The nature of the armed conflict in the donbas: a postnonclassical viewpoint

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The nature of the armed conflict in the donbas: a postnonclassical viewpoint

The Institute for Economics and Forecasting of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Abstract

The article explores the armed conflict in the Donbas as a derivative of the Ukraine crisis through the prism of postnonclassical methodology. Three main approaches to research--and, accordingly, three levels of cognizing the conflict's nature-are critically analyzed: neorealistic, political, and cultural.

Keywords: the East-West dichotomy, fractality, the Ukraine crisis, the Donbas conflict.

Introduction

armed conflict security

In one of his last appearances in the media in early 2017, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of America's foremost foreign policy strategists, pointed out with some trepidation that “strategic insecurity is now a fact of life on a scale heretofore not experienced by the now increasingly vulnerable humanity” (Brzezinski 2017). Great strategic conflicts among the United States, the world's still-dominant superpower, Russia, which inherited the military power status of the former Soviet Union, and the rising superpower of the People's Republic of China (PRC), have “brought about two strategic fault lines, one cutting across East Asia and the other eastern Europe” (Wu 2017: 214).

With regard to the armed conflict in Ukraine's Donbas region, the efforts of the international community have thus far not brought about any real progress toward long-term political, institutional or security stability. The conflict is still simmering, threatening to explode and thereby undermine security throughout the region.

Objectives

By using an interdisciplinary approach--based in large part on recent achievements in synergetics, such as discovering the world's fractal regularities (Christian 2004; Grinin & Korotayev 2013; Afanas'yeva, Kochelayevskaya & Lazerson 2013), along with neomodernization and other non-linear approaches to social history, politics and economics (Müller 1998; Spier 2005; Yefimchuk 2010), including postmodern and postnonclassical concepts and transformation theories--we will:

• generalize principal academic approaches to researching and interpreting the Ukraine crisis, particularly as pertains to the armed conflict in the Donbas, analyze the latter's historical background, and respectively define its nature;

• recommend political and institutional ways of settling the Donbas conflict and the general Ukraine crisis in view of contemporary globalization trends.

Methodology (theoretical tools paradigm)

Postmodern thinkers of the last quarter of the 20th century tried to present some kind of anarchic picture of the world and society, generated in the will to overcome the bloody legacy of totalitarian regimes.

Rhizome (rootstock) is one of the key concepts in the philosophy of poststructuralism and postmodernism. It was introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari their eponymous book published in 1976, which was later included in A Thousand Plateaus, and intended to serve as the basis for their “nomadological project” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). The rhizome as a metaphor of postmodern consciousness is a network of multiple non-linear anti-hierarchical connections opposite to the linear structures of being and thinking typical of classical European culture. While the root (or pivot)-the key concept of structuralist binary thinking--has a center and goes deep, the rhizome is a structure with a missing semantic center, growing in breadth. The rhizome's intrinsic “multiplicity” is a negation of the tree's properties and manifests at all levels in the absence of any main stem or root. In this case, it is obvious that it is not possible to reduce the rhizomatic structure of society to a single common denominator or single general property, be it liberal democracy or a free market or, at the other end of the spectrum, a paternalistic empire or a nationalized economy.

The whole Eurasian megacontinental space is like a rhizome. To use an analogy from A Thousand Plateaus, it is a space where a multitude of orchids and wasps, “as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 10). This metaphor can be understood as one of the innumerable variants in the interaction between East and West: a dynamic, fractal process of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization”. It is not a phenomenon in which alien civilizations are opposed, but a fertilization (“pollination”) process that penetrates into all levels of international, national, regional and local interaction--a dynamic process of mutual becoming generated not by a single actor, but by the conflict among powers in its non-linear development.

Meanwhile, poststructuralist “nomadism” striving to “do away with foundations” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 24) fundamentally denies causation and the very desire to harmonize being (individual, society and the surrounding world), the knowledge of its deep integrity and unity. At the socio-psychological, national and international levels, such a worldview actually contributes to the “deconstruction” of political will to build and maintain sustainable development systems based on the principles of peace and collective security, multilateral cooperation and integration. Such intellectual anarchism is fraught with chaos, social alienation and pessimism, an ego-war of “all against all” and, ultimately, the advent of a geopolitical “attractor” that establishes its external dictates over the society which has lost its foundation and inclination to sets goals.

By contrast, the fractal methodological approach to the universe, world and society is grounded and rooted in the progressive theoretical breakthroughs and achievements of the last quarter of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.

