Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 27 – Under international
law at the present time, one country can interfere in the affairs of another “either
as response to aggression, as a defense of its own citizens, or in reaction to
massive force and genocide,” Vladislav Inozemtsev writes in today’s “Vedomosti.”
But Vladimir Putin’s actions in
Crimea, which he justifies not in terms of these principles but rather in the
name of defending ethnic Russians as such, have the effect, the director of the
Moscow Center for Research on Post-Industrial Society says, of throwing the
world back not to Soviet times but to a pre-Westphalian world (vedomosti.ru/opinion/news/24545371/na-povestke-dnya-krestovye-pohody).
Russian commentators have tried to
muddy the waters about the situation in Crimea by insisting that the was a
revolution in Ukraine and that this was illegal. But “every contemporary nation
began it history with a revolution,” Inozemtsev says, “and every one of them involved
force and ‘excesses.’”
But “this is not the most important
thing,” he continues. What is is “the enormous
dissonance between the rhetoric and actions of Russian leaders and existing
international practice.” That current international system is based on “the
principle of sovereignty and the non-interference of states in the affairs of
one another.”
Obviously, that principle has been
violated many times, but what Putin has done represents a greater violation
than those in the past. Ukraine has not
met any of the conditions under international law that could justify
intervention, “and even if you consider Ukraine a failed state, this is not the
basis for intervention.”
And indeed, Moscow political figures
have not so much invoked them tried to come up with a new one by their talk of “the
threat to the security of ‘ethnic Russians’ and even ‘Russian speakers.’” By
doing so, Inozemtsev says, “Moscow de facto has declared a civilizational
rather than legal basis for intervention.”
Unless Russia were to declare
itself an ethnic Russian and Orthodox
state, something that were it to do would mean that “the country would simply
case to exist,” Moscow has no right to defend its co-ethnics or co-religionists
beyond its borders. The only exception
to this rule in the international system is Israel which has defined itself as
a Jewish state, he says.
If the existing principles are thrown
out the window as Russia has, Inozemtsev continues, one can easily imagine “what
would happen,” and “no one wants a war
of all against all.”
Other
Moscow efforts to justify what it has done in Crimea are equally without
foundation and carry great risks. There
is no basis for invoking the right of nations to self-determination because “the
Russian minority in Ukraine is not an ethnos deprived of statehood” or a
colony.
Moreover, Moscow’s claims about the
supposed large number of “’citizens of Russia’” in Ukraine are “doubtful” at
best, Inozemtsev says. Few ethnic Russians living outside the
Russian Federation in 1991 got Russian citizenship then, and relatively fewer
Russians moved from non-Russian countries to Russia than in the opposite
direction.
“Consequently,” he writes, “Russia
has ascribed to itself the right to ‘defend’ the interests of people who are in
the first instance citizens of another country which creates the basis for an
extremely broad interpretation and a large number of new conflicts.”
The conclusion that follows from
this, he says, is “simple.” By its
messianism, Russia has turned away from “contemporary legal principles in favor
of the re-animation of ethnic and religious identity as more essential than
membership in a political nation.”
And that means, Inozemtsev says,
that “those who consider our country 30 to 40 years behind Europe are seriously
mistaken. The lag is not less than 365 years,” the period that “separates us
from the Treaty of Westphalia which ended religious wars in Europe and offered
the authorities of each country the right to take decisions about the fate of
their own citizens.”
If the situation continues to
develop alone the lines Moscow has pursued in Crimea, the Moscow commentator
says, “the next stage of our political evolution will be the justification of
crusades.” After all, there already appears to be a “consensus” in Russia about
the “infallibility of ‘the pope.’”
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