Russia and the Question of Legitimacy: A Symposium, Part IV
City of Mariupol sign in front of destroyed building. Photo: Russkievesti.ru
Below, we conclude our Center’s Symposium on Realism and Legitimacy with contributions from Paul Robinson, Adam Webb and Paul Grenier. They continue with the theme of legitimacy already taken up in Part III, while also expanding upon it.
Adam Webb does so by adding in the rest of the world beyond Russia, China and the ‘collective West.’ He argues that the spiritual and even physical energies of the youthful South should inspire a cooperative effort oriented to resisting both the Hobbesian state and/or a dehumanized, technocratic globalization. Paul Robinson examines the interaction between legitimacy, which he views as subjective, and the political demands of an institutionalized liberalism. He concludes on a pessimistic note, seeing no way out of the impasse of a “West [that] continues to consolidate itself, and [a] Russia … left out and condemned as an outlaw.”
Paul Grenier posits that a technocratically oriented United States has instrumentalized the concept of ‘legitimacy,’ turning it into a weapon. He argues that, to the extent that the U.S. embraces a flawed (‘technocratic’) version of reason, the truth that Russia and the United States (and most other nations) are similar in the sense of being similarly morally flawed, can never be admitted — because such a truth isn’t useful. In theory, and if it were given due attention, what might best be termed the Christian-Platonic school (which has important counterparts in contemporary Russian and Western philosophy and thought), precisely because rooted in something beyond such ideological pragmatism, offers a way out. — the Editors
Legitimacy, rationality, and the conflict between Russia and the West
— Paul Robinson
Political legitimacy is a subjective phenomenon. People often speak of it as if it has objective criteria, which in the discourse of modern liberalism are often associated with ideas such as free and fair elections and respect of human rights. In reality, though, a state is legitimate if people consider it legitimate, regardless of any such criteria. Indeed, legitimacy is precisely that – a measure of people’s subjective acceptance. This leads to an important conclusion – legitimacy is dependent on others. As Hegel put it,
A state is as little an actual individual without relations to other states as an individual is actually a person without rapport with other persons. … The legitimate authority of a state … is partly a purely domestic matter … however, it is no less essential that this authority should receive its full and final legitimation through its recognition by other states.
States, however, do not always extend such recognition. When this happens, the result is conflict. Thus we may conclude, along with Hegel, that international conflict is very often a “struggle for recognition.” While issues of security, material loss or gain, and so on, may play a role, often they are not the underlying cause of international disputes, but merely the “points of honour” through which the struggle for recognition comes into the open.
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[W]e may conclude, along with Hegel, that international conflict is very often a “struggle for recognition.”
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This framework can shed some light on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Russian authorities, it seems, have come to the conclusion that the West is unwilling to recognize Russia as a legitimate actor on the international stage, and that the West will not under any circumstances recognize that Russia has legitimate interests that have to be taken into consideration. According to Hegel’s logic, the very legitimacy of the state depends on such foreign recognition, and the West’s denial of it thus strikes at the existence of the Russian state. Unable to gain this recognition by peaceful means, Russia’s leaders have determined to win it by force.
Russia’s method of resolving this struggle of recognition is counterproductive. But a good case can be made that the Russian authorities are correct in deciding that the West is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of Russian interests. And if that wasn’t the case before the invasion of Ukraine, it certainly is now. The West has struck Russia off its list of legitimate actors, giving it the status of an outlaw. Moreover, the demands it is making are such that it is almost impossible for Russia ever to lose this outlaw status. For instance, Western states are backing the Ukrainian government’s demand that Russia cede not just the territory it has conquered during the present war but also the whole of Donbass and Crimea. For multiple reasons, including the wishes of the locals, no Russian government could ever comply with this demand, no matter how keen it was to mend its relations with the West.
Given this, it appears that the only means by which Russia can once gain be recognized by the West as a legitimate member of the international community is by suffering a cataclysmic defeat of such a scale that it is unable any more to resist Western demands. How the Russian state could survive such a defeat is not clear. But this is where we are – the only path left open to Russia to gain the recognition required by a sovereign state is to suffer and accept its total defeat, a somewhat paradoxical situation, since such a defeat is of course incompatible with the retention of national independence.
