Month: March 2022

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The Russia Problem

For once, we find ourselves sharing the barely hidden wishes of the Pentagon, White House and entire Western establishment: if only a nice group of boyars could unite in an old-style plot to overthrow Putin and put an end to a war whose objectives remain difficult to comprehend. By boyars I mean the upper echelons of the armed forces or billionaire oligarchs and their contacts in the intelligence and security services; a whole class of potentates who seem ever more uncomfortable with their leader’s adventurism. Yet even if Putin fell and his adventure in Ukraine were halted, an enormous dilemma would persist: the Russia problem. This is something the West has not confronted since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Put simply, what place should Russia occupy in a more or less stable world order? Given the vicissitudes of the past, the small to medium states neighbouring Russia – from Lithuania to Poland to the other ex-Soviet satellites – may hope that it disappears from the geopolitical map. But that isn’t possible.

An alternative solution was put forward by Zbigniew Brzezinski when he suggested turning Russia into an assorted bouquet of territories, even advocating for the dismemberment of Siberia: ‘A loosely confederated Russia – composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic – would find it easier to cultivate closer economic relations with its neighbours.’ This solution was at the very least problematic due to the presence of China. One look at a map suffices: China, an overpopulated country of 1.4 billion inhabitants, with arable land at a high level of desertification, borders Siberia to its north, an interminable expanse of 13 million square kilometres, home to a population of only 35 million, possessing immense mineral reserves and land that could be rendered fertile with the thawing of permafrost. Demographic pressure alone suggests the future movement of human masses. For the emerging superpower, a weakened and isolated Siberia would be no more than an irresistible mouthful to be devoured – an outcome the United States would find difficult to digest.

In any case, even if amputated, a European Russia would remain the largest state this side of the Urals. In short, our insurmountable problem survives: Russia is simply too big to become yet another American vassal, but too weak to be a world power. Let’s not forget that Russia’s GDP ($1.49 trillion) is inferior to Italy’s ($1.89 trillion), and only slightly larger than Spain’s ($1.28). By comparison, Germany’s GDP is $3.8 trillion, Japan’s $5.1 trillion, China’s $14.7 trillion, and the US’s $20.9 trillion. As Joseph Brodsky wrote in 1976, ‘along with all the complexes of a superior nation, Russia has the great inferiority complex of a small country’.

While the United States failed to recognize the Russia problem in 1991 when it emerged victorious from the Cold War, a similar quandary with Japan was ingeniously resolved after 1945, when the enemy was integrated into the new world order. Of course, Japan was lavished with two atomic bombs to inculcate an indelible lesson – whereas, despite everything, this wasn’t possible with the USSR. In the 1990s the victorious US never found a place for post-Soviet Russia. Now everyone blames the past. In retrospect, a few are willing to admit that NATO’s (and the EU’s) eastward expansion overly precipitous; even a Cold War liberal like Thomas Friedman has written that America and NATO are hardly ‘innocent bystanders’ in the Ukraine crisis.

Noting this might seem like a futile exercise in historical recollection. But it is useful, in such instances, to rethink our relation to the past. Might the massacres, wounds and scars of Partition have been alleviated (and the ascent of Narendra Modi halted) had the framework employed by the British to split India on the basis of religion been critically interrogated? (It’s worth remembering that the first partition took place not in 1947, but 42 years prior in 1905, dividing the majority Muslim East Bengal from the Hindu West). Likewise, given the now century-long state of instability and endemic war experienced by the Middle East, we may also need to re-examine the borders arbitrarily traced and abstracted from the realities of human geography by a British and French official – Mark Sykes and François-Georges Picot – in their apportionment of the moribund Ottoman Empire in 1916.

That remembering the past is no idle task is demonstrated, a contrario, by the fact that at the close of the Second World War, the United States remained wary of a second Versailles, in which the victors of the First World War imposed such oppressive reparations on Germany that the peace resulted in runaway inflation and a revanchist nationalism that would find its expression in Nazism. After 1945 the US never asked Germany for so much as a penny, but rather financed its reconstruction. Nor would it have been remiss to recall, in front of the ruins of the Twin Towers in September 2001, that it was the US that initially sponsored and supported Osama bin Laden.

Here, though, what we need is not necessarily an examination of the past, but an analysis of the failure that persists before our eyes. This failure consists in an inability to construct a Russian entity that might have a place – a function, a voice – in the post-Cold War global order, and the inability of the leading capitalist power to guarantee the stable transition of Russia from a statist economy to a structured market one. A handful of naïve commentators saw in the Russian gangsterism of the 1990s a rerun of the late nineteenth-century American ‘robber baron’ era. But in the earlier case magnates reinvested their profits in America, funding its universities and libraries, whereas all Russian oligarchs have done is export their capital and assets abroad while impoverishing their homeland. In creating a society of gangsters, the US was implicitly asking for Russia to be governed by either a cop or a spy. With Putin, they got both.

Responsibility, however, not only lies with the US: Europe too has not been an innocent bystander. The United States might have failed to reconfigure its empire to accommodate Russia, but it has only grappled with this problem for the last thirty years. Europe has been hesitating about Russia for three centuries. At times it has been invited to the fora of the great European powers – the Congress of Vienna in 1815, for instance – but otherwise it’s seen itself relegated to Asia (especially in considerations of its so-called ‘oriental despotism’, the title of Karl Wittfogel’s famous work). As Alexei Miller and Fyodor Lukyanov observe, ‘for more than three centuries Russia was represented in the European discourse in two ways.’ One is that of a ‘barbarian at the gate’. After the end of the Second World War, Italian anticommunist propaganda incessantly conjured Cossacks watering their horses at the fountains of St Peter’s Square (note that Cossacks have always been identified with Ukraine, ever since Pugachev and Gogol’s Taras Bulba). Today the image of ‘barbarians at the gate’ is as topical as ever. However, the second role commonly attributed to Russia is more interesting. For Miller and Lukyanov, it is

that of an ‘eternal apprentice’. In medieval Europe, the apprentice was entirely dependent on the master craftsman, who was responsible for his instruction. Some were allowed to create and present their own masterpiece for the whole guild to judge its merits and to become a member of the guild in case of approval. In Russia’s case the European discourse invariably insisted that ‘the apprentice is not good enough yet’. The role of an eternal apprentice was (and still is) a trap, where Europe invariably positions itself as an instructor and changes evaluation criteria again and again, thereby perpetuating Russia’s role of a trainee.

This attitude – that of a teacher constantly failing Russia in its exams – is evident in German doubts over whether its Ostpolitik is a normalization of ties or, conversely, the first step towards a new Drang nach Osten. Perhaps Europe should also have figured out long ago the relationship between the Union and its cumbersome neighbour.

Of course, Russia is also a problem for Russians, one that’s fuelled by Russia itself. Just compare the Russian and Chinese reactions to American supremacy. For thirty years, China exercised political restraint (from 1980, when Deng Xiaoping launched his reform programme, to the rise of Xi Jinping in 2012) as it focused on expanding its economy, developing new industrial and technological capacities. Only then did it begin to raise its head. This strategy has also allowed it to make inroads in the field of soft power (by building infrastructure for the Third World, for instance, and establishing extremely robust commercial ties with Africa and Latin America). Military spending was therefore sanctioned by a rise in GDP, and investment was able to focus on cutting-edge technology. Russia, on the other hand, concentrated all its resources in the defence sector and remained an exporter of raw materials in almost every other. China and Russia’s per capita GDP is virtually the same, around $10,000 a year, yet the technological and infrastructural gap between the two is abyssal.

From the perspective of efficiency, there’s no competition between Chinese and Russian state capitalism. The causes of this are perhaps best explained by the longue durée: the virtues of the Confucian tradition in the former, as opposed to the purposeful search for incompetent cadres in the latter (under Brezhnev, functionaries were prized for their defects: their passivity, lack of initiative, willingness to act as ‘yes men’). Another factor has been the enormous brain drain after the collapse of the USSR, which triggered perhaps the greatest exodus of scientists in history, reminiscent of Germany’s during 1930s. The result, so far, has been the emergence of a dominant group that never constituted a ruling class.

Behind each of these causes is another unresolved problem, that of Russian exceptionalism. Usually, when exceptionalism is invoked it’s in reference to the United States, the ‘beacon of hope’, a ‘city upon a hill’ with a ‘manifest destiny’. Indeed, every state that strives for hegemony thinks of itself as exceptional. (We’ll have to come back to this affect. As far as the individual is concerned, given that one’s life is unique, and given that when one’s own life ends all other life ends with it, it’s natural that each of us lives their life as an exception; it’s equally obvious that this exceptionalism extends to, for instance, one’s city: I can’t think of a city in the world, no matter how ugly or rotten, whose citizens don’t feel privileged for being born there, or otherwise lyrically glorify the poetics of the urban agglomeration in which they live. The feeling then grows to encompass an entire region or country of birth. Every homeland is ‘the most beautiful country in the world’. In the end, citizens become victims of their city’s mythology, as members of a state become victims of its national myth.)

The fact is that the French, English and Germans are, in their respective ways, healthy carriers of national exceptionalism (here I mean healthy carriers in the same sense as healthy carriers of HIV). Even the Chinese, who are beginning to dominate the world arena, have built a unique narrative of exceptionalism (which I previously analyzed in these pages). Russian exceptionalism also has a story of its own. With good – or more often bad – reason, every nation has monopolized a specific quality of the human spirit: the United States have appropriated dreams (‘the American dream’); the British, humour; France, refinement (l’esprit de finesse); Germany, order (‘German discipline’); Italy, creativity; Spain, pride…

But only the Russians have gone all in with their revindication of the totality of this spirit; the ‘Russian soul’ (Russkaia dusha), that is to say. Dostoyevsky was its standard bearer (‘the Russian soul embodies the idea of pan-humanistic unity, vsechelovecheskogo uedineniia, of brotherly love’). In his Pushkin Speech (1880), he loses it completely:

To become a true Russian, to become fully Russian (and you should remember this), means only to become the brother of all men, to become, if you will, a universal man. (…) I believe that we – not we, of course, but our children to come – will all without exception understand that to be a true Russian does indeed mean to aspire finally to reconcile the contradictions of Europe, to find resolution of European yearning in our pan-human and all-uniting Russian soul, to include within our soul by brotherly love all our brethren. At last, it may be that Russia pronounces the final Word of the great general harmony, of the final brotherly communion of all nations in accordance with the law of the gospel of Christ!

Tell that to the Ukrainians currently under Russian bombardment.

The truth is that none of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century escaped the clarion call of the Russian soul. Even Europhile Turgenev (who spent most of his life abroad) had the most sympathetic character in his novel Rudin (1857) exclaim: ‘Russia can do without each of us, but none of us can do without her. Misfortune on those that think otherwise, and again misfortune on those who live outside Russia… outside of national temperament there is no art, there is no truth, there is no life… nothing!’

The irony of Russkaia dusha lies in the fact that the concept of ‘a people’ as an individual, with its own personality, is a German one imported from Herder, and the idea of a collective, universal soul is lifted verbatim from Schelling. Russian unity is expressed in a German concept! The Russian innovation was to add an adjective that had until then not been thrusted onto any other nation – Holy Russia (comparable only to Israel’s chosen people). The Russian soul subsequently became a European fashion, spread by the love for Dostoyevsky, at least until the 1930s, when D. H. Lawrence looked with disgust on ‘these self-divided gamin-religious Russians who are so absorbedly concerned with their own dirty linen and their own piebald souls we have had a little more than enough’. Today, ‘Holy Mother Russia’ has resurfaced.  

The reactionary character of these conceptions cannot be stressed enough. One of the most ominous long-term effects of this war is that it legitimates – through the destruction magnanimously offered up by the holy Russian soul – the recrudescence of nationalism in Europe, as if the history of this continent needed any more nationalisms.

To think that the first great writer to evoke Russkaia dusha was Gogol, a Ukrainian. Contrary to what Herder thought, an ethno-linguistic community does not at all implicate belonging to a single state, or a single people. The German-speaking Swiss want nothing less than to become Germans, like the great majority of Austrians. The best example of this is Spanish-speaking Latin America, where nations that share a language and a common culture have frequently waged war on one another. The best post-Soviet Ukrainian novel I’ve read, Death and the Penguin (2001), was written in Russian by Andrei Kurkov, who happens to be a strong supporter of Ukrainian independence.

Translated by Francesco Anselmetti.

Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Collapse as Crucible’, NLR 74.

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Domino Effect

The western nations have moved to kick Russia out of the SWIFT system. What is SWIFT, and what was your reaction to this news?

SWIFT is the primary system used by banks around the world to transfer money. Essentially, it is a third party that will take money from Citi Bank in New York and deposit it in a bank in Zurich. The only precedent for a country being taken off the SWIFT system in recent times, as far as I know, was Iran. Russia is the second one, although these current sanctions are far more limited, in the sense that they only cover about twenty entities and two primary banks. Even so, they have already caused a significant drop in the rouble and forced the Russian central bank to increase interest rates by an unprecedented ten points.

As for using SWIFT as a weapon to punish serious breaches of international law: well, the Russian action could be said to warrant it. However, by this standard you’d have to do the same to China based on its treatment of the Uyghurs, and UAE and Saudi Arabia for their actions in Yemen. According to the UN there are about five million people starving in Yemen right now, and another nine million on the verge of joining them. And then there’s Turkey, which has invaded three of its neighbours and committed ethnic cleansing in Northern Iraq and Syria. So I’m all for using these standards, but if they are simply for countries you don’t like then they are not standards at all – they are hypocrisies.

Ukraine seems to be winning the battle of narratives. Is that going to tip the odds in its favour? And can you explain what we mean when we say ‘the PR war’?

