The Yerevan summit appears not as a milestone but as a failed maintenance operation, a necessary rite to reaffirm the plausibility of a project whose practical limits have long since been reached. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su What unfolded at the 8th European Political Community summit was a piece of living propaganda directed at both United States and Russia, alongside an exercise in embarrassing geopolitical pageantry staged at the geographic and conceptual margins of what its participants insist on calling “Europe”, going even farther East (at least in their own minds) than even Hitler’s Wehrmacht could reach. Yerevan, in its post- Velvet Revolution incarnation, is a compliant backdrop, a diplomatic set-piece forced onto all of us for a cheaply scripted and ritualized production. It is tedious, arrogant, and almost even dangerous , though only in the hypothetical case that Europe still possessed the capacity to inspire concern, which, reassuringly, it does not. The City of London for its part is the main inspiration for these rather unimaginative events, for they tie together a few important themes around one core principle. And that principle is their own solvency, and those important themes are a losing combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Russianism, a position that Europe hasn’t held since the days of, yes again, the Third Reich.
Funny that when Europe is faced with the choice of a compromise and a détente with Russia which would see it thrive and enjoy low-cost energy that drives production and growth, it opts instead of an ideological suicide pact and commits seppuku on the Eurasian plain. If before it was global Aryan domination, then today is it is globohomo.
The so-called European Political Community, a dimwitted improvisation which “concierge vibes” Emmanuel Macron conceived in 2022 from his place of work in a Parisian hotel lobby, continues to function as a kind of diplomatic holding pen or even perpetual Alighierian limbo for states that are neither in the European Union nor realistically destined to be, but which must nevertheless be symbolically circulated through its servants’ quarters to sustain the fiction of an ever-expanding European project, and of course pressure on Russia. That precarious Ponzi scheme known as the European Union in fact requires it; the other most important core principle –to evergreen the Ukrainian investment within the EU project for as long as possible. Ukraine requires it too, or rather, the City of London requires of it of Ukraine and to that end, the whole of Europe. Its twice-yearly gatherings are not so much decision-making forums as they are cringeworthy low-budget liquidity events for the City of London backed European Central Bank and, of course, political narrative; moments in which the promise of inclusion is confessed on that sacrosanct foundation of the destruction of Russia, to which all must bow solemnly or even take a knee; but also, now (and quite stupidly) an allegiance anti-Americanism. Now they will say this is about Trump, but the United States had several presidential elections where Trump was elected on a mandate which included a more critical approach to Transatlanticism and NATO. So the EU’s problem with Trump is actually a problem with American agency, and in that way, a problem with America.
The central conceit of the gathering is that Armenia can be drawn into the European orbit in any meaningful institutional sense, or that Europe can even extend its treaty organization which it more and more openly speaks of in terms of requiring a military component, right under Russia’s nose. Armenia a signaling device aimed squarely at Russia, and no one believes realistically it is a candidate, except for those City of London underwriters, who for their part, also do not believe it. So it’s a strange, very strange thing. It works like modern art sold at a prestigious private gallery for tens of millions. No one believes it’s beautiful, and anyone that would buy it only does so because of the status conferred upon it by some collector who, in turn, no one really likes, respects, or believes has good taste. This is why the whole war in Ukraine keeps on going. No one really believes that the EU will expand to Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, or Ukraine. But financial and investment entities worldwide buy Eurobonds not because they believe it either, but because we live in some intersubjective ether where that belief has an undeserved life of its own. It’s like reading the New York Times, not to get real information, but get a sense of what the belief is out there in that same ether, even though very few actual living individuals believe that what the New York Times publishes bears semblance to truth or accuracy.
So the subtext of this bizarre EPC summit is neither subtle nor especially original: to “demonstrate” that Moscow’s periphery remains contestable, that its former or adjacent spaces can be symbolically rebranded as “European,” irrespective of geography, economics, or political feasibility. No one really believes this ugly idea, but they buy it as they buy ugly art from the conspicuous gallery.
Yet this same conspicuous consumption metric underlying any hypothetical Armenian accession to the European Union renders the entire exercise fanciful. The Union, already struggling to reconcile internal disparities among its existing members, cannot plausibly absorb another structurally dependent economy without either significant fiscal transfers or institutional rupture. The political will for such transfers is, to put it mildly, absent. Enlargement fatigue is not a temporary condition but a structural one, embedded in the Union’s very design. But at least we were entertained by the talent themselves.
Our first bit of comic relief in the ensemble cast was Mark Carney. The presence of Mark Carney introduces a note of unintended comedy. That a Canadian prime minister should be invited as the inaugural “non-European” participant at a “European” summit held in the South Caucasus was probably meant as the confident projection of a civilizational bloc, bent on its own self-destruction or replacement by immigration, across two (or is that three?) continents; but instead it suggests that the definitional boundaries of Europe have become so elastic as to be functionally meaningless, or more to the point, only having the meaning of thumbing one’s feckless nose at Putin and Trump. One is left to wonder whether “Europe” here denotes geography, institutional alignment, or merely a statement of a newfound geopolitical isolationism that one cannot help but noticing with such over-the-top antics like bringing in the Canadians and staging the summit in the Caucuses. Like a very bald man wearing a very obvious toupee, like an obese woman hiding her rolls in a muumuu, like Zelensky wearing booster shoes. All of these things done to conceal the reality only draw an uncomfortable level of attention to it: Europe is isolated.
