Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming. It's great to see
a packed house. My name is Tony Levitas. I'm a Senior fellow at
the Watson Institute, and it's my great
pleasure and honor to welcome back to
Brown Timothy Snyder. I say back to Brown because
Professor Snyder received his B.A. from Brown some time
ago, and has since gone on-- Not as long as you. --not so long ago. In fact, the room is
filled with his mentors. Professor Snyder has gone
on from graduating here to become one of the most
eminent European historians of his generation. He received his
Ph.D. from Oxford where he was also
a Marshall Scholar and is currently the Bird
White Housum Professor of History at Yale University. He's been amazingly prolific and
has written five award winning books, including
the 2010 Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler
and Stalin which will be available for
sale and a signing after the talk this afternoon. I'm not going to try and
do justice to the work, but I will say that one of the
signature features of his style is to address hugely
important historical and historiographical issues and
problems through the lives of individuals and in ways that
make the books both extremely important and great reads. Over the last year,
Professor Snyder has emerged as one of the
leading public intellectuals on engaging with the Ukrainian
crisis and what we've been calling here at Watson,
the Ukrainian Crucible, in the hope of what might
be forged in the future. Professor Snyder
is a very busy man. Our ability to get him here
was due in no small part to Patricia's Herlihy, who used
all of her powers of persuasion and charm to get him to come-- [LAUGHTER] --and small threats
to get him here. So without further
ado, I will turn the floor over to that Professor
Snyder who's talk today is Democracy On The
Edge in the Ukraine. OK thank you very much. One thing about the introduction
which was completely true was the last bit about
Professor Hurlihy-- [LAUGHTER] --who taught me the second
part of the European Survey around about 1989. It's a great pleasure to be
at Brown, a great pleasure to be the Watson Institute
which was my campus job. Sophomore, junior,
and senior year, I was working at the
Watson Institute, or what is now a
part of it or what was then called the Center for
Foreign Policy Development. I remember Artemis Joukowski
as a great supporter of that initiative. It's wonderful to be in
a room under his name. I'm going to start by
justifying the subject. I want to start by
defining Ukraine and Russia in a way which is maybe
a bit unconventional. A lot of the way we start with
this question is by asking is Ukraine real as Russia,
in taking for granted that Russia is real. I want to put this
into perspective. I want a to start by
suggesting that this is a little bit like asking
whether Canada's real, which admittedly we
lose track of it. It doesn't appear very often in
our news, but it's out there. It's out there, even
though there's not a Canadian ethnicity,
and there's not. You might think otherwise if
you see a lot of Canadian games, but there is not a
Canadian ethnicity. And there's not a Canadian
language, either is there? I mean there is that interesting
way they speak French, but there isn't a Canadian. Then, if you think another step
back and you think about it, there's not an American
ethnicity either, much as my WASP forebears
might have proudly wished this to be the contrary. There isn't an American
language either, and yet America's real, at
least as real as things can be. So those are the
sorts of premises that are the kinds of premises
that I would start from when we ask about how Ukraine is
real or how Russia is real, because Russia also doesn't
have a language that's its own. It shares its language
with other places, just like England does. No one has a history
which is its own. All histories are
shared across what are now political boundaries. There isn't any such thing--
I'm not breaking any news here I hope-- but there
isn't any such thing as ethnicity in the political
sense of some group which is destined to have its own
state doesn't exist right. It's a retroactive category
applied after things are over. So when we talk about history
in Ukraine and Russia, we have to be open to
the possibility-- which I think is not a possibility
but a certainty-- that these are both societies
that are in formation, whose leaders and whose
experiences direct them back towards history in various ways,
which doesn't mean that history is useless. In fact, it means you have
to have some sense of history if you're going to have your
own opinion about how history is used or not used. I want to begin with a
few general historical observations-- which,
again, I might be pitching in a way which is a little bit
different than accustomed-- so a history of Russian Ukraine
in four minutes or less. I think I can do it. I'm going to do this
by way of dates. There are a certain
set of dates that appear in both Russian and
Ukrainian history, which all of us who have any kind of
survey will be familiar with. 988, for example,
the nominal date when Vladimir, or Volodymyr,
or he actually was called something else,
and in the Arabic sources, he's known by another name. Incidentally, in the Arabic
sources, he was a Muslim. For any of us who want this to
be a pure story about Slavs, he was a Muslim. 988 is the nominal
year when Vladimir converted to Christianity. This is the year when the
history of the people of Rus is thought to begin. 1241 is the year when--
again, as all of you will know-- a great
part of the Mongol horde, led by the Batu
Khan, was moving west and did away with what remained
of the state of Rus, of Kiev in the Rus. By then, there
wasn't much of Rus left because they
had this problem. They couldn't decide who
was going to inherit what. But we do we take 1241 as
the end of the state of Rus and we blame the Mongols,
which is kind of doubly unjust because, first of all,
the main problem was that it was already fragmented. The second problem
is the Mongols, they get a bad rep in
this whole history. They were just trying to
reestablish the East West trade route, and that is a perfectly
reasonable thing to do. That's all they
were trying to do. People get in the way. Things get in the way. You have to move
them out of the way, but all they were trying to
do is establish a trade route, which brings you back to 988. and the important
thing about 988. We would like, or some of
us would like, for this to be some nice date when
some ethnos was established. What happened in 988
with this conversion was that you had this
mishmash of a community, which was established by Vikings. Again, Vikings like Mongols, bad
reputation or good reputation, if you like carnage. They were trying to establish
a North South trade route. That's what they were trying
to do, Baltic Sea to Black Sea. Nothing could be more
sensible in that. Kiev is on the way. If you've ever tried to
establish a North South trade route yourself,
you're aware that Kiev is conveniently located. It was a trading post. It was a city which
was then more or less in the middle of a khanate,
run by people called Khazars. Khazars had just
converted as we now know-- this was actually in
contention for centuries-- but as we now know to Judaism. Right after that they
disappeared from history. Draw your own conclusions. But before they
disappear from history, they engage with these Vikings. So the thing that we
don't think about when we think about
Kiev in the Rus is that this was one of those
rare Viking Jewish consortia. So when the Russians and
Ukrainians talk about Kiev in the Rus, they very
rarely use the phrase a Viking Jewish consortia. But that's as good a
description as any other. I stress this-- just
like I stress the Mongols three centuries later,
how it was already over-- just so we remember that
history itself is a lot more flexible and complicated
and of its own moment than it is in retrospect. It makes a kind of material
for interpretation, but it's flexible. Next date, 1569. Now, here we might be
moving a little bit out of the conventional
dating of Russian history. Why is 1569 so important? 1569 is the moment
of the establishment of something called the Polish
Lithuanian Commonwealth. I pick it as just one date
in the history of Ukraine which is a bit different
from the normal chronology of the history of Russia. Why do I do this? Because after the
breakup of Kiev in the Rus-- and I'm
simplifying this a lot, but this is
basically the story-- you have two
different trajectories of the lands of Kiev in the Rus. Most of them fall under the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which at its time was the
largest state in Europe, a bit out of the mainstream. Fur clad pagans, so
they don't fit very well into the French and German
all those nice narratives. But they had the largest state
of Europe in medieval period. It included all of what's
now Belarus, most of what's now Ukraine. They considered themselves to
be the heirs of all of Rus. They used the phrase, it
was in their legitimation. They actually did
inherit Rus in the sense of using the language of
Rus as their language of law and state. Most of their
population was Orthodox. So in those senses, they
considered themselves and in fact were,
the heir of Rus. The second trajectory is
the trajectory of Muscovy, which, unlike these territories,
remains under the horde, remains under the Mongols
for quite a long time. Then, when Muscovy,
in the famous cliche liberates itself
from the Tartar yoke, it is becoming a successor
state of the Tartars, which Ukraine isn't really. So that's a kind of fundamental
difference in the histories. Now, this of course
can be interpreted in lots of different
ways, but it does mean that there's
a kind of there's a different kind of foundation
for Europeanizing myths in Russia and Ukraine. The Russian Europeanizing
myth goes something like-- and there are many
of you here, who I see who are better and
can correct me about this-- but the Russian Europeanizing
myth goes something like this. We can have it if we want to. If we choose to build
Petersburg, we can be European. But then we can change
our mind five years later and decide that we're Asian. This is kind of the
pattern with Russia. We can take it or leave it. We're European and we
want to be Europeans. Were better than you, but we
don't have to be Europeans. We can be Asians too or
Eurasians or something. The Ukrainian story, because
it's chronological and boring, is much different than that. So in Ukraine, you actually
have all the things that we were taught
about in middle school. You actually have the
Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter
Reformation, the stuff which doesn't happen in Russia. And because you have
all those things and the architectural
traces of them and the history of the
book and all these things, because you have all of that
you can't so easily say we are, we're not, we are not,
we are, we're not, because the history is actually
a much more conventional European one in that
it has these stages and has these engagements. The next bit of history
is the 20th century. Again, I'm going to sort
of catapult us through it very quickly. Three dates, 1922 the formation
of the Soviet Union, 1933, at the end of the
Five Year Plan, 1945 the end of the
Second World War. 1922 is obviously a moment in
which Russian Ukrainian history have something in common. They're both most of what's
now Ukraine, all of what's now Russia are part
of the Soviet Union. 1933, at the end of
the Five Year Plan is an important
moment because as you know-- I'm sure most of you--
the attempt to industrialize the Soviet Union very quickly
in the First Five Year Plan leads to famine, more or less
throughout the Soviet Union, worst in Kazakhstan, very
bad in southern Russia, and with the political
coloration in the Ukrainian Republic. That is, there's
a certain amount of political decision
making in the Politburo by Stalin to confine starvation
inside the Ukraine Republic. About three million people
die there who don't have to. That matters in a kind of
direct way from memory, because it's one of these things
where if you're in Russia, you can decide
whether or not that's going to be part of memory. Generally, the
answer is it's not. Whereas if you're
in the Ukraine, you generally can't decide. That is to say, if you
are from a family which came from Ukraine, just like
your family was from Bengal or a century ago
from Ireland, you don't have the
option of forgetting that grandmother was a cannibal
or whatever it might have been. You don't have that
option because it's simply too terrifying. The experience of
mass starvation is a social experience and
it's horrifying for those who survive in ways that
are not easy to rub out. 1945 though is where I want
to just pause for a minute, because in 1945 is where
things are getting truly interesting in political myth. In a way, it brings
us into our subject, because one of the
features of our subject is that political myth and
politics are running side by side. They're like two horses
