The European Reality Behind the War

The European Reality Behind the War

By Paolo Falconio  

Miembro del Consejo Rector de Honor y lecturer en la Sociedad de Estudios Internacionales (SEI)

Much speculation has been made about Europe’s extremely belligerent stance. Some of these I consider accurate, but they don’t explain the rationale behind Europe’s posture. Faced with our current inability to pose even a threat to Russia—and the reality of a Russia that (nuclear conflict aside) neither intends nor is capable of invading Europe—many wonder about the narrative of Russians in Lisbon, the Russophobic stance, and so on. Let’s add the economic visions that differ profoundly from geopolitical ones.

Premise: The key to understanding the rationale lies in the fact that geopolitics concerns the survival of state entities, while economics concerns their wealth. Becoming poor is terrible, but if you don’t survive, you can’t even have an economy.

Europe’s posture—both at the Union level and among individual European states—toward Ukraine is closely tied to NATO’s survival. It’s a complex issue that I’ll try to summarize. The war in Ukraine has seen a significant investment from NATO, and a defeat would weaken the Alliance’s deterrent power in terms of image and reliability. There are already signs of this. The Trump presidency doesn’t help. The point is that Europe wants NATO—that is, the USA. NATO is the peacemaker of the European continent precisely because it guarantees security, which translates to survival. If NATO were to collapse, the EU would collapse as well. If this scenario were to unfold, old suspicions and grudges that never truly disappeared would resurface. Think of France or Poland facing a rearmed Germany without NATO’s framework. The real risk isn’t a Russian invasion—it’s Europe’s history, which resembles an unresolved feud. More explicitly, we would have a Europe of states competing for survival rather than wealth. The possibility of intra-European conflicts would be much higher than that of a Russian invasion.

Europe is willing to do whatever Washington desires, as long as the USA continues to guarantee security. NATO’s existence is existential for the survival of the EU, which wouldn’t withstand the pressures from individual states.

In this scenario, Russia is fighting a war it considers existential, while also seeing the opportunity to dismantle and disarticulate the two most successful supranational structures ever created: NATO and the EU. In this scenario, the Baltics would indeed face serious problems, and we should fear ourselves. At that moment, we would discover that security means survival—without which there is no economy.

It’s not a foregone scenario, but thinking there’s no NATO risk in the face of a Ukrainian collapse—after all the narrative and effort invested—would be naïve. Then again, everyone is free to wish for whatever they want.