« une puissance médiatrice » The Semiotics of Humiliating Russia

 

 

Wars need their distractions.  Recently French President Macron provided a nice, if brief, respite from the drudgery of a war now in a phase of consuming substantial numbers of humans  on an alter to ther vanity of a national leader. Reuters (among others) reported:

"We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means," Macron said in an interview with regional newspapers published on Saturday. "I am convinced that it is France's role to be a mediating power." . . .  Macron has spoken with Putin regularly since the invasion as part of efforts to achieve a ceasefire and begin a credible negotiation between Kyiv and Moscow, although he has had no tangible success to show for it. "I think, and I told him (Putin), that he is making a historic and fundamental mistake for his people, for himself and for history," Macron said. (Ukraine says Macron remarks on Russia 'can only humiliate France')

Or, in the original:

« Je suis convaincu que c’est le rôle de la France d’être une puissance médiatrice », a déclaré M. Macron. « Nous ne devons pas humilier la Russie pour que le jour où les combats cessent, nous puissions construire une rampe de sortie par des moyens diplomatiques », a-t-il ajouté." (Emmanuel Macron fustigé pour ses propos « humiliants » sur la Russie).

The reaction was predictable and not entirely undeserved. Like Henry Kissinger at Davos, Macros is letting his desire to approach this conflict through the lens of 19th century sensibilities cloud his usually better judgment. From a 19th century perspective, there is certainly some sense in seeking to feed a great territorial power: through partitioning 2nd order states and producing formally constituted neutral zones.  Likewise the rules of inter-national politesse require that traditional ethno-territorial empires be treated respectfully, even when their actions are vile by contemporary standards. Humiliating empires always appeared to go bad, right through  the humiliation of the 2nd Reich in 1918.  That, at any rate was a theory.  Little states, on the other hand, ought to have been trained to understand national humiliation as a way of life.  Ukraine, in that context ought to have the good sense to understand that its existence was a function of their tolerance for humiliation; Russia, on the other hand could expect to avoid humiliation for its adventures in Georgia, Moldova, Syria, Chechnya, and Crimea. After all, naughty empires will be naughty--wink wink.  A little hand wringing in local news organs, some desultory protests by diplomats, and strategically targeted sanctions.   And so the Ukrainian adventure.

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But it is not the 19th century; and the Ukrainians are not anyone but themselves. They are much less likely to humiliate themselves to make the current leadership structure of the Russian Federation feel better about the shape of the Russian adventure in Ukrainian territory. And despite the sensibilities of the past--this war is not a war game; it is not played out on tan environmental simulator (holodeck) of some future space craft.  Mr. Macron, then, deployed 19th century discursive tools powerfully.  But those who might have been affected in an acceptable way are long dead. Today, Mr. Macron might have considered instead worrying about the consequences of the humiliation of Ukraine for the future of Franco-Ukrainian relations within the EU (eventually) or in NATO (maybe), or even the road to peace negotiations with Russia.

France, bereft of its empire (though not informally to some extent)  has had the sense to abandon 19th century territorial aspirations for a conceptually more powerful empire--the empire of mediation. That is also the likely path to power for a Europe that will need substantially longer to flush the detritus of forms of empire that became obsolete after 1945.  But such abstract empires require a better sense of the discursive realities of the 21st century: and that is something that Mr. Macron might yet have to master. And thus the semiotics of humiliating Russia: its basis is a set of discursive premises that died with the old order in 1945; its sensibilities suggest national expectations as a function of the rank of a state in the world order. And yet the semiotics of mediation requires a quite different sensibility in 2022.  That ios something the liberal democratic West has learned the hard way--from the error of writing off Ukraine in February 2022, to the reluctance to deny Ukraine its European identity, to the disastrous consequence of seeking to avoid humiliation of Russia by tolerating the humiliation of the international order and lower ranked states. For a state seeking to rise to the status of mediator world power, these are close to fatal errors. A correction is likely in order.