Miguel Ángel | Unión Proletaria (Spain)
The multiform but joint aggression by the G-7 powers against Russia, Palestine, China, DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Mali, Niger, SADR, etc., is evidence of the concrete reality of imperialism today. It is no longer characterized by a struggle between powers to dominate the world, as was the case with the imperialism of the first half of the 20th century. Now, the Third World War in gestation is characterized by a struggle of all those powers together to preserve or regain their domination and exploitation of the rest of the world. The World Anti-Imperialist Platform has refuted the absurdities of labeling non-oppressor countries and socialist countries as imperialist (the “imperialist pyramid theory” and the “theory of social-imperialism”). In the present article, we will deal with how the substantial change in the development of imperialism occurred whereby the capitalist powers were forced to move from struggle to collusion among themselves. This will help us to understand why the present European governments are sacrificing the immediate particular interests of their countries for the benefit of the United States of America.
For this purpose, it is necessary to recall the enlightening analysis that Zhdanov presented to the First Conference of the Information Bureau (Kominform) in 1947, on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when it was led by Comrade Stalin[1].
The Second World War, which was “in itself a product of the inequality of capitalist development in the different countries―further intensified this inequality. Of all the capitalist powers, only one―the United States―emerged from the war not only not weakened, but even considerably stronger economically and militarily. The war greatly enriched the U.S. capitalists.”
The end of the war “confronted the United States with a series of new problems. The capitalist monopolies were anxious to maintain their profits at the previous high level and consequently pressed hard to avoid a reduction in the volume of wartime deliveries. But this meant that the United States had to retain the foreign markets which had absorbed American products during the war and, in addition, acquire new markets, inasmuch as the war had substantially reduced the purchasing power of most countries. The financial and economic dependence of these countries on the United States had also increased.”
The United States used its military and economic power, “not only to retain and consolidate the positions gained abroad during the war, but also to expand them to the maximum and replace Germany, Japan and Italy in the world market.”
“The sharp decline in the economic power of the other capitalist states” enabled Washington ‘to speculate on their post-war economic difficulties’ and “to bring these countries under American control.”
The United States embarked on a “frankly predatory and expansionist course,” carrying out a “broad program of military, economic and political measures, designed to establish U.S. political and economic domination in all countries destined for U.S. expansion, to reduce these countries to the status of satellites of the United States.”
This frankly expansionist program of the United States was the successor to the program of the “fascist powers, which, as we know, also bid for world supremacy.”
Washington justified its “feverish accumulation of armaments, the construction of new military bases and the creation of bridgeheads for U.S. armed forces in all parts of the world… on the false and self-righteous grounds of ‘defense’ against an imaginary threat of war from the USSR.” Today it also justifies its military expansionism by accusing Russia and China of being a threat.
Since even before the end “of World War II, they set to work to build a hostile front against the USSR and world democracy, and to encourage reactionary anti-popular forces,” as well as to protect and use for their purposes the cadres of the defeated Nazi-fascist powers.
The Cold War anti-communist campaign led “to attacks on the fundamental rights and interests of the American working people, to the fascistization of American political life, and to the spread of the wildest and most misanthropic ‘theories’ and visions,” such as McCarthyism.
“Obsessed with the idea of preparing for a new, a third world war, American expansionist circles” did their utmost to stifle any possible resistance to military adventures abroad, poisoning politically backward and ignorant minds ‘with the virus of chauvinism and militarism’, and stunning the average citizen with the help of all the various propaganda media: cinema, radio, church and press; media to which today we must add the internet and social networks.
“The expansionist foreign policy inspired and directed by the American reactionaries envisages simultaneous action on all fronts:
1. Strategic military measures,
2. Economic expansion, and
3. Ideological struggle (defense of bourgeois pseudo-democracy and condemnation of communism as totalitarian).
Thus, the “expenditure on the American army and navy” in 1947-48 was eleven times greater than in 1937-38; and, since then, it has multiplied[2]. “At the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. Army was the seventeenth largest in the capitalist world”; by 1947, it was already the first.” The United States was not only accumulating stockpiles of atomic bombs, but was already preparing bacteriological weapons.
