The Peninsula Foundation

Category: Geopolitics, War, & Hegemony

  • What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

    What Ukraine needs to learn from Afghanistan about proxy wars

    The greatest enemy of economic development is war. If the world slips further into global conflict, our economic hopes and our very survival could go up in flames. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a mere 90 seconds to midnight. The world’s biggest economic loser in 2022 was Ukraine, where the economy collapsed by 35% according to the International Monetary Fund. The war in Ukraine could end soon, and economic recovery could begin, but this depends on Ukraine understanding its predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war that broke out in 2014.

    The US has been heavily arming and funding Ukraine since 2014 with the goal of expanding Nato and weakening Russia. America’s proxy wars typically rage for years and even decades, leaving battleground countries like Ukraine in rubble.

    Unless the proxy war ends soon, Ukraine faces a dire future. Ukraine needs to learn from the horrible experience of Afghanistan to avoid becoming a long-term disaster. It could also look to the US proxy wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

    Starting in 1979, the US armed the mujahideen (Islamist fighters) to harass the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan. As president Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski later explained, the US objective was to provoke the Soviet Union to intervene, in order to trap the Soviet Union in a costly war. The fact that Afghanistan would be collateral damage was of no concern to US leaders.

    The Soviet military entered Afghanistan in 1979 as the US hoped, and fought through the 1980s. Meanwhile, the US-backed fighters established al-Qaeda in the 1980s, and the Taliban in the early 1990s. The US “trick” on the Soviet Union had boomeranged.

    In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The US war continued for another 20 years until the US finally left in 2021. Sporadic US military operations in Afghanistan continue.

    Afghanistan lies in ruins. While the US wasted more than $ 2 trillion of US military outlays, Afghanistan is impoverished, with a 2021 GDP below $400 per person! As a parting “gift” to Afghanistan in 2021, the US government seized Afghanistan’s tiny foreign exchange holdings, paralysing the banking system.

    The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand Nato to include Ukraine (and Georgia). America’s objective was for Nato countries to encircle Russia in the Black Sea region. To achieve this goal, the US has been massively arming and funding Ukraine since 2014.

    The American protagonists then and now are the same. The US government’s point person on Ukraine in 2014 was Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who today is Undersecretary of State. Back in 2014, Nuland worked closely with Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s national security adviser, who played the same role for vice president Biden in 2014.

    The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

    The second is that Nato enlargement to Ukraine crosses a Russian redline. Russia will fight to the end, and escalate as necessary, to prevent the US from incorporating Ukraine into Nato.

    The US repeatedly asserts that Nato is a defensive alliance. Yet Nato bombed Russia’s ally Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in order to break Kosovo away from Serbia, after which the US established a giant military base in Kosovo. Nato forces similarly toppled Russian ally Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, setting off a decade of chaos in Libya. Russia certainly will never accept Nato in Ukraine.

    At the end of 2021, Russian president Vladimir Putin put forward three demands to the US: Ukraine should remain neutral and out of Nato; Crimea should remain part of Russia; and the Donbas should become autonomous in accord with the Minsk II Agreement.

    The Biden-Sullivan-Nuland team rejected negotiations over Nato enlargement, eight years after the same group backed Yanukovych’s overthrow. With Putin’s negotiating demands flatly rejected by the US, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

    In March 2022, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky seemed to understand Ukraine’s dire predicament as a victim of a US-Russia proxy war. He declared publicly that Ukraine would become a neutral country, and asked for security guarantees. He also publicly recognised that Crimea and Donbas would need some kind of special treatment.

    Israel’s prime minister at that time, Naftali Bennett, became involved as a mediator, along with Turkey. Russia and Ukraine came close to reaching an agreement. Yet, as Bennett has recently explained, the US “blocked” the peace process.

    Since then, the war has escalated. According to US investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, US agents blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in September, a claim denied by the White House. More recently, the US and its allies have committed to sending tanks, longer-range missiles, and possibly fighter jets to Ukraine.

    The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-Nato country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.

    Most importantly, the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations. Such an agreement could have been reached in December 2021 or in March 2022.

    Above all, the government and people of Ukraine would tell Russia and the US that Ukraine refuses any longer to be the battleground of a proxy war. In the face of deep internal divisions, Ukrainians on both sides of the ethnic divide would strive for peace, rather than believing that an outside power will spare them the need to compromise.
    Feature Image Credit: politico.eu

    This article was published earlier in dailymaverick.co.za and is republished with the permission of the author.

  • ‘World War 3 has already started’ between US and Russia/China, argues French scholar

    ‘World War 3 has already started’ between US and Russia/China, argues French scholar

    Ben Norton reviews the interview given by the prominent French Scholar, Emmanuel Todd. The interview was in French and published in the major French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’. Emmanuel Todd argues the Ukraine proxy war is the start of WWIII, and is “existential” for both Russia and the US “imperial system”, which has restricted the sovereignty of Europe, making Brussels into Washington’s “protectorate”. 

    America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it –  Emmanuel Todd

    A prominent French intellectual has written a book arguing that the United States is already waging World War Three against Russia and China.

    He also warned that Europe has become a kind of imperial “protectorate”, which has little sovereignty and is essentially controlled by the US.

    Emmanuel Todd is a widely respected anthropologist and historian in France.

    In 2022, Todd published a book titled “The Third World War Has Started” (“La Troisième Guerre mondiale a commencé” in French). At the moment, it is only available in Japan.

    But Todd outlined the main arguments he made in the book in a French-language interview with the major newspaper Le Figaro, conducted by the journalist Alexandre Devecchio.

    According to Todd, the proxy war in Ukraine is “existential” not only for Russia, but also for the United States.

    The US “imperial system” is weakening in much of the world, he observed, but this is leading Washington to “strengthen its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

    This means that “Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO”, Todd said, and NATO is really a “Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev” bloc.

    US and EU sanctions have failed to crush Russia, as Western capitals had hoped, he noted. This means that “the resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice”, and “the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse”.

    The French public intellectual pointed to UN votes concerning Russia, and cautioned that the West is out of touch with the rest of the world.

    “Western newspapers are tragically funny. They don’t stop saying, ‘Russia is isolated, Russia is isolated’. But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small”, Todd observed.

    He also criticized the GDP metrics used by Western neoclassical economists for downplaying the productive capacity of the Russian economy, while simultaneously exaggerating that of financialized neoliberal economies like in the United States.

    In the Le Figaro interview, Todd argued (all emphasis added):

    This is the reality, World War III has begun. It is true that it started ‘small’ and with two surprises. We went into this war with the idea that the Russian army was very powerful and that its economy was very weak.

    It was thought that Ukraine was going to be crushed militarily and that Russia would be crushed economically by the West. But the reverse happened. Ukraine was not crushed militarily even if it lost 16% of its territory on that date; Russia was not crushed economically. As I speak to you, the ruble has gained 8% against the dollar and 18% against the euro since the day before the start of the war.

    So there was a sort of misunderstanding. But it is obvious that the conflict, passing from a limited territorial war to a global economic confrontation, between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia backed by China on the other hand, has become a war world. Even if military violence is low compared to that of previous world wars.

    The newspaper asked Todd if he was exaggerating. He replied, “We still provide weapons. We kill Russians, even if we don’t expose ourselves. But it remains true that we Europeans are above all economically engaged. We also feel our true entry into war through the inflation and shortages”.

    Todd understated his case. He didn’t mention the fact that, after the US sponsored the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government in 2014, setting off a civil war, the CIA and Pentagon immediately began training Ukrainian forces to fight Russia.

    The New York Times has acknowledged that the CIA and special operations forces from numerous European countries are on the ground in Ukraine. And the CIA and a European NATO ally are even carrying out sabotage attacks inside Russian territory.

    Nevertheless, in the interview, Todd continued:

    Putin made a big mistake early on, which is of immense sociohistorical interest. Those who worked on Ukraine on the eve of the war considered the country not as a fledgling democracy, but as a society in decay and a ‘failed state’ in the making.

    I think the Kremlin’s calculation was that this decaying society would crumble at the first shock, or even say ‘welcome Mom’ to holy Russia. But what we have discovered, on the contrary, is that a society in decomposition, if it is fed by external financial and military resources, can find in war a new type of balance, and even a horizon, a hope. The Russians could not have foreseen it. No one could.

    Todd said he shares the view of Ukraine of US political scientist John Mearsheimer, a realist who has criticized Washington’s hawkish foreign policy.

    Mearsheimer “told us that Ukraine, whose army had been taken over by NATO soldiers (American, British and Polish) since at least 2014, was therefore a de facto member of NATO, and that the Russians had announced that they would never tolerate a NATO member Ukraine,” Todd said.

    For Russia, this is there a war that is “from their point of view defensive and preventative,” he conceded.

    “Mearsheimer added that we would have no reason to rejoice in the eventual difficulties of the Russians because, since this is an existential question for them, the harder it was, the harder they would hit. The analysis seems to hold true.”

    Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

    However, Todd argued that Mearsheimer “does not go far enough” in his analysis. The US political scientist has overlooked how Washington has restricted the sovereignty of Berlin and Paris, Todd said:

    Germany and France had become minor partners in NATO and were not aware of what was going on in Ukraine on the military level. French and German naivety has been criticized because our governments did not believe in the possibility of a Russian invasion. True, but because they did not know that Americans, British and Poles could make Ukraine be able to wage a larger war. The fundamental axis of NATO now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.

    Mearsheimer, like a good American, overestimates his country. He considers that, if for the Russians the war in Ukraine is existential, for the Americans it is nothing but a power “game” among others. After Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, one debacle more or less… What does it matter?

    The basic axiom of American geopolitics is: ‘We can do whatever we want because we are sheltered, far away, between two oceans, nothing will ever happen to us’. Nothing would be existential for America. Insufficiency of analysis which today leads Biden to a series of reckless actions.

    America is fragile. The resistance of the Russian economy is pushing the American imperial system toward the precipice. No one had expected that the Russian economy would hold up against the “economic power” of NATO. I believe that the Russians themselves did not anticipate it.

    The French public intellectual went on in the interview to argue that, by resisting the full force of Western sanctions, Russia and China pose a threat to “the American monetary and financial controls of the world”.

    This, in turn, challenges the US status as the issuer of the global reserve currency, which gives it the ability to maintain a “huge trade deficit”:

    If the Russian economy resisted the sanctions indefinitely and managed to exhaust the European economy, while it itself remained backed by China, the American monetary and financial controls of the world would collapse, and with them the possibility for United States to fund its huge trade deficit for nothing.

    This war has therefore become existential for the United States. No more than Russia, they cannot withdraw from the conflict, they cannot let go. This is why we are now in an endless war, in a confrontation whose outcome must be the collapse of one or the other.

    Todd warned that, while the United States is weakening in much of the world, its “imperial system” is “strengthening its hold on its initial protectorates”: Europe and Japan.

    He explained:

    Everywhere we see the weakening of the United States, but not in Europe and Japan because one of the effects of the retraction of the imperial system is that the United States strengthens its hold on its initial protectorates.

    If we read [Zbigniew] Brzezinski (The Grand Chessboard), we see that the American empire was formed at the end of the Second World War by the conquest of Germany and Japan, which are still protectorates today. As the American system shrinks, it weighs more and more heavily on the local elites of the protectorates (and I include all of Europe here).

    The first to lose all national autonomy will be (or already are) the English and the Australians. The Internet has produced human interaction with the United States in the Anglosphere of such intensity that its academic, media and artistic elites are, so to speak, annexed. On the European continent we are somewhat protected by our national languages, but the fall in our autonomy is considerable, and rapid.

    As an example of a moment in recent history when Europe was more independent, Todd pointed out, “Let us remember the war in Iraq, when Chirac, Schröder and Putin held joint press conferences against the war” – referring to the former leaders of France (Jacques Chirac) and Germany (Gerhard Schröder).

    The interviewer at Le Figaro newspaper, Alexandre Devecchio, countered Todd asking, “Many observers point out that Russia has the GDP of Spain. Aren’t you overestimating its economic power and resilience?”

    Todd criticized the overreliance on GDP as a metric, calling it a “fictional measure of production” that obscures the real productive forces in an economy:

    War becomes a test of political economy, it is the great revealer. The GDP of Russia and Belarus represents 3.3% of Western GDP (the US, Anglosphere, Europe, Japan, South Korea), practically nothing. One can ask oneself how this insignificant GDP can cope and continue to produce missiles.

