This episode explores the geopolitical, economic, and social implications of the current war in Ukraine. The in-depth historical analysis, both of the current Russian invasion in Ukraine, and the larger global context outlines how the war can be understood as a world war, which involves the rethinking and remaking of a world order.
Guests featured in this episode
Georgi Derluguian, Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. Born in the Soviet Union, Georgie then experienced its breakup as a young social scientist. Having pursued African studies in Moscow, Georgi spent two years in Mozambique during the civil war in the 1980s, and then moved to the United States right after that to work with Immanuel Wallerstein, graduating with a PhD in sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
His dissertation research formed the basis of a groundbreaking and idiosyncratic book of historical sociology: Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Glossary
What were the Brest- Litovsk Treaties?
(At 00:2:46 or p.1 in the transcript)
Treaties of Brest-Litovsk, peace treaties signed at Brest-Litovsk (now in Belarus) by the Central powers with the Ukrainian Republic (Feb. 9, 1918) and with Soviet Russia (March 3, 1918), which concluded hostilities between those countries during World War I. On March 3 the Soviet government accepted a treaty by which Russia lost Ukraine, its Polish and Baltic territories, and Finland. (The treaty was ratified by theCongress of Soviets on March 15, both the Ukrainian and Russian treaties were annulled by the Armistice on Nov. 11, 1918, which marked the Allied defeat of Germany. Source:
What was the Marschall Plan?
(00:7:19 or p.2 in the transcript)
The Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program, was a U.S. program providing aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. It was enacted in 1948 and provided more than $15 billion to help finance rebuilding efforts on the continent. The brainchild of U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, for whom it was named, it was crafted as a four-year plan to reconstruct cities, industries and infrastructure heavily damaged during the war and to remove trade barriers between European neighbors—as well as foster commerce between those countries and the United States. In addition to economic redevelopment, one of the stated goals of the Marshall Plan was to halt the spread communism on the European continent. Source:
Who was Vaclav Havel?
(At 00:16:30 or p.3 in the transcript)
Václav Havel, (1936-2011), Czech playwright, poet, and political dissident who, after the fall of communism, was president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and of the Czech Republic (1993–2003).
Havel was the son of a wealthy restaurateur whose property was confiscated by the communist government of Czechoslovakia in 1948. As the son of bourgeois parents, Havel was denied easy access to education but managed to finish high school and study on the university level. He found work as a stagehand in a Prague theatrical company in 1959 and soon began writing plays with Ivan Vyskočil. By 1968 Havel had progressed to the position of resident playwright of the Theatre of the Balustrade company. He was a prominent participant in the liberal reforms of 1968 (known as the Prague Spring), and, after the Soviet clampdown on Czechoslovakia that year, his plays were banned and his passport was confiscated. During the 1970s and ’80s he was repeatedly arrested and served four years in prison (1979–83) for his activities on behalf of human rights in Czechoslovakia. After his release from prison Havel remained in his homeland. When massive anti-government demonstrations erupted in Prague in November 1989, Havel became the leading figure in the Civic Forum, a new coalition of noncommunist opposition groups pressing for democratic reforms. In early December the Communist Party capitulated and formed a coalition government with the Civic Forum. As a result of an agreement between the partners in this bloodless “Velvet Revolution”, Havel was elected to the post of interim president of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, and he was reelected to the presidency in July 1990, becoming the country’s first noncommunist leader since 1948. As the Czechoslovak union faced dissolution in 1992, Havel, who opposed the division, resigned from office. The following year he was elected president of the new Czech Republic. Source
Who was George Kenan?
(00:30:33 or p.6 in the transcript)
George F. Kennan, in full George Frost Kennan, American diplomat and historian best known for his successful advocacy of a containment policy to oppose Soviet expansionism following World War II.
