Böcker av Guy Mettan

While Europe as a whole remains a first world economic power despite Brexit, it has been unable to build a truly democratic and efficient state or carry weight as a respected power on the international scene. Its splendid intellectual and artistic icons of the past two centuries are dimming in memory, leaving it no longer a radiant cultural Mecca for the world. Starting with Brexit in 2016, the European Union is now exposed to an array of dismantling forces, including the possibility of further exits, the organized opposition of populist parties, and popular uprisings like those of the Yellow Jackets in France. Mettan outlines the long history of attempts to unify the European continent, stretching from Charlemagne to Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin, predecessors to the current iteration. He specifies the routes they took, which were most promising and durable, and why they all collapsed. Strikingly, he compares Rome's early adulation and mimicry of ancient Greece, followed by its steady encroachment and final absorption of it, to the current trajectory of relations between Europe and the United States, noting the increasing penetration of American culture and exer-extending application of its laws. The European Union has allowed the United States to tell Europeans how they are to progress, with whom they are to collaborate, and against whom they should go to war. The problems confronting contemporary Europe are then examined in greater depth--its democratic "deficit"; the stifling primacy of economics and law over politics; the sprawling expansion of an ever unsatisfactory governing institutions; its inability to secure peace within its territory; and far from least, on the ongoing encroachment on its sovereignty by the United States. Europe faces two possible futures, Mettan concludes. It can choose to lapse into insignificance, subservient to ever increasing US demands and ascendancy, unable to address its unique concerns in defense or energy policy while being denied potential economic benefits from a rising China and forced into ever deeper and dangerous confrontation with Russia. Or Europeans, fully conscious of what is at stake, can face up to Europe's problems and create an institutional framework that will enable it to stave off its inevitable decline into vassalization--seizing the opportunity of the new space opened by the emerging Chinese power to create a truly democratic and sovereign federal union. Switzerland provides a model for that.

"Why do the USA, UK and Europe so hate Russia? How it is that Western antipathy, once thought due to anti-Communism, could be so easily revived over a crisis in distant Ukraine, against a Russia no longer communist? Why does the West accuse Russia of empire-building, when 15 states once part of the defunct Warsaw Pact are now part of NATO, and NATO troops now flank the Russian border? These are only some of the questions Creating Russophobia iinvestigates. Mettan begins by showing the strength of the prejudice against Russia through the Western response to a series of events: the Uberlingen mid-air collision, the Beslan hostage- taking, the Ossetia War, the Sochi Olympics and the crisis in Ukraine. He then delves into the historical, religious, ideological and geopolitical roots of the detestation of Russia in various European nations over thirteen centuries since Charlemagne competed with Byzantium. Mettan examines the geopolitical machinations expressed in those times through the medium of religion, leading to the great Christian schism between Germanic Rome and Byzantium and the European Crusades against Russian Orthodoxy. This history of taboos, prejudices and propaganda directed against the Orthodox Church provides the mythic foundations that shaped Western disdain for contemporary Russia. From the religious and imperial rivalry created by Charlemagne and the papacy to the genesis of French, English, German and then American Russophobia, the West has been engaged in more or less violent hostilities against Russia for a thousand years. Contemporary Russophobia is manufactured through the construction of an anti-Russian discourse in the media and the diplomatic world, and the fabrication and demonization of The Bad Guy, now personified by Vladimir Putin"--Provided by publisher.