    The reason is that GDP is a fictional measure of production. If we take away from the American GDP half of its overbilled health spending, then the “wealth produced” by the activity of its lawyers, by the most filled prisons in the world, then by an entire economy of ill-defined services, including the “production” of its 15 to 20 thousand economists with an average salary of 120,000 dollars, we realize that an important part of this GDP is water vapor.

    War brings us back to the real economy, it allows us to understand what the real wealth of nations is, the capacity for production, and therefore the capacity for war.

    Todd noted that Russia has shown “a real capacity to adapt”. He attributed this to the “very large role for the state” in the Russian economy, in contrast to the US neoliberal economic model:

    If we come back to material variables, we see the Russian economy. In 2014, we put in place the first important sanctions against Russia, but then it increased its wheat production, which went from 40 to 90 million tons in 2020. Meanwhile, thanks to neoliberalism, American wheat production, between 1980 and 2020, went from 80 to 40 million tons.

    …

    Russia has therefore a real capacity to adapt. When we want to make fun of centralized economies, we emphasize their rigidity, and when we glorify capitalism, we praise its flexibility.

    …

    The Russian economy, for its part, has accepted the rules of operation of the market (it is even an obsession of Putin to preserve them), but with a very large role for the state, but it also derives its flexibility from training engineers, who allow the industrial and military adaptations.

    This point is similar to what economist Michael Hudson has argued – that although Moscow’s economy is no longer socialist, like that of the Soviet Union was, the Russian Federation’s state-led industrial capitalism clashes with the financialized model of neoliberal capitalism that the United States has tried to impose on the world.

     

    The Peninsula Foundation is happy to republish this article with the permission of the author, Ben Norton.

    The article was published earlier in geopoliticaleconomy.com

    Feature Image Credit: newstatesman.com

    Portrait Sketch of Emmanuel Todd: Fabien Clairefond

     

  • Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

    Ukraine War Tolls Death Knell for NATO

    President Vladimir Putin addressed an expanded meeting of the Russian Defence Ministry Board, Moscow on Dec. 21, 2022

    The defining moment in US President Joe Biden’s press conference at the White House last Wednesday, during President Zelensky’s visit, was his virtual admission that he is constrained in the proxy war in Ukraine, as European allies don’t want a war with Russia. 

    To quote Biden, “Now, you say, ‘Why don’t we just give Ukraine everything there is to give?’  Well, for two reasons. One, there’s an entire Alliance that is critical to stay with Ukraine.  And the idea that we would give Ukraine material that is fundamentally different than is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world… I’ve spent several hundred hours face-to-face with our European allies and the heads of state of those countries, making the case as to why it was overwhelmingly in their interest that they continue to support Ukraine… They understand it fully, but they’re not looking to go to war with Russia.  They’re not looking for a third World War.”

    Biden realised at that point that “I probably already said too much” and abruptly ended the press conference. He probably forgot that he was dwelling on the fragility of Western unity.

    The whole point is that the western commentariat largely forgets that Russia’s core agenda is not about territorial conquest — much as Ukraine is vital to Russian interests —but about NATO expansion. And that has not changed.

    Every now and then President Putin revisits the fundamental theme that the US consistently aimed to weaken and dismember Russia. As recently as last Wednesday, Putin invoked the Chechen war in the 1990s — “the use of international terrorists in the Caucasus, to finish off Russia and to split the Russian Federation… They [US]claimed to condemn al-Qaeda and other criminals, yet they considered using them on the territory of Russia as acceptable and provided all kinds of assistance to them, including material, information, political and any other support, notably military support, to encourage them to continue fighting against Russia.”

    Putin has a phenomenal memory and would have been alluding to Biden’s careful choice of William Burns as his CIA chief. Burns was Moscow Embassy’s point person for Chechnya in the 1990s! Putin has now ordered a nationwide campaign to root out the vast tentacles that the US intelligence planted on Russian soil for internal subversion. Carnegie, once headed by Burns, has since shut down its Moscow office, and the Russian staff fled to the West!

    The leitmotif of the expanded meeting of the Board of the Defence Ministry in Moscow on Wednesday, which Putin addressed, was the profound reality that Russia’s confrontation with the US is not going to end with the Ukraine war. Putin exhorted the Russian top brass to “carefully analyse” the lessons of the Ukraine and Syrian conflicts.

    Importantly, Putin said, “We will continue maintaining and improving the combat readiness of the nuclear triad. It is the main guarantee that our sovereignty and territorial integrity, strategic parity and the general balance of forces in the world are preserved. This year, the level of modern armaments in the strategic nuclear forces has already exceeded 91 per cent. We continue rearming the regiments of our strategic missile forces with modern missile systems with Avangard hypersonic warheads.”

    Equally, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu proposed at Wednesday’s meeting a military build-up “to bolster Russia’s security,” including:

    • Creation of a corresponding group of forces in Russia’s northwest to counter Finland and Sweden’s induction as NATO members;
    • Creation of two new motorised infantry divisions in the Kherson and Zaporozhya regions, as well as an army corps in Karelia, facing the Finnish border;
    • Upgrade of 7 motorised infantry brigades into motorised infantry divisions in the Western, Central and Eastern military districts, and in the Northern Fleet;
    • Addition of two more air assault divisions in the Airborne Forces;
    • Provision of a composite aviation division and an army aviation brigade with 80-100 combat helicopters within each combined arms (tank) army;
    • Creation of 3 additional air division commands, eight bomber aviation regiments, one fighter aviation regiment, and six army aviation brigades;
    • Creation of 5 district artillery divisions, as well as super-heavy artillery brigades for building artillery reserves along the so-called strategic axis;
    • Creation of 5 naval infantry brigades for the Navy’s coastal troops based on the existing naval infantry brigades;
    • Increase in the size of the Armed Forces to 1.5 million service personnel, with 695,000 people serving under contract.

    Putin summed up: “We will not repeat the mistakes of the past… We are not going to militarise our country or militarise the economy… and we will not do things we do not really need, to the detriment of our people and the economy, the social sphere. We will improve the Russian Armed Forces and the entire military component. We will do it calmly, routinely and consistently, without haste.”

    If the neocons in the driving seat in the Beltway wanted an arms race, they have it now. The paradox, however, is that this is going to be different from the bipolar Cold War era arms race.

    If the US intention was to weaken Russia before confronting China, things aren’t working that way. Instead, the US is getting locked into a confrontation with Russia and the ties between the two big powers are at a breaking point. Russia expects the US to roll back NATO’s expansion, as promised to the Soviet leadership in 1989.

    The neocons had expected a “win-win” in Ukraine: Russian defeat and a disgraceful end to Putin’s presidency; a weakened Russia, as in the 1990s, groping for a new start; consolidation of western unity under a triumphant America; a massive boost in the upcoming struggle with China for supremacy in the world order; and a New American Century under the “rules-based world order”.

    But instead, this is turning out to be a classic Zugzwang in the endgame — to borrow from German chess literature — where the US is under obligation to make a move on Ukraine but whichever move it makes will only worsen its geopolitical position.

    Biden has understood that Russia cannot be defeated in Ukraine; nor are Russian people in any mood for an insurrection. Putin’s popularity is soaring high, as Russian objectives in Ukraine are being steadily realised. Thus, Biden is getting a vague sense, perhaps, that Russia isn’t exactly seeing things in Ukraine as a binary of victory and defeat, but is gearing up for the long haul to sort out NATO once and for all.

    The transformation of Belarus as a “nuclear-capable” state carries a profound message from Moscow to Brussels and Washington. Biden cannot miss it. (See my blog NATO nuclear compass rendered unavailing, Indian Punchline, Dec. 21, 2022

    Logically, the option open to the US at this point would be to disengage. But that becomes an abject admission of defeat and will mean the death knell for NATO, and Washington’s transatlantic leadership goes kaput. And, worse still, major west European powers — Germany, France and Italy — may start looking for a modus vivendi with Russia. Above all, how can NATO possibly survive without an “enemy”?

    Clearly, neither the US nor its allies are in a position to fight a continental war. But even if they are, what about the emerging scenario in the Asia-Pacific, where the “no limits” partnership between China and Russia has added an intriguing layer to the geopolitics?

    The neocons in the Beltway have bitten more than what they could chew. Their last card will be to push for a direct US military intervention in the Ukraine war under the banner of a “coalition of the willing.” 

     

    This commentary was published earlier on the author’s website – indianpunchline.com

    Feature Image Credit: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation

     

  • Putin’s statements suggest the Ukraine conflict could last for years

    Putin’s statements suggest the Ukraine conflict could last for years

    Most likely, the fighting will continue into 2023, and quite probably beyond, until either Moscow or Kiev is exhausted, or one side claims a decisive victory. For the US, Ukraine is a matter of principle; for the Kremlin, the matter is simply existential – the conflict with the West is not about Ukraine, but about the fate of Russia itself.

    Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake. This confession was stark in the context of the possibility of peace negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin commented, during a meeting with soldiers’ mothers, that he now regards the Minsk agreements of 2014 and 2015 as a mistake.

    It is worth remembering that in 2014, Putin acted on a mandate from the Russian parliament to use military force “in Ukraine,”not just in Crimea. In fact, Moscow did save the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk from being overrun by Kyiv’s army, and defeated Ukraine’s forces, but rather than clearing the whole region of Donbass, Russia stopped, and agreed to a cease-fire brokered in Minsk by Germany and France.

    Putin explained to the mothers that at the time, Moscow did not know for sure the sentiments of the Donbass population affected by the conflict, and hoped that Donetsk and Lugansk could somehow be reunited with Ukraine on the conditions laid down in Minsk. Putin might have added – and his own actions, as well as conversations with then-Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko, confirm it – that he was prepared to give the new Kyiv authorities a chance to settle the issue and rebuild a relationship with Moscow. Until rather late in the game, Putin also hoped that he could still work things out with the Germans and the French, and the US leadership.

    Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned.

    Admissions of mistakes are rare among incumbent leaders, but they are important as indicators of lessons they have learned. This experience has apparently made Putin decide not that the decision to launch the special military operation last February was wrong, but that eight years before, Moscow should not have put any faith in Kyiv, Berlin, and Paris, and instead should have relied on its own military might to liberate the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine.

    In other words, agreeing to a Minsk-style ceasefire now would be another mistake which would allow Kyiv and its backers to better prepare to resume fighting at the time of their choosing.

    The Russian leader realizes, of course, that many nations in the non-West, those who refused to join the anti-Russian sanctions coalition and profess neutrality on Ukraine, have called for an end to hostilities. From China and India to Indonesia and Mexico, these countries, while generally friendly toward Russia, see their economic prospects being impaired by a conflict that pits Russia against the united West. The Western media also promote the message that global energy and food security is suffering because of Moscow’s actions. Russia’s arguments and protestations to the contrary have only limited impact since Russian voices are rarely heard on Middle Eastern, Asian, African, or Latin American airwaves.

    Be that as it may, Moscow cannot ignore the sentiments of the larger part of humanity, which is now increasingly referred to in Russian expert circles as the Global Majority. Hence, official Russian statements that Moscow is open for dialogue without preconditions. However, any Russian delegation to talks would have to take into account the recent amendments to the country’s Constitution, which name the four former Ukrainian regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye as part of the Russian Federation. As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has put it, Russia will only negotiate on the basis of existing geopolitical realities. It should be noted that the Kremlin has not retracted the objectives of the military operation, which include the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, which means ridding the state and society of ultra-nationalist, anti-Russian elements.

    As for Kyiv, it has gone back and forth on the issue. Having nearly reached a peace agreement with Moscow in late March, it later reversed course to continue fighting (the Russians believe this was done on Western advice). Having achieved operational successes on the battlefield this past fall, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky had all contacts with the Kremlin formally banned and formulated extreme demands which he addressed to Putin’s successors, whenever they may emerge. For the West, this was bad from the perspective of public relations, and Zelensky was asked to make it appear as if he was open for talks, but in reality, nothing changed.

    The reality is that the principal parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine, namely Washington and Moscow, do not consider the present, or the near future, as a good time for negotiations.

