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 21^st Century; Paul Rogers (2021)

https://www.humiliationstudies.org/

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

Is this really what the West wants?

The West has not declared war officially on Russia and yet, to all intents and purposes, we are at war with the country. What else is the combination of sanctions and supplies of weapons to Ukraine? The western media – led by the poisonous US channels which strangely imagine themselves safely out of range of Putin’s missiles – have been hyping us all up. 

And we have every reason to be disgusted by the scenes of massacre being enacted before our eyes. Sadly, such scenes have been blocked to Russian citizens – who, for the past 2weeks, have seen only what heavy censorship allows them to see.   

I have just discovered, however, one Russian whose blog has been able to give us a sense of how things are seen on their side. As it happens, he is someone whose writing I have admired for the past few years – from his “Reinventing Collapse – the Russian Experience and American Prospects” (2011) to “Shrinking the Technosphere” (2016). He belongs to those who consider that our days are numbered and was, last I heard more than a year ago, living on a boat and posting on Club Orlov. He seems, however, to have pulled up anchor and returned to Russia - since today I was astonished to hear him say he was “happy to be back in Russia” and then, effectively (in both senses of the word), justifying the Ukraine “operations”.

And, sure enough, when I googled his blog, it was to discover that this has been his position since 2014. Let me repeat – this is someone whose writing I have admired for some years even if it occasionally seemed a bit excessive. But his perceptions of the direction the US has been taking in recent decades are widely shared - it was only a year ago this post made the point that in no way can we consider the US to be a democracy. The military do what they want and I have some sympathy with Orlov's point that, since 2014, Ukraine has been treated as a US colony.

The US website which contains his interview certainly feels under threat and my friends in the highly reputable Scheerpost would agree. This is where the limits of free speech begin to be tested. But it's much more than that - we need to pull back a bit and ask how on earth we reached this dangerous point. 

Basically we took our eye off the ball in 2014 - that seems to have been the point at which we started to ignore what was happening in Ukraine.....This is, of course, no excuse for the brutal murders being committed on civilians by Russian soldiers. But it does mean that we need to call a halt to the oversimplification and tribalism that is going on. I’ve selected this contribution from four analysts who are trying to help us assess how Putin should be dealt with -

 One of the triggers for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine seems to have been the mixed signalling over Ukraine’s Nato membership, which was neither ruled out nor firmly ruled in.

Nato and the EU both need to decide, and to communicate clearly, whether they plan to admit the remaining post-Soviet states that want to become members, and what the relationship with them will look like if they don’t. 

At the same time, even if it is unpalatable to talk about it now, there will also need to be engagement with the Russian government in some areas, as there was between the west and the USSR even in dark periods of the cold war such as the early 1980s. 

The most important area will probably be nuclear arms control. The western debate about a no-fly zone and the Russian government’s inflammatory, if vague, threats about nuclear weapons are a sharp reminder of the threat of escalation between nuclear superpowers – a threat that, worryingly, many seemed to have forgotten or dismissed. However hostile the relationship between Russia and the west becomes, dialogue on nuclear matters needs to be maintained. 

Similarly, some level of continuing military-to-military diplomatic contact on other issues will remain important – more important, in fact, than it has been in periods of better relations. Channels of communication between militaries are important for reducing the risk of miscalculation, even where they are unlikely to build much trust. 

Finally, the west will need to think about how it tries to engage with Russian society. Closing off all contact will simply confirm Putin’s narrative that the west wants to destroy Russia. States need to keep their doors open to Russians who want to study or visit, as well as those who are escaping repression. None of this is going to be easy, and much of it may fall foul of domestic pressures, wishful thinking, and splits within the EU and Nato. But Europe and the US’s future security depends on recognising that we are in a moment of acute danger, and that we are all in it together.

 

Schwarzenegger v Biden - who has the better grasp of psychology?

 It has been Arnold Schwarzenegger - of all people – who has shown the way with his superb video on Twitter (and, perhaps more importantly, on his still unblocked Russian Telegram account) appealing to Russian soldiers and civilians alike.

A masterpiece in messaging, it starts with a convincing account – with subtitles in Russian - of the first hero in his life (a Russian weightlifter) and the importance to him of his Russian fans before telling them they are being lied to. He ends with a short message to Putin. 

Contrast that with the self-indulgent and counterproductive message of Joe Biden who dares to call Putin a war criminal. His epithet is appropriate - but it comes from someone who joins a string of US Presidents who have inflicted mass murder of countless innocent citizens of so many nations. And it is these same US Presidents who joined forces with Russia in refusing to join the International Criminal Court at The Hague. And refused to sign the International Convention on Cluster Munitions. The refusal of both countries to join is all the proof we need of the evil embodied in both systems. 

