On 24 February, the Russian army invaded Ukraine as part of a large-scale military operation aimed at rapidly decapitating Ukrainian power and subjugating the country. This brutal invasion, rapidly accompanied by massive war crimes and crimes against humanity – intensive bombardment of infrastructure and civilian populations, urbicides such as in Mariupol, massacres such as in Bucha, the frequent and sometimes even systematic use of rape and torture – plunged the world’s left into an abyss of perplexity. “Activists who were usually so resolute in their support for all the victims of war and capitalism have suddenly become extremely nuanced and ‘reflexive'”,1 ironised Ukrainian political scientist Denys Gorbach in Lundimatin. Indeed, a significant fringe of the left, from Latin America to India and France, adopted so-called “campist” positions.
“The blatant truth
You can put forward
all the theories in the world
about the background to this war
all the crimes committed
in the past
near or far
by génocidaires
slavers
colonialists
against all the peoples of the world
but we cannot deny
the simple truth
the glaring
irrefutable truth
that in this war
we are concerned with today
Ukrainians are defending their land
their freedom
and Russian soldiers
are acting
as blind slaves
of a tyrant”
– Abdellatif Laâbi
“What is campism?” ask philosophers Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval. “It is a kind of political foolishness, with the most sinister effects, which consists of thinking that there is only one Enemy. It can be defined as a one-way anti-imperialism. From the uniqueness of the Enemy follows the unavoidable consequence that those who oppose the Enemy are entitled, if not to blessings, at least to excuses, on the principle that the enemies of the Enemy are, if not friends, at least ‘objective allies’ in a just struggle.“2
The influence of campism
In France, this position has support from influential voices in politics, the media and academia, which give it considerable weight with a public that, trusting them, spontaneously adopts their analyses: Jean-Luc Mélenchon and a large part of the apparatus of France Insoumise, who has been spreading language close to Kremlin propaganda3 for many years now, or the journalists Pierre Rimbert and Serge Halimi of Le Monde Diplomatique, who deny giving in to campism but who have on many occasions adopted its lexicon in one of the most influential media of the French-speaking left on international issues.
Around the world, campism has long been present in the analyses proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky,4 undoubtedly one of the most influential figures on the international left. Equally vigorous on the Latin American left, it has found expression in the positions of Brazilian President Lula, who said in May 2022 that Zelensky is “as responsible for the war as Putin” and that “he wanted the war. If he didn’t want it, he would have negotiated a bit more“,5 or in that of the former Bolivian president Evo Morales, for his part openly rallying behind Putin, whose birthday he greeted with a warm tweet on 7 October 2022: “Congratulations to brother Vladimir Putin on his birthday. Dignified, free and anti-imperialist peoples support his struggle against the armed interventionism of the USA and NATO. The USA must stop its attacks on life“.6
While most of the time condemning the invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities committed by the Russian army, this campist left tried, using rhetoric that was intended to be subversive – not aligned with the “mainstream media” and their anti-Russian “voluptuous brainwashing“7 – but whose terms often seemed to come straight out of the Kremlin’s propaganda, to play down Russia’s responsibility, if not for the course of the war, at least for starting it. Anti-imperialists “stuck in the coordinates of the 1960s-1970s, on the one hand, and the second Iraq war and the presidency of George Bush Jr., on the other“8 or sovereigntists haunted by the spectre of a French nation dispossessed of its strategic autonomy by “Euro-Atlantic” forces set about convincing their respective audiences that the ultimate responsibility for this war lay with the United States and NATO.
NATO’s eastward “expansion” after the end of the Cold War, all the more intolerable for supposedly having betrayed obscure promises made to the Russian leadership in the 1990s, was, it was said, carried out with the aim of “encircling” and cornering Russia. The aggressor was, in this discourse, thus shamefully transformed into the victim. In so doing, its purveyors did not seem to realise that they were endorsing the profoundly anti-democratic idea that the world should be divided up between great powers, each with a “sphere of influence” unchallenged by the others. Nor that the conclusion they were drawing from the factuality of geopolitical “games”, was that states and societies, in this case those of Eastern Europe, which had joined the Alliance of their own free will, whatever the influence strategy of the United States to bring them into it may have been, should have conformed to this game. Therefore, in their eyes, it was only natural that Russia, seeing its Ukrainian periphery, which rightfully belonged to it, slipping away towards Europe, should intervene to bring it back into its sphere.
Some went even further and, espousing a narrative with conspiratorial overtones, suggested that the United States had done everything in its power to provoke the war in order to break the rapprochement between Europe and Russia, thereby forcing the Old Continent to remain within the American sphere of influence. In this position, we find traces of an “old geopolitical reading, according to which Eurasia, given its size, demography and resources, is the key to world power. According to this view, the United States knows that it is no match for it if it remains isolated on its peripheral ‘island’. It would therefore tirelessly pursue a policy of undermining Eurasian unity by fomenting wars within it. American policy thus consists of dividing Eurasia in order to better rule the world”.9
Russia, humiliated, encircled and provoked, supposedly somehow fell into the trap set for it, unleashing a war that was certainly criminal, but nonetheless understandable from its point of view, to tame the “Trojan horse” of American imperialist expansion in Europe: Ukraine. On the basis of these questionable and debatable assumptions, once the war had been declared, the campist left never ceased to present it not as a war of national liberation waged by a “small nation” against the aggression of its powerful neighbour, but as an inter-imperialist war between Russia and the United States, supported by Zelensky’s government “under orders”. In this narrative, Ukraine, emptied of all existence and will of its own, is finally nothing more than the bloody theatre of this confrontation, and Ukrainians its actors and victims, most often unaware. “Washington’s ventriloquists are leading the dance on the Old Continent“, wrote Serge Halimi in an article with the evocative title, “Saigner la Russie” (“Bleeding Russia”),10 published in Le Monde Diplomatique in June [2022].
