The Ukrainian crisis by John Laughland
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Laughland)
To discuss the Ukrainian
crisis in terms of a choice between Europe and Russia is misleading for several
reasons.
First, the European issue
has been ruthlessly exploited by the Ukrainian opposition and its Western
backers as an excuse for overthrowing the government illegally and by force.
Opposition leaders have never distanced themselves from the most radical
elements on the streets of Kiev,
even though these include neo-Nazis. On the contrary, they have done everything
to use their violence as a bargaining chip in their battle with the government.
Let us never forget that the majority of the 25 deaths on the night of 18 – 19
February were murders committed by the protesters: 9 policemen were shot
dead or stabbed to death, while 3 members of the governing party and a
journalist were also killed.
Second, the choice Ukraine faced between the EU and Russia was not
an equal one. The EU association accord was a comprehensive political
straitjacket designed to lock Ukraine into the orbit of Brussels and Washington
by installing, as all over the EU itself, a pro-EU (and ultimately pro-NATO)
elite whose policies would remain unchanged whichever team was in power. By
contrast, Ukraine’s
agreements with Russia
are confined to a free trade zone and, lately, loans. They carry no
internal political implications at all. Even the Customs Union of Russia,
Kazakhstan, Belarus and Armenia,
which Ukraine will probably
not now join, takes decisions by consensus: it has none of the heavy-handed
supranational and technocratic control of Brussels.
Third, Ukraine did not
really have a choice. Thanks to decades of corrupt politics, the Ukrainian
state is bankrupt. So is the EU. In spite of stringing Kiev along with pretty words about a European
future, the EU could offer only $800 million , via the IMF, and that came at
the price of exceptionally painfully economic reforms. Ukraine would have been subjected to the same
devastation of its agriculture, on which it depends, as Romania and Bulgaria were in their
pre-accession period. Its industry would have collapsed as well. Russia, by contrast, has been able to offer
nearly 20 times this sum in loans to prevent Ukraine from becoming insolvent,
and it is the biggest market for Ukrainian exports – bigger than the whole of
the EU put together. Moreover, Europe’s coffers are empty for good
reason: her member states are drowning in their own debt, while the
economic vice turned on its own member states – Greece,
Spain
and others – has plunged those countries into misery. Russia, by contrast, has tended to run balanced
budgets while her growth ticks along at 4% or so, against Europe’s
anaemic 1%. Trade in the Customs Union has grown by 40% in 5 years. Ukraine’s signature on the EU association
agreement (the one Georgia
signed runs to 400 pages) would have been the longest suicide note in history.
To avoid facing up to its
own inexorable decline, the post-modern EU, like the United
States, has plunged ahead with a radically anti-Russian
geopolitical and ideological agenda based on left-wing fantasies about
resurgent nationalism in Moscow.
We used to laugh at Cold Warriors but the absurd anti-Russian ravings of Dr
Strangelove and Jack D. Ripper have now become the standard fare served up in Washington and Brussels.
What a shame most of the Western media swallows this rubbish.
With Ukip heading for possible victory in the European elections and anti-EU
fervour growing across the continent, it is hard to imagine a country
where people are so desperate to join the EU that they are prepared to take on
water canon in order to make their point. But that country is Ukraine. The
violence which has been brewing for weeks and which erupted yesterday has its
source in many tensions in the country, but one issue defines the two sides:
protesters who are looking westwards towards EU membership and a government
which rejects this and looks eastwards towards Russia.
Maybe President Viktor Yanukovych and Nigel Farage should make a pact: if
Nige were to make an address in Independence Square perhaps the protesters
would slope off home, concluding that their fight for EU membership wasn’t
worth it after all. But I doubt it. The affair is a stark reminder of just how
differently the EU is seen across Europe: in Britain and in a growing number of
western countries as an interfering presence in national life; in the east, a
route to freedom and prosperity.
The case for a wider but shallower EU has never been so great.
Granting EU membership to former Soviet bloc states in Eastern Europe
has made future domination by Russia unthinkable. Year by year countries from
Estonia to Bulgaria, which within living memory marched to Stalin’s every word,
are becoming more stuck in the values of Western Europe. That is a huge gain
for our economy and security. And yet what is good about the EU is
simultaneously undermined by excessive interference in national affairs by an
overbearing and anti-democratic Brussels bureaucracy. If the EU was functioning
well, British citizens would welcome the prospect of yet another former Soviet
satellite, Ukraine, being torn away from Putin’s grasp. As it is, the thought
of Ukraine joining the EU will fill many people with the dread of yet more
millions being eligible for British welfare – and Westminster being able to do
nothing about it.
This is a point which David Cameron and William Hague need to seize in their
much-vaunted but so far somewhat unenergetic campaign to renegotiate Britain’s
membership of the EU. We should cheer Ukrainians who look westwards to our
democracy as a model for their future – and condemn the EU’s aloof hierarchy
whose contempt for the voice of the people compromises that democracy.
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