Liberalism and sovereignty. Evola and Fukuyama
Suicidal violence trumps negotiation. How Ukrainian liberals dreamt of Ukrainian mujahiden. Analysis of Ukrainian liberal media, 2014-2021
See part one here.
Liberalism and Sovereignty
In its essentials, liberal economic theory seems to trumpet itself as harbinger of global peace. Where protectionist nationalism creates violent inter-state competition, liberal free trade was said to guarantee mutual interdependence and prosperity. Ukraine, the avant-garde of the ‘liberal world’, seemingly hasn’t conformed to such expectations.
Minsk’s stipulations regarding constitutionally guaranteed regional autonomy for the Donbass region were constantly critiqued as a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty over domestic policy. Both rightwing nationalists and liberal publications argued that Minsk could not be respected because the Ukrainian parliament had not voted on it.
The liberal idealists proclaimed the existence of international rights, the inviolability of sovereign borders. The right to make a choice is paramount, and no foreign country can infringe on internal affairs. It is hardly clear how the world of globalized capitalism offers much space for national sovereignty, but this is not a dilemma tackled by the liberal heroes of our articles.
Ukraine’s geopolitical realists responded that such rights have never existed, only the right of force, the ability of the strong to do whatever necessary to prevent enemy states from turning their neighbours into hostile military bases. According to them, weaker states can’t change this state of affairs but must learn to manoeuvre the global chessboard to maximize their own wellbeing and minimize risks. They argued that it was no use sacrificing one’s country in the name of nonexistent abstractions.
Conceptions of sovereignty were at the heart of both the liberal idealist approach and its realist critique.
According to Ukrainian Atlanticists, ‘sovereignty’ meant making the choice to enter the EU and NATO.
Realists often responded by pointing out that many things were done by the post-2014 Ukrainian government that certainly ‘violated Ukrainian sovereignty’, if that means that foreigners gained control over decision-making processes in the state. For instance, the domination of western Europeans and Americans in various ‘monitoring councils’ in the court system, state enterprises, the police, and other important state organs. But this was defended and invited by the same Ukrainian liberals who condemned the Minsk agreements for its violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
While the presence of western experts in various Ukrainian state organs acted to weaken the influence of the old (pre-2014) regime, the implementation of the Minsk agreements would have led to a relative weakening of Ukrainian liberals and a strengthening of what they called ‘corrupt pro-Russian oligarchs’.
In the years following maidan, these traditional business elite began funding more and more media groups and political figures that critiqued the pro-maidan ‘sorosite’ militarist NGO ecosystems, proposing a realist return to pre-2014 normality. They did so for materialist interests – the protection of their factories from war, resumption of old trade ties with Russia. They railed against the limitations imposed by the USA on Ukraine’s sovereignty to make such a decision.
Clearly, sovereignty is itself a subjective concept, which depends on the interests of the class defining it. One might add that while it is good to have the ability to make choices, it is also quite possible to make self-destructive decisions. Some decisions can limit or even destroy state sovereignty.
Liberal ode to war
Ukraine’s liberal idealists weren’t totally blind to the consequences of their choices. Ukrainian Truth published plenty of editorials and interviews with state diplomats which were quite forthright about the inevitability of full-scale war with Russia unless the Minsk agreements were implemented. According to the deputy foreign minister in 2016, ‘Minsk-3 might include entirely unpalatable things’. Minsk-3 referred to a new, worse version of the Minsk agreements that would be forced on Ukraine by Russia in case of a new Russian military intervention. To avoid this, the minister continues, ‘whether we like Minsk or not, we must implement it’.
But if you don’t want to acknowledge that your decision ineluctably leads to unpleasant results, you have several options.
The first option is to construct abstractions and live by delusions.
The benefits for Ukraine itself became less important that the benefits Ukraine’s civilizational choice purportedly gave the world. Besides Minsk being bad for Ukraine, they claimed it was also bad for ‘global democracy’. ‘Minsk is a new Munich’. Without Ukraine’s status as a ‘fore-post of global democracy’, global democracy will fall to Putin’s assault. Ukraine must be a martyr for the global Cause.
Some Ukrainian Truth editorials came up with intricate plans for how to ‘implement Minsk on Ukrainian terms’. But the whole point of Minsk was that it was on Russian terms, and it was on those terms because of Russia’s superior military and economic strength. Predictably, these deluded attempts to ‘reinterpret Minsk’ came to nothing.
The creation of elaborate illusions also became popular. Given Ukraine’s post-2014 ‘civilizational’ antagonism with Russia and the unfavourable differential of forces between the two, predicting Russia’s forthcoming disintegration became a national pastime.
The second option is to glorify your own annihilation.
Ukraine’s intellectual world saw a continual radicalization. The partisan subjects of the rules based international order, rather than relaxing in the global village, became mystical warriors fighting against the creep of Kagan’s jungle. Transcendent struggle became more important than victory or defeat, life or death.
One 2017 article in Ukrainian Truth titled Sovereign Right advocated such an approach. It was dedicated to critiquing the ‘dominating axiom’ regarding Minsk, namely that ‘this problem has no military solution’. According to the article ‘there is always a military solution’.
The author attacks ‘rationalism as a means of prognosing’ military chances based on tank ratios. Instead, it points to the example of Napoleon, and ‘the leaders of Afghan tribes, which chronically did not have time to convey the idea of the futility of confrontation with various kinds of imperial formations’. In fact, ‘The most effective "cutting" of political geography is carried out by a hand tightly and sweaty squeezing something that cuts, stabs or shoots.’ Mystical violence beats limitation by geographical reality.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that advocates of Ukraine’s status as fore-post of western civilization should aim to adopt the ideology of the last such famous spearhead, the Afghan mujahiden. From stingers to javelins.
