The global consequences of the war in Ukraine - Joschka Fischer (Social Europe)

 

The global consequences of the war in Ukraine

JOSCHKA FISCHER

That Russia lacks the means to achieve its neo-imperial vision will not stop it from pursuing it to the bitter end.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24th 2022 changed everything for Ukraine, for Europe and for global politics. The world entered a new era of great-power rivalry in which war could no longer be excluded. Apart from the immediate victims, Russia’s aggression most concerned Europe. A great power seeking to extinguish an independent smaller country by force challenges the core principles upon which the European order of states has organised itself for decades.

The war of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, stands in stark contrast to the self-dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, which occurred in a largely non-violent manner. Since the Mikhail Gorbachev ‘miracle’—when the Soviet Union started pursuing liberalising reforms under him in the 1980s—Europeans had begun to imagine that Immanuel Kant’s vision of perpetual peace on the continent might be possible. It was not.

Historical revision

The problem was that many Russian elites’ interpretation of the globally significant events of the late 1980s could not be more opposed to Kant’s idea. They saw the demise of the great Russian empire (which the Soviets had recreated) as a devastating defeat. Though they had no choice but to accept the humiliation, they told themselves they would do so only temporarily until the balance of power had changed. Then the great historical revision could begin.

Thus, the 2022 attack on Ukraine should be viewed as merely the most ambitious of the revisionist wars Russia has waged since Putin came to power. We can expect many more, especially if Donald Trump returns to the White House and effectively withdraws the United States from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But Putin’s latest war not only changed the rules of coexistence on the European continent; it also changed the global order. By triggering a sweeping remilitarisation of foreign policy, the war has seemingly returned us to a time, deep in the 20th century, when wars of conquest were a staple of the great-power toolkit. Now, as then, might makes right.

Cold war

Even during the decades-long cold war, there was no risk of a ‘new Sarajevo’—the political fuse that detonated the first world war—because the standoff between two nuclear superpowers subordinated all other interests, ideologies and political conflicts. What mattered were the superpowers’ own claims to power and stability within the territories they controlled. The risk of another world war had been replaced by the risk of mutually assured destruction, which functioned as an automatic stabiliser within the bipolar system of the cold war.

Behind Putin’s war on Ukraine is the neo-imperial goal that many Russian elites share: to make Russia great again by reversing the results of the collapse of the Soviet Union. On December 8th 1991, the presidents of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine met in Białowieża National Park and agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union, reducing a ‘superpower’ to a regional (albeit still nuclear-armed) power in the form of the Russian Federation.

No, Putin does not want to revive the communist Soviet Union. Today’s Russian elite knows that the Soviet system could not be sustained. Putin has embraced autocracy, oligarchy and empire to restore Russia’s status as a global power, but he also knows that Russia lacks the economic and technological prerequisites to achieve this on its own.

For its part, Ukraine wants to join the west—meaning the European Union and the transatlantic security community of NATO. Should it succeed, it would probably be lost to Russia for good, and its own embrace of western values would pose a grave danger to Putin’s regime. Ukraine’s modernisation would lead Russians to ask why their political system had consistently failed to achieve similar results. From a ‘Great Russia’ perspective, it would compound the disaster of 1991. That is why the stakes in Ukraine are so high, and why it is so hard to imagine the conflict ending through compromise.

Junior partner

Even in the case of an armistice along the frozen front line, neither Russia nor Ukraine will distance themselves politically from their true war aims. The Kremlin will not give up on the complete conquest and subjugation (if not annexation) of Ukraine, and Ukraine will not abandon its goal of liberating all its territory (including Crimea) and joining the EU and NATO. An armistice thus would be a volatile interim solution involving the defence of a highly dangerous ‘line of control’ on which Ukraine’s freedom and Europe’s security depended.

Since Russia no longer has the economic, military and technological capabilities to compete for the top spot on the world stage, its only option is to become a permanent junior partner to China, implying quasi-voluntary submission under a kind of second Mongol vassalage. Let us not forget: Russia survived two attacks from the west in the 19th and 20th centuries—by Napoleon I and Adolf Hitler, respectively. The only invaders who have conquered it were the Mongols in the winter of 1237-38. Throughout Russia’s history, its vulnerability in the east has had far-reaching consequences.

