(An edited version of this
article appeared in the Mail on Sunday)
With all eyes on Athens watching to see if Greece ’s left-wing government
blinks tomorrow in its stand-off with the EU over its debt mountain, let’s not
lose sight of the bigger political picture.
Manoeuvring for
position for any “Grexit” from the Euro is part Russia ’s
deepening rift with the West over everything from Ukraine
to the Middle East . Greece
has become one of the exposed nerves in the New Cold War between Washington and Moscow .
Remember Greece ’s
civil war in 1947 sparked the old Cold War as
President Truman took one side and Stalin the other. Today, Greece is at
the heart of renewed East-West rivalry as well as the Eurocrisis.
On Friday,the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, dropped a
meeting with the EU’s current President, Poland ’s
Donald Tusk, to
travel to Russia ’s old
imperial capital, St. Petersburg , to
meet President Putin instead.
There, in a highly symbolic
tribute, Tsipras laid a wreath at the statue of Kapodistrias, the ethnic Greek
who acted as Imperial Russia’s foreign minister and did much of the diplomatic spadework which would eventually bring about a
pan-European intervention on the side of the Greeks during their war for
independence after 1821. Another ethnic Greek, Ypsilantis, an officer in the Imperial Russian army
actually ignited Greece ’s War
for Independence
in 1821. He was the forerunner of today’s Russian “volunteers” in
the Donbas . Tsipras was paying homage to the
idea that Russia not the
West has been Greece ’s
true patron. Putin himself emphasised Russia ’s deep ties of culture and religion with
neighbours like Ukraine and
Balkan countries like Greece .
Of course, Britain
has been at odds with Russian imperial ambitions in the region before.The
Crimean War was fought to stop them. In 1878, jingoism got its first outing
when London ’s
music halls echoed to the sentiment “We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do”
before listing what the Russians wouldn’t be allowed to grab in the Balkans.
But the current standoff between Moscow-backed rebels in the south-east of Ukraine and the US-supported government in Kiev is why relations
between East and West are so tense now.
But let’s not be seduced too easily by old Cold War stereotypes.
Of course, Vladimir Putin’s much
publicised early career in the KGB has been to give him a sinister glamour, at
home as well as abroad, but he long abandoned any commitment to Communism.
The old Cold War was a clear rivalry between Communism and
Capitalism. Capitalism won hands down – not least in Russia itself. Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union , Putin and his close
circle of ex-KGB ministers, advisers and cronies have abandoned any allegiance
to Marxist ideas. Their Russia
is not a socialist state any more. If anything post-Communist Russia has had
a more cut-throat capitalist economy than anything seen in the West since well before the First
World War.
Putin is often misquoted - or at least incompletely quoted – as
promoting nostalgia for the USSR and a desire to restore it when he said
that Russian who did not regret the break up of the state and society into
which they had been born lacked a heart, but he added – something usually
overlooked - that anyone who wanted to recreate the Soviet
It is to pre-1914
Imperial Russia and its culture and traditions that Putin most often
looks for symbols to bolster his politics today. So he has declared the last
tsar's reforming prime minister, Stolypin, his political hero, not Stalin. Of
course, he savoured the
anniversary of the Red Army’s victory over Hitler in 1945, still the biggest
badge of pride for Russians from their tarnished Communist past, but he by
the Soviet Communists. Strikingly, even his defence minister, a Russian
Buddhist by has committed himself to the country’s Orthodox Christian heritage
so despised origin, nonetheless made the sign of
the cross in the Orthodox way on the spot where the renegade seminarian,
Stalin, had celebrated Hitler's defeat.
Imperial Russia ’s Nicholas I prefigured Putin’s hostility
to “People Power” revolutions, seeing the upheavals of his day – Poland in 1831 or Central Europe in 1848 – as
the result of liberal machinations promoted from Paris
and London as Putin sees Washington 's
hand behind the crisis in Ukraine . Nicholas I made an exception in his support
for Orthodox Christians in Greece
rebelling against the Muslim Sultan.
For many Greeks
and Russians being an Orthodox Christian is essential to their national identity.
