This article is taken from
Figaro Histoire
“When Europe faced the great invasions”
.
Discover in this issue the history of the demographic, political and cultural upheavals that affected Europe from the 4th to the 10th century.
“When Europe faced great invasions” Le Figaro History
Member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, Thierry de Montbrial is founder and president of the French Institute of International Relations and of the World Policy Conference.
As the third year of the Ukrainian war begins, it has been clear for some time that it is helping to accelerate the transformation of the international system as a whole.
The emerging feature of the new configuration is the tendency of Western countries (United States and members of the European Union) and, to a lesser extent, of certain Asia-Pacific States to define themselves as models for the supposed peoples aspire to democracy, and the guarantors of established States who consider themselves to have achieved it.
It is in this spirit that the Russian aggression of February 24, 2022 provoked the rebirth of the Atlantic Alliance which in 2019 Emmanuel Macron declared in a state of “
brain death
”
,
and the hasty opening of the prospect of a further massive enlargement of the European Union.
The shock caused also swept away the scruples which pushed Finland or Sweden to preserve their neutral status.
Only Austria, Ireland and Malta now remain attached to it.
Crusade for democracy
From a geopolitical point of view, the concept of the West is inseparable from the
Pax Americana
which has been its foundation since the start of the Cold War, and this
Pax Americana
extends its effects well beyond the Euro-American couple.
President Joe Biden presents the United States as the leader of the democratic camp.
But in reality, in the United States, even the Democrats have always been able to find a balance between
“power and principles”,
to use the title of the Memoirs of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the famous national security adviser to President Carter.
Thus, the withdrawal from Afghanistan decided by Joe Biden in the summer of 2021 was no less immoral than that of Vietnam under Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in 1975. Likewise, the weariness which is beginning to manifest in the United States for unlimited support of the objectives displayed by President Zelensky is a predictable political fact that cannot be described as either moral or immoral.
Even if lobbies favorable to Ukrainian nationalism have been established in the United States (and Canada) for a very long time, the Ukrainian war is not a major subject for American public opinion.
Joe Biden, October 19, 2023, during a speech intended to convince his fellow citizens of the need to provide financial aid to both Ukraine and Israel.
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
The situation is more clear-cut in Europe for two obvious reasons: geographical proximity and the fact that the European Union is extremely far from constituting a political unit.
We understand that because of their history, the Baltic States or even Poland, although protected by the Atlantic Alliance, felt the Russian aggression of February 24 as a threat against themselves.
Even Romania's fears can be explained, because neighboring Moldova occupies a blind spot from the point of view of the region's security.
The mobilization of these countries has contributed greatly to the spread of a feeling of fear throughout the Union, not to mention the rise of a feeling of guilt in a country like Germany, due to the abuses of the armies. Nazis during World War II in Ukraine.
The posture of the Europeans, even more than that of the Americans, presents itself as a crusade for democracy in the shadow of American protection.
But, to understand the overall reaction of the European Union which has so far remained very coherent in the face of the war, we must also be aware of the fact that due to its impotence (in the fundamental sense of this term) , she had no room for maneuver.
This reaction can be caricatured as follows: Putin is a dictator, who has undermined the chances of democracy in Russia;
its goal is to reconstitute the Russian Empire or even to conquer Europe;
consequently, we must do everything (by delivering weapons for example) so that it loses this war, and first of all, so that Ukraine regains its full sovereignty over its 1991 borders.
The posture of the Europeans, even more than that of the Americans, therefore presents itself as a crusade for democracy in the shadow of American protection, by using in practice the only four instruments at their disposal: piling up "packages" of sanctions against Russia ;
delivery of weapons even if it means depleting their own stocks;
more generally financial aid to Ukraine;
finally, promises to enlarge the Union.
Solzhenitsyn's lesson
Before going any further, we must wonder about the view that, overall, Westerners have on Russia.
This view is part of the philosophy of the end of History popularized in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama, with the ulterior motive of the inevitable victory of democracy over all other forms of political regime.
Such an assertion, the terms of which are also imprecise, will remain unfalsifiable in the sense of Karl Popper for a long time (that is to say, no experimental test can refute it).
Democracy is a concept and even more so a complex reality.
