In his 2022 State of the Union address, US President
Joe Biden
accused Russian President
Vladimir Putin
of trying to “shake the very foundations of the free world” with his invasion of Ukraine six days earlier.
Putin believed that his “premeditated and totally unprovoked” attack on Ukraine would meet with little resistance.
But, as Biden proclaimed, "the free world is holding him accountable."
When he delivers his next State of the Union address on February 7, Biden will most likely trumpet all the ways the “free world” has continued to support Ukraine — and punish Putin — over the past year.
NATO countries and their partners around the world have delivered massive amounts of weapons and other supplies to Ukrainian fighters, while hosting millions of Ukrainian refugees.
Those same countries have maintained – and even increased – sanctions against Russia, while looking for ways to support those who are working to wean themselves from Russian energy.
Biden's pride in his administration's response to Russian aggression is justified.
His determination to revitalize alliances and partnerships and to cooperate closely on all major decisions is particularly impressive.
But
what exactly constitutes the "free world" and to what extent can it be clearly delimited from the "non-free" world?
And support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia, is it a fair litmus test to establish who belongs to which category?
In a sense, Ukraine is indeed on the frontier of the free world.
Russia's actions there - the torture and murder of soldiers and civilians, the destruction of homes, businesses and critical infrastructure, forcing people to huddle in cold basements to escape shelling - are flagrant attacks on freedom.
And its ultimate goal - the conquest of an independent country, the absorption of its territory and the annulment of its national identity - is the
very denial of freedom
.
By fiercely resisting Russian forces, Ukrainians defend their freedom.
But tyranny and conquest are not the only forms of unfreedom.
In his 2021 memoir, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen tells the story of a Muslim day laborer who was fatally attacked by a Hindu mob in 1944 as he was returning from a small job he knew was dangerous but could not afford to pass up.
Sen writes:
"The incident dominated my thinking for a long time, and I came to recognize the enormous scope of poverty in stripping a person of all freedoms: even the freedom not to run the highly probable risk of being killed."
Starting from this idea, Amartya Sen -with the help of the philosopher Martha Nussbaum- came to the conclusion that leaders and policy makers should seek "a vision of development as an integrated process of expansion of substantive freedoms that are connected to each other": political freedoms, economic resources, social opportunities, guarantees of transparency and protective security.
All of these freedoms are both ends and means, as they allow human beings to expand their “capabilities” to “lead the kind of life they value”: to
live, learn, grow, work, and act in the world
.
In line with this pattern, Sen points out in his book Development and Freedom, the developed democracies of the free world are home to millions of unfree people, people whose capacities are stunted by all sorts of factors, from poverty and inadequate public goods to political and social marginalization. .
By contrast, millions of people in countries the United States might dismiss as autocratic enjoy some economic freedom, social opportunity, and security.
Acknowledging this reality
does not mean accepting that there is a necessary trade-off between political freedom and economic growth
, as Chinese and other autocratic leaders have often insisted.
But it complicates the distinction between the "free" and the "unfree" world.
Retired US General David Petraeus recently recalled telling Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar, then India's ambassador to the US, that as a member of the Quad, India had to “choose between East and West”.
Jaishankar replied: “We have chosen, General.
And we have chosen India.”
In Jaishankar's view, the Ukraine war could allow more nations to choose themselves.
He predicts that the conflict will transform a world order that remains "deeply Western" - in which "Europe's problems are world problems, but the world's problems are not Europe's" - into a world of "multialignment", where countries are free to go after their “preferences and interests”.
India, Amartya Sen's home country and the world's largest democracy, is not alone.
Countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America refused to vote in favor of Russia's expulsion from the United Nations Human Rights Council last April.
They blame both Western sanctions and Russian aggression for soaring food and energy prices
, which continue to cause them tremendous hardship.
In his opinion, this is another case of
Europe and the United States turning their problems into world problems
.
If he wants to address a truly global audience, Biden should consider leaving behind the 20th century definition of a “free world” and allowing for freedom of many different kinds.
The United States and its allies, he might say, are fighting to free the Ukrainian people, and peoples around the world, from the chains of conquest, domination, poverty, hunger, ignorance, prejudice, and deprivation. .
We will seek allies where we can find them for all these struggles.
Former director of political planning at the US State Department, she is executive director of the think tank New America
Copyright Project Syndicate, 2023.
Translation: Roman Garcia Azcarate
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