Perspectives of Russia-EU would be partnership. By Alexander FomenkoНазад
Perspectives of Russia-EU would be partnership. By Alexander Fomenko
Up to now the mutual misunderstanding is a real communication problem between Russia and EU - though both sides use today lingua franca of American English.
When Russian Foreign Minister Mr. Lavrov talks about "common European civilization" or about "Russia`s commitment to the European choice"[1], a German, for example, MP (Mr. Karl-Georg Wellmann) can easy suspect that "Russia would also have the choice of turning away from Europe and becoming an Asian country". Why? Dieu seul le sait.
When an old European (the terminology belongs to George W. Bush or to his speech writers) calls baseless any "concerns about an aggressive, expanding Western military alliance"; but Russians do not concern about the direct danger form this badly manageable but expensive military organisation with unimpressive combat output everywhere - in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan. They concern about its trouble-making ambitions to expand far from North and from Atlantic: who knows where the Brussels intellectuals will go next time - just to testify once more that "the international conflict-management mechanisms have obviously not worked"? Dieu seul le sait.
That is why the Russian president is a partisan of a new security architecture stretching "from Vancouver to Vladivostok".
From our non-EU point of view it is rather audacious to tell today about "the extremely successful path towards peace, freedom and prosperity taken by Western Europe", about "the European success story" after 1945.
Today - when the mainstream realists like President Sarkozy are able to get popular vote only if they use the rhetoric common with Jean-Marie Le Pen`s one: as Europe faces the riots of suburban desperados not only in Paris; when respectable citizens suffer a lot from by-products or side effects of NATO-EU conflict-management by sophisticated air strikes and wheeling-dealing with the experienced Balkan smugglers and gangsters.
(Some EU-optimists, like Mr. Alexander Rahr, believe that " the break-up of the Soviet Union opened a period of stability in Europe which the continent has not witnessed for centuries". That means: either bloodsheds of 1990-s happened not in Europe or the lives of the non-EU citizens are too cheap to remember.)
Russians, of course, have no doubt that all that is "inextricably linked" to EU friendship with the United States.
We ourselves have experienced more than a century of real friendship with US - right up to the end of the Russian Civil War and formation of the Soviet Union. Americans, more firmly than Europeans, advocated then the territorial integrity and unity of the Tsars` Empire: they recognized in 1920 neither Georgia nor Azerbaijan, by the way. They refused to recognize even the Baltics until the full victory of Communists. And even in 1922, having got recognised them (two years after the Red Moscow did it), the State Secretary Hughes stated that the principle of non-alienation of Russian territory "is not deemed to be infringed by the recognition at this time of the Governments of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania which have been set up and maintained by an indigenous popula tion".[2]
Under Soviet rule Russians also knew the times of warm cooperation with US - in 1930-s, and even military Alliance with them - in 1940-s.
We can say that, regardless the political regimes in Russia, we never had problems with US except the comparatively short NATO existence period. That is why, may be, we got a habit to follow the good American example to use the military force in order to protect compatriots living abroad - and never considered it as a reason for honest people to feel alarmed.
Russian protests because of the relocation of a war memorial in Tallinn would be called excessive by the outside viewers - but Russians reacted against the lawlessness of the move. Instead of prior signing an inter-government agreement with Russia about the war cemeteries maintaining, as other respectable Europeans already did, Estonian authorities decided to act without rules and thus humiliated the WWII veterans and their relatives.
Europeans should think about the fact of their treating the Baltic governments not as really the EU ones: for example, in Brussels (both the EU and Belgian) it is not allowed today to demonstrate the public respect to such war celebrities as Belgian poet and politician Leon Degrelle, commander of Waffen-SS "Wallonia" division, but in Estonia, where he once fought, not only respect but even glorification is acceptable. Why? Dieu seul le sait.
In reality we do not see a common European policy towards Russia, only German, French, Austrian or Italian ones. That is why Russia estimates the special importance of confidence-building vis-?-vis every single European country, including such small EU Member States as Luxembourg or Slovenia. For sure we do not care about the size of a partner: we are too big physically to mention such a relative difference between this or that EU country.
Very often old Europeans misunderstand Russians, who regret about the demise of the Soviet Union and remind us about "decades of repression" which we experienced in 1920-1930, for example, not they. (Westerners bought the corn from Soviets exactly at the time of collectivisation and did not care about human price of the corn.)
But the question is that the repressive Soviet Union easily survived the decades (having really bad and hostile relations only with countries like Portugal of Dr. Salasar or Spain of Generalissimo Franco) and finally converted into another state - under the same name; where Mr. Gorbachev (future "best German" and Nobel Prize winner) was in charge of reforms.
