“Just like in the Balkans” … A recurring phrase, in the comments on the tragedy in Ukraine. The comparison between what is happening today in Kiev and what happened at the end of the last century in Sarajevo has entered the discourse. A civil war in Europe, with Europe as guilty bystander . But there is an important difference. In the gap between the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the imminent disintegration of Ukraine, there’s the lacking of Europe integration. That comes later, badly and pointless to face the Ukrainian tragedy, squeezed between national interests, realpolitik and indifference. Back in in the roaring ’90s, it was the indifference of the wealthy. Today it’s the indifference-rejection of those who are not so wealthy, that closed in their own suffering or in their own interests, try to minimize the damage and maximize the profits of a war.
The failure of the European foreign policy on Ukraine is the mirror image of the economic policy on the euro. The two failures have indeed the same roots. Lack of cohesion, solidarity and common goals: the same lack that prevents governments to realize that excessive deficits of “spenders” is negative as much as a trade surplus of “virtuous”, that imbalances can be corrected by acting from both parts and not issuing report cards (and consequent punishment). Cohesion, solidarity and common goals would have recommend to all EU governments to move before, and not at random, on the border nascent crisis: avoiding to promise things not possible to be realized and not fueling nationalist tendencies, but listening to the aspirations of that part of Ukrainian society that looks to us as a possible future.
Sure, but why should we care? We were unable to save Athens, with its small debt and its great history, how will we ever be able to save Kiev with its large oil pipelines and its history not known to most people? Maybe it’s too late, maybe the realpolitik to Putin will impose a curfew on the barricades and the silence on the dictators. Or maybe it’s too early, the European election campaign heats up in the spring. When perhaps the slain of Kiev will already be deleted. Or, who knows, the maps on the borders of the European Union will be changed. But then please, let’s change the word also on this side of the border: the word Union, overrated since the beginning, is overtaken by the events.
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