Europe’s Emancipation
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’ call for a new international payment system is but part of Europe coming out on its own. Independent of Trump’s USA.
For the large majority of Europeans, the 2nd WW comes out of history books or at most from an octogenarian’s tale in the family. Yet the most relevant consequence of the last and most terrible European civil war has survived to the present: Europe’s dependence on a US base, underpinning its security, its political stability and its economic bloodstream, in the guise of the almighty Dollar. Paradoxically the implosion of the USSR 1990, main global counterweight to the US, reinforced that trend since for two decades after, Pax Americana reigned supremely worldwide. No change of paradigms was necessary, the EU had more time to continue building structures of economic unity (largely successful) and of its own security (largely unsuccessful e.g. in the Balkans).
Faster than anybody anticipated, the election of Donald Trump as US President will now probably change the course of history. The self-inflicted implosion of the other side in the Cold War as future historians will call it. The return to a system of might before right (Iran Nuclear, and Paris Climate Agreements), to a byzantine tangle of coercive bilateral arrangements (latest example the replacement of NAFTA by individual Free Trade Agreements) and of one-sided international partisanship (Israel and Saudi-Arabia) for purely electoral reasons.
Trump is both an expression and a cause of the steady trend to authoritarian National-Populism worldwide. In Europe this holds especially true. The far-rightist (and a few far-leftist), xenophobic and stridently nationalist forces were of course present ante-Trump. But he gave them respectability to be part of the ‘on the one hand and on the other’- political game, including the respective echo in all media. So, if Fox News and fake news can elect a leader of the free world, why not a Prime Minister in Italy and Austria? In Germany, hitherto inoculated for very good historical reasons, the last days and weeks have shown a major political party, the AfD, coming out as a genuinely fascist force.
That is the background of Maas’s call for a new, Dollar-independent payment system. More than ever the EU will be decisive if Europe, at present the most potent economic bloc in the world, is to pursue, and uphold globally the still reigning international order, originally built up by the winning coalition of the 2nd WW. The further development of the Euro-Zone appears vital in this context. The two decisive players in this fight for sane development, Macron and Merkel fully appreciate what is at stake and want to act in consequence.
Here is also an evident connection with a political and economic role for two ‘mid-size countries’ of traditionally Western origins, both with enormous resources and potential for the future and, crucially, a geographic destiny in the Pacific: Canada and Australia. Ottawa for covering the Americas side, Canberra the Asian side of the Pacific, in tandem with Japan. Even if Trump turns out to be an accident, collateral democratic damage linked to geopolitical upheaval, the EU and its global partners will have to plan their own, ‘American-free’ development. In the economic area this starts happening, on both sides of the world.
In Asia in the form of the multilateral Free-Trade Agreement TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership) minus 1(USA), and its potential link-up with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership RCEP, the free-trade area emerging in Asia under China’s guidance.
In Europe in the form of the single market with a common currency and fiscal policy eventually even including its neighborhood, if and when the latter returns to sanity (Turkey). Connecting the two sides of the world in form of, faute de mieux, the FTAs of Canada and Japan with the EU.
In the security field this is evidently much more difficult. Now and into the future, nobody and nothing can replace American military might. Especially not in the Pacific, checking China, should Beijing pursue imperial overreach. In Europe, if and that is a big if, the Europeans finally mobilize both the necessary means and the political will to unite their military forces. Not, at least not in the foreseeable future, to replace NATO, still indispensable to check Putin. But to substitute it, and the US, where possible and feasible. In Africa generally, and in the anti-terrorist fight there in particular, but also in the East of the Ukraine to mention but the most evident forest fires on Europe’s periphery.
The immediate reason for Heiko Maas’ call for an independent payment system is the Iranian crisis. Triggered by the illegal and needless withdrawal by Trump from the nuclear limitation treaty, the one barrier against an explosion of nuclear armament in the Middle East. Above and beyond this particular crisis, decoupling from the Dollar is but one step towards saving the world as we know it. A world that has allowed most of us to prosper, leave freely and in peace.
Picture: eu2018at (BKA/Michael Gruber)