Small but geopolitically important steps were taken by key members of the European Union from the EU's Eastern periphery. While largely ignored in Western mainstream media and in Brussels, they could well portend a longer-term alternative economic space to the failing construct known misleadingly today as the European Union with its bankrupt Eurozone single currency and European Central Bank. I refer to the talks recently in Beijing at the major Belt and Road Forum, between leaders of 29 nations and China's President Xi Jinping with the Prime Ministers of Hungary, Greece, Italy, Spain as well as the President of the Czech Republic and the President-elect of the Republic of Serbia .
The significance of the attendance of these specific European countries is underscored by the conspicuous absence of the leaders of Germany, France (maybe excusable due to presidential elections), and the remaining EU member countries, as well as the absence of the President of the EU Commission.
The list of Beijing attendees confirms that a tectonic fault line is developing across Europe between government leaders opting for national economic growth and development versus the nations whose leaders are still tied to the scelerotic, dying economies of the old Atlanticist order known as the American Century.
China made clear to the USA and the EU that their OBOR infrastructure project was not at all exclusionary. Beijing made clear months ago that it genuinely wanted their participation in what Vladimir Putin called the development of an Eurasian Century.
Trump responded by sending a low-level National Security Council civil service bureaucrat named Matt Pottiger. Germany's Merkel sent her Economics Minister who pompously declared in Beijing that Germany would not sign the Forum Joint Communique, complaining instead that she wanted a "level playing field," newspeak for the old Anglo-American globalization midel that makes the rules for "less developed" countries and thereby gives superior advantage for the Western G-7 multinational giant corporations and states.
Notably, leaders of the EU countries most strongly objecting to Brussels policies in key areas of the economy and refugees, such as Hungary's Viktor Orban, strongly embraced participation in China's vast $22 trillion infrastructure project called One Belt, One Road or OBOR, more recently Belt and Road, for short.
In remarks in Beijing summarizing his talks there, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke bluntly of an emerging global tectonic fault line. Orban declared that the old globalisation model is obsolete, noting that "a large part of the world has had enough of a world where "a few developed countries have been continuously lecturing most of the world on human rights, democracy, development and the market economy," a direct slap in the face to the US-led "democracy and human rights" NGOs of George Soros and the CIA-tied USAID which have ferociously tried to topple the very popular Orban.
Orban obviously gets the very central point that Washington, Wall Street, Brussels and Berlin are in denial over: The emerging Eurasian Century represents an entire new quality of globalization. No longer are the colonial European powers or their American cousins holding the key cards or calling the shots.
During his private talks in Beijing with Xi Jinping and other Chinese officials, Orban signed Memoranda of Understnding in connection with linking the OBOR infrastructure with the economies of Europe.
In addition to Hungary and Serbia, debt-ridden Greece is also drawing closer to Beijing and her OBOR initiatives. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, until recently a darling of the International Monetary Fund for bringing his Parliament to sign savage pension cuts and other austerity laws so that the EU and IMF debt deals go forward, is finding the Chinese OBOR option increasingly attractive.
Greek infrastructure development group Copelouzos signed a deal with China's Shenhua Group to cooperate in green energy projects and to upgrade power plants in Greece. The deals are worth more than $3 billion. In 2016, China's largest shipping company, state-owned COSCO bought majority ownership stake in Piraeus Port Authority as preparation to turn Greece into a transhipment hub for the rapidly growing trade between Asia and Eastern Europe.
It is important to recall that, contrary to the religious dogma of economic simpletons such as Milton Friedman, there exist in nature no such entities as "free markets." Markets are the careful product of man-made economic infrastructure developments. This is the core of China's "globalization with Chinese characteristics," as Deng might have termed Xi's OBOR idea.
In recent months China has been a major investor in Greece's economy, a sharp contrast to the demands of the EU and IMF for Greek austerity. The China State Grid last year bought a 24 percent stake in Greek power grid operator ADMIE for 320 million euros.