I introduced the writer of this piece, Wolfgang Streeck, in a 2020 post as:
Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
If you can plow through some of the econo-political rhetoric in this essay to the core ideas you get the sense he may be on to something.
Ditto for today's essay, from New Left Review, May 4:
Return of the King
If there ever was a question of who is boss in Europe, NATO or the European Union, the war in Ukraine has settled it, at least for the foreseeable future. Once upon a time, Henry Kissinger complained that there was no single phone number on which to call Europe, far too many calls to make to get something done, a far too inconvenient chain of command in need of simplification. Then, after the end of Franco and Salazar, came the southern extension of the EU, with Spain joining NATO in 1982 (Portugal had been a member since 1949), reassuring Kissinger and the United States against both Eurocommunism and a military takeover other than by NATO. Later, in the emerging New World Order after 1990, it was for the EU to absorb most of the member states of the defunct Warsaw Pact, as they were fast-tracked for NATO membership. Stabilizing the new kids on the capitalist block economically and politically, and guiding their nation-building and state-formation, the task of the EU, more or less eagerly accepted, would be to enable them to become part of ‘the West’, as led by the United States in a now unipolar world.
In subsequent years the number of East European countries waiting to be admitted to the EU increased, with the United States lobbying for their admission. With time Albania, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia achieved official candidate status, while Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Moldova are still kept waiting further down the line. Meanwhile enthusiasm among EU member states for enlargement declined, especially in France which preferred and prefers ‘deepening’ over ‘widening’. This was in line with the peculiar French finalité of the ‘ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’: a politically and socially relatively homogeneous compound of states capable collectively of playing an independent, self-determined, ‘sovereign’, above all French-led role in world politics (‘a more independent France in a stronger Europe’, as the just reelected French president likes to put it).
The economic costs of bringing new member states up to European standards, and the required amount of institution-building from the outside, had to be kept manageable, given that the EU was already struggling with persistent economic disparities between its Mediterranean and Northwestern member countries, not to mention the deep attachment of some of the new members in the East to the United States. So, France blocked the entry into the EU of Turkey, a long-standing NATO member (which it will remain even though it has just sent the activist Osman Kavala to prison, for a lifetime in solitary confinement with no possibility of parole). The same holds for several states on the West Balkans, like Albania and North Macedonia, having failed to prevent the accession, in the first wave of Osterweiterung in 2004, of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and Hungary. Four years later, Sarkozy and Merkel barred (for the time being) the United States under George Bush the Younger from admitting Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, anticipating that this would have to be followed by their inclusion in the European Union.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine the game changed. Zelensky’s televised address to the assembled heads of EU governments caused a kind of excitement that is much desired but rarely experienced in Brussels, and his demand for full EU membership, tutto e subito, drew unending applause. Overzealous as usual, von der Leyen traveled to Kyiv to hand Zelensky the long questionnaire required to start admission procedures. While normally it takes national governments months if not years to assemble the complex details the questionnaire asks for, Zelensky, Kyiv’s state of siege notwithstanding, promised to finish the job in a matter of weeks, and so he did. It is not yet known what the answers are on questions like the treatment of ethnic and linguistic minorities, above all Russian, or the extent of corruption and the state of democracy, for example the role of the national oligarchs in political parties and in parliament.
If Ukraine is admitted as swiftly as promised, and as its government and that of the United States expect, there will be no longer be any reason to refuse membership not just to the states of the West Balkans but also to Georgia and Moldova, which applied together with Ukraine. In any case, they will all add strength to the anti-Russian-cum-pro-American wing inside the EU, today led by Poland, at the time like Ukraine an eager participant in the ‘coalition of the willing’ assembled by the United States for the purpose of active nation-building in Iraq. As to the EU generally, Ukrainian accession will turn it into even more of a prep school or a holding pen for future NATO members. This is true even if, as part of a potential war settlement, Ukraine may have to be officially declared neutral, preventing it from joining NATO directly. (In fact, since 2014 the Ukrainian army has been rebuilt from scratch under American direction, to the point where in 2021 it effectively achieved what is called ‘interoperability’ in NATO jargon).
In addition to domesticating neophyte members, another job that has come with the EU’s new status as a civil auxiliary of NATO is to devise economic sanctions that hurt the Russian enemy while sparing friends and allies, as much as necessary. NATO controlling the guns, the EU is charged with controlling the ports. Von der Leyen, enthusiastic as always, had let the world know by the end of February that sanctions made in EU would be the most effective ever and would ‘bit by bit, wipe out Russia’s industrial base’ (Stück für Stück die industrielle Basis Russlands abtragen). Perhaps as a German, she had in mind something like a Morgenthau Plan, as proposed by advisers to Franklin D. Roosevelt, in order to reduce defeated Germany to an agricultural society forever. That project was soon dropped, at the latest when the United States realized that they might need (West) Germany for its Cold War ‘containment’ of the Soviet Union....
....MUCH MORE
