“Our historic experience repeats itself in the third decade of the 21st century. Once again, anti-European, anti-democratic, and anti-humanitarian forces, gathered around Vladimir Putin, the war criminal in the Kremlin, are trying to restore a Muscovite empire.”
Zurich
Europe is at a turning point according to Ursula von der Leyen’s message on the state of the EU, delivered last Wednesday. Can it really be true? Let the choice of words be a matter of taste. Von der Leyen’s speech in Strasbourg mainly dealt with climate problems, food problems, money problems, and other difficult matters, mostly of a technical nature and therefore solvable. Dutifully and correctly, the EU president declared almost all of Europe to be doing fine.
Critics of the Union can whine and complain as they please. The fact is that half a billion Europeans, inhabiting the western promontory of the Asian landmass, live so well and so safely, at least until now, that the majority of the globe’s remaining seven billion people can only dream of the same.
Precisely in this state of relative bliss lies Europe’s only existential problem, which until recently we tended to forget, but of which fascist Russia now reminds us with it war in Ukraine. Since Antiquity, people coming from outside have tried, again and again, to enter and spoil the European garden. An early example is the Cimbrians, who crossed the Alps in the second century before our era, only to be wiped out by the Romans on the Raudian Fields between Milan and Turin. Vandals, Moors, Mongols, and dozens of others were to follow. An always-present Russian ambition was the Slavic-Orthodox empire from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
This historical experience repeats itself in the third decade of the 21st century. Anti-European, anti-democratic, and anti-humanitarian forces, gathered around Vladimir Putin, the war criminal in the Kremlin, are trying to restore a Muscovite realm, covering both Europe and Asia. The immediate instrument is the war against Ukraine, the bloodiest and most destructive conflict in Europe since World War II. In the background, an alliance of often extremely unpleasant dictatorships is forming, ranging from China and North Korea over Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa to Latin America, so far badly organized under the name of the Global South and characterized by so many conflicting interests that the whole undertaking seems more curious than serious. But that a real danger could emerge, nobody needs to doubt, not even the so-called philosophers and assorted eggheads in the West, who with their demands for a so-called peace arrangement at the cost of Ukraine´s sovereignty and territorial integrity are the errand boys of Putin.
As such, there is nothing new in the Russian attack on Ukraine. The rest of Europe knows that its security begins in Ukraine. The faster and the more effectively the West supplies the Ukrainians with weapons, money and other means, the faster they can win the war that a barbaric thinking and barbaric acting Russia has inflicted on them, and thus secure both their own country and the rest of Europe.
In her speech on the state of the union, Von der Leyen was sober, bordering on dryness. Of course. Next year, we shall have elections to the EU Parliament, then the fateful presidential and congressional elections in the USA. I do not see Europe at a turning point. Rather we are having a reunion with our history. The time is not for pathos or poetry and certainly not for naivety. Foresight and action are the needs of the day.
Author: Per Nyholm
Danish journalist since 1960, based in Austria, columnist and foreign correspondent at the liberal Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten. This text was translated and adapted for The Ukrainian Review by Stanislav Kinka. Per Nyholm´s latest book, “Journeys in the Land of Blood” (Barcelona and Copenhagen, 2023), is freely available to any serious Ukrainian publisher, who might want to publish it.