Russia, of course, will not comply, and Ukraine almost certainly lacks the means to inflict the necessary defeat. The result, therefore, is that the conflict between Russia and the West will almost certainly continue for a very long time indeed.
This then begs the question of why the Western world has adopted a position that dooms it to perpetual conflict by giving its political enemy no way out other than total submission. Arguably, this is an irrational position. Rationality may be divided into two types: epistemic and instrumental. The first involves setting goals that are both desirable and achievable; the second involves using means that are compatible with the chosen goals. Western policy fits neither definition. The chosen goal – Russia’s total defeat – is almost certainly unachievable (and perhaps not even desirable given the chaos that might accompany it), while the chosen means (proxy war and sanctions) have a track record of consistent failure. This is not a one-off. One can see a pattern in the past 30 years of failed Western efforts to deny recognition to chosen enemies and to force them into submission. Rarely, if ever, has it ended well. Yet, the West keeps repeating the same failed formula over and over. This is, one might argue, very much the definition of irrationality.
Given the leading role of the United States, it is tempting to blame this irrationality on some peculiar characteristic of the American psyche or of American institutions. Internal American squabbles of recent years have added to the impression that something is seriously wrong with the global hegemon.
Yet it would be an error to be overly US-centric. The path chosen by the collective West in the past 30 years has not been forced on it by the United States. Most of its members have followed this path willingly, even enthusiastically. One need only look at the imperial delusions of the British to realize that it is not only America that has a strange understanding of the limits of its power. The irrationality of Western policy is a collective problem.
There are many explanations for this, and no single one is complete. Two post-Cold War phenomena do, however, provide at least a partial answer to the question of how we ended up in this situation.
The first is a peculiar conjuncture of the political left and right that occurred in the West after the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the peace movement in the West collapsed also. Meanwhile a curious alliance arose between traditional hawks on the right and human rights activists on the left, producing an ideological hegemony in favour of liberal interventionism. Calls for foreign policy restraint were shunted to the margins of the political spectrum – to a few survivors on the left and to paleoconservatives and libertarians on the right. The very fact that restraint found its support on the fringes then further served to delegitimize it. One senses that the margins of acceptable foreign policy discourse have narrowed considerably, so that opposition to liberal interventionism has almost vanished from the mainstream (for instance, here in Canada, the left-leaning New Democratic Party is as every bit hawkish as the Liberal and Conservative Parties).
The second post-Cold War phenomenon is the institutional consolidation of the West. Until recently, the West was an idea. In the past few years, however, it has taken on an increasingly concrete institutional form, centred on NATO and the European Union. This institutional consolidation has been accompanied, almost necessarily, by ideological consolidation, with NATO and the EU legitimizing themselves and their pre-eminent international status by appeal to allegedly superior moral values and liberal-democratic institutions. The presentation of the West as superior inevitably labels others as inferior. One may speculate that Russia plays a key role in this, playing the role of the “barbaric” other that fortifies Western identity. Seen this way, the institutional consolidation of the West and the denial of recognition to Russia go hand in hand.
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[T]he institutional consolidation of the West and the denial of recognition to Russia go hand in hand.
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Unfortunately, there is little prospect of a turnaround in Russian-Western relations. In his book Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, Andrei Tsygankov argues that Russian foreign policy has long been driven by the desire for recognition from the West. But with the invasion of Ukraine, we have reached a position where the desired recognition has become almost impossible, not just now but at any time in the observable future. As the West continues to consolidate itself, and Russia is left out and condemned as an outlaw, the two sides seem doomed to go their own ways. Perhaps this can be avoided, but at present it’s difficult to imagine how.
Paul Robinson is Professor of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa, and a member of the board of the Simone Weil Center.
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A realism beyond ‘power-sharing’
— Adam Webb
Contra the establishment, a growing number of voices on both left and right counsel more realism and restraint in Western foreign policy. The indictment tends to connect an entrenched crusading impulse to overreach that fails to attain its ends while also causing fallout both abroad and at home. Such calls typically tie urgency to the flattening of global power and the rise of the non-West. Deference to the Other is supposedly justified by both the hard limits of power as distributed, and the moral imperative to cease hubristic wrongdoing.
