Yang Cheng: Reconstructing the "scope of identity" in Europe? The deep cultural structure of the Ukrainian crisis
China News Service, Beijing, March 12 Title: Reconstructing the "Scope of Identity" in Europe? The deep cultural structure of the Ukrainian crisis
Author Yang Cheng, Executive Dean, Shanghai Institute of Global Governance and Regional Country Studies, Shanghai University of Foreign Chinese
It is generally believed that Russia's current "special military operations" in Ukraine are based on the fact that Russia has adopted preventive diplomacy based on the gradual eastward expansion of the United States and NATO after the end of the Cold War in disregard of Russia's security interests; it is the inevitable result of the West and Russia competing for a "sphere of influence", with a two-way "shock-response" characteristic, thus dooming russia and the West to fall into structural confrontation against each other and find it difficult to ease.
This geopolitical interpretation of great powers based on the zero-sum game at its core has its merits, but the complexity of the Ukraine crisis lies in the fact that it is not only reflected in the friction, conflict and confrontation between Russia and the United States and the West. This is indeed the key element that lasted for eight years and eventually shifted from the proxy war to the brotherhood wall of the two former Soviet republics of Russia and Ukraine, but it is by no means the whole story. On the contrary, Russia's view of history and the different concepts of national, state and regional construction in Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union may be the deep cause of this tragedy.
On December 7, 2021, heavy snow fell in Moscow, the capital of Russia. China News Service reporter Tian Bing photographed
In a lengthy televised speech after signing a presidential decree on Feb. 21 recognizing the "independence" of Donetsk and Luhansk, Putin systematically articulated his views on Ukraine. Within its narrative framework, the physical process of the collapse of the Soviet Union ended on December 25, 1991, when Gorbachev announced his resignation as both first and last president, but its psychological process is far from over and still profoundly affects Russia's complex relations with the former republics, including Ukraine. As part of the "Soviet disintegration syndrome", Putin has abandoned the early thesis that "the establishment of the CIS is the result of the divorce of the civilizations of the Soviet republics" at this moment, and to some extent returned to the key node and scene that determined the fate of the Soviet Union's history.
Because, on December 8, 1991, before the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus decided to sign the Belovezh Agreement declaring the Soviet Union to cease to exist as an international law and geopolitical subject, Yeltsin repeatedly persuaded Ukraine to agree to a three-state alliance with it. But Ukrainian President Kravchuk eventually rejected Yeltsin's proposal, and the two countries entered a long-standing entanglement over "independence" and "union," which eventually triggered a deep crisis in 2014 and now.
By any measure, Ukraine has always played a unique role on the cognitive map of the Russian elite, a central element of its civilizational identity. This is not only because Kievan Rus' has always been regarded as the historical source of contemporary Russia, but more importantly, the process of Russia becoming an empire with important influence on European affairs is closely related to its "movement" to the west and the "voluntary accession" of Ukrainians on the left bank of the Dnieper River. Since then, Ukraine has not only been the point of connection between Russia and the West in the spatial sense, but also the meeting point of the two in the temporal sense, and an important support for Russia to overcome what the Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova called "relative synchronicity within the same region", that is, the difference in time between the modernization of Russia and Europe and gain the status of a core great power.
In March 2014, people at Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine. Photo by Jia Jingfeng, a reporter of China News Service
As an important part of the Russian Empire and a republic of the Soviet Union, Ukraine plays a connecting and dividing role in the interaction between Russia and the West; brings it closer and alienates it; creates conflict and promotes unity; promotes both possible integration and a tendency to divide. For the most part, the sense of empire, great power ambitions, and the idea of controlling relatives and ethnic Ukraine have been the key to Russia's status as a great power, which has entered the subconscious of the Russian elite.
Thus, in Moscow's view, the self-identity of Ukraine and Russia is really two sides of the same coin, each "internal other" to each other. For Russia, Ukraine is not only a continuation of diplomacy, or even just internal affairs, but an indispensable part of the construction of a Russian state identity based on a common history, a common culture, and a common memory.
In this sense, Russia's appeal to Ukraine goes beyond simple geopolitical logic. It is not a direct projection of Russia and NATO and Russian-American relations in Eurasia, but to first obtain a "sphere of identity" that is different from the "sphere of influence". Once recognized by Ukraine and the West, Russia will reap long-term benefits that are far from being a variable "sphere of influence" within the framework of the great power game. Thus, the dispute between Russia and Ukraine over control and counter-control in the field of identity is, to some extent, at least as important as the geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West. Therefore, Andrei Tsigankov, a professor of international relations at the University of San Francisco, has repeatedly stressed that Ukraine has become the bottom line that Putin last insisted on because it concerned Russia's "civilizational interests."
Because of this, Putin's position on Ukraine is also heavily related to the change in Russia's perception of Western civilization. Since Peter the Great promoted modernization reforms centered on the "Europeanization" of key areas, Russia has long learned from Europe and tried to catch up with the latter. Catherine the Great, of German descent, proudly proclaimed To the world Russia's European identity in 1767.