With responsibilities thus made to appear symmetrical, and Ukraine as an autonomous political entity with its own agency erased in this way, a conclusion was quickly drawn: let us commit ourselves to peace, and let us beware of giving Kiev the means to defend itself by supplying it with weapons – because by doing so we would risk not only “adding fuel to the fire”, but also playing into the hands of the “Empire” by giving Washington a decisive advantage in its hegemonic ambitions. Not that peace isn’t a desirable goal for Ukraine and the world, but when faced with an irredentist and ideologically radicalised aggressor, these calls for peace are nothing more than a pious hope, and refusing to give military support to the attacked would be tantamount to abandoning them to their torturers.
Anti-American obsession, ignorance of post-Soviet history and denial of the agency of the states and societies that have emerged from it are some of the reasons why this “anti-imperialism of fools“,11 to use the felicitous phrase of the Syrian Leïla Al-Shami, a veritable ethical, political and intellectual shipwreck of our time, has taken hold in whole swathes of the global left. Fortunately, to speak only of the French-speaking world, many authors from the ranks of political liberalism, from certain Trotskyist milieux, and from libertarian socialist and autonomist circles, have been denouncing the weaknesses of these positions and their presuppositions since March 2022, offering a valuable resource in these troubled times to all those outraged by campist rhetoric.12
A decolonial campism
However, one point has perhaps not been emphasised enough by these various authors: the campist left has not been confined to sovereigntist political currents or to an outdated Marxism focused solely on the power of Anglo-Saxon capitalism; it has also been expressed in the media and by thinkers associated with the so-called “decolonial” left. In the Anglo-Saxon world, historian Sandew Hira, coordinator of the Decolonial International Network, presented Russia on 26 February as a victim of the West, going so far as to compare the demonisation of Putin in the Western media to the demonisation of the indigenous populations of the Americas by theologians in the early days of colonisation!13 In France, the media outlet QG Décolonial, well known for its support for Bashar Al Assad’s regime, mentioned on 21 February, a few days before the invasion, “the threat of a major conflict in Ukraine“, blaming this on “Ukraine’s rapprochement with NATO and the prospect of Western military forces being stationed on its doorstep” and the “Maidan Putsch led by the most reactionary and anti-Russian forces in Ukraine with the unwavering support of the West“, which is said to have prompted Russia to “deploy major military resources on its border with Ukraine“.14 And the author of the text concludes with the need to dissolve NATO, convinced that this would appease Russia and lead it to renounce its appetite for war… But it would no doubt have been dishonest to regard this relatively marginal medium, which is close to controversial figures such as Houria Bouteldja,15 as representative of the decolonial field.
So I turned to the positions of intellectuals from the academic sphere, hoping to find at least more nuanced interventions, only to discover that several leading figures in decolonial studies, some of Latin America’s most influential academics, the Portuguese Boaventura de Sousa Santos and two emblematic members of the Modernity/Coloniality group,16 the Puerto Rican Ramon Grosfoguel and the Argentinian Walter Mignolo, had also been active agents in disseminating Russian propaganda. In an article published on 10 March 2022, Sousa Santos described the strategy of ‘provoking Russia and neutralising Europe’ put in place by the United States: “Russia’s expansion was provoked so that it could then be criticised“.17 This thesis was reiterated on 23 December 2022, in an interview in which he asserted that in Ukraine we were witnessing “a war between the United States and Russia“.18
Grosfoguel, for his part, in an interview on 8 March 2022, went even further, declaring that the “United States has achieved the objective it has set itself for several years“, by orchestrating with the help of “Nazi militias” an “international coup d’état to regain political, economic and military control of Europe“.19 A month later, as Ukraine was being bombed and the first images of the Boutcha massacre reached the eyes of the world, he again referred, claiming to be fighting censorship, to “a war manufactured in the United States (…) a genocide led by neo-Nazis to exterminate Russian-speaking Ukrainians (…) and an international coup d’état led against China and Europe, transformed into an American neo-colony through the intermediary of the puppet Zelensky“.20 Mignolo, finally, while he has not taken a public stance on the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to my knowledge, had welcomed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 on his blog. And in an article published in 2017, he welcomed, likening it to a form of decolonisation in action, “the emergence of various de-Westernisation projects, including: the political re-emergence of China, Russia’s recovery from the humiliation of the end of the USSR, which has enabled it to oppose the Westernisation of Ukraine and Syria, and Iran’s cooperation with China and Russia“.21
I admit I was surprised to discover these contributions, which reproduced the Kremlin’s discourse down to its most crazed details, since it seemed obvious to me that the war of annexation waged by Russia, an old imperial and colonial power, should have directed the solidarity of these authors towards Ukraine. The logic of anti-colonialism or anti-imperialism is that the countries or peoples that suffer it should show solidarity with those who suffer it elsewhere, even if it is under the boot of a power that is a rival of the one that oppresses them. Before outlining some ways of understanding these remarks, I would like to stress that, just as it would be unreasonable to speak of decolonial thought in general, disregarding any internal heterogeneity within this current, there can be no question of suggesting that all authors claiming to belong to the field of decolonial studies have adopted them, but rather of questioning the reasons that have led some of its most eminent representatives to be so complacent towards Putin’s regime. It is in fact likely that other figures have taken up the cause of Ukraine, the victim of the aggression in question, although I have not found any public statements to that effect.
