Majorityrights Central > Category: World Affairs

Geopolitics trumps everything, they say.  That’s a pretty good rule, and pretty apposite in the case of the Russian invasion of Georgia now.  The South Ossetians and Abkhazians are getting what they want, which is freedom from ethnic Georgia.  They will doubtless feel that the military aggression they have wilfully exhibited towards the Georgians has paid off in the most handsome manner imaginable.  But they are only foils for the real objectives of the Russian campaign.  The problem is that no one knows exactly what those objectives are, and how far Russia must go to meet them.  And they ain’t saying.

The possible objectives are:-

1. To prevent Georgia from joining NATO, thereby furthering the latter’s ambition to encircle the bear.

2. To make a gesture in the direction of empire unmistakable to other Western-oriented neighbours, and also to the world community (not coincidental, it seems to me, at the moment when China is announcing to a watching world its own arrival as a major international power).

3. Possibly, if Russia seeks to install a puppet government in a defeated Georgia, to exercise control over the movement of oil and gas supplies across Georgian territory.

Meanwhile, the Western press has moved swiftly to engineer public sympathy for poor little Georgia, notwithstanding the fact that Georgia was an inexplicable aggressor (or almost inexplicable).  Judging from that Telegraph thread not many thinking folk are content to be engineered.

Here’s Stratfor’s somewhat kosher but still worthwhile, current take - not illuminating enough, but as good as I can find at present:-

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Several times over the days since his capture I’ve toyed with putting up a post about Radovan Karadži?.  The angle would have been to speculate on his trial strategy ... on whether there really is forensic evidence for the Srebrenica massacre ... on whether the wider claims of a Bosnian genocide actually stand up ... on whether the issues will remain as clear as the prosecution would want, or whether the realities of Western geopolitics will be forced into the open, to overtake the moral standard.  In a word, will Karadži? do what Miloševi? did prior to his death, and lead the Court by the evidential nose.

But the deeper I got into the researching the issues to a depth sufficient to float the intellectual boat, the more I learned how little I understood, or really have any likelihood of understanding, this extraordinarily dark and challenging event.

I did not understand the region and its peoples and their tremendously complex histories.  I did not adequately understand the Bosnian War itself.  I did not at all understand the legalities and precedent involved in bringing a case before The International Court of the Hague.  I did, I felt, understand the geopolitics of Nato in Bosnia and of the importance to the West’s interests in Serbia of bringing Karadži? and Mladi? to “justice”.  But it wasn’t enough.  Discretion won and I deleted my notes.

Karadži?, however, remains a charismatic and slippery figure, comic in his disguise but also admirable in the roguish but resourceful way he lived.  But he still has that word “Nationalism” attached to him and his, we are told, pitiless, genocidal deeds.  For us it is an unjust attachment because Nationalism is not that, but is something born of love.  Still, those who strive to darken Europe at dawn don’t baulk at such distinctions nor hesitate to use the spectre of Karadži? the War Criminal for their purposes.

We are bound to respond in some way, and this post - a not-post, really - must suffice.  Feel free to broach the issue however you please.

A translation by Fred Scrooby of an article by Prof Robert Steuckers which places the the Serbs’ struggle against national fragmentation in its wider European historical context.

Reflections on Kosovo’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence

The question arises as to whether or not to recognize Kosovo’s independence.  To put it differently:  Can one recognize the right of a population represented by a provincial parliament to declare its independence if most of its representatives are in favor of such a step?

Two principles are involved in this inquiry:

1) The right of peoples to arrange their own affairs, the full right of identity, based on objective criteria and concrete foundations (ethnic, linguistic, historical, etc.), the right of peoples to furnish themselves with their own system of political representation within a given spatio-temporal framework, whether within the framework of a multi-ethnic state (as in the Swiss model) or within a state which envisions a more or less extensive federalism based on alternative models, such as German federalism or the country of autonomous communities that is present-day Spain.  Does this right to autonomy confer the right to independence?  As regards the European context, this question can be debated.

2) The right of European peoples to refuse any Balkanization which weakens the continent as a whole, creating in its midst conflicts which can be exploited by third-party powers foreign to the European continent (in the terminology of Carl Schmitt, “territorially-alien powers” – raumfremde Mächte). 

The first of these principles is a principle of rights; the second, of geopolitics.  Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence presents a contradiction:  because it is unilateral it pits rights against geopolitics, whereas in Europe rights and geopolitics aren’t supposed to be at odds but are supposed to form, together, an indissoluble unit.  Rights should help consolidate the territorial whole, barring the door to all efforts at disruption, and not acquiesce in actions having weakening and fragmentation as their effects.