En passant, I should note that the official blocking of Western social media in Russia, hasn’t stopped eight brave Russian readers from showing up yesterday on my blog statistics. Six months ago they were leading the pack. 

Against Nihilism

Violence and viruses have snuffed the life from millions of people these past few years. The increasing sight of mass graves suggest a growing indifference to the value of the individual life. Remember how easily people talked a couple of years ago of the “culling” of the elderly – adding the phrase to the euphemisms which imperial governments have been using increasingly in the past half-century such as “friendly fire” and “collateral damage”. With the global population growing in only 20 years from 6 billion to 8 billion, it is little wonder that we can’t share Steven Pinker’s optimism about human aggression. 

Nor that, beneath our civilised veneer, we are beginning to pose questions about the readiness with which Russian leaders have been willing to sacrifice millions of individuals over the past century. 

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” was first attributed to Stalin in 1947 as ‘If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics’. 

I for one will never forget a conversation with a young Russian interpreter in St Petersburg in January 1991 when I was on a WHO mission to the city - when she spoke about how meaningless life was for her as a Russian.  

 

With Ukraine descending into hell, I stumbled yesterday – via an article and book about the country’s cultural heritage – into the field of memoirs which I last posted about some 7 years ago.

Somehow, against such slaughter, it seemed appropriate to assert that life has value – and should be lived to the full. The website Lives Retold reminded me of Theodor Zeldin’s great venture of self-portraits – with Roman Krznaric’s (of “Carpe Diem” and “The Good Ancestor” fame) being perhaps the most thoughtful. 

 

Other examples of people who led fascinating lives and whose account of them avoids the vanity of most autobiographical efforts are –

·       Dennis Healey’s “Time of my Life” (1989) - a beautifully-written and wry study of the political life at a time when politics mattered – with a dash of culture thrown in.

·       En passant he mentions that Leonard Woolf’s 5-volume “Memoirs” were an inspiration and, when I eventually got round to reading them, they proved to be one of the best in the English language both for its insights into social aspects and personalities of the time

·       “Moments of Being” is a marvellous posthumous collection of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings.  

·       Arthur Koestler's four volumes - "an unrivalled study", as the blurb on the back of the third volume ("The Invisible Writing") puts it, "of twentieth century man and his dilemmas"

·       Elias Canetti’s 4 volumes; “the Tongue set Free”; “The Torch in my Ear”; “The Play in the Eyes”; “Party in the Blitz” are somewhat more caustic and show the less attractive side of humanity

·       Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov is in a genre of its own – with a mixture of styles

·       My Happy Days in Hell; Gyorgy Faludy (1962) amazing, poetic and life-affirming memoir from an émigré who returned to communist Hungary in full knowledge that he would be thrown into jail (where he spent 3 harrowing years)

·       Victor Serge’s Memoir of a Revolutionary best conveys the self-sacrifice involved in the harrowing struggles for a better world in the first few decades of the 20^th century

·       Gregor von Rezzori’s trilogy of novels were based on the life he lived in Czernowitz which was then in Romania

·       The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig which I rate as the best simply because it is so self-effacing

·       My Century – the odyssey of a Polish Intellectual is Aleksander Wat’s stunning memoir which rates with Faludy, Koestler, Serge and Zweig.

·       The various volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography conveyed for me a powerful sense of an exciting new Europe taking shape in the post-war rubble. All Said and Done is the last.

·       graphic artist Tisa von Schulenberg’s harrowing little book “Ich Hab’s Gewagt” tells the tale of a woman who left privilege behind to pursue a life of art and integrity….

·       I also thoroughly enjoyed historian Fritz Stern’s “Five Germanies I have known”

·       And Gunther Grass’s so poetic “Peeling the Onion”

·       Poet Dannie Abse’s “Goodbye Twentieth Century” is a gentle memoir

·       Diane Athill’s various Memoirs are as good as they get

·       Des Wilson, the great campaigner, I knew briefly in the late 70s and he was good enough to send me his rumbustious “Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure”

·       JK Galbraith’s “A Life in Our Times; Memoirs” offer an unsurpassable repast of memories and intellectual musings

·       Clive James’ voluminous output is almost unclassifiable – memoirs, essays, notes – give a real insight into a great mind, prolific reader and writer of prose which jumps off the page – for example Cultural Amnesia – necessary memories from history and the arts

·       Amitai Etzioni (“My Brother’s Keeper”) and Richard Rose ( jazzily entitled Learning about Politics in Time and Space) are two prolific academics whose foray into Memoir help us understand the process of intellectual development 