The main geopolitical divide of the 21st century will centre on the Sino-American rivalry. Though Russia will hold a junior position, it nonetheless will play an important role as a supplier of raw materials and—owing to its dreams of empire—as a permanent security risk. Whether this will be enough to satisfy Russian elites’ self-image is an open question.

Joschka Fischer

Joschka Fischer was Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor from 1998 to 2005 and a leader in the German Green Party for almost 20 years.

Copyright Project Syndicate 2024, ‘The global consequences of the war in Ukraine’

Artigos sobre a guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia no Project Syndicate

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Putin’s War on Ukraine

https://www.project-syndicate.org/topic/the-russia-ukraine-crisis

How to Prosecute Putin

GORDON BROWN

Apr 10, 2023

Putting the Russian president on trial for the international crime of aggression would be more straightforward than trying him for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the International Criminal Court has no mandate to prosecute such crimes, a special international tribunal must be formed – with US support.

EDINBURGH – A few weeks ago, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war crime of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia. It is a significant – indeed, historic – step toward holding Putin and his henchmen accountable for their crimes in Ukraine. But more must be done.

Evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine – including murder, rape, torture, and attacks on civilians, civilian infrastructure, and other non-military targets – continues to accumulate. Just last month, a United Nations-backed inquiry published a report accusing Russia of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. While the ICC indictment is unlikely to be the only legal action brought against Putin and his cronies, it is the first. The ICC prosecutor has ensured that Putin will go down in history as the first leader of a permanent member of the UN Security Council to be indicted for an international crime.

The move is not merely symbolic. Those who think imprisoning Putin is an impossibility should recall that Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor is currently serving a 50-year sentence in a British prison, and former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević died in prison in The Hague while on trial for war crimes. And those who think that the arrest warrant will have no impact on the accused should take note of reports of growing dissent within Putin’s leadership cabal, with insiders no doubt fearing that they will soon face indictments as well.

Admittedly, while the ICC president has moved unusually quickly and issued a statement of intent to arraign Putin in The Hague, Putin is unlikely to leave himself open to arrest by entering any of the 123 states that are signed up to the ICC. Sadly, Russia does not recognize the ICC (nor does the United States). So, given that US President Joe Biden has welcomed action, despite opposing the ICC, how can the world add to the pressure on Putin and his cronies?

The crime of aggression – beginning with the invasion of Crimea in 2014 – is Putin’s “original sin,” the font of all the recent atrocities. As University College London law professor Philippe Sands has argued, aggression would be more straightforward to prosecute than war crimes and crimes against humanity, because it can be linked directly to the Kremlin.

The ICC’s mandate does not extend to prosecuting the crime of aggression, but a special international tribunal can be created with an explicit focus on this “leadership crime.” The tribunal’s work would complement and give weight to that of the ICC.

The encouraging news is that all major European countries, as well as the European Union and the Council of Europe, have endorsed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s request that Putin and his circle be prosecuted for the crime of aggression. A tribunal could be constituted in the coming months.

But American support will be vital to the success of such a tribunal. Biden need not fear that supporting an investigation into Putin would tilt the scales – which he has so carefully calibrated – from support for Ukraine’s defense to active aggression against Russia. After all, the US has regularly supported special tribunals – notably for Cambodia, Lebanon, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and the former Yugoslavia – to prosecute international crimes. And US prosecutors were at the forefront of the Nuremberg trials, carried out by the International Military Tribunal to prosecute and punish leading Nazis after World War II. The same went for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which carried out the “Tokyo trials” of Japanese war criminals.

Both tribunals were founded upon the 1941 Declaration of St. James’s Palace, or London Declaration, in which the Allied powers agreed that there would be no safe haven for those guilty of aggression. This would likewise form the basis of the special tribunal tasked with investigating and prosecuting Putin.

