The Power Of Absent Things.

It explains a lot about Ukraine.

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Thanks to those who continue to provide translations. Versions in Spanish are available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is also posting some Italian translations, and has set up a dedicated website for them here.

I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about the bizarre complaisance of the western political classes and the Professional and Managerial Caste that serves them, in the face of the disastrous development of the crisis in Ukraine. I’ve cited it as an aspect of their inability to face up to real problems that require adult solutions. I’ve talked about the hall-of -mirrors effect, where people in a political and strategic bubble talk only to each other, hear only their own thoughts repeated, read only their own opinions restated, and are constantly reassuring each other that everything is going to be fine.

More recently, we’ve seen the same collective myopia applied to the crisis in Gaza, never mind the long-standing and disturbing incapacity of governments to even think about longer-term issues such as resource depletion, energy shortages, climate change and whatever the next epidemic is going to be (currently it looks like measles.) What’s interesting is that, with the partial exception of Gaza, the silence is not one of embarrassment because the subjects are controversial among the elites of the various nations. The reverse is actually true. Indeed, there are subjects, like immigration, where the PMC of western states walks in lock-step with each other, glancing around suspiciously in case someone is not keeping up, and decreeing that the word itself is not even to be mentioned, because it might, like some magic phrase, let loose the demons of the extreme Right. Or something.

I’ve offered various explanations for this, including an adolescent political class, a disastrous fall in the quality of that class’s basic skills, as well as the influence of history and symbolism. I’ve talked about the sheer complexity and the supertanker nature of international relations. I want to bring some of these points together now, through an approach (I wouldn’t presume to call it a theory) which once more conducts a smash-and-grab raid on some philosophical concepts, and makes off with an idea which I think is useful. In this case, the immediate victim is Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who has a claim to being the originator of Deconstruction as a body of theory.

Now I have suggested on several occasions that we don’t need to be frightened of writers like Derrida, and deconstructionists generally, since, if you put to one side the surface glitter and paradox which makes up so much of their style, what they say amounts in many cases to an overly-complex re-statement of common sense judgements. So Derrida’s suggestion that there are no final meanings of texts is obviously true, otherwise the final interpretation of Hamlet would have been arrived at years ago, and there would be nothing to write about any more.

Derrida wrote a great deal about writing, and he was especially interested in what he called “traces,” which were residues of elements of the past, or anticipated elements of the future. Language is not stable and autonomous, he says, but contains “traces “ of the past and future, which are not “a presence, but the simulation of a presence.” Shorn of its decorative vocabulary, Derrida’s argument is easy to understand. Words used today have resonances from the past, which may be completely hidden, which may be unconscious, or which may mean different things to different people. They may also have a different significance in the future. All political statements stand on top of a mountain of previous utterances, made in different contexts, and in most cases the original context is only half-remembered, if that. The evocation a few days ago of the “Final Solution” to the Gaza question by the US Ambassador to the UN provoked shivers in many quarters, but it seems unlikely that the drafters of the speech in Washington meant a conscious reference to the Third Reich, nor that in this context (as opposed to others) they would even have recognised it. And every time we hear phrases like “standing up to aggression” mentioned in the context of Ukraine, we have to recognise that behind them is a history of generations of uses of the phrase in different political situations in different parts of the world. (If I had the time and resources, I would found a new discipline called Political Textual Archeology, which would subject political texts to the same close reading as literary ones. I touched on one example here. I think the results would be fascinating, so if you are an academic publisher, do get in touch.)

To the extent that our possibilities for action are limited by what we can express in words, therefore, the accretion of past statements, decisions, communiqués, treaties, joint declarations, things that should not have been said and so forth, represent a real constraint on what can be done now. Persuading ourselves, never mind persuading others, requires a vocabulary and a set of concepts. But the argument can be taken further. Decisions made previously, options accepted or rejected, courses of action ruled out, commitments, promises and threats—all these constitute the part of the iceberg you never see, or in Derrida’s terms the “sediment” which underlies the present. Thus, political speech and political action is impossible to consider in isolation, not just from its “context,” but from everything that has gone before and might happen in the future. An obvious example is the decision to send German tanks named after big cats to Ukraine where they were painted with white crosses and in some cases adorned with neo-Nazi symbols. Imagine trying to explain to a Martian political scientist all the unspoken resonances and ramifications of such an incident, as seen by different groups.

