Andrius Kubilius: War: will the geopolitical crisis make the EU stronger?

2022-09-13 | Political initiatives, EU integration, Financial support, Geopolitical analysis

Politicians and experts often repeat a well-known refrain during crises: every crisis must be used by a country or an international organisation to make it stronger.

Jean Monet, one of the founding fathers of the current European Union, once said at the very dawn of the European Community that the Community would be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises. As the subsequent history of the European Union has shown, this was a brilliant insight: in the last decade alone, we have seen the consolidation of the European Union’s political activity in various areas and the creation of new institutions precisely in times of crisis: whether it was the EU Banking Union, created as a response to the global financial crisis of 2008-2012; or the European Frontex institution for border protection, created during the 2015 refugee crisis; or, finally, the multi-billion euro debt  borrowed for the first time in the name of the EU for the Recovery Fund, which was set up to help the European economy under the lockdown during the pandemic. 

It is clear that Russia’s war against Ukraine is a geopolitical crisis on a scale that the European continent as a whole has not yet experienced. The crisis naturally raises the question of how and in what areas the European Union should strive to become geopolitically stronger in the aftermath of this crisis.

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