Europe's greatest acts of make-believe in recent years are coming back to haunt it, says Christopher Booker
Russian-backed separatists firing a mortar towards Ukrainian troops outside the village of Sanzharivka Photo: Maximilian Clarke/AP
Three stories that were making daily headlines last week all had one very important thing in common. One was the shambles unfolding over Ukraine. The second was the ongoing shambles over Greece and the euro. The third was the ever-growing flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East desperately trying to escape to safety in Europe.
Over Ukraine, I cannot recall any issue in my lifetime when the leaders of the West have got it so hopelessly wrong. We are treated to babyish comparisons of President Putin to Hitler or Stalin; we are also told that this crisis has only been brought about by Russia’s “expansionism”. But there was only one real trigger for this crisis – the urge of the EU continually to advance its borders and to expand its own empire, right into the heartland of Russian national identity: a “Europe” stretching, as David Cameron once hubristically put it, “from the Atlantic to the Urals”.
The “expansionism” that was the trouble was not Putin’s desire to welcome the Russians of Crimea back into the country to which they had formerly belonged; or to assist the Russians of eastern Ukraine in their determination not to be dragged by the corrupt government in Kiev they despised into the EU and Nato. It was that of an organisation founded on the naive belief that it could somehow abolish nationalism, but which finally ran up against an ineradicable sense of nationalism that could not simply be streamrollered out of existence. We poked the bear and it responded accordingly.
Another of the EU’s greatest acts of make-believe was that it could weld all Europe indissolubly together in the straitjacket of a single currency. This was a purely political dream, never in any way rooted in economic reality. The desperate Greeks, their lives and economy reduced to ruins, finally voted for a government that has pledged to put an end to all their misery; but at the same time somehow to cling on to the safety belt of the very thing which had caused it. As with Ukraine, the leaders of the EU are determined to preserve their fantasy intact, even though it is now more obviously than ever colliding with a reality that can allow no sensible outcome.
The third self-serving EU dream that is now being horribly caught out is its asylum policy. Under the Lisbon Treaty, EU member states are bound to welcome asylum seekers. But under other rules, the legal responsibility for them lies with the country where they first enter the EU, which bankrupt countries such as Italy and Greece find impossible.
So, in flagrant defiance of the law, they try to wave on as many of this flood of newcomers as they can, to those richer northern countries, such as Germany, Sweden and Britain, where most of them in fact hope to end up. And so great are the pressures this dysfunctional policy is now imposing throughout Europe that there is no longer any common will to address a problem which, like those of Ukraine and the euro, seems to have become insuperable.
Three distinct fantasies are finally falling apart on those realities that the EU for so long seemed determined to ignore. From the Dream Stage through the Frustration Stage to the Nightmare Stage, the EU is going through that classic pattern which shapes any attempt to act out a fantasy. We haven’t yet reached that final Destruction Stage when the entire fantasy itself crumbles apart. But we are getting nearer.
No comments:
Post a Comment