Today many accuse Western leaderships of having been blind with regard to Putin, of not having realised his aims far sooner. They recall the speech he gave in 2007 at the Munich Security Congress in which he openly theorised his will to change the world order. They remember how the West did not react to blatant acts like Russia’s war against Georgia (2008), which ended with the annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to Russia. The Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 produced only mild sanctions, while Russian armed support to separatists in the Ukrainian Donbass has never been sanctioned. Not to mention Russia’s decisive support for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a figure no less tyrannical and no less Ba’athist (i.e. fascist) than Saddam Hussein[1].
While all this was going on, some European states – notably Germany and Italy – were economically tying themselves hand and foot to Russian gas and oil. How to explain this deafness to the Putin cyclone that would sooner or later hit the West?
In part it was the effect of what I would call the Merkel doctrine, itself a corollary of the free-market globalisation project. Merkel, and many with her, believed that the only way to deter and harness the hegemonic policies of any other state is to focus on economic interdependence, in a non-zero-sum win-win game. According to both this globalised and Marxist view, what ultimately matters is the economy, and since the Russian and Chinese economies need the West’s, the only way to keep the peace, it was believed, was to bind both states to the West with economic ties. But the serious Chinese threats to Taiwan first, then the attack on Ukraine, have seriously challenged this optimistic view of what Fukuyama called the “end of history”, i.e. the access to Perpetual Peace through market globalisation.
This is not the first time this idea of Perpetual Peace through economic interdependence has been propagated. Between the 1870s and 1914 this very theory had become widespread: Many absolutely excluded that there could be a war between Germany and Great Britain, for example, since their economies were deeply interconnected.
But another no less essential reason why the West never reacted to the annexation of Crimea and Russian support for the secession of the Donbass from Kyiv is that it does not have a clear, consistent position on secessions. It is driven by two conflicting principles. One is the principle of the self-determination of peoples, the other is that of maintaining the integrity of states.
After all, Ukraine reacts to the secessionism of the Donbass no differently than the Spanish government reacts to Basque and Catalan secessionism: by denying any possibility of separation for these regions. Many Catalan separatist leaders are in jail, others in exile. No one in Europe has moved to defend the self-determination of the Basque and Catalan peoples, through a referendum for example. A similar problem would arise if Scotland voted by a majority to leave the United Kingdom. Or of Corsica vis-à-vis France. Or of Flanders in the case of Belgium, or the other way round, in the case of Wallonia wanting to secede from Flanders.
The historical prototype of this principle of the integrity of states is the American Civil War. Today, everyone is against the secession of the Confederates (Southern states) because they wanted to keep slavery, whereas Lincoln is one of the fathers of the American fatherland. Even Americans from the Southern states who did not own slaves enlisted in the Confederate army on the basis of the principle of self-determination of their people. But this also implies that, even today, the United States does not allow one or more states to secede. If Alaska, say, decided to secede from the US by a popular vote, Washington would have to send an army to bring it back to the American Union.
But on the other hand, Europe and America are the product of a series of secessions of peoples from matrix-states. How could America condemn without qualms Crimea’s determination to secede from Ukraine (albeit after a Russian-controlled referendum) when the United States itself is the product of a war of independence against the British motherland? How could Europe, which includes Ireland, unwillingly recognised as independent from the United Kingdom in 1921, condemn it? Europe did not oppose, far from it, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Kosovar Albanian… irredentism versus Yugoslavia. Nor did it criticise the bloody separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971.
This is all the truer for Italy, which was formed through the secession of Lombardy–Venetia, and later Trieste and Trentino, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
This acceptance of independence derives largely from the principle that one people can choose to separate from another, but also from a kind of historical common sense: the borders of states cannot remain the same forever. To believe that Catalonia or the Basque Country should be eternally part of the Kingdom of Spain, like Scotland of the United Kingdom, or Flanders be forever united with Wallonia, and so on, is historical naivety. Panta rei, everything flows.
What we call the West[2] follows therefore two contradictory principles of legitimacy. They are intertwined with two other no less contradictory principles, in many ways even more fundamental. One I would call the Westphalian Peace, the other the Universalist Mission.
