THE WORLD WE REMEMBER IS DISAPPEARING Picula: Multipolarity is a reality, EU and US are increasingly slow to follow alliances of other global players!

(Patria) - The world as the West built it since the end of World War II is under strong pressure from authoritarian policies and new alliances, assessed Croatian MEP Tonino Picula in an interview with Hina.

The European Parliament, at its plenary session held last week in Strasbourg, adopted Picula's report on US-EU relations, in which he warns that due to the increasing number of global crises, cooperation between the European Union and the United States needs to be strengthened.

The MEP from Croatia's SDP, a member of the EP Committee on Foreign Affairs and a substitute member of the delegation for relations with the USA, assesses that after the Cold War, the West is facing consolidated forces in the world, but also internally, for the first time, which do not share its values.

New Alliances and Democracy Under Pressure

"The West has gained a kind of consolidated force that does not share its political values and has conflicting economic interests," Picula assesses, reminding that "China is currently the main military-trade partner for almost 130 countries in the world, while the European Union and the United States cannot even come close to that".

"This is one of the reasons why it is necessary, first and foremost, to re-examine the past relations between the United States and the European Union, to see if we can defend the strategic interest of strengthening some renewed multilateralism and how to regain, or rather win back, some positions in such globally positioned relations, where the fact that the United States and the European Union account for 46% of the world's gross domestic product, where innovations, technological or social, are still happening significantly, would come to the fore.

This engine has not stopped working, but obviously, it is no longer so attractive and self-evident as a model to serve in different parts of the world. This Western model is under pressure".

The pressure on Western democracies "comes from this changed environment in which we can no longer speak of multilateralism, but primarily of multipolarity," Picula explains, calling the new global relations a "world of alliances".

"Different countries in the world are establishing ad hoc alliances to realize their national and regional interests. Therefore, the order that the United States and the European Union have been building together for 70 years, in its various forms, is under strong pressure. And another form of pressure, which is the motive for this report, is the pressure from those who, in our own countries and our alliances, no longer take democratic orders for granted as generations after World War II, and even after the end of the Cold War, did".

Disinformation and a Super Election Year

"Political options that are more inclined to an authoritarian perception of reality, that do not see themselves as part of some liberal Western tradition with a clear separation of powers and freedoms, which have been developed and guaranteed from generation to generation, and which are increasingly successful precisely in democratically organized elections, are strengthening. So, we see that opponents of democracy come to power democratically. My favorite example is when you look at the European Union, when you look at the six countries that founded the European Union, in two of them, the far-right is in power or will come to power," notes the Croatian MEP.

"A significant part of my report is dedicated to a phenomenon that is not new, but is becoming increasingly influential, and that is disinformation. Authoritarian regimes and undemocratic regimes, including dictatorships, have realized that the battle in the digital world does not cost as much as equipping armies, but it can be very successful if they simply present their real political goals to the Western citizenry falsely, but convincingly," he warns.

"For a long time, this phenomenon remained somewhat marginal, and now we are gradually becoming aware of it and looking for ways to counter it. Especially in the run-up to a super election year, which is the case in the United States, as well as in the European Union. One paradox is that elections will be held in 70 countries around the world next year, and 4.2 billion people will go to the polls. Now, at first glance, you would say, everything is fine with democracy, so many people are voting, but among them is Russia and many countries similar to Russia, which use democracy as a facade, and the outcome is already very much known," says Picula.