Syllabus
1) Introduction
2) John J. Mearsheimer, The Causes and Consequences of the Ukraine War, 6 June 2022, Robert Schumann Centre of EUI (available at YouTube). (See also Why is Ukraine the West’s Fault, University of Chicago, May 29, 2015, YouTube).
3) M. E. Sarotte, America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, Yale University Press, New Haven 2021, Introduction.
4) Ibid. Chapter 6: Rise and Fall
5) Ibid. Conclusion: The New Times
6) Zbigniew Brzezinski, Premature Partnership, 1994, Foreign Affairs March/April 1994 (available on the web)
7) Serhii Plokhy, Lost Kingdom. The Quest of Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. From 1470 to the Present, Basic Books, New York 2017, Part III, The Tripartite Nation
8) Ibid. Part V, The Unbreakable Union.
9) Ibid. Part VI, The New Russia
10) The War in Ukraine & the Future of the World - Yuval Noah Harari & Timothy Snyder, 3/8/2022 (YouTube) and Timothy Snyder, Ukraine Holds the Future: The War Between Democracy and Nihilism, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2022, Ukraine Holds the Future: The War Between Democracy and Nihilism (foreignaffairs.com)
11) Timothy Snyder, The Road to Freedom. Russia, Europe, America, Tim Duggan Books, New York 2018, Chapter 1, Individualism or Totalitarianism
12) Ibid. Chapter 2, Succession or Failure
13) Ibid. Chapter
3.
Annotation
When Vladimir Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the debate broke out in the West about the causes of the war. One school of thought represented by John J. Mearshemer, the leading author of the realist school in International Relations, blamed the war on the West, more concretely, on the successive waves of the enlargement of the NATO which brought the Western alliance ever closer to Russia. The Putin’s war was depicted as a preemptive move whose purpose was to block Western advance to Russia’s western border. According to Mearsheimer, far from being a crazy dictator possessed by imperialistic delusions, Putin followed the rational path of Great Power politics. Western readiness to include Ukraine in the NATO did not give him any other option than attack it and deter the West from doing it.
Mearsheimer’s argument was used by Western Far Left and Far Right to advocate neutrality towards the war in Ukraine. The Western mainstream opinion, however, bought into two opposite narratives which assigned the responsibility for the war unambiguously to Russia. One, expressed already in the 1990s by Zbigniew Brzezinski, did not deduce Russia’s behavior from the Great Power rivalry but rather from its identity as an empire. In order to prevent Russia from expanding and threatening its neighbors, the NATO should move to its border. The same strategy which for Mearsheimer amounted to provoking Russia’s aggressive behavior was presented by Brzezinski as the only way how to stop it.
The third school of thought agreed with Brzezinski on the last point albeit for different reasons. Instead of seeing in Russian imperialism the ultimate cause of Russia’s aggressivity Timothy Snyder conceived it as following from its authoritarianism. It was not the Russian external posture which was the problem but rather its internal regime: unless Russia becomes liberal democracy, the world will not be a safe place.