Zizek: From Cold War to Hot Peace

From Cold War to Hot Peace

Slavoj Žižek/Text

Wang Liqiu / Translator

Slavoj Zizek, “From Cold War to Hot Peace”, Project Syndicate , Mar 25, 2022, https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/hot-peace-putins-war-as-clash-of-civilization- by-slavoj-zizek-2022-03 . The translation is for academic exchange only, please do not use it for other purposes.

Slavoj Zizek (1949- ), a famous Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is one of the most outstanding thinkers of our time.

Wang Liqiu, from Maitreya, Yunnan, holds a Ph.D. from the School of International Relations, Peking University, and a lecturer at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University.

In a world shaped by the iron laws of markets and national interests, Vladimir Putin's atavistic war of conquest has baffled the "political" strategists who embrace realpolitik. Their mistake is to forget that under global capitalism, the only form of political struggle is cultural, ethnic and religious conflict.

With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we have entered a new phase of warfare and global politics. In addition to the heightened risk of nuclear catastrophe, we are already in a state of misfortune, where global crises (pandemic, climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water scarcity) reinforce each other. This scenario demonstrates a fundamental madness: at a time when ecological (and other) factors threaten human existence, and at a time when those threats should be the first priorities to be addressed, our focus suddenly shifts to a new political crisis. Just when we need global cooperation more than ever, the "clash of civilizations" is back with vengeance.

Why is this happening? As usual, a little reading of Hegel helps us answer these questions. It is well known that in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel described the master-servant dialectic. The master and the servant are two "self-consciousnesses" locked in a life-and-death struggle. If both sides risked their lives to win, if both sides persisted, then there would be no winner: if one side dies, there will be no one to admit his existence to the other side who survives. The implication here is that all histories and cultures depend on a fundamental compromise: in an eye-to-eye confrontation, one side (the future servant) "turns his head", unwilling to go all the way to the dark.

But Hegel is quick to point out that there can be no final or lasting compromise between states. The shadow of war perpetually hangs over the relationship between sovereign nation-states, and every period of peace is but a temporary truce. Each nation disciplines and educates its members and ensures civic peace among them, a process that produces an ethic that fundamentally demands heroic feats—that people are prepared to sacrifice for their country. The barbaric relationship between nations, therefore, is the basis of ethical life within nations.

North Korea is the clearest example of this logic, but there are also signs that someone else is heading in the same direction. According to some friends (who must remain anonymous) in a country, many authors in the country's military journals are now complaining that their military has not yet fought a war that would test its combat capability. The US has been testing its troops in places like Iraq, and they haven't fought a war since the last failed intervention in the 1970s.

At the same time, the country's state media has begun to suggest more openly that a military "liberation" is inevitable as hopes for a peaceful solution to the country's long-unresolved territorial issues are fading. As ideological preparations for this action, the country's propaganda machine increasingly incites nationalistic patriotism, induces suspicion of everything beyond its borders, and keeps accusing the United States of trying to go to war over it. Last fall, the country's authorities advised the public to stockpile two months' worth of supplies "for a rainy day." To many, the bizarre warning sounded like announcing that war was imminent.

This trend runs counter to the urgent need to civilize civilizations and create a new kind of neighborhood. We need universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, and as religious and ethnic sectarian "heroic" violence increases, as people become more willing to sacrifice themselves (and the world) for a particular cause , this goal has become increasingly difficult to achieve. In 2017, the French philosopher Alain Badiou pointed out that the outlines of a future war were already clearly discernible. he foresees

“…on the one hand, the United States and its West-Japanese bloc, on the other, China and the United States, with nuclear weapons everywhere. We can’t help but think of what Lenin said: “Either revolution will prevent war, or war will trigger revolution.” "We can define the highest ideal of future political work this way: For the first time in history, we should make the first hypothesis (revolution will prevent war) and not the second (war will trigger revolution) a reality. In the first It was the second hypothesis that became reality in Russia in the context of World War II and in China in the context of World War II. But what a huge price was paid for all this! What dire long-term consequences of everything!"

The limits of realpolitik

Making civilizations civil requires fundamental social change—in fact, it requires a revolution. But we cannot hope that a new war will trigger this revolution. We don't have that luxury. The more likely outcome is that civilization as we know it will be destroyed, and the survivors, if there are survivors, will be organized into small authoritarian groups. We should drop the illusion: in a basic sense, a third world war has begun, although for now, it is mostly fought by proxy.

