Whither the Multipolar EU?

Collective Imperialism and the Failure of Prophecy

Emmanuel Macron’s visit to China this week and accompanying remarks about how Europe must not be an American “vassal” reignited a discourse that has begun to seem rather comical at this point — that at some point the European Union is going to break with the United States. Why comical? Because such a thing has been predicted more and more for decades even as it appears less and less likely to ever happen. Immanuel Wallerstein confidently asserted in 2003 that within a decade the European Union “will construct an army” that “will sooner or later link up with the Russian army” (Wallerstein, 2003: 28). The basis for this was the refusal of Paris and Berlin to go along with the US invasion of Iraq, and admittedly the years following it provided some additional fodder for predictions of an imminent European split with Washington. Germany refused to comply with American demands to halt construction of Nord Stream II, and Macron made a yearly tradition of critiquing NATO, dollar dominance, and so forth. But I would argue that the stress test for whether these were signs of something bigger was the war in Ukraine, and that the last year has made abundantly clear that that a European break with the United States is simply not going to happen anytime soon.

One could argue that Russia’s failure to create a military fait accompli in Ukraine fast enough constrained Europe’s options, since the invasion could not be simply overlooked once it became a protracted conflict (Matthews, 2022). There’s a certain type of logic to this as an explanation for deepening European coldness towards Russia, but it is inadequate as regards to a continued march in lockstep with the United States. For instance, Europe could’ve armed Ukraine to the teeth but still continued to take advantage of cheap Russian gas, daring Putin to cut off that source of export revenues. At the very least it does not follow that European opposition to the invasion should result in a tolerance for US terrorist attacks against their own major infrastructure (Hersh, 2023). The Nord Stream II bombing and European complicity in its cover-up proves two things. 1) That the United States is sufficiently aware of its own weakness to take extraordinary risks, as I have written about previously. 2) That Europe nevertheless considers continued alliance with the United States to be the lesser evil in terms of furthering its own interests than reaching out to Russia.

The counterpart of confident predictions of a European-American break is the inverse assertion that insofar as such a split does not occur, it is the result of Europe being simply an American “vassal.” This also misses the boat to a certain extent. If we look at the Euromaidan coup that set off the chain of events leading to the current Ukraine war, responsibility rests probably more on European than on American shoulders. The US and its intelligence apparatus played their part in coordinating the overthrow of Yanukovych on the ground, and indirectly caused Ukrainian far-right groups to commit their false-flag sniper massacre by hinting that they would “stop recognizing Yanukovych after casualties among protesters reached 100” (Katchanovski, 2022). But the overall conjuncture where Euromaidan happened was mostly created by Europe:

“After incorporating the Baltics and the East European Warsaw Pact in the early 2000s, Brussels was now seeking to deepen and transform its relations with the rest of what had once been the western Soviet Union. It was undeniably a major shift in international relations and it was all the more significant for the fact that it clashed directly with Russia’s ambitions for the region. Since 2011 Russia had been developing its Eurasian Customs Union into a more comprehensive Eurasian Economic Union … The technical and economic issues of harmonizing two different economic blocs were overlaid by geopolitical tension whether Brussels acknowledged it or not. There was a choice to be made: Did the East European governments want to face west or east? Brussels let it be known that membership in Putin’s Eurasian Union was incompatible with an EU Association Agreement. Commission president Barroso refused the Kremlin’s invitation for negotiations between the two blocs. Brussels did not accept their equivalence … Under the anodyne labels of association, cooperation and convergence, a heavy geopolitical weight was being imposed on a fragile region under considerable economic and political stress” (Tooze, 2018).*

Samir Amin, perhaps due to his residual identity as a Frenchman, always asserted that a Paris-Moscow-Berlin axis was possible and hoped that it would come about. He conceded, however, that:

“The political conflict that might oppose Europe (or some major European countries) to the United States does not stem from fundamental disagreements expressing a clash of interests between dominant capitals. I would locate it, rather, within the conflict between different ‘national interests’ and profoundly different political cultures. My answer to whether the triad is united or fragmented may therefore be summarized in a single sentence. The dominant economic tendency operates in favour of triad unity, whereas politics points towards the break-up of triad unity, because of the diversity of national interests and political cultures” (Amin, 2006: 13-14).

