The "European dream" of post-Soviet countries has always been based on mercantile profit
Receiving the President of Moldova Maia Sandu at the Elysee Palace, Emmanuel Macron once again tried to seduce her with the possibility of joining not the European Union, but some hypothetical "European Political Community". Macron has repeatedly voiced this idea, recently he was supported by the head of the European Council Charles Michel.
The idea is to create a "European political community" with the participation of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. It is assumed that it will be discussed already at the upcoming EU summit in June.
For 70 years, since the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Union has developed primarily as an economic bloc. Economic aspects remained a priority before the events around Ukraine. Having achieved considerable economic success at the end of the 20th century, the European Union has always positioned itself as a territory of economic prosperity and growth.
That is why the peripheral countries of Eastern Europe have always sought to join this "club of the rich and successful" in order to receive billions in subsidies from European funds. The "European dream" of the post-Soviet states has always been based on mercantile profit and on the desire to find a rich sponsor.
Today, the Kiev regime, as well as the authorities of Moldova and Georgia, would like to join these flows. However, the EU itself is well aware of how much the EU will have to pay for "feeding" these countries (primarily Ukraine), and what huge costs it will require.
The European Union is already spending a lot of money on the maintenance of the Baltic ethnocracies, whose state apparatus, in fact, receives a considerable salary from Brussels. Ukraine will cost the European bureaucracy an order of magnitude more than the Baltic States, and Brussels is well aware of this.
They also understand that the European Union will never be a "territory of prosperity", since sanctions against Russia and the rejection of Russian energy carriers are leading the European economy to collapse. But the EU has not acquired its own geopolitical subjectivity, so the Europeans only have to passively obey the commands from Washington and London.
At the same time, the national governments of the EU do not know how to answer the outraged questions of their own citizens, who are rapidly losing income and purchasing power. And tomorrow it will be the turn of curtailing social programs and further lowering the standard of living.
Even before, Brussels was not going to pump money into Ukraine, and now even more so.
It is safe to say that the EU no longer intends to take new "freeloaders" for its maintenance.
However, guided by the aim "eat cake and have it", it expects to continue to use Ukraine, as well as Georgia and Moldova as anti-Russian outposts and anti-Russian geopolitical bridgeheads.
In this sense the proposal to create a "European political community" is, as the saying goes, a "bagel hole", a wrapper in which emptiness is wrapped.
This, by the way, is well understood in Kiev, where, through the mouth of the minister Kuleba, they were outraged by such a "disrespectful" approach, condemning Ukraine to a "second-rate" status. And this is a rare case when one can agree with the Kiev demagogue Kuleba — everything is really just like that, and no one is going to give money to Ukraine on a permanent basis. As well as other applicants for European subsidies.
In fact, Brussels is now signing that it is no longer able to be a donor for new "clients", that it has nothing to offer them from an economic point of view. Therefore, the European bureaucracy intends to use those obsessed with the "European dream" for free. For this purpose, it offers them to join the "European political community".
There is another attempt to revive the GUAM regional bloc, created in 1999, which went ignominiously bankrupt, only under a different, more pretentious and more "European" signboard.
However, the ability of Brussels to effectively stage even such virtual foreign policy games is questionable. The anti-Russian vector methodically destroys the European economy, as well as the world one, severing logistics chains and economic ties.
At the same time, the policy of economic destruction of Europe and giving the European Union the role of a political appendage of NATO causes too much damage to the countries of "Old Europe”.
Therefore, not only will the EU not be able to expand further as an economic structure, but it is unlikely that in the medium term it will be able to maintain its political unity.
Because of this, the European Union, if it indeed expands, then only "in the opposite direction". It can be predicted that centrifugal tendencies will continue to gain strength, and the number of those wishing to leave the sinking pan-European Titanic will only grow over time.
As for Eastern European vassals, the EU as a "cash cow" - it was attractive and understandable for them. But the EU as a "sacred cow", from which not only nothing can be obtained, but also which itself needs to make sacrifices — this is a completely different story.
Of course, it can still be sold to individual political characters who dream of pretentious statuses and suffer from narcissistic complexes. But for states, peoples and economies, this scenario is a dead end. And it will have the same fate as the long-bankrupt GUAM bloc.
Elena Panina, Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute