Bombs damaging gas pipelines. What will be the next target? Submarine internet connections? By now the vulnerability of the global society should be obvious. Also far below the threshold of a direct full scale war between the big powers, our intertwined and complex world can be seriously damaged by small actions.
Thus, also without military counterattack, a power under pressure has possibilities
for striking back, possibilities unparalleled in history.
Some East European countries are closing their borders for Russian refugees fleeing military recruitment for the war in Ukraine. Embarrassing indeed! This shows that we are talking about a generalized racism against all Russians, even opponents of the enemy in Moscow.
Earlier I predicted that the Russian invasion would westernize
East Europe politically and culturally. Several developments and not least that
borders are being closed for Russians turning westwards give doubt concerning
the cultural aspect. Instead, returning Russian refugees to Russia shows that
these East European countries mentally are approaching rather than distancing
themselves from Russia.
If also Ukraine were to join the EU, then the Union
would have a giant Eastern LGBT-free region breaking down democracy and abusing
Brussels in their fight against Russia, against all Russian and against all
Russians. This even though the eastern region in internal politics and culture would
resemble Russia closely…
Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain
Friedrich Schiller
The US Supreme Court has just overturned Roe v. Wade.
It is highly signifikant that members of this august institution act like mere tools for Trumpists and Evangelical radicals, a minority of the American nation localized at one extreme pole of the political spectrum. With the simultaneous decision to stop NY’s century old gun control law - which was simply common sense – the Court even turns against the true Republicans (not RINOs) who together with Democrats in the Senate have worked for a minimum of gun control.
We are approaching the day when we may see more events like the storming of Congress, now initiated from a left wing outraged and radicalized by the general offensive from the right wing. An extreme minority cannot in the United States enforce it’s policies without resistance from people, politicians and states.
It is interesting and fascinating for a historian to follow this replication of the last century of the Roman Republic, but for the American nation it the prospects are troubling indeed.
The first couple of decades of the 21. century has been
marked by a surprising series of misguided actions with major strategic and in
some cases humanitarian consequences. I will discuss some of these.
The US invasion of Iraq
The main strategic consequences of this invasion were
within the field of terrorism. Here the effects were the opposite of the
purpose. Instead of Al-Qaeda we got ISIS which was far worse.
The humanitarian consequences are often forgotten. Hundreds
of thousands of people, mostly civilians were killed.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine
I will not here list all the adverse strategic reverses
Russia will suffer because of this mistaken invasion.
Over the preceding moths numerous commentators have done
this. It can be summarised as increased sphere of influence of the West and a major
economic decline and dependency on China.
The humanitarian consequences within Ukraine are grave compared
to the norms of the civilized world, but they will be dwarfed by the recession
and the famine which, intended or not, can result in the third world.
The ongoing self-destruction of the GOP
The decline of the US Republicans which became very visible
under President Clinton is now accelerating at an unbelievable rate. This plus
the ensuing insurmountable polarisation of the United States will harm the whole
country. As often predicted the American nation is approaching civil war-like conditions
with violent shifts of power and hindrance of shifts of power. Policies will shift
between opposites so extreme that half the population can become rebels. The
anti-abortion legislations and the role of the Supreme Court in this matter is
an obvious example.
In this way the decline of the GOP will entail the
self-degradation of the United States. And this at a time when America is
preparing for the expected power struggle with it’s big competitor China.
For a big nation engaged in a competition for power with
other big nations, a struggle which can ultimately become existential, one of the
most important purposes of internal politics is to make sure that your own
nation is strong, is fit for the fight. This means not least that it is
coherent and stable. But for the Republicans their own power and extreme views are
far more important than their country.
A degraded America cannot fight two strong competitors. Therefore,
it is no wonder that the United States want to use the war in Ukraine to
degrade Russia. If you degrade yourself, it is a good idea to also degrade one
of the competing countries. Ukraine is being used for this.
