Two-speed EU?

[innonimatu]

It's all about culture, because culture defines everything - political development, mentality etc.

Russia has had a history which has made it half-European. Essentially, after the Mongol invasion, Russia has been separated from Europe for centuries and during that period, the Russian culture gradually "orientalized". Mongols teached them brutality and despotism. When Muscowy eventually drived them out, the "liberal" culture of Novgorod and Kievan Rus was long gone. Here begins the Russian tradition of absolute rulers, ruthless and despotic.

This is utterly ridiculous. The mongols could not hope to match the level of brutality and despotism western europeans knew during the course of their daily lives. The mongols butchered entire cities during their initial conquests... so what? Western europeans were busy making public shows of burning people to death ofr breaking them on the wheel. And that was just for the crimes that were actually punished (not to mention also for simple dissent from the established moral order). As with any justice based on show, the truth was that most crimes, most violence, went unpunished. Murder was common, and only punished when it threatened the social order, that's the reason a highwayman who had only stolen some money could be tortured to death, while a noble who killed a servant could get away with a fine. Rape was common, and the woman (or man!) usually held as guilty as the raper, if she dared complain. the notion that an act of violence had a person as a victim, the idea of actually helping or protecting a victim, would be secondary to a court, what really mattered was how a crime challenged the social order.

Any look at the western european judiciary systems well into the 19th century will be appalling. Get off your high horse and stop making up justifications for your dogma that Western Europe is superior to everything else. We humans have one history, are part of one civilization, the human one. Digging out the mongols to justify your prejudices (and showing those prejudices again with the talk about the "orientalization") is, I say again, ridiculous. "Oriental despotism" was the excuse for the conquest of Asia and the Middle East by europenas in the late 19th century, and even then they should have seen the ridicule of using that while (despotically!) imposing their imperial rule over the former eastern empires by force of arms.