Concerns that such a tribunal would open the door for prosecutions relating to conflicts like the Iraq War are also unfounded. The special tribunal on crimes of aggression in Ukraine would be a response to Zelensky’s explicit request, made on behalf of Ukraine’s government and people. The tribunal’s authority would be derived from Ukrainian law, together with the prohibition on crimes of aggression inherent in international law. And the body would focus exclusively on the situation in Ukraine, where the evidence of wrongdoing arguably – and unlike in many other conflicts – meets the very high standard of proof required.

Nor will the prospect of a trial make Putin less willing to contemplate peace talks. I dealt directly with him, as both finance minister and prime minister of the United Kingdom, not least over the assassination in 2006 of the UK-nationalized Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko. Those experiences taught me that the only language Putin understands is that of power. He will not view pulled punches as an olive branch worth taking, but as yet more appeasement born of weakness.

In the face of Russian brutality, Ukrainians have stood united and fought valiantly. The rest of the world – led by the US – must show the same courage and resolve to ensure that justice is served, beginning with Russia’s top leaders.

America has willed the end – accountability for Putin and his cronies. Now it must join Europe in supporting the means.

GORDON BROWN

Writing for PS since 2010

Gordon Brown, a former prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer of the United Kingdom, is Chair of Education Cannot Wait’s High-Level Steering Group.

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The Great Revision

JOSCHKA FISCHER

Mar 31, 2023

Amid so much instability, one thing is clear 13 months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine: the world order will not survive in its previous form, and Europe will have to adapt quickly. Even if cooperation eventually prevails, the European Union’s basic character will have changed.

BERLIN – Did Russian President Vladimir Putin know what he was doing when he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February 24? That decision was a turning point for Europe. For the first time in eight decades, a great land war had erupted on the continent, shattering Europeans’ cherished illusions of peace with a force paralleling that of the Russian bombs that have been exploding in Ukrainian towns and villages ever since.

Putin apparently cannot conceive of Russia as anything other than a weaponized, feared, authoritarian world power. But achieving that status requires Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe – a revival of the imperial legacy of czarist Russia and the Soviet Union – for which Putin needed Ukraine. But he badly underestimated the Ukrainian willingness to fight and die for their freedom and independence. This, together with the support provided by NATO and the European Union, has prevented him from achieving his goal.

Three days after the invasion, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz captured the moment well in a speech to the German parliament. “We are living through a watershed era,” he declared. “And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before.” In fact, the war in Ukraine is about much more than most people – including Scholz – realized 13 months ago.

Obviously, the fighting is first and foremost about the Ukrainian people’s survival and the future of their homeland. But it is also about the future of the international order. Will violence triumph over law, or can we return to a lasting peace based on law and treaties? And what are the broader geopolitical implications? Russia’s invasion represented the global order’s first major revision in the twenty-first century, and now China and Russia have entered a deeper (albeit unformalized) alliance to challenge the United States and the West’s dominance.

This struggle – a revival of Cold War power politics – is embedded in two major global transformations: the encroaching digitalization of all spheres of modern life, and the final crisis of fossil-fueled industrial society.

Moreover, Russia’s war has revealed an increasingly complex international picture. Important emerging economies – such as Brazil, India, and South Africa – have refused to take a clear stand. So, too, have most of the Gulf states. All are behaving strictly according to their national interests. When they assess the new great-power conflict, they see not only economic advantages (discounted oil and gas shipments from sanctioned Russia), but also opportunities to enhance their own geopolitical and diplomatic standing.

There is no doubt that the so-called Global South will play a major role in the emerging struggle for dominance in the twenty-first century; that much is already obvious after 13 months of war in Ukraine. Unfortunately, many of these countries and regions will remember the treatment they received from the West – and particularly its leading power, the United States – in the recent past. Their participation in confronting powers like China cannot be assumed. It will have to be won.

In any case, beyond those directly affected by the fighting, Europe will be the region most changed by Russia’s aggression. The war is being waged in its own immediate neighborhood, and it was started by an authoritarian regime that embodies values completely antithetical to its own. With the illusion of peace shattered, Europe’s task now is to overcome its internal divisions and its defenselessness as soon as possible. It must become a geopolitical power capable of self-defense and deterrence, including nuclear capability.

