Czar Putin and Ukraine

Bozen – In the very year in which much of the world is focussed on the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, we see a situation unfolding that looks dismayingly familiar: violent street protests in which security forces killed and maimed protesters; an annexation; troop mobilization, threats and counter-threats.

The Australian historian and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, has written a book about the outbreak of WWI, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”, published simultaneously in German as “Die Schlafwandler: Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog”, which has become a best-seller. Clark steps back from allocating blame, arguing that the great powers stumbled into a war that no one wanted as the unintended consequence of multiple policies that went awry. Out of all the analysis that the book has engendered, one point is salient, although little discussed, but which Clark expressed in a television interview on “Das Erste”. When asked what really differentiated the world a century ago from ours, he noted that in 1914 policies were made by an all-male autocratic elite behind closed doors. What difference, one asks oneself, could it possibly make that in 2014 the major players are more or less democratic and that the Chancellor of Germany is a woman? Would it make a difference if the players were more democratic, and if more of the world leaders were women?

There are plenty of newspaper columns and cartoons depicting Putin as a Czar, and the comparison is not an idle one. As one of the last licensed autocrats in Europe he has been for several years embarked on a strategy to gain geopolitical advantage in Syria and Iran that spits in the face of the Euro-American alliance. Suddenly, with the annexation of the Crimea, Putin has returned to the “Great Game” of the nineteenth century and is seeking competitive advantage closer to home. Putin is an intelligent man, and one does not get the impression that he is impulsive, so it is possible that he chose gun-boat diplomacy and annexation on the centenary of the outbreak of WWI knowing that world leaders were more likely to be sensitive to the moment, and less likely to stumble into yet another war, meaning that he would get away with it. Few doubt that he will get away with it, and the most recent meeting of Foreign Minister Lavrov and American Secretary of State, Kerry, concluded with no mention of Crimea in the communique.

Putin’s inner circle appears to be made up of ex KGB men like himself, and were Russia more democratized, it is arguable that such high risk behaviour would not be tolerable. This is not to underestimate the degree of support the annexation has seen from the Russian public, and even from a carefully conscripted list of artists and intellectuals, including the great conductor of the London Symphony Gergiev, Directors of the Bolshoi and of the Mali Theatre in Petersburg. But there is plenty of commentary to the effect that Putin’s Czarlike behaviour will be most disastrous for Russia itself. The last successful instance of the use of nineteenth century gun-boat diplomacy was by Margaret Thatcher in the Falkland’s, but the Falkland’s are far away and could not bite back. The annexation of Crimea by Putin, which represents less than 5 % of Ukrainian territory, has ramifications that are not to scale. First of all it puts paid to Putin’s early commitment to Russia’s participation in a Eurasian union, and even his overtures to NATO. Second it dashes the dreams of many Russians who also feel themselves European, and had hopes of closer European ties, more democratization and greater participation in the world economy. Then it opens the Pandora’s box of Russian minorities elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and the Baltic States as well as Ukraine. And this is not to mention the destabilization of Ukraine itself. This is also a considerable liability for Russia – what does it do when called upon to “protect” Russian minorities elsewhere?

What could Putin have done differently, and what can he still do? It is true to say that the West has been less than sensitive in the way that it handled the break-up of the Soviet Union, threatening to bring NATO to Russia’s doorstep in the Baltic States, and offering financial inducements to wean Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence. So, for instance, the war in Georgia of 2008 is said to have been directly linked to a NATO Membership Action Plan and, indirectly linked to the unilateral declaration of independence for Kosovo. The fall of the Soviet Union was not a wartime capitulation, because the Cold War never became hot; and it was remarkably bloodless, which encouraged the West to believe that Russia was willingly compliant. Certainly the story is more complicated than this, which overlooks the patriotism, and yet the commitment to cosmopolitanism and social justice, that the old Soviet Union represented to its credit, and now feels betrayed as Russia and its satellites have moved increasingly into the mode of oligopoly, economic inequality, and capital flight, human and financial . But economists and political advisors have long counselled Russia to adopt a policy that would make it more attractive to its well-educated and highly motivated young people who are now escaping in large numbers to the West. Had it abandoned its over-reliance on the export of gas and petroleum, as counselled, and followed a path closer to China’s, with its economic diversification, the chasm that now exists between the Russian economy and the rest of the developed world, and which attracts Ukraine to the West, would not be so great.

Whether or not the Russian leadership could have avoided the rise of the oligarchs we are not in position to know. When privatization took place – and to its credit Russia adopted a much more transparent policy than many of its satellites, transferring property to ordinary citizens who were gifted the apartments in which they lived – the large state concerns appear to have fallen into the hands of individuals who were already beneficiaries of a corrupt party system. If this is the case, the rise of the oligarchs grew out of fairly advanced political corruption based on party cronyism, which it continues to feed. So, for instance, Putin’s own crusade against the oligarchs has reaped big cash rewards, but these have also only fed the coffers of party cronies. Meanwhile those oligarchs who continue to expatriate their profits – and $70 billion are said to have fled Russia for Western capital markets already this year – are a destabilizing force, encouraging and financing dissidents in the Ukraine and in Russia itself.

At the same time NATO, which was never developed to oversee the break-up of the Soviet Union, has no real capacity to act in the Ukraine case. Joint military exercises are no credible threat. And while sanctions involving the freezing of Russian bank accounts and visa restrictions are likely to get more traction, a Russian recession is likely to harm Germany, with the greatest volume of exports to Russia, and the heaviest reliance on Russian gas, as well. However the crisis plays out, and we are not yet in a position to know, one lesson is to be learned that should never be forgotten. And that is that this is once again a replay of the “nationalities problem” which Mark and Lenin once dismissed as an archaic scenario to which Europe, on the high road to scientific socialism, would never return. That was perhaps the biggest mistake they ever made and it went together with their confidence in the withering away of the state and the belief that “primordial ties” in the form of family, clan, tribe, village, and nation would wither away too.

Not even in Russia is this true, as we now know, and the current problems in Ukraine, to put it bluntly, can be seen as a form of tribalism, the same old scenario that, to paraphrase Hegel, confronted us first as tragedy, in the case of WWI, and second, in the case of WWII, with Hitler’s bid to “protect” the interests of ethnic Germans by invading Bohemia and Poland, as farce. Once again the pretext is suspect – Crimea was not Russian from time immemorial, but Turkic Tartar from at least the fifteenth century until Stalin’s deportations in 1944. The Tartars, returning in small numbers only some forty years later, thus suffered the same fate as the Turkic peoples of Chechnya. Should repossession through annexation be the reward for ethnic cleansing? Among the long-term consequences Russia faces as a consequence of Putin’s grandstanding, is the possibility that the Tartars, who mainly abstained from voting in the referendum, make excellent potential Jihadis. Russia is then opening another front for possible destabilization to add to that in Chechnya. Greater democracy, more inclusive representation, and wider consultation, are all ways to prevent such capricious policies and their consequences. One hopes that it is not already too late!