A Neo-Gramscian Perspective on War in and OverUkraine

Michael MerlingenDepartment of International Relations

Central European UniversityBudapest, Hungarymerling@ceu.hu

AbstractWe look inside Ukraine to account for the “people revolution” or “coup d’état” that has brought to power pro-EU and pro-NATO forces, and we explore different international dimensions of the inter-imperialist struggleover Ukraine. Using concepts such as hegemony, heartland-contender structure, the state as social relation and class fractions, we zoom out of the dense stream of eventsmaking up headline stories about Ukraine, and we look “behind” the intentions, meanings and doings of actors in high and in low places, which dominate mainstream and evenmany critical accounts. We explore the structural conditions and unacknowledged effects of the practices producing the events and the strategic selectivity of social relations, institutions and roles, which have privileged certain projects and policies in Ukraine, certain imperialist designs for Ukraine and certain inter-imperialist forms of competition over Ukraine over others.Moreover, we intervene in current debates about historicalmaterialist imperialism theorising by probing the empirical relevance of a series of (contested) theses.

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Finally, we draw out empirical, conceptual and political conclusions about contemporary imperialism.

IntroductionSince the end of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the European Union (EU) and US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), working in tandem though not without tensions and conflicts, have relentlessly expanded their influence into eastern and south-eastern Europe, both through enlarging their membership and through variable association agreements. This has given rise to a new imperialist regional order with a pronounced core-periphery structure within and across countries, with muchof eastern Europe having been, or being in the process of being transformed by and subordinated to Western capital, governmentalities, institutions and practices. The closer the boundaries of the Western imperialist system have moved to Russia’s western borders, the greater has been the resistance by Russia and within target countries. In Ukraine the Western project of the continent-wide expansion of neoliberal capitalism and NATO militarism hasrun into a barrier hastily erected by Europe’s lone contender state and its local supporters. The Russian regime thought it had an understanding with the West that it would respect and accommodate vital Russian interests and hence not push to its geographical limits its revisionist project of incorporating Eastern Europe into the “free world”. The West thought Russia understood that nothing could prevent the end of history coming to all of Eastern Europe. The result of these miscalculations has been a geopolitical earthquake whose epicentre has been inUkraine but whose repercussions have been felt across Europe and beyond and whose fallout is likely to be with us for some time

In this paper we offer a conjunctural analysis of “event Ukraine” aimed at accomplishing two things. First, using

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concepts such as hegemony, heartland-contender structure, the state as social relation and class fractions, we zoom out of the dense stream of events making up headline stories about Ukraine, and we look “behind” the intentions, meanings and doings of actors in high and in low places, which dominate mainstream and even many critical accounts. We explore the structural conditions and unacknowledged effects of the practices producing the events and the strategic selectivity of social relations, institutions and roles, which have privileged certain projects and policies in Ukraine, certain imperialist designs for Ukraine and certain inter-imperialist forms ofcompetition over Ukraine over others (on strategic selectivity, see Jessop, 2010). Second, we intervene in current debates about historical materialist (HM) imperialism theorising by probing the empirical relevance of a series of (contested) theses. Without laying out an overall theoretical framework, we mobilise diverse conceptual tools, which fit into broadly delineated neo-Gramscian intellectual space.

The paper proceeds as follows. It first looks inside Ukraine to explain the “people revolution” or “coup d’état” that has brought to power pro-EU and pro-NATO forces. It then investigates in three sections the international dimension of what it conceives of as an inter-imperialist struggle over Ukraine. It explores who struggles over what; differences between the Atlantic order and Russia in terms of the institutional forms of imperialism and forms of imperialist power employed; and the role of the USA in managing the diverging geopoliticaland capitalist forces variably shaping the national responses of the states of Atlantic capitalism to Russian actions in Ukraine. The paper ends by drawing out empirical, conceptual and political conclusions about contemporary imperialism.

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Contextualising Yanukovych’s Fall: Oligarchic Capitalism, a Weak State and Decaying Hegemony

In 2008 Brussels and Kiev launched negotiations on a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA), which is the core element of the European Union’s (EU) new-generation Association Agreements with its eastern European neighbours. Together with Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine wasscheduled to sign its Association Agreement at the EU’s Eastern Partnership summit at the end of 2013. Literally in the last minute, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych announced the deal was off, and Kiev would instead explorethe possibility of closer economic cooperation with Russia. The decision led to mass protests in many parts ofUkraine. The demonstrations were tapering off when in February 2014 violent clashes erupted, with uniformed snipers shooting dozens of protestors. The event shocked the president and opposition leaders into agreeing to a compromise deal, which, however came apart as soon as it was signed. As the president lost control over the institutional levers of power and enraged protestors stormed the presidential administration buildings, Yanukovych fled first Kiev and then Ukraine. The parliament unconstitutionally voted to remove the president from power. Instead of a government of all colours, the country now had a government whose main representatives were unconditionally pro-Western but whichalso included far-right politicians.

In Western media Yanukovych’s ouster is typically recounted as the result of a people’s revolution that the president brought onto himself by stealing their dream of a better European future. Left-wing accounts often speak of a coup sponsored by the USA. These stories exaggerate and decontextualise either the social magnetism of the EU or the manipulative power of the USA (R. Ferguson, 2014; Ishchenko, 2014). Since becoming a sovereign state in 1991, Ukraine has been characterised by high centralisation of economic assets in the hands of an oligarchic elite; sharp elite divisions and rivalries

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coupled with strong regional political and cultural identities; the capture of the state by rival business clans; decaying hegemony binding together rulers and ruled, with no elite fraction being able to put forth a hegemonic project that could mobilise masses behind a social vision and policy programme; and a comparatively dismal economic performance.

The Ukrainian political economy is characterised by a considerable centralisation of capital, primarily industrial but also banking capital, with about a third ofthe latter being owned by foreign groups. The key domestically owned capitals are controlled by oligarchs and their groups: Ukraine’s current president Petro Poroshenko (automotive, food), Rinat Akhmetov (steel and metal, coal, electric power), Dmytro Firtash (gas, chemicals, titanium), Victor Pinchuk (steel and metal), the Privat Group run by Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Henadiy Boholyubov (banking, oil, steel and metal, airlines), and so on (Matuszak, 2012). It is estimated that out of a population of 45 million, about 100 oligarchs control 80-85% of Ukraine’s economy (Holoyda, 2013). They have acquired control of the Ukrainian economy in a process of accumulation by dispossession when state assets were sold off cheaply in the 1990s. The process was characterised bythe leveraging of personal networks, kickbacks and gangland violence. In the second half of the decade, the robber barons started to turn themselves into legitimate business people. Yet politics has remained what it was: a continuation of predatory commercial practices by other means, with Ukraine’s fragmented economic elite fighting over economic spoils and political influence (Vanderhill, 2013). Political-commercial rivalries have been facilitated by the lack of firm property rights, the absence of independent courts, and the fact that the main television channels are owned by oligarchs who use them, similarly to Berlusconi in Italy, to advance their personal interests (Ayres, 2014).

The oligarchs have used their businesses to amass personal

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fortunes, of which a considerable amount has been transferred to the West, where it is used to finance a high-end life-style and is secured by means of Western wealth management strategies, including the use of offshore companies to conceal acquisitions in the London property market (Allen and Houlder, 2014). The oligarchs have been less eager to pump surplus value back into theirbusinesses. The parasitic oligarchic property relations structuring Ukraine’s political economy have been a veritable fetter on the development of the country’s socially productive powers, with the effect that the economy has done very poorly since 1991, both in absolute and relative terms. For instance, in 1991 Poland was poorer than Ukraine while in 2013 it was two-and-a-half times richer than its neighbour (The World Bank, 2014a).

A political economy characterised by the prevalence of rent seeking and the fluidity of the oligarchic balance offorces have engendered a state apparatus that has been marked by insufficient institutional materiality and hencea low capacity to act in relative autonomy from the business clans controlling it at the moment (Poulantzas, 2000; on Ukraine, Kudelia, 2012). Without the institutional capacity to ‘temper, moderate, and redirect’the power of the group that captured the state(Huntington, 1968: 9), state managers have been unable to pursue any longer-term interest of capital-in-general as expressed in a hegemonic project a comprehensive concept of control (Van der Pijl, 1984). There has been neither aninstitutional nor a political economy base for state managers to act as class strategists. The persistent incapacity of successive ruling class fractions to rationalise and entrench their domination by developing leadership (economic, political, intellectual and so on), which could have ‘regulate[d] this fractiousness’ of capital (Sutton, 2013: 220), and behind which popular classes could have been mobilised, has been aggravated by regional cleavages (religious, linguistic, and so on)(Katchanovski, 2007; Riabchuk, 2012). This weak state withlittle steering capacity and not deeply embedded in civil

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society has produced an institutional bias privileging state managers who use their power to pursue their own short-term political and economic interests. Ukraine thus represents the dystopia of a country in which “the political” has been privatised. Ideological convictions have played a minor role in the interest- and power-based oligarchic politics of Ukraine. Crafty politicians such asLeonid Kuchma, Yulia Tymoshenko or Yanukovych managed to gain some autonomy from their oligarchic backers by playing off different business clans as well as the West and Russia, and they successfully used their temporary control of the levers of state power to enrich themselves.Yet none of Ukraine’s political leaders has been able to “do a Putin” and impose centralised state control over thepolitical and economic activities of oligarchs. The overall impact on Ukraine of this state-society complex has been devastating: corruption has reached dramatic levels and the economy has performed badly, which in turn has hollowed out the material base necessary for binding rulers to ruled in an organic hegemony based on the latter’s active consent. The decaying social hegemony and the closed nature of oligarchic politics has created widespread political apathy among the population, which has periodically been disrupted by fleeting mass mobilisations, which however have done little to change the status quo. In the absence of any unifying domestic social vision of how to work for a better future for Ukraine, the EU “offer” to “modernise” Ukraine by means ofan Association Agreement has enjoyed considerable, albeit far from overwhelming popular backing, even while polls have regularly shown that citizens ‘knew very little or nothing at all about the EU’ (Orlova, 2011).1 Right and extreme-right discourses have also benefitted from the void left by the absence of social hegemony, though their recipes for getting Ukraine back on its feet are even lessplausible than those of the EU.

From the very start of his term as president in 2010, Yanukovych showed that he had no intention to reform Ukraine and tackle the growing challenges facing it. While

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he ‘strong-armed the Constitutional Court into reversing’ the constitutional change agreed during the 2004 Orange revolution (Wilson, 2013: 84), which strengthened the powers of parliament at the expense of the president, he did not make any effort to exercise strategic leadership in pursuit of a broader political rationality. Instead, hepursued an aggressive policy of self-aggrandissement, using his power to accumulate wealth and influence. Inevitably, this alienated large parts of the population who suffered from economic hardship, with daily life for many having become even harder in the wake of the global financial crisis, which saw poverty rates rise from 7.1% in 2008 to 9.1% in 2012 (The World Bank, 2014b). What is more, Yanukovych’s even in Ukraine unprecedented privatisation of the state, and his decision to marginalise political opponents connected to rival oligarchic clans, symbolised by the imprisonment of Tymoshenko, alienated fractions of the political and economic elite. This was the context in which the president refused to ratify the Association Agreement. Many ordinary Ukrainians believed he thus tore up the onlyhope they had for a better life. EU and American leaders did their best to entrench this view through their active support for the anti-Yanukovych protestors, with many Western politicians participating in Kiev’s EuroMaidan demonstrations, and through their warnings to the president’s elite supporters that they would face personalised sanctions by the West if they were to back any “repression” to demobilise the protestors. The president’s fate was sealed when oligarchic supporters of the regime such as Akmetov, fearing for their economic assets and respectability in the West, joined the opposition. As quickly as Yanukovych had built up his personal fiefdom in the state apparatus, parliament and the Party of Regions, as quickly it collapsed.

These structural features – Ukraine’s parasitic oligarchicproperty relations, fractious and shifting intra-elite power relations hindering the pursuit of a rationalised interest of capital-in-general and a peripheral economy

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vulnerable to the superior power of Atlantic capitalism – and the strategic choices enabled by these structures – Yanukovych’s privatisation of the state and Western manipulations of Ukrainian politics – created an overdetermined conjuncture, in which Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the Association Agreement could trigger his downfall.2 The only broader-based vision for a better future that was available, however much belief in it required the suspension of realistic analyses of its expected costs, was the project unsuccessfully pursued in the wake of the Orange Revolution: unconditionally open upUkraine’s economy, polity and society to Western penetration and domination. The dominant fractions of the new ruling class, which have been consolidated by recent presidential and parliamentary elections, have staked their political fortunes on a project of passive revolution, which attempts to create a hegemonic bloc through which the state, mode of accumulation and civil society are reformed, aligned and secured against resistance by those who will inevitably lose out in the unprotected integration of Ukrainian oligarchic capitalisminto Atlantic capitalism.

Contemporary Imperialism in EuropeFor the purpose of this paper, we understand imperialism to refer to a system of capitalist interstate and transnational relations characterised by territorialised relations of domination; asymmetric exchange relations disproportionally benefiting the most advanced capitals and the place-bound jurisdictions in which they are embedded; and pronounced socio-economic inequalities within and between social formations (cf. Brewer, 1990: 3). The system is reproduced and restructured in and through, among other things, ‘molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ and geopolitical struggles among states (Harvey, 2003: 26; Callinicos, 2009). In the remainder of the paper, we offer a deeper understanding of the international struggle over Ukraine by grounding it in a reading of the current epoch of

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capitalist imperialism and by exploring differences between rival imperialist forms and diverging geopoliticaland economic dynamics. This analysis speaks to a series of(contested) theses on imperialism. First, the case shows that geopolitical struggles between (groups of) advanced capitalist states are alive, just as theorists of new imperialism argue (Kiely, 2005). Second, in the current conjuncture in Europe, inter-imperialist struggles assume a form that goes well beyond the political imaginary of classical imperialism theories. They appear as imperialiststruggles between ruling classes/states of the Lockean (liberal-democratic) heartland, or Atlantic capitalism, and the ruling elite of the lone Hobbesian (authoritarian)resister state in Europe: Russia (van der Pijl, 1998). Third, the heartland is held together in a conflictual unity by a dense institutional network, at the centre of which sits the hegemonic USA, which plays the key role in coordinating and managing interstate and transnational relations of the imperialist alliance in Europe (with stress on unity: Panitch and Gindin, 2012; with stress on conflict: Callinicos, 2009). Fourth, Russia is partly inside and partly outside the governance structure of Atlantic capitalism, resisting full integration into it asa subordinate economic, political and military actor(Callinicos, 2010; Van der Pijl, 2006). Fifth, inter-imperialist struggles can productively be analysed in terms of two ‘often contradictory’ logics of power(Harvey, 2003: 30): a capitalist and a geopolitical logic (cf. the debate in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, volume20, issue 4).

Struggles Over Ukraine: The Rivals and the StakesNiall Ferguson (2014) describes the conflict over Ukraine as being about ownership of a ‘chunk of third-rate easternEuropean real estate’. This may be a correct assessment when one takes the socio-economic development of Ukraine between 1991 and today as a proxy. Yet such a perspective overlooks the country’s longer-term economic potential andits broader geopolitical significance for the USA, EU and Russia. Ukraine is arguably the biggest stake left in the

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imperialist struggle over the division of Europe between aWashington-centric mode of security governance within which a Brussels-centric mode of political-economic governance is nested and a Moscow-centric mode of governance.

The ‘Ukrainian republic was the most important economic component of the former Soviet Union’ after Russia (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 2014). The country is a big economic space endowed with considerable natural resources(coal, uranium, shale gas, iron, fertile soils and so on),large albeit often out-dated industries (chemicals, steel,metal, machinery, transport equipment and so on) and a sizeable and well-educated workforce of about 22 million. For Western, especially EU imperialism, there are many profitable bargains to be struck in a new Ukraine that hasbeen opened up by the EU’s DCFTA for accumulation by international dispossession and other forms of foreign economic penetration. To begin with, an open door between the world market and Ukraine through which trade and capital can flow freely, and a juridical, regulatory and institutional environment in Ukraine modelled on the EU offers to Western capital the opportunity to penetrate andshake up current oligarchic ownership structures. Second, there are two (potentially) profitable sectors of the Ukrainian economy, which still remain to a considerable extent under state control: farmland and oil/gas (notably shale gas exploration and production, oil and gas transit,etc.). Western multinationals can expect lucrative acquisitions when pressure by the IMF and EU and the fiscal crisis of the Ukrainian state lead to the privatisation of these sectors under Western supervision and rules, which will favour heartland capital over Ukrainian and Russian capital. Third, Ukraine, whose foreign direct investment per capita remains comparativelylow, promises to be a choice destination for footloose capital as transnational corporations seek to exploit a low-wage economy to increase the surplus value they can pump out from delocated economic activities and to put further downward pressure on wages in their home

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countries. Finally, Ukraine represents a big export marketfor international firms, which can be expected to flood the Ukrainian market with higher value added products, crowding out less efficient domestic and Russian firms. Conversely, Ukrainian exports to the EU consist mostly of raw materials and intermediate goods and thus do not pose a competitive challenge to Western economies (European Commission, 2014: 5).

