Economics

Перелом 2008 года

Aug 8, 2018 Adam Tooze

НЬЮ-ЙОРК – На этой неделе, ровно десять лет назад, российские танки после многочасового марш-броска остановились невдалеке от Тбилиси, столицы Грузии. Эта короткая война на Кавказе знаменовала собой окончание длившейся почти два десятилетия западной гегемонии в Европе после Холодной войны. Подбадриваемая администрацией президента США Джорджа Буша-младшего, Грузия инициировала переговоры о вступлении в НАТО, что вынудило президента России Владимира Путина защитить ту красную черту, которую он провёл годом ранее. Россия, как заявил Путин на Мюнхенской конференции по безопасности в феврале 2007 года, будет считать любое дальнейшее расширение на восток западных институтов актом агрессии.

В августе 2008 года европейские дипломаты старались остановить боевые действия. Но уже через несколько недель всё мировое внимание захватил начинавшийся мировой финансовый кризис. В Вашингтоне, Лондоне, Париже, Берлине и Москве наиболее насущной проблемой стало предотвращение банкротства банков, а не военная эскалация. На первый взгляд Грузинская война и мировой финансовый кризис выглядят никак не связанными событиями. Однако не стоит игнорировать глубинные факторы, вызвавшие эту конфронтацию.

Поглощение посткоммунистической Европы Западом не ограничивалось просто бархатными революциями. Вступившие в НАТО и ЕС посткоммунистические страны, которые Дональд Рамсфельд, министр обороны в администрации Буша, называл «Новой Европой», зависели от сотен миллиардов долларов в виде инвестиций. Кредиты предоставляли те же самые европейские банки, которые помогали создавать бум на рынке недвижимости в США и накачивать ещё более крупные пузыри на рынке жилья в Великобритании, Ирландии и Испании. В период 2005-2007 годов наиболее экстремальная инфляция на рынке недвижимости в мире наблюдалась на восточном рубеже НАТО – в странах Прибалтики.

To continue reading, register now.

Subscribe now for unlimited access to everything PS has to offer.

As a registered user, you can enjoy more PS content every month – for free.

Already have an account? Log in

Subscribe to PS Digital

Access every new PS commentary, our entire On Point suite of subscriber-exclusive content – including Longer Reads, Insider Interviews, Big Picture/Big Question, and Say More – and the full PS archive.

Subscribe Now

new comment has been posted. new comments have been posted.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 9 Comments on this article

Freddy Terranean Aug 14, 2018

2008 was also an outstanding peak year for OPEC income: receipts were a full trillion dollars that year. Cause, effect, or neither?
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Louis Woodhill Aug 12, 2018

The global financial crisis resulted from a series of blunders by the U.S. Federal Reserve. Russia had nothing to do with it.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
j. von Hettlingen Aug 9, 2018

