By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
Everything indicates that the objective of the main European countries is to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, in order to facilitate the creation of a “war economy” on European territory.
The European integration project was conceived after the Second World War as part of a supranational system led and supervised by the United States, which aimed to pacify a continent that had lived in a state of almost permanent war for the last 800 years. The initial project was launched in 1951 with the signing, in Paris, of the treaty that established the European Coal and Steel Community. There were only six countries – Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – but the initial community later expanded and became the current European Union, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, and reached 28 member countries, until Great Britain left in January 2020.
The initial project of the European Community proposed the partial demilitarization of European states, which would transfer their military sovereignty to a supranational defense organization – NATO, which had already been created in 1949 – which would guarantee “mutual aid” in the event of an external attack on any of the community’s member countries. Despite this, the Maastricht Treaty, signed shortly after the unification of Germany, established as its objective the development of a collective security policy for the European Union, but to date it has never managed to address the problem of the relationship between this regional defense policy and NATO’s collective security policy, which is overseen by the United States.
The formation and initial expansion of the European Community progressed under the joint leadership of France and West Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, after the reunification of Germany and the incorporation of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, the European Union fell into a circular trap from which it was never able to escape.
It needed to centralize its political and military power in order to formulate an international strategy, but this centralization was systematically boycotted by its main partners, France, West Germany and England, who never agreed to give up their national sovereignty. This impasse became even more acute after the reunification of Germany, which became the largest demographic and economic power on the continent and began to have an increasingly assertive and independent foreign policy.
Germany’s behavior rekindled old fractures and competitions on the Old Continent, accentuating France’s decline and favoring the British decision to withdraw from the common project. Even so, the European Union remained without resolving its fundamental “genetic flaw,” that is, the lack of a unified central power capable of imposing common objectives on all its member states, and continued to depend on the United States for its common defense.
This situation began to change with the War in Ukraine, starting in 2022, which rekindled the common fear and paranoia of the European Union regarding Russia, facilitating the process of transforming NATO into the true military government of the European Union, directly responsible for the planning, financing and supplying of Ukrainian troops.
The truth is that, from the moment of its creation in 1949, NATO’s objective was to “keep the Russians out”, in the words of Lord Ismay, its first Secretary General. This objective was fully achieved throughout the Cold War. But after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO went through a kind of “identity crisis” and a redefinition of its role within Europe and the international system.
Initially, the military organization turned its attention to the East and the occupation/incorporation of Eastern European countries that had belonged to the Warsaw Pact – an expansion that was the ultimate cause of the crisis and war in Ukraine. In addition, it participated directly, for the first time in its history, in the wars in Yugoslavia and Kosovo in 1999. And before that, in 1994, it launched a military exchange and security project with the Arab countries of North Africa, the so-called “Mediterranean Dialogue”.
And ten years later, at its meeting in Istanbul in 2004, it decided to expand its initial objective, creating the “Istanbul Cooperation Initiative” (ICI), aimed at the countries of the Middle East. In the same period, NATO sided with Anglo-American troops in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later also in North Africa. And now, more recently, it has been proposing to expand its presence in Asia, participating in the military encirclement of China that is being implemented by the United States.
The war in Ukraine, however, and the decision by the main European governments to get directly involved in the conflict, ended up involving NATO in the first major European war since the Second World War. And everything indicates at this moment that the main European countries, together with the new leadership of the European Commission and NATO, are trying to prolong the conflict in Ukraine, in order to facilitate the creation of a “war economy” on European territory.
A war economy that would be led by Germany, which has already given up its traditional manufacturing industry to become the head of a “military complex” involving the other European countries. This new project for NATO and the European Union has the support of the current US government, and is expected to continue and deepen if the Democrats win the next presidential election.
At least this was what was enshrined at the end of the 75th Annual NATO Summit, held in Washington in July 2024, which confirmed the decision to continue and deepen the Organization’s involvement in its war against Russia, now also including China as an adversary of NATO. In this sense, as it celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, it can be said that NATO has decided to definitively transform itself into the “military government” of the European Union, and at the same time the last stronghold of “Western civilization” against the “Russian Orthodox”, the “Islamic peoples” and the “Chinese civilization”. A kind of Knights Templar of the XNUMXst century, responsible for the defense of the “Global North”.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Global power and the new geopolitics of nations (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/3RgUPN3]
Originally published in the Economic Bulletin no. 7 of the International Observatory of the XNUMXst Century — NUBEA/UFRJ.
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