Institute of Democracy and Cooperation

The geoideology of Westernism

Publication day: 29/4/2009

The geo-ideology of Westernism

John Laughland

Ever since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world in general and European politics in particular have fallen prey to something I propose to call “the geo-ideology of Westernism.” According to this ideology, states are said to be liberal democracies if their foreign policy is aligned with that of “the West”, i.e. the United States and its satellites in the EU, while those countries which do not share that alignment are dismissed as autocratic, illiberal throwbacks to a totalitarian era, whatever the truth about their economic or political systems.

The most obvious example of this is Russia, which was happily classed as a liberal paradise in the 1990s (under Yeltsin) but which, people seriously believe, returned to bad old Soviet practices since the ascent of Vladimir Putin in 2000. No one points out – and few people therefore know - that Putin’s so-called statist Russia has a Steve Forbes-style flat income tax of 13%, a level and model of taxation of which the most libertarian Americans can only dream. Neighbouring Estonia also has a flat tax - at a higher rate - but it is widely apostrophised as a free market model everyone should emulate: unlike Russia, Estonia belongs to the EU and NATO.

Similarly, during the disputed presidential elections in Ukraine in 2004, the Western media spun a Manichean fable about how an exciting entrepreneurial reformer was battling a Soviet-style apparatchik. In fact, the main difference between the two candidates, Viktor Yushchenko and Vikto Yanukovich, lay not in their economics but in their attitude to NATO. It mattered nought that prosperity was higher under the prime ministership of the “pro-Russian” Viktor Yanukovich, and people in the West eagerly lapped up the lurid stories about electoral fraud and attempted poisoning. In fact, both of these stories were fantasies: in five years of Viktor Yushchenko’s presidency, the Ukrainian authorities have never brought a single prosecution for either.

The confusion between Western alignment and true liberalism has now gone so far that the European Union is in the surreal position of being in its fifth year of intimate accession negotiations with Turkey, an economically undeveloped but highly militarised and largely agrarian Islamic state, while its leaders use a very long spoon whenever they have to undertake the disagreeable task of supping with Russian leaders, even though Russia is indisputably a European country. By what possible criterion of Europeanness or liberalism can the EU be contemplating the admission of 90 million Muslim peasants while simultaneously doing all it can to push Russia further out into the frosts and tundra of the North and the East, well away from the European heartland? The answer lies simply in the geopolitical imperatives of the EU-US alliance.

The notion of “the West” as a community of values is certainly older than the Cold War. But it grew far too strong during those decades and now leads to such distortions that it should be consigned to the dustbin of history. The community of values, if it exists, is not confined to a specific geographical space as even the supporters of the concept admit when they include Japan in it. The fault-line certainly does not run along the old delineation between the Western and Eastern Roman Empire, now the line between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Yet because the use of the term serves a very simple geo-strategic imperative - the weakening and encirclement of Russia - the geo-ideology of Westernism unfortunately works rather well.

For instead of dissolving NATO in 1990, as should have occurred when the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the Americans decided to impose a Carthaginian peace on their defeated rival in the Cold War. They parked their tanks on the Russians’ lawn (the metaphor is hardly an exaggeration) by extending NATO to within a few moments’ flight of Russia’s second city and former capital; and they pursued strategies of expansion in the geopolitically sensitive areas of Central Asia and the Black Sea, the explicit purpose of which (according to some influential supporters of these projects) was to prevent Russia from ever becoming an empire again. Only thus, it was reasoned, could her neighbours again live in peace and she become a normal nation for once.

The premise underlying all this, seldom made explicit, is that Communism was nothing but Russian imperialism. According to this vision of history, the suffering visited on people in Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was simply the result of the brutality inflicted on subject peoples by a semi-Mongol horde. Communism was not, therefore, a creed embraced by people all over the world from Havana to Hanoi, but instead merely a cloak for the malignancy of a Moscow permanently bent on domination and expansion. The expansion of liberalism and the geopolitical project of breaking Russia’s back are therefore one and the same thing.

This pattern of thought was made perfectly clear in a keynote speech delivered by Javier Solana in Paris last October. Hardly able to contain his excitement at impending election of a new American president –Barack “Benetton” Obama embodies precisely the multi-cultural and post-national ideal for which European leaders long in their own Americanised continent – Solana’s tone of voice hardened when it came to the distasteful business of having to discuss relations with Russia. He grimaced as he prefaced his remarks by saying, “We think, for good reasons, that the liberation and integration of Central and Eastern Europe was exactly that. Liberation and integration.” In other words, the collapse of Communism is equated, in Solana’s mind, with the collapse of Russian domination over Central Europe; and the maintenance of that liberty requires the consolidation of the inclusion of these states in what they themselves, rightly, call “Euro-Atlantic structures”. No mention, of course, of the fact that Russia herself initiated the process which eventually to this happy outcome, or that she engineered the most peaceful withdrawal of imperial control which has ever occurred in human history (if indeed it was imperial).