dragging the same carriage. 1945 was in general a myth that
united Russians and Ukrainians until very recently. 1945 is the victory in
the Great Fatherland War, that is the Soviet
telling of the Second World War in which the Second World
War begins not in 1939. Why not? Because of the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, we forgot about that. It begins in 1941 when the
Germans attacked the Soviet Union. That is the common, in
terms of social memory, the common experience of
Ukrainians and Russians. It's a bit different of course
because the war was actually fought in Ukraine and not
really fought in Russia. 5% of Russia was occupied, 5%. Where as all of
Ukraine was occupied for about two years of the War. But basically, the social
memory is the same. We fought off the fascists and
this was our great triumph. We saved Europe. We saved virtue. We saved the Soviet Union. That was basically in
common until very recently. What has changed
it, is the present and this is how things
now are or fluid. This is my final answer and
I hope an interesting one to the question, how are
Ukrainians and Russians different. Occam's razor always tells
you not to start with 988, but to start from now. If you're going to ask why
two people, or two groups, or two nations are
different, better to start from now than
from 988 as a general rule. What's happening now, I think,
is actually what's decisive. How do I mean that? Everyone who has
been following this understands, knows, has seen
that the way that Russia programs what it's doing
in Ukraine, describes it, the discourse that describes
it, has to do with 1945. From a Russian
point of view if you watch a lot of
Russian television-- which is one of my bad habits--
you see that what's happening is that fascism, anti-fascism,
the political programming the Second World War
has been transposed onto the war in Ukraine. In other words, whatever
you think about that, that is the discourse
that's being used. That is the program. those are the terms. Those are the tropes. And Ukraine that's
just not true anymore. Why? Because the experience
of having a revolution and then being invaded trumps
grandma and grandpa basically. The actual experience of
having revolution and then being invaded trumps even
the most powerful myths of the Second World War. So we might have a
tendency to look at Ukraine and say oh, Second World War. Russia certainly does. But the people who don't
that much are Ukrainians. It's not that they
don't talk about, not that they don't refer to
it, not that the combatants don't talk about where
their grandfathers served, because they certainly do. But I mean at the level of
a coherent political myth, the coherent political
myth in Ukraine insofar as there is one, is no longer
about the Second World War. It's about 2013 to 2015. That is interesting in
one of the things that makes Ukraine
different from Russia, because Russians
are seeing these and are being told to see in
any event, these events in light of the myth which has been
going on for 65, 70 years. That's not true in Ukraine. Ukrainians are actually living
this as a kind of experience. Their myth has to do with
living and dying now. That's I think a pretty
substantial difference. Now that I've said
that, let me say a word about the
contemporary history, that is what has actually
happened between 2013 and the present before I say
a word about how I think it matters. Here, I want to
start with Russia. I don't want to
start with a Maidan. I'm going to start with Russia,
because the events in Russian Ukraine were going in parallel. Things that happened
in Russia before 2013 were quite important,
just as things that were happening
in Ukraine before 2013 were also important. They met at a certain point. The time they met was December. But those of you
follow Russia will know what I'm going to say. The thing which happened
in Russia before 2013 were the protests
of late 2011 early 2012, very significant
in Moscow and in Russia. I'm just going to read
you a couple of things that were said at the time
which I find striking. The Russian journalist,
Yevgenia Albats, who I'm sure some of you know,
talking about the protests said "Today we have just
proved that civil society does exist in Russia, that
the middle class does exist, that this
country is not lost." president Putin the same day,
"She, Hillary Clinton,"-- Oh and by the way,
the whole gender issue would make for a great
that's another subject like, Noonan, Katherine Ashton,
Samantha Power, Angela Merkle, Hillary Clinton, all of these
women on the Western side, no women on the Russian side. There's an awful lot
to be done with that, and with the whole gay business. But that's not my
subject for today. But I think there's something
really interesting going on with gender in all this. Anyway, President
Putin, "Hillary Clinton set the tone for some
actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the signal and with
the support of the US State Department began active work." The protests are categorized
as having been part of an American foreign policy. This is just a
foreshadowing of things that are going to happen later. So the way that
Russian policy turns after this is what interests
us, because part of the larger case that I want to make
is that the things that happen in Ukraine or
the policy choices that Russia makes with
respect to Ukraine are consistent with their
trajectory which was already in motion. It's consistent with the turn
against the European Union, which happened in 2012, 2013. So after the protests
of 2011, 2012, you have the emergence of a
new Russian foreign policy doctrine, which is really
interesting called Eurasianism. Those of you who study
Russian intellectual history will know all of the
colorful resonances of that term, Eurasianism. Eurasianism involves
a domestic turn against the middle
classes, an embrace of what could be slightly
euphemistically called conservatism, a rather
in a rather intense form of conservatism, which some
people might refer to as gay bashing. It involves in foreign policy,
a turn against the European Union. The first time
the European Union is defined as an adversary is in
2013, which is very important. Europe is defined, and this a
key word in the whole thing, especially if you follow central
European intellectual history, you'll see why it's a key word. Europe is defined as decadent. Why is decadent so bad? Now, because we are
so decadent-- I've decided I agree with
the Russians about this, we are decadent. Because we're so
decadent, we think that decadence means that
you're a fat Roman emperor and there are 17 women
dropping grapes in your mouth. When I say decadence,
that's what you think of. Decadence means decay. It means you're disintegrated. It means you're over. It means history
has run through you. It means you're dying. That's what decadence
actually means. It means you're not
doing it beautifully. You're doing it the
ugly disgusting way. This turn towards defining
the European Union as decadent is quite significant,
because it's saying we're the forces of life
and you're the forces of death. I'm now quoting the Pope,
but we're the forces of life, you are the forces of death. We preserve civilization,
you perverted civilization. If civilization is
going to be saved, it's going to be saved by us. That's the basic idea. The political program, as
I'm sure all of you know, was for the time being a trade
agreement, called the Eurasian Union with Belarus
and Kazakhstan and some other
countries and Ukraine, which as Foreign
Minister Lavrov says "Eventually was to stretch
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean." So the idea was that Eurasia was
going to be the whole business. Now, meanwhile-- the meanwhile
is very important-- meanwhile, there's a completely
different conversation about Europe happening
inside Ukraine itself. Ukraine under it's
previous government, its previous not
especially attractive, unbelievably
oligarchy government, had decided that it was going
to sign an association agreement with the European Union. I stress this, it's
important that it was the previous slightly
horrible, oligarchy, really disgusting in many ways,
government, which had already decided that sometime
in 2012 it was going to sign this association
with the European Union. All the state propaganda had
been pushing that direction. All the talk shows were
going in that direction. Everyone knew in Ukraine
the association agreement was going to be signed. The course was changed
in November of 2013 after a meeting between Putin
and President Yanukovych. We do not know what was
said at that meeting, although my hunch,
my very strong hunch is that what was
said was if you sign, we're going to take Crimea. The reason that's my hunch
is that there was clearly a plan already in place,
an operational plan to take Crimea. At any event, at that
point, one head of state dissuades another head of
state, but the story's not over. I think the story was
supposed to be over there. In a way, the whole
history of these events is the story not ending when
Putin thinks it's going to end. One whole reading
of these events is Putin makes one mistake after
another, which unfortunately isn't a good reading because
like one reading of the Second World War is Hitler makes
one mistake after another. But it still doesn't make
things turn out well. So this is an error. If the idea was that this
is going to end the protest, this was an error. What happens instead
is that students, that is to say, university
students, people like some of you. I noticed that the
older generations have forced the younger
generations to stand in the back, which
is very impolite. The university students
were the first protesters in late November, 2013. Why were they protesting? Why was it students? It's a very simple thing. The European Union means
in Ukrainian context, it means the rule of law,
because the main Ukrainian political and social
problem then, now, hopefully not forever, but
so long as there's been an independent Ukraine, has
been oligarchy and corruption, which are the same thing. If economic power is
only in a few hands, it's very hard for
there to be the rule of law for everybody else. Everyone who tries, for
example, to be a small or medium sized businessman or woman,
ends up being blocked. So students are
precisely the people who have the greatest
stakes in there being fair rules of the
game over the long term. Students were the
ones who protested. They were then
beaten quite badly on the night of November 29th
to the 30th by the riot police. At which point, this
became a mass protest. The idea was that we have
to protect our children. So there's this touching
notion, actually, that university students are
the future of the country. Therefore, they
shouldn't be hurt. So when people say
our children, they didn't mean literally
our children. They meant the next generation. But nashi diti, our children,
was what people said. The group that
came out to protect the students, or the children
as they put it, interestingly, were largely veterans of
the Afghan war, of the war in Afghanistan,
Afghansi were the people who came out and protected
them from the riot police. So immediately, you
have quite a spread of the demography
of the protests, because a lot of these
guys were not themselves former university students
to put it in a certain way. They were one or one and a half
generations older, actually two, than the students. At this point, the
protests spread out and begin to include members
of basically all generations and all backgrounds. You know this
already, but I'm going to press the point anyway. Ukraine is a
multilingual society. The main language on the
Maidan was actually Russian. The largest group of
people at the beginning were students and then middle
class Russian speakers, because the middle classes
in Kiev speak Russian. There's going to
be a Ukrainian here that is going to
be annoyed at me, but this is basically right. Are you the one who's annoyed
or are you -- yeah, OK. Good. [LAUGHTER] But the private language in the
Maidan was basically Russian. In fact, there was very typical
thing in which you get up, you give your
speech in Ukrainian. Then, you go back
to your friends and you say in
Russian, how was that. They say it was great, because
that is the way Kiev is. It's a bilingual
capital, which we have trouble getting
our minds around because we are monolingual. Nobody in the Western
world except the Ukrainians has a bilingual capital. Both the Russians and we have
trouble getting our minds around this. No, the Swiss do not
have a bilingual. The Swiss are not as
good as the Ukrainians. It's not the same phenomenon. The point I'm
trying to make here is that there was no clear
ethnic linguistic generational definition to this event. It came from all over society. Now, you see these two
stories come together. And these events from the
point of view the Putin regime in Moscow are going to be
categorized as a threat, but not for the obvious reasons. I think the main
reason why this is a threat is that