Red Square, Moscow, Russia, with the Kremlin to the west. Photo by Zhao Wei, China News Service
Although there is no shortage of indigenous forces in history that have regarded Russia as an independent "cultural-historical type", they imagined Russia as a "middle world" and eventually established Russia, that is, Eurasia, in the rise of Eurasian ideology. But in general, becoming a core member of European civilization has always been Russia's goal. Gorbachev actively advocated the "common european homeland" in the late Soviet Union, And Yeltsin also advocated "rejoining European civilization", putin in the first two presidential terms since he came to power, repeatedly emphasized Russia's European great power identity, and committed to building the four unified spaces of Russian and European economy, freedom and law, external security, and science and education. It should be said that at this time, Russia has the idea of "greater Europe" that has been embraced by Europe with the help of the Eu, in order to hedge the security threat brought to Russia by NATO's eastward expansion, and to ease or even eliminate the contradictions between Russia and NATO by the common European identity.
The key turning point was in 2012. Putin's return to the Kremlin through the "translocation of the king car" with Medvedev is widely regarded by the United States and the West as the spiritual alienation between Russia and Europe, and thus poses a great challenge to the already weak cooperative relationship. In the eyes of the United States, NATO, and the European Union, the key to the West's emergence as the West is the experience of a high degree of recognition of the creation of civilization in ancient Greece and Rome, the ethics and eschatological revolutions of the Bible, the "papal revolution" of the 11th and 13th centuries, and the major modern democratic revolution similar to the French Revolution with liberal democracy as the main connotation. In this sense, Russia is an atypical West, even on the periphery of Western civilization.
Crimea's incorporation into Russia in 2014 systematically changed Russian-Western relations. At this point, the path of building a "Greater Europe" from Lisbon to Vladivostok reached a dead end, and Moscow began to seek to reshape a "Greater Asia" from St. Petersburg to Shanghai, and finally locked in a "Greater Eurasian" solution that returned to Eurasianism. It was in the wake of the Crimean crisis that elite Russian scholars intensified their criticism of the European Union's preaching of Russian preaching, which prides itself on normative power, arguing that the mentor-apprentice relationship between Europe and Russia no longer exists.
Vladivostok, the capital city of Primorsky Krai, Russia. Photo by China News Service reporter Sheng Jiapeng
The beginning of Brexit in 2016 had a huge impact on European integration, which was seen as a model project in the post-Cold War era, and Russia's criticism of European civilization accordingly entered a climax. At the annual meeting of the Valdai International Debate Club that year, Putin, in a dialogue with foreign dignitaries and well-known scholars from various countries, implied that European (Western) civilization was dead, and only a conservative Russia could save Europe and the world.
So far, Russia's official view of Europe has taken a sharp turn of one hundred and eighty degrees since Putin came to power. In Putin's latest geographical imagination, Russia is the "real Europe", and the EU has become a "fake Europe", thus seeing Europe as the fringe of the "greater Eurasia" dominated by Russia.
The hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in 2021 further cemented Russia's strategic judgment that the West is rapidly "decaying" under conditions of a "universal crisis of capitalism." Russia must seize the "window of opportunity" to smash the old system that is lying on the European continent against Russia. In other words, Moscow sees the return of Ukraine as an important part of consolidating Russia's "civilizational self-confidence" and the only way to provide a cure for the terminally ill West.
However, it is not easy for Putin to seek to construct the "Russian world" that he has frequently referred to in recent years based on a narrative of Russian-centrism. Judging from the current status of the progress of the Current Russian-Ukrainian War, the "scope of identity" that Russia wants to achieve shows at least great uncertainty under the impact of the core geopolitical proposition of "sphere of influence". If Ukraine fails to abandon its claim to Crimea and agree to become a neutral country, as Russia expected, can Russia use its civilizational identity to dissolve Ukraine's growing independence identity in the three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union? The EU agreed to urgently review Ukraine's membership, once again putting the opposition between the "European world" and the "Russian world" on the agenda. Is it possible for Russia to reconstruct the scope of European identity on the grounds that the EU threatens Russia's security?
More crucially, Putin believes that Ukraine has no independent state legitimacy, and the source of its discourse system is actually the division of russia and size during the imperial Russian era. This imaginary community, which transcends nationalism, seems to Ukrainians to be precisely an unequal power structure that they have imposed. Moreover, when it comes to the core proposition of distinguishing between who is in charge and who is subordinate, Russia pursues not imperial but nationalist ideas. This is also why Putin needs to wrap up relations with the identity of the Russian-Ukrainian nation in the vast space of the empire, but when it comes to issues such as Donetsk and Luhansk or Crimea, Putin has retreated to the nationalist position of defending the interests of Russians. For the emerging independent states throughout the post-Soviet space, how to respond to Putin's efforts to establish new "identity areas" has become urgent. (End)
About the Author:
Yang Cheng, Professor of Shanghai Chinese University, Doctoral Supervisor, Executive Dean of Shanghai Institute of Global Governance and Regional Country Studies, Head of Interdisciplinary Discipline of Country and Regional Studies of Shanghai Chinese University, Director of innovation and Wisdom Introduction Base of New Asia-Europe Regional Country Studies, Director of SCO and Trans-Eurasian Integration Center of the "Belt and Road" Country and Regional Research Base of the State Nationalities Commission. He is also the vice president of the Shanghai Society of Russian Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the executive director of the China-Russia Relations History Society, and the chief expert of the Provincial and Ministerial Collaborative Innovation Center for Sino-Russian Comprehensive Strategic Cooperation of Heilongjiang University. He is currently an international editorial board member of five foreign academic journals. He has published more than 60 papers in Chinese, English, Russian, French, German, Japanese and other languages.
Source: China News Network