So, it so happens that I am an Eastern European, a child of the frozen tundra of post-Soviet institutional corruption and ludicrous dog-eat-dog neoliberalism so intense it would have made Friedman blush.
(If you are one of those infuriating people from the old country who continue to insist that we are somehow ‘Northern European’, please fuck off and never come back.)
I’m something of a heterodox child of that necromancer-infested graveyard of empires, in that I am neither a queerphobe nor a hardened pro-capitalist, which, trust me when I say this, is a rare combination back home. The last Lithuanian election I voted in, my party of choice won a whopping 9.6% of the vote and its leader lost the constituency he ran in by six votes. There are relatives who I no longer speak to because they hold violently homophobic views that would make Viktor Orbán tell them to hold up, that seems a bit much. And don’t get me started on the fact that I think anyone who believes in flat income taxation is basically a religious extremist — hold those beliefs in private, go ahead, but please don’t force them on the rest of us.
I am, in short, a socialist. I believe in the creed of social democracy in its original incarnation, laid down by Eduard Bernstein: “… I strongly believe in the socialist movement, in the march forward of the working classes, who step by step must work out their emancipation by changing society from the domain of a commercial landholding oligarchy to a real democracy which in all its departments is guided by the interests of those who work and create.” I reject both the nationalist-conservative and the shock therapist-liberal reads of Eastern Europe’s problems and modern history. I want strong unions, an expansive welfare state, gradual appropriation of political power from the property-owning class in nearly all fields, and don’t get me started on my belief that 100% of all customer service environments should be run as cooperatives.
Better writers than myself have written already of how inadequate people like me have found the response of the Western left, how much it is just not up to par with our expectations how our nominal comrades in the West have responded to the war. But truth be told I don’t want to talk about those guys, they have wasted enough of our ink. These are important conversations, sure, but we have exhausted the bandwidth of public attention with how much we don’t like what the Westerners are saying, when truth be told we should have used it for something far more important: talking about how we view the war and how it makes us feel.
If these people insist on not letting the subaltern speak, tough luck, we, too, have internet access and English language skills. The subaltern can yell.
Here’s my attempt to yell.
On definite articles
When I sat down and started writing this, I realised something about myself, which, like, I’m not going to make any grandiose claims of it being culturally specific, but I can imagine that a lot of other Eastern Europeans will relate. To me this war is the war.
When I talk about it, I don’t say ‘the war in Ukraine’, I don’t say ‘the Ukrainian crisis’ (boak), I don’t say ‘the Russo-Ukrainian War’ unless I mean to be dramatic. I just say, ‘the war.’ It has attained a centrality in my mind that Americans might recognise from the way that they used to talk about the Iraq and Afghan Wars in the Bush years. It has consumed everything, it is dancing on the horizon every day like a wildfire, brighter and fiercer than the sun, subsuming my life into a tiny speck on a painting where it is the most dramatic feature even though I am so far away.
Half the songs I listen to now are Ukrainian war songs. I can barely physically restrain myself from endlessly refreshing OSINT and Ukrainian military accounts on twitter. Every morning since the beginning of the war, even when I’m exhausted, even when I feel broken, even when I feel ill, I check my phone. Has Kherson been liberated yet? Have they driven the Muscovite away from Hulyaipole, where anarchist superhero Nestor Makhno once lived? And, most importantly of all, what the actual fuck are the Germans playing at now?
500 years of, uh, deterioration of relations between the Russians and the nations of the old Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania have all crystallised in this moment, where I’m watching the war with mortal self-investment as if I had a cousin on the frontline. (Maybe I do? We’re all from somewhere, after all, and in Eastern Europe when you’re from somewhere your grandpa was from somewhere else.) When you’re a person from our land of eternal social winter, and you’re a socially conscientious person who wants their country and its neighbours to remain, well, extant, it’s hard to imagine what it must be like to be a person to whom Ukraine has a definite article, but the war does not.
Ukraine has become a cipher for the aspirations of an entire row of nations. I mean that literally, in that they array almost perfectly north-to-south like a row in an excel spreadsheet on the world map: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Moldova. And also Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan. The people of these nations are varied, complex individuals who hold all sorts of views on politics, many of them views that I consider utterly reprehensible, even indefensible, but one shared thing throughout their lives for multiple centuries now was that for fuck’s sake, we just want to be the agents of our own fate. So now we stare at our screens, cheering anytime a Russian armoured column is obliterated, for we know that every single soldier that perishes — tragic though all death in the world may be — brings us one step closer to that absolute liberty.
On autonomy
We’ve all seen Mearsheimer embarrass himself with his takes on Ukraine. We know, we’re not stupid, we can read, we see. The arguments he rehashes for the idea of Eastern Europe as a ‘buffer zone’ between a Eurasian bloc centred on Russia and a Euro-Atlantic one centred on the US have been done to death now. Every other week you see a new politically or intellectually compromised figure publishes some variation of this in some new Western newspaper. I’m not really interested in debunking his arguments yet again, so, again, if that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere.
But there is something far more fundamental I want to talk about here. In Washingtonian, Londoner, and Parisian dinner circles we see an attitude towards the war that more or less amounts to ‘we have to fix this.’ That see the war first of all as a great riddle that they can solve if they just find the perfect solution, the perfect balance of security arrangements and armaments for Ukraine and assurance of its safety for Russia (this applies even to people who oppose one or the other), a Question they can answer. As Russian propaganda recently put in a very genocidal screed, the Ukrainian Question, if you will.