·       Herbert Simon was an amazing polymath who launched the post-war interest in decision-making. The intro to his memoir Models of My Life (1996) is one of the best

·       The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1937 cover German culture and politics during this period

·       The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt was written on his death bed at the tragically early age of 62 and gives a powerful sense of what we have lost with his death

·       Journalist Sebastian Haffner – who had to leave Germany in 1933 and whose Germany – Jekyll and Hyde made a huge impact when it was published in 1940

 The Hooligan’s Return; Norman Manea (2003) a Romanian émigré much esteemed in the US paints a powerful picture of post-war Romania

·       An Encyclopaedia of Myself; Jonathan Meades (2014) pyrotechnics from a rumbustious life

·       The Pigeon Tunnel – stories from my life; John le Carre (2016) UK’s greatest spywriter’s memoir

·      Making the Most of it; Bryan Magee (2018) epub Final part of a spell-binding trilogy which started with “Clouds of Glory – a Hoxton Childhood” (2003) and “Growing up in a War” (2007) which resonate with the honesty and clarity this amazing philosopher/politician/interviewer embodied.

·       Je Chemine avec Susan George (2020) It’s an epub so needs conversion! George is a French/American radical political scientist and gives a sense of her political journey in these interviews

·       What Does Jeremy think? Is a rare biography of a top British civil servant

An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues in this tribute to his work and assesses their veracity

Models of My Life; Herbert Simon (1991)

A Synthesising Mind – a memoir; Howard Gardner (2020)

Whatever happened to political psychology?

My last – unusually short - post ended with a question about the curious psychology we seem to be applying to the Russian elite living in its gilded bubble. A couple of years ago I had a post which contained this excerpt - 

The origins (of Polish and Hungarian populism) lie partly in the humiliations associated with the uphill struggle to become, at best, an inferior copy of a superior model.

Discontent with the “transition to democracy” in the post-communist years was inflamed by visiting foreign “evaluators” who had little grasp of local realities. These experiences combined to produce a nativist reaction in the region, a reassertion of “authentic” national traditions allegedly suffocated by ill-fitting western forms. The post-national liberalism associated with EU enlargement allowed aspiring populists to claim exclusive ownership of national traditions and national identity.

The wave of anti-liberalism sweeping over central Europe today reflects widespread popular resentment at the perceived slights to national and personal dignity that this palpably sincere reform-by-imitation project entailed…… 

The excerpts were from “The Light that Failed – a reckoning” (2019) by Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian think-tanker and Stephen Holmes, an American academic who had trailed the publication a year earlier in this Journal of Democracy article.

Krastev and Holmes’ emphasis on the psychological aspects of the humiliation involved in having to copy a foreign model has passed unnoticed since then – but is actually much more relevant to Russia. An article of theirs in the Eurozine journal spells out the psychological process. 

The process was called by different names – democratization, liberalization, enlargement, convergence, integration, Europeanization – but the goal pursued by post-communist reformers was simple. They wished their countries to become ‘normal’, which meant like the West. This involved importing liberal-democratic institutions, applying western political and economic recipes, and publicly endorsing western values. Imitation was widely understood to be the shortest pathway to freedom and prosperity.

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. 

Michael Brenner is about the only analyst I’ve seen in all the commentaries on the war in Ukraine to develop this theme of humiliation.

Krastev and Holmes’ Eurozine article goes on make a second crucial point of huge cultural significance – 

In the eyes of conservative Poles in the days of the Cold War, western societies were normal because, unlike communist systems, they cherished tradition and believed in God. Then suddenly Poles discovered that western ‘normality’ today means secularism, multiculturalism and gay marriage. Should we be surprised that Poles and their neighbours felt ‘cheated’ when they found out that the society they wanted to imitate had disappeared, washed away by the swift currents of modernization?

 

If, in the immediate aftermath of 1989, ‘normality’ was understood largely in political terms (free elections, separation of powers, private property, and the right to travel), during the last decade normality has increasingly come to be interpreted in cultural terms. As a result, Central and East Europeans are becoming mistrustful and resentful of norms coming from the West. Ironically, as we shall see below, eastern Europe is now starting to view itself as the last bastion of genuine European values.

 

In order to reconcile the idea of ‘normal’ (meaning what is widespread at home) with what is normatively obligatory in the countries they aim to imitate, eastern Europeans consciously or unconsciously have begun to ‘normalize’ the model countries, arguing that what is widespread in the East is also prevalent in the West, even though westerners hypocritically pretend that their societies are different. Eastern Europeans often relieve their normative dissonance – say, between paying bribes to survive in the East and fighting corruption to be accepted in the West – by concluding that the West is really just as corrupt as the East, but westerners are simply in denial and hiding the truth. 

