At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany had no public awareness of its ability to shape the world. The USA, whose hegemony has been expanded since then and is accepted in this country as a given, was quite different. European values such as diplomacy and understanding, which grew out of its own history of war, fell by the wayside. In his latest book, Hauke Ritz traces the decline of the West – with Germany in a central position. He speaks of a “colonised consciousness of Europeans” and an “almost childlike immaturity” of US foreign policy.
Source: Multipolar publishes excerpts.HAUKE RITZ, 27 March 2025, 6 comments, PDF
If you read the various election and policy programmes of the CDU, SPD, FDP and Greens that were written between 1990 and 1994 – in other words, in the first few years after the epochal change of 1989 – the first thing that strikes you is the inward-looking perspective. All German parties of this period are basically engaged in navel-gazing. More than 90 to 95 per cent of their election programmes and policy papers are devoted to domestic policy. They deal with environmental protection, the welfare state, the emancipation of women, reconciling work and family life and many similar issues. The SPD election programme of 1990 does not even mention the words Soviet Union or Russia, but instead contains formulaic commitments to the transatlantic partnership. Only the Greens are somewhat out of the ordinary, insofar as they occasionally show an awareness of the problems associated with the continued existence of NATO. They speak of overcoming the bloc order and thus take the absolute opposite position to their current course. Ultimately, however, the Greens were also primarily concerned with domestic policy.
The dominance of domestic policy in all election programmes is evidence of a society that has ceded responsibility for the world order to another power. A few idealistic declarations about the fight against hunger in the world will not help as long as such statements are made without any knowledge or thematisation of the global economic structures. At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany had no public awareness of how the world could be shaped. The world order that existed at the time was perceived as something given and understood as a natural order. The fact that this world order had been shaped by the then dominant superpower, the USA, and could therefore be shaped differently, was ignored by the public. These were the worst possible conditions for confronting the great moment in European history in the 20th century – the fall of the Berlin Wall – with a declaration of one’s own will.
The USA was quite different. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, people there quickly realised that the removal of this geopolitical rival presented a unique opportunity for American expansion. This triggered euphoria at American universities, but also heated discussions. The concept of a unipolar world soon emerged. The world of the Cold War had a bipolar structure. In it, the international order always had to be painstakingly negotiated. In American discussions, the idea began to take shape that the post-Cold War world could take on a unipolar structure. This, in turn, had a multitude of implications that affected almost every area of modern civilisation and were quickly spelt out by individual scientists.
What began as discussions at universities during the fall of the Berlin Wall had far-reaching consequences. It began with purely academic debates in which various terms were used to describe a vision that still seemed unheard of. There was alternating talk of the “end of history”, a “new world order”, a “unipolar moment” and finally the “new American century”. In the second half of the 1990s, people gradually became more confident, increasingly brash and well organised. Gradually, the ideal of a unipolar world order came to the fore, displacing alternative concepts and becoming the strategic goal of US foreign policy.
Initially, the Europeans did not realise that the USA had embarked on the path towards a unipolar world order. They did not realise what this ultimately meant. Namely, that from then on there would only be one modern model of civilisation. And that this model would become binding for all other cultures in the world through economic, military or ideological dependence and interdependence. This did not mean that completely different cultures, such as the Chinese and Indian, would immediately lose their characteristics. But it did mean that an American-style liberal international culture would have such a profound impact on global developments that the other cultures, which were only regionally anchored, would lose the opportunity to develop their own interpretation of the modern world. Through a combination of economic, technological, cultural and ideological power, the USA sought to impose a world order whose structural power would ultimately lead to the westernisation of the entire world.
The unipolar world order was therefore based on an incredibly ambitious claim to power, the negative consequences of which were either accepted or not taken into account. The architects and planners of a unipolar world believed that it was up to the USA, both as a state and as a culture, to decide single-handedly in which direction the modern world should develop in the 21st century. Against the background of their history, Europeans could never have agreed to such a claim to power. After all, such a claim to power would present individual cultures with the choice between massive weakening or self-assertion; a fatal alternative that had already triggered numerous civil wars in 17th century Europe. The principles of the Peace of Westphalia, which still form the foundation of international law today, were established at the time to prevent a repetition of such conflicts.
