Why the West must restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine
How far must the Western World and NATO go in helping Ukraine to restore its territorial integrity after the Russian onslaught? How far must it go to ensure that Russia is taught unequivocally that imperialistic adventures are a thing of the past and must remain so? How far must it go to impress the same message upon China? These are unpleasant but critically important questions. To answer them, it is imperative to understand what is essentially at stake in the current geopolitical crisis.
From the days of Çatal Huyuk until roughly halfway through the twentieth century, the world had always been dominated by autocratic regimes that carved up the earth between them as they saw fit, according to the laws of the jungle and the school playground: each for himself and winner takes all. Even the most modern, most technologically advanced and, in time, formally most democratic nations, such as the United Kingdom, the United States and France, behaved like that in international relations. What international political order there was, depended on military muscle, marriage and shaky, usually short-lived ententes.
Blood soaked exploits
From our distant twenty-first century Western perspective, the results of this Hobbesian geopolitical chaos were, mildly put, horrendous. To us, it is hard to even imagine the sheer horror and day-to-day suffering that were the norm everywhere. From way before the blood soaked exploits of the likes of Assurbanipal and Qin Shi Huang until two world wars after the excesses of nineteenth-century colonial imperialism, it had more often than not resulted in wholesale slaughter of the populations of conquered cities and country folk that found themselves in the way of armies and bands of marauders, with famine, oppression and slavery galore. War was more or less the standard condition. To give an example, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch Republic, then as now a country depending for its life on international trade, was at war with one or more other European powers almost sixty percent of the time, whilst also waging countless greater and smaller wars on non-European adversaries. War was also exceedingly bloody. Between 1618 and 1648, the Thirty Years War took the lives of one third of the total civil population of Germany. In 1813, the three days of the battle of Leipzig resulted in more than 100,000 killed or wounded — it took more than a year to dispose of the corpses. In four years time, the American Civil War wiped out some 620,000 combatants and countless civilians. And so on. It wasn’t until the end of the Second World War that two factors finally caused a real change with respect to the traditional carnage, a first concrete step forward towards a better regulated, safer world.
Diabolical flipside
The first was the coming to fruition of the mindset of modern Western representative democracy with its principle of political equality of all individuals, which had been growing for half a millennium. Inextricably linked to the increasing wealth and possibilities that science, invention and new technology were making available, it gave the population of a considerable part of the Western World far more to lose than ever before, both as regarded material prosperity and in terms of sociopolitical status. The other factor was the diabolical flipside of that same technological boom, which first led to the industrialisation of military slaughter in the Great War, and then, as became apparent in 1945, to the invention of the industrialised annihilation of complete populations: systematically planned genocide.
Together, after Woodrow Wilson’s botched first attempt with the League of Nations at the close of the Great War, these partly beneficial and promising, partly deeply shocking developments caused the world to achieve the first somewhat successful attempt at creating a semblance of a more or less predictable, less belligerent international order. Central to it were the newly created United Nations and the notion of political self-determination, which arose during the nineteenth century and had been formulated by Wilson in 1918 as ‘National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. “Self determination” is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action.’[i] Of course, the UN leave much to be desired and the right to self-determination has proven problematic like few others. But by and large, propped up by these two cornerstones, the Western World as a whole has flourished like never before, while Western Europe went on to enjoy an unprecedented era of prosperity, peace, cooperation and personal freedom, which so far has endured for 75 years, a lifetime. Within the newly established international order, tenuous as it was, even the Cold War was successfully kept cold for 45 years until it fizzled out by the end of the nineteen-eighties. That by itself must count as a resounding success, in view of the menacingly looming clouds of ideological conflict of the day.
Iron rice bowl
And that is not all. By and large, and notwithstanding a completely irresponsible and uncontrolled population boom, primarily in Africa and Southern Asia, circumstances have improved for people beyond the West as well. Globally today, there is a lot less poverty and hunger, and better life expectancy than fifty, sixty years ago.[ii]
These improvements are characteristic of the post World War II era and must be ascribed in their entirety to Western science, technology and political ethics — there simply is no other explanation. During this same period, all remaining dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in Western Europe (Portugal, Spain, Greece) caved in and disappeared, giving way to quite effective modern democracies. Something similar happened in Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989: by and large the former Warsaw Pact nations turned into reasonably well-behaved modern democracies, although some still suffer from serious growing pains. Further East, the extremely repressive, dehumanising communist regimes of both the Soviet Union and Maoist China collapsed as well. China got — and seized — its chance to develop from a poverty-stricken iron rice bowl hellhole into a much more prosperous, if not much freer, more modern nation, in many ways closer to the Western model. As, in its own way, did Russia.
Globally, in terms of general human dignity, well-being and prosperity, the difference between 1945 an 2020 is greater than that between 545 and 1945. These are not ideological boasts, but easily verifiable and widely acknowledged matters of fact. Well entrenched, not externally enforced democracy, rickety, quarrelsome and inefficient as it may seem, has turned out to deliver the goods, making a far greater percentage of the people richer, healthier and happier than any other sociopolitical system.[iii] And after all is said and done, that is what counts.
