Warning against Western Self-Deception

At the 63rd Andechs Europe Day, which took place on 22/23 March 2025 and was attended by more than 200 guests from many parts of Europe, the President of Paneuropa-Deutschland, Bernd Posselt, and the Chairman of the Europe Committee in the German Bundestag, Dr Anton Hofreiter of the Greens, warned against Western self-deception in Ukraine.

Posselt emphasised that Russian President Putin ‘has not the slightest intention of concluding even a reasonably viable peace’. He is still striving for a Moscow-led Eurasia from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Although this goal is not realistic, he and those around him are constantly drumming it up. That is why the idea ‘that you give him a quarter, half or the whole of Ukraine and then all will be quiet is not only morally wrong, but also stupid and illusionistic’.

As the USA was turning its back on Europe and Russia would remain a threat for a long time to come, Posselt said, ‘not only must immediate measures be initiated in a coalition of the willing and massive aid provided for Ukraine, whose very existence is under threat, but at the same time the construction of a United States of Europe with a functioning defence union and a supranational European army must be vigorously tackled.’

The great European Otto von Habsburg, as a friend of the USA, where he had found refuge as a persecutee of the Nazi regime, had coined the phrase, shocking to many people, that the next Hitler could also come from the USA. Trump may not be Hitler, but his fellow campaigners Musk and Bannon ‘are deliberately walking around with their right arms raised and trying to build a worldwide fascist international’, said Posselt. It could therefore not be ruled out that their path would one day lead in this direction.

At the central discussion forum on the topic of ‘An end to empty talk - Europe's unification is facing an emergency’, Anton Hofreiter MdB emphasised: ‘We are under attack on all fronts’. In order to establish a defence capability, he called for the creation of a European secret service - ‘we need our own NSA’ - and in particular an offensive cyber defence: ‘You have to be able to say to the aggressor: you can paralyse our power stations and hospitals, but then you have to expect that we will do the same.’ In addition, there would be the standardisation of weapons systems: ‘In Europe, we have 19 different types of battle tanks.’ As a defence against Russia's subversive warfare in Germany, he spoke out in favour of banning the AfD: This party is anti-constitutional and ‘organises treason in our own parliaments.’ The Chairman of the European Affairs Committee in the German Bundestag urged us to ‘understand what is happening in the world’. Russia is ‘an empire that wants to grow again and does not tolerate democracies on its borders’; and in the USA, Trump's environment, with personalities such as J. D. Vance, Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel, has models of order for the world that correspond to those of Putin and Xi. It is unacceptable that China is manipulating young Europeans through TikTok and spying on the EU at the same time: ‘We must switch off TikTok!’

Poland's ambassador to Germany, Jan Tombiński, quoted Putin's chief ideologist Alexander Dugin: ‘For Russia, war is a factor of identity and is constitutive. Russia should live with war.’ In the long term, this is aimed at destroying an EU that ‘offers us security, confidence and the opportunity to invest in the future’.

Benjamin Hartmann from the cabinet of the first EU Commissioner for Defence and Space in history, Andrius Kubilius, gave an overview of the EU's activities and plans. Although Russia is economically weak, it currently spends more on armaments than the entire EU; and the German secret service has publicly stated that Russia will be in a position to ‘test NATO's Article 5’ as early as 2030.

The European Parliament's rapporteur on Ukraine and foreign policy spokesman for the EPP Group, Michael Gahler MEP, pointed out that the European Parliament had recognised the Russian threat much earlier, also thanks to the 2004 enlargement, and had taken precautions, for example in the 2006 report on foreign energy policy. In order to implement the EU's common security and defence strategy, the potential already enshrined in the Treaty of Lisbon must be exploited, as this does not require unanimity in the Council.

The President of the European Economic Senate, Dr Ingo Friedrich, asked whether Trump's drift would lead to the demise of the entire Western value system with its rules-based order, international law and human rights, as Soviet communism once did: ‘Do we have it in our hearts to take up this flag? Europe must now become the beacon of freedom.’

Prof. Klaus Welle from the Martens Centre in Brussels pointed out that both the USA and Russia are weaker than generally assumed: ‘The American budget is already 25 per cent debt-financed, the country is heading for the wall. Russia only has the economic strength of Spain. Both can only manage one conflict at a time.’

The European and constitutional law expert Dr Dirk Voß, Vice President of the international Pan-European Union, recalled a survey from 1925, exactly 100 years ago. The founder of the Pan-European Union and thus of the modern European unification movement, Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, had asked the entire political, cultural, economic and scientific elite two questions at the time.

Four academics examined the congress topic ‘The fateful year 1945 - how does Europe build on it?’ on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the end of the war: the General Postulator of the Order of Friars Minor, Prof Zdzisław Josef Kijas from Rome, the Director of the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Prof Jörg Skriebeleit, the historian Prof Manfred Kittel and Prof Leonid Luks from the Central Institute for Central and Eastern European Studies at the University of Eichstätt.

• Programme (DE)  (PDF)
• Press release (DE) (PDF)