CODIGO PE/GP - 20

THE GEOPOLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE EURO

MARTINO CONSERVA
 
 

1. The euro-zone as a project of the Trilateral Commission

The creation of a European monetary area (euro-zone) was among the

objectives of the Trilateral Commission project willing to reshape the world
economic space into three large blocs. Trilateral strategists conceived the
notion of supporting the dominant bloc (the US – the dollar) with two
subordinated western (Europe) and eastern (Asia–Pacific) blocs, each one with
its own monetary unit (the euro and, perspectively, the Japanese yen) capable
of playing the role of reserve currency at macro-regional level.
A fundamental preliminary condition of Trilateral blueprint was the gradual
demise of the geopolitical role of Russia-USSR. A process of step-by-step
disintegration of the USSR would find in the euro-zone (and in the Asia-Pacific
zone) the necessary conditions for absorbing the economic sectors of Soviet
Eurasia within auxiliary structures under control from the atlantist centre. 
This condition failed with the unpredictable self-liquidation of the USSR and the
sudden geopolitical void left at the heart of Eurasia: the new (de facto) unipolar
world forced Atlantism to drop the Trilateralist program in favour of globalization.
As a consequence, the nature of the two subordinate monetary areas has been
thus completely upset.

The European Union (EU) as it actually emerged in the 1990s is the result of
the interaction (but not the integration) of three alternative and conflicting
geopolitical projects. We shall call them, for the sake of conciseness, as the
atlantist EU, the mittel-european EU and the social-democrat EU.
The atlantist project envisaged the adaptation of the original program for an
integrated European economic area to the changed world geopolitical setting –
i.e. within the US globalist blueprint.

The purpose of the mittel-european project – mostly patronized by Kohl’s

Germany – was the creation of an European “grand space”. Its core should
have been the German-speaking area (Germany, Austria), and it should have
included Northern Italy and the Central and Eastern European regions under
the political, economic, and financial influence of Germany (Czech Republic,
Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, Poland).

The preliminary conditions of the former project (the atlantist EU) are being
undermined by the present contradictions of the US globalist program. Today
the ability - and even the political willingness – of the Bush jr administration to
effectively manage the globalist project are being put into doubt. The
reassertion of the Russian-Eurasian geopolitical presence was undeniably a
decisive element, although uncertainties and difficulties in mastering the
globalization drive had already surfaced during the second term of the Clinton
presidency.

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Hazardous as it may seem, the second project (a mittel-european EU) is not

devoid of historical dignity. The creation of a large pan-European space was a
dream repeatedly pursued by the western European powers during the last
centuries: Bonaparte and the German national-socialists represent its last
concrete embodiments, yet its resurgence at a theoretical level came with the
geopolitical theses of gen. de Gaulle. The historical opportunity for reviving it
came after the German reunification in 1989, the main condition being the
geopolitical void left by the subsequent self-liquidation of the Soviet Union.
But now the failure of this essential condition undermines the mittel-european
project, or at least severely constrains its scope. The void at the centre of
Eurasia was in fact indispensable for assimilating to the mittel-european “grand
space” the key territories of the north-east (Baltic republics, Slovakia, Belarus)
and of the south-east (Serbia-Montenegro, Moldova, Ukraine). This void
disappeared since Russia has been strongly reasserting its own geopolitical
priorities. Belarus and Moldova are already elements of the forming Russian
geopolitical space, and the same can be said – though in a longer time horizon
– of Ukraine. On the other hand, the atlantist interference (in the form of NATO
eastward enlargement project) forbids a “painless”, purely economical
absorption of the Baltic region (especially of Estonia and Latvia), and even more
so in the case of Serbia. Even the inclusion of Slovakia looms rather
problematic.

The eastern “grand space” is now severely constrained, in parallel with the
chances of “annexing” with minimal disruptions the historically potential
alternative western-European centre represented by France.

The social-democrat project has been paradoxically boosted by incidentally and

fatal convergence of the two former projects at the end of the past decade. 
 The perverse mix of the mittel-european push towards the Balkans with the
Atlantists’ will to jeopardise the European consolidation process engendered the
monster of the European fratricidal war against Yugoslavia – whose
consequences we are still dearly paying for. (This is according the principle
stated by US security advisor Paul Wolfowitz in 1992 and then made famous by
Zbigniew Brzeszinski: never to arise on the European and Asian continent a
strategic force capable to oppose the US).

The aftermath of the Kosovo aggression pushed the European leaderships to

re-examine their geopolitical priorities. For the concrete EU programs this
meant a greater evaluation of the global consequences of the Union’s
enlargement and especially of the significance and the place of the newly
formed European entity within the world geopolitical setting. This first of all
entailed putting the brake on the eastward enlargement strategy despite strong
pressures from the Atlantist lobby, which on the contrary advocates linking the
EU enlargement program to the parallel agenda of NATO enlargement in
eastern Europe.

The social-democrat EU project tends today to develop in the direction of multi-

polarity, therefore objectively being on a colliding path with US-sponsored
unipolarism and globali

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