For its own well-being, Europe needs to move from the past and transition from Old Europe to New Europe, in a manner that the people of the US have in the 2024 polls.
Judging by their reported remarks, it is difficult to fathom which planet leaders of Old Europe believe they are on. In a France-Africa summit that was marked by extreme condescension by him to his guests, President Macron astonished the assembled African leaders by claiming that it was France that was responsible for the fact that they became free. France was the former colonial power that African freedom fighters were opposing so as to get rid of French control. France left its claim of sovereignty over them because the situation inside those countries had become untenable for the French. Memories still persist in France of the Algerian war, in which hundreds of thousands of Algerian freedom fighters were killed by French police and military units. France itself suffered a loss of thousands of lives in the fighting. President Macron appears to believe that the Algerians wanted the French to stay and that the French decision to leave was not in any way because of the losses they suffered in their war against the desire of the Algerian people to be free, but out of the magnanimity of France in handing over power although they did not have to. In the wake of the France-Africa summit, country after country in Africa demanded that the French troops who were on their territory “fighting terrorism” leave.
The French gave inadequate,non-market amounts as compensation for taking away minerals and other resources from African countries by pliant leaders earlier, and the French were replaced in several countries by China, which paid a more, but in effect sought to control authority in the country for its own advantage. India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is ideally placed to play a leading role in the development of Africa, not with a deeply unpopular France as Macron suggested, but by itself. In common with African countries, India shares a similar history of foreign occupation and denudation of resources. Added to that was the impoverishment of the people. The conditions of life in India on August 15, 1947 bear testimony to that. It was poetic justice that Prime Minister Modi ensured at the 2023 G-20 Summit that the African Union was admitted as a full member, in the way the European Union had been since the inception of the G-20. On Macron, there is more. At his interaction with President Trump at the White House, President Macron magnanimously said that Russia could surrender the hundreds of billions of euros of its own money kept in European banks to the EU, which could then hand over the amount to Ukraine. Of course, Macron added that Russia would also have to vacate most of the land it has occupied since 2022, but they could be allowed to keep a small portion in case they handed over their own assets to the European countries in whose ledgers and vaults such assets were kept. Small wonder that President Trump smiled at such a display of freedom from reality by Macron, who is clearly living in an alternate universe. There is no chance of Russia agreeing to such a proposal, something clear to Trump but not to Macron.
And now along comes incoming Chancellor Merz of Germany, who believes that Europe must be “independent” of the US. That it must free itself from “dependence” on the US. In actuality, the US has not been “dominating” the EU as much as it has served as a coolie carrying on its back burdens such as spending money on the defence of Europe, while several in the EU get what is almost a free ride in matters of defence at US expense. Given the unwillingness of the populations in most of the members of the EU to see their lives put at risk by a kinetic war, that too with a nuclear-armed Russia, it is farcical to claim that European countries are willing to sacrifice potentially tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives in such a war. Yet the fantasy of a European Common Defence continues to be expressed by leaders within the group. Poland, for example, ought not to forget that it was the obduracy of then Polish leaders in 1939 to refuse to allow Soviet troops to go through Poland into Germany in case the latter attacked which finally drove Stalin into the arms of the Nazis in the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which paved the way for the German attack and brutal conquest of Poland. That very same year, an attack on Poland was conducted by the Nazis, who were protected by the pact from the USSR coming into the war on the Polish side. These days, Poland is at the forefront of opposition to efforts by the US to broker a peace agreement with Russia. Such opposition to Russia is prominent among the factors which made Moscow warm up to Beijing in a hitherto unprecedented manner, at the cost of the democracies confronting PRC expansionism and aggression in the Indo-Pacific. The Trump administration merits not obloquy but kudos for brushing aside such voices and going ahead with a US-Russia peace agreement so as to bring to a close the war in Ukraine, which is past its third year and counting.
Whether German, French, Polish or other, the European people overall are very different from some of their ancestors. They are cordial, and behave in a very friendly manner with people from other continents, several of whom have made Europe their home. For its own well-being, Europe needs to move from the past and transition from Old Europe to New Europe, in a manner that the people of the US have in the 2024 polls. The hatred the Old US has for the New US becomes obvious in some news channels, who go so far as to prophesy that the administration of President Trump is likely to collapse a few days from now. It has long been time for Old Europe to come to terms with the New US and step aside for a New Europe, but few should hold their breath. After three years and counting of a brutal war in which great suffering has been endured most of all by the Ukrainian people, those leaders of Europe who persist in refusing to see the outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war are never going to come to terms with the futility of sacrificing the people of Ukraine in an unwinnable war. Should the US-Russia discussions result in a close to the conflict, such leaders are going to claim that Ukraine was “sold out” by the US. Very similar to those Germans who said soon after the war was over that the inevitable unconditional surrender of Germany in the 1914-18 war was a “sellout of Germany by the November (the month of the armistice being signed) criminals”, rather than based on the acceptance by the leadership of the German armed forces that the war they had fought at such a cost in lives was lost.