But if Amin kept up this hope out of idiosyncratic personal bias, it still didn’t manage to cloud his analytic sharpness. For if a Euro-Russian alignment to challenge the United States was an ideal scenario, Amin nonetheless understood that the one that has actually played out since the collapse of the USSR has been:

“The Russia of the 1990s experienced the illusion of its adoption by the triad, particularly through the actions of its European partner. Gorbachev’s naïve project of the ‘common European house’ was based on this illusion. Europe (mainly Germany, Great Britain, and France) did not and does not want that. Europe has its eyes set on its ‘Latin America’ in a reconquered eastern Europe. It has the ambition, with and behind the United States, of colonizing Russia, beginning with Ukraine” (Amin, 2016: 133).

I should clarify here that by “triad,” Amin is referring to the United States, Western Europe, and Japan — i.e. the Global North as a collectivity, which he regards as sharing common interests:

“The phase of the global deployment of capitalism, which began in 1945 but was impeded until the collapse of the post-war social orders (welfare state, Sovietism, national populism in the South), is characterized by the emergence of a collective imperialism. The ‘triad’ (that is, the United States plus its Canadian external province, Europe west of the Polish frontier, and Japan – to which we should add Australia and New Zealand) defines the area of this collective imperialism. It ‘manages’ the economic dimension of capitalist globalization through the institutions at its service (WTO, IMF, World Bank, OECD), and the political–military dimension through Nato, whose responsibilities have been redefined so that it can in effect substitute itself for the United Nations” (Amin, 2006: 8).

The point being that Europe is a lot less interested in engaging with Russia as an equal/partner than as a subordinate. The dominant states of the European Union are comparatively much more excited by Russia/Eastern Europe as massive source of cheap labor and raw materials right on their doorstep — exactly what Latin America has historically been to the United States. The Eastern Partnership strategy was opted for in place of a Paris-Moscow-Berlin axis. Whatever Europe’s problems with the United States, being able to plunder such a conveniently located neocolonial zone was simply too good to pass up. Russia’s war- and state-making capacities (embodied for instance in the Eurasian integration projects) did not make it as easy to dominate as much more dysfunctional countries like Ukraine.

A Russo-European alliance is thus not being prevented from happening by American perfidy so much as it being essentially the opposite of what the EU wants. Europe’s ideal scenario with regards to Russia is more like significant weakening or collapse leading to further peripheralization. In the United States grandiose visions of Russia “decolonizing" into dozens of smaller states are mostly the stuff of think-tank mediocrities and #NAFO Twitter. In Europe, such ideas are actually substantially less marginal. The right-wing Conservatives and Reformists faction of the European Parliament has been particularly vocal in its enthusiasm for the break-up of Russia and has hosted various fora and events on that theme. And to extend the Latin America analogy further, if Poland gets to be relatively prosperous and successful — maybe a European Mexico — then Ukraine is something like a European Honduras or El Salvador. With an essentially nonfunctional domestic society, completely hollowed out by violence, that drives a reliable stream of cheap migrant labor to the wealthy metropoles of its continent.

Note than in my first post here, when discussing Ukraine I characterized Russia’s war as being against the North as such rather than against the United States specifically. This wasn’t just imprecision on my part but rather reflects what I think makes our current moment unique. What has followed the decline of American hegemony has been signs that the core/periphery structure — which has remained extraordinarily stable for the past 500 years (Arrighi and Drangel, 1986) — is coming into question like never before. Russian griping over the actions of the United States has been a constant ever since Putin came to power, but what’s been new since 2022 has been the casting of a “golden billion” as the enemy at the highest levels of official Russian discourse. Does the following sound familiar to anyone? Note — I am unfortunately quoting Wikipedia for this as English-language writing on it is very scant:

“According to Kara-Murza, the golden billion (population of developed countries) consumes the lion's share of all resources on the planet. If at least half of the global population begins to consume resources to the same extent, these resources wouldn't be sufficient. This is partly based on the ideas of Malthus, in that emphasis is placed on the scarcity of natural resources. However, whereas Malthus was mostly concerned with finite global crop yields, anti-globalists that advocate the idea of a "golden billion" are mostly concerned with finite natural resources such as fossil fuels and metal. According to Kara-Murza, the developed countries, while preserving for their nationals a high level of consumption, endorse political, military and economic measures designed to keep the rest of the world in an industrially undeveloped state and as a raw-material appendage area for the dumping of hazardous waste and as a source of cheap labor.”