Kennan’s views on containment were elucidated in a famous and highly influential article, signed “X,” that appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine for July 1947, analyzing in detail the structure and psychology of Soviet diplomacy. In the article Kennan, who drew heavily from his Long Telegram, questioned the wisdom of the United States’ attempts to conciliate and appease the Soviet Union. He suggested that the Russians, while still fundamentally opposed to coexistence with the West and bent on worldwide extension of the Soviet system, were acutely sensitive to the logic of military force and would temporize or retreat in the face of skillful and determined Western opposition to their expansion. Kennan then advocated U.S. counterpressure wherever the Soviets threatened to expand and predicted that such counterpressure would lead either to Soviet willingness to cooperate with the United States or perhaps eventually to an internal collapse of the Soviet government. This view subsequently became the core of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Source
SR: Welcome to "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing today. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. This is the second episode of the fourth season of "Democracy in Question." And I have the pleasure of welcoming, Georgi Derluguian, Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. Born in the Soviet Union, Georgi experienced its breakup as a young social scientist. He moved to the United States, where he took his Ph.D. in sociology at the State University of New York and has co-authored many books, which we are not going to discuss today, as what we want to talk to him about is the war in Ukraine. He's a historian of the USSR and its aftermath, and he will help us better understand some of the geopolitical, economic, and social implications of the current war. Welcome, Georgi and thanks very much for joining me this morning.
GD: Hello.
SR: So, Georgi, for the last two weeks, we've been desperately trying to make some sense of the largest military invasion of a sovereign state on European soil since the Second World War. The fog of war is itself difficult to penetrate, even if the element of the failed gambit, we could say of a blitzkrieg has now given way to a more protracted war of position in Ukraine. Let's begin with historicizing the events, not history as destiny, to use Masha Gessen phrase, but let's look back at the failure of the Minsk II agreement to provide any resolution to the conflicts which entail de facto an ongoing war for the last eight years. Would you like to then think of this world in a larger context? And that could be the independence, the 1991 independence referendum in Ukraine. It could also be the breakup of the Soviet Union as the backdrop to the invasion. So, where would you like to begin the history of this war?
GD: I would like to begin much earlier. So, we'll have to go back to 1918 when Ukraine was created. So, it was the result of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty between then victorious Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And in February, in 1918, there was no Russian army, and there was no yet, red army, to remind you. And one of the major demands of German negotiators in Brest-Litovsk was independence of Ukraine. Why? Because Ukraine was vitally important for the war effort, not only as a buffer state but as both granaries. You know, they desperately needed Ukrainian grain and meat, but also coal and Ukrainian steel. It was an industrial hub of Russian Empire. In the meantime, they installed their puppet government, which was overthrown quite soon. And then there was a succession of different governments because Ukrainian-speaking populations were divided between Austro-Hungary and the Russian Empire in a smaller part.
So, Ukraine was shaped into a Soviet Republic, you know, because Stalin could not roll it back. Stalin was an ethnic Georgian, and Stalin was himself, in his early years, a nationalist. So, Stalin understood nationalism or the threat of nationals to his project, you know, quite well. Stalin was also in charge of this failed attack on Poland in 1920. And, of course, you know, he was one of very few Bolsheviks who understood both the power of nationalism and the realities of geopolitics, which explains his extremely vicious, sometimes attitudes towards, both Polish elites, and to some extent, Ukrainians. To him, they were people very much like themselves. They were intelligentsia, middle class educated people who suffered acutely from being second rate in the imperialist world of World War I because in that world, there was a gradation of great powers and lesser nations. And for us, sometimes at the experiential level, it’s so difficult even to imagine what that world was. So, it was that incredible world where the educated elites of Central and Eastern Europe suddenly saw a possibility of leading peasants because vast majority of their population were peasants. And what they could offer those peasants was both national dignity and some kind of justice, which they called socialism.
So, it is almost uncanny, to what extent, everyone is on the left back then. Many of them would later drift to the far right and become national socialists or fascists. So, we are dealing with these parts of the world, you know, which were going through tremendous series of world wars. And in those world wars, what was at stake was something, again, so frightening, you know, because we know what happened in 1945. The continent, minus Britain, and probably half islands of Scandinavia, went fascist, almost wholesale. We blame just Hitler for the invasions of everywhere, but there were fascist movements in virtually every country. But that cancer, if you wish, was removed, surgically by the joint efforts of an improbable coalition.
The remnants of British Empire, America, which was under the New Deal, in effect, the biggest of social democracies. And the former Russian Empire, which was reconstituted as a federation of nationalities, under very brutal, but also a very inspiring dictatorship of communists. And in 1945 we got this incredible situation when the world looked like liberated from the worst ever threat in its history. And it was happy on all sides. Next, both superpowers, of course, ascribing to themselves the great victory over fascism, both of them ascribed to themselves and their scientist’s new way of very scientifically, very rationally regulating the social and the economic. There will be no other big crisis. The French call it "les trentes glorieuses", the three incredible decades, the glorious decades, 1950s, 1960s, early 1970s.
