While many on the left of the political spectrum, including pseudo-radicals like Slavoj Zizek, are cheerleading the Nato-camp in the interimperialist slaughter in Ukraine, others see the US as the chief instigator of the war and claim that the violence could be avoided, that Europe and Russia could work it out if Europe would stop behaving so slavishly to the US, if it could regain its sovereignity. Patrick Lawrence is a representant of the latter current. His recent essay, “The Self-Destruction of Europe”, got quite some attention.
The trigger for that piece was the leaks in late September in Russia’s main gas pipelines to Germany, Nord Stream 1 and 2, which were almost certainly caused by an attack which, experts agree, could only have been carried out by a state actor.
Lawrence rightly accuses the media of paying little attention to the attack but he himself devotes only a few paragraphs to it. Rather sloppy paragraphs, moreover. Sources are missing (e.g., about the unnamed German minister who allegedly said that his government knows who the perpetrators are but can’t disclose it) and the claim that the transport of Russian gas to Europe has stopped is false. It has, of course, been significantly reduced, to 20 percent of prewar levels, according to the research firm Wood Mackenzie (CNN Business, 10/11). To only a small extent this was offset by the increase in European imports of Russian LNG (liquefied natural gas), which doubled this year, according to the same source who also notes, “Most of September’s imports went to France, Spain and Belgium, though some of those cargoes were then reloaded and shipped to countries outside Europe, including China.” Business must go on. Russia currently supplies 15% of European LNG imports.
I had hoped Lawrence would shed more light on the circumstances of the attack and the implications for the energy market and the war. He didn’t. The bulk of his article can be summarized as a plea for European nationalism. Europe must regain backbone, we must emulate leaders such as Charles De Gaulle and Willy Brandt, make our case together against the great culprit, the perfidious U.S. Today’s Europe is “a collection of vassal states subservient, even at the expense of their own people, to the U.S.” and “bowing submissively to the dictates of America” . Lawrence dreams of an alliance between Europe and Russia. A Eurasian colossus with a sovereign Europe as its western flank. Indeed, he is certain it will come about, because “This is very simply the course of history. I have never heard of any country being able to stop the course of it for more than a brief period.” As if the future is already written in advance.
Why is Europe so subservient to Washington? Lawrence turns to The British historian Perry Anderson who he says has an interesting answer to that question, which boils down to the fact that European leaders were conditioned to such an extent by Europe’s dependence on the U.S. security umbrella during the Cold War that even afterward they remained saddled with a “Stockholm syndrome” that blinds them to “Washington’s capricious abuse of European sovereignty,” of which the Baltic Sea attack is the definitive proof. Pop psychology as a crutch for lazy thinkers.
Which is not to say that his hypothesis – that Washington is behind the attacks – is unreasonable. On the contrary. Who else, of those who have the capacity to carry out such a sophisticated operation, has an interest in it? Only the US. Not Europe, which has to go to great lengths to find enough gas and has to pay more for it because of the attack. Not Russia, which loses a much-needed source of revenue because of the attack. Only Washington is drawing triple benefits: reducing the enemy’s resources to wage war, increasing the market for the U.S. gas industry and, perhaps most importantly, severing a vital infrastructural link between Europe and Russia, dimming the hopes of the part of the European and especially German bourgeoisie that keeps thinking that after the war in Ukraine, a course towards integration of the Russian and European economies, which, from the point of view of cost-efficiency makes sense, could be resumed.
The State Department and other U.S. authorities, of course, denied any role. They insinuated that Russia was responsible for the attack, which they said was intended to pressure Europe. Putin suposedly would hope that gas shortages would persuade Europeans to demand negotiations to end the war as soon as possible and recognize Russian conquests. They insinuated, because of course they could not prove it. The scenario is absurd. If it were true, why would Russia increase its exports of LNG to Europe? Because of the higher transportation cost, Russia makes less profit from LNG than from pipeline gas. Putin is not that crazy that he would willfully reduce Russian revenues. And if indeed he would be willing to give up much needed cash in order to intimidate the Europeans, would it not make more sense to shut off the pipelines instead of destroying them? The pipelines are jointly owned by German and Russian capital, mainly the latter. The cost of repairing them is estimated to exceed 500 million euro, which would fall mainly on Russia, which has already started the repairs.