Postnonclassical epistemology, which has been winning more and more proponents among intellectuals, organically combines methods of scientific, philosophical, religious and artistic cognition, as well as the corresponding pictures of the world (Prigogine 1991: 51). In particular, as a result of the interdisciplinary research boom, it became clear that fractality--i.e., self-similarity of part(s) to the whole across different scales--is, along with nonlinearity, a typical property of nature and society (Afanas'yeva, Kochelayevskaya & Lazerson 2013; Yefimchuk 2010).

Fractality, as a determining feature of the postnonclassical vision of the world, essentially overcomes the nomadological (anarcho-“nomadic”) picture of the universe, which was proposed in the 1970s, later called poststructuralism, and became the “mainstream” of Continental philosophy in the post-bipolar era of the 1990s.

In light of the latest achievements of synergetics, which has already revived the holistic worldview based on universal regularities and patterns (previously inherent in mythology and religion) at the scientific level, the issue of trans-civilizational dialogue and integration seems particularly vital. This, in turn, relativizes the dichotomous thinking characteristic of the bipolar and the post-bipolar worlds.

Thus, from the postmodern understanding of the world, we take the concept of rhizome, and from the postnonclassical understanding we take the universal property of fractality. As a result of such a synergetic approach, the world, society in particular, may be represented and cognized as a substantive multiplicity, or plurality (“rhizome”) of interwoven “tree-properties” each nevertheless having its root-centers and its own logic of fractal development (ramification). Such “tree-properties” are capable both of “grafting” and being “grafted” by various factors and actors, leading in organic nature to mutations and in the social world to socio-economic, political, cultural and even civilizational transformations spawning hybrid or principally new properties.

Behind the empirical accumulation of multi-dimensional, non-linear trajectories of contradictions and conflicts that characterize today's structural shocks in the political and security architecture of Eastern Europe, the fractal-synergetic approach allows us to distinguish certain universal paradigms determining the genesis, development and prospects of settling the hybrid armed conflict in the Donbas, as well as the Ukraine crisis in general.

In this regard, the conceptual contrast between East and West-which has existed since Herodotus (484 BCE-425 BCE) and has been developed by universal historians and theoreticians up through Samuel Huntington (1996), Iver Neumann (1999), Alexandr Panarin (2002), Yuriy Pavlenko (2002)-needs further, essentially interdisciplinary development in accordance with the latest achievements in the world of science. Apparently, in the progress toward a multivariate vision of the world and its spatial and temporal dynamics, one may foresee the emergences of new trans-civilizational intellectual currents and socio-political initiatives aiming to reconcile the traditional East-West dichotomy through the global synthesis of different civilizational views of religion, ethics, metaphysics, science and art (Marmazov & Piliaiev 2018: 327-328).

The nature of the conflict: three levels of analysis The Neorealistic Approach to the Ukraine Crisis in the Context of European and Eurasian Security

Modern political science literature devoted to the conflict in the east of Ukraine is dominated by the neorealistic vision of the conflict. This vision sees the conflict through the prism of geopolitics--contradictions in the world, megacontinental and macroregional orders--as a “great strategic crisis” (Wu 2017: 197) of international security and of Europe (more precisely, Eastern Europe) and the post-Soviet space's political and institutional architecture (Bacevich 2002: 114-116).

Leading political realists in the US-such as Robert Kagan, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Robert Kaplan, Andrew Bacevich, et al.-have argued that the new world order will continue to resemble the great power struggles, wars and conflicts of the past. They refute Francis Fukuyama and other neoliberal institutionalists' views throughout the 1990s about the end of the global rivalry for influence (Zajgc 2016: 178), the triumph of democratic liberalism and “democratic peace” (Berryman 2017: 178). In the vein of the realists, Justina Zajgc asserts in her skeptical view “from Warsaw”:

“The 21st century saw a return to the geopolitics of the 19th century-to the power of states, the concert of powers, political and military rivalry, and the division of the world into spheres of influence” (Zajqc 2016: 192-193).

