How a new Europe could look like: Holistic Green Europe – for a peaceful, ecological, democratic, innovative and social Europe- Pedis Europe
This draft for a Holistic Green European Policy was mainly rejected and suppressed during the last EU Parliament elections by parts of the Green Party. Here the concept for a :
Holistic Green Europe – for a peaceful, ecological, democratic, innovative and social (Pedis) Europe
We support a Green New Deal, a green revolution in agriculture, the energy sector, the transport industry as well as consumer behavior, want to Europeanize the energy transition and create green jobs, bring together economy and ecology, resource efficiency to use Europe as a pioneer in climate protection and to use and advance the EU internal market as a global lever for global social and environmental standard-setting. We are absolutely in agreement on these goals and we will fully support them in the European Parliament and beyond. But such a Green New Deal must not be seen in isolation from other global political factors that threaten to condemn it to the ecological niche existence of a Bio-Biedermeier insofar as it is not translated into a holistic Green Europe and a holistic green policy. We would like to present these factors and hitherto untreated topics here, especially with practical proposals for solutions and not-well-known demands, in a manner that is not inflationary, prayer-like, and mantrendious, but rather brings a new perspective into the discussion that has so far been missing.
The Green New Deal, the ecological and social transformation can only be organized in a peaceful environment. Therefore, green peace and European peace policy are urgently needed.
Europe faces many threatening challenges: In terms of foreign policy, Europe stands between three major revisionist powers, the Trump-USA, Russia and China, and in the Middle East between three regional revisionist powers of Erdogan-Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran. They want a rewriting of the world. The consequences are wars, refugee flows and mass misery, which threatens to escalate in an upgrade spiral into new wars, and perhaps even a war in Europe.
The new national security strategy of the Trump administration, speaks of coming major power conflicts, ie possible world wars with Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
The statement of the head of the Munich Security Conference Ischinger that wars between major powers are likely again, should be a clear warning. It is not enough for Europe to make only a more social green deal, but the Greens must remember their roots in the peace movement and revitalize it.
The Greens must transform Europe into a power of peace, contributing to defusing the dangerous tensions through a New East Policy ( Neue Ostpolitik) and disarmament initiatives. Because without peace, everything in war is nothing! Also the most beautiful green deals!
In addition, there are the challenges of climate change, the waste of resources, digitalization, the emergence of authoritarian and right-wing extremist movements and parties that are nationalist to fascist and seriously challenge the existence of the EU.
Furthermore, the upcoming deregulation of the financial markets, as already driven by the Trump USA, China and Great Britain, will lay the foundation for a new financial and euro crisis.
At the same time, the further social polarization of income gaps and housing shortages, while digitalization threatens to exacerbate this, as long as the education system and the welfare state are not put on a new foundation, but not in a neoliberal way.
Likewise, Europe’s technological backwardness must be overcome in the majority of disruptive new high technologies through European research and start-up support programs and a digitalized and reformed education system.
Solving these problems requires not just a New Green Deal, which focuses only on the environment, but a holistic green approach. The goal must be a Holistic Green Europe, which has a peaceful, ecological, democratic, innovative, and social (Pedis/ German: Födis) Europe as a holistic goal and a green strategy for this development.
In order to survive in globalization, Europe must become a powerhouse of peace, an innovation center, an ecological, democratic and social powerhouse, in order to remain a model for global attractive societies and by this approach to become it for its own people and for the world’s population.
The lessons of the Euroscepticism: Against EU tons ideology and expansionism-for a qualitative further development of the EU. Stabilization, consolidation, democratization and modernization
A major mistake of the EU, and with it NATO, was to expand and expand the EU so fast that Greece was included in the euro, Turkey, Georgia, Russia and Ukraine wanted to join the EU. This overstretched the EU, especially as the EU institutions, with the exception of the eurozone and the Schengen area, were not developed for this at all.
The EU’s external borders remained unprotected, the refugee crisis, which brought emergency national solutions showed this as well as the asylum law was not Europeanized, this was shown. The financial crisis, which then transformed itself into a Greece and euro crisis, was the second decisive event that caused the dissemination of nationalist and right-wing parties. The Ukraine crisis, due to EU and NATO expansion into Russian spheres of interest, provided us with the next deep crisis, culminating in a new Cold War.
And the EU has apparently learned nothing from these mistakes. The latest proposals for an EU-reform are on the table-side by Macron and the European Commission . It is planned that bankrupt states that are even more in deficit than Greece as Bulgaria and Romania shouzld be included in the euro area.
On the one hand, it is questionable whether the euro in its present form is sustainable, since the eurozone is not just a currency-optimal area, but combines economically completely different states with especially stark differences in productivity and economic development.
Nevertheless, we now see the hope of the EU Commission and Macron in a European Monetary Fund, an European Minister of Finance and a de facto transfer and banking union, which is to pool the risks. Where the stronger states will be paymasters, while conversely, the weaker states are exposed to a brutal austerity policy to mutual dissatisfaction.
Now also to incorporate Romania and Bulgaria in the euro zone would mean to increase the risk of a renewed euro crisis and rescue packages, especially since even the much stronger countries such as Spain and Italy are considered insecure members.
Furthermore, Juncker has proposed to extend the Schengen area to include Romania and Bulgaria despite the fact that the EU’s external borders are still not sufficiently protected from new refugee flows and thus creating new entry points.
