Crisis 22
Fearless Leader of the Global South
The New Bung Karno - Les Humiliés - Global Sing-Along
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The New Bung Karno
In his rhetoric Putin often claims to be a champion of the emerging multi-polar order and the global south, two concepts that he shamelessly distorts and exploits.
In his speeches, President Sukarno often got carried away with his own rhetoric, yet he basically had a point about the past abuse of European colonial powers, and about the neocolonialism of the United States. Sukarno had fought for independence from the Dutch and tried in his own way to give Indonesians a sense of pride in their country. The following video gives an idea of his thinking, and contains the following quote:
Imperialism and colonialism are the fruit of the system of the Western state, and the feeling of the vast majority of the Organization […] I hate imperialism, I am disgusted with colonialism, and I am worried about the consequences of its last bitter struggle of life.
Of particular relevance to Putin’s twisted rhetoric are the following words about Sukarno’s aims. I take these words directly from the transcript of the video, and I put Sukarno’s categories in bold:
first nationalism […] it emphasized that the state sovereignty and nationalism is efficient […] that should not be constrained by anyone […] second the equality of sovereignty and human rights which underlines the solution of solving the conflicts without any violence […] the equality of sovereignty for all nations which emphasize on the human rights […] third anti-colonialism and imperialism it claims that colonialism and imperialism should be dismissed in order to create a just and peaceful world
Sukarno, despite the autocratic shortcomings of his “Guided Democracy,” understood the concepts of sovereignty, colonialism, and imperialism. Putin either doesn’t understand these concepts or he distorts them beyond recognition.
Sukarno understood that one of the most fundamental guarantors of peace was respect for national borders, for sovereignty and signed treaties. One nation could influence, trade, compete, and argue with another, but they couldn’t fuck with the borders. The days of that were gone. Nations could no longer take land from other nations, no matter what reason they gave. And if you aren’t attacked, you have no right to breach the perimeter, or drop bombs on your neighbouring state. Putin doesn’t accept this fundamental point — a point that Sukarno and the UN and almost every nation on earth accepts (the Americans are also guilty of not accepting this point in Vietnam and Iraq). And yet he calls Western nations colonialists and imperialists.
While Sukarno presided over a positive transition in Indonesia’s history, Putin has done the opposite. Having witnessed the collapse of native Russian communism (the dictatorships of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev), he then witnessed the hard times that followed. He initially seemed to want to integrate Russia into the world economy and trade system. Yet sometime around 2008 it became more likely that he had other ideas in mind. Eventually it became clear that not only would he crush local revolts, as he had done in Chechnya in the 1990s, but he would extend Russian power in Georgia and Ukraine.
Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and started to re-create the kind of closed and fearful society of the bad old days of the Cold War. Yet still he presented himself as a champion of a liberating system, of decolonization, and anti-imperialism. And yet he continued to constrain his citizens and invade his neighbours.
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Les Humiliés
In a recent video (here), Bertrand Badie argues that politics is still largely about security. Going back further in history than Locke’s liberal democracy, Badie suggests that the Russian deal with Putin is the same one Hobbes told us about in Leviathan (1622): quaking citizens trade liberty for security; they back a tyrannical leader so long as he gives them peace, prosperity, and order.
In The Time of the Humiliated (Le Temps des Humiliés), published four years before the Russian invasion of 2022, Badie reminds us about the backlash that can be expected from people who have been humiliated by those who have more economic and military power. The fierceness and determination of this backlash not only explains how the Vietnamese and Afghans beat more powerful nations, but also why Macron in the first years of the Ukraine War warned us against humiliating Russia, which clearly went through difficult (but not necessarily humbling!) years after Gorbachev allowed freedom to the Eastern Block, from The Baltic states to Bulgaria and Ukraine.
Badie’s notion of the humiliated must be applied against Russia (as Macron eventually recognized), because Russia is now in the process of humiliating and decimating the Ukrainians. Indeed, they never really relented — let alone repented— their 500-year old imperialism, unlike Germany after WWII, and unlike England after 1947 (the year of Indian and Pakistani independence). Not only did Russia retain an enormous chunk of the earth; it continued to manipulate and suppress much of it, from Bielorussia and Ukraine to Chechnya and the many oblasts and Stans stretching from the Urals to the Pacific.
Still, given that the Russians feel they were humiliated at the end of the Cold War, it’s reasonable to ask, When do the humiliated become the humiliators? When they finally drop the communist rhetoric about a godly intelligentsia that liberates the wretched of the earth from the ravages of capitalism, chaotic government, and unbridled freedom of thought? When they turn off the gas to a nation that doesn’t want to trade in the manner they demand? When they threaten nuclear strikes against a nation which agreed to give them their nuclear weapons in exchange for the promise of territorial sovereignty? When they bomb dams, power stations, and hospitals? When they double-bomb the medics as they rise from the rubble to tend to the victims?
In such a situation the state becomes less a protector than a Leviathan, and Badie’s final question brings us back to where we began: What happens when two states, each vowing to guarantee their people’s security, can’t see eye to eye? His answer is of course: La Guerre.
Add to this that Putin isn’t even keeping his end of his devilish bargain. By unleashing war on Europe and on what he calls the Western international order, he takes from the Russian people the prospect of peace, prosperity, and order.
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The Global Sing-Along (in Which Putin Frees the People, Just Like Stalin)
Much of what Putin says about the world is true, just as much of what Marx and Lenin said was true: some nations lord it over others, and the unfairness of it all warrants a revolution. Yet Lenin’s version of revolution didn’t fix the problem, and Putin’s will only make it much worse. To pretend that somehow Russia is a postcolonial model for the world is like saying Genghis Khan was a model for Central Asian cities like Nishapur, birthplace of astronomers and poets like Attar and Khayyam. (Note: the Mongols decimated Nishapur in 1221).
To put it in simple terms, no state ought to get away with invading their neighbour and then pretend to liberate them. And no state can forcefully retain within its borders entire cultures (Chechen, Ossetian, Tartar, etc.) and yet pretend to be a model of decentralized, postcolonial multiculturalism, and on top of that claim to be a defender of the Global South.
Putin’s postcolonial points are nothing new and have already been made consistently since the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The overriding point here is that postcolonialists don’t invade their neighbours in the style of the old colonial powers. And yet Putin, the self-styled leader of the multipolar world, does.
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Next: 🇺🇦 Golden Bridges