Molotov Cocktail Of Anarchy: A Realist, Liberal & Constructivist Commentary On Russia Ukraine Crisis

A Ukrainian serviceman speaks backdropped by a bullet riddled effigy of Russian President Vladimir Putin during a media interview at a frontline position in the Luhansk region, eastern Ukraine. Source: AP Photo /Vadim Ghirda

In the epoch of Buddha, the ancient kingdom of Magadh launched a war of conquest over its neighbor Vaishali. While Magadh was the usual monarchy that sustained a big army and bolstered its collection of weapons of assault, “Vaishali was some kind of an anarchic street democracy where people spent all their time arguing over whether to fight, how to fight, who will fight.” (ThePrint)

Sure enough, Magadh annihilated and massacred the poorly armed Vaishali. When the news got to a meditating Buddha, it seems, he frowned in disapproval. To put forth realism’s theorization of the absence of any supra-state actor capable of ordering the international system or in other words, under the condition of anarchy, ‘to have peace, one should posit the capability to maintain peace, or it will meet Vaishali’s fate’. Since Crimean annexation in 2014, Ukraine was the Vaishali to Russia’s Magadh.

At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine had the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal. In the aftermath of the 1994 Budapest accord, Ukraine returned to Russia almost 2,000 nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the breakup of the Soviet Union, in return for security guarantees by the US, Europe and Russia. “However, one of the guarantors has now invaded Ukraine; the second one, Europe, is looking for a place to hide and ruing its possible loss of cheap gas; and the third, the US, is doing no more than pour tender love and care.” Now as Buddha would be frowning at Ukraine’s fate. The question that will continue to echo for decades to come is, would it have been so simple for Putin’s Russia to crush Zelenskyy’s Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear stockpile after the Budapest accord in 1994? For Ukraine has not only become an enduring advertisement for the link between WMD (weapon of mass destruction) and state sovereignty. Being at the receiving end of a powerful state’s unrestrained destruction,” Ukraine is making many nations, comfortable today in the aura of guarantees, uncomfortable” (ThePrint)

Paying allegiance to the realist argumentation of a state pursuing its self-interest  in a system of perpetual anarchy (with this condition of absence of any omnipotent figure ruling the international order, worsened by the western state’s greed for power and the expansionist tendencies of western military alliances). As Russia turned into Europe’s Hobbesian nightmare, it justified its intervention, claiming to be defending itself from a generalized threat posed predominantly by the United States and other NATO members but emanating from Ukraine. As John Mearsheimer articulated, “the trouble over Ukraine actually started at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, when George W. Bush’s administration pushed the alliance to announce that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members”. Russian leaders responded immediately with outrage, characterizing this decision as an existential threat to Russia and vowing to thwart it.” Similarly, in a lengthy speech justifying the invasion, Putin derided the U.S. and NATO for their military intervention in Kosovo, the invasion of Iraq (ridiculing the American claims about their intelligence), the overly expansive and disingenuous interpretation and application of a Security Council resolution on Libya and the consequent collapse of the country, as well as the ongoing attacks in Syria. ‘In general,’ asserted Putin, ‘one gets the impression that practically everywhere … the West comes to establish its own order, the result is bloody, unhealed wounds, ulcers of international terrorism and extremism.’ The Russian state went to the extent of designating to itself the position of an agent acting in collective self-defense of separatist areas in Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk regions, which the Kremlin recognized as independent states three days before its invasion.

 

As a 21st-century version of the malevolent biblical leviathan, armed with weapons of mass destruction, Russia presents a difficult challenge-not just to Ukraine but brings into question the viability of European security order itself.

Reconciling the dilemmas of sovereignty and interdependence, seeking protections and preserving rights within and between states, while liberalism aims to tame the animus dominandi of international order and ameliorate the condition of anarchy through interdependence. However, obedience to similar values does not always breed cooperation amongst states. As Moravscik articulated, “States require a ‘purpose’, a perceived underlying stake in the matter at hand, in order to propose cooperation, or take any other significant foreign policy action. The precise nature of these stakes drives policy”. Thereby, even if we were to leave aside the undue advantage enjoyed by Russia by the virtue of being one of the P5 members of the UNSC, “unlike during the cold war, the opponent is not someone behind an iron curtain but someone from whom you buy gas and to whom you export high-tech goods”. (Krastev & Leonard) Europe is deeply tied to Russian imports of oil, natural gas, and coal. The EU pays $110 billion a year to Moscow for these imports. That the EU cannot boost Russian revenues while Moscow wages war in Europe is beginning to dawn on European chancelleries.

