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The fate of Central and Eastern Europe after the People’s Democracies’ post-1989 fall cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the EU as an extension of German imperialism. Berlin’s drive to ensure the region remains composed of weak, frequently mutually-resentful microstates has endured for well-over a century. Over time, battlefield conquest and occupation has been supplanted by economic and monetary union, and ever-rising military, security and intelligence “interoperability” and “cooperation”, all conducted under “internationalist” auspices.
Comprehending this process and the consistent needs of German imperialism provides a typically absent, critical lens through which to view events such as Yugoslavia’s destruction, the rise and recent demise of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and seen and unseen political machinations throughout the Balkans old and new. German imperialism is a potent, dangerous force frequently overlooked due to its nigh-invisible operation. With US global hegemony irreversibly faltering, it is vital to truly understand the phenomenon as it threatens to emerge in its own militarised right again.
Today, German imperialism is little-understood even in countries and regions intimately shaped if not outright created by Berlin’s colonial meddling and concomitant hegemonic expansion. Its historic apotheosis was the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The terms and consequences provide an eerily precise blueprint for the EU’s modern day role as German empire via other means. Despite Brest-Litovsk’s seismic import, mainstream English language accounts are comparatively rare. A highly compelling, informative synthesis is nonetheless provided by Adam Tooze’s much-overlooked 2014 work The Deluge.
Tooze writes of how “Brest gave birth to the precursors to the Baltic states in their modern form,” and an “independent Ukraine” for the very first time in history. Resource-rich territory that over prior centuries comprised much larger dynastic land empires was broken up into easily exploitable chunks. The newly-formed nations, and corresponding nationalisms, spread throughout ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse swaths of Central and Eastern Europe constituted a formidable anti-Russian stronghold. This provided a firm foundation for Germany’s untrammelled economic, military, and political penetration.
Commenting on Eurasia’s 21st century map, Tooze observes how since the Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution, all Brest-Litovsk’s “creations” have “come to be regarded as legitimate members of the family of nations.” Moreover, states such as the Baltics and Poland then as now “look to protectors in the West,” being “keen members of an American-dominated NATO and the European Union, in which Germany is the dominant force.” Via Brest-Litovsk, “all of these polities fell willy-nilly under the ‘protection’ of Imperial Germany.”
The Treaty was signed between Moscow and Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany and the Ottoman Empire in March 1918, following months of tense negotiations produced the previous December by revolutionary Russia signing an armistice with Berlin. At Brest-Litvosk, both sides advanced their respective visions of “self-determination” for the Central and Eastern European components of the Tsar’s collapsed empire. Vladimir Lenin hoped newly-independent states in the region would be free to turn Bolshevik. Yet, Imperial Germany had no intention of letting that happen.
Instead, the country’s “more intelligent strategic thinkers” realised “there was no better means to dynamite the Tsarist Empire than for Berlin to espouse the demand for self-determination” at Brest-Litovsk. This “manipulative ruse” allowed Germany to extend her hegemony imperceptibly throughout enormously profitable territories. It was “a vision of negotiated sovereignty in which economic and military independence was pooled by smaller states with larger states.” Tooze records how German imperialists argued “full, unfettered sovereignty” was “always a chimera” - “the real choice was one between hegemons”:
“Germany would secure power on a continental scale not through annexation, but through the formation of an economic and military bloc of smaller Eastern European states…The autonomous Polish entity carved by Germany and Austria out of Russian territory in the autumn of 1916 was a start. While in economic and military terms the new Poland would be bound tightly and irrevocably to Germany, in the social and cultural sphere it would be given the freedom ‘to express itself nationally’.”
‘Military Protection’
From the Central Powers’ perspective, self-determination’s colonial windfall was immense. In territorial terms, Moscow lost control of today’s Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. This prime former Tsarist real estate accounted for 34% of the fallen empire’s population, 54% of its industrial land, 89% of its coalfields, and 26% of its railways. Berlin well-knew the regional treasure trove would be hotly contested, and could easily “fall into the orbit of another great power” - “if not Germany or Russia, then Britain.”
Hence, Brest-Litovsk’s terms exclusively allowed for ‘independence’ under formal “German military protection.” This transformed millions of people throughout the region into potential proxy warriors arrayed against Russia, or other major powers threatening Berlin’s local hegemony, in the manner of NATO today. Rapidly collapsing into civil war, with Franco-British intervention to reverse the Revolution impending, the incipient Soviet Union acquiesced to the Treaty’s harsh stipulations. Lenin believed the Bolsheviks would eventually recapture the lost territories, by sheer force of radical gravity.