For Russian imperialism, the economic stakes in Ukraine are different. First, Russian industries such as its military-industrial complex, have had close connections with industries in the Donbas. Disruption of cross-border trade and production-chains will create considerable sourcing challenges and costs to Russian firms. Second, lower-efficiency industries in both Ukraine and Russia have benefited from having each other’s markets as outletsfor their products, which are not tradable in advanced Western economies. Ukraine’s entry into the DCFTA will divert trade away from Russia and towards the EU; prior tothe regime change, Ukraine’s foreign trade was balanced with about one third going to the EU and one third to Russia. Third, Russian oligarchs have unsuccessfully triedto acquire a bigger foothold in Ukraine’s economy, attempting to buy out or subordinate Ukrainian oligarchic capital. Ukraine’s integration into the Eurasian economic community would have revitalised and strengthened this bid. Fourth, when Russia lost the tug-of-war with the Westover Ukraine, it launched a rear-guard action of imperialist repossession of junks of Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and carving out pro-Russian quasi-independent entities in the Donbas. The economic benefits of these moves are uncertain. On paper, the Donbas is of great economic importance, with Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts, where rebels have carved out their strongholds, accounting ‘for about 16 per cent of [Ukraine’s] GDP, and a quarter of exports and industrial goods and services’(Wigglesworth and Olearchyk, 2014). Yet many Donbas industries are out-dated and dependent on subsidies. Reconstructing the war-torn region controlled by rebels,

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which sustained heavy damage, and modernising its industries would cost Russia dearly should it be willing to launch such an investment programme. As to Crimea, it contributed around 3.7 per cent to Ukraine’s GDP(Wigglesworth and Olearchyk, 2014), and it is estimated tohave considerable off-shore shale gas reserves. Kiev claims that it lost $10.8 bln in terms of natural resources and related assets when Russia repossessed the peninsula (Reuters, 2014). However, the costs to Moscow ofswallowing Crimea, including its current efforts to raise the living standard of its population to that prevailing in Russia are considerable and can be expected to outweighany medium-term economic benefits (Fischer and Rogoza, 2014). More important than the economic stakes of Russia’sland-grab in Ukraine are the geopolitical stakes. Annexation of Crimea has secured Russia’s Black See naval base in Sevastopol, which it has maintained since the 18th century, and without which Moscow’s regional power aspirations lack a firm material base. As to the secessionist territory in Eastern Ukraine, Russia can use it as a bargaining chip with both Kiev and the West, notably when the issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership comes up.

More generally, the geopolitical significance of Ukraine stems from its central strategic position (for an early HMassessment, see Gowan, 1999: 301; for an early realist view, see Brzezinski, 1998). Ukraine is a bulwark for Russia against the age-old liberal heartland strategy to ‘neutralize, or lay siege on’ contender states (Van der Pijl, 2010: 52), a strategy which the West has pursued against Russia, in different formats, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is the ultimate stake for the authoritarian Putin regime but the dialectic of uneven andcombined development strongly suggests that the stakes would have been the same for a (relatively) democratic contender regime, which pursued “combined development” to prevent Russia’s subordination to heartland imperialism and to enable Russia to break out from its subaltern position in the international division of labour (Desai,

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2013). This needs to be highlighted to counter the popular“blame Putin” argument, which personalises the stakes for Russia in Ukraine by claiming that Putin’s intervention isa preventive strategy aimed at protecting his own domesticpower. World politics inevitably throws up events that push and shove countries, in which class alliances pursue neo-mercantilist or neo-developmentalist state projects, to act forcefully, independent of the democratic orientation of the ruling classes, to maintain (or enlarge) their freedom of action to exploit the dynamics of uneven international accumulation to their advantage. Russia’s inability to prevent the “loss” of Ukraine has made any such neo-developmentalist project considerably more difficult as it has undermined Moscow’s imperialist project of a Eurasian economic community, which seeks to reinforce Russia’s economic capacity to stand up to the West by positioning it as the central hinge between resource-rich Central Asia and Europe. Ukraine was supposed to be the crown jewel of this project. Conversely, with Ukraine in its sphere of influence, the EU and USA have improved their competitive position in theintensifying international rivalry (with China, Russia andso on) over the energy and mineral resources of Central Asia and over control of the increasingly important transit routes (new silk roads) between Asia and the EU.

In more narrow military terms, Ukraine matters for Russia’s security and independence. Would Ukraine have remained non-aligned or have integrated into the Eurasian economic community, the country would have provided Russiawith strategic depth against NATO forces. Alternatively, were Ukraine to join NATO, it would complete the Western military encirclement of Russia and provide Western imperialism with a military staging area against Russia. While all-out war between the heartland and Russia seems unlikely, limited military campaigns against nuclear armedstates remain an option for Washington as its drive into apost-nuclear world suggests, in which it can (threaten to)degrade or perhaps even neutralise the nuclear arsenal of challengers through missile defences while leveraging its

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conventional military superiority by means of coercive diplomacy or the actual use of force to “lay down the law”to opponents. It is against this background of the continuing importance of military power in heartland-contender relations that Russia’s persistence that Ukrainemust not join NATO has to be understood. A neutral Ukraine, Russian foreign minister Lavrov said, ‘answers … the legitimate interests of all neighbours and partners ofUkraine, and also the interests of European security’(Euractiv, 2014). Such considerations have not figured in president Poroshenko’s unconditionally pro-Western government, which has been trying very hard to do away with the country’s military neutrality, nor have they muchinflected American policy, which has backed Ukrainian NATOmembership even as the few remaining realist intellectualsin the USA have warned in stark terms of such a course of action (Mearsheimer, 2014).

