The war in Ukraine accelerates the shift of power in Europe to the east

BRUSSELS – In August, in Prague, the German Chancellor, Olaf SchoelzHe said it bluntly:

“The center of Europe moves east”.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine it was a shock to the complacent European order, both for the European Union and for NATO.

And it underlined and strengthened the influence of Central and Eastern European countries.

Poland and the Baltic countries supported Ukraine morally, almost filling a vacuum at the start of the war when the traditional European leaders, France and Germany, seemed paralysed.

But the war also brought a new urgency and energy to the enlargement of the European Union to the Western Balkans and beyond, with job offers for Ukraine and Moldova.

Pressure from Central-Eastern Europe has been so decisive that this week, after months of disputes and resistance, it was decided to cede Western tanks to Ukraine.

Scholz announced on Wednesday that his country would supply some of its own tanks. Leopard 2 and would allow other countries to send their own, and the President Joe Biden he said he would send Abrams tanks, which gave Scholz the political coverage he wanted.

The war is also accelerating what Scholz hinted at:

that the balance of power in Europe is also changing, along with its centre, from “Old Europe”, which valued and nurtured its ties with Moscow, towards the new members of the East and North, with their harsh memories of the Soviet occupation and its reluctance to cede chunks of its restored sovereignty to Brussels.

“Scholz is right,” says Timothy Garton Ash, a European historian at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

“Central and Eastern European voices are being heard more and taken more seriously in the Councils of Europe, and there is a big eastward enlargement agenda on the table.”

With a major war raging within its borders, Europe is banking more on hard power than ever before, he said.

“So have a Central and Eastern Europe take safety seriously It has an impact.”

Poland has a rapidly expanding military – last year the government said it would double the size of the country’s armed forces – and has ordered a number of sophisticated new weapons, making it a most important actor both in the European Union and in NATO.

Poland has been a major lobbyist in trying to get a reluctant Berlin to send German tanks to Ukraine and to allow other countries to do so.

“Power has shifted to the east and Ukraine will consolidate this trend,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the Berlin-based European Council for Foreign Relations.

Too much can be extrapolated from the war in Ukraine, he said, “but you see the clear pattern in the moral leadership.”

Central and Eastern European countries, Puglierin said, consider themselves “the freedom fighters in the EU and defend their values, opposing the dictatorship”.

They feel vindicated in their old warnings about Russia’s neo-imperialism, its president, Vladimir Putinand Europe’s dependence on Russian energy, in contrast to what they see as Western European naivety about diplomacy and trade with Russia.

By moving quickly to provide Ukraine with military support and host refugees, these countries helped shape the narrative for Europe, while “even in Berlin and Paris there was such a vacuum, negotiating with Putin to the end and surprised by the invasion,” Puglierin said.

“The countries of the East were fast and much more credible, and we stayed dumb and frozen“.

Germany and France they also had to deal with the failure of their traditional European security policy with Russia, not against it.

The President of France, Emmanuel Macronpersists in its hope of being part of any future peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, going so far as to talk about it give guarantees of security to Russia, which has infuriated many in Europe, not just in the east.

The war has also dwarfed Macron’s aspiration for an “autonomous” European defense given the growing role of NATO and the United States over the past year.

“Eastern countries are not big fans of EU defence:

they want the United States and NATO,” Puglierin said. Germany also wants to improve transatlantic relations and depends on Washington, even as it tries to rebuild its own pitiful military.

“So France will lose some allies and be outnumbered,” he said.

Weakened within Europe, at least for now, France will also have less influence in a more active and aggressive NATO.

The alliance is more dependent on American weapons and leadership than it was before the war, no less, and is expected to expand soon with the new membership of Sweden and Finland.

The new German government, headed by Scholz, was unprepared for war, let alone a sudden disruption of Russian power and commerce.

With growing concern about such a dependency on China,

Germany is faced with the need to reshape its export-driven economy built on cheap Russian gas and unhindered trade with China.

In the long run, “the prospect of a larger, more eastern Europe will be a source of great strength for the German economy,” said Garton Ash, and Ukraine represents enormous development potential.

However, France and Germany are at the bottom of Europe, at least for the foreseeable future.

Luuk van Middelaar, historian of the European Union, points out that since the beginning of the war, both Poland What Hungary they have been treated more kindly by Brussels in their fight for the rule of law.

“Politically and morally, Poland is spared the role it plays as a frontline state, delivering arms and accepting refugees,” he says.

“Poland’s new importance to NATO makes it even more important to” the European Union, said Wojciech Przybylski of Res Publica, a Warsaw-based research institute.

“The volume of purchases of new equipment and the upgrading of defense systems make it a country to talk to when it comes to guarantees of security and peace”.

Central and Eastern Europe, he said, “offers a lot of attitude, even if the substance remains in the hands of the bigwigs”.

The war, he added, “confirmed the reality that Europe can no longer be governed from Paris and Berlin.”

Hans Kundnani of Chatham House, who has written extensively on Germany and the European Union, sees a psychological shift in Europe.

“Poles and Central Europeans feel safer, while French and Germans are more defensive,” he said.

There is no doubt that politically, and also in terms of cultural values, Central and Eastern European countries “pushed Europe to the right,” Kundnani said.

“There is a resurgence of neoconservatism with Ukraine as a backdrop.

The danger is that this divide Europe instead of joining it”.

But the power of Brussels is based on economies and population sizehe said, so Europe’s center of gravity remains in the West.

For the new Eastern countries, he said, “I’m not convinced that trust and high morale are enough to achieve great things in Brussels”.

Van Middelaar, like Kundnani, distinguishes between rhetorical influence that can help shape public opinion, such as “media enjoying witty quotes from Baltic and Polish ministers”, and structural change.

“A lot of things in the EU have nothing to do with Russia or war or defense, and for those things the balance of power hasn’t changed much,” he said.

“France and Germany stay quite central in these economic debates.

The power of the Franco-German “pair” has been in decline for some time.

Van Middelaar has drawn a comparison between the war in Ukraine and another tectonic shock in Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, French and German leaders at the time had strong conflicts over reunification, but they had been working closely together for years.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Scholz, who had been in office for less than three months, and Macron hardly knew each other.

“There was no working relationship or professional intimacy, which is necessary in those moments,” said van Middelaar, so there was “a lot of suspected internal” and “a basic malaise on how to deal with this new continent in which Russia is the enemy and Germany must rethink its economic and political model”.

This has created a leadership vacuum that Central and Eastern European countries have been trying to create aggressively fill.

c.2023 The New York Times Society