EU AND UKRAINE REVISITED . . . THREE DAYS AFTER THE INVITATION DECISION--FROM A MACROSOCIOLOGIST'S SCRAPBOOK ON

I am cordially inviting you to consider the inequalities and trajectories included in this graph, a visualization of economic performance data obtained form the IBRD World Development Indicators, a publicly available dataset. The variable is per capita GDP (at constant 2015 USD). Please tell me--perhaps in comments, if you are so inclined--if you think I miss or misread something.

Since this is just a research note, something I am doing quickly "on the side," I don't want to / can't get into more detail here--but there are a few things in these data that I feel I must point out, and do so now, especially in the context of the recent EU decision to begin full membership negotiations with Ukraine. 

1. The EU continues being on a global downslide. In the time period reflected in the graph, that slide began, in earnest, around 2002, that is, two years before the "Big Bang Accession" of 2004 (which brought in 8 erstwhile-state-socialist countries from east-central Europe plus Cyprus and Malta into the European Union). 
2. That is so much so that the EU fell below the 300% line in 2014, and it has been pretty much there since 2019. A global economic power losing its global advantages, ever so slowly.
3. Ergo, put differently, the EU is still a global core power, hovering well above the marker of 200%--the line we might take as the boundary between the core and the semi-periphery of the world-system--but it has, clearly, been on a decline. That needs to be talked about if we are to understand what is going on, simply because that decline is the most significant feature of the European Union's global geopolitics. Arguably, everything else is smokescreen and self-aggrandizement. This is particularly significant as the EU's historical record shows that it has consistently attempted to compensate for its losses in global economic weight by repeated enlargements. In other words, we would not even begin to understand the EU's predisposition toward enlargements, were we to ignore its decreasing global economic weight. I have argued this in great historical detail, with a large amount of empirical data, in my 2009-2010 book, The European Union and Global Social Change.
4. During the time period included in the data I present here, the EU's downward turn has been most pronounced since 2008 (i.e.,, the year after the accession of Bulgaria and Romania). 
5. As for Ukraine, it has never during the period of 1991-2022 made it above the 50% line, i.e., it must be considered a consistently peripheral state in global system since the collapse of the USSR. The destruction of the USSR and of state socialism meant, for Ukraine, among many other things, a traumatic drop in living standards--i.e., a textbook case of peripheralization, on an unprecedented scale.
6. With all that said, Ukraine went into a most visible dive after the 1991 collapse of the USSR, sinking below 20% of the world mean per capita GDP in 1996.  For comparison, *below 20% of the world mean GDP/capita* is the range where we find Benin, Bhutan and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1996 (just to name those states with a name that starts with a "B" 😐 ). That means, Ukraine was a post-Soviet, peripheral, "global south" state already 17 years before the 2013 outbreak of the Maidan protests and 26 years before the Russian war attack in February 2022. The drop was caused directly by two main factors: the collapse of state socialism and the end to the USSR. That is how Ukraine should be seen and treated.  
7. At this point, it must be concluded, with the invitation of last week, the European Union has embarked on a truly unprecedented endeavor: to take upon itself the task of admitting to full membership Ukraine, a state that has. . .  
• a per capita GDP that is less than one-third than the EU's poorest entrant ever up till this point (Bulgaria was at 65.9% at its accession in 2007); or, put differently, a state that has an economic performance of 18.1% of the world average, contrast that to the ~300% of the EU. . . an economic disparity of 16.7 TIMES. . .
• BTW, Ukraine is considerably poorer today than Moldova (around 33%) and Georgia (44.7%), the two other states "welcomed" into the EU this week; and, 
• we are talking about a state, Ukraine, that has been in a de facto state of live, "hot" war with the Russian Federation, i.e., under siege by one of the world's top military powers, for almost 2 years. 
8. Consequently, an accession by Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia--should it ever actually happen--is bound to. . . 
• further, noticeably reduce the EU's global economic performance on a per capita basis--i.e., contributing to the EU's longue-durée trajectory of downward slide, not to mention
• create even greater economic disparities within the European Union than today, 
• increasing the likelihood of even greater degrees of within-EU dependency and its concomitant result of cross-national value chains and centripetal profit transfer than up til now. 

In other words, with this week's EU-"invitation" to Ukraine, the European Union has committed itself to becoming an even more exploitative supra-state geopolitical organization, not only in its external relations--which has been widely noted--but "within" as well, saddled with perfectly reasonable additional political demands from the would-be new entrants for an economic subsidy project on the scale of a new Marshall Plan, only larger and more exhaustive (for, it is extremely unlikely that a mere 1% of the western Schengen states's collective annual GDP, applied for four consecutive years as it happened with the USA and western Europe in the period of 1948 through 1951, would suffice to bring the poorest would-be EU-member states out of their current economic misery), and set itself on a collective geopolitical course to enter, de jure (not "only" de facto, which it has already been) into a war on a military giant its borders. In other words, it has committed itself to a NON-solution to the war by dramatically raising the stakes of that war. It is absurd to try to imagine that an accession procedure for Ukraine will de-escalate the war and bring a reasonable peace agreement in sight. Arguably the urgency of the EU's invitation to Ukraine, pushed through "shotgun-marriage" style in the week after the US government had given indications that it is "running out of money for Ukraine," (see here, here, here, here or here) could be seen as the EU's desperate political move to make it more difficult for the US to pull its funding from the war in Ukraine. That is a war in which only Nato and a few, relatively insignificant hangers-on are siding with Ukraine openly against Russia; meanwhile, the world's largest and most steeply rising economic and military powers have openly aligned themselves with Russia.

