Capitalist expansion, the war in Ukraine and three decades of missed opportunities in Europe

There had been huge hopes for a peaceful, prosperous future in a united Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Three decades later, the war in Ukraine has brought these hopes to an end. In this post, I will argue that the seeds for the current crisis were sown right at the beginning of the post – Cold War period in the 1990s, when capitalist social relations of production were imposed on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) backed up by NATO military power.

 

Economically, enlargement of the European Union (EU), prepared during the 1990s and completed in the 2000s was intended to offer the former members of the Eastern bloc a return to Europe and economic prosperity. The reality was rather different from the very beginning. With their economies rapidly restructured along free market lines and redirected from former trading links with other members of the Eastern Bloc, Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries entered periods of dramatic economic recession marked by widespread poverty and high levels of unemployment. A brief turnaround in the first half of the 2000s came to an abrupt end in 2008 and the global financial crisis.

 

It was working people, who suffered most across CEE. With national economies in ruins, many had no alternative but to migrate to Western Europe. While Western transnational corporations picked up the most profitable enterprises such as banks and telecommunications at cut-down prices and scoured CEE for cheap labour, workers were doubly exploited. They were either exposed to hyper-exploitative and precarious working conditions at home or exploited as low paid workers with informal contracts in labour intensive sectors such as agriculture or warehouses in Western Europe (Bieler and Salyga 2020). Underneath a rhetoric of a bright future lurked capitalism’s most exploitative dynamics. In fact, Western European prosperity was built on the backs of Eastern European workers. In view of periodic crises, capitalist accumulation regularly depends on outward expansion along uneven and combined development lines. CEE offered an ideal opportunity for such an expansion after 1991.

 

Having experienced so little solidarity from Western European countries after the end of the Cold War, is it surprising that the new CEE members of the EU were opposed to support countries in Europe’s southern periphery during the sovereign debt crisis, when Greece, Portugal and Ireland were bailed out at the cost of punitive restructuring measures? Should we be surprised that widespread racism has reared its ugly head across CEE with especially Poland and Hungary standing out? Some of the consequences are visible now in the Ukraine conflict. While Poland is suddenly opening its borders to large amounts of Ukrainian refugees, there are numerous reports of people of colour refugees being denied entry, either already on the Ukrainian side or by Polish border guards. The different treatment of Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees only a few months earlier at the border between Poland and Belarus further indicates the general racist underpinning of these countries’ migration policy (e.g. The Conversation, 3 March 2022;  The Guardian, 4 March 2022).

 

The post – Cold War security dimension was equally mismanaged during the 1990s. NATO had been founded in 1948 as a military alliance with the primary objective of countering the threat of the Soviet Union and its allies. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, this objective was no longer relevant and NATO should have been dismantled, as had the Warsaw Pact, its counterpart. Instead, after initial years of desperately searching for a new role, NATO was slowly transformed into an increasingly belligerent alliance. Direct interventions in the wars in former Yugoslavia, culminating in a campaign of sustained air strikes in Kosovo in 1999, was followed by a mission in Afghanistan from 2003 onwards. In Europe, military interventions were complemented with Eastward expansion. In 1999, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary became the first new members.

 

In NATO’s expansion to Eastern Europe, Russian security concerns were completely side-lined. Instead of providing stability in CEE, however, NATO contributed to the creation of a dangerous explosive mixture, which has now blown up in Ukraine. Of course, the decision to start the war is fully Putin’s responsibility, but NATO as a military alliance should have never been the organisation in charge of post – Cold War security in Europe. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), established in 1975 in Helsinki and with a focus on conflict prevention and crisis management but no military structure, had been completely side-lined. Ultimately, NATO has provided the military back-up to Western capitalist expansion in Europe and beyond.

 

Russian economic restructuring after the end of the Cold War equally resulted in widespread poverty and high levels of unemployment and inequality. Based to a considerable extent on revenues from fossil fuel industries in gas and oil and dominated by a few super rich oligarchs, Russian capitalism has never presented a viable alternative. Equally, Russian capitalism too has been backed up by a steadily built-up military force and imperialist interventions. Early wars in Chechnya in the 1990s were followed by the war with Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, a heavy involvement in the war in Syria since 2015, intervention in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2020, and culminated in the current large-scale war in Ukraine.

 

In the heydays of globalisation of the 1990s and 2000s, rival capitalist interests between the West and Russia could be easily accommodated. Russian oligarchs were welcomed with open arms in the UK, for example, on the basis of the ‘Golden Visa’ scheme, which allowed millionaires to by-pass lengthy immigration queues in exchange for at least £2m of investment into the UK economy (Open Democracy, 23 February 2022). Against the background of climate change and (fossil fuel) capitalism having come under increasing pressure with Russian gas and oil reserves playing a central role, these different capitalist interests have now spilled over into open geo-political conflict. Within capitalism and its periodic crises, geo-political conflicts are ultimately inevitable. Working people in both Ukraine and Russia are now paying the price for it with the danger of further expansion of the crisis becoming more likely by the day.   

 

Ultimately, only full de-militarisation and a full-scale transformation of the capitalist political economy can provide a secure way forward!

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net

4 March 2022