We are going on in publishing texts and video records related to the spiritual legacy of Yuri Petropavlovsky (03.03.1955 – 11.04.2020). The report was prepared for the EFA (European Free Alliance) General Assembly in 2017.
THE EU FUTURE
EFA, 17.03. 2017
Whether the European Union has a future? The answer is rather clear. The future of European Union we know, continuation of European Coal and Steel Community, union not of peoples and cultures but the union of political, financial and industrial establishment, doubtfully.
The methods of dominion and management, been well technically developed but focused on unification of the population of Europe and the world according to values of “homo economicus” who did not exist in reality – the self-sufficient rational consumer – endure system crisis. And most likely, these methods will lead to crash of any system which is based on them. “The economic person” is even not an abstraction, it is a reduction, a flat projection of one of a set of measurements of any human being. The reality is that all people – West Europeans, East Europeans, Russians, the Chinese or Indians – are irreducible to the sum of their economic requirements and to functioning as consumers of goods and the benefits. It concerns also the consumption of such benefits as progress, representative democracy, market economy, rule of law and even personal freedom.
Each person exists only in the interrelations and the relations with other people, and these communications are irreducible to mutually advantageous or mutually acceptable economic exchange. These are social and political communications – belonging to language, culture, national or subnational community or to religious community. Both these communications and interests are unrealizable out of community, out of political space. Even Robinson Crusou on the desert island kept his national, religious and cultural identity – socially and politically remote image. Exactly thanks to it he remained a person.
God or the nature – as to whom is pleasant more – have created people equal but different. Equal – doesn’t mean identical. What is actually represented as the benefit for many, hardly for all West Europeans, does not at all necessarily represent the benefit for many East Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Arabs or Indians. Even in present borders of the European Union culturally caused norms and values of the Roman South of Europe strongly differ from norms and values of the German North. Especially these norms, values and the thoughtway caused by them differ in Eastern Europe and outside the European Union – in Ukraine, in Russia, in Turkey or Syria. It is admitted even by economists and financiers, but European political establishment reckon with it very little. And it generates inability of the European establishment to predict even the consequences – for example, consequences of “export of democracy” and “humanitarian interventions” for foreign policy of the European Union. And for internal situation and policy too.
As one of ideologists of neoliberalism Friedrich von Hayek in the book “Law, Legislation and Freedom” has honestly noted for a long time, it is doubtful that unlimited democracy is compatible to competitive market economy. In particular, unlimited democracy is incompatible with the competition in the countries which aren’t belonging to the West European culture and a civilization. Including she is often incompatible with the competition in the political market. The last examples of such incompatibility – radical Islamization of all North Africa and the Middle East as a result of powerful “export of democracy” of the West to this region and overthrows of authoritarian regimes in Iraq, Algeria, Egypt and Libya during “The Arab spring”.
There is a politological concept “democratic paradox” – what political process is more open for participation of masses out of the West, especially the anti-Western, anti-European and fundamentalist mode will appear as a result. The most striking example – emergence of ISIL.
The accruing confrontation of the European Union with Turkey – the same consequence of the inability following from unwillingness to understand superiority of cultural and political values for the people of other civilizations. It is quite logical that Turkey to which the West since the end of the 1990th years enough clearly promised return of a zone of influence within the Ottoman Empire and even more widely – in the former Soviet Central Asia, including Kazakhstan isn’t ready to accept submission conditions to the Western European norms. Turkey didn’t intend to become a part of Europe mentally at all – it was going to become a part of the European Union economically, no more than that.
The same misunderstanding of a situation has led to escalation of opposition with Russia. The successor Byzantine, but not Roman, cultures in specific forms, Russia never was and will never be a part of the Western European civilization. Especially as orthodox civilization heritage of ethnic Russians who make vast majority of the population of Russia, Bol of 80%, nevertheless – not the only component of a cultural code of Russians. Throughout many centuries of coexistence norms and values of Islam and the Buddhism to which tradition many of 190 people of Russia belong became an integral part of this code.
And, at last, there is a deep disappointment in bases of the European Union in countries of Eastern Europe which never entered neither an orbit of the Roman Empire, nor to Charles the Great’s empire which almost official successor applies to be the present European Union. This claim is quite clearly declared by the fact that since 1950 the city hall of Aachen, the former capital of the empire, awards with a prize and a medal of Charles the Great for a contribution to association of Europe. Association on conditions and in traditions of submission of the East and South of Europe to the Northwest, obviously.
And reaction of Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, Greeks, as well as my compatriots – Latvians is rather logical. The feeling that Eastern Europe is an internal colony of the North European German countries, and a leading role of Eastern Europe – delivery of rather qualified and well educated labor for old a camp of the European Union grows. This feeling is imposed on historically caused cultural and valuable distinctions and on negative historical experience. And the growth of antipathies towards the structures of the European Union and the European Union in principle, especially among young people, is an inevitable consequence of treating people as mobile labor resources and consumers whose basic freedom is freedom to leave their homeland, family and friends in order to find better earnings or Any earnings at all.