In any given conflict over intervention or expanding alliances or spheres of influence, who provoked whom may be a fruitless question. But the more fundamental questions bear asking. About which realities in international affairs is one being realistic? And in choosing which Other to accommodate, and how, what view is taken on the nature of the philosophical axis at stake, and which elements of one’s own society and polity are laudable or deplorable from that more universal perspective? Such questions go beyond blame for particular misdeeds, into how to reorder the world.
The West is indeed in a long relative decline. One third of humanity was of European descent a century ago. In 2050, it will be merely one tenth. Much of the rebalancing of power has come from the non-West gaining weight more proportional to its numbers, as with the swelling of China’s real share of the global economy from under 5% in 1978 to over 18% in 2021, surpassing America. Talk of a Chinese century has abounded for the last two decades. Earlier this year, the “no limits” friendship between China and Russia was proclaimed as a “new model of international relations.”
But those who would rule the world from the East and those who would defer to them have blind spots. India’s population will surpass that of China next year. By 2050, the combined global population share of the OECD plus China will shrink from today’s 38% to 28%. As China hits the middle income trap and the West grows slowly at the frontier of prosperity, the fastest economic growth, too, will be in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa as they catch up.
We have not two but three geopolitical zones, broadly speaking: 1) the developed West (with the capitalist energy of the Anglosphere and parts of the Pacific Rim, and the supranational bureaucratic template of the European Union), 2) the land-empire axis centred on China (and its westward partners as far as Moscow), and 3) the growing Global South. Actors in each zone have some agency in understanding that landscape and its natural affinities. Based on the long term trends, a Western realism that counsels deference mainly eastward rather than southward would be demographically and economically shortsighted.
But beneath this geopolitical triangle lies another triangle of worldviews. First, a modern atomistic version of liberty has been a solvent for society and tradition, and favours the deracinated and mercenary. Second, an overbearing version of state sovereignty represses and walls off societies, while invoking tradition only instrumentally as part of blood-and-soil essentialism. Third, a fractured diversity rooted in weak states and strong societies generates what looks like stiff-necked benightedness when it comes to both capitalist and statist projects of mastery, and which often is further animated by youthful energy and high levels of religiosity.
The three geopolitical zones and the three ideological tendencies do not exactly align. Elements of each experience and approach to life—and corresponding ideas about the relations among economy, state, society, and tradition—crop up everywhere. But modern world history has produced at least what we might call contingent affinities between the West, East, and South, respectively, and the atomistic, despotic, and resistant, so to speak.
Both calls for realism and idealistic visions of a post-Western world order must consider how geopolitical landscapes and circuits of interest might coalesce with deep-rooted sensibilities in political culture and experience.
For the West to accommodate the East, in the sense that is usually proposed, amounts to doing a deal based on power-sharing. Such a deal implicitly draws a line of geopolitical comity below which it dismisses the rest of the world (including vassals in each sphere of influence) with all the enlightened contempt of the twenty-first century and all the tribal prejudices of the nineteenth. The East would be indulged either for the sake of common-task technocracy—perhaps with “governance” and “climate change” on the PowerPoint slides—or out of kinship with a Western alt-right machismo that no longer finds sufficient outlet at home.
In contrast, what might a Western accommodation of the increasingly weighty South look like?
Much of the South still gives some postcolonial benefit of the doubt to any non-Western power. But strip out the largesse from those trying to buy their way to hegemony with railways and ports, as well as easy use of the West’s rivals as a foil to Western overreach. On the merits, few Latin Americans, Africans, and South Asians are any more impressed with Chinese and Russian soft power or social models than are Westerners. When asked their dreams for the future, the younger generations in those parts of the world are far more cosmopolitan about borders, energised about justice, and moved by spiritual aspirations than are most of the ageing publics or nearly all of the statesmen northward (and local collaborationist élites) who realistically accommodate the world as it is.
