A new world order is in place where according to Kaldor, perpetual violence has become the norm. How come these so-called new wars, or “forever wars” as Kaldor refers to them, are not tied to contest over national territory? Furthermore, does NATO still adhere to Cold War patterns of thinking and is there a willingness in the organization to change the focus towards matters relating to human security? Is Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine not a throwback to the old wars fought for control over territory against neighboring states? And where can we locate the sights and actors of successful resistance, and should these be civilian rather than military? Can the military even be part of the solution, or is the inherent logic of the military industrial complex part of the problem in the first place? Given the current geopolitical tensions can democratic status quo be preserved by relying on a self-limiting and limited capacity for defensive deterrence mixed with policing functions?
Guests featured in this episode:
Mary Kaldor, Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has had a long and illustrious academic career but has also been an activist since the 1980s. She was a founder of the European Nuclear Disarmament Movement, was co-chair of Helsinki Citizens Assembly and Peoples Europe, and was a member of the Goldstone Commission investigating the Kosovo crisis.
She has co-edited several influential volumes, on Dealignment and The New Détente, both with Richard Falk; on Restructuring the Global Military Sector; on Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe; and most recently, on EU Global Strategy and Human Security (2018). She is author of the agenda-setting book Global Civil Society: An Answer to War, Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention, and highly acclaimed New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era.
GLOSSARY
What was the Helsinki Accords (Agreement)?
(00:5:20 or p.2 in the transcript)
Helsinki Accords, also called Helsinki Final Act (August 1, 1975), major diplomatic agreement signed in the capital Of Finland, Helsinki, at the conclusion of the first Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE; now called the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). The Helsinki Accords were primarily an effort to reduce tension between the Soviet and Western blocs by securing their common acceptance of the post-World War II status quo in Europe. The accords were signed by all the countries of Europe (except Albania, which became a signatory in September 1991) and by the United States and Canada. The agreement recognized the inviolability of the post-World War II frontiers in Europe and pledged the 35 signatory nations to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms and to cooperate in economic, scientific, humanitarian, and other areas. The Helsinki Accords are nonbinding and do not have treaty status. Source:
What is the theory of nuclear deterrence?
(00:21:42 or p.5 in the transcript)
The strategic concept of nuclear deterrence aims to prevent war. It is the justification virtually every nuclear state uses for maintaining nuclear arsenals. The concept of nuclear deterrence follows the rationale of the ‘first user’ principle. States reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in self-defence against an armed attack threatening their vital security interests. Possession of nuclear weapons could be seen as the ultimate bargaining tool in international diplomacy, instantly giving any nuclear state a seat at the top table.
The possession of nuclear weapons is repeatedly attacked on the grounds of morality, national credibility, legality, and cost. Nonetheless, proponents of deterrence theory generally draw on one primary argument: its efficacy as a war-prevention mechanism. A notable author in the field, Kenneth Waltz, argues that nuclear deterrence bolsters state security by alleviating the prospect of direct attack, essentially ensuring peace through fear of retaliation. It is argued that the nuclear deterrence developed between the USA and the USSR – the belief that any nuclear attack would lead to massive nuclear retaliation and ‘mutually assured destruction’ – avoided nuclear war and maintained the temperature between the 1950s and 1990s. The continued nuclear deterrence prevented war between the USA and USSR, and has maintained the West’s longest ever period of peace, in the years that followed. It has been noted that no direct conflict has ever broken out between two nuclear-armed states.
On these grounds, a small number of proponents maintain that the possession of nuclear proliferation should not be limited to a select few, ‘superior’ states. At present, countries possessing a nuclear deterrent are thought to exert an unfair advantage on the global stage, leaving vulnerable countries relatively unprepared (and reliant on nuclear states) in the event of an attack.
Since the end of the Cold War, however, the nature of the nuclear threat has changed dramatically. The greatest nuclear fear today is that nuclear weapons find their way into the hands of terrorists or ‘rogue states’, either through autonomous programs of development, or technology passed on. Policy of deterrence is considered useless against terrorists and is less useful against ‘rogue states’ such as Iran and North Korea, whose stability is questioned, and whose motivations are less easily understood. Source:
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S.R: Welcome to Season 5 of "Democracy in Question," the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, the Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna, and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. It's a great pleasure to welcome Mary Kaldor. In fact, welcome her back. She has already been my guest last year. Mary is Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict Research Program at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has had a long and illustrious academic career, but she's also been an activist since the 1980s.
She was a founder of the European Nuclear Disarmament Movement, and was co-chair of Helsinki Citizens' Assembly, and People's Europe, and also a member of the Goldstone Commission investigating the Kosovo crisis. She has co-edited several influential volumes, among them "Dealignment", and "The New Detente" both with Richard Falk, on restructuring the global military sector, on democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, and most recently, EU global strategy, and human security. Moreover, she's the author of several agenda-setting books, among them "Global Civil Society: An Answer to War", "Human Security: Reflections on Globalization and Intervention", and the highly acclaimed "New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era”, which is in its 3rd edition, all three of which we'll discuss in our conversation today.
The conceptual matrix of new wars, human security, and civicness elaborated in Mary Kaldor's pathbreaking work has radically recast our thinking about conflicts. She alerts us to a new world order where perpetual violence has become the norm. I ask her why these so-called new wars are what she calls “forever wars” that are not tied to contest over national territory. Does NATO still adhere to Cold War patterns of thinking? And why is that a problem? Or is there a willingness to change the focus in NATO to matters of human security? Is Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine not a throwback to the old wars fought against neighboring states for control of territory? And where can we locate the sights and actors of successful resistance, which according to Mary Kaldor, should be civilian rather than military? Can the military even be part of the solution at all, or is the inherent logic of the military industrial complex part of the problem? Can democratic status quo be preserved by relying on a self-limiting and limited capacity for defensive deterrence mixed with policing functions, given the current geopolitical tensions? These are some of the questions I look forward to discussing today in this episode with Mary Kaldor. Mary, welcome to the podcast, and it's wonderful to have you with me again.
M.K: It's great to be here, too.
S.R: Mary, let me start with the recent policy brief, which you wrote for the research division of the NATO Defense College, where you called for rethinking NATO's role in today's globally interconnected world. Let me ask you to comment on two related but distinct aspects of NATO's role today. The alliance, which many regard is a remnant of the Cold War geopolitical architecture has been recently attacked for its expansion into regions that used to be outside its sphere of influence. This is Putin's argument for invading Ukraine. Also, NATO has been threatened with irrelevance and underfunding by some of its own members, for example, by President Trump when he was in office. In the light of these internal shifts and external arguments, do you see major shifts both in the internal organizational structure and functioning of NATO and how do these relate to the war in Ukraine? Do you see a risk of NATO reverting, because of the war, to more traditional militaristic agendas, or do you think that the external environment may lead to the kind of reorientation that you propose towards human security when you presented to NATO your paper in January of this year?
M.K: That's a very big question. But let me start with NATO expansion, and what happened after the end of the Cold War. I think that many people hoped, including Gorbachev, that both NATO and the Warsaw Pact would be dissolved; they were both Cold War alliances. And in its place, it would be replaced by something that was called the Helsinki Process and the Helsinki Process represented, I think, a new way of thinking about security. The Helsinki Agreement, which was signed in 1975, included peace, it included confirmation of the territorial status quo, it included international law and forbidding aggression. But it also included human rights, and economic and social cooperation and in many ways, I think those three components really are what we now call human security.
And I think what we all hoped was that when the Cold War was over, you didn't need warfighting alliances, like NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But actually, what we hoped for didn't happen. The Warsaw Pact was dissolved, and NATO expanded. And I think the key problem was that NATO was itself a geopolitical warfighting, classic, old-fashioned alliance, so that even if it kept saying it wasn't against Russia, it was objectively against some enemy. Having said all that, I think that Putin is using NATO expansion as a pretext. I don't think NATO should have given him that pretext. But all the same, I think the reasons why Putin has invaded Ukraine have many different reasons that are rooted in the evolution of Russia itself.
