the new geopolitics of blocs

Russian aggression against Ukraine marks the end of the post-Cold War period and of the dream, already in bad shape since Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, of a vast European entity to which Russia would be, somehow associated. Blocks are back in Europe. But the dividing line was moved some 2,000 kilometers east of that denounced by Winston Churchill on March 5, 1946, during a famous speech at the University of Fulton, in Missouri.

“From Stettin, on the Baltic, to Trieste, on the Adriatic, an iron curtain has fallen over Europe”, launched the “Old Lion” who had left power eight months earlier. He warned against the new danger threatening a Europe in ruins which had just triumphed over Nazism. It was the beginning of an East-West confrontation which was at the same time military, political and ideological, structuring all international relations for forty years. It lasted until 1991 and victory by K.-O. from the western camp.

The situation created by the now open conflict between the West and a Russia largely supported by China, even if the two countries are not linked by a formal military alliance, recalls in many respects the East-West confrontation of the second half of the XX^e century. He opposes, as then, authoritarian regimes to democracies.

“Compared to global issues, this war seems anachronistic to those who have made globalization and demilitarization rhyme since 1991, that is to say fundamentally the Europeans” – Thomas Gomart, Director of IFRI

The term “cold war”, which is an oxymoron, appeared for the first time under the pen of George Orwell, in a very prescient article in the British left-wing weekly Grandstand of October 19, 1945, predicting that after the Americans, the Soviets would in turn have the bomb and that a balance of terror would be formed in “a permanent state of cold war”. Fear of mutual annihilation had guaranteed the status quo in Europe, but wars in Asia and Africa claimed millions of lives. This time, the epicenter is in Europe, a first since 1945.

“With the return of high-intensity warfare, the European continent is losing one of its comparative advantages in globalization, that of strategic stability and being a region at peace”notes Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), pointing out that “compared to global issues, this war seems anachronistic to those who have made globalization and demilitarization rhyme since 1991, that is to say fundamentally the Europeans, but it is not so for those who see the world through the reports of military force, that is to say the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans”. This return to a colonial war of conquest in the shadow of nuclear power represents a major game-changer.

What is being played out today on some 2,500 kilometers of seafront eastern Ukraine, these are the future dividing lines between the European Union and Russia, which wants to re-establish, as before 1989, a “thick border”according to the expression of Sabine Dullin, author, in particular, of the homonymous book, The Thick Border. The origins of Soviet policies. 1920-1940 (EHESS, 2014). “Russian leaders, from the tsars to Vladimir Putin, constantly want to push back the borders, especially towards the west, for fear of being in direct contact with what they perceive as an adversary”, explains the historian.

This was the role of the glacis of people’s democracies in Central and Eastern Europe between 1944 and 1989. This is today one of the main reasons why the Kremlin wants to regain control of Ukraine or at least seize of as much as possible of the east and south-east of this country…

“It is better to accept the reality of a divided continent, while Ukraine, which has failed to play the role of bridge or buffer between Russia and the West, will have lost part of its territory and its population »assures Dmitri Trenin, one of the best Russian foreign policy experts, in an article published by Foreign politic summer 2022. In the current context, in his view, it is not possible to imagine a new major European conference like that of Helsinki, in 1975, for negotiations on a global security architecture and an overhaul border issues. Above all, he calls for concentration to avoid the risk of military slippages, which in his view are much greater than in the 1960s, during the Cuban missile crisis, or in the 1980s, after the invasion of Afghanistan by the Red Army.

Global face-to-face

Even in Stalin’s time, Russian power was never so concentrated in the hands of a single man who displayed his desire to challenge the state of affairs created by the collapse of the USSR. “The Soviet regime was guided, even according to its ideological presuppositions, by the certainty of the “final victory of communism”. So we could be patient. President Putin is a man in a hurry. On the other hand, it is not subject to a “collegial leadership” of which the general secretaries of the CPSU [Parti communiste de l’Union soviétique] were obliged to take into account, and which has often shown itself to be cautious and in any case anxious to avoid a general conflict with the West”worries the historian Georges-Henri Soutou, author, in particular, of The Cold War. 1943-1990 (Plural, 2011).

In the opposite camp, the American president, Joe Biden, veteran of the Foreign Affairs Committee, is a man who was trained during the Cold War and he handles its grammar perfectly. Washington is pursuing a policy of “containment” with a game of alliances to contain the enemy advance – like that theorized in 1946 by the young American diplomat George F. Kennan – and which, today, targets Russia but also the China. To the chagrin of Europeans, starting with President Emmanuel Macron, who want to avoid a confrontation with Beijing.

“This return to the blocs had already been in the making for some time, a consequence of the ever more aggressive policy of authoritarian leaders determined to challenge the current status quo like Putin in Moscow or Xi Jinping in Beijing. But if the first Cold War pitted the United States against a strong USSR and a weak China, Joe Biden must face both a very strong China and a very aggressive Russia.notes Michel Duclos, of the Institut Montaigne.

Unlike the first cold war, there is certainly the reality of globalization and the intertwining of economies. But, even if the camps are not, as at the time, as ideologically structured, the face-to-face is global.

“With the war in Ukraine, we are only at the beginning of a confrontation which promises to be lasting between two blocs, calling into question what was conceived as an inevitable globalization: on the one hand, a Western thalassocratic bloc , led by Washington, encompassing Europe and some Asian countries, led by Japan; and on the other, a continental Eurasian bloc, around Moscow and Beijing”believes Georges-Henri Soutou, emphasizing that “The challenge is first of all geopolitical, and even territorial, because it is above all a question of power, control of resources, and rivalries around economic models”.

This Eurasian bloc, starting with Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, is cemented on an anti-Western resentment shared by many countries in Africa and Asia. Like the non-aligned of the 1960s, they refuse to take sides. And they represent a majority of the world’s population.