The Scuttling of Peace in Europe

.

The Council of Heads of State and Government of the European Union decided on June 23, 2022 to grant Ukraine the status of a country applying for membership. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, specified that the path will be long (Turkey has had this status for 23 years) to raise this country to the level required by the Union, whether in economic or political matters.

The cabinet of the Ukrainian president had already specified that Kyiv does not hope to join the Union, today or tomorrow, because it has another project, but that candidate status opens the way to strong financial support from Brussels to bring it closer to EU standards.

Indeed, Ukraine shares the Polish project of Intermarium : an alliance of all states located between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.

INTERMARIUM VS. EUROPEAN UNION

This project is based both on a geographical reality and on a historical past: the “Republic of the two Nations” (Crown of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania) from the 16th to the 18th century. It was formulated for the first time during the Polish revolution of 1830 by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, then during the interwar period by the Polish general Józef Piłsudski under the name of “Federation Międzymorze”. Piłsudski conceived in parallel an ideology aimed at freeing all the peoples of Central Europe from their integration into the Germanic and especially Russian empires, “Prometheism”. Like the Titan, he promised men technical progress allowing them to free themselves from their overlords. In practice, he preferred the Germans to the Russians and did not hesitate to ally himself with the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans against the Tsar. In 2016, a third version of this project was presented by the Polish President, Andrzej Duda, under the name of “Three Seas Initiative” (the third sea is the Adriatic). Eleven states participated. They have been twelve for a few days.

This project offers in principle a legitimate political response to the absence of physical borders in the great plain of Central Europe: it is better to unite than to submit or to go to war. However, things are not as clear as they seem: the Republic of the two Nations was a confederation allowing the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy to each maintain their own functioning, while Piłsudski imagined a Federation in which each people would merge and where the Poles would hold the upper hand. All the nationalist movements of Central Europe refer to the Republic of the two Nations, but they draw quite different conclusions from it.

For the Ukrainian banderists, the Republic of the two Nations is the heiress of Ruthenia created by the Swedish Vikings, the Varagues, which is a bit far-fetched insofar as their territories do not overlap. At most, we can say that, culturally, these entities have points in common. For the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenski, the Republic of the two Nations is a good example of a confederation which makes it possible to overcome both Russia… and Germany, which dominates the European Union.

It is because the Polish and Ukrainian political leaders are betting on this common project of Intermarium confederation that President Zelensky was able to envisage without blushing ceding Eastern Galicia to Poland  [ 1 ] . However, in both countries, the extreme right (in the totalitarian sense of the interwar period) intended to use this policy to advance its racial ideas.

Poland has never played the game of the European Union, of which it has been a member since 2004. During its period of candidacy for the Union, it did not hesitate to collect enormous sums intended to reform its agriculture and to spend them to buy US warplanes and wage war in Iraq on Washington’s orders. This sleight of hand had been devised by the United States-uno-Polish Zbigniew Brzezinski and the United States-uno-French Christine Lagarde  [ 2 ] . Nothing has changed: today, Warsaw is in perpetual dispute with Brussels, in particular about its judicial system. Ukraine will have no trouble playing the same double game.

This is the main problem of the peoples of Central Europe: they rightly seek to take responsibility for themselves without their large Russian and German neighbours, but do not manage to assert themselves without fighting against them. in the past, this pathology has always pushed them to confront each other.

Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski ended his life in exile in Paris and General Piłsudski set up the headquarters of his Promethean movement also in Paris. In both cases, it was a question of fleeing both Germany and Russia. The memory of this period gave rise in 1945 to the creation of a network of emigrants from Central Europe working first for the Vatican, then for the French secret services and finally for the Anglo-Saxons (network also called Intermarium  [ 3 ]). It brought together the main fugitive leaders of the Croatian Ustashi and the Romanian Iron Guard, etc. Then it was, in 1991, the constitution of the “Visegrád Group” (Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia). Today, the supporters of this project are turning to the Anglo-Saxons, hence the support from Washington and London to Warsaw and Kyiv. Thus the summit of the Three Seas Initiative, in Warsaw in 2017, received US President Donald Trump. While at the June 20, 2022 summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking by video, immediately requested and obtained his country’s membership.

The interest of the Anglo-Saxons for the Intermarium project is old. One of the fathers of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, had identified Central Europe as the heartland ( Hartland ) of Eurasia. For him, the British Empire could only control the world by first controlling this region. One of his disciples, Prime Minister Boris Johnson therefore rushed to Kyiv to support President Zelensky. All the Anglo-Saxon geopoliticians have taken up Mackinder’s ideas, including of course Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was with the Straussian Paul Wolfowitz one of the two main figures of the Washington conference in 2000, which marked the alliance between the States and Ukraine  [ 4 ] .

