LJUBLJANA – After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Slovene government immediately proclaimed its readiness to receive thousands of Ukrainian refugees. As a Slovene citizen, I was not only proud but also ashamed.
After all, when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban six months ago, this same government refused
to accept Afghan refugees, arguing that they should stay in their
country and fight. And a couple of months ago, when thousands of
refugees – mostly Iraqi Kurds – tried to enter Poland from Belarus, the
Slovene government, claiming that Europe was under attack, offered military aid to support Poland’s vile effort to keep them out.
Throughout the region, two species of refugee have emerged. A tweet
by the Slovene government on February 25 clarified the distinction:
“The refugees from Ukraine are coming from an environment which is in
its cultural, religious, and historical sense something totally
different from the environment out of which refugees from Afghanistan
are coming.” After an outcry, the tweet was quickly deleted, but the
obscene truth was out: Europe must defend itself from non-Europe.
This approach will
be catastrophic for Europe in the ongoing global struggle for
geopolitical influence. Our media and elites frame that struggle as a
conflict between a Western “liberal” sphere and a Russian “Eurasian”
sphere, ignoring the much larger group of countries – in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia – that are observing us
closely.
Even China is not ready to support Russia fully, although it has its own plans. In a message
to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a day after Russia launched its
invasion of Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that China is
ready to work to develop China-DPRK relations of friendship and
cooperation “under a new situation.” There is a fear that China will use
the “new situation” to “liberate” Taiwan.
What should worry us
now is that the radicalization we see, most clearly with Russian
President Vladimir Putin, is not just rhetorical. Many on the liberal
left, convinced that both sides knew they could not afford a full-on
war, thought Putin was bluffing when he massed troops at Ukraine’s
borders. Even when Putin described
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky’s government as a “gang of drug
addicts and neo-Nazis,” most expected that Russia would just occupy the
two breakaway
“people’s republics” controlled by Kremlin-backed Russian separatists
or, at most, extend the occupation to eastern Ukraine’s entire Donbas
region.
And now some who
call themselves leftists (I wouldn’t) are blaming the West for the fact
that US President Joe Biden was right about Putin’s intentions. The
argument is well-known: NATO was slowly encircling Russia, fomenting color revolutions in its near-abroad, and ignoring the reasonable fears of a country that had been attacked from the West in the last century.
There is, of course, an element of truth here. But saying only
this is equivalent to justifying Hitler by blaming the unjust Treaty of
Versailles. Worse, it concedes that big powers have the right to
spheres of influence, to which all others must submit for the sake of
global stability. Putin’s assumption that international relations is a
contest of great powers is reflected in his repeated claim that he had no choice
Is that true? Is the
problem really Ukrainian fascism? The question is better directed at
Putin’s Russia. Putin’s intellectual lodestar is Ivan Ilyin, whose works
are back in print and given to state apparatchiks and military
conscripts. After being expelled from the Soviet Union in the early
1920s, Ilyin advocated
a Russian version of fascism: the state as an organic community led by a
paternal monarch, in which freedom is knowing one’s place. The purpose
of voting for Ilyin (and for Putin) is to express collective support for the leader, not to legitimate or choose him.
Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s court-philosopher, closely follows in Ilyin’s steps, adding a postmodern garnish of historicist relativism:
“[E]very so-called
truth is a matter of believing. So we believe in what we do, we believe
in what we say. And that is the only way to define the truth. So we have
our special Russian truth that you need to accept. If the United States
does not want to start a war, you should recognize that [the] United
States is not any more a unique master. And [with] the situation in
Syria and Ukraine, Russia says, ‘No you are not any more the boss.’ That
is the question of who rules the world. Only war could decide really.”
But what about the
people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they also choose their truth or are
they just a battlefield for would-be world rulers?
The idea that each
“way of life” has its own truth is what endears Putin to right-wing
populists like former US President Donald Trump, who praised Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine as the act of a “genius .”
And the feeling is mutual: When Putin talks about “denazification” in
Ukraine, we should bear in mind his support for Marine le Pen’s National
Rally in France, Matteo Salvini’s Lega in Italy, and other actual neo-fascist movements.
The “Russian truth”
is only a convenient myth to justify Putin’s imperial vision, and the
best way for Europe to counter it is to build bridges to developing and
emerging countries, many of which have a long list of justified
grievances against Western colonization and exploitation. It’s not
enough to “defend Europe.” The true task is to persuade other countries
that the West can offer them better choices than Russia or China can.
And the only way to achieve that is to change ourselves by ruthlessly uprooting neo-colonialism, even when it comes packaged as humanitarian help.
Are we ready to prove that in defending Europe, we are fighting for freedom everywhere? Our disgraceful refusal to treat refugees equally sends the world a very different message.
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