Brest-Litovsk was torn up by the June 1919 Treaty of Versailles, compelling Berlin to vacate assorted German-conquered protectorates that had been established throughout the region. Chaotic, violent struggles unfolded over the next three years between Red Army-assisted local revolutionary elements and ‘independent’ states led by collaborationist puppets. Belarus and Ukraine were successfully absorbed as republics, while the Baltics and Poland remained autonomous. Meanwhile, the seed of German hegemony via self-determination had been decisively sown throughout Central and Eastern Europe.
German colonialism particularly left its mark post-Brest-Litovsk via the emergence of nationalisms and according national creation myths throughout the region, which were innately and rabidly antagonistic toward Moscow. In Poland in 1916, Berlin’s invading forces had successfully portrayed themselves as liberators. In the Baltics, Russians represented a large proportion of the country’s urban, land-owning elite. They were easily framed by German propagandists, and in ultranationalist imaginations, as parasitic overlords of largely illiterate ethnic Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian peasantry, who overwhelmingly resided in rural steppes.
Convincing Ukraine’s multiethnic population to embrace an anti-Russian ‘independence’ was considerably more difficult, given their similar backgrounds, customs and languages, and the substantial influence of each others’ culture in both directions since Kiev’s 1654 union with Moscow. Ukraine’s contemporaneous veneration of genocidal fascists, and indeed the wider ongoing proxy war, are direct upshots of efforts by German imperialists to promote enmity and antagonism between Russians and Ukrainians. This strategy was maintained throughout the Cold War by the CIA and MI6, with Nazi-riddled West Berlin’s assistance.
‘Civilising Mission’
Another enduring legacy of Brest-Litovsk was transformation of “self-determination” from a liberal German imperialist crusade, to a fundamental principle of Anglo-American-dominated international relations. The cause was eagerly and cynically seized upon first by British Prime Minister Lloyd George, then US President Woodrow Wilson. The right to minority self-determination globally became absolutely central to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The world over, anti-colonial and nationalist movements saw an opportunity to achieve independence from foreign subjugation.
At the Conference, Austro-Hungary brutally fell victim to this self-determination push, with Britain successfully ordering its constituent territories be “liberated” via the empire’s total breakup. This created the independent states of Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The latter pair were entirely new countries, with Yugoslavia forged from Austro-Hungary’s southern Slavic regions - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Slovenia - and the revolutionary kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro. In a bitter irony, Austro-Hungary herself had previously encouraged self-determination regionally à la Brest-Litovsk, to entrench her imperial rule.
In June 1878, the little-known Congress of Berlin was convened. Major European powers sought to reorganise the Balkans, in the wake of Russia’s victory over the Ottoman Empire three months earlier. The conflict ended with Moscow asserting hegemony over Constantinople’s remaining holdings in Southeastern Europe, via an allied Greater Bulgaria, and the newly-formed, independent states of Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia. However, Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, rapidly expanding host empire Germany, and Italy, wished for these terms to be revised.
While the Congress recognised the three new Balkan states’ independence, attendees demanded Bosnia and Herzegovina become an Austro-Hungarian protectorate into the bargain, much to Serbia’s chagrin. Vienna’s resultant takeover of Sarajevo sent tens of thousands of Muslim inhabitants fleeing to Turkey. This exodus intensified in 1881, after the imposition of military conscription. The move was inspired by Serbia and Montenegro supporting local anti-imperial elements. It was just one Austro-Hungarian connivance intended to transform harmoniously multiethnic, multifaith Bosnia and Herzegovina into a fractious powder keg.
In service of this goal, Sarajevo’s Austro-Hungarian occupation authorities actively nurtured a nationhood centred exclusively on Bosniak - Bosnian Muslim - identity. The local Serbo-Croatian dialect was proclaimed a separate Bosnian language, Cyrillic text got suppressed, while Serbian books and newspapers were banned. Vienna’s meddling failed to incite violent, separatist division between Bosnia’s diverse peoples. It nonetheless created a vast army of conscripts for any future regional war, while providing Austro-Hungary with an imperial public relations victory. Per historian Maximilian Georg:
“[Vienna’s] objects were to teach the population their supposed Bosnian, pro-Habsburg identity, legitimise the Austro-Hungarian rulers as the new Romans, and demonstrate to Europe and the world the success of Austro-Hungary’s ‘civilising mission’ in an ‘oriental’ country. This ‘civilising mission’ under military occupation was the strongest indicator of an Austro-Hungarian colonialism.”
