Mobilization on the Eastern Front! Kallas's grand oral presentation to the European Parliament summarized the future head of European diplomacy's roadmap for her mandate: “Ukraine's victory is a priority for all of us“. The former Prime Minister of Estonia, very Atlanticist – and who was first a candidate for the post of Secretary General of NATO – has displayed, since the start of the Russian invasion, unconditional support for kyiv, advocating its entry both in the European Union and in NATO. “We must demonstrate, through our words and actions, that Ukraine's path to NATO is irreversible. An intransigence which explains the choice of Von der Leyen for his future vice-president; an intransigence which can be explained by the history of a nation sharing 300 kilometers of borders with Russia and a painful past, two centuries of occupation by the Russian empire (until its collapse at the beginning of the 20th), until the decades of Soviet domination, the transformation of the country into one of the fifteen Republics of the USSR – and the massive deportation of Estonians to Siberia.
Should this virulence against “Russian imperialism” be communitarianized? This is implicitly the choice made, before the summer, by the Member States, by validating the Kallas candidacy – reservation made by Hungary, and an Italy contesting more the political label of the candidate of the Renew group than its orientations of foreign policy. It must be said that in June 2024, the results of the European elections gave more legitimacy to ECR, the group of the President of the Italian Council, than to Renew to obtain this “Top Job”, which is traditionally reserved for Southern Europe. In vain. As a result, in the fall of 2024, Kallas's hearing in the Brussels Parliament – and the loud applause of MEPs at his Russophobic accents – are completely out of step with current events: an America which counts its electors and the days that It would take Trump to bring the Russians and Ukrainians to the negotiating table, Putin welcoming foreign ministers from the African continent to Sochi, and even a German Chancellor attempting, solo, Putin/Zelensky mediation.
“A new chapter in European diplomacy is opening, for a five-year term during which Rabat-Tallinn cooperation, renewed in recent weeks, could well find a role going beyond the bilateral framework.”
Who is High Representative Kallas really representing? It is because enlargement, this “geostrategic investment” that it promotes in its five-year program, “in the interest of the EU“, appears just as much like the continuation of the war by other means. She draws a Europe welcoming the Balkans – but not Serbia – and Ukraine. However, in the Member States, the dominant opinion is that the EU should not welcome new countries. Concerning Ukraine in particular, if Europeans continue to demonstrate their solidarity with civilian populations, a recent study by the ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations) shows that 46% of Europeans surveyed fear that its accession would compromise the security of the Europe. And as for the economic consequences of the integration of Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europeans share the same fears, the Poles having clearly set the limit of their support for the Ukrainian neighbor to the defense of their own agriculture. What Kallas does not see, blinded by the Russia-China axis of evil that she denounces, which brandishes its Manichaeism in the face of European peasants threatened by the trade agreement with Mercosur, and the agricultural power of Brazil, in their simply meaning that “if we cannot conclude (Mercosur), the void will be filled by China».
Latin America and the Middle East: two regions of the world about which Kaja Kallas was less than forthcoming in her presentation to the European Parliament jury; and where she is certainly less comfortable than her Catalan predecessor, MP for Barcelona, former President of the European Parliament and Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first Sanchez government. Regarding the war in the Middle East, she displays a cautious fidelity to compromise the least of 27: two-state solution, call for the release of hostages and a cease-fire, in Gaza as in Lebanon. Far from the outings of Borrell denouncing the violation, by the Hebrew State, of international law, and who ends his mandate with a proposal to the 27 to suspend the “political dialogue” with Israel.
A new chapter in European diplomacy is opening, for a five-year term during which Rabat-Tallinn cooperation, renewed in recent weeks, could well find a role going beyond the bilateral framework.
Related News :