Nationalism and the Russo–Ukrainian War

By Jason Lee Steorts

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

 

Someone in my life wired through intermediaries some aid money to Ukrainians in the early days of the war. He received back a story of a Ukrainian woman who fed Russian soldiers several times after they came to her door. Then one day, while retrieving food from the kitchen, she heard a thud and, returning to another room, found her husband with his throat slit. And then she was taken upstairs and raped repeatedly.

 

I cannot confirm the report, but it is plausible. Many such horrors have been confirmed and reported.

 

I have wanted to share this particular horror story and to write something about the war. The enormity of the topic has left me wordless. But President Zelensky, of Ukraine, asked that the world think at Christmas about the sufferings of his people at Christmas, so herewith a handful of thoughts.

 

1.

We should not assume that atrocities such as those committed against the woman and her husband are necessarily absent from just wars. But we should not draw a false moral equivalence, either. The purpose and conduct of a war matter. A just war in which an atrocity is committed will be just in part if the perpetrators of the injustice are punished justly.

 

2.

An unjust war of territorial acquisition and a just war of territorial defense would, even if producing equal atrocities, be morally unequal as to the purpose of the war.

 

And “equal atrocities” does not describe the Russo–Ukrainian war.

 

3.

It is worthwhile to think about the war if you are thinking about the debate in world politics right now between defenders and critics of nationalism.

 

4.

Some Western defenders of nationalism who oppose the war and want Ukraine to win say that Russia’s acts in Ukraine are imperialist, not nationalist, and that the Ukrainian defense is nationalist. They have a point. President Putin, of Russia, has denied in writing that Ukrainians are an independent people with a distinct national identity. (English translation via the Kremlin here; website not secure.) In the same essay, he says that a group of individuals may choose to form a new nation provided that this happens according to a fair process; that the future of Ukraine is up to the Ukrainian people; and that negotiations between Russia and Ukraine should take Ukraine’s pre-Soviet borders as their starting point. (From the Ukrainian point of view this would of course be to start with an unacceptable territorial cession.) The overall view is somewhat unclear, and his words, as he concedes, “can be interpreted in many possible ways.” How to take them is for each to judge. That the invasion last year appeared calculated to decapitate the Ukrainian government and seize Kyiv might be thought to indicate his genuine ambitions at the time.

 

In any case, if the world acquiesced to a denial of Ukrainian distinctness, it would have accepted the erasure of the national identity of the Ukrainian people, who have proven at terrible cost their communal coherence. Such an erasure would not only contradict the principle of nationalism; it would be a moral atrocity and a denial of reality to boot.

 

5.

Some Western critics of nationalism, on the other hand, say that Russia’s invasion was not imperialist but nationalist: that the war is fought in the name of Russian nationhood, with the aims of retaking territory that had formerly been under Moscow’s control and of securing the interests of ethnic Russians who do not wish to be part of the Ukrainian national state. This may look like imperialism in Kyiv and Lviv, but in Moscow it is a matter of national identity, and in the Donbas it depends on whom you ask.

 

6.

How then to decide a dispute of this sort justly?

 

As always when interests conflict or are thought to, we need a standard that can be adopted by all disputants and therefore regarded by all as fair.

 

7.

It is not a matter of whether, in practice, all would agree to any such standard, since that would be nearly impossible.

 

The question is rather what standard all should agree to.

 

8.

Could one turn the principle of nationalism itself into such a standard? If everyone were nationalist, would not everyone respect all nations?

 

9.

If so, nationalism would reduce to a sort of generic communitarianism.

 

That is, each nation would perceive the interests of other nations as well as its own, all would honor the interests of all, and what I have called a “mutually respectful relativistic nationalism” would prevail.

 

10.

But what if some nations did not want to respect the interests of other nations, wishing instead to advance their own at the cost of others’? How would we try to persuade such a nation to abandon what might be called “egotistical nationalism”?

 

We would have to talk about something other than national interest at this point, since conflicting national interests are precisely what the practitioners of egotistical nationalism deny should be weighed equally. We would have to talk about the interests of human beings as such.

 

11.

Could someone not reply to me, “Very well: All people value their nations, just as they value their individual interests. National interests may conflict, but this is just the problem of egotism, as your own terminology suggests. ‘Egotistical nationalism’ is no greater a challenge to nationalism as an ideal than is personal egotism to the ideals of individual ethics.”

 

12.

No. The answer is no. For the situations are not similar after all.

 

The problem of individual egotism is the problem faced by the woman, any number of them, who asks not to have her husband murdered and herself raped and who receives the reply that the attacker understands her but does not care.

 

The problem of conflicting national interests is that her needs as an individual, whatever they be, cannot even be weighed. This is because nationalism lays its normative foundation above the individual, at the level of the national community as such. Her life and her family simply do not figure into an accounting of what is good for Russia qua Russia.

