Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.16
RISE AND TRIBULATIONS OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM (I)
Characterization of European imperialism
In this article we will analyze the development of European imperialism and the tendencies which, from within or from outside, push for its integration or disintegration as the case may be. But before continuing, let us take as a safe reference Lenin's Marxist assessment in 1915 of the slogan of the United States of Europe (the current European Union):
“From the standpoint of the economic conditions of imperialism—i.e., the export of capital and the division of the world by the “advanced” and “civilised” colonial powers—a United States of Europe, under capitalism, is either impossible or reactionary. (…) A United States of Europe under capitalism is tantamount to an agreement on the partition of colonies. Under capitalism, however, no other basis and no other principle of division are possible except force. A multi-millionaire cannot share the “national income” of a capitalist country with anyone otherwise than “in proportion to the capital invested” (with a bonus thrown in, so that the biggest capital may receive more than its share). Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, and anarchy in production. To advocate a “just” division of income on such a basis is sheer Proudhonism, stupid philistinism. No division can be effected otherwise than in “proportion to strength”, and strength changes with the course of economic development. Following 1871, the rate of Germany’s accession of strength was three or four times as rapid as that of Britain and France, and of Japan about ten times as rapid as Russia’s. There is and there can be no other way of testing the real might of a capitalist state than by war. War does not contradict the fundamentals of private property—on the contrary, it is a direct and inevitable outcome of those fundamentals. Under capitalism the smooth economic growth of individual enterprises or individual states is impossible. Under capitalism, there are no other means of restoring the periodically disturbed equilibrium than crises in industry and wars in politics.
Of course, temporary agreements are possible between capitalists and between states. In this sense a United States of Europe is possible as an agreement between the European capitalists ... but to what end? Only for the purpose of jointly suppressing socialism in Europe, of jointly protecting colonial booty against Japan and America (…).” (On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, Lenin, 1915).
Despite the hundred years that have passed since these precise quotations, all their fundamental points are still valid and even tremendously up to date.
The internal borders in Europe have changed. There is no more Austria-Hungary or the German Empire, although they were correctly characterized as already capitalist powers then by Lenin. The European Union is not only fighting for the conquest of markets against Japan and the US but also against China, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, etc. But its sense of existence remains the same as it was in 1915: to prevent and smash if necessary the proletarian revolution within the European Union, and to defend itself together against the other capitalist powers.
In the last two decades it is no longer Germany or Japan that are growing much faster than their rivals, but Asia in general and China in particular that are growing at a much faster rate, but the resulting imbalance is of the same nature.
And is it not obvious that the division of the world after the 2nd imperialist slaughter has collapsed, that as in 1915 another division can only be made by force, and that war is both the inevitable development of capitalism and the only way to prove the real current power of the capitalist States currently in conflict?
After having recalled the reactionary character of the current European Union in the face of the proletarian revolution as well as its imperialist nature, we will place ourselves at the end of the Second World War to analyze how European imperialism has been shaped from that moment on, how its rise has been and in what its stagnation consists.
Victors and defeated, or the other way around
In 1945, Germany, which would later become the core and powerhouse of today's European imperialism, had just been defeated in the war, was divided into four parts, militarily occupied and deprived of an army.
Over the immediate following years, two of the victors and occupiers, French and British imperialism, saw their empires dismantled as a result of the development of bourgeois democratic revolutions in Asia and Africa as well as the Russian-American condominium over Europe and the world.
Thus, while fascism was militarily defeated only to be embraced in practice by all the capitalist States of the world (State intervention in the economy, integration of trade unionism into the networks of the bourgeois State, hypertrophy of the bourgeois State, concentration of the repressive capacity and militarization of all areas of society), two of the supposed victors of the war (France and the United Kingdom) were in reality the great losers in the second world slaughter.
The independence of India (1947), the defeat of France at Dien Bien-Phu (1954) and the later independence of Algeria (1962) are episodes of this retreat. The disempowerment of the United Kingdom and France by Russia and the US vis-à-vis Egypt in the Suez Canal crisis in 1956 would highlight the loss of power of these classic capitalist powers.
Miracles of the defeated
In 1949, the German bourgeoisie recovered its instrument of class domination and the German Federal Republic was founded. Only two years later (1951) the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was constituted on the basis of the Franco-German alliance, also including Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with the express aim of avoiding a repetition of the world war on European territory. The experiences of the first two wars had taught these capitalists that the US had been able to prevail over the other contending countries precisely because the war was not fought on American territory.
After six years (1957) both the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC) were formed by the same capitalist states. The embryo of European imperialism was consolidated around the defeated and still divided Germany.
The Berlin Wall and false Russian socialism
Against the expansion of this embryo of European imperialism and against the working class, the nefarious Berlin Wall was erected by the false Russian socialism in 1961.
This wall built for anti-communist purposes was an emulative cobweb for the capitalist businesses on both sides of the curtain, but it was an enormous and suffocating weight for the European working class. No wall could prevent years later the great confession of the capitalist character of the so-called Eastern bloc, but it did serve for a part of the working class to learn to reject socialism or else to fight for a false objective, contrary to its needs and historical purposes, erroneously identifying in both cases socialism with the tattered capitalism of the area of influence of Stalinist Russia (which for us is not substantially different before or after the death of the individual Stalin).
