Edward McMillan Scott, Vice President of the European Parliament with responsibility for human rights and democracy has been writing about how David Cameron’s European policy has enabled Russia’s President Putin to develop his strategy for a Eurasian Union based on illiberal and anti-democratic values.
He opens by outlining the problems faced by Angela Merkel with the rise of the eurosceptic right wing AFD:
Events in Ukraine may still overshadow Thursday’s trip to London by Angela Merkel, during which David Cameron will seek her support for EU reform. She will not be pleased that Cameron has allowed his Eurosceptics to continue talks with her rival on the right – the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) – in a bid to shore up Cameron’s controversial European alliances, which include Vladimir Putin and Viktor Yanukovich.
The more MEPs elected from the right wing, nationalist, eurosceptic right, the more likely Putin’s aim of the EU falling apart becomes, he argues. Then he explains Putin’s long term strategy:
Putin’s guru is Alexander Dugin, whose Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, is a blueprint for the re-creation of the Russian empire through a Eurasian Union – directly rivalling the EU and the USA. Its philosophy is statist, nationalistic and anti-democratic and based on hostility to ‘the other’ – Muslims, gypsies, homosexuals.
The book states that “the battle for the world rule of the Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”. The Eurasian Union will be constructed “on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism…and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us”.
He then looks at the consequences of Cameron’s alliances within the European Parliament.
Cameron’s was a callow and dangerous move – and led to my leaving the Tory party. It could now have profound consequences for Britain’s future. Cameron’s fruitless alliance ‘with a bunch of nutters, homophobes, anti-Semites and climate-change deniers’ (according to Nick Clegg at the time) is already disintegrating. It cannot even find a candidate in this year’s contest for the presidency of the European Commission.
Cameron’s 2009 split with the centre-right also led to a formal alliance with Putin’s United Russia in the parliamentary assembly of the symbolic post-war Council of Europe, (nothing to do with the EU but also confusingly with its official ‘seat’ in Strasbourg).
You can read the whole article here.
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