Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
Vladimir Putin has put his army’s deterrent force on alert. Paralyzed by this bravado, we allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine with impunity. But now, how long are we going to tolerate these violent bombardments and remain deaf to the appeal of the Ukrainian people?
In solidarity with the Poles during the 1980s, then with the oppressed in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and with the Chechen resistance during the 2000s, the French philosopher André Glucksmann (1937-2015) would be at the side of the Ukrainian people if he was still alive.
In 2009, Glucksmann summarized the main choices open to Eastern European countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall: “Two paths divide post-1989. On the one hand, that symbolized by Walesa [en Pologne] and Havel [en République tchèque]. On the other, that embodied by Milosevic [en Serbie] and later by Putin [en Russie] (collective, The most beautiful story freedom, Threshold, 2009). Either we participate in the dialogue between nations, or we organize the ceremonial of the rise in power. Glucksmann had understood it, the impostor in the Kremlin had chosen the second option.
The former journalist Chrystia Freeland, who became a Canadian minister, would therefore have been right when she covered international politics: Vladimir Putin would attack Ukraine “in order to divert Russia from its own path towards liberal democracy” (Boris Proulx, “Vladimir Putin as seen by Chrystia Freeland”, The duty).
The political conscience of our time
Glucksmann had also thought long and hard about the threat of total war. For the author of The strength of vertigo, a work published in 1983, it should be emphasized that deterrence based on the nuclear threat should in no way neutralize our critical judgment of dictatorships or hinder our support for oppressed peoples. Let us follow his enlightening reflection.
In 1945, the whole world discovers the horror, that is to say the death camps. The nations declare the universality of human rights and the honest citizen takes an oath: “You who have sworn to Auschwitz never again, do not put yourself in the position of having to use the regressive and racist methods of a dubious occupation… » (Strength from VertigoGrasset, 1983).
This oath, wrote Glucksmann, has two objectives: to no longer put oneself in the position of executioner and to free the victims. Where are we today ?
The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 offered a new chance for harmony. Pacifism formed the political consciousness of the new generations. Moreover, the ill-prepared and uncompleted interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan will act on people’s minds as counter-proofs or foils, further reinforcing these slogans: “Let’s stay at home”, “Let’s not give in to temptation to intervene”.
However, the philosopher of resistance could not be silent as many conflicts broke out in various parts of the world. Indefatigable, Glucksmann dared to offer different formulations of an 11and commandment: “Know the devil in you”, “Let nothing inhuman be foreign to you” or “Show the evil” (the XIand commandmentGrasset 1991).
In The strength of vertigo, Glucksmann had undoubtedly best expressed the distress or the despair of the victims of a totalitarian regime: “There are situations where the announcement of a third world war is understood as a deliverance, where those who have little to lose pray for nuclear bombs. »
So the intellectual will come back to haunt us with his overwhelming question: for our fellow men, prisoners in the hands of the executioners, how do we act? With this question, Glucksmann encouraged us to put ourselves in the shoes of a people under the yoke of a dictatorship. He wanted to make the suffering of the affected populations resonate in us, as Ukrainian President Zelensky did with emotion in the Canadian Parliament on March 15, 2022.
The twists and turns of abstention
Obviously, Glucksmann knew the arguments put forward by his compatriots in favor of abstention: “The anthology of good reasons for doing nothing is infinite”, he wrote in his autobiographical work a rage of child (Plon, 2006). He would therefore easily reject the argument that the West, through NATO, had provoked Russia. Indeed, the argument cannot justify a fratricidal war.
Rather, shouldn’t we ask ourselves why Poland and the other neighboring nations wanted to be part of the European Union? Why does the tenant of the Kremlin have to stay in power by arbitrary checks and arrests, that is to say by constant repression? Why murder the courageous journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006? Why imprison the opponent Alexeï Navalny today? Or again: who said that the Russian Federation could not and should never be one nation among others? Without answering these questions, we condemn ourselves to tolerating the existence of dictatorships.
Faced with terror, we become deaf to our lack of solidarity and to the illogicality of our own reasoning. On the one hand, we want to avoid escalation at all costs. On the other hand, we say we are ready to defend the member countries of NATO until the end. Meanwhile, the invader advances and justifies its bombardment of Ukraine by claiming that the other started first.
Truth, lies and aggression
It was the other who started. This denial precedes the cascade of lies. In this sense, the truth is the first victim of hate speech.
But why is this so? Part of the answer lies in Descartes is Francewhich Glucksmann published in 1987, 350 years after the publication of the famous Discourse on Method by Rene Descartes.
At the dawn of modern times, in 1637, Descartes understood that there was no primary truth: neither revealed nor sensitive. The truth is that the human subject is mistaken. For Glucksmann, the lesson of Descartes is simple: one learns to separate the true from the false precisely by eliminating the false, by pooling vigilant critical work.
But in war, there is precisely no more critical work leading to the sharing of true and false. There is only the law of the strongest. The discourse of science yields to the discourse of hate. However, we do not know the encoding of such a discourse. What are the ideological triggers of human aggression? How to disassemble the launch pad of any ramp-up?
Politics as an art of disarming
Market economy, climate change, pandemic, yet we live in an era of interdependencies and shared risks. Any event in the world is broadcast in real time. So, shouldn’t armed conflicts appear intolerable to us? Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, awaits the advent of a new policy. “If our world today is different, then our politics must be too. But what form will it take?
To prevent and defuse conflicts, the art of governing will not suffice. We must learn the art of disarming. In this perspective, “the principle of vertigo” developed by Glucksmann during the Cold War would be very useful to us.
In order to grasp its definition and scope, let’s go back one last time to his major work: “Sovereignty, today, is marked by the ability to forbid the other to forbid us from punishing him. I am sovereign if the other is not, all things considered, no less vulnerable through me than I through him. In other words, deterrence achieves its goal by exposing each opponent’s vulnerability. On the eve of a confrontation, all sides should understand that they have everything to lose.
And Glucksmann further specified, to indicate that no one should be immune to vertigo: “Dissuasive security is based on a fear that, far from eliminating, it strives to share. »
By dangling the nuclear threat, the Russian president thought he was evading the rule of sharing dizziness, he thought he was inflicting immense dizziness on the whole world, but without having to suffer it himself. This is a mistake, Glucksmann would say, because the existence of the United Nations is the result of a sharing of sovereignties. This is why the UN has the legitimacy and legality to guarantee the coexistence of the world. A single nation cannot therefore make its own law in any way.
On March 10, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, also recalled “the founding promise of the United Nations Charter: to save future generations from the scourge of war”. However, the international community can only keep this promise by managing to impose the force of vertigo on any belligerent, without which it condemns us to the disastrous spectacle of our powerlessness to disarm a leader who flouts the common rules of life.
The international community must therefore resume without further delay this “ability to forbid the other to forbid us to punish him” so well described by Glucksmann, a necessary and sufficient condition to finally hear the vibrant appeal of the Ukrainian people.
Suggestions ? Write to Robert Dutrisac: [email protected]. To read or reread the old texts of Le Devoir de philo, go to our digital platforms.