An Association Fallacy, and the need to move past settler-colonial thinking
Rethink NATO, WEOG, and the eastern expansion of the Western European Union
I’ve been frustrated with the political conversations within the Western Europe and other Group of countries (See UN “regional” groups). WEOG has been called the UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc, and there has been an ideological consensus that has kept that bloc together.
The United States has clearly marked a change to that consensus. There is so much discussion about one name (Trump), and one group of insiders, but this has been a longer-term global change that many have been sleepwalking through.
There are major policy and ideological changes required if Canada is to move past merely following the USA’s global agenda.
NATO is an example: NATO was created by Western European countries (and allies/colonies) as a shield to allow unaccountable use of the sword against Eastern Europe (and allies). NATO should have been disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead the threat from expansion of NATO and the Western European Union eastward has induced ongoing European wars (including the proxy war in Ukraine).
Canadians seem to blindly think: why wouldn’t anyone want to join NATO and the Western EU? Aren’t these the “good guys”, the folks that represent the best humanity has to offer? How could anyone object to that priviledge?
I have heard some Canadians negatively reacting to Jesse Watters asking how anyone wouldn’t find it a privilege to become part of the United States.
The question I have is: how is the proposed expansion of the United States northward and southward any worse than the eastward expansion of NATO and the Western European Union? While Canadians regularly like to compare themselves to the United States and claim they are “different” and “better”, there have been FAR greater worldview differences between eastern and western Europe for far longer than the USA or Canada have existed with their common origin stories.
Why is a big “hug” from the United States such a horrible thing, while the ongoing eastward “hug” from NATO or EU something we should support? By keeping that constant threat hovering over what remains of an independent Eastern Europe, it has kept leaders like Putin in power to deal with the fact that the Western European launched “cold war” was never really allowed to end.
I worry about the Association Fallacy that far too many people fall into, where ideas are given honour or guilt based on who else happens to have similar ideas. While the US Democrats have always been interventionist in their US supremacist ideologies, wanting to spread their influence globally, the recent Republicans have suggested a different direction. The USA wanting to end the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine should be seen as a good thing, and taking NATO and Western European Union expansion off the table entirely should have been the starting point for engagement with Eastern Europe over the past 30 years.
But – well – now that the Trump camp is saying it, even those of us who have been arguing against WEOG supremacist and expansionist ideologies are going to be lumped into the Trump camp when we are actually far more different from the Trump camp than the Democrats/Liberals/NDP/etc have ever been.