Tag: war

Editorial of October 2024

On By officialblogunioIn EditorialsLeave a comment 
By the Alessandra Silveira (Editor)
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On peace and sustainability

Between 27 and 29 September 2024, the University of Minho hosted “Greenfest” – the largest sustainability event held in Portugal and one that has been running for 17 years.[1] I had the honour of speaking on the panel dedicated to “Peace” – which addressed issues related to the promotion of peaceful, just and inclusive societies – essential for sustainable development and social cohesion. 

In legal sciences, sustainability is understood as a process through which we pursue a global society capable of perpetuating itself indefinitely over time in conditions that ensure human dignity. From this perspective, anything that contributes to this process would be sustainable, while anything that deviates from it would be unsustainable. [2] For this reason, constitutionalists such as Peter Häberle or Gomes Canotilho consider sustainability to be the structural principle of a new secular paradigm – along the lines of those that followed in the development of modern constitutionalism: humanism in the 19th century, sociality in the 20th century, sustainability in the 21st century.

In any case, talking about peace at a “Greenfest” necessarily brings us back to Kant and what he described as “Perpetual Peace” – a philosophical proposal on how peace can be achieved – especially as 2024 marks the 300th anniversary of the philosopher’s birth.  Kant’s question was not whether perpetual peace would be feasible or utopian, but to devise the means to achieve this end. In other words, to adopt stable institutions that make it possible to avoid war – and thus achieve a peace that represents more than the absence of war.

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Dr. Strangelove or: What Lights Sheds Kubrick on Today’s Union

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Gonçalo Martins de Matos (Master in Judiciary Law by the University of Minho)
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick’s political satire black comedy film, completed, in the past Monday, 60 years of age since its release on 29th January 1964. Often considered one of the best comedies ever made and, arguably, the best political satire of the 20th century[1], the depths of human stupidity are surgically dissected by the keen, sagacious mind of Stanley Kubrick. More than that, Kubrick’s cautionary tale about nuclear apocalypse exposes humans in what they tragicomically have more contradictory, hypocritical and idiosyncratic.

Encompassing a wide spectrum of themes, Dr. Strangelove remains very present, shedding, like all great Art, some light on contemporary issues and events. More so in recent years, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, bringing to the Old Continent the dark fog of war again. Since Russia is a nuclear power, the fear of nuclear escalation invaded once again people’s hearts, reminding the great powers of the Cold War’s Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD – a fittingly ironic name, as well) doctrine. NATO members have been (well) cautious, as to avoid a backslide to the obscurity of the Cold War. Obscurity is the right word to describe the surroundings of war: freedom is suffocated, barricades are erected, and truth is the first victim.

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Union in a time of war: On the Judgment “Violetta Prigozhina”, Case T-212/22

On By officialblogunioIn EssaysLeave a comment 
Pedro Madeira Froufe (Editor)
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I

On 8 March 2023, the General Court delivered a judgment in the case of Violetta Prigozhina (Case T-212/22),[1] whose applicant is an octogenarian lady and mother of the well-known Russian “war entrepreneur” who leads the pro-Kremlin mercenary group called the “Wagner Group”.

The European Union (EU) has always had a sufficiently clear and assertive position towards the invasion of Ukraine by the military forces of the Russian Federation, which began on 24 February 2022. Support for Ukraine stems from many factors, not least the Ukrainian people’s desire to move closer to the European way of life. The so-called “Euromaidan revolution” that began in Kiev in 2014 reacted against the former President Víktor Yanukóvytch for having refused to sign the agreements on trade cooperation and, in general, greater openness to the EU, apparently under pressure from Moscow.[2] On the other hand, the military action (aggression) unleashed in 2022 by Russia against Ukraine calls into question the international order and the assumptions of peace built up after the Second World War. From the perspective of the EU (and the political and civilisational bloc currently referred to as the “West”, associated with the framework of the democratic rule of law), this is a serious violation of international law.

