Si vis pacem para bellum : The war and the impossible “European strategical autonomy”

Does Europe exist? A negative answer to this question could be sustained with the same solidity of arguments than its contrary: on a side the total arbitrarity of the European identity’s project, in reason of the profound contradiction and the ambiguous abstraction of a vague word as “Europe”, is easily demonstrable. On the other side, it is almost impossible to deny that the populations living between Lisbon and Moscow, Nicosy and Edimbourg, without going further, share the same historical and cultural heritage. Although the European integration process is very concrete and tangible, at the moment it is officially extended to 27 countries, and has nothing to do with an idea of brotherhood and sharing, but represents exactly the opposite. The most moral exigence at the European project’s base is to avoid the horrors of World War II – the extreme violence that exploded as a consequence of centuries of conflicts between superpowers of the Continent – could be repeated. This kind of discourse about the European vocation of defense of “perpetual peace”, which is based on some partial but incontestable truths, and is made with the best intention, is not true itself. The European Community of coal and steel was initially born in 1951 as an attempt to create a range of economic interests shared by capitalist economies under United States influence in an anti-soviet perspective. The identity itself of the European project is based on an economic post-war reconstruction made thanks to the USA’s Marshall Plan. The edification of these shared interests had as its immediate political goal, mostly, to avoid a disgregation of the Cold War precarious balances.

The European bourgeoisies’ common path, and so, mainly the one done by the French and German ones, has always lived in a profound ambiguity: by a side, the constitutive dependence from the United States, and so the impossibility of a European autonomy from the USA’s agenda. On the other side, some strong “autonomous” tendencies, that always existed, at least since Charles de Gaulle’s plan Fouchet, that was a particular manifestation of the fact that the interest of the European bourgeoisie is not the same of the American empire, and often are even opposed to them.

This contradiction violently emerged as inevitable when Europe has been brought to its geopolitical responsibilities with the War in Ukraine. Many, mainly in France, talk about “European strategic autonomy” : in front of the conflict, in this moment of acute global crisis, which can be the perspectives for the Old Continent? The foreign policy of its ruling class orthodoxly rallied with NATO and United States, is brutally in opposition to its material interests: this political schizophrenia has engendered the idea of “European strategic autonomy”, at the moment confined to some as astonishing as bold diplomatic proclamations, or ideas, that momentarily are still onirical and abstracts: for example the project of a shared European military defense.

On 7 February 2022, as the international diplomatic escalation that preceded the Russian invasion of Ukraine was gathering pace, US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a joint press conference. Joe Biden said that Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany, which would have been fully operational in September of that year, would have been immediately and undoubtedly suspended in one way or another if the Russian army had crossed the border into Ukraine. Asked by a journalist how this would have been done, with the infrastructure administration being under Germany’s exclusive control, Biden replied, “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

On 22 February, in response to Russia’s recognition of the independent republics of Donetsk and Lugansk in the Donbas, Olaf Scholz declared the suspension of the development of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. Two days later, the Russian army reportedly entered Ukrainian territory.

The energy crisis at the time was a very serious problem for Europe: many countries, such as Germany and Italy – and in some cases France too, where a large proportion of nuclear power stations remained shut down – were almost totally dependent on Russian gas.

Seven months after the start of Moscow’s “Special Military Operation”, on 26 September, the Danish and Swedish authorities reported explosions and losses of gas in the Baltic Sea, particularly at the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 undersea gas pipelines. The images immediately taken by the Danish defense are striking: the larger gas leak produced turbulence on the surface of the water a kilometer in diameter. The climatic impact was also devastating: all the marine fauna within a radius of 4 kilometers of the explosion was killed, but above all, the leak produced the equivalent of the total emissions of the city of Paris in a whole year. Sabotage is not a hypothesis but an obvious conclusion: before the company that manages Nord Stream noticed a change in pressure inside the pipes, and therefore the leaks, the attack was discovered precisely because of the detonations picked up by Danish seismograms.

The Nord Stream project, a series of undersea gas pipelines linking Russia to the German Baltic coast without passing through the territory of other countries, had been the great achievement of the European Union’s ‘autonomous’ foreign policy, led by Angela Merkel in Germany. The idea was that, by creating shared economic interests between the EU and the Russian Federation, the great post-Soviet country, now beyond the limits of socialism, could be brought closer to the “democratic” sensibilities of the unified European market.