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Welf Herfurth’s New Right Australia New Zealand blog is hosting it’s first offering from Troy Southgate.  His subject is the meaning of Putin’s Russia, and its function in the emergence of a new geopolitical dispensation.  Obviously, this is a weighty subject, and Troy has only danced lightly across the surface of it.  He offers no closing prediction, except to note that in the modern context expediency will restrain geopolitical ambition.  That’s true, but one might equally assert that stability is not independent of the second law of thermodoynamics, and things change all the time.

GW

RUSSIA IN 2008: THOUGHTS ON HEGELIAN GEOPOLITICS

by Troy Southgate

Despite the negative image of Russia that is currently being portrayed in the media, it seems pretty feasible that Putin - possibly since his last meeting with Bush in 2007 - was eventually persuaded, albeit covertly, to capitulate to Western demands.

That he’s a loyal friend of Russia’s capitalist ruling class is not even up for debate, even if some people in Right-wing circles do seem to respect him for ousting the Jewish oligarchs several years ago. In reality, however, Russian capitalism is no better than its Jewish-dominated counterpart and Putin’s so-called ‘successor’, Dmitry Medvedev, is little more than a puppet of the same socio-economic regime.

But when you stop to think about the vilification of Russia over the last few months, especially with the well-publicised Litvinenko affair, the systematic construction of what many people are interpreting as a ‘new Cold War’ is, in a sense, rather Hegelian. The reason being, that contradiction, of course, eventually leads to reconciliation and some commentators believe that the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula is better expressed in the dictum: ‘problem-alternative-solution’.

Perhaps this potential return to a bi-polar world is a shift beyond Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ strategy in which there is merely one superpower (United States) fighting against an imagined or manufactured opponent (Islam)? Let’s think seriously for a moment about the relationship between the West and Russia in both a Hegelian (after Fichte) and a geopolitical context:

* thesis or intellectual proposition (Western capitalism)
* antithesis or negation of the proposition (Soviet communism)
* synthesis or reconciliation (a gradual alliance, through perestroika, between the two)
* presentation of a new antithesis (Cold War 2, Russia as the ‘new’ bogeyman)

... and so it goes on ...

Russia has not exactly presented a new antithesis in an ideological sense as Soviet Communism claimed to do, of course, and it was Hegel’s view that no new antithesis can ever arise due to the eventual disappearance of extreme ideological and philosophical positions, but this rather idealistic perspective does not seem to take into consideration the fact that convenience will often outweigh genuine revolutionary fervour. It remains to be seen where Islam will fit into all this.

Food for thought.

Two nights of riots  and counting:-

Thirty police officers have been injured in a second night of violence between youths and officers in the flashpoint suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in Paris.

About 160 riot police came under attack in the notoriously crime-ridden district, 20 miles north of the centre of the French capital.

The violence was sparked on Sunday by the deaths of two young boys, who were killed when their moped collided with a police car.

The boys who died were said by locals to be “aged between 12 and 13”.

Police insisted that their car had not been chasing the boys when the crash occurred soon after dusk.

Two years ago just such an event triggered 20 nights of rioting, and accounted for almost 9,000 torched vehicles and 2,888 arrests.  A state of emergency was declared.  The French media stopped reporting the incidence of burned cars for fear of giving succour to Le Front National.  And in April of this year Nicolas Sarkozy got himself elected, in part by stealing the FN’s clothes.

Now there’s no incentive for Sarko the American to play to white France.  He’ll look to avoid inflaming the situation, and distance himself from it if the unrest continues.

My thanks to Desmond Jones for this link (pdf) which details a draft resolution before the UN General Assembly on the rights of indigenous peoples.  Since it is inconceivable that the peoples of Europe can be winnowed out of this resolution, even on the grounds of past colonialism, it is a significant codification of our status as peoples even potentially under threat.

There are several formulations in this document that struck me as interesting.  But the plainest and most applicable to our uses is Article 8:-

1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to
forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.

2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress
for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their
integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;

(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their
lands, territories or resources;

(c) Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of
violating or undermining any of their rights;

(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;

(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic
discrimination directed against them

You don’t need me to draw the picture for you.  Our efforts against the replacers and their useful idiots will only be strengthened by this.

From BBC News:-

The people of Turkey are voting in a general election which is seen as a crucial test of its secular tradition.

The early election was called to resolve a political crisis after parliament repeatedly failed to agree on a candidate for president.