But if Trumpism returns we might see another answer to the dilemma
of the Americans. The rising volatility of domestic and international politics plus
a type of leader freed from traditions and experts will find it easy to shift
alliances. A degraded America in alliance with Russia – none of them inhibited
by traditions - would be a better match for China. That this prospect is a real
possibility is one more reason why the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a
strategic mistake. Starting it under President Biden was bad timing.
A Russia weakened because of the invasion, the sanctions
and the indirect American participation in the war would be an inferior ally for
a US president (or a Chinese).
The ongoing digitalisation of the EU
The EU is a further possible power. It’s renewed dependence
on the Americans under President Biden seems very short-sighted taken the unpredictability
of the United States and prospects like the above into consideration. I hope
that behind closed doors our politicians think and talk about and prepare for radically
changed conditions. Everybody is talking about the new world situation after
the Russian invasion. But the significance of this will be minor compared to
what could come from Washington.
Europe is in a very weak position because of it’s disunited
condition, easy prey for big powers playing divide and rule. Treacherous right
wing populists work to aid them by splitting the EU. Another very important
factor of weakness is the lack of an own strong IT-industry and the resulting
dependency on America and China. In view of this it is unforgivably stupid that
we have digitalised both public and private sectors in a heavy degree and continue
to do so. As written earlier, this corresponds to building railroads and
highways from the enemy’s military bases to the centre of your own country
without any great firewall to block invasions.
And China?
Three of the World’s major players are thus weakening
themselves. What about the fourth, China? Till now China has made no major single
strategic error. But the accumulating weight of it’s bad reputation is taking
it’s toll. On the humanitarian level the suffering of the few dissidents or the
number of people suffering in Hong Kong or even in Xinjiang is apparently too
limited for European and Moslem politicians compared to economy. But a public
opinion in the West driven by both real idealistic concern and new cold war rhetoric
is pressuring these politicians *.
I am not claiming or assuming that an immediate Chinese
invasion of Taiwan is on the table. But if it happened it would have major adverse
strategic, not least economic consequences. It would be the next major
strategic mistake in our century. Such an invasion would not be swallowed as
easily. It could cause an early disastrous bifurcation of the World as public
opinion and not least sanctions enforced worldwide by the Americans could force
Europe politically and economically into the sphere of the United States. Latin
America would with great likelihood be pressed in the same direction. The
position of India vis-à-vis China is clear. Countries bordering the South China
Sea would also turn to Washington. The sphere or rather area of control of the
United States would be large in population, area and wealth no matter the
condition of this power and no matter on which side Russia would be. Obviously,
the recession caused by an economic shock-rupture would cause a major worldwide
recession.
China has been very qualified in strategic planning and
acting, both internally and externally. But the result of this can quickly be
undone. Just as a major int’l player has an obligation to stay internally fit
for the external competition, he or she also has an obligation to act externally
in ways that do not harm internally.
Conclusion
The discussion above clearly illustrates the lack of
strategic thinking which is typical for late modernities. This is what makes these
periods so unpredictable. Nations which maintain a certain ability to act
strategically will have a clear advantage in the global competition over the next
decades. Long term planning, facts and realpolitik matters. Mistakes and politics or acts based on outbursts
of feelings, biased perceptions, symbols and stubbornness must be avoided.
NOTE
*La séparatisme islamiste is to a large extent the result
of a trait of the Oriental civilization: the segregated living of its
constituent nations. This cannot be overcome by placing Moslems in impoverished
suburbs or locked up in harsh camps. Such treatments only confirm the
segregation. Instead, the young generation should be drowned in wealth, smartphones
and TikTok. This would quickly solve the problem.
In 146 BC, i.e. in the second half of the Greco-Roman
modernity, the Romans destroyed Carthage, caused the death of most of it’s inhabitants
and sold the rest as slaves. This was the so-called Third Punic War, but in reality
just a brutal slaughter of a city which for decades had been completely pacified.
In the same year the famous Greek city of Corinth suffered the same fate. Both attacks
hit cities populated with highly civilized people and aroused shock and horror.
