The events of recent weeks, relating to the war in Ukraine and its possible end through negotiations between the US and Russia, are of transcendental importance. They concern the entire world order of states, therefore, all peoples and all left-wing movements. Trying to have a correct understanding and an internationalist response to these events is absolutely crucial for the future. The centre of gravity of emancipatory politics returns to the international terrain to which domestic aspects tend, increasingly, to be subordinated. There is no escaping this.

In recent years, the left has debated whether Russia is an imperialist power and, if so, whether it is of a regional or global order. The answer was given by Trump and his team. Russia is recognised by the (still) global hegemonic imperialist power, the US, as a peer. Russia is imperialist, and its history, resources, the extent of its borders and the size and power of its armament do not allow it to resign itself to a regional scale.

The war in Ukraine and its likely end through a colonial partition between Russia and the US consecrate the status of the Eastern giant. Russia is an imperialist power with global appetite. Now, this is expressed in negotiations with the US; in the future, it will tend to be expressed through competition and, eventually, through confrontation. A global power is pushed to fight for hegemony, even when it is economically secondary to its direct competitors. The fact that this is totally irrational does not negate that it is a tendency. The irrationality of capitalism is in its nature and is the breach for its overcoming.

If the revelation of this Russian status can shake entrenched conceptions, more shaken is the place of Europe in the world. Here, indeed, a downgrade is evident, from a bloc that believed itself to be a global player to the status of a regional power. Or even peripheral. The historical significance of this fall is enormous: imperialism was born in Europe. Now, it crushes it. The very idea of a “European bloc” was based on the assumption that, united, the eternal European rivals would maintain a global status. That is over.

Can “Europe” be maintained from now on? Will it not be crossed by competition, clashes and cross-cutting and contradictory alliances of its major actors with external powers - the US, Russia, China? The loss of status will have economic repercussions (it is already having them, isn’t that what the German recession is?); from there social unrest will be born. As always, clashes between states open the floodgates of class struggle.

This is the path for the European left: neither crying nor celebrating the emptying of European imperialism. Even less, aligning with chimeras that, with ’European’ slogans, feed the desperate attempt to keep the EU relevant in the carve-up of the world. We are actually against the carve-up of the world. There are no European armies, common debt for arms purchases or pan-European nuclear deterrence that can save us. These are reactionary, unfeasible utopias, caught in the imperial vortex of war - the death of the left, therefore.

Peace between Trump and Putin is not peace. It is colonial partition, preparation for new wars. This is not even hidden by themselves. Which does not mean that a potential ceasefire would not be rightly felt as a relief by the peoples, especially Russians and Ukrainians. Only militaristic blindness can lead someone on the left to fight against the eventual silencing of weapons.

However, this is not the same as silencing, for even a minute, the denunciation of the colonial partition of Ukraine by Trump and Putin. The peace we want is without annexations, plundering of resources and military occupation. That is not an immediate possibility, the “pragmatists” will say. Indeed it is not: it is a position of principle; and it is principles that open paths to the future. Let weapons be silenced in Ukraine, but not internationalism, anti-imperialism, the right to self-determination of peoples.

Manuel Afonso

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