The Danubian Democracies

 Accordingly, there is an obvious need for a more accurate geopolitical concept covering former Soviet satellite-states, subsequently lumped together into “New” Europe. The latter has proved to be an inadequate reflection of realities on the ground. 

Taking  commonalities and shared political agendas into account, one such grouping could be called  the Danubian democracies.

https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/the-danubian-democracies

The US and the Polish Honey Trap

 " Following the law of unintended consequences, the pursuit of America’s global hegemony agenda has given rise in Warsaw to hopes that Poland could somehow benefit from NATO’s expansion in order to resurrect the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a confederation that at its zenith in the 17th century covered a million square kilometres and encompassed the territories of today’s Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. 

https://florianpantazi.substack.com/p/the-us-and-the-polish-honey-trap

POLAND, THE USA'S TROJAN HORSE IN EUROPE

 The Polish premier attended an economic forum in Bucharest last week and proposed to Bucharest an economic and military alliance between Poland, Romania and Ukraine which is both anti-West and anti-East. Curiously, the project has many similarities with the political philosophy espoused in the inter-war period by the fascist Iron Guard in Romania. 

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 After the refusal of Germany and France to participate in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US decided to split the EU in two: "old Europe", who wishes to avoid American military adventures and wants strategic autonomy, and "new Europe", made up of new NATO members such as Poland, the Baltic states, Romania and maybe Bulgaria.

Already in 2008, at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Poland and Romania seconded the US proposal to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance. France and Germany opposed it, in the name of preserving the strategic balance in Europe. A few months after the summit in the summer of 2008, Georgia attacked Russian troops in Ossetia and Abkhazia, which led to war with Russia.

Now the Polish prime minister, who attended an economic summit in Bucharest last week, has launched the project of forming a "strategic triangle " between Poland, Romania and Ukraine, which would represent an economic counterweight directed against EU companies supported by Brussels, as well as a military one, directed against Russia.

It is obvious to me that this absurd project is also inspired by Americans, the "divide and conquer" strategy being obvious. The Polish Prime Minister hopes that this alliance, which would have 100 million members, will be able to economically counterbalance  230 million Western Europeans and, militarily, 180 million Russians.

A. Severin, former Romanian foreign minister, reached similar conclusions: "This is how the war started by the USA in Ukraine is directed not only against Russia, but also against the EU (German Europe), as well as the attempts to form, within the EU or across the borders of the EU, in association with actors from its eastern neighborhood, dissident groups, fundamentally German-sceptic, all of which have as a driving force Poland, with its aspiration to the status of the first European power. Such attempts, of American inspiration and vigorous Polish support, are the Bucharest Format 9 (nine states from the east of the EU, strategic partners of the USA), the Three Seas Initiative (Baltic, Black and Adriatic) and, now, the "Polish-Romanian-Ukrainian confederal strategic triangle".

The Romanian Prime Minister, General Ciuca, did not object to his Polish guest's project. Ciuca fought in Iraq in 2004, and is therefore a man the American hegemonists view as safe. However, in the alliance of this Latin country of 20 million inhabitants with two Slavic states counting together 80 million inhabitants, Romania would be the disadvantaged partner.

Furthermore, as a Latin state, Romania's place is next to France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, not next to Poland and Ukraine. In other words, alongside the states of western Europe, not its neighbours from the north or east.

The West's Last Crusade

 The  possible disappearance of Ukraine from the political map of Europe is the least of the problems facing the international community of states. We are all at a make-or-break junction in world history and not only Russia, but also the 'West and the rest' have to take a stand and help out to bring about a fairer, multilateral world order. Anything less could mark the end of civilisation itself.

Before tackling the West's last crusade happening under our own eyes, I feel we should appreciate Vladimir Putin for trying to reverse western expansionism in his neighbourhood and for pointing the conflict back to the ones responsible for promoting it for ages. 

The fact that we are all only a few steps away from all-out war against Russia as well as from nuclear catastrophe is by no means accidental. As matters now stand, the United States is led by a Catholic president and its House of Representatives by a Catholic speaker. We all know that Catholics have been Russian Orthodoxy's implacable foes for centuries. In fact, as Natalia Narochnitskaia explains in one of her papers "it is ridiculous to explain 600 years of unprovoked expansion to the Western fringes of Russian Orthodox lands by the 'divisions of Poland' and 'czarism' [...] It was the West using the spear of east European Catholics that was consistently moving eastward from the 10th to the mid-20th century. The territory of Russia was consistently pushed further away from the cradle of the Russian statehood."

