These days are somewhat painful for me as...

These days are somewhat painful for me as I still have difficulties to digest that there is a very serious military conflict going on between Russia and the Ukraine – two countries that are actually quite close to each other in terms of language, culture and economy. When I still was in school I picked Russian as my second foreign language and travelled to all those countries now involved in this conflict – Ukraine, Russia and also Belarus. Surely I am telling my story from a privileged European position – we have seen only a few wars in the last decades and armed conflicts are mostly perceived as something distant that takes place somewhere else in the world. Nonetheless, I had tears in my eyes these days when reading that some large rocket has hit Bila Tserkva, a city I visited twice in the context of some pupils’ exchange between Austria and the Ukraine. I still remember how exceptionally kind we were treated there, how quickly we became friends with the local kids and how rich the history of this city is.

Actually Bila Tserkva is a city that has existed for more than one-thousand years, it has had a great cultural capacity and a quite diverse population. It was next to totally destroyed and its large Jewish community massacred by the forces of Nazi-Germany in the 1940s, before being liberated by the Red Army and rebuilt by the Soviet Union. I admit I can hardly believe that the grandsons of those people who liberated and rebuilt this city now shoot rockets into it. And I am strongly convinced that many of those grandsons, who are now serving in the Russian army, also do not understand, why this has to happen. This is to a large degree Putin’s personal war and not one of the ‘average’ Russian citizen or soldier.

Let me make clear that I am surely not naive here: I see that the US basically cornered Russia in the last three decades and was never truly willing to give up the imaginary of Russia as something akin to an eternal antagonist. I am also aware that Ukraine turning towards the West is a military game-changer, not only because of its geographic position, but also because of the strategically crucial and historically loaden role of Sevastopol. And I am surely acknowledging that Russia and its people have for decades been unfairly and pejoratively represented in Western media and culture. However, while all this surely fuels conflict and antagonism, it can never justify a large-scale attack on a neighbouring country.

But still, the US and its European partners have made many mistakes in the past and cornering Russia by successively expanding NATO was surely one of them. But in my view more important mistakes happened thirty years ago, when Russians actually reached out for help from the West to transform their communist structures towards a democratic society with a market-based economic system. Back then our economic experts proceeded on the assumption that free markets will automatically bring forth a free society, while it is actually the other way round: In an ‘open society’ it is possible to tame market forces by means of democratic mechanisms and thereby create inclusive forms of progress, while markets and the profit-motive as such are not tied to democratic institutions and can also strive under a more authoritarian take on political leadership.

The naive conviction that economic freedom has to be understood as the foundation of all other freedoms was powerful back then – and undermined most efforts to create strong democratic institutions in Russia as a foundation for futher peaceful forms of international integration. If you want to catch up on these issues to better contextualize current events, I can recommend Katharina Pistor’s short take on the subject, which clearly spells out some obvious errors made in the past.

As has often been said: Economic ideas can be powerful, especially in the long-run, and Russia’s missed opportunity for creating stronger democratic institutions is an especially tragic example for this. As academics we cannot provide much guidance in times of gunfire, but in my humble view, it is our job & duty to sharply remember those critical historical junctures that led us into this mess. Maybe we all can do better next time.

With hope,

Jakob

PS: Surely many of you noticed the bitter irony that super-frugal, pro-austerity, debt-brake-enthusiastic Germany has just promised to spend 100 billion € to improve military capacities. So it seems that, after all, the Germans can do debt , but the specific reasons that induced them to do it, leave me speechless in the face of painful historical analogies to WW I …