History, Diplomacy and Western Readings of the Crisis in Ukraine

Rome, 28^th March 2014

The West’s difficulty in understanding Russia’s position isn’t helped by the historical models the Western media and commentators have employed to explain events in Ukraine. Many have groped for parallels drawn from the historical confrontation between the liberal, democratic West and its totalitarian adversaries during the twentieth century.

As a result, it’s become popular compare Mr Putin’s defence of the rights of Russian speakers in southern and eastern Ukraine to Hitler’s crusade on behalf of central Europe’s German minorities in the 1930s and to liken Russia’s annexation of Crimea to the Soviet Union’s brutal crushing of dissent in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968: Hilary Clinton’s analogy between Putin and Hitler is perhaps one of the most obvious examples.

Tempting though they are, these comparisons are wrong. From a policy point of view, they’re also dangerous. That’s because such narratives rehearse a model of confrontation between east and west, autocracy and democracy, whose moral and ethical lines are so well drawn as to make serious thinking about the right response to them almost redundant.

Hitler’s duping of Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 taught us that it’s the West’s moral duty to stand up to expansionist dictators and we expect our leaders to do so. Freed of any shades of diplomatic or geopolitical grey, policy-making for Ukraine becomes a relatively easy choice between the ‘goodies’ (us and our aspiring democratic allies) and the ‘baddies’ (repressive and autocratic Russia).

Yet history offers us others parallels that are both morally murkier and politically more complex. As I’ve written before, the First Partition of Poland in 1771 offers us a model through which to read Russia’s actions in Ukraine that puts the emphasis on Ukraine’s own divisions and Russia’s historically vigorous defence of its national interest on the broad plains of Eastern Europe.

The same model suggests the naivety, not to say irresponsibility, with which the United States and European Union entered into strategic competition with Russia in a region which the Kremlin has always identified as critical to its national interest. And it neatly, if tragically, sheds light on the full complexity of the factors that ought to shape the Western response, where some of the options are less bad than others but none really good.

History isn’t a morality play. If it teaches us anything, it’s that diplomacy is often a choice between evils.