Notes to the People: Russia, Ukraine and NATO

It is appropriate to begin this week’s column with a quote from Vijay Prasad of Tricontinental Institute for Social Research: “It is impossible not to be moved by the outrageousness of warfare, the ugliness of aerial bombardment, the gruesome fears of civilians who are trapped between choices that are not their own. If you read this line and assume I am talking about Ukraine, then you are right, but of course, this is not just about Ukraine.

In the same week that Russian forces entered Ukraine, the United States launched airstrikes in Somalia, Saudi Arabia bombed Yemen, and Israel struck Syria and Palestinians in Gaza.” Isn’t it ironic that the popular Media and Social Media have equally failed to even notice the latter three events while so many pages were allocated of course justifiably to the news on the Russian invasion to Ukraine? It is true that the Russian war is more intensive and destructive than the other three recent events of aggression.

Following Alain Badiou, we could say that this event is an event that would create new possibilities. In other words, it is an “occurrence of the real as its own future possibility”. Nonetheless, what new possibilities the Russian invasion of Ukraine would produce is yet to be seen. In order to understand the real causes behind this event, it is imperative to situate ‘the event’ in its broader context, i.e. the existing world system as it has evolved since the 1980s. Gilbert Archer defines it as “the second defining moment of the New Cold War in which the world has been plunged  … as a result of the US decision to expand NATO” while the first being the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Before analysing what new possibilities this second moment would generate, let us see first what systemic changes led to it.

It has been an accepted norm that wars are bad and destructive so should be stopped at any cost. The teachings and praxis of Leo Tolstoy, M K Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and many others had enshrined this pacifist norm, the frequent deviations from the norm are notwithstanding. As Leon Trotsky, a Ukrainian Jewish Marxist once said; “concrete fact departs from the norm. This does not signify, however, that it has overthrown the norm; on the contrary, it has reaffirmed it from the negative side”.

Event and System

Events are linked with a system. One may justifiably argue that the dissolution of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries would have naturally resulted in the dissolution of its other, namely, NATO making its continuous presence redundant. However, it did not happen. On the contrary, what had happened was that the US had shown its preference to expand NATO to Eastern European countries that had severed their links with Russia. The post-World War II world system was characterised by the social-democratic expansion in the West and the cold war between the countries of NATO and the countries of the Warsaw Pact. The world balance of forces changed in favor of the West as a result of the absence of a formidable opposition to it because of the demise of the USSR.

Fukuyama’s Theory

Following Hegel’s formula, Francis Fukuyama advanced a theory according to which the world had entered the end phase of history with the victory of liberalism over ‘socialism’. Of course, the fall of the Soviet system was a victory of capitalism. It had stopped the two waves of contraction of the capitalist world market that was marked by the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917 and the victory of the Chinese Revolution and the Red Army’s march towards Eastern Europe after World War 2. The rise of new capitalist oligarchs over the state-led capital system in the USSR had become coterminous with the emergence of nationalism in member countries and these two elements created the condition for the formation of new nation-states in Eastern Europe, next to Russia’s western border. Operating the capital system in the USSR was not an adequate element to build new nation-states. It required ideological grounding that was produced by nationalism.

Hence, the world system that emerged was not that simple. It was embedded with new dynamics and contradictions that began to grow when capitalism was established in Russia, the former Warsaw Pact countries and China. The new cold war is not based on ideological differences but on intra-systemic rivalries. Although the US showed its need to dominate the world as its principal hegemon by invading Iraq and Afghanistan and disrupting the political stability in the Western Asian and Mediterranean Africa, the new capital systems in China and Russia, with big nuclear arsenals, are not ready to accept it. Hence, the development of a new model of capital systems has increased the system contradiction. The US and NATO have continuously violated the Minsk agreement: according to which the US agreed not to extend and expand NATO to Russia’s western border. China has become equally concerned with similar developments in the South China Sea.

Rivalries between imperialist nations are not new. Lenin has shown how inter-imperialist competition led to the first world war at the beginning of the twentieth century. The idea of inter-imperialist rivalries reappeared in the 1930s.

The Response of Junior Partners

When inter-imperialist competition and conflict occurs, how would the junior partners of the world system respond and react to it is another interesting issue that has to be investigated. We have seen that the countries of the so-called third world gained substantially during the post-World War II cold war situation. Some third-world countries were able to implement risky nationalist development policies including nationalization of big and nationally important ventures owned by the Western capitalist countries.

Leon Trotsky’s following observations made in 1939 after the failure of Stalin’s policy in Ukraine may be also relevant to get some idea about its current situation. “Since the latest murderous ‘purge’ in Ukraine, no one in the [Western Ukraine] wants to become part of the Kremlin satrapy which continues to bear the name of Soviet Ukraine. The worker and peasant masses in Western Ukraine, in Bukovina, in the Carpatho Ukraine, are in a state of confusion: Where to turn? What to demand? The situation naturally shifts the leadership to the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their ‘nationalism’ by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for fictitious independence.” What Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the name of nationalism did was to subjugate Ukraine totally to western imperialism against Putin’s oligarchy.

Since the Russian invasion, the European continent, if not the entire world has been a nuclear powder keg waiting to blow. To offer a permanent solution to the Ukrainian question, the destructive elements that have been accumulated in the last thirty years should be removed. The withdrawal of the Russian troops from the soil of Ukraine should be only a first step. The masses in Ukraine and Russia should convert the current war into a civil struggle in Ukraine and Russia to overthrow the semi-authoritarian regimes of Zelenskyy and Putin. In order to ensure the security and safety of Europe, the masses in the EU countries should force their governments to withdraw immediately from NATO.

By Sumanasiri Liyanage

The writer is a retired teacher of Political Economy at the University of Peradeniya. sumane_l@yahoo.com 

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