Great Power Chauvinism

"The flagrant great-power chauvinism that the Soviet Union exhibited in Eastern Europe, forcibly transforming the social systems of the countries under its sway after its own model, quite irrespective of the interest or sentiment of the working class in those countries, both says something about the nature of Soviet society and the state at this time, and already provided a constituent element of the pattern of social-imperialism ('socialism in words, imperialism in deeds': Lenin) that was to take full shape in the 1960s. And because the Soviet Union could only transform Eastern Europe to its desired social conditions by forcible means, it has ever since played a completely different role vis-a-vis the European people than that of the USA.

"In Western Europe, the economic revival of the 1950s and 1960s, the formation and extention of the EEC and the relative decline in the economic supremacy of the USA, has weakened American control of the West European countries, which was exerted from the beginning by economic means. The American burden that Western Europe has to bear can be in no way compared with the burden inflicted by US imperialism on the South American countries, for example, whose economics it fetters, or develops in grotesquely one-sided ways, while enforcing its rule through military juntas that it trains and bribes.