This will not be easy, and the path ahead is strewn with hazards. Consider some of the worst-case scenarios. What will Europe do if another “America first” isolationist is elected to the White House next year, followed by the ascent of French right-wing nationalist leader Marine Le Pen to the Elysée? This outcome is a distinct possibility.

With Russia unable to defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, the war will eventually have to be ended through difficult negotiations. Whatever the outcome, Europe will be living in a different world, just as Scholz foresaw. It will have to adjust to the existence of a perpetual threat from the East, regardless of whether it is Putin or his successor.

Although the EU will have gained more internal stability, its basic character will have changed. Security will be a central concern for the foreseeable future. The EU will have to start thinking of itself as a geopolitical power and as a defense community working closely with NATO. Its identity will no longer be defined mainly by its economic community, its common market, or its customs union. The bloc has already accepted Ukraine as a candidate for future membership, and that decision was driven almost entirely by geopolitical considerations (as was also the case, previously, with Turkey and the West Balkan states).

A great revision of the world order is underway. If this struggle plays out according to traditional power politics, everyone will be worse off. Cooperation must prevail if we are to create an order adequate to the great economic, security, and climate challenges of the twenty-first century.

JOSCHKA FISCHER

Writing for PS since 2006

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.

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How Vladimir Putin Saved NATO

JOSEF JOFFE argues that the Alliance was never as sclerotic as even many Western leaders presumed in recent years.

 

Covid: a inimiga de todos os sistemas autoritários - Joschka Fischer

 Project Syndicate, Praga – 28.12.2022

COVID and the Chinese Social Contract

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, different countries adopted different strategies, depending on their respective cultural and historical traditions. While China's top-down authoritarian strategy initially seemed effective, the regime's zero-COVID policy ultimately proved to be fatally flawed.

Joschka Fischer

 

BERLIN – In October, the Communist Party of China convened its 20th National Congress, primarily to confirm President Xi Jinping’s hold over the country’s leadership. Everything went according to his plan: the CPC’s top governing body, the Standing Committee, is now staffed only by his most devoted henchmen. With Xi having secured a third term as general secretary – and thus as president – one man now has absolute power in China for the first time since the days of Mao Zedong.

Gone is the principle of collective, term-limited leadership that Deng Xiaoping introduced following Mao’s death – a time when China was just beginning its massively successful modernization phase. Yet, as recent history shows, the return to one-man rule in a country of 1.4 billion people represents one of the greatest risks to China and its status as a rising superpower second only to the United States.

Yes, under Xi, the Chinese regime’s power has increasingly seemed unlimited and unrestricted, owing to massive investments in state-of-the-art digital mass surveillance and social control systems. Yet the CPC’s strength is not based only on all-encompassing “smart” repression. Rather, it is the result of the party’s tremendous successes in modernizing China.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, China integrated itself into the world economy, becoming its “extended workbench” and its number-one exporting country. China then leveraged this growth to develop a highly efficient mixed economy, with a growing private sector operating alongside the traditional party-controlled state sector. The results were phenomenal: China consistently recorded massive annual growth rates, lifting hundreds of millions of people (especially in the coastal regions) out of absolute poverty and into a newly emerging middle class.

As China became richer, it increased its military power and pursued more dominant positions on the technological frontier. Within the space of just a few years, its technological successes – born predominantly of the private high-tech sector – made it a serious rival to US Big Tech. For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower.

Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. Despite some Chinese authorities’ efforts to cover up the emerging epidemic, it soon became the entire world’s problem. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak to be a pandemic, and the global economy ground to a halt as countries locked down to contain the spread of the virus.

But different countries adopted different strategies over the medium term, depending on their respective cultural and historical traditions. The open, democratic societies of the West, for example, embraced transparency and relied on voluntary self-isolation and the rapid development of effective vaccines. Three years later, their populations are now largely immunized – though many people have died.

By contrast, China relied from the beginning on draconian containment measures. Under its zero-COVID policy, every detected infection resulted in forced, closely supervised quarantines for all those affected.For a long time, this strategy seemed superior to the Western approach. China had far fewer deaths, and because it had isolated itself from the rest of the world, its domestic economy also recovered faster than those of the US and Europe. Accordingly, many around the world began to suspect that authoritarian command economies are better equipped for such crises than are the West’s messy, pluralist liberal democracies.