Secular parties and the powerful military blocked the nomination of a candidate for the post backed by the Islamic-rooted ruling AK Party.

They said Turkey’s secularism was in danger - a claim the AKP dismissed.

... Voters have been heading home from the beaches by the coach load, interrupting their holidays to take part in the polls, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford in the capital Ankara says.

Some of them say they have made a special effort to come back this time because they believe that the secular system needs to be protected, our correspondent says.

The role of religion here will be a key issue at the ballot box, and so will Turkey’s relations with the outside world, our correspondent adds.

Nationalist sentiment is running high, fed by bitter disappointment with the EU. Renewed fighting with separatist Kurds and talk of an incursion into northern Iraq will also influence the result, she says.

It is in our interests for the revolt against the Turkish political Establishment, which saw the Islam-rooted Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi become the largest party in the Grand National Assembly in the November 2002 election, to continue today.  And it will.  Last time AK attracted close to 11 million votes, or 34%.  Polls suggest that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be returned with around 40% this time.

More surprising, perhaps, is that the long-moribund Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, the traditional vehicle for nationalist sentiment, could leapfrog the two steeply-declining Establishment parties, and come in second.  An Assembly dominated by religious conservatism and Turkish nationalism is tantamount to a civilian coup!

From a majoritarian European perspective this is most welcome.  Indeed, any reflection anywhere of national character and the popular will in government is welcome to us.  These things portend distinctiveness, and distinctiveness yearns for distance.  Any consequent retreat from the homogenising cast of “modern” politics that we see throughout the West, and which finds its ultimate expression in the international institutions, is a good.  In Turkey’s case the revolt against the modern world was initiated by the failure of a political status quo under the pressure of unsympathetic external forces, namely the dealings of the EU in frustrating Turkey’s ascession, the encouragement given by America to the Kurds, and the growing influence of Putin’s Russia in the region.

One wonders whether there is a major historical dynamic appearing here, very fragile though it might yet be.  One wonders what that might mean for Western power and Western-led internationalism in a post-Iraq era.  One wonders what opportunities at the level of national politics might then arise.

Martin Hutchinson’s latest offering at Prudent Bear revisits the geopolitics of Ukraine.  It is a subject we have covered only once, quite early on in the Orange Revolution.

GW

The apparent revival of the Cold War by Vladimir Putin causes those of us nostalgic for the unpleasant certainties of a bipolar world to ponder whether the Domino Theory should also be revived. Indeed it should, and the domino currently wobbling most vigorously, magnificent in its precariousness, is Ukraine. Ukraine gets limited press in the West, but its fate over this long summer may well determine the geo-strategic and economic outlook for the next generation.

Contrary to most Western reporting on Ukraine, the struggle there is not bipolar but tripolar. Favoring an economy dominated by publicly owned behemoths of heavy industry is the current prime minister Viktor Yanukovych, strong in the ethnically Russian eastern areas of the country and proponent of closer ties with Moscow.

Vladimir Putin regarded Yanukovych as the natural successor to Ukraine’s previous corrupt and economically stagnant president Leonid Kuchma, so when in 2004 his election was opposed by the “Orange Revolution” of pro-Western forces he was furious, believing that the West had no business interfering in an election so close to the Russian heartland.

He need not have worried. The Orange Revolution candidate for President Viktor Yushchenko, in spite of having married an American wife and during the campaign suffering a mysterious poisoning that would foreshadow the unexpected demise of so many of Russia’s opponents in years to come, was a weak social democrat, also favoring a group of big corporate oligarchs, those of ethnically Ukrainian nationality from western Ukraine. 

Essentially, like so many East European leaders from Mikhail Gorbachev through the socialists currently running Hungary, Yushchenko believed in an a non-existent “Third Way” under which a nominally capitalist economy would avoid the disruption of rapid change and preserve existing business structures. He was thus favored by the EU, the Financial Times and the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, all of whom tend to like social democrat compromisers who won’t rock the boat. Nevertheless, when the Orange Revolution won the election re-run in December 2004, the world outside the Kremlin rejoiced.

It quickly became obvious that the Orange Revolution forces were far from united. Yushchenko appointed as prime minister his main ally, Julia Tymoshenko, but within a year had fallen out with her, to the extent that he dismissed her and called new elections in early 2006. These resulted in the revival of Yanukovych as leader of the largest party in parliament, with Tymoshenko second and Yushchenko’s forces reduced to third. Even though Yushchenko and Tymoshenko still had a parliamentary majority if their forces combined, Yushchenko chose to throw in his lot with Yanukovych.

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