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.

Spare a Thought for Joe Biden

 " Errare humanum est, sed perseverare diabolicum"

The American president is in big trouble, both domestically and internationally. After only one year in office, Joe Biden is considered one of the most unsuccessful presidents since George W.Bush. On the home front, the Democrats' fortunes are going south in all major polls, the party risks losing a significant number of Congressional and Senate seats in the fall. Former allies are deserting the party in droves and no wonder: the current administration has mishandled both the pandemic and the American economy, with inflation having risen to a 40-year high long before the Ukraine conflict started. The president's approval rating is one of the lowest ever, proving that Obama's advice - who told Joe Biden he did not have to run in 2020 - was both prescient and timely. 

The bad news on the home front is more than matched by disastrous news from abroad. As soon as he moved into the White House, Biden brought the ill-famed team of neocons Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland into the State Department and the national security apparatus, together with whom he had masterminded the so-called Maidan "revolution" in Ukraine back in 2014. This team did not waste any time in botching diplomatic negotiations with Russia throughout 2021 and provoking it to intervene militarily in Ukraine. They are currently undermining any bilateral talks which might lead to a peace treaty being signed, if Blinken's declarations are any guide. As Victoria Nuland recently told Congress, they envisage a long drawn-out conflict in Ukraine. This would suit the neocons' strategy to torpedo Russia's economy and leadership.

European political leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, were shocked when Joe Biden launched his savage personal attack on Vladimir Putin in Poland, advocating for regime change in Moscow. This, however, was consistent with the neoconservative agenda regarding Russia, despite Blinken's official denials. By calling Putin a "butcher", Biden is desperately trying to determine American feminists to vote Democrat in the midterm congressional elections. Sure enough, the importance of geopolitics in international affairs is hard even for seasoned politicians like Olaf Scholz to grasp, let alone for feminists. This is the reason why they have reduced the entire Ukraine situation to an issue they have been nursing for some time, that of Vladimir Putin's "toxic masculinity". According to leading American feminists, a kind of hormonal reaction of the Russian president explains Russia's intervention in Ukraine. 

Neoconservatives deserve another special mention, however. Affected as they are by the virus of global hegemonism that destroyed Napoleon's France in the 19th century and Hitler's Germany in the 20th century, they continue to push a "USA uber Alles" unipolar agenda in international affairs. Their hate towards Russia is not racial in nature, rather it is based on the realisation that the two other major hegemonic drives in the West's modern history were stopped only with the help of Russia. By refusing to accept NATO's expansion up to its doorstep, Russia - together with China - became the biggest obstacle to their global hegemonic plans.

Any sane American administration would have relegated the neocons to the dustbin of history long ago, not recycled them as they did. Instead, Joe Biden gave them center stage in framing American foreign and defense policies once again, and the results are nothing short of disastrous. Small wonder, therefore, that leading neocon figures are calling this period in US political history "the neocon moment". Walking back American foreign policy from its current predicament seems to be a tall order, which, unfortunately, will have to wait until the next US presidential elections. Let us hope that after so many decades of overseeing US foreign policy, Joe Biden will at least be able to avoid igniting World War III.

On the G8 and NATO

 In the spring of 1997 during my lobbying activity to foreign chancelleries, I was very preoccupied with the need to create an appropriate institutional framework for the transition from a bipolar to a multipolar world. American neoconservatives and NATO had other plans, however. If they wanted Russia as an enemy, well ... now they got it.

In the spring of 1997, I came up with the idea of ​​recommending to the Clinton administration the inclusion of Russia in the G7, a proposal that was accepted by the Americans. Thus, in June 1997 the G7 became G8 with Russia as a member.

My geopolitical suggestion was based on solid economic reasons, but also on the fact that Russia felt immense frustration with its international status after the disappearance of the bipolar world. Between 1995 and 1997 I participated in a series of international conferences organized by EuroForum or IBC (two London companies) in Bucharest, Prague and London on the transition of Eastern European states to a market economy and the necessary reforms. On those occasions, I was able to see the dissatisfaction of the Russians with the way this process was evolving in their country, but also with the uncertain status of the new Russia internationally.

