Category: VIEWS

The temptation is strong, Mr. President, but beware! You can tell yourself, of course, that all you would have to do is save Alexander Lukashenko to be able to force him to agree to an “integration process” between his country and yours, because he has his back to the wall after five weeks of demonstrations.

This can lead to wars, even though it is not ready for them. This can fracture it to the point of breaking up. Conversely, this could also close its ranks and finally turn it into the political power it is still so far from being. We don’t know. It is far too early to say, but the fact is that everything forces the European Union to become a player on the international scene today.

This aspiration knows no boundaries. It was this aspiration that brought down the Iron Curtain in 1989. It was the one that led the Iranians to demonstrate for six months in 2009. It was also the one that sparked the Arab Springs of 2011, whose strength and provisional failure are so reminiscent of the European Spring of 1848. It is again the same one that had raised Hong Kong before giving the Belarusians the courage to defy their despot, and this aspiration for freedom announces, without a doubt, the awakening of a Russia that we feel so tired of living too long in a state of constantly going backwards.

Beware of summers. They are associated with holidays, a parenthesis within the stress of the political year, but it happened during a month of August that the forces of the Warsaw Pact had crushed the Prague Spring, that Iraq had invaded Kuwait or, happier but even more fundamental, that Solidarity was born, the first free trade union of the communist world, a world whose death bells Solidarity started to ring.

We have to go back to after the war. To understand the reasons that led Emmanuel Macron to choose a high-ranking civil servant, Jean Castex, who has never held a political role, as the new Prime Minister, one has to admit that France and the entire European Union are in the same situation as they were in 1945.