It’s not always as dramatic as that, but in the politics of crisis, fundamentally the same argument always applies. Take, for example, a bilateral meeting between the Foreign Ministers of two European countries, perhaps Belgium and Denmark, to discuss Ukraine in the margins of another meeting. Such a meeting will probably just be an exchange of banalities and mutual support, but the briefing for it will be perched on top of a mountain of internal and external documents and statements. What the Foreign Minister said to Parliament, what was said in Cabinet, what was said to the US, the UK, France  or some other larger state, criticism from the public or the media, policies that have been decided but not yet announced, policies that are still being debated, initiatives taken by other states, publicly and privately, what they said the last time the two met, the last communiqué their nations agreed to, ideas that are circulating at the moment in NATO or the EU, communiqués or other documents that are bring discussed but haven’t been agreed …. and much more, for an exchange that might last twenty minutes. Not only that, but, as Derrida would have suggested, there will lots of things that aren’t there. Too complicated, too controversial, no settled national position, too sensitive to raise with the other side, might provoke disagreement, and so on. It’s always interesting to look at political documents to see what’s missing, that you might logically expect to find, and try to work out why that may be so. Of course if the Foreign Minister of Brazil is visiting the EU, and wants a bilateral with his German opposite number on the same subject, then there will be a whole other series of bilateral and multilateral factors invisibly present at the meeting as well.

This problem is exacerbated by the limited time available, and the sheer complexity of even the most apparently simple security issue. Nobody has the time to go back through all the documents I’ve listed—the “sediment”—so instead whoever is writing the brief, in the short time available, adopts an essentially impressionistic approach. Put that in, leave that out, too long, too complicated, potential hostage to fortune, better make sure we say that, all based on the kind of gut feeling you acquire in that kind of job. Moreover, precisely because crises are so inherently complex, and often involve fine levels of detail, much is quickly forgotten when people move on. What remains is a set of handed-down ideas and assumptions, which may simply be part of the conceptual furniture, which refer back to decisions taken months or even years ago, and which are simply too complex to undo, or even question. A friend of mine coined the term “crisis mismanagement” to describe the process by which, instead of governments managing a crisis, the crisis itself takes over, and governments are left running to catch up.

All this is observably happening over Ukraine, for example, with the recent, rather touching, plea by a former Secretary General of NATO that the alliance should “think out of the box” to help Ukraine. It would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh. But the “box” is not a bad analogy for the narrowing, limiting and vulgarising of thought that Derrida’s sediment produces. It’s clear, for example, that no western politician can say “Russia has won.” The first to do so will be ostracised from the club. So the conference held in Paris over the last couple of days, in the post-Avdeevka panic, was apparently predicated on the requirement that “Russia must not win,” and so fantasies of sending handfuls of western troops were (perhaps) discussed, on the basis that it gave the leaders something to talk about instead of the inevitable Russian victory.

Now put all this together and multiply by dozens of nations with different interests, histories, cultures and interactions with each other, and you have two obvious implications. One is that any common position is going to be very difficult to arrive at, and in many cases will mean different things to different nations. The other, by consequence, is that change is so difficult, and will unearth so many buried problems from the sediment, that it is to be avoided at all costs. Often, a failed policy continues because there is no possibility of an agreed change, and because “something” still has to be done. (I’ll give a couple of examples in a moment.) Suffice it to say that if you were to take a verbatim record of a North Atlantic Council meeting, it would be possible to write an entire book on the “sediment” lying beneath the choice of subjects and the ritualised exchanges.