if you are Moscow, it is convenient to have
the main oligarch in charge of Ukraine. That's what Yanokovich was. He was trying to set himself
up as the main oligarch. The Oligarch who was above
all the other oligarchs. That is very convenient. If you're Russia, you can
deal with one oligarch. What you don't want to deal
with is a spontaneous, organized Ukrainian society. That's very awkward
because first of all, it's always awkward. But secondly, it could prove
to be a model for your society, especially because--
I'm now going to annoy my Ukrainian
constituency-- especially because it's an east Slavic,
post Soviet country where a lot of people speak Russian
and a lot of the media is in Russian, including
a lot of the best media is in Russian. So it looks like
a bit of a threat. Now, to stress a
point I've ready made, the Russian propaganda
that comes in at this point is all civilizational. So I was following
this day by day. It's all civilizational. It's about why would
you go on the Maidan because it's just for Europe
and Europe means pedophilia. So if there's a
television program about how in Sweden
it's mandatory to have sex with children, and on
and on and on in this vein. The idea is that
Europe is decadent. Why would you be associating
yourself with Europe? So these the Maidan,
was called Yevromaidan. It was called the
Euromaidan this time around, which in Russian then became
the Gay-- I'm not even going to try to do it--
the Gay Euromaidan. So everything European was
gay, why would you be gay? Another one which--
I like this one. If you join the EU, you can have
free movement within the EU. But first, you have to you
have to have gay marriage. You're allowed to join
the EU, but first you have to have gay marriage. The hard version
of this is, if you want to have movement
inside there, you personally have to marry
a man and then it's OK. So they really,
really pressed this. I'm from Ohio and it
really reminded me of Ohio 20 years ago. Which in some sense,
gives me optimism because we were really obsessed
with gay marriage for while. It's just the most
important thing in the world for 18 months
and then we got over it. So maybe other people
can get over it anyway. But the point here is that the
whole push was about Europe. It had nothing to do with NATO
or the Americans at this point, because Russian foreign policy
was angled against Europe. This was categorize as
being Europe, which it was. The mistake of Russian
policy at this point, if you want to see it that way,
was to pay off in late December the Ukrainian government
to repress the protests. Then, the two measures which
the Ukrainian government took, first passing a
series of dictatorship laws in January, 2014, and then
shooting from the rooftops protesters in February
turned these protests into a revolutionary movement
and led to the toppling of the government itself. Again, just to
stress this point, I'm probably beating a
dead horse at this point, but when the shootings came,
when the mass violence came, the people who died reflected
the complex ecumenical content of the movement itself. So the first two people who died
in this Ukrainian revolution were a Belarusian
and an Armenian. Over the course of the
shootings, a Pol was killed. Russians were killed,
not just Russian speakers that's a different thing,
Russians were killed. Pols were killed. Five Jews were killed,
victims of these repression. Simultaneously, more or
less with repressions and the fall of the government,
was a Russian invasion. So in the second
part of this talk, I want to try to
discuss what I think of the most interesting
underlying structural realities of this invasion. I'm consciously separating it
from discussion of the Maidan because I think it is
something rather different. I don't think there
is a story in which the Maidan automatically
leads into an invasion. I think in retrospect, we're
supposed to think that it does. But there's no particular reason
why the Maidan story couldn't have ended with the Democratic
presidential and parliamentary elections that then followed. That would be a perfectly
normal revolutionary trajectory. You overthrow some government. You have some elections and
then you make your own problems after that. That would be the
natural Ukrainian ending. But that's not how this ends. This ends instead in a
completely different way which is that Russia invades. So I want to now try to discuss
the Russian invasion as a more or less distinct event,
which I think it was, a distinct but be very
interesting event. I'm going to try
to break it down, not so much in terms
of its chronology, but in terms of the way
it's been prosecuted. I don't think that
this war is chiefly about Crimea or Donetsk
or Luhansk Oblast. I think this war is
chiefly about Europe. This war is a continuation
of the policy that was announced in 2013
of trying to supplant, to get under, get into,
dissolve, overwhelm, over master, be better than
somehow the European Union. The original version of that
didn't work out so well. The Eurasian Union is now, not
only is Ukraine not a member and never will be, but
Belarus and Kazakhstan are having their hesitations. I don't know how many of you
have been following Belarus, but it's really interesting the
way the Belarusian policy has changed with
Lukashenko becoming, if not Putin's most
analytical critic, I think probably
his funniest critic. If you haven't been
following this, it's definitely
worth going closer. I'm going to just pause. When the Russians
invaded Crimea, which is where I'm
going to go next, and gave the ethnic argument
that it's a Russian territory, Lukashenko said
well if that's true, it would make just as much sense
to give Moscow to the Tartars as it does to give
Crimea to the Russians. Because after all,
all of Russian history came from Tartar history. So if we're going to
follow this ethnic logic, why not give Russia
to the Tartars rather than the
other way around. It didn't get a lot of
coverage in Russian press. [LAUGHTER] You have to look for Belarusian
links to get the story. Anyway, to the original
version, this Eurasian version doesn't work so well,
but other things do work. I'm going to try
to categorize them. The first is the
level of tactics. So as I've said, I don't
think the war is actually the main front. I think it's one
front among many, but it is a revealing front. Of course, is a very
significant front for Ukrainians who are
living and dying there and for Russians
who are dying there. What are the tactics
on these territories? I would characterize
the way that this war has been prosecuted
as reverse asymmetry. So I'm now going
all military on you. An asymmetric war
is usually a set of tactics prosecuted by a
weaker force against a stronger force, or a non-state actor
against a state actor. What's interesting about the
war in Crimea and southeastern Ukraine is that the Russian
state, although it's clearly the stronger party in this
war-- it has one of the best armies in the
world-- is fighting as if it were the weaker side. That is, it's using techniques
like not having insignia, mixing in with the
civilian population, claiming it's not really
there at all, human shields, drawing fire onto a
large population centers in order to hurt,
alienate civilians, things like this, which are
classic partisan tactics and which work. But they don't work so well
that the Russians don't have to invade with
conventional troops. They do that in August. They do that in December. They do work to a fair degree. This is combined with
a domestic politics of the Big Lie in which
the war is characterized in Russia as a civil war
where heroic anti-fascists inside Ukraine are fighting off
a fascist junta, yada, yada. Meanwhile, the
Russian technology is what actually
changes the war. The Russian presence is
what changes the war. It's Russian fighters
and Russian aircraft which grounds the
Ukrainian Air Force which is hugely significant,
hugely significant. Admittedly, they shoot
down a civilian airliner every now and then
but the militarily they ground the Air Force. Russians are shelling
from Russian territory Ukrainian troops. The Russian Air Force has
engaged the Ukrainian Air Force. Things like this have
really turned the tide. Of course, thousands
of Russians have also died on Ukrainian territory. There's that was that
little fact as well. But the interesting
thing though is, as far as if I'm trying
to make here, is that what Russia has done a
spot a very unconventional war. I think the best
way to talk about it is that they're using
the weapons the weak even though they're the strong, which
is kind of interesting in terms of Russian history. Usually, the Russians
overdraw on the other side, like we're the great power. But, here they're not. Here, what they're
doing is they're saying we're the small guys
or maybe we're not even there and the people who are
fighting are the underdogs. The extreme version
is here you've got a bunch of
pitchforks and they're fighting like the
nuclear armed Americans. That's kind of the
story that's being told, and that really is the point
because part of the story is that these
partisans are fighting an international fascist
conspiracy backed by the United States of America. That is in a way the
logic of the whole thing. If you think about it that way--
which I don't urge you to-- but if you think
about it that way, then Russia really
is the underdog. If this really were a
conflict between Donetsk and the United
States of America, OK Donetsk is then the underdog. There is a certain ideological
consistency with this. Now, as this war
has been prosecuted, there has been no lack of
clarity about its goals. I think the way that the Russian
leadership from President Putin to Ragozin, Glazyev,
and then people are outside the
regime, Dugin, the way they've talked about
it has been in terms of ending the Ukrainian state. So all of these things which
we've heard so many times, they sound familiar,
even reasonable, like the ethnic
rights of Russians or Russian speakers in
Ukraine, the historical rights of Russia, the idea that Ukraine
and Russia are one people, the idea that Vladimir converted
cetera 988, the idea as Present Putin put it that Ukraine
is a composite state. All states are
composites states. There were no states
created by God. I went back and read
Genesis and checked. [LAUGHTER] They were all composite states. Anyway, all of these are
ways of saying the Ukraine state is illegitimate. That it's exceptional. That it need not exist, at
least in its present form, which brings us to the strategy. I think the best way of
talking about the strategy is a kind of
strategic relativism, because, as I said before,
the original way of doing this didn't work. One of the things
we have to remember when we think of Putin as a
fantastic strategist-- which he's not-- is that this whole
thing is a series of mistakes. When tyrants make mistakes,
they almost never say oh yeah, made a mistake. That almost never happens. I mean this is something that
Socrates noticed a long time ago or Plato. Tyrants have an
information problem. They have a problem with denial. They make mistakes. It tends to be somebody
else's fault, classic point in political thought. Everybody knows it. Anyway, a whole lot of
predictions went wrong here. They thought they could
they could stop Ukrainians from signing the agreement. They didn't. They thought that it
would be good to pay to put down the protests. That didn't work so well. I think they thought in
annexing Crimea that would make the Ukraine state fall
apart, but it didn't. I think they then thought
in supporting separatism a lot of people would come
over to their side, which also didn't happen. So you have a whole
lot of mistakes, which means the original
vision didn't work out. The Eurasian Union
doesn't work out. At this point nobody likes it. What do you then do? I think what you
then do is something called strategic relativism. That is to say, you
accept that you were weak, and here we have to grant a
certain maturity in realism. You accept that
you're weak and you ask how can you
weaken the other side. So it's not about being strong. It's about making the
other side weaker. This is operating
at several levels. One is the transatlantic level. Very obviously, Russian policy
is to separate the Europeans from the Americans. The nice telephone leaks
that they issue of now and again are a good
example of this. Most importantly though is
the European Union itself. I'm going to stress this
in front of this mostly American audience. We-- this is my American we--
would really like this for it to be about us, because one
of the ways we're decadent is that we really like for
things to be about us all the time. It's got to be about
us, us, us, us, us. But sometimes, things
aren't about us, and this one of those times. This is really about
the European Union. The Russians are pursuing
a very intelligent policy of weakening the European
Union at four or five levels. One is cultivating
client states who are member states, like Hungary. One is supporting
separatism of any guise, any political coloration,
