Looking at the war in Ukraine and ways it could end from a global perspective

ABSTRACT

Our dialogical book Debating the War in Ukraine covers more than three decades of world history, but focusses mostly on developments in Europe. Here we situate the war in Ukraine within a global context. The aim of this special forum is to broaden our dialogue on historical counterfactuals and possible futures in geopolitical terms (critically understood) by including new contributors. The forum will start with a book review, followed by one commentary and three articles that pose questions about counterfactual histories and possible futures by discussing the roles of Brazil, China, India, and Turkey and the difference they could make. How will the war end and how will it reconfigure global processes and constellations of world politics? Is the world becoming increasingly divided into antagonistic blocs? Are there real possibilities for a peace process or better common institutions? We conclude this forum by a further dialogue on future possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• dialogue
• global south
• mediator
• peace
• Ukraine

Most likely the deadliest war in 2022 was not in Ukraine but in Ethiopia (see Plaut & Vaughan, 2023).¹ While it seems evident that a full-scale war in the heart of Europe is more of a shock for Europeans than for citizens and pundits residing in East or South Asia or Latin America, the events and conflicts in the Horn of Africa tend to remain sidelined in the media and political discussions in most parts of the world. The two conflicts are different in nature – in Ethiopia, most deaths have resulted from ethnic cleansing, genocidal massacres, and a particularly massive humanitarian crisis – yet the radical difference in the attention these conflicts receive says something essential about our world in the 2020s.

A simple comparison between the two conflicts serves as a reminder of the enduring centre-periphery relations in what is often characterized as an increasingly multipolar or polycentric world. Another way of expressing this is to talk about the post-hegemonic world. The point of our special forum is not, however, to discuss Euro- or West-centrism in its various meanings and guises, or to replace them with any other form of centrism; nor is our aim to advocate multipolarity. Rather, the goal is to try to understand the nature of relevant processes in a way that is not committed to the view that Europe is the primary location of world history. This is particularly important since our Debating the War in Ukraine (Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023) might be read as exhibiting Eurocentrism in this sense.

That said, it should be stressed that we consider that there is a sense in which the war in Ukraine is central to the future of the world: it works as a catalyst for reshaping global politics after the so-called post-Cold War era. Our special forum emphasises how the war in the heart of Europe is intertwined with broad political, economic, and ecological processes involving many countries, regions, and spatial scales. The way that states and other actors relate to the war reflects ideas of international norms, their interpretations, allegiances, and views of the future constellations of power. Finding a solution to the conflict will have global repercussions, reshaping prevailing patterns of cooperation and conflict, and constituting a new precedent. Furthermore, some rising powers may see the war as an opportunity to enhance their status as indispensable global actors in the field of diplomacy. The war has also reawakened the acute possibility of nuclear war. Even a limited nuclear war would wreak havoc across the planet and lead to a devastating nuclear winter. That is another reason why the global community cannot afford to be indifferent towards the war.

Our book Debating the War in Ukraine (Forsberg & Patomäki, 2023; available open access) was an attempt to discuss the war in light of counterfactual histories and in terms of future possibilities.² While the present state of the war in Ukraine embodies elements of different possible futures, all scenarios are theory-laden and there are different theoretical schemes through which we interpret the past. Perhaps history is, after all, about to end in political and economic liberalism, as was commonly envisaged after the end of the Cold War; perhaps the journey to the end of history is just bumpier and more complicated than expected in the 1990s. An anti-Whiggish ‘realist’ may ask, however, whether the liberal account is an illusion that ignores the eternal return of power politics. Alternatively, from a critical political economy perspective, perhaps worldwide neoliberalisation and its consequences have gradually created the conditions for a global military catastrophe by assembling multiple components that are conducive to such an outcome. A critical peace researcher or political economist does not need to give up hope. Perhaps the ongoing political, economic and other processes triggered or accelerated by the war will eventually facilitate (possibly after a catastrophe of some sort) the rise of new forms of global cooperation and institutions.

The special forum

The special forum starts with Ole Wæver’s review of Debating the War in Ukraine. Wæver ponders the nature of the arguments about the past. He believes that they are relevant to the extent that they can influence the current debates that shape the future. While duly sceptical of the relevance of discussing the causal histories that led to the war at a time when the logic of war prevails, Wæver also describes the book as a ‘comprehensive mobilization of all the main arguments and observations of the causes and consequences of the Ukraine war’. He argues that it is important to problematize prevailing understandings: ‘At a time when extreme events in Ukraine mostly trigger simplifications and interrupt dialogue and self-reflection, this book fosters careful examination of a complex and tragic history, the lessons from which will condition crises to come’.

