Author: Oliver Eagleton

New Reality?

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 19 August 2022

Six months into the conflict, a Russian army incapable of taking Kyiv is presented as a threat to the entire continent. Ukraine has become, according to President Zelensky, ‘a springboard for an attack on other nations of Europe’. For the US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Russia represents nothing less than ‘a challenge to free people everywhere’. Given in the American airbase of Ramstein, Germany, his speech sounded like a script for a historical reenactment of the Cold War.

The war in Ukraine is widely regarded a war against Russian expansionism and thus a war for Europe. The Cold War fantasy of seeing Cossacks watering their horses in the fountains of Saint Peter of Rome has gained a second life. The Cossacks are now motorized, and nothing short of a coalition of the so-called free world will prevent Kilo-class submarines from mooring in Gdansk or columns of T-14s from racing down the Autobahn. If we don’t want to stock up on flour and sugar, we need to enlarge NATO by bringing in Sweden and Finland. And while we are at it, why not fight and defeat Russia on the battlefield, with NATO on the front lines?

Realism is in short supply these days and we are teetering on the edge of a global war. It wouldn’t hurt to remind ourselves more often that since 1945 nuclear arsenals have set absolute limits to worldwide conflicts and to the possibility of substantially modifying the global order. Between nuclear powers, there is a tacit agreement that this order cannot be radically altered. We should not try to find out where the breaking point is.

Despite recurrent announcements that we live in a ‘new reality’, neither the end of the Cold War nor globalization have fundamentally altered this situation. A world interconnected by global markets and productive and communication systems is less flexible than we imagine. With its abundant reserves of raw materials and highly developed sectors in military and space technologies, it is already clear that Russia will continue to be part of the global system despite Western sanctions. At most, these limits have become less visible and more fragile. Nothing would be more dangerous than to mistake a proxy war between nuclear powers for an asymmetric conflict against a ‘terrorist state’ fought in the name of lofty ideals such as ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’.

If realism struggles to be heard, it is also because in wartime everything is grist for the propaganda mill. Democracy, antifascist resistance, and the fight against imperialism are noble goals but they are also easily pliable (not so long ago, they motivated the special military operation to ‘denazify’ Iraq). Since they are now the main narrative for the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion, realism has become de facto assimilated to Kremlin propaganda or worse. Whether it’s John Mearsheimer or Jürgen Habermas, woe betide those who dare to balance idealism against the realities of international politics!

And yet, we need a sober assessment of the objectives pursued by the coalition of countries supporting Ukraine. Is it to kick the Russians out of the country and to take back its eastern provinces? Despite the stunning performance of the Ukrainian military and even without considering Crimea, it is unlikely this can be achieved. Is it to put an end to the atrocious war crimes that Russian troops seem to commit on a daily basis? Only a perverse logic can seek justice in the continuation of a war that enables such crimes in the first place. Or is to deal Russia a decisive defeat on the battlefield, which would leave the country ‘weakened’ if not ‘humiliated’? This goes beyond Kyiv’s most intransigent demands and runs the risk of escalating the conflict and increasing the chances that non-conventional weapons are used. In any case, any talk of ‘victory’ is meaningless.

In this dangerous situation, what should Europe do? There is no doubt that the war in Ukraine represents a turning-point in which the future of Europe is at stake – but not for the reasons usually invoked. There is a distinct possibility that the war might generate a fracture between eastern and western Europe and spell the end of Europe as a political project. It is in the interest of the Europeans – and of the Ukrainians, who will eventually join the Union – to make sure that this project does not become a collateral victim of the conflict. To prevent this, a return to realism is necessary.

First, Europe must recognize that, increasingly, its interests do not coincide with those of Washington. It bears repeating that European unity was achieved outside the strategies that furthered US national interests: for the US, NATO has always been a greater priority than European unity. Yet, no matter how painstaking and tentative it may be, this unity has recently reached important milestones (with the mutualization of debt to face the pandemic, for instance). It should not be sacrificed to the goal of weakening Russia.

The United States can afford to bet on a protracted conflict and to raise the stakes because the consequences of these decisions are born mostly by Europe: the resettlement of millions of refugees, the cost of sanctions that are devastating for European economies, and the need to scramble for new sources of energy. The increase of European defense budgets will further impact welfare systems already weakened by decades of neoliberal policies and the 2008 crisis, which are nevertheless central to the regulation of the social equilibria upon which the political stability of the Union is premised. Finally, should the conflict escalate, Europe would become its primary theatre.

The war in Ukraine offers Washington an opportunity to shore up its declining hegemony by shifting onto European countries some of its costs while also drafting them in its global confrontation with China. In this respect, the continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations is striking. This would have a major impact on Europe’s constitutional order that will diminish the capacity of its historical members to define the political orientation of the Union, in favour of more docile governments.

The political weakening of Europe has become an explicit goal of NATO enlargement, especially among neoconservatives reinvigorated by the prospects of a war with Russia sold as a fight for democracy. To counteract the risk of an alliance made unwieldy by its swelling membership and a tumescent mission that now includes the containment of China, some suggest using NATO enlargement to adjust the balance of power within the Union. Their goal is to promote a coalition that would include ‘the Eastern European and Baltic states, with Poland in the lead…the Scandinavian states, in particular Finland and Norway’ but also ‘the English-speaking external powers, including the United Kingdom and Canada’. The same strategy is behind the recent British proposition of creating a ‘European Commonwealth’, which would amount to establishing a shadow Union more aligned with transatlantic agendas. This approach finds support in the new NATO strategic concept, which promotes the ‘fullest involvement’ of non-EU members in European defense efforts.

Against this backdrop, Sweden and Finland’s bid to join NATO stands out for its political implications rather than its strategic significance. As Adam Tooze has pointed out, their decision to apply was made possible by the weakness of the Russian military, not by the threat it represented. It’s too early to say how the emergence of a Nordic and rather hawkish NATO constituency will shape the conflict but it makes visible new fault lines in Europe.

Can we save Ukraine, and yet save Europe as well? As the physicist Carlo Rovelli recently wrote, ‘the problem of wars is not to win them: it is to put an end to them’. Europe is not a club of winners. It was built upon the rejection of war, the limitation of state sovereignty, and the adoption of federalism as a founding principle. Its main goal was always to organize peace on the continent and it must remain the same today if Europe is to survive.

The support of European governments to Ukraine cannot be the vehicle for strategies that prevent Europe’s further political integration. This does not mean abandoning Kyiv to its own devices or refusing to send military assistance. It means that this assistance must be accompanied by explicit diplomatic conditionalities, and that it must be carefully calibrated so as not to prevent future negotiations or future relations with Russia. Sooner or later, there will be a negotiated solution which will probably approximate the contours of the Minsk agreements.

Europe must also keep a safe distance from a US grand strategy that has not yet found the political formula for accommodating the global decline of American power and its loss of prestige. Going back to the Cold War will not restore American supremacy but it will hurt Europe. It will not restore prestige either: leading a global fight for ‘democracy’ is less convincing when the leading country is one whose Senate is holding hearings about a coup attempt, where women’s rights are trampled by the jurisdictions supposed to protect them, and where the possibility of civil war is a recurrent conversation topic. Unsurprisingly, most of the world does not go along.

It would be a mistake for Europe to throw its lot in with this strategy. Rather, it should bet on the rising cadre of ‘restrainers’ in Washington who advocate a different and less bellicose foreign policy, far from the unctuous homilies about the liberal international order and its military underpinnings. Caught between the crisis of American hegemony and the sly maneuvering of the Kremlin, which seeks to bolster the most anti-European and reactionary political forces, Europe must become a political subject and develop strategic autonomy at the global level. The war in Ukraine has made this an urgent task that can no longer be postponed.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Matrix of War’, NLR 133/4.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Mish-Mash Ecologism

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 18 August 2022

Things seemed to be looking up in late 2020. After yet another catastrophic season of fires, floods and heat, the US elected a president with the most ambitious climate plan of any candidate in history, directly shaped by the Sunrise Movement and the campaign for a Green New Deal. Yet here we are in 2022, and it’s all gone awry. The fossil fuel industry is earning windfall profits, and asset manager titans have reversed their efforts to shift the financial sector away from such enticing returns. Joe Biden’s breakthrough climate legislation, the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), includes major concessions to the fossil fuel industry and has been met with their approval.

The IRA greenlights offshore oil and gas leases in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico for the next ten years and backs the bitterly contested Mountain Valley pipeline. At its core, it aims to ‘derisk’ private capital investment in the green transition, in line with what Daniela Gabor calls the ‘Wall Street Consensus’. Its major policy tool is its tax-credit programme, available for mostly middle-class homeowners looking to buy EVs or new appliances and private companies that develop and manufacture electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. (A direct pay provision might open the door for expanding publicly owned clean energy, but it will have to compete in a largely private market).

Such measures have been hailed as the largest climate investment in US history – but that is not saying much. It is estimated that decarbonizing the US power grid alone will cost $4.5 trillion. Biden’s Act offers a mere $369 billion to be spent over a decade. Most of it will be handed to the private sector, including the fossil-fuel industry itself. The tax credit programme does contain prevailing wage and domestic content standards that aim to reinvigorate domestic industrial policy toward solar, wind and EV manufacturing, but it’s not clear if such standards can be met or how they will be enforced. Optimistic models suggest the IRA will lead to 40% reductions in carbon emissions by 2030, but they also admit that doing nothing at all would lead to reductions of between 24% and 35%. The wager for the planet thus appears to be that state-supported green capital can beat fossil fuels on the free market.

Meanwhile, fossil capital continues to win. In June, it was reported that of the top ten best performing stocks of 2022, three were coal producers and five were linked to the oil and gas industry. If it wasn’t clear already, it should be now: those who profit from the production of fossil fuels will continue to do so unless forced to stop. Market-based solutions such as the IRA neglect basic questions of political and economic power. As such, it is worth pausing to consider what answers eco-socialism can offer in the present conjuncture. Two new books – The Future is Degrowth by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter and Half Earth Socialism by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass – both embrace utopianism as an Archimedean vantage point from which to imagine a reconfiguration of the world, beyond the narrow confines of mainstream climate policy.

Co-authored by an economic historian (Schmelzer), a political ecologist (Vansintjan) and a journalist (Vetter), The Future is Degrowth argues that the global economy must be scaled down to align with its natural limits. The book offers a broad overview of the degrowth movement and its critique of the postwar Keynesian paradigm – along with the colonialist, capitalist and patriarchal ideologies that underpinned it. Though the authors acknowledge ‘overlaps and similarities’ between their framework and the Green New Deal, they argue that the latter is fundamentally flawed. Not only is it hitched to a fantasy of ‘progressive productivism’, it would also require a neo-colonial mining regime for its build-out of renewable-energy infrastructure. Against this trend in climate policymaking, The Future is Degrowth articulates a form of utopianism rooted in the here and now, based on what Engels once called ‘model experiments’. Engaging with the work of Erik Olin Wright, the authors describe a series of ‘nowtopias’ – community-supported agriculture, communing, cooperative economies – which they see as an antidote to climate ‘megaprojects’ (on which they propose a blanket ‘moratoria’).

While defining degrowth in bland terms – ‘a fair reduction of production and consumption that encompasses both human well-being and ecological sustainability’ – Schmelzer et al. also lay out a concrete agenda: the ‘Global North’ must lower consumption while switching to renewable energy and more localized production. How will this ‘fundamental political and economic reorganization of society’ be brought about? The authors admit it may require ‘confrontations with private ownership structures’. Historically, they write, such transformations ‘have always been marked by fierce controversies, public disputes and, up to now, (violent) conflict.’ Yet their main strategy for enacting this green transition is borrowed from the well-worn post-1968 playbook of turning the Leninist Antonio Gramsci into an ecumenical pluralist. They predict that degrowth alternatives will add up, one by one, into a powerful ‘counter-hegemony’ able to simultaneously offer alternative lifestyles, pass ‘non-reformist reforms’ via the state machinery, and build revolutionary ‘dual power’ ready for ruptural crises.

Half Earth Socialism shares some features with the degrowthers: it too focuses on natural limits and calls for lower consumption, renewable energy and deindustrialized agriculture in the Global North. But the books differ in their focus and ambition. While The Future of Degrowth envisions a ‘pluriverse’ of diverse and localized alternatives, letting a thousand degrowth flowers bloom, Half Earth Socialism is much bolder, imagining nothing less than planetary-scale ecological planning. Co-authored by an environmental historian (Vettese) and an environmental engineer (Pendergrass), the book rejects the standard solutions to climate change – bioenergy, carbon capture, geoengineering and nuclear power. Instead, it combines the socio-biologist E.O. Wilson’s proposal to leave half the planet’s habitable surface to wild nature with Pendergrass’s computer models of a world defined by 100% renewable energy.

Whereas The Future of Degrowth avoids ‘indulging in the euphoria of expert-led planning’ and attempts to ‘give space for many different visions for the future’, Half Earth Socialism wants to resuscitate the socialist planning tradition. It draws on the work of Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath and Soviet mathematician Leonid Kantorovich to mount a trenchant critique of Hayekian planning-scepticism. Yet Vettese and Pendergrass explicitly reject Marxism as part of a Hegelian-Promethean thought-system marked by the ‘humanization of nature’ – ‘the process by which humanity overcomes its alienation from nature by instilling the latter with human consciousness through the process of labour.’

By contrast, the authors’ vision is almost as austere as Pol Pot’s. Their core claim is that nature should largely be left to itself, free from human manipulation. Citing Morris’s News from Nowhere, they imagine a world 25 years in the future, run on the principles of cooperation, democracy and ecological restoration. With Pendergrass’s algorithms to guide them, the ecological planners of the 2040s develop a variety of land-use models and let people democratically choose which scenario they prefer – some with more/less energy per capita, some with more/less land left to wilderness. The energy quotas range from 2,000 Watts per person to as low as 750.

One of Half Earth Socialism’s merits is that its authors take the land-use needs of different energy-production systems seriously. But their penchant is for the most land-hungry options – solar and wind power – even as they accept that the intermittency of these energy sources is likely to lead to regular blackouts. Their models also include land-intensive biofuels which, in one scenario, are estimated to cover 26% of land surface. And their plan to rewild half the Earth’s habitable surface would require perhaps the most preposterous proposal of all: the imposition of universal mandatory veganism (otherwise the numbers would never add up). They also reject the energy source that could free up space for biodiversity by using less land than all the others: nuclear power.

Vettese and Pendergrass invite us to imagine that ‘the Half-Earth socialist revolution happens tomorrow’, but they do not explain how this might occur. Though they gesture towards a pro-Half Earth political coalition, its members are vaguely delineated: ‘there should be animal-rights activists and organic farmers there, as well as socialists, feminists and scientists’ – constituencies that make up miniscule fractions of the eight billion-strong population they hope to corral. As for broader layers such as social classes, Half Earth Socialism is largely silent. Like The Future is Degrowth and much of the left for the last half-century, the authors assume that a ‘movements of movements’ – uniting various disparate and subaltern groups – will eventually gain enough power to confront capital.

