In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Mark G.E. Kelly and Timothy W. Luke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its consequences for world order. Our current issue, Telos 199 (Summer 2022), features essays by Luke, Kelly, and Pan on the war in Ukraine, excerpts of which appear here. Click through to read the full articles at the Telos Online website (subscription required). To learn how your university can subscribe to Telos, visit our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are also available for purchase in our online store.
Ukraine and World Order: Today’s Scramble for Eurasia
Timothy W. Luke
After fourteen weeks of war, it is too early to determine the full impact of Russia’s February 24, 2022, invasion of Ukraine upon the existing world order. Nonetheless, there are emerging indicators of significant shifts in Eurasia, which must be recontextualized, given how they remain forgotten or ignored after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1990–1991. The short-lived era of corporate-led, neoliberal globalization—which dawned in 1992 as “the end of history” triggered in the ruptures of 1989—now seems eclipsed by another epoch ripped open by the Kremlin’s assault on Kyiv. Given the past ten to fifteen years, this time increasingly seems defined by a “clash of civilizations,” swirling around shards and specters of the Soviet Union in many new epicenters of ethnonational alliances.
Forged by populist, chauvinistic authoritarian leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping to Donald J. Trump, intent upon narrowing the conduits of existing neoliberal globalization, the currents of “where we go from here” appear both consistent with boosting the interests of “Russia First,” “Nigeria First,” “Japan First,” “Iran First,” “India First,” “France First,” “China First,” “Britain First,” “Brazil First,” “Arabia First,” or “America First” over and against the transnational interests of all the planet’s peoples, who increasingly are beset by the accelerating ill-effects of state failure, rapid climate change, stagnating standards of living, and environmental degradation.
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Bleeding Ukraine
Mark G. E. Kelly
The conflict in Ukraine began in 2014. The invasion launched by Russia in 2022 was not its genesis but an escalation that fundamentally changed the nature of the war, and perhaps also marked a sea change in international affairs.
Ukraine
The proximal origin of the current war lies in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1992, producing the first durable sovereign Ukrainian state ever to exist. Acquiring the territory of the Ukrainian SSR, a republic within the Soviet Union whose borders were determined by internal calculations of the Soviet state, independent Ukraine was riven from its inception by an internal polarity in relation to Russia, of which most of the new Ukraine had historically been a constituent part. The south and east of Ukraine were Russian-speaking and tended to sympathize with Russia; the westernmost regions of Ukraine had not historically been part of Russia, spoke Ukrainian, and tended to view Russia negatively. Between them lay a Ukraine where people spoke an intermediate dialect between Ukrainian and Russian, just as a large proportion of the population did not have particularly polarized attitudes. For more than two decades, power in Ukraine seesawed between relatively pro-Russian and pro-Western orientations.
This political situation dramatically collapsed in 2014, when a Western-sponsored “color revolution,” the “Maidan,” toppled a corrupt and unpopular—but nonetheless elected—pro-Russian regime. This proceeded through violent street confrontations and can be seen retrospectively as representing a decisive shift in Ukrainian politics from democratic civil contestation to civil war, first in the violence involved in defending and toppling the government, then in the attempts of areas of southern and eastern Ukraine to secede in response to the nationalist victory in the revolution and in the repression of these efforts. While nationalist forces stymied secessionism in most of eastern and southern Ukraine, some of the easternmost areas of Ukraine, specifically parts of the Donbas bordering Russia, coalesced into two unrecognized quasi-states, in a constant low-level state of war with the Ukrainian state. One region of Ukraine, the Crimea, was—due to its military significance and the fact that it had a more tenuous historical and geographical connection to Ukraine than any other part of the country—simply annexed by Russia.
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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and the Rise of the Nation-State
David Pan
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has signaled the emergence of nation-state politics as the new basis of global order. Gone is the hope that globalization would establish a world of interlocking trade relationships to mediate between regions and cultures in order to establish a liberal order of peace and prosperity. On the one hand, the benefits of trade have created opportunities to use trade as a means of coercion that is being used on both sides of the conflict. On the other hand, economic globalization is now being rolled back in such a way that the global economy will be structured more along the lines of political antagonisms. But as opposed to the Cold War, in which the ideological conflict was defined as capitalism vs. communism, or to the post–Cold War era, in which liberal democracy set itself against authoritarianism, the conflict is now between competing nationalisms. Russia has relied on the notion of the civilizational state to support its claims on Ukrainian territory, but in fact the appeal is to Russian nationalism as the basis for a nation-based imperialism in the tradition of Napoleon and Hitler. But as with Napoleon in Spain or indeed in Russia, the Russian nationalist expansion into Ukraine is itself engendering the development of a Ukrainian nationalism that is seeking to ally itself with Europe in order to make its nationalist claims.
Rather than the end of the Westphalian system, we are seeing in fact its culmination. Until the twentieth century the nation-state system consisted not so much of a world of nation-states but of a succession of nation-empires headed by countries such as Spain, England, France, Russia, Japan, and Germany, each of which made a universalist claim but was organized around a state whose nationalist basis undermined its ability to maintain a multiethnic empire. It was only the anti-colonialism of the twentieth century that, in dissolving these nation-empires, reconfigured sovereignty all over the world in such a way that the previously colonized peoples attained their own nation-states. The Cold War merely retarded this development toward a world of nation-states by casting the main global conflict as one between capitalism and communism. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the states that made up the de facto Russian empire became independent nation-states, thus completing the long-term shift.
Precarious, indeed.
Might want to throw into this geo-political cauldron of growing nation-state instability a cauldron of internal psychological/social conditions within the U.S. leading to the potentiality for even greater instability in foreign and domestic policy.
What if we are also collectively experiencing increasing social atomization leading to a sense of generalized loneliness, social isolation and a lack of social bonds culminating in a lack of meaning in life in conjunction with a type of free-floating anxiety as well as a type free-floating aggression and frustration?
Maybe we than have all of the foundational elements for mass formation– initiated through a series of public suggestions in the media over the past 5 or 6 years about how the actual objects of such free-floating anxiety and free-floating aggression can be found in Trump, the unvaccinated and Russia leading to a radical intolerance of the opinion of others and a strong tendency towards authoritarianism. And then, among maybe 30% to 50% of the population, there is a psychological pivot from a highly adverse and painful psychological state of social isolation to a new sense maximum interconnectedness with a group of fellow citizens, (See The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet).