Belgian Prime Minister Bart de Wever is being reasonable in public, a cardinal sin in Brussels these days
Ideally, policy debates should serve to bring together the fullest information, the brightest minds, and the sharpest arguments in order to find solutions. That is, the optimum combination between what is best and what is feasible.
In the real world, shaped by ordinary human fallibility and the extraordinary egotism of professional politicians, that is usually not what happens. But the EU is still special in just how atrociously, hopelessly, for crying-out-loud bad it is at the solution game. Because it is not just playing it badly, it’s not playing at all.
Instead, in the upside-down, white-is-black, Israel-is-defending-itself-and-Iran-is-just-so-damn-mean alternate universe of the EU, the space where policy debates should take place has long been fully clogged up by three pernicious weeds of swamp-á-la-Brussels. First, those elaborately underhanded backroom deals that eliminate even the faintest remains of transparency and accountability. For a fresh – if also foul – example, just check out the recent double-dealing between the EU parliament’s oh-so-democratic Centrists and the at-least-not-so-hypocritical far right. A deal so obviously perfidious, even Berlin doesn’t like to be associated with it – in public, that is.
Secondly, there is that old bureaucratic panacea: hyperactive lethargy. If you can’t devise a rational solution to a public need to find broad support with most of 27 national governments (not to speak of their voters who matter little anyhow), just keep churning out inefficient non-solution papers, strategies, and plans that everyone can at least agree to keep talking but do very little about. That’s the pattern in which the EU is currently not addressing, for instance, its quite possibly medium-term-lethal problem of decaying competitiveness.
And finally, there is the doctrinally most demanding way of shutting down genuine policy debate: the hammer of the Brussels inquisition. That, of course, is not a specific office but a pervasive attitude of narrow-minded conformism always ready to promptly pounce on any heretic who offers alternative views on reality and plausible courses of action. Those, clearly, would be an essential ingredient of any productive debate and decision-making process. But that’s not important for the EU. No divergence from the party line, please, we are Europeans! And down with all rebels!
That is what is currently happening to the Belgian prime minister Bart de Wever, and not for the first time. He is already notorious for having almost single-handedly kept the EU (and Berlin) from fully plundering Russia’s frozen sovereign assets in the EU. With unheard of audacity, De Wever insisted on protecting Belgium’s national interests first.
In an interview with his country’s L’Echo newspaper that has been widely reported from the Financial Times to the Guardian, De Wever has painted a target on his own back by acknowledging the obvious and concluding the inevitable. The obvious being that the current EU policy of waging a proxy war against Russia by way of Ukraine is not working and will never work, and the inevitable that when you can’t win your ill-conceived war, then you must settle for a compromise with your opponent.
And once you have to make peace, you might as well do so in a way that offers economic benefits. In the EU’s case, the most obvious – and most urgently needed – would be in trying to regain access to Russian gas and oil. Moreover, if the EU sticks to its policy of, in essence, total obstruction, then it will only make sure not to be part of the solution once a way back to peace is finally found. Not at that table, it will have to accept an outcome that will be disadvantageous to its interests. And all for playing hard to get. De Wever’s points are simple and compelling, right?
Among the reasonable, yes. And among the morally normal as well, because even on the EU’s own, misguided terms, it is perverse to continue a war that is allegedly waged on Ukraine’s behalf but has always been unwinnable, bleeds its people dry, can be ended with a reasonable settlement, and is encountering ever more popular opposition.
There is a reason why Kiev is running a de facto authoritarian regime and the Ukrainian military has turned to massive and brutal forced mobilization. But the response from both Brussels and national governments is to try to push even those Ukrainian men who had made it out back into the proxy war meatgrinder.
Those setting the tone in the EU are neither reasonable nor humane. That is why even De Wever’s decidedly realistic arguments cannot make a dent in their monotonous group think. De Wever, after all, is not a Russophile. Witness, for instance, his recent appearance on a Davos World Economic Forum panel, led, as it happened, by uber Cold War Re-enactor Gideon Rachman from the Financial Times. There, De Wever was clear about his view that the EU has to keep aiding Ukraine, on this occasion to the tune of $90 billion, to “keep [it] in the fight.”
De Wever, incidentally, was wrong on this one. It would be better if the EU had long stopped pumping any money into the ultra-corrupt Zelensky regime. Much of those funds is stolen by Ukraine’s outstandingly rapacious elite; and the “fight” is futile, a waste of lives, and will only make things even worse for Ukraine. Yet one thing is obvious, this is precisely not what a secret friend of Russia would have said.
What makes De Wever tick, clearly, is not sympathies now considered terribly illicit among the EU’s shakers and movers as well as their docile mainstream media. His recent push for finally normalizing the EU’s relationship with Russia is a matter of, in his own words, “common sense” applied to promoting “Europe’s interest.”“Without,” as he emphasized, “being naïve about Putin.”
Yet even that demonstrative display of unsentimental sobriety hasn’t helped De Wever. The Brussels inquisition has spotted a heretic and is out in force. EU energy commissioner Dan Jørgensen, for instance, has reiterated the trite old cant about dependency on Russia this and blackmail by Moscow that. As if getting your LNG from Qatar (or not) and the US were a recipe for independence and reliable supplies. If the EU really were after diversification of its supplies, it would, of course, include Russia, so as to counterbalance the obvious risks that come with other sources.
Lithuania’s foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys has done what you would expect from a Baltic representative and told the EU to stay its course until it has “the sticks in its hands,” which seems to be Lithuanian-English for dreaming about a position of strength you will never have. Meanwhile, in Belgium itself members of De Wever’s coalition, including the foreign minister, have distanced themselves from the prime minister who, they stress, was speaking only in a private capacity.
What probably makes De Wever’s public independence of mind even more galling to his detractors are three circumstances. He enjoys great and growing popularity with Belgian voters, as fresh polls show. Indeed, he currently has the best polls for a prime minister since 2008. Second, that the EU needs Russian energy is driven home by the accumulating fall-out from the Iran War started by Israel and its US auxiliaries, who have, however, no idea how to end it. As the Wall Street Journal has summed it up, this is a war that “hits Europe with an energy shock it can’t afford to absorb.” And, finally, as De Wever was uncouth enough to reveal, “behind closed doors, European leaders tell me I’m right, but no one dares to say it out loud.” How unsporting indeed, Mr. De Wever! First, you have reality on your side, and then you put your colleagues to shame by showing one can actually talk about it and live.
Belgium may look like a small country, but it is also a founding member of the European integration process that has, for worse and the worst, resulted in the EU. It is significant that De Wever cannot easily be dismissed as a grumpy Russophile from, say, Slovakia or Hungary. His challenge, lonely as it may still be at this point, comes from the historic heart of the EU. If only all those other EU leaders who can’t yet muster enough courage to openly challenge its leadership were to finally speak up. Is that really asking for too much?