    The reality is that the principal parties involved in the conflict in Ukraine, namely Washington and Moscow, do not consider the present, or the near future, as a good time for negotiations. From the US perspective, despite the unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia by the West and the recent setbacks that the Russian Army has experienced in Kharkov and Kherson, Moscow is far from being defeated on the battlefield or destabilized domestically. From the Kremlin’s perspective, any truce or peace that leaves Ukraine as an ‘anti-Russia’, hostile state, is tantamount to a defeat with highly negative consequences.

    Instead, both sides believe they can win. The West, of course, has vastly superior resources in virtually every field that it can use in Ukraine. But Russia is working to mobilize its own substantial reserves in both manpower and the economy.

    Where Moscow has an advantage is in escalatory dominance. For the US, Ukraine is a matter of principle; for the Kremlin, the matter is simply existential – the conflict with the West is not about Ukraine, but about the fate of Russia itself.

     

    It looks as if the war will continue into 2023, and possibly beyond that. Talks will probably not start before either side is prepared to concede due to exhaustion, or because both parties have reached an impasse. In the meantime, the death toll will continue to mount, pointing to the essential tragedy of major power politics. In the fall of 1962, then-US President John F. Kennedy was ready to walk to the edge of the nuclear precipice in order to prevent the Soviet Union from turning Cuba into its missile base. Sixty years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a military action to make sure that Ukraine does not become an unsinkable aircraft carrier for America.

    Whatever Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought about his right to counter US missiles pointed at Moscow from Turkey with weapons of his own targeting Washington and New York from Cuba (with Havana’s consent), and whatever successive US presidents thought about their right to expand the NATO military bloc to include Ukraine (at Kyiv’s wish), there is always a horrendous price to pay for the failure to take into account the rival power’s security interests.

     

    There is a lesson to be learned from this. Whatever Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev thought about his right to counter US missiles pointed at Moscow from Turkey with weapons of his own targeting Washington and New York from Cuba (with Havana’s consent), and whatever successive US presidents thought about their right to expand the NATO military bloc to include Ukraine (at Kyiv’s wish), there is always a horrendous price to pay for the failure to take into account the rival power’s security interests. Cuba went down in history as a narrow success for common sense. Ukraine is an ongoing story, with its outcome still hanging in the balance.

    Feature Image: rt.com

    Image: Khrushchev and Kennedy – rferl.org

    Image: Robert and Jack Kennedy – bostonglobe.com – The most important lesson of the Cuban Missile crisis.

  • The Meaning of War in the 21st Century

    The Meaning of War in the 21st Century

    War is, as Clausewitz said, a continuation of politics…or to be precise it is part of geopolitical machinations.  The complexity of the conflict in Ukraine can be understood only if one examines the many dimensions at play in 21st-century wars.  French journalist and political scientist, Thierry Meyssan delivers some thoughts on the evolution of the human dimension of war. The end of industrial capitalism and the globalization of exchanges do not only transform our societies and our ways of thinking but the meaning of all our activities, including wars.                                          – TPF Editorial Team

     

     

     

    The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not part of any military strategy. Japan had already intended to surrender. The United States just wanted them not to surrender to the Soviets who were beginning to pour into Manchuria, but to themselves.

     

     

     

    Since the end of World War II 77 years ago, Europeans (except for the former Yugoslavs) have known peace on their soil. They have forgotten this distant memory and discovered war with horror in Ukraine. The Africans of the Great Lakes, the ex-Yugoslavs and the Muslims from Afghanistan to Libya, passing through the Horn of Africa, look at them with disgust: for many decades, the Europeans ignored their sufferings and accused them of being responsible for the misfortunes they were suffering.

    The war in Ukraine started with Nazism according to some, eight years ago according to others, but it is only two months old in the consciousness of Westerners. They see some of the sufferings it causes, but they do not yet perceive all its dimensions. Above all, they misinterpret it according to the experience of their great-grandparents and not according to their own experience.

    Wars only a Succession of Crimes

     As soon as it starts, war forbids nuances. It forces everyone to position themselves in one of the two camps. The two jaws of the beast immediately crush those who do not comply.
    The ban on nuances forces everyone to rewrite events. There are only “good guys”, us, and “bad guys”, those on the other side. War propaganda is so powerful that after a while, no one can distinguish the facts from the way they are described. We are all in the dark and no one knows how to turn on the light.
    War causes suffering and death without distinction. It doesn’t matter to which side you belong. It doesn’t matter if you are guilty or innocent. One suffers and dies not only from the blows of those on the other side, but also collaterally from those on one’s own side. War is not only suffering and death, but also injustice, which is much more difficult to bear.
    None of the rules of civilized nations remain. Many give in to madness and no longer behave like humans. There is no longer any authority to make people face the consequences of their actions. Most people can no longer be counted on. Man has become a wolf for man.

    Something fascinating is happening. If some people turn into cruel beasts, others become luminous and their eyes enlighten us.

    I spent a decade on the battlefields and never went home. Although I now flee from suffering and death, I am still irresistibly drawn to those looks. That is why I hate war and yet I miss it. Because in this tangle of horrors there is always a sublime form of humanity.

    The Wars of the 21st Century

    I would now like to offer you some thoughts that do not commit you to this or that conflict and even less to this or that side. I will just lift a veil and invite you to look at what it hides. What I am about to say may shock you, but we can only find peace by accepting reality.

    Wars are changing. I am not talking about weapons and military strategies, but about the reasons for conflicts, about their human dimension. Just as the transition from industrial capitalism to financial globalization is transforming our societies and pulverizing the principles that organized them, so this evolution is changing wars. The problem is that we are already incapable of adapting our societies to this structural change and therefore even less capable of thinking about the evolution of war.

     War always seeks to solve the problems that politics has failed to solve. It does not happen when we are ready for it, but when we have eliminated all other solutions.

    This is exactly what is happening today. The US Straussians have inexorably cornered Russia in Ukraine, leaving it no option but to go to war. If the Allies insist on pushing her back, they will provoke a World War.

    The periods between the two eras, when human relationships must be rethought, are conducive to this kind of disaster. Some people continue to reason according to principles that have proven their effectiveness but are no longer adapted to the world. They are nevertheless advancing and can provoke wars without wanting to.

     

     

     

    On the night of May 9, 1945, the US air force bombed Tokyo. In one night more than 100,000 people were killed and more than 1 million were left homeless. It was the largest massacre of civilians in history.

     

     

     

     

    If in peacetime, we distinguish between civilians and soldiers, this way of reasoning no longer makes sense in modern warfare. Democracies have swept away the organization of societies into castes or orders. Everyone can become a combatant. Mass mobilizations and total wars have blurred the lines. From now on, civilians are in charge of the military. They are no longer innocent victims but have become the first responsible for the general misfortune of which the militaries are only the executors.

    In the Western Middle Ages, war was the business of the nobles and of them alone. In no case did the population participate. The Catholic Church had enacted laws of war to limit the impact of conflicts on civilians. All this does not correspond anymore to what we live and is not based on anything.

    The equality between men and women has also reversed the paradigms. Not only are soldiers now women, but they can be civilian commanders too. Fanaticism is no longer the exclusive domain of the so-called stronger sex. Some women are more dangerous and cruel than some men.

    We are not aware of these changes. In any case, we do not draw any conclusions from them. This leads to bizarre positions such as the refusal of Westerners to repatriate the families of jihadists they have let go to the battlefields and to judge them. Everyone knows that many of these women are far more fanatical than their husbands were. Everyone knows that they represent a much greater danger. But nobody says so. They prefer to pay Kurdish mercenaries to keep them and their children in camps, as far away as possible.

    Only the Russians have repatriated the children, who were already contaminated by this ideology. They entrusted them to their grandparents, hoping that the latter would be able to love and care for them.

    For the past two months, we have been receiving Ukrainian civilians fleeing the fighting. They are only women and children who suffer. So we do not take any precautions. However, a third of these children have been trained in the summer camps of the Banderites. There they learned the handling of weapons and the admiration of the criminal against humanity, Stepan Bandera.

    The Geneva Conventions are only a vestige of the time when we reasoned as humans. They do not stick to any reality. Those who apply them do so not because they believe they are obliged to, but because they hope to remain human and not sink into a sea of crimes. The notion of “war crimes” is meaningless, since the purpose of war is to commit successive crimes in order to achieve the victory that could not be obtained by civilized means, and in a democracy, each voter is responsible.

    In the past, the Catholic Church forbade strategies directed against civilians, such as the siege of cities, on pain of ex-communication. Besides the fact that today there is no moral authority to enforce rules, no one is shocked by “economic sanctions” affecting entire peoples, even to the point of causing murderous famines, as was the case against North Korea.

    Given the time we need to draw conclusions from what we are doing, we continue to consider certain weapons as prohibited while using them ourselves. For example, President Barack Obama explained that the use of chemical or biological weapons is a red line that should not be crossed, but his Vice President Joe Biden has installed a large research system in Ukraine. The only people who have forbidden themselves any weapon of mass destruction are the Iranians since Imam Ruhollah Khomeini morally condemned them. Precisely, they are the ones we accuse of wanting to build an atomic bomb, as they do nothing of the kind.

     In the past, wars were declared in order to take over territories. In the end, a peace treaty was signed to modify the land register. In the age of social networks, the issue is less territorial and more ideological. The war can only end with the discrediting of a way of thinking. Although territories have changed hands, some recent wars have resulted in armistices, but none in a peace treaty and reparations.

    We can see that, despite the dominant discourse in the West, the war in Ukraine is not territorial, but ideological. President Volodymyr Zelensky is the first warlord in history to speak several times a day. He spends much more time talking than commanding his army. He writes his speeches around historical references. We react to the memories he evokes and ignore what we don’t understand. To the English, he speaks like Winston Churchill, they applaud him; to the French, he reminds them of Charles De Gaulle, and they applaud him; etc… To all, he concludes “Glory to Ukraine!”, they do not understand the allusion which they find pretty.

    Those who know the history of Ukraine recognize the war cry of the Banderites. The one they shouted while massacring 1.6 million of their fellow citizens, including at least 1 million Jews. But how could a Ukrainian call for the massacre of other Ukrainians and a Jew for the massacre of Jews?

    Our innocence makes us deaf and blind.

     

    For the first time in a conflict, one side censored the enemy media before the war started. RT and Sputnik were shut down in the European Union because they could have challenged what was to come. After the Russian media, opposition media are beginning to be censored. The Voltaire Network’s website, Voltairenet.org, has been censored in Poland for a month by decision of the National Security Council.

     

     

     

    War is no longer limited to the battlefield. It becomes essential to win over the spectators. During the war in Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair considered destroying the satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera. It had no impact on the belligerents, but it gave pause to viewers in the Arab world.

    It is worth noting that after the 2003 war in Iraq, French researchers imagined that military warfare might turn into cognitive warfare. If the nonsense about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction only lasted a few months, the way in which the United States and the United Kingdom managed to get everyone to believe it was perfect. In the end, Nato added a sixth domain to its usual five (air, land, sea, space and cyber): the human brain. While the Alliance is currently avoiding confrontation with Russia in the first four domains, it is already at war in the last two.

    As the areas of intervention expand, the notion of a belligerent is fading. It is no longer men who confront each other, but systems of thought. War is thus becoming globalized. During the Syrian war, more than sixty states that had nothing to do with this conflict sent weapons to the country, and today, twenty states are sending weapons to Ukraine. As we do not understand the events live, but interpret them in the light of the old world, we believed that the Western weapons were used by the Syrian democratic opposition while they were going to the jihadists and we are convinced that they are going to the Ukrainian army and not to the Banderites.

    The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

     

    This article was published earlier in voltairenet.org and is republished under Creative Commons License 4.0.

    Feature Image Credit: Proxy Wars and 21st Century Merchants of Death.

     

  • Killing in War – Between Striving for Power and Self-Preservation

    Killing in War – Between Striving for Power and Self-Preservation

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    Introduction:

    How does it come about that humans kill each other en masse in wars? Within the animal kingdom, they seem to have a special position in this respect. Many animal species have a killing taboo within the species, but at the same time, there is a displacement competition, which is often decided by fights. This displacement of conspecifics corresponds to the formation of communities as well as processes of belonging to or exclusion from them. If the displaced conspecifics do not succeed in forming or joining their own communities, they usually perish, for example, because they are denied access to food sources. The displacement of conspecifics serves their own survival and the formation of a group that enables this survival directly or in the transmission of the biological heritage.