Historians inevitably try to impose a structure on the events they describe: indeed, if you’ve written any substantial work of history, you know that this is effectively inevitable. Even the earliest strictly chronological list (“in this year King Ethelfrith was killed by his brother Athelthrath”) represents the result of a choice about what to include, and, more importantly, what to leave out. The result is to give historical outcomes, especially over relatively long periods of time, a sense of inevitability that they do not really possess. Whilst few historians are strict determinists, there is a natural temptation to begin at the end, with the outcome of the crisis, and work backwards. Inevitably, those events that seem to have contributed to the outcome as it actually happened will be subliminally stressed in the narrative, at the expense of those going in other directions. Thus, major historical events, which in practice are highly contingent, as I have discussed, take on a certain apparent inevitability. The same is true of instant punditry as well: with enough effort, any significant outcome, no matter how unexpected and chaotic, can be represented as the result of a deep-laid plan of some sort.

This is seldom how it seems at the time. Indeed, one interesting insight from government papers and contemporary memoirs is that we often have a very different perception today even of what crises were about, from that of the participants at the time. Take the Spanish Civil War, for example, which is often painted in bright colours as the precursor to the inevitable bloodbath that followed. Yet for the British, in particular, the real danger of the War was that different countries would take different sides, and that a general European war would result as had been the case in 1914, except this time starting in Madrid, rather than Sarajevo. To this end, France and the UK proposed a Non-Intervention Agreement, which was eventually signed by 27 states. Because the agreement was violated by the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy, it has largely been forgotten, but it was actually behind much of the diplomatic and political activity of the time. As always, motives were different. The Germans and Italians were largely interested in trying out new weapons, the Soviets were less interested in a Republican victory as such, than in preventing the emergence of a socialist state not beholden to Moscow, and the British, ironically, were worried about the possibility of a state in the Mediterranean controlled by Moscow. Meetings of the Non-Intervention Committee must have been fascinating to attend.

This example is typical, in the sense that crises are not, for the most part “managed” but rather reacted to. The actual experience of being in the middle of a crisis is that almost all decisions are small-scale, detailed and taken on the basis of what seems right (or least objectionable, or even just inevitable ) at the time. The result is that the ship of state gets completely lost, and very frequently winds up at a completely unexpected destination. Indeed, after a certain period of time has elapsed, with all its mini-crises, emergency summits, rows and arguments, discussions of fine points of detail, strains on bilateral relationships, and the inevitable irruption of other, unrelated, issues into the debate, it’s easy to forget where you wanted to go, or even what the original question was. It’s very hard to reflect this in historical writing, or even respectable commentary, because it risks leaving the reader befuddled with a mass of unconnected detail. The administrative chaos of Nazi Germany, for example, which was deliberately promoted as part of the Nazi ideology of incessant competition at all levels, is probably the only constant of the Third Reich, but it’s difficult to write a history of chaos, and so historians have selected one or more themes, to give readers something to hang on to. That’s fair enough, but it can mean reading back retrospectively into history objectives of which the actors may not have been fully conscious, or even explicitly disavowed at the time.

In general, grand strategies and long-term policies, which may indeed exist in a document in someone’s cupboard, are not reflected in the actual daily life of crises. Rather, it’s that Derrida’s “sediment” underlies the approaches of different governments, often in a banalised form, and sometimes in a way their own actors aren’t aware of. For example, one of the most frequently asked questions about the end of the Cold War is “why did NATO continue?” It’s a fair question, and it’s one that I asked myself at the time. The simple answer was that, at a point when the world was undergoing convulsions of all kinds, the chances of finding an agreement on the future of NATO were next to zero, so the alliance effectively just rolled on. The more complex answer has to do with the “traces” that Derrida talked about, many of which were never articulated, but well understood to be present, nonetheless.

For many governments, the “traces”left by NATO membership, and the Cold War itself, were so profound and so deeply buried in the sediment that it was genuinely impossible to imagine any alternative. Even informal discussions over lunch effectively got nowhere, because there was no obvious point of departure. Was a collective security organisation still needed? Could you have a Treaty without an organisation to back it up? How to deal with a Soviet Union which was falling into chaos and whose future was unclear? There were no answers, even in principle, to such questions, because the future to which they might apply was almost totally opaque. The result was that it was impossible to have serious discussions about the future (if any) of NATO at any important level.