But the Europeans remained astonishingly unaware of the basic principles of the new era. They did not even realise that all the fundamental strategic decisions of the 1990s and 2000s were made without them. Europeans were not involved in the shaping of globalisation, in the choice of the economic philosophy on which it was based, in the architecture of the modern financial market. (1) Europeans were also not involved in the development of new technologies, such as the Internet. As a result, they did not develop internet-based digital corporations, did not have a voice in the question of whether these corporations should be allowed to acquire a monopoly position and were therefore not in a position to reconcile European values in the area of data security and privacy with these new technologies. Europeans perceived all these developments as natural phenomena, without recognising the shaping American power behind them, let alone addressing them publicly. (…)
The European concept of world order
Europe had shaped international law on the basis of its own political experience. And this was characterised by the fact that, since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe had disintegrated into several states and zones of influence and had never found its way back to political unity. For over 1500 years, the continent has been politically fragmented, partly due to Europe’s geographical borders, such as the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the English Channel and the Baltic Sea, which naturally separate different peoples and language areas from one another. However, although a new Roman Empire never emerged, it did leave behind a structure that preserved the cultural unity of the continent despite its political fragmentation.
This was primarily due to the work of the Church, which was able to maintain the unity of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, at least in the religious and cultural sphere. A decisive factor here was the preservation and transmission of ancient knowledge in the early monasteries of the Church, which created a standardised European educational canon, on the basis of which, with the dawn of the Renaissance, an enormous development and differentiation of European culture took place, which now, due to the common Christian imprint, transcended political borders. In this way, the philosophy of humanism, together with the arts, was able to maintain the cultural unity of Europe when the continent was torn apart by the conflict between the confessions. Later, it was the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the growing importance of literature and music that again played a similar role across political boundaries. From the 17th to the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe increasingly emerged as a unified cultural resonance chamber in which there were different national cultures, but which had identical forms and characteristics and influenced each other.
By compensating for its political fragmentation through cultural unity, Europe was an exception among most other civilisations in the world. It was far more common for a centralised political power to be established, which then created a comprehensive, unified sphere of power in the form of a caliphate, as in the Arab world, or by means of the military and the law, as in China or the USA. The fact that this did not happen in Europe forced the continent to develop its diplomatic skills early and comprehensively. As war could always break out in a politically fragmented continent, diplomacy, understanding, reflection on the interests of others, their perspective and point of view had to be accorded a correspondingly high level of importance. As a result, an international law developed in Europe in which reflection on the diversity of the other country was taken into account from the outset. The Manichean view, which was based on the opposition of good and evil, was replaced by a view that recognised the other side’s right to be different. Europe thus achieved a feat of civilisation that it itself periodically fell behind, but which is still highly relevant today and which is of enormous importance in the dawning multipolar world.
This civilisational progress was codified for the first time in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and later became the basis of international law. The international law that emerged from the Peace of Westphalia was based on the idea that all states, regardless of their size and power, were equal subjects of international law. They were therefore all granted sovereignty, even if their power to realise this was very different. In other words, the international law resulting from the Peace of Westphalia binds the strong in favour of the weak; it recognises the sovereignty of France and Great Britain as well as that of Denmark. It is based on the idea that the great states impose voluntary self-restraint on themselves through the juridification of international relations. It understands that this spirit of self-restraint is a prerequisite for the validity of civilisational standards, which can all too easily break away if free competition is given free rein.
In a world of states organised according to Westphalian principles, all states, even the small ones, are protected from interference by other powers in their internal affairs. In return, these states in the Westphalian system also had to base their foreign policy on respect for the sovereignty of other states and refrain from interfering in their internal affairs. International law based on the principles of the Peace of Westphalia guarantees the right of the various states to be different, so to speak. This right is guaranteed by the deliberate maintenance of a balance of power between the states. If a state repeatedly disregarded these principles, the principles of the Peace of Westphalia could give rise to counter-coalitions that would in turn curb this abuse.