There are other countries that might benefit from this attack, notably Ukraine, but they don’t have the capacity for such a sophisticated operation according to experts, and even if they did, it is not conceivable that they could undertake it without Washington’s knowledge and blessing. So even though, unsurprisingly, there is no hard proof, the U.S. is indeed the most likely culprit.
My disagreement with Lawrence, and the many leftists who think like him, is not that he thinks the U.S. is an imperialist country seeking hegemony. The problem is that he thinks this is an American thing, that other countries are not like that. So in the current war he sees only a “U.S.–led campaign against Russia via its proxy in Ukraine “ You would come to believe that Ukraine invaded Russia and not the other way around. To deny Russia’s imperialist ambitions is a form of blindness born of nationalism.
He accepts the vision we were spoon-fed with the baby-porridge: that the world is the theater of nations, that there are good and bad nations, and that ours is a good one because it is ours. So more power for ‘our’ nation is by definition good. Lawrence’s nightmare is loss of power, the “destruction altogether of Europe as an independent pole of power with a voice of its own and—just as important, to my mind—of “Europe” as an idea and an ideal.“
“Europe as an idea and ideal,” what are we to imagine? Are we talking about the continent where more wars raged than anywhere else in the world, the continent that exported war to the rest of the world, that organized colonization, slavery, genocides, and so on? Or is he talking about the Europe of Beethoven and Schiller, the Europe that sings, “All men become brothers”, meanwhile paying Turkey and Morocco to keep the refugees out ? Of course, Europe has also produced much that is good and beautiful. But “Europe as an idea and an ideal” is a purely ideological construct, a propaganda tool for nationalism.
According to Lawrence, we live in an “American-imposed world order” as if, if America suddenly disappeared, imperialism would be gone as well. The reality is that all countries that have the opportunity to do so, harbor imperialist ambitions. America pursues hegemony because it can, because it has the economical, financial and military power to do so. And that has been highly profitable for American capital. But for European capital as well. The alignment of interests is now so intense that there is really no need to drag in a Stockholm syndrome to explain why European leaders prefer an alliance with Washington to the alliance with Russia favored by Lawrence.
The world order is based on competition, between companies, between countries. Competition over resources and markets. The world order is based on capitalism, on the urge and the compulsion to make profit, to grow. The compulsion remains but the possibility diminishes. That is why the world order is in crisis. That fuels imperialism. Economic competition becomes military competition, war. That is why Russia is imperialist. That’s why China is imperialist. (And by the way, please let’s stop calling China “communist.” A system that is profit-oriented, that relies on exploitation of the working people, that compulsively accumulates and globally competes is capitalist, don’t be fooled).
The danger is not “the self-destruction of Europe” as Lawrence claims but the self-destruction of the entire human world. By the disruption of the climate that cannot be stopped because the growth compulsion bites all countries in the heels. By wars that are already becoming so multiple that we can hardly keep up with them – who remembers that a million people died recently because of war in Ethiopia? By pandemics as a side effect of the hunt for profit, by famine and mass flight in areas of the world that can no longer be profitably exploited by capital, by the inevitably increasing waves of migration that are grist for the mill of the “our own people first” patriotism that is the breeding ground for warmongering, for the death cult.
The world order is in decay. Not because American capital is in charge – you could call that a historical contingency. It is in decay because its foundations – competition, exploitation, profit as a condition of production – are diametrically opposed to the problems facing humanity. They make a solution impossible. The fundamental opposition is not between nations – they are all parts of the same pilotless machine – but between the economic, political and ideological managers of that world order and the rest of the population. Or, to put it in classic terms: between capital and the working class. That sounds old-fashioned but it will sound more and more contemporary as the decay deepens and the urge for survival unleashes the creativity of the masses. The enemy is in your own country.
Sanderr