Germany was reborn from ashes. I need to remind everyone because again, it’s somewhere in the background that here was the Marshall Plan. The pinnacle of modernity and optimism was early 1960s. Look at the iconic images of that time. It was John Kennedy, it's the Beatles, it's Ernesto "Che" Guevara, maybe it's Jawaharlal Nehru, but it's also Gagarin, Yuri Gagarin. Look at their gaze beyond the horizon and just how they look in almost transcending, you know, the reality that we can do it. And it was an incredible spirit. And that spirit led to the rebellions of 1968. It was taking the powers that be to the account of behaving according to their promise.
So, the very poor powerful program of East European dissidents was to demand that the Soviets live up to their own constitution. And we want socialism, which promised national development that Ukrainians, and Armenians, and Bulgarians, you know, will be brought up to the level of advanced countries. That promise, that's why we also have so many national dissidents. But the same, or something very similar was happening in the West, where young people, the educated young people, were demanding what I would call capitalism with a human face. And the common narrative, at the time, nobody wants to remember. It was about convergence, convergence of the two systems. Very important people, Raymond Aron on the right, and Wright Mills, American sociologist on the left, and lots of people in the middle, and academician (Alexei) Gvishiani in Moscow, and Gorbachev himself. They all came to believe that communism and capitalism started from different premises, but they're going to meet at the golden mean somewhere, and the world will be wonderful. And this is, in large part, probably the realization that drove the creation of the European Union. The original vision, you know, that it will be regulated, it's the club of former defeated empires, because look at the face of it. What is Austria, what is Germany, but also Belgium, France, Portugal, you know, that it will be a great company of defeated empires, defeated and liberated from the imperial title, who are reinventing themselves as something humane, progressive, technologically advanced. And this is what was animating in 1989 Eastern Europe.
SR: So, let me pick up two threads from your answer, Georgi. One is the whole question of the resurgence of ethnonationalism in the entire region, Ukraine and Russia included, but what you show is maybe not a resurgence, but a continuation of many, many decades of nationalism and even ethnic nationalism in the region. And I think what I would like to ask you, too, is to link that to the scramble of local factions, local elites for survival, after the collapse of the state socialist regimes, the often-neglected political economy of oligarchic wealth accumulation that went hand in hand with that, in most of Central - and Eastern Europe. So, that's one strand, I think, which I would like to pursue with you. And the other strand is, if we look at Putin's framing of the current war, he talks about a “military operation”. Even calling it a war is a criminal offense in Russia at the moment, punishable by 15 years of imprisonment. He says, "This is a military operation for the sake of denazification and demilitarization." But the idea here is to constantly point to the remanence of fascism in Ukraine. So, would you like to comment on both of those strands in your previous argument?
GD: Speaking of fascism, as I said, you know, there were all kinds of fascists, including Russian fascists. In fact, had it not been for the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was probably going to become the original fascist state. Because let me remind you about the Block Hundreds, and the Protocols of Elders of Zion, you know, the infamous fake coming out of Russian Empire. They were in the second World War. They were important ethnic Russian collaborators. In fact, they were ethnic nationalist collaborators with the Nazis from all sides. And this is an uncomfortable memory, which Putin and his propaganda machine are using very selectively because it is true that there were Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in the second World War. It is also true that there were Russian collaborators in the Second World War. It is also true that Putin's favorite philosopher, Ilyin, was a Russian émigré who hailed the emergence of Mussolini and then Hitler as the way to solve the crisis of what they saw in the 1920s as decadent Europe in twilight.
This is not the way I would approach, however, the current war, because the explanation is not in the ideology that Putin is proffering. The explanation is in the reaction to democratization that started in the 1950s, 1960s in Eastern Europe. It was massive democratization. It started in 1956, all over the place in Eastern Europe. It peaked in the late 1960s, so, of course, Prague Spring, and so forth. You know, the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev tried to stop it. However, Americans ran into very similar problems, and in many Western governments. So, the Western response was different and, of course, it makes a big difference whether your satellite allies with Japan and West Germany, or Mongolia and Poland. The United States managed to go into the next stage. And that stage was deregulation and globalization, basically allowing corporations to get out of the constraints of national states where they were being taxed under those social-democratic provisions and compromises emerging from the 1930s and the 1940s. In the 1970s, 1980s, they were undone in the West, and that was very bad news for Eastern Europe. Because just as Eastern Europe was emerging, from collapse of communism, we saw a terrible situation, you know, when reforms of the 1990s were hailed as more radical, the more anti-socialist they would be.
