Friday, January 21, 2005

Divided Europe

Here's an interesting article, MSNBC - A House Divided on a split between the new members of the EU, Poland and Lithuania being the most prominent.

I posted on this earlier, but some in the EU have told these two to stop shilling for the US in Ukraine. The article ends:

For New Europe, the experience has been unsettling. "It's difficult for Polish politicians to have to choose between loyalty to the United States and NATO and solidarity with the EU. They're only now realizing that the West doesn't always speak with one voice," says Zdzislaw Mach, director of the Center for European Studies at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Which voice Europe will use when it finally speaks to Yushchenko is still unclear. Yet many EU countries understand only too well the struggle to emerge from a communist past. Whether old or new, it will be difficult for Europe to abandon a Ukraine so tantalizingly close to joining it on the other side of totalitarian rule. That fact alone may sooner or later force the two sides to bridge their differences.

The CIA thinks that the EU won't be around in the next few years. If they are right on this, and they haven't been right on a number of important things recently, this might be one reason, the split between Old Europe and New Europe. And interestingly enough, that split is really over America-- and it might affect Ukraine.

2 comments:

Alex said...

I really doubt how real the New/Old thing is, or indeed if you can really speak of a split between NATO and the EU (note that a large majority of both organisations' members are double members). In fact, I was impressed with the speed of the EU's response - almost immediately after the second round vote, a common position had been arrived at and the Commission President (a Portuguese - does that count as old Europe, new Europe or middle-aged Europe?), Kwasniewski ("new") and Joschka Fischer (definitely "old"!) had all made strong statements denying Yanukovich's legitimacy. And, for that matter, agreement had been arrived at for Kwasniewski to represent the EU.

The "some in the EU" appears to be the Spanish socialist speaker of the EP, which isn't frankly the most significant of posts. Possibly he's been at the CIA-plot vodka kool-aid

Anonymous said...

“The CIA thinks that the EU won't be around in the next few years.”Well, many of the outgoing CIA heads (fired by Bush) certainly want the EU to thrive - and it has not. The new comers (CIA heads) are markedly less supportive, but they are among a still distinct minority within the CIA as a whole. But, with reference to the CIA, the most important point to keep in mind is that the entire role of the CIA is headed for marked change - with a near immediate cessation of almost all activities effecting foreign relations.

That the EU has become an essentially anti-US organization, led in no small part by France, Belgium, Germany and to a lesser degree by Italy, Spain and Greece, has not exactly created greater US support for a healthy EU. Nor has the EU been resoundingly successful or popular among the peoples of its member ‘states’ - as demonstrated last June in the election of the European Parliament (EP) where voter apathy and very low voter turnout (16-20% in some states) across the EU angered and upset European Commission members.

There is certainly reason to believe that the surprise gains of Eurosceptics in all elections among most states of the EU will slow progress of EU integration, and weaken its political clout significantly in the short term - if not eliminate it in the long term.