Vladimir Putin’s multiple crimes against Ukraine include aggression and genocide. But what happens when these two categories of criminality come together? Among other things, this result is not “merely” additive; it is also synergistic. Hence, the cumulative Russian wrongdoing is actually greater than the calculable sum of its component “parts.”[1]
What pertinent connections ought to be explored? To begin, aggression and genocide should not be considered as mutually exclusive. “Crimes against peace” (the Nuremberg antecedent of aggression) might be the means whereby a particular genocide is undertaken. According to Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention, which entered into force on January 12, 1951, genocide includes any of several listed acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such…”. The listed acts include forcible transfer of children from the victim states to the offending one.
There is more. Ukraine’s barbarous victimization by Russia demands coherent and comprehensive theorizing. This victimization also demands a more diligent application of pertinent international law. Though international law does not specifically advise any particular penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide committed by others, all states, most notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, among other things, by the peremptory obligation, known as pacta sunt servanda, to act in continuous “good faith.” The extraordinary harms imposed upon that beleaguered country has a much deeper significance than tactical or strategic, To use the word “Hitlerite” in this connection is entirely reasonable, both historically and jurisprudentially. Ukraine also offers an opportunity to explore what “really” ails this imperiled planet; that is, to help identify those still-remediable factors that are most patently causal. And it serves as a reminder that all states are co-responsible for the enforcement of relevant international law.
Russia’s Ukraine criminality has many “sides.” It is both microcosm (war; religious conflict; crimes of war; irrational prejudices; bitter rancor) and macrocosm (the individual human being: non-rational; death-fearing; anti-intellectual; superstitious; self-destructive).
Big questions will still have to be answered. What are America’s legal obligations in this conflict? In The Law of Nations (1758), classical Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel observes: “The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.” Though a “general law” (in formal jurisprudence, a “peremptory” law), this imperative is routinely disregarded. Why?
There is more. Unless we finally take tangible steps to implement an organic planetary civilization – a civilization based on the immutably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all. The time-urgent imperative of this critical portent is magnified by our species’ steady “advances” in the creation of mega-weapons and infrastructures. Augmenting this “progress,” some major states are now committing themselves to nuclear deterrent strategies based not “only” on threats of “assured destruction”, but also upon recognizable capacities for nuclear war fighting.
In such existential matters, planet earth is still at the beginning. Until now, we humans have consistently managed to miss what is plainly most important. Nonetheless, the central truth here is simple: There exists a latent but determinative “oneness” to all world politics.
Scholars and statesmen need a refined strategic dialectic. Often, human beings fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death. Amid the palpable chaos and impending genocide now stampeding across Ukraine, suffering individuals still offer their unswerving loyalties to the stubbornly corrosive claims of “tribe.” Everywhere, people desperate “to belong” wittingly subordinate themselves to the endlessly predatory expectations of nation, class and faith.
There is more. To survive on this self-imperiling planet, we should learn something very basic from Russia’s war on Ukraine: All humankind must survive together, must rediscover individual lives that are sufficiently detached from deeply-felt obligations “to belong.” It is only after such an indispensable rediscovery that peoples and nations could plausibly hope to reconstruct world politics and international law on sound footings. In the end, merely to survive, we will have to “give birth” to more durable foundations of global interdependence.
Unrealistic? Of course. Still, “in the end,” as we may learn from Italian film director Federico Fellini, “The visionary is the only realist.”
In The Decline of the West, a modern classic first published during World War I, Oswald Spengler comments: “`I believe’” is the great word against metaphysical fear (sic.), and at the same time it is an avowal of love.’” The welcome visionary would accept that the most suffocating conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by improving global economies, building larger missiles, fashioning or abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid regime with another or “spreading democracy.”
Such traditional “remedies” would be insufficient for good reason: The planet as a whole would still remain on its lethal trajectory of belligerent nationalism and tribal conflict. French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955) states: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.” But throughout history, what may be perfectly obvious via calculations of human Reason has still been undermined by variously manipulative claims of anti-Reason.
Before the tortuous Realpolitik drama is over in world politics and world law, humankind will need to take more seriously that global survival requires an escape; from the acrimonious spirit of national-tribes. The likelihood of ever meeting such a daunting requirement of human “oneness” is portentously low, but foreign policies can no longer be constructed according to the defiling assumptions of power politics.
Aware that our “Westphalian” system of international relations displays the same fragility as an individual life – that is, the irremediable fragility of not being immortal – an extraordinary shudder should run through all “powerful” states. Even if the Ukrainian crisis should end more quickly and successfully than first expected, it will ultimately be revealed as just another milestone on the twisted road to species self-destruction.
A concluding thought dawns. Shared theologies will prove indispensable to human survival, but this belief-system cannot be just another chanted affirmation of competitive divinities. Whether we believe that a transcendental supreme being created a balanced cosmos or a chaos, ultimate survival responsibilities will be humankind’s alone. “In the end,” warns Goethe succinctly in Faust, “we must depend upon creatures of our own making.”
It is less important that we agree on the nature of such “creatures” than we share a planet-serving commitment to “world order” reform.[2] Whatever else we might find agreeable or disagreeable, one fact will remain incontestable: Everything must ultimately depend upon the individual human being, the “microcosm.” No nation can ever be any better than the sum total of its constituent “souls.” Swiss thinker Carl G. Jung summed it all up best with enviable candor and simplicity: “Every civilization is the sum total of individual souls in need of redemption.”
Footnotes
[1] This problem has become much more urgent with Vladimir Putin’s open threats of using nuclear weapons against Ukraine. This threat is more credible than would first appear because Russia is returning to classic Soviet policy on pertinent nuclear thresholds. In essence, this policy states that the critical escalatory threshold is not between conventional and nuclear weapons (the traditional US posture) but between tactical or theatre nuclear weapons and strategic ones.
[2] The term “world order” has its contemporary origins in a scholarly movement begun at the Yale Law School in the mid- and late 1960s, and later “adopted” by the Politics Department at Princeton University in 1967-68. The present author was an early member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project, and wrote several of the early books and articles in this once still-emergent academic genre.