Unfortunately  at the time , the West had not yet framed a coherent post-1989 foreign policy, so as to give the Russians the feeling that they had not become a third-hand power, as many US or EU political actors would have liked. The fact that my proposal was accepted proves that at that time the Clinton administration had not yet come to be dominated by neoconservatives, the artisans behind American unipolarity, that was inaugurated by President GW Bush after the 2001 terrorist attack.

In the end, Russia was arbitrarily reduced - at the instigation of the neoconservatives - to the status of a big state with an oil pump ( Nina Khrushcheva ) and was removed from the G8 in 2014, after it annexed the Crimean peninsula.

In the summer of 1997, I also sent a lobby letter to then-US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in support of Romania's NATO membership. My motivation was by no means anti-Russian. At that time, the country was in a dire economic situation, failing to attract - like the Czech Republic, Hungary or Poland - foreign investors to take over large bankrupt companies in Romania. It was only years later that I realised that the military goal of the alliance had really become that of encircling Russia, and it never crossed my mind in 1997 that NATO would accept the Baltic states in 2004 as members of the alliance. ..

Certainly at that time, I did not grasp that I was trying to gain Romania's accession to a politico-military alliance, NATO, which would become responsible two decades later for the outbreak of hostilities heralding World War III, because this is the phase which we are all in after the events of 2014 in Ukraine. Mea maxima culpa !

On Russia's Global Importance

 Over the last 30 years, Western officialdom's policies concerning Russia have grown increasingly irrational. Europeans tend to forget that long before the US or the Ukraine ever existed, Russia was always there in their hour of need. Unfortunately, after the latest events, Russia might not be there for us any longer.

For me as an historian, the only Slavic state that deserves all the respect and consideration of social scientists is the Russian state.

Unfortunately, the European Slavs proved an absolutely incredible inability to create solid states that would last over time and prosper. Neither the Serbs, nor the Czechs, nor the Slovaks or even the Poles have proved to Europe or the world that they have the attributes necessary to live in peace with each other, to build well-organized or consolidated state structures (see Ukraine).

To be sure, the Poles disappeared for 200 years from modern history, reappearing as a state only since 1918. Federal Yugoslavia disappeared after only 70 years, Czechoslovakia around the same time. Most of the time, these branches of the Slavic people became the victims of their stronger neighbours - Turks, Germans, Russians or Austrians - because of this inability to build solid state structures.

Please compare the European Slavs now with the Russians, who have a millenary history of existence as a state, although their central position in Eurasia is an extremely difficult one geopolitically. During the Middle Ages, they managed to defeat both the Mongol invaders and the Tartars, not to mention the Turks. In modern times, they colonized Siberia as far as the Pacific and came to expand their territories in the west to the borders of Romania or Poland. All this time, Russia has overall been a factor of stability in Europe, being a reliable ally of both the Germans and the Western powers - England and France, but also the United States - in the first half of the twentieth century.

Nowadays most of the European Slavs have joined the NATO umbrella and are barking like puppies at the big dog, Russia, which has done nothing to antagonize them in recent decades, on the contrary. The Russians have instead been busy rebuilding their economy and developing their agriculture. From an importer of wheat during communism - according to Gorbachev they used to purchase it with gold bullion at one point - they became one of the biggest exporters of grain.

Russia has always been run by the secret services, whether we are talking about Tsarist Ohrana, the Soviet KGB or now the FSB. This is one of the secrets of the Russian state's longevity and stability, since the Russians are not at all convinced that professional politicians or Western-type democracy could ensure their survival as a state. They were willing to give it a go during the nineties, but the experiment failed miserably and was never going to be repeated.

Of course, the West would prefer Russia to be run by an alcoholic like Yeltsin or someone like that. But the Russians - who have recovered economically from the disaster of the 1990s under Vladimir Putin, have paid off their outstanding debts, rebuilt their army and amassed important financial reserves for the first time in their recent history - have other options. In fact, this is the fundamental reason why Putin is not liked by leaders in the West, the rest is just propaganda.

In terms of international relations, Russia cannot agree to a unipolar world  ruled exclusively by Washington, just as China does not agree. The Russians' preference for a multi-polar world, in which they have a say, is hundreds of years old. They were the ones who put an end to the French hegemonic plans in 1814, they were also instrumental in the fight against German hegemony that caused two world wars last century. 

