Russia, Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism

Boris Kagarlitsky, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman, Boris Kagarlitsky, Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138636996
• eBook ISBN: 9781351794572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. The volume brings together writers from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, many of whom attended a gathering of scholars and activists from all over Ukraine, held in Yalta, Crimea, just after the conflict in Eastern Ukraine erupted. Challenging both the demonization of Russia, which has become standard for Western writing on the topic, and the simplistic discourse of official Russian sources, this book scrutinises the events of the conflict and the motives of the agents, bringing to the fore the underlying causes of the most critical flashpoints of the post-Soviet world order. This volume offers a refreshing, profound perspective on the Ukraine conflict, and will be an indispensable source for any student or researcher.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal International Critical Thought.

The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism

Radhika Desai^a, Alan Freeman^b and Boris Kagarlitsky^c

^aDepartment of Political Studies and Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; ^bGeopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada; ^cInstitute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, Moscow, Russia

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, we provide an overall framing of the articles that follow by placing the Ukraine conflict which today embroils the West in confrontation with Russia, within an historical account of the geopolitical economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in the twenty-first century, taking particular account of the decline of US and Western power and the rise of other centres of economic and military power, which are able to resist and contest Western power. We pay particular attention to how today’s geopolitical flashpoints, of which Ukraine is among the most critical, emerged to belie post-Cold War expectations of a “peace dividend” and a “unipolar” world, clearly distinguishing the US and the EU roles in these processes. Given the widespread tendency in the West to label Russia “imperialist,” particularly after the integration of Crimea into the Russian Federation, we end our discussion with a consideration of this question which concludes that the term, while it continues to be an appropriate description of the pattern of Western actions, is not so for that of Russian ones.

Since November 2013, when the Maidan protests unseated the Yanukovich government for its reluctance to sign the EU accession treaty, events have taken a tumultuous course in Ukraine. In the ensuing civil war Crimea transferred its allegiance to Russia, parts of the East entered a protracted military conflict with the Kyiv regime and Ukraine became major flashpoint in rising international tensions between the West and Russia. The confrontation is sufficiently serious that both Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—warned that it could spark a new, nuclear, World War (see also van der Pijl 2016).

Advancing under the usual banners of democracy and self-determination, the West sponsored regime change to install a new government friendlier to the West and more open to EU and NATO membership, which also contained members of extreme fascistic groups including the Right Sector and Svoboda. The Western-dominated IMF also extended a $17 billion loan to the new regime, the first time it has ever extended a loan to a country in civil war. Meanwhile expectations that Russia would follow up its support for Crimea with aid to the rebels in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, fired by a vision of an autonomous (but not necessarily sovereign) “Novorussia,” which would preserve their productive economy as well as linguistic and other rights, were disappointed and its social radicalism curtailed by Russian actions (Clarke in this issue). By early 2016, the situation seemed stalemated and by summer, while NATO massed troops up and down Russia’s Western frontier in the run-up to its Warsaw summit, the British vote in favour of leaving the European Union opened up a host of new questions about the economic and military links between the continental European and the Anglo-American parts of the Western alliance and whether further Eastern expansion remains on the cards.

Given the number of questions that still hang over the Ukraine imbroglio, not to mention the configuration and dynamics of the world order, this issue seeks to shed light on key aspects of the Ukrainian crisis and its international dimensions. There have been others. There are, of course, the usual tendentious works, such as Edward Lucas’s attempt ([2008] 2014) to steel Western resolve by one-sidedly celebrating the Maidan protests as a “democratic revolution” if “chaotic in places, with some admittedly troubling fringe elements” (xvii) and condemning Russia as irredeemably authoritarian, corrupt and expansionist, a modern day Tsardom. This sort of rhetoric appeals to both the liberal interventionists and the neoconservative unilateralists in the US policy-making establishment. However, thanks to the growing list of US military and foreign policy failures, a new “realist” school now frontally criticizes the irresponsibility and provocation of US policy (Mearsheimer 2014) and arrives a more nuanced analysis. Ironically this “realist” analysis relies on two rather unrealistic assumptions—that “Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time” and that Ukraine is not a “core strategic interest” for the West—that Western actions have demonstrably belied (Mearsheimer 2014, 88).

If Lucas’s work essentially articulates standard US policy for the Ukraine case, the EU also has its intellectuals who essentially make a case for Ukraine’s integration into the Union which calls up visions of prosperity and stability (Åslund 2015), entirely ignoring the reality of economic devastation and political chaos that nations hitherto even more prosperous and productive than Ukraine, pre-eminently Greece, have already been subject to in the European Union and the Eurozone. They also ignore the gravely adverse effects of severing the critical historic links between the Ukrainian and Russian economies.