Is there a Marxist alternative to this 21st-century utopianism? In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Engels saw the emergence of 19th-century utopian socialism, signalled by the work of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, as a reaction to the defeated aspirations of the French Revolution. By the early 1800s it was already clear that it had failed to deliver the kingdom of reason and justice promised by the Enlightenment; instead, the triumph of the big bourgeoisie had brought corruption, war and the poverty produced by super-abundance. Industrial production was barely developed, and the proletariat, wrote Engels, appeared to these radicals as ‘incapable of independent political action’ – ‘an oppressed, suffering order’ which required help from outside. In these conditions, the utopian socialists attempted in idealist fashion to evolve the solution to social problems ‘out of the human brain’:

Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

Two hundred years on – and in the wake of the defeated aspirations of the 20th-century revolutions – utopian eco-socialists appear to be repeating the same pattern. A new ecological order will be conjured up out of their brains, trialed in micro-experiments – as in The Future of Degrowth – or, as in Half Earth Socialism, ‘imposed from without by propaganda’. What is missing here is any analysis of the concrete class relationships that both inhibit such transformations or might bring them about. For Engels, winning real socialism hinges on class struggle: ‘Socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes – the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.’

As idealists, 19th-century socialists saw their mental adumbrations as the expression of an absolute truth – although, as Engels pointed out, the absolute truth differed for the founder of each school; each was mutually exclusive and hence the sects were in permanent conflict with each other. As a result, nothing could come of the early-socialist movement but ‘a kind of eclectic, average socialism’ – ‘a mish-mash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion’:

A mish-mash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sects, as excite a minimum of opposition; a mish-mash which is the more easily brewed the more definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate, like rounded pebbles in a brook.

Hard not to think of Engels when one reads The Future of Degrowth’s evocation of the ‘pluriverse’ or ‘mosaic of alternatives’ which will supposedly overwhelm the tightly defended capitalist interests of the ‘Global North’. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific he insisted, on the contrary, that socialism could only emerge from the historical economic conditions of the age. This did not involve any condemnation of utopianism as such. Rather than crow over the failure of Owenite experiments, Engels wrote, ‘we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that everywhere break out through their phantastic covering.’

In present conditions, as Mike Davis has put it, ‘utopian thinking can clarify the minimal conditions for the preservation of human solidarity in face of convergent planetary crises.’ But the initial problem remains: those who benefit from their massive fixed investments in fossil fuels seem hell-bent on sustaining them. Does this utopianism yield a strategy to confront the political and economic power of the planet’s opponents – in the first instance, key sectors of the American ruling class?

As Ellen Meiksins Wood wrote nearly four decades ago, the working class has done more to challenge power than any other social force. Where does it stand today? Engels argued that ‘scientific’ – that is, self-critical, rigorously conceptualized and empirically tested – socialism must be rooted in an investigation of historical development: ‘the process of evolution of humanity.’ He himself lived through the epochal ruptures of mass proletarianization and the industrial revolution. The 20th century saw those processes accelerate, in what Farshad Araghi calls ‘global depeasantization’ – a process continuing in China today, in what is probably the largest rural-urban migration in human history. According to David Harvey, global capitalism has added something like two billion people to the global proletariat over the past twenty years. While Marx and Engels thought this mass proletarianization would swell industrial factories, the result has more been the rise of a vast ‘informal proletariat’ deemed superfluous to the needs of capital; a surplus humanity, housed in a Planet of Slums.

Planetary proletarianization should be a central issue for eco-socialism: capitalism produces an urbanized majority with no direct relation to the ecological conditions of existence. The most pressing question of our times is how we can solve ecological problems while restructuring production to provision a society largely torn from the land. If that provisioning requires large-scale democratic planning – as Vettese and Pendergrass rightly assert it does – the ‘demos’ must include the global proletariat. But the eco-socialist penchant for a retreat to small-scale agriculture – Half Earth Socialism’s fictionalized utopia concedes agriculture will require ‘a lot more labor, for sure’ – implies hunger, if not starvation, for the world’s mega-slums (and, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrates, urban gardens are no substitute for industrial scale grain production).

The question of the actually existing productive forces poses a further set of problems. Eric Hobsbawm called the Industrial Revolution ‘probably the most important event in world history’. Machines and fossil fuels replaced a good deal of human and animal muscle-power – as he put it, ‘the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies.’ In the 21st century it is easy to take this transformation for granted, while blaming it for our present ecological predicament. The Future is Degrowth offers a wholesale critique of ‘industrialism’ and proclaims, ‘the goal of degrowth society must be to overcome industrialism and towards a post-industrial society.’ Yet it was only with the development of modern productive forces that it became possible to envisage a standard of life that could allow the free development of all. Solving climate change undoubtedly requires massive new industrial infrastructure in energy, public transit and housing. We do need to develop the productive forces – but ecologically.

A socialist eco-modernism should make the transformation of production and the productive forces the fulcrum of any new relation to the planet. One of the few thinkers to have explored this problem is Jonathan Hughes, who speculated about ‘ecologically benign forms of technological development.’ Clearly, the productive forces must develop beyond their historically entrenched reliance upon fossil fuel. Yet, the private ownership of energy prevents this from taking place – a contradiction realized through the wider crisis of planetary climate change, from rising seas in Bangladesh to drought in the horn of Africa. All known technological pathways to halting environmental breakdown are ‘fettered’ by the social relations of production: renewable energy might be getting cheaper, but that does not necessarily translate to profits. Other solutions like nuclear fission, green hydrogen, scaled geothermal and carbon removal all present the same key obstacle: they cost too much, and fossil fuels are more profitable. In sum, solving climate change requires new social relations of production that would develop the productive forces toward clean production.

While the utopian eco-socialists would likely scoff at these as ‘techno-fixes’ – technological solutions which don’t challenge capitalist social relations – an eco-modern socialist perspective would insist these technologies will not be developed unless we challenge capitalist social relations. Beyond climate, most other aspects of the ecological crisis hinge on developing new forms of production: greening nitrogen production and consumption and finding less land-intensive production to preserve biodiversity (e.g. lab meat). All of these ecological forms of production struggle to compete with dirtier and more profitable alternatives under capitalism.

In this context, the climate left does not lack for utopian imaginaries, which can make for productive (and enjoyable) exercises. But such utopianism can too easily avoid the material realities of the world as it exists. We need a climate politics that aims outward, beyond the already converted – towards the exploited and atomized working class.

Read on: Kenta Tsuda, ‘Naïve Questions on Degrowth’, NLR 128.

Tags Environment

Uncategorised

Odourless Utopia

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 17 August 2022

In Europe, the war bulletins come not just from Ukraine, but also from the climate front. The French government has cracked down on water use, banning watering lawns and washing cars in 62 of 101 departments, as more than 100 municipalities no longer have potable water. Nuclear power plants on the Rhône and Garonne have had to reduce production due to insufficient water in the rivers. In Italy, the government has declared a state of emergency in 5 of 20 regions, while Second World War bombs are discovered on the beds of its largest river, the dried-up Po. In Germany, the Rhine is so low that the barges plying its 1,000 kilometres from Austria to Holland have had to reduce their cargo from 3,000 to 900 tons so as not to run aground, and the river is expected to soon become impassable to freight traffic. In England, for the first time on record, the source of the Thames has dried up and the river is beginning to flow more than 5 miles further downstream. In Spain, restrictions on water consumption have been imposed in Catalonia, Galicia and Andalusia.

These are all warning signs. In a few centuries, the idea of water as an abundant resource and universal right may be unimaginable. It is easy to forget that even in the so-called advanced world, domestic running water – for toilets, cooking, personal hygiene, washing clothes and dishes – is a very recent and ephemeral phenomenon, dating back less than a century. In 1940, 45% of households in the US lacked complete plumbing; in 1950, only 44% of homes in Italy had either indoor or outdoor plumbing. In 1954, only 58% of houses in France had running water and only 26% had a toilet. In 1967, 25% of homes in England and Wales still lacked a bath or shower, an indoor toilet, a sink and hot- and cold-water taps. In Romania, 36% of the population lacked a flushing toilet solely for their household in 2012 (down to 22% in 2021).

The availability of domestic running water varies depending on one’s individual wealth and on the affluence of one’s nation. While in Western Europe and the US, the number of households with toilets equipped with running water currently exceeds 99%, in a number of African countries the percentage is between 1 and 4: Ethiopia 1.76%; Burkina Faso 1.87%; Burundi 2.32%; Uganda 2.37%; Chad 2.50%; Niger 2.76%; Madagascar 2.83%; Mozambique 2.87%; Mali 3.71%; Rwanda 3.99%; Congo 4.17%. In these countries the toilet is a marker of class status; in Ethiopia less than one in 56 households has one. The data also contains some surprises: there are more toilets in Bangladesh (35%) than in Moldova (29%), India is in roughly the same situation as South Africa (44% versus 45%) and just ahead of Azerbaijan (40%). While in Baghdad the number of houses with flushing toilets is 94.8%, in central Kabul it is 26%, and in Afghanistan as a whole it is 13.7%.

It is possible to trace the social and geopolitical history of running water. Its widespread accessibility was the the result of two primary factors: 1) the industrial revolution that provided the pipelines and purification plants needed for this colossal planetary enterprise; and 2) urbanization, for it is fairly obvious that bringing running water to a series of isolated cottages is far more expensive and complex than to centres of high population density. Urbanization was stimulated by the industrial revolution, and then in turn by the availability of running water for newly-arrived citizens. This may well be one of the most significant, and most peculiar, features of contemporary civilization. For what it created was the utopia of an odourless society. This would not have been possible without the spread of running water, but it was accelerated by the growing desire to deodorize the human habitat. In the twenty-first-century, we no longer perceive smells as our ancestors did.

In The Foul and the Fragrant (1988), Alain Corbin asks, ‘What is the meaning of this more refined alertness to smell? What produced the mysterious and alarming strategy of deodorization of everything that offends our muted olfactory environment? By what stages has this far-reaching anthropological transformation taken place?’ An incisive answer is offered by Ivan Illich in his brilliant little book, H₂O and the Waters of Forgetfulness (1986), which reminds us that it was not until the last years of Louis XIV’s reign that a decree was passed for the weekly removal of faeces from the corridors of Versailles. It was in this era that the project to deodorize began. ‘The sense of smell’, Illich writes,

was the only means for identifying the city’s exhalations. The osmologists (students of odors) collected ‘airs’ and smelly materials in tightly corked bottles and compared notes by opening them at a later time as though they were dealing with vintage wines. A dozen treatises focusing on the odours of Paris were published during the second part of the eighteenth century…By the end of the century, this avant-garde of deodorant ideologues is causing social attitudes toward body wastes to change…Toward the middle of the century shitting, for the first time in history, became a sex specific activity…At the end of the century, Marie Antoinette has a door installed to make her defecation private. The act turns into an intimate function…Not only excrement but the body itself, it was discovered, emanates bad odours. Underwear that up to this time had served to keep one warm or attractive began to be connected with the elimination of sweat. The upper classes began to use and wash it more frequently, and in France the bidet came into fashion. Bed sheets and their regular laundering acquired a new importance, and to sleep in one’s own bed between sheets was charged with moral and medical significance…On November 15, 1793, the revolutionary convention solemnly declared each man’s right to his own bed as part of the rights of man.

Being odourless thus became a symbol of status:

smelling now began to become class-specific. Medical students observed that the poor are those who smell with particular intensity and, in addition, do not notice their own smell. Colonial officers and missionaries brought home reports that savages smelled differently from Europeans. Samojeds, Negroes and Hottentots could each be recognized by their racial smell, which changes neither with diet nor with more careful washing.

Naturally this myth was self-fulfilling, to the extent that colonized peoples were denied running water, soap and flushing toilets. Subaltern classes also began to smell and arouse revulsion. ‘Slowly’, Illich continues,

education has shaped the new sense for cleanly individualism. The new individual feels compelled to live in a space without qualities and expects everyone else to stay within the bounds of his or her own skin. He learns to be ashamed when his aura is noticed. He is embarrassed at the thought that his origin could be smelled out, and he is sickened by others if they smell. Shame at being smelled, embarrassment at coming from a smelly environment, and a new proneness to be offended by smell – all taken together place the citizen in a new kind of space.

Realizing this ideal of olfactory neutrality required increasing amounts of water. Before the Second World War, bathing once a week was considered hygienist paranoia. Only with the mass production of household washing machines did cleaning clothes become more frequent. I remember the London of the 1970s: on the Underground, the City clerks could be recognized by their detachable cuffs and collars; the former were changed regularly but the latter were grayish from having been worn for a week straight. The families that hosted us would ask us to insert coins into a special hot water meter: breakfast was included in the price, showering was not.

Now, though, the utopia of an odourless humanity has conquered much of the planet. Yet, as with many aspects of modernity, the moment we acquired the means to achieve a goal, its enabling condition (namely the abundant, unlimited availability of water) was lost. An ever more populous and rapidly warming planet will likely return to a state in which water is scarce and contested. This future may however be marked by a significant cultural difference. Whereas in the past, water was scarce for a humanity able to live happily with odours, now it will be scarce for one that considers their own odours insufferable, not to mention those of others.

I remember being struck by the extraordinary success of the Canadian TV drama H₂O (2004), whose trailer announced:

A dead Prime Minister. A country in turmoil. A battle for Canada’s most precious resource – water. On the eve of testy discussions with the US Secretary of State, Prime Minister Matthew McLaughlin is killed in an accident. His son, Tom McLaughlin, returns to Canada to attend his fathers’ funeral where he delivers a eulogy that stirs the public propelling him into politics and ultimately the Prime Minister’s office. The investigation into his father’s death, however, reveals that it was no accident, raising the possibility of assassination. The trail of evidence triggers a series of events that uncovers a shocking plot to sell one of Canada’s most valuable resources – water.

As James Salzman noted in his book Drinking Water (2012), this omitted ‘the most exciting part, where American troops invade Canada to plunder their water supply’. A US–Canadian war over water! Until now, such conflicts seemed to be the preserve of semi-desert areas in the Middle East (think of Eyal Weizman’s writing on the Israelis’ use of water to surveil and punish Palestinians), or torrid Africa (as in the latent conflict between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam built on the Blue Nile). But with the possible desertification of the central European plain, war for water will become a real prospect, even in regions once famous for high rainfall and water infrastructure. We citizens of ‘rich countries’, ‘industrialized nations’, ‘more developed powers’, will fight to smell less.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read more: Nancy Fraser, ‘Climates of Capital’, NLR 127.

Tags Society

Uncategorised

A New Sorpasso?