Adam Tooze says this month marks the tenth anniversary of the Georgian-Russian war and the eve of the global financial crisis, which was the worst the world ever saw since the 1930s. The two events – at first glance – may seem “unrelated”, if one chooses “to neglect the deeper currents driving the confrontation in the Caucasus.” But the Georgian crisis of August 2008 should explain “how dangerous the new global economic dispensation might become.”
Russia went to war with America’s ally, Georgia over South Ossetia, which – like Abkhazia – is a breakaway province in Georgia backed by Russia. Georgia offered the two provinces autonomy. But South Ossetians overwhelmingly rejected the offer in a 2006 referendum. Its NATO membership talks prompted Putin to draw a red line – he warned against “any further eastward expansion” of the EU or NATO during the Munich Security conference in February 2007.
In April 2008 NATO members at a summit in Bucharest postponed the decision to admit Georgia and Ukraine until December. Russia sent troops to Abkhazia in April and May. In August Georgia deployed troops to South Ossetia, and Russia responded by moving tanks and troops through South Ossetia into Georgia. The US, the UK and NATO urged the warring parties to stop fighting.
The five-day war ended with a cease fire agreement brokered by the then French president, Nicholas Sarkozy. The then Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev signed an order recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Bush administration condemned Russia’s decision, seeing it as a violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity, and called for humanitarian aid be sent to the region.
In 2009 the EU fact-finding mission concluded that historical tensions, provocations and overreaction on both sides contributed to the 2008 short war. Since gaining independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia had again become the arena of conflicting interests. Increasing US economic and political influence under the pro-Western leader. Mikheil Saakashvili had long been a source of concern for Russia, as have Georgia's aspirations to join NATO and the EU.
The author points out “the onset of the global financial crisis, that captured the world’s attention.” In Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, “preventing bank failures, not military escalation, was the most pressing problem.” As an effort to absorb former Soviet satellites into the West, hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into the region by “European banks that helped fuel the US real-estate boom and inflate the even bigger housing bubbles” in the UK, Ireland, and Spain.
“The most extreme real-estate inflation in the world between 2005 and 2007 was on NATO’s Eastern frontier.” Former Soviet satellites benefited from the debt-fueled global boom. The 2008 financial crisis, created in the West, hit hardest in ex-communist countries, which embraced capitalism. It was a rude awakening for these new democracies and they had to grapple with the deepest crisis after years of rapid growth.
Many in Eastern Europe needed bailout funds from the IMF, which were conditioned on swingeing budget cuts. Resentment towards Western banks, that stopped lending when the crisis erupted, ran deep. They helped create one of the world's biggest bubbles through profligate lending in hard currencies. When the bubble burst and property prices collapsed, the new middle class found itself in negative equity.
Putin became immensely popular thanks to the huge surge in oil prices. But Russia was one of the worst affected by the financial crisis and must confront sharply declining export revenues from its energy and mineral sectors. A chorus of “bailout appeals, a credit crunch, banking failures, a bursting real-estate bubble and mortgage defaults,” accelerated capital flight, putting pressure on the Russian currency and the stock market.
Russia “was armed with substantial dollar reserves – the third largest after China and Japan – the $600 billion enabled Putin to ride out the storm without external help.” But others could not. “No country in the region was strategically more important, more fragile politically, or worse hit economically than Ukraine.” The author says in 2008, “two pressure fronts of global capitalism were rushing toward each other across Eurasia. While Western investment drove economic growth in Central and Eastern Europe, the commodity boom sustained Russia’s geopolitical revival.”
The author comes to the conclusion that the West was wrong about market-driven economic growth being “an irrepressible force that gave the edge to the US-led West” in the post-Cold War era. He says that “extending capitalism to the post-Soviet world” did not necessarily “shift the balance of power in the West’s direction.”

The West should learn “two painful and deeply disconcerting lessons from the 2008 conflict. “First, capitalism is prone to disasters. Second, global growth did not necessarily strengthen the unipolar order. Truly comprehensive global growth breeds multipolarity, which, in the absence of an overarching diplomatic and geopolitical settlement, is a recipe for conflict.”
A decade on, if the West is “still struggling to come to terms with these disconcerting realizations” it can be explained by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is true that today, “all eyes are on Asia, the rise of China, and its growing influence across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America.” But stability in many of these countries leaves much to be desired, especially when “Putin’s Russia continues to be a spoiler” and China is ruled with an iron fist.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Karl Barber Aug 9, 2018

First, the accompanying description of the article is misleading and incorrect. The author didn’t mention any “Russian invasion of Georgia”, as there was none. Georgia attacked its separatist regions trying to recupture them. In immediate response to these attacks, Russia enforced its peacekeeping mandate given by the UN.

Second, it is odd to call Yanukovych pro-Russian. During his term Yanukovych worked closely with the IMF and the EU with his official goal of signing the association agreement with the EU. The only time he could be loosely called pro-Russian was for a brief period in the end of 2013 when he decided to delay signing the agreement in exchange for huge handouts from Russia. So, most of his term Yanukovych was a devoted pro-EU president, and had a brief period starting to doubt the wisdom of his choice at the end of his presidency. Please, keep your facts straight.

Third, the so-called transition economies were affected differently. For Poland it was a walk on a beach, for the Baltics the decline was huge, albeit not as huge as for Greece. The decline of gdp and the subsequent recovery made Russia okay in comparison with many euroarea countries. It did relatively well after the oil shock of 2014.

Since 2008, Ukraine lost 25 percent of its GDP, which looks like Greece and worse than the Great Depression.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Petey Bee Aug 9, 2018

My understanding was that the compromise option of neutrality was distinctly unpopular in Ukraine, with the majority wishing their nation to choose a side between east and west.

