“We shouldn’t let Putin define Russia’s security interests because the only interest of his regime is to stop democracy. “What threatened Putin was not NATO expansion, but the democracy expansion”. We have to understand that long before the talk of ‘national interests’ and ‘spheres of influence’ we’ve already walked the walk of appeasing the people who can’t let go of their power and use the talk of ‘national interest’ as a guarantee of their personal security—which for them means forever staying in power. Putinverstehers perpetuate the idea of Russian innocence because it was left without a choice—but to accept this is to let every tyrant justify violence with the mythology of national interest: ‘the Russian foreign ministry claiming Russia will be “forced to take retaliatory steps” if Finland joins NATO’. No, it will not be “forced”, in the same way that Russia was not “forced” to attack Ukraine. This decision appears “forced” only if one accepts the whole set of ideological and geopolitical assumptions that sustain Russian politics’.
But for the ‘realist’ there is no difference between democracy and autocracy. The ‘realist’ equivocates all ‘great powers’ and then asks us to listen to every last one of them. At the end of the day, it is a recipe for the appeasement and subservience to the bullies, for an international order based on balance of power between the strongest empires. Putin wants to build an international order like this—where strong states do things at will but disguise it by the sacred ‘security interests’ which they define according to their caprice. He had established the new axis of autocracy[12] that includes India’s Modi, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, China’s Xi, and infiltrates even well into NATO and Turkey. This is why ‘realism’ plays into the hands of imperial ambitions. Putin points to the double standards of Western policy when it falls short of its espoused ideals, but Putin wants an order where there will be no ideals to fall short of, a world without hypocrisy. Yet today we must learn to think of hypocrisy as a good thing because the world where hypocrisy is impossible is a very dark place. “Yes, the liberal west is hypocritical, applying its high standards very selectively. But hypocrisy means you violate the standards you proclaim, and in this way you open yourself up to inherent criticism – when we criticise the liberal west, we use its own standards. What Russia is offering is a world without hypocrisy – because it is without global ethical standards, practising just pragmatic “respect” for differences. We have seen clearly what this means when, after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they instantly made a deal with China. China accepts the new Afghanistan while the Taliban will ignore what China is doing to Uyghurs – this is, in nuce, the new globalisation advocated by Russia. And the only way to defend what is worth saving in our liberal tradition is to ruthlessly insist on its universality”.[13]
The problem is not power itself, but its arbitrary exercise. The West’s ‘sphere of influence’ is postcolonial (rather than simply ‘colonial’) because it is not imposed at will—in contrast to the fundamental disregard to human rights and life by the autocratic regimes, the West presents a form of life that people aspire to emulate, providing the individual with a space, time and silence for growth: be it Swedish spacious public spaces, German observance of recreation on Sunday, or Swiss laws of silence, be it the flamboyance of ‘American dream’ or the normcore of ‘Nordic minimalism’. This is why many nations voluntarily choose to be integrated into the West. This self-determination principle, inscribed into international law, is what is being threatened by Russia’s recent transgressions. If the international law does not function properly, empires (nations that have problem with recognising their borders) will simply impose their will on the weaker nations because empires don’t recognise them as subjects of politics. But if all nations are given voice, there is a chance of creating legislative communication on the planetary level and then abstracting violence to that level.
Can we break the sovereignty of strong states just like in the past we broke the sovereignty of strong individuals? In the past, we managed to abstract violence to the level of the state—to the legislative communication between citizens—and from that level to enforce it onto the lawbreakers. We abstracted violence to polity, allowed the police to apportion violence onto the brutes, bandits and bullies—and called it justice. We said to them—“You cannot act with impunity, you have to attune your conduct to the laws that are conducive to the common good”. And now wherever, say, domestic abuse takes place, police can intervene and punish the abuser. The household is not a sovereign order unto itself with the man as a sole dictator of moral judgements, the local arbiter of good and evil. The human rights legislation does not recognise the right of the strong to impede on the liberty of the weak.”
—Denys Bakirov
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| metamoderna.org |
Denys Bakirov, 27, is a lecturer at the University of Kharkiv, Ukraine who currently works as a researcher at Metamoderna in Sweden. When war broke out on February 24th, his village north of Kharkiv right on the border with Russia was occupied by the Russian Army. Denys was forcefully deported from….
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