I would argue that the main reason why Putin invaded Ukraine is because Ukrainian democracy represented a threat to Russia. You have to understand that both Ukraine and Russia were oligarchic capitalist regimes, and the oligarchs in Ukraine were very much linked to the oligarchs in Russia. And, you know, both The Orange Revolution, and then the Euromaidan protests that followed, represented democratization in Ukraine, and it really did represent a threat to Russia, both in the sense that it offered an example for people in Russia, but also in the sense that it threatened the relations between Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, which were very close. So, I'm not going to say more about that at this point. My main point is that NATO expansion was a mistake. We should have had a different type of European security system. But I think it's quite wrong to assume that NATO expansion is what caused the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
So how has the war in Ukraine affected NATO? Well, rather to my surprise, having talked to lots of people in NATO, it's brought on them a realization that they can't plan for the kind of classic war they were planning for in the past. NATO had a posture that was supposed to be defensive. But nevertheless, the way in which it defended NATO territory was by threatening immediate escalation if anyone attacked NATO. In other words, there was an assumption that if there was a conventional attack, you might easily use a tactical nuclear weapon in response, or some other kind of offensive military attack and there was a huge danger that any war would rapidly escalate and could actually threaten mankind.
And I think NATO suddenly realized, this is completely impossible. We can't do that any longer. That there has to be a change in NATO strategy that doesn't involve large scale killing of civilians and large-scale distraction. And that's why I think the memo I wrote on human security is very relevant. I think if there is a possibility that NATO could actually become more like what we envisaged in 1990, more like the Helsinki security system, that could be quite a positive development. And if you ever get democratization in Russia, then Russia could also join.
S.R: So, let me just start with the question of human security and pick up that argument of yours. And if I may quote your definition, you say, "Human security encompasses the security of individuals and the communities in which they live in the context of multiple economic, environmental, health, and physical threats." So, in a sense, its security thought of in very different terms from the security of states, of borders, etc., in the conventional logic of war. But the term human security was also used by the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP. So, could you say something about how your understanding of it differs from the UNDP? Do you have a different genealogy, a different development trajectory that you see of how the concept of human security relates to the logics of war?
M.K: Yes, absolutely. During the early 2000s, I convened a study group on European Defense and Security Policy that reported to Javier Solana, who was then the EU's foreign policy chief. It was this sort of interesting group of academics and practitioners, including military people; and we were, of course, very influenced by the wars in the former Yugoslavia. And we came up with a set of proposals for what was the best way for dampening down such wars, and dealing with such wars, and we decided to call it “human security”. When I wrote the "New and Old Wars" book, I actually used the term cosmopolitan law enforcement. And obviously, when we were in this policy-oriented study group, cosmopolitan law enforcement sounded a bit over-intellectual. So, we decided to use the term human security instead.
And, of course, at that time, I wasn't really familiar with the whole genealogy of human security. And so, I then sort of went back and read all the literature and tried to see how this concept of human security related to the earlier concepts. My version of human security is often known as the Barcelona version, which was presented to Javier Solana in Barcelona in 2004. It's very much a version that's focused on conflict and violence, although it completely recognizes that conflict and violence is interrelated with poverty, climate change, pandemics, and all of these other things. But the usual definition of human security is first that it's about the individuals and the communities in which he or she lives, as opposed to the state. And second, it's about an array of threats, material and physical, and not just violence.
I think the point that we added was, human security is the sort of security you enjoy. If you live in a right space, law-governed society, like say, the UK, or Austria, where you are now. And in such a society, if something bad happens, a terrorist attack, a fire, a bad accident, you take it for granted that emergency people, whether they're firefighters, police, health workers are there to help you. And I think our idea was human security is that sort of security, but globalized. And we thought that was very important in a European Union context, because clearly, that sort of security applies to the whole of the European Union. No one thinks for a moment that any European Union country is going to attack each other. But actually, it's about expanding that sort of security outwards. So, I think that was how we understood human security, which is a little bit different from the UNDP version, which was very much about development, and hardly mentioned physical security, actually.
S.R: Mary, let me pick up one point, the context of the development of the concept, which is the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the wars fought in Europe after a long time of peace. You describe these as unwinnable wars, forever wars, wars that are impossible to win for either side, although they'd, of course, cause massive devastation and human suffering. Putin's war of aggression seems to be a mixture of some of the features of these new wars, and some of the features of old wars, wars because it is targeting civilians, but it's also about control, conquest of territory. It looks like it could be an unwinnable war; and what is this kind of a war then, which can continue in some kind of a state of frozen sort of conflict, which we've seen in Ukraine since 2014, what does that imply for the kinds of strategies that are needed to deal with it?
M.K: Yeah, I think it is very worrying. I think in 2014, Putin understood a lot better than now about the unwinnable nature of war. I think it's not that those new wars are unwinnable, it's that all wars are unwinnable because you know, classic old wars, which were contests between two sides, and as Clausewitz said, tended to the extreme, the extreme nowadays is human annihilation, which is why you can't fight old wars. And new wars were a way of getting around the problem of old wars; and actually, in new wars, the various parties are not trying to win or lose, they're actually gaining from continuous violence, perpetual violence. They're gaining either because they can promote ideologies based on fear and extremist propaganda, or because they actually make money through looting and smuggling. I think that is what was Putin's aim in 2014.
In 2013, Valery Gerasimov, who is still the Russian chief of staff, wrote an article where he wrote about nonlinear war, which was a little bit like my new war argument. And he said it's very easy, with a combination of information, technologies, special forces, and internal opposition, to reduce a country to a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe, and civil war. New wars, I think we need to think of them...and if only we could develop a name, it might be clearer to people. We need to think of them as a sort of social system. They're not wars in which the sides are trying to win. They're a system in which resources are allocated through violence. They're a kind of alternative to capitalism or to democracy. And it's a way of thwarting democracy. And that kind of social system exists even if you have a diplomatic agreement. It kind of exists in Bosnia, where the diplomatic agreement, to be sure, halted the worst of the violence, but it legitimized the ethnic warlords who are fighting over Bosnia, who continue their extremely predatory activities.
And I think that's what Russia is like. What Russia wanted to do was to prevent democracy from developing in Ukraine. And my worry with Ukraine is that this war can't be won. Even if there is a diplomatic agreement, it will mean the Russian-occupied areas are still under the control of sort of criminal mafia gangs, and it will be a huge obstacle to the further development of democracy. Ukraine is exhibiting an extraordinary civic spirit. But my worry is that could be weakened and undermined. The hatred of Russia, for what it's done, could turn into ethnic tension between Ukrainians and Russians. So much has been destroyed. I just read a figure that was calculated in April, that $600 billion worth of physical destruction had already taken place. That's three times the size of the Ukrainian GDP. So inevitably, the poverty shortages, and the fact that they have handed out weapons to all Ukrainians makes it also possible that you'll see looting and this kind of thing, which would then turn Ukraine from being a democracy to being something more like what I would call a new war, and that's my huge worry.
S.R: So now, let's think of one of the elephants in the room, which is the nuclear option. You have been campaigning for many, many years for nuclear disarmament. Suddenly, what we hear in Putin's propaganda is preparing Russian citizens for the exercise of this option by Putin's regime, either as a threat towards the West, or, in a sense, preparing the ground for it among his own citizenry. So, the question for me here is, what kind of an institutional international law framework would we need, and what kind of a nuclear disarmament framework would we need to go back to if these options are to be ruled out completely?
M.K: You're absolutely right. I think it's really terrifying. Putin has used the nuclear threat. And I think what these wars show is how terribly thin the whole argument of nuclear deterrence was, because it clearly is not deterring Russia. And actually, if Russia did use, say, a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine, I do not believe that the West would respond with a nuclear response. And in a way, the whole theory of deterrence depends on the idea that people are mad. They presuppose that you really are willing to kill millions of people, which suggests that people are mad. And so now we're all discussing, is Putin mad or not? And of course, it's in his interest for us to believe that he's mad, because then his threats become credible. And, on top of all of that, there are of lot of people who say, "No, look, surely he won't, the people around him won't let him." “China won't let him”- is one of the arguments, but we honestly have no idea.
So then, to your question about international law, my view is that nuclear weapons are illegal under international law. When the case was taken to the International Court of Justice, the International Court of Justice ruled, on the president's casting vote, that nuclear weapons are legal in the event that the very survival of the state is at stake. But what does the very survival of the state mean? What is the state? Is it territory? Is it apparatus? Is it people? Nobody's ever explained what that strange formulation means. And it seems to me if you look at international humanitarian law, and you're meant to save civilian casualties, you look at human rights law, surely there is no law under which nuclear weapons are really legal. We do have the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which is a huge breakthrough. Nobody expected it to enter into force, it has. NATO is actually opposed to the treaty. And I think whether or not NATO is serious about a shift in its strategy, and its posture will be, in a way, evidenced by what it does on nuclear weapons. At the very least, I think, it needs to declare no first use, and it needs to stop opposing the treaty on the prohibition on nuclear weapons. But there's no question that we're going to have a big debate, going forward, on this issue.
