Drang nach Osten

Drang nach Osten

This German expression means “push to the East.” Going West is more familiar in the American tradition – as in “go West, young man.” And when it comes to massive popular moves, it goes all the way to when the Spaniards and the Portuguese and the Dutch ventured into the open seas – and before them the Norsemen. Maybe there was land to be discovered beyond their narrow horizons? And there was, and it made them rich. Some of these ancient explorers circled Africa all the way to Asia, and the ancient civilizations of Asia offered plenty of riches to share.

And then there was all of Africa to explore. One of the most lucrative trades there was the slave trade. The British, the French (and the Arabs before them and the Americans as well) vied with each other to profit from it. The Africans proved to be better workers than the Native Americans: they were made to plant cotton in North America or hack at sugar canes in the Caribbean or dig for minerals in Africa, which the Europeans needed for industrialization.

Germanic tribes had also moved West (and South) causing the downfall of the Roman Empire. Eventually a number of ethnically ‘mixed’ nations became organized throughout Europe with Christianity established as their unifying ideology. But when Martin Luther exhorted Christians to take the Holy Book away from the priests and read it for themselves, fierce religious wars ensued. This caused Germany to remain parceled out into smaller and larger provinces over which Protestant Prussia and Catholic Austria fought for supremacy. Germany as such didn’t get its act together as a unified state until Bismarck organized it in the 1860s.

But this proved too late for industrial development: the Americas as well as Africa and Asia had already been occupied: the land, its resources and its cheap labor ‘belonged’ to other countries. Even tiny Belgium ‘owned’ the huge territory on the Congo River in Central Africa.

Britain, among them, was foremost: they had initiated the industrial revolution and looked to the sea to build their empire. One hears a lot lately about Halford Mackinder’s ideas about land-based vs. sea-based empires (‘tellurocracies’ vs. ‘thalassocracies’). He developed these ideas in reference to the long-standing conflict between the British and Russian empires known as the ‘great game.’ Russia had advanced into Siberia and Central Asia, and this, the British feared, could challenge their domination of Asia’s southern periphery – especially their ‘crown jewel’ – India. Thus, the Crimean War of 1853 to1856 was about blocking Russia from access to the seas – the Mediterranean Sea by way of the black Sea.

Having thus accomplished their conquest of other continents thanks to technological advantages in armament and seafaring, the Western Europeans rationalized their success by pointing to their ‘obvious’ civilizational superiority. A favorite shortcut focused on the difference of skin color between northern and southern peoples.

In the case of Germany, however, which was stuck in Central Europe, skin color was not as readily available as a defining marker. But the East-European peoples, known as the Slavs, could be defined as inferior in other ways. For one thing, they had not been successful in organizing themselves into viable states. The example of Poland, eventually ‘partitioned’ between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, was a case in point. Another example of Slavic inferiority was the subjection of the Balkans to even non-Christians like the Turks.

But when some Slavs did organize themselves into a state, as in the case of Russia, having finally thrown off the 250 years – long ‘Mongol yoke’ in the fifteenth century, they were clearly ‘behind’ the civilizational advances of Western Europe. They missed the glory of the Renaissance and the enlightenment of the French revolution. This is why Napoleon took his mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) to the Russians, still stuck in autocracy. It did not work out as expected. The irony, however, is that Russian autocracy was eventually challenged by another Western philosophy, namely Marxism.

By that time Marxist critics had been questioning the basis of Western achievements as well. Because the Capitalist system required the colonization of the rest of the world, and the world was beginning to run out of available lands, Capitalist states ended up in conflict. And since Germany was a late comer to industrialization and colonization, Britain, France, and the United States made sure, during World War I, that it remained so. As a result of this ‘humiliation,’ the meaning of Drang nach Osten found its fundamental justification. Hitler called on the superior Teutonic race to take over the lands of the backward Slavs who had been stupid enough to buy into Marxism.

Once again, while Poland proved something of a cakewalk, the vast expanses of what had become the Soviet Union proved problematical. Whether the fighting experience acquired against repeated earlier invasions, or the now Socialist ability to equal the Capitalists in industrial capacity, or the alliance with Britain and the United States were to be credited for the defeat of Germany – Germany suffered defeat again in World War II.

Now split into Eastern and Western sections, Germany became the geographical meeting point between the Capitalist powers of the West and the Socialist powers of the East. And despite the creation of the United Nations in 1945 as a foundation for international dialogue and cooperation, these powers devolved into an ideological or ‘cold’ war.

The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe meant the support of Communist regimes in these countries. Even in some West European countries, such as France, Italy, Greece, and Yugoslavia, the popular resistance against Nazi occupation had been primarily organized and fought by Communists. And because this was reflected in their strong presence in post-war parliaments, President Truman’s administration organized a multi-layered response. The CIA was created as a covert initiative to undermine European politics: it fomented ‘false flag’ rebellions and financed the infiltration of intellectual organizations. Western Germany was welcomed back into the fold, with its scientists and intelligence operatives incorporated into the American system.

These initiatives required more obvious ‘defensive’ military backing: in 1949 the United States created NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization). As a British wit defined it, its purpose was to “keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In response, the Soviets created the Warsaw Pact in 1954. This ‘Cold War’ also manifested itself in former colonized areas of Asia, Africa and South America: notable among them was the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.  

But the greatest challenge to all of humanity was the nuclear arms race between the two super-powers. In time a détente was initiated between them, resulting in arms reduction treaties. A major moment of diplomatic success occurred in 1990 over the long-standing division of Germany. Soviet Premier Michail Gorbachev offered to withdraw Soviet troops from East Germany in exchange for the American commitment to halt NATO at the German border.

