Putin's Wars

by Marcel H. Van Herpen

  Notes

  1. Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 89.

  2. Montesquieu, “Lettres persanes,” 89.

  3. Montesquieu, “De l’esprit des lois,” in Oeuvres complètes, 539.

  4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 1039.

  5. Rousseau, “Considérations sur le gouvernement de Pologne et sur sa réformation projettée,” Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Part III, 1039.

  6. Cf. Denis Diderot, “Observations on the Instruction of the Empress of Russia to the Deputies for the Making of Laws,” in Diderot: Political Writings, ed. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81.

  7. Diderot, “Observations,” 82. Another contemporary who expressed his doubts concerning Catherine’s democratic credentials was the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. “The monarch of Russia,” he wrote, “presupposes a motivating force that her language, nation, and empire do not possess: honor. One should read Montesquieu on this and the Russian nation and state of mind is exactly its opposite: one should read him on despotism and fear, and both are exactly present.” (Johann Gottfried Herder, Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769 (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1976), 99.)

  8. Cf. Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 622.

  9. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 626.

  10. Cf. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, I. The Challenge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 403. These special rights of the nobility included that “they could not lose their status, honor, property or life without judicial proceedings, and could be judged only by judges of equal birth with themselves. . . . They received permission to leave state service at will, to take service with foreign governments, and to travel outside the country. They were given the right to sign their names (like European nobles) with territorial titles. They were reconfirmed in their right to ‘buy villages’ (that is serfs), and to engage in wholesale or overseas trade.”

  11. Palmer, Democratic Revolution, 404.

  12. It is still a subject of discussion whether the Cold War could be called a “war” that ended in a defeat. This interpretation is defended by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wrote: “The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied.” (Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Cold War and its Aftermath,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 4 (Fall 1992), 31.) Ernst-Otto Czempiel, on the other hand, stated: “It is easy, but erroneous, to argue that NATO won the conflict, . . . that the NATO alliance defeated the Warsaw Pact without firing a single round, so to speak. . . . The Warsaw Pact remained a strong military alliance until the very end. It was in many respects superior to NATO. No, a proper explanation lies elsewhere. It is more accurate to view the end of the East-West conflict as having been produced not by the military defeat of the Warsaw Pact.” (Ernst-Otto Czempiel, “Governance and Democratization,” in Governance Without Government: Order and Change in World Politics, eds. James N. Rosenau and Ernst-Otto Czempiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 251.) Of course, Czempiel is right: it was not a military defeat. However, it certainly was an ideological, economic, political, and moral defeat. It was this moral defeat, in particular, that led to the breakdown of the empire and—ultimately—to the disestablishment of the Warsaw Pact.

  13. Cf. Walter Pintner, “Russian Military Thought: The Western Model and the Shadow of Suvorov,” in Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 360.

  14. According to Benedict Anderson, as late as 1840, almost 98 percent (!) of the Russian population was illiterate. (Cf. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 75–76.) However, the Russian defeat in the Crimean War was caused not only by the illiteracy of the Russian serf soldiers, but also by the use of obsolete military technology. According to Daniel Headrick, “During the Crimean War, while French and British soldiers carried modern rifles, almost all Russian soldiers used smoothbore muskets, the same kind of guns used in the war against Napoleon. The Russian government tried to purchase new guns from the American Samuel Colt and from gun makers in Liège but were not able to import them in time.” (Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 169.)

  15. Pintner, “Russian Military Thought,” 362.

  16. As concerns Russia’s membership of the G-8, even Moscow’s mayor and 1999 presidential hopeful, Yury Luzhkov, remarked: “Its [Russia’s] full membership of the ‘Big Eight’ is obviously also a self-deceit.” Luzhkov, however, was here not so much referring to Russia’s deficient democratic credentials, as to its insufficient economic potential. (Y. M. Luzhkov, The Renewal of History: Mankind in the 21st Century and the Future of Russia (London: Stacey International, 2003), 151–152).

  17. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (March/April 1994), 71.