so UKIP in England, but also the
Scottish Referendum. The Scottish Referendum
did not pass. There was one country which
issued informal protest, which was Russia. Russia claimed that all the
votes hadn't been counted and that Scotland
actually had succeeded. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. When Sputnik, the new
Russian propaganda carrier, was launched in the US,
they announced-- you may not all been watching this
with the same lividity that I was-- but they launched
their year's coverage by saying 2015 was going to be
the year of separatism. Texas, Florida Donetsk,
it's all one big story, world separatism. The year is young. Sorry? The year is young. Right, we can always dream. I'm making fun, but this
is a serious policy. You legitimate what's happening
in Donetsk and Luhansk by saying well,
separatism is just what happens around
the world and it would be a good thing if the
European Union fell apart. That's the underlying message. So they also support populism. Marine Le Pen and
Vladimir Putin, in case you haven't
noticed, have come very, very close friends. Recent reports are to the
effect that the Front National, the big, ever bigger,
successful, right wing Populist Party in France,
gets a lot of loans from a country to the
east whose name you know. Then, they also support--
and it gets worse-- they also support the fascist. They support the Nazis. There is no place where
they will not stop. So the "referenda"
in Crimea and then the ones in Donetsk and Luhansk
to separate from Ukraine, the Russians invited observers. Who were these observers? With the exception of people
from the German party, Die Linke-- which is a beautiful
story in and of itself-- they were the European
right, the far right, but also the fascist
right, and also just the flat out Nazi right. These are the people
who came in order to legitimate as
it were this event. What is the underlying
strategy here? Well, certainly
the Russian regime has a basic existential
interest in the preservation of energy markets
remaining the way they are. It's much easier to deal with
individual European nation states then it is to deal the
whole European Union, which now that you've alienated
it by invading Ukraine, has started to come up
in energy policy, which is very bad for you. Little asterisk
around Crimea, Crimea is a great example of how we
let the Russian story become our story. So we think Crimea
was always Russian. I was recently with a bunch of
extremely rich and important Republicans-- because that's
the kind of social life I have-- [LAUGHTER] --and they were saying but
Crimean was always Russian. I thought OK,
that's interesting. If there's anybody
in America who I thought might
be resisting this, it would have been these people. But no, they thought
Crimea always-- of course, I mean nothing's
always anything-- but I mean Crimea
is many things. It's Greek. It's Turkish. It's been many different things. That always Russian is
something that it's not. That they were buying into this. They didn't actually
say [INAUDIBLE], but I was kind of expecting it. Of course, the significant
thing about Crimea are the shale gas fields. The only place in the Black
Sea where there's a lot shale gas it is within
Ukrainian-- not Russian-- Ukrainian Maritime territory. Now, if you take
Crimea, that is now part of Russia, which
doesn't mean the Russians are going to use it. They're not. They don't need it, but
they're keeping the Ukrainians from using it. They're keeping
Europeans from having it. That's the most important thing
about Crimea and taking Crimea. There's an attempt to make
the European Union fall apart and it corresponds I think
with a really interesting intellectual difference. Let's put that way,
because I think there is a sincere difference
about the way the politics work or should work. In the things that
the Maidan does have in common with
the European Union is a basic understanding
about how politics works, which is you have to have
civil society to have a state and you have to have a
state to join Europe. That's the bedrock of the way
the European system works. The European Union is
a collection of states, but it's not a collection
of any old states. It's a collection of
functional states. We cannot form a state and
join the European Union. We have to first show that
we are very functional. Ukraine, to put it politely,
has not met that standard. But the way to make
the state functional is to demonstrate or to
take part until it is. That is one model of
way politics works. You try to make your
state functional. Then your state can
join the European Union. The European Union
then reinforces ideas of rule of law. That's one idea of
how politics works. There's another idea
of how politics works, which is that that
can be broken. You could intervene
from the outside at the level of civil
society, the level of the state, the level
that you can break it. That's the Russian approach. It's perfectly intelligent. It's to be respected I
think for its intelligence and it's working
to a large extent. Now, this brings
me to little point about civil society, which
is a crucial concept here. The Maidan is clearly an
example of civil society, in the East European
sense of the word of something between the
state and the individual, something which is
spontaneous, something which is political in
the sense that it's about changing the
state-- although it doesn't come from the state. The legitimation of
this kind of activity would be the Jeffersonian
one from the Declaration of Independence. That is, if the state does
not behave predictably, then society has the right to
behave unpredictably as well. I'm paraphrasing
Jefferson because I'm not an American historian,
but that's the basic idea. If there's no rule
of law in the state, then society has the
right to insist upon it and to break certain
rules itself. In the mainline Russian
interpretation of the Maidan, that's not what happened. There can't be that thing. It doesn't exist. The civil side doesn't exist. There's no such thing. I think it's fair to
say that not true. I think it's fair to
say that civil society under some definition-- you
might disagree with mine-- but under some
definition it exists. What we're doing
now where nobody paid you to come, with three
exceptions that I know about-- [LAUGHTER] --nobody paid you to come
and nobody paid me to be here, and so on and so forth,
except Pat in affection. That's an example. These voluntary
things do happen. They actually exist. Not everything is a
result of conspiracy. But you can misunderstand
civil society and destroy it by
misunderstanding it. That's just a kind of East
European historical lesson. If you don't believe in
it, you can destroy it. By not believing in
it, you can destroy it. If you treat it as
a conspiracy, you can use that as a
way to destroy it. That's how it's
happened in the past. Which brings me to
build the last point I want to make about
all this, which is what's happening at
the level of philosophy. The philosophy of this
conflict on the Russian side is a kind of applied
and now I'm at Brown. Well, I don't know what
they teach at Brown. Maybe there's been some kind of
revival of 18th century studies and I'm going to be surprised. That didn't get
very many laughs. [LAUGHTER] OK, thank you. It's a kind of
applied postmodernism. They've recycle a lot of things
that I learned in the 1980s and they've used
them to great effect. So I'm talking about the
propaganda and the way the world has been present. Now, some of the propaganda
is just traditional techniques but applied very intensively. For example, making things
up that didn't happen. You construct an
alternative universe in which there were certain
things that happened, like the story of Ukrainian
army crucifying a small boy. That simply did not happen,
but it's a pretty big feature in the alternative universe. There's another sensation
technique which they perfected, which is I would call--
I hope gracefully-- liberation from context. So anytime anybody
says any sentence, there's the risk that
that sentence will then be placed at some
point and a half hour documentary in which you have
all kinds of beautiful visuals which lead up to how
awful the sentence is. So if you're President
Obama, for example, and you say anything about
how you're supporting Ukraine, then there will be a half
hour documentary where they make fun of you for
saying Ukrainians are making their own choices and they talk
about how awful like the Maidan and then your little sound
bite comes in at the end. By then, you look like a
complete idiot and a loser. They're extremely good at that. Their interview technique is
something called taped to live, which is really cool. So they do an interview
with you and they tape it. Then, they like pick
out the things they want to take out of context. Then, they invite other
people to come in live and make fun of you. My American colleagues
are going through this one after the other and saying oh
yeah, that didn't seem fair. Did they do that just to me? No, this is what they do. This is their way. That's more or less traditional. What I'm interested in
explaining here briefly are the things which are
a little bit more intense. One of them is political
marketing, which of course, we also know, but they, I
think, have perfected, so telling stories
along the lines of what people want to hear. The two main stories
that have been told about the
Maidan and the war are the fascist story and
the geopolitics story. The fascist story is that,
however you like, all the Ukrainians are fascists or
the Ukraine revolutionaries are fascists or whatever. That story basically
delayed anyone in the west from putting two synapses
together for about 6 months. So it was pretty effective. Then, the one which
is dominating now is the geopolitics story. There aren't really
any Ukrainians They didn't really
make any choices. There's not really a Ukraine. Forget about, Ukraine. It doesn't exist. What really matters
America, America and Russia, the superpowers. It's all geopolitical. A lot of us go for this
because, as I mentioned, we like stuff to be about us. A lot of our international
relations theorists really like for stuff for
us, because we're a power. It's all about power. But that's the story. The geopolitics
thing is a shtick. It's a trope. It's a way of trapping
you intellectually. That's basically cost us
another 6 to 9 months. We're still in the
middle of that one. We got over fascism one more or
less, but the geopolitics one we're in the middle of still. Let me give you some more
interesting examples of this. The point about marketing
is you hit different people with different stories. Sot the fascism one is
pretty good in Europe, because it splits, it
detracts a lot of attention from the European
left, including a lot of well meaning people who
are of course against fascism, as you should be. But the geopolitics
one works well in Europe too
because what it says is, it's all the Americans. So it's all about these
grand struggles, blah blah. So if you say it's all
about the Americans, then Europeans
will say either OK, well then let's the
Americans deal with it, or they'll say it's
the American's fault which prevents them
from developing coherent policies even though
it's really all about them. The marketing can get more
interesting than that. Ukraine, there's one line
which says the Ukrainians are all decadent and gay. Then, there's another
line which says Ukrainians are all fascists. Those are targeted
for different people. You tell the European
Christian right that the Ukrainian Revolution
is all about decadence and Sodom and so on. Then, you tell the European left
that it's all about fascism. Sometimes you say it's about
gay fascism, admittedly. You bring the two together. [LAUGHTER] You're laughing
like you're hearing this for the first time,
but I don't think you are. I think you've been
living with it. I think this is
a moment for you. But you see the point
that you can market. You can hit people with
different messages, even though they're
contradictory. The most intense one
is the Jewish one, where some people are told
that Ukraine itself is an example of the international
Jewish conspiracy. That is, anti-Semites are
told that because there's a big anti-Semitic
constituency out there. Then, other people are told
that Ukrainians are all anti-Semites. Those probably
are not both true. Maybe neither one
of them is true, but they're probably
not both true. The point is that
this is marketed. It's targeted. But the really deep stuff and
the really effective stuff, which is bring me to
where I want to end, has to do with
what I would think of as a kind of
calculated cacophony. And again, this is a little bit
familiar because we do this. Fox News definitely does this. I think of this
as one big problem that we're having with the
Russians rather than something that the Russians
are doing to us, or that we've prepared
ourselves for, prepare them for. I think it's one
big conversation and we should see it that way. Anyway, calculated cacophony
is when something happens that you can't