On the contrary, when the revolutionary proletariat will succeed in taking power in one or several countries, in the heat of the next revolutionary wave about which we are fully certain despite the fact that it does not appear as immediate and not even close, not only will it not raise any wall but it will be instead the capitalists of the rest of the countries who will raise it. And they will raise it to prevent the thrust and extension of the communist revolution and the spread of the news about the establishment of the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat: destruction of the bourgeois State, expropriation of the means of production, drastic reduction of the working day, incorporation of the proletarian masses to the exercise of revolutionary power, elimination of money and wage labor, expropriation of the housing stock and other buildings to eliminate the shortage of housing and eradicate the use of unhealthy rooms, etc.
The creation of the European Monetary System
The gradual attraction of the various capitalist countries of Western Europe followed its course: in 1973 Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom joined the EEC, followed by Greece (1981), Spain and Portugal (1986), but a milestone in the development of European imperialism was the creation in 1979 of the European Monetary System (EMS), the basis of the future currency with which European imperialism would try to dispute the primacy of the dollar as reserve currency or international currency.
The possibility of printing dollars and exchanging them for real commodities had been the basis for the appropriation by the US of part of the profit obtained by the rest of the world bourgeoisies through the surplus value exploited from their respective working classes. This was the function of the Bretton Woods agreements (1944), imposed by the US in the final stretch of the second imperialist slaughter and which had blown up in 1971, coinciding with the first US trade deficit.
The trend towards integration in the Eurasian area
In 1982 the construction of the Russia-Europe gas pipeline began. In an attempt to prevent this energy integration between Western European capitalism and Russia, the US embargoed the French subsidiary of Dresser (manufacturer of the compressors needed to liquefy the gas), which was followed by its requisition by France in order to seize the compressors.
This virulent reaction of US imperialism to prevent the energy connection between Europe and Russia was the prelude to a constant in US policy. In turn, the European reaction was a manifestation of a real tendency on the part of European capitalism, and German capitalism in particular, to realize this integration. The links of this tendency with Russia could be seen years later in the role of G. Schröder (former president of Germany) at the head of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and in his positions in Rosneft.
Also on the production level, all the countries of the Eastern bloc were falling into a relationship of dependence with the German capitalism of the GDR, and in a high degree of financial indebtedness with the FRG
Fall of the Wall and German reunification
Russian capitalism could not prevent in 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the crumbling of its bloc due to a combination of factors (military defeat in Afghanistan in an imperialist war initiated ten years earlier in 1979 and the great waves of strikes inside Russia, see “El Comunista” No. 19, November 1989, p.14) which prevented it from mobilizing the army as it had done in 1968 in Czechoslovakia and in Poland in the strikes of 1970, repeated later in 1976 and 1981.
The massive indebtedness of all the countries of the Eastern bloc and also of those of the West to Germany, together with the crisis of relative overproduction in the Russian area, determined the complete collapse that followed.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakdown of the Eastern Bloc, the foundations of the Russian-American condominium and the division of Germany collapsed: right after that, in 1990, the German capitalist State was reunified, and in the same year the European Economic and Monetary Union was formed (see “El Comunista” No. 20, May 1990, p.14).
The breakup of Yugoslavia
A year later, in 1991, the breakup of Yugoslavia, the process of subduing Serbia and the recovery of the direct exit to the Mediterranean by Germany began. The successive declarations of independence of Slovenia and Croatia, promoted by Germany in whose academies the Slovenian and Croatian military cadres had been trained, were the prelude to the Bosnian war whose population was cynically sacrificed in an artificially prolonged war (as was the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988) to wear down and reduce Serbia. The absence of a class alternative and of an uncompromisingly internationalist approach making no concessions to any kind of nationalism, determined a bloodbath that lasted until 1999 with the Kosovo war and the bombing of Serbia, the first foreign military action of the German army after the second imperialist slaughter.
US competitors: Japan and Germany
With Russia in free fall and China in the process of industrialization (initiated after China's defeat by Vietnam in 1979 and the launch of the Special Economic Zones in 1980), two capitalist powers threatened to oust the US: Japan and the nascent European imperialism.
Japanese imperialism was already investing in areas that had been US hunting areas, such as the construction in 1980 of the world's largest refinery in Abadan (Iran), with a production capacity of 2.5 barrels per day. And by 1990, Japan had displaced the US in the world's top 10 banks by assets. By 1994, there were 413,578 industrial robots in Japan compared to only 65,198 in the US. Note that comparatively small Germany also already had 56,175.
This prompted the US show of force with the first Iraq war in 1990 (after conveniently inciting Iraq to provide an excuse by invading Kuwait) and the campaign to make Japan and Germany pay for the costs of the war: the two defeated of the second world slaughter who were challenging US world primacy.
On this basis US was able to apply against Japan the production quota as well as the delivery of the two most advanced supercomputers. By preventing Japanese commodities from being sold if they were not produced in the USA, the Japanese bourgeoisie was condemned to stew in the sauce of the installed productive overcapacity. But it could not subdue Germany and European imperialism, which was continuing its process of integration and expanding its influence towards southern and eastern Europe, which was in the process of collapsing.