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 28 July 2022

Over the last decade, many left-wing activists have been heartened by events in Spain. While progressive projects ran aground elsewhere in Europe, Podemos rapidly rose to prominence before entering government as a junior coalition partner in early 2020. Yet, since then, its experience of state power has served as a cautionary tale. Podemos’s initial radicalism has been stifled by the strictures of government and the compromises of coalition politics. It has failed to pass significant political reforms or fix the structural problems in the Spanish economy. As a result, its base is atomized and its popularity is trending downwards. If the left is to remain relevant, it must learn how to revive its insurgent energy without forfeiting its influence.

How did Podemos enter an electoral sphere dominated by two longstanding centrist parties, the Popular Party (PP) and the Socialist Party (PSOE)? Thanks to the so-called ‘economic miracle’ that started in the 1980s, Spain became one of the best-performing countries in the European Union, experiencing sustained growth rates and an unprecedented real estate boom. House prices rose by 8% per year from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, while neoliberal labour and welfare reforms were applauded by the ‘modernizers’ in Brussels. Yet, when the 2008 financial crisis hit, it became clear that the Iberian Tiger had feet of clay. Its economic model – which was heavily reliant on tourism, construction and cheap, casualised labour – proved unsustainable once the large financial institutions that fuelled the construction bubble found themselves on the brink of collapse. The government bailed them out at a hefty price, and the Spanish people were forced to foot the bill.

The PP and PSOE were held equally responsible for this disaster. In 2011, the Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero rolled out a series of brutal austerity programmes that slashed public spending and caused the unemployment rate to rise above 25%. In doing so, he ignited a popular uprising. More than three million people staged demonstrations and occupied public squares across the country, in what became known as the Indignados Movement. Protests camps were set up – foreshadowing Occupy Wall Street – and activists held sit-ins at major banks. Polls showed that 70% of the public supported their demands for more democratic participation, employment, housing, public services and an end to the corruption of the political class.

Podemos was founded in 2014 to give this nascent struggle institutional form. It claimed to represent a new left, capable of channelling the anti-austerity movement while avoiding the minoritarian politics of older radical parties like Izquierda Unida. Its Laclauian approach involved speaking to broad social sectors – in the style of the Latin American Pink Tide – rather than the usual band of true believers. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias – a young political science professor from Complutense University who had already demonstrated his charisma as a regular guest on TV talk shows – came to embody this strategy. Instead of opposing ‘the right’, he focussed his attacks on la casta: a term borrowed from the Italian Five Star Movement, which presented the PP and PSOE as part of the same elite set.

From the outset, Podemos expressed the democratizing spirit of the Indignados Movement. Its first manifesto sought to frame diverse policy issues – economic, environmental, social, international – in terms of democratic rights. Proposals included the establishment of regular referendums, popular law initiatives and recall votes, as well as radical measures to combat corruption and increase transparency. Its economic platform, designed with the help of Thomas Piketty, had a strong eco-socialist current, setting out a series of green transition initiatives that have since gained mainstream acceptance. The party pledged to restore public investment and outlined a ‘new model of production’, which would combine green reindustrialization with investment in technology and the ‘knowledge economy’.

Unlike Italy’s Five Star Movement and La France Insoumise, Podemos never entertained the prospect of exiting the euro, let alone the European Union. But it promised to break with Troika fiscal policy and restructure the country’s public debt, calling for a rescate ciudadano (citizens’ bailout) to repair the social devastation wrought by elites. It also advocated a guaranteed income, between €600 and €1,300 per month for poorer households, to be funded by new taxes on high incomes and financial entities. When the media attacked Podemos as communist or ‘Bolivarian’, Iglesias pointed out that, just a few decades ago, its manifesto would have been seen as a traditional social-democratic programme.

Iglesias’s pitch was seductive. Just a few months after Podemos was established, it won 8% in the European elections, before picking up 20% in the national ballot the next year. Its ambition was to enact a sorpasso in which it would leapfrog the PSOE and become the official opposition, while the centre-left Pasokified itself and faded into obscurity. As part of this strategy, Iglesias decided to ally with other left parties including Izquierda Unida and rebrand as Unidas Podemos before the snap elections of 2016. This move was intended to consolidate the left’s gains by establishing a unified electoral bloc. Yet its effect was to sow division among the leadership. The mastermind of Podemos’s populist strategy, Iñigo Errejón, saw it as a betrayal of the party’s original purpose: to transcend the radical left tradition and court disenfranchised voters on the basis of their shared interests. By joining with Izquierda Unida, he claimed, Podemos would lose the political novelty on which its entire appeal was based. From this point on, Podemos was increasingly beset by internecine conflict. Having made no headway in the 2016 election – which returned a PP minority government under Mariano Rajoy – it entered a period of secular decline.

Although Podemos continued to act as a vocal opposition to the PP, it now occupied a different place in the Spanish public sphere. Having initially captured the sense of solidarity generated by the Indignados, it had since succumbed to a familiar sectarianism. Several bruising local election defeats indicated its waning organizational capacity and the weakness of its cadres. In the Madrilenian regional elections of 2019, Errejón dropped the Podemos brand and ran as part of an alliance with other small parties and civil society groups, mimicking the mayoral campaigns of Ada Colau in Barcelona and Manuela Carmena in Madrid. This precipitated a final rupture with Iglesias, in which Errejón jumped ship to found his own political party, Más País. Other leading figures such as Carolina Bescansa and Luis Alegre departed soon thereafter, citing a lack of internal pluralism.

By this time, however, the PP had been forced out of office amid multiple corruption scandals, and the PSOE, led by Pedro Sánchez, was struggling to keep its minority administration afloat. When the April 2019 snap elections returned an inconclusive result, Sánchez was forced to enter coalition talks with Unidas Podemos. These initially went nowhere, as the Socialists refused to make meaningful policy concessions. But in a follow-up election that November, both Unidas Podemos and the PSOE were punished by voters: the former reached a nadir of 12.8%, while the latter declined to 28%. Rattled by this poor showing, plus the strong performance of the Francoist Vox party, Sánchez changed tack and struck a deal with Iglesias, granting Unidas Podemos the powerful Ministry of Labour as well as greater policy influence. Since then, the left has continued to see its electoral support ebb away; yet it has also had a rare opportunity to put some of its ideas into practice.

Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, a representative for the Spanish Communist Party who ran as part of the Unidas Podemos coalition, has achieved a series of impressive policy victories during her two-year tenure. In the first weeks of the pandemic, she introduced the Expediente de Regulación Temporal de Empleo (ERTE) – the functional equivalent of the UK’s furlough scheme – which covered 3.6 million workers and was praised for its faultless rollout. She subsequently introduced a historic labour reform to limit the use of temporary contracts, which Iglesias described ‘the most important law in the legislature’. The bill, which has so far tripled the number of permanent contracts in the Spanish job market, passed with a majority of just one, after a Popular Party MP accidentally voted in favour by pressing the wrong button. Diaz has also increased the minimum wage by 33.5% and issued a €200 cheque to poor households to help with the cost-of-living crisis. Podemos’s guaranteed minimum income programme has now been officially adopted, with poorer households eligible for an ‘Ingreso Minimo Vital’ ranging from €560 to €1,400 per month.

But these successes have been offset by many disappointments. Podemos has seen its policies consistently watered-down or obstructed by a Socialist Party whose economic agenda remains unabashedly pro-market. The roll-out of the Ingreso Minimo Vital, overseen by the Socialist Minister for Inclusion and Social Security, has been incompetent at best. A combination of underfunding, bureaucratic complexity and a lack of personnel to process the applications means that the benefit reaches only half the households it is supposed to cover. Meanwhile, the PSOE Economy Minister Nadia Calviño – a deficit hawk with close ties to the financial sector – has stonewalled Podemos’s fiscal policies and refused to countenance new wealth taxes. The Socialists have fought tooth-and-nail against the introduction of rent controls and dragged their feet over a windfall tax on energy companies. Such recalcitrance speaks to their broader refusal to reform Spain’s broken economic model, which remains over-reliant on construction and an unproductive service sector. There has been little progress in addressing high unemployment rates – close to 14% – or expanding the undersized manufacturing industry, since fixing such problems would require a level of interventionism which the PSOE is unwilling to contemplate.

Podemos has therefore been forced to confront both the obstinate realities of institutional politics and the inertial tendencies of Spain’s rentier capitalist economy. This hasn’t helped its poll ratings, which hover at around 10%. Many erstwhile supporters are frustrated with the party’s ineffectual performance and feel that it has been duped by its coalition partners. Meanwhile, its failure to establish workable democratic structures continues to damage its credibility. The fact that Podemos cannot properly manage factional conflict means that internal struggles frequently break out into the open, damaging the organization as a whole. In the run up to the recent Andalusian elections, the Anticapitalistas – a Trotskyist outfit which played an important role in Podemos’s formation – decided to break away, claiming that the party had strayed too far from its original principles. When the vote was held, the left suffered heavy losses.

A further blow for Podemos came with its defeat in the Madrid regional elections of May 2021. Iglesias had stepped down as Deputy Prime Minister in order to lead the campaign, which was meant to rally grassroots support and secure a local foothold for the party. But his decision to focus his attacks on Vox, and present Podemos as a bulwark against the far right, failed to cut through. After winning a paltry 7% of the vote, he abandoned institutional politics altogether and returned to media punditry. In Iglesias’s absence, Yolanda Diaz may become the most important player in the party’s regeneration. She is currently trying to forge a new electoral platform called Sumar (meaning ‘to sum up’ or ‘unite’). As the name suggests, its mission is to overcome both the ideological and geographical divisions that have constrained the Spanish left. It has already secured the support of Izquierda Unida, Más Pais and Podemos, as well as regional formations such as the Valencian Compromis and the Catalunyan Comuns. Bringing these forces into a single political entity will be crucial to winning back the million or so voters that Podemos has lost since 2016, while also gaining the support of subaltern classes who typically shun the ballot box. If this ambitious strategy succeeds, it could open the door to a sorpasso of the kind that Podemos unsuccessfully attempted several years ago – relegating the PSOE to the status of junior partner in a left-led government.

Diaz’s profile may help her to carry out this momentous task. According to opinion polls, her record as Labour Minister has made her the most popular politician in Spain. Although her policies are radical, she has an instinct for pragmatic dealmaking and a softer rhetorical style than Iglesias. To her supporters, this makes her the perfect figure to reconcile Podemos’s institutionalization with its foundational idealism. But her approach also has its detractors in the party leadership, who believe they will continue to haemorrhage support if they retain their agreement with the PSOE after the next election. Further cracks have emerged over the Ukraine conflict, with Diaz proving more reluctant to criticize NATO than many of her comrades. Such cleavages reflect the basic fact that winning over disenchanted voters and unifying the left are two very different aims. Diaz wants to do both; but by moderating her position to appeal to wavering parts of the electorate she may end up alienating vital sections of her progressive bloc. It remains to be seen how she will attempt to solve this electoral puzzle. Recapturing the spirit of the Indignados will be no small feat when confronted with a recalcitrant PSOE, a demoralized electorate and a rising far right. Yet the Spanish left has already demonstrated a unique ability to defy the odds – and Diaz may do so again.

Read on: Pablo Iglesias, ‘Understanding Podemos’, NLR 93.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Tory Fractures

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 26 July 2022

On 20 July, when the field of UK prime ministerial contenders was whittled down to Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, an unnamed Conservative MP briefed that party members would now be forced to decide between a ‘backstabber’ and a ‘moron’. This was a fair assessment. Whoever wins the leadership election will be no more fit for office than their toppled predecessor. But its outcome will nevertheless have major implications for Britain’s macroeconomic direction. If the candidates’ pledges are to be believed, fiscal policy will either stay on its current course, as set by the backstabber during his time at the Treasury, or it will diverge sharply, as the moron rips up the status quo. The new premier will not only decide the fate of the ambiguous political formation known as Johnsonism; they may also get to define the contemporary meaning of another, equally contested legacy: Thatcherism.

Sunak and Truss are each posing as the legitimate heir to these traditions, yet they have adopted markedly different perspectives on them. The former Chancellor describes his outlook as a ‘common-sense Thatcherism’ that prioritises whipping inflation over cutting taxes. His doxa is based on fiscal responsibility and reluctance to increase the public debt. He condemns borrowing as ‘immoral’ short-termism and insists that the tax burden can only be lightened when such reductions are within our means. The costly measures he implemented during the pandemic – such as the furlough scheme and Universal Credit uplift – were, he says, necessary to boost demand and avoid economic collapse: pragmatic adjustments to save the neoliberal model, not a repudiation of it. As the Independent’s Sean O’Grady writes, ‘Thatcher was a balanced-budget, sound money right-winger, as Rishi Sunak is now.’

A traditional Thatcherite programme might seem to conflict with the populist-interventionist tendencies of the Johnson government. But in fact, Sunak’s balanced budgets involve retaining the flagship reforms of the last three years: raising National Insurance contributions, increasing corporation tax, and keeping public service spending on its upward trajectory (though without restoring any departmental budget to its pre-2010 level). Sunak has even paid lip-service to the ‘levelling up’ plan for regional realignment, framing himself as the saviour of England’s ‘northern powerhouses’. He claims that in these turbulent times, common-sense Thatcherism means continuity Johnsonism. Sensible economic management – of the kind supposedly required to confront the cost-of-living crisis – relies on a tactical expansion of the state.

For Truss, however, Thatcherism means something more fundamental: an insurgent libertarian creed willing to drastically depart from economic orthodoxy. She plans to make annual tax cuts worth more than £30 billion, ‘putting money back into people’s pockets’ rather than swelling the state coffers. Under her administration, green levies would be scrapped while defence spending would skyrocket. Such a spree would need to be funded by higher borrowing, which Truss may enable by changing fiscal rules. Although she has officially rejected a return to austerity, she has also promised a raft of ‘public service reforms’ and an overarching Spending Review – both of which will likely lead to cutbacks. Extant regulations would meanwhile be repealed as part of a ‘red tape bonfire’.

Truss justifies these potentially inflationary policies by appealing to the essence of Thatcherism – viewed as a disruptive individualist philosophy rather than a conservative approach to budgeting. Whereas Sunak is seen as a joyless ‘bean-counter’, Truss has cast herself as a ‘new Iron Lady’ capable of revitalising the party and reversing its downward polling trend. Yet, far from marking a break with Boris, her campaign purports to be more Johnsonist than Johnson himself. Of all the Tory candidates, Truss has been the least willing to criticise the PM, declaring that he should have stayed on in the job and refusing to question his personal integrity. Johnson’s loyalists have lined up to endorse her, and his final remarks at the dispatch box – ‘cut taxes and deregulate wherever you can’ – seemed to resonate with her agenda. Although the candidate pledges to upend the economic consensus, she is clear that this consensus came from Number 11, not from Number 10. Truss’s wing of the party views the big-state policies of the Johnson era as the Chancellor’s impositions, which the PM grudgingly accepted to mitigate the Covid meltdown. They believe that Prime Minister Truss will realise the free-market reforms which Johnson always wanted. By returning to authentic Thatcherism, she will rescue the rebellious spirit of Johnsonism from the prison-house of the Treasury.