Nor, as we shall see, is it a question of rejecting all the presuppositions of this thinking. On a personal level, having lived in Mexico for a long time, I had observed that the country’s socio-racial structure, even if it was no longer legally or constitutionally codified as such, far from being purely residual, bore witness in certain respects to a persistent “coloniality”. As a translator, I had also noticed, not without regret, that it was much harder to convince a French-speaking publisher to translate a social science book – of equal quality – when it was in Spanish than when it was in English; in this way I directly experienced these phenomena of the coloniality of knowledge and epistemic injustice rightly pointed out by the decolonialists.
As an ecologist, I couldn’t ignore the fact that the territories sacrificed by extractivism were mostly in countries of the South, or that in former colonies the plantation regime inherited from slavery, by locking in the economic and ecological trajectories of certain territories, continued to have devastating effects on the health of the inhabitants, as in the French West Indies, seriously polluted by chlordecone, a pesticide massively spread on banana plantations over several decades.22 The history of ecology itself is not exempt from colonial practices, with many national parks in America, Africa and Asia having been founded by excluding the indigenous populations who lived there. As for the history of ideas, I was also aware of the extent to which Western philosophy, and even more so modern philosophy, at least in its dominant expressions, which has constantly devalued the Earth and erected anthropocentric systems of thought while exacerbating the Nature/Culture dualism, had its share of responsibility for the ongoing catastrophe.
Drawing attention to the persistent asymmetrical effects, on societies and environments alike, of the different waves of European colonisation and slavery, and highlighting the double colonial and racial “divide” that lies at the heart of capitalist modernity, over and above the simple division of society into classes, seems to me not only legitimate, but necessary. In many respects, it seems relevant, in different historical and geographical contexts, to establish an equivalence between the “dominant/dominated” and “centre/periphery” pairs on the one hand, and the “Global North/Global South”, “West/rest of the world” or “white/non-white (racialised)” pairs on the other.
A culturalist conception of relations of domination
How, then, can we account for the reaction of the decolonial thinkers I have mentioned to the war in Ukraine? In some respects, the anti-Americanism of these thinkers, two of whom are Latin American, can be explained by the United States’ responsibility for the violence to which their continent was subjected in the twentieth century, leading them spontaneously to see everywhere the “hand” of the power that supported so many dictatorships, if necessary through military intervention, in their own countries. On this point, their positions do not differ fundamentally from those of campists such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who declares that he does not believe in “an aggressive attitude on the part of Russia or China. Only the Anglo-Saxon world has a vision of international relations based on aggression“.23
But it seems to me that in addition to this essentialist and unilateralist vision of international relations, there is a deeper form of essentialism, generally absent from sovereignist positions such as Mélenchon’s, which they draw directly from their own elaboration of decolonial thought: the tendency to posit the modern West as it has existed since 1492 and the conquest of the Americas up to the present day, what Grosfoguel calls the “modern European/European-North American/colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system“,24 as an unchanging and virtually unchangeable bloc. Under the heading of the modern-colonial ‘episteme’ are lumped together “capitalism and communism, Enlightenment political theory (liberalism, republicanism, Locke, Montesquieu), political economy (Smith) and its adversary, socialism-communism” (Mignolo).25 As for the tensions and contradictions internal to the history of Europe and its ideas, they are simply erased, as Daniel Inclan rightly points out, underlining that there is no room in their reflections for a “dialectical vision of Europe, which is presented as a unity, as a malignant substance spreading throughout the world“.26
Yet this framework, within which the analysis of concrete situations seems to give way to a metaphysics of history in which an all-powerful hyper-subject holds a virtual monopoly on evil in the world, is clearly unable to grasp the specificity and complexity of the war in Ukraine, just as analyses of this type of the Syrian revolution and civil war were hardly compelling. This is a point rightly made by the great Syrian writer Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. Although he criticises the “post-colonial” approach here, a slightly different current of thought, and although he is talking about Syria, I think it is worth quoting him because his thoughts also apply very well to the approach of our authors and to Ukraine: “The post-colonial reading does not provide relevant tools to explain and understand the history of Syria. Neither before the revolution, nor after. In my view, the marginalisation of the Syrian cause in international left circles has a lot to do with the hegemony of the post-colonial prism or, in more conventional language, with the anti-imperialism inherited from the Cold War years. But the Syrian cause is revolutionising global liberation thinking precisely because of its ‘complexity’, as we hear it said and repeated everywhere. Complex’, in the sense that it eludes any analytical exhaustiveness of any given theoretical framework. But this complex reality demands complex thinking, which goes beyond the ‘Salafisms’ (in the sense of traditional, rigid clichés) of the Left. We are at the heart of a process that we can hope will contribute to a revolution in theory, for want of a theory of revolution.“27
Of course, certain aspects of the war in Ukraine and its effects seemed to support the perspective of the authors under discussion here. For example, it is clear that the privileged welcome given to Ukrainian refugees, not only in comparison with the Syrian, Afghan and Sudanese refugees before them, but also in comparison with the African and Sri Lankan students who lived in Ukraine and were often turned back at the Polish border, was partly linked to the racial privilege conferred on them by their whiteness. Similarly, some of the comments made about Ukrainians fleeing their country, described as “culturally European” and “high-quality immigrants“,28 or the, to say the least, controversial statement by Josep Borell, Vice-President of the European Commission, comparing Europe to a “garden” and the rest of the world to a threatening “jungle“,29 had obvious racist and colonial overtones, confirming in many respects the persistence of a “global ethno-racial hierarchy” (Grosfoguel).30 Finally, it is true that the Ukrainian cause, unlike the Syrian cause a few years earlier or the Palestinian cause, has benefited from high media visibility and significant diplomatic, economic and military support from the Western powers, symptomatic of a very flexible form of indignation when it comes to breaches of international law.
But legitimate criticism of this double standard alone cannot explain, let alone justify, the lack of solid support for the resistance and mass mobilisation of Ukrainian society. This lack of solidarity must also be understood in the light of the limitations inherent in the thinking of these authors themselves. By contrasting “the skin and geo-historical locations of migrants from the Third World” with the “skin of “native Europeans” from the First World”31 (Mignolo), by asserting that “epistemology has a colour“32 (Grosfoguel) and that “the world-system refers to a spatial articulation of power”33 (Mignolo) where Eurocentric fundamentalism and its North American extension, the “most dangerous on the planet”34 (Grosfoguel), occupy a central position that nothing seems able to challenge, they give the impression of postulating an equivalence between the ‘dominant/dominated’ and ‘centre/periphery’ pairs and the ‘West/Global South’ and ‘White/non-White’ pairs. While this thesis is in many ways relevant from a historical point of view (and still valid today in many socio-political contexts), it becomes extremely problematic when it takes the form of an essentialising and totalising thesis. It then fails to grasp the specific historicity of many of the major events of our time, which are not necessarily part of the continuity of European colonial and imperial history.
From a historical point of view, we could of course point out that the situation in the world has never corresponded completely to this thesis. Even at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when much of the world was under European domination, Jim Crow laws and racial apartheid were taking hold in the United States, consecrating the triumph of white supremacism, and while many Latin American countries were governed by post-colonial elites keen to whiten their populations through European immigration, independent poles of domination continued to exist or flourished, such as the Ottoman Empire, whose final years were marked by the genocide of the Armenians, and Japanese imperialism, which was then in full swing. In the very heart of Europe, many white immigrant populations who were not from colonised territories were the object of virulent xenophobia, sometimes going so far as to trigger massacres, such as that of Italian workers at Aigues-Mortes in France in 1893,35 not to mention the omnipresent anti-Semitism, which was based on the racialisation of a ‘people’ that was phenotypically indistinguishable from the rest of the white population, and which would lead a few decades later to the Shoah. However, between the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, we have to recognise that the position defended by Mignolo and Grosfoguel is broadly correct, given the massive domination of the “West” over the world.
It is when this thesis is applied to the contemporary world in its entirety that it becomes more fragile. In this respect, our authors would do well to recall the work of historians who have shown that in the United States, Italian or Irish immigrants were first “racialised” before being integrated into the sphere of whiteness,36 or the work of authors who have argued that the concept of the global South does not necessarily refer to a geographical location, that there are “Norths” within the “Souths”, and vice versa. Even if for most of us it will never be possible to entirely dissociate the word South from the cardinal direction to which it originally refers, or the word whiteness from the corresponding skin colour, this lexical and conceptual reworking might have enabled our authors to ‘see’ and recognise the suffering and resistance of the Ukrainians under attack, instead of taking up the cause of their aggressor, who is, moreover, just as white and Nordic, but whose rhetoric clearly has the merit, in their eyes, of attacking the “collective West”, Vladimir Putin’s designated enemy (more on this later).
“Simplistic historiography, permanent Manichaeism, cultural essentialism and Latin American provincialism” are some of the reasons for this failure, to which must be added an “apparent critique of Eurocentrism, which in reality conceals a stubborn occidentalism“, as Pierre Gaussens and Gaya Makaran have clearly shown.37 The paradox is that the thinking of these authors, one of whose first and perfectly legitimate vocations was to criticise “Eurocentrism” and “provincialise Europe”,38 is often profoundly Eurocentric and Western-centric when it comes to understanding the present, the blissful celebration of the West and its “civilising mission” has given way to endless denunciations of its misdeeds, without its centrality ever really being challenged, even when this idea no longer entirely corresponds to developments in the contemporary world. There’s something of an unthinking political theology here: a primary cause (in this case, the United States/the West) and secondary causes that are always the by-product of and reactive to this primary cause, if not its completely passive object.
In this, the decolonial campism of a Mignolo or a Grosfoguel joins other forms of campism, which also tend to view the world through the exclusive prism of American/Western influence. Wouldn’t it be better to think of the world as a complex and largely unpredictable tangle of social, political and geopolitical forms of agency that do not all respond to American power, but have their own histories and dynamics? Can we admit that other peoples, other states and other powers are, for better or for worse, capable of acting on their own without necessarily being provoked or pushed to do so by the “West” or the “Empire”?
