Some Reflections on War

Roger Berkowitz
The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine raises questions about what Hannah Arendt called “the war question.” Since Clausewitz,  wars have been understood as “the continuation of politics with other means”; but wars cannot survive when the outcome of war—even non-nuclear war—means total destruction of the defeated party. Thinking about wars and revolutions in the shadow of the nuclear age, Arendt was convinced that the threat of total annihilation would mean that revolutions would likely stay with us while wars would likely disappear. “Wars,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “if they should continue to threaten the existence of mankind and hence remain unjustifiable on rational grounds, might disappear, at least in their present form.” 

But while total annihilation remains a threat, it is likely, Arendt foresaw, that modern war could forsake nuclear threats of total annihilation and yet still be horrific. In such cases, she speculated, wars might persist “for the simple reason that our present stage of international relationships, still based on national sovereignty, cannot function without force or the threat of force as the ultima ratio of all foreign policy. Whether we like it or not, our present system of foreign affairs makes no sense without war as a last resort.” 

This ambivalence—that war is at once impossible to imagine and yet still necessary within our system of international affairs—is the position of our present moment. The shock many in the Western world feel in the Russian bombing of Ukranian cities and the killing of civilians is a reminder that war—even a technologically horrific war—remains part of our political world. As much as many may have hoped that large-scale and violent warfare were a relic of past worlds, the war in the Ukraine reminds us that war is still a part of our world. 

The starting point of Arendt’s consideration of the “war question” is her assumption that we’ve reached a stage of technical development in which war is so destructive as to be irrational. “For those who tell us better dead than red forget that it is a very different matter to risk one’s life for the life and freedom of one’s country and for posterity than to risk the very existence of the human species.” And at the same time, she realizes that technology—short of full scale nuclear war— also permits massive destruction that can be rationalized and justified. We are seeing just such a rationalization of horrific warfare in the Russian bombardment of Ukrainian cities. And similar justifications could be employed for the use of chemical and so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons. 

There is, Arendt argues, a “reckless optimism” on both sides of the war question today. On one side, proponents of fighting can justify the killing and murder of thousands and even millions of citizens in war because of the “frightening increase of population.” On the other side, those who would submit simply “forget the concentration and extermination camps and with them the terrible prospect of freedom vanishing from the earth forever.” A recent Quinnipiac University poll supports this second bit of reckless optimism, finding that 38% of Americans would flee if Russia attacked the United States, and only just over half would stay and fight. 

That so many Ukrainians are staying in Ukraine and resisting the Russians shows that the one real justification for war today in the face of potential annihilation and destruction is freedom. The Ukrainians—and many others in the former Soviet bloc— remember life under the Soviet Union and have little optimism about life without freedom. But freedom means, for Arendt, both the freedom from tyranny and  the freedom to found a new body politic based on the experience of self-government. Insofar as Ukrainian are willing to fight for freedom, they are the truly revolutionary force that might remind Europe and the United States what freedom means. 

We must also reckon with the reality that the majority of the world (based on population) lives in countries that have refused to condemn the Russian war on Ukraine. As Sanjib Baruah argues, this suggests that the freedom at stake in Ukraine is seen, by the majority of the world, as a racialized and European freedom, not something worth fighting for. What this means for the fate of a racialized freedom is unclear; but it does suggest that the fight for freedom is hardly decided. Baruah writes (subscription only):

Perhaps America’s Ambassador to the UN, Black diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield could have given some thought to DuBois’s prophetic words before commenting on the large number of African abstentions in the UN General Assembly vote deploring the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She vigorously rejected any analogy with the non-aligned stance of former colonial nations during the Cold War. The resolution was supported by an overwhelming majority of countries: 145 to 5 with 35 abstentions — India, China, and South Africa among them.
Since many UN member countries have tiny populations, there is a growing tension between the “one country one vote” and the “one person one vote” doctrines. Many regard the latter as more truly democratic. To be sure, small countries having their own voice is an important democratic safeguard. But it is surely significant that countries that abstained in the UN vote constitute the majority of the world’s population. They come from all regions of the world except for Europe and its North American offshoots. Moreover, the abstainers include major non-Western democracies, which contradicts the US official framing of the war in terms of democracy versus autocracy.
Commentators have mostly speculated on the interests of the abstaining countries rather than try to understand their positions. One lesson of Vincent’s essay is that the Cold War was not the only thing that captured the attention of newly independent countries. He drew on the work of the Kenyan-born political thinker Ali Mazrui and pointed at the significance attached to “the principle of racial sovereignty” by many former colonial countries. Mazrui believed that it was the recognition of “the inherent sovereignty” of “peoples recognisable in a racial sense” that led many African and Asian leaders to welcome India’s annexation of Goa in 1961 since the colonial power ruling the territory — Portugal — was of a “different racial stock”.
To the newly-independent countries, says Vincent, “the dignity and worth of the human person” was a far more important foundational principle of the UN than peace and security, which for the Western powers were its “master purposes”. That is why defeating the apartheid regime in South Africa became a more urgent issue for the UN than matters of territorial aggrandisement.
Ukraine has a long history as a rebellious borderland resisting aggressive Russian nationalism. This happened even in Soviet times since, in the hands of the Bolsheviks, as the Indian-born colonial cosmopolitan revolutionary M N Roy put it, communism became “nationalism painted red”. Roy’s phrase appears on the title of a book on this period of Ukrainian history by Stephen Velychenko.
Ukrainians now strongly identify with “Europe” and “the West”. Unfortunately, these concepts are haunted by the memories of colonialism and racial segregation. Orientalism, as Edward Said put it memorably, “is never far from… the idea of Europe, a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all ‘those’ non-Europeans”.
The Treaty of Rome, the European Union’s founding act, limits membership of the Union to “European” states. In 1987, Morocco’s application for admission to the European Communities — the precursor of the EU — was rejected on the ground that it was not a “European state”.