control, you hit it with as many weird
interpretations as you can so that the
event is overwhelmed by the interpretations. So let's say, for example,
that you accidentally shoot down a civilian
airliner, not a good thing. The traditional old fashioned
way to deal with this would be to deny it, but there's
a better way to deal with that, and that is that you throw up
truly weird interpretations of it. You say a Ukrainian
fighter plane shot it down, even though that's
technically impossible. Or you say, it was
a natural disaster. Although, that's
really unlikely. Or, my personal
favorite, you say that the Malaysian airliner
that went down over Ukraine was the same Malaysian
airliner that disappeared over the Pacific
which was meanwhile taken into possession
by the CIA, filled up with corpses,
launched from Amsterdam and then blown up by remote
control over Ukraine to make it look like the Russians did it. Now, the point of the throwing
all this stuff into the air is not that you're supposed
to believe any one version. The point is to sideline
the event itself, so you don't think
about how horrible it is that 300 people
just died and so that you don't think about the
simplest explanation for what happened. What actually did happen is very
simple, very simple in fact. So simple, it gets to the heart
of why this is a problem for us and not just for the Ukrainians
but for the Russians. What happened was very simple. The Russians shot it down. Not only do we know
this, but in some sense we knew it in advance. This is the frightening part. What do I mean by that? How did MH17 go down? Well, there were Russian
tank units in Ukraine. Russia had invaded Ukraine. Russian tank units
are always accompanied by certain kinds of
anti-aircraft capability because the great enemy
of concentrated tanks are fighter planes. You have to be able to get them
in advance at high altitudes. We knew, although
we wouldn't say, we knew that Russia
had invaded Ukraine. We knew that there were
Russian tank units in Ukraine, and we knew that they never
go anywhere unaccompanied buy BUKs, unaccompanied by this
anti-aircraft capability. We also knew that their sensors
distinguish friend and foe according to Russian
fighters and everyone else. So we had the
knowledge last summer when this all happened to
reroute civilian airliners, but we didn't because it
was too hard for us to say Russia had invaded Ukraine. If we say that simple
thing, it follows logically that you have to get
civilian airlines out. Of course, I mean
the responsibility for shooting that airliner is
a responsibility of the people who invaded Ukraine. But there's a sense in which
we were brought into it in our inability to speak
or think straight about what was actually happening. In that sense, this is
the great difficulty. This is the great
philosophical difficulty. So what I'm calling
the philosophy is alss-- you could also flip
my whole argument around and say this is the tactics. This is the day to day
meat of what's happening. This is how we're
being approached, how we're being changed. The philosophy is
part of the tactics and the people
literally live and die because we're unable to
think straight, which is where I want to end this. I want to end this on a note of
thinking about-- this is going to sound really old
fashioned and you have to wait 20 years after
you graduate from Brown to use this word that I'm about
to use-- and the word is truth. [LAUGHTER] There is-- you guys
were in 22 years ago. The thing that I
just said about MH17 is about simple old
fashioned Aristotelian truth, non-contradiction. If you know that there
are Russian troops, if you know there are
tanks, this all follows. It's just a logical chain. Logical consistency has
been a big problem for us. Admittedly, we've had help
but it's been a big problem. Think about some
lines of propaganda which you have all
heard and ask yourselves whether you have
actually thought about the contradictory
character. So if I say that there
is no Ukrainian state, but I also say the Ukrainian
state's repressive, If I say there's no
Ukrainian nation, but I also say all
Ukrainians are nationalists, if I say there's no
Ukrainian language, but I also say
Russians are being forced to speak the
Ukrainian language, I'm contradicting myself. But not a whole
lot of our response has been along those lines. It's more been hm,
that's confusing or maybe that's right. The problem with
accepting things that are contradictory
as possibly right is that you can't
possibly be thinking yourself when you do it. In a way, that's where
this is all headed. It's not about you accepting
this or that proposition. It's about getting
inside your mind in preventing
things from working. So that's the
Aristotelian truth. There's a legal kind of truth
which is at stake here as well, the connection between the
individual and the state. The convention across
much of the world, at least that much the Western
world, much of the world, is that we have a legal
relationship to the state called citizenship. The moment that we admit
categories like Russki Mir civilization
or ethnicity, we are accepting that that truth
is at least as in competition with other kinds of truth,
that that legal truth maybe be subject to
challenge or even over. Another kind of truth
which I think is at stake is what might be called
existential truth. People did or didn't
choose to go on the Maidan. They did or they didn't. They did so for
their own reasons. They took risks. Many of them paid quite dearly. They define themselves
by what they were doing. There's a sense in which that
truth is being taken away. So if the Maidan
itself is forgotten, or if Ukrainian choices, choices
made by individual Ukrainians become part of some larger story
about ethnicity or language or geopolitics or what have
you, then that individual kind of truth that you're making
yourself by the choices you make, the truths that
you decide to uphold, that goes away. The most important kind though,
and maybe the fundamental kind, and a kind that I hope we're in
some sense now taking part in, is what you might call
social truth, which depends upon trust. It's very hard to be
right all by yourself. Usually, if we're right,
it's because we're in some kind of conversation
with other people, with other people who we
trust either personally or some kind of
institutional reason. A university is an
example of this. You're in an institution
where certain figures have some kind of authority. Your peers are in a certain
kind of relationship to you. It's very hard to get
to truth all by yourself as an alienated individual. It's actually very hard. This ultimately
depends upon trust. I think civil society
in this sense, as the basis for us believing
in certain things, a plurality of things, not any one
thing, but believing that some things
are true, that that may be the ultimate
stake in all of this, because if you can be
brought to believe that it's all a matter of conspiracies
and who really knows and you can't
trust anybody, then you're in a world where
you're all by yourself. If you're all by yourself,
there's no truth. If there's no truth, then
you're all by yourself. That, in the end, is
the point and maybe the real danger of all of this. So I'm going to close there
with renewed and repeated thanks for inviting me back
into a place where I once had all kinds of groups who
helped me to learn how to think and how to trust in thinking. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] You want to? Thanks. Yeah, I'm happy
to take questions. If you don't mind just
saying who you are and then asking your question
the form of a question. [LAUGHTER] The East Europeans laugh, yes. Yes sir. I'm actually from Haren,
a very decadent country in the Netherlands. But I'm not quite getting you
NATO European Union divide, because in passing you said
this is not about NATO, but you made clear that this is
all about the European Union. Most European Union members
are also NATO members. Indeed, northwestern
European presidents made a big deal out of
the Russian disagreement with NATO enlargement
especially with Poland and the northern states. So how does it come into this? Because it seems that there's
a bit more to it than you suggested at least
in your lecture. Yeah, I think there's
more and less. Thanks for that question,
because I think this is a place where
very traditional sort of old fashioned historical
chronological arguments are really helpful. This is one of the
places where I disagree with a lot of people, because I
was following this day by day. Then, the NATO enlargement
issue I've been following for the past 25 years. I don't think so and here's why. I wouldn't claim that the
Russians are enchanted with NATO or NATO
enlargement, but if you look at the chronology
of NATO enlargement, the decision to
admit Poland-- which is the most significant country
in this context-- to NATO was taken in 1994,
so 21 years ago. Ukraine was not about
to be admitted NATO. That's a complete red herring. Ukrainian public opinion
was solidly against NATO and I think for good reasons. I think that was completely
sensible in the world before Russian invasion. I don't see why Ukrainians
would want to be a NATO. Ironically, the only way
you get a Ukrainian majority in favor of NATO is to
be Russian to invade. Now, public opinion
for the first time is in favor of joining
NATO, which doesn't mean it's going to happen. It's still not going to happen. But my point about
this is that, I don't see any chronological
connection between anything NATO was doing and the Russian
change in policy in 2013. It's true that NATO
enlarged in 1999. The decision was
made in 1994, but I don't see how that's connected. The Russians are certainly
talking about a lot of stuff that did or didn't happen. There's this big push which
some of the Western media have often picked up on
that supposedly in 1990, Bush promised Gorbachev that
NATO would never enlarge, which that did not
actually happen. That simply did not
happen nor could it have happened, because in
1990 the Soviet Union hadn't fallen apart yet. It's hard to imagine
that-- again, this is like an being old fashioned
dumb chronological historian-- but you can't make promises
about countries that don't yet exist and what your policy
is going to be to them. Not only is there no
document in any archive, at least that anyone
has found-- which suggests that this is true. I don't think logically
it could've been true. Now the other chronologies
is the chronology of 2013, where what happens-- I tried
to stress in the talk-- is that the Russian
reorientation of 2013 is not to say we
don't like NATO. They don't like NATO. That's a constant. The reorientation is to say we
don't like the European Union. That's what's new. Then when the Maidan comes,
they don't hit with you guys are bunch of NATO spies. They hit with you
guys don't understand you're letting yourselves
in for pedophilia and so. They hit it, in other words,
with the anti-EU propaganda which has already
been in the works. The NATO stuff, crucially,
comes in in full force after Russia invades Ukraine. That's when the
NATO stuff starts. Now in retrospect,
it gets all blurry because they've
been hitting us now with the NATO stuff for a year. So we think OK, maybe it's
been about NATO all along. But even following
the chronology of their own
propaganda, NATO only comes into it after they
begin a war of aggression. So I'm not really buying it. So why are they talking
about NATO so much? Because NATO works really well
at two levels of propaganda. The first is it's much easier
to rally Russian public opinion around NATO and the
Americans than it is around the European Union. So it's true that Russians
are less and less attracted to the European Union, just as
Ukrainians are more and more, but it's much easier to
design NATO and US as enemies than the Netherlands and EU. It just works much better. Then in Europe, it's
much more divisive. Because if Russia
flat out said hey, we're against the
European Union, we don't like you having your
visa-free Portuguese vacations or whatever, we're
against that, we don't like your public
health insurance, we don't like the
fact that you're rich, people might eventually get it
that Russia is against them. But if Russia says oh no,
we're against Atlantacism, we're against America,
we're against neoliberalism, we're against NATO, that has a
lot more resonance in Europe. I realize I'm in
the minority here, that most people are going
for this realists thing. but I don't think
NATO has anything to do with this actually. So we'll just go
around like this. Yes, please. Somewhere I read that Ukraine
gave up it's nuclear weapons after breaking with
the Soviet Union, to Russia in
exchange for a pledge that Russia would not
breach Ukraine sovereignty. But subsequently, I actually
read that those were actually Russian nukes and Russians
simply repossessed them. It's sort of like ours having
nukes in Turkey or Subic Bay. Which is true and do you
have any more detail on that? That's a really nice
game show question because it's like
is it A or is it B? It's A. It's not B.