Russia had peacefully and voluntarily given up, without armed conflict, the bi-polar world that appeared after 1945, but it cannot agree not to participate at all in global decision-making. This approach is an extremely dangerous neoconservative utopia, which could trigger World War III, even a nuclear one. Unfortunately, since the inhabitants of the Anglosphere  are not Russians, I don't think they will peacefully give up their plans for a unipolar world that the American neoconservatives have been trying to impose globally for 25 years now ...

The US are Acting on the Wrong Philosophical Assumptions about History

 When foreigners or Americans themselves are complaining about the US, they usually take aim at its political and economic elite, institutions, its foreign policy, the military or America's cultural or global ambitions.

Few, however, are aware of the fact that powerful nations are run according to an agenda that incorporates a specific interpretation of history:  a historical algorithm, so to speak. By and large, this philosophical interpretation of world history goes a long way towards explaining why nations like the United States behave the way they do.

From the Age of Enlightenment we have inherited a conception about the historical evolution of humanity which in most cases is depicted as both irreversible and unidirectional, or as some specialists call it, linear. In the 19th century Hegel, a German philosopher of history, refined this approach by adding a final destination to this linear historical evolution, which he called "the end of history" (in his view, German history ended with the formation of the Prussian state). Karl Marx was one of his students and he devised his own end-of-history , which was supposed to happen when the proletariat would get on top of the capitalist class for good. The type of society he imagined was called communism, in which exploitation of any kind would completely disappear and  perfect equality would reign among all members of society.

One of the legacies that Marxist philosophy of history left behind was a partition of history according to different types of societies, defined by their specific modes of production. Thus, humanity advanced from prehistorical hunter/gatherers to the classical, slave-owning ancient societies, on to feudal societies, which gave birth to what Marx called capitalist societies, in their turn the harbinger of future communist societies. And herein lies one of his biggest errors. According to a number of social scientists like Eugene Buret, or renowned economists such as J.A. Schumpeter,  capitalist society is not a new and entirely different type of society if compared to the feudal one, but just the decaying phase of medieval Western society. 

In other words, what we were conditioned by Marx to believe about the existence of capitalist and communist societies is basically wrong. If, on the other hand, we look at capitalism (in the west) and communism (in the east) as simply the decomposing phases of feudal societies, many aspects about the organisation and functioning of capitalist or communist societies become more comprehensible from a sociological point of view. What is important to note at this point is that whereas decaying medieval Western societies turned capitalist, decaying feudal Eurasian or Asian societies turned communist. 

It is useful to remember that both capitalism and communism have facilitated the transition of entire nations from agricultural countries to industrialised and urbanised ones in a relatively short period of time, albeit using vastly different methods in achieving these goals. Both types of transition, however, have been marred by extremely painful dislocation, misery and in some cases millions of casualties.

The most problematic part of the historical algorithm used to elaborate political, geostrategic and military agendas is that which refers to the evolution of humanity as a whole. Thus, if Hegel and Marx were right, then under certain conditions historical evolution will stop after reaching a peak, after which the history pages in the book of life will remain blank. A version of this misguided interpretation of historical evolution was given to the American public by Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 published his essay "The End of History and the Last Man".

Like Hegel before him, Fukuyama believed that after the 1991 implosion of the USSR the end of history was in sight. In his view this consists of the universal adoption of market economics principles and of liberal democracy as a political system. His interpretation of world history and especially his end-of-history thesis has informed  the political action of the US and that of American neoconservatives since 2000. To this day, neocons wrongly believe that because the US is the only superpower left, it should retain the status of world hegemon for at least another century.

What actually happened after the implosion of the bipolar world was - after a brief unipolar moment - the advent of the multipolar world, which the US alone adamantly opposes.

In fact, a much more fruitful approach to understanding the historical evolution of humanity could be found in the writings of Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. In his "Scienza Nuova", he postulated that human societies have a cyclical - instead of linear - evolution. Vico's definition of progress differs from that of Kant or Hegel, for example, who were firm believers in the infallibility of human reason. For Vico too, reason was the catalyst for human progress. However, Vico believed in the possible collapse of reason at some point, which in turn could cause civilisational collapse. In other words, he was convinced that a breakdown in reason can cause man to revert to an earlier, barbarous state.( His approach could for example better explain how the excesses of nazism and even communism were ever possible.)