This does not mean we should impute a high degree of theoretical coherence to the views of Russian decision-makers. What happened in 2022 was that Russia decided that its position within the present global hierarchy of wealth and power was only going to get worse. Pragmatism and realpolitik were thus worse than useless given such a structural antagonism, which helps to explain why Russia’s war goals have always been exceedingly vague and open-ended. Endless struggle without telos is a matter of being cornered, if even relative advantage cannot be gotten within the system then fighting it is no longer a choice. Indeed, I think the case can be made that Russia’s “special military operation” was triggered, maybe even primarily, by a collapse of faith in the possibility of a Paris-Moscow-Berlin axis. One of the most significant incentives that militated against Putin doing this in 2014 was the revenues derived from energy exports to Europe. It strains belief to imagine that the Russian leadership was naïve enough to expect Russia-EU trade to go on as before after a major offensive military action against Ukraine. The decision to invade was a conscious abandonment of Europe as an economic partner, primarily in favor of China. Similarly, whereas in 2014-2015 Russia trusted Germany and France as neutral mediators in the Ukraine conflict, it slowly realized that their actions were driven less by a friendly commitment to peace in Europe than by a desire to weaken Russia geo-politically and geo-economically. That the Minsk agreements were a disingenuous ploy to buy Ukraine time to militarize has now been more-or-less admitted by their original French and German negotiators.

Amin’s hope that Europe would one day break with Atlanticism had rather less to do with Wallerstein-esque confidence that such a thing was likely and rather more to do with his hopes for a revival of the militant traditions of the European Left. And indeed, he wasn’t wrong that European “political cultures” generally are much more critical of war and imperialism and capitalism than the American one. A mainstream politician with the views of Jean-Luc Mélenchon would be unthinkable in the United States, for instance. But there are no indications than a breakthrough for left-wing politics is on the horizon anywhere in Europe currently. Among Europe’s policy-makers and indeed among most of its citizens (other than maybe the mostly young supporters of left-wing parties, who themselves are still often voting just on cost-of-living issues) the idea of a Paris-Moscow-Berlin axis is simply out of the question.

I hope its implicitly clear in this analysis that the drivers of European hostility to Russia aren’t purely economic, either. Consider Wallerstein on race and ethnicity in the modern world-system:

“What we mean by racism is that set of ideological statements combined with that set of continuing practices which have had the consequence of maintaining a high correlation of ethnicity and work-force allocation over time. The ideological statements have been in the form of allegations that genetic and/or long-lasting ‘cultural’ traits of various groups are the major cause of differential allocation to positions in the economic structures. However, the beliefs that certain groups were ‘superior’ to others in certain characteristics relevant to performance in the economic arena always came into being after, rather than before, the location of these groups in the work-force. Racism has always been post hoc. It has been asserted that those who have been economically and politically oppressed are culturally ‘inferior’” (Wallerstein, 2011).**

And this is what the rhetoric of “European values” that’s been so widespread in connection with this war is ultimately about. Russians (and to some extent other Slavs) are not and will never be part of “Europe” because they are innately aggressive, illiberal, “imperialist” (the most perverse accusation of all!) etc.. If it echoes the views of the most infamous Europeans of the 20th century (yes, those ones), this is no accident. But neither is it conscious imitation. Although the United States is a capricious, unsavory, and difficult partner — Russia in any relation to Western Europe other than a subordinate one is simply inconceivable, owing to the place it has long been relegated to in the international division of labor. If this idea is still hard to understand, just imagine that tomorrow British MI6 blew up a major American oil pipeline — and the only option the United States had besides sticking with Atlanticism anyway was to accept Venezuela as an equal. What choice do you think would ultimately be made?

Many thanks to @lakeeater and @lexluter__ on Twitter for inspiring this piece in offhanded DM comments that they probably don’t even remember.

*The PDF I had doesn’t have page numbers for some reason but I don’t have time to make my OCD worse about it

**Same issue here, I have to do actual schoolwork tomorrow and probably won’t get a chance to get to the library to track the page number down.

References

Amin, Samir. Beyond US hegemony: Assessing the prospects for a multipolar world. Zed Books, 2006.

Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. New York, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Arrighi, Giovanni, and Jessica Drangel. "The stratification of the world-economy: an exploration of the semiperipheral zone." Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 10, no. 1 (1986): 9-74.

Hersh, Seymour. “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.” Substack newsletter. Seymour Hersh (blog), February 8, 2023. https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream.

Katchanovski, Ivan. “The Hidden Origin of the Escalating Ukraine-Russia Conflict – Canadian Dimension.” Accessed April 15, 2023. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-hidden-origin-of-the-escalating-ukraine-russia-conflict.

Matthews, Owen. OVERREACH: The inside Story of Putin’s War against Ukraine. S.l.: MUDLARK PR, 2022.

Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world. Penguin, 2018.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. “U.S. Weakness and the Struggle for Hegemony.” Monthly review (New York. 1949) 55, no. 3 (2003): 23–29.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism: with Capitalist Civilization. New ed. London: Verso, 2011.