“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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