Later as Rome controlled most of the Mediterranean world the series of shocking
events continued internally with political killings and proscriptions.
Corresponding events took place during the horrible wars for
hegemony of the Warring States period in China which lasted from ca. 500 to 221
BC. In the year 260 BC in the battle of Changping the state Qin buried several hundred
thousand defeated soldiers from the state Zhao alive. The historian Sima Qian reports
that Qin in the same period raided a neighbouring country simply to kill men
which could otherwise serve as soldiers. Like the crimes of the Romans these
ones by Qin also affected highly civilized people and caused great horror. Of
course this was part of the purpose; deter peoples and governments from resistance
in the ongoing end fight for hegemony.
The Germans have coined the term Zivilisationsbruch, in
English civilizational rupture, to denote deliberate events and acts which grossly
defy all ideas and ideals about humanity built up over centuries of civilising
culture. The mentioned acts by Rome and Qin are examples of such civilizational
ruptures in those civilizations. Many civilizations experience such shocking
events during their modernity.
In a given modernity civilizational ruptures may come in
more than one wave. In our Western civilization the Nazis and World War II represented
a first brutal wave. The Holocaust was the archetypical Zivilisationsbruch.
Exactly the extreme shock caused by the concentration camps and the World War was
part of what triggered the great efforts of our mature modernity having the
purpose of securing peace and wellbeing for as many people as possible.
Drawing on historical precedents this period could be
predicted to end in another wave of civilizational ruptures, that is if we
refused to learn and therefore made the wrong decisions. The Russian war
against Ukraine is a major civilizational rupture and marks the second wave. Obviously,
despite understandable comparisons with the Nazis by angry Ukrainian
politicians and corresponding politicising comparisons by some in the West, the
scale of the Russian acts till now is smaller than that of the Nazis. But
seeing towns full of people like you and I being bombed to rubble while the inhabitants
try to hide in the metro is indeed shocking. And reports of deliberate killing
of civilians just reinforce a picture of utter barbarism raining down on
innocent civilized civilians.
Of course it does make a difference where in the world we are,
and this is not automatically an expression of racism. All civilizations consist
of a central thoroughly civilized area plus less civilized fringe areas. The
peoples and countries in the fringe areas typically have a history more continuously
filled with wars and violence. Therefore a sudden appearance of such violence
in the central civilized countries must cause shock and horror. The old Chinese
talked about “The Civilized World” or Tianxia. This did not encompass all
under heaven, but exactly only the mostly civilized areas. This concept can be
generalized to other civilisations. Typically the size of these central areas
grow during the history of a civilization. In our case Tianxia is now North
America, Europe, Russia, China and Japan plus a few further countries. Since WW
II brutal military confrontations in these areas are
or were perceived as impossible. Therefore they shock if and when they do happen.
In other words, a civilizational rupture is a deliberate act
which breaks the norms of humanity within The Civilized World, Tianxia.
To stay in the Chinese examples, the sudden onslaught of the
Mongols in the 13. century was one of history’s most extreme examples of a civilizational
rupture. The Mongols not only Killed the soldiers of the countries they
invaded. More often than not all civilians were slaughtered in cities and rural
areas where troops had offered resistance. China consisted of two big countries,
Jin in the north and the greater Song in the south. These were The Civilized
World. In this case “civilized” was a very precise term. Notably Song was
history’s first modern society and the only modern society before our own.
Internally and externally tolerant and peaceful, wealthy, partly industrialised, using paper
money and having a fully fledged continuous public debate. The Mongol invasions
put an end to this. Tens of millions were deliberately massacred, and many others
starved to death. In the end the Chinese population was halved, and we no
longer can talk about a modern society. This was indeed a civilizational
rupture. Modern cities with people living and thinking very much like you and I
were besieged, and then after surrender you could watch your fellow citizens being
slaughtered one by one knowing that it would soon be you.