On the other hand, Wæver opines that the book plays down the role of political struggles in the production and writing of history. He also expresses the criticism that the book does not sufficiently deal with the most classical International Relations (IR) questions that nevertheless play a key role when assessing the development leading to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, such as whether states generally expand if given the chance. This is important because, in Wæver’s view, ‘participants in public debate and policy-making overwhelmingly hold a particular set of assumptions that we can easily identify through the lens of IR theory’.

The subsequent four contributions to this special forum pose questions about counterfactual histories and possible futures by focussing, to varying degrees and in diverse ways, on four countries – India, China, Turkey, and Brazil – and on the difference they could have made and can make. The most general of these contributions is Sundeep Waslekar’s ‘Ukraine War and Beyond’, which illustrates how it is possible to categorize theory-laden scenarios in dissimilar ways. Waslekar distinguishes between three schools of thought. The optimistic peace researcher hopes for a ceasefire followed by a peace process. Resonating with Wæver’s ironic remarks about the dominance of ‘a weird kind of liberal-paleo-realist’ theory among Western policymakers and media, Waslekar argues that the ‘realist’ expects a protracted war that will continue for several years.³ The alarmist worries that a long war, waged either deliberately or inadvertently, may cross the nuclear threshold threatening the extinction of our civilization. Assessing the optimistic scenario, Waslekar argues that ‘if India, as the current chair of the G20, launches an initiative jointly with Brazil and China for a ceasefire followed by a peace process, it may carry some weight. However, such an initiative does not seem plausible’. An atmosphere of mistrust prevails between China and India, and in the March 2023 meeting of G20 foreign ministers that took place in New Delhi, other neutral countries did not support India’s efforts to use the platform ‘for initiating dialogue rather than accentuating hostility’.

While it seems that a prolonged war is likely, Waslekar criticizes the premises of those in the West who would prefer the war to continue. Regime change in Russia is far from any sort of panacea. A prolonged war involves significant costs for the West as well and will result in the bifurcation of the world into two camps. What is even more serious is that ‘a protracted war can spark an accident or incident which may inadvertently or deliberately lead to a nuclear exchange’. The concerns of the alarmist are thus justified. At this point, Waslekar turns his attention to international and global institutions. There are multiple fault lines in the current international system. He proposes ‘a robust conflict resolution mechanism, particularly to deal with situations where the honour and interests of the P5 countries are involved’; a ‘civilizational crisis response mechanism’, and far-reaching regulations on new AI and other technologies and weapons of mass destruction. ‘The question before humankind is whether we can harness our wisdom to create a sustainable architecture of peace, not dependent on lethal arms, or whether we will succumb to universal death’.

Feng Zhang considers four counterfactuals in his article on China’s role in the context of the war in Ukraine. On the one hand, China is strongly committed to the principles of state integrity and sovereignty (which prevent it from supporting any separatism or Russia’s efforts for forced annexations in Ukraine), but on the other hand, Russia is an important partner in the loose anti-US hegemony coalition. Asking whether China would have made a difference in preventing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, or could make a difference in ending it, Chang firstly explores a scenario in which China had criticized Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The second counterfactual is the possibility that the Chinese leaders had warned Putin against the invasion before Putin made his final decision. He also asks whether Chinese opposition to the invasion would have hastened the end of the war. While some critics in China have been in favour of severing ties with Putin’s Russia, Chang does not find these scenarios entirely plausible⁴ as they would have required reasonably good Sino-US relations. Chang argues, however, that the fourth counterfactual is plausible, namely China reducing material support for Russia to increase Putin’s willingness to achieve a peaceful settlement. Chang concludes that China’s influence on Putin has been limited. Although it seems likely that China could not have prevented Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it can play an important role in affecting the course and outcome of the war. This is because of Russia’s economic dependence on China and its vast markets and resources.