  18. Daniel Headrick contrasts this smooth, swift, and easy conquest of Siberia by the Russians with the slow conquest of its Western frontier by the young United States, where, due to the fierce resistance of the Native American tribes, “the conquest was slow, difficult, and costly” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 277). “The contrast with the Russian expansion into Siberia is striking,” wrote Headrick. “In the 1590s, Russia was confined to the west of the Ural Mountains. By 1646, Russian explorers and fur traders had reached the eastern edge of Siberia and had founded Okhotsk off the sea of that name and Anadyrsk in northeastern Asia. By 1689—after only a hundred years—Russia controlled almost all of Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, 3,500 miles from European Russia” (Headrick, Power over Peoples, 278).

  19. Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power, with a new introduction by Francis P. Sempa (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 69.

  20. Cf. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 31.

  21. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 140.

  22. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 141.

  23. Colin S. Gray, “The Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era: Heartland, Rimlands, and the Technological Revolution,” Strategy Paper No. 30, National Strategy Information Center, Inc., (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1977), 35. Charles Tilly even spoke of “two and a half centuries, [in which] Russian expansion scarcely ceased” (cf. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, 189). The Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen estimated that “every seven years from 1500 until his day [around 1910, MHVH], Russia gained an amount of territory equal to that of his own country, the Kingdom of Norway.” (Vladimir Solovyov and Elena Klepikova, Inside the Kremlin (London: W. H. Allen & Co Plc, 1988), 262–263.) The land surface won by Russia in four hundred years, was, according to Nansen, approximately fifty-seven times that of Norway, which is about 17 million square kilometers. The surface of the tsarist empire in 1910 was about 23 million square kilometers. Nansen’s estimate seems rather plausible.

  24. Edward Dicey, “Mr Gladstone and Our Empire,” September 1877, in Nineteenth Century Opinion: An Anthology of Extracts from the First Fifty Volumes of The Nineteenth Century 1877–1901, ed. Michael Goodwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 261. Dicey added: “But our conquests have come to us as the accidents of war, not as the objects of our warfare. I do not deduce from this that our annexations of territory have been obtained more justly or more rightfully than those of other powers who have co
nquered for the sake of conquering. What I want to point out is that our Empire is the result not so much of any military spirit as of a certain instinct of development in our race. We have in us the blood of the Vikings; and the same impulse which sent the Norsemen forth to seek new homes in strange lands has, for century after century, impelled their descendants to wander forth in search of wealth, power, or adventure” (Dicey, “Mr Gladstone,” 262).

  25. Quoted in Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, “The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe,” Policy paper (London: European Council on Foreign Relations, 2010), 32.

  26. Claire Mouradian, “Les Russes au Caucase,” in Le livre noir du colonialisme: XVIe–XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance, ed. Marc Ferro (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 393 (emphasis mine).

  27. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2013), 399.

  28. Cf. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), 337.

  29. Anderson, Lineages, 346.

  30. Anonymous authors, Proekt Rossiya: Vybor Puti, Vtoraya Kniga (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 395.

  31. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, with a preface by F. A. Hayek, reprint of the original edition of 1861 (Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1962), 88. This compensatory function of imperialist policies had also been observed by the sociologist Max Weber: “Weber saw Russia as a typical imperialist power, its pressure for expansion coming from a combination of elements within Russian society: from the landhunger of the peasants; from the power interests of the bureaucracy; from the cultural imperialism of the intelligentsia, who, ‘too weak to secure even the most elementary demands for a constitutional order and guaranteed freedoms at home . . . find a support for their damaged self-esteem in the service of a policy of expansion, concealed under fine-sounding phrases.’” (David Beetham, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1974), 140.)

  32. Peter Sloterdijk, Die Verachtung der Massen: Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 33.

  33. Instead of seeking refuge in the ersatz self-esteem, provided by empire, a more authentic way to reappropriate the self-esteem that has been denied, is described by Axel Honneth in his book The Struggle for Recognition. “In the context of the emotional response associated with shame,” he wrote, “the experience of being disrespected can become the motivational impetus for a struggle for recognition. For it is only by regaining the possibility of active conduct that individuals can dispel the state of emotional tension into which they are forced as a result of humiliation.” The praxis thus opened up makes it possible, according to Honneth, “to take the form of political resistance.” (Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 138.)