What we have, then, are competing attempts to define – and reconcile – the legacies of the Tory Party’s two most successful leaders in living memory. The stakes of the struggle are high, as one can glean from the gloves-off atmosphere of the campaign. Sunak labels Truss a ‘socialist’ for her uncosted ‘something-for-nothing’ policies. Jacob Rees-Mogg, in turn, excoriates Sunak as the ‘much-lamented socialist Chancellor’ for his soaring taxes and pandemic hand-outs. These recriminations are more than just the typical mudslinging of Tory husting events. They are a symptom of the present economic conjuncture, in which it is impossible to act as both a competent bean-counter and a radical free-marketeer. Amid the spiralling costs of the pandemic, the care crisis and the knock-on effects of the Ukraine conflict, a ‘sound money’ approach requires constant intervention, while shrinking the state entails piling up debt and flouting restrictions on expenditure. In the post-Covid landscape, these two features of Conservative ideology – fiscal discipline and laissez-faire – can no longer be synthesized. The different factions of the party must decide which is more important and denounce the other as a leftist deviation.

This rupture within the Tories also helps to explain the peculiar tone of Sunak’s leadership bid. During the last decade, opposition to spending cuts was dismissed as infantile and unrealistic. Theresa May famously told voters there was ‘no magic money tree’ that could be used to maintain public sector wages. Now, Sunak has mobilised the same themes – railing against ‘comforting fairy-tales’ and ‘fantasy economics’ – to attack a programme which, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is more austerian than his own. The discourse of capitalist realism, of making the ‘tough choices’ that the market dictates, has been harnessed to a post-austerity politics based on rising investment and selective tax hikes. Against this new norm, Truss has managed to imbue her low-tax policies with a utopian energy. Whereas Sunak claims there is no alternative to measures like the National Insurance rise, Truss offers a forward-looking vision that may, in practice, involve recalibrating the lean Conservatism of the 2010s.

If there’s one lesson to be learned from the upheavals of recent British history – Brexit, Corbyn, Johnson – it is that realism has lost its grip on the popular imagination. In each instance, an optimistic force triumphed over ‘project fear’ and widened the sphere of political possibility. If this pattern holds, Sunak’s pitch to the membership will fail to cut through. His attempt to paint Trussonomics as a boosterish illusion may ultimately heighten its appeal. But, if Truss wins, the upshot of this anti-realist sentiment could be austerity 2.0, dressed up as a dynamic form of right-wing populism and accompanied by culture-war crackdowns on migrants and trans people. Should she decide to fund her policies by slashing spending, Britain may soon regress to its recent past, disguised as its non-existent future.

Read on: Tom Hazeldine, ‘Transformatrix’, NLR 131.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Sinking Germany

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 19 July 2022

Whoever the victor may be, it’s become increasingly unclear what winning the war in Ukraine would mean. The greater the destruction, the more intractable the conflict appears. With a rising death toll and escalating sanctions, the objectives of the belligerents seem ever more inscrutable. What would Russia gain from annexing an obliterated corner of Ukraine, compared to everything it would lose? Why would Ukraine run itself into the ground to retain a region which does not want to be detached from Russia? And to what ends would NATO erect a new Iron Curtain, thereby consolidating a Russian-Chinese bloc endowed with both raw materials and advanced technology?

Granted, for some time now the United States and its allies have fought wars in which victory is impossible to envision. What would winning have looked like in Iraq? If it involved turning the country into a Muslim replica of Israel, this was never a realistic outcome. In the end, it was practically handed over to the Iranian sphere of influence, while Afghanistan was abandoned to Pakistan and China. (All this without even mentioning the Syrian civil war.) Yet, if it is difficult to identify a potential victor in Ukraine, it is easier to pinpoint the potential losers. As we shall see, one of these will likely be what the Australian economist Joseph Halevi has termed the ‘German bloc’: a set of economically interconnected nations stretching from Switzerland to Hungary.

Of course, more or less all of us are losing out in the present conjuncture. When the invasion began, everyone was primarily concerned with the supply of gas and petrol. It was only later brought to public attention that Russia and Ukraine account for 14% of the world’s grain production and up to 29% of global grain exports. It was subsequently revealed that they provide 17% of corn exports and 14% of barley. As the treasure hunt continued, analysts realized that 76% of the world’s sunflower products come from the two states. Russia also dominates the fertiliser market, with a global share of more than 50%, which explains why the blockade has caused agricultural problems as far afield as Brazil.

More surprises were in store. The war hit not just the oil and gas sectors, but nickel too. Russia – home to Nornickel, a giant in the sector – produced 195,000 tonnes of nickel in 2021, or 7.2% of global production. The invasion, combined with increased demand for nickel used in power lines and electric vehicles, caused prices to skyrocket. Meanwhile the global superconductor industry, which produces calculators and computer chips, was heavily affected. The Russian steel industry sends neon gas to Ukraine, where it is purified for use in lithographic processes such as the inscription of microcircuits on silicon plates. The most important centres of production are Odessa and Mariupol (hence the relentless struggle over these areas). Ukraine provides 70% of the world’s neon gas, as well as 40% of its krypton and 30% of its xenon; its major clients include South Korea, China, the US and Germany. The supply of several other ‘critical’ metals is also endangered, as the Columbia Center for Global Energy Policy reported in April:

Other metals of interest in the Russia crisis include titanium, scandium, and palladium. Titanium is strategic for aerospace and defense applications and Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of titanium sponge, the specific application that is critical for titanium metal. Used extensively in aerospace and defense sectors, Scandium is another key metal for which Russia is one of the three largest global producers. Palladium is one of the most notable critical minerals affected by the Ukraine crisis because it is a critical input to the automotive and semiconductor industries and Russia supplies nearly 37 percent of global production. Russian palladium illustrates one of the key geopolitical features of critical minerals: alternative supplies are often located in equally challenging markets. The second largest palladium producer is South Africa, where the mining sector has been wracked by strikes for the past decade.

Each day, then, we discover new difficulties in decoupling Russia from the global economy. This is partly because sanctions have proven less effective than predicted, despite the tenacious efforts of the US and Europe. To date, there have been at least six sets of successive sanctions, each more drastic than the last: the removal of Russia from the international financial system operated by SWIFT; the freezing of the Russian Central Bank’s foreign reserves, which amounted to around $630 billion; the freezing of $600 million deposited by Russia in American banks, and the refusal to accept these funds as payment for Russia’s foreign debt; the exclusion of Russia’s most important banks from the City of London; and the restriction of Russian deposits in British banks.

Western airports (and airspace) are now closed to Russian planes, and the Russian merchant navy is forbidden from docking in Western ports (Japan and Australia included). Technological exports to Russia are banned, as are many imports. The European Union has sanctions in place against 98 entities and 1,158 individuals, including President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov; oligarchs with ties to the Kremlin like Roman Abramovich; 351 representatives to the Duma; members of Russia’s National Security Council; high-ranking officers of the armed forces; entrepreneurs and financiers; propagandists and actors. All Western banks and a majority of Western companies have closed shop in Russia and sold their branches. Russia has responded by banning the export of more than 200 products, demanding ruble payments for oil and gas exports, and blocking provisions to Poland, Bulgaria and Finland when they refused to accept this stipulation.

Paradoxically, though, certain sanctions have played into Moscow’s hands. The embargo on oil and gas has increased Russian revenues due to the price rises it has caused, while foreign observers note that Russian supermarket shelves still seem to be well-stocked. In the first four months of the year, Russia’s balance of trade ran its highest surplus since 1994, at $96 billion. Yet, after its initial collapse during the first days of the war, the ruble gradually recovered, such that it is now worth more than it was last year. In 2021, 70 rubles were needed to buy a dollar. On 7 March – its worst day – that figure had nearly doubled; but as of 18 July it dropped back down to 57.

The relative inefficacy of sanctions was predictable. If decades of economic warfare had proved incapable of bringing down effectively defenceless regimes such as Castro’s Cuba (by now targeted for over 70 years), Bolivarian Venezuela (30 years) or Khomeinist Iran (42 years of American sanctions, plus around ten years of international measures), it’s difficult to imagine them triggering regime change in a country like Russia, which has been preparing for this eventuality by revamping its industrial capacities. Yet the more ineffective the sanctions the more the war drags on, lurching from one escalation to the next, and deepening divisions that seem ever more irremediable. By now we can assume that relations with Russia will be interrupted for at least some decades (a regrettable situation for any Westerner who hasn’t had the good fortune to visit Moscow and St Petersburg). The new Iron Curtain has been raised, and won’t be crossed for years to come.

This will frustrate the strategic designs pursued over the last thirty years by the German bloc. Halevi’s thesis is that since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, Germany has sought to construct a series of mutually interdependent economies which now essentially amount to a single economic system. This grouping has a Western flank (Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands) and an Eastern one (the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia), with different roles and sectors divided between them. The Netherlands acts as a global platform and transport hub; the Czech Republic and Slovakia as seats of the automobile industry; Austria and Switzerland as producers advanced technology, and so on. If Germany is the hegemonic centre of this bloc, we must revise our view of its geopolitical role and global significance. As a whole, the bloc has 196 million inhabitants compared to Germany’s 83 million, and a GDP of $7.7 trillion versus Germany’s $3.8 trillion. This makes it the world’s third economic power – smaller than US and China, but larger than Japan.

This web of relations is especially visible when we look at trade. German exports to Austria and Switzerland – which have a combined population of 17 million – amount to €132 billion, compared with €122 billion to the US and €102 billion to France. When it comes to total trade with Germany, France (with its population of 67 million) is behind the Netherlands (with only 17 million): €164 billion to €206 billion. Italy, meanwhile, receives less than Poland, despite having a bigger population (60 million to 38 million) and a per capita income almost twice as large. This marks a spectacular reversal, given that in 2005, the year after its accession to the EU, Germany’s trade with Poland was only half of that with Italy.

What has occurred, then, is the reorientation of Germany’s industrial apparatus away from other European partners towards its own economic bloc, on the one hand, and trade with China on the other. Beijing has now become Germany’s prime commercial partner, with a relationship worth €246 billion. The other members of the German bloc have also seen a marked rise in trade with China. ‘If we take 2005 as a reference’, Halevi writes,

that is to say, the year immediately after the entry of Eastern European countries into the EU, the value in dollars of Germany’s global exports in goods increased, up until 2021, by 67%, whilst its trade with China increased more than fourfold. In the same period — and though they nearly tripled — French and Italian exports to China showed a rate of growth far inferior to that of German trade. For the states in the German bloc, integration with Germany has generated a veritable explosion of exports to China, with Germany not only paving the way for these states, but also establishing ties between sectors and individual companies that in turn stimulate their local exports. To Germany’s west, the Netherlands’ direct exports to China grew by at least five since 2005, whilst Switzerland’s increased twelvefold, making it China’s second largest European exporter. These tendencies have been a lot more contained in Belgium and Austria. In the east, Poland’s exports to China multiplied by 5.5, by 6 for Hungary, by around 10 for Czech Republic, and by nearly 21 for Slovakia. The natural consequence of this process is the formation of a Eurasian economic zone, a real necessity for China both because of its need for Russian raw materials, and because of growing nodes of railway infrastructure that cross Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In the last decade, the first convoys of freight trains departed China for Dortmund and the Netherlands, news which was even reported by the Financial Times. The Germans had, at least in industrial circles, the intention of creating synergies between China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and thereby Europe and Germany. In other words, the aim was to integrate states bringing together logistical, productive and energy exporting zones (Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan) and imports of industrial goods both from China and Germany.

Here we can glimpse the Teutonic equivalent of the new Silk Road – or Belt and Road Initiative – launched by Xi Jinping in 2013. Indeed, the ultimate objective of the German bloc as parsed by Halevi is the creation of a Eurasian continental front with Germany and China as its two extremities, and Russia as an indispensable connector. This explains the persistence with which the Germans have pushed, against the interests of Washington and NATO, for the gas pipeline Nordstream 2. The first tangible geopolitical effect of the Ukraine war was the burial of this project.

The war has effectively put an end to the dream of a common Eurasian space because it forces Germany to weaken its ties with China and closes the Russian channel of communication between them. It also bars Germany’s use of Russia as a resource-rich backwater and Lebensraum – or more accurately Großraum, in Carl Schmitt’s sense of the term. Now, instead of a Great Space, Russia has become an insurmountable geopolitical obstacle. This will compel the strategists of the German bloc to revise their entire plan, to rethink the relationship between their own sub-imperial power and the US empire, while also redefining their relations with other European states. At the same time, the German bloc has been strained by the conflicting interests of its individual members. A small yet significant fact indicates how much the rules of the game have changed: in May this year, Germany’s monthly balance of trade tipped into the red for the first time since 1991. It wasn’t much (only around $1 billion), but it was a trade deficit nonetheless. A situation is thus emerging out of the Ukraine conflict which is not without historical precedent: the defeat of German strategy. In the Third World War, the losers still seem to be the Germans.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Joshua Rahtz, ‘Germany’s Faltering Motor?’, NLR 93.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Fortress Greece

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 13 July 2022

On 7 June, the Greek Minister of Migration, Notis Mitarakis, proudly declared that the right-wing New Democracy government had fulfilled one of its flagship pledges from the 2019 election campaign: reducing refugee arrivals by 90%. He declined to say how this target was reached, yet to any informed observer the answer was obvious. Over the past two years, reports have been circulating that Greece is engaging in systematic pushbacks: a practice – prohibited by international law – of forcing refugees back across the border before they can claim asylum. Although this activity has caused dozens of refugees to drown in the Aegean, it has elicited little domestic protest, and appears to be on the rise. This reflects broader changes in Greece’s ideological climate, which has become increasingly receptive to far-right attitudes since New Democracy came to power. One of the chief priorities of the current government, led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is to consolidate such changes and build a security state which will act as the EU’s frontline barrier against refugee crossings. This, in turn, requires whipping up a perpetual moral panic about those entering the country ‘illegally’, while stamping out a previously vibrant culture of migrant solidarity.

New Democracy’s hardline approach was intended to mark a contrast with Alexis Tsipras’s administration, which initially took a more welcoming stance towards those fleeing war, persecution or destitution. At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015-16, Syriza organized accommodation and medical care for new arrivals while responding to the sharp increase in asylum applications. It also made attempts, albeit sporadic and unsystematic ones, to provide education for refugee children. Yet Syriza’s focus on the reception of refugees neglected their integration. Tsipras permitted the establishment of refugee camps such as the infamous Moria on the island of Lesbos – where thousands were kept in unsanitary and overcrowded conditions – and imposed so-called ‘geographical restrictions’ which constrained migrants’ ability to move from the islands to the mainland. This was partly a result of the EU–Turkey deal signed in March 2016, which sought to curb irregular migration to Europe. The agreement stipulated that Turkey would take all necessary measures to prevent people travelling irregularly from Turkey to the Greek islands; that those who managed to make the journey could be forcibly sent back; and that Erdoğan would receive €6 billion toward accommodating refugees in Turkey. Ultimately, Syriza’s decision to act as the EU’s border police by implementing this agreement marked the end of its migrant-friendly approach. With that, Greece entered the era of permanent camps and crackdowns on new arrivals.

