Geopolitical and economic bargainings

The fact that the candidates for membership of the EU are plagued by corruption imposes another requirement: that of reviewing the rules of citizenship. The issuing of passports obviously remains the prerogative of each country. But it becomes everyone’s business when it allows people, and above all, capital to circulate freely across the continent.

EU members Malta and Cyprus are already gateways to money laundering in Europe. It is simply inconceivable that a country like Ukraine — the size of France! — can offer such services.

Let’s remember how Mitterrand extracted an agreement from the Germans on the creation of the euro.

Let’s go even further: These negotiations about enlarging the Union are also an opportunity for Paris to push unresolved issues, including the banking union that the Eurozone so badly lacks.

Obviously, this seems far removed from the stakes at hand on the ground in Ukraine. But Europe was often built on bargainings that involved geopolitics and economics. Let’s remember, for instance, how French President François Mitterrand had managed to squeeze an agreement on the creation of the euro single currency out of a skeptical German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in exchange for Paris greenlighting German reunification.

Mitterrand and many others in France were very wary of a reunified Germany, but what prevailed was the very French conviction that Europe’s deepening must be the corollary to its enlargement.