
November 07, 2014
Meet Zeldenrust, "the one that seldom rests."
This smock mill is one of the hundreds of its kind in the Netherlands' northwestern Friesland region.
Meet Zeldenrust, "the one that seldom rests."
This smock mill is one of the hundreds of its kind in the Netherlands' northwestern Friesland region.
The dominance of a single narrative of globalization and liberal democracy is over.
Map of the world, focus North America
-Analysis-
MEXICO CITY — As the Bolshevik leader Lenin once observed, there are decades when nothing happens and weeks in which decades take place. The big turns in history tend to go unnoticed in their decisive moments because daily life doesn't suddenly change for most people around the world.
Stay up-to-date with the latest on the Russia-Ukraine war, with our exclusive international coverage.
Sign up to our free daily newsletter.Yet in retrospect, certain moments become crucial. Everything suggests the invasion of Ukraine is one of those turning points, with enormous implications for the world's future.
There have been other dramatic turning points in recent history, like the end of World War II, the fall of the Soviet Union and creation of the European Union, or China's estrangement from the West, especially after the 2008 financial crisis.
While certain elements of the "new" future were taking shape before the invasion of Ukraine — like the militarized artificial islands China has been building in the South China Sea — the direct clash of Russia and the Western block has ushered in a new phase. It is certainly the end of the notion of "holidays" from history put forward by the writer George Will. It means the end of the idea that we could all escape the logic of big-power interests and collectively play under the same rules. Geopolitics are back.
This was an outcome that has been long in the making. After the end of the Cold War, economic decisions became the priority. All nations devoted themselves to winning investments to fuel their economic growth and development. The writer Francis Fukuyama famously wrote of The End of History, which firms and governments eagerly adopted as a mantra. Capitalism had won and the world was now "flat," said the journalist Thomas Friedman.
Apparently it made no difference anymore whether you invested in Germany or in Zambia. While more cautious observers like the historian Samuel Huntington insisted on enduring cultural and political differences, the dominant idea was of the world as a market.
The rise of a series of strongman rulers in the last decade was a sign of change. Regardless of their attributes or defects, their emergence reflected new socio-political realities in countries as diverse as Brazil, the United States, Turkey, China or Mexico.
When Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, says economic decisions must be subordinate to political decision-making, the message is clear: to hell with the Davos model. For citizens and business people, this means a government much less concerned with development and more with subordination, power and control.
These circumstances show a clear trend, identified by Huntington, which may very well become a new geopolitical reality with the Ukrainian war. The U.S. government has always tended to take decisions that overlook its commercial commitments: its size and nature lead it to suppose that the rest of the world will simply adapt.
A recent example was subsidies for electric cars, which will remove incentives to set up plants in Mexico (and Canada), showing how economic rationalism has become subordinate to political factors. For Mexico, this is a sign of developments ahead.
The return of zones of influence will not be a repeat of what existed in the Cold War, but will change the way nations interact. The information economy and AI era are changing the nature of political and economic activity, while certain rising powers, like India, will be able to limit the weight and impact of the two or three main zones of influence likely to emerge (the U.S., Russia and China).
In historical terms, zones of influence meant the preeminence of powers able to exert a measure of control and restrictions on surrounding nations. In the digital era and with the prevalence of real power factors like Sino-American rivalry in various fields, the new setup will very likely prove more tense, unpredictable and conflict-prone than the simpler, bipolar Cold War.
Separately, a nation's greatest defense in this new reality is obvious: it must fortify its development, which is only possible with a clearly focused government and a society free of major tensions. Without these, we can expect a complicated future.
The dominance of a single narrative of globalization and liberal democracy is over.
French President Emmanuel Macron is making a point of keeping an open dialogue with Putin, hoping to avoid a world war at all costs. But he needs to get his historical comparisons (and world wars) in order.
Attacks in Ukraine's second biggest city are reminiscent of strategy in Mariupol.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.