    Living and surviving in the community, exclusion and displacement of conspecifics not belonging to the community – this can be considered as a basic pattern of conflicts within a species. In the animal kingdom, such conflicts are usually ritualized rank fights in which the killing of the opponent is usually avoided. However, this cannot hide the fact that killing also takes place here – for example, when the inferior is forced into a territory where he has no chance of survival (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1984). While in the animal kingdom the right of the physically stronger is almost unrestricted, there is a special feature in humans. Because of their intelligence, they are able to recognize that displacement from the community means immediate death and makes biological reproduction impossible (Orywal et al., 1995).

    Recognition of the connection between displacement from the community (or displacement of one’s own by competing communities) and personal death or restriction of reproductive opportunity is the decisive reason for the skipping of the killing taboo within the human species.

    Recognition of the connection between displacement from the community (or displacement of one’s own by competing communities) and personal death or restriction of reproductive opportunity is – according to my central hypothesis – the decisive reason for the skipping of the killing taboo within the human species. In addition, there is in the human being the ability, also developed by his mind, that the weakest or a group of weaker can kill the strongest. This happens with the help of tools, above all weapons, but also by “cunning and trickery”, i.e. by the use of intelligence. At the same time, this basic constellation also gives rise to the possible realization that a fight to the death can lead to the downfall of one’s own community. At a certain point in the conflict, it may therefore be more advisable to abandon the struggle and secure one’s own survival through other efforts – e.g., through improved food production, development of new technical processes, etc. (this is the core idea of Hegel’s struggle for recognition; Herberg-Rothe, 2007).

    Defensive also appears in cases where the militant preservation of one’s identity is not a reaction to an attack from outside but means an attempt to prevent the internal disintegration of one’s community. When a community is threatened by internal tensions, war may serve to stabilize it by fighting an external enemy. Paradigmatic for this is the well-known dictum of Kaiser Wilhelm II at the beginning of World War I that he no longer knew any parties, he only knew Germans.

    Likewise, wars are waged in order to establish a community with its own identity in the first place. Here, the war is supposed to constitute the political greatness through whose anticipated existence it legitimizes itself. This motif emerges most clearly in the national-revolutionary liberation movements, whose strategy is to establish in the struggle the nation for which the war is waged. The talk of the purifying power of war (Ernst Jünger) or the purifying function of violence (Frantz Fanon) acquires its political content here. In the struggle, the community is to be “forged together” (Münkler calls this the existential dimension of war; Münkler, 1992).

    This keeps people in its clutches by no means exclusively because war is essentially determined by feelings (van Creveld, 1998 and Ehrenreich, 1997), but because it subjectively or objectively serves the material as well as ideal self-preservation of communities internally and externally. It is true that feelings play an essential, if not often even decisive role within wars – but the respective decision to go to war is in the rarest cases dominated by feelings alone.  With this determination, however, only one side is mentioned. Defence and self-preservation appear as the real core of war only insofar as it is determined by the aspect of fighting. If, on the other hand, we take more account of its “original violence”, the first moment of Clausewitz’s “whimsical trinity”, and the membership of the combatants in a comprehensive community, war remains equally determined by the aspect of the violent “wanting to have more” (Plato) of material or ideal goods as by the preservation (or creation) of one’s own identity in the struggle, in the displacement competition of communities.

    Let us recapitulate why this cut-throat competition is violent. In a non-violent competition between communities, one of them can be defeated. In order to preserve its physical or symbolic existence, the side that subjectively or objectively sees itself as the loser resorts to violent means. This is the fear of the physical or symbolic death of one’s own community, which can be maintained solely by struggle and, in the last resort, by war. Contrary to the assumption of Thomas Hobbes, the founder of modern political theory, according to my hypothesis, the fear of one’s own death does not lead to the abandonment of the struggle for life and death, but rather to its unleashing.

    While Hobbes’s assumption may be largely plausible with respect to single individuals, although it underestimates the momentum of self-definition through violence (Sofsky, 1996), it is fundamentally wrong with respect to communities. Here, many individuals put their lives on the line precisely because they thereby enable the “survival of the community” and thus their own symbolic or biological survival. The same mechanism of displacement competition, however, can also lead to the insight that the preservation and strengthening of one’s own community can be promoted much better by cooperative behaviour than by a violent conflict.

    If we apply this hypothesis to the interstate sphere, all those approaches fail that derive causes of war only from a single essence, for example from violent struggle (Hondrich, 2002), from the apparently aggressive nature of man or from the struggle for survival (sociobiological theories). The same is true, conversely, for attempts at explanation that see human beings as basically peaceable and seek the causes of wars solely in structures that have taken on an independent existence, such as the state, “capitalism,” the arms industry, dictatorships, or the lack of democratic participation.

    Rather, violence and war are a possibility of self-preservation inherent in human action and, at the same time, of self-delimitation (“wanting more” of material as well as ideal things) of communities. Since this possibility can never be completely excluded, the decisive task of political action is the limitation of violence and war in world society.

    Abolishing proximity and creating distance

    In his study on killing, former Colonel Dave Grossman describes his experiences with U.S. Army training programs that teach soldiers how to kill. He sees the decisive approach in switching off the soldiers’ thinking and automating their actions. Using historical examples, Grossman tries to prove that in a battle only 15-25% of soldiers actually have the willingness to kill others. Grossman concludes that there is an anthropological inhibition to kill others “eye to eye” (Grossman, 1995).  But 15-25 of those involved in war who kill, rape, maim are, in this perspective, either mentally ill to an even lesser degree or subject to a process of violence taking on a life of its own.  Violence is perhaps the drug that is most quickly addictive and considered “normal” by its practitioners.

    According to Grossman, there is an inhibition to killing due to the perceived anthropological sameness and the resulting proximity to the respective opponent, it is precisely this proximity that leads to explosive excesses of violence in mixed settlement areas.

    While, according to Grossman, there is an inhibition to killing due to the perceived anthropological sameness and the resulting proximity to the respective opponent, it is precisely this proximity that leads to explosive excesses of violence in mixed settlement areas. The conclusions drawn from this are extremely contradictory. While in cases of great (spatial or interpersonal) distance the killing inhibition is eliminated by the fact that the opponent is no longer perceived in his sameness as a human being, the use of force in complex and confusing civil war situations can contribute to the creation of distance between people. Last, however, distance can also lead to the limitation of violence. Proximity and distance thus structure the occurrence of violence in very different ways.

    Eliminating proximity between opponents to reduce the inhibition to kill can be done in very different ways. Systematically, three methods can be distinguished that have also played a major role historically: first, the creation of spatial distance, second, social distance, and third, the integration of the combatants into tightly knit communities in which it is no longer the individual who acts, but the group. Belonging to a group and its courses of action are then stronger than the individual’s inhibition to kill.

    One instrument for creating social distance is the degradation of the opponent by denying him his humanity. The demonization of the opponent is the prerequisite for his destruction.

    The creation of spatial distance between combatants is above all a characteristic of modern warfare and the development of distance weapons. The extent of interpersonal distance appears to be directly proportional to the range of the weapons. In the case of bows and arrows, the distance is still relatively small, as it was in the early development of rifles. Only in connection with another distancing principle, the integration into firmly established formations, did these weapons attain their historical significance. The situation is already different with weapons that have an effect at a greater distance, such as artillery in the Napoleonic Wars and World War I or the modern use of aircraft and rocket-propelled grenades. Bomber pilots can no longer see their opponent and perceive him as a human being. They drop their bombs on illuminated squares or leave target acquisition to the sensors of their weapons systems. In the most modern form of spatial distance, the enemy no longer appears as a human being at all, but only as a number and a diagram on computer screens.

    One instrument for creating social distance is the degradation of the opponent by denying him his humanity. The demonization of the opponent is the prerequisite for his destruction. Thus, in the metaphoric of the Nazi regime, political opponents mutated into vermin and rats. In the political propaganda between the world wars, the ideological opponent was also assigned animal characteristics (“Russian bear”). The stigmatization of the opponent as a “machine being” also belongs to this category. In all these cases, the humanity of the opponent is negated, on the one hand, in order to strengthen the sense of belonging to one’s own community by spreading fear and terror, and on the other hand, in order to lift anthropological inhibitions against killing.

    The Nazi concentration camps played a special role in the creation of social distance. In them, two mechanisms of action were applied: on the one hand, the organized and purposeful dehumanization of people, who were degraded to mere numbers by systematic terror. Their individuality was erased by pain and hunger to such an extent that in the end, they were only walking skeletons, “Muselmanen” (Sofsky, 1993, 229 ff.). On the other hand, a sophisticated form of “division of labour” was developed, especially in the pure extermination camps.

    Inhibition to kill was also lowered in groups whose coherence and inner structure had a stronger effect than individuality. The importance of group cohesion was particularly evident in World War I. For many men, the war was the only place “where men could love passionately” (Stephan, 1998, 34 f.) What is meant, however, is not primarily homosexual love (although it always played a major role in men’s alliances), but the intoxicating, emotional bond with the community (ibid.). These men did not fight out of fear of their superiors or of punishment, but primarily out of comradely feelings: Just as they could rely on their comrades, the comrades should be able to rely on them. Possibly, this bond to the group through stress and practiced movements is more important and obvious than abstract ideals or interests for which the individual goes into battle. The decisive factor then is the community on a small scale, which must be defended.

    The fear of one’s own death, the fear of being killed by another person, can only be countered in hopeless situations by killing the other person. The fear of one’s own death or the death of a member of the group leads directly to wanting to kill the cause of this fear of oneself. Fear of death and killing are directly related. The subjective impression arises, as if only the opponent brings one to kill oneself. In this case, the opponent seems to be responsible for the painful overcoming of one’s own inhibition to kill. This creates a boundless rage against him, because it is he through whose behaviour one’s own killing inhibition has been lifted. In the direct fight (“eye to eye”) for life and death, the fear of one’s own death becomes the furore of immoderate violence.

    This “automatic killing” out of fear of one’s own death is described most vividly in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Nothing New in the West. It says: “I think nothing, I make no decision – I thrust furiously and feel only how the body twitches and then softens and slumps.” And further: “If we were not automata at this moment, we would remain lying, exhausted, will-less. But we have pulled forward again, will-less and yet madly furious, wanting to kill, for that there are our mortal enemies now, their guns and shells aimed at us. We are numb dead men who can still run and kill by a dangerous spell” (Remarque, 1998).

    If one assumes an anthropologically conditioned inhibition of killing in humans, one can furthermore interpret the mutilation of the opponent as a reaction to the fact that precisely despite the prohibition of killing “the other” was killed. The mutilation mitigates the guilt of killing a conspecific by the fact that this conspecific is no longer identifiable as a human being. In the act of killing a conspecific, its mutilation restores the distance between the opponents.

    Whether the “lust” for killing described by Remarque is the result of a drive remains to be seen. It is more likely that the feelings felt in the existential situation of struggle are an expression of triumph over death because one’s own fear of death had to be held down in order to be able to act (Sofsky, 2002). If one assumes an anthropologically conditioned inhibition of killing in humans, one can furthermore interpret the mutilation of the opponent as a reaction to the fact that precisely despite the prohibition of killing “the other” was killed. The mutilation mitigates the guilt of killing a conspecific by the fact that this conspecific is no longer identifiable as a human being. In the act of killing a conspecific, its mutilation restores the distance between the opponents. Especially in the desecration of the dead, as often occurs in massacres, the motive of one’s own “apology” is revealed in the attempt to rob the opponent of even the last vestige of humanity.

    Killing and proximity

    In the case of groups and communities that are closely connected spatially and through neighbourhood relations, emerging socio-economic, religious-cultural, ethnic or political conflicts that are no longer negotiable can turn into extreme mutual anger.

    So far, the creation of spatial and social distance has been discussed as a prerequisite for the individual as well as mass killing. In contrast, in situations characterized by great proximity, killing is often a means of re-establishing distance. It is a well-known fact that most murders committed by private individuals occur in the immediate social environment of the perpetrators. It is also no coincidence that the cruellest ethnic persecutions and exterminations take place between neighbouring or closely related population groups, as the example of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks teach us. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, spoke of the “narcissism of small differences” (Freud, 2001): The closer individuals and groups of people are to each other, the more disappointed expectations of love and happiness, unfulfilled claims, and hurt feelings of self-esteem play a decisive role in the mutual relationship. One cannot be as disappointed and hurt by “strangers,” by those who are not the same as by those who are closest to one (Mentzos, 2002).