By applying these principles, it was virtually impossible for value conflicts to play too great a role in foreign policy. There was a separation between a value-orientated domestic policy and a foreign policy that was only guided by interests. This was the lesson that Europe had learnt from the Thirty Years’ War, a war that had lasted 30 years precisely because of the interference of external powers and had not ended even when most of the warring parties had long been exhausted. This war had exposed the destructive effect of values in foreign policy. The exclusion of values from foreign policy was intended to make interference in the internal affairs of other states and thus ideological wars such as the Thirty Years’ War impossible in future.
Having learnt from the experience of war, Europe developed a foreign policy aimed at maintaining peace. It is true that this did not always succeed in practice. But even this periodically recurring failure cannot erase the fact that the principles of the Peace of Westphalia were a first step towards breaking the destructive effect of a purely subjective power. By forcing states to exist in a balance of power, they are forced to reflect on the other state and its interests.
As long as the USA acted merely as an informal empire in the 20th century, the American allies in Europe were formally sovereign. In practice, the American influence on German politics in particular was already overwhelming at that time. However, there were at least remnants of sovereignty, particularly in German economic policy. As long as this was the case, international law and thus also the principles of the Peace of Westphalia structured relations within the Western community of states. In its European policy, the USA had to take into account the formal sovereignty of its allies on the one hand and act within a balance of power on the other.
In the 1990s, American neoconservatives turned against the Westphalian model because it was the only way to realise their ideal of consolidating their own society and ultimately that of their allies under a dominant narrative. They realised that, in contrast to the first half of the 20th century, modern consumer society no longer engendered the same identification with the community and the resulting willingness to make sacrifices. To remedy this, they considered the creation of a mythical world view that would swear society to the battle between good and evil and, through hatred of the supposedly evil, would once again generate love and identification with one’s own country. Values should therefore once again play a role in foreign policy and henceforth serve as a door opener for interference in the internal affairs of other states. In order to justify such interference, the responsibility to protect was to become a pillar of international law. The Peace of Westphalia, which prohibited such interference for good reasons, was derided by the neoconservatives as “Westfailure” (2).
The fact that all the destabilising elements that had triggered the Thirty Years’ War and other civil wars in the 17th century would return to politics was of no interest to the neoconservatives. After all, a sense of responsibility towards the world and peace was unknown to them. They only knew a sense of responsibility towards the USA, whose grandeur and glory they dreamed of, thinking mainly of their own privileged class and not necessarily of the working population. They literally wanted to wage a jihad with the values of democracy. Their main aim was to feel once again like the first explorers and settlers who ventured into the wilderness and pushed an unclear frontier westwards. Behind the extremely bloody and aggressive foreign policy was an almost childlike immaturity. (…)
The brief phase of European resistance
The dark side of America’s sole superpower status only gradually became apparent to Europeans after the turn of the millennium. In the wake of the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, which culminated in the collapse of the World Trade Center, the USA now began to openly present itself as an empire with global aspirations. During the Cold War, it had behaved quite differently. Although it already had foreign military bases, interfered in the domestic politics of numerous countries and had established its own currency as the world currency, it always denied that it was an empire and maintained the outward appearance of respecting the sovereignty of its allies.
But after 11 September, Washington began to demand loyalty to the alliance, and the sovereignty of the allies was now being curtailed more and more directly. One week after the attacks, President W. Bush announced in his speech to the nation: “Every nation in every region has a decision to make. You are either with us or with the terrorists.” (3) Subsequently, the US established a doctrine of pre-emptive war that legitimised US wars of aggression without a mandate from the UN Security Council. The legitimacy guaranteed by the UN Security Council was now to be replaced by the right of the USA to attack countries that it felt threatened by for whatever reason. This meant that in future the USA could act relatively arbitrarily and without the approval of the UN Security Council.
This doctrine was applied for the first time during the Second Yugoslavian War in 1999. Now, in 2003, this doctrine was to be applied again and thus gradually become customary law. The war in Yugoslavia, which had also been conducted without a UN mandate, was still considered an exception by the Europeans, while the war in Afghanistan had been approved in the shock of the events of 11 September 2001. But with the Iraq war, Europeans gradually began to realise where the USA was leading the world, namely into a future in which the principles of the Peace of Westphalia would no longer apply. Only now did Berlin and Paris seem to realise the consequences. There was a brief phase of resistance from the European side. This manifested itself in a joint “no” from the then French President Jacques Chirac, the German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Europeans campaigned for the USA’s pre-emptive strike doctrine not to replace the United Nations.