The PR war is anything that involves weaving a narrative about the conflict. On this front, what the Ukrainians are doing is avant-garde, cutting-edge stuff. Granted, they have it easier because they’re the ones that are being invaded; but they’re doing a masterful job. There have been some very effective fabrications coming from their side: for example, the border guards on Zmiinyi Island who were declared to have been killed after telling the Russians to ‘go fuck themselves’, but turned out to be alive and well; or the so-called ‘Ghost of Kyiv’ fighter pilot, who was said to have shot down six Russian planes, but never actually existed. The tone of such communications is very American – Anglo-Saxon, you might say – and has played well with the US public. Much of this is probably not being done by Ukrainians themselves; it is probably being assisted by Western actors (state or otherwise), because they know which buttons to push. They understand not only how to speak to a Western audience, but to a young, social-media savvy one. They’ve managed to make Ukraine a cause célèbre among young people who don’t know anything about this region or about this conflict.

How is the war going militarily? On the Ukrainian side, the narrative is that Russia was expecting to Blitzkrieg through Ukraine but hasn’t managed to; on the Russian side, they are talking about advances in a lot of different regions of Ukraine. What is actually going on?

Well, they’re both right. The Ukrainians are clearly putting up a much tougher fight than anyone expected, but that doesn’t fundamentally alter the power dynamics. The Russians are making slow and steady advances. To put things in perspective, it took the Americans three weeks to get to Baghdad in the face of almost no resistance. By contrast, the Russians were outside Kyiv in a day and a half, and I think they made a foolhardy attempt to see if they could end it quickly by sending special forces into the city – which proved to be a disaster. Ultimately, the PR war doesn’t move lines and doesn’t involve tanks. So the Ukrainians’ narrative might win out, but if you look at the actual situation, they’re steadily losing ground. Mariupol has been surrounded, which means that most of southern Ukrainian coastline down to the Black Sea, outside the area around Odessa, could soon be captured. In the north, they’re making their way to the big cities, encircling Kharkiv and Kyiv, and there seems to be a pincer movement to trap the Ukrainian troops facing the Donbass. The best of the Ukrainian forces are on the eastern front, and if they get surrounded that will be a major blow. So I think there’s a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. This has obviously been more costly to Russia than expected, but so far only one side has been retreating every single day, and I frankly don’t see that reversing.  

The economic war has also started. What do you think will be the real-world ramifications of the Western sanctions?

The implications of the economic war are in some ways more geopolitically relevant than the actual war, because Russia is an integral part of the world economy. If you look at the sanctions that have been applied, they are not directly targeting the energy sector, from which Russia gets most of its income. There is an extent to which they can’t sanction it, because then the Germans and Danes and whoever else is buying Russian gas won’t be able to pay for it, and the Russians will cut it off. So I think that, in a couple of days, Russia will adjust to the economic bite and realise this is not the same as what happened to Iran. Whereas the rouble has now fallen by about forty percent, the Iranian rial fell by almost three hundred percent in a couple of days. There’s a question of scale here, and there’s only so much you can sanction.

However, a more frightening element is the issue of food security. Ukraine and Russia are the bread baskets for most of the region, including North Africa and the Middle East, and if their shipments are interrupted you’re looking at bread prices rising three or four hundred percent, which will destabilize various countries from Turkey to Egypt to Lebanon. Russia is also one of the biggest fertilizer producers in the world at a time when there is great demand for it, and there is also the critical issue of oil prices, which will trigger another recession if they continue to rise. Meanwhile, many countries are closing their airspace to Russia. If Russia reciprocates, then pretty much every flight to Asia from North America will need to be rerouted, because every flight that goes to China, Korea, Thailand, Singapore, also goes through Russia. This rerouting means they’ll either need to go to Alaska or South America to refuel, which would make every trip ten hours longer and twice as expensive. So I don’t think people understand the domino effect of disasters that will flow from this.  

What is the likely trajectory of the war?

Historically speaking, Ukraine is highly dysfunctional. It was essentially an Argentina in the middle of Europe: a large wheat-producing nation with an imbalanced economy and a corrupt political system. In fact, I think it’s the only post-Soviet country that hasn’t returned to 1990 GDP levels, which is extraordinary. It is clearly not a threat to anyone. I totally understand Russia’s desire to not have NATO at its border, but the greatest geopolitical threat to Russia does not come from the West; it comes from the south. In between Armenia and China there are seven current and future Afghanistans, current and future failed states. If you remove the carbon industries from all these countries, their GDP levels would be in the seventy to one-hundred dollar per annum range. One of the effects of this war will be to accelerate decarbonization, as Western Europe learns that if it cannot rely on Russia, it must make the switch to renewables. That will endanger Russia’s long-term national security by creating seven Afghanistans on its doorstep, with flat border regions in which millions of people will try to migrate by foot. When these states collapse and implode over the next twenty years, the consequences for their neighbours will be severe.

On the Western side, we are descending into madness with former generals of NATO and members of US Congress talking about no-fly zones over Ukraine. This would mean a war between two nuclear powers – an insane price to pay for gaining influence in this dysfunctional country. Whoever wins the war may come to regret it, because for many different reasons, economic and demographic, it is exceptionally difficult to transform Ukraine into a workable state. If the conflict continues for an extended period, Ukraine will go from being the Argentina of Europe to the Syria of Europe, with six or seven million refugees displaced on the continent.

There is speculation that the Polish military have been telling Western powers they can use their airbases to fly in and out of Ukraine. Well, what if one day Russia decides to destroy your base? Then you’ll have war between NATO and Russia. None of this is worth it. We don’t need more weapons being shipped to this area; what we need is a ceasefire and direct negotiations – ones in which Russia recognizes Ukraine’s independence and agrees to withdraw, in exchange for a neutrality agreement that prevents Ukraine from joining NATO. There is a widespread notion that Ukraine has a right to associate with whoever it wants. And yes, that right exists, just as I also have the ‘right’ to be a centre-forward in the Premier League – but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. It’s not a question of what your rights are, it’s a question of what price is worth paying for them. So I am confounded and disappointed that we could be sleepwalking into an entirely unnecessary nuclear confrontation over this issue.

Right now there should be immediate shuttle diplomacy, involving Blinken, Macron, Putin, et al. People have criticised Macron for speaking to the other side, but how are you going to end this conflict unless you agree to talk? What we need is intensive negotiations to end the war and find a solution that saves face for everyone. The Ukrainians have already proved their independence. One thing the invasion has done is create a distinct Ukrainian identity – a narrative and a story – which they previously lacked in some respects. Meanwhile, the Russians have made their point that they’ll blow up the world if Ukraine joins NATO. So what’s needed now is active diplomacy rather than more irresponsible warmongering.

An earlier version of this interview appeared on CivilNet.

Read on: Georgi Derluguian, ‘Recasting Russia’, NLR 12.