Economic expansion was “an important complement to the realization of the U.S. strategic plan.”
It took advantage of “the post-war difficulties of the European countries, particularly because of shortages of raw materials, fuel and food in the Allied countries that suffered most from the war, to impose exorbitant terms on any assistance given to them.”
Driven by the economic crisis of 1947-50, the United States was in a hurry to find new monopolistic spheres of capital investment and markets for its goods. U.S. economic “assistance” pursued “the general aim of making Europe the slave of American capital. The more drastic the economic situation of a country, the harsher the terms which the American monopolies are determined to dictate to it.”
Inspired by the profitability of the Dawes Plan (1924-29) after World War II, the U.S. imperialists have become accustomed to “assisting” countries in difficulty in exchange for stripping them of “every vestige of independence. American ‘assistance’ almost automatically implies a change in the political line of the country to which it lends: the parties and individuals who come to power are prepared, following Washington’s instructions, to carry out a domestic and foreign policy program befitting the United States.”
In this sense, one of the lines taken by his ideological campaign “is an attack on the principle of national sovereignty, a call for the renunciation of the sovereign rights of nations, to which the idea of a ‘world government’ is opposed. The purpose of this campaign is to mask the unbridled expansion of U.S. imperialism, which ruthlessly violates the sovereign rights of nations, to portray the United States as a defender of universal laws and those who offer resistance to U.S. penetration as adherents of an obsolete and ‘selfish’ nationalism. The idea of a ‘world government’ has been adopted by bourgeois intellectuals and pacifists, and is being exploited … as a means of pressure to ideologically disarm the nations that defend their independence against the invasions of American imperialism”. Today they express it under the name of a rules-based world.
At the end of World War II, the expansionist ambitions of the United States find their concrete expression in the “Truman Doctrine”―military bases abroad, support for reactionary regimes and interference in uncontrolled countries – and the “Marshall Plan”. “Although differing in their form of presentation, both are an expression of a single policy, both are an embodiment of the U.S. project to enslave Europe.”
The unfavorable reception which the “Truman doctrine” met explains the necessity for the appearance of the “Marshall plan,” which was “a more carefully veiled attempt to carry out the same expansionist policy.”
“The vague and cautiously secretive formulations of the ‘Marshall plan’ amounted to a scheme to create a bloc of states subject to obligations to the United States, and to grant American credits to European countries as a reward for their surrender of economic and then political independence. Moreover, the cornerstone of the ‘Marshall plan’ is the restoration of the West German industrial zones under the control of the American monopolies.”
It is “to bring under American control the main sources of coal and iron needed by Europe and Germany, and to make the countries needing coal and iron dependent on the restored economic power of Germany,” where to this day the bulk of the American presence in Europe is located.
“Whereas the Truman plan was designed to terrorize and intimidate these countries, the ‘Marshall Plan’ was designed to test their economic steadfastness, lure them into a trap, and then shackle them with the shackles of dollar ‘assistance.’”
Since then, through the Marshall Plan and its subsequent European version (European only in appearance), the United States builds “a ‘Western bloc,’ … like an American protectorate,” which “essentially attacks the vital interests of the peoples of Europe, and represents a plan for the captivity and enslavement of Europe by the United States.”
The “Marshall Plan” (and, years later, the European Economic Community and the European Union) attack “the industrialization of the democratic countries of Europe and, therefore, the foundations of their integrity and independence”.
The above expressions in quotation marks are taken from the Report read by Zhdanov. They explain the origin and essence of the present Euro-Atlantic institutions.
In this design, the United States took inspiration not only from its public experience (Dawes Plan), but also from the simultaneous experience of collusion of private monopolies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: on the one hand, the Pan-European Movement created in 1924 in the face of the advance of communism, promoted by German and American bankers; and, on the other hand, the German trusts (the “konzern”) that sought to organize a Euro-American exploitation and domination of the world, playing a key role in Hitler’s rise to power. It was even the Nazis, fervent supporters of Europeanism, who coined the name European Economic Community. The U.S. merely appropriated the Nazi project, showered it with its dollar “democracy” and put it at its service.