This way, Eastern Europe in the 1990s set out to reach the shores of America. And it did, but it was not North America, it was South America. All kinds of South American-type regimes emerged in this space from Elba to the Yellow River. Some of them are like Mexico, you know. Others are more familial, sultanistic regimes like in Azerbaijan or in Turkmenistan. So, this is where, you know, we see on the one hand the West, and of course, I'm not going to speak too much here about the complicity of all this thinking or that it's okay when billionaires emerge instantaneously from very poor countries. Ukraine is exhibit number one. It was the most developed, industrially developed, and scientifically developed republic of the former Soviet Union. It crashes to the level somewhere of the Third World, and very, very wealthy men, like say, Mr. Poroshenko, one-time President of Ukraine, emerge out of nowhere. How could that be, you know, when millions of other men and women lost their livelihoods?
And that was taken as something communist, although please, you know, corruption is nowhere just a communist privilege. Corruption is one of the most common human behaviors. The question should have been, why we observe these kinds of regimes all over the place? Why did they produce such dysfunctional societies? And these societies, they massively demoralized and downgraded their intellectual classes. Before 1989, being a poet, even a very poor poet, in Eastern Europe was a great calling in life. After 1991, who's a poet? What happened to them? You know, my sociological interpretation is very simple. I wrote a whole book about Bourdieu's secret admirers in the Caucasus. The people who are structurally, very much like Vaclav Havel, but because they were located in places like Georgia, Azerbaijan, or in Chechnya, they could not become like Vaclav Havel because their countries had no common border with the EU, and so they become something else.
SR: If I were to play devil's advocate for a moment, let me ask you whether you think that ultimately, the war in Ukraine, the Russian invasion, stems from what Putin has been putting out as his rather strong claim that the West had crossed the red line and the red line was expansion of NATO since 1997, which was promised that this would not be the case. And I think many critics of U.S. hegemony among the Western left also tend to this view. So, the question here for me would be, do you think it really has played a role in the antecedents to the invasion?
GD: The critics, as it often happens, go too far because this is a self-exculpation. So, this is the way of carving out a large niche for himself in the world, very much like what happened with Mr. Erdoğan. And so, the problem is, with the West, and there, it's a big conversation where we need somebody like Ivan Krastev, you know, so what happened, what the West did wrong, and I think, you know, they did not expand bold and far enough. The West and Europe, in particular, missed a huge opportunity in the Balkans. They had to stop those wars of Yugoslav succession very early and demonstrated their ideological commitment. Why? Because war still is, unfortunately, the best way of mobilizing domestic opinion. So, what happened, I think, in the 1990s, is that less threatening geopolitical estates were included in the West. And that, however, in Poland is not a lesser problem. And I remember in 2004, a Russian diplomat told me, you know, that we have headaches with Poland in the Eastern Bloc forever. Now, let them have such headaches in the EU. Good luck. You know, integrate Poland, and you’re going to deal with Polish nationalism and conservativism.
So, let me remind you that with Erdoğan, it’s very important to compare to Putin. Mr. Putin and Mr. Erdoğan came to power, they emerged in the early 2000s as the men who were going to consolidate after chaotic transitions, the new emerging market economies. And they were actually quite pro-Western. They were hoping to be accepted in the club eventually. But, of course, both of them were also socially conservative. And they deployed very simple discourse that, “Hey, in the West, your democracy took centuries to be perfected. In the United States, you know, your universal voting right was not really extended to your minorities until the 1960s. Why are you talking about us?” And second, you know, you have to respect our ethnic background. So, we are going to have democracy. Of course, nobody’s arguing against democracy. In this respect Francis Fukuyama was right. There were no more ideologies of anti-democracy. However, this is going to be a democracy with our local features. For instance, the son of president is going to be either the biggest businessman in the country, it’s just local tradition, or he is going to inherit outright like in Azerbaijan. It just because the people like the values of continuity and permanence. So, this, I think, is the game of consolidating power. For Putin this war is obviously a mistake. He was carried away, but it was a succession of one going after another. If we are not being accepted, then we are going to remember our great Ottoman, or Russian, or Soviet imperial past. That's it. That's where we are now.
