The great European illusion. How Putin has reshaped the balance of power

I spent a few days in Kyiv, almost always confined to my hotel due to ongoing discussions, yet I could see and feel that the city was alive and determined to remain so. It is for the sake of life that Ukrainians want to keep resisting despite the gravity of the situation – first and foremost for the soldiers at the front, but also in the capital and now even along railway lines that have become targets, where trains come to a halt and passengers have to get off and take shelter, if they’re lucky in a shelter, otherwise in the surrounding woods. Everyday life is especially burdensome, as indicated by rising figures for hospital admissions due to heart attacks or stress, and by the uncertainty about the future of a war that has now lasted for more than four and a half years. Above all, this burden is embodied by millions of absences, particularly of families with children who have been living for years in the countries that have generously taken them in. Yet no one questions the need to hold firm – a conviction that has proved to be the strongest weapon of a Zelensky whom Trump believed to have ‘no cards to play’. Despite the severe cut in Patriot missile supplies – which are making nights in Kyiv difficult – this conviction has prompted the Americans to guarantee support that remains significant in terms of intelligence, artificial intelligence and communications. It is fuelled by European backing – particularly, though not exclusively, financial – which has so far proved stronger and more stable than expected and is vital, both psychologically and materially.

Next year’s French presidential elections will therefore mark a decisive turning point for the future: both that of a Ukraine which, after four or more years of literally heroic struggle, has nevertheless already secured – albeit in unpredictable forms and on an unpredictable scale – an independent future, because everyone now knows, even in Moscow, that it is not and does not wish to be Russian; as well as for the European project, its form and substance, but perhaps even its very existence. The elections in Russia – or rather, in the Russia that Putin and his allies have shaped and moulded, which is clearly in difficulty – should, however, carry little weight, even if hope must never be lost. In February 2022, few observers in Moscow could have anticipated that, nearly five years later, Ukraine would still not have yielded, leaving Russia to stake its future on China—a China that now looms large on its horizon—as well as on Iran, North Korea, and the countries that continue to purchase its raw materials.

Living in Kyiv, even for a short time, inevitably forces one to reflect on what have become, are becoming, and will become concepts that are at once rapidly evolving political realities such as Europe – including a Ukraine fighting to be part of it – and the West, that is to say the old alliance whose core consisted of the bloc comprising the United States, Western Europe and states of European origin such as Canada and Australia – and a Russia behind which one can glimpse the presence of China and, further afield and less clearly aligned, that of India, the likely new global superpower. I shall therefore try to reflect on this anew, as I did on the train to and from Kyiv, with its many hours of delay. We know that the modern concept of the West emerged in the mid-19th century as a reaction against the Russia of Nicholas I, which was oppressing Poland, but also a Ukraine that was beginning to take shape, the peoples of the Caucasus and the formerly Ottoman populations along the Black Sea coast. It was then that Auguste Comte proposed replacing a Europe that also included the Russian Empire – which had played a fundamental role there for over a century but was now perceived as an enemy – with a ‘West’ that would exclude it and instead incorporate the American democracies and, above all, the United States.

However, the great development of Russian culture – which by the late nineteenth century was an integral part of European culture – and, above all, the first phase (1914–1918) of the third great European war following the Thirty Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars, overturned Comte’s theory. The West, which had taken shape in 1917 with the arrival of American troops and ideas on the Old Continent, was in fact initially an anti-German, rather than an anti-Russian, West; it was a ‘Russia’ that one still hoped to save from Bolshevism. The role of the USSR in defeating Nazi Germany then seemed to confirm this hypothesis, which was also fuelled by hopes for a form of socialism of clearly European origin. Soon, however, the forced construction of the socialist bloc and the arrival – not least through millions of refugees – of terrible reports on the reality of Stalinist USSR in the 1930s and on the brutality of the occupation of Central and Eastern Europe breathed new life, to some extent, into Comte’s idea. Thus was born the post-Second World War West, centred on Washington rather than on London and Paris, and comprising a part of Germany that roughly corresponded to the German states which, in the early 19th century, had sided with Napoleon, were subsequently humiliated at Vienna, and were finally swallowed up by Prussia.

In this new West, thanks to American support, the project of ‘European integration’ has taken shape – in some respects new, beneficial and courageous, but in others fuelled by illusions linked to its past. Like the many projects that have followed one another since ‘Sully’s Grand Design’ in the early 17th century, it has been based on the presumption – which for some three centuries corresponded to reality – that Europe was the centre of the world, and that cooperation and the balance of power amongst its nations would be sufficient to guarantee peace. This made it pointless to aim for a true state, a choice confirmed by the institution, right from its earliest incarnations, of a right of veto that no one has ever contested, not even when, in 1992, it was decided to rename what remained an association – a beneficial and therefore initially centripetal one – as the ‘Union’; an entity that is still not even a confederation today. The greatest illusion – and, from many points of view, an extraordinary one – was the notion – linked to a Eurocentrism that remained extremely strong despite having no basis in reality – that if Europe were stabilised, history would cease to unfold, the rule of law would prevail over interests and their constant shifts, and changing power dynamics would not lead once again to the dominance of a politics driven by nation states. Not even the collapse of the socialist bloc and that of the USSR – interpreted at the time through a surprisingly ideological lens – nor the Yugoslav wars – which, like the Chechen wars, broke out in Europe – were enough to make it clear that history does not stop simply because we decide it should, and above all that it goes wherever it pleases.