Lerna Yanik discusses Turkey’s role in the war. Yanik’s article highlights the subtle and complex connections between mutual economic interdependence and diplomacy. Turkey has become dependent on Russia for its natural gas imports (between 34% and 65% of its imports since 2005), and for tourism (almost 7 million Russian tourists in 2019). Turkey has not joined the Western-imposed sanctions against Russia. This is the context in which Turkey has been a very visible player since the war started by mediating most of the agreements that the warring parties have been able to reach concerning the exchange of prisoners and grain export. Its mediating efforts were also significant in the early stage of the war when a peace deal was sought. Yanik sees that Turkey could have acted differently in some cases but does not attach any pivotal effect to them. It could have refrained from invoking Article 19 of the Montreux Convention that regulates maritime traffic in the Bosporus and Dardanelles Straits in Turkey, but in doing so it has effectively banned warships from entering the Black Sea, apart from Russian warships that are returning to their home base. Additionally, Turkey could have joined the Western sanctions and it could have refused to sell drones to Ukraine. Yanik concludes that Turkey’s position, which is seen as one taking distance from the West, is not based on an indication of its willingness to be closer to Russia, but has been adopted instead to maximise its political and economic gains when the war comes to an end. Yanik also presumes that Turkey, and especially its construction companies, are likely to acquire a ‘big stake’ in the post-war recovery of Ukraine. While all this underlines the importance of political economy considerations, Yanik’s analysis also indicates ambiguity about the Turkish potential for contributing to a peace process and the end of this war.

Bárbara Motta and David Succi’s contribution to the special forum deals with Brazilian foreign policy towards the war in Ukraine. They analyse the differences between the policies of two very different presidents, Jair Bolsonaro, who was president when Russia launched its invasion, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who became president at the beginning of 2023. While both presidents positioned Brazil as neutral in the conflict, Bolsonaro’s line was more inert and Russia-oriented while Lula championed a more proactive policy of non-alignment. The article also discusses three counterfactuals in the form of scenarios concerning Brazil’s relation to the war: its role as a mediator, its willingness to choose a side in the conflict, and its engagement with finding a peaceful solution to the war. Motta and Succi conclude that, in the best case, Brazil would potentially have some influence in bringing the war to an end.

We had originally intended to include a paper on South Africa as well, but for a number of practical reasons, this aim was not realized. Hence, the last piece in our special forum is ‘The Shape of Things to Come: A Further Dialogue’, in which we continue to debate how the war in Ukraine might come to an end. Whereas Heikki Patomäki (HP) perceives an ongoing escalation of the conflict and war, Tuomas Forsberg (TF) argues that ‘the situation has definitely not improved but […] it has not dramatically worsened either’. While HP laments that the possibility of nuclear annihilation is taken on both sides with an unbearable lightness, which increases the likelihood of it happening, TF expresses relief that, after the initial phase of the war, anxiety and concern about the possibility of a nuclear war have partially dissipated, and writes that he is not acutely afraid. To paraphrase and use Waslekar’s categories, HP appears as a Cassandra-like futurologist⁵ inclined to support the optimistic peace researcher, while TF is a ‘realist’, expecting a protracted war to continue for several years because the conditions for a just peace from the perspective of Western liberalism and the still anticipated ‘end of history’ are absent. However, the multiple and often contradictory uses of the term ‘realism’ are further illuminated by the fact that both of our analyses are, albeit in different ways, based on critical realism, and that HP in particular has participated in the development of such realism.⁶ Despite our partly shared metatheoretical commitments, we differ in our assessments about the prospects for peace. The problem for TF is that ‘those who fear military escalation are more willing to see Ukraine make concessions even if key issues of justice would be compromised, while those who fear Russia more than escalation think that Russia should not be rewarded for its military invasion’.

Our differences indicate how background assumptions, anticipations of possible and likely futures, and normative assessments of the present actions are intricately intertwined. Apart from the escalatory potential, HP also stresses the immense human and socio-economic costs of the war and proposes that negotiations for a peace deal could revolve around concepts such as a ‘demilitarised zone’ and a ‘UN-managed territory’ (Indonesia has recently proposed something similar). At this point, our dialogue turns to uncovering and criticizing some of each other’s background assumptions, on the one hand, and discussing the available evidence on who has been negotiating in good faith and who can be trusted (with TF doubting the trustworthiness of Russia’s present regime, and HP seeing various problems in the actions of all the main parties). In this regard, we both see a possible role for third-party facilitators and mediators. We disagree, however, on whether successful mediators are likely to come primarily from countries that are seen as outsiders to the conflict and thus would be able to mediate between different conceptions of justice. Based on this criterion, HP thinks that most NATO members should be excluded, while countries such as Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and Turkey might be decisive in terms of mediating the conflict and facilitating an agreement. For his part, TF believes that countries such as China cannot be seen as neutral mediators, but this does not rule out their possible role in facilitating the endgame of the conflict, if they are able to influence not only Ukraine’s but also Russia’s calculus.