Struggle Over Ukraine: Contrasting Atlantic and Russian ImperialismPost-1945 the USA has taken the lead in developing a highly institutionalised system of interstate, transgovernmental and transnational coordination, into which in the wake of the collapse of the bipolar international order all the world’s advanced and emerging economies have been (unevenly) integrated. Within this imperialist governance structure, relations between the American hegemon and the strategic follower that is the EUstand out in terms of scope and depth of economic interaction and mutual penetration, cultural-ideological homogenisation and institutional linkages (state and societal). The USA and the EU have developed a sophisticated form of cooperative regional imperialism through a trial and error process, which has entailed limited inter-state conflicts, say, over the development of a regional European security and defence policy (for a conflictual HM take on EU-USA relations in Europe, see Carchedi, 2006; Oikonomou, 2010). The USA and the EU have relied on an array of institutional forms, processes and narratives to support their joint offensive in Eastern and

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South-eastern Europe and to frame it as bringing the benefits of capitalist modernisation to the East. An important feature of these institutionalised imperialist relations has been a built-in preference for the use of institutional and productive (subjectivity-forming) power over compulsory power to cajole and constrain the region’sstates and societies to accept and even desire their variable integration into the imperialist system of Atlantic capitalism. These institution-based forms of power have been enabled by the heartland’s structural power in the capitalist world order, that is, the fact that the central features of this world order have been shaped by and primarily benefit the USA and its Western allies. While heartland expansion into and rule over much of Eastern Europe has thus relied primarily on consent, Russia and peripheral European countries such as Serbia under Milošević and Belarus, which have resisted the unconditional internationaliation of their states and the transnationalisation of their economies, have been subjected to compulsory power including military force, diplomatic isolation, subversion and sanctions.

Russian imperialism has been characterised by the absence of effective institutionalisation of hegemony over the near abroad. Despite repeated attempts to counter the institutional and productive power capacities of the heartland, notably by building Russian equivalents of the EU and NATO, from the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Shanghai Co-operation Organization to the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Community, Moscow has failed to achieve the institutional efficacy of Western multilateral institutions (cf. Wilson Rowe and Torjesen, 2009). As a result, the project to defend Russia’s shrinking imperialist system against heartland offensives, which hasenjoyed considerable domestic elite and popular support(Kasamara and Sorokina, 2012), has had to privilege compulsory power. Hence, the overall character of Russian imperialism has been largely old-fashioned and defensive, although single policies if taken out of context may

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appear to be offensive. In pursuit of its imperialist project, Russia has used military force as in the 2008 warwith Georgia; economic coercion such as cutting off accessto the Russian market and cutting off gas deliveries to pro-Western Eastern European governments; and active support, as a means to punish states that seek to join theWestern imperialist system, for secessionist movements in Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transniestria. Russia has onlysecondarily relied on economic and diplomatic incentives such as elimination of tariffs and price discounts on oil and gas deliveries to entice reluctant states to align with it. At the same time, and again in contrast to western imperialism, Moscow has little capacity to use compulsory power to force the EU and the USA to respect what it considers its vital interests. Both Russia’s more coercive imperial system and its very limited ability to hurt (economically, diplomatically, militarily) the heartland are a reflection of its structural weakness in the capitalist world order.

With the full backing of the USA, the EU has developed theEuropean Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), whose latest instruments to open up Eastern Europe to its political, juridical and economic influence are Association Agreements with DCFTAs. While Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan have resisted EU pressure (social and material)to sign up, Moldova, Georgia and now Ukraine have recentlydone so. Objectively, that is, in terms of their expectable (and partly already observable) effects on the ground, the Association Agreements accomplish two things. First, they integrate the countries into a hierarchical relationship with the EU, which valorises EU governmentalities, practices and institutions and which benefits EU and transnational capital, even as it providessome modernisation benefits to select class fractions in the target countries. More precisely, DCFTAs integrate underdeveloped economies without protection (except transition measures) into transnational markets, which, according to standard (albeit internally differentiated) HM accounts of the effects of internationally uneven

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conditions of accumulation, locks these countries into lower value-added economic activities in the hierarchized European division of labour and asymmetrically dependent on capitalist development in the West (e.g. Kiely, 2010; Milios and Sotiropoulos, 2009). Second, the Association Agreements roll back Russian influence in the neighbourhood that Moscow and Brussels share. Western discourse (policy and academic) has represented the EU project of exporting its laws, regulations and capital to its neighbours as a generous “offer” to ‘develop a zone ofprosperity and a friendly neighbourhood’ and, naturally, as being in Russia’s own best interest (European Commission, 2003: 4).

In parallel to EU expansion, the USA has led NATO into Eastern Europe. The alliance has developed institutional mechanisms to transform the region’s militaries, ranging from the Partnership for Peace (PfP), which renders “partner” armed forces interoperable with those of NATO, to various asymmetric contractual arrangements preparing countries for membership. In this way the USA has diffusedelements of its strategic thinking, ways of doing and organisational templates to the East, and it has built personal ties between its own and NATO officer corps and those of the region. Through its eastern expansion NATO has recruited and prepared vassals to add firepower to US overseas military expeditions, and it has enhanced Washington’s ability to legitimise them by giving greater credibility to its claims that it leads the “internationalcommunity” into battle. Last but not least, NATO has provided a means through which US and EU weapons manufacturers have created a captive market as NATO associates in Eastern Europe are pressured to upgrade their military hardware so as to make it interoperable with that of US and NATO forces. Similar to their EU counterparts, NATO leaders have described eastern militaryexpansion as being about the promotion of democracy and peace.

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In short, both the EU and NATO have developed dense institutional linkages with their Eastern European neighbours through which they have reshaped their economies, political systems and military structures in line with Western modes of governing, in the process subordinating them to the influence of the dominant powersin the two Western-centric international organisations. Asthe political scientist Terry Moe (1990: 213) has underlined, institutions, whatever else they do, are ‘alsoweapons of coercion and redistribution. They are the structural means by which political winners pursue their interests, often at the expense of political losers’. Whatmakes liberal international institutions such as the EU and NATO so valuable to the powerful is that they offer some benefits to weak(er) actors while locking them into structures which cement their dependent position in international hierarchies (political, military, cultural) and exploitative international economic relations.

