Tag Archives: NATO

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: War: New Times

It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington D.C originally expected – or ten weeks, as the pessimists thought. It may well extend to ten months and possibly morph into another ‘forever war’ (both hot and cold).

We are therefore turning our original FocaalBlog discussion, launched in the very first days of the war, into a rolling Feature that is open for any genre of submission: ethnographical, historical, theoretical, global.

So, this is an open call: we invite further contributions.

However, given the sprawling passions around this topic and the massive ideology production and propaganda on all sides, we emphasize that at FocaalBlog we continue to honor the elementary distinctions between description, explanation, historical contextualization, and moral justification. We are not in the business of the latter, and none of our authors engages in it.

A white man wearing a gray beanie and black tracksuit, with a cigarette in his mouth, carries a small dog and a grocery sack down a pathway surrounded by trash and rubble. A larger dog walks behind him and others follow in the distance.
Image 1: Bucha after Russian invasion, photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak

We remain deeply and intimately interested not only in what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukrainian and Russian citizens of all sorts – including the young and better educated current refugees into the EU as well as the older vulnerable people who remain behind in the war torn villages and suburbs without food or water – but also in the critique of war, militarism, imperialism, violence, primitive accumulation, ideology, nationalism, fascism, racism, and the shifting power fields of the ever less liberal global order in which this war is embedded, into which it feeds, and which it may accelerate.

This involves any type of critique of all the main actors in this cruel and utterly dangerous drama started by Putin. There is no doubt, this is Putin’s war. While this is so in a juridical sense, we should carefully consider that the very possibility of this war, with the exact same stated reasons and objectives from the side of Russia (minus the ethno-essentialism), was already discussed between US Secretary of State James Baker and (former) President Gorbachev in 1992, long before Putin came on stage (Sarotte 2021). Thus, the critique also continues to include prominently the US, the EU, and NATO.

There are loud and self-advertised NATO anthropologists around these days who imagine that NATO can save us from the abys and must have been the solution all along. They should never forget this: while NATO was steadily expanding in Eastward direction towards Russian borders (CEE, Georgia, Ukraine), it was simultaneously waging war for one and a half decade in the Middle East, invading, occupying, and destroying countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, at the cost of close to a million official deaths (on Yemen, a proxy war, we keep counting). The US and the UK had acted on transparent lies and treacherous accusations, had blatantly ignored the United Nations, and pushed aside the principled objections against their aggression within NATO/the West. The unprecedented and globe spanning anti-war demonstrations of early 2003 made no impression whatsoever. Russia, not averse to superpower aspirations of its own, duly took note (as did China): this is apparently allowed. We as anthropologists and citizens (mostly) of the Western world do not have the moral luxury to forget this. This is ‘hard’ knowledge, and it is an anthropological sine qua non for understanding the contemporary world order.

We are writing almost two months into the violence (19 April 2022). The UN has openly acknowledged that a majority of the more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees will probably never actually ‘go home’ again. In the centers of war planning, it is also now gradually accepted that the expected but failed Russian blitz into Ukraine, which in Russia itself was not allowed to be called a war, is sliding unstoppably into a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and NATO, with heavy and advanced weapons deployed on both sides and both military colossuses determined not to lose. Ukrainians continue to heroically play their part and to actively imagine, and being made to imagine, that it is a war for their ‘sovereignty and freedom’. At some point, the distance between these abstract and lofty desires and the raw reality of death, destruction, and mass out-migration will for some begin to feel alienating. After the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser on 16 April even TV commentators in Moscow, in emotional outbursts, are now allowed to call this a war. Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox church continues to defend the holy war of Mother Russia against the sinful West of the LGBT’s and the gay parades. Meanwhile, in a militarily surrounded and levelled Mariupol, the hard Right Azov Brigade, or what is left of it, refuses to give up its arms and has retreated into the underground tunnel complexes of the giant Azov Steel complex. They are betting that the massive soviet heritage of industrial labor they had so ardently wished to erase ideologically during the ‘de-communization’ campaigns and memory wars after the 2014 Maidan revolution, might in the end offer them some paradoxical protection. President Zelensky, chosen in 2019 on a platform that resolutely rejected the polarizing identarian logic of the nationalist-civilizational cleavages of Ukraine’s antagonistic governmental elites (‘European Ukraine’ versus ‘Russian’), saw his program quickly collapse in the face of determined right wing nationalist opposition, such as from the members and supporters of the Azov Brigade. The Minsk 2 peace process then all but stalled. Zelensky has now announced that if these circa 2000 national heroes of Ukraine get killed in the Azov Steel tunnels, there cannot be any peace negotiations and Ukraine must fight for final victory. All the actors are overwhelmed by the logic of war.  