SR: One of the Western narratives at the moment is to portray Putin as a dangerous madman. He's really lost all rationality. But the method you see in this madness then is twofold. One, it's about restoring ancient Russian glory. But the other is to make a different kind of bid for acceptance by the West. The context, however, in which one risks such a war is, does it have something to do with Russia's integration into the global economy, as Adam Tooze has posited recently, saying that this was the opportunity to strengthen and to consolidate Putin's own hold because he is exploiting the Western dependence, especially European dependence, I should say, on Russian oil, on natural gas, on raw materials? So, this is the time when he has built up these billions of dollars of reserves that he can wage a war, risk the threat without the sanctions really costing him much.
GD: I think Adam Tooze is our most brilliant economic or macroeconomic historian commentator. So, Adam should be everywhere. He is on the very top of my reading list in any of such discussions. However, we have to realize, you know, that there is hardware and there is software to power. So, hardware is money, and guns, and so forth. And software is the way people think. And let me remind you this phrase from semi-forgotten now German philosopher, Karl Marx in German ideology, that ideology differs from any other commodity in that its producer must necessarily become its first consumer. It would be actually very interesting if we could ever reconstruct his process of learning about the West. But I think I can, you know, watching at least some mainstream Russian commentary. In the early 2000s, they came to believe that the West was in deep trouble. They watched, of course, the American invasion of Iraq, they watched films, like, as you probably know "House of Cards," and "Wag the Dog." Especially "Wag the Dog" is among Putin's favorite movies. You know, it’s reported, that he gave a copy of "Wag the dog” to his ministers saying that this is what Americans are really about and these are the people who do not allow us to pick our noses.
And then, of course, with the shameful outcome in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and with the election of Donald Trump, and with the financial crisis and very bizarre response in 2008, two things were violated. Two things by which the West was swearing - popular democracy and free market. Because nobody really consulted, nobody had the guts to consult or to even inform members of Parliament about what the treasuries were doing, and what the banks were doing to save the banks, and it was not at all operations of a free market, how they got out of the mess in 2008. So, in Moscow, and I'm sure in Ankara, and I'm sure in New Delhi, and in Beijing, their own conclusions were drawn that the West is in decline. And this talk about the decline of the West has been so persistent all over. And it was supported by a lot of evidence, for instance, of course, the so-called populistic parties emerging in the fringes, mostly the far-right parties. But also in Moscow, they suddenly realized, how cheap came Western politicians that, say, £100,000, sometimes even less would be enough to get them voting the way you ask them.
So, there was more and more cynicism emerging in these East European capitals. But you have also to realize that Putin, yes, he's fluent in German, but where did he live, and how much experience in Germany does he have? What is their experience in the West? Those very rich Russians, you know, who went shopping in Milano, or who went gambling in Cote d’Azur, did they really understand the societies there? So right now, we see that they are trying, giving up on the West, probably falsely, trying to carve out their own spheres of influence. The Western reaction is very early to predict. Let's talk about the Western reaction. It doesn't seem to be working because we see something very similar, in my view, to the 1930s in Europe. We see revisionist powers, like Germany and Italy in the 1930s, or Japan in the Far East, trying to carve out their own spheres of influence. How vicious they could become in this process remains to be seen in the course of wars. We are just in the beginning of such a war and I very hope that this war is going to be relatively short. That it's not like the second World War, and that we can avoid the destruction on that scale.
SR: But then let me ask you, do you think the sanctions are an effective measure even the relatively strong sanctions, which have now been put in place, and what do you think will be the effect of those sanctions on Russian society itself? Do you think we could expect to see larger resistance to the war within Russia?
GD: The sanctions are being tried right now. So, this is a weapon, which was being prepared over decades. It was tried and tested on smaller countries like Cuba with not much result. However, in this case, because Russia is intrinsically a European country, you know. It became European in the 1990s, fundamentally European, I mean in the social sense and the lifestyle, consumption, expectations of the people, we must take seriously actually at face value ideology proffered by Putin. It's not for nothing that he began writing articles on modern history. So, this is his rationality. You know, he sees himself as a last stand, leader of Russia. But then, there are the other Russians. You know, there are many other Russians. There are those who are confused. There are those who think, you know, like, in any war, in the beginning of the war, there is always an outpouring of patriotism. Again, to remind your Max Weber in August 1914 felt very unhappy that he was too old to join as a soldier. He was begging for several months. Max Weber was begging any German regiment to take him as a writer of orders, as an office worker. By the end of the war, by 1918, Max Weber was moving toward social democracy.
