Postimperial Empire
How the War in Ukraine Is Transforming Europe
It’s been a busy week in Europe. European Parliament elections marked a surge for right-wing parties across the continent; leaders of some of the world’s major powers met at the G-7 summit in Italy to discuss pressing global challenges; and officials from dozens more countries will convene in Switzerland this weekend to consider a potential path to peace in Ukraine. With France, Germany, and the United Kingdom facing domestic political turmoil, and the possibility of a second Trump term hanging over the NATO alliance, Europe’s political future seems far from certain.
If the European Union wants to preserve its large and diverse political community in the face of dissension from within and threats from without, it will need to strengthen its central authority and gather in defense of shared interests and values—to become, in other words, a “liberal empire,” wrote the historian Timothy Garton Ash in a 2023 essay. The continent must do so, he argued, “to prevent the comeback of a declining Russian empire and constrain a rising Chinese one.”
They say that energy is power. What does Europe's energy security look like? Europe depends on Africa (e.g. uranium deposits), on the Middle East (oil and gas), and also on "territories east of NATO" (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc.). Europe's energy base is beginning to escape European influence. What does this mean for Europe? Disaster. I guess Europe must become an empire to survive.
Zoosemiotics
9 个月Those in Europe who have opposed the union, conveniently forget that the strength of the EU is it's upholding of democratic principles, equality, sustainability and economic prosperity. That it has been forced to protect sovereign nations on its periphery is due to the expansive and divisiveness of two totalitarian regimes that have revived imperialism - in order to safeguard kleptocracy in Russia and an aging failed system in China. These nouveau imperial states are governed by phallocentric needs that insist on inequality, poverty and racism. The designs of Putin and Xi Jinping rail against what are the core values of every European which though tested by far right populism still insist on democracy and fairness. The new technology of this age has facilitated an awful hybrid war that conjoined by the frustration of some, represents a danger to new nation states and fledgling ones. The greed and fatal geographies of the past - has made it crucial that today despite our political differences, Europeans collectively challenge antidemocratic forces on all fronts. The surge of the Right and populism has been bankrolled or engineered by the totalitarian states.