Outside of the immediate theatre, much of the Global South and all the BRICS have refused to support the Western condemnation and isolation of Russia, which they find sanctimonious. The spiking inflation in the prices of energy and food probably mean that, after the massive build-up of pandemic related debt, many of these postcolonial nations are going to face simultaneous famine and debt-defaults by the end of the year, with likely resounding political consequences. The West, meanwhile, bootstrapping itself out of the embarrassing Afghanistan debacle of just half a year ago, and finding itself viscerally surprised about its own sudden unity, has accepted President Zelensky as the brave contemporary embodiment of its own historical ideals of liberty and freedom, so under siege lately by domestic ‘populism’. It has launched unprecedented financial punishment on Russia – deploying its continued exclusive control over financial circuits and values – and is seeking to isolate and cut down Russia for the long term by banning its oil and gas while claiming to speed up its own green transition. China, clearly, is far from ready to impose a Bismarckian moment (the Berlin conference of 1885 that carved up the world for colonialism) and seems willing to remain modestly supportive of the Russian side – indeed, Putin started his war directly after meeting privately with Xi. There is no doubt that the US is waging its proxy war also with an eye on teaching China what can happen if it does not abide by Western rules. Western Central Banks, meanwhile, faced with the highest inflation in four decades, revert to an earlier monetary normal, and are beginning to push up the interest rates, loosely talking about ‘a repeat of stagflation’ (a misplaced comparison with the 1970s), a possible ‘Volcker moment’, and a ‘necessary economic recession’. Global South and other big debtors are forewarned. Donald Trump is waiting rather quietly in the wings, as is Marine Le Pen, both (former?) admirers and clients of Vladimir Putin.

The palimpsest is utterly scary, full of actual and potential future violence, extremely volatile and dynamic, and full of powerful contradictions. We need to think, discover, describe, and analyze. On the ground and off the ground. New Times.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Editor at Large of Focaal Journal and FocaalBlog.

References

Sarotte, M.E. 2021. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. New Haven: Yale U.P

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. ‟War: New Times.‟ FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine

After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the charismatic President Zelensky, who has addressed parliaments in Brussels and Westminster to rapturous applause. In Britain, football stadia and Oxbridge colleges (including my own) have draped themselves in the Ukrainian national colours. There is little or no attempt to representation of the Russian perspective. It is light versus darkness, innocent victims versus post-communist megalomaniacs, Europe versus Oriental Despotism. In her recent contribution to this blog, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn presents the binary in terms of the right of smaller peoples to choose freedom in the face of Russian neo-imperialism.

The evidence seems so clear cut that only a Putin stooge or an idiot could argue differently. But anthropologists have a habit of complicating matters and they are not alone in doing so. You don’t have to be a Marxist to highlight the humiliation heaped upon Russia by Western leaders unable to discard their Cold War blinkers; but David Harvey addresses this emotional dimension particularly well. The West bears a lot of responsibility for creating the monster called Putin: it rebuffed Russian efforts to integrate into western institutions, instead targeting their closest relations for admission to the world’s most militarily powerful and economically prosperous alliances (Kalb 2022). Elsewhere, Michael Hudson has pinpointed the American interests that lie behind spectacular demonstrations of renewed Western unity; the catastrophe in distant Ukraine is already a defeat for Europe, and especially Germany, by the military-industrial complex of the capitalist hegemon, in combination with the key sectors of resource extraction and finance.

Image 1: The CIA was actively involved in the maidan demonstrations of 2014; it did not trust Ukrainian “civil society” to secure an optimal outcome for Washington, photo by Ivan Bandura

Few of the analyses I have read so far engage with the history and geography of the places where the violence is unfolding. I suspect most Western Europeans and North Americans perceive Ukraine naively as the historic homeland of the Ukrainian people, regrettably complicated by a subversive Russian minority. In fact, the territory of contemporary Ukraine has been occupied by many diverse populations since prehistoric times (Magocsi 2010 provides a dispassionate and comprehensive history). The dominant elements in the last millennium have been Slavic. Kyiv was the centre of the first Rus’ polity. The city was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 and was not reintegrated into a Slavic state until centuries later. A Ukrainian national consciousness emerged only in the late Tsarist era. When the great empires of the region collapsed at the end of the First World War, the majority of former subjects hardly knew what their identity was (or should become) as citizens of a nation-state. In the case of Ukraine, this learning process has dragged out over a century. It is being completed before our eyes in the most tragic way imaginable.