The massacres continued in Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia
and East Europe. A racist myth claims that the Russians of today are political
or even ethnic descendants of these invading Mongols, and that they therefore are
barbaric. Obviously this is nonsense, but unfortunately the invasion in Ukraine
strengthens such racist narratives.
Wars in The Civilized World, our Tianxia, our common house
should continue to be unthinkable and forbidden. But in the worst case the
Russian war against Ukraine can create precedence by lowering the threshold for
use of violence in the future. A return of Trump or the like will lower it further.
Djengis Khan and his successors were committing some of the worst
atrocities in history. But had it not been for the moderating influence from the
wise Confucian counsellor Ila Chucai even more people would have been killed. This
man saved millions from being massacred. We need politicians of this type to help
us through the next perhaps seven troubled decades.
NOTES
• The wars in Ex-Yugoslavia in the nineties were also a
shocking rupture, but they were geographically limited and were perceived more as
a local anomaly.
• Obviously wars outside The Civilized World are just as terrible.
We should export peace from the centre to the fringes, not import wars to the
centre.
A nation is a complex concept with many aspects, and these
even vary between civilizations. Several errors and crimes in domestic and international
politics during the last two centuries have their origin in misunderstandings and
deliberate distortions of what a nation is.
A nation is not simply a group of people characterised by
a certain language. To take an example, even though right wing politicians often
deny it, Austria and Germany are two different nations. And Switzerland with it’s
four different languages is one nation. Belgium has never reached this level
and still contains two nations. Nations have
even less to do with genetic ethnicity. Except for the Oriental civilisation
neither religion is a defining characteristic of a nation, at least not in modernities.
This is not to say that religion, language and ethnicity are irrelevant. They
do play smaller or bigger roles for the distinction of nations, and they can be
imposed and used to increase or create distinctions which gradually can become real
parts of the characteristics of nations.
In some civilisations we see an increased focus on the
importance of nationality in their modernity. This was the case both in Europe
from 1800 and in China during the Song Dynasty where the earlier tolerance of
other nations was strongly reduced. At the same time the concept of a national state
changed. In Europe the importance of language increased immensely. These two changes
in strength and content of nationality often necessitated changes in countries
which deviated strongly from this strengthened and changed concept.
We saw this after WW 1, where the multinational empires
Austria-Hungary and to a lesser degree Germany had become untenable. But here the
politicians made the error of assuming that ethnicity measured as language was
the only important sign characterising nations. Therefore the chimeric state of
Yugoslavia was created on the basis of common language. The result emerged not
least in the nineties.
With such unclear and changing definitions how can we then
understand a nation? A very broad, but useable definition is that a nation is
a large group of people living in a large delimited
territory, a group of people which is shaped and united by common experiences.
The word “large” is broadly understood as several
thousand people in several thousand square kilometres or several thousand
square miles. These criteria of number and size are included to distinguish a
nation from any other smaller group with shared experiences. Language and religion
can also become parts of common experiences, but they are not the only factors.
The Russian worries over the expansion of NATO and the EU moving
closer and closer to Moscow are very understandable. This expansion has without
doubt contributed to the conflicts between Russia and the West.
But from this it certainly does not follow that Russia and
Ukraine together constitute one nation because they both belong to the East Slavonic
language group. This would be repeating the error after WW 1. The assumption was
correct for some eastern Russian speaking parts of Ukraine, but with the definition
above; a large group of people living in a large delimited territory, a group
of people which is shaped and united by common experiences, Ukraine as a whole was
not a nation immediately after it's independence three decades ago. During Soviet
times it had not melted completely together with Russia. But neither had
Ukraine unified culturally with itself. It’s people had different languages in the
western an eastern parts and above all, combined with this they had quite
different experiences both in the remote and more recent past. But gradually life
together in the newly independent country reinforced the weak common national
feelings. And since 2014 Putin has with great skill worked to create a fully
fledged Ukrainian nation. Now with the invasion he is completing this work. No common
experience is so strong as a war being waged against all members of the population.
If any Russian speakers still leaned towards Russia, bombing them in their
cities will embed them thoroughly in the Ukrainian nation.