They were not Russian. No, they were not
Russian nuclear weapons based in Ukraine. What happened was that the
Soviet Union fell apart and what had been the
Soviet nuclear arsenal was distributed among the
Russian Federation, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. By the terms of the breakup
of the Soviet Union, the states the Soviet Union
inherited the military forces and capacities that were on
their own sovereign territory. So those were Ukrainian
nuclear weapons, just as they were
Kazakh nuclear weapons. The Kazakhs did the same thing. In 1994-- I'm now just to
develop version A, which is the correct one. In 1994, Ukraine agreed to
give up its nuclear weapons. It was at that time,
numerically at least I think, the third nuclear
power in the world. They agreed to give up their
nuclear weapons in exchange for some loans and in exchange
for a promise from the Russian Federation, the United
States and Great Britain. Not just that those countries
wouldn't invade Ukraine, it was that these
three countries would undertake to protect
Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. That's the Budapest
Memorandum of 1994. So it's not just that Russia
promised not to invade, it's that Russia actually
promised to help Ukraine protect its own territory. So this was a pretty
flagrant violation. And incidentally,
President Putin's response when this was pointed out to him
was to say the Ukrainian state no longer exists. Therefore, our prior
agreements with it no longer hold force, which
is an extremely interesting doctrine. if you think about it. Now, what's really
bad about all this doesn't have to do with
Russia and Ukraine. It has to do with
the rest the world. There's a whole version
of this talk which is why Russian policy
hurts Russia and this is a good example. Of one of the
things the Russians like to talk about is-- not the
Russians but-- Kiselyov Russian propaganda. Certain members of
the Russian leadership like to talk about as how
they could turn us all to ash. OK, they could turn us to ash. But the problem with breaking
the Budapest Memorandum is that you're telling the whole
world that you should really keep your nuclear weapons,
or if you don't have them, you should develop them. This was probably
the worst setback for nuclear nonproliferation
in the history of nuclear nonproliferation,
because a big country with nuclear weapons undertook
not to invade or to protect a small country that got
ride of nuclear weapons and then invaded it. It's a nightmare scenario
for nonproliferation. And everyone is taking notes,
including a lot of countries around Russia. So Russia has now made more
likely a scenario in which it's going to be surrounded by more
countries with nuclear weapons. Anyway, that's the story. I was going to go this way. So Professor Cook and then-- Thank you. So that was a great talk. I have a question though. You set the whole context
for Russia's reaction to the Ukraine in terms of the
Russian domestic and foreign policies of 2012, '13. But does the Russian behavior
in Georgia in 2008, which also was in response
to noises about Georgia moving westward, maybe
joining the EU or NATO-- and I know that actually Russia
did invade Georgia, but only briefly and then it
kind of broke off those two pieces, Abkhazia
and South Ossesia-- so is the logic and the drivers
of the policy in Georgia different from those in Ukraine? And if so, why? I think something's
are very similar, but there has been
some change over time. I would more see it
as the factors that were relevant in Georgia
are still present, but other factors
are present too. In Georgia, unlike
in Ukraine, there was a very serious
conversation about NATO. I agree with you that the
Russian interest in Georgia has to do with that. They figured out
then, if not earlier, that if you can invade a
country before it joins NATO, you can make it hard
for to join NATO. I don't think the Russian
leadership in 2008 would have invaded Ukraine. It's the same people, I know. But I don't think they
would have done it. I don't think in 2004
they would have done it. I think they've
changed over time. The difference that
I tried to stress is that they've categorized
European Union enlargement as a problem, Which. For me is extremely significant. Now, I'm going to go back
into my Russophile mode. NATO doesn't really matter for
Russia one way or the other. It can enlarge. It can't enlarge. It's not going to invade Russia. It's really important in all
kinds of propaganda ways, but it doesn't really
matter for Russia. Russia's relations with
the European Union, however, matter
hugely for Russia because that's their
biggest market. That's where they'd
like to travel. That's what really
matters to them. Also, it matters to
them just-- if you're going to be a realist, as
people like to be-- then what matters in Russia's
power position in the world is the ability to balance
between the European Union and China. It's two great
neighbors, both of which are economically
much bigger than it. So if you throw the
European Union away, you're basically
throwing yourself at the knees of China, which
is kind of what's happening. Again, they're not
stressing that. Their line is we're going to
try and show the Europeans we have an alternative. But what they're
really showing is they don't have an alternative,
because the moment they have any kind of problem
with Europe, they have to immediately
go to China and sign a gas deal which is manifesting
out on their own interests. I think that the
significant thing here is the change in
doctrine about Europe. But significant for
Ukraine, for all the reasons we've talked about, but
also significant for Russia because what Russia has done--
just putting Ukraine aside for a minute-- is
making it much harder for it to get back to the
position that it was in 2011 and '12 with respect to the EU. One way this could all end
or could never have started, is that the European
Union and Russia do some kind of
deal which respects the interests of both sides. I mean if Putin had
just said 2013, OK fine, Ukraine has an
association agreement. What I want is an association
agreement on much better terms. He would have gotten it. There would be to sanctions and
Russians would be traveling. The Russia GP wouldn't
have collapsed, et cetera, et cetera. Now, they're in a
position where they have to really, really
struggle to get back to where they were in 2013. Now again, this is
all analysis, which is not filling the
Russian airwaves, but I think this is more
or less what's going on. Susan? Thank you for that talk
which was wonderful. I have a question that's
a little different from these others which is
about the ways in which talking about policy and politics
today, and talking about Ukraine have or have not affect
your writing of history, because you're still an archival
historian and someone who spends lot of time working
in both primary documents and secondary
sources and writing about parts of the 20th century
and not the 21st century. So I was wondering
the ways that doing this mode of being a
public intellectual affected your scholarship. Yeah. I'm going to say
something really simple and say I hope not at all. I hope it's the
other way around. There's certain things that
I do a historian which put me in a position to play defense. So for example, historians are
natural defenders against myth, because first of all,
we're aware of it as a kind of concept we can
put it away from history. But also, we can say some
of the things about it which make it seem less
powerful or at least less true. If Vladimir-- of course
that Russian pronunciation of his name didn't exist
in 988-- but you know, if he indeed converted
in 988, which is not at all certain right, he did so
for totally strategic reasons weighing Western
Christianity as well as East. He apparently converted at least
twice to Eastern Christianity. According to the Arabic
sources he was a Muslim. The state was a sort of Jewish,
Viking conglomerate, blah, blah, blah. If you could, if you
say these things. Sorry? The best kind by the way. Yeah, yeah. I'm not to say
anything about that-- [LAUGHTER] --because I'm being recorded. It's amazing how much
difference that makes. The point is though, that
historians kind of surround myths by these kinds
of tiresome facts. And then they can put the myths
into context, which isn't just in a scholarly exercise, because
if you actually do things. If Russian soldiers are dying
because Vladimir supposedly converted to Christianity in
988, that is a tragedy in that. If we can put that into
context, we might actually be helping in some sense. It helps you play defense. Also, you notice if other
people are reading history. Putin is reading history. That's actually a
demonstrable fact. He's not alone. In the Russian leadership,
they're reading a lot of books now. They have reading
circles up there. No, they do. They have reading circles. Unfortunately, there's not
enough cross pollination with Californian suburban
housewife reading circles. I think there should be
some kind of exchange where like a California's
urban housewives get to chose the books
one week and Putin gets to choose the next week. I think that'd be good
for everybody, honestly. You can almost tell what
they're reading actually. They're reading exile
interwar Russians. You see it in Putin's
speeches, the way he's thinking about
history and also the things he says
about history. But I only know
that because I have some sense of what Russian
exile in the '20s and '30s, what that did, what
the ideas were. It's also a demonstrable fact. Some of them talk about
what they're reading, so I'm not just
speculating here. Then, you can see
where this takes them. As a historian, you can then
maybe reacted a little bit and say OK, well this is
one way of seeing things, but it's not just true. So when Putin talks to
teachers of Russian history and says well, we all know this,
that, the other thing, no, we don't all know what
that's just like. That's the one book that you
just read three weeks ago. But it's not just totally true. Beyond that, the you have
certain kinds of intuition. As you know, the
book that I've just finished that I've been
obsessing about for last five years is about the Holocaust. What does that have
to do with this? Well, for one thing,
if you're trying to explain the
Holocaust, you end up thinking about a whole lot
of things which are not the same thing as the myths
and the political exploitation of the Holocaust. The Russians go into
Ukraine and they say, we're doing one
of the things they say-- I didn't talk
about this-- one thing they say is we're saving the
world from another holocaust. OK, maybe that's just
an abuse of a history, which is what it is. Maybe they're trivializing
the memory of the Holocaust. That's fine, it does. But there's something
else going on, which is that in order for
the Holocaust to happen, the Germans first had to
destroy the European system and get inside of and destroy
individual European sovereign states. That's how it actually happened
as a matter of historical fact. It's a long argument, but let's
just assume that's the case. Because I think that,
I'm much more alert to Munich and Anschluss
and the begins of the end of the European system. So I don't look at the
tragedy of the European Jews or the horrors of the Second
World War from the back. I look at them from the front. What happened? What had to happen first? And so then, when
Russian doctrine says things like we have
their ethnic rights, not state rights. The conventional state
no longer matters. Then, I think Karl Schmidt,
and I think of Munich. I think of Anschluss. I think of the beginning of
the end of the European system. One of the reasons
why I think it's justified to think
about that is that I think they are thinking
about that too. I think I'm in this with them. I think they're thinking
about it as well, just that they're thinking about
it positively, as a lesson. So I think it's the
other way around. I try very hard to make sure
it's the other way around, that it's the stuff
that I think I know that allows me to
take other things apart and to play defense. I think if it's the
other way around, then you have real problems. So I was going like, please. So Tim if you're
[INAUDIBLE] yet, I really liked your idea
about perversity symmetry. I guess my question is going
to be a little bit about us, about the US since you
didn't talk about us. And that is, we have in a
sense a political constraint of the aftermath the Iraq war
and the disaster that that was and the context any
kind of very active and even sending weapons to other
country as opposed to troops becomes kind of this aggressive
foreign policy associated with John McCain and
the political right. Then, the Europeans have that
same frame where it's not about Ukraine, it's
about Iraq, Libya, anything but Ukraine or Russia. I guess my question is, how
does that political constraint inform what should be
the appropriate policy response from the US
and Europe, knowing this is a very real constraint? This isn't just about being