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Animatron

In May 2020, the radio station France Inter commissioned a series of prominent writers to reflect on the consequences of the pandemic. One of the first invitees was Michel Houellebecq, reporting on the home front while holed up in his Paris apartment. The tenor of most other interventions was one of hopeful transition, that COVID would mark a civilizational watershed, leaving behind a world indelibly changed. Houellebecq disagreed violently: ‘After lockdown we will not wake up in a new world; it will be the same one, just a bit worse.’ COVID was ‘a banal virus, unglamorously related to some obscure flu illnesses, with poorly understood survival conditions, unclear characteristics – sometimes benign, sometimes deadly, not even sexually transmissible: in short, a virus without qualities’. This banality appeared crueller still given the response – the ways in which the victims had been hidden, abstracted, dehumanized in past months. In his intervention, Houellebecq wondered until what age elderly patients could ‘be resuscitated and cared for? Seventy, seventy-five, eighty years? It depends, apparently, on which region of the world one lives in; but never has the fact that not everyone’s life has the same value been expressed with such quiet impudence; from a certain age onwards, you are practically already dead.’

Indignation at the contemporary treatment of death, along with empathy for the private suffering of the dying, emerges as the animating force of Houellebecq’s latest novel, Anéantir, which arrived in Francophone bookstores in January. The set-up is as follows: the year is 2026, and Paul Raison is an advisor to his friend Bruno Juge, the Minister of Economy and Finance. Trapped in a tired marriage with Prudence, another senior civil servant at the same ministry, he dreams of one-night stands with Juge’s wife, Evangeline. Presidential elections are underway, and Juge is planning to run on a modernizing platform after delivering a reasonably performing economy for the previous five years. Videos of the minister’s beheading surface online, made with such ingenuity that the department’s specialists find themselves at pains to figure out who composed the clips. A series of mysterious cyberattacks then occur, shutting down traffic in several international ports. At this point though, the novel changes gear, as Paul leaves Paris to visit his father, on life support after suffering a stroke. The homecoming involves his sister Cécile, a loyal Le Pen voter and born again Catholic, now married to an unemployed notary. We also get glimpses of Paul’s mother Suzanne, a conservationist, and his brother, Aurélien, an archivist at the Ministry of Culture married to a displeasing woman named Indy. The novel ends with Paul’s own descent into purgatory after a cancer diagnosis.

‘A political thriller veering into metaphysical meditation’ was the polite summary given by one French critic; another spoke of ‘a book written in the minor key’. Many were less polite. Promoted as both a personal reflection on faith and a world undergoing rapid deglobalization, the novel’s 730 pages suggest a Wagnerite symphony, but Anéantir (‘Annihilation’, though the meaning is closer to the German ‘Vernichten’, literally ‘nothingify’) is closer to a string of sonatas, orchestrated with little sign of editorial interference. While the cyber warfare and broken supply chains of the opening pages conjure the same lure of the contemporary as the Islamist takeover of Soumission (2015) or the périphérique revolt of Sérotonine (2019), these incidents rapidly fade from view as the book suddenly transitions into a hospital memoir, growing more and more claustral, dragging itself from one sonata to the other without ever settling on a unifying theme. We hear Paul’s thoughts on presidents, televisions, vegans, the far right, fantasy films, yet none of this amounts to any clear declaration of intent or desire. The novel simply continues, aimlessly, like a device stuck on shuffle mode, switching from one track to another. 

To the habitual houellebecqien, the constitutive elements of Anéantir may feel familiar – reminiscent of the competitive sociability of Extension du domain de la lute (1994), the neurotic professionals of Particules élémentaires (1998), the vaudeville treatment of the art world in La carte et le territoire (2010), the meditations on religious feeling in Soumission (2015), the social upheavals of Sérotonine (2019). But there is an unmistakeable diminution. The novel reads as if it was written compulsively and in haste, the range of themes is remarkably less grand in scope, and the tone is uncharacteristically mellow. Its goals are clear enough: Houellebecq hopes to rescue death from its contemporary dehumanization as exemplified in the state response to the pandemic. This is paired with openly congratulatory portraits of the healthcare workers and general practitioners who helped France weather its plague years (in his acknowledgements, Houellebecq devotes a word of thanks to specialists at a French hospital, who helped him with technical details on medical care). Yet this is not what the novel initially promises, nor what we’ve come to expect from Houellebecq.

A degree of strategic aimlessness has long been part of his repertoire, and indeed once provided us with Houellebecq at his most exhilarating, whether in the opening party scenes in Extension du domain de la lutte or the closing visits to the psychiatrist in Sérotonine. Such moments approximate the repetitively psalmodic style of Thomas Bernhard, an influence that was made manifest in 2019 when Houellebecq was pictured trying on Bernhard’s jacket during a visit to the late Austrian author’s country estate. The admixture of personal and political also has precedent: Soumission simultaneously dwells on the religious and existential concerns of its protagonist, Sérotonine their depression and ailing sex life. Yet in Anéantir, the balance has shifted, with its long flight of interiority taking Houellebecq’s writing closer and closer to Bernhardian monologue. Bernhard, however, was consistent in his refusal to engage in conventional storytelling. ‘Whenever signs of a story begin to form somewhere, or even when I just see in the distance, behind a prose-hill, the indication of a story emerging, I shoot it down.’ The resulting oeuvre was one in a dizzying state of mid-air suspension, castigated by Baudrillard as little more than onanism for the Viennese bourgeoisie, but consistently captivating in its own right. In Anéantir, however, we have stretches of writing which could only be described as ‘animatronic’, intimating a sense of style where there is, in fact, none:

It was still rather vague but you could feel the beginning of spring, there was a sweetness in the air and the vegetation felt it, the leaves were shedding their winter protection with a quiet shamelessness, they were showing off their tender areas and they were taking a risk, these young leaves, a sudden frost could at any moment destroy them.

Or:

He began to wonder whether he would have been better off coming by car; it was a pleasant surprise to discover that there was a car park in the courtyard of the hospital. Its brightly coloured facade reminded him a little of the one at Saint-Luc Hospital in Lyon. After the PET-Scan, the prospect of a spinal tap and a gastrostomy, this façade. Decidedly, he thought with a mixture of ambiguous feelings, he was increasingly following in his father’s footsteps.

In a passing assessment from 2004, Perry Anderson noted how ‘the steady drone of flat, slack sentences’ in Houellebecq’s work ‘reproduces the demoralised world they depict’. Here even the affect is missing, flatness without its imitative correlative. What might explain such passages? One factor may be that Houellebecq, far from a natural born member of the establishment, has gradually developed a proximity – a cosiness, even – with parts of the French power elite. France, beholden to its republican heritage, is unique in the close relation between its literary stars and political class, consecrated through institutions such as the Académie. The Charlie Hebdo killings of 2015 marked a point of escalation: Houellebecq featured on the cover during the week of the shootings and Soumission was released the same day, with the murders prompting a rallying round of the French establishment in the name of free speech. New Philosophers such as Alain Finkielkraut subsequently celebrated the book as an authentic portrayal of France’s impending ‘Lebanonization’. The effect has been an inevitable weakening of his oppositional stance.