Ultimately, however, this brief alliance between Paris, Berlin and Moscow remained dependent on individual politicians and specific circumstances. It could not be translated into a lasting world view and an established consensus, which is why these ideas were not institutionalised. This was also extremely difficult simply because the USA already had cultural and media hegemony in Europe at the time and was therefore able to disrupt an autonomous European self-understanding even in the early stages. After this brief phase of rather spontaneous resistance, Angela Merkel on the German side and Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande on the French side then followed the phase of acceptance and support for the concept of a unipolar world order, which was labelled an “international rules-based order”.
Why did the Europeans go along with Washington’s ambitious plans? Why did they not put up a more sustained defence and also try to push through a debate on these foreign policy plans against American resistance? Would it not have been up to the much older European civilisation to warn the Americans of the inevitability of war, which was part of their power projection? But European policy was primarily focussed on domestic politics and had hardly any awareness of the possibility of an independent European path.
In addition, a generation of politicians had come to power in Europe who, for the first time, had grown up without major world views. The collapse of socialism also triggered the demise of social democracy. And communism, nationalism, Catholicism and conservatism had already been fundamentally criticised in the decades before. The vacuum was replaced by neoliberal views and ultimately by the legitimisation of selfishness in relation to one’s own advancement. As a result, a class of politicians came to power who felt responsible only for their own careers, but no longer for the course of history. Leaving the concepts of world order to the Americans now proved to be a rational calculation. (…)
Abandonment of the European Union
In 2005, Jeremy Rifkin’s book “The European Dream : How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream” was published. In this book, the author clearly emphasises that, judging by external data, Europe would be far better suited to becoming a global superpower than the USA. It would have a more advanced understanding of diplomacy, a greater economic output, a better level of education and so on. What the author overlooked, however, was that the European Union lacked an important component of self-reliance and sovereignty. And that was an awareness of itself.
In the 19th century, Europe was the undisputed centre of economy, technology, progress and science. However, it was divided into nation states, some of which built empires, which in turn caused conflicts between them that ultimately triggered the century of European wars. Europe was confronted with the paradox that it was precisely its economic, technological and scientific superiority that almost destroyed the continent twice in succession between 1914 and 1945. In addition, the Second World War represented a moral defeat for Germany in particular and confronted the country with its own evil. Germany, which had been respected for its culture and civilisation just a few decades earlier, had unleashed the greatest barbarism in human history to date. The widespread destruction, combined with a defeat that was not only military but also moral, left the country deeply traumatised. Due to Germany’s leading role in the European Union, it transferred this attitude to other parts of Europe. The result is a massive insecurity in Europe towards itself.
The presence of the Americans after 1945 offered an easy way out. Initially, it was the obvious defeat that forced the Germans to renounce their sovereignty. But over time, the advantages also became apparent. By transferring their sovereignty overseas, they also transferred the responsibility and thus the risk of becoming guilty again. For West Germans in particular, American hegemony represented a psychological guarantee of this. The memory of the former sovereignty of the individual European states and the balance of power that they formed among themselves was coupled with the memories of the world wars and in this way was seen as something negative that people did not want to return to. In view of the shame and pain over the guilt of the Second World War, one could almost feel gratitude for the lost sovereignty on a subconscious level.
As Germany and many other European states had transferred their sovereignty to Washington, particularly in matters of security and foreign policy, the USA had the freedom to intervene in European affairs at will. While European intelligence services made sure that neither Russia, Turkey nor Iran installed networks of influence in Europe, the Americans turned a blind eye. They were allowed to operate an Atlantic Bridge in Germany, for example, which called representatives in all parties its own and was thus able to influence the political selection process in several parties at once.
