Grouped in a Union that has nothing to say in foreign policy – neither on its own borders in the East or in the Mediterranean, nor on its alliance with the United States, nor about the democracy they wish to represent –, the European governments are wandering through the world scene as stupefied, their eyes listless, their ideas strewn over and most of all variable. They act as kings, but have forgotten what a crown and a sceptre are. Their obsession is doing business, and they continue to ignore the faults of the markets, although they did experience them. They cling to a totally unequal Atlantic Alliance, dominated by a superpower in decline which seeks to reproduce in Europe the old bipolar order, the Russian-American one, legacy of the Cold War.
The Europeans have been asleep for years, unaware of a world that is changing around them. There is no event, there is no international negotiation in which they are key players, ready to join together in order to say what Europe wants to do. Sometimes they raise their voices to defend autonomous views, but the voice soon fades and gets buried. This can be seen in Ukraine: a very hot border for both the EU and Russia. This can be seen in the Euro-American negotiation that will create an economic pact aimed at supporting the military one: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). This can be seen in the weak and unsuccessful fight against the eavesdropping plans of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. Those are three essential tests, and the Union is failing all of them.
It is failing in Ukraine, because Europe hasn’t rethought yet its relationship with Russia. Europe knows nothing of what is boiling into that large and opaque world. It is not able to assess Moscow’s fears and interests, nor the dangers of its rekindled desire for power that Putin embodies. It doesn’t understand why Putin is popular at home, and also in many regions of the former Soviet Union, which now belong to other states and include extensive and downgraded Russian communities. Being unable to speak with Moscow, the Europeans let the United States, once again, face the chaos, exacerbating it. It’s Washington that promises guarantees to the Ukrainian government, warns Moscow against any annexation, and alarms it with the threat to move the NATO frontier to the East.
Europe stands idly by, convinced that the austerity plans proposed by the IMF and the European Commission will be enough, should Kiev enter its orbit. Indeed, this is the sceptre, the only one that nowadays the Union is able to wield: not a foreign policy, but a free-market economic prescription mixed with moralizing formulas on debt – writes the Russian historian Dmitri Trenin who heads the Moscow Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As if the dramas in failed states in the world were only financial.
The political response to these failures is entrusted to Obama and inevitably the mistakes committed by the Europeans are being repeated (suffice to remember Kohl’s huge mistake, when he said in the 1990s that Slovenia “deserved its independence”, since it was “ethnically homogeneous”). De-politicized, Europe suffers the anachronistic return of the Russian-American duopoly. It’s Washington that decides whether Kiev should be the NATO’s new eastern shield, although the Ukrainian people obviously prefer neutrality. For almost half a century, the outpost was West Germany, later replaced by Poland: Warsaw now hopes that in its place a forcefullywesternized Ukraine may arise, breakable as Yugoslavia was. Moscow asks that the country become a federation, rather than a confused agglomeration of nationalist resentments. It’s strange that it is not Europe, with its experiences, to ask such a thing.
The second test is the trade pact with the United States: a deal full of traps, because many EU legislative achievements risk being swept away. It is no coincidence that multinational corporations are carrying out secret negotiations, away from democratic controls. Long-settled laws are under attack, rights for which the Union has fought for decades: these include the right to health, environmental care, the penalties on polluting enterprises. The healthcare systems will be open to free market that will let profits prevail over social needs. Emblematic event: the onslaught of big drug companies to cheap generic medicines. Also in danger are taxes to which Europe seems to attach great importance, both to increase its meagre common budget and to curb speculative activities and climate degradation: the financial transaction tax and the tax on carbon emissions. EU counter-offensive policy against the trade treaty does not exist yet. During the meeting in Rome with Obama, Italy’s Prime Minister Renzi called for the acceleration of negotiations, without asking anything, neither for his country nor for Europe.
Many half-truths are told about the pact. Some people guarantee that when it will fully enter into force in 2027, the income of Europeans will grow significantly (€545 per year for 4 personfamilies), with a benefit of $120 billion per year for the Union and of 95 for the United States. Other calculations are less optimistic. The Prometeia Institute, while welcoming the agreement, said that the gains would not exceed 0.5% of GDP in the case of total liberalization. The Austrian Institute Öfse (Research for International Development) envisages an even higher unemployment in the transition period, due to the reorganization of labor markets imposed by the Partnership.
A not less serious issue: trade disputes would be solved not through lawsuits in ordinary courts, but in extraterritorial courts. It will be multinational corporations that will take governments, companies, public services deemed non-competitive to court, demanding compensation for loss of earnings because of too binding labor laws and overly strict environmental or constitutional laws. All this in the name of “cutting the red tape”: the buzzword Renzi prefers, virtuous and at the same time insidious. In the context of the transatlantic partnership, simplifying means breaking down the so-called “non-tariff barriers”, a cryptic term referring to the hardelaborated European standards: health rules for health protection, safety standards for cars, procedures for approving drugs, and much more.
Last but not least, the third test: the Snowden case, after the former CIA computer professional who brought to light a sprawling surveillance system, designed by the US spying agency on the pretext of preventing terrorist attacks. Thanks to Snowden, it became known that even the mobile phones of the European leaders (including Angela Merkel) were eavesdropped, no one knows for what security reasons. The EU governments protested, but separately and more and more feebly. In a message to the European Parliament, on March 7th, Snowden joked about the alleged sovereignty of individual member states, explaining how absurd is the complacency of governments that imagine to be able to stop the Datagate without mobilizing the entire Union.
The Snowden story is also a matter of democratic civilization. The existence of someone who unmasks these misdeeds – not spies but whistleblowers, denouncing crimes committed by their own organization – does enhance democracy. It is a very bad and paradoxical sign that the journalists involved in Datagate alongside Snowden received the Pulitzer Prize (a slap to Obama), and that he himself, the whistleblower, has found shelter not in Europe that promises in its Charter the “freedom to receive and give information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers”, but in Putin’s Russia.
Translated by Laura Roscio
The article was originally published in la Repubblica, April 23rd, 2014