This proximity is encapsulated by the fact that the minister and presidential candidate in the novel is based on Bruno Le Maire, current Minister of Economy and Finance and personal friend of Houellebecq. They first met when the latter’s dog was held up by Irish customs and help from the diplomatic service was required. The two have been exchanging emails ever since about ‘German Romanticism, economic affairs, and Rilke’s poems.’ Anéantir bears unfortunate traces of this friendship. In a recent debate with Éric Zemmour, Le Maire claimed that France was now ‘nearing a growth and employment rate equal to that of the trente glorieuses’. Houellebecq picks up this theme in the book, claiming that the ingoing president was able to restore France’s competitive edge by recharging the nation’s ‘knowledge economy’. The very same ‘knowledge economy’ was once the bane of the French working class in his novels, and these passages could perhaps be read as ridiculing Macron’s attempt to modernize a hopelessly declining country. Yet in the run-up to the last election Houellebecq confessed that, given his recent change of station, he ‘now obviously supports Macron’. Such are the dangers of a writer immune to self-theorization.

In Anéantir this inability for introspection is compounded by an even more destabilizing development. The central subject of Houellebecq’s original novels – the nihilist neoliberalism of the 1990s and 2000s – has become less reliable as a target. As a raw capitalist reflex, neoliberal policies will retain their attraction. But they are hardly election winners anymore, as the current contest in France makes plain. Macron and Le Maire might be Europe’s ‘last neoliberals’, yet they are operating in a landscape far removed from that which the first neoliberals had to navigate. Along with a return to religion, Houellebecq had long predicted that neoliberals might one day adopt the protectionist platforms of their opponents. Yet what to do when the ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ of the 1990s become the ‘zombie Catholics’ of today? The great portraitist of the neoliberal subject has lost his model; in the resulting confusion, the natural pivot is to existentialist cliché: death, faith, Jacob wrestling with the angel, love eternal and so on.

‘Every writer knows the temptation of irresponsibility’, as Sartre used to say. And there has always been a place for smaller feelings in Houellebecq’s work, much as Schopenhauer’s practical philosophy – a source of lasting inspiration to the novelist – ended in unconditional devotion to his poodle. But it is grating to see a writer once antinomic to the ruling order now appear essentially subdued by it. The unrelentingly bleak vision of French life in Houellebecq’s finest novels, which tied together the personal and social dimensions of despair, seemed to implicitly ratify almost any anti-establishment movement (though never openly supportive of the Gilets Jaunes, it appeared that they had a shared object of critique). The characters in Anéantir however do not appear as the resigned victims of neoliberal restructuring. Rather, we see men and women outside of history, facing a godless universe as Christians without a church. The novel may reference nearly every contemporary political orientation – from right-identitarians to anarcho-primitivists to deep ecologists – but all appear merely as unwitting agents in a ‘gigantic collapse’, a naturalised disaster personified by Paul’s father’s comatose state. In this way, Anéantir is more Blaise Pascal than Michel Clouscard, the protagonist (Paul Raison) merely a cipher for modern man’s incapacity to face up to the transcendental.

If this is indeed Houellebecq’s last novel, as he proclaims in the acknowledgements, it is an underwhelming finale. Incensed as he may be by the indignities of the dying, he has remarkably little to say about the causes or material circumstances of their suffering. The pandemic is ultimately just an avenue for his growing spiritual preoccupations, increasingly detached from brutalities of the social. Houellebecq was once able to write compassionately without succumbing to religious delirium. In a 1993 essay on the city of Calais, for instance, composed after the French vote on the Maastricht Treaty, he gave readers a portrait of a déclassé France filled with spleen and anger at its tormentors, but also deeply admiring of its victims:

Calais is an impressive city…even if it was razed to the ground during the Second World War. Saturday afternoon one does not see a soul on the street. One passes by abandoned store windows, immense deserted parking spots (without doubt this is the city with the most parking space in the whole of France). Saturday evening is a bit jollier, but it is a particular kind of jolliness: everyone is inebriated. In bars one finds a casino, with a set of machines at which the Calaisians come to waste their benefit payments. The preferred walking spot Sunday afternoon is the entry tunnel to the Manche. Behind the bars, families pushing baby carriages watch the Eurostar pass by. They handwave to the foreman, who hoots in response before being swallowed up by the sea.

Christopher Prendergast, ‘Negotiating World Literature’, NLR 8.

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Nun Chai Stories

Highway of Zojila Pass, a high mountain pass between Srinagar and Leh at 11575 ft, 9 Km stretch. Highest Indian National Highway. Black and white image.

A popular image from the 1970s shows an eight-handed Hindu goddess superimposed over a map of the Indian subcontinent. Sitting astride a lion, Bharat Mata or Mother India clutches a set of vaguely symbolic objects: a prayer bead, a lotus, a quill; a Trishul or trident, a sword, a sickle. Over her flowing hair, she wears a gem-studded crown which neatly obscures Kashmir. The picture speaks with crude eloquence to Indian imperialism in the Himalayan region, much of which it has occupied since Partition. (There are now under fourteen million people living in Indian-administered Kashmir as opposed to four million in Azad Kashmir or Free Kashmir, the arid north-western part controlled by Pakistan. China sits on a few villages in the far-eastern reaches.) For Indian nationalists, Kashmir is as a mystical, contradictory place: both national treasure and troubled borderland, an ‘integral part of the country’ – the phrase is repeated – that threatens to slip away.   

Part of the problem for India is that it has no historical basis for claiming Kashmir. For centuries, the Kashmir Valley has been ruled by outsiders: it was annexed by the Mughal Empire in the late 1500s, taken over from 1750-1840 by Afghan and then Sikh warlords, and after the Anglo-Sikh war of 1846, purchased for seven and a half million rupees from the British East India Company by Dogra mercenaries. From then until 1947, the Hindu Dogras lorded it over the Muslim peasantry – the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims, 85 to 15, has stayed roughly the same since the fifteenth century – even bringing back the corvêe. Crucially, Kashmir was never part of the British Empire, whose subjects shared a colonial identity, whatever their other differences.

In Constitutional terms, Kashmir was a ‘Princely State.’ This meant that Maharaja Hari Singh had the right to accede to either country created at independence. He flirted with both options until Nehru lost patience and forced the issue in October 1947, sending in the newly minted Indian army, who were met by Pakistani forces entering from the northwest. Skirmishes continued till 1948, when the United Nations Security Council called a ceasefire and drew up a Line of Control (LOC) demarcating Indian and Pakistan-held territory. Kashmir was partitioned. What’s often forgotten is that over two hundred thousand were killed in massacres inflicted by the departing Dogra mercenaries, with support from paramilitaries sent north by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ever-resourceful fascist organization that later set up the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). This is how the atoot ang or inseparable limb of Kashmir was joined to Mother India.