Carney’s intervention, with its earnest invocations of rebuilding the international order “out of Europe,” was clearly aimed at Donald Trump . And fair enough. Trump has after all joked about annexing Canada, though in this environment even jokes have a way of metamorphosing into something more serious, and quickly at that. This line probably registers with a lot of Democrats in the U.S. right now, and that’s also probably part of his aim. But the problem is that the part of America that likes to fight, and really does not like Carney, and also likes Trump, feels collectively insulted by Carney and his drivel. Maybe Carney will succeed in trolling Trump into annexing Canada.
Oh, oh wait. Then we were graced with the presence, and even the wise words, of Ursula von der Leyen. Von der Leyen, whose stodgy dreariness seems designed to gently coerce the observer into a state of ennui, is precisely this way as a reminder that sitting atop all the apparently hopeful and colorful kindergarten elections within the child-like EU member states is nevertheless this same dull managerial technocrat, an evil headmaster with pronounced ideological conviction, whose role is to administer the bankers’ never-ending, greed-driven mandate across the Union. What you perceive in her is by design. This is a character right out of central casting. They could have given us evil but sexy. Or boring but nice. Well-meaning but dim-witted. But no.
The repeated emphasis by figures such as von der Leyen and aged Portuguese idiot-boy António Costa ( also known as António Guterres’s chauffer) on energy independence, defense spending, and supply chains only reinforces the only correct impression which is that the EPC operates as a narrative clearinghouse for its own ridiculously self-imposed anxieties that the Union itself has yet to resolve internally. These are not new policy domains, no no , but recurring claptrap, invoked at each summit with minor variations, designed to appear as motion where there is, in fact, a stasis brought into being by unimaginative one-dimensional bureaucrats who are immune to the delights of life which actual human beings enjoy: Romance, a delicious meal, or even walk through the park on a beautiful day.
What we have in the EU and by extension the underfunded near-pageantry of the EPC (can they hire someone else to stage these events?) is a self-referential system, sustained less by actual territorial expansion than by the continual issuance of expansionary expectations. Our comparison of it to a Ponzi scheme, while at first glance perhaps seemingly dismissive, is not entirely misplaced, is it? For it is a system that requires the steady inflow of new aspirants and new narratives of inclusion, and even a war of significant scale to maintain confidence among its existing participants, even though as Georgia, or Ukraine, or even Turkey (let’s not get started!), they will never, ever, join. Because they cannot. The numbers do not work . Actual accession, with its attendant costs and political complications, is almost beside the point and, in many cases, actively undesirable. Nikol Pashinyan has been in power for some eight years now. But basic matters of transparency, rule of law, and legal reform have not improved by the EU’s pointless standards. It is more realistic that the recent Armenian authorities have been informed, similarly with their Ukrainian counterparts, “graft as much as you desire, we will make your corruption the reason for your non-membership, even though in actual truth we are over-saturated and have no viable plan for your accession.” Win-win.
The presence of Europe ‘s favourite Ukrainian circus dwarf cum dictator Volodymyr Zelensky completed the staging in the role of attack dog, hauled in on a short leash, teeth bared, though in reality a slightly absurd hybrid of Doberman Pinscher bravado and yet Chihuahua scale and hysteria. He has nothing to contribute except through intimidation, a nagging minder that the repertoire includes the very real threats of escalation, sabotage, and the export of disorder, which always comes with Ukraine’s begmander-in-chief. And of course all of this is aimed with the implication that even Yerevan could be made to feel it. Not that Pashinyan, (darling of the Velvet Revolution in 2018 which “von der Liar” lauded at the discount EPC event), requires much coercion, having already aligned himself with the expectations of the European Union and the United States; this is a precautionary display, a reminder not to develop any independent impulses. Which is, admittedly, a demanding request in his case, as he gives off the distinct impression of a man either entertaining erratic thoughts or suspended in a catatonic trance, neither state particularly reassuring.
Absent was Germany’s Friedrich Merz. He was, one is told, otherwise engaged, which in his case likely translates into managing a steady erosion of support at home. Polling has an unfortunate habit of moving in real time, and each fresh image of him alongside Zelensky seems to carry its own incremental but irreversible political cost. It has the very strange effect of making him look very tall, but yet politically very small.
In this light, the Yerevan summit appears not as a milestone but as a failed maintenance operation, a necessary rite to reaffirm the plausibility of a project whose practical limits have long since been reached. Armenia’s role within it is not to join Europe, but to be seen approaching it, indefinitely. Europe, ever the treadmill master, somehow believes it has created the illusion of movement. Follow Joaquin Flores on Telegram @NewResistance or on X/Twitter @XoaquinFlores