Comment by Simon Valdenaire on April 4, 2012 at 6:55pm

So, do you see Sustainability as the key to political unity in Latvia?

Comment by Aleksey Vesyoliy on April 5, 2012 at 10:26am

It would be great if sustainable ideas would unite people of different cultures and nationalities in Latvia and they finally start to think about development, cooperation and economics instead on what languages do we speak, etc ;)

Comment by Guilhem Duchatelle on April 20, 2012 at 2:28pm

When we look at History, unification has often (if not always) been led by Strength and aggression : you mentioned the Roman Empire and the 3rd Reich. But we can also talk about Napoleon or use the example of France, or the Imperial China, built on the submission of regional nations, cultures, kingdoms. Using ethnic and cultural assimilation of the dominating forces, the unification around a centralized power is possible. But it needs strong repression for generations. It needs to kill or weaken the identity of a people to install the politically and culturally unified, centralized, area.

It's clearly something I don't want. Europe's main wealth is its cultural diversity and we should be able to unify the proper way. First, the International Law doesn't allow anymore brutal unification... Or should I say that a theoretical and official basis has been built since more than 50 years to avoid such a thing. 

But it's very known. The best way to make people gather is to find a common enemy. You fight side by side even with strangers when you feel threatened by something stronger than you.

But looking to what's been happening since 20 years, do you think that political leader will have the courage and the awareness to assume that the competition is not the best paradigm? We need an international agreement, with established objectives and strategies, to invest now for results maybe in 20 years.

A unified Europe would be a great step. But a unified World is the only true solution. If Europe makes sacrifices to fix a direction and decides to commit, alone, in a long-term plan, we will be looted, plundered, squashed, by other opportunistic powers.

So we can act or wait for an International Agreement. Or we can try to move forward, slowly, without a true commitment, in order to protect ourselves from the attacks, and try to establish a long process of transformation of our societies. 

Green Economy can be the solution, but it has to be a high-added-value Green Economy, and Europe will have to take the leadership of this new model. And impose it to the World, by its profitability and the "space of creation" it enables.

Easy to say... now, what could we do to facilitate this?

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