The Security Council had mandated a plebiscite on the national question in Kashmir, which Nehru agreed to and then put off indefinitely. (King Hassan followed his lead in Western Sahara.) In 1953, he arrested Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic leader of the National Conference (NC) party, which stood for Kashmiri Azadi or independence. For the next four decades, democracy in Kashmir meant rigged elections, press censorship, random arrests, and the transformation of the NC into a client regime. When armed resistance broke out in 1989, the state enforced democracy more bluntly.

By 1990, there were three hundred fifty thousand soldiers in Kashmir; that number has more than doubled thirty years later. Ostensibly sent to track down militants, they have effectively occupied the valley – erecting check-posts and spreading barbed wire, grabbing land for barracks and torture centres. An estimated seventy thousand has been killed, and another eight thousand ‘disappeared’, their bodies missing. A tiny minority of the victims are militants. The preferred method is a ‘fake encounter’, in which a civilian is murdered and labelled an insurgent. The army has also opened fire on public demonstrations, in recent years blinding and killing stone-pelting teenagers, who are risibly classified as ‘agitational terrorists’. While the insurgency petered out in the mid-90s, counterinsurgency has only intensified. Today, Kashmir is the most militarized region in the world.

In August of 2019, the ruling BJP abrogated Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which had given the Kashmir assembly the sole right to determine who could purchase land in its territory. The Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act also dissolved the state, splitting it into two ‘union territories’ to be controlled by the federal centre. Kashmiris are clear this legal coup paves the way for setter colonialism. In the build-up, there was an ominous influx of troops into the valley, presumably sent to spread news of the abrogation from door to door. The Indian government completely shut down the state’s internet access, which was only partially restored four months later.

Kashmir remains under siege. The Legal Forum for Kashmir, a human rights monitor, recorded 257 political killings in 2021: of 163 militants, 46 civilians, and 48 armed forces. In November, Khurram Parvez, an activist who has tirelessly chronicled state impunity, was himself put in jail under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), the crown jewel of Indian Penal Code, which allows for the arrest of anyone that might endanger national security. Under a new media policy, Kashmiri journalists have been harassed for publishing ‘anti-national’ content. Like everything else, the response to Covid-19 has been militarized.

*

How has India managed to get away with the occupation? In the first place, it has faced next to no domestic resistance. There was a time, in the 1950s and 60s, when socialist politicians like Ram Manohar Lohia could make the case for Kashmiri self-determination in mainstream newspapers – a state of affairs that seems apocryphal today. The space has been entirely ceded to Hindu nationalists and their liberal holograms, who alike place the integrity of Mother India above such things as democratic aspirations and human rights. (The parliamentary left – represented by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – opposed the abrogation and has urged Modi to uphold human rights. But self-determination remains a bridge too far for them.) The media has merrily played along, vilifying Kashmiris as separatists and Islamist fanatics while piously worrying after our under-paid soldiers.

Nor has the United Nations covered itself in glory. After calling for a plebiscite in 1948, it’s done little to hold India to account, now and then expressing ‘concern’ over human rights abuses. As for guardians of the liberal order, their strong words on Xinjiang contrast bitterly with the silence on Kashmir. ‘The cautiousness – or timidity – of western politicians is easy to understand,’ Pankaj Mishra has observed. ‘Apart from appearing as a lifeline to flailing western economies, India is a counterweight, at least in the fantasies of western strategists, to China.’

Mishra was writing in the summer of 2010, when mass protests broke out on a scale that drew comparisons to the Palestinian Intifada. The trigger was the murder in Kupwara district of three civilians who were lured into the hills with the prospect of jobs by soldiers, who shot them, planted weapons on their bodies, and no doubt pocketed a tidy sum for their efforts – a system of financial rewards has been put in place for nabbing or killing militants. ‘There’s a very important link between these incentives and the occupation of Kashmir,’ according to Khurram Parvez. ‘Stop this corruption, and I don’t think the occupation will even last a day.’ (Anna Politkovskaya said as much about counterinsurgency in Chechnya.) When the truth came out, so did demonstrators onto the streets of Srinagar, who were in turn greeted by police violence.

On 11 May, a seventeen-year-old boy, Tufail Mattoo, was returning home from tuitions when he was hit in the head by a tear gas cannister tossed by police. The intense protests that followed his killing lasted through the summer. The protestors’ demand was unequivocal – ‘Go India. Go Back’ was chanted and graffitied on walls – and as was the state response. In four months, 118 civilians were killed. Many were teenage boys, some even younger. This endless cycle – state crimes leading to protests leading to more state crimes – is why Kashmiri anthropologist Muhamad Junaid compares the Indian occupation to an ‘ouroboros’, after the mythical dragon that eats its own tail.

The 2010 Intifada forms the backdrop to Alana Hunt’s artbook Cups of Nun Chai, published in 2020 by documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak’s press Yaarbal Books. (This is their second title, following Witness (2017), an extraordinary compendium of photographs by Kashmiri photojournalists.) An Australian artist and writer, Hunt first grew interested in Kashmir in the late aughts, while doing an MA in aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Visiting the region with friends, she was horrified by what she saw, and felt powerfully if obscurely compelled – like Joe Sacco was in Palestine – to expose the atrocities that the Indian government was keeping quiet. Hunt was back in Australia by the time the Intifada broke out, which made it impossible for her to record voices on-the-ground, even as she wanted to commemorate the protests. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is born of that juncture,’ she writes in the introduction.

An oral history of a kind, the book is made up of 118 conversations Hunt held over two years with people in Australia (mainly), India and Kashmir. The rules are simple: over a cup of ‘nun chai’ – a salty tea popular in Kashmir – she speaks about the occupation, adapting their discussion into a two-to-three-page narrative. Each entry is accompanied by a close-up photograph of the interlocutor’s hands holding the teacup. ‘Cups of Nun Chai is a search for meaning in the face of something so brutal it appears absurd,’ she writes. ‘It is an absurd gesture when meaning itself becomes too much to bear. It is also a memorial, grounded in the killing of 118 civilians.’

Tea-drinking as an act of witness? The conceit is less naïve than it is seems. Like the Parisians clueless of Algeria in Chris Marker’s La Joli Mai (1962), most of Hunt’s interviewees know next to nothing about Kashmir, which, paradoxically, makes for fruitful dialogue. They ask commonsensical questions –


‘Is it a war over resources or religion?’

‘If the UN is so good, why don’t they step in and do something to help Kashmir?’

‘Is it something to do with India and Pakistan?’

‘Does Kashmir have its own politicians, or are they governed by India?’


 – that she patiently answers, filing in the historical and political background, offering a useful primer on the occupation. Their more wide-eyed observations – ‘When people are mourning, they are being killed!’; ‘They are killing children!’ – carry a simple moral force, burning through the justifications of the Indian state. The discussions also fill a void in the cultural discourse on Kashmir, which tends to be presented in the media as a conflict zone and nothing more. Kashmiri poet Uzma Falak addresses this tension in her lyric essay, ‘Life or Siege?,’ included in the volume:

How much silence makes a siege?