Already, in 1989, at the time of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, what did we not see or hear from intellectuals (including many former "Maoists"!), politicians or Western activists convinced that a Western-style democracy would soon be able to be established in China.
The entire ideology of happy globalization, until at least the
subprime
financial crisis of 2007-2008, was based on the implicit assumption that “others” would soon become “like us.”
Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in 1975. Louis Monier/Bridgeman Images
From this perspective, the individual Vladimir Putin is therefore designated as largely responsible for the new misfortunes of the Russians.
Here we will attempt a slightly more subtle interpretation, relying on the giant that was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and seeking to understand why he was adored then rejected by Westerners.
This reference echoes the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the book which did so much to weaken the image of the USSR in the 1970s,
The Gulag Archipelago.
It should be noted that, to deepen one's vision of Russia and one's understanding of the history of the Soviet Union, one must turn to the 6000 pages of
The Red Wheel.
His great work in his own eyes.
Also read 50 years ago: Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, the bomb that will strike Soviet totalitarianism to death
In what follows, I rely in particular on a long article by Gary Saul Morson, an eminent American specialist in Russian literature, published in the
New York Review of Books
on May 12, 2022. Morson has over most commentators the advantage of having read and meditated on all of the writer's writings.
His article is titled
“What Solzhenitsyn Understood.”
But since we are going to talk about revolution, we will first mention the greatest expert on the subject, who had meditated a lot, as a man of action, on the French Revolution.
For Lenin, in essence, the two prerequisites for any revolution are summarized as follows:
“The top can no longer, the bottom no longer wants.
»
In other words, the ruling class is no longer capable of maintaining its domination unchanged, while the lower classes no longer want to live in the old way.
Behind these are organized groups ready to take advantage of the situation.
As a result, “the top” can only survive by reforming while there is still time;
that is to say – and here, we think of Tocqueville – on the basis of a relevant analysis of the situation, and from a position of strength.
Solzhenitsyn, who did not have a high opinion of Nicholas II, nevertheless believed that his minister Pyotr Stolypin had undertaken the right reforms, which would have made it possible to avoid the revolution if he had not been assassinated in 1911. For the author of
The Red Wheel,
the implementation of Stolypin's reforms would have, certainly
very gradually,
committed the country to the path of individual freedoms and the rule of law.
Solzhenitsyn abhorred violence and pinned his hopes on gradual change through reform.
The Ukrainian front fgrandclaude
Nearly seven decades after the October Revolution, Gorbachev and then Yeltsin did not bring together any of the conditions that would have made it possible to reform the Soviet Union.
Reforms which would certainly have had a territorial component.
For Solzhenitsyn, Russia should separate from the non-Slavic republics and try to preserve the union with the Slavic republics: Ukraine and Belarus.
He was not the only one to sense the misfortunes of a failed secession with Ukraine.
His nationalism, however, was not imperialism.
It was based on the conviction of the need for
spiritual restoration
as a prerequisite for any true revival of Russia.
For him, both the national side and the personal side of the “Russian soul” feel “what is from Heaven”
above them .
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was greatly misunderstood, as is often the case, it is true, with original personalities, who are not satisfied with simplistic speeches on good and evil in international politics.
Gary Saul Morson emphasizes the importance of the language of spirituality in Russian culture.
This language is not specifically orthodox.
He tells us that Westerners who confuse it with a theocratic aspiration are missing the point.
This is, in fact, the whole meaning of Solzhenitsyn's famous Harvard speech (1978), which sets Americans (or Westerners) and his Russian compatriots back to back.
According to Morson, the great man found in Western intellectual circles marked by their materialism the same narrow-mindedness as among Russian liberal intellectuals before the revolution.
More profoundly, it is not enough to sing the praises of “liberal democracy” (the principles of 1789) to be on the good side, those of “illiberal democracy” (Jacobinism) to be on the bad side.
Finally, between his expulsion from the USSR in 1974 and his return to Russia twenty years later, the author of
The Gulag Archipelago,
in his own words, found himself stuck between two
“mills”.
He was therefore greatly misunderstood, as is often the case, it is true, with original personalities, who are not satisfied with simplistic speeches on good and evil in international politics.