From this perspective, the blindness of the Western European elites (while the Central and Eastern European elites more or less looked after their own interests) was truly extraordinary, perhaps comparable to the belief that the United States would always remain ‘a Europe outside Europe’ – a daughter who would continue to look to her mother, without even imagining that social, demographic, economic and other trends would, within the space of a few decades, change everything. And yet these elites read the writings of those who, in 1915, had thought that ‘the ideas currently in vogue in London and Berlin will be on everyone’s lips tomorrow in New York and Chicago’, as the highly intelligent Alfred Zimmern wrote in 1915, and they were direct witnesses to how, just forty years later, it was the European capitals that were looking to the United States.

The other great illusion concerned Russia, which was imagined as an integral part of Europe, just as Moscow imagined that Ukraine was nothing more – and would forever remain nothing more – than a ‘little Russia’. Yet Russia had only entered Europe at the end of the 17th century; it had drawn closer to its heart over the following two hundred years and had begun to drift away from it – evidently – in 1917, within a Soviet Union whose ruling classes devoted themselves to building a system and a culture that were as different as possible, through the systematic use of violence. Yet the collapse of the USSR – whose past few were willing to face in terms of reality and legacy, as if it were merely a ‘parenthesis’ in history, much as fascism had been for Croce – brought to light the evidence of that diversity in other countries of the socialist bloc as well, such as Yugoslavia or East Germany; a diversity that is still evident today. Above all, the collapse set in motion powerful currents there too that were pushing towards divergence, for example between Moscow and Kyiv. Gorbachev’s ideal of a Europe finally whole and reunited, however, captivated even ‘pragmatic’ men such as Berlusconi, obscuring a reality that was already, in the early 1990s, brimming with deeply disturbing signs. Above all, and always surprisingly, it was forgotten that a large part of the Russian ruling classes – including the Tsarist, and later the Communist and anti-Communist ones – the Slavophiles of Danilevsky as well as the circles around Tsar Alexander III, but also Stalin and the first and second generations of Eurasianists, had indeed viewed Russia in different ways, but always as a continent in its own right, with its own peoples, obliged to look to Moscow and be governed by it. Not even the open admission of the prevalence of these ideas within Putin’s inner circle – which, moreover, did not fail to express them with increasing vigour – was enough to rouse the European elites from their benevolent yet poisonous – above all for themselves – illusions. One certainly cannot rule out, and indeed one should hope for this and work towards it, that different ideas might prevail in Russia, as has certainly happened in the past; yet the direction of events was visible in 1993, crystal clear in 2000, forcefully asserted in 2007 and ‘put into practice’ in 2008 as well as in 2014, whilst Europe had its head in the sand.

These illusions that, deep down, everything was going for the best – as it certainly seemed, and was therefore partly ‘true’ – were also fuelled by the call for European integration coming from the formerly socialist countries, joined by Ukraine from 2004 onwards; a call that, in its own way, restored Brussels to the centre of the world, albeit a smaller world than in the past. There was no shortage, however, of signs pointing in the opposite direction, such as the rejection of the Constitution and then, above all, Brexit, which revealed the existence of centrifugal forces – recently confirmed by the Icelandic case – linked, at least in part, to the fact that Europe had not been, and had not been for some time, the centre of the world and, consequently, to the idea that it was better to look elsewhere, even though a realistic assessment of one’s own capabilities should have discouraged adventurism and, if anything, encouraged greater integration. From this point of view, the British mistake is the same one being made today by European sovereigntists, who fail to see that not only is Europe no longer the centre of the world, but also that its former great powers – even France, Germany and Great Britain – are, on their own, at best medium-sized powers lacking any real influence; it is no coincidence that Trump and his ilk can afford to mock them (and it would be interesting to know what they really think of this in Beijing, Delhi and, in future, Lagos).

In short, whilst it is possible to understand the love of one’s country that drives one to seek the best for one’s own nation, it is difficult to comprehend the inability to acknowledge the shift in scale that has taken place in the world. The new major powers have hundreds of millions, even more than a billion, inhabitants, who are as well-educated as – and in some cases even more so than – Europeans. Existing in this world therefore requires a different scale, which in Europe can only be achieved if we recognise that the principle of nationality – championed by Meloni in an interesting interview with Il Foglio – a principle at the root of our continent’s blessings and curses over the last two centuries, and for this reason both loved and hated – is simply no longer enough. The issue is not abandoning identities—which are, after all, evolving rapidly—but the capacity to meet today’s challenge, a challenge that Asian states such as India and Indonesia have been able to tackle, and which is ‘natural’ to accept in an Africa teeming with peoples and languages, a reality that therefore compels many of them to live together.

If this challenge – which the war in Ukraine reminds us of every day – is overcome, Ukraine will have a better future, and so will we; and who knows, perhaps one day we might attempt to bring Russia back into Europe, whilst in the meantime beginning to forge equal relationships with the other superpowers of the new world that is taking shape before our very eyes. A European Union that is more truly European – perhaps in new and original forms – could even promote the formation of a new global West, an endeavour that is theoretically feasible, as indicated by our relations with Canada, but also by those – which we can already glimpse – with India or certain African countries. If we fail to achieve this, our fate will, at best, be one of quiet irrelevance – a state already visible today, which renders the demands of our homegrown pseudo-pacifists ridiculous and despicable; they insist that ‘Europe’ should promote peace by forcing a Ukraine deprived of its support to accept terms worse than those made possible by its resistance. And perhaps one day it will be the new great powers that guarantee the balance of power on our small continent. To avoid this, it would be important to act swiftly, for other opportunities for rebirth will certainly arise again. Even Italy, with its system of states already among the richest and most civilised in Europe, which was brought to its knees in the 16th century by the new great powers of the time, eventually managed to ‘rise again’ – but it took three hundred years. In the worst-case scenario, one can hope for another favorable opportunity to arise sooner, but above all, it is crucial that this one not be missed.