But this view has proved to be deeply mistaken. We now know that China’s zero-COVID policy required a suspension of the social contract between the CPC and the people. Xi seems to have overlooked the fact that today’s China – at least the large metropolises that drive the economy – is not the China of the 1960s and 1970s.

The new China simply is not suited for policies that require the authorities to shut down entire mega-cities with no notice, often locking workers in factories for weeks at a time. Moreover, owing to China’s position in the world economy, self-isolation was always going to be costly. Not only did zero-COVID create enormous disruptions in international supply chains; it also caused considerable damage to China’s own export sector.

Xi wanted to use the pandemic to demonstrate the superiority of the Chinese system over the declining West. Yet this meant that, out of nationalistic arrogance, he refused to import the vastly superior Western mRNA vaccines. With China’s huge population remaining under-vaccinated and unprotected, lifting the zero-COVID measures was bound to be risky.

But so, too, were the never-ending lockdowns. Just weeks after the 20th Party Congress, public frustration exploded across China’s large metropolises. Protesters held up sheets of white paper to decry the CPC’s censorship regime, and the “revolt of the blank sheets” spread like a bushfire. Xi had clearly overreached.

How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves.

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.

 

La fin de l’histoire contemporaine - Joschka Fischer (La Tribune)

Interessante artigo do ex-ministro das relações exteriores da Alemanha (Partido Verde), mas ele coloca o embate entre o Ocidente e as duas grandes autocracias em termos econômicos e geopolíticos. Tendo a enfatizar mais os aspectos políticos primários, ou seja, a fratura fundamental entre democracias e ditaduras.

Paulo Roberto de Almeida

 

La fin de l’histoire contemporaine

La guerre en Ukraine fait perdre un temps précieux à l’humanité qui devrait être unie pour affronter une somme de défis inédite. Au lieu de cela, la concurrence des États et la fin de la Pax Americana font craindre une intensification des confrontations

Joschka Fischer

La Tribune, 3/08/2022

 

Je ne me souviens pas qu’il y ait jamais eu, ces 75 dernières années, une telle accumulation de chocs majeurs et mineurs. Le monde est aujourd’hui confronté à l’intensification du changement climatique, à une pandémie, à des guerres majeures, à une inflation galopante, à des perturbations du commerce international et des chaînes d’approvisionnement, ainsi qu’à de graves pénuries alimentaires et énergétiques.

Une part importante de cette agitation découle des rivalités nouvelles (et renouvelées) entre les grandes puissances. Cela a eu des conséquences très visibles et chaotiques, illustrées par la guerre d’agression de la Russie en Ukraine. Pas besoin d’être un prophète de malheur pour prédire que ce conflit ne sera qu’un acte d’une longue tragédie. En Asie de l’Est, la revendication de Taiwan par la Chine menace également de conduire à une escalade militaire. Et au Moyen-Orient, le programme nucléaire en cours de l’Iran pourrait trop facilement déclencher un conflit militaire majeur.

En bref, nous assistons au dénouement de la Pax Americana qui a sous-tendu les relations internationales pendant plus de 70 ans après la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Après être sortis vainqueurs des deux guerres mondiales du vingtième siècle, les États-Unis ont remporté la guerre froide qui a suivi. Pendant cette période, ils ont garanti la paix et la stabilité en Europe – qui avait été en grande partie détruite en 1945 – et ont jeté les bases de nouveaux systèmes multilatéraux de commerce et de droit international, établis sous l’égide des Nations unies, dont le nombre de membres a augmenté à la suite de la décolonisation. Mais avec la montée en puissance de la Chine et d’autres pays, la Pax Americana – qui n’était certainement pas parfaite – a laissé place à une réalité plus multipolaire.