The next idea is that you want to include the Balkan states, especially Serbia and Montenegro, as EU members until 2025. These nationalist mafia economies, which are economically less likely to be included in the EU, means to reproduce the negative experiences with Orban-Hungary, and Kaczynski-Poland.. The democratic community of values in the EU would fail, because these authoritarian nationalists will be new political as well as economic disruptive factors in the EU.
In its attempt to make itself after Brexit and Catalonia appear stronger and intact in the sense that they are continuing to push ahead with EU expansionism, despite growing opposition from European populations, the European Commission plans to expand the eurozone, the Schengen area and the EU , In this fatal development, the EU Commission and the driving forces in Paris and Berlin seem undisturbed.
Instead of integrating the EU, making it more transparent and social, the neo-liberal course will be maintained and EU expansionism will continue, which will further undermine the EU and further discredit the European idea.
A new EU policy would take on the new global political framework and formulate a new holistic EU policy. In addition to the New Green Deal already formulated in full by other Greens, this would, above all, include the following essential points that make up Holistic Green Europe:
The leading national and EU circles want to unite the EU only for the military and fiscal transfer union and further advance the neoliberal EU course. Therefore, it would be important to promote the following policy projects, at least at the national and European level:
- A New East Policy (Neue Ostpolitik) -prevention of a new arms race
1) Germany is working within the EU and NATO to ensure that Ukraine receives a neutral status comparable to Austria in the post-war period and serves as a bridge state between the Eurasian Union and the EU
2) Germany is working within the EU, NATO and Ukraine to ensure that Russia is guaranteed its Black Sea port in Crimea, irrespective of the respective Ukrainian governments and, in contrast, reverses the annexation of Crimea and stops support for the pro-Russian rebel groups in Eastern Ukraine and the first step: compliance with the Minsk Agreement
3) Disarmament Initiative Germany is working within the EU, the UN and NATO to ensure that both Russia and NATO prevent an arms race, and / or renegotiating the previous treaties on conventional and nuclear restrictions – with the inclusion of cyberspace and space and maybe China.
4) Resumption of the modernization partnership, especially in the economic sphere-negotiations on the long-term objective of a free trade area or a common market from Lisbon to Vladivostok - 5) An EU-Russia ecological cooperation for a sustainable Eurasia from decarbonization in a strategic transition period, hydrogen technology, gas as a bridge technology, sewage management, limiting the deforestation oft he Siberian woods, and other fields of cooperation still have to be discussed.
2) European Silkroad Marco Polo 2
Instead of EU membership for mafia and nationalist Balkan states: an EU Silk Road Marco Polo 2, which is expanding public transport, as well as an infrastructure program, which also enforces the complete digitization of Europe. This also and above all in order to release the 16 states of the 16 plus 1 group from the Chinese influence and to integrate them into the EU and also to bind them to the EU without EU membership. As a result, this is also would be a uniting and connecting European project, which appears as a counterweight to China’s New Silk Road, but also in cooperation and could be connected with Russia. Unlike abstract institutional reforms, the population can be shown a tangible material benefit of an increased EU budget that does not go into the non-binding, intransparent euro rescue programs whose beneficiaries are hidden. A European Silk Road Marco Polo 2, providing a European analog and digital infrastructure, creating jobs, economic growth, revitalizing Europe’s prosperity promise, giving Europe a concrete vision and a common goal. In addition, the European New Silk Road should be an ecological, sustainable infrastructure project in contrast to the Chinese New Silk Road.
3) An EU-Los Alamos research project for the development of quantum technology, blockchain technology, AI, digitization and its socially responsible promotion and implementation, including binding European social standards. On the one hand, to overcome the technological gap to the USA and China in these main disruptive technologies. On the other hand, in order to exploit the opportunities of new technologies socially and ecologically and sustainably, the leaps in productivity must improve the lives of the European population.
4) EU refugee fund Instead of further demanding EU quotas for refugees, although the Eastern European, Scandinavian, France and Austria have made it clear that they will not accept refugees in their countries:
A fixed EU refugee fund, with the agreement of the Eastern European countries, which reject EU refugee quotas to improve the situation of the refugee camps in Greece, Italy and the Greater Middle East. Here, the multiplier effect of purchasing power on the ground must be exploited, in order to provide viable social conditions, to establish ecological and sustainable standards and new modern urban structures – from sewerage, job creation to education and health systems.
5) Democratization of the EU
Juncker’s only positive proposals are to introduce a bicameral system between the EU Council of Heads of State and Government and the European Parliament, and to be able to choose an EU president more „directly“, with further discussion of what „more direct“ means and nobody knows how this then happens concretely.
Juncker again restricts that this is a long-term issue, while the EU under him wants to expand in the short and medium-term the euro area, the EU and the EU Schengen area, as well as a transfer and banking union. These disastrous measures are expected to go very quickly, as opposed to a democratization of the EU, which will be postponed to a distant future.
6) An EU Climate Fund that compensates for climate damage, promotes restructuring oft he
European agriculture to a sustainable economy and climate-smarting
technology.
Instead of letting the EU continue to expand frantically in the
euro area, Schengen area and membership, pushing transfer unions
and military unions alongside NATO, the EU should consolidate
itself, initiate a New East Policy (Neue Ostpolitik) including
disarmament initiative and unifying concrete European projects,
while at the same time addressing the new social issue. And
revitalize a European spirit.