Unfortunately, those who push the United States to support the Intermarium project are representative figures of far-right nationalism. Thus, the advisers of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, who made them adopt the concept of “captive nations (of the USSR),” were all former collaborators of the Nazis, members of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations  [ 5 ] ; those who organized the aforementioned congress of 2000 were their children; and today the most important of them is the United States-Poland Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, who never ceases to minimize the crimes of the Nazis  [ 6 ] .

All members of the Three Seas Initiative are members of the EU, except Ukraine. Most consider spontaneously that it is for them much more important than the EU, although it does not have the same means. The fact that Ukraine joined three days before its EU candidate status was recognized not only shows that it is more important for it, but also that Brussels has understood that it has to accept all members of the Three Seas Initiative so as not to lose any.

Ultimately, this logic should lead the members of the Three Seas Initiative to collectively leave the EU when it is no longer financially profitable to them, because they have never shared its political objectives.

Already, the entire security architecture of the continent is being called into question. It rested on two pillars, on the one hand the Council of Europe and on the other hand the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe.

RUSSIA PUSHED OUT OF THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE

The Council of Europe was created in 1949. For some founders, it was a question of basing European unity on common legal principles via a Council of States and for others, via an assembly of parliamentarians. Ultimately, the two projects were combined, but at the time the Soviets and their brother countries were kept out. The USSR and the members of the Warsaw Pact adhered to it just after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This Council has two flagship institutions. In the first place the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Unfortunately, it has become politicized in recent months, showing an obvious bias against Russia. For example, in January it recognized the right of a Russian citizen to spit on the official portrait of the President of the Russian Federation (Karuyev v. Russia judgment). Or, in February 2022, the right of a Russian citizen to disrupt a pro-Putin demonstration by displaying a sign “Putin, better than Hitler!” (Manannikov v. Russia judgment). And it has just censored the Russian law which had been adopted after the color revolutions requiring political organizations financed from abroad to display it on all their publications (Ecodefence and others v. Russia judgment).

The other major institution is the Venice Commission, which has helped the newly independent States to assimilate the rules of democracy — a Commission which, by the way, has constantly warned Ukraine about its administrative procedures and institutional  [ 7 ] —.

Ultimately, the West suspended Russia’s voting rights in the Council of Europe on the grounds that it would attempt to annex Ukraine by force. To which Russia, flabbergasted, replied that it had never intended to do so and that it was withdrawing from an institution that had become partisan.

RUSSIA PREVENTED FROM PARTICIPATING IN OSCE MEETINGS

The other intergovernmental platform is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). It was created in 1975 on the occasion of the Helsinki Accords. Unlike the United Nations, it is not a place of arbitration, but just a forum that allows all actors on the continent to speak to each other freely. It was for example that it adopted the Istanbul Declaration of 1999, also known as the “Charter for Security in Europe”, which lays down the two major principles (1) of the right of each State to choose the allies of its choice and (2 ) the duty not to threaten the safety of others by ensuring his own; principles whose non-respect is at the origin of the conflict between the United States and Russia  [ 8 ] .

Remember that the Russian Federation has never contested the right of anyone to join NATO, but that of NATO members to host US military bases. Our readers remember that when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wrote to each of his “partners” asking how he reconciled the two Istanbul principles with the installation of American military equipment and personnel close to Russia, none dared to answer him.

However, the neutrality of this forum was violated in April when new OSCE officials, more precisely former NATO soldiers, were caught in the act of spying in the Donbass  [ 9 ] .

As if that were not enough, the United Kingdom has just refused the necessary visas to the Russian delegation which was to attend the annual parliamentary assembly of the OSCE, from July 2 to 6, 2022 in Birmingham. London, which is violating its obligations, took shelter behind the nominal sanctions of the European Union against each member of the delegation.

Consequently, not only do the documents signed by the 57 Heads of State and Government of the OSCE no longer have any value, but the administration of this organization has become a weapon of war, and ultimately it will no longer play its forum role.

The security architecture of the European continent is therefore radically changing. Eventually, Central Europe will come together as a bloc, first within the European Union and its candidates, then outside the Union. Its Defense will be guaranteed by the United States. While the two western and eastern parts of the continent will no longer speak to each other. This will be the culmination of the plan of the Anglo-Saxon geopoliticians. 

But this project, if realized, will be unstable. First, the Western Europeans have always needed Russia, and then the peoples of Central Europe have long lived on a battlefield. When the Teutonic Knights and the Cossacks did not come to fight at their house, they fought among themselves. For a peace to be lasting, all the protagonists must be respected.