Another genre of writing on the current crisis in Ukraine is the work of old Russia hands in the West who recall the optimism that surrounded the early post-Cold War years and the prospects of increasing closeness between Russia and the West as the essential backdrop for their narratives of how matters went downhill from there. They speak with knowledge of the actors involved and seek to chart ways back to that original optimism (Levgold 2016; Matlock 2010).

While there are indeed some works that aim to provide a guide to the complex history of Ukraine and the current crisis and challenge many Western myths about Ukraine, they typically lack a focus on the political economy of the region (Pikulicka and Sakwa 2015; Sakwa 2015) or of the volatile geopolitical economy of imperialism in an age of increasingly multipolarity (Yekelchuk 2015). Unless the confrontation in Ukraine is placed in these contexts, it is hard, if not impossible, to grasp the causes and dynamics of the social and military evolution of the crisis or the seriousness of the confrontation over Ukraine and the potential it contains for war.

Against this literature, our contribution can be distinguished in a number of important ways. It arises from a grass roots initiative taken at the very beginning of the rebellion in Donetsk and Luhansk. A “school” for activists and social organizations from all over Ukraine was held in Belgorod. They shared broadly progressive views, aiming to develop and defend the welfare state and other progressive policies and institutions in all parts of Ukraine and beyond. In discussions of major issues and strategies, participants decided that they needed to formulate a common platform and consolidate the identity of a progressive, socially oriented coalition going beyond defending Russkiy Mir (Russian world, or Russianness). Focused as they were on social and economic issues, turning away from the narrow cultural focus of so many Maidan activists, the participants resembled the sort of progressive coalition of leftists and social populists not unlike that which powered the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US. Certainly they felt part of a wider global trend against the sort of neoliberalism that the EU project represented. Anna Ochkina (in this issue) further describes, analyses and reflects on their views and motivations.

The school ended with two statements, an international declaration and a domestic programme designed by Ukrainians for Ukraine. This programme, which continues to circulate around Ukraine, stressed the need for social transformation, democratization and cultural equality of all languages (not just Russian and Ukrainian) as the only way to overcome the crisis. It refrained from mentioning Novorossia as a state though it did mention Novorossia as an idea. In doing this, the signatories were indicating that their programme could be realized in any one of a number of possible state frameworks, including a united federal Ukraine or one divided between autonomous states.

A meeting in Yalta, called jointly by Ukrainian and Russian supporters of the declarations, was convened in June 2014. It brought many of these together with activists and scholars from other parts of the world, allowing the latter vital access to discussions among grass-root Ukrainians. This gave them a very different understanding of the way developments were unfolding on the ground in eastern Ukraine, Crimea and other parts of Ukraine than that provided by or via either Western or Russian official sources. The result was the Yalta Declaration (see Appendix).

Though the movement in Ukraine itself was politically defeated both inside the republics and suppressed outside it, its participants remain active and in contact. This issue is a fruit of their work. Another initiative, taken by Roger Annis, who was present at Yalta, is the New Cold War: Ukraine and Beyond website (www.newcoldwar.org) which “aims to provide accurate factual information about the Ukraine conflict and its rapidly-widening consequences.”

Bringing together contributions from many who were present at Yalta and/or Belgorod with some others, this issue is unique in presenting views that either arise from the grass-roots or scholars who have an appreciation of developments on the ground in Ukraine. As such, it contains critical new perspectives such as that on the rebel movements in the Donbass; they appear here as proto-revolutionary in that they lack the level of consciousness and leadership that accompanied the classic revolutionary movements. This issue also casts entirely new light on the nature and dynamics of the resistance, its political economy and geopolitical economy. Many of the chapters provide, for the first time in English, inside accounts of the social character, political aims and internal politics of the resistance movements.

Second, while many emphasize that the international crisis unfolding in the eastern edges of Europe involves not only the civil war in Ukraine but rising tensions between Russia and the West, this issue, particularly Boris Kagarlitsky’s contribution, gives readers a complex understanding of how domestic politics and political economy in the two countries are intertwined. This understanding forms the background against which to understand international developments.

Third, this issue provides an understanding of the Ukraine crisis and international tensions between the West and Russia within an updated historical materialist account of imperialism (in this introduction and in the contributions by Buzgalin et al., and Lane). It also deals with the intertwined questions of how exactly Western actions are part of a broader imperialist project, which is connected with the forms capitalism takes in the core Western countries and whether Russia is imperialist, as so many in the West, neoconservative, liberal or realist, allege.