The ability of the USA to exert media influence in Europe was also never stopped by the Europeans. And so the USA was able to derail the young European Union’s quest for sovereignty. If the European Union had really wanted to fulfil its promise of peace and democracy, it would have been essential to first deepen the Union, to give it the characteristics of statehood as a first step before expanding it. However, the USA lobbied politicians and the media in favour of a rapid enlargement of the European Union. Once it had been enlarged by twelve states, it was certain that any further discussion about deepening and the associated appropriation of sovereignty could not succeed.
Europeans became painfully aware of this when they in Paris, Berlin and Moscow had just come to a joint “no” to the Iraq war in 2003. Not particularly irritated by this, Donald Rumsfeld declared that there was now a “New” and an “Old Europe”. The newly admitted states of Eastern Europe were the “New Europe”, whose foreign policy would be closely aligned with Washington’s in the future. This made any attempt to define the EU’s own European foreign policy impossible. The rapid enlargement, which was linked to prior NATO membership (4), meant that the Europeans had fallen into a transatlantic trap. From then on, it was clear from the outset that any initiative towards an independent European foreign policy would be prevented by Poland, the Baltic states and other Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Romania. The only way for the EU as a whole to reach a consensus on foreign policy was to formulate it together with the USA. And that meant that the EU had to betray its promise of peace and from then on be prepared to play the role of the American bridgehead in Eurasia. In concrete terms, this meant that the EU would serve as a basis for the future destabilisation of Russia.
Attempts to establish the euro as a global currency in competition with the dollar also failed due to the constant influence of the USA on intra-European affairs. Greek debt, which had been hidden in the Greek shadow budget with the help of the American bank Goldman Sachs, triggered the biggest currency crisis in the European Union to date in 2010. The austerity policy that was subsequently imposed on the countries of the European Union under the leadership of Angela Merkel ensured that the euro could not compete with the dollar and also slowed economic growth for many years. While the gross national product of the EU was still slightly higher than that of the USA in the 2000s, this ratio was drastically reversed as a result of the austerity policy. Nothing was as easy for the neo-conservative faction in Washington as eliminating Europe as a competitor. For Europe, still burdened by the traumas of two world wars, feared sovereignty and independence on a subconscious level and therefore helped the Americans to contain themselves. (…)
The German edition of Brzeziński’s famous book “The Grand Chessboard” (“Die einzige Weltmacht”) contains a foreword by Hans-Dietrich Genscher. In it, Genscher endeavours to interpret Brzeziński’s interpretation of geography in European terms and, contrary to the inherent logic of the text, to understand it as a call for cooperation. However, this interpretation is tantamount to self-deception, as the text simply does not support this interpretation. Here, the wish was clearly the father of the thought. And this desire has permeated European politics since the end of the Second World War. Europeans have wished for an America that, in the light of day, does not exist. As in an abusive relationship, they have apologised for America’s missteps and hoped for improvement. And so they did not contradict American analyses even where, as in Brzeziński’s case, they fell dramatically short of the Europeans’ horizon of knowledge and experience. (…)
Germany with two identities
(…) Egon Bahr, the architect of German Ostpolitik under Willy Brandt, [had] travelled to Moscow specifically in the years of upheaval to warn the Russians not to make too naive concessions and instead to work out a common security architecture independent of NATO. (5) He correctly predicted that maintaining NATO would lead to a new Cold War. During Kohl’s and Schröder’s terms of office, Germany also entered into close economic co-operation, which benefited both sides. There were also initiatives such as the German-Russian Forum and the Petersburg Dialogue, which expressed German society’s desire for reconciliation and lasting friendship. However, these positive approaches, which reached their peak during Gerhard Schröder’s time in office, were also accompanied by negative ones. Germany took part in the dismantling of Yugoslavia and, together with the USA, exerted pressure on Russia in the 1990s to persuade Moscow to abandon its own foreign policy positions.
Throughout these years, Germany had two identities: it saw itself as both a European and a Western country. As a European country, it strove for reconciliation with Russia and wanted to learn the lessons of two world wars and a Cold War; as a representative of the West, it worked to exclude Russia from Europe and to reopen the rifts of the world wars and the Cold War. And so it constantly vacillated between co-operation and adopting the American triumphalism.