‘Yugoslav Nationalist’
Austro-Hungary and Germany alike considered independent Serbia’s mere existence a permanent irritant to their Eastern European supremacy, in need of eventual neutralisation. Tensions constantly mounted after the turn of the century, leading in 1908 to Bosnia’s formal annexation by Vienna. All along, imperialists in Berlin were spectating Austro-Hungary’s colonial machinations with intense interest. In 1888, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck prophetically foresaw “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” upsetting Europe’s delicate balance of power, and precipitating a major global conflict.
Serbia and Montenegro’s October 1912 invasion of Albania, in the wake of her declaration of independence from Ottoman rule, almost proved that “damned foolish thing.” Serb and Montenegrin forces sought to permanently capture territory, but retreated a year later under threat of Austro-Hungarian intervention. In the aftermath, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Vienna, declaring “war between East and West was in the long run inevitable.” As Slavs “were born not to rule but to obey,” their anti-imperialist tendencies couldn’t be tolerated much longer.
Wilhelm II moreover pledged to “back” Austro-Hungary in any future conflict in Eastern Europe, assuring his Viennese counterparts Berlin was “ready to draw the saber any time your action makes it necessary.” Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip’s June 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo provided an ideal pretext for the Kaiser’s long-desired showdown between Slavs and Teutons. Pressured by Austro-Hungarian authorities to implicate Belgrade directly in his actions while on trial, Princip instead insisted he was ideologically motivated:
“I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria...The plan was to unite all South Slavs. It was understood that Serbia as the free part of the South Slavs had the moral duty to help in the unification, to be to the South Slavs as the Piedmont was to Italy...In my opinion every Serb, Croat and Slovene should be an enemy of Austria.”
In post-World War I Yugoslavia, Princip was elevated to national hero. In early 1930, a plaque was erected on the site of Ferdinand’s assassination, celebrating a foundational event in the new country’s creation. It was the sole trophy claimed by the Nazis following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, presented to Adolf Hitler at a formal ceremony on his 52nd birthday in April 1941, two days after Belgrade’s surrender. A potent totem of German embarrassment expunged, it was now time to erase Yugoslavia permanently.
Carving up the country relied heavily on constructing genocidal, ethnonationalist puppet entities. Painful memories of these attempts to exert hegemony over the Balkans under the banner of “self-determination” remained visceral for many residents of Yugoslavia in December 1991. Then, newly-reunified Germany unilaterally recognised federation members Croatia and Slovenia as ‘independent’ states, while encouraging other republics comprising the collapsing country to follow the pair’s secessionist lead. It was widely predicted Yugoslavia’s demise would produce bloodshed, on a grand scale.
‘Fundamental Subordination’
Dissolving Yugoslavia began waging war on Croat and Slovene secessionists six months earlier. The latter conflict lasted just 10 days, but the former was still simmering. The European Community and UN futilely struggled all along to achieve peaceful settlements to Yugoslavia’s gravely worsening crisis, while formally committed to preserving the country in some form. Berlin’s recognition summarily sabotaged those efforts, removing any incentive for Yugoslav republics to negotiate their futures with Belgrade, while emboldening nationalists of every extraction countrywide.
Fears of Berlin’s resurgent imperialism were not confined to Yugoslavia. As TIME contemporaneously observed, “it used to be a given of European political life Germany…would not take a leading or controversial role in world affairs,” which “suited its neighbors very well indeed.” While occupied West Germany operated throughout the Cold War as “an economic giant and a political dwarf,” unified Berlin’s “unexpected show of diplomatic muscle” in recognising Croatia and Slovenia as ‘independent’ countries was now causing “discomfort” throughout Western capitals.
In Britain’s parliament, then-Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd explicitly evoked the World Wars as disquieting precedents for Germany’s modern-day “self-determination” push in the soon-to-be former Yugoslavia. “There is a tradition of the main states of Western Europe splitting in rivalry on these Balkan questions, and this all ending up on the battlefield. I don’t think that tradition is a good one,” Hurd cautioned. Washington, immensely irritated by Berlin belligerently “getting out ahead of the US,” duly assumed management of the Yugoslav crisis, with disastrous consequences.