A district of Dnipro, on the banks of the Dnieper, in Ukraine, hit by a Russian missile on January 14, 2023. CLODAGH KILCOYNE/REUTERS
What was radically lacking in relations between Western countries and Russia after the fall of the USSR was the shared desire to seek in good faith a form of adaptation of the collective security system in the deepest sense of the term, to allow real “detente, understanding and cooperation” between the former adversaries.
The fault is not only on the side of Russia and more precisely of Vladimir Putin.
She is also on the side of Westerners, prisoners of a narrow conception of their interests and their political ideology.
Vladimir Putin's calculation
After the return of the “vertical of power” with Putin, the Kremlin increasingly stood up to the West, accused of wanting to install NATO at Russia's doorstep and perceived as claiming to impose their way of doing business everywhere. view the world, in reality their desire for economic domination and a selective interpretation of international law.
By deciding to launch his “special military operation” on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin broke the taboo – recent in history – of the inviolability of borders.
He was wrong in the calculations which made him hope for a lightning victory over Ukraine, but, two years later, the balance now seems to have shifted in his favor.
This is an opportunity to recall a famous saying from Bismarck:
“Russia is never as strong or as weak as we think.
»
In Russian military history, examples of difficult beginnings followed by turnarounds are not rare.
Russia is settling into the prospect of a prolonged war that the government believes to be tenable, and is playing on a more rapid attrition of the Ukrainians and the weariness of their allies.
A taboo has been broken.
It is a fact.
After the Stolypin episode and that of Gorbachev-Yeltsin, Russia has certainly once again missed a chance to reform itself in depth.
But what followed widened the gap, and the responsibility for this failure is shared.
And the spiritual dimension in Russia transcends the trials of ordinary life.
The country continues to exist and influence world affairs.
In his time, Barack Obama missed an opportunity to remain silent by relegating it to the rank of regional power.
If the question now is, as many have thought or hoped since the start of the Ukrainian war, whether Vladimir Putin's regime is on the verge of collapse, to venture an answer we must return to Lenin's remark on revolutions: today, in Russia, the top still can, and the bottom is not to the point of no longer wanting.
Prigozhin's funny attempt, in June 2023, failed.
A peaceful coup is unlikely.
The Russia-Africa summit, in Saint Petersburg, in July 2023, during which Vladimir Putin expressed his desire to promote Alexey DANICHEV/AFP
Is Russia about to lose the war?
After the failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 and the establishment of a war economy, also due to the adaptation capacities of the Russian economy and the failure of Western sanctions, the answer seems rather negative.
Russia is settling into the prospect of a prolonged war that the government believes to be tenable, and is playing on a more rapid attrition of the Ukrainians and the weariness of their allies.
The Kremlin also has no shortage of means to attack the interests of its adversaries, such as those of France in Africa or elsewhere.
If we look at where things are today, with a tighter club of authoritarian states (like China, North Korea or Iran), and an increasingly “multiple” “global South”. -aligned” – where we even find Turkey, a member of NATO – we feel that a significant number of States would be prepared to welcome the idea of a compromise between Russia and Ukraine.
The price to pay
Perhaps the Ukrainian war will last a long time.
Perhaps one day time will stand still like July 27, 1953 with the Panmunjeom armistice, which ended the Korean War.
Much will depend on the evolution of United States support for Ukraine, after the election in November 2024. Whatever happens, in addition to the strengthening of the Atlantic Alliance under their leadership (more or less firm, it is another question), the Americans already appear to be the major economic beneficiaries of the crisis, due firstly to the massive increase in their comparative advantage in the field of energy, after the Europeans stopped openly import their oil and gas from Russia.
The cost of energy is today three times lower in the United States than in Europe.
And, despite the efforts of Europeans to reindustrialize, the Americans are largely in the lead in this area too, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and a vastly superior economic and financial culture.
But, above all, the 27 current members of the European Union form a culturally and economically disparate group, which has still not digested the great enlargement following the fall of the USSR.
The reference to democracy is not enough to establish an identity.
The political heterogeneity of this whole makes it unlikely, on the part of the Member States, the further abandonments of sovereignty which would be necessary, for example, to provide the Union with a common budgetary policy compatible in the long term with the missions of the European Central Bank, and even more so a real foreign policy, inseparable from a truly common defense policy.
