At a Green Left zoom discussion on 23 June about “the Green party and NATO”, I argued that we can support resistance to Russian imperialism while opposing NATO.
I was on a panel along with Paul Ingram, research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge; the socialist writer Gilbert Achcar, Emeritus Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; and Linda Walker of the Green Party’s Peace, Security and Defence Policy Working Group.
This is what I said, followed by some notes on issues that came up in discussion. Simon Pirani.
Thank you for inviting me to speak. I will say some things about NATO, Russia and Ukraine, since I have researched and written about those countries. Before that, a couple of general points to frame what I say.
This is what I said, followed by some notes on issues that came up in discussion. Simon Pirani.
Thank you for inviting me to speak. I will say some things about NATO, Russia and Ukraine, since I have researched and written about those countries. Before that, a couple of general points to frame what I say.
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| Demonstrating in London, October 2024 |
First, before working out political demands narrowly defined as demands on the state, we need first to talk about the interests of society as a whole, of humanity, as expressed by the labour movement (“labour” with a small “l”) and by social movements and civil society more broadly.
This is central to my understanding of socialism. It helps us to avoid falling in to the trap of defining our aims primarily in terms of policies that could in the short term be adopted by the UK parliament.
Second, when dealing with a specific foreign policy issue such as NATO membership, we need to consider the broader set of relationships between capital and society that form the context for NATO and other military alliances.
To explain what I mean by that. Let’s look at the 21st century’s great war crime, the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s illegal expansionist wars in Lebanon and the West Bank.
It could be argued that NATO has little formal involvement. But that would be ridiculous. Israel is recognised, and defined in US law, as a major ally of NATO. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states also have a wealth of connections with NATO powers.
The largest NATO powers, including the UK, have actively facilitated the genocide.
In the last few weeks, while the UK has been trashing the right of free speech by treating direct action protest against Israel as terrorism, another NATO country, Sweden, has hosted an arms exhibition by Elbit Systems to market its technologies to NATO powers.
All this is reason enough to look forward to NATO being dismantled, just as we look forward to the European rearmament programme being scrapped, to nuclear disarmament, and to the whole notion of “security” being re-defined as a human, not state, concern.
In this framework, what about Russia and Ukraine? Ukraine has since 2014 been subject to invasion and occupation, and since 2022 to all-out war, by Russia, which is not only a non-NATO power but, in geopolitical discourse, is one of NATO’s main enemies.
There have been two very distinct responses to this by “left” political forces in Europe, including the UK.
One response has been to recognise and support Ukrainian resistance, just as socialists have traditionally recognised the right of people, from the Irish Fenians onwards, to resist colonialism.
To convey this point, on the big demonstrations in London about Gaza, a group of us carried a banner that said “From Ukraine to Palestine, occupation is a crime”.
We were welcomed by the vast majority of demonstrators, but not by the organisers of those marches in the “Stop the War” coalition, who have avoided acknowledging that Ukrainian resistance is justified, and avoided denouncing the occupation of eastern parts of Ukraine by Russian-supported puppet regimes since 2014.
This political blindspot is described as “campism” – a belief that the anti-US geopolitical camp of Russia, China and Iran is somehow less dangerous than the US and its allies. Older people here will recognise a strong streak of post-Stalinism in it.
The practical, political issue where this difference matters is: arms supplies to Ukraine. “Campists” specifically oppose such supplies, putting themselves on the same side as the extreme right parties in Europe supported by Putin.
My view is that we can not oppose such supplies, even if they come from NATO powers who are simultaneously arming Israel. I agree with those Ukrainian socialists, who have welcomed calls by Scandinavian left parties for arms exports to be banned to all countries except Ukraine.
Note. This interview explains the stance of the Red-Green Alliance (Denmark); this, specifically on arms exports, can be machine-translated if you don’t speak Danish. On how this might play out in a UK context, see here.
I would like to mention a couple of “campist” myths that have been used to justify refusal to support Ukrainian resistance.
One such myth is that Ukraine is fighting a “proxy war” for NATO, and that NATO somehow pushed Russia into invading Ukraine.
In fact, NATO expansion in eastern Europe from the 1990s was first directed at trying to control, and then contain, Russia. Not to destroy it. Remember that the NATO powers fully supported Russia’s bloodbath against Chechnya in the early 2000s, and even talked to Russia about joining NATO itself.
Second, NATO expansion can not be understood as the only or even the main factor in changing relations between Russia and the European powers.
It has to be considered along with the integration of Russian capital into the global system, the resurgence in the 2000s of Russian capital on one side and the emergence of powerful social movements in Ukraine, Russia and across the former Soviet Union on the other, and then, under Putin, Russian imperialist revanchism.
This revanchism is feared not only in Ukraine but in other eastern European countries, the Baltic states especially, and that is the basis for overwhelming support in those countries for NATO membership.
In Mexico, people fear one imperialist aggressor. In Estonia, it’s a different one.
This is a reason to combine opposition to NATO with concrete discussions about how people in these countries can protect themselves from Russian imperialist aggression.
Another myth current in 2022 was that military aid to Ukraine should be opposed, because Russia might use a nuclear weapon. This downplayed
(a) Any analysis of the paralysing/ terrorising effect of nukes on civil society that persisted through and beyond the cold war;
(b) The actual damage done by conventional weapons, such as the destruction of the Kakhovka dam or Russia’s provocative actions at the Zaporizhya nuclear power station; and
(c) The counterfactual, i.e. the situation eastern Europe would be in now, had no military aid been given to Ukraine.
Note. In the discussion, I was challenged: how I could be certain that Russia would not use a nuclear weapon? I can not be certain. I think an exaggerated assessment of the danger is also a problem, though, as I argued in 2022 in this article. My point was to warn about the potential political damage of such an exaggerated assessment.
Finally, I would like to give my view on some relevant, immediate political issues.
(1) We can, and must, oppose the massive general rearmament programme.
(2) We can support the supply of weapons to Ukraine, not only by the state, but also the massive civil society effort for example by Ukrainians living in western Europe and the UK.
(3) We can engage in discussion with the labour movement and civil society in eastern European countries where fear of Russian invasion and interference is very real, e.g. the Baltic states;
(4) We need to consider our reaction to mischief-making by Russia in western Europe, largely via support for the extreme right. Our responses to this should be part of our efforts to strengthen the labour movement and social movements to defeat the extreme right, rather than relying solely or mainly on responses by the state.
☭ ☭ ☭ ☭ ☭
Here are comments on two issues that came up in discussion.
☭ I was surprised to hear the claim repeated that in April 2022 the Istanbul peace talks collapsed because Boris Johnson persuaded Volodymyr Zelensky to reject the deal on offer. I thought this fantasy, once current in some “left” circles, had been abandoned by now. Surely, with the benefit of four years of hindsight, it should be obvious to more people that a whole complex of problems torpedoed the peace talks, above all the question of what “security guarantees” could be provided to Ukraine, and who by.
Let’s recall the situation the Ukrainian government was in. Their country had been subject to the biggest land invasion in Europe since world war two. Reports were reaching them of the Russian army’s war crimes in Bucha and elsewhere. They were being asked to agree to giving away chunks of Ukrainian territory in exchange for too-vague “security guarantees”.
Ukraine had given up its nuclear arsenal in 1994, in exchange for security guarantees by Russia and the western powers that its sovereign territory would be respected – guarantees that were broken from 2014, when Russia gave military support to the proto-fascist “republics” in the Donbas, and the western powers’ reaction remained limited.
Did Boris Johnson go to spin Zelensky an aggressive, anti-Russia line? Probably. Were Zelensky and his colleagues stupid enough to take Johnson at his word, let alone act on his advice? No reason to think so, as Taras Fedirko and Volodya Artiukh pointed out at the time. And plenty of extra details emerged subsequently. The caricature version of April 2022 mainly served those western “leftists” who did not want to interrogate the real character of Russia’s actions and the imperialist revanchism that guided them.
☭ Mention was made of human rights abuses and political repression in Ukraine, and I responded that these could not be compared in scale or character to those in Russia. My concern is not to minimise them, but to counter the wretched “leftist” narrative, that points to these abuses to “prove” that the war is fought by two equally responsible and equally malign sides, neither of which deserve support (and, specifically, weapons).
Human rights abuses in Ukraine are well documented by, among others, Zmina and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Mistreatment of civilians accused of “collaboration” with Russian occupation forces, and of PoWs, is rampant. But there can be no serious comparison between this and the oceans of repression unleashed over the last four years by the Kremlin in the Ukrainian territories occupied by Russia, and in Russia itself.
There have been tens of thousands of forced disappearances of civilians in the occupied territories and systematic kidnapping of children; Russia’s human rights groups – all of which, unlike their Ukrainian colleagues, are forced to operate outside the country – estimate that there are at least 3000 political prisoners; and state terror against all forms of political activity has virtually extinguished the rights of free speech and freedom of assembly.
Many Russian socialists and liberals define this as a new form of fascism. No-one in the Green party or anywhere else is likely to get their heads around what to do, if they do not have a clear take on the interaction between war and dictatorship.
🔴 Watch Try Me For Treason: speeches by anti-war protesters in Russian courts (50 min, English language) here
🔴 Voices Against Putin’s War – download free pdf here
