01 March 2022

Carnegie: Russia’s War Against Ukraine Ends Europe’s Self-Deception

Ten years after Strategic Europe was launched, the EU, with Germany playing a pivotal role, may finally start acting strategically. It will mean shattering illusions about war, peace, and stability.

When Strategic Europe was founded a decade ago, the very title of the blog was designed to raise questions about why the EU could not—but should—do strategy.

There were several reasons why a prosperous bloc, often basking in a comfort zone despite the arc of instability in its eastern and southern neighborhoods, avoided acting strategically.

There was no common threat perception among the member states. There was little effort to defend the rule of law and uphold an independent judiciary inside the EU itself. There was no coherent, consistent foreign and security policy that should have emerged after the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The one big and enduring success was the enlargement of the EU, aimed at making Europe whole and united.

More recently, there has been much self-congratulating when the member states agreed an enormous spending fund so that European economies would recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. There was also an element of smugness about how it was the EU that was the leading the way for dealing with climate change. And the bloc even harbored illusions that it was time to develop its own kind of “strategic autonomy.”

The Donald Trump years, so lambasted by most European governments, created a delusionary notion that the EU could go it alone in having its own strategic compass, but without understanding what was happening to the West during the post–Cold War era.

Little came of those ambitions related to autonomy. Germany, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2005 until November 2021, worked to shape foreign and economic policy to fit Berlin’s own agenda and interests, not Europe’s. Russia and China are cases in point.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has finally shattered Germany’s illusions. Berlin now faces the immense challenge of making Europe strategically and politically relevant.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has already moved with a speed that has shaken his own Social Democratic Party, pacifists, pro-Russia factions as well as the political establishment and the powerful business lobbies.

In a raft of decisions, with the United States pushing Berlin to discard its sentimental and delusionary beliefs about the post–Cold War status quo, Scholz tore up a rulebook that made relations with Russia central to Berlin’s economic, energy and foreign policies.

He agreed to send weapons to Ukraine. He supported the exclusion of Russia from the SWIFT international payment system. He halted the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project. As for defense spending, something which Merkel wasn’t interested in, let alone the parlous state of the country’s armed forces, Scholz said Germany would now be meeting the NATO target of spending 2 percent of its gross domestic product on defense.

In short, the post–1991 peace dividend and the reunification of Germany, despite the subsequent wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, the turmoil following the Arab Spring of 2011, didn’t fundamentally lead to a reassessment of Berlin’s role in Europe—or the West. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed all that....

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