As subsequent years demonstrated, however, NATO proceeded to incorporate one country after another, until even Georgia and Ukraine were invited to join NATO in 2007. In other words, a new Drang nach Osten was taking place under the aegis of the Atlanticist Alliance. In this instance, however, this initiative was pursued not out of a sense of ‘humiliation’ the Germans had suffered during World War I, but rather out of a sense of ‘superiority.’

Was the capitalist system indeed superior, or did the post-war situation reflect a different kind of imbalance as well? After all, the United States had not been invaded by the Germans, while the Soviet Union had suffered a devastating invasion of its territories. And despite the United States engagement against the Japanese in the Pacific and later the Germans in Europe, their 450,000 war casualties were no match to the 27 million casualties suffered by the Soviets.

Whatever the reason, it looked like the Capitalist West was capturing the hearts and minds of the people in Europe as well as its territory. The Marshal Plan was making available to impoverished Europeans the purchase of the goods of productive America. To pacify the sizable European Left, governments were allowed to maintain social welfare supports. To put a stop to centuries of internecine wars, a unified Europe was in the making.

The Soviets, however, insisted on controlling their own territory. They stuck to their own system, which had transformed a country of poor peasants into a society where the majority of the people had achieved reasonable standards of living – and made them strong enough to stop the Nazi onslaught.

Yes, there had been a price to pay. After all, change always requires a price – and sometimes a bloody fight. Was this not true of the American Revolution as well? After ejecting the British, they followed their example by building their prosperity on the subjection of others: the near eradication of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. And the Monroe Doctrine took over from the Europeans the control of South America.

Similarly, the French Revolution had had its Jacobin terreur against the aristocratic elites, and the ensuing wars with the rest of conservative Europe. After its rebellion against these elites, however, the French bourgeoisie also turned to Capitalism for the creation of prosperity, which required accelerated exploitation of lesser developed countries.  

And the Russian Revolution, whose civil war had caused some two million of its elites to flee abroad, had also had to fight invading armies who supported these elites. But the revolutionaries chose to trust Marx’s warning that the relentless profit seeking promoted by Capitalism was unsustainable economically and unjust socially. They also entered the international competition, only not as conquerors, but as equals.

In the post-war years, however, the successes achieved by socialism began to be taken for granted and increasingly questioned. The Socialist focus on ‘equality,’ now largely achieved, caused the now educated classes to make other demands. The restrictions on ‘liberty’ during the strenuous years of Socialist development could not be denied. And now that the siren song of ‘liberty’ from Western well-wishers was flooding their airwaves, they were interested. Western missionaries like George Soros’ Open Society financed journals and oppositional organizations. A movement of Soviet ‘dissidents’ became active. The younger generation stopped reading Marx: his focus had been on the problems of Capitalism while their reality was the problems of Soviet Socialism: increasing  economic stagnation, lack of consumer goods, slow technological innovation. In time, ‘free enterprise, free markets, and individual freedoms’ began to be understood as interchangeable.

Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika were official responses to these trends, as well as Yeltsin’s more radical interventions – culminating in the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. But his invitation of Western economists to guide them in the practice of Capitalist enterprise proved to be yet another Drang nach Osten. A swarm of Capitalist ‘entrepreneurs,’ together with local oligarchs-in-the making, privatized and dismantled major public companies and institutions, leaving the general population to scramble in a social free-for-all.

The advancement of Vladimir Putin in 1999 to replace Yeltsin began a slow reversal. He was supportive of cooperation with the West to begin with, but his expectations to be accepted on equal terms were repeatedly rebuffed. The continued advance of NATO became a major bone of contention. In his speech to the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin warned that the advance of NATO to the very borders of what was now the Russian Federation was an existential security issue. His statement was ignored. After all, the ‘superiority’ of the West had been amply demonstrated by the events of the 90s. The next step in its Drang nach Osten was the 2014 regime change in Ukraine.

Its purpose, as later acknowledged, was to provoke Moscow to intervene, which would then justify the West to dismantle the Russian Federation as well: its vast territory all the way to Vladivostok needed to be challenged as in the days of the ‘great game’ with Britain. President Putin held off direct intervention into Ukraine, even though its Eastern Russian-speaking population suffered relentless shelling from the new Kiev government. After renewed attempts at security negotiations with the West, which were again ignored, Moscow initiated its Special Military Operation of 2022.

But neither the economic and financial sanctions, nor the war on Ukrainian soil are yielding the expected results. In the meantime, China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics,’ which has appropriated some elements of Capitalist enterprise while keeping principal control in the Communist Party, has proven to be a great economic success. And now Mackinder’s definition of ‘natural’ power antagonism between sea and land empires is on the map again. The hostility of the West toward Russia has facilitated its alliance with China, and the creation of an impressive Eurasian entity.

Thus, the latest Drang nach Osten has resulted in yet another failure. The NATO project, on the other hand, at least the part relating to “keep Germany down” has proven successful. There is the presence of some 100 American bases on its soil. The recent destruction by the United States of Nord Stream 2, which had fueled the German economy with cheap Russian gas, is yet another ‘put down’. Once again Germany is in the middle, now between the Atlanticist and Eurasian projects. If only power politics understood the benefits of dialogue and cooperation! But this is hard to conceive if you happen to be superior, exceptional, civilized, chosen – and a billionaire.