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
Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net
4 March 2022
"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"??
ReplyDeleteThe NATO invasion and devastation of Yugoslavia brought those hopes to an end.
The Ukraine action is merely a postlude.