- Hubert Walas
Broken empire.
The war in Ukraine is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, legalistic, decentralized, and multicephalous; the other archaic, nationalistic, centralized, and monocephalous. War is often a good moment to raise fundamental questions. Is the interest of the Russian people identical to the interest of the Russian Federation? Or simply put, isn't Russia's collapse in the interest of Russian citizens? Welcome to the 20s Report.
The material is based on the essay "A Clash of Two Systems" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a distinguished Lebanese-American essayist and mathematician. Author of many bestsellers, including "Black Swan”.
Offensive vs. Defensive Nationalism
This conflict shows a harmful confusion, among the Russians and their supporters, between the state as a nation in the ethnic sense and the state as an administrative entity - writes Taleb.
A state that wants to base its legitimacy on cultural unity must be small; it is otherwise doomed to meet the hostility of others. A Francophone Swiss citizen, although culturally linked to his or her language, does not aspire to belong to France, and France does not try to invade French-speaking Switzerland under this pretext. Further, national identities can change quickly: Francophone Belgians have a different identity from French people. France itself went through an operation of internal colonialism to destroy Provençal, Languedoc, Picard, Savoyard, Breton, and other cultures and eradicate their languages under a centralized identity. Nationality is never defined and never fixed; administration is.
Cultural unity can make sense, but only in the form of something reduced such as a city-state –I would even go so far as to say that a state only works well in this way. In this case, nationalism is defensive — Catalan, Basque or Christian Lebanese — but in the case of a large state like Russia, nationalism becomes offensive. Notice that under the Pax Romana or the Pax Ottomana, there were no large states, but city-states gathered in an empire whose role was distant. But there is a loose empire and a rigid nation-state-like empire, the latter being represented by Russia.
There are now two imperial models: either a heavy model, like that of Russia, or coordination of states on the model of NATO. We will see which one will emerge victorious from the current conflict. This war not only pits Ukraine and Russia against it, but it is also a confrontation between two systems, one modern, decentralized and multicephalous, the other archaic, centralized, and autocephalous. Ukraine wants to belong to the liberal system: while being Slavic-speaking, like Poland, it wants to be part of the West.
What is it that We Call the West?
What we call “the West” is not a spiritual entity, but an administrative system first and last. It is not an ethno-geographical ensemble, but a legal and institutional system: it includes Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. It mixes the thalassocratic Phoenician world of network-based trade and that of Adam Smith, based on individual rights and freedom to transact, under the constraint of social progress. In the United States, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is minor when seen from a different century. Both sides want social progress, but at different rates of growth.
On the other hand, nationalism requires the All-Mighty Centralized –worse, Hegelian — State, and one that curates cultural life to weed out individual variations.
Nationalism is often linked to a spiritual dimension — represented in Solzhenitsyn and the Patriarch of Moscow via the Russian-Slavo-Orthodox model –which horrifies me as an Orthodox myself, writes Taleb. Moreover, this alleged proximity between Ukraine and Russia is questionable: Crimea has been Russian since Catherine II, and Stalin has russified it by displacing the Tatars. It is easy to say that Ukraine is the soul of Russia because it comes from the Rus’ of Kiev, but it can just as well be said that it is the Golden Horde of the sons of Genghis Khan.
And even if, spiritually, Ukraine were part of Russia, it would not mean that Ukrainians would not have the right to join the Western system. They could be emotionally Slavic but administratively organized in a Western system and militarily protected through an alliance between Westerners — which even includes, I remind you, Turkey. Putin cannot understand this, nor do some specialists in international relations who are sometimes called “realists” — I am thinking, for example, of John Mearsheimer.
States vs Individuals
These sloppy thinkers, the author continues, such as Mearsheimer and similar handweavers conflate states with individual interests; they believe that there is only a balance of power between powers — for Mearsheimer, Putin is only reacting to undue progress by the West on its ground. But the reality is quite different: what Ukrainians want is to be part of what I would call an international “benign” order, which works well because it is self-correcting, and where the balance of power can exist but remain harmless. Putin and the “realists” are in the wrong century, they do not think in terms of systems or in terms of individuals. They suffer from what I call the “Westphalia Syndrome” — the reification of states as natural and fixed Platonic entities.