The today`s China, respectable member of the Olympic movement, differs from Mao`s China of 1960-s not more, than Soviet Union of 1970-s differed from itself of 1920-s.
When Russians and other former Soviets (go to Georgia or Moldavia and ask locals about 1970-s) lament today about the demise of the state where they lived in - they remember not the repressions of the Bolshevik Westernizers but the joy of everyday life in the country without hunger and fear on the streets. (Soviet police in general was in 1970-1980, like British Bobbies, not armed; only criminal police units used pistols but not machine guns.)
Russian freedom-loving intelligentsia freed Russia, our Soviet compatriots and even foreign neighbours from the Communist ideological yoke and we do not regret about the move, though nobody heard any gratitude for it. But we really regret about the catastrophic way of the drastic capitalisation of our economic structure and about various human losses.
We have to admit that such a constant miscomprehension between two different "cultures" proves the need for "an unbiased discussion among politicians and historians about the history of the 20th century".
We really need discussion about the history of the EU project itself: during the celebration of 50-th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome in 2007 no one official speaker dared to mention the fundamental difference between the initial European project and the actual one.
Thoughthe Rome Treaty of 1957 proposed to build united Europe as a real global economical (and thus - geopolitical) player, but the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 completely changed the project initiating the enlargement process. Instead of shaping the initial core of the Union of Coal and Steel into economically strong and homogeneous EU, the traditional engines of the Euro-integration have been forced to spend or waste their resources on investing in the "new European economies" including the ones which never pretended to the status of economical engines of Europe - like our Slavic or Orthodox brothers of Bulgaria or Rumania [3]. That is why Mr. Rahr says: "Two decades of rebuilding of a new Europe have exhausted the EU".
The bigger is generosity of this weakened Europe - the longer way is to a stronger Europe.
Even the administrative mechanisms of the EU - like that of consensus - were initially implemented to avoid a probable rivalry between recent War enemies like France or Germany. Nobody could imagine the trap of decision making process depending on, for example, outdated Russian-Polish historical complexes originating from XVII-XIX centuries. (Some intellectuals call it the exercise of "the new political muscles of the enlarged EU".)
Europe of Brussels has now a choice.
Either to agree with the perspective of its deep interdependence with Russia as an energy supplier - alternative from the Persian Gulf, and to go from the actual soft confrontation to the future cooperation in geo-politics and geo-economics; or to continue the nowadays faits accomplispolicy: dependence on labour force supply from Maghreb, Central Africa or Turkey and on consumer products supply from China which both follow to unavoidable repudiation of the European geo-political and historical identity.
The suicidal rottenness of the EU countries still relying on migrants` labour is evident. Because this pumping not only deprives the donor countries of their best human resources - most strong and motivated citizens; but also pushes the recipient countries to invest a lot in the social adaptation of the unhappy migrant workers and not in the development of its traditional competitive advantages.
The deindustrialisation of liberal-minded Europe is a scientifically tested fact[4]("China price" kills the very idea of fair competition), as well as its natality decline resulted from the hedonistic laziness of these former Christians.
Why the overwhelming majority of Euro-liberals did not want even to mention Christian heritage in the preamble of so called "Euro-constitution"? Because for them, so keen on the Liberal Decalogue teaching, only positivistic reason is universally valid, as mentioned the Pope Benedict XVI in his famous speech in the University of Regensburg 12 September 2006. But "the world`s profoundly religious cultures", as Pontific said, see it "as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures". Though, they talk today so much about the dialogue.
That is why modern Europe and Russia - do not need to talk about former common values: church life in half-Christian Russia, reconciled with her Christian tradition, is much more alive than in post-Christian over-circularised EU. (Is this not a Divine irony of XXI century: to teach the victorious atheists by putting those in front of the profoundly religious Islamic communities not ready to share the secular "republican values" of their hosts?)
The financial crisis, of course, can improve the EU-Russia relations, but just in case of mutual readiness to engage in a simply pragmatic partnership of common interests. It is time to understand each other. As from the common sense point of view, all nowadays conflicts between Russia,the EU andthe US - in presence of over developing China - remind a fight at the airport desk for the last ticket, when the plane has already taken off...
26/01/2009
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[1]Lavrov, Sergey. Russian Foreign Policy and a New Quality of the Geopolitical Situation // Diplomatic Yearbook 2008
[2] The Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 1920, Vol. III, p. 462; 1922, Vol. II, pp. 873-874.
[3] Sapir, J. La fin de l`eurolibёralisme. Paris, 2006.
[4] Tremonti, G. Rischi Fatali. L`Europa vecchia, la Cina, il mercatismo suicida: come reagire. Milano, 2005.
FOMENKO Aleksandr
Member of the RF State Duma (2003-2007),
PACE Member (2004-2008)
