The unpleasant news for the supporters of the transatlantic partnership and Eurocentrism comes one after another. No sooner had the Western political elite recover from the results of the UK European Union membership referendum, than it was caught up with the news of the victory of Republican Donald Trump, advocating a more isolationist American policy. It is significant that Trump’s first foreign guest after his victory in the US presidential election was none other than an ideological leader of the British eurosceptics, Nigel Farrage of the UKIP. This fact hasn’t escaped the attention of the European press.
The future of the European Union in its current condition is becoming more elusive: a rise of the right-wing populism in their own societies, and an outright confusion of the ruling elites in connection with the dramatically changed layouts in Great Britain and the United States suggests that the next year will be quiet fatal for the united Europe. Will a French nationalist leader Marine Le Pen become the next French president, burying the prevailing German-French political tandem? Will Angela Merkel, who embodies modern political Europe, run for the post of chancellor or will she be forced to leave the political scene, symbolizing the end of the era of an absolute rule of the liberal values in Europe?
Rumen Radev
The EU is experiencing tangible failures in the East European direction: a Socialist candidate, General Rumen Radev, won the presidential race in Bulgaria . A graduate of the American squadron officer school ‘Maxwell’, Radev is in favor of lifting of the anti-Russian sanctions and rapprochement with Moscow - though, not putting the relations with NATO in a dangerous position. It is possible, that this approach, being impossible before, will be successful during Trump’s presidency. Significant adjustments are likely to be made no later than in the summer of 2017, when the US president-elect will be invited to the NATO summit.
At the same time, in Moldova - the main hope of the "Eastern Partnership" - a vast majority voted in favor of a supporter of the Eurasian integration, Igor Dodon. Dodon openly declared in the interviews, that he sees a salvation of the economically impoverished Moldova in its integration into the Eurasian Customs Union. Thus, the Polish-Swedish initiative ‘Eastern Partnership’, which was launched in 2008, ended in a fiasco 8 years later: Armenia, having been flirting with the EU for a long time, on the eve of the Vilnius summit of the Eastern Partnership in 2013, declared joining the Customs Union - the Armenian diplomats in the European capitals are still justifying themselves, that then they faced a tough pressure from Moscow. After the ill-fated summit in Vilnius, Ukraine saw the Euromaidan, lost Crimea and bogged down in a long-running conflict in the Donbass region, being in a certain dependence on Russia’s further actions. Needless to say, that the European integration of Kiev wasn’t successful. Recently, the ruling coalition Georgian Dream won in the parliamentary elections in Georgia. Though the party keeps the focus on Europe and NATO, however, it is signaling readiness to pay much more attention to the policy interests of Moscow, than it was done previously be Mikhail Saakashvili and his UNM party. Azerbaijan initially showed little attention to the Eastern Partnership, and refused the European association, as far as it didn’t see any benefits in it. Baku is building the relationship with Brussels in the energy sector and considers the European Union as an oil and gas market primarily. Finally, Belarus, headed by its permanent president, Alexander Lukashenko, is a part of the Customs Union and the EAEC, and all the manifestations of the ‘orange revolution’ are repressed fast and hard by the local authorities. Occasionally, Belarus flirts with the Europeans to bargain more effectively over some issues with Moscow, but Lukashenko understands that the West will always consider him ‘the last dictator of Europe’.
An estimation of many experts and journalists in Europe and the United States is surprising. They make the Russian authorities and security forces, waging a ‘proxy war’, responsible for such disheartening developments on the world political arena. And if the arguments about the real tangible influence of Russia on the post-Soviet space can be understood, the talks about the global Russian influence are exaggerated, even if they are flattering Russia. So much so the factor of Moscow's influence on the presidential race in the United States became one of the main topics of the Democrats and the global media, supporting them. It has become a trend to write about a ‘proxy influence of Moscow’ in several European countries - Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, France and Germany.
Undoubtedly, in the context of the current confrontation, Russia doesn’t want to see the Western countries to act as a single monolithic block, dictating their economic and political conditions. That is why a regression in the transatlantic relationship, or centrifugal forces within the EU are playing into the hands of Moscow. It is also obvious, that the Russian special services, as well as all the special services in the world carry out tasks and operations within the country and abroad in the interests of their own state. In fact, they were created for this purpose. The divide and conquer strategy is equally practiced by all the superpowers, and Russia is no exception. Moreover, it would be naive on the part of the Kremlin not to take an advantage of the growing unrest in the minds of Europeans, and not to support the rising Euro-skeptics, while the ruling elites extend the economic sanctions against Russia.
But we should understand that modern Russia is not a superpower, as the Soviet Union used to be, and it at times yields its economic, propaganda and military capabilities to the US, not to mention the combined might of NATO. The problems, undermining the ideological foundations of the modern Western civilization, are mostly internal economic, cultural and political ones. For example, the monetary policy in the Eurozone, which plays into the hands of the export nation of Germany, in fact, killed immediately the economic growth in Italy. It has generated the Italexit movement in the country. It is considered, that the main supporter of the pan-European ideas is the younger generation, but in Italy the youth unemployment rate is nearly 40% - and it is unlikely that these young people will be the supporters of the country’s membership in the EU in the future elections. The same situation is in Spain, where the number of unemployed is more than 20% of the total working population.
The fatal mistakes of the United States and the EU’s Middle East policy have led to the fact that the millions of illegal immigrants are now in Europe, and to a difficult political crisis of the EU, which divided the bloc into ‘supporters of humanism’ and those, who are in favor of the borders closure. The subsequent bloody attacks, carried out by the terrorists, infiltrated into the EU under the guise of refugees, actually cast a shadow over all migrants from the Middle East and those politicians, holding the door to Europe open for them. Russia doesn’t need to do anything special in this situation. It is enough to observe and to make stove-piping occasionally. And today, when it is vital for the EU to reach an agreement with the government of Erdogan to solve the immigration crisis, the European politicians are beginning to consider seriously the anti-Turkish sanctions because of the arrest of the opposition journalists and Kurdish deputies. They rarely think, that such sanctions will give Erdogan and his supporters the opportunity to present Europeans as supporters of the Kurdish separatism and collapse of the Turkish state. And few people hear the voices of pragmatists, who understand that even the hard line of Erdogan in Turkey is much better for Europe, than another hotbed of instability and chaos near its borders. And if on this background the Russian-Turkish relations strengthen, then surely, there will be politicians and experts in the West, ready to express their grave concern about the ‘growing influence of Putin’ on the southern flank of NATO - in Turkey.
