For the fourth consecutive month, accompanied by all the usual precautions, our team continues to believe that the crisis’ peak is now behind us. It’s clear that two photos taken five minutes before and five minutes after this peak can be identical. On the other hand the film isn’t comparable; it’s that the perspective is radically different. The mountain walker knows, after crossing the pass that the descent seems easier than the climb: clear direction, gravity on one’s side, shelter in sight… But be careful all the same, before reaching the tarmac road obstacles and risks of a fall are still very present, perhaps even aggravated by the comfortable feeling associated with the fatigue of the climb. This impression of the end of the walk is exactly what our team feels after four months now. Some of our readers are surprised to see us put on rose tinted spectacles; are the spectacles rose tinted or is it really this crisis’ setting sun shining through?
Since 2006, the GEAB undertook to analyze and anticipate the different stages of what our team’s coordinator, Franck Biancheri, decided to call the “global systemic crisis” which can be summed up as a gigantic transition between two global systems: the Western centered unipolar world on the one hand, and the multi-polar world on the other, which we have now entered and which no one can no longer deny – even if some offer the hypothesis of a neo-unipolarity, this time China-centric, in the making[1].
This gigantic global change was allowed, and is accompanied by, another major systemic transformation, linked to the Internet “revolution”, which has caused a re-organization, or rather a deep and total “organicization”[2], of the whole social structure, methods of organization and business at global level.
As the GEAB has said for a long time, the global system which is collapsing in front of our noses was 500 years old. It was born out of the Renaissance’s major discoveries which gave Europe a 500 year advantage, then to the Russian and American reincarnation, to the detriment of the existing major civilizations such as China and Iran. This Western-centric world no longer exists today and it’s the West itself that triggered this transition: by inventing colonization then decolonization, then postcolonial guilt, then cooperation, then the regional integration process, then globalization, then the Internet,… somehow the West has created/wished for this multi-polarization which, therefore, has no reason to be so scary for some. It’s time to face the consequences of our policies and our speeches and agreed to share the planet.
And that is what is happening. With Obama currently providing the best proof that, after appearing instrumental in escalating Euro-Russian tensions last year, he has turned into a real peacemaker in the Middle East this year with this 180° strategic shift as regards Iran. Not to mention the recent attempts to revive the constructive dialogue between Kerry and Lavrov, attempts which despite not resulting in any progress at this stage of course, have the merit of existing.
The global systemic crisis’ mountain pass is behind us, even if the slips are still ahead of us, slips which can be painful but which themselves can only bring us closer to the plains in view, slips which are still our job to continue to try and anticipate.
In this issue, our team has chosen to focus on the characteristics of the reorganization now underway in three of the Western world’s players: the European Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, three political “unions” which must imperatively reinvent themselves to become compatible with the multi-polar world. But our team considers that the reinvention process is now underway, finally dragging the West onto the path of its indispensable systemic transformation.
The article contains three main parts:
1. Europe : Back to the community method
2. The Disunited Kingdom: the end of the United Kingdom as we know it… and its reinvention
3. 2015-2016 – By the end of his term of office, Barack Obama will have begun to deserve his Nobel Peace Prize
Our team has decided this month to make public the first chapter called: “Europe : Back to the community method”
Europe : Back to the community method
As we have already explained, since the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, the European Union has yielded to the temptation of duplicating all the nation-state tools at its level. The community method invented by the Founding Fathers was nevertheless a real political innovation whose principles of a flat structure coordinating the continent’s diversity has been forgotten by several generations of politicians and technocrats lacking imagination: incapable of conceiving anything other than a state superstructure, unable to democratize it, unable to command… the EU has only succeeded in generating national resistance and giving in to the most powerful interests, interests which no one wished to see become the collective European interest for which the European institutional apparatus had been created.