In this cyclical paradigm of evolution, a fallen empire like Rome, for example, partially re-emerged in a different form in 800 under the name of The Holy Roman Empire (considered by Popes as the secular arm of the Church), and it was arguably the most powerful European feudal state during the Middle Ages. The Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years until 1806, when it was replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine by Francis II, the Austrian emperor. After the reunification of German states around Prussia in the 19th century, the rise and the fall of the German empire in the 20th century, the partition of Germany after 1945 and its reunification in 1991, the German federal state is still the most powerful country in the EU.

Yet another example is the recent re-emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, after what the Chinese call "the century of humiliation", with the Chinese share of global GDP  approaching again 25 percent, as it did around the year 1800. 

Russia, too, has put the trials and tribulations of empire collapse and 70 years of communism behind her and is fast re-emerging as the leading Eurasian military power, a status that it used to hold undisputed from the middle of the 18th century. 

Such examples conclusively prove that today's American policymakers would be well-advised to discard theories of history, like Fukuyama's, that can only lead to huge errors, especially in foreign policy. Adopting a cyclical approach to assessing historical developments could indeed yield much more positive outcomes for American experts and politicians alike.

Accordingly, German reunification and de facto leadership of the EU, the re-emergence of Russia as a major military power in Eurasia, or China's rise as a global economic actor should be considered normal historical developments . Moreover, even these countries' quest to have their spheres of influence recognised has deep historical roots and should be considered by Washington as legitimate, instead of being treated as offensive, as it is now the case.

US: from Nation-Building to all-out War

"Billions spent on the Kennedy School, grand strategies seminars, and the Georgetown School of Foreign Service has bought us an elite that's about to blunder us into a Ukraine war."(J.D. Vance)

In a few days from now, President Biden will host German Chancellor Scholz in Washington. The expectation of Washington neocons is that he will succeed in pressuring Germany to join a pan-European alliance against Russia. 

To be sure, the German refusal to send weapons to Ukraine - and thus help ignite a fratricide war between Ukraine and Russia - makes sense. Germany was right in refusing to join the neocon-inspired war against Iraq in 2003 and is even more justified in refusing to join NATO in sponsoring a war against Russia now.

Unfortunately, France is no longer led by a president as experienced or astute as Jacques Chirac: Macron seems willing to send troops to Romania, regardless of how pointless this is from a military point of view.

Since 2001 the US have embarked in quite a few military interventions or coups around the world, which were followed by a disastrous drive to promote nation-building: in Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011) and Ukraine (2014). All these ill-conceived nation-building efforts have backfired miserably. Undaunted, the Washington neocons who have monopolised American foreign policy for the last two decades are now promoting a war by proxy, encouraging the Ukrainians to fight the Russians.

Since 2007 onwards, Vladimir Putin has cautioned the West against pushing the boundaries of NATO eastwards. His pleas went ignored and - at the NATO summit in Bucharest one year later -  the George W Bush administration officially announced the intention of the US to include countries like Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance (these efforts were thwarted by the refusal of France and Germany to endorse the expansion). In 2014, the US engineered a coup d'etat in Kiev, replacing Yanukovich with an American puppet regime that ultimately bled Ukraine dry and is at the origin of today's crisis.

Unfortunately, after 14 years of unsuccessfully calling for a stop to NATO's eastward expansion, the Russians were deliberately left with no other option by US negotiators than to put a stop to this expansion through military action against Ukraine. 

The fact is that the treaty they are seeking to guarantee Russia's security can only be concluded after fighting a war, not before.

Since the Age of Enlightenment, Western intellectuals have elaborated projects aimed at achieving "perpetual peace". Some of the fruits of this labour have been the multilateral institutions such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Sadly, however, humanity has been confronted with some of its biggest and most devastating military conflicts regardless of such well-intentioned efforts. To this day, no lasting peace treaty has been able to be concluded without fighting it out on the battlefield first.

The recent, ill-conceived US nation-building efforts abroad have coincided with a period in American history when consensus has evaporated, the nation is deeply divided and American society itself is in danger of internal collapse. Sure, the Pentagon and the US Defence Department are against a war breaking out in Ukraine, but the neocons in Washington and their supporters in the military-industrial complex want it and will most probably get it. 

