Ukraine: a product of the West's arrogance

Author: Jonathan Kočevar

Date: Thursday, April 21, 2022

With the war in Ukraine, conflict has come uncomfortably close to the nations of the West, sitting next to the dividing line between Eastern and Central Europe. How was this possible? According to the West, the living moments of the past 30 years have been championed as the “end of history”, and the end of war as the decisive factor in world conflicts. How has war once again emerged from its dormant status allowing for another strongman in Europe to have his way? The answer is it has never left.

I believe there is an extremely important lesson of the Western psyche when analyzing the Ukrainian conflict, and it both shows a contradiction in the values and flaws of the West. Since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the geopolitical state of the world was seen as post-historical. Liberal cries of “diplomacy triumphs over war” were seen as the new status of the globalized world. It very much mirrored the state of Western politics after the First World War, the uniting of nations in international bodies and a general agreeance to settle disputes with councils rather than cannons.

With the encroachment of Russia into the territories of Ukraine within the past 20 years, Liberal democracy, the child of Western enlightened values, has failed again. The aggressive enforcement and encouragement of democratic states within the former Soviet Union and the policy of NATO enlargement by the Clinton regime in the mid-’90s led to high tension within the area, with not much improvement to show. In turn, Ukraine has become another sacrificial goat for the West. It is another victim of NATO encroachment on the region, stuck in the unfortunate position of being wedged in between the major diplomatic factions of the world. Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, when prosed with the political nature of the Ukrainian conflict said the following:

“Look at all this Putin, Western Europe, United States madness! Are we aware that we are already entering the climate of the next world war? Our situation is not as people claim, that now we have new fascism, it’s like Western Europe in the nineteen-thirties. No! I think a much better metaphor is the years before the First Great War, where everyone was talking about the war, and then the big surprise is that the war really exploded! Why? because everyone is talking about it, but no one took it seriously.”

Žižek makes a well-founded assertion of the West here. It has not learned from its mistakes. The western notion of “Debate and argument of war will withhold it”, and that peace can be found solely through reason is false. War strikes those who are complacent with the notion that war is an event that happens to the other, people not close to the West or its values. The advertisement of Ukraine on the news and the placement of Ukraine as a sacrificial goat that Russia encroaches on exposes the hypocrisy of the West’s values once more. It differs much from the “military exercises” partaken in foreign countries like Syria and Yemen because that has “just been the way of life for those people”.

To conclude, I hope for this article not to be seen as a dismissal of Ukrainian suffering and invasion, but rather as a small analysis of the hypocrisy of the West in terms of the Donbas conflict.