This inverted Western-centrism can be found even in the historical culture of the campist left, of all persuasions. While the long history of American intervention in the world, from the coup d’état in Guatemala in 1954 to the war in Iraq in 2003, via the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in 1961, the Vietnam War, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, is relatively well known and constantly recalled, a strange amnesia seems to surround the equally long history of Soviet intervention in many of its peripheries, in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Warsaw in 1980, not to mention, in the specific case of Ukraine, the Holodomor39 or the deportation of the Crimean Tatars,40 even though these events are the subject of many works by historians. This lack of knowledge is clearly apparent in the decolonial thinking of Grosfoguel and Mignolo, which focuses on Western Europe and America, and is therefore incapable of making room for the diversity of colonial histories and their legacies. In this respect, a polycentric decolonialism could be a fruitful perspective.
Admittedly, unlike the Spanish, British and French colonial empires, which essentially developed “overseas”, Russian colonialism was an “overland” colonialism, to use the judicious distinction made by the geographer Michel Foucher.41 This undoubtedly explains why it is less easily discernible, since the territories conquered from the seventeenth century until the end of the Second World War were, in successive layers, on the immediate periphery of the initial core territory. And although some of these territories emancipated themselves from Soviet control after the fall of the Union, the after-effects of this long colonial history are still very much alive, particularly in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where the populations are subject to persistent racism.42 To this should be added that in the first months of the war, it was the ethnic minorities of the Russian Federation, notably the Buryats and Yakuts, who paid the heaviest price on the Ukrainian battlefield, while the white middle classes of Moscow and St Petersburg were relatively spared.
A dangerous convergence with the propaganda of authoritarian regimes
But if it were simply a question of a lack of complexity in the analysis, in the end all this wouldn’t be so serious. The problem is that this reductionism leads to a worrying blindness to the nature and diversity of the threats we face today, and to complacency towards, or even active complicity with, authoritarian regimes. It is high time to admit that we are no longer living in a monocentric world-system (if such a thing ever existed), in which the ‘white West’, alone, is said to occupy the hegemonic position (simply criss-crossed by rivalries internal to its dynamics and its supposed essence), but in a polycentric world-system, in which authoritarian, nationalist and racist violence can emerge from anywhere, without having been engineered or provoked, in the last instance, by NATO, the CIA, Europe or any other Western entity.
Of course, the Western powers continue to enjoy many privileges and to benefit from economic and ecological exchanges that are imperialist and unequal. The leading power among them, the United States, has persistent hegemonic ambitions. Of course, ethno-nationalism and white supremacism are steadily gaining ground in Trump’s America and Zemmour’s France, where fears of the “Great Replacement” are proliferating. But we also have to reckon with the threat of Great Russian nationalism, whose limitless violence can be seen today in Ukraine (and yesterday in Chechnya and Syria), and Hindu ethno-nationalism and supremacism in Modi’s India,43 already a grave threat to the lives of Muslims, who are victims of outright pogroms, and to adivasis (the name given to India’s indigenous populations), or Han ethno-nationalism and supremacism in China, where a process of self-racialisation is at work within the majority ethnic group, relegating non-Han populations44 to an inferior status – some of whom, like the Uighurs, are victims of crimes against humanity that some no longer hesitate to describe as genocide.
Yet the thinking of the decolonial authors we have mentioned, in denouncing “a fetishised object called the ‘West’, accused of everything, and the universal occult power of a ‘Western’ rentier caste” (Vincent Présumey),45 while unreservedly equating the commitment to “human rights (…) with global imperial conceptions and the global ethno-racial hierarchy between Europeans and non-Europeans”46 (Grosfoguel), unfortunately resonates with the ideology and propaganda of these political regimes, which tend to present their crusade against the West as a process of decolonisation of the world order. Putin, for example, in his much-commented speech of 27 October 2022, spelled out the long list of misdeeds committed by “the West” in the course of its history: the slave trade, the extermination of the American Indians, the exploitation of resources in Africa and India, the colonial wars, the Allied bombing of German cities, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and so on. He went on to say that “Russia will never accept the diktat of the aggressive, neo-colonial West” or the manoeuvres of “Europeans”, “NATO”, “Anglo-Saxon countries” and “the United States” to impose “totalitarianism, despotism and apartheid”, “nationalism and racism” on the whole world, before concluding: “They don’t want us to be free; they want us to be a colony”.47 Sergei Lavrov, the country’s foreign minister, added during a diplomatic tour of Africa: “our country has not tarnished its reputation by the bloody crimes of colonialism and has always sincerely supported Africans in their struggle for liberation from the colonial yoke”.48 The same goes for Erdogan, the Turkish autocrat, author of a book “where on every page the vision of an unjust and binary world shines through: on one side the West, the colonising and imperialist countries, blinded by their privileges; on the other the oppressed Muslims”.49 In India, the philosophers Shaj Mohan and Divya Dwivedi have highlighted the convergence between certain post-colonial theories and Hindu ultra-nationalism, united in a common denunciation of the “Eurocentric” nature of demands for respect for human rights and feminist demands.50 And of course, in China, Xi Jinping and the Communist Party have made the West and its “values” their designated target.51
To return for a moment to the Russian regime’s propaganda and take a closer look at its specific features: it really is important to realise its dual nature.
