Russia, the United States and Ukraine in the Long Economic Crisis: Assessments and Prospects for the Developmental State

ABSTRACT

The ingredients for conflict in Ukraine and a New Cold War were stirred in with the preparation of the post-Soviet order. More Treaty of Versailles than Bretton Woods, Russia was treated as the loser of the Cold War rather than strategic partner by the United States. This outcome was pre-configured by the global long economic crisis that began in the 1970s, along with the related challenges to the United States’ short-lived hegemony. Attempts to resolve these crises were in part handled through a “spatial fix” to further incorporate the post-USSR’s natural materials into global trade circuits in order to depress their prices. This model met with temporary success in the 1990s, but did not result in long-term solutions for the global economy and US attempts to create a unipolar world. This process has been in part inspected through the frameworks of Nikolai Kondratiev and Robert Brenner and concludes with a developmental-state proposal for Russia and Ukraine.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• Russia
• United States
• Kondratiev
• economic crisis
• developmental state

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jeffrey Sommers is professor of political economy and public policy (and senior fellow of the Institute of World Affairs) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is also visiting professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is co-editor with Charles Woolfson of The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socioeconomic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model (Routledge, 2014).

Vasily Koltashov is director of the Center for Economic Research at the Moscow-based Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) and an expert of the Laboratory of International Political Economy (Department of Political Economy) at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics. He specializes in the study of economic crisis and methods of promoting growth.

Notes

1 While the term “Eurasianists” is used in both the United States and Russia, the United States references the term in regards to specialists who study Eurasia with a mind to prevent Russia from reconstituting its power, while Russia’s Eurasianists seek that power restored.