    Particularly in the case of groups and communities that are closely connected spatially and through neighbourhood relations, emerging socio-economic, religious-cultural, ethnic or political conflicts that are no longer negotiable can turn into extreme mutual anger. Because of manifold mutual dependencies, it may be necessary for such conflict situations to reassure oneself of one’s own identity by distancing oneself from the other group. One’s own self or that of the group finally experiences its own power and independence in a violent struggle, in which, precisely because of the dangerous proximity to other people or to the other group, not least one’s own elementary recognition is at stake (Altmeyer, 2002).

    Victims

    For Martin van Creveld, war does not begin when groups of people kill and murder others. Rather, a war begins at the point when the former risk being killed themselves. For van Creveld, those who kill for “base motives” are not belligerents, but butchers, murderers, and assassins (van Creveld 1998, 234-238). Despite all commonalities, the opinions of the theorists of the “New Wars” diverge widely at this point. While some emphasize the independence of violence, the excesses and irregularity of warfare, and pursue a culturally pessimistic approach (especially Sofsky), others primarily stress the aspect of the victim. War is understood here as an almost “sacred act” in defense of the existence of communities (van Creveld, 1998) and civilization (Keegan), characterized essentially by the soldierly willingness to sacrifice for the community (Ehrenreich, 1997 and Stephan, 1998). By considering only one side of the pair of opposites of victims and perpetrators, these theories transfigure war into a pure act of sacrifice, ultimately the most selfless of human activities (van Creveld, 1998).

    The blurring of the contrast between victims and perpetrators in war is summarized by Thomas Kühne in the concept of the victim myth. In modern military life, this myth takes on the task of making an active killing in war socially acceptable, and of dissolving the contradiction between killing and being killed in a sacred aura.

    The question, however, is who is a victim and who is a perpetrator in combat in wars. And when and where do the lines between the two blur? There is a long tradition of the myth of sacrifice, in which even the most barbaric destruction of the other was passed off as self-sacrifice for a higher cause. Heinrich Himmler, for example, spent some effort convincing his subordinates that the extermination of Jews in the gas chambers was in fact a heroic act. A distinguishing criterion obviously lies in whether one’s violent act is directed against the defenseless or against persons who have an opportunity for self-defense or escape. The blurring of the contrast between victims and perpetrators in war is summarized by Thomas Kühne in the concept of the victim myth. In modern military life, this myth takes on the task of making an active killing in war socially acceptable, and of dissolving the contradiction between killing and being killed in a sacred aura. The myth of sacrifice created a symbolic order in the moral and emotional conflict between the experience of death and killing, between feelings of omnipotence and powerlessness (Kühne, 1999 and 2001).

    We will not abolish war in the 21st century, but we must limit it for reasons of self-preservation.

    If we summarize, violence in war is possible because the other is no longer seen as equal, but a spatial or social distance makes it possible in the first place. Through our intelligence, even the physically weakest can defeat a stronger one and does not have to succumb to cut-throat competition. In part, violence also creates social distance in the first place, an aspect we find especially in civil wars. I am unsure whether violence has tended to increase or decrease in wars. Steven Pincker argued that, regardless of media portrayals, violence has decreased to a significant degree worldwide (Pinker, 2013) – to what extent the Ukraine war heralds a contrary trend is impossible to predict. What is likely, however, is that the wars of the future will revolve around ideas of order, around the resurgence of empires and civilizations that have been submerged in colonization and European-American hegemony and that are pushing onto the world stage (Herberg-Rothe & Son, 2018). Whether the possibility of overcoming violence or intensifying it follows from this will remain contested. A positive example could be the end of the Cold War, in which the countless overkill capabilities themselves overcame the antagonistic opposition between capitalism and communism, because the threat of the planet’s self-destruction made people realize not to fight a war with nuclear weapons. The other possibility remains that a new thirty-year war for recognition and order is looming. To be sure, war is not the “father of all things,” as Heraclitus opined. But its horrible destructiveness is nevertheless integrated with the dialectic of self-preservation – on the one hand through the increase of power and material, on the other hand, the preservation of an own physical or symbolic identity.  This dialectical development can also contribute to the self-preservation of humankind, as it succeeded in the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, albeit with great luck in some cases. War as a means of self-preservation is abolished in the nuclear age. Even at the micro level, unleashing violence would endanger humanity’s self-preservation. We will not abolish war in the 21st century, but we must limit it for reasons of self-preservation.

    References

    Altmeyer, Martin (2000), Narzissmus und Objekt, Göttingen.

    Ehrenreich, Barbara (1997), Blutrituale. Ursprung und Geschichte der Lust am Krieg, München.

    Creveld, Martin van (1998), Die Zukunft des Krieges, München.

    Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus (1984), Krieg und Frieden aus der Sicht der Verhaltensforschung, München.

    Gray, Chris Habbles (1997), Postmodern War, London.

    Grossman, Dave (1995), On Killing. The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Boston.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2007), Clausewitz’s puzzle. Oxford.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2017), Der Krieg. 2. Aufl. Frankfurt.

    Herberg-Rothe, Andreas and Son, Key-young (2018), Order wars and floating balance. How the rising powers are reshaping our worldview in the twenty-first century. New York.

    Hondrich, Klaus (2002), Wieder Krieg, Frankfurt.

    Kühne, Thomas (1999), Der Soldat. In: Frevert, Ute/Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard (Hrsg.), Der

    Mensch des 20. Jahrhunderts, Frankfurt New York, 344-372.

    Kühne, Thomas (2001), Lust und Leiden an der kriegerischen Gewalt.

    Traditionen und Aneignungen des Opfermythos, ungedruckter Vortragstext zur Jahrestagung des Arbeitskreises Historische Friedensforschung “Vom massenhaften gegenseitigen Töten – oder: Wie die Erforschung des Krieges zum Kern kommt”, Ev. Akademie Loccum, 2.-4. Nov. 2001.

    Mentzos, Stavros (2002), Der Krieg und seine psychosozialen Kosten, Göttingen.

    Münkler, Herfried (1992), Gewalt und Ordnung, Frankfurt.

    Orywal, Erwin u.a. (Hrsg.), (1995),, Krieg und Kampf. Die Gewalt in unseren Köpfen, Berlin.

    Pinker, Steven (2013), Gewalt. Eine neue Geschichte der Menschheit. Frankfurt

    Remarque, Erich Maria (1998), Im Westen nichts Neues, Köln.

    Sofsky, Wolfgang (2002), Zeiten des Schreckens, Frankfurt.

    Sofsky, Wolfgang (1993), Die Ordnung des Terrors, Frankfurt.

    Sofsky, Wolfgang (1996), Traktat über die Gewalt, 2. Aufl., Frankfurt.

    Stephan, Cora (1998), Das Handwerk des Krieges, Berlin.

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  • The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control

    The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control

    Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power.  Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown.  It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.

    The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War.  This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

    Since the middle of the 19th Century, the West has competed with Russia over Crimea and more specifically, naval power in the Black Sea.  In the Crimean War (1853-6), Britain and France captured Sevastopol and temporarily banished Russia’s navy from the Black Sea.  The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War.  This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.

    The US has long regarded any encroachment by great powers in the Western Hemisphere as a direct threat to US security, dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which states: “We owe it, therefore, to candour and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”

    In 1961, the US invaded Cuba when Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro looked to the Soviet Union for support.  The US was not much interested in Cuba’s “right” to align with whichever country it wanted – the claim the US asserts regarding Ukraine’s supposed right to join NATO.  The failed US invasion in 1961 led to the Soviet Union’s decision to place offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, which in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years ago this month.  That crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.

    Yet America’s regard for its own security interests in the Americas has not stopped it from encroaching on Russia’s core security interests in Russia’s neighbourhood.  As the Soviet Union weakened, US policy leaders came to believe that the US military could operate as it pleases.  In 1991, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to General Wesley Clark that the US can deploy its military force in the Middle East “and the Soviet Union won’t stop us.” America’s national security officials decided to overthrow Middle East regimes allied to the Soviet Union and encroach on Russia’s security interests.

    In 1990, Germany and the US gave assurances to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could disband its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, without fear that NATO would enlarge eastward to replace the Soviet Union. It won Gorbachev’s assent to German reunification in 1990 on this basis.  Yet with the Soviet Union’s demise, President Bill Clinton reneged by supporting the eastward expansion of NATO.

    America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”   

    Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested vociferously but could do nothing to stop it.  America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”

    Under Clinton’s watch, NATO expanded to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999.  Five years later, under President George W. Bush, Jr. NATO expanded to seven more countries: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania), the Balkans (Slovenia), and Slovakia.  Under President Barack Obama, NATO expanded to Albania and Croatia in 2009, and under President Donald Trump, to Montenegro in 2019.

    Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement intensified sharply in 1999 when NATO countries disregarded the UN, attacked Russia’s ally Serbia, and stiffened further in the 2000s with the US wars of choice in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, President Putin declared that NATO enlargement represents a “serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

    “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?  And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”  – Putin at the Munich Security Conference in 2007.

    Putin continued: “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?  And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience of what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee. Where are these guarantees?”

    In 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East).  Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

    Also in 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East).  Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and the Middle East.  With Ukraine’s and Georgia’s entry, Russia would be surrounded by five NATO countries in the Black Sea: Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine.

    Russia was initially protected from NATO enlargement to Ukraine by Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who led the Ukrainian parliament to declare Ukraine’s neutrality in 2010.  Yet in 2014, the US helped to overthrow Yanukovych and bring to power a staunchly anti-Russian government.  The Ukraine War broke out at that point, with Russia quickly reclaiming Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, the region of Eastern Ukraine with a relatively high proportion of Russian population.  Ukraine’s parliament formally abandoned neutrality later in 2014.

    Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas have been fighting a brutal war for 8 years.  Attempts to end the war in the Donbas through the Minsk Agreements failed when Ukraine’s leaders decided not to honour the agreements, which called for autonomy for the Donbas.  After 2014, the US poured in massive armaments to Ukraine and helped to restructure Ukraine’s military to be interoperable with NATO, as evidenced in this year’s fighting.

    The Russian invasion in 2022 would likely have been averted had Biden agreed with Putin’s demand at the end of 2021 to end NATO’s eastward enlargement.  The war would likely have been ended in March 2022, when the governments of Ukraine and Russia exchanged a draft peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality.  Behind the scenes, the US and UK pushed Zelensky to reject any agreement with Putin and to fight on.  At that point, Ukraine walked away from the negotiations.

    The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake. 

    Russia will escalate as necessary, possibly to nuclear weapons, to avoid military defeat and NATO’s further eastward enlargement.  The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake.   Terrifyingly, the US was also prepared to use nuclear weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a senior Ukrainian official recently urged the US to launch nuclear strikes “as soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out nuclear strikes,” surely a recipe for World War III.  We are again on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

    President John F. Kennedy learned about nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis.  He defused that crisis not by force of will or US military might, but by diplomacy and compromise, removing US nuclear missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing its nuclear missiles in Cuba.  The following year, he pursued peace with the Soviet Union, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

    In June 1963, Kennedy uttered the essential truth that can keep us alive today: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”  

    It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO.  Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of control, as the world has done on so many past occasions – yet this time with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.  The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.

     

    This article is republished with the permission of the author. It was published earlier in www.other-news.info

    Image Credit: Scroll.in

  • The West’s False Narrative about Russia and China

    The West’s False Narrative about Russia and China

    The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous.

    The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts.  The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous.  It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.

    The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy.  The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”  These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

    The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.  The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.

    US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.  

    President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.”  US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.

    The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts.  A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.

    Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy.  Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria.  The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.

    Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticized Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticized China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.

    The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire.  Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and the Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.

    Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.

    Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive so that Putin should have nothing to fear.  In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.

    The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices).  In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 per cent of the world compared with 41 per cent in the BRICS. 

    At the core of all of this is the US’s attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia.  It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea.  The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices).  In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 per cent of the world compared with 41 per cent in the BRICS.

    There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US.  It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony.  With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

    European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations

    Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea.  Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine.  At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.

    Feature Image Credit: Big Stock

    This article was published earlier in Pearls and Irritations.