Henry Kissinger[3] insisted on the worth of the Peace of Westphalia (1648): it put an end to the Thirty Years’ War that had devastated Central Europe, a war that was considered religious between Catholics and Protestants (but it wasn’t only that; wars are always very complex). The Peace of Westphalia imposed the principle of ‘eius regio, cuius religio’, ‘whose realm, their religion’. Sovereigns hold the right to have their own religion, imposing it on their subjects too. This established the principle of religious tolerance between states, i.e., both Catholics and Protestants renounced exporting – we would say today – their confessions to areas of a different Christian faith. This Westphalian principle in a modern version would sound as eius regio, cuius ideologia, with ideology (economic free market, socialism, confessional state, liberal democracy, etc.) taking the place of religion. In practice: liberal democratic countries renounce imposing their political model on countries with different regimes. It is this principle that drove Kissinger and Nixon to their alliance with Mao’s China in the 1970s, a principle that has inspired the Merkel doctrine in Europe for over fifteen years (tying Putin’s increasingly autocratic Russia to economic interdependence with Western Europe) and the West’s peaceful rivalry with China. That is, a country should not try to change another’s regime, but accept its political legitimacy.
This Westphalian principle creaked when the principle of humanitarian interference was imposed: One country can intervene in an internal conflict of another state when this is to prevent mass slaughter. Cases labelled as “humanitarian interferences” were the intervention in Lebanon (in 1958 and in 1983-4) and in Kosovo against the Serbs (1999). Then, in March 2022, Biden in Warsaw declared to the world that Putin is not a legitimate leader, he is a butcher who must be removed… Declaring a leader of another country illegitimate breaks the principle of eius regio, cuius ideologia.
This was the principle that the democratic powers (France, Great Britain, the USA) applied until 1939 to Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy: even though these were dictatorships, democratic powers recognised them as legitimate. That is why they all decided to participate in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was only when Hitler decided to invade Poland that France and the UK had to go to war against him, i.e. when Hitler broke the Westphalian principle of non-aggression of other sovereign states.
I often wonder: if Hitler had decided to exterminate all German Jews, and German Jews alone, would the democratic powers have stood by and watched? The Westphalian principle is that within their borders all rulers, even tyrants, can do as they please. After all, even when Saddam Hussein was massacring Shiites and Kurds within his own borders, the West let him go ahead. The principle of humanitarian intervention is occasionally applied, but only according to opportunity.
With the French Revolution, another principle, which I would call the Universalist Mission, came to the fore: what we now call the universality of human rights. These take precise forms today: the right of women to at least legal equality, the right to freely express various sexual orientations, freedom of religious worship and political opinions, the right of dissidents to criticise their political system, the right of ethnic and linguistic minorities to survive as such. “Western” countries (in the sense mentioned in the footnote) consider these principles valid for all mankind, even in countries whose regimes are different from democratic ones. It is often said that “the West is wrong to want to export its model of democracy”, and indeed the West has exported its model at gunpoint – this was the case with Germany, Italy and Japan after 1945, Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003[4]. But usually the West tolerates non-democracies that are not hostile to itself – Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, Singapore, China, many African states… At the same time, however, the West condemns violations of the rights of dissidents. Hence the support for both Chinese and Russian dissidents, the support for the Hong Kong protests against the Chinese government (2019-2020), the rights of Tibetans and Uighurs, anti-Castroists in Cuba, etc. Autarkic regimes such as Russia, China or Myanmar are deeply irritated by this Western interference in their handling of opposition, because they rely on the Westphalian principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of another country.
In fact, since the end of the 18th century, universalist political ideologies – pluralist democracy, socialism and open society liberalism – have been propagated that are reminiscent of the universalism of early Christianity, when its task was evangelising all pagan peoples. The 20th century has seen the supremacy of two countries that were established on a missionary basis, the USSR and the USA. This can also be seen from their names. In “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, there is no reference to the Russian nation; any nation could, after all, be part of the USSR[5]. On the other hand, in “United States of America” there is only one geographical reference, to America. The genetic code of the USA is non-ethnic. In short, the USA wanted to be an ideological construction from the start, and as such exportable: any country on the American continent could be part of the USA (an assumption that underlies the Monroe Doctrine).
In the 20th century, we saw the rise of another missionary state: The Islamic State. Not just ISIS or Daesh, but Iran. The fact that the Islamic state for now identifies itself with Iran is something contingent, temporary. The explicit plan is to create a nation of all Islamic people completely dominated by Sharia law[6].
All these ideologies have a missionary spirit: their project is considered the best for all human beings, so it is the duty of the states carrying these ideologies to “convert” other peoples to the system. Be it pluralist democracy, whose leading state is the US; be it socialism, whose leading state was for a while the Soviet Union; be it fundamentalist Islam, whose leading state is Iran. These universalist ideologies or narratives – as I prefer to call them – actually aim at permanent revolution: The world will not be at peace until all peoples have converted to liberal democracy, or socialism, or Islam (for just under a century, after the fall of the pope in Rome as king in 1870, Catholicism seems to have forfeited this missionary conquest of the world).
