The European Parliament has called for “a complete and immediate import embargo on oil, coal, nuclear fuel and gas from Russia”. On April 7, 2022, the resolution received 513 votes in favour, 22 against and 19 abstentions. The Italian MPs who took part in the vote all voted in favour, with the exception of former Nordliga player Francesca Donato. These measures it says should be accompanied by measures aimed at continuing to secure the EU’s energy supply in the short term, and by detailed steps for the eventual lifting of sanctions “in the event it is explained that Russia takes measures that aim to restore Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders and to completely withdraw its troops from Ukrainian sovereign territory”.
The exclusion of Russia from the G20, from UNHCR, from Interpol, from the WTO, from UNESCO would be an “important signal that the European states are no longer working together with Russia in the usual way to make sanctions more effective”. The European Parliament therefore called for the exclusion of Russian banks from Swift as proposed in the first instance by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi and a ban on entering EU territorial waters and calling at EU ports for ships flying the Russian flag, registered, owned, chartered, operated by Russia and providing road freight services to and from Russia and Belarus.
The European Parliament statement culminated in a call for Russian war criminals and mercenaries to be tried by a newly established courtmartial that would condemn them immediately, while arms supplies to Ukrainian troops must be stepped up. A civil war procedure with the devastating consequences that can result and that we are already seeing happening with horror in the world, from South America to Africa and even before that from Asia, starting from the Vietnam War, and then against France, and then against the USA in the era of decolonization and the Cold War.
This rush to the abyss is shocking and certainly not a harbinger of diplomatic skills capable of moving forward a process of ceasefire and intensified negotiations to end the war and atrocities following the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the ground fighting that the Attacks followed.
What is striking about this statement, as does Draghis again “von Boulanger” (who thinks that one can and must choose between heating with Russian gas or ending hostilities by punishing Russia by changing energy relations between competitors in the field and of the EU as a whole) is the fact that the European Parliament thereby loses any typical and essential role of the institutions of democratic polyarchies. Namely, to be the assembly that unlike in referendums decides with a milder balance and again unlike actual situational lobbying processes escapes the pressure of the material interests of those involved (US liquid gas, etc.). Pressure, the latter, typical of every historical movement of associated life, in today’s late capitalism, as well as in all regimes that the history of associated men has witnessed.
Master Leopold von Ranke, who studied these processes all his life in order to understand them, had emphasized how always the character of the external relations between states has determined the fundamental aspects of their internal constitution. The result was a more or less strong centralization of power, a more or less accentuated militarization of society, an autocratic or liberal character of political institutions and law. The conditions of the “class struggle” were also determined for Ranke, for his school and for us by the state of international relations.
This principle is well known or should be related to the theory of raison d’etat, i.e. to the priority that every state must recognize, under penalty of disappearance, the value of security. The Aristotelian principle that government (and hence its foreign policy) is nothing but the mirror of a society should be overturned in order to understand the story unfolding before our eyes. This is a principle that I call essential, necessary to ultimately understand the aggressive or peaceful stance of states in international relations: an interpretative orientation that becomes an ideal guide and that of liberal, democratic ideologies in essence was accepted as a socialist.
Until the collapse of the USSR and the overthrow and impoverishment of international relations through North American unipolarity, this principle also determined US foreign policy. The harbingers of their downfall, however, had already begun with the US wars of aggression of the 20 ) and then in Syria, Libya and before that in Georgia and Ukraine bolstered by the operational lessons of earlier counterinsurgency operations in Africa and before that in South America with the Washington Consensus and then in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the creation of jihadist militias funded by USsponsored opium crops.
We had hoped that the very civilized Europe would be spared such a terrible experience from the US. Recent events confirm that the ranks of the Boulanger generals, with their staff activism known as heterodirected servomechanisms, ensure that this is not possible.
Finally, in Il 18 Brumaio, Marx reminds us that the Boulanger generals always end up as perpetual lieutenants.
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