  34. Stalin was a great admirer of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny), whom he considered as his great historical role model. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, “[H]e regarded Ivan the Terrible as his true alter ego, his ‘teacher.’” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 177.) Montefiore described how Stalin, at the very moment that the German armies stood before Moscow, “kept reading history: it was now that he scribbled on a new biography of Ivan the Terrible: ‘teacher teacher’ and then: ‘We shall overcome!’” (Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 396). Stalin admired in Ivan not only his imperialist policies, but also—if not more—his ruthless killing of the boyars, the Russian nobility. (On Stalin’s self-identification with Ivan the Terrible, see also Benedict Anderson, Lineages, 160, and Vladimir Fédorovski, “Le Fantôme d’Ivan le Terrible,” in Le Fantôme de Staline (Paris: Éditions du Rocher, 2007), 175–181).

  35. An example of this imperial inequality was the fact that even when, in 1946, the Algerians obtained civil rights, they did not get the same voting rights as French colonists. They got these only in 1956 after the war of liberation had already started.

  36. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Empire & Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 187.

  37. Nederveen Pieterse, Empire, ibid.

  38. Rousseau, “Considérations,” 1039.

  39. Rousseau, “Considérations,” 970.

  40. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (London and New York: Penguin, 2004), 193.

  41. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, reprint of the original, Edinburgh, 1767 (Milano: Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2001), 417.

  42. Ferguson, An Essay, 418.

  43. Sir John Rober Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (London: Macmillan & Co, 1914), 294.

  44. Seeley, Expansion of England, 347.

  45. Seeley, Expansion of England, 348.

  46. The young and democratic United States had an important flaw, which was the status of black slaves who were not considered citizens. However, in its territorial expansion the United States did not act as an empire (at least not until 1898, when it took the Philippines from Spain). Neither did it incorporate the native American tribes. Their land was “bought,” and they were driven from their lands, finally ending up in extraterritorial reservations. Alexis de Tocqueville, a profound admirer of American democracy, who, in December 1831, witnessed the deportation of the Chactas Indians, denounced the silent extermination that went on behind a juridical façade, writing that “the Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of the law and legality [than the Spaniards in South America], never bloodthirsty, are more profoundly destructive of their race [Chactas tribe] and it is beyond doubt that in one hundred years there will remain in North America not one single tribe, nor even one single man, belonging to the most remarkable of the Indian races.” (Alexis de Tocqueville, “Contre le génocide des Indiens d’Amérique,” in Textes essentiels, Anthologie critique par J.-L. Benoît, (Paris: Havas, 2000), 305.)

  Chapter 2

  Comparing Western and Russian Legitimation Theories for Empire

  Imperial rule needs legitimation. But it would be an exaggeration to state that imperialist rule always needs legitimation. In the first phases of modern imperialism territorial expansion just happened. Often it could not even be called imperialism, especially when expansion took place in empty territories where no native populations lived that could be subdued. However, it was a different matter when imperialist expansion implied wars of conquest, as in South America where the Spanish conquistadores conducted bloody wars against the indigenous Indian populations. It is, therefore, no coincidence that “Spain was the only conquering country . . . that asked itself questions about its capacity and the legality to exercise its rights and dominate other peoples.”[1]

  Imperialist Legitimation Theories: Christianity, a Superior Civilization, and the White Man’s Burden

  In its search for a legitimation theory Spain fell back on the old medieval theory of the “just war” waged by Christians against the infidels. The “infidels,” in this case, were not Muslims, but pagans. An additional argument was found in the fact that the population of the Caribbean included cannibals, which was considered a reason for them to be enslaved. Thus, in this early period the Christian faith and the superiority of Europe’s civilization were used as arguments to support imperialist rule. In Western Europe the inherent hypocrisy of these theories began to be attacked in the eighteenth century when Enlightenment philosophers, such as Voltaire and Diderot, formulated the first fundamental criticism of slavery and colonial rule.[2] These critical voices found resonance in the nineteenth century, when a widely supported anti-slavery movement emerged. This led to a new legitimation theory, the theory of the white man’s burden, which was the result of the bad conscience caused by the new moral criticism. It became more difficult to legitimate imperialist expansion by referring to the Christian faith (in both its catholic, as well as its protestant variants). In the words of John Kenneth Galbraith,

  [Colonialis
m’s] real motives, were they stated, would be altogether too uncouth, selfish or obscene. So where colonization has involved people—where it has not meant merely the appropriation and settlement of unused lands—the colonialists have almost always seen themselves as the purveyors of some transcendental moral, spiritual, political or social worth. The reality [however] has as regularly included a considerable component of pecuniary interest, real or anticipated, for important participants.[3]