As long as the American polity remains unable to expunge from their ranks the neocons putting America's future in jeopardy, however, the string of military and nation-building failures experienced by the US is set to continue.

A NEOCON FOREIGN MINISTER IN TITULESCU'S COUNTRY

 

 I have lived to see this one too! In Titulescu's country, they have installed as  foreign minister a certain Bogdan Aurescu, who acts abroad as if he were an employee of the US State Department and his boss were Blinken, not the president of Romania.

On January 24, Aurescu proposed - without his EU counterparts paying any attention - that the next regular meeting of EU foreign ministers be held in Kiev, in an apparent show of "solidarity" with Ukraine. Without mentioning a single word about the Ukrainian government's policies of denationalization through the language suffered by the 500,000 Romanians who actually live in the middle of the Ukrainian nightmare, Aurescu is worried about the fate of Ukraine! (I won't mention here the fact that in 2015 the same Romanians living in Ukraine complained that the Kiev authorities were forcibly recruiting them and sending them to fight the Russophones in the Donbas.)

As a matter of interest, in 1998 - anticipating trouble in the region - I sent a letter to Romanian President Emil Constantinescu, advising him to try to relocate the Romanians from Ukrainian Bukovina to the villages in Transylvania left empty after the massive migration of Transylvanian Saxons to Germany after 1989. Naturally, the former president turned a typical deaf ear , as if those Romanians did not exist for Bucharest. President Iohannis can find the letter in the archives of the Presidency and could try, as a fellow Transylvanian Saxon, to save willing Romanians of Ukraine from  Kiev's nationalist excesses in the way I proposed back then. He could consider that, of course, once the ski season comes to an end...

As for Aurescu, a resignation of honour would be the most appropriate exit from the scene, even more necessary than that of Prime Minister Ciuca. I am sure that just as the Ukrainians have found a job for the former Georgian president Shakashvili, Aurescu too would be able to find a job over there with the help of American neocons, maybe even as Kiev's foreign minister.

The Failed Presidents of Eastern Europe

  With each passing day, I am more and more convinced that the Ukrainians have fallen into the same political trap as Romanian voters did when they elected Iohannis as president in 2014.

To be sure, Iohannis did not have the necessary national political experience : until his election, he was the mayor of a Transylvanian city atypical for Romania, nor was he a member of the Liberal Party (he had been active in the German Forum). No, he was elected because Romanian voters thought that by endorsing a Saxon they would get a better treatment in Brussels and that they would be accepted faster in the Schengen area by the EU:

"The election of Iohannis is undoubtedly linked to high expectations and hopes. But these alone do not fundamentally change the political situation in Romania,"  a leading German CDU MP said. "Doubts about Romania's accession to the Schengen Area persist (...) (Romania) will not achieve this goal in 2015," he added. The reaction of the chairman of the Bundestag Committee on Internal Affairs comes in the context in which, recently, the president Klaus Iohannis declared in the German press that he will make efforts for Romania's accession to Schengen to take place in 2015. "( Adevarul newspaper from 2015)

In turn, Zelensky was elected president without any previous political experience. In my opinion, the Ukrainians voted for him because of the supposed connections that someone of his ethnicity might have in Washington. Ukrainians seem to have believed - wrongly, as it comes out - that the mere choice of Zelensky as president would secure their admission into NATO. ( Unfortunately, neoconservatives of Jewish origin's perceived domination of US State Department structures had created a vulnerability for the United States, which is currently being exploited by the likes of Zelensky. )

Both Iohannis and Zelensky were also elected with a mandate to end corruption, which has not happened. Instead, Iohannis became - ironically for a descendant of Hitler's allies in Transylvania - a vocal champion of campaigns to combat anti-Semitism in Romania ...

The two presidents both belong to microscopic ethnic minorities from Romania or Ukraine, which unfortunately do not have a history of harmonious coexistence with the majorities of the two states. This fact makes their selection for their state's top job  even more inexcusable.

The consequences of choosing the two presidents are worrying, to say the least. Romania's domestic political instability has become chronic over the past year, while Zelensky has managed to endanger peace across Eastern Europe through his uninspired neighborhood policy.

It is obvious today that at the instigation of domestic and / or foreign services, both peoples made a colossal electoral error. I am curious to see, however, how all this will play out in the end.