If Ukraine were a NATO member, the alliance would be obligated to defend it against Russia and other adversaries. “However France and Germany have in the past opposed Ukraine’s inclusion, and other European members are wary — a deal breaker for an alliance that grants membership only by unanimous consent.” (Wong &Jakes) Fearing higher energy prices, a refugee crisis, cyber-attacks, or Russian military action in retribution, while Europeans are ready to stand behind the former Soviet nation, they are less enthusiastic about paying the transactional costs of deterring Russia militarily. With the principal objection being: “Does such a move actually contribute to the stability in Europe, or would it contribute to destabilization?” said Douglas E. Lute, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Although it is tempting to assert that cooperation is possible under anarchy, however any account of (non) cooperation among them requires a shifting of the gaze to the conditions & pre conditions that defines the terms of cooperation amongst multiple actors.For, the fear of NATO nation state’s to get embroiled into a war with Russia and their subsequent reluctance to include Ukraine within its security matrix has much to do with Ukraine’s identity as a former Soviet state than only what liberalism argues as “states being rational actors will be unwilling to go to war due to transaction costs”. Then the Russian intervention transcends beyond the Ukrainian border, putting into question the viability of the 'identity' of the European security collective as well. Thereby, identities have much more meaning for each state than a mere label. “The identity of a state implies its preferences and consequent actions. A state understands others according to the identity it attributes to them, while simultaneously reproducing its own identity through daily social practice” (Mitzen)

Tanya Nedashkivska 57 mourns the death of her husband who was killed in the Bucha massacre. Source: AP Photo/Rodrigo 

 “You could sit on your chair and pick over the language

as if it were a bowl of peas. / A lot of people do that.

It might be instructive. / You don’t even need the chair.

You could juggle plates of air.”

(Margaret Atwood, The Door) 

To interpret Putin’s forceful incursion into the sovereign soil of Ukraine and the use of legal dictums by the former to justify the same, crucial becomes the understanding of the interplay of identity, political discourse and what Jennifer Mitzen argued as the “the need for ontological security of a person extrapolated to the level of the state”.

“Ontological security is security not of the body but of the self, the subjective sense of who one is, which enables and motivates action and choice----The idea is rather that individuals value their sense of personal continuity because it underwrites their capacity for agency.”(Mitzen)While the unmitigated regime expansion of the western alliance in a situation of anarchy can be seen as one of the primary cause of Putin’s existential crisis. However in Putin mirroring NATO’s attempt at inculcating Ukraine (an Ex-Soviet state) within its folds by invading Ukraine instead as a counter measure and simultaneously putting forth the justification of the Russian invasion as an attempt to prevent genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime against Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine, the idea of ‘anarchy’ not only becomes an inter-subjective construction, acquiring meaning in the interplay of multiple social variables. Furthermore, the painting of “the phantom specter of Ukraine as a purported fascist—which posits Ukraine as an enemy equivalent to Nazi Germany and therefore worthy of Russia’s ire as the country that won World War II, justifying almost any moral transgressions.”(Mcglynn) provides evidence to the existence of a “continuum of anarchies” (for Putin it is constituted domestically and both externally vis a vis the west, for Ukraine the idea of anarchy is embodied by Russia’s intervention etc) that is being constructed, performed and expanded continually to serve as an excuse for a state’s action and as a “means for reconciling with oneself”.

Finally, one is replete with options when it comes to picking the priced ingredient to add to the Molotov cocktail of anarchies as it get prepared and distributed in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. One can choose realism and argue for the existential crisis of a state caused by the west, or choose liberalism and attempt to ‘poke sticks through the chain-link fences’ of the liberal institutions that encircles the animus dominandi of the international order, or add constructivism to the mix and grapple with the idea of the insecurity of a state leader. But no matter which side of the anarchy problématique we choose, the bloodied reality remains the same: Ukraine Is Burning, And Innocents' Lives Are Being Extinguished In Vain.

References

Hopf, Ted. “The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory.” International Security, vol. 23, no. 1, 1998, pp. 171–200, doi.org/10.2307/2539267. Accessed 21 April 2022.

“John Mearsheimer on Why the West Is Principally Responsible for the Ukrainian Crisis.” The Economist, 17 Mar. 2022, www.economist.com/by-invitation/2022/03/11/john-mearsheimer-on-why-the-west-is-principally-responsible-for-the-ukrainian-crisis.

Ikenberry, G. John. “The end of liberal international order?”, International Affairs, Volume 94, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 7–23, doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix241

Krastev, Ivan, Mark Leonard. “The Crisis of European Security: What Europeans Think about the War in Ukraine.” ECFR, 9 Feb. 2022, ecfr.eu/publication/the-crisis-of-european-security-what-europeans-think-about-the-war-in-ukraine.

Loconte, Joseph. “Putin’s Bloody Leviathan.” The Heritage Foundation, www.heritage.org/europe/commentary/putins-bloody-leviathan. Accessed 21 April 2022.

McGlynn, Jade, and Ian Garner. “Russia’s War Crime Denials Are Fuel for More Atrocities.” Foreign Policy, 23 Apr. 2022, foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/23/propaganda-russia-atrocity-bucha.

Mitzen, Jennifer. “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma.” European Journal of International Relations, vol. 12, no. 3, Sept. 2006, pp. 341–370, doi:10.1177/1354066106067346.

Moravcsik, Andrew. “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics.” International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 51, no. 4, 1997, pp. 513–553., doi:10.1162/002081897550447.

“Why Buddha Would Be Frowning at Ukraine Today, and Why India Got It Right with Pokhran 1 and 2.” YouTube, uploaded by ThePrint, 26 Feb. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cTtRUs1ywU.