Es ist der bisher kühnste Versuch der Europäer, den wirtschaftlichen Druck auf Russland zu erhöhen und dem Land die Kriegsführung in der Ukraine zu erschweren. Seit Montag ist ein Embargo in Kraft: Ölimporte aus Russland in die EU über den Seeweg sind verboten. Pipeline-Öl darf nur für Ungarn und die Slowakei fließen. Europäischen Redereien und Versicherern ist es nicht mehr erlaubt, russisches Öl zu transportieren oder Lieferungen zu versichern, wenn der Rohstoff für mehr als 60 Dollar je Fass verkauft wird.
Tag Archives: EU
The European Project Is Now at the Mercy of the Weather
Right now, the sobering truth is that the future of Europe hinges on the weather. It seems absurd. But whether the winter ahead is cold or warm will determine if Europe gets through the next six months without major economic, political, and social stress.
We are in this situation because, thanks to the clash with Russia over Ukraine, Europe has lost roughly a third of its regular gas supply. Much of Europe, particularly in the former Soviet bloc, relied on Russian gas for electricity generation, home heating, cooking, and industrial purposes. Germany and Italy, the largest and third-largest economies in the Eurozone, were also heavily dependent on Russian gas.
Since the spring, as the scale of the conflict became clear, Europe has been bracing for the worst. While buying as much Russian gas as it can, Europe has been scrambling to sign new gas deals and make up the impending shortfall by buying up cargos of liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Over the summer, as Russia’s situation became more dire, deliveries of Russian gas slowed to a fraction of their normal level. Europe’s purchasing went into overdrive, pushing gas prices to extraordinary levels—equivalent to roughly $400 per barrel of oil or more. As a result, the gas storage facilities are now full. Gas prices, at least for the next few months, have plunged. There is simply nowhere to put more of the stuff. It’s now the daily charges for LNG tankers that have gone through the roof, as shippers wait offshore for European demand to return. It is only a matter of time. The gas storage facilities are sufficient to cover no more than a few months. Gas prices for next year and for the foreseeable future remain severely elevated—in the $200-per-barrel range, around 8 times their precrisis levels. With no prospect of a resumption of Russian gas deliveries in sight, the outlook is grim—unless, that is, the weather stays warm.
‘In the nightmare of the dark’
EMMANUEL Macron, the man who has led France since 2017, gave an ominous speech at a cabinet meeting before he left his country to attend the funeral of the recently expired Queen of England.
“What we are currently living through is a kind of major tipping point or a great upheaval … we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance … the end of the abundance of products of technologies that seemed always available … the end of the abundance of land and materials including water”.
Macron’s portentous statement caught my attention because it announced with apparent candour, the end of something good. Used to the pronouncements of Pakistani leaders for whom abundance lies in some perpetually deferred future, I wondered what sort of political imperative could have goaded the French president to make such a declaration.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1711230/in-the-nightmare-of-the-dark
Neofascismo en Italia: la involución de Europa
En 1922, Benito Mussolini formó y lideró un gobierno de coalición de diversos partidos de derechas. Aunque obtuvo solo el 8,15% de los votos, el líder del Partido Nacional Fascista llegó al poder doblando la mano del rey Saboya con la Marcha sobre Roma de las camisas negras. Un siglo justo después de aquella giornata particolare, está a punto de presidir el próximo Gobierno italiano una heredera espiritual de Mussolini, Giorgia Meloni, líder y renovadora del partido posfascista Fratelli d’Italia, que tiene su origen en el MSI (Movimiento Social Italiano) de Giorgio Almirante, un fascista que militó en la República de Saló, el último bastión mussoliniano aliado de los nazis en el norte de Italia.
Los grandes medios italianos y europeos han tratado de rebajar el alcance de esta escalofriante jornada electoral retorciendo el lenguaje y tirando de eufemismos. Algunos definen la unión de Meloni con la xenófoba Liga del Norte y el machismo-putinismo de Berlusconi como “el bloque de centro derecha”, “la coalición de las derechas” o la “alianza conservadora”, mientras otros, estirando el chicle por el qué dirán, hablan de “triunfo de la ultraderecha”.
Starving hedgehogs, dry rivers, parched farms: The toll of Europe’s worsening drought
Climate change is turning up the heat on Europe’s growing list of crises.
With another heat wave sweeping France and the British Isles this week, the Continent faces a worsening drought — with serious consequences for energy security, food prices, trade flows and biodiversity.
Two-thirds of the European Union’s land is now covered by drought warnings. The European Drought Observatory’s latest map, a sea of red and orange, puts 47 percent of EU territory at the “warning” stage and 17 percent at the highest “alert” level.
Across the Channel, U.K. authorities are preparing to declare an official drought as southeastern England approaches 150 days with little or no rain.
The extent to which climate change is driving this drought isn’t yet clear.
Water mismanagement can be a factor. But warmer temperatures play a role by, for example, increasing evaporation and altering atmospheric pressure patterns. Scientists predict that the Mediterranean and Western Europe will face growing drought risks as the planet heats up.
“It’s very difficult to say for sure how much climate change is actually exacerbating this particular event,” said Justin Sheffield, a professor of hydrology at the University of Southampton. “But [on] the actual temperature side of things, there’s probably an impact for sure.”
Across Europe, a brutal summer — part of a clear warming trend — desiccated rivers and soils already weakened by an unusually dry winter and spring.
