European Union “leaders” grand aspirations are belied by their subservience to the U.S. From Laura Ruggeri at strategic-culture.su:
A ‘geopolitical EU’ remains little more than a consolatory fantasy predicated on its power of attraction — the queue to join.
At the end of October, the president of the EU parliament Roberta Metsola was asked by a journalist whether the EU would formally open Ukraine and Moldova’s accession talks after granting candidate status to these countries in 2022.
“If a country looks to Europe, then Europe should fling its doors wide open. Enlargement has always been the European Union’s strongest geopolitical tool.”
Though Metsola simply rephrased statements made by the head of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen and by the president of the European Council Charles Michel, her word choice offers an excellent insight into the ideological underpinnings of EU expansionism.
Metsola conflates Europe and the European Union, but this is not simply a slip of the tongue, Brussels has a long tradition of assuming that the EU equals Europe and countries lying outside its borders are not truly European otherwise they wouldn’t be ‘looking to Europe’. To become European is to become ‘civilized’ since outside the ‘garden of Europe’ people live in a ‘jungle’, at least according to EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell. The EU, posited as the embodiment of superior values, has a moral duty to open its doors and admit those unfortunate countries that are currently locked out of this garden of delights, and by doing so, rescue them from some unspecified danger. Basically, a variation on the colonial theme of the white saviour. Then Metsola offers the decisive argument in support of enlargement: well, duh, it’s a geopolitical tool to make the EU stronger.
Whether enlargement would make the bloc stronger as its proponents claim or, on the contrary, accelerate its implosion, has divided opinions for two decades. Metsola conveniently forgets to mention that without unanimous agreement accession talks can’t even be started, but of course Eurocrats can’t let facts get in the way of a good narrative.
