immanence

I’ve just posted a piece called “Understanding Russia” over at UKR-TAZ, in which I look at some proximate and deeper causes of continued Russian support for the invasion of Ukraine. It’s mainly a review of some recent literature.

The part that may be of greatest interest to readers of Immanence is the concluding section, in which I discuss Sophie Pinkham’s review of Thane Gustafson’s recent book Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change. Gustafson discusses Russia’s economic over-reliance on oil and gas, and its dismal economic prospects in the long term. As Pinkham puts it,

Russia is warming 2.5 times as fast as the world on average, and the Arctic is warming even faster. The cliché, avidly promoted by Moscow, is that the country will be a relative winner in climate change, benefiting from a melting and accessible Arctic shipping route, longer growing seasons, and the expansion of farmland into newly thawed areas. Gustafson counters, with a dry but persuasive marshaling of facts, that in the redistribution of wealth and power that will result from climate change, Russia is doomed. After reading Klimat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine begins to look like the convulsion of a dying state.

In my analysis, Russia is not an isolated case of a country that has deviated from some international norm. Rather, it is a variant of something we find reflected in many places — in illiberal, authoritarian responses to looming economic insecurity, such as those undergirding Trumpism in the U.S., Orbanism in Hungary, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and shades of Modiism (India), Xiism (China), Brexitism, and many others. And in an increasingly climate-traumatized world, we can not only expect those to continue, but to also seek common cause with each other.

In that sense, the war between Russia and Ukraine can already be called a “world war,” except that in most places it’s still taking place in the cultural sphere — as a war for power and hegemony — and not in the military sphere (at least not yet, with the exception of Ukraine).

And it’s not a war between Russia and “the West,” as Russian nationalists (and some westerners) like to portray it. It’s a war that’s being waged internally within every country, more visibly in liberal democracies that allow for division and dissent, but not absent in other places. It’s a war, if you will, between authoritarian retrenchment wedded to the past (oil and gas, “traditional values,” et al), and a democratic politics open to the future.

There are other combinations possible: for instance, a “green authoritarianism” (imagine if Xi’s China took their “ecological civilization” slogan seriously), which could also take “communitarian” or “traditionalist” forms; or, for that matter, a “fossil fuel democracy” (Norway, if you took away its environmental efforts?). It’s not too far-fetched to say that the future will be made up of such combinations and the contestation between them.