Put yet another way, the EU has committed itself to becoming similar to today's Poland or Hungary; a place where physical labor--from uber drivers to elderly caregivers, from garbage haulers to household cleaners and other service workers--is performed by a newly ethnicized and (re-)racialized, extremely low-paid, hyper-exploited east European underclass whose only labor market "niche" has to do with the relatively low melamine levels in their skin, and their reliance on an ideology of "Europeanness" resulting in an undervalued, semi- or quarter-valid quasi-European 'carte blanche' (pun intended), a form of moral identification that can pretty much only be used for attaining the dubious privilege of employment in a richer country below reasonable levels of remuneration. The EU has in effect bought itself into a large reserve army of very cheap labor, creating an arrangement featuring breathtaking disparities in favor of the interests and rights of west Schengen capital and states and fully rights-bearing citizens, by infringing on the rights and interests of their "fellow Europeans" a couple hundred kilometers toward the east. 

In other words, the "invitation" fits into the process of de-emancipation, the removal of collective rights for the former-Soviet / and to a certain extent, the other erstwhile-socialist (semi-)periphery. All that is leading to the emergence of gigantic, binding structures of external dependency. East(-central) European societies still remember what serfdom was like, both in its First and Second varieties. Well, what we are seeing is the construction of a Third Serfdom, in which a moral-geographical boundary, separating the eastern parts from the rest of the continent, emerge as quasi-legally binding structures of oppression, exploitation, expropriation and, overall de-emancipation.

Viewed in the context of all other countries' pending approaches and applications to join the EU (for a list, see the EU's own website here), the current political leadership of the European Union has taken a very clear position with respect to the problem identified by Joschka Fischer, the erstwhile German Foreign Minister in his famous 2000 speech titled "Thoughts on the Finality of European Integration." The EU is apparently willing to expand eastward into former-Soviet geo-economic space and, in doing so, it favors three poor, post-Soviet societies with majority populations racialized as White--albeit "only" the "dirty White" variety--over societies that cannot, and will not, be racialized as "White." In other words, the true "finality" of European integration (to use Fischer's remarkably outspoken phrasing) neatly reproduces a centuries-old "racial" code along the geographical line between the "eastern" flanks of Fischer's "Europe." 

A comparison with the pending (N.B., pending since 1987!!!) application for full EU membership by Türkiye, for instance--a state that has, currently, a per capita GDP of approximately 121% of the world mean, more than six times greater than that of Ukraine, higher than current EU-members Bulgaria and Romania and not too far below Hungary--suggests that the political machine of the European Union vastly privileges a perceived of 'race' unity--specifically, the White-ifiability of the applicant state's population that is to be transformed into an intra-European personal-service-working-class---over any applicant state's economic performance. The EU's brass thinks it "knows" how to deal with east Europeans who will "pass," more or less, as much as they can, as an underclass racialized "dirty White" for generations to come. It is "dirty White" alright, but their cultures will keep telling them that's "White" nevertheless. So that's "ok." The EU brass feels more comfortable with that choice than the alternative, a non-Christian, non-Whitifiable population of west Asians, let alone north Africans. Add to that the politically sanctioned, ongoing murder of large numbers of people from African and Asian societies in the Mediterranean Sea, scores of humans betting their lives on the idea of serving west European capital-state-and-society by moving there, if they don't drown beforehand, answering the five centuries old, colonial cultural and economic calls of "Europe", putatively the land of culture and civilization, not to mention living standards . . . and you have the new Europe-centered global "order" before your eyes.

As far as I'm concerned, we are starting to see the end of the European Union as we know it. Apologists of the EU-project will face the task of engaging in ever more extreme, ever more outrageous, ever more absurd tall tales and blatant lies to make European political and economic practice appear even remotely compatible with some basic principles of liberal democracy. The entire PR project relies on the breathtaking ignorance, and moral disinterest, of its intended ("western") audiences in, life "elsewhere," on the EU's internal fringes, especially toward the east, as well as on the outside. Especially if the new "wretched" of the EU's "earth" are countries the west European bourgeois subject will never visit, on account of them not being on the "radar" of the tourism industry.  

In some ways this was predictable--the EU has always been a geopolitical entity, a colonial-racist customs union with an unbelievably overblown, un-reflected-upon, clearly colonial PR--now all that is becoming even more of a reality, showing the contours of a Grand Geopolitical Design. The gloves are coming off. 

An entity with the name "European Union" will perhaps continue to exist for a while--history does take its time to unfold sometimes--but the EU that is emerging before our eyes will be something considerably more vicious, more oppressive, more exploitative, more uneven and unjustifiable than what it has been. 

Its unavoidable fall will not be nice, and everyone, all over the world, should figure out now how they will take cover.

EU AND UKRAINE REVISITED. . . THREE DAYS AFTER THE INVITATION DECISION--FROM A MACROSOCIOLOGIST'S SCRAPBOOK OFF