War in Europe: Our worst nightmare

By Jamal Qaiser, Horst Walther, Andreas Dripke and Hang Nguyen

Europe has become the battlefield of a merciless proxy war between the superpowers. The war erupted in 2022, but it has been in the offing for more than two decades.
 
In the wake of  the Cold War, Western Europe sought to achieve a peace process in Eastern Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany's Ostpolitik (German policy towards Eastern Europe)  is an example of this. Russia became a partner, almost even a friend. However, at the same time, NATO, under US leadership, expanded further and further east. This development brought the peace process to a standstill and eventually reversed it. Today, Russia and the USA are irreconcilably opposed to each other in Europe. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022 has made any peaceful agreement between Europe and Russia impossible for the foreseeable future. Europe is committed to the USA and not only vis-à-vis Russia. For according to the will of the USA, this front is also to be positioned vis-à-vis the People's Republic of China.
 
This fatal development is critically connected to the fact that Europe has not succeeded in creating an independent and autonomous position for itself in world politics. The "Old Continent" has become dependent on the USA, Russia and China, from which there seems to be no escape. Europe has become the pawn of the superpowers. The battle for Europe has begun.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diplomatic Council e.V.
• Release date: Jun 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9783986740313

Jamal Qaiser

Jamal Qaiser ist ein international engagierter Friedensaktivist, Buchautor ("How to avoid World War III") und Peace Consultant. Nach der Flucht seiner Familie aus Pakistan aufgrund politischer und religiöser Verfolgung absolvierte er eine glänzende akademische und geschäftliche Karriere, bevor er die Bewahrung des Friedens in der Welt zum Hauptanliegen seines Lebens machte.

Book preview

Dedicated to the next generation

This work is dedicated to our children, nephews and nieces.

They all represent the next generation. May they grow up in peace and freedom and, as adults, ensure that successive generations can also thrive in peace and freedom.

Andreas Dripke, Hang Nguyen, Jamal A. Qaiser, Dr. Horst Walther

"Callous individuals who do not see the needs of the people and do not take them to heart should not be allowed to hold leadership positions".

Michail Gorbatschow, 1987

Europe is not a place, it is an idea.

Bernhard-Henri Lévy, 1995

Europe now finds itself suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined.

Henry Kissinger, 2014

Russia is no more than a regional power standing alone.

Barack Obama, 2014

The war has surprised a society in Germany that has long been lost in often dull debates on privatism. It was about striking a balance linguistically, gender equality and all kinds of variants of you mustn't. Those who liked could participate there with little life experience and a lot of moral will to shape things, no big deal. We now seem to lack the earnestness for a debate on war and peace".

Boris Palmer, 2022

Contents

Preface

The dependent continent

Proxy wars on European soil

Old world and new dependence

The idea of a peaceful Europe

Europe losing its impartiality

Freedom versus unfreedom

The free West against the Sino-Russian axis

First and Second World Wars

The high death tolls

Innumerable wars

Everyone knows WW III to be a nuclear war

Quo vadis Europe?

What Europe means (to us): the torn unity

Why we need Europe

Euro: The last collective feat

Inexorable species extinction

Climate change: often mentioned, little done

Resource consumption on the increase

Dogma of the growth economy

Overpopulation : Too many of us

Economic inequality on the upswing

Conflict potential abounds

Europe needs democratic legitimacy

Europe needs more influence

Europe must take stand

Europe must establish a clear mission for itself

How we can recreate Europe

Europe looks out primarily for itself

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Human Rights violations in the EU

Global power centres

International law

Basis for a better world

Security Council grapples with veto trap

Multilateralism has had its day

Congress of Vienna: Foundation of diplomacy

USA shuns international organisations

EU comeback since 24 February 2022

A run on NATO

No one has declared World War III

Angela Merkel's new world order

Russia on the fence

Russia shuffles up Europe

The Russian worldview

Perestroika and Glasnost

Putin's dream of Great Russia

The struggle for Ukraine began in 2004

UN appeals to OSCE remain futile

Crimea: Part of Russia since Catherine the Great

Home of the Black Sea Fleet

Russia seizes Syria

Four decades of Assad

The UN plan for Syria

Private mercenaries on the rise

Russia's charm offensive in Africa

Putin's world history spin for children

Operation Iron Fist

Russian invasion of Ukraine

Germany soft-pedals with Russia

Ukrainian-Western offensive

Germany gets ready for war

It is all about gas and money

America's sacred obligation

Ukraine's national and presidential courage

Comedian, corrumpist, war hero

All but China vote against Russia

Alliance Treaty between China and Russia 2022

Millions flee Ukraine

Vladimir Putin: The weak get beaten

Putin captures German hearts

Bounty on Vladimir Putin's head

Warmonger Joe Biden

Many weapons generate much war

Ukraine not Russia's last point of call

China buying Europe: Silk Road

New Silk Road – dream come true

China's charm offensive in the West

Italy at helm, European dwarfs to follow

17 plus 1

Europe a Military Dwarf

Europe's guardian loses military edge

Hypothetical attack on Europe

The West fights back: NATO

NATO's zigzag course

Nine-Eleven – first case of alliance

European army faces huge hurdles

The world is re-arming

Killer robots on the march

Arms race in space

Cyber war – war on the Internet

Warning to the digital society

Intelligence agencies destabilize cyber world

Attack on vaccines

Hacker attack on Putin

Nuclear war: Who wants it?

