By Veton Surroi
Kosovo and the Western Balkans are now in company with the cold war with China and the end of the war in Ukraine and the Middle East. Welcome to the contours of the new world order
1.
It has been a while since the European fever for the important presidential elections started. We are talking about the American presidential elections and this fact speaks volumes for all of us Europeans – the Portuguese, the French, the Estonians, the Kosovars, the Ukrainians – for the implicit fact that the election of the American president has an impact on our lives. For the Dutch and the French, for example, the American role was existential at the end of World War II for the liberation of their countries. For Estonians, Czechs and Romanians, it was of revolutionary importance when the Berlin Wall came down. For the Kosovars, it was existential to be saved from genocide, freed from the occupation of Serbia and to create an independent state. For Ukrainians today, the USA is the factor without which the secure future of this state and nation cannot be imagined.
For Europe, America’s role on the continent has become so implicit that it creates two deep and conflicting collective European perceptions. One, that this role will always be the same and therefore, of decisive importance is who will win the elections on November 5. Two, that America’s actions are so powerful that they dilute the autonomy of the actions of individual European states or of the European Union as a whole.
So America, in fact, turns into a front, with which Europeans in a successful form can hide their failures, such as the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue. From 2013 until today, European diplomacy has tried unsuccessfully to reach a point of relations between Kosovo and Serbia that will be called normalization. The lack of European success also has two “American” justifications: one, that the Americans were not sufficiently involved and two, if they were decisive in their diplomatic presence, more success would be achieved. So, the fault for not achieving normalization is the lack of American diplomacy, a successful cover-up attempt to hide the incompetence of European diplomacy.
2.
It will of course matter who wins the US presidential election next week. There are fundamental differences between the candidates in how they view democracy inside and outside America, how they view relationships with allies and adversaries, and so on.
But regardless of who wins, there are some geopolitical developments that will be knocking on the door of Europeans (and the world as a whole) and which Europe must be ready to face. From the basket of challenges (where there is an extensive list, including climate change and artificial intelligence), we can extract three: the cold war with China, the cessation of the war in Ukraine and Gaza, and the unfinished wars in the Western Balkans. All of which have, as can be seen, the common denominator of war, the definition of time, in which we live.
Let’s start from the first challenge. The US has already entered a cold war with China. This is not just trade competition between the two strongest economies in the world. It is a competition of political systems and values, which offer – one with democracy and the other without it – equal social development. And it is a global geopolitical race, in which the USA and President Biden developed a series of political and military alliances in the Pacific that should protect the world order as it was until recently.
Whoever is in charge of the USA will continue the cold war with China, and China will develop it with whoever is the American president. Europe, as well as a large part of the world, will not be asked whether or not this cold war will be involved or feel its consequences, willy-nilly or not.
For Europe, the cold war with China is an essential challenge, from the automotive industry to cyber security. Moreover, it also has an identity character, as long as there are European countries, inside and outside the EU, in which the conviction has developed that, as in China, democracy is not necessary for economic development.
The challenge for Europe is not how to escape the cold war with China, but how to integrate its interests on the side of the conflict it will find itself on, the transatlantic one.
3.
The second challenge concerns two wars, in Ukraine and Gaza (further in the Middle East) that are taking place on different continents, but which have several common denominators, the main of which is that they will not end , but can be temporarily stopped. And, how they stop, will tell the developments of the coming years beyond.
Europe, with states in the EU and outside it, has supported Ukraine and Israel. Over the next year, Ukraine will be ripe for a cease-fire, and whoever is president of the United States will espouse the belief that there will be no military victors in that war. Israel may destroy the last building in Gaza, but it will again be faced with the knowledge that, in order to win militarily, it will have to kill or expel the last Palestinian, which would be the “final solution”, i.e. genocide . So it will take a cessation of fighting with the Palestinians in Gaza, an end to ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and an end to the war in Lebanon plus a tacit ceasefire with Iran.
The challenge for Europe may be that in 2025 it faces the historical dilemma of supporting a new status-quo in the East, in which part of Ukraine will be administered by democratically elected leadership, while another part will be administered by Russia. The agreement that manages to legitimize such a state (called temporary) will largely define a part of the European security architecture for the next ten years. And, such an Agreement does not lead to looking outside the Cold War with China. The (temporary) border between Russian and independent Ukraine may for a considerable time be the border between the transatlantic and the Euro-Asian world.
The other challenge, that of Gaza (and the Middle East) is that of the defining moment, of reaching a cease-fire with or without the prospect of creating a Palestinian state. In the war in Ukraine, Europe has expressed support for the Ukrainians as support for the values ​​of humanity and democracy in the war in Gaza, and has supported Israel throughout the collective punishment of the Palestinian people with daily repetitions of crimes against humanity.
The clear path to the formation of the Palestinian state would also be a clear path to a security architecture in the Middle East that would make it part of the transatlantic world. Without it, the truce is a period needed only to rearm them for the next war.
4.
And the third challenge is so obvious that it blinds the eyes. The Western Balkans is a space of unfinished wars. Europe may find it difficult to maneuver so quickly in the cold war with China, with the war in Ukraine and the Middle East winding down, but the six countries of the Western Balkans weigh significantly less than any other crisis. Europe as a continent and the EU as a political, economic and security force can seriously deal with this region, treating it first as one of the security challenges of the European continent, of the challenges that begin with the cold war in China, the disruption of that in Ukraine and the Middle East and the conclusion of these in the Western Balkans. Whoever wins in America, it will be primarily the responsibility of the Europeans (this includes, of course, Great Britain) to maintain security within NATO that will guarantee political transformation.
What is the common denominator of this future? These are the contours of a new world order. Europe must integrate itself into it.