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Editorial of September 2022

On By officialblogunioIn Editorials2 Comments 
By Alessandra Silveira and Pedro Madeira Froufe (Editors)
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The (near) future of the European Union: Remarks on the “State of the Union” Address, September 14, 2022

On September 14, 2022, Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, delivered her third “State of the Union” address in Strasbourg. The two previous addresses by the President of the Commission were marked by the pandemic. Another kind of crisis conditioned this year’s “State of the Union” address: war. One key idea emerged from the address and was underlined by the President of the Commission: the war we face – which gives rise to many of the problems the Union and its citizens will have to deal with – was caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Quite clearly, there is a direct perpetrator of the war being waged in Europe and, in a similar vein, an indirect culprit for the subsequent economic crisis, inflation, and the social and migratory crisis triggered by the war and which the Union will have to overcome: the Russian Federation and the Russian power centered and personalized in Putin. In other words, there was an assertion of political principle at play here; an attempt to make the Union’s geopolitical position clear. Similarly, Ursula von der Leyen proclaimed the impossibility of the European Union (i.e., the historical and values-based framework of integration) being defeated: “this is about autocracy against democracy.” In that sense, unless we relativise the preconditions of integration and the “Union of law”, there is an irreconcilability in conceptual and civilizational perspective that determines the proclamation that Ukraine cannot succumb in these terms.

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Notes on European defense and the signs of a new world and European order

On By revistaunioIn EssaysLeave a comment 
By Pedro Pereira (Master's Student in EU Law at the University of Minho)
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1. Introduction

Defense policies in the European Union (EU) and how they should be conducted are an old topic. In any case, it is defensible that i) the fact that European defense was provided by the United States of America (USA) during the historical period of the Cold War, as well as ii) the circumstance that in more recent times, European defense was materialized and operationalized through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) decisively contributed to the deepening of the rights of the European citizen and to the intervention of EU Member States in the development of sociality – something that shaped the way European integration was being built around the Rule of Law and the Welfare State.

The hypothesis of a progressive gap in transatlantic relations (EU and US) – or, at least, the revival of this debate – returns whenever an external threat to European security arises. But world geopolitics may actually be at a turning point, motivated mainly by the return of war, due to the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine– which requires a reassessment of European strategies in terms of foreign policy, security and defense. Recent events, in a way, contradict the thesis of an inevitable European dependence on the US, as well as urge a restructuring of the EU’s defense – which, despite still depending on NATO, aims to be more robust and autonomous. To this extent, the change in the way the EU presents itself on the international scene may be imminent.

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The other side of War: disinformation

On By revistaunioIn EssaysLeave a comment 
Ricardo de Macedo Menna Barreto (Guest Professor at the University of Minho Law School)
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Last Tuesday, March 8, 2022, during a debate at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, Josep Borrell, EU diplomacy chief, warned that the Russian government will systematically lie about Ukraine’s military situation. At his intervention, Borrell defended that: “(…)accompany Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, spreading false information among their own population about why this invasion has taken place and what is the situation in Ukraine(…) it not just bombing houses, infrastructure, the bodies of the people; they are bombing their minds, they are bombing their spirits”.[1] The EU diplomacy chief underlines a problem that, in his opinion, is getting worse as our lifetime goes by: the daily battle in the informational field. A battle whose main characteristic is the manipulation of information, a particular form of abuse of power, that is, of social domain. According to Teun van Dijk, manipulation is a form of illegitimate influence, achieved through discourse, in which manipulators make the manipulated believe in (or even do) things that are of special interest to the manipulator (and usually against the interests of the manipulated). In this sense, we can consider discursive manipulation as a complex social phenomenon, involving interaction and abuse of power (domination) between certain groups and social actors. It is also a complex phenomenon, taking into account that it presents itself in two ways: a) as a cognitive phenomenon, since it implies manipulation of the participants’ minds; b) as a discursive-semiotic phenomenon, since it can be expressed in the form of text, conversation or visual messages.[2]   

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Editorial of March 2022

On By officialblogunioIn Editorials2 Comments 
By Pedro Madeira Froufe (Editor)
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Europe and war

They do not know that dreams are a constant of life

As concrete and defined as any other thing (…)

They neither know nor dream that dreams command life![1]

(António Gedeão)

The history of European integration is made up of moments of war, manifestations of collective irrationality, and the permanent reaction to and overcoming of such instances. In fact, Europe itself, “the daughter of mythology and war”, was gradually built as a stage for violent and disastrous wars and, simultaneously, for virtuous and great conquests.[2]

The success of this 71-year-long integration can be illustrated by the fact that we are dramatically surprised by Russia’s war against Ukraine! European integration was born out of the debris of World War II, trying to permanently bury it. Its great merit was, after all, and as Jean Monnet said, to try to unite Men, more than to unite States.[3] Thus, we have been living in the illusion that the supreme inhumanity and irrationality of war would be definitively overcome. At least, on the European continent (not only in the European Union) and among sovereign states.

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