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Colonial Europe is losing touch with reality
Once a global powerhouse, Europe appears to be increasingly out of touch with today's worldview and the growing role of emerging nations as it continues to look through a colonial lens.
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Foreign but familiar: Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi (right) welcomes European Union Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell during the Group of 20 Foreign Ministers Meeting in Nusa Dua on the resort island of Bali on July 8, 2022. (Reuters/Pool/Willy Kurniawan)
O
n April 9, two German representatives of the European Union argued in an opinion piece published in this newspaper that “EU-Indonesia relations need a new dynamic”.
However, what they offered was nothing new, but the same old colonial song. By calling on Indonesia to support their so-called “international rules-based order”, it seems they have completely lost touch with reality.
By now, most non-Western countries understand that this particular world order is not the neutral, internationally supported, democratic, peace-loving order that Westerners say it represents. The same goes for the phrase “international community”, which is rather a synonym for “the West”, so it does not include the entire world and its diverse population.
Rather than being a strongly united, pro-Western power bloc that everybody supports, old colonial Europe is becoming more and more isolated, both politically and ideologically.
For the rest of the world, it has become obvious that Europe, the United States and its allies are the actual warmongers. Many people no longer buy into the propaganda of the West as the defender of democracy and all that is right and good.
The paradigm of spreading democracy was already proven a lie by the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2002. This is why most people in Indonesia automatically sided with Russia in the Ukrainian conflict, as the public rightly holds the NATO countries responsible for indirectly initiating the war, long before Russia took up arms.
Therefore, you do not have to be a political expert to know that referring to Russia’s military response as “an illegal war of aggression”, as the two EU members did in their article, will fall on deaf ears in Indonesia.