Fratricidal conflicts that subsequently engulfed Yugoslavia forged a highly invasive beachhead, via which German economic and political hegemony throughout the region surged, without direct military engagement. While Berlin framed her support for Croat and Slovene ‘independence’ in terms of human rights, the rich financial rewards of shattering the federation were plain. As by far the two wealthiest republics, Germany effectively granted herself access to “the best productive assets” in the soon-to-be former country by kickstarting its practical and physical collapse, per a 2008 academic paper.
The authors write of how Berlin’s “hegemonic relationship” with Yugoslav successor nations was thereafter writ considerably larger than even Germany’s imperial infiltration of “smaller states” elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. This is due to the “specific dependence” of Balkan countries on Berlin’s “structural power”. In economic terms, this means vast national trade deficits with Germany across the region, with “Balkan pre-products and raw materials” flowing in vast, constant profusion to Berlin, while German corporations and products dominate many commercial, financial and industrial sectors locally.
Undergirding this extraordinary economic colonisation was adoption by Yugoslavia’s successor states of ‘independent’ currencies, pegged first to the former Deutschmark, now Euro. This proved pivotal to the “fundamental subordination of the political economies of the region to the ideological and operational norms” of the EU - or German empire, via other means. New national and private banking systems of post-Yugoslav countries were structured specifically according to Berlin’s own, with German banks ascendant, as elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. That’s not all:
“[Deutschmark/Euro pegging] was an essential precondition for the shaping of the macro-economic policies of these (and other transition) states, for their foreign economic relationships, for the further development of their capital markets and the programmes of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation which ensued.”
‘European Continent’
Berlin’s Balkan banking takeover moreover fundamentally “facilitates the penetration of all German enterprises into the commercial life of the Balkan economies.” Berlin has gluttonously feasted on local resources and industry alike ever since, its investment regionally “characterised by takeovers.” For example, throughout Central and Eastern Europe German supermarkets are a near-monopoly, with prices of goods frequently higher than back home, despite meagre local purchasing power. Low wages, vast structural unemployment, and mass brain drain are all interlinked, ruinous inheritances.
The Balkans’ Western “transition” has been far more destructive than even the horrors unleashed upon the former Warsaw Pact in the 1990s. Heavily influenced “by prescriptive programmes emanating from the EU and from the World Bank,” Brussels has since 1999 also been “actively involved” in advising and guiding every country in the region towards bloc membership. After so much imposed impoverishment, it isn’t precisely clear what meaningful benefits Balkan states or populations will reap from their vassalage under German imperialism becoming formalised.
In late 2019, a Balkan liberal who once eagerly supported their country joining the EU wrote a sorrowful ode to “the process of so-called integration” Yugoslav successor states suffered by adopting “measures”, “instruments”, and “reforms” dictated by “Western technocrats”. Freshly ‘independent’ countries “were expected to build a fully developed Western liberal democracy from scratch…upon the ruins of a different yet fully developed system…while dragging behind us the burden of deepening poverty and trauma.” Several were and remain deeply scarred by ‘independence’ wars, encouraged by Berlin and Brussels.
However, “this excruciating process of destroying and building anew a whole system…went neither fast enough nor successfully enough” for the new German empire. What’s more, “competition was not fair” - “opening our markets to the developed capitalism of the West and undertaking neoliberal reforms drained our human and economic resources while we kept trying to stay apace.” Socialism’s vestiges were eradicated, state industries sold off, and social spending slashed. The op-ed mysteriously failed to mention how Germany’s contemporary Balkan economic assault has a “strong security dimension”.
The 2008 paper notes Berlin exerts direct colonial-style control across the region, for example via Bosnia and Herzegovina’s EU-chosen Office of the High Representative, which traditionally serves as Germany’s imperial viceroy in Sarajevo. Moreover, Berlin has always been a key contributor to NATO’s Kosovo peacekeeping force KFOR, sustaining a military occupation under which Pristina controversially declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. This summer, Washington’s KFOR contingent began departing Kosovo after 27 years.
Meanwhile, the Americans are openly signalling Bosnia’s abandonment, raising potentially urgent questions about the unified country’s future. In April, EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen made clear the EU and she personally intend to “[complete] the European continent so it does not fall under Russian, Turkish or Chinese influence,” in explicit reference to the former Yugoslavia. History shows us such declarations by German imperialists frequently result in world-threatening catastrophe. Meanwhile, “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” could evidently today yet again trigger war.
Excellent Kit.
I have been saying this to my French friends: I am more scared of Germany than I ever would be of Russia.
I can’t believe I wasn’t aware of this. One of the most important pieces I’ve read in a long time. Thank you.