S.R: So, Mary, if I may turn to another aspect which you have been talking about, as well. In the framework of human security, you've been pointing to the whole issue of climate change, and the kinds of really serious dangers that it poses for the lives and livelihoods, and therefore for the security of populations all around the world. Now, the question I have for you here is, what kind of changes do you think, from a human security standpoint, would be needed in the way in which, for example, the EU polices its borders these days against those who are fleeing climate change, civil war in Africa or the Middle East? The British government, for example, has started deporting these refugees of all the countries to Rwanda of late.\
M.K: Well, I'm a radical on immigration. I believe in free movement as a fundamental human right. I believe in the free movement of people. I think the whole immigration crisis is not a consequence of immigration pressures, but a consequence of unscrupulous populist politicians. I think, actually, the European Union would have been a lot more successful, and no one would have noticed, if it had accepted immigration on a large scale. We actually have a project in my team at the moment on the integration of Syrians in Germany, and it's really been a success story.
There is a shortage of labor in the European Union. My feeling is that if we allowed immigrants in on a much larger scale, it would actually contribute to the European economy, and the kinds of tensions that politicians are warning about are hugely exaggerated. Of course, it needs you to respond with equivalent welfare states. I mean, the ridiculous thing is that we're much richer now, and yet our politicians say we can't afford healthcare and all of those other things. But actually, if immigration is a net contributor to our economy, of course we can. And so, I think it's all very much bound up with issues of social justice, as well, and issues of how you deal with right wing authoritarian climate-skeptic politicians.
S.R: So, let me take up the question of how does one deal with authoritarian states? Because one of the interesting points, Mary, that you make in your policy brief for NATO, is the argument that if only the United States had not pursued counter-terror policies in Afghanistan, and not relied on corrupt local commanders while weakening civilian leaders, the Taliban insurgency may not have succeeded in toppling the democratic government in the end. The question for me here is, not only the investment in military versus the very low levels of investment by all the foreign governments, including the U.S., in building up a strong civil society in Afghanistan, but the question is, can we safely assume that forces like the Taliban would accept the rules of the game which are set according to democratic liberal principles, cosmopolitan ideals of gender equality, of participation, of keeping religion separate from politics? Do they share enough of these principles for them to be part of such a project at all?
M.K: Probably not, would be my answer. But the question is, how many Afghans really support it? And my feeling was that when the Americans came in, in 2001, the Taliban at that time was very weak, willing to surrender, willing to disarm itself. And had there been a successful development of democracy in Afghanistan, and had there been no war on terror, more importantly, I don't think the Taliban would have grown. After however many years, over 20 years of the war on terror, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Al Shabaab are much more powerful than they were in 2001. And I honestly think that just as the attacks on the Taliban provoked insurgency, so the attacks on all these movements have actually provoked their responses. It's been an incredibly inefficient, ineffective, and counterproductive campaign. So why the hell does the U.S. do it?
And my answer is that Biden did not want to commit troops, and the drone campaign seemed to be a good way of sort of showing the American public that it was doing something about terrorists. It's illegal, it's targeted assassination, and they tried to claim it's self-defense after the attack in 2001. It's a very, very thin defense, thin legal argument. But what it does is to sustain the military industrial complex, which has now morphed into a sort of vast complex involving private security companies, intelligence agencies, which makes it incredibly difficult to deal with. And it's very strange that this is an issue that nobody is really seriously discussing. People were discussing it a lot during the Cold War, but now it sort of seems to go almost unnoticed.
S.R: So, Mary, let me come back to some of the questions you raised about the Ukraine war in the beginning, so that we can wrap up the conversation by taking another look at the war of aggression in Ukraine. I think your notion of human security very rightly prioritizes de-escalation, it focuses on legal instruments, and the need to support civil society activism instead of military support. And yet, the war in Ukraine, I think, does pose some uncomfortable dilemmas. What could the EU do to ensure lasting peace? How optimistic are you about the prospects of progressive civic forces winning out in both Ukraine and in Russia?
M.K: I'm not very optimistic about either of those things, but I certainly have ideas about what should be done. First of all, I think there needs to be large scale economic support to Ukraine to prevent the kind of disintegration that I mentioned earlier. I strongly support debt cancellation. Ukraine is heavily indebted, and it's ridiculous that it's paying back its debt in the middle of a war. But most importantly, I support a complete ban on oil and gas exports from Russia. For a long time, I have thought that the problem with oil and gas was not just fossil fuels and climate change, but that fundamentally, oil and gas underpin most of the dictators around the world. It's the problem with most of the Middle East repressive regimes, it's the problem of Russia, it's the problem of Venezuela.
