Jan Oberg – Can the EU pick itself up by its civilian bootstraps and join the future world?

With its rampant Re-Arm policy against Russia, it risks becoming an underdeveloped, over-militarised and marginalised corner of the future world. It would be great if the EU could develop a vision…

Jan Oberg is the director of the Sweden-based think tank Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research

Cross-posted from the TFF Substack

It seems to me that the EU has always broken more bread than it can bake. While it has succeeded historically in bringing Germany and France together in continuation of the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, it has failed to create the peace that is its Treaty’s highest goal. It has failed to create what some call a European identity, failed to be a Western alternative to the US – but always put all its eggs in the US basket.

It has failed to speak with one voice in foreign and security matters, which it is also stipulated to do, except when it recognised Slovenia and Croatia out of Yugoslavia without a thought of what that would mean to Rest-Yugoslavia. Thus, it made the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina inevitable, which did not prevent the scandalous Nobel Peace Committee from awarding the EU its prize in 2012.

Until today, the EU has not been able to devise new innovative concepts for welfare, security, or a regional-global foreign policy. It has also made no innovation regarding democracy; its parliament is weak, and its leadership is chosen at dinner parties rather than elected by Europe’s citizens.

Perhaps worst of all, the EU has no vision—nothing like China’s Belt & Road Initiative, BRI, and nothing like new thinking about global governance, human and global security, or shared prosperity for all. It does not seem to prepare itself for joining the future multipolar or multi-nodal/networking world based on a new thinking of cooperation as a road to peace.

Thanks to these failures, the EU has been unable to employ any kind of diplomacy in the wake of the NATO-Russia conflict about the alliance’s provocative expansion that so tragically plays out in the war on Ukrainian territory. Instead, one element in the EU’s diminishing cohesion is cancellation and hatred of everything Russian and blaming everything on Vladimir Putin.

Consequently, the EU has been completely sidelined, as a Union, in the present—weird—attempts to stop that war and find a peaceful solution. In my view, this will not succeed, but the EU has shown no intellectual capacity to contribute to such a solution to a conflict in its own region. It has de facto chosen war, winning over Russia through Ukraine.

Tragically and self-destructively, the EU has now decided to not only have but become a Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC, with gigantic investments in Re-Armament of € 800 billion on top of an already substantial armament and depletion of its own weapons and ammunition arsenals. EU countries will continue to pour these into the deep black war hole called Ukraine – that is, into an already lost war.

The EU has no role in mediation – mediation is, paradoxically, conducted (amateurishly) by the US that caused the conflict in the first place – by pushing through NATO’s provocative expansion and by masterminding the regime change in Kiev in 2014 followed by CIA presence, boosting of Ukraine’s army and then killing of thousands of Russians in Ukraine.

To express it diplomatically, the EU is now in a deep crisis. It seems that it had not made any viable Plan B for the eventuality that Donald Trump would be re-elected and set up an authoritarian, law-breaking, unpredictable regime based on issuing executive orders and making statements. The Trump Regime wants Greenland – a territory of the EU – the resources in Ukraine’s ground, a deal with Russia above the EU’s head. And he puts tariffs on the world, including on the US’ European friends and allies, in continuation of his predecessor’s destruction of Nord Stream which started and the economic warfare on the Union.

In this situation, the Financial Times recently wrote that ’Europe must choose between America and China.’ Apart from reflecting a typical Western dichotomising way of thinking, this also implicitly, at least, conveys the tragic forecast that the Union, with its 450 million people, cannot choose or reinvent itself.

One could also ask: Who wants to choose the EU and help it out of its crisis?

Extrapolating the Trump Regime’s destructive and self-isolating policies into the next 3,5 years, it’s reasonably safe to predict that very few will want to have anything to do with his vision of a United States of Autarchy. It will, simply put, not be possible for an economically defunct and militarised EU to join the US.

I also think it is pretty safe to predict that the EU and NATO will dissolve, and new exciting possibilities could thereby open up for all. European countries and their civil societies will have to shape new cooperative projects with the rest of the world, such as China, the BRI, and BRICS+, and put much more emphasis on the UN.

They will also have to learn how to cooperate and solve conflicts peacefully, including rebuilding their relations with Russia. In short, they will have to, in different ways, join the future of humankind, think globally, and put their superiority complex about Europeanness – being a Paradise in a Jungle – behind them.

This will require that the EU immediately pick itself up by its civilian bootstraps. If only by the military ones, it may become an underdeveloped, over-militarised and marginalised corner of the future world.

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