MAIN TOPIC: War in Europe
photo: ©2022 Drop of Light/Shutterstock.
Europe’s defence – collective responsibilities Respect for nations in creating European forces
by Hartmut Bühl, Publisher, Paris
V
ladimir Putin has achieved the impossible: in a few days, his war against Ukraine has made the European Union (EU) politically move further than it has done in more than seven decades of peaceful economic and financial development. In those few days, a true “spirit of defence” has been created. The war has come as a great shock to all those who believed that peace in Europe was eternal. We Europeans must stop advocating utopias that we hide behind while doing nothing! We must conduct Realpolitik, based on geopolitics, geostrategic ambitions and a militarily feasible defence strategy based on our values and political objectives.
A surprising U-turn in Germany Germany is currently experiencing a fourth paradigm shift in the post-war history of its defence and armed forces: The first paradigm shift was the rearmament of 1954, and entry into NATO and the WEU, with limited sovereignty, after the failure of the European project of the European Defence Community (EDC). The second paradigm shift was reunification: finally, the people saw themselves freed from the substantial burden of spending for their heavy front-line defence and could invest the money “usefully” in the process of reunification. The third paradigm shift came shortly afterwards in the Balkans in 1994, the first deployment of German soldiers and their involvement in combat operations since the second world war. And on a Sunday, 27th February 2022, in an exceptional plenary session of the Bundestag in Berlin, observing with shame and horror Russian war crimes in Ukraine, Germany experienced its fourth paradigm shift by burying its complexes
of the previous seven decades towards everything military. In just a few minutes, a cultural revolution took place, a farewell to the dreams of “eternal peace” and a return to a cruel reality. Two days after the Russian invasion into Ukraine, the young German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, very skilfully attacked President Putin and his Foreign Affairs Minister Sergueï Lavrov personally, calling them liars, and on Sunday 27th February, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – known for his Hamburg equanimity – revealed himself in direct combat, with Russia and Putin’s war by accusing him personally. In a move unprecedented since 1956, and in order to “counter the threat of Putin”, Olaf Scholz announced the complete modernisation of the German Bundeswehr, with a “single special fund”, included in the constitution, of €100bn on top of the annual federal defence budget of €50bn: a quantum leap in European defence.
Europe and its defence For six decades, the United States was the “security provider” of the Atlantic Alliance and the Europeans the “security consumers”. When President Trump reflected on “the end of NATO” in 2018 and withdrew thousands of his troops from Europe, he created some disarray among Alliance members but after the pointed remarks of the French President in 2019, qualifying the Alliance as “brain dead”, a new sense of solidarity emerged among members. The war in Ukraine has seen a strengthening of the Atlantic Alliance, in a unity of spirit rarely observed in the past, but Europe is no longer the centre of our American friends’ interests and concerns, as they boost their commitment to the Indo-Pacific! The actual solidarity with Europe could quickly change. And what should Europe do so → Continued on page 28
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