But this choice will also hinge on which version of the West itself will take the leap into a post-hegemonic world order. The West does not sit in modernity as a unitary social force. In Western societies, much more than in the foreign policy of Western establishments, the fault lines of modern experience run deep. With its weak states, strong societies, and religiosity, the South has its counterparts in the traditional and pluralist elements of the West, which are distinct from the secular Western new class that dominates foreign policy and thus shows its face to the world.
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Between tech capitalism and Orwellian surveillance, allegiances will switch West to East and vice versa as the winds blow.
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The new class anywhere will embrace profit and control, just as their spiritual ancestors in the bureaucrats and courtiers of the past did. Between tech capitalism and Orwellian surveillance, allegiances will switch West to East and vice versa as the winds blow. Yet we can still find in the West enough reservoirs of traditionalist resistance to inspire real debate over the direction of the West itself and its relation with the rest of the world. Eastward, after the massacres and social churning of the twentieth century, less survives that is capable of countering the apparatchiks in Beijing who would export a dystopian governance model that crushes both soul and society.
The West’s greatest contribution to the world can be its older intellectual and constitutional heritage of ordered, pluralistic liberty, anchored in the virtues and cosmologies of tradition. The South has the untamed energy of a youth bulge that not only will carry more weight economically and demographically in this century, but also lived traditions that have not wholly dissolved into insipid modernity. They are natural and complementary allies.
The price of such a world-reordering alliance, for Western traditionalists and pluralists, would be higher than merely accommodating grievance-laden land-empires whose power has also peaked. Two realities demand recognition. First, Western hegemony is over. The worthiest elements of the Christian and classical heritage have been on the back foot in the West for generations. Those elements can survive the end of the West as a geopolitical hub, if shorn of the gunboat spirit, white tribalism, and assumptions of permanent economic mastery. Second, a flatter world will mean real concessions to juster economic relations, hospitality to migrants, and, eventually, a post-sovereign global constitutional settlement that blends the best of ordered liberty and social inclusion.
Finally, such a dénouement would not be a mere West–South alliance with a Manichaean geopolitical agenda. The most resilient strands of liberty and pluralism—rather than just new class Faustianism—do run along that axis, rather than from Washington and Brussels to Beijing and Singapore. But beyond geopolitics, the vision can connect with compatible aspirations elsewhere, including in the East. Just as reaching out to allies in the South is ultimately a choice that the West would make between versions of itself, so too does that choice imply giving succour to allies in the East where they can be found. Today’s propaganda and jingoism notwithstanding, enough countervailing humane tendencies run through Orthodoxy, Confucianism, and Daoism, and beg for rediscovery. The unravelling of top-heavy states could release such traditions’ energy into global society in ways both truer to their nature and congenial to a new cosmopolitan horizon.
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… countervailing humane tendencies run through Orthodoxy, Confucianism, and Daoism, and beg for rediscovery.
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Perhaps realpolitik will end as it often has ended, with a surprise. Two rivals often exhaust each other playing an old game, while a third pole emerges that reframes the contest. And sometimes the best adjustment to reality, properly understood, is an idealism that revives the forgotten part of oneself and embraces allies who were all too easy to overlook.
Adam Webb is American Co-Director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and Resident Professor of Political Science. He is also a director of the Simone Weil Center.
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Legitimacy and Reason
— Paul Grenier
Legitimacy as a category necessarily involves one in making a moral assessment. I have argued elsewhere that American foreign policy, and American culture more generally, has become thoroughly technocratic,[1] but even technocrats are obliged to make use of the language of morality to make their case. What is useful will therefore be deemed moral and good (or the equivalent thereof, perhaps using various circumlocutions), while what is not useful will be deemed the opposite.
A country such as Russia, which has the potential to thwart the United States’ freedom of action, will certainly not be acknowledged as a legitimate global actor. What would motivate the United States to do so? What one would expect, instead, is that the United States would present Russia in as negative a light as possible. One would expect that the U.S., whenever it finds it advantageous to do so, would twist facts and even invent evidence in order to prove that Russia is extremely bad and unattractive.[2] And of course, this is precisely what we have seen, especially since the United States definitively concluded that ‘Russia has become a problem.’[3]
Examples of the above-noted twisting of facts and inventions of evidence are far too numerous to fit into a brief presentation. Let it suffice to mention the Russia-gate controversy which for so many years dominated American media coverage about Russia and caused a near hysteria about and loathing of Russia, despite the near total absence of any factual basis to the entire controversy, at any rate as regards Russian actions.[4]
In my view, for America to become capable of acknowledging Russia’s legitimacy, America must first renounce its technocratic utopian project. But now let’s take a look at Russia. How does it view its own sources of legitimacy?