The rules-based order rules out negotiations
This ‘liberal militarism’ was given a clearer formulation by Hanna Malyar, deputy defence minister since 2021 to the present, in her 2017 article ‘the Trap of Peace Initiatives and Peace Plans’.
According to Malyar, when a situation involves an ‘aggressor’ –
‘the norms of law lag behind the norms of force. Whoever is stronger dictates his conditions for ending the war, and the rules of law will be created under them. Actually, this strategy is reflected in the Minsk agreements. The changes to the Constitution of Ukraine declared in them, the special status of the ORDLO [separatist/occupied territories], the law on amnesty for separatists - this is the legitimization of what is now illegal, that is, the criminal actions of the aggressor and his terms of the ceasefire - read, the slow destruction of Ukraine.’
Since the military balance of forces created the legal construct of the Minsk Agreements, the Minsk agreements are illegitimate. If force determines law, then whatever legal documents result are illegitimate.
But is not all law overdetermined by force? Are not all peace agreements determined by the balance of power on the battlefield? Does not this position rule out the possibility of international law and legal arbitration, replacing it with the ‘law of the jungle’? Mearsheimer’s claim regarding the self-destructive nature of any attempt at imposing global rules would be confirmed.
Malyar has little time for the idea of negotiation and compromise. She attacks those who ‘propagandize the idea of the mutual responsibility of both sides’. According to her, such falsehoods are what “various civil ‘peace’ initiatives and ‘peace’ plans are trying to push onto society”.
Many articles in the liberal press claimed that it was not worthwhile implementing any agreements with Russia because the latter is congenitally incapable of respecting international agreements. In the struggle between absolute Good and Evil, Democracy and Dictatorship, obviously there can be no talk of compromise.
In the ‘rules based international order’, heterogeneity excludes the possibility of negotiations. It seems this order is so fragile that any disagreement is intolerable.
Victory through Death
According to the Nordic tradition, no sacrifice or form of worship was more appreciated by the Supreme God, and rich in supra-mundane fruits, than that which is performed by the warrior who fights and falls on the battlefield. – Julius Evola, ‘the Sacrality of War’, 1935
One might be confused to find such militaristic ecstasy in a supposedly liberal discourse.
In fact, liberalism and nationalism have crosspollinated for generations in this part of the world. Ukrainian nationalism, ever since its late 19th century genesis in the works of historians like Mikhnovsky and Hrushevsky, has asserted the intrinsically Indo-European, property-owning nature of the Ukrainian Nation, as opposed to the Mongolized, collectivist Russians. The Ukrainophile movement in the Russian empire was to a significant extent an offshoot of urbane Russian liberalism.
In the post-soviet period, this alliance only strengthened. Liberals and nationalists opposed themselves to the social democrats and communists. When they called their enemies ‘Russians’, this was less an ethnic designator (most Ukrainian liberals and nationalists mainly spoke Russian), but a political one – ‘Russians’ are congenitally anti-European, Asian, communist, anti-progress, anti-liberal, retrograde. Slaves and orcs. Another puzzling exception to the putative universalism of liberal democratic ideology.
Some rhetorical differences remained on cultural matters. Ukrainian rightwing groups sometimes rhetorically declared their opposition to the ‘cultural Marxist’ EU just as much as to the ‘neo-Bolshevik’ Russian empire. They grumbled about gays and darkly predicted a migrant invasion.
But the rightwing were the avant-garde that brought to victory the Euro-maidan revolution. There weren’t too many immigrants in Ukraine to begin with. Pride parade and other LGBT organizations became vocally militaristic, which wasn’t too difficult considering their middle-class makeup and the politics of the Russian Federation. Most importantly, since 2014, the ‘anti-EU’ nationalists have only survived in the battle against Russia and its local allies because of Western aid.
EU integration need not be anathema to the hard right. The ideologists of the Azov movement embrace the idea of ‘Intermarium’ – alliance between Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states based on opposition to both the communist east and decadent west.
Francis Fukuyama at Stanford university with members of the Azov Battalion and wives of imprisoned Azovites
Once sponsored by the French and British with the aim of creating a cordon sanitaire against both Germany and the Soviet Union, the Intermarium project was also enthusiastically pushed by Pilsudsky’s Poland. After consuming Poland, Nazi Germany adopted and reinforced this transnational network of anti-communist, anti-Russian nationalist movements. Naturally, the US took full control of this movement after WW2, uniting a wide range of anti-Soviet organizations in front groups like the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which was led by WW2-era Ukrainian nationalist (and Nazi collaborationist) Yaroslav Stetsko.
Yaroslav Stetsko, right, Chiang Kai Shek, left. 1955
Today, the role of the Intermarium states as an avant-garde of US interests against sickly, decadent, insufficiently anti-Russian old Europe is obvious. And by any measure, the EU kills enough third world refugees to make any self-respecting white supremacist happy.
The liberals and right united on questions of life and death. In the days leading up to February 24, 2022, fearing that the west would force Ukraine to implement the Minsk agreements to avoid war with Russia, key representatives of both camps affirmed that total war was preferable to abandoning Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic ambitions.
Partisans of the rules based international order seem not to have travelled far from the sentiments of legendary Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who in 1951 hoped that “The Third World War would shake up the whole structure of world powers even more than the last two wars”, while voicing frustration with the western powers because of their undue ‘fear of nuclear war’ with the Soviet Union.
Not everyone is brave enough to embrace the consequences of their worldview. I remember how my liberal-nationalist family in Kyiv anxiously mourned the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, before sighing in relief that Russia’s imminent collapse would spare Kyiv the same fate.
The preservation of the rules-based international order requires great catastrophes and sacrifices. Its foot-soldiers must embrace Valhalla or maintain remarkable delusions.