The attack on the EMS and the formation of the EU
In an attempt to dynamite the process of conformation of European imperialism, in 1992 speculative attacks were launched against the Italian lira, the Spanish peseta and the pound sterling. These currencies were massively sold in order to devalue them and force them out of the European Monetary System, obtaining huge profits by buying back these devalued currencies at a much lower price. This attack against the EMS was led by G. Soros, with the participation of both US and Scandinavian speculators, among them and very significantly the current US Treasury Secretary in the second Trump term (S. Bessent).
Despite their effectiveness against the Italian, Spanish and British currencies, the speculators crashed against the French franc, or rather, they crashed against the Bundesbank (German central bank), which bought all the francs that were massively launched for sale. With this, the attempt to push the franc out of the EMS also failed, and the effort for the unity of German and French capitalism was demonstrated, as well as the economic power of this bourgeoisie which had resisted the attack.
The failed financial attack could not prevent the formation of the European Union the following year, 1993, on the basis of the “European Communities”, i.e. the ECSC, the EEC and the EAEC.
European Central Bank and the launch of the euro
And in 1998 the European Central Bank was created, a step prior to the launching of the Euro as a currency for international transactions in 1999 and its introduction as a general currency in 2002. European imperialism had equipped itself with a single currency and intended to unseat the dollar as reserve currency, although it never came close to achieving this.
When analyzing the following chart, it should be noted that prior to 1999 the Euro category includes all the European currencies that later joined the euro. The strength with which the US dollar displaced the pound sterling is striking. The gradual rise of the European currencies and the Japanese yen in the years following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreements can be observed.
Around 1990 (as a result of the Iraq war), the dollar expanded again, on account of the loss of ground by the European currencies and the Japanese yen. In 1999 and then in 2002, with the introduction of the euro, the European currencies grouped in this way recovered ground. But from then on, the euro did not really advance. And the dollar declined, but not so much because of the euro as because of other currencies. These currencies (yuan, ruble, rupee, dirham, etc.) did not yet have a specific weight in 2017, when the chart ends, but they showed an upward trend that they have maintained.
Expansion of the EU to the East
If the last incorporations to the EU prior to the launch of the euro, in 1995, were Austria, Finland and Sweden; from the launch of the European currency, mainly Eastern European states joined: in 2004, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia, in 2007, Bulgaria and Romania, and in 2013, Croatia. In this way, the radius of European imperialism reached almost the whole of Europe and its peak. From this moment on, the admissions as candidates to join the EU have ceased to be a genuine attempt at imperialist expansion to become a promise to maintain expectations and prevent these states from getting too close to other capitalist powers, such as China or Russia.
In 2022, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and Ukraine were admitted as candidates, which were put in line for actual admission with North Macedonia (since 2005), Montenegro (since 2010), Serbia (since 2012) and Albania (since 2014).
Euromaidan in Ukraine
In 2013, China announced the launch of the New Silk Road, in which Ukraine was to play the role of distribution hub in Europe. On the one hand, the European bourgeoisie had been realizing the progressive hollowing out of its backyard by China and, on the other hand, the US had been investing systematically for years in an attempt to wrest Ukraine from the Russian sphere of influence and drag Russia into a war against the European states.
The result was the Euromaidan, which deposed President Yanukovych after he suspended the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement that had been approved by Parliament. This move wrested the bulk of Ukraine from Russian influence and prevented Ukraine from being the platform for the flooding of Europe with Chinese commodities brought in by train.
But Russian imperialism did not stand still and in 2014 occupied Crimea and Sevastopol, as well as the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk. Then began the EU and US sanctions against Russia and the low-intensity war in the Donbas that continued until the outbreak of open warfare with the entry of the Russian army into Ukraine in February 2022.
To be continued
In the next issue we will analyze how, after the almost uninterrupted rise we have been following until before 2013, the process turns from here on into a period in which internal disputes will be highlighted at the same time as some states act as a fifth column of either Russia or the US, important deficiencies in military field and in key technologies become apparent, the approach of commercial complementarity with China fades away at the same time that the US becomes an unpredictable ally, the United Kingdom will separate from the EU to end up in a worse position than it was in, European imperialism is expelled from the Sahel, its energy integration with Russia is dynamited and the US manages to trigger a war in Ukraine to then begin normalization negotiations with Russia at the expense of European imperialism.
These are some of the elements, added to the effects of the crisis of overproduction, which we will analyze as generators of centrifugal and centripetal tendencies acting in opposite terms in the process of integration or disintegration of European imperialism.
In either of these two eventualities, the working class has nothing to gain either by the maintenance of the national States or by their fusion into a single State in capitalism: in both cases the only way forward is the revolutionary destruction of the existing capitalist States (whichever they may be at the time) for the overcoming of capitalism, establishing the World Proletarian Dictatorship which will work relentlessly towards its own extinction, disappearing once the social classes and the attempts of restoration of capitalism have been definitively eliminated.