The war triumvirate

USA: First nuclear weapons test in 1945

Cuban Missile Crisis – world on the brink

Exit from disarmament

Missiles against China – and back

Destruction of the earth

Pathways to peace

World War III can be averted

Happy place and non-place Utopia

About the authors

Andreas Dripke

Hang Nguyen

Jamal Qaiser

Dr. Horst Walther

Books published by Diplomatic Council (English)

About the Diplomatic Council

References and Notes

Preface

On 24 February 2022, the war in Europe began. This is often asserted because on that day the Russian army crossed the border into neighbouring Ukraine.

Now this step undoubtedly represented a caesura for Europe. But one can hardly call it the beginning of a completely surprising development. Europe had long before fallen into a kind of agony, a drowsiness, from which the Russian invasion of Ukraine has aroused us. In this book we want to trace how Europe has become this drowsy paradise, what consequences we are threatened with as a result, and how real the danger of war in Europe really is. This range of topics includes, of course, the failure of the European Union, but also of other international organisations, first and foremost the United Nations.

The dependent continent

We have divided this book into three parts. The first part is about all the worries and hardships of Europe before the outbreak of war in Ukraine. In the final analysis, all these challenges still persist. The problems of old Europe have been concealed by the war, but not solved. This includes Europe's age-old dependence on the USA and on Russia, as we have become acutely aware since spring 2022, and on China, something we have been suppressing for many years. The supply bottlenecks for many products that have been rampant since 2021, threatening entire branches of industry in Europe, have opened our eyes to this dependence for the first time. Without software from the USA, chips from Asia and energy from Russia, prosperity in Europe is at risk. The EU – and the Federal Republic of Germany, for that matter – would have had plenty of time to reduce this dependence. But instead, it has imagined itself to be in a world of friends, whose supplies seemed self-evident as long as one only paid for them. As a result, Europe today finds itself more dependent and reliant on others than ever before.

The second part focuses on the raging war in Europe. In so doing, we wish to point out that this by no means began in 2022 but at least as early as 2014. In this context, the question of an independent European army also plays a role, which we discuss in this book. For since 2022 at the latest, it has been clear that Europe is not capable of defending itself.

Finally, in the third part, we turn to the dangers of war that do not emanate from Europe at all, but directly affect Europe as well as other parts of the world. This undoubtedly includes the danger of nuclear war as well as the possible consequences of the devastating arms race in space. In all these cases, Europe is certainly not the initiator, but neither is it even a player at eye level on the stage of world politics.

But our sights go far beyond the immediate military conflict. The question of Europe's independence is also at stake. China's economic invasion of Europe under the guise of the New Silk Road is proceeding peacefully but is nonetheless of fundamental importance. This is all the more true since, at the latest after the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Europe has drawn geopolitically closer to the United States of America.

In the political poker of the superpowers, on the one hand, the USA with an undisguised claim to world supremacy, and on the other hand, the emerging People's Republic of China and the resurgent Russia, which have no intention whatsoever of succumbing to US supremacy, Europe is like a pawn in the waves of global conflict, without itself taking an active part in the game, let alone being the leader.

Proxy wars on European soil

The wars in and around Europe are therefore mainly proxy wars, conflicts between the superpowers that are fought on European soil and to the chagrin of the European population, but which are basically not about Europe at all.

Countries like Vietnam and Korea have seen how these bloody proxy wars between the free world, the West, on the one hand, and the authoritarian power blocs on the other, have destroyed their countries. Today, the situation has changed: Europe has become the stage – one could also say the battlefield – of this confrontation.

We have authored this book in the hope that much of what we outline here will turn out to be wrong, that the course of history will take a different turn, that the European values of which we can rightly be proud will once again find a greater hearing in the world.

Andreas Dripke, Hang Nguyen,

Jamal A. Qaiser, Dr. Horst Walther

Old world and new dependence

The Old World is a historical term for the continents of the earth that were known to Europeans before the discovery of America in 1492: Europe, Africa and Asia. Basically, Europe (ancient Greek Εὐρώπη Eur pē) is not a continent in its own right, but merely a subcontinent that, together with Asia, forms the continent of Eurasia. However, the term Europe is not defined purely geographically, but also refers to historical, cultural, political, economic, legal and intellectual aspects. Not a place, but an idea... a category of mind, not of being, was how the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy characterised Europe in August 1789, in the wake of the French Revolution.¹ This cultural Europe is also usually meant when one speaks of the Old Continent. The term illustrates Europe's entrenchment in Greek culture as well as its conditioning by the Roman Empire and Christianity, three influences that still have a decisive impact on European culture today.