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During the 1990s, at a time when corruption and criminality in Russia were at their peak, and the Russian leader perennially drunk, Russia enjoyed a brief period during which it was considered ‘legitimate’ by the United States. At that juncture, Russia did not enjoy full sovereignty and was incapable of impeding America’s will.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and its institutions in the early 1990s issued in an extended period of hostility, particularly among Russian elites, to everything connected with Soviet morality. This hostility led to the popularization of the new notion that individual success, not self-denial, defines the moral good. Since communism was bad, conspicuous consumption must be good. In his book on Vadim Tsymburski, Boris Mezhuev described as follows the reigning spirit of the post-collapse period:
[T]he cruelty of the situation stemmed from the total unwillingness of the Yeltsin administration and all its hangers-on in the new post-Soviet elite to find in their new value system a place for those outside of their own sphere. From the perspective of the liberal elite, the victors, who had grabbed their piece of the pie, were proven right by their very success … If some intellectual worker tried to bring moral demands to the attention of the elites, such a person was automatically dismissed [by the Yeltsin era liberal elites] as a loser.[5]
As part of his efforts to recover from the chaos of the 1990s, Vladimir Putin began emphasizing the need for a return to tradition, to ‘traditional values,’ along with the limitation of oligarch greed and the corruption associated with the new ethic of personal success at any price. However much the pervasiveness of ‘corruption’ in today’s Russia may be exaggerated in the West, it is certainly true—and widely acknowledged even by official Russia—that corruption does exist, just as it is also obvious that efforts at top-down reforms have only partially succeeded. The kickbacks received by mayors for public works, the manipulations of the political party system—these and many other internal ills have served to undermine Russia’s legitimacy both inside Russia and among its neighbors.
During Putin’s conservative restoration,[6] Russian intellectuals, often with state support, attempted to draw on the Russian thought tradition to formulate a Russian idea that could unify the nation and increase its legitimacy, first of all in its own eyes. Many of these intellectuals were open to, indeed eager for an engagement with the West; they were well familiar with Western thought and committed to intellectual probity and honesty.
The West, however, vigorously rejected any such dialogue and responded to all such efforts as intrinsically suspect and illegitimate. The West presented Russia’s search to define new ‘conservative’ ideals as being either intrinsically hostile to the West, or completely cynical, or both.
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The West presented Russia’s search to define new ‘conservative’ ideals as being … intrinsically hostile to the West …
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Undoubtedly, for some Russian actors, the search for new ideals was indeed a cynical matter of playing a role. After all, the ongoing legacy of the 1990s required, for many Russians, the rejection of any new ‘ideology,’ the rejection of externally imposed ‘ideals’ of any sort. When talk show hosts on state television programs nonetheless spouted the new conservative line, it often had an air of insincerity. [7] But this does not mean that Russians in general have become indifferent to, or incapable of, genuine philosophical depth. It seems to me that Russia is in the midst of an ongoing, sincere effort at a retrieval of its own tradition, and there is a good chance that these efforts could lead to a path beyond technocratic reason, while also responding to Mearsheimer’s anti-philosophical suspicion of ‘reason’ as something inherently subjective (and self-interested).
