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ABSTRACT
The article examines the role of politics and ideology in post-Cold War imperialism, focusing on the current conflict between Russia, Ukraine, the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union. The article argues that primary causes are not economic but primarily political and ideological. While there are clear raisons d’etat that explain all sides’ decisions, the article claims that there is a contradiction between the raisons d’etat and an objectively rational assessment of the stated goals and the actors’ ability to attain them. The article concludes that while the Marxist understanding of imperialism includes a focus on both its political and economic dynamics, they can sometimes over-emphasize the economic and objective rationality of political decisions. The current conflict in Ukraine, the article will argue, is a paradigm example of raisons d’etat becoming unhinged from objectively rational strategies and economically rational capitalist motives.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 In Smith’s case this meant breaking from the consensus inside the Democratic Socialists of America, whose leadership took an early position against the war and in favour of negotiations (Democratic Socialists of America Citation2022).
2 I use “socialism” generally here to refer to a democratic society committed to collective ownership of basic life-resources, their use to satisfy the fundamental natural and social needs of each and all, and thus to the maximization of the life-value of its citizens. I will return to a discussion of this definition of socialism in Part Three, but for a systematic articulation and defense of the relevant principles, readers should turn to my earlier work (see Noonan Citation2006; Noonan Citation2011, 195–216; Noonan Citation2012, 123–140; Noonan Citation2014, 85–101).
3 The idea of raisons d’etat traces its history to Machiavelli and is an important idea in realist international relations. In the popular interpretation of Machiavelli, raisons d’etat are defined by their independence from the reach of ordinary moral judgement. States are entitled to do what individuals are forbidden from doing because of the distinctive nature of states’ interests. Machiavellian scholars object that this position oversimplifies Machiavelli’s thought, but I am not interested or qualified to enter into those debates here. For my purposes raisons d’etat are not so much a special permit that allows states to act in ways which would be immoral if an individual were to act that way, but rather reasons which make sense from within the framework of what rulers define as the national interest, but might not be rational when critically assessed from opposed perspectives or tested in light of likely outcomes. See Johansson (Citation1996, 295–330) for a discussion of the relevant theoretical and historical debates.
4 For a more complete discussion of the connections between Marxism and the Hobbesian background to realist theories of international relations, see Kubalkova and Cruickshank (Citation1985, 31–36).
5 Hale, Held, and Young do not ignore the flow of wealth from Global South the Global North, but they do not see the role of multinational corporations as imperialism in a different form, but a problem that can be solved by more equitable trade laws and tighter regulation (Hale, Held, and Young Citation2013, 131–134).
6 The struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada are paradigm examples. The major political flashpoint in Canada today is between the Wet’suwet’en people of Northern British Columbia and the Canadian state over an oil pipeline being built across their traditional lands. Updates can be found at: https://unistoten.camp/no-pipelines/. For a general discussion of the political and spiritual dimensions of indigenous struggles, see Coulthard (Citation2014, 60–64).
7 Neither Hall nor Bilous deny that US and NATO policy played a primary role in stoking the conflict, but both insist that the conflict be viewed through the eyes of Ukrainians under invasion. From their perspective Putin’s decisions are themselves part of a history of Russian imperialism.
8 The problem of how historical materialists should understand the causal force that ideas exert in history would take us into philosophical waters in which we do not have time to swim. Callinicos himself provides an excellent, non-reductionist account of the material force of ideas in Making History (Callinicos Citation1989). I have argued elsewhere that to properly understand the force that ideas exert, Marxists need to understand the meaning of “material” in a non-physicalist, non-reductionist way that can include the symbolic dimensions of human social life (Noonan Citation2021, 1043–1059).
9 In the 1960s and 70s on the anti-Stalinist Left a debate arose over the question of whether the economic relationship between the Soviet Union and the Eastern European members of the Warsaw Pact was imperialist. Michael Barrett Brown argued that there was some evidence that the terms of trade established by the Soviet Union vis-à-vis its Eastern European clients resembled the sort of systematically exploitative relationships typical of Western imperialism (Brown Citation1974, 285–304). While that debate has only historical interest now, the after-effects of the Soviet Union remain essential to understanding the political fears that drive the politics of Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine today. Whatever the economic dynamics were, these countries equated, and continue to equate, the policies of the Soviet Union and today’s Russia with the history of Tsarist imperialism. I will return to the importance of this relationship in section two.
10 Although the current American military budget is over 700 billion dollars, that only represents 3.5% of American GDP (Statista Citation2022). There are models that suggest redirecting capital away from military industries would lead to higher levels of economic growth (Garrett-Peltier Citation2017).
11 Despite a courageous anti-war movement, Putin’s approval rating jumped from 69 to 82 per cent in early April, more than one month into the war (Levada Centre Citation2022).
12 I cannot provide a detailed assessment of the September referenda in the Donbass or Putin’s speech justifying the annexation of these territories, save to say that the decision makes an eventual negotiated solution that much more difficult. While the case of Kosovo exposes Western hypocrisy, exposing Western hypocrisy, while necessary, does not solve the problem. For Putin’s speech, see Putin (Citation2022). The parallels with Kosovo are explored in Snider (Citation2022).
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Jeff Noonan
Jeff Noonan is Professor of philosophy at Department of Philosophy in University of Windsor. He is the author of Critical Humanism and the Politics of Difference (2003), Democratic Society and Human Needs (2006), Materialist Ethics and Life-Value (2012), Embodiment and the Meaning of Life (2018), The Troubles with Democracy (2019) and more than 50 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. He also writes regularly for alternative and progressive websites in Canada and abroad and maintains an active blog at www.jeffnoonan.org.