At this level of political analysis, the Ukraine crisis is the result of unresolved geopolitical contradictions between the West and Russia after the collapse of the USSR and the former bipolar world order with two global superpowers maintaining the geopolitical and military-strategic balance: the US and USSR. In institutional terms, this geopolitical contradiction is expressed in the conflict of the normative orders (regimes) of the Euro-Atlantic hierarchy (which the Kremlin considers the substitution of international law for the NATO-centric but not the universal rules (Lavrov 2019: 13) and the Russia-controlled (relying on its strengthened economic power) hierarchy (Eurasian

Economic Union, Customs Union, CIS, CSTO) (Bogdanov 2017: 39). According to dominant political analysts in mainland China, it is “one of the most serious geopolitical crises since the end of the Cold War” (Lilei 2015: 159). “The Ukraine Crisis, in essence, embodies competition and mutual confrontation between the EU and the Eurasian Union” (Lilei 2017: 173), and “is seen as a clash between the West and Russia” (Zajqc 2016: 137). At the same time, some political analysts, not only Russian and Chinese but also Western ones, lay the blame primarily on the West. Among the main arguments put forward by critics of the West, two stand out: the failure to comply with the political assurances of not expanding NATO to the east given to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by the then-US leadership in late 1989 and early 1990; and the alleged “hypocrisy in US policies on Ukraine versus Kosovo: Washington argued for elections in Kosovo under the guise of human rights, while denouncing elections in Crimea under the argument of sovereignty” (Saalman 2017: 138).

Certainly, such accusations are likely to only intensify after the recognition by US President Donald Trump on March 25, 2019 of Israel's 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights--i.e., Israeli sovereignty over Golan Heights. Earlier, on December 6, 2017, Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The EU is against such steps.

Other political scientists lay the blame for undermining the world and the European normative order--the Helsinki principle of inviolability of borders and the entire system of regional, continental and global security--on Russia and, indirectly, on the PRC (for getting closer to Russia on the basis of their rivalry with the US) (Berryman 2017: 180; Duleba 2014; Gorbulin 2015: 23; Haran 2015; Karolewski & Cross 2017: 150; Loftus & Kanet 2017; Motyl 2014: 82; Radziyevska, Us, & Pokryshka 2017; Serbos & Anastasiadis 2018; Engaging Russia 2014: 12; Yekelchyk 2015; Yermolenko 2019). Still others, though less commonly, take a neutral (equidistant) position (Arakelyan 2017, Costea (Ghimis) 2016: 345; Freire 2017: 205; Rytövuori-Apunen 2017; Wu 2017).

As Ana-Maria Costea (Ghimis) points out, the Kremlin's “constant antagonism vis-à- vis the West and the expansion of the EU and NATO in Russia's own backyard” created “the preconditions of a war that would lead to a frozen conflict on the Ukrainian territory that ultimately would freeze Kyiv in a gray zone in which is neither with Russia, nor with the EU/NATO. Taking all these into consideration, we should acknowledge also the West's responsibility in playing in the Russian backyard and not reacting sooner and in a more constant manner” (Costea (Ghimis) 2016: 345). In this regard, from the global and continental perspective, the armed conflict in the Donbas might also be seen as a proxy war (Minasyan 2014; Mumford 2013; Saalman 2017: 135) between the world's biggest nuclear powers and major geopolitical actors in Eurasia, which has much in common with the Korean War, the ongoing confrontation on the Korean Peninsula, and the strategic conflict over Taiwan. From this point of view, along with Russia's direct military intervention in the armed conflict in Ukraine, another great power has become actively involved as a security protector: the US. As Taiwanese political thinker Alexander Chieh- cheng Huang emphasizes in this regard: “Taiwan is more like the rest of Ukraine, dangerously and unfortunately situated in a competition between great powers and simply trying to survive” (Huang 2014). Academician Yu-Shan Wu further posits: along with “the main geopolitical fault line for Sino-American competition found in East Asia”, “another great strategic conflict in today's world is between the West and Russia over Ukraine. The lesser powers in Eastern Europe are in a situation similar to that of their counterparts in East Asia: both are caught in a competition between two great powers” (Wu 2017: 197).

As British political scientist Richard Sakwa (2015: 31-32) rightly points out: “The Ukrainian crisis is only the latest symptom of the long-term failure to reconcile the various interests on the European continent.” This is eventually a continental crisis, reflecting fundamental problems in the East-West relations of the post-unipolar epoch. Sakwa sees the root of the Ukraine crisis in the fact that after the fall of the Berlin Wall “unlike at Yalta, there was no Winston Churchill to speak on behalf of Europe” (2015: 31-32). As a result, at the Maltese summit of the leaders of the USSR and the US, Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, held on December 2-3, 1989, less than a month after the Berlin Wall had fallen, there was no substantive talk about Greater Europe:

“The tragedy of the Malta Summit is that Gorbachev was not talking about these ideas with European leaders, but with the President of the United States. [...] Not surprisingly, the idea of a Greater Europe was the last thing that Bush wished to talk about, since it would signal precisely what America had long feared: a split between the European and American wings of the Atlantic alliance. [...]