  • Beyond Unipolarity and the Euro–American Horizons of IR Thought: Reflections on the Emergent World Order

    Beyond Unipolarity and the Euro–American Horizons of IR Thought: Reflections on the Emergent World Order

    Abstract

    Amidst the continuing conflict in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a notable pronouncement of the end of the US-led unipolar world and the rise of multipolar world order. Against this backdrop of the debate on polarity, my research paper seeks to address the following questions. To what extent have global institutions, mainstream IRT (International Relations Theory) and academia as well as policies reflected if not reinforced Euro-American norms and interests? Does this purported shift to multipolarity require a shift in institutional and theoretical practices reflecting the broad concerns of the Global South? Using global and regional case studies like India (especially in regard to the representation within academia and the glass ceiling affecting institutional practices like Young Professionals Programme), I draw from critical and post-colonial theoretical IR frameworks to argue for a comprehensive reform of the prevalent global institutional and theoretical structures. 

    Introduction

    The Euro-American hegemony runs very deep, pervading a range of institutions, norms, global practices, knowledge and even academic teaching practices.

    The month of February this year witnessed one of the most defining moments of the post-Cold war era. Marking a major escalation of the simmering conflict that began with the insurgency in Eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine resulting in thousands of casualties and millions of refugees.[1] This conflict inevitably has given rise to a wide range of debates in the global arena, including global governance, institutions, conflict and security. In this regard, one of the most interesting debates that have seen a resurgence is the question of the future of the world order. 

    The notion of a shift to multipolar world order has emerged as a prominent theme in the wake of this crisis. This is best exemplified by Vladimir Putin in his address to the St Petersburg International Economic Forum Plenary session, “a multipolar system of international relations is now being formed. It is an irreversible process; it is happening before our eyes and is objective in nature.” It is indeed widely recognised that the brief period of unipolarity, dominated by the US, following the end of the Cold War, has given way to the era of multipolar world order, characterised by ‘new powerful and increasingly assertive centres.’ [2] However, even as this shift to multipolarity seems almost deterministic, there persist legitimate questions on the conduciveness of the current world order to the emergence of these multiple power-centres. 

    Against this backdrop, my work shall be organised as follows. I commence with a discussion on the shift towards multipolarity, providing the conceptual capital of notions like power and polarity. This shall be followed by my argument that the current global order, exemplified in its norms, institutions, and intellectual resources, fall severely short of the expectations required of the multipolar world order. To illustrate this point, I draw from the case study of India, in particular. I conclude by providing some prescriptions necessary for the transition to multipolarity to be meaningful. Towards this pursuit, I draw from critical post-colonial theoretical frameworks, employing secondary literature review as the overarching method.

    Shifts towards multipolarity

    Before proceeding to the premise of the shift towards multipolarity, a few conceptual clarifications are in order. Polarity in this context is understood as the modes of distribution of power in the international system. Typically, it is classified as unipolar (e.g. US hegemony in the post-Cold-War era), bipolar (e.g. Russia-US dominance during the Cold War era) and multipolar (e.g. Europe during the pre-World War era). [3] While there are myriad debates on what constitutes power in the global landscape, I draw from the useful typology provided most famously by Joseph Nye – hard, soft, and smart power. Hard power is often described as the typical carrot and stick approach, involving coercion and is often measured in terms of “population size, territory, geography, natural resources, military force, and economic strength.” On the other hand, soft power is described as the ability to influence state preference using intangible attributes like “attractive personality, culture, political values, institutions, and policies” resulting in the perception of legitimacy or moral authority. Smart power is often understood as the instrumental deployment of a combination of both to secure political ends.[4] 

    The end of the Cold War era, prematurely lauded as the end of history by a scholar, resulted in a brief unipolar moment of US hegemony. As Putin puts it, the US was the predominant power with a limited group of allies which resulted in “all business practices and international relations … interpreted solely in the interests of this power.”[2]  However, a range of factors in the twenty-first century led to a crisis in American leadership. The interventionist atrocities carried out in the wake of the September 11 attacks as well as the crisis of global capitalism during the financial crisis of 2008 led to a crisis in American leadership.[5] This period also saw the emergence of new powers like the BRICS nations, who posed a serious challenge to the notion of unipolarity.[3] 

    As Amitav Acharya and Burry Buzan argue, this diffusion of power has resulted in the ‘rise of the rest’ characterised by the absence of a single superpower. Instead, a number of great and regional powers have emerged with their respective institutions and models of growth. Such a world order is also shaped by a greater role accorded to non-state actors including global organisations, corporations, and social movements as well as non-state actors.[6] Thus, the current global landscape is often termed as multipolar, multi-civilizational and multiplex offering myriad opportunities and benefits for states.[7] The crisis in Ukraine has only bolstered this multipolar moment even further. Consider India as a case in point. The likes of the U.S. (and even China) have competed for India’s affection and India’s seemingly pro-Russia stance has not prevented Delhi’s deeper engagement with her counterparts in the West. These initiatives can only enhance India’s great power status, resulting in potentially a higher degree of multipolarity.[8]

    Thus, even as there is an increasing scholarly and policy-based consensus on the shift towards multipolarity, there remain important reservations on whether the current global arena is equipped to deal with the seismic shifts posed by the emergent world order. In other words, does this purported shift to multipolarity require a shift in institutional and theoretical practices reflecting the broad concerns of the Global South? In the next section, I answer in the affirmative, arguing that the dominant norms, institutions, and intellectual resources are broadly skewed towards the preservation of Euro-American hegemony. 

    The maintenance of Euro-American hegemony: norms, institutions, and academia

    The exercise of U.S. hegemonic power involved the projection of a set of norms and their embrace by elites in other nations.

    Drawing from Persaud, I argue that dominant powers forge an “academic/foreign policy/security ‘complex’ dedicated to the maintenance of a hegemonic world order.” [9] Such a complex is constituted by an intricate network of norms, institutions and theoretical/ intellectual practices which seek to uphold the status quo. In this section, I examine each of these aspects in detail.

    Consider norms, in the first instance. Norms can be defined broadly as the “collective expectations for the proper behaviour of actors.”[10] When certain norms which serve certain interests are considered as general interests, it results in hegemony. The dominant powers socialise and hegemonise other countries into an ideological worldview that best serves their interests. In other words, actors have to orient themselves according to a ‘logic of appropriateness’ framed by these intersubjective notions. In the post World War era, the Roosevelt-led US administration projected a series of norms and principles guided by liberal multilateralism, to shape the post-war international order. Such a form of ‘institutional materiality’ posited a clear separation between the political and the economic realm. The embrace of these norms outside the US occurred through various modes of socialisation including external inducement (e.g. Britain and France), direct intervention and internal reconstruction (e.g. Germany and Japan) as well as military and economic dominance.[11] 

    The exercise of U.S. hegemonic power involved the projection of a set of norms and their embrace by elites in other nations. Socialisation did occur since U.S. leaders were largely successful in inducing other nations to buy into this normative order. But the processes through which socialisation occurred varied from nation to nation. In Britain and France, shifts in norms were accomplished primarily by external inducement; in Germany and Japan, they resulted from direct intervention and internal reconstruction. In all cases, the spread of norms of liberal multilateralism was heavily tied to U.S. military and economic dominance. [11]

    Such norms are often manipulated (and flouted) to their advantage. For example, consider the liberal norm of conditional sovereignty, linked to human rights, spearheaded by the likes of the US and many countries in Western Europe. Assuming the primacy of the individual over the state, it has legitimised intervention on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. However, the execution of these norms has been far more uniform as best exemplified in their differential application in the wake of the atrocities in Kosovo and Rwanda. An intra-state conflict resulting in a humanitarian crisis in Kosovo precipitated a successful multilateral intervention. However, the same decisiveness was starkly absent with regard to a similar (if not greater) conflict in Rwanda which resulted in almost 800,000 casualties and more than two million refugees. Multiple studies have traced the rationale of intervention to the “strategic interests in Europe’s future and the NATO alliance.” Rwanda on the other hand was considered peripheral to the national interests of either Western Europe or the US.[12] This substantiates the argument that the norm of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is often tied more to brutal national interests rather than the protection of human rights.

    A range of global norms, ranging from economic norms, dealing with the management of finance, to those dealing with water governance has been shown to be skewed towards the interests of great powers rather than participative in nature.

    Consider another instance. The Liberal International Order (LIO) asserts the concept of ‘conditional sovereignty’ where sovereign nation-states are bound to look after their entire populations. A failure to that end invites interference and comments from other nation-states and external agencies. This norm has been pushed forward and spearheaded by first-world countries like the US and Western Europe, much to their advantage. Contrary to this, the neo-Westphalian order is a proponent of the ‘classical sovereignty’ model where nation-states are sovereign within their own territory to administer in any manner they want, obviously with a necessary reverence to human rights, but others are not authorized to interfere in the same. China and other authoritarian regimes have been advocating for the same. So, while the LIO talks about the equality of every individual, the neo-Westphalian order focuses more on the equality of all nation-states.[13] Similarly, a range of global norms, ranging from economic norms, dealing with the management of finance, to those dealing with water governance has been shown to be skewed towards the interests of great powers rather than participative in nature. 

    Similarly, Cox and Gill have argued how global governance through institutions play a critical role in maintaining hegemony.[14] The multilateral institutions which the US had created both in the political and economic realm have played a critical role in the sustenance of Euro-American (and especially the U.S.) dominance. In other words, even as the international world order shifts to a multipolar one, it has not exactly been accompanied by multilateralism.[15] While multilateralism puts forward the interests of multiple states, most so-called multilateral institutions reflect and reinforce prevailing power configurations. 

    Consider the United Nations, for instance. It cannot be a mere coincidence that the UN has been ineffectual against most of the contemporary global challenges like climate change, the pandemic etc. when it has not been responsive to the reality of the increasing number of power centres in the multipolar world order.[16] The most glaring evidence is the UNSC. Despite an increasing number of voices on the rise of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the P5 includes only one representative from Asia (which is China) and no members from either Africa or Latin America. In addition, while there has been more than a threefold rise in UN membership, the number of non-permanent seats has only risen from 11 to 15. Even at the administrative levels, the lack of non-western representation is indeed a concern. Besides the absence of a UNSC permanent seat, it is also disheartening to see that it has been years since the Young Professionals Program has been held for the likes of India.

    These same institutions are often undermined by the likes of the US, under the facade of NATO. Consider the harrowing intervention in Libya. The NATO intervention on supposedly ‘humanitarian’ grounds in 2011 led to the death of Muamar Gaddafi, violating the legal structures of the UN charter in the process and resulting in a proxy war. The result has been a prolonged state of near-anarchy characterised by arbitrary detentions, executions, mass killings and kidnappings. [17]

    The WTO is plagued with similar issues. While it ostensibly reflects the ‘global’ norm of neoliberal free trade, it is “structured and ordered to promote monopolistic competition rather than genuine free trade. These institutional roadblocks include the exclusion of developing countries from several informal decision-making sessions, lack of transparency, coercive decision-making in meetings involving developing countries, astronomical costs involved in Dispute settlement Understanding and so on. The result is that the Western countries have an overwhelming advantage against their counterparts from the Global South. [18]

    Lastly, as highlighted earlier, the international policy making apparatus cannot be divorced from the intellectual resources churned by IR academia. Zvobgo, in an insightful piece, has argued how the big three of IR theory – realism, liberalism and constructivism – are built on Eurocentric, raced and racist foundations.[19] The role of imperial policymakers in shaping contemporary IR knowledge has been well acknowledged. Kwaku Danso and Kwesi Aninghave argued about the prevalence of methodological whiteness, which projects White experience as a universal experience.[20] It is no coincidence that the principles of the Westphalian treaty are not significantly different from those underlying the current UN charter. Acharya has argued that racism was integral to the emergence of the US-led world order exemplified in the scant focus on colonialism in UNDHR as well as the “privileging of sovereign equality’ over ‘racial equality.’[21] 

    These forms of methodological whiteness have had devastating impacts across the world. The projection and the forceful projection of the Weberian state as the fundamental unit of security and conflict management has resulted in disastrous policy-level consequences in Africa which have always been characterised by a range of hybrid political systems beyond the nation-state.[20] Similarly, much of the problematic policies carried out today based on the binaries of ‘developed’ v/s ‘developing’ nations have direct continuities with the legacy of empire and race reflected in dichotomies like ‘civilised v/s uncivilised’. 