Sergei Karaganov, former dean at the Higher School of Economics and one of Russia’s most prestigious foreign policy theorists, writing in 2019, worried that Russia still stands in need of an inspiring national ideology or at any rate a large national project. Without such an ideology or project, he stated, “all the great powers have eventually unraveled.” Interestingly, especially in light of Vladimir Putin’s speech this August at the conference on international security, Karaganov already in 2019 advocated for Russia the role of chief defender in the world of the freedom to preserve one’s own civilization.[8]
Whereas the more traditional, religious (Christian) strain in Russian culture and political philosophy typically appeals to a metaphysical reality beyond the ‘accidents’ of human culture and willing, Karaganov’s approach appears to allow for different truths, different ‘realities.’ Such an approach is suggestive of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice, Which Rationality? and is at least compatible with the cultural and epistemological relativism of an Oswald Spengler. (It is worth noting that both MacIntyre and Spengler are widely read and respected in today’s Russia.) What Karaganov calls ideology is likewise clearly something functional – its point is to strengthen Russia. The role of an ideology is to ‘work,’ and to work for Russia. For all that, Karaganov’s writings, at least of this period, display no aggressiveness whatsoever toward Europe or the United States. He notes, somewhat forlornly, that the U.S., for domestic reasons, will not be ready anytime soon for a dialogue with Russia.
Mikhail Remizov and Boris Mezhuev, two of the most widely respected Russian intellectuals from the conservative movement, in a joint paper written in late 2021, declared that Russian society must move beyond the false choices of either a sovereignty without freedom or a freedom without sovereignty. Liberal political theory, whether that of a Nozick or a Rawls, is ultimately individualistic, the authors note. What is needed in Russia, however, is a political practice that not only defends Russian sovereignty but that is grounded in both freedom and solidarity. Such an ideal has obvious roots in the traditions of Russian thought, going back to Khomiakov (cf. sobornost’), as well as in the teachings of Orthodox Christianity (cf. the Trinitarian thought expounded by Fr. P. Florensky in the early 20th century). To that extent, their concept is suggestive of a grounding in a transcendent reality, though Mezhuev and Remizov do not here make that explicit. At any rate, this is clearly a step in the opposite direction from technocratic reason.
To further reinforce that same point, it is worth considering the work of one of the most important intellectual influences on the wider circle of thinkers from which Remizov and Mezhuev emerged: the Russian geo-politician and classicist Vadim Tsymburski. Writing already in the late 1990s, Tsymburski condemned those on the Russian right who insisted on the need for an expansive empire for Russia to successfully defend its sovereignty. Tsymburski vigorously advocated a far more limited, virtually isolationist policy, an ‘Island Russia’ which would pursue its own ideals, separate from the liberal West, but not actively in opposition to it. Crucially in the present context, Tsymburski hoped for a Russian culture that would be inspired by the philosophical theologians S. Bulgakov and P. Florensky.[9] It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this choice of inspirational sources for the continuation of what Tsymburski referred to somewhat mysteriously as Russia’s ‘counter-reformation,’ a period that will promote new moral ideals that counteract and are different from the quasi-Calvinist morality and asceticism (sacrifice and work hard for the future!) of the early Bolshevik ‘reformation.’
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Reason, for Bulgakov and Florensky, is … grounded not in the logical world of concepts (‘correct ideas’), but in the reality of the good.
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Tsymburski’s reference to Bulgakov and Florensky is of great philosophical significance. Their system, while grounded in Russian history and, indeed, in Eastern Orthodox theology, is at the same time ‘rooted’ in what D.C. Schindler terms actuality as opposed to technical making and willing. Florensky, like S. Bulgakov, broke with the Hegelian and Marxist-Leninist attachment to rationalism, secular immanentism, and concepts. Reason, for Bulgakov and Florensky, is ultimately grounded not in the logical world of concepts (‘correct ideas’), but in the reality of the good. Such a good, and the reason grounded in it, unites because it is shareable without diminishing anything about it.
To repeat, for this modern Russian Platonic tradition, which Tsymburski shares, concepts are not central. To build a new foundation for Russia on the basis of “correct ideas” – to use the old Marxist (and, for Tsymburski, imbued with magical thinking) lexicon – is to build on sand. In the final analysis, these are words and phrases playing the role of a political technology. For Tsymburski, as for Mezhuev, it is quite secondary whether this or that concept is on the left or on the right, is liberal or conservative. What is crucial is not the concept, but the guiding spirit, the Idea in its proper Platonic sense. Idea in this context pertains to something that has real existence, and whose existence is coincident with what is good, and which, finally, is the very ground of the (imperfect and still fragmented) phenomena in their coming into being.
