The ‘Greatness’ Neurosis

What is ‘greatness’? For most of us, it is the achievement of excellence as individuals and collectively the quality of our culture, its spirituality, its originality of thought, it works of literature, art and architecture. In international relations, however, ‘greatness’ has a very specific meaning as the projection of power. No nation, it goes, is ‘great’ unless it has the ability to exert influence and bind other nations to its will. Power implies the ability to back threats with action, which in turn requires military strength. Conversely, a nation that withdraws into isolationism creates a power vacuum that rising powers step into, and arguably this is where the United States is now. Now let’s construct a scenario. Let us say that a given nation has, in the past, been humiliated or subordinated to the will of other nations. There is a simmering resentment, a poison that infects the entire culture from the top down. Then there is a revolution and a new assertive regime takes over, promising a revitalisation of the nation, restoring its national pride and making it ‘great again’. A fever of militarism grips the nation in which the existing great powers are demonised. The new regime flexes its muscles, extending its influence to surrounding states in order to create a ‘sphere of influence’. Any encroachment on that sphere of influence by the other great powers is perceived as a military threat. It now only requires a single wrong move such as a missile strike on a sovereign nation or an assassination of a dignitary to trigger a major war. Indeed, modern European history has always moved (or rather lurched) through this cycle of collapse and re-building of the international order.

Let’s take a look at some examples from history. One can go back to Napoleon who rescued France from revolutionary paralysis and set about exporting the revolution to Europe, confirming Robespierre’s prediction that if the revolution expanded the power of the army, eventually the army would take over the revolution. One can see in Napoleon the type of leader who takes a nation in the grip of chaos, centralises power around himself and sets out to restore the nation’s original ‘greatness’ by challenging the powers that surround it. Napoleon, like so many charismatic leaders before and after him overplayed his hand: returning from exile after his defeat by the great powers in 1814, he launched an abortive invasion of Russia and then lost Spain to Wellington in the Peninsular War, to be defeated in a final showdown at Waterloo. The subsequent world order established after the 1815 Treaty of Paris held good until the mid-nineteenth century Crimean war (1853-56) which began the historical humiliation of Russia’s great power pretensions (added to by its defeat in the Russian-Japanese war of 1905), but for all that, the world order remained relatively stable until the late nineteenth century and the rise of Germany.

The aggressive behaviour of Germany prior to the First World War followed its unification under Wilhelm I and Bismarck in 1871 after which Germany began to industrialise, competing with the existing industrial powers and engaging in a belated race to establish its own colonies in Africa. Bismarck’s humiliation of France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871 was the first shot in German expansionism. This illustrates an important law in international relations: expansion always follows unification. Think of the Arabs bursting out of the fertile crescent in the 7th century, powered by the new religion of Islam, or the Mongols bursting out of Central Asia in the 13th century, or even Russia under Peter the Great who subdued Sweden in 1721 and gained access to the Baltic; it’s the same principle. That expansion then brings the new nation into conflict with the established powers. A comparison would be the new kid on the block muscling in with the gang at the local school; he is either driven off or gives the existing leader a bloody nose, as a result of which the existing power relationships are upset. This brings us to a second law of international relations: states behave like people because they are run by people, and the same neuroses that afflict people also afflict whole nations. Unfortunately, while there are counselling services for people, there are no counselling services for countries. In the case of Germany, its belligerent attitude created a network of alliances among the great powers that drew the world into war with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo in 1914.

Now let’s look at the rise of Hitler. Germany had been humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles in 1918. When it couldn’t pay its reparations, the French moved in and occupied the Ruhr. By the 1920s, it was suffering hyper-inflation as its currency collapsed. This paved the way for the rise of Hitler who promised to restore Germany to greatness, which he did very ably, transforming German into a military-industrial superpower in just six years: cue the emergence of the Nazi state and its pursuit of a greater Germany in which all the ethnic German-speaking peoples of Europe would be united in a single great ‘thousand-year Reich’. Typically, however, like Napoleon, Hitler overplayed his hand. Having invaded Austria and Czechoslovakia, Hitler was stopped at Poland, thus initiating the Second World War. Confident that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 would keep America out of the war, and that the Japanese would help him in the European war, he declared war on the US and invaded Russia; and it was this miscalculation that cost Germany the war.

Japan also fits this model of unification and expansionism. Japan had never been colonised by the European powers but it had endured centuries of civil war under the Shogunate. The nation had been unified under the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and set out to vie with the European powers in creating its own empire in the Far East, occupying Korea in 1910 and invading Manchuria in 1931. Its behaviour in Manchuria (particularly the rape of Nanjing in 1937) and its threat to US interests in the Far East led to a US oil embargo on Japan. In September 1940, Japan concluded a Tripartite Pact with Nazi Germany and Italy aimed at keeping the US out of the war. The strike on Peal Harbour in 1941, however, had the counter effect. After the defeat of Hitler, the Pacific war continued to rage as the US island-hopped closer to Japan but it was the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 that permanently ended Japan’s imperial age.