Once New Democracy was elected, migration policy took an even more sinister turn. One of the first measures it adopted was Law 4735/2020, which introduced changes to the system for awarding Greek citizenship, including a strict financial threshold. Under Mitsotakis, the camps were turned into de facto prisons, heavily policed, with barbed wire fencing, surveillance cameras, x-ray scanners, magnetic doors and punitive detention facilities. Border patrols were strengthened and migrants were denied legal routes to claim asylum. Perhaps the starkest shift was the covert yet persistent practice of pushbacks – both in the Aegean and on the Greece–Turkey land border. In summer 2020, the New York Times brought this story global attention, in exposing how migrants were regularly forced onto unsafe life rafts and abandoned in the middle of the sea. Though the claims were backed by first-hand interviews with survivors, three independent watchdogs, two academic researchers and the Turkish Coast Guard, the Greek government denied the allegations, and the EU was reluctant to investigate. Shortly after, Human Rights Watch found that Greek police were routinely stripping asylum seekers of their clothes and possessions before handing them over to masked men who would leave them floating in small boats in the Evros river. It also revealed a pattern of violent and deadly attacks on refugee boats by the Greek Coast Guard.

In response to these findings, the EU Commissioner for Human Rights announced that ‘the scale and normalization of pushbacks at Europe’s borders requires urgent and concerted action by governments and parliamentarians’. Yet this was little more than an attempt by the EU to cover its tracks. In fact, the European authorities had spent years working hand-in-glove with Greece to keep out migrants. Frontex, the EU’s border and coast guard agency, has seen an almost twenty-fold increase in its budget since its creation in 2006, and is projected to employ over 10,000 guards by 2027. Its executive director, Fabrice Leggeri, was forced to resign earlier this year after being investigated for alleged complicity in pushbacks. Though his departure is a welcome development, it will not lead to any meaningful policy change. The EU will not lift a finger to stop Greece, or any other country, from using brutal deterrent tactics for they are an essential part of its plan to make European borders uncrossable – thereby preserving ‘freedom of movement’ as an ideal that applies only to the predominantly white population of the trading bloc.

This dynamic was evident during the Evros incident in March 2020, when Erdoğan declared that he would no longer stop migrants from leaving Turkey. New Democracy responded by illegally suspending the reception of asylum applications, in a move that was widely praised by European leaders and backed by the Syriza opposition. Ursula von der Leyen thanked Greece for acting as ‘our European shield’ and promised €700 million in aid to help its border authorities. That autumn, the EU awarded Greece a further €121 million for the construction of reception centres on the islands of Samos, Kos and Leros, and the following March yet more funding was allocated for centres on Lesvos and Chios. Migrants can now be kept for an indefinite period in these remote locations, away from the European mainland. Having deterred over 140,000 people from entering the country between April and November 2021, Greece is now seeking more EU funding to triple the length of its steel border fence in the Evros region. At the same time, the government has instrumentalized the Ukraine crisis to whitewash its human rights record – creating a two-tier system in which Ukrainian refugees are given preferential access to registration, accommodation and education.

The New Democracy government continues to dismiss evidence of pushbacks as ‘fake news’ or ‘Turkish propaganda’, and has developed effective methods to close down discussion of the issue. The vilification of pro-migrant NGOs – a staple of far-right discourse during the Syriza years – is now a talking-point of cabinet ministers. Under new laws, such organizations are required to sign up to an official register and receive permission from the state to continue their work, which must conform to highly restrictive criteria. New Democracy has also ensured that the camps remain off-limits to the press, and so the public is prevented from seeing the horrors therein. Meanwhile, journalists who try to cover migration issues can expect a hostile backlash. When the Dutch-born reporter Ingeborg Beugel accused the Prime Minister of lying about the activities of Greek border forces, for instance, she became the target of a state-backed smear campaign. After a barrage of death threats, Beugel was forced to temporarily leave Greece on the advice of the Dutch embassy. She is now facing criminal charges for allowing an Afghan asylum seeker to lodge in her house, which could lead to a year in prison and a fine of €5,000. A similar fate befell Iason Apostolopoulos, field coordinator of the humanitarian organization Mediterranea Saving Humans, who was labelled a traitor and a Turkish agent for conducting search and rescue operations. He was targeted by a pro-government news outlet which published his personal information online. Because of this climate of fear, Greece has fallen 38 places in the Press Freedom Index over the past year: now ranking 108^th, just below Burundi. Earlier this month, when the European Court of Human Rights found that the Greek Coast Guard had sunk a migrant boat in 2014, causing eleven asylum seekers to lose their lives, major news outlets simply ignored the ruling.

This media blackout has contributed to hardening attitudes towards refugees and migrants among the Greek population. Previously, a coalition of forces – NGOs, progressive political parties, the anarchist movement and small unaffiliated groups – constituted an impressive migrant solidarity network. They assisted with the first reception of refugees, hosted them in their houses, helped them file asylum claims, organized food deliveries and clothing donations, and even occupied empty buildings in the centre of Athens, where migrants could live less controlled and more dignified lives than in the camps. Yet this atmosphere began to change in 2016, when the European borders closed following the EU–Turkey deal. Henceforth, Greece was no longer seen as a ‘transit country’ but a permanent home for its migrant population. Many islanders realized that the camps were there to stay and feared that they would be a detriment to the local tourist industry. Accordingly, the perception of refugees as victims of war and societal collapse was supplanted by representations of them as scroungers or civilizational enemies. This shift, in which the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party played a major role, was fomented by the widespread sense of despair following the 2015 bailout referendum, where the resounding vote to reject the Troika’s demand for more austerity was flatly ignored by Tsipras. In these conditions of scarcity, with the promise of a left alternative betrayed, far-right propaganda succeeded in turning many ordinary Greeks against migrants, framed as competitors for limited jobs and benefits.

This about-turn was also aided by the Orthodox Church, which continues to enjoy extraordinary influence in Greek society given the lack of an official separation between Church and State. With the rise of multiculturalism during the 2000s, a significant section of the ecclesiastical body gravitated towards the far right, often parroting conspiracy theories about the existential threat of ‘Islamicization’. The Archbishop of Athens led the charge, stating that ‘Islam is not a religion but a political party…and its believers are people of war’. Although Golden Dawn lost their parliamentary seats at the last election, racist views have been all but normalized in public discourse. A survey conducted earlier this year found that 55% of the Greek public think that refugees will contribute to the spread of terrorism, 72% believe that they have a negative impact on the economy, and 73.5% want those who enter the country ‘illegally’ to be deported back to their country of origin.

With the exception of MeRA25 – a marginal left-wing party founded in 2018 as part of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) – the parliamentary opposition has done nothing to push back against such views. Syriza has wholly adopted New Democracy’s migrant-baiting rhetoric, claiming that Greece is ‘facing a geopolitical threat from Turkey’ in the form of refugees. A few international organizations (UNHCR, The Danish Refugee Council and the International Organization for Migration) as well as long-standing local solidarity structures, anarchist and far-left groups, still work closely with migrants, offering legal advice, educational services, practical and psychological support, accommodation and advocacy. But their position in a society increasingly seduced by far-right rhetoric is precarious. Without concerted organizing efforts, it may vanish completely under Mitsotakis’s repression.

Read on: Stathis Kouvelakis, ‘Borderland’, NLR 110.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Petro’s Premonition

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 6 July 2022

On Monday 27 June, Gustavo Petro gave his first interview to the international press as president-elect of Colombia. Reclining on the sofa of his home in the northern suburbs of Bogotá – sporting jeans, loafers and a fresh haircut, flanked by photographs of his wife and children – Petro exuded the confidence that came with a convincing victory over his opponent Rodolfo Hernández one week earlier. His answers, however, hung heavy in the room. Why has it taken Colombia so long to elect a leftist president? Do you worry that if you fail, you may be its last? ‘If I fail, darkness will come and sweep everything away’, Petro replied. ‘I cannot fail.’

Petro’s premonition reflects the friability of the political moment. Did the Colombian establishment – the party of outgoing President Iván Duque, the regulators in the National Electoral Council, the armed forces and paramilitary syndicates, the US State Department and Southern Command – really let him win? Over the past half-century, virtually every country in Latin America has seen a left victory, from revolutionary projects in Nicaragua and Venezuela to Pink Tide governments in Brazil and Argentina. Not so in Colombia. Left candidates that came close to power – Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948, Luis Carlos Galán in 1989, Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa and Carlos Pizarro Leongómez in 1990 – were all gunned down. And Petro was a near-miss exception. During one of his earlier presidential bids back in 2018, gunmen opened fire on his car after a campaign event in the town of Cúcuta. It was only the bulletproof reinforcements on the windows that saved his life.

‘The spectre of death accompanies us’, Petro told AFP in February. Three weeks before the first round of presidential voting, Petro was forced to suspend his campaign after receiving a tip-off about an assassination attempt by the right-wing paramilitary group La Cordillera. Thereafter, he appeared onstage surrounded by bodyguards wielding bulletproof shields. Threats from paramilitaries continued to pour in – not only directed at Petro, but at the broader coalition of the Pacto Histórico that stood behind him. In February 2021, the Pacto succeeded for the first time in bringing the country’s fragmented left-of-centre forces into a single electoral vehicle, spanning liberals and greens, social democrats and communists, Indigenous activists and social movements. Feeding on the energy of the 2021 National Strike – when millions of Colombians poured into the streets to protest President Duque’s austerity reforms and faced violent repression from the police – the Pacto surged in the legislative elections in March to become the single largest force in Congress. The paramilitaries were desperate for revenge. At the start of Petro’s presidential campaign, the narco-terrorist Black Eagles warned that ‘We will exterminate them like the rats they are.’

It is tempting to see such threats as an outside intervention in the democratic process. But violence has long been a structuring principle of Colombian politics. After the civil war of 1948-1958 – La Violencia, in which the Liberals and Conservatives fought each other to a stalemate – the two parties agreed to establish the National Front: an antidemocratic agreement in which power would rotate between them. This triggered a series of guerrilla wars, in which leftist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) fought to expand political participation and advance the interests of marginalized peasant communities. These forces, which controlled large sections of the countryside, clashed with the Colombian government and its paramilitary associates, who regularly targeted and assassinated trade unionists, land defenders and human-rights advocates. Only recently have we learned the true scale of such atrocities; last month, Colombia’s Truth Commission released a comprehensive report that documented 450,000 total deaths – more than twice the commonly cited figure.

In 2016, after years of negotiations in Havana, then President Juan Manuel Santos negotiated Peace Accords with the FARC that precipitated their transition to parliamentary politics under the new name Comunes (talks with the ELN meanwhile broke down, and the group vowed to keep fighting). Yet far from ending the conflict, this created a vacuum in former FARC territories that has since been filled by right-wing paramilitaries, intent on repudiating the peace deal and continuing their dirty war on the left. According to the Institute for the Study of Development and Peace, more than 1,300 social leaders have been assassinated since the peace accords were signed – including nearly 300 of the actual signatories. Over 85 such killings have taken place this year alone. This is due in no small part to President Duque, who campaigned on a promise to dismantle the accords. Although he could not officially repeal them, he refused to comply with their stipulations. A coalition of 275 Colombian NGOs accused him of ‘rejecting peace talks with the ELN, neglecting to fight against paramilitarism, and creating conditions for the increase in impunity and the presence of illegal armed actors throughout the country.’

This architecture of political violence is partly the result of collaboration between Bogotá and Washington. At the ceremony of the Truth Commission, declassified documents from the National Security Archive were released to the public which reveal the extent of the CIA’s complicity in the targeted killing of workers, peasants and guerrillas. One 1988 CIA report relays intelligence on a massacre of unionized farmworkers coordinated by Colombia’s military. Another from 1997 details paramilitary violence organized by private oil companies and sponsored by the Colombian armed forces. A secret 2003 Pentagon memo to Donald Rumsfeld, ‘Recent Successes against the Colombian FARC’, boasts of US-trained commando units ‘yielding dividends’ in the form of 543 targeted killings in the first seven months of that year alone.

Under President Bill Clinton, the US signed the so-called ‘Plan Colombia’ to dispatch arms to the Colombian military under the banner of the War on Drugs. Its $7.5 billion budget was to be spent training and equipping the Colombian armed forces to eradicate cocaine production. In fact, the opposite happened: cocaine production is now flourishing in rural areas – 1,228 metric tons in 2020 alone, a 10% increase from the year before. Rather than stamping out the drug trade, US weapons found a different purpose: protecting the interests of foreign investors. Colombia’s investor-state relationship is longstanding. Back in 1928, the Colombian Army killed several hundred striking United Fruit Company workers in the town of Ciénaga in what became known as the Banana Massacre. Fifty years later, the same company was found to have paid over $1.7 million to a far-right paramilitary group to terrorize communities and torture trade unionists in the country’s banana-growing regions. Today, such activities continue in Colombia’s mining, logging and drilling regions – all with the tacit endorsement of the US government. As members of the human rights organization CCEEU told me, ‘Nothing happens in Colombia without the gringo’s knowledge and consent’.

If Colombia’s political violence is fuelled by overseas actors, it is also exported abroad. In September 2019, two former members of US Army special forces teamed up with former Venezuelan soldiers training in Colombia to lead a failed coup attempt against Nicolás Maduro. Three months later, according to Trump’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper, the White House again considered attempting to oust Maduro with US-trained mercenaries from Colombia. The following year, Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in Port-au-Prince by a group of former Colombian soldiers disguised as agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Biden’s Department of Defense later revealed that several of the mercenaries had received military training in the US.

It is the centrality of Colombia in the story of hemispheric reaction that makes Petro’s victory so improbable, and consequential. In the late aughts, Colombia played a critical role in obstructing the regional integration of progressive governments, using its veto power at the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to frustrate ambitions to build institutions that would decrease their dependence on the United States. A decade later, at the start of the next Pink Tide, Colombia remained a committed saboteur of the Latin American left. During the Ecuadorian presidential elections in 2021, Colombia’s right-wing administration participated in a false-flag operation against the leftist candidate Andrés Arauz after a video was posted online that appeared to show the ELN declaring its support for Arauz. The Duque government then claimed to have obtained laptops belonging to the ELN which contained evidence that the guerrilla group was illegally financing the Arauz campaign. The Attorney General of Colombia went so far as to fly to the Ecuadorian capital to turn over these laptops – only to have the entire story debunked by an ornithologist who recognized that the bird sounds in the ELN video were not native to Colombia. Yet the damage to Arauz was already done. Less than a month after the visit of the Colombian Attorney General, Arauz’s opponent – the banker and tax evader Guillermo Lasso – won by less than five percentage points.