In the struggle over Ukraine’s future alignment, the West has mobilised different forms of institutional and structural power to manipulate the asymmetric interdependence relations that tie Ukraine to it. The EU, supported by the IMF, has used its superior market and financial power to coerce (through conditionality policies) and bribe Ukraine to lock itself into a neoclassical economic policy paradigm that renders impossible any active industrial development policy to escape its less developed economy status. It has been estimated that the unprecedented capitulation to free trade imperialism decreed by the Association Agreement will involve the adoption by Ukraine of about 350 EU laws,and of course enormous adjustment costs (Jozwiak, 2013).3 The EU has used its superior political power (international status, authority, legitimacy) to persuade Ukraine to align its foreign policy with its Common Foreign and Security Policy and to “invite” an EU securitypolicy mission – the EU Advisory Mission for Civilian Security Sector Reform Ukraine – to monitor and restructure the internal coercive arm of the Ukrainian

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state - its police and judiciary. The USA, backed by hawkish eastern European governments, has used its political power and military standing to make the case to Ukrainians (elite fractions and ordinary citizens) for abandoning the country’s multi-vector foreign policy and to associate tightly with NATO. In 1997 Kiev signed the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership with NATO, holding regular PfP military exercises with American and other NATO forces ever since. In the wake of the pro-Western Orange revolution, the government, ignoring popular opposition, launched preparatory work to join NATO, which in turn has ‘agreed … that these countries will become members of NATO’ (2008 NATO Summit). Between 2003 and 2008Ukraine deployed a relatively large troop contingent to Iraq to fight alongside the USA and since 2007 it has participated, with a small number of troops, in NATO’s operation in Afghanistan. When coming to power in 2010, president Yanukovych dropped the goal of alliance membership from his foreign policy agenda. Events in 2014 have again made it a central foreign policy goal of Ukraine.

Last but not least, the EU and USA have used their superior cultural power – the attraction of Western discursive and visual frames for making sense of daily life – to penetrate and remould Ukrainian civil society inthe Western image. Of course, ideologies or discourses arenot free-floating: ‘their ideologicality consists precisely in their appearance of real independence’ from ‘materialistic connection’ (Sayer, 1987: 91). The fact that former communist neighbours such as Poland have movedfar ahead of Ukraine in terms of per capita income since they joined the EU, and foreign grant monies to local pro-Western civil society actors have been key materialistic connections underpinning the West’s cultural power in Ukraine. Through their civil society development programmes, numerous public and private Western agents such as the German Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, the Polish Stefan Batory Foundation, the EU’s European Instrument forDemocracy and Human Rights and the American National

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Endowment for Democracy have funded a great number of small and large, local and national quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation (quangos), clubs and think tankssuch as the Zhytomyr Youth Civic Organization “Modern Format”, Democratic Initiatives Foundation, Razumkov Centre and the Ukrainian national platform of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum. The targeted infiltrationof Ukrainian civil society by Western discursive practices– ideology embodied in material practices such as grant-writing and co-funding requirements – has had multiple effects (on how these innocuos practices create their effects, see Kurki, 2011). It has diffused self-congratulatory views of hollowed-out Western democracies and their growing socio-economic inequalities. It has privileged Western knowledges and practices across diversespheres of life. It has fashioned neoliberal citizens who govern themselves as entrepreneurial complements of the capital relation rather than, say, work with others to achieve social self-determination through the ‘subordination of their communal, social productivity’(Marx, 1993: 158). Civil society support activities of this sort have contributed to the ‘EU’s positive image [inUkraine], which is largely based on stereotypes of the high living standards and welfare in European countries’(Orlova, 2011), and they have thus indirectly empowered the EuroMaidan protests.

Compared to the sophistication and offensive character of Western imperialism in Ukraine, Russian imperialism has been old-fashioned and defensive. Moscow sought to countergrowing Western influence and to entrench its own positions in the country’s politics and economy by using Ukraine’s dependence on Russian gas as a weapon to manipulate local politics and to assist Russian capital torepossess Ukrainian assets. To prevent Kiev from signing the EU’s Association Agreement, Moscow used carrots and sticks. It threatened to limit Ukrainian access to its market if Kiev signed the EU deal while offering economic support if it did not. Furthermore, Moscow tried to convince Yanukovych that Ukraine would get a better deal

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if it joined the Eurasian economic community, in which Russia’s political, military and economic weight make it ahegemon. When Moscow lost the tug of war with the West over who was to become Ukraine’s international patron, it resorted to the oldest of imperialist foreign policies: territorial expansion. Moscow annexed Crimea, which has anethnic Russian majority and belonged to Russia until 1954 when Kruchev gave it away. Moscow tried to legitimise its imperialist land-grab by reference to the referendum on the status of Crimea, which was organised by pro-Russian forces. The campaign showed little concern for ensuring a genuine public debate on the future of the peninsula, notably paying scant attention to the Crimean Tatars, mostof whom were opposed to annexation.4 Once Crimea was annexed, Moscow turned to another traditional imperialist foreign policy: support of secessionism in target countries. It encouraged and aided, including with heavy military equipment, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine who, in a rerun of the Crimea script, organised independence referenda and then established the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Over the summer of 2014 the Donbas descended into full-scale civil war as the central government in Kiev tried to regain control of the renegade regions. Russia prevented its local allies from certain battle-field defeat by ratcheting up its material support and by deploying thousands of Russian “volunteers” to the Donbas. As the balance of power shifted on the ground, Kiev was forced tosign a cease-fire with Moscow and local rebels. Since thenthe developments have gone some way towards the consolidation of a quasi-independent pro-Russian entity inEastern Ukraine.

In terms of heartland-contender relations, the West has pursued a policy of compellence. Gradually ratcheting up sanctions, the heartland has settled on excluding key Russian banks and non-financial firms in the energy and armament sectors from borrowing on European and American capital markets, restricting oil industry technology exports and banning arms deals with Russia. Moscow has

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responded by imposing a one-year ban on agricultural imports: meat, fish, seafood, vegetables, fruit, milk and dairy products from the USA, the EU, Australia, Canada andNorway (Rankin, 2014).5 Russia’s response to internationalsanctions reflects both a lack of power to hurt the heartland and the asymmetric dependency of the Russian economy on the West. In an internal document the Russian finance ministry warned that geopolitical tensions generated by the conflict over Ukraine presented “the greatest risks of destabilisation of the Russian economy”(The Wall Street Journal, 2014). Current data on Russia’s economy show that destabilisation is underway, with the rouble depreciating, capital fleeing abroad, economic growth decelerating and so on.