This particular history needs to be born in mind constantly when commentators write about “the Ukrainian people” as an entity of great antiquity. It goes without saying that the writers of history books in today’s post-Soviet Ukraine can evoke national heroes who repelled invaders in the distant past. This is in fact easier terrain than the twentieth century. Elizabeth Dunn is right to note that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a product of forcible incorporation into a new empire, that of the USSR. She does not describe the chaotic and violent circumstances in which very different Ukrainian polities were constructed on the ground in 1918-9, when the national flag was already the flag in use today. She does not mention the large-scale pogroms that characterized the larger of these embryonic Ukrainian states. The dark history of repressed Ukrainian nationalism continued during and after the Second World War (see also Kalb 2022), when most of its leaders collaborated with Nazi occupying forces and instigated new campaigns of terror against Poles as well as Jews. Dunn cites the result of the referendum of 1991 as evidence that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens wished to regain their sovereignty. She does not detail the circumstances in which this referendum was held, following an attempted coup in Moscow, when the socialist empire had already imploded. Earlier in that same year (despite a national revival in the years of perestroika), a large majority of Ukrainian citizens voted not for independence but for a continuation of the Soviet Union in some form.

It is easy to get lost in such details and anthropological case-studies are unlikely to help. We need tools for comparative analysis at the macro level. In an original comparison of the demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Andre Gingrich (2002) proposed the concept of “dethroned majorities” to help grasp the virulence of national sentiment both inside and outside the boundaries of the shrivelled states that emerged from imperial collapse. It is instructive to consider contemporary Ukraine in this light, where the “dethroning” was interrupted for almost a century by socialist federalism. In this post-imperial conjuncture, the familiar range of ressentiments at the former imperial centre has been intensified by the broken promises of the West. Simultaneously, emotions also run high among those motivated by a mission to consolidate a new nation-state on exclusivist principles, with a particular distaste for co-citizens suspected by virtue of their nationality of identifying with the ancien régime.

Structurally, the comparative analysis of socialist empires should be extended to China. While copying many aspects of Soviet nationalities policy, Mao was careful to maintain continuity with the Qing dynasty: thus even “autonomous” regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang were integral components of the sovereign nation-state. Although few Cold War scholars in the West took Soviet federalism seriously, without this “decorative fiction” the constituent republics would not have been able to proclaim their independence as they did, hastening the final disintegration of the USSR.

Does each sovereign state have the right to seek out new partners freely and without restriction? International law guarantees this, but again it is worth considering real-life comparisons. Elizabeth Dunn invokes Canada and Mexico hypothetically, but the case of Cuba seems more pertinent. When the Soviet Union (responding to Western initiatives in Eurasia) sought to place missiles on the territory of its ally in 1962, President Kennedy triumphed in the ensuing diplomacy. So much for sovereignty. If we are to avoid double standards, it is incumbent on us in the West to see the expansion of NATO through Russian eyes, i.e. as aggression.

The Russian Federation has swallowed the admission to the Western military alliance of several former allies and even the Baltic states that were formerly inside the empire. But it has always stressed that Ukraine was different. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric concerning Ukraine is open to the same objections as that of his neo-nationalist opponents: essentialist notions of the Eastern Slavs as one people eternally are no more convincing than Adolf Hitler’s justifications for the Anschluss of Austria. So Dunn is right: Ukrainian citizens should have the right to opt for new allegiances. Some observers may object that they have not done so freely, that the CIA played a key role in the Maidan demonstrations that toppled an elected government. The circumstances were tarnished. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the “European” course would in any case have triumphed eventually. With millions of Ukrainians already working in the West as labour migrants, the material incentives to benefit from consolidating this affiliation were overwhelming.

At the supra-national level, the European Union must be similarly free to decide who is eligible for “priority partner” status and who is to be left out in the cold. But those who formulate and justify these policies in the name of “democracy promotion” have elementary obligations to reckon with the consequences of their implementation. The combination of geopolitical security considerations and intimate historical connections make for a complex configuration in which it was irresponsible of the West to forge ahead in transforming Ukraine into a neoliberal “vassal state” (Kalb 2022) while isolating Russia.