In addition, and as I have mentioned before, “traces” of past history were everywhere. For smaller western nations, NATO represented a degree of control exercised over Germany. Likewise, with the new European Union coming along, the US presence represented a counterweight to domination by larger states. For Germany itself, NATO had been, with the European institutions, a way back to international acceptance. For the Greeks, NATO represented the hope of keeping Turkey under some kind of control. For the British, it was a force multiplier for discreet influence, for the French (and others) it was a reassurance that the US would not provoke a crisis with the Soviet Union or its successor, only to leave Europe to deal with the consequences, for the United States it was a way of having a powerful institutional voice in European security issues. And so on. Little of this was ever articulated, but all of its was, you might say, present by its absence in discussions at the end of the Cold War, and lay behind fundamental questions like how border disputes that had been frozen in 1945 would be dealt with after the demise of the Warsaw Pact.

It followed that agreeing security arrangements in Europe which satisfied all of these unspoken agendas, as well as others that arose at the end of the Cold War, was effectively impossible. In any event, the sediment that NATO had accumulated in forty years was enormous, and raised questions to which there was no chance of rapid collective agreement. There was no agreement even on what “NATO” was. Should the Washington Treaty be cancelled (the text contained no provision for that)? Should the NATO command system be stood down? What to do with NATO headquarters, many of which were national as well? What would happen to NATO’s permanent staff? What about the NATO Defence College and the SHAPE Technical Centre, for example? Would Defence and Foreign Ministers still meet, and if so under what aegis? How would the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, negotiated between the two blocs, be implemented without NATO? Was there still a need for a European security organisation? If so, how would it be different from NATO? In a calm international environment, and with years for discussions and decisions and a decade for implementation, these and dozens of other thorny questions might have been settled. But of course the international environment at the time was one of generalised chaos.

This showed up first in the reactions to the collapse of Yugoslavia. I’ve mentioned that episode  before, but it’s worth quickly reviewing it, because the “debate” in the West, if we can call it that was a classic example of the sediment of the past, and the unspoken presence of other agendas, most of which had nothing to do with the crisis itself. For a start, nobody cared about Yugoslavia. The crisis was like a vehicle suddenly appearing out of a side road and causing an accident. It completely derailed European negotiations towards a Political Union Treaty, and led to institutional warfare within and between NATO and European institutions, and between Ministries in many European capitals. It left the US a confused spectator under Bush, and under Clinton an NGO-dominated warmonger, provided somebody else did the fighting.

But one of the basic rules of international politics is that there is always a struggle to control the management of problems, even problems you don’t understand and don’t know how to deal with, to avoid somebody else controlling them. This didn’t mean organisations actually doing very much, but rather just discussing the subject, issuing statements and subsequently launching futile peace initiatives. Unspoken but present in all of this was the historic distinction between the regions of Yugoslavia that had been part of the Habsburg Empire and therefore Catholic and relatively developed, and those which had fought for their independence against the Ottomans and were largely Orthodox. Austria and Germany, for example, supported Slovenia and Croatia’s bids for independence, and Germany pushed very hard on Croatia’s behalf for banal reasons of internal electoral politics, and sympathy for Croatia in the Catholic South of the country. Meanwhile, people remembered vaguely how different European countries had supported different sides in Yugoslavia in the Second World War, and some saw (or claimed to see) new evidence of German territorial ambitions following unification.

Behind all this was the confused historical memory of Yugoslavia as somehow “different” from the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, more “western,” even, but this was uncomfortably combined with the desire to see the end of the last entity in Europe that called itself “Communist,” and the almost complete ignorance of how Yugoslavia actually worked. Wasn’t it a bit like the Warsaw Pact, some said, which after all had come apart without violence? To repeat, few of these “traces” from the past were ever articulated, and many were not fully understood, so much had they entered in vulgarised form into the traditional folklore of international politics. Ignorance of the facts and normative views of what the facts should be, combined with half-remembered elements from the sediments of history to produce chaotic and incoherent interventions that did no good, and probably some harm. Combine this with all the unspoken “traces” that influenced  most countries’ views of the future of NATO and European security, and the negotiation of the Political Union Treaty and its subsequent referendums, all of which had their own buried “traces”, and the result was fruitless debate and half-hearted initiatives that largely circled around things that could not be said, and were only half-remembered anyway. Few things were more divisive, for example, than extreme German pressure for European military forces to be sent to Bosnia, although unfortunately, We Germans, because of Our Constitution, can’t deploy any forces Ourselves, about which a whole book could be written.