As the balance of power in Europe shifted in the 18th century in favour of Russia and older powers like Poland, Sweden and Turkey declined, the importance of the Russians increased manifolds. Unfortunately, "civilised" Europe found it very hard to accept such geopolitical shifts ever since, and insisted on labelling Russians as "barbarians", just as Zelensky and president Biden do now. 

Nor was the strategy of alleviating east-west tensions by involving Russia in various European coalitions successful in the longer term. As the same Natalia Narochnitskaia points out, "a larger part cannot be integrated by a smaller one, which goes a long way towards explaining the centuries old rejection by the West of Orthodox Russia.[...] Russia is the vehicle of Byzantine legacy the West hates so much". 

Most of today's American political leaders have been influenced in their views of Russia by Zbigniew Brzezinski's depiction of Orthodox Slavs as culturally inferior to other ethnic groups in the world. In the current environment, this enables Zelensky and Ukrainian ultranationalists to reject peaceful compromise with Russians and advocate their indiscriminate killing by the local population instead. 

NATO's relentless eastwards expansion to the borders of Russia, therefore, fits a centuries-old tradition. This latest crusade is now led by a small number of Slavic nations that have joined the alliance in 1997, aided and abetted by an American Catholic president who is catastrophically ill-prepared for the job. Since 2014 as vice-president, Joe Biden has been in direct control of the upheaval in Ukraine and the subsequent takeover of the Kiev government by Ukrainian ultranationalists, most of whom are Catholic themselves. The conflict in Ukraine has however been presented to a hapless Western public as a fight for democracy against autocracy. It is hoped, in the view of American planners, that such a false narrative might eventually convince misguided Europeans or even Americans to fight the Russians directly in Ukraine in the near future. 

The expansion of the West using Europe's crusading Catholic Slav nations, like Poland, is not the sole explanation for Nato's expansionism in the last 20 years. The other ingredient contributing to today's explosive situation is the US military-industrial complex (MIC), a traditional major provider of American jobs. The expansion of Nato has been instrumental in assisting US industries working for the complex to sell military hardware to its new member countries, which have become its captive customers. 

To date, only president Obama has tried to reduce the size of his country's MIC and to cut defence budgets. He is also credited with starting a series of brainstorming sessions among the military with the objective of finding downsizing solutions. Soon after he left office, however, president Trump allocated more money to the military and, using the current tensions in Ukraine, president Biden increased the US defence budget yet again.

For American citizens, the US is a safe and secure country defended by its geographical position in between two oceans. The average American finds it hard to understand why the US should pay for Europe's defence via Nato, or why it should take on the obligation to fight on behalf of any Nato member that might come under attack, for reasons that have nothing to do with the interests of the United States. Still, by continually depicting Russia as a menace to American democracy or as the barbaric aggressor of innocent, democratic Ukrainians, the Catholic lobby in the US and Europe - which also includes the Vatican - has succeeded in preparing the Western population psychologically for war with Russia.

Problem is, Catholic pundits and political leaders are acting like a dangerous bunch of idiots. Russia is not only a huge and militarily powerful country, but it is also the main nuclear power in the world today. Short of eradicating it from the map, the US has no other solution but to reach an acceptable compromise with this former foe and learn to live with it peacefully. This, of course, involves first and foremost giving up Catholic-inspired crusades against this country.

As FDR advised during the forties, the US and Russia should try to become in some ways more like each other. For its part, Russia did try to become more like the United States, in adopting a market economy. It is now up to the United States to ditch liberal democracy in favour of electoral democracy and to start accepting the fact that Orthodox Christians around the world are in no way inferior to Catholic Christians.

On a wider, Western scale, the Catholic faith should finally be reformed in ways that would prevent it from interfering in international relations between states the way that the Church has in the past, and still does today. In order to defang it, it would be a good idea for the Italian state to abolish Vatican statehood, transform the Vatican into a national museum with the proceeds going to the Church's many victims, and give it 44 hectares to move its headquarters somewhere else in Italy, away from Rome itself. This way the Catholic Church would become like any other Christian denomination and hopefully act accordingly.  

