EUROPE: OLD FRIENDSHIPS, HESITANT ALLIANCES 

Gaither Stewart

DATELINE— Rome

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the late 1950s many signs of the carpet bombing of Germany were still evident. Though the factories had been at work since soon after war’s end, the first wave of post-war, cheap and hurried housing construction was the rule. Germans were still rebuilding train stations, several of which I followed like an urban planner, including the Frankfurt/Main and Munich stations. The restoration of the great gothic cathedrals of Cologne and Ulm proceeded at snail’s pace.

Most urban areas of the cityscape still had gaping holes where important buildings had once stood. While one spoke widely of denazification, the general atmosphere in the country still smelled of war, unjustifiably accompanied by what seemed to be fervent positive hopes for the future. I think now that only foreigners perceived a certain bitter sweet romanticism in the general destruction; Germans were too busy rebuilding to romanticize their situation.

Germans examine the rubble in one of their cities after heavy nighttime bombardment.  (1944)

Americans in Europe tended to lump together all European countries under the name “Europe”, which irritated Germans and other Europeans in those times when only a few European dreamers bandied about the idea of a united Europe. I soon learned to distinguish carefully one country from the other: Germany was Germany, France was France and Italy was Italy … the latter geographically and culturally separated from all.

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince that time an adulterated form of a United Europe has emerged: the economic European Union, today capitalism’s arm for the subjugation of the “continent”, a tainted union, however, far, far from the original European idea of its earliest founders—Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Altiero Spinelli—whose ideals for a united Europe were peace, unity and prosperity. Gradually borders and some old divisions fell, while the founders’ original ideals mutated into excessive bureaucracy and exaggerated forms of EU-controlled capitalism run by a clique of unelected capitalist leaders who have created little more than the political wing of US-controlled NATO. An economic union policed by the so-called troika consisting of the European Union (EU) in Brussels, the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington. The troika has ruined the economy of more than one country with its rules and their subsequent enforcement. Greece is now engaged in a life or death struggle against those regulations and directives and guidelines. The troika’s blind adherence to German-dictated austerity economics and to the US neocon program for Europe is generating growing resistance especially in southern EU member states.

Always luring, sometimes mysterious, Europe, Europa, Evropa, Auropa is the ancestral home of many Americans and still the first travel destination of American college students and Japanese and Chinese wealthy. Like seventy years ago or in the post-WW I era, something about contemporary Europe still attracts foreign youth, artists and scholars. Today’s Europe encompasses an area of 4,000,000 square miles with a population of over 500,000,000—depending on how far east your Europe reaches. As traditionally understood Europe is the second smallest continent, after Australia, only about one-fifteenth of the world’s total land area. The Europe considered here reaches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains, as in the post-WWII era former French President Charles de Gaulle preferred. According to Nietzsche, the Europe of his time was powered by two great narcotics: alcohol and Christianity (neither of which hold water today). Or, as Milan Kundera prefers, war and culture are the two great inseparable poles of Europe, both her glory and her shame. Not to be outdone in the spinning of quotations, the great Leo Tolstoy allegedly once said after a long and pensive study of the world map: “Evropy niet.” Europe does not exist.”  A true observation in the sense that French are still very French, Germans are German and Italians are Italian. Surveys however show that today’s young people of university age might identify themselves as first Europeans and secondly according to their ethnic belonging. Today, in Italy, a silent emigration abroad of college graduates is occurring, however, for the wrong reason: lack of employment at home.

The European Union has become little more than the political wing of US-controlled NATO.

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]owever, I assume Tolstoy had in mind the geographic fact that Europe in reality is a large peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass, separated from the continent of Asia by the Ural Mountains and the Ural River in the east, the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus Mountains in the southeast, and the Black Sea, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora, and the Dardanelles in the south. The Mediterranean Sea and the Straits of Gibraltar separate Europe from the continent of Africa. On the north Europe is bordered by the Arctic Ocean, on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, on the south and east by the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It is quite common today to hear the expression: “Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals.”

Jean Monnet: one of the fathers of the European Union idea.

Those Eurasian borderlands are precisely the lands that neocon-led America wants to get its hands on because of an infantile fascination with the historical claim that, “he who controls Eurasia controls the world.” In reference to the grandiose convictions of America’s neocons, I keep in mind Tolstoy’s words in War and Peace: “Those whom God wishes to destroy he drives mad,” which he borrowed from the Greeks, probably Euripides.

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ABOVE: The actual cost of war. Have Western Europeans forgotten so easily? Why are they so inebriated with Washington’s indecent lies? Is American propaganda that effective?

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou can’t ignore the reality that perhaps never before has a fine knowledge of geography been more important than today. It is a geographical fact that Eurasia exists. However any gung ho American neocon policy that aims at American control over that vast area rings like an Earth power claiming control, or aspiring to the control of, say, the planet Uranus. Fortunately, Europe understands the idiocy of neocon belief in America’s invincibility and Exceptionalism … or perhaps Europe is finally beginning to understand. But not necessarily for the right reasons. Old competitions, old rancors, old misunderstandings have a way of repeating themselves.

According to journalist Viktor Tolochko, as reported by Russia’s RIA News, German analysts have come to believe that the American game in Ukraine (or, in THE Ukraine, as Tolochko writes) is aimed less at Russia than at the European Union (EU) itself. The writer says his German contacts confirm that Germany opposes Ukrainian membership in the EU because that country faces default. Furthermore, according to German analysts, the sanctions against Russia pressed on the EU by Washington have cost the EU over one trillion euros, making each German 25% poorer than before the sanctions. And while the very nature of the EU, its spirit and long-time goals, degenerate, causing dissension in its member states, ecco Greece bursts on the scene and demands no less than reparations from Germany for the damage inflicted on Greece in WWII, thus threatening to undermine that original spirit of United Europe: peace, and the existence of the EU itself. (Hypocritical Europe likes to speak of seventy years of peace, simply ignoring the wars against ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the bombing of another European capital, Belgrade, and the recognition of Kosovo, annexed by the USA and the small country converted to one great military base.)

Robert Schuman: another visionary of a peaceful union of European states. The dream was betrayed.