So, these are processes that we observed many times before, and I hope, you know, that we're going to see it again. The task for the West right now is to make sure that this war is stopped, that Putin was denied his objectives. It's already very clear. Putin doesn't know how to extricate himself but must be stopped, and sanctions must continue. And sanctions, if the regime is to change, they must become more inventive if you wish, and understanding, you know, that after the sanctions, which is just paying, must come something, which was like the Marshall Plan of the 1945. You know that this is not an obliteration of a European country, that this is not just a destruction, like in 1945. My feeling is there are many comparisons with what is going on right now. Some people are saying that this is like war in Finland in 1939. Some people say that this is like war in Afghanistan. No, it's not like a war. I would compare this to the failed coup of August 1991 that finished off the Soviet Union. And that's why I don't think it's going to be very long. It's already much bloodier, however. And I don't see much prospect of a peaceful resolution to this.
SR: So, let me think through with you two possible postwar scenarios, which you have hinted at, and I would like you to flesh out. What do you think are the odds of a successful democratic transition in Russia, if some sort of a Marshall Plan as you envisage would be provided? And what do you think would be the best scenario for Ukraine? Could it still opt for a kind of neutrality that Austria or Finland have had, or is it just too late for that?
GD: Let me start with neutrality. It's not just too late, it's a different geopolitical configuration. Austria and Finland could stay neutral with the Soviet Union that was very comfortable in its international position. And George Kennan back in the 1940s was right, you know, that this was not an expansion of superpower. With Putin, precisely because he is cornered, this doesn't apply. So, I don't think neutrality, even if it ever emerges, is going to last as a solution. The second question is much more important. It will be on everyone's mind about the democratization of Russia. Yes, we are back to 1991, very much like what failed to materialize in the 1920s, in the wake of World War I. New World Order, which was very flawed, the order based on the Versailles treaty was completely redone after 1945. So, something like this, you know, needs to be done now. What is on the agenda? In my view, right now is the post-war peace. What is going to happen in Ukraine? What kind of reconstruction Ukraine would need? What kind of de-oligarchization everyone would need? And let me finish by saying that Mr. Putin has an uncanny prophetic streak to him that he feared Western expansion, yet he made it possible to happen.
SR: Thank you very, very much, Georgi. I think this has been an extremely wide-ranging conversation, both in terms of historical depth and geographical scope. So, thank you very much for being with me today.
GD: And thank you for listening. I hope that this interview, which is very broad, as you said, you know, could make a difference. People now need to focus, of course, on Ukraine, specifically in helping the people there. But this is already the time we should have started planning yesterday for the post-world war order. And this is a world war. That's my main message.
SR: What we have heard is an in-depth historical analysis, both of the current Russian invasion in Ukraine, but also situating it in a much larger global geopolitical context. What we have heard also is why we need to understand this, therefore, as a world war, a war that involves the entire geopolitical order, the world order that needs to be rethought and remade. We need to recognize that Russia is a diminished power, a diminished wounded power, but still a nuclear power. And if Putin is to be able to extricate himself from this war of his making, sanctions may do one part of the work, but it would be necessary to have an innovative approach to a post-war scenario, one, which involves also economic support of the kind of a Marshall Plan for Russia. We must take Putin's ideology seriously. We must also take his historical narrative seriously, his need to resurrect Russia's ancient imperial glory and to restore its national wounded pride. That is what makes Russia today an expansive power.
We also could learn a lot from comparing Russia and Turkey to non-Western empires, both in search of a new identity. Ironically, the demilitarization and denazification that Putin claims is the reason for his invasion of Ukraine are two approaches, which will determine Russia's own future. This was the second episode of season four. Thank you very much for listening. Join us also for the next episode in two weeks' time, and please go back and listen to any episode that you might have missed so far. Do let your friends know about this podcast if you have enjoyed it. You can stay in touch with the work of CEU at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.