Hence the often inconsistent and wavering character of Western foreign policies. On the one hand, they do not seek at all to weaken the neo-Confucian political system of today’s China, and have so far aimed at maintaining good relations with the increasingly autocratic Putin regime. On the other hand, Western countries support, sometimes actively, the claims of women, LGBT+ people, marginalised or segregated minorities (such as the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Kurds in various countries…), the fight against customs considered detrimental to women’s dignity (e.g. female genital mutilation, or the prohibition of the Indian custom of sati[7]). On the one hand Westphalian Realpolitik, on the other the mission to liberate the non-Westernised world from institutional restrictions on freedoms. Indeed, the West has an individualistic view of freedom: a country is free if all its individuals are free. In this the West is not Rousseauian: there is no volonté générale, general will, only the will of majorities or minorities.
However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine found a unified response from Western countries because in it two serious infringements of the West’s two contradictory principles, of both the Westphalian peace and the universalist mission, combined. The perfect storm. Invading a sovereign country recognised by the UN to impose regime change on it breaks the Westphalian principle of recognising the political regimes of other states as legitimate. The fact of having invaded a democratic country, with a president elected in a quasi-plebiscite during a non-rigged popular vote, appears to be an attack on that pluralist democracy that the West pursues as the ultimate goal of its historical mission, as the “end of history”, in the double sense of the word end. It is true that Bush Jr. and Blair in 2003 had broken the principle of Westphalian peace vis-à-vis Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq (note that future President Obama voted against that invasion and some Western countries, including France and Germany, opposed the venture). But their infringement appears less serious to many because everyone recognised that Saddam was a bloodthirsty dictator, whereas the same cannot be said of President Zelensky. The Anglo-American aggression against Iraq is absolutely condemnable, but the storm was not as perfect as it is now with Ukraine.
However, Putin still has an ideological card to play: appealing to the democratic principle of self-determination for the populations of Crimea and Donbass. An appeal to which the West cannot remain entirely indifferent. (Perhaps this is why the Russians, defeated for now in northern Ukraine, seem to be concentrating on the war in the South-East, around Crimea and Donbass). This claim by Putin of liberating populations that do not wish to be Ukrainian is surely much stronger and more convincing than the several ageing tanks sent off to Ukraine to be burnt. And for this reason, many in the West argue that Zelensky must be forced into peace, i.e., in effect, to cede the Donbass to Russia, in addition to Crimea already annexed in 2014. In a way, Russia’s demands for the Donbass sound legitimate.
But if the West supports the thesis “let the citizens of Donbass choose democratically whether they want to live as Ukrainians or as Russians”, what will it then have to say to the Catalans, the Basques, the Scots, the Corsicans, the Kurds… when they make the same claims? Supporting therefore, even if obliquely, Ukrainian sovereignty over the Donbass, follows the principle I would call Lincolnian of the integrity of nations. A tangle from which the West hardly emerges convincingly.
NOTE
[1] Someone recently commented that if the West had saved Aleppo from destruction by the Russians in support of the al-Assad regime, today Putin would never have dreamt of invading Ukraine in the belief that he would not be seriously sanctioned. Obama should have reacted when the Syrians crossed the famous “red line” of employing chemical weapons. There is, however, a difference: The rebels in Aleppo drew on Islamist ideologies, no less nefarious to Westerners than al-Assad’s Pan-Arab nationalism. In Ukraine, the West felt it was defending a country that was completely westernised politically.
[2] Today by “West” we also mean Eastern countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Australia, New Zealand; as well as Europe (excluding Russia) and North America. What leads us to think that all these countries form a kind of unity, incorrectly called the “West”? Two fundamental traits. One is that they are the countries with the highest GDP per capita in the world; the other is that they are pluralist “liberal” democracies in the American sense. We do not therefore usually include India, which is a pluralist democracy but still has a low GDP per capita. Nor the Arab oil countries, which have a very high GDP per capita but do not benefit from a liberal democracy. “Western countries” in this sense have shown until now a great advantage: they never fought a war between some of them.
[3] H. Kissinger, World Order, Penguin Books, 2015.
[4] This “exporting” was successful in the case of Germany, Italy and Japan, but has failed in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq (at least so far). How can this difference be explained? With the fact that Germany, Italy and Japan were already highly industrialised countries with high GDPs per capita, Afghanistan and Iraq were not. What makes the difference, in these cases, is the level of economic development.
[5] Indeed, I wonder why Stalin did not integrate the satellite countries – Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany – as states of the USSR. Probably the legitimacy principle recognized for these separate nations prevailed over the USSR’s universalist project.
[6] Of course, this aim is impossible to achieve because Iran is Shiite, and the majority of Muslims are sunni.
[7] This was the Hindu ritual in India by which the widow could ask to be burnt alive with her dead husband. Contrary to popular belief, the sati was a voluntary action by the woman, not something imposed on every widow. The practice was banned by the British governor in 1829.