We have to keep in mind that all modern day political leaders who have organised crusades against Russia were Catholics, from Napoleon, Hitler and Mussolini, to Joe Biden and Boris Johnson today. The current arrangement with the Italian state which recognized in 1929 the sovereignty of the Holy See within the Vatican was a major error. As Rome was the capital of the Roman Empire, the Roman Catholic Church has thrived for centuries by giving religious backing to all European powers in their quest of empire-building, from the Spanish and the Portuguese in the New World to the Austrians and French within Europe. In truth, the Catholic Church has been responsible for keeping the flame of imperialism and crusades alive for most of its existence, all while benefitting handsomely from the leaders and countries it supported in their quests. By revoking the Lateran Treaty from 1929 and by moving the Catholic Church head office outside Rome and getting this church out of international politics, the Italian state would make a huge contribution to world peace.

As matters now stand, the Catholic Church has a big share of responsibility in fuelling American hegemonism around the world and trying to cash in on it. I advocate this course of action not out of hate for Catholics, but in the interest of avoiding a devastating nuclear war, which Catholic crusaders are unfortunately ill-equipped to prevent.

Russia's Bismarckian War in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is in many ways puzzling, not only for the average European but also for seasoned historians who have failed so far to recognise or admit to its nature. This is so because, living as we are in a post-Cold War world and with a distant Atlantic power acting as the military leader in Western Europe, the actual nature of this war has largely been hidden from sight. 

As we all know, there are many types of wars. Hegemonic wars, like the ones France and Germany fought during the 19th and 20th centuries; straight wars of conquest involving the acquisition of real estate at the expense of one's neighbour, which was the main type of war during the Middle Ages; wars of extermination, such as the ones fought by the Americans against the indigenous Indians, or by the Spanish against the Incas; there are also civil wars, which are wars within the boundaries of one country which can provoke significant loss of human life, as it happened during the war of secession in the US during the 1860s. In Europe, we also experienced the ravages and devastation provoked by religious wars, which afflicted the continent for 30 years and ended with the Peace of Westphalia. Finally, there are small-scale wars such as border wars, which mainly involve countries in Asia and which do not represent a major threat for international peace.

The war in Ukraine is exceedingly rare and we can call it a Bismarckian-type war. Such a war takes place within a group of countries that do not only neighbour each other but also share the same culture or language and are part of the same ethnic group. The Germans experienced such a war between Prussia and Austria in 1866. 

A strongly militaristic Prussian state, built around Berlin, wanted to eliminate a second pole of power within the German world, Catholic Austria, which was dividing the German world and was making it impossible for them to unite into a more powerful political unit. This situation led to the " German war of brothers", or Deutscher Bruderkrieg.

The political leader at the time was the well-known Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. He spilled German blood during his war against Austria, but succeeded in his drive to unite most Germans around Prussia and remained to this day one of the greatest political figures in German and European history. (His legacy in international affairs was the advice - unfortunately not followed by his successors - that in order to have peace in Europe, a "good treaty with Russia" was paramount).

Like today, Bismarck's war was fought after the European continent experienced a long period of peace which followed the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars in 1815. The similarities do not end here. Prussia, like Russia, was no fan of liberal democracies, but rather an authoritarian state managed with an iron fist by its emperor and its chancellor. Like Russia in the nineties, Prussia had been  affected by the 1848 revolutionary wave in Europe - similar to the 1989 revolutionary wave - which sought to bring to power liberal-minded governments on the whole continent and generally democratise European political life. 

The Slav world also oscillates between two religious poles and two nations that would like to be considered as leaders. One is Russia, a militaristic Slavic "Prussia", which has weathered many national crises and defeated two major enemies in modern times (the French and the Germans). 

The second is - since the election of Karol Wojtyla to the Papacy - Poland. Its contribution to bringing about the fall of communism during the eighties, the implosion of the USSR, and its accession to NATO have rather adversely affected the minds of Polish politicians. Their hope is that by initially building Ukraine up as a client-state which is to be ultimately led by the Catholic element in that country, they would in time be able to challenge Russia together, for the leadership position of the Slav world. This is the main reason why Poland, which is militarily weak, is the most strident advocate of NATO intervention on behalf of Ukraine. But not being able to fight the Russians by themselves, the Polish leaders believe they have the cunning to push the Alliance to fight the war with Russia for them.

Russia felt that its primacy within the Slav world was being challenged by the Poles, who enlisted not only Ukraine's help but that of the Czechs and Slovaks as well, and in the end was forced to initiate a Bismarckian-type war in order to quell such plans. The Russians correctly assumed that such inter-Slav rivalries were a godsend to the advancement of Washington's unilateralist agenda, and to the final triumph -via Russia's defeat- of the neocon unipolar world project with America on top.

The only major difference now compared to Bismarck's times, therefore, lies in the existence of an extra-European superpower, the US, who has tried hard over the last twenty years to remain the sole leader in world affairs after the disappearance of the bipolar world. Still, it would be hard to believe that Americans would risk an all-out nuclear war with Russia, which is one of the champions of a multipolar world, in order to enforce their claim. For all practical purposes, by assisting Ukraine in its fight against Russia, the US and the EU are playing the role France played in 1866 in supporting Austria diplomatically. That, to be sure, will not make Ukraine win this or any other war against Russia.

 

Three Seas or Five Seas Initiative ?

 July 6, 2017

Polish President Andrzej Duda’s Three Seas Initiative project is a logical outcome of the European Union’s eastward expansion since the turn of the millennium.

To observers in the former Soviet satellite states of Central and Eastern Europe, the expansion of the EU looks very much like a “drang nach Osten” affair minus the tanks, that is. Even the French regarded this group of countries as lands to be conquered economically. Pascal Lorot, for example, one of the co-founders of geoeconomics, even wrote a book on the subject suggestively titled “La conquête de l’Est”.

Truth be told, ex-Soviet satellite states which have adhered to the European Union since 2004 have quickly become second-class countries within it. This is, by-and-large, a development I fully expected. As the Nobel-prize winning Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in the seventies, from the association of a group of rich countries with a group of developing or poor countries, the latter would end up as the losers.

At the time the membership of the EU was restricted to Western Europe and Germany, things had worked out rather smoothly. Most if not all of its members were economically developed, former imperial powers, institutionally compatible with each other.

The EU’s new entrants since 2004, on the other hand, have a shared history of anti-imperialist struggles in their quest for nationhood that sometimes go back centuries. Some, like Poland, had even suffered partitions at the hands of all neighbouring empires: Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. The countries in this group see their economic development stifled by Brussels’ over-regulation, their national sovereignty infringed upon in ways they cannot accept, and their future within the Union as a bleak one. These are but a few reasons why a closer integration between countries like Czechia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and ex-Yugoslav states makes much more sense now than it did in the inter-war period.

Still, in my view, Poland would be an unlikely nucleus for promoting closer economic, military and even political links between them. To be successful, the group has to shy away from including states like the Baltic republics, Ukraine or Moldova. The latter states have millions of Russians or Russian-speaking citizens within their borders and, short of resorting to Stalinist-era eviction solutions, these countries’ eventual adherence would prove poisonous to the entire group. Needless to say, Russia would strongly oppose the formation of such a group if the Polish-inspired drive to include the largely neutral countries on its border would somehow prevail.

And last but not least, Greece should also potentially be included as a member of the TSI, which would thus become FSI (Five Seas Initiative). Greece’s adherence would give the group increased international clout, an enviable geostrategic configuration and better access to the Mediterranean. As matters now stand, there is no love lost between the Greeks and the German-led EU officialdom.

In fact, the driver of such an integration project should be Romania, for strategic and historical reasons. The inter-war Romanian foreign minister N. Titulescu had succeeded in 1934 in merging the Little Entente (made up by Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia) with the countries from the Balkan Pact, which included Greece and Bulgaria. He was also careful not to antagonize the USSR, with which he signed a non-aggression pact.

Tragically, however, at this point in time Romania is unable to play such an essential role. Practically all the politicians we inherited from Ceausescu’s dictatorship – and Iliescu’s “original democracy” experiment – lack decency, credibility, vision, solid qualifications and political skill. Most of them are an illustration of the sociological nightmare of the worst who get on top, which makes it very difficult for the country to solve its internal woes, let alone participate in such a demanding undertaking.

The support of the United States, although not necessarily a military one, is a prerequisite for the successful completion of any of the above projects. It is no accident that President Trump gets a better reception in Poland than, say, Germany or Britain. The United States have themselves appeared on the world map after a successful war of independence, fought against imperial Britain.

If successful, the efforts of Central and Eastern Europeans to closer integrate their economies and markets and to build the needed physical infrastructure would also benefit the European continent as a whole.