And how much sound ends it?

What makes a siege a siege?

When do we stop calling it so?

For how long does a siege last?

Does the Siege interrupt [our] Life or is [our] Life

merely in the way of an undying Siege?

What is a siege in a [perpetual] siege called?

What is more persistent – Life or Siege?


Hunt, however, foregrounds the lived experiences of Kashmiri people, who have responded to her project. In 2016, on the anniversary of Tufail Mattoo’s murder, her recorded conversations began to appear as a column in Kashmir Reader, an independent Srinagar newspaper founded in 2012 and known for its investigative reporting, which has kept the Indian censors busy. A month later, the popular military commander Burhan Wani was killed by security forces, prompting the largest protests seen since 2010. On cue, the Reader was banned for three months. Archival images of its pages (and, it seems, of some Indian publications) are interspersed throughout the book. The headlines allude to Kashmir’s dismal political situation – ‘JKPCC chief demands ban on use of pellet guns’; ‘Shutdown marks 1994 Kupwara Massacre.’

*

Most of the conversations take place in Sydney, where Hunt is based. Mainly friends and acquaintances, her interlocutors are curious, well-intentioned, and basically liberal in their political outlook – though she might have spoken to some conservatives too. The discussions tend to begin with uncertainty. Confronted by the scale of violence – ‘Isn’t that akin to genocide?’ – many wonder, with a mix of embarrassment and outrage, why so little global attention is paid to India’s crimes. ‘I doubt that anyone in my journalism class has ever heard of Kashmir,’ a student confesses. ‘None of this has been in our media,’ a friend complains. They guess this is because India is in the United States’ good graces, which is part of the story. Another factor, which Hunt alludes to obliquely, is that Kashmiris have been largely denied ‘the permission to narrate’ their own experiences – to borrow a phrase from Edward Said. All mainstream Indian politicians, and most of its liberal intellectuals, describe the occupation as an ‘internal matter’, as if the whole point was not Kashmir’s rejection of imposed state boundaries.

As the facts sink in, people are curious to know what life is like in the valley. Drawing on her own experiences and the stories of her friends, Hunt describes the overwhelming presence of the army. ‘I had seen the soldiers, thousands and thousands of them,’ she writes. ‘On street corners, on top of buildings, in their barracks, in trucks and armored cars, in orchards, under trees . . . I have seen stones fill the surface of an almost empty street.’ Hunt is also attuned to the more insidious ways in which India is disfiguring the landscape. For instance, she notes that Chinar trees – a recurring image in the towering Kashmiri-American poet Aga Shahid Ali’s verse – have been declared state property, along with the land on which they are planted, which obviously discourages people from growing them. ‘This makes the most majestic and iconic of trees in Kashmir an enemy of the people,’ Hunt caustically reflects, ‘and the people are made any enemy of it.’

Hunt speaks to Aboriginal people who immediately grasp the parallels between Australian and Indian state-creation. ‘That’s the same story here,’ the late Gija painter Rusty Peters tells her, describing settler massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, one of which his uncle narrowly escaped. In staging such moments, Hunt seems to critique ‘the whole idea of a map and of a nation,’ though she does not spell out what an alternative to a state-based order would look like. (For a more in-depth discussion, see recent books by Claire Vergerio, Mahmood Mamdani, and James C. Scott, who Hunt cites in passing.)

Two years after Tufail Mattoo’s killing, Hunt finally arrives in Kashmir. Here she speaks to students, professors and activists, who alike greet her with affection – she is clearly a cherished visitor. The scholar Sheikh Showkat Hussain compares her project to the Kashmiri tradition of fatheha-chai, in which neighbors take responsibility to feed a mourning family for three days after a death, and on the fourth, nun chai is drunk to mark the end of grieving. Indian citizens will have to speak up against the occupation if we too hope to someday be accepted by Kashmiris as neighbours and not jailers.  

Read on: Alpa Shah, ‘Explaining Modi’, NLR 124.

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Fog of War

Accounting for the descent of the European state system into the barbarism of war – for the first time since the collapse of Yugoslavia and NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade – needs more than lay psychiatry. What made Russia and ‘the West’ engage in an unrelenting wrestling match on the edge of the abyss, with both sides eventually falling off the cliff? As we live through these monstrous weeks, we understand better than ever what Gramsci must have meant by an interregnum: a situation ‘in which the old is dying and the new cannot be born’, one in which ‘a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’, like powerful countries turning their future over to the uncertainties of a battlefield clouded in the fog of war.

Nobody knows at the time of writing how the war over Ukraine will end, and after what amount of bloodshed. What we can try to speculate about at this point is what the reasons may have been – and human actors have reasons, however crankish they may seem to others – for the uncompromising brinkmanship on the part of both the US and Russia. What a scene: escalating confrontation, rapidly dwindling possibilities for either side to save face short of total victory, ending with Russia’s murderous assault on a neighbouring country with which it once shared a common state.

Here we find remarkable parallels, as well as the obvious asymmetries, since both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time denied it.

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv.

At some point, the Russian regime apparently concluded that this creeping erosion, domestic as well as external, would continue unabated unless dramatic action was taken to stop the rot. What followed was the military build-up around Ukraine from Spring 2021, accompanied by the demand for a formal commitment from Washington to henceforth respect Russian security interests – seeking an open conflict instead of a hidden one, perhaps in the hope of mobilizing the spirit of Russian patriotism that had once defeated the Germans.

Turning to the American side, one finds a grudge going back to the early 2000s, after Boris Yeltsin, America’s post-Soviet placeman, turned over the farm to Vladimir Putin in the wake of the economic and social disaster caused by American-advised ‘shock therapy’. Putin’s initial quest to join NATO under the auspices of the New World Order was rejected, despite all his efforts to help Washington in its invasion of Afghanistan. Russian objections to the 2004 enlargement of NATO – now threatening its northwestern border – were met by Bush and Blair’s declaration of the ‘open-door’ policy for Georgia and Ukraine at the 2008 Bucharest summit.

The American political establishment, led by the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, began to treat Russia as a rogue state, much like that other country that had extricated itself from American control, Iran. Where in the past there had been a Red under every American bed, now the self-invited guest was a Russian – a distinction that many Americans had never really learned to make in the first place. Even Trump’s election in 2016 was attributed by the losing party to covert Russian machinations, which politically killed Trump’s initial attempts to seek some sort of accommodation with Russia. (Remember his innocent question about why NATO still existed, three decades after the end of Communism?) By the end of his term, in order to mend fences with the American deep state and the voters, he had returned to the tried-and-tested anti-Russian stance.

