But in waging war on Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is inspired by a different concept, ethno-nationalism. It is the idea of nationality and identity based on language, culture and blood – a collective ideology with deep roots in Russian history and thought.
Putin has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine is not a de facto state and that Ukrainians are not a real people, but are in fact Russians, part of a Slavic stronghold that includes Belarus.
“Putin wants to strengthen Russia’s civilizational frontier, as he says, and he is doing so by invading a sovereign European country,” said Ivan Vejvoda, a senior fellow at the Anthropological Institute in Vienna.
In this sense, argues Ivan Krestev, the war is again one of colonization, the annexation of lands ruled by the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
“Even if Ukraine was autocratic, Putin would not tolerate it,” he said. “He is reinforcing imperialist nationalism.”
If Putin started out as a “Soviet man, a red colonel,” said Bulgarian Krustyev, who heads the Liberal Strategies Center in Sofia, “he now attacks the Soviet Union as an oppressor of the Russian people.” For him, it’s an identity war.”
For Putin’s opponents in Ukraine and in the West, nations are built on civic responsibility, the rule of law, and the rights of individuals and minorities, including free expression and a free vote.
Yale professor Timothy Snyder has written extensively about Russia and Ukraine, but attacking assumptions about a peaceful Europe respecting borders, national sovereignty and multilateral institutions, “What Russia is doing here is an innocent Not waging war against the nation.” ,
“The Russian leadership is deliberately destroying the linguistic and moral framework that we drew from World War II,” he said.
Nathalie Tosi, director of Italy’s International Affairs Institute, said behind the war a conflict between the political system, a “war against liberal democracy” and Ukraine’s right to self-determination. But it is part of a larger struggle, she said, as Putin tries to change what it means to be sovereign.
“He’s going back to a dangerous, irreverent and ethno-nationalist view of sovereignty and self-determination,” Tosi said.
Vejvoda, who is a Serb, notes that the concept of ethno-nationalism is one that was also manipulated by former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, saying that old Yugoslavia had suppressed Serbian identity and ambitions. While Milosevic used such arguments in a cynical fashion, Putin seems to have embraced them wholeheartedly.
The idea of Russia as a distinct civilization from the West with which it competes goes back centuries, with the roots of Orthodox Christianity and the notion of Moscow as the “third Rome”, followed by Rome and Constantinople. Snyder has examined sources called it a form of Russian Christian Fascism, including author Ivan Ilyin, born in 1883, who saw emancipation in a totalitarian state led by a righteous man.
Ilyin’s views have been revived and celebrated by his close circle of security men and allies such as Putin and Yuri Kovalchuk, who was recently described by Mikhail Zyger, former editor of the independent news channel TV Rain, as “a thinker, a subscriber to a worldview”. which combines conservative Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy theories and hedonism.”
Putin is similarly drawn from the ideas of Soviet-era historian and ethnographer Lev Gumilyov, who promoted “Eurasianism” as an antidote to European influence, and Alexander Dugin, who promoted an ultranationalist view of Russia’s fate. To promote that notion has been carried forward. The Conservative Empire in Perpetual Conflict with the Liberal Western World. Their history is notably described by Charles Clover in his book “Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism”.
Dugin, who has long pressed for the re-absorption of Ukraine, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s philosopher”. In 2014, Dugin said: “Only after the restoration of Greater Russia, that is, the Eurasian Union, can we become a credible global player.” That year the Ukrainian uprising against Russian influence he called “a coup by the United States”, a Western attempt to halt “the progress of Russian integration”.
But if Putin had ever used such ideas to fill the ideological hole left by the fall of communism, he seems to have now absorbed them – and acted on them.
The soil is ready for such ideas in Russia, which for centuries have been torn between “Westernizers” and those who see the West as cancer – alien, decadent, insidious and threatening.
Western Europeans coped differently with their own failing empires, merging their weakened nation-states into the European Union, to stifle aggressive nationalism.
“The European Union was a transformation of empires that failed, desperate to find something new,” said Pierre Vimont, a former French ambassador to the United States at Carnegie Europe – something safer and less prone to war.
Putin’s concept of one nation is ethnic and autocratic, in contrast to the Western idea of a multicultural state built on civic responsibility, the rule of law, and individual rights. To be an American, many have suggested, it is only necessary to take an oath of allegiance to the flag, obey the law, and pay your taxes.
Efforts to more narrowly define what is to be a “true American” have fueled a far-right populism, and a strong defending of former President Donald Trump’s “traditional” — and restrictive — praise of Putin. There are elements of identification with the leader. Definition of National Relations.
But as has happened with far-right countries in European countries such as Germany, France and Italy, the relationship with Putin now during the war of aggression in Ukraine is a shameful reminder of where such views can lead.
China, the other great autocracy in Biden’s formulation, is built on similar ideas of ethnic nationalism – that all Chinese are part of the same nation, that minorities such as the Uighurs are inferior or dangerous, and that Taiwan’s secession is deceptive, a crime in history. which should be rectified.
Even India, a great democracy, has been pushed into ethnic nationalism by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with its Hindu dominance. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recreated the historical stories of the Ottoman Empire, working in solidarity with Turkic-speaking peoples in Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh and Central Asia.
Even in Europe, the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has promoted Hungarian identity and nationalism, despite condemnation from Brussels. They have handed over Hungarian passports to ethnic Hungarians in Romania and other countries who are allowed to vote in Hungary, giving them an electoral edge so far. But Orban faces parliamentary elections next month, and his long, close ties with Putin have hurt him politically, even as he has been accused of supporting EU sanctions on Russia and Ukrainian refugees. Fast forward to welcome.
Putin’s ethno-nationalist war did not go particularly well, apparently to his surprise, turning out to be a bloody slog rather than a swift victory. Casting it as a civilizational war creates all kinds of difficulties for the Russian invaders – after all, if Russians and Ukrainians are one people, as Putin insists, they are firing on their brothers and sisters.
“It’s not easy to kill Ukrainians for kids who share the language and look like them,” Krustyev said. “It was easier with the Chechens,” the non-Slavic peoples of the Caucasus with whom Russia has been fighting since Catherine the Great.
Krustev said, Putin’s great disappointment was to find out that Russian speakers in Ukraine fought with their forces. Even his favorite Ukrainian oligarchs, such as Rinat Akhmetov and Dmitro Firtash, have “suddenly discovered Ukrainian-ness.”
Putin has also worked to build a more militaristic society based on Russia’s pride in defeating Nazi Germany in what has been called the “Great Patriotic War”. But now Ukraine, which also fought and suffered under the Nazis, is using the same trope against the invading Russians. As for Ukraine, Krustyev said, “this is their Great Patriotic War.”
Krastaev said that Putin has done more than anyone in the West to build Ukraine’s nationality.
“Putin wanted to be the father of a new Russian nation,” he said, “but he is instead the father of a new Ukrainian nation.”
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