Almost thirty years have passed since Samuel Huntington put forward his own distinctive vision of how cultural factors would come to dominate geopolitics in the wake of the Cold War (Huntington 1996). The conservative political scientist, though hardly an expert on East-Central Europe, paid considerable attention to Ukraine. He saw the country as divided by a “fault line” between east and west. In the west, Galicians had been free to nurture national sentiment under the Habsburgs, while the Greek-Catholic Church had introduced elements of pluralism characteristic of the West. No such pluralism was tolerated in the Russian-controlled territories, which according to Huntington belonged to a distinct civilization. This binary makes anthropologists uncomfortable but it is not entirely fabricated. East-west differences have been clearly visible in Ukrainian voting patterns since the 1990s, as the country oscillated between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments. Nationalist sentiment has always been strongest in western cities such as Lviv. This is not the sort of nationalism that commends itself to liberals in Brussels. In practice it has meant, for example, significant constraints on the evolved rights of Hungarian and Rusyn minorities in Transcarpathia.

Might any positives emerge from this tragedy? It is hard to be optimistic. Persistent nationalist blemishes in Ukraine might be excused in light of the post-imperial conjuncture, and corrected once the country is inside the European Union (though the examples of neighbouring Hungary and Poland are not encouraging in this regard). Another pious hope would be that the corruption riddling Ukraine’s post-Soviet kleptocracy (until now so similar to that of Russia) might be more effectively addressed following accession.

In any case, rapid accession is surely inevitable. When the “dethroned majority” resorts to such brutal action, Huntingtonian fault lines will finally be transcended. Ukraine will not have to oscillate any longer. Having paid a ghastly price in blood, it will be welcomed as a worthy member of the Euro-American civilization, thereby taking its long history of imperial peripherality to a new level. Fast-track admission may also be offered to Moldova and Georgia. NATO membership will perhaps have to be postponed for all three, but only for as long as Western Europe remains highly dependent on Russian gas and oil.

It is hard to see any grounds for optimism at all concerning Russia. The Kremlin will dig in and continue to behave badly in fogs of nationalism. Putin and his eventual successors will emphatically deserve to remain in that category of “other” (for the free West), with all glimmers of a post-Soviet escape route extinguished. Russia will continue to occupy that slot at least until an alternative “other” has taken shape (perhaps the socialist empire that rejected the federal model?).

Meanwhile the immediate winners of this catastrophe are Washington, numerous large American corporations, and generally the manufacturers of weapons and flags.

Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

References

Gingrich, Andre 2002. “When ethnic majorities are ‘dethroned’: towards a methodology of self-reflexive, controlled macrocomparison” in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox eds. Anthropology, By Comparison. London: Routledge. pp. 225-48.

Hudson, Michael. 2022. “America defeats Germany for the third time in a century.” Monthly Review online blog, 28th February: https://mronline.org/2022/02/28/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/

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

Kalb, Don. 2022. “‘Fuck Off’ versus ‘Humiliation’: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East.” FocaalBlog, 1 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/01/don-kalb-fuck-off-versus-humiliation-the-perverse-logic-towards-war-in-europes-east/

Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2010. A History of Ukraine. The Land and Its Peoples. (Second Edition) Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Cite as: Hann, Chris. 2022. “The Agony of Ukraine.” FocaalBlog, 11 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order.  While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty.  Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921.  Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes”  (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.

Dimly lit firefighters stand amid smoke and ruined buildings.
Image 1: An apartment block in Kyiv (Oleksandr Koshyts Street) after shelling, 25 February (Credit: Kyiv City Council, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR3ieAzQ7Nt8LBf62tYs1P2fORG-QVNV1uP-8DNiZqlZ6j1tJHFRaI1Rrzg#/media/File:Житловий_будинок_у_Києві_(вул._Кошиця)_після_обстрілу.jpg)

Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.”  He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”

Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.  

Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:

“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).

The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets.  But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia.  As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.

Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).

The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020).  Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.

David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.  

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University.  Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992.  Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation.  Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs.  Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.

References

Bilous, Taras. 2022. “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv”, Commons, February 25, https://commons.com.ua/en/letter-western-left-kyiv/

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen.  2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004.  Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.

Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.

Hall, Derek, 2002. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to Harvey.” https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/28/derek-hall-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-response-to-david-harvey/

Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.

Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos

Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.

Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the  environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.

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Chris Hann: The Expansion of NATO and the Contraction of Eurasia

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in South Wales held 4–5 September 2014 was heavily mediatized in member countries as a “wake-up call” for this military alliance, for Europe, and even for Western civilization. Violence in eastern Ukraine, for which Vladimir Putin alone was allegedly responsible, was said to be catapulting the world back to the polarization of the Cold War. Yet when one looked more closely, Putin’s propaganda was restrained in comparison with the inflammatory rhetoric of the retiring NATO secretary general and the hyperbole of the US State Department and numerous European politicians with only one thing in common: They knew little or nothing about the history of Ukraine.

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