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info-war strong states

PUTIN’S REALITY: a personal reflection

Kyiv in World War II

Rarely has a contemporary geopolitical discourse so clearly trampled on reality as Putin’s defence of the war against Ukraine. Yes, we used to put the word ‘reality’ in quotation marks because we learned that ‘facts’ are a language thing and that reality consequently is a creation. Does our habituation of a world created by ‘influencers’ spell the end of the world order as a source of international justice, whatever the actions to punish Putin and Russia may yield? Such questions of rightness and reality have dominated my own intellectual life for a long time.

If any interests were deeply buried in my DNA they are a gift for technology (particularly electronics) and love of nature. None of it would determine my professional career although it certainly inspired my teenage dreams of an advanced study in electronics and somewhat later in biology (which I studied for a year in 1963-4). Actually my long term professional interest would be better defined as ‘human (mis)perception, particularly as manifested in politics. Some experiences in my younger years may, in hindsight, have been decisive for this outcome. As a passionate observer of plant- and bird-life in a large estate just across our street, I was deeply grieved when they started to transform my paradise into a complex of buildings, worse: a university campus. It made me rethink the idea of progress and I discovered for myself at the age of 14 what Max Weber had stated long before in terms like “absolute progress does not exist”. Progress can only be established value-free in a search for more effective means to reach a well-defined goal. But goals themselves are never value-free. Preventing a worldwide ecological disaster may come close to such a thing but this universally acclaimed goal is overwhelmed by self-serving policy proposals.

How language is used to seduce people in mixing fact and fiction became a favourite perspective since the 1970s (discourse studies and poststructuralism). I was particularly inspired by the work of a sociologist like Peter Manning who pioneered a more organizational approach in his study of the police by showing how the productivity of such organizations may be biased by their own decisions to do what they can most easily achieve. It revealed a logic in constructing our reality and inspired my PhD thesis about the construction of the police image of the local environment of Amsterdam (1987). This work, however, never seduced me to adopt the extreme post-structural conclusion that ‘facts do not exist’ (Baudrillard, etc.). Actually I found that the police themselves were much aware of the tension between their data and (false) representations of urban space in the public. In any way, their data did not help them to ease their job.

The whole desire to construct a ‘logical world’ became acute at a the national level when the frozen Cold War borders collapsed in Europe at the end of the 1980s. As a political geographer I immediately sensed that it would not merely bring ‘freedom’ but also a new need for demarcation that could spell war. During a study trip in 1990 with master students to some of the former communist countries (among which Yugoslavia)* I was amazed how little my students could imagine the new (political) identity problems that tried these people. It was this naiveté in the West that urged me to write ‘National Identity and Geopolitical Visons’ (1996).

The problem however re-surfaced after the ethnic wars in former Yugoslavia had been checked with the help of international intervention. Recent tensions in Bosnia-Hercegovina already smashed the vain hope that an exposure to the forces of globalization might have softened the need for territorial demarcation. Similarly the current Russian occupation of Ukraine is another example of a need to reinforce one’s boundaries. Much of this is shocking for those who believe in the benign force of globalization, a vision that thrives particularly in the European Union. My book ‘Territorial Shock’ (2018) raised the question how states, prompted by their decreasing autonomous power, adapt to the process of globalization. In order to establish a clear response to globalization in a nation’s foreign politics one should particularly look at adaptations that follow on total collapse, a ‘reset’ like the procedure applied to failing electronics. In other cases foreign policies may appear as a more vague continuation of tradition, albeit with small adaptations. The condition of a reset occurs in states that have been conquered by a foreign power, that have been dissolved or that have been ravaged by civil war. Looking at France (rising after World War II), Russia (after the dissolution of its empire) and Somalia (civil war) I discerned three types of reaction: multinational governance (EU), imperialism and ‘glocalism’. Russian imperialism has received a new impetus since 1990.

Only by liberating media and political speech from all attempts of mind control can we hope to move Russia into the sphere of multinational governance. Losing a war did the job in Europe and a failure of the Ukrainian expedition may do the same in Russia. The latter, however, may ask a a prolonged action of all democratic nations and the contribution of groups such as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

*I organized the trip together with my colleague Petr Dostal who in 1998 became a professor at Charles University in Prague and sadly died in 2021.

