Category: VIEWS

We are told that efficiency is on the Chinese side. This is being whispered and said more and more and, yes, it is absolutely true, because we have rarely seen a political power managing, in no time, to provoke a pandemic, to place half of humankind in confinement and, no doubt, soon to plunge the world economy into a crisis whose magnitude could be absolutely spectacular.

In a crisis, you also have to think about tomorrow. It is difficult to do so because how can we envisage the post-crisis period when so many tragedies are still to come, in Africa, in the United States, in Great Britain, in all the countries at war, in the whole of the European Union, too – but every pandemic has an end.

The Maastricht criteria have lived and died, and the Thatcherian era with them. We will not return to them, anyhow not for a long time, and certainly not in the form in which they were known, for what has killed them is a cluster of convergences in which the coronavirus merely dealt the final blow to those ceilings under which the Union was running out of steam.

Well, no, Mr. Borrell! I am sorry to have to tell you this, but you were mistaken, and were seriously wrong, when you said last week, before the 27 Foreign Ministers of the Union meeting in Zagreb, that: “If you forget your capacities and you only think about your purposes then it’s not political, that’s magic. (…) We want to act according to our capacities and resources and we don’t have the capacity of establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.”

Inaction also has its price and it is high time to get out of it because… Let us recall the chain of events that led to the chaos that is taking place on the borders of Europe. In Syria, in spite of France, Barack Obama did not want to enforce the red lines that he himself had drawn for Bashar Al-Assad. His successor then largely withdrew from the Middle East while Europe decided not to act on its own. Russia rushed into this vacuum to regain a foothold in the region alongside the regimes in Damascus and Teheran.