Putin’s emphasis on traditional values puts him at odds with the West,
where tolerance and individual rights are now sacrosanct. Putin’s
government has put a lot of effort into rallying cultural
conservatives in the West to Russia ’s
side as the bastion of family values.
Cynical propaganda it may be but it is very different Soviet Communism’s
anti-Christian diatribes.
Putin emphasises Russia ’s the thousand-year old ties with the
Greek Orthodox Church which brought Christianity first to Ukraine then Russia itself. In 1947, Greek
Christians were anti-Communist and so anti-Moscow. Not any more.
As in the early
nineteenth century, Graeco-Russian solidarity is based on religion which was
very different from British sympathy for the Greeks then which was a liberal
cause.
But Putin backs up appeals to cultural solidarity with incentives
in hard cash.
If Putin dreams of a revived Orthodox Christian alliance
reaching deep into Europe’s backyard in the Balkans, this is because he
calculates that Greece is where
Moscow could split
the EU and NATO.
Tsipras may calculate that he can use the Russian bogey to
frighten Brussels into continuing the
bail-out, but if the Germans refuse to pay up, Russia
can at least tide Athens
over for a while it sorts out an orderly return to the drachma.
Putin has not,
however, got limitless resources to play with. Oil and gas prices are well below
where the Kremlin needs them to have the tens of billions to throw around which
would really buy friends and influence throughout the Balkans if the West plays
tough.
But Greece has had a long history since 1945 as the
most truculent member of both NATO and then the EU, so it could prove a tough
nut for Western pressure to crack. Greece 's
obstinate refusal to acknowledge "Macedonia "
as its neighbour's name and therefore the country's candidacy to either
the EU or NATO is just one symptom of Athens '
ability to block its allies when it chooses to.
Today’s Russia
does not have the resources of the West but nor is it the basket-case which
the Soviet Union had become by the 1980s.
Putin is playing on the economic realities which make the New Cold War so
different from the past. During the Cold War alliance with Washington was the high road to prosperity for Western Europe . After 1948, America ’s
Marshall Plan helped lift post-war Europe out
of misery. Communism’s inability to match the West’s economic boom from the
1950s sealed its unpopularity in Eastern Europe
and Soviet Russia itself.
But today the White House is
asking its European allies to make economic sacrifices to counter the Kremlin.
For four decades,
Western Europe had a free-ride on Washington ’s
coat-tails. Now sanctions on Russia hit European businesses
hard. Particularly in rural Greece
and the ex-Communist states of the new
EU members, losing agricultural sales to Russia has bee a body-blow.
But big German and Italian manufacturers have taken heavy hits too.
Putin plays up the argument that President Obama is setting the
anti-Russian sanctions policy but the price is paid by austerity-hit Europeans.
Gnawing away at European support for sanctions on Russia
over Ukraine
are the losses of valuable exports to their vast eastern neighbour. Greece is least
able to afford such losses.
Putin is able to sit out the
sanctions because ordinary Russians blame the West rather than him for growing
hardship. That is a very different state of affairs than the cynical attitude
towards the Kremlin in the last years of Communism. He hopes to chip away
at EU solidarity. Let’s face it, there are a lot of divisions inside the EU and
not just over Russia .
Newly-elected governments here in Britain
and in Denmark
want to cut back the rights of migrant workers flooding west from Poland and the Baltic
States which see themselves as the frontline of the New Cold
War. In Warsaw , plans in London to change migrants’ rights to benefits are seen as a
stab in the back of NATO’s eastern allies.
Greeks demand solidarity from
NATO allies in cash. As that dries up, Greece could be the first domino to
fall. Turkey
could follow as its own political and economic crisis is pushing President Erdogan eastwards.
Nothing in history is every exactly a repetition of past patterns.
The New Cold War has different dynamics from the one before 1989, but, by jingo, it seems that traditional British
fears of Imperial Russia’s dream of dominating the region could have life
in them yet.
Mark Almond is
Director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford (CRIOx).
Contact:
criox.director@aol.com
No comments:
Post a Comment