So that's one set of issues that I think is really important. But then the second set of issues is how to support the anti-war movement in Russia, and how to support, particularly in Russia, conscientious objectors. There is a right of conscientious objection in the Russian constitution, and you're allowed to object not just against war in general, but any particular war. So, there are many, many soldiers that are trying to resign from the armed forces, and there are also many, many conscripts that are claiming conscientious objection, and they need a lot of support, particularly legal support. But I think there is a big issue around the sanctions. While I think stopping oil and gas would be hugely important, because that's what pays for the war, I'm less convinced of all the other sanctions that have been introduced, because I think that can affect the very people who are likely to oppose the war.
What we've seen in all the places where sanctions have been imposed, Syria, for example, Iraq, Venezuela, is that sanctions do really speed up the process of fragmentation and criminalization. It's very hard to use targeted sanctions to stop oligarchs. They have so many clever ways of avoiding it. They give their money to their mothers, and wives, and children, and they set up trusts and all sorts of things, and they nearly always manage to evade these sanctions. At the same time, the middle-class people who are affected find ways to leave the country, and poor people who can't leave the country are those most vulnerable to state propaganda, and most likely to believe that their poverty is not due to their government's behavior, but due to the West's behavior.
So, I think it is quite worrying what the sanctions will do to Russia, and I think there needs to be a rethink of the structure of sanctions. I think we need to hugely increase, in the West and elsewhere, the capacity to investigate corruption. I think universal jurisdiction is really important. I think the best way to deal with oligarchs and crony capitalism is through the law, rather than through targeting. I mean, it would be very difficult now to lift sanctions, these other sanctions that affect ordinary people in Russia now, but it might be done, I was thinking, conditionally in exchange for, say, ceasefires, or for releasing prisoners of war, or ending deportation of Ukrainians, those kinds of practical issues. So, these are my ideas and suggestions. I'm not incredibly optimistic. In the end, I think the end of this war will only happen through democratization of Russia. And whether that will happen or not, I don't know, but all of us should focus on that issue.
S.R: Thank you so much, Mary, for this really wide-ranging discussion, from the concept of human security to nuclear disarmament, to very practical suggestions, and the prospects for ending not only wars in other parts of the world, but also, very particularly, the current Russian aggression against Ukraine. Thanks very much for being with me today.
M.K: Thank you, Shalini, for the lovely discussion.
S.R: Let me wrap up some of the main points of my discussion with Mary Kaldor. Perpetual violence has become the new norm today. We are faced with a so-called forever war, wars that are impossible to win. The aim of these wars is to continue violence indefinitely, and to allow warlords to profit from them in war zones. NATO, therefore, needs to rethink international security, and to reorient it to human security. Human security encompasses the security of individuals and communities, and it's not about the relations between states and their borders. Human security includes economic and social security, economic and social rights, and the protection of individuals and communities from physical threats, health, and climate change threats, and from violations of their human rights. Security cannot and should not be reduced to military security.
Putin is using NATO expansion as a pretext to invade Ukraine. For the Russian regime, it is the process of democratization in Ukraine that is felt to be a threat. There is no law under which the use of nuclear weapons is legal. Yet, Putin's use of the nuclear threat shows how fragile the nuclear deterrence framework always was and continues to be. Targeted sanctions have never stopped oligarchs in any country, as they are easily able to evade these sanctions. Middle classes often managed to leave and settle abroad, it is the poor who bear the brunt, and are hit hardest by the sanctions. And it's the poor who are left behind at the mercy of autocratic rulers who subject them to state propaganda and in the end, the poor then often blame the West for their plight, instead of their own governments.
What Ukraine needs urgently is economic support, and a cancellation of its very high debt. The EU would do well to accept immigration, not only refugees from Ukraine, but immigration as a whole, legally, and on a large scale, for immigration is a net contribution to our economies in Europe, and only the democratization of Russia can finally bring about the lasting peace that we need in the region. This was the first episode of season 5. Thank you very much for listening. My guest in a fortnight will be Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University. I will discuss with him whether the United States is sliding into fascism. Please go back and listen to any episode you may have missed, and, of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the Central European University at www.ceu.edu, and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch/democracy.