The messaging aimed at the right and far right (who share with Putin the desire to liquidate the emancipatory and democratic aspects of political modernity, and to make way for a world where all forms of domination – capitalist, racial, patriarchal, anthropocentric… – will have free reign, where all opposition will be crushed by a regime of terror) exalts tradition and authority, particularly of the religious variety (with the blessing of the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill), while emphasising the moral decadence of the West, due to the combined effect of immigrant “invaders” from the South, the loss of virility brought about by feminism and the LGBTQI+ movements, and last but not least, the “wokeism” and “cancel culture” of which Russia today is allegedly a victim.
The messaging aimed at many countries in the South and certain sections of the far left, particularly the decolonial left, on the other hand, presents Russia as an anti-imperialist power – it would liberate Ukraine and the Ukrainian people from their government, which has been under the thumb of American imperialism since the “Maidan coup” in 2014 – and an anti-colonial power capable of offering an appreciable counterweight to American hegemony. This is obviously a crude and unconvincing story, considering the long (and ongoing) history of Russian colonialism mentioned above – but it does work up to a point. By accusing NATO of being ultimately responsible for the war and by opposing arms deliveries in the name of a pacifism as saccharine as it is falsely virtuous, a certain Left seems convinced that a little “balance of power” and “multipolarity” cannot but be a good thing.
Be it because of naivety or ideological siloing, this current of the Left is therefore, even as it is sometimes honestly fighting these same developments, unwittingly contributing to the ongoing barbarisation of capitalism and to the advent of the world dreamt of by the far right and by all the illiberal forces at play. There is obviously nothing wrong with the ideal of a multipolar world as such. But in the current context it must be said that multipolarity would not lead to a renewal of autonomy, freedom and justice for the peoples of the world, still less to a slackening of the increasingly infernal extractive and productive pressure exerted on the Earth. Rather, a multipolar world would be one in which the most powerful geopolitical blocs would recognise each other’s right to preserve, or re-establish, internally, the most brutal and inegalitarian social orders, if need be by perpetrating all sorts of atrocious crimes, with no one able to say a word against them (ah sovereignty!), while at the same time benefiting from spheres of influence, unchallenged by the other blocs, over client states at their periphery. In short, a world where every power could go about their little massacres as they pleased. A world in which the whole fragile normative architecture of international relations built up over decades, founded – despite its immense imperfections, failings and hypocrisies – on a reference in principle to respect for the right of peoples to self-determination, human rights and fundamental freedoms, would be liquidated. A globalised Syria, against a backdrop of the collapse of the Earth’s habitability – that is the true horizon of “non-alignment” and “multipolarity” today.
In a remarkable text, Multipolarity, the Mantra of Authoritarianism,52 the Indian feminist Kavita Krishnan has clearly highlighted the objective convergence between certain left-wing criticisms of the “West” and the ideology of nationalist and authoritarian regimes that seek to discredit any reference to universalism, democracy and human rights – while incarcerating activists who defend them, accusing them of being “foreign agents” – on the pretext of their supposedly Western, and therefore colonial, “essence”:
“Multipolarity is the compass orienting the Left’s understanding of international relations. All streams of the Left in India and globally have for long advocated for a multipolar world as opposed to a unipolar one dominated by the imperialist USA.
At the same time, multipolarity has become the keystone of the shared language of global fascisms and authoritarianisms. It is a rallying cry for despots, that serves to dress up their war on democracy as a war on imperialism. The deployment of multipolarity to disguise and legitimise despotism is immeasurably enabled by the ringing endorsement by the global Left of multipolarity as a welcome expression of anti-imperialist democratisation of international relations.
By framing its response to political confrontations within or between nation states as a zero-sum option between endorsing multipolarity or unipolarity, the Left perpetuates a fiction that even at its best, was always misleading and inaccurate. But this fiction is positively dangerous today, serving solely as a narrative and dramatic device to cast fascists and authoritarians in flattering roles.
The unfortunate consequences of the Left’s commitment to a value-free multipolarity are illustrated very starkly in the case of its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The global and the Indian Left have legitimised and amplified (to varying degrees) Russian fascist discourse, by defending the invasion as a multipolar challenge to US-led unipolar imperialism.”