 

13.

This is not to say that a nationalist nation will choose to be cruel. But if it makes the national interest its sole decisive principle, it deprives the woman whose husband is about to bleed to death of any necessarily shared criterion of judgment, any language she can speak to it that it is guaranteed to understand. If it feels any regard for her as a person, this is only because it has taken in ethical considerations extraneous to nationalism per se.

 

And it is not as if the Russian state has shown remorse or embarrassment over the butchers of Bucha and the perpetrators of similar atrocities elsewhere in Ukraine.

 

14.

This is why it is necessary to make individual interests the final standard of judgment of right and wrong in politics and geopolitics. We do not want to fail to count anyone.

 

By starting with individual interests, we will pick up the interests of nations and other communities, which must be interests of some individual or group of individuals, living or to come, if they are interests at all. Communities are not sentient as communities; their value is felt only by the individuals who compose them.

 

The woman not only makes her plea in a tongue foreign to her attackers. She addresses it to an abstraction.

 

15.

The need to count everyone’s interests, as I have written elsewhere, requires that the consent of the governed be the standard of political legitimacy. Since I see the Ukrainian cause as an attempt of the majority population to govern itself by mutual consent, I favor the cause of the Ukrainian nation.

 

16.

Along a disputed border where ethnicities are mixed, the question of consent will not be so simple. But acts of coercion are still morally prohibited, and we should see clearly that defense against coercion is not itself coercion.

 

I take Russia to be the state actor that coerced, by invading first Crimea and then other parts of Ukraine.

 

I also take Russia to have been the main force behind the bloody unrest in eastern Ukraine these past years, although I do not deny that acts of unjust violence, including murder, have been committed against pro-Russian Ukrainians (as in the Maidan protests in Odesa that Putin mentions in his essay).

 

17.

Please pay attention to and remember always what a border adjustment amid a mixed population can look like.

 

Yoram Hazony, whose writings I value despite my disagreements with them, writes in The Virtue of Nationalism that “the aspirations of national states tend to produce petty wars whose purpose is adjustments in the hierarchy of power among them, or to achieve an alteration in the boundaries among them.” This could be true, but “adjustments” could just as well look like the Russo–Ukrainian war or the horrors attendant to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Hazony’s reference to war “between the Serbs and the Croats,” for instance, is curious in its omission of the term “ethnic cleansing” and any equivalent language — in its theoretic blindness, that is, to the attempted erasure of one national identity where two conflicted. He wants minority populations to be treated decently, but this wish must spring from normative sources other than the one he makes foundational to his theory, and must draw him finally into the sort of universalist political ethics that he abjures.

 

18.

Nor should we overlook the tragedy of the war for the Russian people and for the soldiers being offered up as a kind of sacrifice to the abstraction of national ego. The New York Times’ transcripts of intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers are heartbreaking.

 

19.

It is possible to misperceive a situation drastically.

 

Maybe the Russian government did think the war would be quick and the result welcomed by or beneficial to most Ukrainians. This would in fact be consistent with the belief that Ukraine is not a distinct nation but rather part of Russia. An invasion thus becomes a reunion.

 

Western nations including the United States have also made errors of judgment, for example in thinking that the invasion of Iraq would be mild in its damage and quickly produce a stabler and juster Iraq governed by Iraqis.

 

But far from undermining the distinction we have drawn, this comparison crystallizes it. “Stable” and “just” and “governed by [the people]” are part of an ethical language we all can speak just because we are human beings. “Country A must be forced to return to Country B because Country A really is Country B” is not; it is irreducibly particularist.

 

20.

It is awkward that the people making claims such as mine live in countries whose own histories have included outrages of inconsistency with the claims.

 

One really cannot look at what the United States did to American Indians as anything other than a genocide. (For details on the foremost atrocity, consult Unworthy Republic, by Claudio Saunt.) It is not better than the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs, for example; to me it seems worse.

 

One really cannot deny that the United States fought wars of territorial acquisition that were unjust.

 

One really cannot deny that the United States has massacred civilians.

 

21.

In one way this is not a problem of hypocrisy, since the people who did those things are gone and no one is obliged to be as bad as his forebears.

 

It is therefore salutary to discard Chesterton’s idea of tradition as a “democracy of the dead.” If we continue their ways it should be only because we see the goodness of them. We do not owe it to the dead to repeat their errors. If they care about us, they should in fact want us not to do so. They should want us instead to correct their errors, for our own benefit and that of those to come.

 

22.

But even if the entire world forswore injustice today, accidents of history still would have distributed most unevenly the fruits, comestible or foul, of past injustices.

 

To that problem I have no answer. But I know that the answer is not to go on practicing injustice forever, and that the sin is the greater the clearer the alternative seen.