Berlin versus Moscow - the real, enduring conflict of our time

The posting by the Wiki Man, asserting amazingly that ‘The EU only in recent years decided that Ukraine had met the criteria for membership. The route to membership was clear and open with only signatures to the appended to documents and parliaments to ratify agreements’,  was so amazing that it made me think it was time to re-examine the Russian question.

 

How the Wiki Man can imagine that the EU thought or thinks that the Ukraine has qualified for *EU membership*, I really do not know. Perhaps he has been consulting Dodgipedia, that well known source of duff information. Daft as the EU can sometimes be, it is not that daft. The eastern regions of the EU do indeed pulsate with herds of lipsticked pigs, nations whose enormous failings in economic mismanagement, corruption etc disqualify them from EU membership, yet which have been admitted.

 

But Ukraine is so hopelessly corrupt, lawless and bankrupt, as well as being huge, that even the EU’s most breathless expansion enthusiasts know that membership is a distant dream, at best. There is not enough lipstick in the world to change this.

 

Now, I have tried to explain many times that the real issue here is an abiding conflict between Russia and Greater Germany, dating from the early years of this century.

 

In its original form, this took the shape of Austria and Germany (helped by Lenin and others willing to accept subsidies) stirring up national feeling in the areas now forming part of Ukraine.

 

Some of what is now Ukraine was already then in German (well, Austrian) control, notably the parts around the Austrian city of Lemberg, which later became the Polish Lwow, then was Sovietized and so Russianized as Lvov under the Stalin-Hitler pact, then was seized back by Hitler (I’m not sure what it was called during this period) , then returned to the Soviet prison as Lvov, where it was close to a major centre for jamming Western broadcasts (the electric lights in Lvov are said to have been noticeably brighter after the jamming stopped, so much power did it use), and finally renamed Lviv after Ukrainian independence in 1991.

 

Those who think this area is straightforward, and that the entire ‘West’ is on the same side in an uncomplicated freedom versus tyranny alliance might want to read this interesting account of a recent controversy on the subject in Poland.

 

http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2014/10/poland-and-russia

 

Gosh, doesn’t Mr Sikorski get around a lot? Amazingly he once belonged to Oxford’s famous Bullingdon Club. And it seems to be bad form to mention that he is married to Anne Applebaum, the prominent and influential American journalist and author, at least, hardly anyone ever does mention it, either when writing about him or her.  But he is.

 

Anyway, I’d add that, whatever most of Ukraine is or was , the area round Lviv/Lvov/Lwow/Lemberg, known as Galicia,  is historically quite German and quite Polish, and also, as it happens, the seat and centre of the most militant Ukrainian nationalism. Perhaps this is because it is the most contested.

 

In any case, until Bismarck unified Germany around Prussia, I think it fair to say that this part of the world was predominantly Slav and, with the exception of Galicia, looked more towards Moscow than towards Berlin (though of course Poles, seeking liberation from their three neighbouring oppressors, Russia, Prussia and Austria, tended to look to Paris and even Washington for the hope of liberty).

 

Berlin’s interest grew as Germany grew more powerful and ambitious. Some readers here must be tired of my mentions of Friedrich Naumann’s liberal nationalist concept of ‘Mitteleuropa’, and of Richard von Kuehlmann’s discovery of what would become the concept of the EU – an empire that didn’t look like an empire, that gave the political classes of its member states the trappings of office, but not the reality.

 

As Adam Tooze puts it in in his ‘The Deluge’ (p.113), what Germany sought in 1917 was a ‘zone of German hegemony in central Europe, based on some kind of federative imperialism’.

 

‘‘Once Tsarist power collapsed in 1917 and America entered the war, it was obvious to the more intelligent strategic thinkers in Germany that there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination’.

 

I stress this forgotten but fascinating and educational era partly to avoid being accused of a thing I don’t do, namely equating modern Germany with Hitler. This would be both hysterical and wrong. Germany had a much more intelligent expansionist policy when it was run by civilized Edwardian liberals. The similarities between the Naumann and Hitler policies arise from the fact that both saw an eastward expansion as being in Germany’s long-term interests, in terms of natural resources, population, labour pools, and long-term, access to the Near-East (by which I mean Asia Minor and the Middle East ).

 

Hitler was stupid and crude where Kuehlmann and Naumann were cunning. Hitler , apart from being distracted by his dogmatic obsession with the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, sought crude conquest by force, made no effort to enlist the local populations,  and lost what he gained in a few years.

 

If Germany had won its 1918 offensive in France (and it very nearly did) it would to this day be ruling Ukraine, the Baltic States and Poland, and probably the Caucasus too, in a ‘federative empire’ made up of nominally independent vassal states claiming to be exercising self-determination.

 

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, still wheezing picturesquely on, but in truth entirely run from Berlin,  would form part of this federative empire, so relieving us of any need to wonder about such states as the Czech Republic , Slovakia or Hungary, which wouldn’t exist in their current form, or about the Balkans, which would have fallen inevitably into the Berlin camp.  There would have been no Versailles, no Trianon. Instead, perhaps, a Treaty of Potsdam with very different implications.

 

The only questions would be about the extent of this ‘federative empire’ and the sort of Russia which would have survived on its edges; and also of its relations with whatever Turkish state survived the process. A German victory in France in 1918 would have prevented the carve-up of the Levant and Mesopotamia by Britain and France, so altering history in even more unpredictable ways.  It would also have left the USA in a rather awkward position, having backed the wrong horse.

 

Anyway, things turned out as they did ( and as they might have turned out in 1914 had we had the sense to stay out of it) , and now, about 100 years later, under American patronage, the European continent has finally implemented most of what Naumann and von Kuehlmann sought in 1918. Except that Russia won’t accept defeat. Britain is no more, France is no more. The USA has decided that von Kuehlmann’s federative empire is the best road to stability( perhaps wrongly)   Berlin and Moscow for the first time face each other in a direct, unmediated confrontation.

 

I shall shortly explain a couple of aspects of that confrontation which are now forgotten or neglected, arising from Peter Hopkirk’s ‘The Great Game’, which I recently finished, and Richard Pipes’s ‘Russian Revolution’ which I am currently reading.  The first may explain Britain’s often rather silly view of Russia. the second may explain why it is rather hard, even for Germanophiles such as I am, to forgive Berlin for its actions in Petrograd in 1917.