The prospect of foreign intervention haunted Petro’s presidential campaign. For months, the US State Department had been voicing its ‘concerns’ that Russia may interfere in the election to aid the leftist frontrunner. Just nine days before the first round of presidential voting, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III welcomed the Colombian Defence Minister Diego Molano to the Pentagon to announce a new plan to ‘deepen’ military ties between the two countries. Three days later, Biden officially designated Colombia a ‘Major Non-NATO Ally of the United States.’ One could be forgiven for reading these executive gestures as a veiled threat. ‘Colombia is facing the most dangerous moment in its modern history,’ declared the Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar the weekend of the election. ‘Petro is a thief, a terrorist, and Marxist…We on the Committee on Foreign Affairs say loudly…Communism is a threat, and the biggest threat right now exists in Colombia.’

Yet if fears of Putin’s intervention were overblown, so were those of Petro’s ‘Communism’. Born to a humble family in small town in the north of Colombia, at seventeen Petro joined other students and activists in the formation of the urban guerrilla movement M-19, where he stockpiled stolen weapons and helped coordinate its campaign for democratic rights. M-19 earned its infamy with the 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice, which saw the guerrillas take 300 hostages inside the Supreme Court. In 1990, M-19 signed a peace treaty and disarmed; one year later, its newly founded political party helped write the country’s constitution, and Petro began his parliamentary career in the Chamber of Representatives. In 2010, Petro launched his first presidential campaign. He won only 6% of the vote, but landed the prize of the Bogotá mayoralty. There, in the nation’s capital, Petro elicited the ire of the Colombian right for uncovering major corruption in the system of municipal contracts. President Santos attempted to remove him from office – citing ‘administrative errors in the trash collection scheme’ – only to reinstate him a month later on the order of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. ‘During my time as mayor we had the highest employment levels ever seen in Bogotá and high levels of foreign investment,’ Petro told the Financial Times. ‘Foreign investors weren’t scared away just because the mayor was called Gustavo Petro.’ Petro has confessed to having ‘studied Marx with some profundity’, but his presidential programme shed this radicalism to focus on basic social democratic reforms to the health, education and pension services. (In any case, when it comes to philosophy, Petro says, ‘I distance myself from dialectics and prefer Foucault.’)

For years, investors in Colombia had warned of a special ‘Petro clause’ in their contracts which stipulated their intention to renege on their obligations and flee the country were Petro to win the presidency. His 2022 campaign sought to calm their nerves. On 18 April, Petro called journalists to a notary’s office where he signed an oath pledging not to engage in ‘any kind of expropriation’. He later began tweeting out reports from Bank of America that legitimated his programme for government, alongside endorsements from Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek. This was the ideological straddle that brought Petro to power. ‘I don’t divide politics between left and right, as we did in the 20th century’, Petro told an interviewer last year. ‘The politics of the 21st century is divided…between two great camps: the politics of life and the politics of death.’

There is no more powerful representative of the first camp than Francia Márquez. Raised in the impoverished tropical village of Yolombó, Márquez has been active in the struggle against extraction since the age of thirteen, when she joined the successful fight against the mining corporations which sought to divert the Ovejas river that sustained her community. In 2014, when miners backed by paramilitary muscle descended on her region in pursuit of gold, she organized a women’s march from the high mountains of Cauca to the capital of Bogotá. The federal government labelled her a ‘threat to national security,’ but the march continued, and its participants established an encampment in front of Congress until they secured a meeting with the Vice-Minister. ‘In the name of development they enslaved us and now in the name of development they expelled us from our lands’, Márquez told the protesters. That December, she reached an agreement with the government to dismantle the illegal mining in the region and create a special task force to combat its rise across the country.

In 2022, Márquez announced her run for president at the National Feminist Convention. In the presidential primaries for the Pacto that followed, Márquez claimed over 750,000 votes, securing her place on the Petro ticket. Together, the two covered considerable ground for the Pacto in its pitch to the country. I often heard the same word to describe her candidacy among activists: encarna – it embodied, literally as well as figuratively – the struggles against slavery, colonialism and exploitation. No wonder Márquez confronted so much racist and classist abuse throughout the campaign. What could be more offensive to the colonial sensibility of Colombia’s suburban class than a former domestic worker walking proudly into the Casa de Nariño? But on election night, the ‘nobodies’ – Márquez’s affectionate moniker for marginalized Colombians – outvoted its elites. Turnout rates shot up by 5%, 6%, 7% across the Pacific, Caribbean, and Amazonic regions of Colombia. In a country long dominated by its Andean heartland cities, this election signalled the rise of the peripheries.

In the days leading up to the final round, Petro ditched large campaign events to focus on these neglected regions. He spent the night at a fisherman’s house, cut sugarcane in the morning, picked coffee in the afternoon and shared a drink with truckers and taxi drivers the next evening. This made for a stark contrast with his opponent Hernández. A septuagenarian with heavy Botox and implanted hair, Hernández pitched himself as a construction magnate so rich that he could never be corrupted by political office – a claim undercut by the ongoing investigation into his corruption as mayor of Bucaramanga, where he had constructed a political persona based on quick wit, a short temper and absolute allegiance to neoliberal reform. (‘He was the workers’ executioner’, one trade unionist remarked to the New York Times.)

A gaffe-prone self-publicist who once told an interviewer ‘I am a follower of a great German thinker, named Adolf Hitler’, Hernández had not been the establishment’s first choice. The former mayor of Medellín, Federico Gutiérrez, secured the endorsement of every traditional party; yet his reputation as Duque’s anointed successor, along with his lack of charisma and threadbare policy platform, sealed his defeat in the first round, where he gained only 23% of the vote. The responsibility to keep Petro out therefore fell to Hernández – who refused to give interviews, attend debates or hold rallies. Instead, he put his faith in a young social media manager and a piece of software called Wappid, which uses Ponzi marketing techniques to register supporters and activate their Whatsapp networks. Hernández ‘doesn’t fill public squares’, the CEO of Wappid proudly declared. ‘He goes and creates his network, and the network does the work for him.’

Ten days before the election, Hernández pushed this absenteeism to the extreme by leaving the country altogether. ‘For my safety…I have made the decision to cancel all my public appearances between now and the elections,’ he said en route to Miami, Florida. The timing of his departure, however, had less to do with security concerns than with the priorities of his conservative allies to clear the way for their last-ditch attempt to sabotage Petro. Just two days later, a massive cache of secret recordings of private meetings of the Petro campaign was leaked to the press. Quickly dubbed the ‘Petrovideos’, the leak supposedly exposed various crimes and misdemeanors of the Pacto. In the week leading up to the vote, the right-wing press carried a stream of stories that they hoped would scandalize the public. ‘Colombia has never experienced a scandal of the magnitude of the “Petrovideos” in its presidential campaigns,’ wrote the right-wing Semana of its own scoop.

But the content of the recordings was less sensational than its presentation. Much hay was made, for example, of a campaign meeting in which Petro’s wife described him as ‘stubborn’. This was a case of boy-who-cried-wolf: publications like Semana had slandered Petro so many times over the years – photoshopping his face onto criminals, cooking up accusations of terrorism – that the public were largely unmoved. (During Petro’s 2018 campaign, Semana went so far as to reproduce the rumour that the pornographic actor Mia Khalifa was, in fact, the candidate’s daughter.) Hernández returned to the country just in time for a High Court to issue a ruling that both candidates must attend a presidential debate to put forward their policy proposals. When he refused, his reputation did not recover. Petro became the candidate of transparency, while Hernández appeared slippery and evasive.

By 4:20pm on 19 June – just twenty minutes after the vote count began – Petro knew he had won. Record turnout in the poorer regions coincided with waning participation in the conservative heartlands. Hernández had been trapped in a fatal bind: to present himself as a populist insurgent, he needed to distance himself from the establishment and refuse their formal offers of coalition – contesting the election as an independent backed by a hastily established ‘anti-corruption’ alliance. Yet, to win, he also needed to rally the supporters of the major right-wing parties in large numbers, to offset the galvanized base of the Petro-Márquez campaign. This balancing act required a level of strategic nous that eluded Hernández. His ramshackle coalition could not contend with the Pacto, built carefully and strenuously during its years in opposition.

Petro now prepares to take the reins of government with three programmatic priorities: ‘peace, social justice, environmental justice’. He hopes to convene a new international process that can deliver on the promise of the 2016 accords, bringing guerrillas, paramilitaries, peasants and the armed forces back to the table to negotiate the terms of disarmament and land distribution. He also plans to raise taxes on Colombia’s elite – to support pensions for the elderly, family welfare schemes and free university education – while setting Colombia on a decade-long transition away from fossil fuels toward a portfolio of legal, sustainable and economically viable exports. ‘Our three main exports are poison’, Petro has said of coal, oil, and cocaine. His vow is to replace them with high-value industry and marijuana farms – and to do it fast: ‘Reforms are made in the first year or they are not made’.

It is an ambitious agenda for any president, but it will be particularly difficult to realize in a country with a minority coalition in Congress, a strong and recalcitrant right, a towering business elite and a well-armed paramilitary network. As the credit rating agency Fitch Ratings reported with a sigh of relief, ‘Colombia’s broad policy framework will remain intact because institutional checks and balances are likely to prevent policy radicalization. An independent central bank and autonomous judicial system will also provide checks and balances to the executive.’ Petro’s gamble is to bring all his opponents to the table. In the days following his election, Petro convened what he called a ‘Great National Accord’ to set a new direction for the country. He has welcomed rivals from the Conservative Party and U Party into this compact, shaking hands with figures like Hernández and former president Álvaro Uribe. He has also appointed a transition team with ministerial candidates from the left, the centre and the conservative right. If the coalition of the Pacto Histórico required an ideological straddle, then Petro’s plans for government will push this tactic further still.

Allies of the president-elect present these cross-partisan gestures as shows of strength. Critics describe them as clientelism dressed up as diplomacy. The real question is whether they will work. Even if the National Accord does not disintegrate, it is unclear what kind of what kind of concessions Petro will be called upon to make in order to survive in such a hostile political environment. The most effective bulwark against capitulation is the popular movement that drove the Pacto to power, which will continue to fight back against extractivism and paramilitary violence across the periphery. Yet this struggle cannot succeed without international allies to oppose attempts by the US and its allies to neuter the Petro presidency and secure its resource rents. For centuries, the wreckage has piled up in Colombia – the dead and disappeared, the ‘nobodies’ discarded in the course of its uneven development. Now a storm is finally blowing in from Paradise. The task of the left – alongside Petro and the Pacto – is to guarantee that the storm does not bring darkness and sweep it all away.

Read on: Juan Carlos Monedero, ‘Snipers in the Kitchen’, NLR 120.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

Means of Destruction

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 2 July 2022

In 2021, the year preceding its invasion of Ukraine, Russia spent the equivalent of $65.9 billion on its armed forces, amounting to 4.1% of its GDP. Germany, with a population of little more than half of Russia’s, spent $56.0 billion, or 1.3% of GDP. The respective figures were $68.4 billion (2.2%) for the United Kingdom, $56.6 billion (1.9%) for France, and $32.0 billion (1.5%) for Italy. Together the four biggest EU member states outspent Russia by a factor of more than three. United States military spending, equal to 38% of the global total, exceeded Russian spending by a factor of twelve, and combined with the big four European NATO countries by a factor of fifteen.

Figures on military spending are less reliable than those on, say, average temperatures. But if the data provided by the most highly reputed research institute in the field are only halfway valid, the Russian invasion raises the issue of why an obviously inferior power should have risked a confrontation with a much stronger bloc. That Russia attacked from a position of weakness is also reflected in the fact that according to military experts, its invasion force of an estimated 190,000 in February 2022 was far too small; there appears to be agreement that it should have been at least twice as large if it were to achieve its presumptive goal, the conquest of Ukraine – a country of 40 million people with a landmass almost twice that of Germany. And while Ukraine’s 2021 defence budget amounted to less than $6 billion (or 3.2% of GDP in one of the poorest countries in Europe), it underwent an impressive increase of 142% since 2012, by far the highest growth rate among the 40 countries leading the world in military spending. It is a secret only to European legacy media that the increase was due to extensive American military aid, aimed at ‘interoperability’ of the Ukrainian and American armies. (According to NATO sources, interoperability was achieved in 2020.) In effect this turned Ukraine into a de facto if not an official member of NATO.

Regardless of the Russian invasion having taken place from a position of dramatic military inferiority (although with freely provided public assurances from the US and NATO, renewed almost every week until today, that they would never send troops to aid the Ukrainians on the battlefield), from the first day of the war Germany came under insistent political and moral pressure from the US to increase its military spending, so as to finally comply with NATO’s longstanding goal for its member states to spend 2% of GDP on what is called ‘defence’. Already in the late 1990s the United States had urged European NATO members to spend more on their armed forces, as the US itself was beginning to do at the time. At the NATO summit in Prague in 2002, the 2% goal was first discussed, against the background of 9/11, the nascent ‘War on Terror’, the imminent invasion of Iraq, the expansion of the NATO mandate to out-of-area operations, and the decision to extend NATO membership to Eastern Europe, beginning with the ‘Visegrád’ states of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. That decision ended earlier discussions of a ‘Common European House’ (Gorbachev) or a ‘Partnership for Peace’ (Bill Clinton) that included Russia, initiating a return to the Cold War border between Western and Eastern Europe, the latter now consisting essentially of Russia alone.

The 2% target was formally adopted at the 2006 NATO summit in Riga. In 2008 Merkel and Sarkozy failed in their attempt to block a formal invitation to Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO – the proposed third and final step of NATO expansion into Eastern Europe. In 2014, following the Maidan revolution and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, the commitment to the 2% target was renewed. Although it formally applied to all NATO members alike, it was primarily directed at Germany, the only country where, because of its size, a relative increase in military spending would yield a significant absolute increase in NATO’s military strength. France and the UK had for some time already spent 2% or almost that on defence: the UK 2.49% and France 2.10% in 2002, 2.48% and 1.90% in 2008, and 2.17% and 1.86% in 2014. Germany, by comparison, spent just 1.33% in 2002, 1.21% in 2008, and 1.15% from 2014 to 2018, after which a moderate increase began, to 1.34% in 2021.

There seem to have been several reasons why the four successive Merkel governments, from 2005 to 2021, were unable or unwilling to comply with the 2% spending rule. Frequently mentioned are the overly pedantic procurement bureaucracy and the allegedly deep-seated pacifism of the German electorate stemming from defeat in two world wars. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it is also claimed that Merkel believed Putin’s promises to respect what the West considers to be international law – which, while it allowed the US and its ‘coalition of the willing’, including Ukraine, to invade Iraq, and for a still-larger coalition, including Ukraine, to occupy it, presumably forbids Russia to invade Ukraine. Whether Putin ever made such promises must be left to future historical research; given his public warnings against Ukrainian and Georgian accession to NATO, untiringly repeated since 2002, it seems doubtful.