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info-war

Does the American mind mesh with democracy?

The unruly relationship between democracy and individual freedom

Communal fight in Bologna

The scorched earth tactics of Donald Trump in the twilight of his career as president, is a blow to many people who have a high opinion of the United States as cradle of democracy. In history it rather mirrors the violent struggle for power between two political groups in the Italian city-states around 1300 to which we owe the Divina Commedia. Dante was a city official and victim of these political wars in which the truth had been subordinated to power. In his exile Dante longed for a higher and more just authority which, as in the case of the US, was sadly absent.

The higher authority in the modern democracy is a system of justice based on facts. But precisely facts are liable to erosion in the world of internet and social media. The one who succeeds in reproducing a lie a millionfold controls the facts. That requires, of course, also some social tools like a flock of loyal followers and a ritual that suggests infallibility. It is not improper to characterize Trump as cult-leader as many commentators are now doing. Trump does not represent the GOP but a group of people that believe in him and that go into ecstasy with the rituals or the rallies in which Trump plays the role of visionary leader. This group and these events are in their turn intimidating for the more moderate Republican rank and file.

Those who consider these antics un-American pass over the multiple sects and religious groups who have found a fertile soil in the US. The specific history and geography of the US has shaped a mental climate for which two experiences were dominant: the absence of an exterior territorial force that could resist expansion and the freedom to create whatever you want.  The first has induced a lack of interest in and knowledge of the motives of people outside the American continent and the second a contempt for people who fail because they have themselves to blame and not the world outside.  

The freedom to make what you want has a perverse effect on the valuing of facts. After the Iraq war an aide to President George W. Bush boasted to be glad not to belong to the ‘reality-based community’ (the critical journalists) because ‘We are an Empire now and create our own reality’. Conversely, this has also led to a broadly shared distrust against bureaucracy, at least where it touches the citizen. No wonder that it is easy to believe in fraud at the elections.

All this does not alter the fact that the average American holds democracy in high esteem, also as a matter of national pride. This attitude conceives of democracy as the guard of individual freedom. As soon as collective interests are at stake – as in the case of Covid-19 control – unbridgeable gaps open between the parties. In this respect democracy is not facilitated by a two-party system.

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info-war

America’s election outcome is not comforting

The American election struggle has made the ideal of democracy as a safeguard for pragmatic decisions about the future (promoting peace, wealth, and equality) into an illusion. It is not guaranteed that a party with a reality-based program (for example about foreign policy) will win elections if it runs against misconceptions that have taken root in the public. It should be the duty of any political leader to correct misconceptions but as Paul Pillar correctly concluded in his book ‘Why America Misunderstands the World’ (2016) “Probably no one has ever won an election in the United States by telling citizens how ignorant or biased they are” (p. 158).

American misconceptions ensue from its history and geography (Dijkink 1996). The history of a self-contained state, untouched by the mischief reigning elsewhere in the world, and capable of creating itself by individual – although violent – action, has inspired both a lack of interest in and knowledge of the outside world and a hostility against government in general (the ‘deep state’ myth)  including scientifically based rules (like the response to the Covid-19 pandemic). It also entails a contempt for facts because ‘we have the power to create the world as we like it’:  facts merely describe the past.

These attitudes most clearly reside in the Republican Party and most shamelessly in the discourse of Donald Trump and his circle. It leads to a vision of foreign affairs as a struggle against an ‘endless series of demons’ (Pillar) which of course ends in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even the presidency of a Democratic candidate will be scourged by this discourse that continues to be used as a lethal weapon by his adversaries.

This electoral struggle has dealt a blow to the world both in credibility of the USA and belief in democracy as a stable political system.

Gertjan Dijkink, National Identity and Geopolitical Visions, Routledge : London, New York, 1996.

Paul R. Pillar, Why America Misunderstands the World. Columbia University Press : New York, 2016.

America: the last refuge of democracy (cartoon)
America and ‘war-mad Europe’ (Carey Orr 1933)