Conclusion
What can we conclude from this convergence between the positions of certain representatives of one of the most prominent currents of the contemporary radical left, usually associated with movements for emancipation, and the rhetoric of some of the worst political regimes of our time? It would of course be absurd to deduce from this convergence that everything in decolonial thought in general should be rejected. On the other hand, if we are to avoid campism, it seems essential that important authors in this field, like Grosfoguel and Mignolo, abandon their totalising and essentialising tendencies in favour of circumscribed and historicised approaches, a historicisation that could itself lead to the kind of polycentric decolonialism I evoked above. This would make it possible to think beyond the relationship between Western Europe and its former colonies, and better grasp the specific situation of the post-Soviet spaces, as the Ukrainian researchers Adrian Ivakhiv53 and Hanna Perekhoda,54 for example, are doing. From this point of view, it might be interesting to draw inspiration from the Zapatistas in Mexico. Long involved in a struggle with decolonial overtones against capitalism and the Mexican state, they have not yielded to campism, and on 13 March 2022, thousands of them marched through the towns of Chiapas in support of the Ukrainian resistance, to cries of “Putin out!”. Secondly, we need to recognise that not all political dominations can be viewed through the prism of the concept of ‘coloniality’, and that many of them are part of other historical dynamics. Finally, by abandoning culturalist approaches to domination, it would be possible to focus on the analysis of the specifically political differences between the states that are today confronting each other on the international stage, and thus escape the relativism of all those who seem convinced that “in the night of late capitalism, all regimes are grey”.55
Of course, we must not give in to the rhetoric of the “free world” brandished by hypocritical neoliberal elites who pose as defenders of “values” that they in fact constantly flout, abandoning migrants to certain death in the Mediterranean and sometimes even entire peoples, as in Syria, to their programmed annihilation. But while we must remain vigilant in the face of the cynicism of our leaders, who are tempted to protect the most inegalitarian and ecocidal tendencies of our societies by brandishing the threat of “there are worse things out there”, it is essential to recognise that the Ukrainian war of national liberation is also a confrontation between a criminal dictatorship whose only future lies in more ruins and mass graves, and a regime in which the arbitrariness of capitalism and the state is counterbalanced by institutions and (social, mediatic, intellectual) counter-powers that guarantee a minimum of democratic vitality and rule of law, keeping the future open for dissent and making emancipatory breakthroughs possible. The historian Taras Bilous, to whom I will leave the last word, notes in this regard that if he had been an Iraqi in 2003, he would have condemned the American aggression, but would not have defended Sadam Hussein’s regime. As a Ukrainian in 2023, however, he joined the territorial defence forces without hesitation to defend “the fragile Ukrainian democracy which, far from being perfect, nevertheless deserves to be protected from Putin’s para-fascist regime”.56
Notes:
- https://lundi.am/Une-guerre-genante-que-faire-lorsque-la-Russie-attaque-l-Ukraine-mais-que-tu-es. ↩︎
- https://blogs.mediapart.fr/pierre-dardot-et-christian-laval/blog/180322/reinventons-linternationalisme-24-la-faillite-d-un-anti-imperialisme-sens-uniq. ↩︎
- For a good summary of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s positions on international policy, see this remarkable blog post by Jean-Yves Pranchère and its many links: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jean-yves-pranchere/blog/270322/l-inutilite-du-vote-utile. ↩︎
- For a detailed critique of Chomsky’s positions on international politics, see the Open Letter to Noam Chomsky published by a group of academics (https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2022/05/19/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war/); the article of the Syrian writer Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Chomsky is No Friend of the Syrian Revolution (https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/) and that of French researcher Jonathan Piron, « Y a-t-il un problème Chomsky ? », La Revue Nouvelle 2022/1 (N°1), p. 90-97. ↩︎
- https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/05/05/selon-lula-volodymyr-zelensky-est-aussi-responsable-de-la-guerre-que-vladimir-poutine_6124832_3210.html. ↩︎
- https://twitter.com/evoespueblo/status/1578423391828049924. ↩︎
- In the words of Pierre Rimbert and Serge Halimi, writers at Le Monde Diplomatique : https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/09/HALIMI/65016. ↩︎
- So says Jean-Yves Pranchère : https://esprit.presse.fr/actualites/jean-yves-pranchere/anti-imperialisme-ou-complicite-avec-l-agression-russe-43904. ↩︎
- Florian Louis quoted by Joseph Confavreux and Fabien Escalona in their article ‘Ukraine, cette gauche qui n’a rien appris’, 27 November 2022. https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/271122/ukraine-cette-gauche-qui-n-rien-appris. ↩︎
- https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2022/06/HALIMI/64758. ↩︎
- http://solitudesintangibles.fr/lanti-imperialisme-des-imbeciles-leila-al-shami/. ↩︎
- These include, in no particular order, the Poles of the Razem party and the Ukrainian historian Taras Bilous in the Courrier d’Europe Centrale, Daria Saburova in Contretemps, Denys Gorbach in Lundimatin, Perrine Poupin in Mouvements, Jean-Yves Pranchère in Esprit, Edwy Plenel, Fabien Escalona and Joseph Confavreux in Mediapart, the duo Dardot/Laval and the internationalist collective ‘La Cantine Syrienne’ in the blog of the same newspaper, the ‘Brigades de Solidarité Editoriale’ set up by the publishing house Syllepse, and Vincent Présumey in Aplutsoc, to name but a few. ↩︎