Managing Tensions Within the Heartland: Dealers vs Squeezers and Profits vs Geopolitics

The cooperative imperialist framework constructed by the USA and EU to subordinate Eastern Europe to Atlantic capitalism and militarism has not done away with tensions and conflicts among its constituent states. While the Atlantic world has been united in its condemnation of Russian efforts to prevent Ukraine from being unconditionally opened up to Western imperialist domination, there has been disagreement about what to do about Russian recalcitrance. Divergent geopolitical and economic considerations and forces have fuelled this disagreement, with geopolitics and the non-economic ideologies woven into it often trumping short- and long-term capitalist interests. Initially, Germany led a group of “dealers” (France, Italy, Slovakia, Czech Republic and so on), which preferred to resolve the stand-off with Russia through negotiations and reassurances to Moscow of the West’s “good intentions” in Ukraine. The dealers prioritised cooperative economic relations with Russia over confrontational geopolitics. They were opposed by the“squeezers”, which were led by the USA and which stressed the importance of compelling Russia, by means of a robust

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punishment strategy, to accept a resolution of the conflict on Western terms (Ignatius, 2014). Key members ofthis camp were, after initial prevarication, the UK and the anti-Russian hardliners Poland, Romania and the Baltics. The squeezers prioritised confrontational geopolitics over capitalist profits, with different national governments and policy-makers stressing variable ideological configurations and rationalisations (neo-conservativism, identity and historical memory constructs related to Stalinist subjugation and so on). Membership inthese rival camps has not (always) been the result of cool-headed cost-benefit calculations based on comparing the security risks to Western interests of letting Russia get away with its Ukrainian incursions and the economic costs of sanctions. Some of the most outspoken geopolitical hard-liners are also the most economically vulnerable in relation to Russia, say, Lithuania, which is100% dependent on Russian gas, and for whose food producers and transport industry Russia is a central market. In these cases, geopolitics has trumped both short-term and long-term capitalist interests.

The Obama administration has pursued a three-fold strategyin relation to developments in Ukraine. First, it has taken the lead in imposing tough sanctions against Russia(Lynch, 2014). When the EU was still limiting its sanctions to persons and entities that undermined Ukrainian sovereignty, the USA already engaged in so-called phase-three sanctions, which targeted key players in key sectors of the Russian economy (Bendavid, 2014). Comparatively thin economic relations between the USA and Russia have facilitated this hard line. Even when US corporations have lobbied the administration against imposing sanctions and especially against getting too far ahead of the EU, the Obama administration, with broad backing by the American political class, has persisted in pursuing its course of action (Oliver et al., 2014). Second, there has been a concerted effort by Washington tocontain policy differences among its European allies. Eastern cold worriers such as the Baltics and Poland have

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accused Russia of an invasion of Ukraine, that is, in the words of the Lithuanian president Grybauskaite, of being ‘practically at war with Europe’ (Bubrowski, 2014). The obvious implication being that in a war, one fights back and does not appease the enemy. Estonian foreign minister Paet has spelled this out clearly, stating that ‘it makes no sense to have a political dialogue with Russia’ (Zeit Online, 2014). Conversely, for both chancellor Merkel and her foreign minister Steinmeier the main objective has been to keep open channels of communication between the West and Russia. ‘We do not want a cold war … we want to preserve the European peace order’ (Steinmeier, 2014). Washington has been careful to contain these differences between the dealers and squeezers, arguing that the government ‘didn't expect an exact overlap’ of positions among its allies but rather focused ‘on complementary steps’ (State Department spokeswoman, cited in Bendavid, 2014). This has been a very different stance compared to the Bush administration’s public divide-and-rule strategy in the run up to the Iraq invasion in 2003, which was predicated on the message that there was a price to be paid by those Europeans who did not align with American policy preferences. America’s diplomatic posture at the time emboldened Europeans lining up on opposite sides of the debate to mutually denounce each other in a form of vicious op-ed diplomacy. The result was a very public split in the Atlantic world, which critics of the Bush administration and the administration itself soon realiseddegraded US global hegemony by weakening its internationallegitimacy as the “leader of the free world”.

Third, while managing intra-alliance tensions and disagreements, the Obama administration has worked behind the scene to put pressure on Germany and other dealers, constantly ‘nudging and pushing’ them to take a harder line on Russia (Glasser, 2014). The Obama administration’spoint-woman on this policy, which forms part of the decades-old US project of maintaining hegemony over the EU, has been Under Secretary of State Viktoria Nuland, a neo-con and former senior aid to Vice president Cheney

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(Dyer, 2014). Aided by like-minded heavyweight European policy-makers such as (then) Swedish foreign minister CarlBildt and encouraged by domestic hawks such as senator McCain, she has persistently hectored the dealers to expand their sanctions. The pressure has been quite considerable as Steinmeier bluntly explained, with him coming ‘under attack abroad from hawkish countries such asthe US’ (Wagstyl, 2014a).