Democratization advances
Barroso’s double era pushed this reasoning to its extreme limits, leading to citizen repudiation expressed by the countless Eurosceptic and Euro-critical voices none of which are anti-European, however. Neither Tsipras, nor Orban, nor even Le Pen is henceforth thinking of exiting the EU. On the other hand all want it on their terms: first – sharing wealth, second – linked to Russia, third – dealing with migration issues, etc… Finally, it’s European democracy which is beginning to be put in place whose first condition is the emergence of a European public debate, now audible. A European citizenship is seeing the light of day.
From the pyramid to networks
On the politico-institutional system side, Juncker sends a strong signal this month on the conceptual foundations of his organizational vision for Europe. In launching his “Network Security” project[3] which replaces the old idea of a European intelligence agency, he sets the tone: the European level has stopped wanting to substitute itself for the member states to become the conductor of a concert of European nations set to music. The EU is taking on the role of becoming the authority for coordinating its members’ sovereignty tools, national sovereignty reaffirmed at the same time but which will only thrive through their combination and cooperation. Back to the original principle of “e pluribus unum”.
Transatlantic relationship: less of a security link
Of course it’s regrettable that the first field of application for this “reinvented community method” should be security. And at the same time… It must be from the topics where the states’ interest in cooperating is the most compelling. As to why this interest is so compelling, it’s likely that, in addition to the obvious aim of managing cross-border terrorist threats, it has become urgent for the EU to extricate itself from the pre-existing system in this field, namely the German-US system currently revealed by the attacks against Merkel[4].
This attempt at emancipation has been brewing for a long time now. We carefully followed Merkel’s accusations of the NSA’s unacceptable tapping of her ‘phone[5], then we saw the German courts conclude that there was no evidence of this tapping[6], before the affair pops up under a new guise through accusations against Merkel, this time of unconstitutional cooperation between the NSA and the BND. Actually, since 9/11, the Americans have convinced the Europeans of the risks weighing on them at home and that, in the absence of a European intelligence; they had no other choice but to cooperate with the US ones via Germany which, in security and defence terms, is a mini America on the European continent[7].
The simultaneousness of all this, with the reverberating judgment over NSA surveillance in the US, where the American courts succeeded in a power-play of judging NSA eavesdropping illegal and convicting the agency[8], couldn’t have been a coincidence. The former transatlantic intelligence system, and a major feature of US tutelage over Europe, is in the process of disappearing. NATO remains… which has exactly the same characteristics: in the absence of a European defence, NATO protects Europe.
Unity reaffirmed
This last point brings us to the lack of European leaders at the commemoration of victory against Nazism organized by Russia[9], and absence of which the Europeans must be aware sends a terrible signal to the rest of the world: Europe is lined up on the side of Nazism… It’s really thus that it must be known how the rest of the world read the absence of European leaders at the side of the emerging powers… and the UN. Indeed, Ban Ki Moon was in Moscow… just as he is on Iran’s side in the civil war in the Yemen. That said our team’s “rose tinted spectacles” enabled it to detect good reasons in this European attitude as well.
The fact is that the Ukrainian crisis, just as it has undermined the Ukraine’s integrity, menaces the EU’s. Some believe that the UE’s dislocation, and especially on its Eastern flank[10], is now inevitable. Therefore, it’s now of prime importance to reaffirm European unity and solidarity. The absence of the WHOLE of the EU at the Russian celebrations, including several well-known countries which had begun by accepting the invitation, such as Greece, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Hungary and Slovakia[11], shows that there had been some negotiation around this need to mark unity. But we anticipate that this concession made to the Baltic States and Poland, empowers these four countries and will not be without a quid pro quo. But Poland is instrumental for European defence coordination… the Baltic States also, in a certain fashion.
Greece: modernisation underway
A few words also on Greece which, as anticipated, still found the money needed to repay the interest due to the IMF[12]. During the last four weeks, our team has particularly noticed the draining of Greek municipalities’ liquidity by Athens[13]. Here, where the media saw a desperate Greece, we see Tsipras, playing on European pressure, profiting by weakening the local chiefs – mostly members of the two institutional parties who, caught in a patronage system, prevent any modernization of the Greek state apparatus – and is centralizing his country’s reform tools: money and power. The Greek politico-institutional system’s modernization, a priority for Europe in the 21st-century, is moving ahead quickly.
