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Russia’s June 27 missile attack on a shopping center in Kremenchuk,
Ukraine resulted in 20 civilian deaths, but it appears Russian
forces anticipated many more. The 1000 kilogram high-explosive
ordinance hit a facility with about 1000 people inside. The attack
was consistent with Russia’s strategy of creating terror among
Ukraine’s civilian population, but it was evidently also a political
statement: It took place as leaders of the G7 group of the largest
liberal democracies met at Schloss Elmau, Germany. They called the
attack a “war crime,” and vowed continuing support for Ukraine, but
images from the event showed them frolicking boyishly together in
humorous poses. The horrific attack became an internal propaganda
victory for Russia in its ideological war against Euro-Atlantic
liberal internationalism.
The images confirmed stereotypes of the unmanly “trans-national” man
purveyed in the Eurasian political philosophy driving Russia’s
foreign policy. Russia had the courage to defy the West with its
power, and its willingness to kill, shocking Western sensibilities.
Russians steeped in xenophobic Kremlin propaganda felt pride, not
shame.
Aleksandre Dugin, a Russian academic and current flag-bearer of
Eurasianism, has made much of Western societies’ blurring of
national and gender boundaries, and of their attachment to
cosmopolitan universalism. Dugin presents these tendencies as
morally corrupt and weak, in contrast to the communal spirit of
Russian-dominated Eurasia. Eurasia, roughly co-terminus with the
former Soviet Union and the Russian Empire before that, is
understood as a civilization, a Grossraum, or zone of shared values.
For Russia’s Eurasianist ruling elite, both the Westphalian
nation-state model, and an inclusive “international community” based
on a “rules-based international order,” are European impositions
alien to the “Russian World.”
The Eurasian ideology is collectivist and, arguably, racist. One
main founder, Ivan Ilyin, who advocated for fascism in his 1933
article, “National-Socialism, The New Spirit,” believed that
individuality was evil; the purpose of politics was to overcome
individuality. People within Eurasia are the same, but distinct from
others. At a 2014 press conference, Vladimir Putin stated that, “The
powerful genetic code of the Russian nation, that makes us Russians,
is different from other nations and especially compared to the
so-called Western genetic code.” He added that a feature of the
Russian genetic code is the ability “to die for the common cause
publicly, in front of the eyes of the community.”
Eurasia, inhabiting the cultural space of Czarist Russia and the
USSR, articulates an alternative to the universalism that originated
in Classical and Hellenistic Greek thought, and the Judaeo-Christian
tradition. The latter treats the world as a single, open space. Its
people are equal under the transcendent rule of one God and by
virtue of common ancestry. Its nations are responsible for upholding
a Law of Nations (ius gentium) derived from natural law. In the
Eurasian view, there is no common human nature legitimating
universal moral standards for states. Russian Orthodox Patriarch
Kirill invoked the God of the Church and Russia, a God who, he
implied, cares for Eurasia but not its opponents. He blessed the
invasion of Ukraine, asking God to “preserve the Russian land… a
land which now includes Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and other
tribes and peoples.” The Patriarch castigated those who fight
against the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine, targeting them
as the “evil forces.” These and other pronouncements have led to
calls for Kirill to be prosecuted by the International Criminal
Court for incitement and abetting war crimes.
Roots of Russian Foreign Policy
A clear line connects Russia’s current foreign policy with the core
tenets of Eurasianism, and especially with the views of one of its
founders, Russian linguist Prince N. S. Trubetskoy. Trubetskoy
taught in Sofia and Vienna in the 1920s and 30s. As a thinker, he
was a forerunner of post-war structuralism. His books demanded a
particular Russian civilizational approach to political culture, law
and international relations, in opposition to that of Romanic and
Germanic Europe. Russia needed to dissociate itself from European
liberalism. The idea of a “universal civilization” was a conceit; as
glossed by Nicholas Riasanovsky in a 1964 review, Trubetskoy claimed
that cosmopolitanism was simply another form of chauvinism, while
chauvinists were seen, by its proponents, as separatists from
universalism, and objects of hostility. Cosmopolitanism, highly
particularized and circumscribed, was analogous to egocentrism
whereby European civilization saw itself as the center of the world,
and subscribed to a “religion of panhumanism.” But Eurasia was a
“distinct and fundamental cultural entity, entirely independent from
Europe.” Trubetskoy considered Eurasia not a political empire, but
rather a “harmonious, symphonic organic association of peoples which
constituted a higher historical and cultural unity….the issue of
separatism lost its meaning within the boundaries of Eurasia,”
united by the Russian language in an “ideocratic” state.
Critics have accused Russia of the international crime of aggression
under Chapter VII the UN Charter. For Russians, however, the attack
on Ukraine is not seen as a war with a sovereign neighbor, but
rather as an internal affair. It is a “police operation” against
Eurasian separatists who are traitorously seeking to cleave to
another, threatening civilization, i.e. Europe. Russian leaders do
not recognize any of the 14 Newly Independent States as sovereign,
independent political entities within a global political system.
