The German historian Heinrich August Winkler has a long article in the July/Aug edition of Internationale Politik (2022:4) on Die Legende von der versäumten Chance ("The Legend of the Missed Chance") on US-Russian relations in the context of the current Ukrainian war.
For a comparison, I also looked at an interview with Winkler and Jörg Baberowski, "Erbschaft der Sowjetunion. Der Ukraine-Konflikt in historischer Perspektive. Eine Diskussion" Journal of Modern European History 13:3 (2015).
All translations from the German here are mine.
A treacherous "lesson" from the fall of the Soviet Union
Winkler (2015) makes an important point about the fall of the Soviet Union, which is that it had very much to do with its status as a petrostate:
The downfall of the Soviet Union, the dissolving of this empire of many people, came from within and was no simply a result of Western policy. It began at the latest in the second half of the 1970s, when above all the second oil crisis led to the Soviet Union feeling itself hopelessly inferior to the West.A significant part of the American foreign policy establishment regards the USSR's war in Afghanistan as a fatal blow delivered by the West to the Soviet system. There's a real danger that the Biden Administration sees the current Ukraine war as a rerun of that supposed success.
Winkler argues instead that the USSR remained further "fixed on the export of its own raw materials [particularly oil and gas], and the collapse of the raw materials prices struck the Soviet Union with full force in the 1980s."
Winkler (2015) makes an important point about the fall of the Soviet Union, which is that it had very much to do with its status as a petrostate:
The downfall of the Soviet Union, the dissolving of this empire of many people, came from within and was no simply a result of Western policy. It began at the latest in the second half of the 1970s, when above all the second oil crisis led to the Soviet Union feeling itself hopelessly inferior to the West.A significant part of the American foreign policy establishment regards the USSR's war in Afghanistan as a fatal blow delivered by the West to the Soviet system. There's a real danger that the Biden Administration sees the current Ukraine war as a rerun of that supposed success.
Winkler argues instead that the USSR remained further "fixed on the export of its own raw materials [particularly oil and gas], and the collapse of the raw materials prices struck the Soviet Union with full force in the 1980s."
NATO enlargement as reality and as propaganda point
Winkler (2022) discusses at some length the alleged agreement made by NATO in 1991 to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to never ever expand NATO membership beyond the borders of the unified Germany. Since it was a conversation and not any kind of formal agreement, and since Gorbachev himself says that there was no such promise or agreement made, it's a hard argument to make that it actually was such an agreement.
And Winkler also explains that there was no such agreement. In doing so, he cites a recent book by Mary Elise Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (2021) that deals with that period.
In the 2015 interview, Winkler speaks approvingly of the NATO enlargement to Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. He argues that (along with their becoming part of the EU) was a "contribution to the stabilizing of east-middle and southeastern Europe." He explains the rationale: "An in-between Europe like in the time between the two world wars should not develop again. That was a zone of political, economic, and military instability."
It's not at all surprising that Russia justifies its invasion of Ukraine on NATO expansion. For any government, war mobilization involves blaming the Other Side.
(Here I use the terms "NATO enlargement" and "NATO expansion" interchangeably. The NATO website uses the term "enlargement.")
But the fact that a claim is useful for war propaganda does not determine whether its true or false. That some anti-Russia hawks like Obama's Ambassador to Russia Michal McFaul insist that NATO expansion has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with Russian actions in Ukraine may also be understandable. But how one can argue with a straight face that Russia could have had no security concerns about an adversarial military alliance expanding farther and farther in its direction is a mystery to me. Of course Russian officials would take account of that as a possible security issue. That would have been the case even had Putin been the "lawless democrat" that German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once rather bizarrely called him.
As Winkler and almost everyone who comments on this observes, even real security concerns doesn't justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine or the annexation of Crimea. But especially since Russia from the start of the expansion expressed objections and concerns over it, it's hard to see how they can be dismissed out of hand. Even if one argues that they were unjustified.
And none of this means that Russian decisions on Ukraine didn't have other motives, as well, such as concern over access for the Russian fleet in the Black Sea to Crimean port facilities, concerns about the internal stability of Putin's regime, or even ideological ethnonationalist beliefs. As Winkler observed in 2015:
The lack of modernization of the Russian economy under Putin in his two terms of office today seduces to compensate for such weaknesses through pathetic nationalism. Völkisch nationalism serves as a distraction from self-inflicted failures. The annexation of Crimea has certainly led to a popularity bonus for Putin, but such an effect quickly burns itself out.The first NATO enlargement - Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999
Winkler (2022) observes:
That Russia's admission to the G7 in 1997, i.e. its enlargement to the G8, and some assurances from the Western Alliance regarding the military status of the new NATO members were sufficient to persuade the Russian President [Boris Yeltsin] to sign the NATO-Russia Act and thus to accept the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary to NATO in 1999 (and thus in the future also other former communist-ruled states), was certainly a great success for Bill Clinton and the West as a whole. [my emphasis]He continues:
But no one could hide the fact that Russia was deeply dissatisfied with the results of its cooperation with the West so far and considered itself the loser of the epochal turn of 1989/90/91: an assessment that was reflected in the Kosovo war of 1999, NATO's humanitarian intervention against Serbia, which was not authorized by the United Nations, against Serbia, which is historically closely linked to Russia, seemed to confirm. For the time after the Clinton and Yeltsin presidencies, this did not bode well. [my emphasis]After the Clinton Administration came the Cheney-Bush Administration and its aggressive unilateral foreign policy. They treated Russian security concerns with open contempt. Membership Action Plans (MAPs) were made during the Clinton Administration for several additional countries. In 2004, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia became NATO members. Without the kind of negotiated arrangements the Clinton Administration had made with Russia over the 1999 additions.