Thus, Malta turned out to be not just a lost opportunity but a political disaster” (Sakwa 2015: 32).

In 1989-1990 Germany and in the early 1990s Poland claimed the role of bridge between East and West (Zajgc 2016: 186-187). Then this role passed to Russia and Ukraine. Now, since the above crisis, there is no country playing such a role. After the dissolution of the USSR, Washington and Brussels' policy toward the new independent states of the CIS has been fundamentally different from their approach to Russia, setting up the foundation for strategic conflicts.

Helena Rytövuori-Apunen sees causes of frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet space (Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia) and the simmering conflict in the Donbas in the “normative dualism embedded in the concept of the state border” since the latter has become increasingly contested starting from the 1999 NATO military intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Helena Rytövuori-Apunen 2017: 186-187). This has loosened the fundamental principle of the inviolability of borders (agreed in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and further implemented in various international treaties between European/Eurasian states) under the pretexts of blatant and/or mass human rights violations necessitating international “humanitarian interventions”, “peaceforcing” missions, self-declared separatist referendums, etc. By referring to the Kosovo precedent (including the eventual recognition in February 2008 by Western powers of Kosovo's self-declared independence from Serbia), Russia, as Rytövuori-Apunen emphasizes, “used a similar argumentation in its recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, as well as in its annexation of Crimea in 2014” (Rytövuori-Apunen 2017: 180).

Like John W. Burton who, on the eve of the detente crisis in Europe and a new arms race, warned that the “win-lose” framework logically contradicted conflict resolution (Burton 1979), Helena Rytövuori-Apunen sees in such a “(quasi)legal approach” the establishment of “right” and “wrong” categories, which create a dangerous trap for efforts to settle border-related conflicts by freezing them without settling the real fundamental contradictions that gave rise to these conflicts (Rytövuori-Apunen 2017: 180).

With regard to the trajectory of the Ukraine crisis, Rytövuori-Apunen argues:

“[...] the conflict in Eastern Ukraine became deadlocked when the Ukrainian parliament in January 2015-subscribing to a practice that already existed in the government-defined the insurgents and separatists in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people's republics as `terrorists' and thereby criminalized not only their military methods but also their voices concerning the issues that had ignited the conflict” (Rytövuori-Apunen 2017: 180).

Some political scientists in the context of the Ukraine crisis note its destructive consequences (Arakelyan 2017; Bock, Henneberg, & Plank 2015; Freire 2017: 205; Rytövuori-Apunen 2017; Sakwa 2015: 31-32; Zajgc 2016), while others actually support the black-and-white logic of the zero-sum/“either-or” (Arakelyan 2017: 70) geopolitical game (Baev 2019).

Back in the mid-1990s, Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed out the key geopolitical role of an independent Ukraine as a pivot between the West and Russia:

“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state [...]” (Brzezinski 1997: 46).

Nowadays, this conviction and its corresponding arguments are still rather mainstream among American political scientists engaged in Ukraine studies, although such views are not always expressed in an explicitly neorealistic form. In this regard, John Berryman's analysis of the Ukraine crisis, with respect to its impact and implications, is of particular interest:

“Nonetheless, it remains clear that a combination of American military power and the contribution of other regional powers will be necessary to prevent the emergence of a Eurasian hegemon-the central aim of US grand strategy” (Berryman 2017: 180).

From the position of offensive realism, Suzanne Loftus and Roger E. Kanet directly link the potential realization of Russia's aspiration “to reestablish itself as a world power and sustain its rebellious attitude” towards the post-Cold War order with the capacity “to support its loud barks with substantial economic strength” (Loftus &Kanet 2017: 29).

Authors of the North American Chapter of the Trilateral Commission's report released on May 15, 2014, devoted to the current state of and prospects for the West- Russia relationship in the context of the Ukraine crisis, are extremely frank as well:

“Putin's Russia is an adversary, bent on pursuing regional hegemony and challenging the Western-led international system.

[...] Above all, Russia affects the United States' ability to [...] ensure a favorable balance of power in critical regions that enables continued US global leadership” (The Trilateral Commission 2014: 12).

Characteristically, the Brzezinski concept applies in this regard not only to Russia but also to China as the emerging Eurasian and world superpower. Meanwhile, such a “win-lose” framework is logically opposed to the conflict's peaceful (diplomatic), not to mention consensus-finding, resolution.

