The constant references to a “New Cold War“, The return of a discourse that seems to want to contrast two different ones Blocks of Civilization and evoke atmospheres of the twentieth century. How much of it has political or strategic value? And yet how misleading is it to try to really understand what the new international balances are and how they are economically, politically and ideologically very far removed from those of the Cold War era, which again is more complex than you think? To answer it is Federico Romeroteacher fromEuropean University Institute, with many publications in his favour, including Cold War history. The Last Conflict for Europe (Einaudi, 2009). Since 2015 he has been in charge of the projectEuropean Research Council “Looking West: European Socialist Regimes Facing PanEuropean Cooperation and the European Community”.
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Professor Romero, in Zelenskyy’s speeches to parliaments there were many references between World War II and the Cold War, with quotes from previous leaders. Is there, and possibly what, is the strategic point of this narrative?
I don’t think there is a strategic purpose in the full sense of the word. Rather, I believe it is a willingness to use rhetoric well and effectively approval, depending on the audience, use the most striking images to dramatize, move, involve. It’s a way of doing things, I think rather political how strategic: The discursive and political point is to include Ukraine in the family of Western democracies. Zelensky thus seeks to sanction Ukraine’s membership in the symbolic and cultural universe of Europe and, more generally, the West. This is happening all the more right now: Ukraine cannot join NATO, but that does not mean that there are no opportunities to join the European Union yet, quite the opposite. The apparent flattening that sometimes occurs between European Union membership and NATO is historically linked to the construction of an ideal of a democratic West with its shared infrastructures. However, it depends different realities, it should be noted that there are neutral countries in the EU. In addition, this flattening tendency also comes out strongly at certain points in time: the differences between the EU and NATO always return as soon as a war or security emergency recedes somewhat. It is therefore important for Zelensky to cultivate the soil of the symbolic, to grow a vocabulary of the common identification that it is also a political resource, both for a future accession route to the EU; either to have more resources to deal with the influx of refugees or to plan future peace negotiations.
Since the 2014 Maidan protests, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and support for the Donbass uprisings have led to a radical Ukrainian departure from the idea of integration into the project of Russia’s economic and political union and towards a rapprochement with the EuroAtlantic system . Russia responded by ramping up its antiWestern narrative and fomenting ambiguous talk about the Minsk accords leading up to the February 24 invasion. Are the escalation and Ukraine just a strategic pretext for a Russian Realpolitik aimed at understanding how far we can go and how much the West is willing to do?
For a long time I thought there was a strategy. I believed that with this deployment of armed forces they wanted to build some form of Diplomatic blackmail to Ukraine and indirectly to the West to a negotiating table on some issues such as the formal recognition of the separatist republics of Donbass, Donetsk and Lugansk; the exclusion of any negotiations on Ukraine’s accession to NATO; the agreed definition of a geopolitical line of power balance beyond which the West should not be pushed. However, if that had ever been the strategy, everything would have blown up with the invasion. In fact, since the invasion, I’ve had a hard time discerning a strategy. When the strategic reasoning shifts to conquering part or all of Ukraine, something is wrong: on the one hand, the military operations they would have been better organized; On the other hand, Russia has more to lose materially than it has to gain if these are deepened conflict. I tend to think that, as so often in history, strategic thinking was overwhelmed by events. He took the field by emphasizing the national resentment and the conviction of a growing western threat, perhaps even with the strategic notion that this would serve to consolidate inner strength and to increase the alliance spaces with the China. Often, however, we go beyond the strategies and end up identifying with what we say, with what we say propaganda. It’s blurred boundaries.
American diplomat George Frost Kennan, a key figure in the Cold War and creator of the “policy of containment” of Soviet expansionism, wrote in the New York Times in 1997 that, among other things, “the expansion of NATO” was “the most fatal mistake” of US policy , which warns that it “could push Russian foreign policy in directions we decidedly do not like.” What role did this enlargement play in preparing for this conflict?
In my opinion, it is a very complex, but in some respects simple matter. In 1989 NATO stopped in Germany. It gradually widened towards Baltic countriesSlovakia, Poland, getting closer to Russia and certainly these moves have affected the recovery of a strong Russian nationalism which clearly has an obvious role in today’s conflict, even if we have no way of knowing how much it weighs on Putin’s mind. We do know, however, that in the 1990s several analysts including very conservative ones opposed NATO enlargement in focusing the discussion on NATO expansionism. In retrospect, however, I would not be able to say what kind Diplomatic error or not, because scenarios must also be kept in mind. An imaginative alternative of jointly redefining a new balance between the West and the exSoviet world was unthinkable because the West won in every case. Meanwhile, Eastern European countries knocked on the West and were areas with political regimes newborn, unstable, subject to ethnic and religious conflicts. Express the urgency of stabilization at their own limits, and this option prevailed, even if one could realistically imagine a bad reaction. Perhaps the expansion could have been combined with an extremely positive and proactive policy towards Russia. This would have meant providing enormous financial help to avoid this postSoviet shock. At the same time, this would have involved an enormous amount of money and it was unthinkable, also because that was exactly the moment when people began to believe and say about this free market free competition had the power to fix everything. It is a jumble of hypotheses, hard to say what could or could not have been done, what should or should not have been done.
Does it make sense today to speak of the “new Cold War” or is it an evocative simplification that does not allow us to read into the historical transformations?
I don’t think the Cold War analogy gets much point. The first crucial difference lies in the fact that the US and the Soviet Union thought they each had their own recipe for world progress, capitalist or socialist. With these recipes, the balance of the world was at stake and the ideological aspect was very strong. Now the picture looks completely different, there are no conflicting visions of progress, expansion ideas of universal models. Now it’s a power conflict between forces and the ideal element is much more blurred. This is also noticeable in Western discourses, which oppose democracy with an undefined autocratic front. However, everything fades when we think of China, for example. The USA, Great Britain and Australia are in favor of identifying Beijing and Moscow in one single autocratic bloc contradict, but that does not apply to Italy, France, Germany. That’s a point that could be main emphasis for the western future on a strategic level.