In its most extreme form, this nationalisation of political history is simply racist. The Conservative Polish MEP, Maciej Giertych, was censured by his EU parliamentary colleagues in 2007 for a pamphlet he published which made negative remarks about the Jews. But the views he expressed on Russia were far worse. In an essay whose ideas are copied from an early 20th century ideologue, Giertych maintains that the world is divided up into different “civilisations”, with Poland belonging squarely to “Latin civilisation”. (Poles are, after all, well known for being warm-hearted, good-looking, handsome food-lovers.) Russia, by contrast, belongs to “Turanian civilisation” – nothing but an Asiatic race of incorrigibly despotic militarist morons.

The Baltic states propagate this sub-Huntingtonian geo-ideology as if on speed. These post-Soviet republics have, like the Union from which they seceded, adopted official state histories whose theories are presented in newly erected state-funded museums. In Riga and Tallinn, they have a Museum of Occupation, in Vilnius a Museum of the Victims of Genocide. The Occupation in question is that of which the Baltic states were allegedly the victim after 1945, while the “genocide” is not that with which most people would associate the town of Vilno, but instead the supposed genocide of Lithuanian victims of the KGB. The clear message in all three museums is that Communism was nothing but Russian domination directed against the brave nationhood of freedom-loving peoples.

In truth, of course, the Baltic states were not “occupied” by the Soviet Union: they were annexed by it and incorporated into it. Balts were very active in the Bolshevik revolution and in Soviet structures. Yet the occupation theory serves to hide both facts, no doubt because several of their former apparatchiks have gone on to high positions in the post-Soviet states, notably the former Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas (a senior minister and party leader since the 1960s) and the now European Commissioner for fraud, Siim Kallas (a former state official and Party ideologue). The occupation theory also enables the Balts to pursue state policies which are deliberately discriminatory against their large Russian-speaking minorities, policies which would be denounced as racist if they were implanted, say, in the Balkans. If Latvia has 400,000 Russian speakers to whom citizenship is denied, this is because it has adopted measures on citizenship, language and education which are based on supposed states’ rights – their right to re-establish themselves after “occupation” and “colonisation” – and not on human rights, as is expected from everyone else. They get away with it because they are geo-politically important.

They also get away with overt support for Nazism. In 2001, and partly to encourage support for NATO membership, the Latvian state supported the creation of a vast military cemetery in the village of Lestene to commemorate tens of thousands who died fighting for the “Latvia Legion”, i.e. the Waffen SS. Meanwhile, an old Soviet memorial on the site of a German concentration camp has been allowed to go to rack and ruin. Every year, veterans and supporters of the SS lay a wreath at the national monument in Riga, undisturbed by the national police or international busybodies because the imperative is to underline Latvia’s basic hostility to Russia. Men who were decorated as war heroes in Soviet times have been convicted as war criminals by Latvia because they executed Nazi collaborators; and books are published rehabilitating (among others) Friedrich Jeckeln, an SS Obergruppenführer in the occupied Soviet Union who led one of the most murderous Einsatzgruppen which killed 100,000 people. Best of all, the current president of Lithuania, Valdas Adamkus, boasts on his own presidential website that he fought the Soviets before escaping to Nazi Germany in 1944 where he studied before emigrating to America. Adamkus is the only serving European head of state to have fought in the war - and he is proud of the fact that he did so in German uniform.

The notion that Communism and the Soviet system was nothing but Russian imperialism in disguise is nonsense. As a political creed, Marxism was obviously invented by German exiles in Britain who never expected “backward” Russia to embrace their cause. Socialism in imperial Russia was popular mainly among urban Jews and Balts, who with other national minorities were heavily overrepresented in the Communist movement. Even Lenin once said that he cared nothing for Russia but was interested only in world revolution. It was a common sad joke in Soviet Moscow, but a true one, that the USSR was the only empire in which the master people fared worse than the so-called colonies.

Indeed, soon after seizing power (with a little help from Imperial Germany) Lenin broke the unitary Russian empire up into bogus federal units in order to create the fiction that the new Soviet Union was a collection of republics which had come together in joyous unison. Far from suppressing local culture and language, as is now claimed, the Soviet authorities energetically promoted folkloric displays of it in the republics, in support of the myth of the “brotherhood of peoples”. It was they who made “Ukrainian” the official state language of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, thereby laying the foundation stones for the existence of today’s Ukrainian state. People talk of the forced dissolution of the USSR in 1991 as “the collapse of Communism” but the use of Lenin’s administrative borders as the boundaries of new sovereign entities is in fact in the supreme fulfilment of the most important decision the Bolshevik leader ever took, the decision to destroy Russia. So much for Communism as a vehicle for Russian greatness: now the very birthplace of Russia herself, Kiev, is regarded in the West as the capital of a self-evidently independent country, and any Russian influence there as evidence of imperialism. But the reality is that that city, like most of Ukraine, is in fact ancient Russian land which remains Russian speaking to this day.

Indeed, the geo-ideology of Westernism owes far more to the old Soviet ideology than most people realise. The American national dream, that of a contract-based, ideological and universalist state of which persons of all ethnicities and backgrounds may become citizens, bears more than a passing resemblance to the old post-national ideology of the USSR. In fact, Westernism has itself, like Soviet ideology, become little but an instrument of power. America’s military presence in Europe, and her continuing domination over European politics, is a major contributory factor to the artificial division of the basically homogenous European continent along East-West lines. May they both soon come to and end.

This article appears in the Italian current affairs journal, Limes (3 / 2009), published on 28 April 2009. For a summary of the issue's contents, click here.