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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, March 21, 2022

Humiliation as a force in international relations

The Economic Consequences of the Peace” was a famous and influential book written by John Maynard Keynes in 1919 from his experience of being drafted as a very young economist to the British delegation to the Versailles Treaty which settled the boundaries both of Europe and wider afield at the end of the First World War.

It argued strongly – and presciently - that the reparations demanded of Germany were not only humiliating and unjust but would fan the flames of resentment.

I find it strange how seldom the notion of humiliation comes up in the literature of international relations. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West saw the opportunities -  both economic and geo-political - and has, in different ways, gone out of its way to humiliate the rump state of Russia. The very highly-regarded George Kennan was one of several senior US statesmen to express grave warnings (in 1998) about the dangerous path being taken in extending NATO eastwards – 

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”The Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else”. 

Thousands of books have been written about the collapse of the Soviet Union but only a few have tried to deal with the enigma of the “Russian soul”. Natasha’s Dance – a cultural history of Russia by Orlando Figes (2002) is one of these rarities. A more political one is Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America” (2018) about which I was less than complimentary when I first read it – although I do remember the section on Ivan Ilyan making an impact.

Snyder may be American but has made Russia and the wider region very much his speciality as an historian. I’ve been moved by the war to start rereading “The Road to Unfreedom” and certainly find the Introduction doesn’t deserve the criticisms made by the famous UK historian referred to in the link embedded in the title. Perhaps he found the text too poetic – with its contrast of the “politics of inevitability” with the “politics of eternity”?

 

The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.

 

Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do.

Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

Once in power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present.

In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling. 

I actually find this contrast quite enlightening…

One book highly relevant to understanding the psychology of national humiliation is

 The Light that Failed - why the west is losing the fight for democracy by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (2019) although it focuses more on Hungary and Poland than Russia. But it does give a better sense of the dynamics of national humiliation better than any other book I know 

Pursuing economic and political reform by imitating a foreign model, however, turned out to have steeper moral and psychological downsides than many had originally expected.

The imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.

 

What makes imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.

In this sense, imitation comes to feel like a loss of sovereignty.

Thus, the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and xenophobia in central and eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 ‘imitation imperative’, with all its demeaning and humiliating implications.  

And this piece by Michael Brenner is one of the only attempts I’ve seen to link the war in Ukraine to the theme.

In case readers feel that the posts are too clinical – here’s the harrowing diary of a Russian-speaking volunteer at a Polish village on an exit point from Ukraine 

Further Reading

“Natasha’s Dance – the cultural history of Russia” can be downloaded in full here

Politics of the past – the uses and abuses of history (the socialist group of the European Parliament 2009)

https://www.bisa.ac.uk/articles/losing-control-chequered-history

Losing Control – global security in the 21st Century; Paul Rogers (2021)

https://www.humiliationstudies.org/

https://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/evelin/HitlerBroadMasses.pdf

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