Europe seeks its place in the world

The summit hastily called by French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris to try to coordinate the European position on Ukraine can be read in two ways: as a sign of weakness, since everything points to the fact that the important summit will be the one held in Saudi Arabia by the United States and Russia, and as a first step to try to straighten out the situation. In any case, Macron has shown flair and agility and has wanted to counteract the image of weakness that Europe offered at the Munich Conference (who came up with this location with dark historical resonances?) with a meeting that, despite being informal, actually seems to be the first serious step taken in the era of Europe that makes it a time to articulate. In addition to France and the United Kingdom, the summit was attended by the heads of government of Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Denmark, a kind of European G-8 (with the EU and NATO) that is seeking its place in the world after the divorce The Paris meeting, which was intended to be informal, did not result in any official agreement, because, as Sánchez himself recalled, this was not a European Council, but it should serve to send the message that Europe is willing to help Ukraine and to assert itself against Washington and Moscow's attempt to resolve the war in a formal manner. However, in order for Kiev and especially Washington and Moscow to take Europe seriously and consider that it should have a place in the talks, the Europeans must show that they are willing to take important measures and use their specific weight. It has often been said that Europe was an economic giant but a political dwarf, and as long as the alliance with the United States worked and Russia behaved like a country aspiring to be a democracy, things went reasonably well. But now the situation has changed. If it does not react soon, Europe runs the risk of being humiliated by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, who want to act as if the Old Continent did not exist.

At the outset, the leaders reminded British President Keir Starmer that the time has not yet come to talk about sending peacekeepers, with the war still underway. Starmer's words can be interpreted as a gesture of following Trump, who will surely want to reach an agreement with Putin and then make the Europeans foot the bill for both peacekeeping and reconstruction. The priority must be, as Macron and Scholz maintain, to avoid a defeat of Ukraine that would increase Putin's power and to negotiate lasting and fair peace conditions for the Ukrainians. And, in any case, Europe must put in place an urgent plan so that the next crisis that occurs on European soil cannot be resolved without its voice being heard. The political dwarf must grow up in a world in which the multilateral order is collapsing and a new one is emerging that, as in the darkest times of humanity, is governed by the law of the strongest.