Credit: Wolfgang Ammer
The recent release by the Russian authorities of the Soviet copy of the
infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in August 1939 on behalf of Germany and the
Soviet Union by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov has led to a bout
of rancorous discussion. In the West, the agreement is largely perceived as
having had dire consequences for the peace in Europe, while in Russia it is
largely seen as a last ditch attempt at staving off war. But while each perspective
has its merits, analyses that is limited only to explaining the causes of the
Second World War as well as which army played the greater role in defeating
Nazi Germany miss a wider and enduringly crucial picture; this is the
centrality of Germany to any calibration of the geopolitical power
balance.
The
Nazi-Soviet Pact was an agreement which provided that Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union would not attack the other or support aggressive third parties. It
also provided each signatory state with spheres of influence. One week later,
Hitler attacked Poland, occupying the western and central parts of the country,
while the Soviet Union took over the eastern part. Hitler would later turn his
military westward while Stalin would annexe the Baltic States.
The case for
the pact as having served as a malign force in disturbing the peace among
European nations would appear to be an open and shut one. The argument is that
it enabled Hitler to attack and conquer much of Western Europe and thus start a
colossal conflagration that would consume millions of lives. However, a
compelling counter-argument to this from the Russian side posits that Stalin
was forced into the unholy alliance simply because the Munich Agreement signed
in September 1938 by Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had
the motive of encouraging Hitler to embark on his anti-Bolshevik crusade.
It is, after
all, widely accepted that many western politicians -and not only those who were
right-wing conservatives- saw the Nazi regime as a bulwark against the spread
of Soviet communism. Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace in our time” did not
objectively include the Soviet Union whose western lands, Hitler regarded with
envious eyes.
There is also
evidence presented in a recently published Russian book, in which the Russian
copy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact is reproduced, that Stalin had sought an anti-Nazi
alliance with Britain and France, but that his overture was rebuffed. As
revealed in 2008, the offer to move over a million troops to the border of
Germany to deter Hitler was made in Moscow by senior military officials of the
USSR to a visiting delegation of French and British officers two weeks before
the Wehrmacht attacked Poland.
The truth is
that the Western liberal democracies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on
the other, were trying to shift Nazi aggression onto the other side.
The back and
forth was of course set against the background of the recent commemoration of
the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings from which the Russians were not
invited. The not unreasonable assertion that the Soviet Union had borne most of
the burden in defeating Nazi Germany was met by claims that the Soviets
received massive material aid from the West which enabled them to resist the
German invaders.
And while
most serious scholars of military history would pinpoint the Soviet defeat of
the Sixth Army and other axis armies in Stalingrad as the turning point in the
war which set in motion the inexorable process of Germany’s defeat, the atmosphere
among many Western analysts was not conducive to anything other than
memorialising the sacrifice of allied soldiers who succeeded in the perilous
venture of establishing a bridgehead in occupied Europe after the Normandy
landings.
The point of
this article is to put to one side the differing interpretations of the events
which primed Nazi Germany to go on the attack as well as arguments pertaining
to which side did the most to defeat Hitler and his axis allies, and instead to
focus on the centrality of the German nation to the determination of the
balance of power between the Western alliance and the Eurasian power of Russia.
The Cold War
which followed Germany’s defeat after World War 2 as well as the present Cold
War which has arisen since the emergence of Vladimir Putin place Germany as a
focal point of the tension between east and west.
The German
nation, which lost a great amount of territory, was divided into two countries
because the Western allies and the Soviet Union realised that having a regenerated
Germany in one of the post war camps would have given a monumental strategic
advantage to one side. This issue remains at the heart of the contemporary
east-west divide because a key condition; indeed, arguably the preeminent
proviso which enabled the leaders of the old Soviet Union to consent to German
reunification and German membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) was the promise given by the leaders of the West not extend NATO “one
inch eastward”.
This promise
was not kept by the American-led Atlantic alliance which since the
administration of President Bill Clinton has persisted in expanding NATO to
Russia’s border. Guided respectively by the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the
Brzezinski Doctrine, the United States has in the period since the ending of
the ideological-based Cold War sought to impose a historically unprecedented
form of global hegemony.
By this is
meant that the ends sought by the brutal and perverted philosophy of Nazi
Lebensraum was constricted in terms of the amount of territorial conquest and
control of other nations. This was implicit in Hitler’s offer to Britain to
keep its empire in return for giving Germany a “free hand in the east”. The other belligerent of World War 2, Japan
sought a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, imperialist by design, but not
the global dimension suggested by the forged Tanaka Memorial.