This was surely made worse by the fact that the financers (IMF, Gazprom etc) were in "debt collector" mode. So among other things, what was at stake was which of the creditors would be paid off more completely? To what degree, I don't know, but it would be interesting to find out more.

It seems neutrality, or at least ambiguity for the sake of avoiding conflict, would've ensured that ALL the creditors would have to take a loss. When this was added to geopolitical imperatives, rejection of the non-conflict option was the lowest common denominator, agreed upon by all the sponsors of the hostilities.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Walter Gingery Aug 9, 2018

"Putin's Russia continues to be a spoiler."

Many observers made the mistake of thinking that, with a the fall of the USSR, Russia would become like the West. What they didn't understand is that Russians don't necessarily WANT to become Westerners.

There are exceptions, of course, and individual sentiments vary, but as a rough approximation, Russians see the West as hypocritical, rapacious, and dangerous.

It can be useful to see the relationship between Putin and the Russians as analogous to that between Trump and his base. Trump's base understands that the mainstream looks down on them ('flyover country') and patronizes their culture, history, and preferences. They understand that Trump is vulgar, corrupt, erratic and untruthful, but they overlook these qualities because they see in him an indispensable defense against the mendacious and greedy coastal elites.

Likewise, Russians, though they are aware of deficiencies in his system, view Putin as their defense against the West. For to become 'westerners' would mean giving up their history and culture. Westerners see in Russian history, and Soviet history in particular, a gigantic Potemkin village: all show and no reality. They see the pervasive corruption, the police state, and the millions murdered in Stalin's engineered famines and in the gulag. Russians look at it differently. They see, above all, their victory in the Great Patriotic War. They don't want to give that up, nor other aspects of Russian culture that most Westerners have no appreciation for.

The take-away is that westerners should not expect Russia to change any time soon.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Walter Gingery Aug 9, 2018

For a society to become rich, competitive markets are not enough; there must also be pluralistic, democratic political institutions that prevent elites from monopolizing power, suppressing competitors, and seizing an excessive share of resources. In this model, inequality is not a harmless by--product. . .[it] creates the risk that economic elites will dominate the political process and use their power to cement their position in society.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.
Jose Antonio Vanderhorst Silverio Aug 8, 2018

Might The End of History of Frances Fukuyama, back in 1989, missed the emergence of the Computing Big Shift, with the Start of History of The Wealth of Globalization? To address "these disconcerting realizations" please consider two Spanish Twitter hashtags which are part of the systems structure of the new and the old histories: the #MCGA (the updated global conceptual model) that makes obsolete the #MSG (the simplistic globalization model). The #MCGA has three narratives: the #BrightGlobalization, the #DarkGlobalization and #DeGlobalization.

Havng said that, the post "Global Politics towards the #BG_NS ( https://medium.com/@gmh_upsa/global-politics-towards-the-bg-ns-fc7af972977f )" has an introductory image that says:

Please contribute to this #BG_NS (#BrightGlobalization North Star) Politics thought experiment by 8 a.m. EST August 9, 2018.

Intended to be readable in mobile devices, this is a #GlobalDebout introduction to the update of the partial story "Might China's 'new game plan' come first than the European Union or the USA?," (to be read on a computer) that adds two comments from ELIZABETH PULA and three of mine to the article "Putting FDI on the G20 Agenda" and one contrarian comment by STEPHAN EDWARDS to the article “Global Politics for a Globalized Economy” by KEMAL DERVIŞ and CAROLINE CONROY.
- Jose Antonio Vanderhorst Silverio Aug 9, 2018
  
  This is what resulted from the thought experiment: "Do what has never been done for #GlobalDebout ( https://medium.com/@gmh_upsa/do-what-has-never-been-done-for-globaldebout-3413a047285b )."
  A new reply to this comment has been posted.
A new reply to this comment has been posted.

https://prosyn.org/sOsazOTru

Перелом 2008 года

Subscribe to PS Digital

New Comment

Contact us

Handpicked to read next

The Advanced Economies’ Lost Decade

Log in/Register

Перелом 2008 года

Subscribe to PS Digital

Handpicked to read next

Edit Newsletter Preferences

Set up Notification