Kursk, Donbass, Sudetenland, Alsace-Lorraine - Part 2 of 7

In the early 20th century, Trotsky wrote about precisely that kind of situation in relation to the Balkan Wars, where Slavic populations looked to Tsarist Russia, as they engaged in struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, the Palestinians have repeatedly looked to other, usually reactionary, bourgeois states for their salvation, just as Irish nationalism, repeatedly looked to other bourgeois states, from France, to Nazi Germany, to the United States, and the USSR and Gaddafi's Libya, for support against British colonialism. Trotsky wrote opposing such an alliance with Russia, and opposed the Russian intervention, in the Balkans, itself. But, in the last few decades, the anti-Russian xenophobia, particularly in the Baltic states, has been, itself, quite apparent, as with the genocidal attacks on majority Russian populations in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, by the Georgian government of Mikhail Saakashvilli, who was seeking membership of the EU and NATO, and no doubt saw the stoking of such conflict with Russia, as a fast track to such entry. Saakashvilli has more recently been involved, in a similar manner in Ukraine.

Bismark believed that the threat of war and invasion by France, would prompt the remaining German states to join the confederation, and bring about the creation of a unified German nation state. So, Bismark goaded France into such action. Threat of Russian invasion, provoked by NATO, acts in a similar way to encourage more European states to join NATO, and at the same time, those same states feel encouraged to provoke war with Russia, by attacking their own ethnic Russian populations, in the belief that, just as NATO engaged in war in Serbia, in Iraq, in Afghanistan and so on, so too it would be forced to engage militarily in those states such as Georgia and Ukraine, hastening NATO membership – and for these, more or less bankrupt, and corrupt European economies, even more importantly, into the EU, and access to its funds, markets and so on. The delusional Saakashvilli, as he embarked on such a course, was always to be seen festooned with the EU flag, even though Georgia was not a member and had little chance of becoming one!

And Marx and Engels set out, of course, why Russia might, also, see the advance of NATO up to its borders, in Ukraine, as a threat, and so be even more inclined to provide a buffer, by utilising the pretext of the interests of ethnic Russians, in Eastern Ukraine, as the basis for doing so.

“The knaves and the fools who discovered these guarantees of eternal peace ought to know from Prussian history, and from the drastic treatment laid down by Napoleon in the Peace Treaties of Tilsit that such violent measures of pacifying a viable people produce an effect exactly opposite to that intended. Compare France, even after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, with Prussia after the Tilsit Peace!

If, as long as the old political conditions obtained, French chauvinism had a certain material justification in the fact that since 1815 a few lost battles meant that the capital, Paris, and with it France, were at the mercy of the invader, what new nourishment will chauvinism not imbibe when the boundary line will run along the Vosges in the East and at Metz in the North?

(ibid)

You don't have to accept the naïve, liberal narrative that, in this case, France, or, today, Russia, is acting altruistically to defend the rights of its kin, in the oppressed regions – Alsace-Lorraine and, today, Eastern Ukraine – to see that such states will utilise those conditions to morally justify their military actions in seizing them.

“That the Lorrainers and Alsatians desire the blessings of German government even the... Teuton does not dare to maintain. It is the principle of Pan-Germanism and of ‘secure’ frontiers that is being proclaimed, which, if it were practised by the Eastern side, would lead to fine results for Germany and Europe.

Anyone who has not been entirely overawed by the din and noise of the moment and has no interest in overawing the German people must realise that the War of 1870 will necessarily lead to a war between Germany and Russia just as the War of 1866 led to the War of 1870”.

(ibid)

In fact, the historic alliance between France and Russia did not immediately lead to such a war, because Russia had been defeated in The Crimean War, by the alliance of Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia. Russia required the lifting of its limitations on Black Sea naval construction, imposed in the Treaty of Paris, which Napoleon III was not prepared to do.

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