For Trump’s successor Biden, as for Obama–Clinton, Russia offered itself as a convenient arch enemy, domestically and internationally: small economically, but easy to portray as big on account of its nuclear arms. After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from Germany’s Sonderweg exiting coal and nuclear power at the same time. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would make it impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration had talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2; in return Germany agreed to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

Thus Western unity was back, greeted by the jubilant applause of the local commentariats, grateful for the return of the transatlantic certainties of the Cold War. The prospect of entering battle in alliance with the most formidable military in world history instantly wiped out memories of a few months before, when the US abandoned with little warning not just Afghanistan but also the auxiliary troops provided by its NATO allies in support of that once-favoured American activity, ‘nation-building’. No matter also Biden’s appropriation of the bulk of the reserves of the Afghan central bank, to the tune of $7.5 billion, for distribution to those affected by 9/11 (and their lawyers), while Afghanistan is suffering a nationwide famine. Forgotten too is the wreckage left behind by recent American interventions in Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya – the utter destruction, followed by hasty abandonment, of entire countries and regions.

Now it is ‘the West’ again, Middle Earth fighting the Land of Mordor to defend a brave small country that only wants ‘to be like us’ and for the purpose desires no more than being allowed to walk through the open doors of NATO and the EU. Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank. Keeping pro-American governments in power in the former Soviet satellite states, which may be costly, makes for an attractive burden-sharing under which ‘Europe’ pays for the bread while the US provides the firepower – or the imagination of such. This makes the EU in effect an economic auxiliary to NATO. Meanwhile, Eastern European governments are happier to trust Washington with their defence than Paris and Berlin, given the former’s proven trigger happiness and its invulnerable home base. In return for US protection through NATO, and Washington’s patronage in their relation to the EU, countries like Poland and Romania host US missiles allegedly defending Europe against Iran, while unfortunately having to pass over Russia on their way.

The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status. EU extension to Ukraine and the West Balkans, even to Georgia and Armenia, is considered by the US as ultimately for Washington to decide. France in particular may still object to further enlargement, but how long it can hold out, especially if Germany can be made to pick up the bill, is anybody’s guess. (Though formal EU accession procedures for Ukraine are not yet underway, von der Leyen has announced: ‘We want them in.’) Moreover, Poland being strictly anti-Russian and pro-NATO, it will now be hard to punish it by cuts in EU economic support for what the European Court sees as deficiencies in its ‘rule of law’. The same holds for Hungary, whose wayward leader, Orbán, has turned increasingly anti-Russian. With the American return, the power to discipline EU member states has migrated from Brussels to Washington D.C.

One thing EU-Europeans, especially those of the Green kind, are currently learning is that if you allow the US to protect you, geopolitics trumps all other politics, and that geopolitics is defined by Washington alone. This is how an empire works. Ukraine, a house divided between an astounding collection of oligarchs, will soon begin to receive enhanced financial support from ‘Europe’. This will, however, be no more than a fraction of what Ukrainian oligarchs are regularly depositing in Swiss or British or, one assumes, American banks. Indications are that, compared to Ukraine, Poland and even Hungary are, to use an American simile, as clean as a hound’s tooth. (Who could forget the salary Hunter Biden enjoyed as non-executive director of a Ukrainian gas company whose principal owner was then facing a money-laundering investigation?)

What remains a mystery, obviously not the only one in this context, is why the United States and their allies were for the most part happy to discount the possibility of Russia responding to continuing pressures for regime change – in the form of ‘Western’ denial of a security zone – by deepening an alliance with China. It is true that historically, Russia always wanted to be part of Europe, and something like Asiaphobia is deeply anchored in its national identity. Moscow is for Russians the Third Rome, not the Second Beijing. As late as 1969, Russia and China, both Communist then, clashed over their mutual border on the Ussuri River. Now, with Russia cut off from the West for an indefinite future, China, short of raw materials, may step in and provide Russia with modern technology of its own. As NATO is dividing the Eurasian continent into ‘Europe’, including Ukraine, against Russia, as a non-European enemy of Europe, Russian nationalism may, against its historical grain, feel forced to ally with China, as foreshadowed by that strange picture of Xi and Putin standing side by side at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Would an alliance between China and Russia be an unintended result of American incompetence, or on the contrary, an intended result of American global strategy? If Moscow were to team up with Beijing, there would be no prospect anymore for a Russian-European settlement à la française. Western Europe, in whatever political form, would more than ever function as the transatlantic wing of the United States in a new cold or, perhaps, hot war between the two global power blocs, the one declining, hoping to reverse the tide, the other hoping to rise.

Only a Europe at peace with Russia, one that respects Russian security needs, could hope to free itself from the American embrace, so effectively renewed during the Ukrainian crisis. This, one presumes, is the reason why Macron insisted for so long on Russia being a part of Europe, and on the need for ‘Europe’, as represented of course by himself and France, to provide peace on its Eastern flank. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has for a long time, if not forever, put an end to this project. But then, it was never very promising to begin with, given Germany’s felt dependence on American nuclear protection, combined with German doubts about all-too-fanciful French global ambitions, re-defined as European ambitions to be funded by German economic power. And Russia may with some justification have questioned if, under these conditions, France would be able to push the US out of the European driver’s seat.

So the winner is… the United States? The longer the war drags on, due to the successful resistance of Ukrainian citizens and their army, the more it will be noticed that the leader of ‘the West’, who spoke for ‘Europe’ as the war built up, is not intervening militarily on behalf of Ukraine. In case there was war, the US has given itself a special leave of absence, as Biden made clear from the start. Looking at its record, this is nothing new: when their mission gets out of hand, they withdraw to their distant island. Nevertheless, as Germans look on, wondering where the US is, they may start to feel some doubt about the American commitment to come to their nuclear defence. That commitment, after all, underlies German membership in NATO, German adherence to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, and the housing of 30,000 or so American troops on German soil.  

In this context the special budget of €100 billion, announced a few days into the war by the Scholz government and devoted to fulfilling the promise, going back to 2002, to spend 2 percent of Germany’s GDP on arms, looks like a ritual sacrifice to appease an angry God who one fears might abandon his less-than-true believers. Nobody thinks that had Germany actually lived up to the 2 percent NATO demand, Russia would have been deterred from invading Ukraine, or that Germany would have been able and willing to come to its aid. It will also take years for the new hardware, of course the latest on offer, to be made available to the troops. And it will be hardware of exactly the sort that the US, France and the UK already have in abundance.

And not to be forgotten, the entire German military is under the command of NATO, meaning the Pentagon, so the new arms will add to NATO’s, not Germany’s firepower. Technologically, they will be designed for deployment around the globe, on ‘missions’ like Afghanistan – or, most likely, in the environs of China, to assist the US in its emerging confrontation in the South China Sea. There was no debate at all in the Bundestag on exactly what new ‘capabilities’ would be needed, or what they will be used for. As in the past, under Merkel, this was left to ‘the allies’ to determine. One item could be the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), beloved by the French, which combines fighter bombers, drones and satellites for worldwide operations. There is scant hope that there will at some point be a strategic debate in Germany on what it means to defend your own territory, rather than attack the territory of others. Can the Ukrainian experience help start this discussion? Unlikely.

Georgi Derluguian, ‘A Small World War’, NLR 128.