When Merkel took office, the latter attitude gradually began to predominate. Now the German press was also becoming increasingly involved in the information war against Russia launched by the USA. This made something possible that had seemed impossible in Germany all those decades after the Second World War. The more hostile the German press wrote about Russia, the easier it was for politicians who were secretly driven by a desire for revenge against Russia stemming from the Second World War to take leading positions in the Berlin rivalry. The circle of German politicians who arrogantly brushed aside all the lessons of the Second World War and actively worked towards the destruction of German-Russian relations grew ever larger. The political principles of Brandt’s, Schmidt’s, Kohl’s and Schröder’s policy of détente were cancelled in a few years and consigned to oblivion. (…)
Hegemony over the modern world
As long as Russia, as the eastern part of Europe, gradually regained its sovereignty after its short-term loss in the 1990s and resisted the weakening of European identity, there was the possibility of a settlement and thus also a reversal for the whole of Europe. During the Cold War, the USA had succeeded in reinterpreting the European world culture that had emerged in modern times and transforming it into a powerful instrument of its own global influence. However, its hegemony over European culture was not seamless. As long as Russia had sovereignty and was able to orientate itself in the world and in history independently of the USA, the rest of Europe also had the opportunity to recognise its own position and remember its own identity and history.
For the American interpretation of European culture was only really strong and dominant on the condition that it was the only interpretation of European culture. As soon as the possibility of a comparison existed, the synthetic character of postmodern values became immediately apparent. No one who has seen the beauty and cultural level of a fully developed bourgeois culture could then warm to postmodern societies, which are fragmented into lifestyle groups. Precisely because the American interpretation of European culture was ultimately based on a manipulative revaluation of its fundamental principles, it could not stand comparison with the original. The mere fact that Russia did not join in the postmodern re-evaluation of European culture thus posed a threat to the USA.
At the same time, such a threat to the USA did not emanate from China, India or Iran, which challenged American superpower status geographically, militarily and economically, and which could also thwart American interests in their respective regions, but which, as non-European powers, had no possibility of influencing the interpretation of European culture itself. In the “hermeneutic world civil war” (6), China, India and Iran only had a regional voice, not a global one. Just as the cultural differences between China and Japan are barely perceptible to Europeans, it is just as difficult for the Chinese to distinguish between the USA and Europe or to separate modernity from postmodernity. Only those who are part of a cultural group can feel its cultural sources, can judge its direction of development and can separate the actual culture from its ideological deformation.
Because only Russia has sovereignty in the entire European world today, only Russia has this role in today’s world. If the Russian Federation were to lose its sovereignty, the Western world could still be challenged economically and militarily. But the permanent American hegemony over existing world culture would then probably be almost impossible to reverse. This special role of Russia in today’s geopolitical confrontation explains why the USA has never been able to free itself from its antagonism towards Russia, why it still spends more resources on containing Russia than on China, even though China is the USA’s real economic challenger.
However, this contradiction quickly becomes understandable when you realise that in today’s world, power has taken on a very significant intellectual and cultural-political dimension. While the world powers in the 19th and 20th centuries were still primarily fighting over the control of geographical areas and the raw materials stored there, a new factor has been added since the middle of the 20th century. The new geographical space that now demands the attention of all military strategists in the 21st century lies in the area of culture and the institutions that shape culture, i.e. the media, universities and science. If the strategists of the 19th century fought over the control of straits and counter-coasts, the strategists of the 21st century are fighting over the question of who controls the mass formation of world consciousness. However, because this world consciousness has been shaped to a considerable extent by Europe over the past 500 years, its further influence in the short term can only come from a major power that is based in Europe or at least, like the USA, has been colonised by Europeans. In the long term, it is certainly conceivable that China, India and Iran could also develop their own interpretation of the modern world and use this to gain global cultural and political influence. But in the short term, this possibility is only open to a European power and the USA. (…)
The West – An anomaly in history
Gradually, this created a colonised consciousness among Europeans. Over the decades, this psychological influence of the USA on Europeans became the mainstay of its political power in Europe and was soon more important than direct military and economic influence. Europe’s tradition of seeking peace by establishing a balance of power was overwritten by American thinking in terms of enemy images and the American pursuit of naked violence. From crisis to crisis, it became increasingly difficult for Europeans to perceive themselves as independent subjects and to reflect on their own history and the interests derived from it.