One of the “founding fathers” of the EU (at that time, EEC) was Walter Hallstein, President of the European Commission between 1958 and 1967, after having been re-educated in the United States as a German prisoner of war. He had declared in 1935 to be a member of the Association of National Socialist German Legal Professionals (Bund Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Jurister―BNSDJ) and the National Socialist Teachers League (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund―NSLB)[3]. In 1936 he was elected dean of the Rostock faculty. He was in charge of representing the Nazi government in Rome between June 21 and 25, 1938, during the negotiations with Fascist Italy for the establishment of the legal framework of the New Europe.
The origin of the European Union is to be found in the “Schuman declaration” that would give birth to the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). This declaration was given to Robert Schuman―a member of the collaborationist Vichy government―by Monnet after it had been drafted by the services of the US State Department.[4] Monnet was repeatedly accused by General de Gaulle, the French Communist Party and others of being a covert agent working for US interests.
It is significant that the Charlemagne Prize―awarded annually to distinguished pro-Europeans―was given in 1959, two years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome establishing the EEC, to the American general George Marshall, promoter of the homonymous Plan.
In 1965, the US services advised the Vice-President of the European Economic Community, Robert Marjolin, to “surreptitiously pursue the objective of a monetary union”, according to declassified US State Department documents.
At present, the subordination of the EU’s “common security and defense policy” to the interests of the US-led military NATO is endorsed by Article 42. 2 of the Treaty on European Union: “The common security and defense policy shall include the progressive framing of a common Union defense policy (…) The policy of the Union in accordance with this section shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defense policy of certain Member States, shall respect the obligations arising out of the North Atlantic Treaty for certain Member States [22 out of 27 countries!] which consider that their common defense is conducted within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and shall be compatible with the common security and defense policy established within that framework.”
Moreover, the motto of the “European Army” or Eurocorps is: “European Corps: a force for the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance”.
With the sole exception of D. Trump, all U.S. presidents have enthusiastically endorsed the Western European union. The European institutions are full of agents of American influence, such as members of the CIA or representatives of transatlantic financial institutions: Monnet, Durao Barroso, Sutherland, Draghi, Monti, etc.
Even the lobby of Europe’s big bosses, the European Round Table, takes its name from the Yankee equivalent , the Business Round Table.
The US ensures its domination through the agents of influence it has infiltrated in the States, companies, the media, universities, NGOs, etc.; as if this were not enough, even greater is their presence in the bureaucracy of the Community institutions to which the national States must submit; moreover, the mechanism of decision-making by unanimity facilitates the stability of the Yankee domination over the so-called European Union.
Of course there are contradictions between the European and American monopolies, but the still dominant tendency is towards the collusion of interests of one and the other, in the face of the independent States (Russia, China, etc.) and with the aim of jointly organizing the exploitation and domination of the rest of the world. The great central-western bourgeoisies of Europe subject their nations to dependence on the USA.
As World War III unfolds, tensions will also sharpen within the imperialist camp, between the U.S. and its allies. The working class and communist forces will have to reckon with this perspective in drawing up their strategy and tactics, but starting from the awareness that a solid dependence and unity of all the imperialists against their enemies has been built up over more than half a century. It can only be broken by developing the mass struggle against the international and national financial oligarchy, in close solidarity with the current vanguard of the world revolutionary movement: the socialist countries, the independent countries and the oppressed peoples who are rising up against imperialism.
Notes
[1] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6ashtYNJL6xWW9FYm00LU9wVUk/edit?pli=1&resourcekey=0-if4cnWC96ulQHUIE_C9WpQ
[2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasto_militar_de_los_Estados_Unidos#/media/Archivo:Defense_spending.png . https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
[3] Thomas Freiberger, Der friedliche Revolutionär: Walter Hallsteins Epochenbewusstsein, in Entscheidung für Europa: Erfahrung, Zeitgeist und politische Herausforderungen am Beginn der europäischen Integration, de Gruyter, 2010.
[4] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs, Daily Telegraph, September 19, 2000.
[5] Ibid.
