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Copenhagen, 7 May 2014
ANGELA’S
HOUR: Why Ukraine’s future lies in Germany’s hands
History,
they say, never repeats itself. But events in Ukraine bear an uncanny
resemblance to the Partition of Poland more than two hundred years ago. Careful
attention to how it unfolded can help us see where the power to bring an end to
the crisis lies today—and it isn’t in Washington.
Though it has gone little
commented upon, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken frequently with
Russian President Vladimir Putin over the past week. Their most interesting
conversation took place last Thursday.
For Mrs Merkel, the immediate
issue was the release of a group of OSCE observers held by pro-Russian forces
in Slovyansk. For Mr Putin, however, it was geopolitics. According to the
Kremlin, the Russian president urged Mrs Merkel to use her influence over
Ukraine’s interim government to prevail on Kiev to withdraw its forces from
southern and eastern Ukraine.
Precisely how the German
chancellor reacted isn’t known. But Mr Putin was, in effect, asking her to
consent to a partitioning of Ukraine between the pro-Western, and
Western-backed, government in Kiev in favour of closer ties with NATO and the
EU, and pro-federalist or separatist militias backed by Russia in the east and
south.
Figure 1: Getty Images
Outspoken in her criticism of the Kremlin’s tactics
in Crimea, Mrs Merkel has since become more circumspect, as if unwilling to
push her dealings with Putin into a rhetorical corner. She seems personally
disposed to take a harder line with the Kremlin, but the pressure on her from
German businesses and a surprisingly pro-Russian political establishment—on
both left and right—has been enormous. It’s been estimated that 300,000 German
jobs depend on exports to Russia.
At the same time, as the EU’s unofficial
gatekeeper, Mrs Merkel is among the few Western leaders who could persuade Kiev
to agree to the federalization plan Moscow insists is essential to quelling the
violence. By far the European leader with the most influence in eastern Europe,
she finds herself in an awkward position—one a long line of German leaders has been
in before.
She has geography, the Kremlin and Germany’s own
strength to thank for this.
Germany is
the only European country Putin—himself fluent in German—takes seriously. It’s
also one of Russia’s biggest trading partners. In 2013, Russia exported some
€40bn in trade with Germany, most oil and gas, the bread and butter of the
Russian economy. Though Germany would inflict real harm on itself, a tough
sanctions regime would apply real pressure on Russia.
The two countries have a long history in dividing
up their neighbourhood. In 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler’s
Germany and Stalin’s USSR put an end to an independent Poland. In 1918, the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk divided all the lands of modern Poland and Ukraine
between the Kaiser and the Bolsheviks—generously in Germany’s favour.
But the most instructive division of Europe from
today’s perspective took place when Russia’s Catherine the Great, Empress of
Russia from 1764 to 1794, partitioned the sprawling Polish Commonwealth between
herself and Europe’s two leading Germanic powers: Frederick the Great’s Prussia
and Maria-Theresa’s Austria.
Figure 2: Catherine the
Great. Arts for the Empire - Masterpieces from The State Hermitage Museum,
Russia. www.ago.net
Eighteenth-century Poland—then Europe’s largest
country save Russia itself—included much of the lands that now lie in today’s
Ukraine. Indeed, Putin is today pursuing more or less the same strategic aims
as Catherine the Great, when she first brought Russian rule to the Europe’s
southern steppes in the 1760s, and doing so in much the same way and on much
the same pretext.
Fabled for its ancient constitution that provided
for a king elected by parliament (the Sejm), enshrined the right of even a
single nobleman to veto royal legislation and licensed rebellion of noble
factions against the crown, Poland was in fact an anarchic place dominated by
local magnates with their own private armies, which they used to extract
revenues from the peasantry in their domains. It was a situation external
powers found irresistible, not least Catherine’s Russia.
In other words, eighteenth-century Poland was not
at all unlike modern Ukraine, where in twenty years of independence regional
oligarchs have used their power and money to gouge out local monopolies at the
expense of the overwhelming majority of the country’s citizens, and which until
late last year the Kremlin found easy to exploit by playing one elite client
off against the next. It’s a strategy Putin might have taken straight out of
the eighteenth-century empress’s playbook.
In 1764, Catherine took advantage of Poland’s
divisions to install a former lover on the Polish throne. As king, however,
Stanislav turned out to be made of stronger stuff. Rather than merely towing
Catherine’s line, he set out to reform the Polish state, curtailing the nobles’
veto rights—rights, as Catherine well knew, that had made Poland ungovernable
and so easily amenable to foreign (i.e. Russian) influence.
Styling herself the defender of Poland’s ‘ancient
freedoms’, in 1768 Catherine used the threat of invasion to force Poland’s King
Stanislav to sign a treaty not only to protect Poland’s Orthodox minority—whose
religious freedoms she claimed Stanislav’s new constitution threatened to
undermine, much as Putin has lately been doing on behalf of Ukraine’s sizeable
Russian-speaking minority—but also to restore the unwieldy constitution
Stanislav had sought to modernize.
