Category: EU neighborhood

Although the French society is based on laïcité, a full separation of state and church, Islamic attacks in France and the radicalization of the highly unemployable Islamic youth have prompted President François Hollande to call for an “Islam of France”,which aims at appealing to its believers to incorporate the revolutionary values on which the French society is based of liberté, égalité, fraternité into their religious faith.

The secular faith that all men are created equal is the bedrock of the thinking of the Western establishment and one of the postulates all Western sociology is founded on. This conviction is not only upheld by the so-called “left”, but it has become the cornerstone of Western economic theories. Present-day investors do not see ethnicity, culture, religion or race as a key factor in a country’s economic growth and progress. Rather, they believe that people are clean slates, that external factors alone contribute to their advancement and, such is the narrative, if countries open up their borders, allow free trade and implement the rule of law, then their populations pick up required skills, adopt Western solutions and with the aid of education set themselves on the path of development.

When the so called communist system had crumbled in Eastern European countries, their respective societies embraced Western-style democracy and economy, which, taking into consideration the development gap between the two systems came as no surprise. What was stunning, however, was the fact that yesterday’s communists became today’s social-democrats; yesterday’s enemies of the West transpired as today’s ardent friends of the west; yesterday’s anti-liberal propagandists had no difficulty changing sides and becoming today’s pro-liberal propagandists; why, to top it all, yesterday’s Moscow’s footstools turned into the Kermlin’s fierce critics. It does not stand to reason that they (i) became capitalists overnight and that (ii) they converted to western values in droves.

The same people in a position of power who before 1989 would punish their compatriots for entertaining a mere thought of emigrating to the West or copying Western-style political or economic solutions; the same people at the helm who would not even ponder leaving the Warsaw Pact and joining NATO, arguing that geopolitics was such as to impediment any such attempts, the same people after 1989 came to laugh at the opponents of the European Union or NATO.

Let us recall: the exclusion of Greece from the Euro Area was impossible in 2012 due to a large amount of Greek debt held by foreign banks, which were rescued by the ECB, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions, called Troika, saved banks and private creditors, not the Greeks: 95% of the bailout money went to banks, as a study of the European School of Management and Technology proved.