EU’s borders reached
The EU has finally settled on its boundaries. From the beginning of his mandate, Juncker warned that enlargement was going to experience a pause: a reduction in the Directorate-General for Enlargement, a five-year moratorium on any further enlargement,… today, even the free trade agreements are not making progress[14]. It must be said that, on one hand, European citizens are rather against the rationale of unlimited enlargement, enlargement which everyone has known for a long time is preventing the long-awaited political strengthening, henceforth a priority, of the EU and, on the other hand, the essentials of the enlargement/free trade agreements targeting the CIS/Eurasian Economic Union countries (Moldavia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, the Ukraine…) in which the populations are far from being fully in favour of European integration (the Ukrainians are telling us loud and clear) and which necessitates a prior agreement with Russia of course, a badly taken path.
With the Ukraine, the non-ideological EU has understood that it had reached its geographical limits. It’s a shame that it couldn’t see them itself and that it should be its neighbours who would be obliged to remind it that a politico-institutional entity which doesn’t set borders inevitably takes on the characteristics of an empire.
Therefore, the time has come to get along with our neighbours under the rules of joint ownership: rebuilding a transatlantic relationship on equal terms without any links of servitude, build an EU-Eurasian Union partnership taking note of Russia’s regional integration project, cooperating in the establishment of the Arab Maghreb Union and contributing to the resolution of the dispute linked to the Western Sahara between Morocco and Algeria[15], etc… Europe must build relations with its neighbours, no longer on the reasoning of strong to-weak, but on that of equals. And our team is happy to read here and there that the EU is now speaking of trilateral negotiations with the CIS countries[16], where “trilateral” means the EU-Russia-the country involved, the one and only solution to the resolution of the Ukrainian civil war in particular, as explained, for example, by the LEAP president in a letter addressed to a Ukrainian student Association[17]… Subscribe to read the entire document
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Notes:
[1] A hypothesis which our team tends not to believe: the first anti-Chinese reactions were fully taken on board by the Chinese, India’s emergence as the next demographic superpower destined surpass China in size by 2025… gives an indication of future multi-polarity.
[2] A word based on the adjective “organic” which matches the characteristics of the Internet’s social structures, directly connecting cells to everything.
[3] Source : EUObserver, 12/05/2015
[4] Source : The Guardian, 07/05/2015
[5] Sources : The Guardian, 24/10/2013 ; The Guardian, 17/12/2013
[7] Don’t forget that Germany alone, with 38,491 US servicemen in the country, is home to almost 25% of US forces in the world (outside the US), some 160,000 people (source : Wikipedia) !! These numbers provide an understanding of the difficulties for Merkel or any other German leader to impose their views if they don’t match those of the US “ally”. We see, by the way, the extent to which Germany needs the rest of Europe to put an end to its tutelage; it’s completely impossible for it alone.
[9] Source : The Hindu, 09/05/2015
[10] Moreover, we ourselves anticipated this risk from the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis: at a time when all the Western media was betting the opposite on a violently anti-Russian Eastern Europe leading Western Europe in this strategic thrust, we anticipated Eastern Europe’s division between anti-Russians and non-Russians.
[11] Source : Der Spiegel, 10/04/2015
[12] Source : The Guardian, 11/05/2015
[13] Source : Ekathimerini, 25/04/2015
[14] Source : EUObserver, 13/05/2015
[15] Source : Le Maghreb, 04/01/2014
[16] Source : Euractiv, 15/04/2015. We recall that this trilateral negotiation configuration, requested by the Ukrainian parliament in November 2013 for “national security” reasons was rejected by the Barroso Commission, a rejection which we consider carries a major responsibility for more than 6,000 Ukrainian dead.