And this article by a Czech assesses not only Krastev’s argument but those contained in the books I mentioned in an earlier post - first one by Anne Applebaum (“The Twilight of Democracy?”) and the other by Timothy Snyder in whose “The Road to Unfreedom” (2018) we find a full exposition of Putin’s hero, the nationalist Ivan Ilyin.

And this article from an erstwhile hawk is also important in suggesting that the West, having done too little to oppose Russia risks going to the other extreme.

A thought

The Russian military has so far killed more civilians than Ukraine soldiers but its campaign has bogged down – particularly in the north. And the Ukrainians are resisting heroically. This is not the way the war was supposed to go – and we can only imagine the recriminations that are going on in the Kremlin, with all dissent viciously suppressed 

In the meantime, the western media taunt Putin – flapping a red flag at a psychopathic and highly dangerous bull.

This is hardly the most clever psychology

Notes about the War on our Doorsteps

The murderous destruction of hospitals by Russian missiles is the latest horror to be added to the wider attacks on civilians and the streams of refugee from Ukraine (the photo is of victims being buried in a Mariupol mass grave).

This will be a series of disparate notes selectively drawn from the media coverage available in a town just north of Bucharest – starting with a comment about that media coverage and the skilful use being made by Ukrainian authorities (including an interview with a Russian POW); then asking whether aggression every works and what we really know about Ukraine; and finishing with an important discussion now underway about realism in politics. 

Media Coverage

Shaun Walker is typical of the thousands of journalists now posting from the country - although today he crossed into Romania with useful tweets. Simon Wren-Lewis is an Economics academic whose blog strays into the political field and makes a useful point in his latest point 

Contrast public perception in the UK of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with the US and UK invasion of Iraq. There is, rightly, no attempt to balance the reality of what is going on in Ukraine with Putin’s propaganda. National self-determination for Ukraine is being overridden by the use of lethal force based on the fantasies of empire by one man, or a small group of men around him. But the reality of the Iraq war was not so different. The invasion was the project of one man, George Bush, or a small group of men around him, with the UK following because our Prime Minister thought he should.

Yet with Iraq public perceptions were different, because the misinformation was coming from our own governments. We were told there were stocks of chemical weapons that could be used against us, or at least our allies, whereas in reality there were no chemical weapons. The bigger lie in the US was that Iraq was somehow linked to Al-Qaeda, whereas anyone with any knowledge knew that this was nonsense. We were freeing Iraq from a tyrant, whereas in reality we were undertaking a national rebuilding process with little idea of how to go about it, with what turned out to be disastrous consequences. 

This post from Chris Hedges about “worthy and unworthy victims” extends the point.

 Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum have written extensively about Ukraine – with  Snyder’s “Bloodlands” (2010) in particular being a harrowing story of the tens of millions of people killed by Stalin and Hitler in the region and his later “Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America” (2018) a curious and badly-written exploration of Russian attitudes to the region. Snyder penned this article in mid-January about to How to Think about War in Ukraine – and this is a more recent video discussion between Yuval Harari, Snyder and Applebaum.

India has adopted a neutral position on the war and this piece is therefore of interest.   

A Russian POW and the Ukraine President tell it as it is

https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/03/this-moving-speech-by-a-russian-pow-in-ukraine-does-not-sound-like-a-typical-forced-confession.html

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/08/zelenskiy-brings-down-the-house-with-his-speech-to-the-commons 

Aggression doesn’t pay

You would have thought that, after the disastrous Russian and US invasions of Afghanistan, US and UK invasions of Iraq, Libya etc, the very idea of invading another country would have been laughed out of court. Was it just nationalistic groupthink? 

But it all depends

If this article is typical of thinking in western newsrooms, it shows how deranged we have become

This is UK military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment - and one from the US stable. 

What about Negotiation?

https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/01/03/2022/diplomatic-solution-ukraine-crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-look-like a very recent article from Anatol Lieven 

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-what-will-end-the-war-heres-what-research-says-178721

Understanding Ukraine

This series of posts has already referenced a couple of important books for understanding the conflict – Ukraine and the art of strategy; Lawrence Freedman (2019) and  Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019)

I have just come across a small collection of open access books on the region and downloaded three of them – one being a fascinating memoir from an English historian (now resident in Canada) who has made Ukraine. Russia and Belarus his specialities – it’s “Understanding Ukraine and Belarus” by David Marples. 

An important debate about Realism in international relations

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/john-mearsheimer-and-the-dark-origins-of-realism

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-95-is-ukraine-the-wests?s=r