[LINK] "Putinization of not only Balkans, but Europe as well"

[rfmcdonald]

Bosnian writer and diplomat Hajrudin Somun's essay in Today's Zaman makes the argument, looking at France and Hungary and Italy and Turkey and elsewhere, that right-wing authoritarianism--near-fascism, even--is doing well in Europe outside of Russia. These things can spread.

Something strange is happening with the good old lady Europe. It seems as though it is returning to the previous century, to the outbreak of World War I, which will be commemorated with pomp in Sarajevo at the end of June. Has she already become saturated with neoliberal dogma, or will she be occupied by galloping corporate neoliberalism? Such gloomy conclusions could be heard after the recent elections in which 28 European countries brought a wave of far-right politics, unseen in the old continent since World War II, to the European Parliament (EP).

Aside from that trend, which is being widely analyzed, there is a simultaneous phenomenon that has drawn my attention even more. It is a warning of the merger between this xenophobic and racist offensive on the European west and the authoritarian “managed democracies” to its east, in and around Russia. Regardless of the political temperature's drop to Cold War levels between Moscow and the West, particularly due to the Ukrainian crisis, the Russian influence in rightist European circles has become almost equal to that which communist Russia had over Western socialist and leftist movements. “While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia's annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe's right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin,” Andrew Higgins wrote in The New York Times.

Here we are coming to the original source, the real cause of and accurate term for this phenomenon -- Putinization. It has already entered Wiktionary, which found that it was first used in 2010 to mean the conversion of a democracy into a one-party state. The Georgian media wrote about the “Putinization of Georgia" after the “Rose Revolution.” The anti-Barack Obama American media have mentioned “the Putinization of American Politics” as well. Hans Küng, the controversial Swiss Catholic theologian and head of the Tübingen-based Global Ethic institute, criticizing former Pope Benedict XVI in Der Spiegel, said: "In the past, the Roman system was compared with the communist system, one in which one person had all the say. Today I wonder if we are not perhaps in a phase of 'Putinization' of the Catholic Church."

It is no wonder why former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi praises Putin, because they belong to similar Machiavellian schools of rule. The French National Front's (FN) leader, Marine Le Pen, has even pleaded for the creation of a strategic alliance with the Kremlin in the form of a new “pan-European union.” Despite Europe's dependence on Russian energy and the interdependence between the European and Russian economies -- about 6,000 German companies are working in or for Russia -- it is unlikely that such a political union would be possible. Pro-Russian feelings in Western Europe are part of a tactical populist rhetoric to gather anti-American and euroskeptic voters. Alain de Benoist, a French “rightist” philosopher, has said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.”