Without that spirit -- what might be called the spirit or inspiration of a reason so grounded -- “freedom will inevitably amount to nothing more than the power to dominate, the right of the dominant class to forswear all its obligations toward the greater part of society.” By contrast, even a ‘liberal’ freedom situated within a civilization that embraces these higher values will “stress the right of every man, of every citizen, to judge the higher authorities, to verify the state’s compatibility with those values that have been chosen as the priorities of that particular community.”[10] Such was the conclusion of Boris Mezhuev in one of the most poignant sections of his summary of the political thought of Vadim Tsymburski.
From a certain perspective, all this may, of course, be simply dismissed as so much hot air—mere ‘words and ideas.’ I grant that good ideas must be backed up by deeds and action. Precisely. Had the West been willing to engage with the proponents of these good ‘words and ideas’ in the period following 2016, instead of indulging itself endlessly with the fantasy world of Russia-gate, and with Trump as Putin’s Manchurian candidate, tens of thousands of young Russian and Ukrainian men would still be alive, and the world would not be teetering on the edge of an abyss.[11]
Paul Grenier is president and a founder of the Simone Weil Center.
NOTES
[1]Paul Grenier, “Technology and Truth: Reflections on Russia, America, and Live Not By Lies,” The National Interest August 22, 2021 [ https://nationalinterest.org/feature/technology-and-truth-reflections-russia-america-and-live-not-lies-192138 ]. This essay borrows heavily from earlier theoretical work especially by D.C. Schindler and Hannah Arendt. Mearsheimer, for his part, explains America’s refusal of limits as best explained by elite commitment to liberalism. Others have forcefully argued (cf. Ethan Alexander-Davey’s contribution to this Symposium, Part I) that the workings of bureaucracy introduces a mechanistic, thoughtless quality to political action. I would argue that technocratic reason includes liberalism and bureaucratism as two subspecies of a wider genre or civilizational style, one which, following the usage of George Grant, I associate with technological reason. Grant’s essay, “Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship” (in G. Grant, Technology and Justice), connects the thoroughly anti-Platonic spirit of modern thought with Nietzsche, and for Grant, we are now living in a world largely made by Nietzsche’s concepts. Since the strictures of this present essay oblige terseness, I have not fleshed out this difficult theme as much as perhaps warranted. The following passage from Grant may be helpful: “Whatever may be given in Plato’s attack on democracy in his Republic, it is certainly not that for some human beings nothing is due. Indeed, to understand Plato’s account of justice, we must remember the relation in his thought between justice and the mathematical concept of equality … In Nietzsche’s conception of justice there are other human beings to whom nothing is due – other than extermination. The human creating of quality of life beyond the little perspectives of good and evil by a building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought is the statement that politics is the technology of making the human race greater than it has yet been” [the italicized phrase – not italicized in the original – is Nietzsche’s formulation]. Technology and Justice, 94.
[2] A case that had enormous resonance inside Russia, but as far as I know has not yet been commented on among foreign policy circles in the West, were the WADA accusations of doping against the Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva at the Beijing Olympics. If the intent was to insult something held sacred by a great number of Russians, and thereby to increase the conviction in Russia that the West was implacably hostile to even what Russians hold dearest, the choice of strategy was indeed inspired. Undoubtedly the vast majority of Russians believe that this case was politically motivated, meant to deny Russia the chance to show to the world a side of its culture that is sublimely beautiful, and in keeping with Russia’s long-standing traditions going all the way back to the Ballets Russes. That such a judgment by Russia is very likely objective is supported by the chief sportswriter of the Washington Post, Sally Jenkins, who acknowledged that the WADA accusations against Valieva were likely “political.” See “The Kamila Valieva case is an indictment of the anti-doping system, not her,” Washington Post, Feb. 11, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2022/02/11/sally-jenkins-valieva-anti-doping/
