The Left Party was officially founded in 2007 in a merger of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the party Labor and Social Justice – The Electoral Alternative (WASG). The PDS was the "post-communist" successor party to the former ruling party of East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party (SED). The Left Party has been skeptical of military intervention and in favor of peaceful and friendly relations to Russia.
But the Left Party has a, well, left political perspective. So it is not sympathetic to the oligarchic/authoritarian style of rule that is the current system in Putin's Russia. Putin's ideological soulmates in Germany and the rest of the EU are generally the far-right populist parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), and the Lega in Italy. But generalizations on this can be tricky. Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party is a similar far-right formation, but its version of Polish nationalism includes, not surprisingly, a suspicious-to-hostile view of Russia. Hungary's President Viktor Orbán is the closest in its authoritarian ruling style to Putin's, but his Fidesz party is formally affilited to the conservative party bloc in the EU Parliament, not to the far-right blac.
Liebich reviews his party's view of the development of the West's relations with Russia since 1989. In their view, the 1990 arrangement between the US, Canada, and Western European countries with Russia (then still the dominant country in the Soviet Union) known as the Paris Charter, which aimed at improving East-West integration under the auspices of what is now the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Lieblich argues that with the dissolving of the Warsaw Pact, NATO should also have been abolished.
Obviously, that didn't happen. But the diplomatic position of the West was that NATO could be broadened to include even Russia. It seems unlikely that anyone could have ever taken that position very seriously, however convenient it may have been to pretend that they did. NATO was formed as an alliance to defend Western Europe against the Soviet Union and it also brought the NATO allies under the American nuclear umbrella. Liebach notes that instead of the NATO alliance being ended, "NATO expanded and the desire of [Russian Presidents]Yeltsin, Putin and Medvedev for the inclusion of Russia was ignored by the 'victors'." Nearly 30 years after the fall of the [Berlin] Wall, we find ourselves in a new ice age." (All translations from the German are mine.)
Lutz Schrader notes in this article on the OSCE from the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (BPB), Die OSZE – ein Erfolgsmodell muss sich neu erfinden 22.02.2017, that the Clinton Administration used the formal prospect of NATO ascension for Russia to make the actual expansion of NATO to former Warsaw Pact countries more acceptable. And that they informed the Russians formally in March 1995 that they had no intention of expanding NATO to include Russia.
It might be an exaggeration to say that the notion of expanding NATO to included Russia was always a joke. But not by much. And it doesn't seem to realistic that Putin in his first Presidency (2000-2008) or Medvedev during his (2008-2012) might have still been expecting that inclusion in NATO was a realistic option. Because essentially the Western countries quit pretending by 1995.
Liebach's states the Left Party's position on Russian expansionism as follows:
The LINKE criticize the incorporation of the Crimea into the territory of Russia as a violation of international law, just as the removal of Kosovo from Serbia was. The proposal of the Russian President [Putin] before the Federation Council to send soldiers into the Ukraine on the grounds that there was allegedly a threat to Russian citizens living there was as much a violation of the ban written into the UN Charter on the threat of violence as the military intervention in Grenada in 1983 was under US President Ronald Reagan, who in any case chose the same justification. It is occasionally argued that Russia could act in that way because the USA also did, and that [Russia] had to defend itself against a strategy of encirclement. But we [the Left Party] aren't making geopolitics from Russia's point of view but rather left peace policy. We stand for international law and against violations of it. If we are blind in one eye [i.e., one-sided in such criticism], we damage our credibility and weaken ourselves even when we oppose unjustified attacks against Russia. If we criticize the national government for using two different standards, we shouldn't also do that ourselves.Liebich states the Left Party's position as opposing the current sanctions against Russia. And he holds out the 1990 goal of a pan-European OSCE instead of NATO.
Keeping longterm goals in mind is important in foreign policy. But it's safe to say that a pan-European OSCE that replaces NATO is a more distant goal now than it was in 1990. And, in practice, ending the current sanctions is part of a larger package of international issues with Russia.
I've thought for a long time that the post-1990 expansion of NATO - "NATO enlargement" in the standard jargon - was a reckless action done with too little consideration of how Russia as a nation would see itself required to respond, no matter what kind of government it had. That process played out pretty obviously the way that the foreign policy "realist" school predicted. The US found itself as the world's "hyperpower" in a "unipolar world." In the realist scheme, the US would look for ways to maintain its dominance and prevent the rise of "peer comptetitors" in the world. Preserving NATO and expanding it eastward was an obvious way to pursue that goal. That's not to say that those were the only choices that could have been made, of course.
Having united Germany as part of NATO was one level of risk. That arrangement was negotiated in the "Two Plus Four" process in 1990 to unify Germany. The 1999 inclusion of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland was another level of risk, the first incorporation of former Warsaw Pact countries. The next round of expansion took place in 2004, adding former Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovakia; the oncetime Yugoslav republic of Slovenia; and three countries previously part of the Soviet Union itself, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And that was even a higher level of risk.
Russia subsequently created a situation in the former Soviet republics of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014) in which Russian forces controlled parts of their territory secessionist entities in ethnic-Russian dominated areas and with the incorpration of the Ukrainian Crimea formally into Russia itself. That greatly complicates any move by NATO to incorporate either of those nations in a further expansion, since neither country currently controls all of its own territory and therefore explicit agreements with Russia would be required to achieve that.
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