They have “reimagined” borders, citizenship and sovereignty within
the Eurasian Grossraum, according to Cindy Wittke of the Leibniz
Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, in Regensburg,
Germany.
In fact, since its assault on Ukraine began, Russia has repeatedly
affirmed its commitment to the UN Charter and international law. It
sees these as properly falling under the purview of the UN Security
Council, where it assumed the former Soviet Union’s veto power. What
Russia rejects is the assertion of a “rules-based international
order” reflecting specifically Western values and interests—the
threatening and intrusive particularistic universalism of which
Trubetskoy warned decades prior to the formation of the modern
international global governance system. As observed by former
American diplomat Philip Remler, while Russia claims to abide by the
UN Charter and Security Council Resolutions, Russia regards the
human rights treaties and norms of the “rules-based order” as
“boundless and amorphous” standards based on Western civilizational
principles that are incompatible with those of Eurasia. Remler
clarifies that for Russia, the UN Charter is interpreted as
affirming that “the legitimacy of recognized governments is absolute
regardless of their origins, governance, human rights record, or any
other external norm.” It is, according to Wittke, a “hyperformalist,
positivist approach to international law when pointing to the
alleged hypocrisy of the West’s violation of the sovereignty and
territorial integrity of Serbia, Iraq, or Libya.” This position is
consistent, Remler notes, with “Russian domestic preoccupations in
the era of color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and domestic unrest”
and its defense of Assad in Syria. Russia has no problem defending
international law when this can shield Putin’s regime, and those of
its allies, from threats to his iron rule.
In a 2021 article in Kommersant, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov played Eurasia’s sex card, claiming that in Western
countries, “students learn at school that Jesus Christ was
bisexual.” He went on to accuse the West of promoting “totalitarian
rule in global affairs,” and made a plea for a “multipolar” and
“polycentric world,” one where human rights standards are not
universal, but particular to diverse civilizational formations. The
West “had its own ‘rules’ in the Balkans,” where, after Serbia
refused to accept a diplomatic solution in Kosovo at Rambouillet,
NATO began a bombing campaign without Security Council approval. The
international order upheld by Russia is thus one that regulates
relations between states, not those between individuals and their
governments, nor one whose principles might call into question the
legitimacy of a state, like the Russian Federation, that deeply
encroaches on individual freedom and dignity.
Defending Universal Rights
In the Declaration of Independence, America’s Founders clarified
that when any government abuses the principle of universal,
individual natural rights and acts without their consent, “it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing
its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect
their Safety and Happiness.” By its example and projection of this
revolutionary and emancipatory message, which is an invitation to,
and promise of conflict in the struggle for liberty, America has
inspired the people of many other nations who have sought to change
their governments, either by overthrowing them or by moving them
politically toward democracy and freedom. Particular societies,
including many non-Western societies, have thus come to embrace
universal principles that have widespread appeal, although they
emerged in the West.
Today in Ukraine, Russia, in the name of the Eurasian cultural
entity, tries to violently suppress the efforts of people in a
society putatively part of that entity, who seek liberty and
self-determination. The Ukrainians are, with their courage and
sacrifices, demonstrating that Eurasia is no homogeneous space with
regard to political culture, where men and women are willing to
submit to domination by elites, and indifferent to the denial of
political and civil rights. They are showing that universal natural
rights and freedoms mean something in a society that shares much
with the culture of Russia; indeed, something worth dying for. They
demonstrate the transcultural will to freedom, and, once again, the
hollowness of the “culture relativism” objection to human rights
that has often been posed by authoritarian rulers.
Ukrainian moral and military resistance has shown the corruption and
irrationality of Russia’s hegemonic Eurasian pretensions, yet
Russia’s critique of the “rules-based” international human rights
order should elicit serious reflection. Decades of human rights
inflation and ideological exploitation have indeed resulted in
“boundless and amorphous standards,” some of which stray far from
the core principle of universal individual freedom, and reflect the
ambitions of interest groups. But while Russian propagandists play
on widespread concerns about the translation of moral universalism
into international law and standards, those questions are used by
Russian propagandists to sow confusion and division in the open
media West. Citizens of Western societies should not allow theme, or
the broader failures of Western populations to live up to the moral
challenges of liberalism, to cloud their understanding of this
conflict.
Russia’s program of war crimes, rape, expulsions and pillage, of
disregard for the lives not only of Ukrainian civilians, but
Russia’s own troops, is a throwback to pagan barbarism. It is thus
an assault not only on the rules-based international order, but on
core principles of Judaeo-Christian civilization, principles shared
by Russians and their neighbors in the Euro-Atlantic sphere. In
confronting these tragic and threatening developments, we can, and
must draw strength from our tradition, with the confidence that the
defense of Ukraine from Russia’s brutal, imperialistic attack is an
obligation anchored in the deepest layers of our common humanity.
Aaron Rhodes is Senior Fellow in the Common Sense Society, and
President of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. He was director
of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights between
1993-2007 and is author of The Debasement of Human Rights (Encounter
Books, 2018). |