confused by Russian propaganda. It's not that Obama and
his team are watching too much Russian television. It's that they don't
want to say these things and then take the consequences,
because either they don't believe it's a
good idea or they believe that the public won't support it
because this is what they were elected to do, to
end wars and to not get involved in a new one. The Germans are afraid
of a war with Russia. How do you address that? It's sort of like you could
agree with everything you said, and you could still
say OK, that's really bad news for the Ukrainian. I'm really sorry
that they're going to be stuck in this conflict,
but the interests of the United States and Europe
and the constraints politically that
they suffer, they may not want to take those
kinds of aggressive actions. OK. Well, taking the point
of your question. I think that the way you
phrase it has a couple of gaps. First, the alternatives are
not take aggressive action and shrug your shoulders
and say we can't do anything because there was an Iraq
War or a Second World War. There's a whole big filing
cabinet full of stuff that we can do short
military intervention Iraq style and nothing. The second little
gap is I don't think it's right to create an
alternative between we're watching too much Russian
TV and we just think what we do because of our constraints. That's a mutually
reinforcing pattern, because the Russians are aware
of are soft spots, because they understand us much better
than we understand them. Everything they do is meant
to get hold of our soft spots and just twist them
a little bit so they feel a little bit softer
than they actually are. That's what they're after. That's what they're
trying to do. So with a question
of arms, of course they give us a
lot of stuff which suggests that it's going to
be a horrible escalation, because they know it's a
close debate in the US. If it wasn't a close debate,
they wouldn't bother. So I don't actually think
you can make separation between Russian
propaganda and our, as you put it, objective
historical constraints, because they're playing with
our constraints all the time. They're playing on
them beautifully. That's what they do. That's what they're good at. It's not Russian television. RT is the second largest English
broadcaster in the world. There are all kinds of ways
in which the American NGO sector and even
American journalism are affected by
Russian propaganda. Not to mention, our
parliament is also affected. So it's not that Russia is
over there and we're over here, it's one big discussion. Anyway, how to
answer your question? The conclusion you
draw-- I know you're doing this for the
purposes of illustration-- but the conclusion
that you draw oh this is too bad for the Ukrainians,
but you know it's not real. That's what we're
supposed to think. That's what we're
supposed to think. And thinking that is
supposed to be deadly for us. That's the thought
which will kill us and it's meant to kill
us because this is not about Ukraine. It's about us. Ukraine is a way
of getting to us. And if we decide
to support Ukraine, then the conclusion
is oh, let's have another ceasefire in Minsk. Let's just keep having
ceasefires in Minsk. OK, let's have one when the
war is about the Lukansk. Then, let's have one when
the war is about Debaltseve. Then, let's have one when
the war's about Mariupol. Let's have another one
when it's about Odessa. Let's keep having
ceasefires at Minsk. The ceasefires at Minsk are
consumer foreign policy. They're us telling
ourselves that oh yes, this is a local problem in
Ukraine and now we've solved it by flying to
Minsk ans spending 18 hours. If this analysis is right
and since in your question you said OK, let's
assume it's all right. So let's assume it's all right. If this is all right, then if
we do nothing, what happens is the progressive
disintegration of the European Union and the
transatlantic relationship. So what the answered
to your question then is in terms of our policy,
the whole question of arming Ukraine or not it is as I see
it, is a kind of red herring. That's putting all the
emphasis in the wrong place. If this analysis
is correct, that means that what we need
to be thinking about is how you secure a Ukrainian
state on the principle that our system is composed
of sovereign states. How does the European
Union respond to this multi-dimensional
challenge? How do you keep the EU American
relationship going over the very, very, very long run? Let's assume this is going
to last for 10 years, and not just think OK this is
the little problem in Ukraine. We're going to solve
it or not solve it. I actually see the
whole arms debate as the triumph of
Russian propaganda. That we've been put
into this corner where it's like oh arms might be
good, they might be bad. It wouldn't matter
one way or the other I don't think that much. In the long run,
the Ukrainians are going to lose unless
we help their state and that includes helping
their armed forces, but it's not limited to that. The European Union
I think is going to fall apart unless positive
feedback loops get established to match the negative ones
that have been established so effectively in
the last two years. I think the response has
to be a full-on response. If as we're tentatively
agreeing if this is right, then the response has
to be one which says OK, there's this
multi-dimensional problem. We're going to have a
multi-dimensional response, which isn't just-- this is
the kind of my whole point-- which isn't framed
by the rhetoric that is being framed for us. Then, we've already lost. In fact, this is
how we're losing. This is actually
why we're losing. This is what the Russians have. It's the main thing they have. The main thing they have
is they're outsmarting us. That's the main thing that have. Until we get that, The Russians export as
much as the Netherlands. Their GDP is as big as France. Their economy is way over
focused on hydrocarbons. They've got a lot of problems. They can't take that
many military casualties, I don't think. They've got a lot of weaknesses. But so long as they're out
thinking us 8 ways to Sunday, they're going to keep winning. That was a long
answer, I'm sorry. All right, yes please. I just wanted to
follow up on something. So how exactly do
you counteract? They are sponsoring the far
right parties in Europe. Do we sponsor far left parties? What are we supposed to do? Yeah. There's a certain
place where I stop. I try to play. As I said in response to
Susan Ferber's question, I try to use the things
I think I understand as a way to play defense and
conceptualise what I think is going on. I try not to be like real
specific about policy advocacy. However, I would like
to say that I don't think financing the far left-- [LAUGHTER] --is going to answer, partly
because they're already there. The Russians also
finance the far left. That's less historically
significant, because the far left is less
historically significant. Right now is a moment of the
rise the far right in Europe. Yeah, I know but-- the Greek
government, as you know, is a coalition of the
far left the far right. The Russians have it
covered on both sides. On both sides, they've got
both sides on that one. Anyway, but no. I think very, very roughly you
have to decide who you are. So a lot of Ukrainians
come to me-- I'll rephrase your
question-- and they say should we have propaganda
the way the Russians have? The Ukrainians have
this sort of they have an advantage over-- well,
OK I'm talking to Ukrainians-- but they have the
advantage over us that they understand
all this stuff. All this stuff
that take an hour, they more or less
get it like that. None of this, I couldn't
give this talk in Kiev because they'd be like
come on, my six-year-old understands this. [LAUGHTER] So you can't give
this talk in Ukraine, because the one people
in the world who are not particularly moved buy
this stuff are the Ukrainians. They're familiar with
all these gimmicks. So a lot of the
questions I get from them are from young
Ukrainian journalists, should we have a TV
sender which is like RT. Should we count the
propaganda with our own? I always say no. Maybe, I'm naive and
stupid and wrong, But I always think that's the
whole point is that if that's if you do that, then they win. Not only because--
I don't even mean in just some dumb ethical way--
they're always going to be better at it then you are. Also, if I'm right-- in my deep
normative Hannah Arendt moment at the end-- if it's all
about thinking and thought at the end of the
day, if it really is a clash between two
different styles of politics, in which one is about
making people fragmented and aliens that
can't think, and one is about creating the
possibility for some kind of discussions groups
and so on so people can, if there really
is that difference at the heart of this--
I think there is-- then if you partake in it
with your own Ukrainian or your own American
propaganda, for that matter, they're winning in some
deep objective way. So I don't think you can
fight fire with fire here. I think you have to recognize
that the way to respond is by trying to figure
out who you are. This is when I say that
the Russians are right, that we're decadent. I'm not sure I'm joking,
because I would've thought we would've responded
better to this challenge than we have so far. By we, I mean everyone
from Kiev to San Francisco. I would've thought we would
have done better with this. When they started
all this, I thought when I saw some American propped
up with the Russian message, I thought OK, there's a problem
here that has to be addressed. But I didn't realize that
we were going to address it so badly and so slowly. Going this way, Michael. So Michael Kennedy, Sociology. Just taking the
last things that you said to re-frame the question
I had intended previously, that is I can't decide now
whether the debate about how far Russia will go is a Russian
debate or a Western debate. According to some of the
things that you said, I could imagine that this
is not ending in Ukraine. That in fact, it
would make sense as Putin's lot gets worse and
worse that it would make sense to go into Estonia, because
if by going into Estonia, then you automatically trigger
either the end to NATO or the American response
because of NATO, and therefore confirm what Putin
had originally said that this is a fight with America. So that issue, although
it was beginning to be raised last
spring by a variety of military strategists,
is now almost a common sense anxiety
among people in NATO that Putin's ultimate aim is
not the destruction of EU-- although, I think
you're right-- but that is the destruction of
NATO, which is something that can be a victory for him. So is that a worthy
or important debate for the West to be having now? Or is that a debate
on Russian terms? The debate about what exactly? About whether we
should be preparing. The debate is
simply this I think, which is what NATO people say. When are we going to stop him? Are we going to wait
until he invades Estonia through this reverse
asymmetric warfare, or are we going to try
to stop him in Ukraine? Because we can't rely
on his exhaustion-- by virtue of your own analysis--
because his exhaustion will just lead to more
and more destructive behavior which might in the end
be self-destructive for Russia. But it's going to be
destructive for a lot of others who are our allies now. Yeah, I don't have a
clear answer for that because my gut conviction
is that any calculation about the long term is
not likely to be right. Some other stuff is going
to intervene along the way. So for example, what's
the biggest problem that Putin is having now. The biggest problem
Putin is having now is that oil prices are down
because Saudi Arabia has decided to hinder American
investment in shale oil and shale gas extraction
by dropping the price. It has nothing to
do with Russia. Their propaganda is that we
and Saudi's got together, but in fact a Saudi policy
directed against the United States as it were is the
thing which is hurting Russia more than anything else. Clausewitz said this
a long time ago, but when you start wars what
happens is all kinds of things you didn't expect to happen
over the course of the war. I think there will be
more things like this. If this goes on
for long enough, I think the Chinese
will stop might be a little bit less discreet
than they're being now. The Russian army is already
stretched to the point where young men are
coming from the Far East. It's not a big army. It's big compared to
the European Union Army, which is zero. [LAUGHTER] But the number of men
who can actually fighting in the Russian armies
is 50 to 70,000, which is big by
European standards. But it's not huge,
especially for some kind of long term campaign. I think it would be a mistake
to follow either logic, that they're going
to be exhausted, they're not going
to be exhausted. I think what you
have to do is secure, try to secure the things
that you think really matter. I think about it that way. So if you think Article
Five really matters, then you need to make it