Three other factors may be more important: that Germany has no nuclear arms, which in the UK and France take up a large part of military spending, so that German conventional forces may, in spite of a lower total defence budget, be roughly equal to those of Britain and France; that unlike other countries, all German forces without exception are integrated into NATO, meaning that any increase would primarily benefit the US; and that, related to this, postwar Germany has no military doctrine, not even a general staff to figure out what it needs its military for. Indeed, as German soul-searching after the Ukrainian invasion tried to explain the supposed neglect of the Bundeswehr in the last two decades, an investigative journalistic account in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung showed that procurement policies had long wavered between territorial defence in Germany and Europe (Landes- und Bündnisverteidigung) and out-of-area missions, like Afghanistan and Mali, engaged in as a courtesy to the US and France, which required very different equipment and turned out to be more expensive than expected.

Nevertheless, standard German and international public opinion readily subscribed to the claim that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had Germany fulfilled its 2% NATO duties. It followed that Germany needed urgently to mend its ways, also to prevent Russia from attacking other European countries as well: not just Poland and the Baltic states, but also Finland and Sweden. (The fact that Russia couldn’t even conquer Kiev, less than a hundred miles from the Russian border, never figured in mainstream ‘discourse’. Nor was it considered that if ‘Putin’ was indeed mad enough to try to conquer Finland, he might also be mad enough to use nuclear arms when under duress.)

This line, emanating from the media and NATO was taken up not just by the Bundestag opposition (Merkel’s CDU/CSU), but also by elements within the coalition (where the liberal FDP ’s ‘defence expert’ is a member of parliament from Düsseldorf, home to Rheinmetall, the second-largest German arms producer after Airbus, and where the Greens are working hard to get rid of the peacenik image inherited from their early years). Three days after the Russian invasion, on February 27, Scholz called a special Bundestag session in which he pleaded guilty on behalf of Germany for having neglected its obligations to NATO and the West. The invasion, according to Scholz, amounted to a Zeitenwende – a historical turning point – after which, he pointed out, nothing would be the same. This required Germany to upgrade its military in line with the expectations of its allies, above all by finally living up to its pledge to increase its defence spending to 2% of GDP, and further still as the German economy begins to grow again.

For this purpose, Scholz announced an extraordinary fiscal maneuver: the creation of a special fund, a Sondervermögen, of 100 billion euros, exclusively devoted to military spending, entirely debt-financed and – a German specialty – written into the constitution. During the years of the pandemic Germany had accumulated an unprecedented amount of public debt (at least by German standards), in excess of what its constitutional ‘debt brake’, instituted in 2011, allows. To circumvent the debt brake, the special fund was set up outside the regular budget through a constitutional amendment, which required a supermajority, possible only with the agreement of the opposition. (The German constitution gets longer and longer every year thanks to amendments of this sort.) In order to get the CDU/CSU on board, Scholz had to talk the Greens out of demands from their membership to define ‘defence’ such that it included peace missions and development aid. As the Green leadership had already transformed into ardent believers in military might as a tool for promoting general human flourishing, this didn’t take very long. More difficult was to bring in the CDU/CSU, which insisted that the additional money be spent exclusively on military hardware, rather than on fashionable products such as cybersecurity infrastructure.

It is not entirely clear how the special fund is to relate to the regular defence budget, in particular the 2% target. The plan seems to be that the fund is to be spent over several years, each year topping regular spending up to a total of 2%, with regular spending gradually increasing so that once the special fund is exhausted, it will have reached 2% and remain there. In his 27 February speech, Scholz went as far as to promise that Germany would ‘year by year invest even more than 2% of its GDP in defence’ – an overzealous overstatement that subsequently disappeared from government documents. Meanwhile it was decided that about 40 billion euros would go to the air force, 19 billion to the navy, and 17 billion to the army; 21 billion would be spent on what is called ‘command capacity and digitization’, from satellites to digital radios for the troops.

Spending 100 billion euros is far from straightforward. The sum amounts to roughly half of what Italy is to receive under the EU’s Corona Recovery programme, officially to be spent over seven years. First on the shopping list are 35 Lockheed Martin F-35 multipurpose stealth fighter bombers, a special object of desire of the Green foreign minister, who forced the SPD, during coalition talks, to make their purchase a top priority for the new government. The F-35 is licensed by the US Air Force to carry American nuclear bombs under the so-called ‘nuclear participation’ arrangement between the US and Germany, something dear to the heart of the German military, even though target selection is of course strictly reserved for the US. The plane, which is to replace the Tornado fighter bomber, is the principal fighter plane of the US, which in April 2022 was operating 790 of them worldwide and is planning to increase its fleet to 2,456 in 2040. One of them is said to cost 100 million euros, but this price will certainly increase, to perhaps as much as 150 million, by the time they are delivered in three or four years. It seems to have been decided that the Luftwaffe will in addition get about 60 Chinook CH47 transport helicopters, available at the earliest in four to five years, at a cost of about 5 billion euros. Also on the shopping list are 140 armed Israeli Heron TP drones.

The coming years will see a no-holds-barred wrestling tournament among the arms industries of Europe and the US – each of them vying for a share in the German bonanza. France will consider the special fund another opportunity for a French-led industrial policy for the European ‘defence’ industry, merging French and German producers into global players strong enough to compete with their American counterparts – once again, of course, in vain. To keep the French happy, Germany will also spend a chunk of the money on the new ECR (Electronic Combat Role) version of the Eurofighter, and probably a larger chunk on the FCAS (Future Combat Air System), a French sci-fi project combining satellites, drones and fighter bombers. None of this will be of use in the war in Ukraine, which will have ended one way or other by the time the new equipment becomes operational. This, however, has not been mentioned to the German public, who tend to assume as a matter of course that the 100 billion will help end the suffering of the Ukrainian people under the brutalities of the Russian military. In fact, one sometimes has the impression that the fund functions as a smokescreen behind which the German government hides a peculiar reluctance regarding the delivery of heavy arms to Ukraine, against intense pressures from the Ukrainian ambassador – who has become a moral authority in Germany by accusing his host country almost daily on Twitter of a lack of moral fiber and ‘European values’ – as well as the German and international media and, of course, the CDU/CSU opposition.

The supply of arms to Ukraine, however, is far more than a technical matter and has major strategic implications. One relates to the question of how and when a third country becomes a combatant: an ally of one side who may under international law legitimately be attacked as an enemy by the other. Apparently, there is a threshold here, not easy to define, where support from outside the battlefield turns into participation on the battlefield. Those in charge of manufacturing German public consent pretend that there is no such line, implying that Germany may give Ukraine whatever it demands without legally becoming a Russian target. (Of course, what is called ‘Putin’ is said by the same sources not to give a damn about international law.) That this may not be so is perhaps one reason why the Scholz government was slower than other governments both in committing itself to sending heavy arms to Ukraine and, once committed, in actually delivering them. After all, of the major NATO powers involved, Germany is located closest to the war theatre and to Russia itself. It also has no nuclear defence, and its transportation of tanks and heavy artillery to Ukraine by land may easily be intercepted by ‘Putin’ before they reach their destination.

While most of the German international law community keeps silent on this subject, which is shunned entirely by mainstream journalists, FAZ, in a moment of truth on 18 May, could not help but publish a letter to the editor from one of Germany’s foremost international law experts, Jochen Abraham Frowein. A conservative if there ever was one, Frowein laconically observed that by supplying arms to Ukraine, Germany might become ‘party to an armed conflict’, regardless of whether Russia was in breach of Article 2 of the UN Charter, which prohibits wars of aggression. According to Frowein, this implied that German ‘military forces, including their positions on German soil, could be attacked by Russia’. Citing what the anti-Scholz fronde considers a morally delinquent lack of resolve to come to the aid of an invaded country, Frowein concluded that ‘the federal government’s caution about its status as a party’ – i.e. a party to the war – ‘is entirely justified.’

Ukrainian demands for military hardware are far from modest. An adviser to President Zelensky let it be known by mid-June that the country, in order to ‘win’ the war, needed at least 1,000 155-millimeter howitzers, 300 multiple rocket launchers, 500 tanks, 2,000 armed vehicles and 1,000 drones. Compare this to the seven howitzers provided by Germany in cooperation with the Netherlands and the four rocket launchers Germany delivered to Ukraine two weeks later. The US, which maintains military bases in 85 of the world’s 200 countries (compared to eight Russian bases in countries adjacent to Russia and one base in Syria), would of course be able to single-handedly supply Ukraine with the enormous amounts of material it has requested, having already underwritten the increase in Ukrainian military spending since 2014. (Recently, the Biden administration got Congress to set aside another $40 billion for military aid to Ukraine this year alone.) That efforts are nonetheless being made to get other countries inside and outside of NATO – about forty in total, including even very small ones – to pitch in as well seems to serve mostly political ends, above all demonstrating the unity of a resurrected ‘West’ under American leadership. Like the assassination of Julius Caesar, where each conspirator had to sink his knife into the victim (‘Et tu, Brute?’), this will serve to distribute responsibility, so that nobody can later deny involvement and, if it comes to it, remain safe from Russian counterstrikes. Large-scale arms delivery, turning a country into a quasi-combatant, might also preclude it from later mediating between the warring parties. From an American perspective, this would be particularly welcome with respect to Germany and France.

Another strategic aspect of arming Ukraine concerns the Ukrainian war aims and the extent to which Ukraine’s allies may have a say in them. The more hardware Ukraine receives, the more ambitious its political objectives may become. Under the influence of the extreme right of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, which like the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany regards the anti-Semitic terrorist Stepan Bandera as a national hero, the present Ukrainian government has turned away from both the Minsk Protocols of 2014 and 2015 and the so-called ‘Normandy Format’ – a grouping established in 2014 to resolve the Donbas conflict, involving Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France. (The US was not involved in either process.) The terms of the Normandy agreement included Ukrainian neutrality, regional autonomy of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking provinces – in particular the Donbas – and future negotiations on the status of the Crimean Peninsula.

Currently Ukraine’s declared aims include include driving all Russian forces back to Russia, the unconditional return of Crimea to Ukraine, the return of the breakaway provinces to the central authority of Kyiv, and Ukrainian membership, if not of NATO, then at least of the EU. NATO and the EU have publicly committed themselves to leaving it to the Ukrainians to decide what to aim for, when to negotiate and what to agree. To the delight of the Ukrainian government, the US and other Western countries including the UK have also indicated that for them, the objective of the war is a ‘victory’ over Russia that would ‘decisively weaken’ its military and economy, while having Putin stand trial in an international criminal court. (Scholz’s line on this is that Russia must not win the war and Ukraine must not lose it, rather than Ukraine having to win and Russia to lose.) It is against this background that Ukrainian access to advanced military hardware matters, since it affects whether Ukraine, fighting on its own without US and NATO forces by its side, might be able to withstand a war lasting, potentially, several years, with a chance, slight as it may be, of ‘winning’ one way or another. For this, the Ukrainian government would have to ask its citizens to accept massive losses of life and wealth for the sake of maximalist national objectives, in a conflict that increasingly positions it as a proxy of the ‘West’, aimed at eliminating Russia as an independent economic and political power.

By determining what and how many arms they supply to Ukraine, its allies apparently hope to influence the objectives, duration and outcome of the war, by adjusting the balance of forces on the battlefield to the outcome they find most desirable. For the US, arming Ukraine ensures that the mood inside Ukraine does not shift towards any ‘defeatist’ support for a Minsk-like settlement. This strategy may not be in the interest of either Germany or France, however, not least since the risk of Russia pulling the emergency brake and using its nuclear capability might increase with time. For Europe, the nuclearization of the Ukrainian war would be a catastrophe, whereas the US would hardly be affected if at all. Germany in particular is less interested than the US in a long war fought with freely supplied Western equipment. For Scholz, going slow on arms delivery may be an attempt, if a weak one, to make the Ukrainian government consider a settlement short of Putin having to be handed over to The Hague, provided a Normandy-like deal is still available. (Countries threatened by nuclear fallout through the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict might employ the slogan, ‘No annihilation without representation’.) The situation may be similar in France and Italy, while the UK, more remote from the war theatre, has as always tightly closed ranks with the US.

What about the Zeitenwende? Big as it may seem, Germany’s 100 billion special fund merely reflects a longstanding trend in global politics following the end of the post-1990 ‘peace dividend’ and the elder Bush’s New World Order. World military expenditure, in 2020 constant dollars, began to decline in 1989, reaching a nadir ten years later at a level two-thirds that of 1988. From then on – the real Zeitenwende – it increased steadily, returning in 2007 to its 1988 level, continuing to rise until 2010 and further after 2015, to a record level in 2020-21: one third above 1988, the last year of the Cold War.

The driving forces were the US and China. Between 1990 and 2001, US military spending had declined by one quarter; then, in 2002, it started rapidly to rise, by almost two-thirds in the nine years until 2010. By 2016 US military spending had fallen back to its 2004 level, to increase again by 11.3% from 2017 to 2021. In parallel, the US step by step dismantled the US–Russian arms control architecture. In 2002 it formally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited anti-ballistic missile defence systems; in 2009 it let the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) expire; it prevented, through its withdrawal from ABM, the ratification of START II, negotiated in 1993; it later refused to negotiate a START III treaty on limiting nuclear warheads; and in 2019 it withdrew, again unilaterally, from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, so it could begin to locate missile defence launch systems in European countries like Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic. While allegedly this was to protect Europe from Iranian nuclear missiles, in 2018 the US also cancelled the nuclear nonproliferation agreement reached with Iran in 2015, negotiated together with the major European powers.

While the American departure from ABM, START and INF mostly concerned Russia – in a double sense, one assumes – China was and will increasingly be the second major player in the worldwide build-up of means of destruction after the end of the end of history. Until the late 1990s Chinese military spending was almost negligible, amounting to no more than 8% of its American equivalent. Then it picked up, growing faster year by year – even more so than the US’s rapidly growing expenditure. In 2005 it had risen to 10%, five years later to 15%; in 2015 it was as high as 29%, and in 2021 it reached 35% of US spending. Russian military spending, by comparison, looks negligible. In 1998, a year before America’s favourite, Yeltsin, handed Vladimir Putin a country in total disarray, the Russian military budget was down to 3.1% of that of the US. In spite of enormous efforts after 2004, when it became foreseeable that Putin’s original ‘Lisbon to Vladivostok’ European project would fail, the relative size of Russian military spending increased to no more than 10.7% in 2016, only to fall again to 8.2% in 2021. Alluding to the Greek historian Thucydides and his analysis of the origins of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), Western military strategists call a Thucydidean moment one in which a dominant power feels compelled to go to war against a rising power, to prevent it from crossing a threshold beyond which it can no longer safely be defeated. Such a moment, it appears, may be right around the corner for the US and China, as it perhaps was for Russia in 2021, watching the arming of Ukraine by the United States. (Note that Athens had to learn the hard way that it had missed the magic moment and attacked Sparta too late.)