The aging West in its grand halls has determined that this is its final global challenge to solve, so the high priests of Western foreign policy have risen from their slumber and are now penning piece after piece, realist or idealist, constructivist or Marxian, trying to come up with a perfect solution to the Ukrainian Question that keeps the wolf (or bear, as they continually insist on framing Russia metaphorically as) happy and the sheep alive. They want to fix things. The unifying feature of the left-isolationist Quincy Institute, actual war criminal Henry Kissinger, and the writer of every single article titled ‘How Putin’s War has unified the West’ or ‘the rise of the new American century’ is that they see themselves as the central protagonists of this saga. IR liberalism and IR realism in this context both smell of a fair amount of mission civilisatrice, where they see their objective as that of finding a new fun way to manage the world.
A lot of my friends who study or work in IR academia think I hate IR, and I kind of do. There is this overwhelming feeling that IR academics, think tankers and opinionators see their job as that of sage storytellers, weaving beautiful narratives to Western governments of what their place in the world is and advising them on how to conduct themselves in the grand mission of reordering the world in accordance with their conceptual idea of the good. Or, in plainer words: it sounds an awful lot like Western liberals, realists and constructivists alike want to rule the world and are basically just disagreeing with each other on just how much they should sell Eastern Europeans out to ensure that.
Here’s a thought: maybe don’t do that? You can’t ‘fix’ anything. You can’t just come in here with Trump-like ardour to make ‘the deal of the century’, because you aren’t, and shouldn’t be, the overlords of the world. And this goes even for the realists-isolationists and the liberals-interventionists. Neither of you understand what is going on anymore, because you have no frame of reference for global events that take place outside a unipolar order.
As an Eastern European, I am asking you to please respect our autonomy. You should provide military, logistical, and economic aid to Ukraine not because it advances visions of some sort of ‘liberal international order’ with America at its heart, and you should hope for peace without prejudicing the right of a people to reject capitulatory terms to their very end. You should arm Ukraine because the Ukrainian people have made the executive decision to defend themselves against a regime hellbent on their obliteration as a sovereign nation. No further reasons should be necessary. But you cannot resolve this conflict because it simply does not revolve around you. You cannot manage it. You cannot fix it. And you shouldn’t. It is a historically central culmination to 500 years of Ukraine’s struggle to define itself as an autonomous actor in history again, and it has to play out to its natural conclusion, which is its victory. The only honourable role for North America and Western Europe in this saga is that of ally, not hero and not neutral arbiter.
On doubts
Some might read my paragraphs above as a bloodthirsty call for eternal war against Russia. Truth be told, it couldn’t be anything further from the truth. I am not just an Eastern European and a leftist, I am also a member of a national minority in my own homeland. The artificiality of the Eastern European conception of nationhood, born directly out of the struggles of 1848, has dug into my rib like a nasty tumour since before I could walk. There are people in Lithuania who will never accept me as one of them; a much larger number who are extremely keen to accept me as one of them to the point that they get angry if I dare consider myself something other than one of them; and of course people who don’t really care, but get weirdly angry if I have the audacity to express any sort of distress over these attitudes. I don’t like nationalism.
I don’t really believe in a distinction between ‘defensive’ and ‘offensive’ nationalism, for the same reason that it is basically impossible to determine whether an AK-47 is a ‘defensive’ or ‘offensive’ weapon. All nationalism, universally, is based on the idea that you are defending a particular concept of what your nation is from its enemies. The same person could be a civic nationalist who believes in a purely territorial notion that their nation, defined along the lines of some sort of widely acknowledged border, is being short-changed by its imperial master and deserves autonomy; and, one day, a reactionary extremist whose political movement persecutes supposed enemies of the nation within its own borders and constantly promotes revision of those borders to include minorities of the nation’s titular ethnic group that live in outlying areas. Indeed, you may have heard of this person: his name is Viktor Orbán, respectively in his 1989 and 2022 incarnations. Revolutions eventually eat their children.
I’m not going to go into detail on my personal traumas associated with prolonged exposure to Lithuanian nationalism. Suffice to say that I don’t have much sympathy for the idea that a nation can ever be the unequivocal constantly maltreated underdog of history, and I think its social effects are so corrosive we should avoid its penetration across society whenever possible. I think this is going to set back our nations decades in terms of reckoning with the flaws of that idea. It is going to create hundreds of opportunities for bad people to make themselves into heroes. And it is very much going to poison the water in terms of how much divergence from the median view on any remotely controversial subject is socially accepted. Anyone who has lived in a society like ours can tell you there are certain people who just love accusing folks they don’t like of being traitors at the first, most contrived excuse. In Lithuania, for instance, we saw writer Rūta Vanagaitė, whose work focuses on the study of Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust, blacklisted from all major publishing houses after she dared insinuate that it is possible that Lithuanian anti-Soviet resistance fighter Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas was a collaborator, which, to be clear, he objectively was.
But I am the most vulgar of vulgar Marxists, and I can tell you now, as a believer in the idea that a material base shapes idealistic superstructure: this will continue for as long as our autonomy is infringed on. For as long as it is credible that an interlocutor is a provocateur, people will be able to derail a conversation, no matter how important, with an accusation that you are a provocateur, for that speaks to a real practical anxiety amidst your audience: is it possible that this person was sent by the people who want to kill us all?
A fear I have is of course that no matter what the situation is, that real threat is always going to be used as an excuse to avoid uncomfortable conversations. Personally, I can make a personal resolution to never do so, sure. But what about the large masses of millions of Lithuanians, Poles, etc. to whom that is a far more difficult journey whether we like it or not? We need them to reckon with the wound the nationalisms they remain loyal to like a warm blanket have inflicted on these lands, or this will always fundamentally remain pointless.
I guess I don’t really have a good answer to any of that.
