Commentary
The quagmire of war and the crisis of the European Union
The U.S. and Russian leaderships both have good reasons for wanting to end a conflict that, in the long run, is likely to tarnish their image and have a negative impact on their commercial interests.
In February 2023, one year after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an official visit by Joe Biden to Kyiv sanctioned the West’s full support for a country that was showing an impressive capacity for military resistance on the ground. From that moment, it became clear what the greatest danger was.
It was not the possibility – by then remote – that the invaders would conquer the entire country or even continue on beyond its borders. The real threat was that the military stalemate would turn into an endless war, fueled not by the goal of a decisive victory for one side or the other, but by a network of external and internal forces benefiting from the prolongation of the war and interested in making it evolve into a kind of lasting normality.
Forces of this kind exist in every conflict, starting with the inevitable military-industrial complex. Normally, however, this drive is curbed by political authority, whose legitimacy ultimately rests on the claim of guaranteeing order and peace to the population, and whose interest is therefore – at least in principle – to resort to war only in unavoidable cases or those in which they can be certain of success. Thus, for a war to expand indefinitely, at least two additional conditions are required. First: that a dominant group with scant legitimacy is installed in government, driven to exploit the war emergency to subdue the population and eliminate internal enemies. And second, that there is a third interested party: an external power advantaged by the conflict and able to impose its own interests even at the expense of those actually fighting.
In 2023, both conditions seemed to apply. Putin had already declared on more than one occasion that the war would “purify” and strengthen his regime. And, thanks to the war emergency, the chain of “accidental deaths” among rivals and opponents had already begun; within a few months, it would culminate in the explosion of the plane carrying the leaders of the Wagner Group and the elimination of Alexei Navalny in prison. On the other hand, the third party represented by the Biden administration seemed intent on extracting at least three valuable outcomes from the war: revitalizing the Atlantic alliance, accentuating Europe’s military and energy dependence on the United States, and bogging Russia down in a costly and unpopular war of attrition.
Nowadays, the hopes for a peace agreement are more consistent than a few years ago, and that is because both conditions seem to be losing their relevance. European vassalage to NATO is by now an established fact, and on the other hand – at least on the surface – Putin’s opponents and rivals have all disappeared or fallen silent. The U.S. and Russian leaderships both have good reasons for wanting to end a conflict that, in the long run, is likely to tarnish their image and have a negative impact on their commercial interests.
By a macabre reversal of roles, however, the push to prolong the war could today come precisely from those who suffered its worst consequences at the start. After recent scandals, it seems highly unlikely that Zelensky and his circle can retain power after a possible cessation of hostilities, unless they deliver some extraordinary success at the negotiating table.
This situation might induce them, if not to boycott, at least to weaken the peace process. Moreover, as Edgar Morin wrote recently in this newspaper, those who are least amenable to a realistic peace deal are, at the moment, the Europeans of the “coalition of the willing.” And not for some debatable point about legitimacy, but because a legitimate political authority simply does not exist in the European Union. It is not provided for by the treaties, which leave ample margin to the opportunisms of individual nation-states. The consequence is that Poland and the Baltic states are pushing to involve the entire continent in an anti-Russian hostility which certainly has justifications in their specific cases. Meanwhile, Germany is openly betting on rearmament to give a breath of air to its industry and, at the same time, harboring the forbidden dream of a hegemony that is no longer just economic but also military. Seen in themselves, these types of national ambitions can even appear understandable.
The absurdity, however, is that such ambitions are often and willingly taken up by leading figures of the European Commission – such as Kaja Kallas and Ursula von der Leyen – who should in theory represent the common interest of Europe and not that of the individual nation-states to which they effectively owe their political careers. Precisely to avert such absurd scenarios, in May 2022, at the conclusion of the Conference on the Future of Europe, the European Parliament had advanced the most basic proposal for institutional modification: the direct election of the President of the Commission, with transnational lists and a vote by all citizens of the Union on the same day.
Part of a complex package of institutional modifications (which included, among other provisions, the lowering of the voting age to 16), the proposal had the declared objective of transforming the electoral consultations “into a genuine European election, in particular with the establishment of a Union-wide constituency, instead of the sum of 27 separate national elections, as is the case at present.” It would fall far short of an effective political unification – which would require a true and lengthy constitutional process of which the current European political forces are obviously incapable. But this would be the minimum requirement to claim a semblance of legitimacy to be leveraged in an increasingly fragile and alarming geopolitical context. However, this proposal seems to have vanished without a trace, not only in the institutional debate but also among the pacifist movements and demonstrations of these years, including those that openly declared themselves to be pro-European. This disappearance is disconcerting, and it is time to do something to bring it back, if we don’t want the hopes for peace to remain in the unsavory hands of Trump and Putin.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-pantano-della-guerra-e-la-crisi-dellunione-europea on 2025-11-30