Bertie Jacobs

The war in the Ukraine continues to rage on. Thousands are dead, millions have been displaced and the world awaits an uncertain outcome. The conflict has had many consequences on many different fronts, and the continent it is based on has not been left unaffected.

In a webinar hosted by the School of Government Studies and members of the Focus Area: Social Transformation in the Faculty of Humanities at the North-West University (NWU), experts both locally and abroad addressed some of these issues. The webinar was titled A costly inflection point: European politics and business in the Russa-Ukraine war, and was presented by Dr Heinrich Matthee, an independent senior political analyst and strategy adviser at the Hanse University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands.  

The Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 represents an inflection point in Western politics and business, and the webinar discussed the political and security dimensions of the war, the responses by Western governments and how Western businesses are responding to the various challenges.

Matthee called the war the most significant economic event for European business since the fall of the Shah in Iran and predicted that energy prices will skyrocket. This will result in the various parts of the supply chain becoming more expensive, and the government will have to look at how to best implement subsidies to counteract that.

The face of Europe has changed and will continue to look different for the conceivable future.