Solzhenitsyn clearly saw the diabolical aspect of communist society but believed that Western society was just as harmful. But being naturally multicentric, the West aims to be like Switzerland — it’s bottom-top oriented in spite of occasional concentration. Furthermore, the “West” is evolving; it does not have fixed centers of authority. Certainly, there are disproportionate influences in the West, as of today’s Google and yesterday’s General Motors, but Google or General Motors are not the centers of it — these multinationals do not even control themselves.
Multinationals tend to go bust — in fact, they are more likely to fold than your family-run business.
This model tends to “antifragility” — a concept present in my books that refers to a property of systems that strengthen when exposed to stressors, shocks or volatility. Russia cannot be what I call “antifragile”.
An Error Correction Mechanism
A stable system requires a decentralized and multicephalous organization, which makes it possible to correct errors and avoid the deleterious effects of certain risks by confining them to the local level. After the 1918 war, the French destroyed Syria by centralizing it. Conversely, when the new Germany was formed, the French insisted that it be federal under the illusion that it would weaken it. Deprived of a center of gravity, Germany no longer thought of waging war, but of making… money. Butter, it turns out, works better than guns. Germany became an economic power thanks to federalism — and it appears to be natural as it spent its history in fragmented states before the Prussian takeover. For Russia, such a decentralized organization would be impossible: if let go of ballast, it would immediately find itself facing the secession of 20 small states — Chechnya, Ingushetia, Bashkiria… It, therefore, tightens the screw in the other direction.
The interest of the Western world is that it is a multicephalous model, made of contracts that allows regional autonomy under global coordination; Russia is an autocephalous system, which thinks only in a balance of power. Look at the West: is there a center? No. If there were one, moreover, he would be in Kyiv today. And if you want to destroy the West, how many bombs do you need? If you destroy Washington, London and Paris will remain. But if you destroy the palace where Putin is, it’s something else.
The stability of a decentralized system is much better than that of a centralized system. As such, I am pleasantly surprised by the reaction of the Western world, which was done so, organically. I thought the West could not face Putin, because a fight between an autocrat and employees seemed lost to me in advance, but it seems that the aggregation of our actions is beginning to bear fruit.
How can Russia enter the modern world?
Only if it fragments into separate states. Some Russian groups have always been irredentist, the Cossacks, the Kulaks (localist farmers), and the Siberians. There are also many minorities. More broadly, because of this Westphalia complex, it is forgotten that the Russians do not necessarily have the same interests as Russia. National interests are abstract things, and people end up believing in them even when they conflict with those of those populations they encompass.
People want to be able to trade together in Adam Smith’s world. This false debate reminds me of the opposition between Napoleon and the English. All the English initially wanted was for their products to arrive safely. Napoleon’s views did not interest them. While Napoleon thought in terms of the glory of France, they thought of the wallet of the English shop owner. But the English grocer won and, with the Phoenician trader, it was he who made the modern world — the Anglo-Phoenician world of mercantile cosmopolitanism. This is what means, for example, that today Germans are more interested in exporting cars than in Germany’s geographic expansion. Moreover, it amuses me to hear some people talk about “American cultural imperialism”. Do you think that in the morning, when they wake up, Americans think about exporting their music and food? It’s simply that on the other side of the planet, young people prefer to eat hamburgers.
The modern liberal system makes mistakes, yes. But when I criticize it, I don’t aim at destroying it, but at improving it. And it is a good system because it is self-correcting. I criticize naive Western interventions because I think about their consequences: I was against the war in Iraq, and experience justified my fears; I am against intervention in Syria, because if we get rid of Assad, we do not know what will replace him; I have nothing against Brexit, because if the British think they can manage to be part of our system without depending on the Brussels bureaucratic machinery, it is their right.
The problem posed by a benign system like ours is its transparency, which causes perceptional distortions: Tocqueville understood that equality seems all the stronger when it is reduced; similarly, a system seems all the more dysfunctional when it is transparent. Hence my attacks on someone like Edward Snowden and his acolytes, who exploit this paradox to attack the West for the benefit of Russian plotters. Snowden claims to defend the Americans against Google’s tyranny while operating from … Moscow!
Naive libertarians do not realize that the alternative to our messy system is tyranny: a mafia-don-like state (Lybia today, Lebanon during the civil war) or an autocracy. And these idiots call themselves libertarians!
Moreover, even if this conflict ends well for Russia, it will have shown that it is enough for a state to have nuclear weapons to cause a disaster. However, in today’s world, it is not acceptable for a leader to conquer another territory simply because he owns the atomic bomb. This principle must be destroyed.
