The “New Europe” Concept Revisited

The recent use of the “New Europe” label by American policymakers comes as no surprise, as US foreign policy has been hijacked a second time this century by neoconservatives. Unfortunately, what the neoconservatives have overlooked is the true " graveyard of empires" role played in the modern era by the nations from this area of Europe. Indeed, all the major European empires which attempted to dominate it , like Austria ,Germany or France, as well as outside powers like Russia or the Ottomans , imploded. Therefore there is no reason to believe that US domination of it will have a better fate than that of its other imperial predecessors.

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Since the start of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine in 2022, the discredited geopolitical concept known as  “New Europe” -launched in 2003 by the late Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld- has started being used again in American official narratives about Eastern Europe.

The concept “of New Europe” was coined by Rumsfeld after NATO’s leading allies in Europe -France and Germany- flatly refused to participate alongside the American and British troops in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

“New Europe” referred to ex-Soviet satellites like the Baltic states, Poland, Romania and even Bulgaria, which were supposed to be more pliant to NATO’s geostrategic objectives in Europe.

Already by 2003 after NATO’s bombing campaign in Serbia or the Iraq invasion, the alliance was thoroughly discredited as a peacekeeping organisation. In spite of Russian objections, however, NATO expanded eastwards and by 2008 at its Summit in Bucharest the Americans were talking about including Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. Again, this objective was defeated by the opposition of the French and German leaders, who knew that the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in NATO would be an absolute red line for Moscow, as the then-US ambassador to Russia William Burns also warned his bosses in Washington.

20 years later the concept of “New Europe” has resurfaced again in American political discourse, a fact that should come as no surprise, since neoconservatives have hijacked American policy a second time, as they did during the George W Bush presidency. Now as then, neoconservative-inspired foreign policy has ignited a devastating military conflict, this time being fought on NATO’s behalf by Ukrainian proxies. 

Like in 2003, the Americans include in this group of countries they call “New Europe” almost all of the USSR’s former satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, from Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia to Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. What US policymakers have not mentioned to these new NATO members is the fact that they would simply substitute American hegemony to that of the Soviets without actually considering them -as it was the case between 1949 and 1989 with France, Italy or Germany- equal alliance partners on the European continent. 

To their discredit, Czech, Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian leaders have failed to realise that what took place was just a change in colonial masters: from the neighbouring USSR to the much more distant USA; from a land-based military superpower to a maritime superpower.

This confusion in the minds of Central and Eastern European political leaders has been fully exploited by the US, which convinced them to invest their countries’ hard-earned billions into American weaponry and to prepare for war with Russia, a war that -needless to say- is not about to happen. Thus, states in the region were persuaded to invest between 2.5% (Romania) to 4.5% of their GDP (Poland) in military hardware, with a view to getting American security guarantees against an enemy that does not plan to invade them anytime soon.

What American geostrategists fail to realise is that they have applied the New Europe label to the most anti-imperialist region of Europe. Accordingly, it is just a matter of time for ex-Soviet satellite countries to grasp that what has actually happened is just a change in colonial masters. When that takes place, the time-honoured anti-imperialist traditions of nations in the area will reassert themselves in a forceful way, jeopardising American plans to establish themselves as the new masters of Central and Eastern Europe.

Romania's Confused Geopolitics

 Starting with 1968, Romania's geopolitical situation and the foreign policy of the Romanian state stopped taking into account the country's historical ties and the geographical area it belongs to .This situation has changed unfortunately little since.

For a long period of time, the modern Romanian state had a policy of alliances that reflected the fact that the country's political elites had a very clear idea about Romania's actual enemies, its potential enemies and the states that could be of help in obtaining or defending its independence.

Until the end of the 19th century, the number one enemy of the newly created Romanian state was the Ottoman Empire, against which the Romanian army fought, alongside the Russian troops, to obtain its independence. Second on the list of Romania's enemies was, until its disappearance in 1918, the Austro-Hungarian empire.

After the union with Transylvania, Moldova and Bucovina in 1918 and the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the main enemy of Greater Romania became the USSR, a communist state that emerged from the ruins of the old Russian empire. This enmity, it is worth emphasising, did not have a historical or geopolitical basis, being of a purely ideological nature ( in fact, between 1934 and 1936 Titulescu negotiated with USSR's Litvinov a non-aggresion pact with the Soviet Union ). For the Romanian political class in the interwar period, however, Soviet communism represented a permanent and real threat, because the infiltration of Moscow's agents had the potential to undermine the stability of the Romanian state.

