The Telegraph: Three sweet EU dreams turn into nightmare

Three stories that have made headlines of many newspapers and magazines this week have demonstrated something very important, The Telegraph wrote. 

One of them was the mess unfolding across Ukraine. The second was the ongoing conflict between Greece and the euro. The third was the ever-growing flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East, who were desperately trying to escape to safety in Europe.

According to the author of the article, it is hard to recall an episode of life, when Western leaders would be acting in such a hopelessly wrong way. 

"We are treated to babyish comparisons of President Putin to Hitler or Stalin; we are also told that this crisis has only been brought about by Russia's "expansionism". But there was only one real trigger for this crisis - the urge of the EU continually to advance its borders and to expand its own empire, right into the heartland of Russian national identity: a "Europe" stretching, as David Cameron once hubristically put it, "from the Atlantic to the Urals," the author of the article, Christopher Booker said. 

The West poked the Russian bear and it responded accordingly. 

Another great drama of the European Union is the straitjacket of the single currency. According to Booker, that was a purely political dream that never came to economic reality. The desperate Greeks, whose economy is in ruins, have finally voted in favor of the government that pledged to put an end to all the misery, while staying belted to the European Union. 

As in the case of Ukraine, EU leaders intend to keep their fantasy intact, even though it is now apparent that it is hopeless. The third selfish dream of the EU is the policy of granting asylums to refugees. Under the Lisbon Treaty, EU member states are obliged to welcome asylum seekers. "But under other rules, the legal responsibility for them lies with the country where they first enter the EU, which bankrupt countries such as Italy and Greece find impossible. So, in flagrant defiance of the law, they try to wave on as many of this flood of newcomers as they can, to those richer northern countries, such as Germany, Sweden and Britain, where most of them in fact hope to end up," Christopher Booker wrote. 

The author of the article believes that the pressure of these dysfunctional policies has been quite considerable throughout Europe. There is no common will to solve the problems that seem to have become insurmountable, like Ukraine and the euro.

Pravda.Ru 

Read the news story on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru

Original article available here