PR 10: A new “new world order”

One does not have to agree with neo-con Robert Kagan’s assessment in the Washington Post that the conflict will be seen as “a turning point no less significant” than the fall of the Berlin Wall, to recognise that the “new world order” that came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989 is being revised, with all the dangers of intensified inter-imperialist rivalry in the decade ahead.

Georgia was an accident waiting to happen, a fragile faultline in US-Russia relations. It is a small but key ally for the US in the Caucasus. The government of Saakashvili has been its neoliberal poster-boy in the region since 2004. His army and security services were trained and armed by the US and its 2,000 Georgian troops were the third largest contingent in Iraq. Tiblisi has been pushing for Nato membership, raising its military budget to $1bn in July 2008 from only $84m in 2004.

In August Georgia put some of this armed might to work in South Ossetia. Scores, if not hundreds, of poor farmers and civilians have lost their lives – first in the vicious Georgian bombardment of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, and then through Ossetian militia reprisals against Georgian villages in the area.

Russia claims to be the innocent party in these events, acting as a “peacekeeper” and in defence of South Ossetia and Russian citizens. This story is far from the truth. Russia has being looking for an excuse to deal a blow to Georgia for some months and the speed of its military offensive showed it was ready. Saakashvili’s provocation gave it just the excuse it needed.

Russian intervention in Georgia is a calculated response to years of aggressive expansion by the US and Nato up to its borders. The entry of many of the former Soviet and east European states – Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic etc – into the EU and Nato, the planting of anti-missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and the promise of Nato membership to Georgia and the Ukraine, have all led Russia to act to defend what it sees as its sphere of influence, its backyard.

Georgia has been used to make a point. The US and NATO are on notice that Russia is no longer the collapsed country of the 1990s but a major regional power that can stand up for itself and assert its might, just as the US does. It is also a warning to the Ukraine, where the joining of Nato will pose a real threat to the strategic Russian naval base in the Crimea.

Russia played out its prepared plan. It has taken advantage of the US’s overstretched strategic commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq (the latter stable but precarious, the former rapidly deteriorating). Medvedev has made it clear that it considers Georgia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet states as regions where Russia has “privileged interests”. He has declared that the era of the unipolar world is over and that Russia would do what it could to create a multi-polar world that challenges US hegemony and power, without seeking to supplant it.

Georgian people are suffering the results of being at the heart of a growing imperialist rivalry, being in a strategic oil and gas rich region of the world. Socialists should condemn this rivalry and refuse to take sides in this fight over Georgia. The working people of the Caucuses are the real losers in this battle.

Georgia certainly has a right to territorial integrity, but not to oppress national and ethnic minorities within its own borders. We should defend the rights of national and ethnic minorities such as the Ossetian people to determine their own future, with separation from Georgia and/or merger with North Ossetia and secession from Russia as well if they choose. But we should warn, as with other mini-states like Kosovo, that the creation of a separate state is no answer to the poverty and deprivation suffered by most of the people. The workers and peasants need to build alliances across borders against those who would use their communities as pawns in their great power rivalries.

The only real solution to this problem lies in the overthrow of imperialism east and west and in the establishment of a voluntary socialist federation of the Caucasus, where national autonomy and national rights are respected and the corrupt capitalist leaders who promote division and ethnic cleansing are assigned to the dustbin of history.

Tue 02, December 2008 @ 17:37