The second great enemy of Romania in the interwar period was Nazi Germany, which in 1938 imposed on Romania, through the Vienna Diktat, the cession of northwestern Transylvania to Hungary. The success of the Nazis in Vienna encouraged Stalin in 1940 to demand by means of an ultimatum the reunification of Moldova with the USSR.

Until 1937, Romania had a policy of regional alliances well thought out by the then foreign minister, Nicolae Titulescu. This is how the Little Entente appeared, a pact signed in 1920-21 between Romania, Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenes directed against Austro-Hungarian revisionism and the Balkan Pact of 1934 between Greece, Romania, the Kingdom of Serbo-Croatian-Slovenian and Turkey.

In 1941, the first and perhaps the most serious geopolitical error occurred, when Marshal Antonescu - the head of the Romanian state at the time - decided to participate with a million soldiers in the Nazi invasion of the USSR, although the dictator Salazar of Portugal advised him, in a secret diplomatic communication, to opt for Romania's neutrality.

After the occupation of Romania în 1945 by the Red Army, the ally of the Romanian state became the USSR, together with all the member states of the Warsaw Treaty. This time, Romania had a collective enemy, Western Europe, represented militarily in the area by NATO, which appeared in 1949.

It is nevertheless remarkable that the communist regime in Bucharest managed to convince Moscow to withdraw its troops from Romania as early as 1958, 31 years before that happened in the other communist states from Central and South-Eastern Europe.

After 1968, the Ceaușescu regime opted for a bizarre geopolitical orientation, anti-Soviet but pro-Chinese and pro-American, a fact that largely isolated Romania from the other alliance partners from the Soviet bloc and contributed to strategic destabilization in the area. For the first time in Romania's history, the Romanian state sought economic and political support outside Europe, from countries on other continents, such as the USA or China, located thousands of kilometers away, but which in turn had a adversarial relationship with the USSR .

Even more curious was the 1976 affiliation of Romania to the Group of 77, promoter of a policy of non-alignment. Since the group had only Yugoslavs and Romanians as members in Europe, Romania was included in the group of Latin American states of the G77. Again, Romania's potential allies were countries from other continents, thousands of kilometers away from our area of ​​the world. In this context, it should also be mentioned the alliances of the Ceaușescu regime with countries from Africa or the Middle East, which betrayed the exaggerated great power ambitions of the Romanian dictator.

Unfortunately, the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to a return to normal from a geopolitical point of view or to re-establishing Romania's traditional alliances. Romania's accession to NATO in 2003, an alliance led from a distance of 7000 km from Europe, by Washington , is a case in point. Becoming a member of this alliance did not contribute to the geopolitical stabilization of the area, or to more secure Romanian borders , as the war in Ukraine currently demonstrates, on the contrary. Sadly, although since 2007 Romania has become a European Union member, the EU has been systematically prevented by the US to build its own collective security structures.

VAROUFAKIS ABOUT NATO

 Yanis Varoufakis has recently published in Unherd an article highly critical of NATO's role in Europe.

In reality, NATO is the military arm of American imperialism in Europe, otherwise Washington would have no valid reason to pay for the "defense" of EU countries itself. Varoufakis is right, NATO isn't in Europe to promote or support liberal democracy, this is pure propaganda, as his testimony of the "colonels' dictatorship" in Greece from 1967 demonstrates .

NATO's real purpose is that of enforcing the hegemony of the US in Europe and, if possible, even beyond, in Eurasia. Unfortunately, most Western Europeans are not yet aware of the obsolete, zombie nature of NATO after 1989, because they have become victims of relentless US propaganda. NATO did not even help "liberate" the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It was actually the Soviets who realised their time was up and who decided that their troops should return home.

In truth, it was not NATO military pressure that determined the Soviets to do so, but popular pressure from below in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. People in these countries demonstrated in 1989 in the streets against Soviet IMPERIALISM, against the artificial division of Europe, and not necessarily in favour of liberal democracy, as most Western pundits like to claim nowadays .

People from our area of Europe have only recently started to realise that the US has simply substituted its hegemony to that of the Soviets and they are not happy about it. As Central and Eastern Europe is historically the most anti-imperialistic region of Europe , what happened there after 1989 will backfire miserably against the US in the very near future.