Exhaustion finally brought an end to the fighting in Bosnia, and every organisation and donor in the world piled into the country, largely to be seen to be there. NATO, in search of a mission, took on a peacekeeping role for which it was poorly suited. Critically, though, at a point where the supremacy of western Liberal ideas seemed unchallengeable, and it appeared that soon peace would be brought to the Balkans, there was still some unresolved business. Skilful propaganda and diplomacy by the Croats, coupled with “historical links” with Germany and other countries on the one hand, and expensive and expert propaganda for the Bosnian Muslims funded by Gulf States on the other, had left the Bosnian Serbs and the Serbian Serbs (many journalists and decision-makers confused the two) out on a limb. Although Milosevic had been influential in ending the fighting, and although Serbia (unlike Croatia) had not particularly interfered in postwar Bosnia, the Belgrade government, which was not interested in NATO or the EU, was seen as an obstacle to peace, and all efforts were made to replace its “nationalist” government with a “pro-western” one. These efforts failed, and western governments did not like being resisted, let alone taunted. When a nasty little insurgency broke out in Kosovo in 1996, and became more serious a couple of years later, western nations started to ask themselves if this couldn’t be exploited somehow to bring Milosevic down and install a new, pro-western, government.

Thus began the sorry story of Kosovo which came quite close to destroying NATO. But what’s interesting is the way in which NATO and its members stumbled forward, unsure of what they were doing, but unable to go back. The fiftieth anniversary of the Washington Treaty was approaching, the future of NATO was in question, and most of all it was unacceptable that a tiny nation should defy the West. Step by step, communiqué by communiqué, threat by threat, allegation by allegation, meeting by meeting, NATO narrowed its options until only the threat of violence was left. NATO had supposed that by playing up atrocity allegations, and by “warning”against their repetition, they would somehow … well, actually they didn’t know what would happen, except that in some way Milosevic would disappear as if by magic. When this didn’t happen, NATO found itself trapped by the immense weight of its previous declarations, threats and warnings (the British satirical magazine Private Eye published a long list of “final warnings” given to Milosevic over the months) and stumbled into a conflict it hadn’t wanted and never thought would happen, which lasted months and achieved little, until the Russians eventually intervened to force Milosevic’s government to abandon the province. Milosevic was then overthrown by angry nationalists following an election of dubious validity: not quite what NATO expected.

NATO more or less stopped functioning during the crisis, but even to the extent that it did, it was largely a victim of the sedimented weight of the past, and the “traces” of its inability to act in Bosnia in 1992, the scepticism that was still rampant about its genuine usefulness, and most of all the endless declarations, warnings and threats of violence that it had been making over the years. The decision-makers who tried to contain the crisis in 1999 were not the same as those who had tried to manage Bosnia earlier in the decade, and they worked with handed-down memories and simplified judgements, which had made their way into the underlying sediment. After a while nobody could quite explain why it was that Milosevic was so evil, but everybody shared the rather incoherent feeling that somehow he had to go, mixed in with half-remembered stories from Bosnia, and even Rwanda. Above all, and this was the one thing that could never be said openly, NATO could not change policy or seek a more consensual solution without destroying its own credibility, and it was that credibility which was the absent presence in all NATO and bilateral meetings.

All of the above, I hope, helps to account for the apparently weird and inexplicable behaviour of western states over Ukraine. Now whilst it is true that for the Europeans, Ukraine is an existential ideological crusade against heresy, which must be pursued at any cost, that doesn’t explain why some individual policies that have clearly failed, such as sanctions, are still being blindly pursued. The explanation, simply put, is that western decision-makers, cheated of the quick and easy victory they promised themselves, now have very little idea what they are doing and why. As often in the terminal stages of major crises, they are in a kind of waking dream, going through the motions of acting rationally and speaking in complete sentences, while actually taking part in a collective hallucination. They are living in a reality, if you can call it that, made up of the sediment of the past, hemmed in by sorts of ideas that are present only by their absence, and cannot be articulated.