The entire European continent has been in a state of hypnotic rigidity ever since the USA, with the support of the EU and Germany, carried out a coup d’état in the Ukrainian capital Kiev in 2014. The fact that the Ukraine policy contradicts everything that both the project of European unification and German foreign policy have actually stood for since 1949 could no longer be articulated publicly. From then on, almost the entire political class and all relevant institutions only reacted to signal words and moved towards war without reflection.
This state of unconscious disorientation imposed on Europeans naturally precluded a self-confident actor like Russia, which knew its history and had an independent orientation in the world, from taking part in discussions within the West. Russia had the potential to remind the Europeans of what they had lost, especially when it came to joint strategy debates. From the American perspective, Russia therefore had to be kept out of Europe as far as possible, and even isolated as a dialogue partner. Even the talks between European and Russian diplomats posed a threat to American influence.
In the first half of the 20th century, Russia had developed an independent model of civilisation in the form of socialism and assumed the status of a superpower in the second half of the 20th century. Russia had also been one of the most influential cultural nations in Europe in the 19th century, alongside France, Germany and Italy, with significant contributions in the fields of literature, music and philosophy. Against the backdrop of this past, Russia viewed the westernisation of Europe with completely different eyes. Russia was prepared to enter into an alliance with the West in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. And Moscow’s offers that Russia itself could join NATO (7) and enter into ever closer economic ties with the EU, even accepting that “at some point in the future, Brussels will be our common capital” (8), were meant quite seriously.
However, it was clear from the outset that Russia’s entry would have meant that the Western world itself would have had to change fundamentally. With the Russian state, an actor would have taken a seat at the table who, unlike the politicians of Germany, Italy and France, did not accept the processes of cultural transformation as natural processes, but someone who knew them from his own power-political experience and would have put them up for discussion accordingly. Russia could therefore only have been integrated into the West if the cultural-political power of the USA, which had been exercised covertly until then, had become a common political content of the entire alliance, which in turn would have triggered discussion processes that would have led to a change in assessment and thus also policy.
This in turn means that Russia could only have been integrated into the West if the USA had granted Europe independence. However, this would have meant that the USA would no longer have been the administrative centre of the West. In a way, this would have meant the dissolution or re-creation of the West. Instead of a unipolar structure with the USA at its centre, a tripolar structure with three centres would have emerged, albeit with Europe at its centre. Both Russia and the USA would only have been able to connect with this new Europe through a relationship based on partnership. The West would have had to transform itself into the larger European cultural area in order to integrate Russia. In this larger European cultural area, which would then really have stretched from Vancouver to Vladivostok and consisted of three independent centres, the USA would then have had to maintain equal relations with the EU and Russia.
Until 24 February 2022, Russia had been a country that felt deeply connected to European culture, in some ways possessed a European dream and desired the well-being of Europe, indeed wanted to contribute to it. To have rejected and possibly permanently lost this friend by planning the separation of Ukraine from Russia, as the supreme army command once did in the First World War, is perhaps the most dramatic mistake Europe has made in its entire history. It remains to be seen how far Russia will now distance itself from Europe through its integration into the new alliance system of the BRICS states. However, Russia’s exclusive reference to Europe, which has prevailed for the last 300 years, is unlikely to be restored any time soon. However, cultural imprints can only be changed over generations and not in the short term, which is why the possibility of a renewed alliance between the EU states and Russia based on a common culture is still conceivable.
Hauke Ritz, From the Decline of the West to the Reinvention of Europe, Promedia, 272 pages, 23 euros
About the author: Hauke Ritz, born in 1975, studied general and comparative literature as well as religious and cultural studies at the FU and HU Berlin. He has taught at the University of Giessen and Lomonosov University in Moscow, among others. Together with Ulrike Guérot, he published the book “Endspiel Europa” in 2022 .
Cover photo: Western heads of state at the G7 summit in Italy in June 2024 | Picture: picture alliance / Anadolu | Baris Seckin
