Any consequences need to be thought about in advance. Questions must be asked now About what we want after Russian and Ukrainian weapons stop firing, which will happen sooner or later. Every conflict ends, even if the energies of the combatants are exhausted. But a ceasefire does not necessarily mean peace, and we must remember that there are types of peace worse than war itself.
The end of peace means that we need to think critically about what we are willing to accept as “restoring peace,” beyond the suspension of war, and about the steps that will take us from here to there.
The best minds are not always the same. Certainly, Jürgen Habermas, who co-signed with Jacques Derrida a statement against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, cannot be accused of being a warmonger. In April 2022, he said that aspiring to peace “is not equivalent to demanding that a politically free existence be sacrificed on the altar of mere survival.” He continued that stable peace requires justice, without which all ceasefires remain risky. In February 2023, after the first year of the Ukraine war, Habermas softened the tone of that statement and called for vaguely defined negotiations. Preventive quality Before we reach a dramatic crossroads: or more precisely the choice between actively intervening in the war, or leaving Ukraine to its fate in order not to spark a first world war between the nuclear-armed powers.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In defense of Habermas, he was addressing the direct question of how to deal with Ukraine's ever-increasing requests for advanced weapons. But with all due respect, this way of framing the issue runs the risk of signaling to aggressors that their best interest is precisely to push us to the intolerable crossroads where they have a reasonable hope of abandoning Ukraine.
However, I am interested in addressing the broader question of what goals “we” have – not just the EU, not just the EU and the US, not just NATO member states, but all those who care about democracy (East and West). West, North and South) – they must want to follow the world after the ceasefire. There has been a lot of discussion about whether Ukraine will restore its territorial integrity before 2022 or even before 2014, or whether there will be a Korea-style division of the country, with or without a buffer zone. But the question about the state of the world after the war is broader. Assuming that a decent and worthwhile truce can be reached (and not a peace treaty that authorizes the defeat of one of the warring parties), we must ask what the world will look like in the aftermath – or rather, what will we, critical theorists and committed democrats, fare like? , you should want to consider.
Before we address this question, perhaps we should pause to consider three ways in which Russia's invasion of Ukraine changed the world.
First, the future prospects of global governance institutions have been profoundly affected. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Michael Walzer compared several possible forms of global governance with global institutions. The status quo at the time, centered around the UN under Kofi Annan (which was about to outline the “responsibility to protect” principle, which Ban Ki-moon later adopted), seemed like a fairly conservative regime. It now seems utopian. In the presence of an aggressive, expansionist, nuclear-weapons state, even John Rawls's “realistic utopia,” sometimes criticized for its commitment to enforcing only a short list of human rights and containing “lawless” states, is no longer “realistic.”
Second, the belief that global trade and commerce curb aggressive stances by authoritarian states has been shaken. This was a Leitmotif Since Montesquieu's claim, V The spirit of the laws“The natural effect of trade is to lead to peace.” This was then amplified by Thomas Paine's optimistic view, in human rights, That “if trade were allowed to operate to the universal extent of its ability, it would eradicate the system of war.” Kant famously implied that republics do not wage wars against each other, while Mead believed that “the economic process goes right in the direction of bringing people together.” The doctrine inspired the German Eastern politics From Brandt to Merkel, it boils down to the slogan Change through trade (“Change through trade”). But trade has now proven itself usable as a weapon. Dependence on energy, fuel, minerals and advanced technology has turned trade into an instrument of political pressure and aggression.
From being a stabilizing factor, economic interdependence has become a stabilizing factor Instability. This has led to a preference for national or regional self-sufficiency at best and independence from global exchange flows. Neither globalization, as was ideal in the past, nor “deglobalization” seem likely outcomes. Instead, we may be heading towards… Differentiated globalizationA combination of globalized trade in strategically inert goods and services, and regional or imperial self-sufficiency in strategically vital resources.
Third, the world as an international community of 195 countries appears polarized again. The democratic countries grouped in NATO, along with Australia and East Asia, form a single camp. They are opposed by a less integrated camp, coming from all continents, and including countries that support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, do not explicitly condemn it, or are simply indifferent to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Unlike what happened during the Cold War, these camps are not clustered around two superpowers, but rather around three superpowers. This indicates long-term instability. In addition, the first camp represents more than 50% of the world's gross national product, but it includes only 12% of the world's population. This makes it vulnerable to the accusation that it is an exclusive club for the world's richest countries.
Because none of these three factors are likely to change significantly over the next two or three decades, what kind of world should any critically thinking person, or democratic constituency, aspire to?
A decisive commitment to justice must seek to ease the tension between two goals: global security for all democratic states – which requires tighter coordination between them, both militarily and commercially (including energy needs) – and preventing further spread of the world's image. The richest 12% are building a global fortress to defend their privileges. If we add their closest supporters, the other two superpowers – Russia and China – amount to about 17% of the world's population. This means that the remaining two-thirds are watching the drama unfold from a position of general sympathy for one side or the other. The state of the world in 2050 will depend to a large extent on the consensus that emerges between these two-thirds of the world's population and their elites.
But consensus on what? This is unlikely to materialize around the superiority of liberal democracy. Today, elections are no more than a facade. When only three countries in the world do not hold regular elections, they lose their former meaning as a brand of democracy. A full and strong democracy requires multipartyism, freedom of speech, press, religion, movement, and association. It seems unlikely that all of these components will gain universal support.
Therefore, the consensus that critical democrats should seek among these two-thirds of living human beings must be broader. There must be consensus on the necessity of enforcing the principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter: the prohibition of aggressive wars against another recognized state, whatever the nature of the conflict. This is the basis for a truly post-Westphalian world order, whether it involves the organization of a few hundred nominally sovereign states, or three empires and their clients. Wasn't this engraved on the marble of the United Nations Charter? Apparently, only formally, as the war in Ukraine shows.
This is then the basic proposal that the coalition of existing democracies should endorse, and on which they should seek to gain global consensus. No one is safe in a world where eleven countries have nuclear weapons, and the principle of territorial integrity can be ignored when appropriate. This is a message that can appeal to every constituency in the world, regardless of its democratic status. In short, the demand for a universal rule of law may find sympathetic ears among those less receptive to the demand for democracy.
It is therefore necessary to address the doubts of others, specifically those who remain on the sidelines because of what they see as the partisanship of the Democratic Alliance. They point out that Ukraine's supporters are willing to go so far as to become directly involved in the war, but they ignore similar positions elsewhere in the world. But criticizing this real, undeniable aspect of the current impasse should not be tantamount to condemning those who support the victims of aggression per se – even if other victims are ignored. Instead, criticism should be directed at the absence of a rule of law at the global level, with institutions capable of preventing everyone Violations of territorial integrity are everywhere, not just those violations that some consider to be of strategic importance.
Without these institutions, or in the face of their ineffectiveness, the only option for small states is to acquire strategic importance for one of the great powers, an arrangement akin to the medieval pact of obedience or protection. Only “small states” should prefer the strict application of the UN Charter to the current loose application, corrupted by the veto, which leaves them dependent on the arbitrary intersections of the political interests of the powerful.
Beyond the untold suffering of the Ukrainian people, the long-term cost that Russia's invasion has imposed on the world is the damage to the institutions of global governance. The goals of organizations aimed at defending peace and prosperity have essentially been reduced to survival and basic security. The United Nations, paralyzed by the veto power of Security Council members, now rivals the ill-fated League of Nations in its level of ineffectiveness. Will the General Assembly be able to put enough pressure on Russia to get it to accept the veto amendment?