I’ve looked at the origins of these “traces” before. There’s the historic trope of the barbarian “enemy from the East”, and there’s the identification of the Russians as a Schmittian “enemy.” To which you can add the propaganda about sexual violence committed by the Red Army in 1945, carefully manufactured by Goebbels and now largely discredited, but nonetheless absorbed unchallenged into the historical sediment. There’s the post-1945 fear of the mighty Soviet war machine rolling through Europe to the Channel, meanwhile undermining our society and our impressionable young people with its propaganda. There’s also the pre-1914 caricature of the “Russian steamroller:’ masses of poorly trained conscripts overwhelming the enemy with human wave tactics, which has survived even to today's allegedly serious military analysts.

The result is a confused, scared and over-stressed ruling class that has started something it now cannot control and which it knows, at some level, will end badly. But it cannot understand the mistakes it made, it’s not very sure how it got into this mess, and it literally cannot envisage any other set of policies apart from continuing the current funeral procession. I’ve mentioned a few of the unspeakable reasons for this above, but let’s just deal finally with a few of the more respectable—if still unspoken—pieces of the sediment.

The first thing to bear in mind is that few western decision-makers today have any actual expertise in Russian affairs. What they knew at the start of the crisis was eighth-hand diplomatic and strategic folklore, passed down from  those who, thirty-five years ago, did at least know something about the Soviet Union. One of the layers of sediment is a dimly remembered pastiche of Cold War misunderstandings, of a Soviet Union both frighteningly strong and ridiculously weak.  So older people asked me at the start “does Putin intend to overrun the whole of Europe?” not because anything the Russians had said or done suggested that, but because it was so deeply ingrained in collective assumptions. In the Cold War, the Red Army would have been trying to capture territory, so that sedimentary level remains in peoples’ unconscious, and they suppose, without consciously knowing why, that the Russians must be attempting something similar now, even as all the evidence suggests the contrary.

The next layer of sediment is the 1990s. here, there is a folk-memory of the economic collapse of the Soviet Union, leading to the end of the Cold War. In fact, of course, the economic collapse followed the end of the Soviet Union, not the other way round, but that is typical of the detail that gets edited out over time. Because Russia had abandoned the worst features of the market economy under Putin, and gone for national autarky and protectionism, it was assumed that their economy was as fragile as that of the Soviet Union was supposed to have been. Likewise, the gangster-led politics of the Yeltsin era were both assumed to have continued, but also confusingly assumed to have been ended by brutal repression by Putin’s government. Broadly, the economy was assumed to be unchanged since the 1990s.

At the professional level, there was an assumption that the collapse of Russian military power in the 90s had still not been addressed, and the Russian Army was useless (this coexisted with another sedimentary belief that it was terrifyingly strong.) And just as the Russians had protested in 1999 over Kosovo, protested at the first NATO expansion, and protested at a series of western and NATO operations up to Libya in 2011, but ultimately done nothing, so NATO could continue its expansion to the East without hindrance. If you had asked the Political Director of a European Foreign Ministry five years ago how the Russians might react to ever-closer defence links with Ukraine, the answer would have been a vague statement about Russia being weak, always protesting, but unable to actually do much. That person—probably at University in 1989, and whose previous job was perhaps as Ambassador to Riyadh or Brasilia—would also be unable to explain what lay behind such a judgement, which had by then become so deeply embedded in the sediment that it was mainly present in discussions by its very absence.

I have, of course, oversimplified things by suggesting that the layers of the sediment are the same everywhere. Clearly, Finland, Portugal and Greece leave very different “traces” in their statements about the crisis, and probably no two countries have the same, largely-unconscious, half digested legacy of strategic folklore. This is the main reason why the ship of western states is steering so determinedly for the rocks. Agreement on any new policy would be an impossibly difficult task. It isn’t just the weight of all the years of violent, aggressive angry rhetoric against Russia which would somehow have to be put to one side, nor the end of political careers and the fall of governments that would result. It’s that I can’t see how such a discussion could even begin. The West has no real collective idea what it’s doing in Ukraine any longer, nor why, and when you don’t understand what you’re doing or why you are doing it, any kind of sensible change of policy is ruled out before you start..