Who are we?

In the Middle Ages wars were very much an affair for kings and their nobility. If you were a peasant your options were to be forced into foot soldiery, having your village raped and pillaged, or keeping your head down and hoping things passed you by. When hostilities concluded you might find yourself living in a different country, or, if that is too anachronistic, living under a different ruler. This would probably have made little difference to you. You would carry on your geographically constricted life, speaking the same language and still paying extortionate rent that kept your existence strictly subsistant.

The wars of religion offered an idealistic component that ‘elevated’ them above mere struggles for power. And with the emergence of nation-states patriotism could become a factor, though armies could still be full of mercenaries and contain only a minority in the ranks from the putative nation they were fighting for. But even in the latter case there was little to suggest that the outcome would have a material impact on the life of the general populace. Napoleon perhaps offers an exception with the spread of his jurisprudence, rigorously logical weights and measures, and, in the case of the Dutch, surnames.

Even as late as the First World War there is little evidence of a better life offered by either side or indeed any intent to conquer and subjugate. Reparations would have been extracted either way and the troops withdrawn. This would obviously inflict economic hardship on the defeated party, but to the extent that ‘the ultimate sacrifice’ was justified for the rank and file? World War Two stands as the great example of a just war, and a just victory. Hitler’s unique evil gainsaying any attempt at cynicism. This carries a lot of weight, particularly if you belong to one of the minorities he identified for extermination. But the hackneyed claim that “you’d be speaking German if it weren’t for us” is less persuasive. Would that really be such an awful fate? One that is worth the sacrifice of so many lives?

So far, so Noah Harari. What then do the combatants of the war in Ukraine offer the populations that are suffering and dying in the conflict? In the case of Russia it doesn’t bear much examination. Putin’s best pitch is that Ukraine belongs in the arms of Mother Russia. There is a spiritual component offered in terms of unity under the Russian Orthodox church. These benefits are not economic nor social. It is the atavistic embrace of blood and soil. Life would be changed only by a greater restriction on social and political freedom, a conservative attitude that interprets diversity as a threat explicitly to civil cohesion, and implicitly to the regime. Its limited appeal makes it obvious why it needs to be enforced by the barrel of a gun. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is really all about the continuance in power of Vladimir Putin.

For the Ukraine things are more complicated. Economic comparison with Russia is mixed, and by no means differentiating. Just as in Russian, racism and homophobia appear to be prevalent. And politically the contribution of neo-Nazis to the turmoil of the last decade are not solely the product of fevered Russian propaganda. Despite all this, the unquestionable personal courage of Zelensky and viral distribution of clips of defiant Ukrainian citizens have created a wave of sympathy in the west which is unprecedented, and has created the sense that the people of Ukraine are ‘like us’ in a way that evades their counterparts over the border in Russia. This mood has reached the highest echelons of the EU as well as a staggeringly disparate array of western corporations, as cancel culture is applied to Russia by the likes of Ikea and Volkswagen. This may be the first LinkedIn war, as the white collar middle class embrace the inspirational message of the resistance and laud the leadership qualities of the president. leadership being the sin qua non of corporate types who find the term manager insufficiently Randian.

All the talk of us standing with Ukraine and the claim by Ursula von der Leyen that Ukraine is one of us, raise the tricky question of who ‘we’ are. In the science fiction novel The City and The City by China Mieville a divided population inhabits two superimposed cities, each ignoring the existence of the other. This is not unlike the results of our 50%-ism democracy. Elections and referenda produce results which are considered decisive if the victors carry 50-something percent of the voters. Afterwards one half of the population gets to wallow in the happy delusion that theirs is the dominant view. The issue declaration couched in terms of what the nation can’t/shan’t/won’t sanction, what it needs, what it deserves and produce definitive statements of what it is, cast in their own image. Meanwhile the losers are left to feel like sullen strangers in their own land, alienated by the prevailing mood, spitting futile expletives at the television when the elected leaders appear.

This creates a dangerous confidence in those leaders that they somehow speak for everyone, that their victory at the polls has had a transformative effect on the people they govern. Without even the need for an election the Ukrainian war has offered an opportunity for the liberal nexus in the west which has suffered a series of reverses in recent years to coalesce around a cause which gives them the almost forgotten sensation of being in the ascendancy, their opponents hamstrung by the having to avoid looking like Putin apologists. However as with all cases of 50%-ism this is a deception. The populations of the west contain plenty of people who are no less racist and homophobic than Russians or Ukrainians. They are as culturally conservative and wary of progressive causes as anyone. They wouldn’t feel out of place in these cultures of the east and might even welcome a bracing blast of authoritarianism in their own countries. As the boomers and generation Xers among us struggle to remind ourselves that Russia is no longer ideologically opposed to the west, there are significant numbers in the United States in particular who look with a degree of envy to the society which Putin has created and is insistent on imposing on the Ukraine.

The giddy sensation conjured by social media that the doughty Ukrainians are winning and can win is more than likely overshot. It is what many of us want to believe, for reasons that have spread far beyond the direct consequences of the conflict. Belief is always in some part desire.