But someone disagreed.

Without going into details and speculation, in economic terms there are clear winners and losers from this attack, just as there are from the war in Ukraine, of which this terroristic act is an epiphenomenon.

Even without the sabotage, the development of Nord Stream would have stopped in view of the sanctions against Russia: the very existence of the pipeline was a mean for Moscow to blackmail Europe for energy. One of the main ways in which the countries of the Old Continent managed to deal with the energy crisis caused by the conflict was to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States (in addition to diversifying their natural gas suppliers and reopening coal-fired power stations) at a price four times that of the Russians. Although the plans of energy companies such as France’s Engie and Total to import liquefied gas from the United States go back a long way, the war made the purchase of American gas an absolute emergency, while the North American apparate criticized Europeans for engaging in a perverse dynamic of energy dependence on Russian fossil fuels.

NATO’s warmongering policy not only poses a military and global security problem in the context of the war in Ukraine but also imposes war economic choices (and therefore a rising cost of living) on member countries. In times of “peace” (the wars of imperialist aggression waged mainly under the NATO flag in recent decades have continued to bloody the world), Europe was content to pursue its interests, more or less peacefully, as we saw during the Trump presidency: but the illusion of this autonomy was quickly shattered.

Europe’s proudly asserted pacifism, which in the final analysis is relativisable notwithstanding its surface moral component, is very much a matter of respectable political realism. The contradiction of the EU’s situation was made manifest by statements, which caused a great deal of scandal because of an unexpected lucidity by Emmanuel Macron to journalists from several newspapers, during his visit to China at the beginning of April 2023. After six hours of dialogue with Xi Jinping, during which the French president raised the subject of the crisis in Taiwan, he told the editors of “Politico”: “The paradox would be that […] we start to follow American policy, out of a kind of panic reflex. The question for us Europeans is this […] Is it in our interest to speed up the Taiwan issue? No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans should be followers on this issue and adapt to the American pace and a Chinese over-reaction.”¹

While the risk of being drawn into crises of catastrophic proportions is absolutely taboo and impossible to contemplate in the context of the war in Ukraine, the China question is still open, and the Europeans, although geopolitical adversaries of China, as Emmanuel Macron very clearly states in this interview, have interests to protect themselves and escalation would be absolutely unprofitable. European policy was moving in the same direction in the case of tensions with Russia, as demonstrated by the Franco-German Minsk I and II treaties, which sought to mediate between the government in Kyiv and the rebels in Donbas. But NATO’s expansionism on the one hand, and Putin’s encirclement syndrome on the other, have had catastrophic consequences.

The strategic autonomy desired by France, which is strictly in the form of a “Gaullo-Mitterrandian” dream and therefore of French hegemony on the continent (the other member countries will surely accept it willingly), is impossible to achieve given the nature of Europe’s total instrumentality to US policy. “To be an ally does not mean to be a vassal” said the resident of the Elysée Palace a few days after his statements from Beijing. These words testify to a very unrealistic vision of the relationship between Europe and the North American republic, they fully express what we have been talking about, and also reveal how and why not only are there not the material conditions and the balance of power that would allow Europeans to emancipate themselves from the USA but that at the moment they do not even have the capacity to do so.

This observation becomes even more worrying if we consider that US global hegemony will not last forever, but above all that for some time now it has been sinking into a deep crisis. The rise of China, the heroic insubordination of South America (Brazilian President Ignacio Lula and Xi Jinping, for example, recently decided to trade exclusively in yuan instead of dollars) and Russian revanchism are direct and very real threats to North American Weltpolitik. If Europe remains a ‘vassal’, subordinate to Washington’s interests, and fails not only to emancipate itself but also to distinguish itself clearly from the USA and its policies, the consequences of the fall of the American empire will undoubtedly be tragic for the peoples of the old continent.

But we must not stop thinking about a Europe that is free and at peace: the only certain law of history is that any prediction is always contradicted by the facts.

Ismaele Calaciura Errante

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Ismaele Calaciura Errante

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Ismaele Calaciura Errante was born in Rome in 2003. He is a double degree student in Philosophy at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne and in Modern Literature at the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. He participates in the French and Italian social and student movements.