On New York City streets these days you can see ads for a new product on the market – Lvov vodka from Poland. A tweet by the company describes it as follows:
“Lvov vodka takes its name from a town in Poland (now in Ukraine due to ever changing map lines of the region), and is crafted the same way for generations.”
It is the greatest demonstration why Ukraine has a vital stake in the May 7 presidential elections in France, next month’s general elections in the United Kingdom, in the vote to be held later this year in Germany, in a strong European Union and, in general, in the preservation of a stable post-World War II global political system.
A wave of nationalism is sweeping the world. We see it in China and India as these countries revel in their newly found – or rather, revived – national prowess. The Israelis, having claimed for seven decades to be the longed-for home for the world’s dispersed Jewry, have discovered that they are a separate nation after all and are asserting their nationalism with a vengeance. In Europe we see a disillusionment with the transnational E.U. project giving rise to Brexit, Marine Le Pen and the revival of right-wing nationalism.
In America, too, Donald Trump took advantage of the nativist, white Christian resentment and he’s now threatening to undermine the international status quo in order to “make America great again.” This is total nonsense of course since it is the United States that derives the greatest benefit from the international system it created after World War II and has been upholding ever since.
In Europe, too, junking the E.U. project would be similarly idiotic. It has been responsible for a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the Western part of the continent, afforded Germany a chance to unify under the auspices of the Federal Republic, allowed Southern European nations to achieve higher incomes and made it possible for Eastern Europe to break from under the Soviet sway.
While less developed nations – or emerging economies as they are called – including China and India – get substantially less benefits from this system, they are clearly better off within it than outside.
The point is that much of the nationalist rhetoric – Trump’s, Le Pen’s, Theresa May’s and others’ – is irrational. It is driven by resentment and makes no economic or political sense. Nor do the populists have any realistic solutions to the economic and social problems which they are cynically exploiting to ride to power. As other populists with authoritarian tendencies throughout modern history, they will sweep the problems under the carpet and work to placate their constituents with belligerent rhetoric and empty virtual reality gestures.
To see how populist regimes end up if they’re allowed to rule unchecked all you need to do is take a look at Venezuela.
As far as Ukraine is concerned, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland fit into the same populist trend and, like other populists who have either come to power or are still trying to do so, they have no good prescriptions for their citizens’ prosperity or their countries’ greatness.
But once political or economic bankruptcy starts to loom, they tend to stir up patriotic fervor. As Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin said in the 19th century: “They’re starting to stress patriotism. No doubt they’ve got their hand in the till.”
Putin with his adventures in Ukraine seems to illustrate this idea perfectly. He feeds a narrative of greatness to the Russians but Russia’s economy and military are too weak to be a real empire. Clearly impotent to reverse “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as he once termed the collapse of the Soviet Union, he has been making mischief on a much smaller scale, taking advantage of a revolution in Kyiv to grab Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine.
This may eventually prove to be a model for Ukraine’s other neighbors, notably for the governments of Hungary and Poland. Both have embraced nationalism and are displaying an authoritarian, anti-democratic streak which has launched them on a collision course with Brussels. If their relations with the E.U. deteriorate seriously, their economies will suffer, possibly severely. This would then be a great time for a pseudo patriotic adventure, to show the nation why it has to tighten its belts.
Irredentism has long been part of the Hungarian political landscape where a true Hungarian must supposedly be forever aggrieved by the loss of national territories after World War I, as a result of the Treaty of Trianon.
In Poland, nationalists are also bemoaning the loss of the once great Polish cities such as Lviv and Vilnius – see the Lvov Polish vodka ad, which casually betrays this nostalgia. Needless to say, a German vodka called Danzig (named after a German city currently located in Poland) would not play well in Warsaw.
Hungary can’t take on Romania or Serbia to reclaim the lost Hungarian lands. Nor can Poland do much about Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. But carving up Ukraine if an opportunity arises is not outside the realm of possibility.
And, if populists, nationalists and authoritarians of all stripes go on undermining the global rules-based political system such opportunity might indeed present itself at some point in a fairly near future. Putin and Trump are only waiting for the noise around the Russian meddling in the 2016 US election to die out – which the fake Republican patriots in Congress are doing their best to tamper down – to come to a sweetheart agreement on Ukraine. In the meantime they look set to do a deal on Syria to show the American public how advantageous a friendship with Putin could be.
The Moscow-Washington axis of evil would be all the more effective – and would be able to come out in the open – if anti-EU parties come to power in key European capitals.
Don’t think that because the Polish and Hungarian government don’t see eye to eye on Russia they won’t be able to join forces with Putin to break Ukraine into spheres of influence. Putin for one would welcome a chance to share the responsibility for carving up the country – after all, that was how Hitler and Stalin chose to act in Poland at the start of World War II.
With Trump shilling for Moscow and agitating for Le Pen, Ukraine can no longer fully trust the United States, even though it still has a number of true friends and allies in Washington. This is why Kyiv needs a strong, united Europe under an enlightened German leadership – lest it is left alone to face rapacious neighbors the way Poland was on 1939.