In classical antiquity, the Roman Empire temporarily united southern Europe with the other coastal countries of the Mediterranean into one great empire. In late antiquity, Christianity was elevated to the status of state religion, which continues to have an effect today. During this time, a multitude of mostly Germanic tribes such as Anglo-Saxons, Franks and Goths invaded western Europe and laid the foundations for future nations such as England, France and Spain. Throughout all these centuries, Europe has been a battleground, not at all a model for whatever.

It was not until the 18th century that the Enlightenment movement set new accents and called for tolerance, respect for human dignity, equality and freedom. When we speak of European values nowadays, we mean the time of about 300 years ago. The Old Continent in this nowadays fondly referred to tradition thus only goes back to about 1798 – the year of the French Revolution. In the process, the dark spots since that time, especially the First and Second World Wars, are often more or less obscured in order to extol European values as noble and good.

The idea of a peaceful Europe

Only after the Second World War did the idea of a united or at least peaceful Europe gradually emerge. In a speech held in Paris on May 9, 1950, the then French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann developed the idea of a supranational European institution to manage and pool coal and steel production. In his vision, this new type of political cooperation was intended to prevent wars between European neighbours.² His proposal, which was implemented one year later in the form of the European Coal and Steel Community, is considered the cornerstone of today's European Union. However, it was still a long way until then. In 1951, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and France joined forces to form the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). The attempt to establish a European Defence Community (EDC) as well as a European Political Community (EPC) failed in 1954 because of the French National Assembly. As a result, the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the European Economic Community (EEC) were founded in 1957 with the Treaties of Rome. Since the Treaty of Brussels in 1967, the three European Communities (ECSC, Euratom and EEC) have shared the common institutions of Commission, Council, Parliament and Court of Justice. With the Treaty of Maastricht in 1993, the EEC was renamed the European Community (EC). At the same time, the European Union was founded, encompassing the three Communities and adding two intergovernmental policies, the Common Foreign and Security Policy and cooperation in the field of Justice and Home Affairs. In 2002, the ECSC was disbanded and its functions were taken over by the EC. The Treaty of Lisbon fully merged the EC into the EU on 1 December 2009.

In the wake of eastward expansion in 2004, 2007 and 2013, and the Brexit in 2020, the EU currently has 26 European member states, with the 27th member state, the Republic of Cyprus, geographically counted as Asia. ³ All these figures, developments and institutions are part of the general education of anyone seriously concerned with Europe. The fast forward through history gives the impression that Europe has overcome its centuries of strife and is on the way to unification, a United Europe.

That would be nice – but in fact Europe is facing challenges that make the future of the Old Continent seem less rosy. This has to do with the fact that Europe is more entrenched in the past than concerned about its future. European society has hardly any vision for the future of its own continent, let alone the world.

European politics largely takes its cue from this lack of imagination on the part of society, the sole aim of which is to preserve today's prosperity and continue to bask in complacency. Increasingly more people in Europe, nevertheless, are beginning to suspect that this complacency and lack of vision will lead to Europe's decline. This thought process did not first begin with the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022. Long before, the vision of a European paradise had been relegated to the sidelines by bickering over nation-statehood, anxiety about the stability of the euro as a pan-European currency (fuelled anew by the spectre of inflation), the sprawling Brussels bureaucracy, Europe's apparent failure in virtually all aspects of digitalisation, which is enveloping our entire lives, the discussions about migration and the threat to our European values, as well as Europe's dwindling importance on a geopolitical scale and, related to this, the dependence of the Old Continent on America and Asia, especially the United States of America and China. This was accompanied by the realisation that the so-called international institutions with their concept of multilateralism are not as powerful as they often make themselves out to be – from the European Union to the United Nations. The security supposedly associated with these institutions often seems more illusory than real.

An additional shock wave was triggered in many people by the realisation that the predatory exploitation of our environment could lead to a global climate catastrophe that will not spare Europe. Resulting new migration flows, dependencies and potential wars over resources have come into focus and appear more real today than ever before.

Europe losing its impartiality

With reference to American power play and the inadequacies of U.S. policy, it appeared over the years that Europe could adopt an impartial, virtually equal stance between the United States and Russia, on the one hand, and, above all, China on the other. In the highest European government circles, the idea of an independent European army was advanced in order to no longer have to play the role of junior partner in NATO, the intergovernmental military alliance.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 has made all these considerations absurd. Without the economic, technological and, above all, military support of the United States of America, Europe would be lost. One may lament this but to ignore it would be fatal in the truest sense of the word, as the Ukrainian people have tragically experienced.

Freedom versus unfreedom

One must be clear that both the Soviet Union, of which only Russia is left at the moment, and the People's Republic of China share a fundamentally different view of humanity than the free West. The old-age struggle between the West and the two former communist states is by no means over, as it appeared to be after the end of the Cold War