Unspeakably awful as it is for the Ukrainian people, the current fighting in the Donbas is no more than a sideshow in a much larger story: that of an approaching shoot-out between a declining and a rising would-be global hegemon. One function served by the war in this context is the consolidation of the US hold over its European allies, who are required as backing for the American ‘pivot to Asia’ (Obama) – to what used to be the South China Sea and is now referred to by the loyal Western mediacracy as the Indo-Pacific. The task for Europe is to prevent Russia taking advantage of the US turning its armed attention to other corners of the world – and, if need be, to join the US on its Asian expedition (something for which the UK is actively preparing). There is no guarantee that there will not be the odd nuclear explosion along the way, not least in Western Europe. For the countries there, the ever more urgent question will be whether they aspire to become more than an American auxiliary charged with controlling Russia and assisting in the upcoming battle with China – a question that Scholz, Macron et al. must now address before it is too late.

Read on: Susan Watkins, ‘An Avoidable War?’, NLR 133/134.

Tags Politics

Uncategorised

The Bourgeois Bloc

Post author By Oliver Eagleton
Post date 30 June 2022

Just a few months ago, the French political situation seemed to be smiling on Emmanuel Macron. Since his election as president in 2017 there had been no shortage of crises: social (the gilets jaunes), health (the Covid pandemic), diplomatic (the war in Ukraine). Most French people also believed that his record was poor (56%); that the country had deteriorated over the last five years (69%); that his programme was dangerous (51%); and that he had predominantly served the interests of the privileged (72%). Yet, in a contest against Marine Le Pen, whom he had crushed five years earlier, Macron’s return to the Élysée seemed the most likely outcome – in fact, all but assured. It was widely predicted that, having vanquished a far right divided between Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, and a left split between the ‘radical’ La France insoumise (LFI) and the more ‘moderate’, more liberal, more Atlanticist Socialist Party (PS) and Greens (EELV), Macron would make short work of his opponents in the subsequent parliamentary elections.

In the end, though, only the first part of this scenario came to pass. President Macron was indeed re-elected and the left excluded – though only just – from the second round of voting. This is no small matter: neither Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 nor François Hollande in 2017 managed to win a second term. But they were not lucky enough to find themselves in a run-off against the far right. Macron’s re-election nonetheless indicated a worrying trend. When the National Front first made it to the second round in 2002, after unexpectedly beating the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, Jean-Marie Le Pen captured only 18% of the electorate. In 2017, Marine Le Pen nearly doubled her father’s score. And this year she won 41% – 2.6 million more than in 2017 – while Macron’s vote fell by 2 million.

Few seemed troubled by this when the results were announced on 24 April. With the incumbent having secured a second term, most commentators assumed that the Rassemblement National (RN) – penalized by the two-round simple majority voting system and refusing any alliance with Zemmour – would win a derisory number of parliamentary seats. The only contest that seemed to matter was between Macron’s coalition, Ensemble, and the one that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had succeeded in forming around LFI, which brought the PS and EELV under its control. Mélenchon had even proclaimed that if his coalition, the Nouvelle unité populaire écologiste et sociale (NUPES), won, he would become Prime Minister, responsible for the country’s economic and social policy. Le Pen, meanwhile, seemed so resigned to defeat that she limited her ambitions to thirty seats out of the total 577. Suffice to say that no one was interested in her campaign, which was largely concentrated on her own district in Pas-de-Calais.

The results of the National Assembly elections therefore came as a shock. Where the RN previously had eight deputies, it will now have 89, making it the third largest parliamentary grouping after Macron’s 245-seat coalition and Mélenchon’s 151-seat opposition. Without any support from French elites, without a serious programme or compelling electoral campaigns, and with little militant activity or grassroots organizing between election cycles, the far right nonetheless continues to advance. Since it appears unimaginable that Le Pen could become President or Prime Minister, backing her carries little risk, and allows voters to express their frustration when the price of petrol rises or violence erupts outside the Stade de France.

The RN already had strongholds in the north and east of the country, where the scars of industrial outsourcing remain raw. But the party is now spreading its web across the entire country, with the exception of Brittany, most big cities (Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Rennes) and suburbs with large immigrant populations, such as in Seine-Saint-Denis. In Aude, a former outpost of the left near the Spanish border, the RN now holds all three seats, including that once occupied by Léon Blum, head of the Popular Front government (1936-38). Le Pen has just been re-elected with a large mandate in the Pas-de-Calais, an old fiefdom of the French Communist Party (PCF), one of whose famous deputies was Maurice Thorez, a former miner who led the party for more than thirty years.

This consolidation of the far right reflects both the failure of Macron, now deprived of a parliamentary majority, as well as that of the left, which remains a minority in the country, particularly beyond the big cities and suburbs. Upon entering the Élysée in 2017, Macron claimed that his election would stem the far right’s surge. The Economist ran a cover image of the youthful new President – ‘Europe’s saviour?’ – walking on water. Under his leadership, it was assumed, France would become a happy isle in the tormented West. For a global bourgeoisie terrified by Brexit and Trump, his arrival on the international scene was the sweetest revenge, heralding the retreat of right-wing populism and the return of the liberal centre. And for once, the good news came from France!

But the illusion did not last long. Eighteen months later, the movement of the gilets jaunes exploded. On 15 December 2018, three of its activists read an address to President Macron from the Place de l’Opéra. ‘This movement belongs to no one and everyone’, they declared. ‘It is the expression of a people who for forty years has seen itself dispossessed of anything that enables it to believe in its future and its greatness.’ No political party or trade union had organized the uprisings, whose participants were mostly drawn from isolated areas, far from public services or media attention: a sort of Gallic fly-over known as la France périphérique.

Revolutionary and patriotic, the new sans-culottes had identified their Louis XVI and some dreamed of a similar end for him. In Macron, they saw an arrogant young banker in the pocket of the multinationals which had dismantled their factories and torn apart their communities. It was difficult to imagine a starker contrast between what the gilets jaunes represented, where they came from and what they thought, and the social and political coalition embodied by the President. The scale of repression meted out to the former was stunning (2,500 were wounded, 24 lost an eye, four an arm). Eventually the movement waned, but in rural areas where it had been powerful, Le Pen and the RN capitalized on its discontent more effectively than Mélenchon and NUPES.

Macron’s ‘bourgeois bloc’, as Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini have termed it, is not an invention of the President himself. It is a political configuration born out of the liberal turn of the left, or what passed for it after it broke with the popular sectors and trade unions. Macron represents a distinctively French iteration of the strategy pioneered by Gary Hart in his 1983 presidential campaign against Walter Mondale, and then pursued by Clinton, Blair, Schröder, d’Alema and Obama over the subsequent decades. In France, what facilitated this merger between a moderately reactionary neoliberal right and a ‘modernizing’ left infatuated with free markets and globalization was the question of European integration.

From 1983, the Socialists François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors were the architects of Europe’s single market and capital liberalization laws. In 1992, in a dazzling prefiguration of what became the bourgeois bloc, Mitterrand and Chirac, who had clashed during the presidential election four years earlier, joined forces in the Maastricht Treaty referendum to advocate for a Yes vote. They rallied a novel coalition of right- and left-wing bourgeois behind them: managers, executives, professionals, as well as teachers, artists, intellectuals. On the other side, opposing the Treaty, was a disparate group of popular actors including the PCF, some Gaullists, the far right and Jacobin Socialists such as Jean-Pierre Chevènement. Despite a lopsided media campaign, the Yes campaign won by only a narrow margin, 51% to 49%.

Thirteen years later, roughly the same coalitions re-formed during another referendum on the proposed European Constitution. Hollande and Sarkozy appeared together on the front cover of Paris Match to endorse the Yes campaign. But this time, closer European integration was decisively rejected, 55% to 45%. In the interim, globalization had advanced, and a sizeable section of the insecure petite-bourgeoisie had come to loathe the neoliberal policies associated with the EU. For those who still needed it, Hollande and Sarkozy’s photo shoot was proof that the traditional left–right cleavage concealed a basic convergence. So when Macron, then Economy Minister under Hollande, resigned from the government in 2016 to forge an alliance with the liberal right intended to override these outdated cleavages, most of the work had already been done for him.

Many in Macron’s inner circle were once close to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Socialist grandee who was appointed Economy Minister under Jospin before becoming the Managing Director of the IMF. As early as 2002, Strauss-Kahn had laid out a plan for the Socialists to retain power without abandoning the neoliberal programme that cut them off from their popular constituency. His recommendation was simple: the party should not only resign itself to doing without working-class voters; it should learn to actively distrust those who previously formed its social base. The PS, he wrote in his book The Flame and the Ashes, must ignore the proletarian strata who ‘do not vote for it, for the simple reason that, most often, they do not vote at all’, and instead pitch itself to a ‘prudent, informed and educated’ layer. Rather than lamenting the embourgeoisement of the Socialists, Strauss-Kahn described this as a political and moral imperative: ‘Regrettably, we cannot always expect serene participation in a parliamentary democracy from the most disadvantaged group. Not that it is uninterested in history, but its irruptions into it sometimes manifest themselves in violence.’ Fifteen years later, the gilets jaunes would demonstrate as much to Macron, who welded the two fractions of the bourgeoisie into one hegemonic force, defined against the ‘deplorables’ protesting in the streets.

At this year’s election, Macron managed retain the support of Hollande’s electorate in the first round of vote in spite of the regressive policies pursued by his administration: abolishing wealth taxes, reducing social protections for workers, dismantling the rights of the unemployed and laying the groundwork for railway privatization. Ever since the Fifth Republic introduced universal suffrage in presidential elections – that is, from 1965 onwards – every second round of the vote has included a candidate from the traditional right or the traditional left (and often one facing off against the other). This precedent has been shattered in the most spectacular fashion. Whereas in 2012 the Socialists and centre-right totted up almost 56% of the vote between them, by 2022 that figure had fallen to 6.5%. The incumbent has become the choice of the liberal right as well as the bourgeois post-left, which has become increasingly accustomed to (and satisfied with) neoliberal reforms.

Macron likes to present himself as the originator of this coalition, even though it long predates his presidency. As he explained two days before the vote, ‘The radical centre project’ rests on ‘re-grouping several political families, from social-democracy to ecology, the centre, and the right that is part-Bonapartist and part-Orleanist and pro-European’. Sociologically, the bourgeois bloc is defined by this strange synthesis. Ensemble is the ‘party of order’, of property owners and business people. It is a coalition of all those who were scared by the gilets jaunes and reassured by its ferocious repression. In affluent areas like Neuilly or Versailles, Macron’s score has doubled in the last five years, allowing him to flatten the candidate of the official right, Valérie Pécresse, who could only distinguish herself by outbidding him on security and xenophobia (thereby helping to legitimize Le Pen, who looked almost moderate by comparison.) Once Pécresse was successfully ‘triangulated’, Macron then turned to the left’s electorate to beat Le Pen. And when this was achieved, he equated Mélenchon with Le Pen – les extrêmes – in order to dissuade his voters from backing NUPES candidates (who might have formed an parliamentary majority) against RN (which had no chance of doing so). With such cynical manoeuvring, Macron has largely discredited the old idea of a ‘Republican front’ against the far right.

Behind Macron’s centrist project, then, is assembled a conservative electorate of well-heeled pensioners and executives, in proportions that increase with age and income. An exceptional participation rate (88% of 60-69 year olds turned out to vote in the presidential election) amplifies its electoral impact, whereas supporters of Mélenchon and Le Pen are less inclined to use the ballot box (only 54% of 25-34 year olds participated in the first round, down from 72% in 2017). For Mélenchon, winning a parliamentary majority was contingent upon mobilizing large numbers of voters under the age of 35. This was not to be. Yet his campaign achieved several of its key objectives. Most impressively, it demolished the sections of the left that had embraced the right’s economic orthodoxies. Given the declining popularity of Podemos in Spain, Die Linke in Germany and the Communists and Left Bloc in Portugal, not to mention the capitulation of Syriza in Greece, this was a significant outcome – a French exception of sorts.

Mélenchon won 21.95% of votes cast on 10 April, against a mere 4.63% for the EELV and 1.74% for the PS. That enabled him to form an electoral alliance on his terms: increasing the minimum wage, expanding the state sector, lowering of the retirement age, environmental planning, rent controls, higher taxes on high-earners and reinstatement of the wealth tax abolished by Macron. Moreover, Mélenchon’s platform involved defying the European treaties insofar as they would impede his policies – a stance imposed by LFI on the reluctant Socialists and Greens. NUPES may not have won a majority, but it allowed the Socialists and Communists to maintain their seat share, the EELV to form a parliamentary group, and LFI to soar from seventeen to 75 deputies.

LFI triumphed in overseas territories and advanced in larger towns – increasing its popularity among the young, educated middle classes, some of whom voted for Macron in 2017. The party also made a breakthrough in the banlieues. Its new parliamentary intake includes militants such as Rachel Keke, an Ivoirian-born former housekeeper who became famous for leading a successful strike of precarious workers at the Ibis hotel in Batignolles, Paris. But despite these encouraging signs, the left made little progress in terms of votes in the country as a whole. It fared badly in rural areas and in the former mining, automobile and steel communities of the deindustrialized north and east, where the far right expanded its presence.

Of course, this rightward drift is not unique to France. Lorraine and Pas-de-Calais have their equivalents in Germany’s Saxony, America’s Midwestern rustbelt and England’s Red Wall. Across the West, the left is struggling to unify three heteroclite groups that are indispensable to its electoral victory: the educated bourgeoisie, the proletarians of the inner cities, and the popular classes in peripheral areas and the countryside. Often, in the absence of powerful organizations that can forge ties between these groups, distinct political identities are formed, and firmed up, around issues as diverse as immigration, religion, car use or hunting. A ‘wall of values’ has been erected between different sections of this potential progressive coalition which has enabled the rise of the extreme right. A left-wing electoral campaign every five years is not enough to heal such divisions, which are relentlessly exacerbated by the media and online networks. The bourgeois bloc, by contrast, has a clearer sense of its shared interests, and can more effectively contain internal conflicts.

However, even in the absence of a unified opposition, the new composition of the National Assembly may prevent Macron from implementing his reforms – in particular, the one most important to him and to the European Commission: raising the retirement age from 62 to 65. LFI and the RN oppose the measure, as does a majority of the population. And the gilets jaunes have demonstrated that even an authoritarian president can sometimes be forced to retreat in the face of popular anger. Now, with his majority gone and discontent simmering, Macron will struggle to impose his will.

Translated by Gregory Elliott.

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘The Centre Can Hold’, NLR 105.

Tags Politics