by Rossana Rossanda
Published in the daily newspaper il manifesto, 29 June 2014<\/p>\n
Europe certainly did not come into being as an anti-American project but, given its size and population, at least as a large, autonomous market, with a currency that might compete with the dollar; and for some years that is what it was. But for some time now it has been asserting, to an astonishing degree, a role that would once have been called \u201cAtlanticist\u201d. No longer under the anti-communist banner, communism having disappeared long ago, but under an anti-Russian one. <\/p>\n
Some years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein told me that, once ideological confrontation had died away, the new wars would be commercial. And what other meaning can be given to the conflict now taking place in Kyiv? Ostensibly, it concerns Ukraine\u2019s national identity. With the exception of il manifesto, the entire press and television present a picture of a poor but democratic Ukraine struggling in the clutches of the Russian bear, which has already torn away the Crimean peninsula and would like to swallow the country whole. Russia is almost being portrayed as a new Third Reich. On the seventieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, French President Hollande was criticised for inviting Putin to the commemorations\u2014as though the Battle of Stalingrad had not made those very landings possible for the United States by drawing the bulk of the Wehrmacht away from northern Europe\u2014while German military units, of all things, were invited to take part in a re-enactment of the first Allied parachute landing at Sainte-M\u00e8re-\u00c9glise. <\/p>\n
In recent days we have also learned that the United States\u2014not even President Obama, but his former rival McCain\u2014has warned Bulgaria, Serbia and the other countries involved in a project to build a pipeline carrying Russian gas to Europe (along a route bypassing Ukraine because of its poor record of payment) to halt construction work, preferring a new route through Ukraine to one running directly to Western Europe. Astonishment and muted protests from Brussels, which is convinced that this is merely a symbolic threat. Yet it must be seen in the context of a change in US exports, now being directed towards the shale-gas trade, although that trade has not yet begun. <\/p>\n
Europe fears Russian reprisals for having applauded the overthrow of Ukraine\u2019s pro-Russian president Yanukovych by the forces of Maidan Square, now in power in Kyiv. But the history of relations between Russia and Ukraine is anything but straightforward. The principality of Kyiv was the first form of what would become the Russian Empire, annexed to Russia by Catherine II around the middle of the eighteenth century, when she established its strongest naval base in Crimea. Its culture, development and figures, from Gogol to Berdyaev, were among the leading forces in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Russian literature as a whole remains marked by the war between Russia, Britain and France, which sought to get their hands on the region: one need only think of Tolstoy and of the streets and broad avenues in the respective capitals commemorating that war (Sevastopol). But the country, originally traversed, like Italy, by a multitude of ethnic groups, from the Scythians onwards, struggled to unite as a nation and was marked by savage struggles\u2014not merely ideological ones\u2014between different nationalisms, often of the right. These reached their height during the First and Second World Wars: in the first, under the presidency of Petliura, a right-wing nationalist, when Ukraine was the last refuge of the \u201cWhite\u201d generals Denikin and Wrangel, and Petliura clashed with the Soviet republic of Kharkiv. Only with the definitive victory of the USSR was the Soviet republic founded in Kharkiv consolidated, destined to become a centre of industrialisation in the 1930s. Industrialisation developed exclusively in the east (the Donbas basin, with Kharkiv as its capital), while the west of the country remained largely agricultural (with Kyiv as its capital, as it was of the republic as a whole); and this remains at the root of the dispute between the two parts of the country. During the Second World War, moreover, the German occupation found favour with part of Ukraine\u2019s political landscape, a legacy evidently still alive in the recent events in Maidan Square: an explicitly Nazi party is still active, and this is not the least of the reasons why the country remains divided between its eastern and western regions. After the war, Khrushchev granted Ukraine full administrative autonomy, including Crimea, without any politically significant consequences because the process remained internal to the Soviet Union. <\/p>\n
It was only from 1991, with the collapse of the USSR, that the Ukrainian government, under pressure also from Poland and Lithuania, began looking towards Europe (and NATO) and intensified its confrontation with the eastern part of the country. It seems incredible that the West failed to consider that the Soviet Union was not merely a legal construct: dissolving it by decree and from above, as happened in 1991, meant creating a series of critical situations affecting both cultures and the economic relationships that extended across that vast territory. Since then, Kyiv has made no secret of its aim to achieve an ethnic and linguistic unification of the two regions, even by force, going so far as to prohibit the inhabitants of the east from using the Russian language to which they were accustomed. <\/p>\n
Europe and NATO have consistently supported Kyiv\u2019s policies, and then the uprising against the deeply corrupt President Yanukovych, who was forced to flee to Russia. But the eastern region certainly does not miss him: it cannot tolerate the Kyiv government and its complicity with NATO, but not because it longs for the return of that individual. It has rebelled against Kyiv\u2019s past and present policies, which have even sought to prevent the use of Russian, the language spoken by the majority of the population in the east. Europe and NATO, supported by Poland and Lithuania, maintain that this is not a genuine and spontaneous expression of nationalism but direct Russian interference; the Italian press and television say the same. There is no doubt that Russia wanted Crimea back in its fold, but the east\u2019s proposal for a federation with the west, guaranteeing autonomy to both parts, was rejected by Kyiv and the insurgents\u2019 government. The decision to hold a referendum in the east against Kyiv was taken not by Putin, who was put in an awkward position, but by the population of the east, which voted 98 per cent in favour. This was not a regular process (we would not accept South Tyrol voting one Sunday in the near future to join Austria, without any prior diplomatic negotiations), but neither was it a Russian manoeuvre, as the whole of Europe maintained. <\/p>\n
It is astonishing that even what little remains of the European left has embraced this position, and that in Italy Alexis Tsipras\u2019s reservations about Brussels\u2019s policies have found no echo. Some have even irresponsibly invoked armed action against Moscow. The drift towards conflict, including military conflict, and not only in Ukraine, threatens increasingly to define a Europe that has forgotten history, geography and politics. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Rossana RossandaPublished in the daily newspaper il manifesto, 29 June 2014 Europe certainly did not come into being as an anti-American project but, given its size and population, at least as a large, autonomous market, with a currency that might compete with the dollar; and for some years that is what it was. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1842,"featured_media":901297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-901296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-scouting"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n