However you look at it, the idea of a united Europe was beautiful in its own way. It still is.
European countries, which had spent centuries in bloody wars with each other, one day decided to create a community based on economic interests. From coal and steel to a full-fledged union! Brussels – with the active participation of Washington – has indeed succeeded in fashioning its trademark “unity in diversity” out of the 27 states of the continent. By obliterating national borders, the EU has created a well-functioning common space for goods, services, capital and people. And it was ready to continue its integration expansion on the continent.
It is noteworthy that the attractiveness of the EU image is still ensured not so much by Brussels’ propaganda efforts, but by the absence of a proportionally successful alternative. Therefore, in both the Balkans and the post-Soviet space, European integration aspirations are still a significant political factor. Three of the six countries of the former Soviet Union’s Eastern Partnership formally proclaimed their goal of joining the EU as soon as possible. Serbia, despite its historical friendship with Russia, has not given up its bid to join the increasingly anti-Russian European Union.
And over the past three decades, the Russian Federation has also been striving, if not to integrate into the EU, then at least to build a common trading and economic area with it on the basis of coinciding interests. Europe, united by strategic pragmatism from Lisbon to Vladivostok, even in the conflict situations of 2008 and 2014, was the default reference point for Russian foreign policy.
In 2022, however, the impossibility of implementing non-confrontational scenarios for Russia’s interaction with the EU in the foreseeable future becomes obvious even to incorrigible Eurooptimists. Those who in recent years have vainly hoped that Moscow would somehow miraculously manage to separate the grains of interaction with some relatively non-hostile European capitals from the chaff of irreparably damaged relations with Washington and London.
On 30 May, the EU leaders, who had squabbled in Brussels, did not dare to impose a full embargo on Russian oil deliveries, leaving the Druzhba pipeline out of the sanctions regimes for the time being. However, they later agreed to an embargo on two thirds of Russian black gold. It’s about blocking shipments by sea.
Incidentally, exactly the same, the Eurobureaucrats, despite their belligerent puffing of cheeks, have still not given up supplies of Russian gas. Not surprisingly, since stopping imports of blue fuel from Russia would cost the EU economy an estimated $238bn this year and next. And the Europeans, while displaying some masochistic tendencies of late, are not suicidal.
However, Moscow should act as if nothing good is waiting for Russian goods on EU markets. For example, the scale of oil supplies from Russia to Asia already exceeds the exports of black gold to Europe. In one month of 2022 we provide India with more oil than in the whole of 2021. And we are overtaking Saudi Arabia in black gold imports to China.
The growing confrontational nature of relations with Europe is irreversibly turning Russian trade and foreign policy in an Asian direction. At a speed that is by no means comfortable for everyone. Processes which in other circumstances would take decades to unfold, take years and even months. But their awareness as well as the corresponding trade and transport infrastructure are lagging far behind the pace of the new times.
From a Western-centric frame of reference few of us are aware that in 18 of the 20 centuries AD China contributed more to the world economy than any of the Western powers. In 1820, for example, the Celestial Empire produced more than 30 percent of global GDP.
The world is just gradually returning to the appropriate historical proportions. Last year, China’s GDP surpassed the gross domestic product of the entire European Union. The Asian Development Bank estimates that the region will double its share of global GDP by mid-century. The IMF predicts that by 2024, four of the world’s six largest economies will be located in Asia. This means that global demand will predominantly be generated there in the coming decades. That is where global investment will flow.
If there is a gain, there is a loss. For example, in just one week in March, investors took $13.5bn out of European securities. This is not yet a catastrophe, but it is a historic record. What if we imagine that Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s gloomy forecast about a fivefold increase in European gas prices comes true by the end of the year? Such a scenario not only cannot be completely ruled out, but even too unlikely. Today, pipelines carrying Russian hydrocarbons continue to pump vital energy into the EU economy almost uninterruptedly. And tomorrow? Who guarantees that the inadequate Brussels bureaucracy, which has already shot itself in the foot in several places with anti-Russian sanctions that are primarily detrimental to the EU, will not suddenly decide to shoot itself in the head? Especially if a killer signal follows from Washington or, who knows, London.
While EU leaders are conferring in Brussels on how to hit either the Russian or the European economy harder, at the World Forum in Davos Henry Kissinger sounded a landmark, albeit belated, warning. The man who knows better than anyone that in the US-Russia-China triangle it is absolutely contraindicated for the West to maintain bad relations both with Moscow and Beijing. The living classic of American foreign-policy is not comfortable with a situation in which Russia can “completely separate itself from Europe” and find “a permanent alliance somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Kissinger’s nightmare is inexorably coming true. The comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction between Russia and China has all the hallmarks of a long-term alliance, underpinned by both a common view of a multipolar world order and an economic basis. Balanced by Moscow’s expanding ties with New Delhi, Hanoi, Vientiane and other friendly Asian capitals, the Russo-Chinese alliance already looks like a very competitive alternative to the overly familiar but overly conflicting European foreign policy vector.
When the world was still unaware that “the end of history” was being called off, the United States of Europe seemed to be an unprecedentedly successful, in a sense, breakthrough project. However, the migration, pandemic, energy and other crises undermined not only the unity of the West as a whole, but also significantly eroded the foundations of the EU. In the years to come, the EU will simply have nothing to offer to the emerging multipolar world. Its contribution to global GDP will decline. Ideologically, the European Union is untenable.
At some point, it will be an impossible task for a globally irrelevant and out of touch Eurobureaucracy to explain to itself and to the world why such disparate nation-states should remain in a single integration association. And this moment may come much earlier than it seems to us today…
Alexander Vedrusov, Izvestia newspaper
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