For Stanislav, the treaty turned out to be a big
mistake, allowing a faction of nobles to cast the king as a Russian puppet. And
when they revolted—as fed up Ukrainians did last year when another Russian ruler
to give up a potentially transformative trade agreement with the EU—, Catherine
pounced. In 1771, under the guise of protecting ‘law and order’, a Russian army
entered Poland. The country collapsed. The Ottoman Turks declared war, but the
Russians defeated them and made them hand over Crimea. Unwilling to go to war,
Prussia and Austria instead decided to join Catherine in dividing Poland up.
The result, in 1772, is what has since become known
as the First Partition of Poland, which awarded thousands of square miles of
Polish territory to Russia, Austria and Prussia. In 1783 Catherine annexed
Crimea and pushed the Ottomans south towards the Danube. Into this so-called
New Russia flowed Russian settlers, whose ‘rights’ Putin has lately deployed
the Russian army to defend.
It took two further partitions to erase Poland from
the map. They have since become a by-word for double-dealing, as diplomats in
hushed drawing rooms disposed of a fractious, aristocratic commonwealth that nineteenth-century
liberals loved to present as a tragic tale of democracy denied.
Figure 3: The Partitions
of Poland, 1772-1795. Source: Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central
Europe. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.
Sound familiar? It should. Because behind the
recent crisis lies a combination of elite in-fighting, constitutional wrangling
and Russian opportunism at Europe’s eastern crossroads that’s almost a
set-piece replay of the situation Catherine exploited.
Like Catherine, Putin took advantage of squabbling
between Ukraine’s modern-day elites for a division of the country’s spoils. And
just as Catherine’s treaty trapped Stanislav, so the Kremlin’s deal-making with
Yanukovich delivered him into Putin’s pocket, including the infamous $15bn loan
for walking away from the EU’s trade deal that ended up making him look like a
Russian stooge.
Ever since, Putin has been playing the same
legitimist card as Catherine, presenting Russia as the defender not only of the
lawful Ukrainian president and legitimate Ukrainian constitution, but also of
the ‘rights’ of Ukraine’s Russian speakers, first in Crimea, now in Donbas and
Odessa.
What Catherine had but Putin has always lacked are
international partners to legitimize the sphere of influence he has asserted
and, to all intents and purposes, carved out. Led by the United States, the
West won’t talk, but like Prussia and Austria in the 1770s, however, it has
ruled out war to make him give them up.
This is where Germany’s Angela Merkel comes in. Like
Frederick the Great and Maria-Theresa in the 1770s and 1790s, she was last
Thursday being asked to partition a swathe of eastern Europe with Russia. She
can be forgiven for being surprising at finding herself in this position. The
‘end of history’—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the expansion of the EU and
NATO—was supposed to put a stop to this sort of thing.
What it hasn’t changed, however, is Germany’s
position as central Europe’s richest and most powerful country. Not only is Germany
the only big European country Russia will deal with; it’s the only one that
really has to.
The other thing that hasn’t changed is Russia’s aggressive
view of its interests. As in the days of Catherine the Great, Russian meddling
has again plunged a fatefully divided neighbour into a constitutional crisis that
has allowed the Kremlin to intervene as the defender of law, order, and
minority rights. Now as then Moscow is looking for a Western partner to
acknowledge its gains; once again, Germany is the Western power with the most
pressing interest in doing that.
Today, partition doesn’t mean the actual dividing
up of Ukraine between Russia and Germany. What it does mean is that, in return
for a Russian promise to let Ukraine’s Western half drift closer to Europe, Mrs
Merkel would encourage the authorities in Kiev to listen to Russia’s demands
for the country’s federalization, an outcome that would leave Russia’s border
where it is but reassure the Kremlin of its influence in the eastern and
southern regions it considers essential to its security—and prevent the country
as a whole moving definitively into the West’s orbit.
Morally, this is an invidious position for any
democratic leader to stand in. But the only alternatives are more sanctions
(which will harm Germany almost as much as Russia and, from Berlin’s point of
view, embitter an essential regional partner) or war on Ukraine’s behalf (which
everyone has ruled out).
While Catherine seems hardly to have let such
scruples bother her, it’s said that Austria’s Maria-Theresa sobbed guilt-ridden
as she divided Poland up with Russia’s wily empress. But having ruled out the
unpalatable alternative, she pulled herself together. ‘The more she wept, the
more she took’, Prussia’s more pragmatic Frederick the Great mocked.
Normally noted for her pragmatism rather than
sentimental or ideological attachments (she shed not a tear when the bailout
conditions she imposed on southern Europe cost thousands their jobs), this
crisis seems thus set to test Mrs Merkel’s non-committal political strategy to
the limits.
By taking the moral high ground, and with so little
at stake economically in Russia, Washington has made itself secondary to the
only real diplomatic solution to this crisis—one that gives Russia at least
some of what it wants. But Mrs Merkel hasn’t yet fully shown her hand and, with
much more on the line, we should definitely pay more attention to her phone
calls with the Kremlin.
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