Why the “Current European System Cannot Work”

Before participating in the Ibn-Sina Forum in Kabul (cf. below), the former Executive Director of the UN Office on Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODC), Pino Arlacchi, attended the XVI Eurasian Forum in Samarkand Nov. 3-5. On the sidelines of the event, he gave an online interview to Ottolina TV, where he touched on various subjects, including the collapsing Western paradigm, China’s foreign policy, and the suicidal course and the built-in failures of the European Union.

To begin with the last point, the big question for Europe is whether it will follow the United States in its decline, as its current “vassal” behavior would seem to indicate. To avoid that, Arlacchi is convinced that the EU as such must undergo a profound change. The current European system, he said, “is based on the effort to create the United States of Europe”, which cannot work. The reasons he gives will be familiar to readers of our newsletter:

“It cannot work because: 1. We are no longer in the era of large federations; 2. Europe is made of single states that can very well share common areas, coordinate among themselves, without needing a common government. This is so true, that a large part of national policies are the same. There is no need to create this supranational power, this bureaucracy that can make terrible errors and can be much more easily conditioned than the governments of single countries.

“Therefore, we really need to rethink the basis of the European idea. We have created absurd institutions from the European standpoint: the European Court of Human Rights is the most scandalous example. The rulings of this court are not worth the paper they are written on. European countries have a very strong system to defend citizens’ rights: They are the most advanced in the world. What was the need to create this court? It was [George] Soros who created the institution, which is paradoxical: 40% of its members are not judges, not even lawyers; they are former Soros activists who have been pushed by the Eastern European countries where Soros is strong, and have ended up in the court. The court issues abnormal rulings, very often against Italy, always against Russia, and against the weakest ones in the system.”

At the conference in Kabul, where he praised the Afghan authorities for the eradication of opium poppy cultivation, Arlacchi called on Europe and other donor countries to help consolidate this success.