An abstract call for peace is not enough. The term "peace" fails to draw the key political distinction we need. In the lands they occupied, the occupiers always sincerely hope for peace. In occupied France, Nazi Germany wanted peace, in the occupied West Bank, Israel wanted peace, and in invaded Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted peace. This is why, as the philosopher Etienne Baribar once said, "pacifism is not an option". The only way to prevent another major war is to avoid such a "peace" - a peace that requires sustained local wars to maintain.

Under such conditions, who can we rely on? Should we trust artists and thinkers, or pragmatists who practice realpolitik? The problem with artists and thinkers is that they may also lay the groundwork for war. Consider William Butler Yeats' apt poem: "I spread my dreams under your feet, / Tread lightly because you tread on my dreams." We should apply these two lines to the poet on yourself. They should be careful when they lay their dreams under our feet, because there are real people who read them and act on them. Consider the same Yeats who also continued to flirt with fascism, and even blatantly supported Germany's anti-Semitic Nuremberg Acts of August 1938.

Plato tarnished his reputation for arguing that poets should be driven out of the city-state. But judging by the experience of recent decades, it's a pretty sensible suggestion. Over the past few decades, it has been poets and thinkers like Alexander Dugin, Putin's royal theorist, who have prepared the excuse for ethnic cleansing. There will be no more ethnic cleansing that does not require poetry to match, because we live in what is said to be a post-ideological era. Because great secular causes no longer have the power to mobilize mass violence, people need greater, divine motives. Religious or ethnic affiliation plays this role perfectly (pathological atheists who commit massacres for pleasure are the rare exception).

Nor can realpolitik provide better guidance. Today, it is nothing more than an ideological alibi. And ideology often speaks of a hidden dimension behind appearances, in order to cover up blatant crimes. The way to declare this double mystification is often to talk about the "complexity" of the situation, and that there is a lot of water behind it. Speaking through that "much more complex context", the obvious facts are relativized. After this operation people were told that aggression was actually defense.

This is exactly what is happening today. Russia is clearly attacking Ukraine, and it is clearly targeting civilians and displacing millions. But critics and experts are eagerly searching for the "complexity" behind it.

Of course there are complexities. But this will not change the basic fact that Russia hit Ukraine. Our mistake was that we didn't take Putin's threat literally enough; we thought he was just playing a game of strategic manipulation and brinkmanship. We should think about the famous joke told by Sigmund Freud:

"Two Jews met in a train car at a Galician station. One asked: 'Where are you going?' The other replied: 'To Krakow.' The other blurted out: 'You liar! If you say you're going to Krakow Kov, then you want me to believe you're going to Lemberg. But I know you're going to Krakow. So why are you lying to me?'"

When Putin announced military intervention, we didn't take it literally, what he meant by saying he wanted to pacify and "denazify" Ukraine. On the contrary, the accusations of the disappointed "squatter" strategists amounted to complaints: "If you really want to take Lviv, why are you telling me you want to take Lviv?"

This double mystification exposes the end of realpolitik. As a rule, realpolitik is opposed to the naive approach of tying foreign and foreign policy to (one's own version of) moral or political principles. But in the current scenario, realpolitik is naive. It would be naive to assume that the opponent, the enemy, also aims at limited practical ideals.

force and freedom

During the Cold War, the Doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) clearly defined the rules of conduct for superpowers. Every superpower can be sure that if it decides to launch a nuclear attack, the other side will strike back in full force. As a result, neither side would go to war with the other.

By contrast, when North Korea's Kim Jong-un talks about a devastating blow to the United States, one can't help but wonder how old he thinks he is. He said it as if he didn't realize that his country (and himself) would be destroyed because of it. It's as if he's playing a very different game called NUTS (Nuclear Exploitation Targets Selected), where you can precisely neutralize an enemy's nuclear capabilities before they can counterattack.