En particulier depuis le début de ce siècle, l’économie mondiale subit une transformation technologique fondamentale. La numérisation et l’intelligence artificielle restructurent radicalement les économies avancées et rééquilibrent le pouvoir politique au niveau mondial.Depuis la crise financière de 2008, les conditions mondiales sont devenues plus chaotiques, révélant des failles mortelles dans les hypothèses occidentales. L’Europe a succombé à l’illusion qu’un partenariat énergétique avec la Russie garantirait la paix et la stabilité sur le continent.Quant aux dirigeants américains, ils ont cru à tort que l’adhésion de la Chine à l’Organisation mondiale du commerce et à d’autres accords multilatéraux conduirait inévitablement à sa démocratisation.

Dans les deux cas, les dirigeants occidentaux sont restés aveugles aux intentions et aux objectifs stratégiques des dirigeants russes et chinois. Ils étaient si confiants dans l’attrait universel de leurs propres modèles de civilisation qu’ils n’ont pas su anticiper les conséquences politiques des dépendances économiques qu’ils avaient acceptées. La facture de cette naïveté arrive maintenant à échéance, et elle sera lourde.

La Chine est rapidement devenue un rival technologique de l’Occident, et en particulier des États-Unis, un statut que l’Union soviétique n’a jamais pu revendiquer, même au plus fort du «choc Spoutnik». Il reste à voir où mènera cette nouvelle phase de la concurrence mondiale systémique, mais on peut affirmer sans risque de se tromper que la Chine sera un casse-tête difficile à résoudre. En outre, la nouvelle concurrence entre grandes puissances se déroulera dans des conditions mondiales totalement nouvelles. Le Covide-19 et le changement climatique ont fondamentalement modifié les calculs économiques et politiques mondiaux et continueront à le faire.

Si l’humanité ne parvient pas à réduire les émissions de gaz à effet de serre au rythme nécessaire pour contenir le réchauffement de la planète, elle se dirigera vers une ère de crises mondiales irréversibles et potentiellement incontrôlables. Pire encore, en raison de la nouvelle dynamique de la concurrence mondiale, les grandes puissances s’orienteront vers une intensification de la confrontation, alors même que les défis auxquels nous sommes confrontés exigent une coopération plus étroite. C’est la véritable tragédie de la guerre du président russe Vladimir Poutine: au-delà des destructions gratuites et des souffrances humaines indicibles, la crise ukrainienne fait perdre à l’humanité un temps précieux qu’elle n’a pas.

Une dernière crise doit être mentionnée ici. Au milieu de tout ce chaos mondial, les États-Unis ont aussi de profonds problèmes intérieurs qui font douter de leur avenir en tant que démocratie stable et fonctionnelle. Le 6 janvier 2021, le pays a connu la première tentative de coup d’État de son histoire. Comme l’a montré la commission du 6 janvier de la Chambre des représentants, Donald Trump a cherché à renverser l’élection de 2020 en intimidant les responsables électoraux des États, en organisant de «fausses» listes de collège électoral et, finalement, en incitant une foule violente à prendre d’assaut le Capitole. La démocratie américaine s’avérera-t-elle suffisamment résistante pour empêcher qu’une telle situation ne se reproduise, ou Trump ou une figure similaire réussiront-ils là où le «coup d’essai» du 6 janvier a échoué?

Cette question sera décisive, non seulement pour les États-Unis et leur démocratie, mais aussi pour leurs alliés et l’avenir de l’humanité plus largement.

L’élection présidentielle de 2024 pourrait être la première de tous les temps à avoir des conséquences civilisationnelles et planétaires directes. Ce n’est pas un hasard si le destin du monde au XXIe siècle se jouera dans la plus ancienne démocratie du monde et dans le pays qui a assuré l’ordre international ces 75 dernières années. (P.S.)

 

Joschka Fischer, ministre des Affaires étrangères et vice-chancelier de l’Allemagne de 1998 à 2005, a été l’un des dirigeants du parti vert allemand pendant près de 20 ans.

Ex-chanceler (ministro das relações exteriores) da Alemanha Federal denuncia o projeto imperial da Rússia - Joschka Fischer

 The Telegraph, Londres – 25.2.2022

Russia's Stolen Future

By invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin is challenging not only that country's independence but also the broader European system, which rests above all on the inviolability of borders and the law of nations. There has been no comparable event in Europe since the Hitler era.

