Author Ding Gang Department Senior researcher at Chongyang Institute of Finance, Renmin University of China, senior researcher and senior editor of the People's Daily. This article was published on September 22, 2022 Ding Gang reads the world public account.
1995, Swedish became a member of EU .
A Swedish scholar I interviewed at the time told me that if I asked him, "Which country are you from?" he would definitely say without hesitation, "I am Swedish." But after joining the EU, Swedes faced a problem of identity transformation.
He said that it would not take long before the Swedes would first answer that they were "Europeans" or that there would be no such change at all.
Now, Sweden has become a member of NATO , taking an important step towards the "Europeans".
This is the choice when facing threats from Russians from the other side of Europe, and NATO is a military group with clear hostile targets.
I later switched to Belgium to work, and went through the start of the euro and the eastward expansion of NATO.
The issue of "Europeans" has always been a basis for me to observe the integration process. In this process, there were not only geopolitical changes, but also the expansion of ideology and political system, as well as the drastic changes caused by this.
I first saw the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. More than 10 years later, I heard that Russia and Ukraine had conflicts over the Crimea incident (2014). I realized more strongly that integration has boundaries.
The predecessors of European integration hope to eliminate war through community is still far away.
When Romanians, Poles, , Swedes, Finnish will gradually become "Europeans", and the identity of Russians will definitely be stronger. Such recognition will continue to expand to people with common religious beliefs and cultural traditions, and to people with Russian ethnic groups in various surrounding countries and regions.
They are part of Europeans, but they seem to be less and less like Europeans.
European integration ultimately leads to the Russians facing two choices, either to transform themselves into real Europeans, that is, Europeans recognized by Europeans in the west, or to continue to be Europeans in the north without being "dissolved".
Finally, they returned to the situation of historical tragedy: either I was eaten or I ate you.
Western public opinion is keen to compare the current Russia to the Germany of that year. Then, it may not be difficult to find another correspondence for Germany in the long history of war in Europe.
The great integration process of Europe seems to be not a smooth process of national identity and identity, but is full of the risks of war caused by rejection. The root cause lies in the inherent religious uniqueness and sense of mission in its civilization, as well as the genes of the expansion and struggle for hegemony.
The European gentlemen standing above the high altar constantly appealed to the whole world to support their decisive battle with Russia, but they could not convince most countries that they could end the war forever.
American scholar Samuel Huntington said in his book "The Conflict of Civilizations ": "The West won the world not through its ideas, values or religion superiority (almost not many people in other civilizations convert to them), but through it the advantages of organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerns never forget it."
European scholars will still tirelessly tell people that Western civilization has been constantly progressing from war and will eventually find order to maintain peace, but Ukraine's tragedy seems more like a version upgrade of a war game. Will such an upgrade continue with 2.0, 3.0, 4.0... according to its internal laws and the design of the producers?
What people are worried about is that the current war in Europe will expand to a scale like World War I , World War II and Cold War , which will have a catastrophic impact on global development, especially , the developing countries of the world.
Harvard History Professor Neil FergusonHistory published an article titled "War: In history’s shadow" in the Financial Times (8.2).
He concluded in the article that as we commemorate the outbreak of World War I , don't let anyone swallow the ancient but stubborn lies that their "sacrifice" is necessary and sublime. Instead, this war is best understood as the biggest mistake in modern history. This is a harsh fact that many historians still find it unpleasant. But, as A.J.P Talor (A British historian, author of the book "HTM1 The Origin of World War II ") once pointed out, most people who study history simply "learned from past mistakes how to create new mistakes."
The Russian-Ukrainian War is not a single-episode drama or a multi-act drama, but an episode in a series where the ending is not visible.
(Welcome to Renmin University Chongyang Sina Weibo: @Renmin University Chongyang; WeChat official account: rdcy2013)