Finally, by putting the Ukraine crisis within this broader understanding of imperialism, this chapter also relates it to the widening circles of crisis, which characterize our transitional times.

This introduction seeks, inter alia, to clear the way to a better understanding of the geo-political economy of contemporary capitalism and the dynamics of imperialism in it, particularly as they touch on the Ukraine conflict. We begin by outlining the geopolitical economy of the capitalist world in a longer historical perspective and the postwar period. We then examine the post-Cold War context in which this crisis has germinated and identify the circumstances and motives of key actors. We end the introduction by assessing claims that modern Russia is a new imperialist power today.

The parabola of capitalist imperialism

No greater harm has been done to our understanding of the workings of the capitalist world order than by the exaggeration of the power of the US and the West in the proliferation of writing on “empire” and imperialism with the advent of George Bush Jr’s “imperial” presidency. For just about then, it was entering a steep decline with the rise of China and other emerging economies, a fall which the 2008 financial crisis and accompanying stagnation in the West only accelerated. An entirely new approach to understanding the capitalist world order, its contemporary dynamics, the patterns of imperialism in it and their relation to those of the past, and to capitalism is indispensable for an understanding of the stakes in the confrontation over Ukraine and its role in the wider scenario of confrontations and interventions through which the US and the West seek to retain their purchase on developments.

These have been militarily sharpest in the Middle East and Africa, with increasing signs of bellicosity in the “Pivot to the Pacific” and the consequent souring of US-China relations (Woodward 2017). They have also surfaced in escalating economic discordances between the West and the BRICS countries, whether at the WTO (Abbas 2016), in the governance of the IMF and the World Bank, within Europe in relations between its core and periphery countries (Serfati 2016) and, in the face of dog-in-the-manger Western intransigence, in the emergence of alternative institutions of international economic governance—from regional trade agreements to initiatives such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Western economic policies of austerity have not only mired the West itself in stagnation, the malign consequences of its exported form, structural adjustment, have also provoked a tide of popular revolts against them from the Latin American Boli-varian governments to the Arab Spring. Today, the potential for such popular opposition to Western policies is present in domestic battles around economic policy taking place not only in developing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil but also in the West itself as the Sanders, Trump and Corbyn phenomena suggest.

While the neoconservative celebration of US empire could hardly be expected to shed light on the mechanics of imperialism, the considerable Marxist writing on the subject too, while not without its insights—the rising importance of outright dispossession in twenty-first century capitalism and that of the control of Middle Eastern oil in the case of David Harvey’s work (2005), for instance—on the whole refrained from any theoretical engagement with Marxist understandings of imperialism. A considerable amount of left writing focused on “financialization” but even the most sophisticated failed to give a proper account of the phenomenon under consideration (Lapavitsas 2009, 2010; for a critique, see Desai and Freeman 2011) in Marxist (or the very compatible Keynesian) terms, let alone connect it to the volatile and destructive dynamics of the dollar-denominated system of money and finance.

Though the left has long recognized that capitalism and imperialism have always been intimately linked and that the latter does not operate through markets alone, critical approaches to imperialism remain divided and hazy about the nature of postwar imperialism, and susceptible to the obscurantist influence of the US discourses of US “hegemony” “globalization” and or “Empire.” Perhaps the most fundamental reason is that while Marx and the theories of imperialism in the early twentieth century understood the drivers of modern capitalist imperialism to be capitalism’s contradictions, in particular its tendency to commodity gluts and surfeits of capital, and its thirst for superprofit from abroad, “Marxist economics” in the latter twentieth century has largely jettisoned the idea of contradictions and endogenous crises in capitalism. The result has been to understand capitalism as a promethean and self-sustaining system, an understanding which is closer to Schumpeter than Marx (Desai 2016a). Capitalism, thus understood, does not “need” imperialism, though it regrettably happens (Zarembka 2002, 8).

With the understanding of imperialism unhinged from capitalism’s dynamics and contradictions, it also became possible, in the same breath, to insist that postwar imperialism remained undiminished and, by some acco...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism
• 2 Ukraine and Russia: Two States, One Crisis
• 3 The Donbass in 2014: Ultra-Right Threats, Working-Class Revolt and Russian Policy Responses
• 4 Ukraine and the New Economic Cold War
• 5 Semi-Peripheral Russia and the Ukraine Crisis
• 6 Russia, the United States and Ukraine in the Long Economic Crisis: Assessments and Prospects for the Developmental State
• 7 Theses on Ukraine: Dialogue with an Emerging Leadership
• 8 The International Context: Russia, Ukraine and the Drift to East-West Confrontation
• 9 Russia: A New Imperialist Power?
• Index