Italy’s Crisis Redoubles European Foreboding
An Italian government crisis, once so frequent as to be a near nonevent, has exposed the fragility of a Europe contending with rising energy prices, a plunging currency, faltering leadership, and a war in Ukraine where time appears to favor Russia’s autocratic resolve over the West’s democratic uncertainty.
That uncertainty engulfed Italy this week as Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a symbol of European resolve in the face of Russian aggression, quit in response to a populist rebellion in his national unity government — only to be asked to persevere at least until next week. One of the issues that split Mr. Draghi’s coalition is the cost of a proposed garbage incinerator in Rome, not the kind of thing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has to worry about.
“Yesterday, they made a toast in Moscow, because Mario Draghi’s head was served to Putin on a silver plate,” said Luigi di Maio, the Italian foreign minister. “Autocracies are toasting and democracies are weaker.”
How Europe’s Changing Borders Define the Region
If Russia’s war in Ukraine ends in triumph for the West, could Ukraine, with all of its manifold problems—vast devastation of infrastructure, corruption, weak institutions—eventually join NATO and the European Union? Given Europe’s history over two millennia, that course would be unsurprising.
Europe has always been defined and influenced by its periphery, and it has shifted its position on the map accordingly. NATO’s very move eastward after the Cold War, incorporating the countries of the former Warsaw Pact—however controversial that decision remains—has a deep echo in Europe’s past. So does the construction of Russian natural gas lines extending throughout Central and Eastern Europe. The American historian Henry Adams famously wrote more than a century ago that the fundamental challenge of Europe was and would remain how to integrate Russia’s various lands into what he called the “Atlantic combine.”
Expansion, writes Tony Judt, the late historian of postwar Europe, is part of the “foundation myth” of the European Union. From the start, the EU was a highly ambitious enterprise, gradually encompassing former Carolingian, Prussian, Habsburg, Byzantine, and Ottoman domains, each with its own separate history and development pattern. In other words, Europe must always find a way to be larger than itself, to be forward-deployed, so to speak: to be continually ambitious. For if Europe’s influence is not strongly felt in its frontier zones, adversaries like Russia will constantly threaten.
How the West Is Strangling Putin’s Economy
Russia’s military failure in Ukraine has defied almost everyone’s predictions. First came abject defeat at the gates of Kyiv. Then came the incredible shrinking blitzkrieg, as attempts to encircle Ukrainian forces in the supposedly more favorable terrain in the east have devolved into a slow-motion battle of attrition.
What’s important about this second Russian setback is that it interacts with another big surprise: The remarkable — and, in some ways, puzzling — effectiveness, at least so far, of Western economic sanctions against the Putin regime, sanctions that are working in an unexpected way.
As soon as the war began there was a great deal of talk about bringing economic pressure to bear against the invading nation. Most of this focused on ways to cut off Russia’s exports, especially its sales of oil and natural gas. Unfortunately, however, there has been shamefully little meaningful movement on that front. The Biden administration has banned imports of Russian oil, but this will have little impact unless other nations follow our lead. And Europe, in particular, still hasn’t placed an embargo on Russian oil, let alone done anything substantive to wean itself from dependence on Russian gas.
Dramatic U-turns by Social Democrats in Sweden, Finland paved way to NATO
Like so much of recent Nordic political history, in the end the decision by Sweden and Finland to join NATO came down to the Social Democrats.
On Sunday evening, all eyes were on the Swedish party, whose leaders announced it was backing alliance membership, clearing the way for Sweden to file a formal application as early as Monday.
“We Social Democrats think that the best thing for the security of Sweden and the Swedish people is to join NATO,” Prime Minister and Social Democrat leader Magdalena Andersson told a press conference. “It is clear that our freedom from alliances has served Sweden well, but our conclusion is that it wouldn’t serve us as well in the future,” she said.
With the decision on Sunday, the Swedish Social Democrats locked arms with their Finnish sister party, whose decision to support NATO membership on Saturday was the final endorsement needed by their country’s leadership to approve its own application to join the Western defense alliance.
The second coming of Nato
In November 2019, from the salon doré of the Élysée Palace, where Charles de Gaulle once held court, Emmanuel Macron warned his fellow Europeans that Nato, the transatlantic alliance that had secured Europe since 1949, was on the point of “brain death”. President Donald Trump’s administration, to the horror of America’s own soldiers, had just unilaterally withdrawn support from the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, sacrificing them to Bashar al-Assad and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Within a year, the US would impose sanctions on Turkey, a member of Nato since 1952, for its purchase of Russian anti-aircraft missiles. Disunity reigned.
In 2017 Angela Merkel had returned from a chaotic meeting with Trump to declare that Europe could clearly no longer count on America as an ally and must look to its own resources for its security. Macron’s concern over two years later was that little had happened to make good on that realisation.
The antics of leaders such as Trump and Erdoğan would be hard to contain in any formal alliance. But Nato’s problems went deeper than populism. What was still a compact, anti-Soviet alliance in the 1980s had, thanks to expansion in the 1990s and 2000s, grown into a sprawling and aimless organisation. As west European defence spending dwindled, the alliance relied ever more on America’s huge military budgets and eager new east European recruits. The failures of Nato intervention in Afghanistan from 2001 and Libya in 2011 were demoralising, something that in 2021 would be underlined by another unilateral American withdrawal – this time from Afghanistan on the orders of Joe Biden.
Idler on a hammock 