The EU may have delivered peace, but look in just about any direction and Europe’s neighbourhood is a mess
The prospect of war in Ukraine currently dominates the headlines. But look in just about any direction and Europe’s neighbourhood is a mess. Belarus, Europe’s last dictatorship, recently flew in migrants from Iraq, dumped them at the Polish border fence, gave them boltcutters and ordered them to try to break into thein the hope of causing another refugee crisis. The Belarusian despot is now welcoming Russian soldiers, perhaps on their way to invade Ukraine.
In Turkey, an eccentric autocrat presides over a crashing currency. In the western Balkans, pound-shop demagogues rant and loot. Across the Mediterranean, a mere people-smuggling dinghy ride from the, North Africa now mixes a drift away from democracy with civil war . Only Norway, Switzerland and occasionally Britain look like functional places. To lose one neighbour to strife or demagoguery may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose nearly all of them looks like carelessness.
To be fair, much of the disarray has been deliberately fomented by one exceptionally aggressive neighbour. Besides grabbing bits of Ukraine and threatening much worse, Vladimir Putin has sown discord across the whole region. He props up a despot in Belarus and may one day swallow the country into Russia. His troops and cash support a breakaway sliver of Moldova, making life hard for its pro-government.
Europe once had a viable strategy to counter such meddling. Countries that wanted to escape from Russia’s coercive “sphere of influence” were welcomed into the. The prospect of attending those dull fish-themed European summits, not to mention trading with and receiving subsidies from some of the world’s richest economies, was more than enough to lure countries like Bulgaria and Poland into the club. Accession talks required them to adopt hard but mostly sensible economic and political reforms.
The lack of unity is even more apparent when it comes to matters of war and peace. Bits of eastern Europe see, and specifically America, as the bedrock of their security. By contrast, France’s President Emmanuel Macron relentlessly pushes the idea that Europe must develop its own “strategic autonomy”. Russia has long depended on a series of all-weather friends within the, notably Greece, Hungary and often Germany and Italy, to play down its wrongdoing.
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