What, then, do the respective words of the President of the Commission, the President of the European Council and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy represent in this last area, on the one hand;
heads of state and government of member states, on the other hand, when they move away from the agreed generalities on democracy and human rights?
As soon as we go into the detail of the national interests of the member countries, shaped largely by History, we understand the difficulty of any notion of a truly common foreign policy vis-à-vis both Russia and China. than Turkey, Algeria or the Gulf States, for example.
Volodymyr Zelensky receiving, in kyiv, the President of the European Commission Ursula Von der Leyen, November 4, 2023, ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP
There is more.
We remember the distinction established in the 19th century by the British political scientist and economist Walter Bagehot and his thesis, adopted by Churchill, according to which the legitimacy of any constitution, written or not, rests on two pillars: dignity (symbolic aspect and sacred) and efficiency (aspect of government work).
In the English system, the monarchy embodies dignity, and the government efficiency.
Legitimacy cannot survive indefinitely the breakdowns likely to occur on one or other of its pillars.
We come back to the causes of revolutions.
The problem of the European Union since it renounced the common sense rule according to which any new enlargement must be preceded by the deepening of the previous one, that is to say since the fall of the Soviet Union, is due to the fact that, compared to the ambitions displayed (on Schengen, for example), governance has gradually weakened both from the point of view of dignity (a dimension that in fact the European Union has never embodied) than efficiency.
Also read: Pierre Lellouche: “Ukraine in the European Union, the great illusion”
However, faced with the Ukrainian war, the heads of state and government followed the easy solution by opening up the prospect of a new wave of enlargement, including Ukraine – which Poland itself fears. now openly compete (on agriculture, for example) – without having the slightest idea of how to go about it other than by trusting destiny.
Politically, it will be impossible to completely turn back (there are limits, even to hypocrisy) and the perspective opened by the European Council of December 2023, which decided to begin negotiations for accession to the Union European Union with Ukraine and Moldova, to grant the status of candidate country to Georgia and to accelerate the accession process of the Western Balkans, will mobilize the strength of all community bodies for a long time to the detriment of other priorities.
It will be extremely costly for current member countries, whose budgets are and will be increasingly under pressure.
Let us add that with the new enlargement that is coming, the question of the superiority of European law over national law will become more and more sensitive.
Among the already clearly identifiable consequences of the Ukrainian war, we can therefore announce a profound revolution within the European Union.
The vision of the founding fathers is dead.
And besides, why should Europe escape the trend towards increasing nationalism that we observe everywhere else?
If, since Brexit, other member states have not seceded, it is primarily due to a short-medium term cost-benefit calculation.
It is also because of the poor performance of the British.
The return of tragedy
Everything can therefore happen within ten or twenty years.
Ultimately, what history could remember above all from the Ukrainian war is that by daring to break a taboo, Putin reactivated Clausewitz's principle according to which
"war is the continuation of politics by other means.”
By
dint of having been violated, not only by the Russians (for example, in 1999, with the NATO bombings in Serbia, and above all, in 2003, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein – moreover on the basis of a lie), international law is more likely than before February 24 to find itself further flouted in the coming years, especially since the balance of powers within the UN charter is more and more contested.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine reveals the new dividing line of the world.
fgrandclaude
There remains a taboo still inviolate: the first use of nuclear weapons.
No doubt Putin was tempted to do so when things seemed to be going badly for Russia, but his main support, China (also one of the overall winners in the short to medium term of this war), was dissuaded.
But we can fear that one day more or less soon this taboo will also be broken, and not necessarily by the Russians.
The great powers of the 21st century, starting with the United States and China, are aware of these realities, against a backdrop of accelerating technological revolution.
The members of the European Union, dormant since 1945 and decolonization, have lost the sense of tragedy.
In their search for a new paradigm for the Union, without renouncing the democratic ideal, they will have to re-learn realism in international politics.
What trials will they have to go through before achieving this?
To go further: French Institute of International Relations (Ifri).
27, rue de la Procession, 75015 Paris.
Rens.
: ifri.org;
01.40.61.60.00.
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