American pressure and Putin’s continuing active oppositionto Western policy in Ukraine finally did the trick: a frustrated German government joined the squeezer camp, though not its cold-worrior fraction. In the wake of the downing of a Malaysian airliner over rebel-held areas in Eastern Ukraine in July 2014, ‘Ms Merkel emerged as the most important backer of sweeping EU sanctions’ (Wagstyl, 2014b). The German policy shift in turn made it possible for the EU to follow the American lead and impose broad sectoral sanctions on Russia. Since then Germany has insisted, against the dealers, on maintaining the tough sanction regime even though big business has campaigned against it. Russia’s overall economic importance to Germany is comparatively low, with the exception of fossil-fuel deliveries on which Germany depends for about 35% of its gas and 30% of its oil. Russia accounts for only 3.4% (WTO data, 2013) of Germany’s total exports. However, national champions such as manufacturers of cars (Volkswagen, Opel, Daimler), consumer goods (Adidas), chemicals (BASF), machinery (Siemens) and retailers (Metro) as well as numerous small and medium sized German businesses have over many years built up major stakes in the Russia market (Bryant, 2014). As Eckhard Cordes, chairman of the lobby group Eastern Committee of German Industry,put it, German industry is worried ‘that large parts of the Russian trade will move towards Asia or Latin America’(Vasagar, 2014). When sanctions began to hurt German capital and the German economy more generally, Cordes called for developing a plan to move away from economic punishment of Russia and to explore a political solution to the Ukraine crisis (Niesmann, 2014). Yet Berlin has

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ignored the interests of its capitals, which prefer certain profits in Russia to as yet incalculable profit opportunities in Ukraine. The geopolitical explanation of Germany’s policy turn-around is that it has preserved Berlin’s traditional role as broker in the US-dominated Atlantic order, a broker which self-consciously occupies amiddle-ground in geopolitical tensions and conflicts between allies, say, over NATO or EU foreign policy. Berlin’s role conception has predisposed it to opt for limited imperialist confrontation with Russia in order to demonstrate its lack of revisionist ambitions within the Atlantic order, which under the Schröder government seemedto re-emerge when Germany, France and Russia prevented UN authorisation of the US invasion of Iraq. Germany’s foreign policy turn-around on Russia speaks to the continuing solidity of US hegemony over the EU.

ConclusionWe end by drawing out empirical, conceptual and political conclusions from our analysis. First, we have foregroundedthe systemic dimension of the “event Ukraine”. The resulting story assumes the form of a process without subject. While such a perspective is an important corrective to the agential bias in much contemporary critical theorising, it does not logically entail that either the fact or form of the imperialist clash between the West and Russia over Ukraine has been necessary. Whileone can explain “event Ukraine” ex post, identifying its causal determinants, ex ante there was nothing pre-determined about what was going to happen and how. For instance, there was nothing inevitable about the shooting of demonstrators on EuroMaidan, nor about how events unfolded in its wake. Bob Jessop’s (2010) notion of contingent necessity nicely captures the coming together in conjunctures of structure/necessity and agency/contingency.

Second, the empirical evidence we have presented does not lend itself to an interpretation of the struggle over

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Ukraine as a sign of American hegemonic decline. The empirical case made by new imperialism theorists such as Callinicos (2014a, 2014b) that we are in the midst of a steep ‘crisis of American imperial power’ and that the “event Ukraine” is its ‘most visible example’ is weak. Yes, Russia captured Ukrainian territory, just as it “captured” tiny economic backwaters in its war in Georgia in 2008, but the West succeeded in ending the in-between position of Ukraine, fully integrating it into the westerncamp (just as it succeeded in firmly locking Georgia into the Western camp). More generally, there are reasons to believe, as Callinicos does, that America’s relative economic, political and military power is likely to decline in coming decades, ushering in a new epoch of capitalist imperialism in which international order management will be more conflictual, possibly leading to armed conflicts among peer competitors. Yet international order management has not yet entered such a more “anarchical” phase. The USA does not control all global outcomes that matter to it, but it never did. Nor would itbe rational for Washington to try to do so as the willingness of a state to mobilise resources in pursuit ofits foreign policy objectives ought to vary with the intensity of the preferences that underpin these objectives. Also, not even the most powerful actor can eliminate the contingencies inscribed in a richly overdetermined world, which may lead to unwelcome outcomes. Last but not least, even if outcomes deviate considerably from intentions, the structural power of US imperialism may be reinforced, and arguably has been in recent geo-strategic campaigns. For instance, Iraq’s (or Afghanistan’s, Libya’s) current domestic instability and conflict may not be what US policy-makers intended, but a client government whose survival depends on US good will and which has no capacity to follow Saddam in contesting America’s role of external patron of the Middle East entrenches US structural dominance of the region and thus must be counted on the plus side of the balance sheet of US imperialism. Palestinians have recently experienced thenew “political climate” of the new Middle East when there

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was minimal official regional protest or action against Israel’s military onslaught against the Gaza Strip.

Finally, there is an important difference in the “function” performed by heartland and Russian imperialism,which is linked to their differential articulation to the interstate system. We have argued that Russia is an imperialist power, which has acted as such in Ukraine. Yetin protecting its imperialist domination in the near abroad, Russia has also defended the remaining interstate checks and balances in world politics, which constrain thefreedom of manoeuvre of the American hegemon and its allies. Conversely, US-led heartland imperialism has been slowly but steadily bulldozing away resistance, wherever it finds it, against the integration, on heartland terms, of every place and every polity into the core-periphery structure of the global capital relation. This asymmetry between Russian and heartland imperialism has strategic implications. The liberal West sees itself as the culmination of history and is busy enclosing the world, making it ever more difficult to articulate and pursue radical alternative socio-economic and political futures as social movements and working class struggles seeking toenact such futures are ridiculed and, if this does not work to keep them at the margins of polite world society, ruthlessly criminalised and supressed. Insofar as Russia resists heartland hegemony it resists, even if unintentionally and for imperialist reasons, the transformation of global order into a graveyard for all revolutionary and radical ideas that deny that liberal capitalism is the end of human life.

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1 Just prior to the EuroMaidan mass mobilisation, a representative survey showed that 50% of Ukrainians wanted their country to sign theAssociation Agreement (Deutsche Welle, 2013).2 For a mainstream political science perspective, see Khmelko and Pereguda (2014).3 The Yanukovych government estimated that the EU-guided modernisation of Ukraine’s economy would cost ‘at least 150 billion to 165 billion euros’ (Bershidsky, 2013).4 According to the organisers, the referendum ended with 97% of voters opting to join Russia.5 Russia has also engaged in ‘guerrilla warfare against western companies’ such as McDonalds, which are harassed by police and regulators (hygiene, etc.) (Buckley, 2014).