The crisis in the Ukrainian is a test of the stability of democratic reform in the midst of capitalism. Here in Eastern Europe, the powers that be – Russia, the EU and the US – are involved in a tug of war over territory. The West calls it ‘new markets’ and they criticize Russia for grabbing it from under their feet.
Perhaps in a highly charged environment Russia just sees it, fair and square, as motherland – pure historical land.
Whatever way it is cooked up, this is capital in the eyes of both. Or in the eyes of Mr. Putin and Mother Russia, this is something else, the least of which is to prevent the West from seizing it and turning it into inhumane profits at the cost of a sacred Russian history and at a heavy loss to poor Ukrainians.
Either way Ukraine bears the cost.
What the crisis in Ukraine reveals is not encouraging for the West however. It turns out that Vladimir Putin and his Mother Russia has more admirers around the world than they might expect for someone they claim uses a ‘Soviet combination of violence and the big lie to dismember a neighboring sovereign state.’
But that criticism deviates from a careful study of Europe and Eastern Europe. They have always been violent – two world wars and a third in counting should NATO decide to engage the Russians in Eastern Ukraine. The Soviets/Russians have been just as violent as the West.
And Russia, in equal stead (the US in Iraq and Afghanistan) is strapping up to show the West what it is capable of – that it can unleash in equal measure and its fair share of violence in the Ukraine.
Russia’s admirers are not just the shunned governments of Venezuela and Syria, two of his most vocal supporters. Russia’s strongman reaps tacit support, even quiet plaudits, from some of the world’s most important powers, starting with China and India.
One would hope that a country like China, which has so consistently defended the principle of respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of existing states (be they the former Yugoslavia or Iraq), and which itself has a couple of prospective Crimeas (Tibet, Xinjiang), would feel uneasy about Russia simply grabbing the backside of a historical aunty?
Well, Ukraine is a long way away – and, frankly speaking, the positives of the crisis outweighed the negatives for China. What’s more, the United States would have another strategic distraction (after al-Qaida, Afghanistan and Iraq) to hinder its pivot to the Asia-Pacific region, and divert its attention from China.
In addition, Russia would be more dependent on a good relationship with Beijing if the cold-shouldering by the West can kick it up another notch in gear. As for Ukraine – which already sells China higher-grade military equipment than Russia has been willing to share with its great Asian ally – its new authorities had already quietly assured the Chinese authorities that Beijing’s failure to condemn the annexation of Crimea would not affect their future relations.
What’s not to like in all that?
And there’s more. The emotional component cannot be overemphasized. Chinese leaders such as Xi Jinping, who was nurtured under Chairman Mao’s regime, instinctively warms to the idea of another non-Western leader standing up to the capitalist and imperialist West.
Xi and his China like Putin’s Russia. Chinese media commentary has become more cautious since Putin moved on from Crimea to stirring the pot in eastern Ukraine. China’s nationalist paper Global Times, which last month spoke of “Crimea’s return to Russia”, now warns: “Ukraine’s eastern region is different from the Crimea. Secession of the region from Ukraine strikes a direct blow to territorial integrity guaranteed by international law.”
But then, Putin is not aiming at outright secession. He is a better chess player than that? Just a Finlandized Greater Ukraine – a neutral country with a version of federalism so far-reaching that the eastern regions would become Bosnia-style entities, within a Russian sphere of influence.
However, this growing concern did not apparently cool the warmth of the welcome given to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Beijing on Tuesday. President Xi said that relations between China and Russia “are at their best” and have played “an irreplaceable role in maintaining world peace and stability”.
The Chinese foreign ministry pronounced China-Russia to be the “major-country relationship that boasts the richest contents, the highest level and the greatest strategic significance”. Cry your eyes out, USA. And Beijing looks forward to welcoming Putin for a major summit next month. It is not just China.
With the likely success of Narendra Modi and the growth of India’s own “crony capitalism”, liberal Indian friends fear that the world’s largest democracy may get its own version of Putinismo. In any case, so far India has in effect sided with Russia, not the West, over Ukraine.
Last month Putin thanked India for its “restrained and objective” stance on Crimea. India’s postcolonial experience with sovereignty, and resentment of any hint of Western liberal imperialism, plays out – rather effortlessly – in support for a country that the West accuses of dramatically violating its neighbor’s sovereignty.
An Indian satirical magazine even suggested that Putin had been hired as “the chief strategic consultant for India in order to bring a once-and-for-all end to the Kashmir issue”. India also gets a lot of its arms from Russia.
And it is not just India. Russia’s two other partners in the Brics group – Brazil and South Africa – both abstained on the UN general assembly resolution criticizing the Crimea referendum. They also joined Russia in expressing concern at the Australian foreign minister’s suggestion that Putin might be barred from attending a G20 summit in November. The Russian ambassador to South Africa expressed appreciation for its balanced attitude.
What the West faces here is the uncoiling of two giant springs. One, which has been extensively commented upon, is the coiled spring of Mother Russia’s resentment at the way her empire has shrunk over the past 25 years – all the way back from the heart of Germany to the heart of the Kievan Rus.
The other is the coiled spring of resentment at centuries of Western colonial brutal domination and its aggressive post-colonial capitalist imperialism. This takes very different forms in different Brics countries and members of the G20, of course. They certainly don’t all have China’s relentless narrative of national humiliation since Britain’s opium wars.
But one way or another, they do share a strong and unwavering concern for their own sovereignty, a resistance to North Americans and Europeans hypocrisy, telling them what is good for them, and a certain instinctive glee, or schadenfreude, at seeing Uncle Sam (not to mention little John Bull) being poked in the eye by Mr. Putin and his Mother Russia.
Perhaps, this is not the immediate issue in Ukraine, but it is the big outlook opened up by the east European crisis. In the broader, geopolitical sense, as we go deeper into the 21st century, there will be more like Ukraine.
