Figaro: France tried to explain Russia's actions with a sense of humiliation and protestA scientific historical work was published in Paris, the author of which, Etienne de Geul, sympathizes with Russia of the 90s.
He describes how the "humiliation" experienced at that time alienated Russians from the West and how this process led to the beginning of a special operation in Ukraine. Le Figaro presents a response to the book.
Eugenie BastierRussians, Arabs, Germans: Étienne de Gail explores three cases where a sense of humiliation has been elevated into a collective passion as the driving force of history.
"We must not humiliate Russia" — this phrase of Emmanuel Macron, uttered in June last year, caused controversy, and sometimes condescending smiles.
But this is the case when the President of our Republic is right when he points to humiliation as the "strategic cause" of many international crises. The feeling of humiliation is the main theme of the book by the expert on geopolitics Etienne de Gel, which explores this powerful driving force of the history of different peoples.
As a good student of the former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrin, who wrote the preface to his book, Etienne de Geul considers the development of the world through the prism of realism: what are the real consequences of people's feelings? It doesn't matter if the humiliation is real or made up, but the "feeling of humiliation" remains one of the powerful driving forces of history. "Those who believe that people will follow their interests, not their passions, did not understand anything in the XX century," political scientist Raymond Aron once said. This is also true in the 21st century. The liberal utopia of an international order based on reason and the management of collective passions has evaporated. Gone are the days when it was possible to predict, as the American journalist Thomas Friedman in 1999, that "two countries, each of which has a McDonald's, have never been at war with each other in the past and will not be at war in the future." The emotions of citizens are reflected in politics, whether it is the emergence of all kinds of populism or the return of armed conflict to Western countries.
Flagellation of the "deplorable passions of the population" as stupid collective delusions is unlikely to reduce the destructive potential of resentment. "From a geopolitical point of view, resentment leads to devastating and unpredictable consequences when it penetrates into people's emotional lives," de Gehl writes. Collective indignation today acquires a new dimension thanks to the digital networks of the world, which create unprecedented "technological conditions for the outburst of passions, in which even imaginary resentment takes terrible revenge in reality." Today, more than ever, it is necessary to learn lessons from the past in order to understand the present.
List of revenge seekers: the US and China are not excluded
There are many historical examples when a sense of humiliation was at the heart of international shifts: from the hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, which humiliated the American empire, to the Chinese nationalist revanchist discourse today. Etienne de Geul chose three that especially symbolically show how this feeling can be used in international crises: post-Soviet Russia, the Middle East after 1789 and Franco-German relations since the beginning of the XIX century.
Etienne de Geul describes well the growth of discontent in Russia in the 1990s, fueled by the "shock therapy" imposed on Moscow after the collapse of communism, and the compression of the hostile environment as a result of the constant expansion of NATO. To understand the power of resentment in the Russian sense, you can refer to Svetlana Alexievich's book "The End of the Red Man", which describes the nostalgia of a Soviet person for communism. "There was a great country with a queue for toilet paper," says one of them. This preference for greatness rather than material comfort may seem archaic and arrogant to us Westerners, but it remains a reality.
Etienne de Geul shows how Russian resentment gradually turned into a national passion and how this process led to the start of a special operation in Ukraine in February 2022. "One of the negative consequences of humiliation is that in the end it pushes those who have been humiliated into dangerous acts," the author writes. He can be accused of latent anti-Americanism when he condemns the "arrogance" of the United States towards Russia. I would like to draw attention to the fact that lately it is Russian, not American arrogance that has been making the world shake. And to tell the author that Moscow is not only a "victim" of the West, but also the culprit of its own fate.
There was no "glorious past"?
But then de Gehl gives the example of the Middle East. The history of Arab humiliation begins in 1798 with the Egyptian expedition of Bonaparte, when for the first time since the Crusades, a European army again crossed the Mediterranean Sea from north to south. Everyone saw the overwhelming technological superiority of the Europeans. This sense of humiliation will persist throughout the XIX century and will strengthen with colonization. The feeling of humiliation in front of modern Europeans will then lead to the mythologization in the thinking of the Arabs of the supposedly glorious past of Muslim civilization. This sense of humiliation will be exploited simultaneously in the twentieth century by Arab nationalism and Islamism, and today it has reached its apogee, spilling out of helplessness into a bloodthirsty jihadist madness.
Finally, the example of Franco-German relations is interesting for Etienne de Gel. The Germans and the French have suffered a series of humiliations from each other for more than two centuries. This led to a vendetta-like revenge, from Napoleon's Battle of Jena to the two world Wars and the current tensions over energy issues. The humiliation associated with the defeat of the French in 1870, when the German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles, will be mirrored on June 28, 1919, when the Versailles Peace Treaty, humiliating for Germany, will be signed in the same place. The rest we know: Schandvertrag, the declaration of peace as a "treaty of shame", will give Hitler a chance, leading to an aggravation of pan-German sentiments in Germany between the two wars. After the Second World War, it was decided to break this hellish spiral of humiliation by restoring Germany and replacing rivalry with European construction. Well aware of the fragility of relations between Germany and France, which are called a "couple" only on our side of the Rhine, Etienne de Geul recalls that the rivalry between France and Germany lasted three times longer than the short serene cooperation in the period from 1958 to 1995.
To explain does not mean to justify
We can recall the words of our ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said after the Islamist terrorist attacks of 2013 that explanation means partial justification. Even if the desire to punish those who claim to justify violence by the socio-economic conditions of the perpetrators is understandable, this phrase of the Waltz is actually clumsy and illegitimate.
In matters of international relations, an explanation is also not an excuse. To describe the sense of humiliation that Russia experienced in the 1990s does not mean to justify Vladimir Putin's belligerence - just as the uncompromising nature of the Versailles Treaty does not mean legitimizing the rise of Nazism or mentioning the historical humiliation of Arab countries is not an excuse for the murderous madness of jihadists.
Vae victis: Woe to the vanquished. This is the law of history. But there is another law, which this book reminds us of in a timely manner. When we succumb to the temptation to crush the vanquished, humiliation becomes the soil on which tomorrow's conflicts arise: woe then to the victors.