Although we have both learnt a great deal in the course of engaging in our dialogue, and there has been convergence on some issues, it has not ended – at least not yet – in a rational consensus. It is not only that the same available evidence can be interpreted in many different ways, but also that our normative and theoretical commitments are closely related to how we assess counterfactuals and anticipate possible and likely futures. The next step would require us to either engage systematically with our deep background assumptions, or to methodically isolate such claims that can be systematically tested in one way or another, and whose falsification and rejection would have consequences for the wider belief system.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tuomas Forsberg

Tuomas Forsberg is Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies at the University of Helsinki until August 2023, then resuming his Professorship in International Relations at the University of Tampere. Apart from Debating the War in Ukraine, his most recent book in English is The Psychology of Foreign Policy (with C. Pursiainen, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Heikki Patomäki

Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics and Global Political Economy at the University of Helsinki. Apart from Debating the War in Ukraine, his most recent books in English are The Three Fields of Global Political Economy (Routledge, 2022) and World Statehood: The Future of World Politics (Springer, 2023).

Notes

1 Estimates of the number of dead resulting from the Tigray War in 2020–2022 cited in the media (e.g. The Economist, 2023) vary from 385,000 to 800,000. Moreover, the sources of these estimates are not as reliable as they could be (e.g. ‘independent scholars, based at Ghent University in Belgium’). For estimates of casualties in the war in Ukraine, see the beginning of our dialogue in this forum.

2 There is renewed scholarly interest in exploring counterfactuals in general and some efforts in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in particular (see e.g. Rosenfeld, 2022). One important counterfactual that we did not discuss in the book concerns the question of what would have happened if Trump had won the 2020 US presidential election instead of Biden (see Kaarbo et al., 2023).

3 If we follow Waslekar’s conceptualization, a Whiggish liberal is, in fact, a ‘realist’ to the extent that he or she does not see an alternative to a prolonged war (until the defeat of Russia in some sense or regime change in Russia); whereas an anti-Whiggish ‘realist’ may agree with our critical peace researcher that a ceasefire followed by a peace process is not only a possible but also the most desirable outcome. Wæver’s concept of liberal-paleo realism describes these complexities from a slightly different but interesting angle. ‘[This dominant conception] is liberal in the sense that it assumes the superiority of “our side” in every confrontation, derives international dynamics from domestic sources and justifies a moralizing interventionism. However, it combines this with a simplistic version of realism that has little affinity with any serious scholarly school of realism (classical, neo, post-classical or offensive) and rather consists of an asymmetrical cynicism and militarism: The evil ones only understand the language of force’.

4 Following Richard Ned Lebow (2010, pp. 44–45), Chang maintains that there are two kinds of scholarly counterfactuals: plausible world counterfactuals and ‘miracle’ counterfactuals. The word ‘miracle’ is strong, usually associated with an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs or something analogical (as it is also the case with Lebow’s examples). When we are talking about ordinary ethical and political choices by a single actor in a limited world-historical context, a theory-laden claim about the relative implausibility of a particular choice may be dramatized as ‘miraculous’, but it seems reasonable to take this kind of dramatization with a grain of salt.

5 In the ancient Greek mythology, Cassandra was a young woman who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. When Cassandra did not return his love, Apollo placed a curse on her so that no one would ever believe her predictions. Cassandra foresaw the destruction of Troy but could do nothing because she was not believed by the Trojans. A modern Cassandra anticipates dire futures in the hope of generating terror. The point is to trigger a change in the course of actions, public policies, and world history. A Cassandran futurologist is an ‘alarmist’ in Waslekar’s terminology.

6 The term ‘realism’ in critical realism refers to ontology. Ontological realism is a philosophical stance that holds that the world is real and – except for a very small part – independent of the researcher’s (my or our) knowledge of it. Ontological realism also means that the world is not only real but it must also be differentiated, structured, layered, open-systemic and possess causal powers for science and many other practices to be intelligible. For the varied ways HP has contributed to critical realism and critical realism has influenced his work, see Patomäki & Morgan, 2023. For TF’s theoretical commitments, see e.g. Pursiainen & Forsberg, 2021, Ch 1.