Now let’s take a look at China. China suffered egregiously in what it called its ‘century of humiliation’ during which the British turned China into a nation of opium addicts. The revolution of 1911 had disposed of the imperial dynasty, but was followed by civil war between the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-Shek and the Communists under Mao Zedong which culminated in the Communist revolution of 1949. Following the disastrous policies of Mao, in the 1980s Deng Zhou Ping transformed China into a modern state capitalist powerhouse, but it was the ascension of Xi Jinping that ended the collective rule of the Communist Party and concentrated power in one man… a man intent of turning China into an imperial power, and one that is determined to redress the grievances of history. Xi has embarked on a campaign of neo-colonialism, binding other nations to China through a combination of debt and economic dependence, known as the ‘belt and road initiative’. Having quashed the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong (ahead of the official handover to China and in violation of the Basic Law), it will only take an invasion of Taiwan to set off the Third World War. Xi’s antidote to the ‘century of humiliation’ is the ‘China century’. With its state capitalist architecture powered by Chinese investment banks, China’s economy is National Socialist, erected on a cultural bedrock of Confucianism, and it displays the characteristic blend of nationalism, militarism and expansionism that we have come to expect of nations humiliated in the past.

Meanwhile Iran sets out to destabilise the Middle East, launching proxy wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen (through the Houtis), Lebanon (through Hezbollah) and Palestine (through support for Hamas). Why is Iran flexing its muscles? First, because for centuries, Shiites have lived under the thumb of Sunnis as second class citizens, so the creation of a Shiite Islamic Republic is payback and redresses the imbalance of power that has always existed in the Islamic world. Secondly, because, like China, Iran was humiliated by the western powers. The Shah had been a puppet of the American and European states and the moment of humiliation came in 1953 with the Mosaddegh affair when the Iranian Majlis voted to nationalise Iran’s oil industry and Britain and the United States organised a coup that replaced him with Shah Reza Pahlavi, who in turn was overthrown during the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Courtesy news.yahoo.com

Finally, let’s come to Russia. The agenda of Vladimir Putin is also rooted in national humiliation. It began when the Soviet Union was ejected from Afghanistan in 1989 by the Mujahedeen, and by the disaster of Chernobyl. After the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, several nations that had been part of the Warsaw Pact like Georgia, Ukraine, the Baltic states and Kazakhstan broke away. The brief flirtation with open market capitalism under Boris Yeltsin ended disastrously as western companies struggled to take over Russian economic interests in a capitalist feeding frenzy. It was the election of Vladimir Putin that restored order and national pride, and that worked fine for many years until Putin’s desire to recover the old Soviet territories and reunite ethnic Russians in nations like Ukraine where they form a minority (as Hitler had set out to do for Germans in the Sudetenland) has put the world on the precipice of war.

Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its origins in the Crimean war of 1853-56. The Crimea, with its warm water port of Sevastopol, was appropriated by Russia under Catherine the Great in 1776, giving the Russian fleet access to the Black Sea. This brought Russia into confrontation with the Ottoman Empire and its Balkan territories which Russia coveted. The Russo-Turkish war of 1828-29 ended with the Treaty of Edirne which established a Russian protectorate over Moldavia and Wallachia and and granted Russian access to shipping through the Dardanelles and Bosphorous straits. In 1853, using the issue of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire as a cassus belli, Russia occupied the Ottoman Danubian principalities triggering a declaration of war by the Ottoman Empire and the involvement of Britain and France to constrain Russia’s ambitions in the Balkans and its access to the Mediterranean. At the subsequent Treaty of Paris in 1856, following Russia’s loss of the war, the Black Sea was demilitarised. This did not stop a further conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1877-78 in which the Ottoman Empire was defeated but several Balkan states such as Romania achieved independence.

The Crimean War is often dismissed today as an obscure sideshow in nineteenth century great power conflict, yet it is vital for understanding today’s conflict between Russia and Ukraine because Russia’s humiliation in that war sowed the seeds of Russian fear of western encirclement, and that fear continued into the Cold War era and survived the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, we have this situation today because Russia was never ‘de-sovietised’ after its transition to a republic and the same security chiefs remained in power, foremost being Putin.