[3] The ‘problem’ created by Russia came to the fore with ever-increasing urgency in the U.S. when Russia began impeding U.S. foreign policy in Syria in 2012 and 2013. At that time, the director of the private intelligence firm Statfor, George Friedman, noted that, from the perspective of the American permanent foreign policy apparatus, Russia was “becoming a problem.” The events on Maidan square, which Friedman, in an interview in the Russian paper Kommersant described as “the most blatant coup in history [“Россия называет события … организованным США госпереворотом. И это действительно был самый неприкрытый госпереворот в истории”] was conceived as a way to greatly increase the costs to Russia for impeding American wishes. Here is a link to the full interview, in the original Russian, with George Friedman: “The Interests of the Russian Federation and the U.S. in regards to Ukraine are incompatible,” Kommersant, Dec. 19, 2014 [ https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2636177 ]
[4] A typical example, among innumerable others, of the insubstantiality of the Russiagate narrative: In the January 2017 Intelligence Community ‘Assessment’ of alleged pervasive Russian meddling in the U.S. election, RT programming was dwelt on at length, with particular attention given to an RT broadcast, “Breaking the Set,” led by host Abby Martin. Although that program had ceased to exist some 18 months prior to the election, the ‘intelligence community’ felt that it bolstered their case for Russian interference. Masha Gessen, one of the harshest critics of Putin’s government that I know of, summarized her impressions of the IC report as follows: “if the report’s vague assertions were clarified and its circular logic straightened out, nothing would be left.” I reviewed Gessen and related matters in “Russiagate as Symptom of the Crisis of American Community,” TELOScope, September 7, 2018 [ http://www.telospress.com/russia-gate-as-symptom-the-crisis-of-american-community/ ] Among my other conclusions in this essay, an essay which has aged well, incidentally, I note that “Russia-gate should interest us not for what it can teach us about Russia (almost nothing) but for what it can teach us about ourselves.”
[5] B. Mezhuev, Politicheskaya Kritika Vadima Tsymburskogo (Moscow: Evropa, 2012), 172.
[6] The campaign itself has waxed and waned, but roughly I would date its start as 2008. By 2018, it was running out of steam, but over the past year it has gathered new energy at the level of the Kremlin, and also in Russian popular culture and among public intellectuals such as A. I. Fursow, S. Glazyev, S. Kurginyan, and Maria Shukshina, among others. Their writings and presentations are followed in Russia by hundreds of thousands of persons, often on Telegram or through other social media.
[7] Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, which appeared in 2014, and which I confess to have only skimmed, may capture some aspects of the post-modern spirit, or to put it more plainly, cynicism, which does have an unfortunately large presence in Russia and does undermine to that same extent Russia’s appeal. Pomerantsev’s book spends many pages on such areas as the Russian fashion industry, television news programming and political consultant technologies. Anyone well familiar with the state of American mass media and politics (to say nothing of America’s political consultants, the case of Jeffrey Epstein, fashion empires such as Les Wexner’s Victoria’s Secret, or the machinations of American Big Pharma, to name just some of the more striking examples) cannot take seriously that cynicism is somehow a uniquely Russian trait. Such an accusation might serve at best as a case of unconscious psychological projection.
[8] S. Karaganov, “Kuda idti i s kem idti,” Rossiskaya Gazeta, Dec. 27, 2019. The article by Karaganov concludes with the words, “The main thing, while struggling against both our internal and external enemies, is not to forget about a future-oriented strategy and ideology. Such is not yet on our horizon – and yet it is something which cannot be done without.” [Главное — борясь с ‘врагом внутренним и внешним,’ не забывать устремленной в будущее стратегии и идеологии. Которой у нас пока не просматривается, а она должна быть.]
[9] V. L. Tsymburski, Ostrov Rossii: Geopoliticheskie j Khronopoliticheskie Raboty (Moskva, 2007), 178.
[10] Quoted passages from Mezhuev, Politicheskaya Kritika Vadima Tsymburskogo, 173 – 174. I have interpolated what I take to be Tsymburski’s understanding of the spiritual grounding of these ethical positions shared by Tsymburski and Mezhuev. At any rate such an interpolation is in keeping with the philosophical stances of Florensky and Bulgakov, but cf. also previous footnote (Tsymburski, Ostrov Rossii, 178).
[11] American ideologues can comfort themselves, to be sure, that at least they managed, back in 2017, to imprison a Russian college girl who had the temerity to come to the U.S. seeking high-level dialogue despite having failed to register as a foreign lobbyist.