While fighting and dying in Ukraine, two weeks after Russia’s violent aggression against any international principle or law, Europe is getting stronger. The idea of European defense was strengthened, the idea of belonging, the values of freedom, the values of self-determination were strengthened and then the idea of a peaceful coexistence, free from aggression and violations of sovereignty, which in the post-war period it had established itself within the perimeter of the European Community first and the European Union later.
In truth, the Covid 19 pandemic had already awakened values of solidarity and sharing, also leading to the suspension of the Stability Pact, which in some way embodies certain national “selfishness”, and to the launch of the great Next Generation Eu Plan, with the important innovation of the creation and sharing of a European debt.
Today, however, faced with the abyss of war and aggression, the emotional and value drive is even more important: not only material values and economic prosperity are being discussed, but the same founding principles of the EU, namely freedom and peace. Freedom and peace that are fiercely defended by the Ukrainian people and their President Zelensky, who has shown not only courage but leadership and above all concrete and visible attachment to these founding values of the EU, on the basis of which he has rightly advanced, once again, the request for immediate membership of the European Union.
But what does the accession of a new country to the EU mean? Previous enlargements to 11 new Central and Eastern European countries, the Peco (Slovenia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria between 2004 and 2007, and Croatia in 2013) , have strengthened the idea of freedom and peace within the perimeter of the adhering countries. With certainty we can affirm that the EU offers a vision of the social economy within which solidarity, integration, welfare, social and economic rights as well as civil liberties and political rights, therefore precisely peace and freedom, develop. And this despite the fact that in recent years nationalist movements and the dangers of authoritarian drifts have had increasing space, within some of the Pecos but also in the old 15-member EU. Indeed, what is happening today in several European countries that have not joined the Union demonstrates that the EU is a true container of freedom and peace, and is an antivirus that effectively counteracts illiberal drifts, the risks of which are still present. But without the framework of the European Union these risks would have become, with a certainly greater degree of probability, authoritarianisms, wars, violations of sovereignty, deaths, sufferings, aggressions between countries that had not actually entered the EU.
A united Europe guaranteed that the modification of the political geography that took place after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was peaceful and guided by the principle of self-determination: all the countries that entered the EU approved the membership choices with popular referendums. We take it for granted, but it was an extraordinarily new fact in Europe which, until 1945, had seen every previous geographical change marked by wars and conflicts, as well as the most recent ones in the 1990s and 2000s in the Balkans or the Caucasus, which arose precisely in countries outside the EU perimeter. Not only that: during the economic transition from the planned economy to the market economy, between 1989 and 2007, the attraction towards the EU had guaranteed a better economic and social convergence, as well as institutional and political, in the Peco respect to the former Soviet Republics merged into the so-called Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The countries that have entered the sphere of the enlarged EU have had a better evolution not only in terms of economic growth but also in terms of human development indicators, such as life expectancy and education, and social variables, such as inequality and poverty. In the Pecos, the level of GDP per capita at current prices is about 16 thousand dollars a year, in the CIS it is half, around 8 thousand dollars, and Russia is about 10 thousand dollars. In the Pecos the average life expectancy is 77 years, in the CIS it is 73 years; with respect to inequality, the richest 1% in Russia holds over 20% of national income, a figure slightly higher than that of the US (notoriously a country with a high rate of inequality) and much higher than the EU average , where 1% holds about 10-12% of the national income. And also the human development index is on average higher in the Peco than in the CIS, with Slovenia and the Czech Republic above 0.90, Russia at 0.82, Ukraine at 0.78, Azerbaijan at 0.75, Turkmenistan at 0.75. 0.72, and so on.
The development of the CIS countries (Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Kirzikistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Arzerbaijan, with Georgia and Ukraine released respectively in 2009 and 2014 respectively) has been the opposite drop in life expectancy, and a stronger increase in inequality and poverty, as well as a drop in income more than double compared to the Peco: -50% against -20%. In the CIS countries, policies of “shock therapy” or “chaotic therapies” have been implemented with wild privatizations (except in Belarus) and absent market rules that have favored people or groups in a dominant position, which later became oligarchs, making a transition with sui generis “liberalization” and “privatization”, without democratization and with an explosion of corruption. law, democracy, anti-corruption have created institutions capable of containing oligarchies and favoring market institutions. These factors have gradually allowed a greater level of economic democracy and social cohesion, even where in a first phase they have also been implemented liberalization and privatization reforms independent with respect to the “starting” conditions of each country. An example above all: Poland in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin wall, had a per capita GDP equal to Ukraine (about 1600 dollars), and Russia about 3500 dollars. Today the story is completely reversed: Poland has about $ 15,760, Russia 10,126 and Ukraine about 3,724.
From the point of view of civil liberties and political rights, and not economic freedoms, Freedom House considers the CIS countries predominantly “not free” or “partly free” while the Peco are all “free” as a whole, as well as the Voice and Accountability indicator of the World Bank, which measures participation and freedom of expression in some way attributable to the degree of democracy, on average in the Pecos it is significantly higher than in the CIS.
To conclude: to give to Ukraine – which has already demonstrated with the Orange Revolution of 2004, the subsequent EuroMaidan protest of 2014 and up to today’s heroic resistance of wanting to belong to the world of democracies and to share the founding values of Europe – the possibility of quick access to the EU could free it from the tortuous transition it has had and would allow it to definitively embark on a more sustained path of growth and human development, giving a clear and highly symbolic signal against the illiberal political system and oligarchies economies of Russia and CIS countries. The same possibility should be given to the Balkan countries that have not yet joined the EU. In the tragic emergency that Ukraine is experiencing today and, through it, the whole world, we can also intervene through this decision to determine the present and the future of Europe. And to give real effect to the values we believe in.
* President of Inps
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