Russia has always considered Ukraine to be part of Russia, even though historically Kyiv and Novgorod pre-date Muscovy as independent principalities in early medieval times. The Russian tsars from Ivan III laid claim to the east Slavic lands and created a false history of a common culture which Peter the Great continued, and which Putin has used as justification for reunification. Novgorod was absorbed into Muscovy in 1478, and in the mid-seventeenth century Ukrainian lands east of the Dneiper (the so-called Ukrainian ‘left bank’ ) were absorbed into the Russian state following a war with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. In 1721, Muscovy declared itself the Russian Empire, the western (right) bank being absorbed into it in 1793. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Ukraine (still considering itself culturally foreign to Russia) claimed independence, only to be re-absorbed in 1922, after which Stalin starved the Ukrainian population in a famine known as the Holodomor. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine declared independence in 1991, but the presence of Russian speaking populations in the Donbas close to the Russian border provided an excuse for Russia to ‘liberate’ them.

Putin has three obsessions: to make his mark on history as the man who restored the integrity of Russia as it existed under the Soviet Union (like a new Peter the Great); to prevent encirclement of Russia by western-leaning democracies who are members of NATO (which he wrongly regards as an offensive alliance); and finally to maintain access to the Black Sea and Baltic fleets. When Ukraine split from the collapsing Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Black sea fleet ended up in a sovereign state that was no longer under Russian control. This latter is one reason why Putin annexed Crimea (where the Black sea fleet resides at Russian-occupied Sevastopol) in 2014 and then proceeded to invade Ukraine in 2022 to establish a land bridge from Russia to the Crimea, incidentally annexing the heavy industry of the Donbass. The Baltic fleet operates out of Kaliningrad on the Baltic coastline (the old Prussian Konigsberg which the Soviets took over at the end of WWII). Since the Baltic states seceded from the collapsing Warsaw Pact, Russia is dependent on the Suwalki Gap for rail transport from Belarus via Lithuania, so when Lithuania shut off rail transit through the gap in June 2022, Putin was mighty annoyed. This makes the Baltic states the next target for Putin’s aggression, except that the Baltic state are members of NATO.

So there is a common pattern here: humiliation is followed by nationalism and centralisation of power under a strong leader, which is followed by expansion and militarism. Militarism is perennially the handmaiden of nationalism and where you have one, you have the other. The American political scientist Graham T. Allison coined the phrase ‘Thucydides Trap’, after the Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, to explain how the appearance of a new assertive national power threatens the existing international order, leading to the destabilisation of that order, followed by war and the creation of a new order.

What then of America, which has always been the top dog of the international order, but now feels compelled to be ‘great again’? Where once the US helped defeat Hitler, re-started the economies of Europe under the Marshall Plan, contained the Soviet Union during the Cold War and fought proxy wars in Latin America, the contemporary US is a nation not sure of itself any longer. Since the Second World War, the US has not won any major war in which it was involved. It withdrew ignominiously from Vietnam, it withdrew from Iraq leaving an unstable democracy behind it, contributing to the rise of ISIS, and it has now withdrawn from Afghanistan, driven out by the same Taliban that it courted to drive out the Soviets. In the latter two cases, it has signally failed to ‘nation build’ as it did for Germany and Japan. In the course of those wars, it racked up several trillion dollars worth of national debt, and national debt is the graveyard of superpowers (it was, after all, ancien regime France’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War that bankrupted the country and led to the French Revolution). America is more polarised than at any time since the Civil War, and its infrastructure is falling apart. It suffers more racial division than any European nation, its income distribution and access to services is grossly unequal, it has a chronic gun violence issue, and, alone among civilised nations, it doesn’t give mandatory parental leave or fund nursery provision. It is a nation in which it is impossible to get anything done; indeed, Americans cannot even agree on what type of government they want. Add to this, that demographic change threatens white Anglo-Saxon dominance. It is not surprising, therefore, that a significant portion of the American Right hanker after the age of American ‘greatness’ when the US projected its power into the world (and, incidentally, unpleasant facts like the Slave Trade, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement are airbrushed out of history).

On the world stage, America suffers from the ‘Byzantine problem’: it is surrounded on all sides by hostile powers, resulting in a kind of ‘whack a mole’ scenario, and democracy across the world is in retreat, and yet economically it cannot fight any more wars or face national bankruptcy (the point at which the cost of servicing the national debt exceeds the annual GDP of a nation). No wonder, then, that the egos of right wing Americans are sorely bruised and the Trump administration cashed in on this discontent with the call ‘Let’s make America great again’.

So, the need to be ‘great again’ is really nothing more than a collective neurosis afflicting societies that have suffered humiliation in the past or hanker after a golden age of power and influence, and sadly, this neurosis is behind most of the major wars in history, from the Napoleonic Wars to the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War and, when it happens soon, the Third World War. What we see today is the instance of yet another cycle in European history doomed to repeat itself.

In closing, while international relations conventionally concerns itself with geopolitics and historical formations of state and societies, one cannot understand it without understanding the collective neuroses and psychopathology of leaders.