But a what turned out to be a kind of diplomatic Rubicon occurred in 2008 at the NATO summit in Bucharest. The Cheney-Bush Administration wanted to start a formal MAP with Ukraine and Georgia. But Germany and France refused to accept what they regarded as such a risky move. But the formal declaration of the summit stated unequivocally that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO members.
This has rightly been described as a worst-of-both-worlds situation. It was a classic Cheneyite move. They gave Russia the finger and said NATO was taking on Ukraine and Georgia as members and they didn't give a damn what Russia thought about it. But they didn't begin the formal process that would prepare the two countries for accession. Both were (and remain in 2022) far away from meeting the membership criteria for NATO.
Winkler (2015) also criticizes the EU for striking a posture that portrayed EU accession for Georgia and Ukraine as an anti-Russian move.
And he points out (2022) the very real considerations were very much part of policy considerations after the 1999 enlargement:
The fundamental decision to open NATO to the east was connected to a number of open questions. Apart from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, who was eligible for accession at a later date? Should NATO establish an eastern border on its own initiative beyond which it would not expand? What problems would be associated with this if it were to opt for the admission of former Soviet republics such as the three Baltic states, which historically belonged to the old Occident, i.e., were culturally influenced by the West? If NATO were to open the door to Ukraine, which has been independent since the end of 1991, what repercussions would this have on Russia? Should a democratic Russia one day be able to join NATO, which Gorbachev had not ruled out in 1990 and which Yeltsin also considered conceivable, or should the West make it clear that this was not an option? [my emphasis]The idea of Russia as a possible NATO member may seem bizarre today. But in 1999, the idea of Russia as an allied member of a formal European security arrangement was not only seriously discussed, but could reasonably be seen as a near-term prospect. Though no one thought such a move would be quick or easy. The formal Partnership for Peace offered NATO countries a possibility, or at least an opportunity, to develop a more cooperative long-term relationship with Russia.
This 1997 piece from no less a foreign policy establishment figure than Richard Haass (President of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2003) gives an idea of how the options for relations with Russia looked to the mainstream in the late 1990s: Enlarging NATO: A Questionable Idea Whose Time Has Come Brookings Institute 03/01/1997.
In 2016, Haass was still stressing that there were possibilities for a more constructive relationship with Russia that were not fully exploited by the United States. In World in Disarry, he wrote:
The post-Cold War relationship with the Soviet Union and then Russia was problematic from the start. ...The Kosovo precedent
US actions, though, contributed to Russia's problems and humiliation. The United States did not do all it could and should have clone to help the Soviet Union and then Russia make the transition from a controlled political and economic system to something rnore democratic and market oriented, and what "help" some Americans provided turned out to be more of a burden. US. officials also did not give Russia the respect it sought; the United States elected, for examnple, to downgrade the importance of formal arms control (where Russia still could appear to be something of an equal) when it just as easily could have gone through the motions of according it more priority.
More significant, though, was the decision to enlarge NATO, which started in the late 1990s under the Clinton administration and was continued by its successors. This policy has proved to be one of the most consequential and controversial of the post-Cold War era. That NATO would continue, much less enlarge, was hardly a foregone conclusion. lt is rare in history for an alliance born in one strategic context (in NATO's case, the Cold War, to deter and if need be defend against a Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of Europe) to remain in place once the context has changed and the mission has become obsolete. The question was whether NATO could and should endure-or whether its success would prove to be its undoing. [my emphasis]
And Winkler (2015) addressed the question of (the very real) Western double standards in questions of national sovereignty. As quoted above, Russia regarded the Kosovo intervention as a particularly egregious case. And with what we now know about the actual results of intervention, it's hard to argue against that characterization. And it continues to be a major complication in the EU's Balkan policy.
If you refer to President George W. Bush's illegal action with regard to Iraq, I was the first to publish a massive critique of the Bush Doctrine in Der Spiegel at the time, in September 2002, when that doctrine was proclaimed. And I feared the fatal consequences of the war just as they occurred. Nevertheless, the Crimean crisis is different from the Iraq crisis – the Americans did not annex Iraq. Both were violations of international law, but Russian annexation was the traditional policy of collecting Russian soil. It belongs to a policy of völkisch nationalism. If similar constructions were to be taken seriously in Germany, what would there be to collect: from Königsberg [Kaliningrad, Russia] to Strasbourg [France], from Breslau [Poland] to Bressanone [Italy]. If this example sets a precedent, then we can bury the Charter of Paris and all the fruits of the peaceful revolutions of 1989. That is why we must not play down the violation of international law in relation to Crimea, but must work out what distinguishes this case from other breaches of international law. In Crimea, for example, unlike in Kosovo, there was no situation of ethnic discrimination or ethnic cleansing that would have justified external intervention. [my emphasis]
No comments:
Post a Comment