Review: The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, by Glenn Diesen

‘A world order’, writes Glenn Diesen, ‘outlines the system and rules for how to live peacefully on the same planet.’ While the distribution of power is the bedrock of international order, equally important is its legitimacy—the accepted and expected modes of state behaviour. But the overriding goals of any world order are permanency and stability—no mean task in the prevailing state of ‘international anarchy’.

As a realist, Diesen subscribes to the classic schema of structural change in modern international relations that begins with the sovereignty-driven Westphalian treaties of 1648, followed by the conflict-ridden multipolar balance of power system of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, that system's complete breakdown during the Napoleonic Wars, the nineteenth century Concert of Europe, the meltdowns of the First and Second World Wars, the bipolarity of the cold war and the unipolarity of the early post-communist years.

But Diesen's fine book is as much about ideas, values and subjectivities as transformations in power structures. His is a soft realism rooted in an analysis that captures and synthesises a combination of ideologies, identities and materialities. Diesen sees the current world order as crisis-ridden and transitional. Western hegemony based on liberal values and American power is fading fast. But the remnants of the 1990s unipolar moment, during which the United States ruled almost supreme, have yet to be supplanted by Diesen's preferred option of a multipolar, Eurasian world order, whose prime value is the sanctity of state sovereignty.

According to Diesen, the Ukraine war is simply the latest and most intense clash between those who valorise states’ sovereignty and those who wish to impose Western liberal and democratic values on all members of the world community. In a world of nuclear-armed powers that conflict between competing visions of international politics is a highly dangerous one that threatens to collapse world order entirely.

While Diesen is a stern critic of liberal hegemony, that doesn't stop him from giving a fair account of what motivates it. The effort to ‘Westernise’ world politics serves values as well as interests. The so-called rules-based order is well-intentioned as well as self-serving. Its proponents genuinely believe that spreading democracy and liberal values serves the interests of all humanity. In this imagined liberal universe, some states are deemed more virtuous than others and entitled to more sovereignty.

The rub, as Diesen points out, is that the accompanying ideological fanaticism has led some liberals to use the promise of perpetual peace as justification for perpetual war. Madeleine Albright famously termed the United States an ‘indispensable nation’ that is entitled to use force whenever and wherever it pleases, but it is a mindset that pervades the West as a whole.

Among the book's many choice quotes is Walter Lippmann's 1965 comment that: ‘A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.’ As Diesen comments, the West's sense of moral superiority is inimical to diplomacy and the concomitant effort to see the world through the eyes of others. States are categorised as good or bad and their actions judged through the prism of an ascribed identity.

In power terms, the challenge to American-based Western hegemony is led by China and Russia, who are striving for a world order based on civilisational diversity and a balance of power and interests. But Beijing and Moscow's defence of Westphalian sovereign equality is supported by the vast majority of the world's states. Tellingly, while the Global South did not support Russia's invasion of Ukraine, neither did it back NATO's proxy war against Russia. Russia's invasion was, of course, an egregious violation of state sovereignty. In no way does Diesen justify Putin's action—‘a war of aggression with unpredictable consequences’—but he does try to understand it. Putin invaded because he came to see Ukraine as an ‘anti-Russia’—a state being armed by NATO and integrated into its alliance structures. In Putin's view, it was only a matter of time before Ukraine, with Western support, would attempt to secure by force the return to its sovereignty of Russian-occupied Crimea and rebel Donbass. The aim of the so-called Special Military Operation, argues Diesen, was to force Ukraine and the West to negotiate a diplomatic settlement of Russia's security concerns. The momentous decision for war was, of course, Putin's, but the scene was set by NATO expansion and the strategy of marginalising Russia as a European great power. Whilst the inviolability of state sovereignty is one principle of the Westphalian system, another is the indivisibility of security: a state's sovereign rights are balanced by obligations not to threaten the security of other states. Western calculations that Russia was so weak its interests and sensibilities could be ignored proved disastrous, not least for the Ukrainians. Rather than weakening Russia, Western policies have accelerated the transition to a multipolar Eurasian world order.

There was an alternative to this sorry story. As Diesen relates, in the 1990s Ukraine's then President, Leonid Kuchma, sought a common ‘return to Europe’ alongside Russia—a policy that resisted Ukraine having to make a civilisational choice between East and West. A common return to Europe would strengthen Ukraine's independence relative to Russia as well as the EU and NATO, whilst at the same time obviating the internal divisions that could provoke civil war. Kuchma's delicate balancing act was disturbed by the ‘Orange Revolution’ of 2004 that empowered extremist Ukrainian nationalism. Elected President in 2010, Victor Yanukovich returned to Kuchma's approach but he was swept aside by the Maidan events of 2014.

Diesen's conclusion is optimistic and pessimistic in equal measure. He sees the emerging Eurasian world order as more egalitarian and empowering of non-Western states, but worries the United States will find it difficult, if not impossible, to adjust peacefully to the multipolar distribution of power and sovereign egalitarianism of a renewed Westphalian world order.

The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, by Glenn Diesen. Clarity Press. 314 pp. £24.35.