But American
worldly hegemony has its blue print in its domination of the global
institutions of finance, namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank, which were created after the post-war Bretton Woods agreement.
Furthermore, the U.S. dollar emerged as the de facto world reserve currency.
The “end of
history”, as Francis Fukuyama infamously put it, occasioned by the fall of the
Soviet Union and its dominion states in eastern Europe, meant that the
free-market economic system and liberal democracy had won out in a dialectical
struggle with Marxism. This would, he prophesied mean that free-market
orientated liberal democracies would become the world’s “final form of human
government.”
This line of
thinking fell neatly into place in the new world order envisioned by those who
believed in the strand of “American exceptionalism” that embraces the spread of
American values by force of arms and those who subscribed to the ideology of
neoconservatism and its Trotskyite-like fixation on a form of “permanent
revolution” involving the export of the American economic and political system
through the instrument of the American armed forces or its proxies.
Thus was born
a new age of American militarism. The Wolfowitz Doctrine insisted on imposing
the will of the United States even at the cost of abrogating multi-national
agreements, while the Brzezinski Doctrine made a specific case for preventing
the rise of a Eurasian power that would challenge Anglo-American supremacy. The
latter doctrine explicitly sought to intimidate Russia to a state of military
impotence, while creating the circumstances whereby Russia -preferably a
balkanised Russian state- would service the energy and resource needs of the
West.
Where does
Germany fit into this? The projection of American military power under the
auspices of NATO and the use of the European Union (EU) by the United
States to provide legitimacy for a
succession of disastrously implemented interventions has exposed the necessity
for restraint on the desire for the imposition of a unipolar model of an
international order insisted upon by the United States to be its historical
right.
Apart from
providing it with the legal cover for illegal military endeavours, the EU has
been used by the United States to apply pressure on other countries through the
imposition of trade sanctions even when such a course of action has been to the
disadvantage of members states such as Germany. For instance, the United States
provided covert support for the coup which forced out the democratically
elected government of Viktor Yanukovytch in Ukraine and brought to power
ultranationalist, Russophobic parties who proceeded to threaten Russia’s vital
strategic interests in the Black Sea.The not unreasonable Russian reaction of
annexing Crimea after a plebiscite was construed by the United States as an act
of aggression which necessitated a range of sanctions including, at US
insistence, German sanctions; measures which many German business leaders
opposed because they harmed the German economy.
Yet, for all
its influence as the dominant nation within the EU, Germanyhas been unable to
assert itself by putting a leash on American aggression. There are many reasons
for this, not least of which is that after defeat in two world wars, Germany
has remained somewhat in the thrall of the Anglo-American world. The presence
of 32,000 American troops who are permanently based there, albeit reduced from
the Cold War figure of 300,000, is officially part and parcel of the business
of conducting a mutually beneficial military alliance. But for a sizeable
segment of the German population, their continued deployment, far from
providing an assurance of national protection, bears the aura of an army of
occupation; a reminder of Germany being somewhat of a dominion state of the
American empire.
The lack of
assertion in Germany’s political leaders stem from an erosion of a form of
national self-esteem that is based on fears that an assertive Germany may lay
the seeds for a resurgence of German militarism. They are also conscious of the
doubts which persist among allies. Margaret Thatcher, after all, was not
initially in favour of German reunification because of this age-old fear. This
fear, deeply rooted in the German psyche, was addressed by Goethe, who in the
Napoleonic age cautioned his countrymen about their enthusiastic embrace of
nationalism and militarism. He predicted that Germany would come to disaster if
they followed that path and so called on them to invest in culture and the
spirit: in other words, conquer the world with their talents in music,
philosophy, trade and the sciences.
Today, shorn
of its martial fixation and possessing the fourth largest economy in the world,
Germany would appear to be firmly on the path of which Goethe advised. Many are
inclined to view the EU as a German-dominated organisation, something made all
the more glaring given the decline of French economic power. Germany imposes
its values on economically struggling EU states by diktat. It is a state of
affairs which some cynically view as the culmination of the ‘long desired’
German ‘conquest’ of Europe.