Even the US has oscillated between MAD and NUTS over the past few decades. While it acts as if it still believes in MAD logic in its relations with Russia and China, it also, from time to time, can't help but want to implement a NUTS strategy against Iran and South Korea. Putin was thinking the same when hinting at the possibility of a strategic nuclear attack. The fact that the same superpower can use two directly contradictory tactics at the same time is a testament to the whimsy of the matter.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, MAD's logic is outdated. The superpowers are constantly testing each other, trying in different ways to use proxies to promote their own global rules. On March 5, Putin called the sanctions on Russia "a declaration of war". But since then he has repeatedly reiterated that economic exchanges with the West should continue, stressing that Russia will keep its financial commitments and continue to deliver hydrocarbons to Western Europe.

In other words, Putin is trying to implement a new model of international relations. No cold war, but peace: an eternal state of hybrid warfare in which major powers engage in military intervention under the guise of peacekeeping and humanitarian missions.

Therefore, on 15 February, the Russian Duma (Parliament) stated that "it clearly and firmly supports the desire to speak and write in Russian, that freedom of religion is respected, and Appropriate humanitarian measures for residents who do not support the actions of the Ukrainian authorities that violate their rights and freedoms”.

We’ve heard similar arguments in the past too often, as the US has said when leading interventions in Latin America or the Middle East and North Africa. While Russia is bombing Ukrainian cities and Ukrainian maternity wards, international business should continue. Outside Ukraine, normal life should continue. That's what it means to maintain permanent global peace through non-stop peacekeeping interventions in isolated areas of the world.

Can anyone be free in such a predicament? Following Hegel, we should distinguish between abstract and concrete liberties, which correspond to our concepts of liberty and liberty. Abstract freedom is the ability to do what you want regardless of the rules and customs of society; concrete freedom is the freedom granted and supported by rules and customs. I can only walk freely on a busy street if I am reasonably sure that other people on the street will treat me in a civilized manner - drivers will obey traffic rules and other pedestrians will not come and rob me - .

But there are also critical moments, when abstract freedom is about to strike. In December 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: "Under the German occupation, we are free as never before. We have lost all our rights and, most importantly, our right to speak. They insult us in person...  That's why resistance is truly democracy; the soldier, who faces the same danger, the same loneliness, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within the same discipline, as the man above him."

Sartre is describing liberty, not liberty. The right to liberty was established when normalcy was restored after the war. In Ukraine today, those who are resisting Russian aggression are free, they are fighting for freedom. But that raises the question of how long this distinction will last. What if millions more people decide that in order to protect their liberty they must be free to break the rules? Isn't that what the pro-Trump mob who broke into Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 thought so?

A not-so-big chess game

We still lack an appropriate word to describe today's world. Philosopher Malabu believes that we are witnessing the beginning of an “anarchist turn” in capitalism: “How else would we describe things like decentralized money, the end of state monopolies, the obsolescence of the intermediary role of banks, the decentralization of communication and transactions What about a phenomenon like that?"

Those phenomena may sound fascinating, but as state monopolies fade away, so do state-imposed restrictions on ruthless exploitation and domination. While anarcho-capitalism aims for transparency, it also “allows the massive but opaque use of data, the dark web, and the fabrication of information.”

Malabu commented that in order to avoid chaos, the policies of various countries have embarked on the road of "evolution of fascism", "which is followed by excessive security and military construction. These phenomena do not contradict the trend of anarchism. Rather, they show precisely the disappearance of the state whose obsolescence (through the use of violence) of force, once it has lost its social function, becomes apparent. Thus, hypernationalism signals that nation-state authority is experiencing Dying pain."

From these perspectives, the situation in Ukraine is not yet one nation-state attacking another nation-state. Instead, Ukraine was attacked as an entity whose ethnic identity was denied by the aggressors. Russia justifies aggression in terms of its geopolitical sphere of influence. The sphere of influence often extends far beyond the communal confines, as was the case in Syria. Russia's refusal to use the word "war" to describe its "special military operations" is not just to downplay the brutality of its intervention, but above all to clarify that what used to be called war - armed conflict between nation-states - - Not applicable here.

The Kremlin wants us to believe that it is only ensuring what it sees as "peace" within its geopolitical sphere of influence. Indeed, it has also intervened through its proxies in Bosnia and Kosovo. On March 17, Russia's ambassador to Bosnia, Karabukhov explained, "If [Bosnia] decides to join any alliance [such as NATO], then that is its own business. Our response is another Thing. The example of Ukraine illustrates our expectations. If there is a threat, we will respond.”