- https://din.today/news/a-decolonial-view-of-the-war-in-ukraine/. ↩︎
- https://qgdecolonial.fr/2022/02/21/edito-46-en-ukraine-comme-ailleurs-lotan-est-ladversaire-de-la-paix/; see a few months later on this same site an incantatory call for peace: https://qgdecolonial.fr/2022/10/10/plus-que-jamais-contre-la-guerre-plus-que-jamais-pour-la-paix-revolutionnaire/. ↩︎
- https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article38866. ↩︎
- For a good overview of this group and its ideas, see Claude Bourguignon and Philippe Colin, ‘De l’universel au pluriversel. Enjeux et défis du paradigme décolonial’. Raison présente, 2016/3 (No. 199), pp. 99-108. ↩︎
- https://www.pagina12.com.ar/406933-el-lamentable-papel-de-europa-en-la-guerra-rusia-ucrania-y-l. ↩︎
- https://www.rfi.fr/pt/programas/convidado/20221223-ucr%C3%A2nia-estamos-diante-de-uma-guerra-entre-os-eua-e-a-r%C3%BAssia. ↩︎
- https://observatoriodetrabajadores.wordpress.com/2022/03/18/ucrania-en-llamas-golpe-de-estado-internacional-de-eeuu-contra-rusia-entrevista-a-ramon-grosfoguel-miguel-angel-pirela/. ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBApUrQ4B10&ab_channel=LaIguanaTV. ↩︎
- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/692552. ↩︎
- On this point, see the article by Malcom Ferdinand and Erwan Molinié, ‘Des pesticides dans les outre-mer français’, Écologie et politique, 2021/2 (No. 63), pp. 81-94. ↩︎
- https://melenchon.fr/2021/11/12/ma-ligne-cest-lindependance-de-la-france-interview-pour-le-figaro/. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2006-3-page-51.htm. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-mouvements-2013-1-page-181.htm. ↩︎
- Daniel Inclan « La historia en disputa : el problema de la inteligibilidad del pasado », dans Piel blanca, máscaras negras, crítica de la razón decolonial, p. 57 (http://comunizar.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/Piel_blanca_mascaras_negras_Critica_de_l.pdf).Daniel Inclan « La historia en disputa : el problema de la inteligibilidad del pasado », dans Piel blanca, máscaras negras, crítica de la razón decolonial, p. 57 (http://comunizar.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/Piel_blanca_mascaras_negras_Critica_de_l.pdf). ↩︎
- https://diacritik.com/2021/12/09/entretien-avec-yassin-al-haj-saleh-ecrivain-syrien-sans-terre-sous-ses-pieds-1-3. ↩︎
- https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/010322/refugies-ukrainiens-l-indignite-derriere-la-solidarite. ↩︎
- https://www.liberation.fr/international/josep-borrell-le-maitre-jardinier-de-leurope-se-perd-dans-la-jungle-20221019_2KOTPBOMSBC3RJLJRUJV7VMY2E/. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2006-3-page-51.htm. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-mouvements-2013-1-page-181.htm. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2006-3-page-51.htm. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2001-3.htm. ↩︎
- http://reseaudecolonial.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Entretien-Ramon-Grosfoguel-RED.pdf. ↩︎
- Gérard Noiriel, Le massacre des Italiens. Pluriel, 2018. ↩︎
- Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People. New York, 2010. ↩︎
- ‘Autopsia de una impostura intelectual’, Crítica de la razón decolonial, op. cit., p. 21. ↩︎
- To use the title of a famous text by Dipesh Chakrabarty, a thinker on postcolonialism who, to avoid any misunderstanding, has never been known to disseminate the language of Russian propaganda. Provincialising Europe, postcolonial thought and historical difference. Amsterdam, 2015. ↩︎
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#:~:text=Le%20jour%20comm%C3%A9moratif%20du%20Holodomor,qualifie%20de%20g%C3%A9nocide%20en%202022. ↩︎
- https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9portation_des_Tatars_de_Crim%C3%A9e. ↩︎
- Michel Foucher, Une guerre coloniale en Europe. Editions de l’Aube, 2022. ↩︎
- See the remarkable article by Mathilde Goanec in Mediapart: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/240722/de-bichkek-kazan-un-douloureux-reveil-postcolonial?. ↩︎
- https://mrmondialisation.org/inde-leffrayante-montee-du-nationalisme-et-de-lislamophobie/. ↩︎
- https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/111022/taiwan-ouighours-les-derives-nationalistes-de-xi-jinping. ↩︎
- Vincent Présumey, published on Facebook on 30 September 2022. ↩︎
- https://www.cairn.info/revue-multitudes-2006-3-page-51.htm. ↩︎
- For a detailed analysis of Putin’s speech, see this remarkable article by Wiktor Stoczkowski in Desk Russia: https://desk-russie.eu/2022/10/14/poutine-a-t-il-declare-la-guerre.html. ↩︎
- https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2022/07/26/le-chef-de-la-diplomatie-russe-en-tournee-pour-rassurer-et-soigner-ses-partenaires-africains_6136152_3212.html. ↩︎
- https://www.lhistoire.fr/dans-la-t%C3%AAte-de-recep-tayyip-erdogan. ↩︎
- https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/culture-idees/200518/en-inde-etre-philosophe-peut-conduire-la-mort. ↩︎
- https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/10/14/l-occident-ennemi-designe-de-la-chine_6145809_3210.html. ↩︎
- https://www.theindiaforum.in/politics/multipolarity-mantra-authoritarianism. ↩︎
- https://www.e-flux.com/notes/457576/decolonialism-and-the-invasion-of-ukraine. ↩︎
- https://zaborona.com/en/why-does-russia-still-think-in-imperialist-categories-and-does-not-recognize-the-agentivity-of-ukrainians-what-is-subaltern/. ↩︎
- F. Escalona and J. Confavreux, https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/271122/ukraine-cette-gauche-qui-n-rien-appris. ↩︎
- https://courrierdeuropecentrale.fr/taras-bilous-une-grande-partie-de-la-gauche-prefere-une-approche-plus-imperialiste-exigeant-que-loccident-decide-pour-nous/. ↩︎
Pierre Madelin, author and translator, grew up in Cuba and Paris. He lives and works in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico. His books include ‘Après le capitalisme. Essai d’écologie politique’ (2017), ‘Faut-il en finir avec la civilisation? Primitivisme et effondrement’ (2021) and ‘La tentation écofasciste. Ecologie et extrême droite’ (2023).
The French original of this article was first published in lundimatin # 372.
Translated by Daniel Mang.