The events in Europe’s second-largest country with over 40 million inhabitants are closer to us than ever before. Until now, we “only” took notice of certain headlines: Oligarchs or parties (one of which included a Ms. Tymoshenko) gave cause to grievance (not only) after the Russian pattern. Corruption reached new records, reforms stalled, and political divides emerged on the basis of ethnolinguistic “justifications.” Separatism and the Crimea crisis were accompanied by maximally untransparent national military and militia operations, above all in the East.
Some of us may remember the hours-long interrogation of Foreign Minister “Joschka” Fischer in an investigative committee marathon broadcasted in April of 2005. It scandalized his “visa decree” from March of 2000, which particularly benefited Ukrainians of all sexes and persuasions. Fischer was accused of effectively acting as a pimp and smuggler for criminals. This seems almost cute in comparison to the final dam burst in 2015, the ongoing migration chaos, and all the other blatant crimes in the finance sector alone that have since taken place in Germany and the EU.
But what has(n’t) changed since the year 2000 in Ukraine? And what about Germany, the EU, the US, and Russia? The “color revolutions” from the former Yugoslavia to Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan – one still doesn’t quite know who organized them – are one matter. Another matter is NATO, which the active Ukrainian hero-president Zelensky calls on time and again. In the course of its apparently hyperactive interventions around the world since the 1990s, it hardly counts more successes than Putin’s Russia. Perhaps even fewer. Incidentally: German expert circles and ideological media even wrote off a President Zelensky himself as a serious reformer a year ago.
Nonetheless: Ukraine was/is not only attractive for more than 40,000 (real) “foreign students from developing countries,” but also surprisingly interwoven with the world economy. Raw materials and the products of Ukrainian agriculture and industry, which is certainly present, will now be missed not only in Africa and Asia, but also in Western and Central Europe, possibly even in Russia. We establish the following: The deterioration of the precarious planned economy and social project out of Brussels, the “EU,” didn’t begin in the 2000s. It appears just as unfit for a positive economic and social “development” of Ukraine as does the simple adoption of “Muscovite conditions.” By the way: The EU’s role when it comes to the export of goods amounts to one-third, with imports less than half.
One should pursue a maximally autonomous independence that preserves one’s own traditions and structures. The WTO is in fact sufficient for economic purposes in Ukraine and the United Kingdom. To expect salvation from without is hardly more than a trick to flee from one’s own responsibility. Regarding the future: Not only Ukraine is well-advised to Swissify itself to a certain degree. Why should that be more difficult in “the West” than in “Central Asia?” A new “Cold War” or the continuation of the last, unspoken, but factually present since the middle of the 1990s at the latest, may be in the interest of certain branches and groups, but certainly not in the interest of the “peoples of this world,” in whatever countries they may find themselves. And note: Considering the period up to Russia’s most recent maximal violation of international law, the balance of the US-NATO-EU since the 1990s is by no means so much “better.” To quote the good soldier Schwejk: Around “12 o’clock after the war” at the latest, a reformed NATO and a reformed Russia should agree on a denuclearized Eastern and Central (or “between”) Europe, including an extensive demilitarization of Kaliningrad/Königsberg and the Baltic States. Hopefully the path there doesn’t require a detour towards militarization with German participation and notable national nuclear armament.
After all, the French example from 1966 to 2009 offers a quite pragmatic possibility – not a mere utopia and theory in time and space – for decoupling the (political) “NATO guarantees” from complete “military integration.” We do not need a continuation or new edition of the not-only-”cold war”, but rather prospects of peace, development, and wealth for civil society throughout the world, independent from oligarchies old and new, and from the hitjob schemes, rather of purely power-political nature, of the interest groups and media complexes. This should all emerge far from the deadlocked and discredited institutions with headquarters not only in Washington, Brussels or Moscow.
Now back to the German home front. Today’s nearly three hundred thousand officially deportable persons and all the questionably entitled net recipients acquire their accommodations and hefty tens of billions in taxes and social programs at the expense of real war refugees or justified asylum applicants. Politicians have the goddamned duty, perverted for decades, to set the (inter)national revolving door in motion in a “national exertion” (Chancellor Merkel, early 2017) and send the greater part of the unentitled economic and social migrants packing as a precondition for continued normal labor migration and temporary emergency relief. If they don’t, they will only strengthen the permanent negative trends that haven’t the least to with enlightened domestic and foreign policy, but everything to do with lobby-driven clientele policy, not only at the expense of the autochthonous still-majority, but also at the expense of a practical high-quality migration that lends itself to integration.