Moreover, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov even suggested that the only comprehensive solution would be to demilitarize the whole of Europe, leaving the Russian military to keep the peace through occasional humanitarian intervention. There is no shortage of similar ideas in the Russian media. As the political commentator Dmitry Evstafiev explained in a recent interview with a Croatian publication, "A new Russia is born, and you have to recognize that it does not consider you European Partners. Russia has three partners: America, China, and India. You are to us the spoils to be divided between us and the Americans. You have not grasped that, although we are doing something very close to that idea.”

Dugin, Putin's royal philosopher, based the Kremlin's position on a quirky historicist relativism. In 2016, he said:

"Postmodernity shows that all so-called truth is just a matter of believing. So, we believe what we do, we believe what we say. And that's the only way to define truth. So, we have our special Russian truth, you guys It needs to be accepted. If the US doesn't want to go to war, then you should realize that the US is no longer the only one. On Syria and Ukraine, Russia said, 'No, you're not the head anymore'. The question is who will rule the world . . It's really all about war."

Which again begs the obvious question: what about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they also choose their own truths and beliefs, or are they just a playground or battlefield for the big "chiefs"? The Kremlin will say that in the big division of power, they don't count. Within the four spheres of influence, there is only peacekeeping interference. Only when the four chiefs cannot agree on the boundaries of their spheres of influence will real wars take place.

a new non-alignment

But if only the threat of war, and not the threat to our environment, can mobilize us, then the liberties we gain in the event of a victory on our side are not worth having. We are faced with an impossible choice: if we compromise to keep the peace, then we are contributing to Russian expansionism, which can only be satisfied by the "demilitarization" of the whole of Europe. But if we support all-out confrontation, then we take a huge risk - we could lead to a new world war as a result. The only real solution to the problem is to change the way we understand the situation.

At a time when global liberal-capitalism is clearly approaching a crisis on multiple levels, the Ukrainian war has been mis-simplified, and that simplification is dangerous. Global issues like climate change have no place in that clichéd narrative of the war in Ukraine, which sees it as a conflict between a barbaric-totalitarian state and a civilized, free West. However, new wars and conflicts of great powers are also responses to these problems. If the problem is surviving on a troubled planet, then we have to make sure that we are stronger than others. Far from being a moment of truth, the current crisis is a moment of profound deception at a time when fundamental confrontations are exposed.

While we should firmly support Ukraine, we also cannot be obsessed with war. Now, the war has apparently taken away the imagination of those pushing for an open confrontation with Russia. We need something akin to a new non-aligned movement, but this non-alignment does not mean that nations should remain neutral in the ongoing war, but that we should question this whole concept of a "clash of civilizations".

According to Samuel Huntington (who coined the term), the arena for the clash of civilizations was set at the end of the Cold War, when the "velvet curtain of culture" replaced the "iron curtain of ideology." At first glance, this dark world looks like the opposite of Fukuyama's end-of-history conclusion in response to the fall of communism in Europe. What could be more different from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian idea—at last, it was discovered that the best social order man could devise was capitalist liberal democracy?

Now we can see that the two views are fully compatible: the "clash of civilizations" is the politics of the "end of history". Ethnic and religious conflict is a form of struggle consistent with global capitalism. In a "post-political" era (in which politics itself is gradually replaced by professional social administration), the only legitimate source of conflict is culture (ethnic, religious). With the depoliticization of our society comes the rise of "irrational" violence.

Within this limited horizon, indeed, the only option other than war is the peace of civilization (different "truths," in Dugin's words; or, in a more popular term today, "lifestyles") coexist. The implication here is that as long as it happens in another country, as long as that country is fully integrated into the global marketplace, then things like this—forced marriages, homophobia, rape of women who dare to go out alone—are tolerable.

The new non-alignment must expand our horizons by acknowledging that our struggle should be global and by overcoming Russophobia at all costs. We should support those protesting the invasion inside Russia. They are not some abstract internationalist clique; they are true patriots of Russia who truly love their country and have been deeply ashamed of their country since February 24. Nothing is more morally disgusting and more politically dangerous than this statement: "But when it comes to borders, right and wrong." Unfortunately, the first victim of the war in Ukraine is universality.