This brings us to the next risk, China. Certainly, it has not escaped the modern world as much as Russia, and it is closely linked commercially to the West. But it also has imperial tendencies. The best thing would therefore be for it too to fragment to escape the yoke of Beijing. Taiwan and Hong Kong outperform China, so consider more of those!
Russia Divided
We must let it divide itself! If the central regime weakens, there will be autonomous thrusts. The liberal model is not compatible with this imperialism and Russia cannot survive without centralization.
If you give Putin even one finger, he will have won the war. Russia’s leadership must therefore be humiliated, and the only way is for it to retreat. We need a repetition of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. In this case, Putin will be overthrown from the inside, because, historically, people who accept autocracies do not like the weak. A weak Putin is no longer Putin — just as a nice, tactful, and thoughtful Trump would no longer be Trump. For this to continue, it takes a lot of suckers to keep feeding the narrative — and if the suckers begin to doubt the story, it will be the beginning of the end. - ends his essay Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In a similar vein to Taleb, Russia expert Kamil Galeev, already quoted on this channel, speaks out in one of his many Twitter threads on the Russian-Ukrainian war.
Galeev points out that Russian society lacks agency. This is partly because any form of social responsibility has been suppressed for years. - “Uprooted sense of agency & personal responsibility is an elephant in the room. After this war Russians will need a rehabilitation course to regain them again. But such rehabilitation is incompatible with the existence of the Russian state which uprooted them in the first place. Dismantling of the Russian state is necessary not only for preventing further attempts of imperial restoration and thus large military conflicts but as a necessary condition for rehabilitation which would restore the sense of agency and personal responsibility. The majority of the Russian population believes they can't do anything, their personal actions have no impact and the best they can do is submit. Which is not wrong. In such a massive empire their voice has no weight and no impact. Thus the empire must be dismantled into smaller polities.”
Finally, a comment from us. So is the breakup of Russia in the interest of the citizens of the Russian Federation? Inevitably, yes. History teaches us that almost the entire history of Russia is marked by imperialism because without it Russia collapses - this was shown in the 1990s. However, imperialism in the Russian version is to the exploitation of the individual, i.e. its own citizens. The last few hundred years of Russia's existence have been a period of poverty and suffering for millions and wealth for the few. Each successive regime, of course, blames everyone but itself for this state of affairs. The years of persistent brainwashing, combined with the elimination of any individual responsibility, made the Russians today actually believe in the Moscow propaganda gibberish and see no alternative to it.
The potential collapse does not immediately mean the loss of Russian culture, an argument often raised by the Kremlin's propaganda apparatus. No one will remove the literature of Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn, the music of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, or the prose of Pushkin. On the contrary, a look without ideology will allow a new understanding of their work, including noting darker sides, such as the imperialist inclinations of the latter. Not to mention wider access to art and culture, because a man can appreciate it only when he no longer wonders whether he has something to put in the pot, and does not have to endure 20 degrees of cold, taking care of his physiological needs in the backyard outhouse. And remember, these are problems that continue to affect a large part of Russian society.
The basic problem is the administrative structure of the massive 17 million square kilometers of territory of the modern Russian Federation. Effective management of such a large area, while wanting to maintain a high degree of centralization, is not possible. And in Russia, only Moscow matters. This results in extremely inefficient management of available resources, their outflow towards the core, and the spread of lawlessness that suits the central authorities. All this comes at the expense of the average citizen of Chelyabinsk, Perm, or Khabarovsk.
As Taleb rightly points out, history shows that healthy decentralization, in the long run, leads a given administrative unit towards prosperity. Examples can be multiplied - Germany after World War II, or the Holy Roman Empire before that, as well as modern Singapore, Hong Kong, or even Europe and the United States. Decentralization, backboned by economic freedom and the rule of law, naturally makes use of available human, raw material, and capital resources. The Republic of Siberia or Yakutia with its unlimited natural resources, the Republic of Khabarovsk with its geographical proximity to China, Korea, or Japan, or the Krasnodar Republic with its fertile soils and beautiful Black Sea landscapes would naturally grow rich much faster than being tied down by a regime thousands of kilometers away. On top of that, there would be healthy competition. Whoever manages his territory better will have a better life than his neighbor.
Of course, there is no point in deluding ourselves - it would involve a period of chaos and political struggle. However, just as the current generation of Ukrainians is fighting for a bright future for their nation, isn't a similar struggle in Russia worth the sacrifice?
