NATIONALISMBack to Which Future? Putin and the Nationalist Playbook
What explains Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022? An argument can be made that nationalism – rather than realist geopolitics – lies at the heart of the conflict. Instead of revealing the primacy of security-related grand strategizing and hard national interests over naïve idealism and soft ideas, Russia’s actions pit old-fashioned ethnic nationalism against the norms and institutions devised to contain this quintessentially European ideology.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked many observers in the West. Clearly, the hopes of a cooperative, borderless world have been dealt a serious blow. In many ways, however, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 heralded the “return of geopolitics”.
It can even be argued that the current war vindicates – with some delay – John Mearsheimer’s “Back to the Future” article from 1990, which predicted that the end of the Cold War would bring a new phase of old-fashioned great-power balancing rather than an era of liberal peace.
But does realist theory depict this seeming anachronism correctly? Indeed, geopolitics is back with a vengeance – not just in Ukraine but also more recently in the Middle East. But the question is: which type of geopolitics?
While many realists, including Mearsheimer, identify with the allegedly sober and sophisticated 19th century masters of Realpolitik, their perspective seems oddly anachronistic even by 19th century standards. Great power competition, the law of the strongest, and territorial conquest dominated international relations long before the 19th century and partially persisted beyond 1945.
Nationalism and the War in Ukraine
Our recent research suggests that rather than century-old geopolitical forces, it is the 19th century ideological innovation of nationalism that helps to make sense of what is going on in Ukraine. While realizing that power politics and nationalism are intimately related – or “kissing cousins” to use Mearsheimer’s term – realists have so far failed to integrate important aspects of nationalist politics into their theoretical edifice.
Drawing on Clausewitz’ ideas about the mobilizational potential of nationalist warfare evidenced by Napoleon’s levée en masse, they view nationalism primarily as a “power booster” within fixed state borders, rather than a truly border-modifying force. Crucially, due to its fixation with states as the only important actors in world politics, realist theory loses sight of the autonomous impact of ethnically defined nations.
At its core, nationalism is a principle of political legitimacy that takes sovereignty away from dynastic overlords and instead vests it in the nation, a community of citizens striving for political self-determination. As Ernest Gellner famously argued, realizing this principle required aligning political and national boundaries.
Since most national communities in 19th and early 20th century Europe were constructed around ethnic cores, nationalist grievances served as a rallying cry for political action wherever ethnic groups found themselves under alien rule by another nation or divided by state borders.