    There also exists historical amnesia of racism in academia, whether in terms of representation or teaching practices. For example, in the US, only 8% of the faculty identify themselves as Black or Latino. Similarly, the configurations of colonialism and racism in building the modern world order are either glossed over or overlooked in most academia.[19] Indian academia is a case in point. As Behera argues, despite the strong tradition of Indian independent IR thought as well as the long history of colonialism, Indian IR has imbibed a definite set of givens including  “the infallibility of the Indian state modelled after the Westphalian nation-state as well as a thorough internalization of the philosophy of political realism and positivism.[22] Rohan Mukherjee, for instance, has highlighted an unpublished survey of IR faculty within India wherein the majority self-identified as either liberal or realist.[23]

    Thus, the Euro-American hegemony runs very deep, pervading a range of institutions, norms, global practices, knowledge and even academic teaching practices. In the next section, I conclude by outlining certain prescriptions for a future world order which responds to and is far more conducive to the inevitable multipolar shifts. 

    Conclusion

    India has umpteen intellectual resources from Gita and the Sangam literature to stellar modern political philosophers like Gandhi, Tagore and so on, which need to be strategically combined with contemporary IR notions and questions of security, justice and so on.

    This paper first established the backdrop of the shift towards multipolarity within the world order by outlining the myriad modes of power through which the ‘Rest’ has caught up with the ‘West.’ In the succeeding section, I demonstrated how a range of norms, institutions and intellectual practices had been historically constructed to maintain Euro-American hegemony as well as promote the interests of the West. In such a world order, certain parochial interests have masqueraded themselves as common or global interests. In the concluding section, I outline certain prescriptions which have become necessary for a more equitable, multi-civilisational world order. 

    Institutions like the UN require urgent and seismic reforms reflecting the interests of emerging power centres. The number of seats within the Permanent and non-permanent seats must be expanded to include more nation-states from Asia, Africa and Latin America. A revitalisation of the UNGA is highly overdue and requires a focussed and timely debate on the problems of the highest priority at any given time through rationalization of its agenda. [24] Similarly, the proposed WTO reforms, which seeks to move away from multilateralism to impose plurilateralism, should be opposed at all costs. [25]

    As Zvobjo puts it eloquently, how IR is taught perpetuates the inequalities which are detailed above. Besides the dominant IR triumvirate, there needs to be an increased focus on critical perspectives as well as increased engagement with the uncomfortable questions of race, empire, colour, and caste.[19] This should be complemented by more diversity in terms of representation within academia. In India specifically, there needs to be increased efforts to construct Indian or South Asian IR notions. India has umpteen intellectual resources from Gita and the Sangam literature to stellar modern political philosophers like Gandhi, Tagore and so on, which need to be strategically combined with contemporary IR notions and questions of security, justice and so on. However, as Mallavarapu reminds us, care needs to be taken to ensure they can address existing inequities in the world order without succumbing or falling prey to jingoism or nativism.[26]

    References

    [1] Alex Leeds Matthews, Matt Stiles, Tom Nagorski, and Justin Rood, ‘The Ukraine War in data’, Grid, August 4, 2022

    https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/08/04/the-ukraine-war-in-data-12-million-people-driven-from-their-homes/

    [2] Address to participants of 10th St Petersburg International Legal Forum, President of Russia, June 30, 2022

    http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68785

    [3]Andrea Edoardo Varisco, ’Towards a Multi-Polar International System: Which Prospects for Global Peace?’, E-International Relations, June 3, 2013.

    https://www.e-ir.info/2013/06/03/towards-a-multi-polar-international-system-which-prospects-for-global-peace/

    [4]Aigerim Raimzhanova, ‘Power in IR: hard, soft and smart’, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy and the University of Bucharest, December 2015

    http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/content/pdf/participant-papers/2015-12_annual/Power-In-Ir-By-Raimzhanova,-A.pdf

    [5]Ashraf, N. (2020). Revisiting international relations legacy on hegemony: The decline of American hegemony from comparative perspectives. Review of Economics and Political Science

    [6] Kukreja, Veena. “India in the Emergent Multipolar World Order: Dynamics and Strategic Challenges.” India Quarterly 76, no. 1 (2020): 8-23.

    [7] Ashok Kumar Beheria, ‘Ask an Expert’, IDSA, April 1, 2020. 

    https://idsa.in/askanexpert/world-moving-towards-multipolarity-akbehuria

    [8]Derek Grossman, ‘Modi’s Multipolar Moment Has Arrived’, RAND blog, June 6, 2022

    https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/06/modis-multipolar-moment-has-arrived.html

    [9]Persaud, Randolph B. “Ideology, socialization and hegemony in Disciplinary International Relations.” International Affairs 98, no. 1 (2022): 105-123.

    [10]Shannon, Vaughn P. “International Norms and Foreign Policy.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics (2017).

    [11]Ikenberry, G. John, and Charles A. Kupchan. “Socialization and hegemonic power.” International organization 44, no. 3 (1990): 283-315.

    [12] Tracy Kuperus, ‘Kosovo And Rwanda: Selective Interventionism?’, Centre for Public Justice

    https://www.cpjustice.org/public/page/content/kosovo_and_rwanda

    [13] Falit Sijariya, ‘Democratizing Norms: Jaishankar’s Comments and the Challenge to US Hegemony’, April 22, 2022

    https://thegeopolitics.com/democratizing-norms-jaishankars-comments-and-the-challenge-to-us-hegemony/

    [14] Overbeek, Henk. “Global governance, class, hegemony.” Contending Perspectives on Global Governance: Coherence and Contestation 39 (2005).

    [15] Tourangbam, Monish. “The UN and the Future of Multilateralism in a Multipolar World.” Indian Foreign Affairs Journal 14, no. 4 (2019): 301-308.

    [16] The UN Turns Seventy-Five. Here’s How to Make it Relevant Again, Council on Foreign Relations, Sep 14, 2020.

    https://www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global-memos/un-turns-seventy-five-heres-how-make-it-relevant-again

    [17] Ademola Abbas, ‘Assessing NATO’s involvement in Libya’, United Nations University, 27 October 2011

    https://unu.edu/publications/articles/assessing-nato-s-involvement-in-libya.html

    Lansana Gberi, ‘Forgotten war: a crisis deepens in Libya but where are the cameras?’, Africa Renewal, December 2017 – March 2018

    https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2017-march-2018/forgotten-war-crisis-deepens-libya-where-are-cameras

    [18] Ed Yates, ‘The WTO Has Failed as a Multilateral Agency in Promoting International Trade’,E-International Relations, April 29, 2014

    https://www.e-ir.info/2014/04/29/the-wto-has-failed-as-a-multilateral-agency-in-promoting-international-trade/

    [19] Kelebogile Zvobgo, ‘Why Race Matters in International Relations’, Foreign Policy, June 19, 2020

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/

    [20]Danso, Kwaku, and Kwesi Aning. “African experiences and alternativity in International Relations theorizing about security.” International Affairs 98, no. 1 (2022): 67-83.

    [21]Acharya, Amitav. “Can Asia lead? Power ambitions and global governance in the twenty-first century.” International affairs 87, no. 4 (2011): 851-869.

    [22]Behera, Navnita Chadha. “Re-imagining IR in India.” In Non-Western international relations theory, pp. 102-126. Routledge, 2009.

    [23]Rohan Mukherjee https://mobile.twitter.com/rohan_mukh/with_replies

    [24]United Nations Reform: Priority Issues for Japan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Japan, January 2006

    https://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/un/reform/priority.html

    [25]Abhijit Das, ‘Reform the WTO: do not deform it’, the Hindu Business Line, December 1, 2021

    https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/reform-the-wto-do-not-deform-it/article37792701.ece

    [26]Shahi, Deepshikha, and Gennaro Ascione. “Rethinking the absence of post-Western International Relations theory in India:‘Advaitic monism’as an alternative epistemological resource.” European Journal of International Relations 22, no. 2 (2016): 313-334.

    Feature Image Credits: Foreign Affairs

  • Mankind as a wholeness – we must comprehend ourselves as a unity in order to survive

    Mankind as a wholeness – we must comprehend ourselves as a unity in order to survive

    One might think that mankind has not changed for millennia – we are still antiquated, as Günther Anders had pointed out after his visit to Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bombing. Basically, Anders argued that technical-industrial possibilities have rushed far ahead of comprehension and our moral responsibility – as evidenced in the use of nuclear power, the possibility of self-destruction of humanity during the nuclear arms race (especially in 1983), which was partly prevented only by chance, genetic engineering, and medical possibilities at the beginning and end of life. Add to this climate change and obscene inequality throughout the world.

     

    Looking at the current explosions of violence on the macro level (Ukraine, Syria, new arms race between the great powers) as well as on the micro level (for example in Central America the Maras) one might think that mankind has not changed for millennia – we are still antiquated, as Günther Anders had pointed out after his visit to Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bombing. Basically, Anders argued that technical-industrial possibilities have rushed far ahead of comprehension and our moral responsibility – as evidenced in the use of nuclear power, the possibility of self-destruction of humanity during the nuclear arms race (especially in 1983), which was partly prevented only by chance, genetic engineering, and medical possibilities at the beginning and end of life. Add to this climate change and obscene inequality throughout the world, we must ask ourselves who we are as humans? How can we explain to our children and grandchildren what we have done for them – or more importantly, not done? Statistically, however, we are living in the most peaceful age in human history to date. The present dominance of the violence topic, of fears and despair as world-politically effective emotions can therefore be a question of the increased and partly medially staged perception – or nevertheless a real setback.  But also, here it could be true that mainly our terms and conceptions are put to the test. For such setbacks primarily question the idea of the linearity of progress, not necessarily progress itself. If we assume the models of a linear ascending progress as in the Enlightenment or in Kant or an equally linear pure history of decay, we cannot integrate contrary developments into our world view – and every contrary development calls the whole model into question. In contrast, models of history based on a cycle (Greek Stoa, Hinduism) are able to capture the constant in change but can only imperfectly explain progress at the societal level. The historical model of a Machiavelli, on the other hand, includes change, but change is always repeated and can best be compared to a sine curve.

    The argument about models of history is by no means abstract, as it appears at first sight. The Marxists as well as Leninists and finally the Stalinists have pursued radical politics with the linear model of progress, just as the idea of the thousand-year Reich had influence on the politics of the National Socialists. Are there alternative models beyond pure decay, equally linear progress, or the assumption that humans do not change after all, or lag behind their technological capabilities in moral and spiritual terms?

    Models for Understanding History – G W F Hegel

    These positions are not unfounded – however, their absolutization is wrong. As in various psychological (Piaget and Kohlberg) and sociological (Auguste Comte) approaches, the German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel starts from a stage model in which he develops a progress of world history in the consciousness of freedom. Despite his own Eurocentrism, stage models are in principle capable of countering a pure binary opposition of affirmation or negation of progress in human history. They also do not imply an absolutely inevitable development, as can be seen from the fact that Kohlberg, for example, does not assume that all people reach the highest level, but emphasizes, like all stage theorists, that one cannot skip any of the stages. But Hegel was just not in the tradition of the Enlightenment and Kant, who assumed a linear model of progress, but developed a dialectical sequence of stages, which in my interpretation could best be compared to a sine curve (as in Machiavelli) but erected on an ascending x-axis. In such a model, we can think of the Enlightenment’s idea of progress (in the ascending x-axis) as well as cyclical developments (Machiavelli) of rise and fall, progress, and regress in world history together.

    In this model developed by the author, there is progress, but it is not linear, but itself cyclical. We know such cycles from the business cycle theories in the wake of Kondratieff’s research or also from hegemonic cycles. In contrast to these theoretical approaches, the model of history advocated here is related to a (more or less) slightly ascending x-axis and is derived from Hegel’s conception of becoming at the beginning of his monumental work on the “Science of Logic”, since coming into being and passing away are not completely cancelled out, but a “surplus” arises which goes beyond the infinite coming into being and passing away.  Such a model is on the one hand closed (with respect to the high and low points on the Y-axis), at the same time open on the X-axis and develops “between” its high and low points.