Yet, while
Germany has forsworn the trappings and the burdens of militarism, some may
lament that it does not use its economic might as the basis of tempering the
excesses of the American empire. One way of achieving this is to manifest a
greater resolve at casting away its inhibition at defying the malign
enterprises pursued by the United States so far as consenting to the illegal
military adventures pursued by the American, as well as the imposition of
sanctions on those perceived to be the enemies of the United States.
Unfortunately,
Germany has wilted under American pressure to maintain sanctions against
Russia, and while a signatory to the Five Plus One Agreement with Iran, it has
begun to buckle in regard to the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran
after Washington abrogated on the treaty. Many larger German commercial
concerns have ceased trading with Iran as a result of the threats issued by the
United States that they would face
repercussions.
There have
been instances when the Germans have tried to act independently of American
machinations. For instance, through the Minsk Accord of 2015 which was jointly
brokered by Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois
Hollande. It was a worthy effort aimed at creating the circumstances for peace
between the warring sides in the Ukraine, but one whose failure owed a great
deal to the opposition of the United States.
American
animus towards Russia, something developed after the replacement of the pliant
Boris Yeltsin by Vladimir Putin, poses a grave threat to world peace. It also
serves as an impediment to the German national interest. Not only does NATO’s
expansion eastwards, reneging of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and
deployment of a missile shield system imperil Germany, the United States has
actively sought to impede the development of Nord Stream 2, the second offshore
natural gas pipeline emanating from the Russian mainland which has its entry
point to western Europe in Germany. The threat of sanctions issued in June 2019
by U.S. President Donald Trump against Russia is redolent of the sort of
paternalism practised by the Americans after the ending of the Second World
War. In the words of Trump:
We’re
protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of
dollars in money.
These
followed a letter writing campaign conducted in January 2019 by the US
ambassador to Germany who urged the companies involved in the project to stop
their work or face the possibility of sanctions.
The American
claim -shared by some eastern European countries- that the project would
increase Russian influence in the region, is one which Germany’s political and
business leaders feel does not outweigh the benefits that will accrue once it
is operational.
Nord Stream
notwithstanding, the development of closer ties between Germany and Russia in a
much broader sense is one which provides an existential threat of sorts to
different parties. For the Anglo-American world, it would represent the
beginning of the process whereby Germany jettisons out of their orbit of
influence; severely weakening the basis by which British and American empires
have sought to counterbalance and contain the rise of any Eurasian-centred
power. The French may view it as a dynamic which would shift German focus away
from Franco-German relations, which of course was at the heart of the creation
of the EU project. The strengthening of Russo-German relations is also viewed
with alarm by those nations in eastern Europe who have historically suffered
from the projection of Russian and German power, not least of which relates to
the implementation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.
Fears over an
emerging power alliance were heightened in some quarters by the appearance of
an article written in 2017 by a member of the Russian
Izborsky Club. It called for a new geostrategic alliance between Germany and
Russia which would serve as an updated version of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact
by re-dividing eastern Europe between both countries.
Formed in
2012, and composed of a group of Russian intellectuals, the Izborksy club is a
think-tank which disseminates strongly nationalist and anti-liberal views. The
level of influence that it has in the Kremlin is something which is disputed.
But the thoughts of Aleksandr Gaponenko, the head of the Baltic section of the
club, were seized upon by anti-Russian think-tanks and media as evidence of
what they believe would be the logical conclusion of a modern German-Russian
axis.
Entitled “A
Union of Russia and Germany”, Gaponenko argued that such an alliance would
allow Germany to “recover” the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Poland,
Hungary and Romania as well as portions of Ukraine and Lithuania. Russia, on
the other hand would take over the rest of the Baltics, Transdniestria and
establish a protectorate over Belarus.
How such a
fantastical enterprise could be made practicable was not addressed by
Gaponenko.
What is more
realistic and would be of benefit to the region is if Germany served as a
bridge between the West and Russia; in the process diffusing the manufactured
tension developed by successive administrations of the United States who are
prodded along this path by the self-serving interests of its military industry
and national security apparatus.
What is
needed is a radical change in the political culture of Germany, one which has
been for decades dominated by subservience to the United States, which is
insistent on maintaining a form of global hegemony in regard to which Russia,
China and Iran offer the last resistance.
Such a
transformation of attitude and action through a new-style detente would not
only serve German interests, but also the interests of the wider community of
nations.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2019)
Adeyinka
Makinde is based in England. He often blogs on topics pertaining to Global
Security.
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