Bodily integrity
The most fundamental cornerstone underlying these achievements is the principle of self-determination, the political equivalent of the fundamental human right to bodily integrity. Itself based on the principle of equal rights and equal opportunity, it grants any people the right to choose their sovereignty and their political status with respect to other peoples without interference from others. But there is a big difference between it and the right to bodily integrity. Whereas it is evident what counts as an individual’s body, it is not a priori clear what qualifies a conglomerate of humans as a people or a nation. During the post-war period alone this has led to endless disputes about the rights and status of minorities, some of them very nasty. Kurds, Palestinians, Uyghurs, Rohingya, Basques, Macedonians, Yazidi, Saami, the Scottish, Catalans, South-Sudanese, Bosnian Serbs and Serb Bosnians, Corsicans, Tigrayans, Igbo’s, Tutsi’s, Spanish Saharans, the list is endless, as is the list of civil war-like conflicts arising from them. However, one thing is crystal clear: the right to self-determination categorically excludes all wars of aggression, for any violent intrusion on foreign territory necessarily infringes on the inhabitants’ rights and freedoms. Therefore, strictly abiding by the idea of self-determination is an absolute requirement for a world like the one we have achieved and hope to improve upon. Without the basic guarantee that peoples and nations respect each other’s territory, we will soon all be back where the world was before 1945 — only, there are now more than three times as many of us. So there is no going back, humanity simply cannot afford to.
Reckless adventurism
This, in its entirety, is what the Russian assault on Ukraine is really about. The world is confronted with the reckless adventurism of an atavistically authoritarian regime, led by a man who fancies himself a latter-day Peter the Great, trying to revert to the bad old ways from the bad old days. If the Russians succeed, all the improvements of the past 75 years will inevitably be lost, and more. For what with the unprecedented destructive powers of modern technology, the dangerous state of environment and climate, and the demographic and migratory pressures, these throwback oppressive authoritarians will then plunge the world into a chaos like it has never seen before. As history has shown time and again, gains granted to such regimes from their extortionary exploits will do nothing to satisfy them. On the contrary. Greed feeds on spoils, so appeasement or meeting them part-of-the-way will only embolden them. Today’s world is simply too full, too complex and too interdependent to allow that to happen.
So here is the message that the West, which was the cradle and continues to be the motor of modern prosperity and the incipient international order, must send to Putin and his fellow authoritarians everywhere in no uncertain terms: the old ways are a thing of the past, unfit for and incompatible with today’s civilized world, and therefore unacceptable to it. If the human race is to survive, the existing international political order, such as it is, must be maintained, expanded and improved upon. Not jeopardised. In this day and age, everybody’s cooperation is desperately needed, which first and foremost requires that every nation’s autonomy and territorial integrity be respected. In this regard, ‘nation’ or ‘people’, as the right to self-determination has it, should be defined as any de facto autonomous territorial unit that came into being without external military pressure or occupation, or pre-dates the Second World War.
Territorial gains
Of course the right to self-determination applies to Russia as well, which is why it makes excellent sense for the American President Biden to worry about American weaponry being used for operations on Russian soil, and for his Ukrainian colleague Zelensky to solemnly promise not to do so. But, dear appeasers and self-appointed “realists”, it also crucially entails that Russia cannot be allowed any territorial gains from Putin’s ill-considered adventure, which has already caused enormous loss of innocent lives as well as colossal material and psychological damage, and has ruined international trust for decades to come. Allowing Russia to keep one square yard of the territories it usurped since 2014, is simply an encouragement to all ruling and would-be authoritarian regimes to go and grab their piece of the cake.
Nuclear threat
It is easy to prove that the Russians, while calling upon the principle of self-determination themselves each time they threaten nuclear war in case of a perceived ‘existential threat’ to their country, have no intention of abiding by any international rules or ethics or morale, do not respect any other country and do not even pretend that they will keep their word. To all intents and purposes Russia has positioned itself outside the international community, an enemy to all. Sadly, this is nothing new, not even in the post-Soviet era. In 1994, together with the United States and the United Kingdom, Russia solemnly reaffirmed its ‘obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations’, in exchange for the Ukrainians giving up the nuclear arsenal Putin is now threatening both them and the rest of the world with.[iv] Barely twenty years later the Russian regime had succeeded in surreptitiously fomenting such discontent among the Russian minorities in Eastern Ukraine and the Krim, that it saw fit to intervene militarily, sparking a war that has festered ever since, and forcibly annexed the Krim peninsula. It is impossible to negotiate seriously with such a party.
That being the case, the West has but one course of action open to it: to put its foot down and counter Russian aggression with a thunderous ‘no!’ and sufficient military strength to thwart Putin’s purpose, as well as prevent any disruptive attempts by other geo-political dreamers. Yes, this means imposing the Western conception of political order on the world, at least in part. But as global migration patterns amply and unequivocally show, it’s the only kind of order on the menu worth its salt.
[i] Address to Congress, 11 February 1918.
[ii] For a quick survey, see Johan Norberg, Progress, Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future, Oneworld Publications 2016.
[iii] For more on this, see chapters 1
0 and beyond of my The Art of Verbal Warfare, Reaktion Books 2022 (to appear 11 July).