look like Article Five really matters. If you want to try
to win in Ukraine, you have to think about how
you're going to win in Ukraine using some kind of
intelligent measure which isn't just dictated
by the Russian debate. In the long run, Ukraine
is completely winnable. I mean it's completely. The Russians are not in
such a great position there. I think it's important
not to follow the logic of if we do this,
will this make them overreact, because we just do not know. If you follow that logic,
then you could say, what if we gave
Ukraine to Russia? What if we said right now,
we have no-- like Eisenhower said about Korea--
we have no interest. We have no interest
in this at all. Take it. We just do not care. What would happen then? Would that be good? I tend to think it wouldn't be. I don't believe
that they're going to stop because they've
got Ukraine, because I don't think it's about Ukraine. On the other hand,
are they going to stop because they
get stopped in Ukraine? No, I don't think that either. I don't think there's
any story which leads to this ending except
when Putin leaves power, which of course will happen
because it will eventually happen one way or the other. There are two ways it can happen
basically, neither of which is pretty. Until that happens
nothing's going to happen. I think the real question
is how do we secure what we think is important
knowing that we don't know which narrative is true. I'm going to take the privilege
of asking the last question. There's more. Two more? I'll be brief. I'm Gary [INAUDIBLE] student. I was wondering, you talked
about the Budapest Memorandum not being honored by
the Russians, decreasing credibility of nonproliferation. Do you think the West's part
in that agreement is worth saving to any degree? Can you talk on that? I'll take even a
step back from that. Although the Russian
interpretations of international law has
been innovative and curious, they are a reminder of how
important international law is. And if you do draw that
conclusion as at least I do, it then reminds you how you
should take your own commitment seriously. That's sort of a general. So with Budapest,
I think it would be a very good idea for the
Americans and the British to talk about Budapest, whatever
they do to help Ukraine, because they did
oblige themselves in this very vulnerable
moment, not only in Ukraine but in world history. Those states gave up their
nuclear weapons in 1994. It was a very big
deal for the world. It was part of a general
push back against the spread of nuclear weapons and I
think it was hugely important. The Americans and the
British are in fact I think morally if
not technically, legally obliged to help Ukraine. In whatever they
do, I think they should talk about
Budapest when they do it, if only to lift some of the
shame of the absence of policy so far, but if only to
try to slowly buildup the credibility of agreements
like this in the future. Because we have to remember
that nonproliferation isn't problem for
the world, which is to go on and on regardless
what happens in Ukraine. This has been a total disaster. Obviously, the Russians
aren't say oh yeah, we woke up today we
remembered Budapest. Sorry. That's not going to happen. So at least the
Americans and the British could roll into the
preambles of their agreements to help Ukraine. I think they should. Why do you think they're not? That's a good question. I don't know. I don't know. They're worried about
everything which make it seems like
they're obliged to help. I think that's been
one of the problems. Rolling this back to
a year ago, a year ago I wrote all kinds
of things which basically said the same
things that I'm saying now. One of them was about Budapest. What I said was not
only is this bad, but we need to immediately
put this into our language about why we're going to help. The sad thing is that
I think they will now, but it's taken a year to do so. I think there was
this whole year where we were trying to avoid
this confrontation with what actually happened. In going back to
your question it's partly real hesitation,
real worries about war, which are serious and should
be taken seriously and matter in domestic
constituencies in Germany and the US in other places,
but it's also partly being spun in a certain direction. Crimea itself, if you remember
back to when it happened, it was presented
as a maskirovka. It was presented as
something that it wasn't. It was presented as some kind of
mysterious local uprising, who knows. Who are these people
in green uniforms? Then once it was
all over, and Putin gave a speech he said
oh yes, those people are Russian soldiers. It wasn't given to
us straight and we chose not to take it straight. Since we chose not
to take it straight, then we couldn't say
OK, Budapest Memorandum was violated, because
our line was waiting to see what's happening. Then, after a while,
that gets embarrassing. So this is in a way why I
concluded on this thought business, that if you're unable
to define what's happening at the time, it's harder for
you to keep your own obligations because you get into the
psychological position where OK, I'm not sure
this has been triggered. Then, you figure out six
weeks for six months later that it has. Then it's kind of embarrassing
in a way to do it. I don't have any better
characterization for you than that. I wanted to ask, let's
for a moment stipulation that we are in Kiev and
we are the Ukrainian to understand all of this
pretty much by nature, and that part of the propaganda
is the Ukrainian state is a fiction. What is your advice
to them about creating a narrative of a Ukrainian
state or a reality of a Ukrainian state
that's robust enough to withstand that discourse? I think the smaller
problem is the narrative. The smaller problem
is the narrative. I think by now people have
generally moved forward to the point where
they know that there is something called Ukraine. If you think back 12
months ago, 15 months ago, all the news stories,
almost all of them, literally had like a
map of Ukraine a line drawn through the middle of it. Do we remember this? We should be ashamed basically. It's like having a map of
America with a line drawn through the middle of it like
the red states are all here and the blue ones are all there. Don't you know that
there's a line? It's called the Mason
Dixon line and everyone down there is white. Everyone up there in black
and they're also gay. [LAUGHTER] The idea of drawing a
line through the middle of the country and saying
oh these people like this, it's just totally absurd
and we wouldn't do it if we didn't regard them. Anyone when you took seriously,
you wouldn't do that to I think we have moved
past that at least. You do still hear people say
it's a divided country and so on, but even the war itself has
disproven that because there's been so little support for
actually moving away from Kiev. It's two Oblasts. Even there, the public
opinion polls interestingly show the same thing that
they've showed for the past 20 years, which is that
very few people actually want to join Russia. They want they want
more local authority. The narrative is less
and less of a problem. I mean they could
definitely do a better job in telling their own history. Here, you kind of interesting
difference in, I think, something like
political style, where the Ukrainians tend to
communicate politically with pictures. If you look at the
history of the Maidan, it's really a lot about images
which worked well the time, but don't work well over time. Whereas the way the
Russians handle politics is much less with pictures
and much more with cliches. They'll hit you over and
over again with cliches, like Crimea was ours,
Ukraine is a divided country, over and over and
over and over again and eventually that sinks in. I think it's actually just the
kind of irreducible difference in style there which
you can't really ask the Ukrainians to fix. With the state, here I think
is the core of your question. I agree with you completely. Here, it's not
about a narrative. it's about a reality
of the state, because the Ukraine state is
weak and that's the problem. It's weak in the basic sense
that it can't provide day to day predictability for
its citizens, which is what states are supposed to do. They're supposed to
monopolize violence, which the state kind of does. And they're supposed to
provide the rule of law or predictability, a baseline. That is absolutely
what they need to do. You asked me and this
is what I do tell them. This is, in an odd way,
the key to the whole thing. I'm glad this is the last
question, because it actually transcends almost everything
that I've been talking about. The Maidan was about this. Ironically, the protests
in Donetsk and Luhansk are also to a large measure
about this, about this lack this feudal system which was
slightly different there, but which is still
a feudal system. The problems that
Ukraine is having now in holding off
the Russian military is also largely about this. The answer is ironically--
it's hard to think about them outside the
context of the war-- but the answers have to do
with the kinds of things you've been working on. The answers have to do with
relocating public funds, with decentralizing,
not because Ukraine is some kind of repressive
centralized state or like the people in Kiev
oppressed Donetsk or Luvil for that matter, but
because the Ukrainian state is so weak you have to
build up capacity somewhere. You have to actually create
capacity where none exists. You have to create Ohio
or Connecticut or Provin. You have to create
municipalities, [INAUDIBLE], whatever. You have to create
these units which don't exist and have them
have some local control, not because the Russians
want federalization. That's not relevant
one way or the other, but because the Ukrainian
state doesn't really exist at that level and
has to be made to exist. That's the crucial thing. One of things that
worries me about the war is the war becomes an
argument against this, when in fact the war is
an argument for this. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
An excellent talk. Listened to all of it, and TBH: I can't think of anything to disagree with. Several of these issues were highlighted by different authors, but rarely you see one person putting all of it in one coherent talk. I really wish more people would become aware of this context of the events.
Some reasons why a weak (or even better, disintegrated) EU is in Putin's interest:
One in Prague here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoUkoGn7cRU (no worries, it's in English, past introductions).
Very interesting stuff.
I guess that from Russia's standpoint, odd as it sounds on the face of it, EU is offensive, and NATO is defensive.
NATO is unlikely to attack Russia, but once a country joins NATO, Russia can't attack it: it just closes the door to Russian expansion in that country. That nullifies use of Russia's hard power against that country.
However, the EU actively attacks Russia, not in any military sense, but simply in the form of being a more-appealing alternative to Russia: providing an option of a better life.
It's very-unlikely that Russia will be able to attack NATO in the near future, which means that it's placed in the position of needing to make itself more-appealing for countries than the EU.
There aren't a lot of options to stop that -- you'd either need to use hard power before a country becomes a NATO member and make the consequences of potentially-joining NATO awful, so that nobody else is willing to bear the costs.
Or you need to make people uninterested in the EU. That means either out-competing the EU in providing a good life and making Russia a greater source of good things, or emphasizing a value split between a country and the EU.
Currently, I don't believe that Russia is heading in the direction of outcompeting the EU in terms of providing a good life. Russia can afford to buy off leaders, but not to buy off a whole populace.
So instead, you emphasize how much people wouldn't want to be part of the EU, and hence focus on conservativism.
Yes, he is a hero.
Timothy Snyder with The Bloodlands, Origin of Nations, his talks about WWI, WWII, Ukraine are just brilliant.
Men like Timothy Snyder and Edward Lucas are doing a great job in making Eastern Europe relevant and understood for the world and ourselves. Cleaning the wound of Soviet legacy of brutality and oblivion.
"Memory is not self evident"
Its a really fascinating talk, especially about the impact of conspiracy theories that confuse the situation. Its amazing how much more informed and in depth this talk is and answers are than the Chomsky interview elsewhere on /r/europe. Its night and day.
Russia is not a country but an old empire - similar to the empires of France in Africa and Great Britain - a territorially small core of "Russians" surrounded by huge swaths of lands which has no link to any Slavic tribe propelled by cultural dominance over non-Russians and stigmatization of any ethnic non-Russian, hence Russia should be destroyed and thoroughly decolonized.