    Hegel’s stage model has itself been a great historical advance; at the same time, we need to go beyond Hegel to overcome his tendency of constructing a systematic closure (which was then taken as an absolute by Marx in a perfect society of communism) in favour of an approach that is at once closed and open. Despite his Eurocentric reductions, Hegel develops a systematic development of the idea of freedom. In his sequence of stages, human history begins with the development of states in which at first only one was free – the ruler, mostly in the figure of the priest-king, who symbolizes the laws of the gods and rule. Still with Plato we find the construction of the philosopher, who must be at the same time king and vice versa. This all-surpassing freedom of the priest-kings is clearly found for Hegel in the pyramids of Egypt. Hegel calls this phase the infancy of history. Greek antiquity, and here especially the city of Athens, is for him the adolescence of world history – the first individualities are formed. The aesthetics of the Greek statues symbolize for him this phase, in which man understands himself as free, when he professes his free polis. In a certain sense, this phase can be understood as that of the aristocracy, because Athens symbolizes the beginning of democracy, but of the approximately 200,000 inhabitants, only about 30,000 were free – slaves, women and metics (“strangers”) were excluded from freedom.

    The focus is no longer on the individual, but on the supra-individual law. Even today, the study of law begins with Roman law (e.g., in dubio pro reo or nulla poene sine lege). Of course, not only Hegel’s choice of words is problematic (e.g., that of “oriental despotism” as the beginning of world history), but also the identification of the fourth stage with the “Germanic period” as the “goal of world history.”

    For Hegel, the manhood of world history is that of the Roman Empire. Here, not the individual but the state has become the supreme purpose and Roman law is developed. The focus is no longer on the individual, but on the supra-individual law. Even today, the study of law begins with Roman law (e.g., in dubio pro reo or nulla poene sine lege). Of course, not only Hegel’s choice of words is problematic (e.g., that of “oriental despotism” as the beginning of world history), but also the identification of the fourth stage with the “Germanic period” as the “goal of world history.” Nevertheless, his characterization is noteworthy. In this stage the state is ordered according to reasonable principles, the individual is completely free because he lives in a reasonable society whose laws he recognizes and to which he can refer. Community and individual are reconciled, the ups and downs of world history (as illustrated in the sine curve) seem to have come to their end and now the real history of mankind begins, a happy time.

    Of course, we know that this was not so, as Hegel assumed – the violent conquest of the world in colonial times, two world wars, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, the almost self-destruction of mankind in the cold war, all this was still to come. But is Hegel thereby refuting? Or can and perhaps must we continue Hegel?

    Differences to Hegel

     In contrast to Hegel’s conception of world history as a progress in the consciousness of freedom, I argue that this development is a progress in the consciousness and practices of humanity to be a wholenessness. Hereby, I no longer foreground Kant’s four questions concerning the individual human being or even an “I”, but rather transform them into who is humanity, what should we do as humanity, what can we know and hope as humanity? The concept of humanity contains the single individual, but this goes beyond the generalization of the individual as in Kant’s categorical imperative. Also, here the old sentence of Aristotle is valid that the whole is more than the sum of the parts – and so I would like to add, mankind as a wholeness is more than the accumulation of at present over 7.8 billion people. At the same time, humanity is realized in individual human beings; there is no humanity without individual human beings.

    According to the “Out of Africa thesis,” the genus Homo originated in Africa and spread from there to all continents. One of these groups, immodestly calling itself homo sapiens, has not only outlasted all other human species, but has populated even the most distant tip of this earth, moreover, is making its way to other planets of our solar system. Arnold Gehlen’s determination of man (as also already Aristotle) as imperfect, forces mankind to develop more and more. During this time of spreading over the whole planet, however, the individual groups lost contact with each other, because this lasted for millennia and the distances became too great for the time to bridge in shorter periods of time – they became estranged from each other and lived in isolated cultural islands (for example in China, India, in Africa south of the Sahara, the two Americas or also in the more European part of Eurasia as well as in West Asia). With the increasing spread of these initially isolated cultural islands, they came back into contact with each other – which turned out to be peaceful or sometimes warlike. Huntington’s thesis that these contacts were mainly violent underestimates the mutual cultural influences and learning processes. Globalization since European colonization brought humanity into ever closer contact with each other and made it possible for the first time to think of humanity as a wholeness.

     Of course, the setbacks and low blows must not be forgotten – the wars between the great empires, the almost perpetual state of war at the edges of these empires, colonialism, Islamic and Atlantic slavery, racism, two world wars and Auschwitz as a sign of history – but in the end they confirmed the dictum of Goethe and, derived from this, systematized by Hegel as the cunning of history. This is a part of that force which always wills evil and yet creates good. This does not mean to relativize the suffering of countless people. But perhaps we must differentiate and not already take the ideals of the Enlightenment at face value. For this was not only compatible with racism, colonialism, and slavery, two world wars and the Cold War – according to Zygmunt Bauman, these were even direct consequences of a one-sided Enlightenment.

    There is currently a worldwide biologisation of the social in the form of ethnicities, gender antagonisms, nationalism and tribalism (Make America great again by Donald Trump, the Chinese Dream by President Xi Jinping, New Russia by Vladimir Putin, Salafism, right-wing nationalist movements in Europe).

    If, on the other hand, we assume that the impulse of the realization of human rights could actually only fully develop after World War II and the Holocaust, and included all people, not just one’s own ethnic, cultural, or religious group, we are only at the beginning of the realization of human rights. Again, while it is true that there are setbacks at present – in the form of a discourse of “We against the Rest,” the current replacement of global governance by a renationalisation of world politics, the return of tribal thinking to cope with the demands of globalization, this is not the whole picture. It is also true that globalized liquid modernity (Bauman) is leading to the dissolution of all traditional identities including patriarchy as well as consumerism and many states and nations are updating ancient identities because they trust them to outdo even this accelerated transformation, There is currently a worldwide biologisation of the social in the form of ethnicities, gender antagonisms, nationalism and tribalism (Make America great again by Donald Trump, the Chinese Dream by President Xi Jinping, New Russia by Vladimir Putin, Salafism, right-wing nationalist movements in Europe). Nevertheless, while we are simultaneously witnessing the (often violent) dissolution of the old world, we are also experiencing the birth pangs of a new world. After the West defeated the rest of the world in the 19th century, colonised or submerged peoples and civilizations in the 20th century had to learn to live with the victorious West. In the 21st century, the world’s civilizations must finally learn to live with each other.

    In the 1990s, Samuel P. Huntington put forward the much-publicised thesis that the cold war between the ideologically opposed superpowers would be replaced by a similar contest between the world’s civilizations and their respective core states (Russia, India, China, the United States). On the surface, Huntington received more criticism than approval. A closer reading of his approach reveals that he had not drawn up an instruction manual for the “clash of civilizations,” but had formulated a warning to avoid it. The liberal critics, however, emphasized in particular that not only should there not be a clash of civilizations, but also that there could not be, because there was only one civilization in the world, the Western one. The other civilizations mentioned by Huntington are determined by different religions and cultures, but they would not be civilizations. In contrast, the “clash of civilizations” involves a conflict, but the implicit recognition that civilizations other than the Western one exists at all.

    In the 21st century, the world’s civilizations must finally learn to live with each other.

    This recognition of a limited plurality of civilizations makes possible for the first time the thinking, experiencing, and acting of humanity as a wholenessness. In such a wholenessness, opposites, conflicts and even wars are conceivable – from a sociological perspective, conflicts are not opposed to a socialization of humanity (sociology of conflict in the wake of Tönnies and Simmel), even if these bring much suffering with them.  All high religions that emerged between the 7th century B.C. (Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity) and the 7th century A.D. (Islam) formulate an overcoming and renunciation of infinite suffering. This ethicization of transcendence (Jaspers) or also of immanence (Confucianism) contains in its core a perspective of the abolition of suffering, which can be overcome either in transcendence or, with appropriate conduct of life, already in immanence. Suffering, war, and violence are thus no longer accepted as “natural”, but an attempt is made to leave them behind. Although in Hinduism the cycle (symbolized in the wheel) is emphasized – but the goal of life in the different rebirths consists in overcoming this cycle. Therefore, a core message of Hinduism is the statement that the end is good – but if it is not good, it is not the end. While in the “nature religions” like also the Egyptian mythology, before the emergence of these high religions the transcendence was only a mirror of the earthly life, this is explained now to be absolute good – connected with the perspective to orientate the own life at this construction.

    in Hinduism the cycle (symbolized in the wheel) is emphasized – but the goal of life in the different rebirths consists in overcoming this cycle. Therefore, a core message of Hinduism is the statement that the end is good – but if it is not good, it is not the end.

    Here it should not be concealed that this ethicization of the transcendent as well as of immanence can be and has been used to legitimize violence – in direct inversion to Goethe and Hegel we have to acknowledge that the absolutization of the good has also contributed to the legitimization of war and violence in the form: “this is a part of that force which always wants the good and yet creates evil” (Herberg-Rothe). In contrast to positions that attribute the positive sides of religions only to these themselves, the negative ones exclusively to the respective social, political, cultural, and historical circumstances, I assume that the absolutization of the respective ideas contains a tendency to violence. After the western modernity had written the generalization of the presupposed individual on the flags, a new balance of the individual and the communality is to be constructed for a dialogue of the civilizations, which contains at the same time their further development.

    Mankind understood in this way does not include a pure juxtaposition in the sense of a diversity of the civilizations of the world, as this is laid out – despite all remarkable insights – in the conception of a multiplex world or a Global International Relations Theory (Global IRT), both by Amitav Acharya, which is connected only by communication. The conceptions of diversity also do not go beyond mere multiplicity. All these conceptions in the wake of the French post-structuralisms have their strength in the critique as well as overcoming of totalitarian and authoritarian social relations or system constraints and discourses of power. However, since their own approach excludes borders per se, they cannot include any border of their respective approach. Diversity is wonderful and colourful – also the questioning and de-construction of the “normal” following Foucault has been an essential progress, just as tolerance is a moral value to be demanded always. The question, however, is where the limits of tolerance are – we should be far less tolerant of human rights violations, even if the understanding of human rights remains contested in different “cultures.”

    Conclusion

    From Thomas Hobbes we have learned that unlimited freedom leads to war of all against all, civil war.  Freedom must therefore be limited in order to enable people to live together peacefully. But how can freedom be meaningfully limited without oppressing people? Kant’s solution, that my freedom ends where the freedom of the other begins, is a nice metaphor, but far from adequate when two or more parties lay claim to the same good in the broadest sense.  The idea that it is not an oppression of freedom if it is limited only by the freedom of the other is a pure illusion. Even if in the wars and civil wars of the present, the refugee movements and in the worldwide slums, a human life seems to count for little, it must be maintained that all human beings have the same human rights, they are equally endowed with dignity and conscience. Freedom thus finds its limits not primarily in the freedom of others, but, since it is not an abstract freedom, rather one of human beings – thus in their fundamental equality as human beings and thus human rights. Following Hannah Arendt, one can say that freedom does not consist in arbitrariness, but in the right to be different from others. The path of humanity is shown here as self-preservation based in our equality and self-transgression in the freedom to differ from other humans. Such an understanding of the equality of us all as humans seem to contradict all current developments and appears as a kind of wishful thinking. But it is perhaps not just an idea of a better future, but the question how mankind could see itself as a wholeness in order to survive.

     

    References:

    Acharya, Amitav and Barry Buzan (ed.). Non-Western International Relations Theory: Perspectives on and beyond Asia. New York: Routledge, 2010.

    Anders, Gunther; Christopher John Muller. Prometheanism: technology, digital culture, and human obsolescence. London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd., 2016.

    Arendt, Hannah; Danielle Allen and Margaret Canovan. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

    Arendt, Hannah and Anne Applebaum. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt: Brace & co, 1951.

    Bauman, Zygment. Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press, 2000.

    Bauman, Zygment. Born Liquid. Polity Press, 2018.

    Comte, Auguste and Harriet Martineau. The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte: Freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau. New York: C. Blanchard, 1858.

    Gehlen, Arnold. Man, his Nature and Place in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

    Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. London: Andrew Crooke, 1651.

    Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

    Kant, Immanuel; J M D Meiklejohn. Critique of Pure Reason: Tr. from German of Immanuel Kant. London: Bell, 1881.

    Machiavelli, Niccolo. Discourses. S. I.: Open Road Media, 2020. Internet.

    Magen, Nathan H. The Kondratieff Waves. New York: Praeger, 987.

    Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels; David McLellen. Communist Manifesto. Oxford University Press, 1992.

    Shuman James B., and David Rosenau. The Kondratieff Wave by James B. Shuman and David Rosenau.New York: World Pub, 1972.

    Tonnies, Ferdinand; edited by Jose Harris. Ferdinand Tonnies: Community and Society. Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2001.

     

    Feature Image Credit: NDTV