The result of the Russian invasion will be a coherent and
strong Ukrainian national identity. Because they have been attacked from the
East by an authoritarian power, the Ukrainian nation - occupied or not - will
be oriented towards the West and towards Western democracy. Ukraine may be militarily
conquered, but with it’s strengthened national feeling and anger it will not be
easily pacified, and it will strongly resist assimilation.
For the Russian civilisation Putin’s invasion may turn out
to be a major defeat also if it succeeds. It could Westernize East Europe for a
very long time. In this sense the invasion could be defining for the future.
Hawks in NATO must be pleased.
Russian invasion of Ukraine. Another of these deliberate
irresponsible acts which falls outside well-established patterns.
It is a further step into the unknown waters of post-mature
or late modernity. An act defying the norms of behaviour and humanity which
defined mature modernity since the last world war.
The invasion is one of the worst events till now in a
series of developments and decisions bringing us into the last chaotic part of
our modernity. Other hallmarks were the first presidency of Donald Trump with
several decisions breaking the norms. Others are the attempted coup d’état in the
United States one year ago and not least the present subjugation of the GOP by
Trump. One of the next will be the return of Trump to power, this time with a
party too intimidated to control him.
All of these developments create precedence. Restraints
once broken down are difficult to re-establish in a lasting way. Throughout a modernity
the aggressions rooted in never solved internal, social and int’l tensions
again and again break out in violence. With time this typically gets more
serious and frequent because of the continuous weakening of old norms seen not
only in Woodstock, but also on the political scene and on the battlefield.
At least two civilisations have seriously tried to control
this aspect of their modernity on a large scale, replacing it with written and
unwritten humanistic norms and rules. I am talking about the second Chinese
modernity in the Song Dynasty which had open political discussions and implemented
social reforms. And avoided conflicts with neighbouring countries by a
combination of a strong and technological military deterrent (perhaps an early
version of a terror balance) and not least through regular payments of large
sums of money to the main competing powers. The politicians were too wise to
see this as humiliating and instead saw it as their goal to have the people
live in peace.
The other example of a civilization trying to implement humane
ideals in its modernity is our own, the Western civilization (including most of
the present world). In some ways we have been far less successful than the Song
politicians; we have had many periods with utterly barbaric persecutions,
genocides and wars. But through the 20th century we have made world
history’s most impressive attempt to create welfare, democracy (not necessarily
only in the Western sense) and peaceful
coexistence between nations, at least in the rich northern hemisphere. Keeping
peace has of course been aided by the terror balance. The policies have been
rather successful since 1945.
But now through the series of developments described above,
these attempts at creating freedom, prosperity and peace on earth seem to be
ending. The will to or rather craving for power replaces political ideals. Donald
Trump, the republicans and several countries are killing democracy. And now the
Russian leadership is undermining the ideal of peaceful coexistence between civilized
nations.
Clearly, conflicts in and between countries are not
atypical for modernities. But as said before there is always a degree of freedom
to choose how severe this will be. That somebody deliberately chooses war on
this scale in Europe is a major and unnecessary paradigm shift.
Here I have not used the hypothesis of Russia belonging to
another civilization. This is because the country since Czar Peter The Great has
become so heavily westernised that it for major parts of its politics is best
understood as a player in our civilization. IF we use the idea of an East
European civilization, see my recent posts, there can be little doubt that the
Russian action is counterproductive. It will only push East European countries
politically and culturally westwards.
Taking the broader perspective into consideration Europe
should be prepared for a very different future. This not solely because of the
precedence now set by Russia. There awaits us a future where Trumpism and the US
Republicans further erode rule-based behaviour and transform the United States into
a post-constitutional authoritarian country. It’s support can then no longer be
taken for granted. Instead like Russia the United States will treat us with contempt
and disrespect.
The Western civilization has been very ambitious in it’s
attempts to create paradise on Earth. But compared to the song dynasty our
attempts did not last as long. More and more, power will replace paradise as
the goal.