Joschka Fischer

 

Berlin – Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his choice. He has brought war to Ukraine. This is a watershed moment for Europe. For the first time since the Balkan wars of the 1990s, which were limited to the area of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, the continent is once again confronted with bombardments of cities and rolling tank divisions. But this time, it is a nuclear superpower that started the fighting.

By ordering an invasion, Putin is showing a brazen disregard for international treaties and the law of nations. There has been no comparable event in Europe since the Hitler era. According to Putin’s latest declarations, Ukraine has no right to exist as a sovereign state – even though it is a member of the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council of Europe; and even though Russia itself (under Boris Yeltsin) has recognized the country’s independence.

Putin now claims that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia. Whatever the majority of Ukrainians think is irrelevant to him; Russia’s greatness and international standing are all that matter. But make no mistake: Putin wants more than Ukraine. His war is about the entire European system, which rests above all on the inviolability of borders. In seeking to redraw the map by force, he hopes to reverse the European project and re-establish Russia as the preeminent power, at least in Eastern Europe. The humiliations of the 1990s are to be erased, with Russia once again becoming a global power, on par with the United States and China.

According to Putin, Ukraine has no tradition of statehood, and has become a mere tool of American and NATO expansionism, thus posing a threat to Russia’s security. In a bizarre speech the day before his troops stormed across the border, Putin even went so far as to claim that Ukraine is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. In fact, when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Ukraine – home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal at the time – surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia with the active diplomatic support of the “evil” US.

Ukraine did so because it had received “guarantees” of its territorial integrity, as stated in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances of December 5, 1994. That document was signed by the guarantor powers: the US, the United Kingdom, and Russia, alongside Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan (the latter two relinquished the smaller nuclear arsenals they had inherited from the USSR).

Set against the historical facts, Putin’s statements are nonsense. His primary purpose, clearly, is to give his own population a justification for invading Ukraine.Putin knows that if ordinary Russians were given a choice between a war to dominate Eastern Europe and a better, more prosperous life at home, they would prefer the latter. As so often in Russian history, the country’s people are having their future stolen by their rulers.

Russia’s ascent to global power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in numerous tragedies not only for the neighbors it subjugated and gradually absorbed, but also for its own people. China’s current leaders, in particular, should be mindful of this history, considering that imperial Russia seized more territory from China than from anyone else.

What Putin does not seem to realize is that Russia’s longstanding policy of dominating foreign peoples in its sphere of influence makes other countries focus on how to escape the Kremlin’s geopolitical prison at the first opportunity, by securing protection from NATO. The alliance’s eastward expansion after 1989 attests to this dynamic. Ukraine wants to join NATO not because NATO intends to attack Russia, but because Russia increasingly demonstrated its intention to attack Ukraine. And now it has.

It is worth remembering that in the 1990s, Russian propaganda accused the West of harboring all manner of evil plans. None of these plots was realized at the time, when Russia was down, because no such Western scheme ever existed. The accusations were fearmongering nonsense.

The Russian imperial project has always been characterized by a mixture of domestic poverty, brutal oppression, florid paranoia, and aspirations of global power. And yet, it has proved to be exceptionally resistant to modernization – not just under the czars and then under Lenin and Stalin, but also under Putin.

Just compare Russia’s economy to China’s. Both are authoritarian systems, yet Chinese per capita incomes have grown robustly while Russian standards of living have been declining. In historical terms, Putin is taking Russia hurtling back toward the nineteenth century, in search of past greatness, whereas China is forging ahead to become the defining superpower of the twenty-first century. While China has achieved unprecedentedly rapid economic and technological modernization, Putin has been pouring Russia’s energy-export revenues into the military, once again cheating the Russian people out of their future.

Ukraine has tried to escape this never-ending cycle of poverty, oppression, and imperial ambition with its increasingly pronounced orientation toward Europe. A well-functioning European-style liberal democracy in Ukraine would jeopardize Putin’s authoritarian rule. The Russian people would ask themselves and their leaders, “Why not us?”

Putin would have no good answer to give them, and he knows it. That is why Russia is in Ukraine today. (P.S.)

 

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader of the German Green Party for almost 20 years.