Pavel Baev is skeptical about the efficacy of a China-Russia alliance doing away with US dominance:

“Instead of a cordial arrangement for complementary efforts at cutting short the US dominance, the China-Russia pseudo-alliance has turned into a mutually irritating duress, in which Beijing seeks to prevent Moscow from spoiling its difficult deal-making with Washington, and Moscow resents the short leash-and needs to escape from the path of a designated loser” (Baev 2019: 13).

By contrast, a Chinese contributor to East-Asian Chapter of the Trilateral Commission's above-mentioned report argued:

“From a Chinese perspective, the Ukrainian crisis is the product of residual Cold War mentality. [...] What Western media called `a new Cold War' triggered by the Ukraine crisis is in no one's interest. If Ukraine at this point is forced to choose between the US/Europe and Russia, the situation will be further destabilized and the country risks another round of disintegration after it lost Crimea, and if the EU breaks with Russia for supporting Ukraine [sic] and the two end up in a new Cold War, the interests of both sides will be jeopardized as the costs far outweigh the gains” (The Trilateral Commission 2014: 27).

Among the EU member states, where there are strong fears of a revival of German imperialism and revanchism, the recommendations to use the Ukrainian crisis to contain German-Russian relations and prevent their transformation into a close strategic partnership (a nightmare for both American strategists and many politicians from countries that survived the German and/or Soviet occupation in the 20th century) are noteworthy. For example, Greek scholars Sotiris Serbos and Georgios Anastasiadis emphasize:

“We argue that US strategy favoring a united Europe can exploit events in Ukraine and security fears in Eastern Europe to contain the German-Russian relation, leaving Germany with no better option than commitment to lead EU integration” (Serbos & Anastasiadis 2018: 178).

In an effort to preserve for an indefinitely long time a tough confrontation between Ukraine and Russia in the US's strategic interests, one American political analyst, in the midst of the armed conflict, was proposing a direct Machiavellian strategy with regard to the particular districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts not controlled by Kyiv:

“The goal would be to turn them not into autonomous federal units within a weak Ukraine, as Putin desires, but into an independent entity, as he pointedly does not” (Motyl 2014: 82).

In this regard, one may dispute the expediency of the West's decision to fully include the Central and Eastern Europe states in the decision-making process regarding the EU-Russia relationship, because their relations with Russia were burdened by recent conflicts and problems, such as the occupation of the Baltic States, events in Hungary in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968, and very painful Poland-Russia relations with respect to historical memory, etc.

Some prominent Polish politicians, in particular, not only actively supported providing Ukraine with defensive weapons but “entertained a possibility” of armed intervention in Ukraine by using NATO forces (Zajgc 2016: 168). At the same time, politicians and political forces aimed at resolving the Ukraine crisis by taking into account the interests not only of the West, but also of Russia, were labeled as “Trojan horses”--that is, direct agents of the Kremlin--in the scientific literature of the countries of the former “sanitary cordon” against the USSR (Karolewski & Cross 2017: 150). All this is very reminiscent of the aggressively derogatory Cold War rhetoric at its worst. Naturally, with such rhetoric, the “Donbas is likely to remain an unresolved conflict” (Karolewski & Cross 2017: 150).

At the same time, a number of prominent American political scientists are well aware of the danger of a global and continental US confrontation on two fronts--both against Russia and China. As early as April 2014 Rory Medcalf wrote:

“Is it fanciful fearmongering to start thinking of the prospect of a future double Cold War, with US-Russia and US-China relations in the freezer at the same time?” (Medcalf 2014).

Soon after Donald Trump's election as US President, Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes addressed him with a blueprint wherein they argued that for the US “closer relations with Russia could provide counterbalancing to China” (Allison & Simes 2016).

Serbian political scientist Srdja Trifkovic also stresses the above need if one takes the viewpoint of US geopolitical interests:

“In the early 1970s, Dr. Henry Kissinger was really wise to consider the benefits of the discovery of the United States for China [...].

Then the Soviet Union was much more powerful than China, so the United States had a logical connection with the weaker side of the triangle. However, today China is economically and demographically much stronger than Russia, and for the United States the best strategy would be to strive for good relations with Moscow as a weaker side in the same triangle” (Trifkovic 2014: 21-22).

Turning to the issue of blame for the conflict in the east of Ukraine (by exploring and explaining), one may logically move to a second, deeper level of analysis of the conflict associated with confrontation and direct clash between different value-identity and political-normative orders on the Eurasian megacontinent. Herewith, some political scientists are limited to a purely political modernization approach, appealing to the contradictions and dynamics of democratization in the modern world in general and in Eurasia and in the post-Soviet space in particular.

Conflict in the Context of Post-Soviet Transformation