"Will the European Union collapse, just like the USSR? An incompetent political class, a large number of countries with different political cultures, the disproportionate expansion of political power – all this recalls the pre-collapse period of the USSR," notes Čas on December 14, referring to the German magazine Wirtschaftswoche.

“How strangely the deck has been shuffled!” – that is what Woland seems to exclaim in the unforgettable novel. We are forced to exclaim the same: there are not many things in the world on which the German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche and the Latvian Russian-language newspaper Čas would find common ground. Yet it has happened: the EU is supposedly going to collapse just like the USSR. German right-wing industrialists and Latvian post-communist leftists have merged in ecstasy, each for their own reasons. The German journalist uses an anniversary: December 5th marked 20 years since the Belovezha Accords on the dissolution of the USSR. This allows an appeal to German national sentiments. In short, the French and the Italians are living at our expense, and that will lead to no good end. Čas , on the other hand, is stoking good old revanchism. Like, dear Latvians, you ran away from the USSR to that Europe, but look what you have now...

But let us leave the journalists alone – demagoguery is a profession in this case. Instead, it might be worth comparing the two unions according to some formal criteria, so we can get a sense of the context for the collapse predictions. Here, empire theories, which have recently been riding high in political research – starting with Hardt and Negri’s well-known work “Empire” – provide a good framework. In popular perception, the word “empire” has a nasty aftertaste, associated with oppression and exploitation. In our region, it surely arrived with Lenin’s work “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” which we were forced to read during the Soviet era. However, this is not entirely justified. Historically, empires are older and more widespread than today’s “sovereign nation-states” and will likely outlive them as well. It is empires that have given humanity its greatest achievements. Furthermore, not long ago, the word “empire” itself did not mean anything bad, but rather greatness and wealth. After all, the famous Manhattan skyscraper Empire State Building was named in honour of the state of New York in 1931.

However, one should ask in what sense the EU and the USSR can be compared as empires. Firstly, empires imply governance over large territories. Everything would be fine with that. The same applies to ruling over different ethnic and religious groups. There is no shortage of these in the case of either the EU or the USSR, although the USSR was certainly a much more diverse empire in this respect. It included both Western Christian lands, like the Baltic republics and Western Ukraine, and almost purely Islamic lands in Central Asia. The USSR did not consider itself an empire, however, because the classic definition of an empire would include legal status differences between the citizens of the metropole and the colonies. For example, in the British Empire, the inhabitants of the colonies were not considered British subjects, but in the USSR, all citizens were formally equal. Yet the same could be said of the EU, where the unified status of EU citizen has recently appeared.

Nowadays, however, empire theories pay little attention to such subtleties, focusing more on economic dependence. What is the difference whether a territory is a formally independent state or an official province if its economy works for the benefit of the metropole? The US does not annex new territories, but its empire de facto extends far beyond North America – at least according to Hardt and Negri.

Wirtschaftswoche builds its argument on the assumption that the Russian SFSR’s resource-based economy subsidised the other republics, much like Germany today subsidises the rest of the eurozone. This sounds quite foolish coming from a serious business magazine. In general, the study of the Soviet economy remains in a rather sorry state today, but some things are clear: first, all Soviet republics subsidised Central Asia; second, the three Baltic republics paid more into the common budget than they received from it. To claim that the entire USSR lived at Russia’s expense is simply false. Moreover, the economic problems and catastrophic shortages of consumer goods in the USSR were caused not by “imperial overstretch,” but by the arms race – a matter that is completely foreign to the Brussels empire. Economically, the EU is built on market principles which, at least in an ideal scenario, should generate mutual benefits; the USSR operated on an administrative planned economy – theoretically very progressive, but in practice a catastrophically inefficient system.

In short, the argument about the similar causes of collapse for the EU and the USSR in the economy is stretched thin because of the Belovezha anniversary and generally does not hold water.

However, there are other issues where parallels between the two empires could be more fruitful. An interesting question is by what means an imperial centre ensures the submission of its provinces. It is clear that the EU and the USSR are very different empires: while the former is economically motivated and technocratically managed, the latter was ideologically motivated and managed largely by violent means. Nevertheless, all empires must address the question of how to handle cultural diversity so that it does not create separatist tendencies. Here, an arsenal of various means is available, from forced assimilation to centre support for local cultures. If the EU wishes to become an imperial entity, it too should address these problems rather than avoid them. The Soviet example can be instructive here. Theoretically, the USSR was not an assimilationist empire. Although Russian chauvinism sometimes dominated in practice, its political design was a union of peoples. The USSR was governed by an ethno-federal system in which the Georgian SSR was a republic for the Georgians, the Latvian SSR – for the Latvians, the Russian Federation included many ethnic autonomies, even a Jewish Autonomous Oblast in Birobidzhan, Siberia, and so on. The USSR invested huge resources to allow the various peoples to cultivate their culture, thereby ensuring that the cultural goals of the peoples did not come into conflict with the goals of the empire. According to this approach, small nations in an empire do not need to be made to feel culturally “deprived”; otherwise, they will not be loyal to the centre. This is most vividly expressed in Central Asia, where the cultural achievements of the nations are tied directly to the Soviet era. But let us also mention Latvia – cautiously, of course. Look at your bookshelf at the critical edition of Rainis’ collected works in 30 volumes and ask yourself whether something like that could be published in independent Latvia. At the same time, look at the number and quality of translations, the many professional Latvian theatres and press publications, the films of the Riga Film Studio – and ask yourself the same question. Of course, this cultivation of Latvian culture was ideologically “castrated” and served political goals, but the USSR invested huge resources in it, which independent Latvia does not and never will have the power to do. Moreover, large-scale support for local cultures is no curiosity, but a generally accepted imperial practice that was also widespread in the British Empire and elsewhere. It is hard to say whether anyone in the EU is aware of this; the EU deliberately avoids using the cultural sphere to secure its legitimacy, instead talking about the rather abstract European identity and ignoring the fact that in an open EU space, the natural competitiveness of different cultures varies greatly, which therefore creates inferiority complexes.

Another interesting comparison relates to the imperial centre’s attitude towards local elites. In extreme cases, they are either driven out and physically destroyed, or they are included in the ranks of the imperial elite. The USSR used the former instrument more: it drove out the Kalniņš family and Alfrēds Bērziņš, murdered Marģers Skujenieks and Arveds Bergs, while it included the Latvian communist elite it had essentially created itself, led by Vilis Lācis and Arvīds Pelše. The EU, of course, works more with mechanisms of elite inclusion. We have “our own” commissioner Andris Piebalgs, “our own” EU Court judge Egils Levits, a total of nine European Parliament deputies, and a series of smaller spirits representing Latvia in the imperial centre. A number of our administrative, scientific, trade union, business, and other elite representatives travel to Brussels daily to settle various matters, symbolically repeating Kaupo’s journey to Rome and gradually beginning to identify with the central power. It can only be added that Brussels, if it wants to be a proper imperial centre, should invest a bit more in external pomp – it still does not quite measure up to other European metropolises like London, Vienna, or Saint Petersburg. As loyal provincials, we would like something more magnificent, something with which it would be a pleasure to identify aesthetically as well.
Article first published in the January 2021 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine.