Democracy or dictatorship? The moral call to defend Ukraine

Retrieving the moral core amidst the discourse on war

According to Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means; according to Foucault, in a somewhat provocative inversion, politics is the continuation of war by other means. At the beginning of political action there is always already the intention to strategically overwhelm, whose ultimate purpose is oriented towards the domination – or even annihilation – of the Other, whatever the cost. Here, in relation to this politics-war constellation, morality is to be brought into play. How would a thinking be possible for which moral intentions and values did not only mean the normative continuation of politics, but politics itself could be nothing else than the continuation of morality? In fact, such a grounding of politics from the spirit of morality is already contained in the revolutionary movements of the earlier modern period, at least according to their historical-hermeneutical memory. The French and the American Revolutions are virtually symbolic-cognitive as well as institutional-social establishments of universal values – freedom, equality, solidarity – which thereby aim to give an institutionalized reality to the political will aligned with them. Born from the spirit of previous political philosophy, these revolutions and their value structure provide a living source of inspiration to influential philosophical movements, from Marxism to liberal thought to recent critical theory. ¹

In the current discourse on the war in Ukraine, moralizing, ‘realpolitical’, bellicose, neo-imperialist, positions are mixed up in such an unfiltered and confused way that the extent to which certain positions are normatively acceptable, or rather amorally contaminated, seems unclear. This provides a major motive to retrieve the moral grounds which could guide one’s stance. It is about overcoming a situation which is dominated by an unhealthy mixture of half-heartedly reflected mixtures of supposed ‘moral good wills’ – the war must stop immediately, must be frozen, lives must be saved – up to an uninhibitedly unrestrained readiness for war (which can sometimes blatantly carry along imperialist theses, ‘Putin must go’, ‘Russia must be weakened’). Either a full stop of the war actions under present conditions, or an infinitely open willingness to wage war against the aggressor! A moral-philosophical reconstruction should make it possible to avoid both extremes and to reflectively evaluate the apparent motives to reach a better understanding of the situation. The supposedly normative healthy and ‘good’ advocacy for peace and against war may reveal itself in fact as expressive of a deep-seated moral decadence, which in turn is influenced and maintained by ideological and social-theoretical assumptions. At the same time, the somewhat immediate, ‘intuitive’ advocacy of ever more and ever more far-reaching military support for Ukraine, principally including arms transfers, may prove exceedingly problematic unless embedded in a framework of moral-political orientation. Thus, even though an empathetic call for solidarity with the attacked party may emerge from these reflections – including the military support for Ukraine to enable an efficient self-defence – this must occur under precisely articulated conditions such that the accusations of bellicose attitudes, of war-obsession, as well as of a naively moralistic partisanship – as mere gut feelings towards the situation – can be dismissed as inappropriate.

To adequately set the stage, three pitfalls must be avoided from the outset, three misunderstandings cleared out of the way. First, this is not a matter of unadorned moralism, of irrefutable judgments: no moral lecturing or finger wagging! Rather, a reflexive distance from one’s own as well as to other prejudices is to open up, within which moral intuitions can show themselves as such, and thus appropriately in the current context. ²

Secondly, at stake is the liberation from a pseudo-objectivism that assumes one’s own moral-abstinent position to be less ‘emotional’, more rational, or more ‘objective’. To undo the perfidious concealment of the originally ethically determined field of phenomena is the target of this deconstruction. Its aim is to reveal the discursive operations that denigrate our most basic, ‘immediate’, and thus allegedly naïve and unreflective moral intuitions. What is often assigned to a naïve moral feeling as ‘folks ethics’ must be freed from such a discursive down-putting. The actual moral sources of motivation must be unearthed in such a way that an attitude appropriate to the whole situation can emerge. ³

And thirdly, the aim is to peel out the normative motivation of a justified reaction to the violent acts of aggressive war by falling back on the moral core of our experience, and to do so without a pedantic recourse to the tradition of justified war, nor by simply dogmatically invoking grand and allegedly uncontroversial concepts such as ‘international law’ (Völkerrecht), ‘national self-determination’, or even human rights. Without disputing the relative legitimacy of these steps in public discourse, the aim here is rather to bring to light, the bedrock of our moral feelings and reactions regarding war, especially one led by self-defence. It may make possible a normative response to war as a means of politics as the continuation and realization of morality by other means.

Empathetic morality and the collective reality of war

No one seriously doubts the right to defend oneself against an attacker, be it as an individual or as a nation. What’s at stake, however, is what’s required or demanded of the bystander, the observer, the third party. Let’s imagine we find ourselves in such a situation, confronted with it as initially seemingly uninvolved. A child drowns. A woman is raped. In a burning house, we are told, there is a person with a disability on the second floor. I must act. What should I do? What can I do? But is that really the real question? It seems clear: if possible, I must help. The situation calls for our help. It calls for assistance. But what is this demand based on? What is the basis of the feeling of having to help, of being addressed in relation to help? One would like to say: there is an immediate situation of being morally addressed, which we experience within us to a certain extent as given, that is, that it is about a situation of suffering, within which another subject as a being capable of suffering is in danger or is being mistreated. In this empathetic experience, based on an immediate projection or a direct understanding of the other as a suffering subject, the actual origin of morality shows itself in a special way: my own experience is transcended in an intersubjective way in relation to the other subject, who now appears as an opposite centre of care and respect for her life, bodily integrity, dignity.

Yet the intuitive listening to the demand for help must not, however, simply disregard the circumstances, that is, the means to an end. The inclusion of the empirical context, as the only path through the mediation of which I arrive at an effective assistance, is to be distinguished from a medialized avoidance of the actual claim, the avoidance of the directly relevant moral claim thus from the morally motivated inclusion of the means in the moral assistance. ⁴ Thus, instead of using the context as an escape from the moral challenge, it is a matter of bringing it into play in the context of the moral development of the situation.

The subject who is to be helped here, to be sure, goes far beyond mere bare life or physical integrity. In fact, this nakedness in need of help shows the transcendent trait of a subject that, according to the idea, is always already beyond mere life. The drama of this terrible situation consists in the dialectical negation of the actual predestination to live out one’s life, to be able to behave in a self-determined way, as opposed to being placed in contingent circumstances without any power of one’s own, that is, not to be helplessly at the mercy of the will and desire of others. The negation of a subject whose mere life or bodily and psychic integrity is threatened or violated thus refers to a self-designing, self-determining subject that is deprived of its own determination in these situations. ⁵

The immediate help demanded of us corresponds in its core intuition to listening to this transcending subject dimension. This is suggested by the fact that the call to help is precisely not determined by contextual knowledge or could be diminished by it in a morally detrimental way. I do not first ask what nationality the child is, whether the woman was decent or sober, or whether the occupants of a burning house are really all in ‘full health’. In the empathic experience of having to help, of being called upon to help, it is not a matter of the specific empirical characteristics of the individuals in need. Social categorizations vis-à-vis the Other are ‘qualifications’ that do not stand up to moral judgement. The empathically heard call to moral solidarity with others is thus completely independent of any merit or behaviour of the other, and solely owed to their vulnerability in the present situation threatening the other’s moral integrity and self-determination. ⁶

But to what extent are these reflections at all relevant for the moral evaluation of a case of war? Is this not a matter of violent confrontation between collective entities? States, nations, peoples wage war against each other, on whose behalf or responsibility the individuals act, feel, and think, not the individuals as such. Without denying the reality of these collective identities as a decisive dimension of war, my point here is precisely to emphasize the perhaps trivial, but normatively decisive dimension of subjective participation in war. Only then can its full moral weight be put into perspective, especially regarding the justification of self-defence that is ready to use violence. In this context, individual participation is itself constitutively related to collective identity, in a passive-suffering (1), active-complicit (2), and symbolic-mediated way (3).

The war may be waged between nation-states, but the victims are their concrete subjects. Of course, these commonly see themselves as part, as members of the nation – as Russians, Ukrainians, US-Americans. But the real ‘investment’ of this mode of collective reference to each other is, of course, each subject’s own human life. Carl Schmitt (1985) therefore considered impossible any moral justification of the state vis-à-vis the right over life or death, despite its otherwise granted unlimited power over subjects. No human being can command over life as such of another. This is, of course, the precise essence of war. It is the purposeful intention towards destruction of the individually embodied representatives of another power, usually as soldiers. Importantly, as will become clear later, the concrete objectives are nonetheless generally not directed at a complete destruction of the other, rather at the subjugation of the other people via one’s military capacity, to enable economic exploitation, territorial expansion, colonization, safeguarding one’s own security and so on. The focused extinction of the life of concrete subjects as quasi-representatives of the other collective identity serves the teleological subjugation for the increase in power of one’s own collectivity.

The geopolitical perspective and its moral abstraction

However, the intrinsic reality of the collective dimension of war is a major reason why its moral complexity may be dramatically misjudged. The collective existence of nations, states, peoples – which is nonetheless rooted in the individual subjects – allows for a cognitive abstraction from the existential situations in such a way that the collective identity as such becomes the central object of discourse and reflection. In this symbolically constructed detachment, which produces (and admittedly to a certain extent only reproduces) the existence of the nation or the state as an entity sui generis, the real devilish deception about the origin and reality of war has its ground. Bellicose hawks as well as ethically motivated pacifists alike orient themselves to this trans-subjective abstraction. Yet the penultimate reality with which they are concerned is this new social-ontological phenomenon, which – for all its obstinacy – must in turn refer to and remain grounded in the situated subjects themselves.

Against this backdrop, the challenge is to engage the question of war in a morally informed manner such that the vulnerability and experience of situated subjects is preserved and recognized, while the collective reality of the situation is nevertheless addressed. Such an ascendence to the collective reality is often invoked by a ‘geopolitical perspective’ that considers itself above petty or emotional ‘moral concerns’. It claims to address the situation in a realistic spirit regarding objectively existing power blocs and security interests. ⁸ From the outset, geopolitical thinking has morally abstracted from the situational perspective of committed individual subjects. It starts from the relations of macro-subjects, the states, nations or territorial powers, whose ‘balance’ and ‘peaceful coexistence’ are supposed to be at stake, so that a stable and mutually ‘respectful’ order can be established. Not being drawn into the thicket of self-justifications constitutes its pseudo-normative substance. ⁹ If it gets engaged, then this position ‘officially’ advocates an end to the military conflict as such, but de facto demands as a concrete strategy – alongside endless appeals to intensified ‘serious’ diplomatic effort on the part of Germany, the EU, the United States – the termination of assistance for the victim of the attack. The ultimately immoral core of this demand, which radically negates the intuitive call for support for self-defence and the preservation of a self-determined way of life, is concealed by its orientation towards peace, which presents itself as normatively justified and even morally superior stance in contrast to the existing warfare (and loss of life). ¹⁰

The legitimacy to ignore the moral reality of war, however, in a situation of an attacked people which calls for support, is as such precarious and ultimately unjustifiable, and therefore calls for additional backup strategies. In its support, three strategies are detectable. First, a normative equivalence of the confrontationally encountering systems is suggested. Here, especially the United States and NATO are considered equally or even more so ‘imperialistic’ and guilty of aggression, such that a normative attack on the ‘aggressor’ seems misguided. Second, the empirical-military possibility of a victory over the attacking party is doubted. Here, either the Russian military’s might, or the political-existential survival of Putin, or the impossibility to defeat a nuclear power (and in line the threat of the Third World War via escalation), are invoked. Third, and especially perfidious, the political-ethical worthiness of the attacked party is problematized. Ukraine is portrayed as a corrupt country, co-defined by right wing players, overly nationalistic and so on. ¹¹

Yet none of these arguments convince as the ultimately moral call for assistance for the vulnerable subjects is unaffected by all. As will become clear, the discursive and ideological worldview of Putin’s regime, which is decisively operative in this war, cannot be equated with Western style democracies, however imperialistic and critique-worthy its past foreign politics have been. The undefeatability of Putin’s Russia is as such a controversial empirical claim, and ultimately not a given. Bolstering it with the threat of an escalation towards the use of nuclear weapons does not help, as its use is both highly unlikely and, if committed, inefficient. Neither can Putin’s regime afford further isolation (then to include China and India), nor could it withstand the military response by NATO, nor is it in Putin’s interest to engage in what would amount to self-destructive behaviour. ¹² The argument from the unworthiness of the Ukraine fails since the moral call is independent, as we showed, from assessments of the victim’s character. But besides this normative failure, it would be absurd to equate the emerging if imperfect democratic system of the Ukraine with the by now well-established autocratic rule of Putin’s Russia.

This is not to suggest that we should merely ignore the calls to peace and diplomacy. ¹³ But what needs to be done first, as it were, is to fully establish how the current situation of war is perceived and understood by the involved parties. ¹⁴ Since this war is triggered, on any account, by the invading Russian army, we need to take a closer look into the discursive-ideological framework which enwraps and defines Putin and the Russian power apparatus. By analysing its basic parameters, the conditions for peace and diplomacy can subsequently and in contrast be outlined. Yet this will now be possible in such a manner that the geopolitical situation is considered based on a full recognition of the moral demands of the situation.

Putin’s imperial intent and ideological profile

We often hear that the Ukraine war is ‘senseless;’ an ‘absurd’ war, not ‘goal-directed’, that the whole thing is total madness. A deeply humanistic motive may resonate here, that every war contradicts the actual meaning of life and the appreciation of others through its essential dimension of destruction. But subliminally, the morally decadent attitude may also come into play, according to which one’s own intervention in this conflict itself makes no sense, since the action (immoral because it refuses help), like the entire event itself, does not contain or permit any rational value orientation. But exactly this marks an attitude of withdrawing from the events, which radically contradicts the perspective of the participants. In truth, nothing makes more sense for both parties directly involved than this war. For Ukraine, the preservation of its life is at stake in the context of its self-defence, not as bare survival, but as the existence of its political-national identity; for the Russian aggressors, it is just as much about the consistent realization of their own national-political identity, which is supported by a large-scale imperial self-image with a geopolitically determined leadership role within a concrete sphere of influence. Defence of one’s own way of life here, realization of imperial claims there – in both cases, the defensive or offensive war follows a hermeneutically comprehensible logic.

Thus, mutatis mutandis, this should also play a role for either the empathically engaged solidary or apathetically action-abstinent observer. As Anja Kohl noted in a public discussion, this war forces upon us an inescapable political positioning – or at least it should. But taking the position must be informed by as accurate and human-scientific an understanding of the agents involved as possible. The deficiency of views that ignore the self-understanding of involved parties or of the regional situation often led to systematic misjudgements in global conflict situations (think only of the disasters of Soviet and then US occupation in Afghanistan, or Iraq). The unwillingness or inability to adopt a radically situated perspective, which sounds out the political-national, symbolic-ideological and strategic-operational intentions of the positions involved in the conflict, precludes from the outset an adequate and insofar possibly successful assessment and subsequent intervention. The projection of one’s own concepts of interests, agency or rationality, that is, the idea that the other is basically also acting rationally, often stands in the way, since ‘rationality’ is generally understood in an unexamined and thus naively ‘ethnocentric’ way. The application of one’s own substantive definitions of meaning or reality to that of the Other commonly prevents real understanding. ‘Transformation through Trade’ (Wandel durch Handel) – the magic formula of Germany’s attitude towards Putin’s Russia – for example assumed that the economic interest and well-being was the leitmotif of the Russian Federation as well. ¹⁵ It considered such an approach to be based on a universal variable, and certain historical examples seemed to support this. Voices of warning that Russian society was being politically transformed into a nationalistically oriented and autocratically repressive culture were ignored, as they did not fit into this stubbornly held (and to a certain extent, of course, self-serving) picture.

The reconstruction of Putin’s geopolitical orientation is by no means an understanding of his inner intentions; it is not a psychological immersion in his inner world of thoughts or feelings. Rather, it reconstructs a complex Handlungsorientierung, a symbolically articulated and practically executed disposition composed of actions, discourses and strategies that, taken together, articulate a clearly delineated imperialist motif. At the same time, however, the determination of this motif does not entail the representation of a collective identity, in which, as it were, a Russian popular action is put forward as being carried by a large-scale subjectivity. Rather, it is a matter of understanding the form of government symbolically embodied by Putin, which is extremely hierarchical due to its autocratic form. It is important to keep in mind that the concrete subjects of the Russian population are integrated into this strategy through further strategies of appropriation and influence, including depolitization and tyranny. Their rationality and intentionality as well must be reconstructed from observable and presentable data, not to conceptually invoke a collective super-subject. ¹⁶

Putin’s aspiration to restore the greatness of the Russian nation goes back to his inauguration. Putin’s later speech to the Munich Security Conference makes it clear that he is laying claim to a sphere of influence of his own that is virtually identical to the former Soviet hegemony. ¹⁷ The West’s promise not to expand NATO eastward, perhaps given verbally but surely not sealed in a treaty, is bitterly serious for Putin. ¹⁸ The repeated reminders, and perhaps grudging, but probably never serious and thus strategically playing for time, concessions in subsequent years, are evidence of this, rather than an indication of Putin’s giving in and acknowledging the national self-determination of the new NATO-members. ¹⁹ Within this steadily progressing constellation of a dramatic (in terms of the old Soviet complex) decline in power, striking statements by Putin become important. Assertions such as ‘whoever wants the Soviet Union back is a fool; yet whoever does not mourn it has no heart’ and of course ‘the destruction of the Soviet Empire is the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century’ are significant indicators. This emotionally charged language reveals an emphatically nationalist orientation, which in turn points to the expansionist imperial position extending the country beyond its own current national borders. Obama’s infelicitous remark that Russia today is but a ‘third-rate regional power’ lacking truly geopolitical significance, and McCain’s lesser known but all the more biting remark that Russia is ‘a gas station parading as a state’, must have cut deep into the emotional flesh of any imperially oriented Russian nationalist.

This discursive evidence, however, would be inconsequential without the politico-military complementarity with which the restoration of imperial pretensions is staged on at least two strategic levels. On the global level, Putin’s Russia established itself as a reliable pillar of support for anti-Western autocratic regimes such as Assad’s Syria as well as various African dictators. And on the regional level, a consistent series of violent integrations and militaristically affected annexations can be noted. It proceeds from the brutal suppression of the Chechnya resistance and destruction of Grozny (1999) to the invasion with partial annexation of Georgia (2008) to the Crimea integration (2014) up to February 24, 2022. The invasion of the entire Ukraine is in this light by no means surprising or an ad hoc event but fits into a coherent line of territorial expansion of power. ²⁰

Aleksandr Dugin and the Eurasian leadership claim

However, the strategic dispositif of Russian aggression becomes truly understandable only if the regressive track of imperial Post-Soviet nostalgia is put in connection with the positive-proactive discourse of the Eurasian claim to leadership. Here, Aleksandr Dugin’s provides the main testimony. Dugin’s effectiveness unfolds in the context of an amalgam of an Eurasian ideology in which fascist thought (Ivan Ilyin), Russian linguistics (Trubetskoi) and Orthodox Eastern Christianity are synthesized. ²¹ Reconstructed as a discursive dispositif, this worldview consists of a culturally essentialist justification of the unique leadership status of the Russian nation. What is invoked in public speeches and pamphlets as the ‘Russian soul’, the ‘essence of Russia’ and so on has an intellectual basis elaborated by thinkers such as Dugin. It is to be taken seriously not so much because of its internal philosophical stringency, but because it can be symbiotically linked to the interests of a geopolitical imperialist power. In this sense, it displays classic ideological features.

To begin with, the radical difference of Russian culture from the West and other cultures is emphasized. This difference, gained from comparison, does not refer to universal moments of a possible cultural comparison but rather stylizes a differential cultural essentialism. The cultural nation is based on a linguistic world-disclosing structure, absolutely centred in itself. This structuralism assumes a linguistic-cognitive essence inherent in every authentic culture, grounded in its unique national language. The genuine language structure predetermines each individual part of the whole. The part thus owes itself entirely to the whole, making sense only within the totality. Structure does not become, as in de Saussure or Lévi-Strauss, a universal capacity of humanity, but rather, as it were, is regionally-ontologically limited to respective ‘cultural circles’, which then appear as determined by a core of essence peculiar to them. ²² This cultural essence or nucleus thus creates an ideal identity whose rootedness is expressed in the corresponding geographical locality of the nation. The nation has a genuinely and internally linguistically ‘ideal reality’, expressed externally by the territory. Thus, currently existing borders of existing states can be rejected as superficial pseudo-determinations to bring about the actual correspondence of essence and appearance.

The dominance of the whole over the parts shows itself as the value of the nation over that of the individual. The concrete subjects exist, so to speak, only as moments of the whole. Their reality is defined by their participation in such totality. The totality alone counts. Just as the individual speech act only expresses the structure of language without changing it in its substance, the individual is an expression of the whole that continues to exist even without this particular subject. The sovereignty of the nation is thus not affected by the erasure of concrete individuals – just as Putin says that, after months of war, which meant tens of thousands of Russian deaths: ‘the sovereignty of Russia remains completely undamaged’.

This dominance of the whole, in turn, is realized in a self-contained, stable structure that cannot be shaken by anything: the absolute hierarchy. In the tradition of Genghis Khan (Dugin), the absolute ruler stands guard over the whole, everything is hierarchically organized, everything is under the power of the whole. Thus, so-called Western values such as individualism or democracy prove to be incompatible with, and in a strict sense alien to, the Russian order. Since the value of this order itself is exaggerated as absolute in the Russian system, values like individualism or democracy prove to be decadent phenomena of a disintegrated, decentred, disoriented West, in which the cacophony of individual ‘self-realizations’ and democratic excesses destroys the order as such. ²³ This suggests furthermore – perhaps also as a quasi-pedagogical achievement, to make it visible to all – that this internal conflict potential can be further fuelled from the outside, as known to be the motive of the Fake News activities of the Russian secret service. Furthermore, all internal tendencies towards differentiation and all conflicts within Russian society can now be branded as due to ‘external influences’. It is a classic motif for autocratic systems to view internal movements for more democracy and individual lifestyle as destabilizing and decadent phenomena running counter to one’s own culture and morality. They must thus be opposed with all severity in the name of truth and order. In the Russian case, this policy is supported by a national-linguistic dispositive, which Dugin transformed into a national-cultural-essentialist mission, with the goal of establishing Russia’s autonomy via the restoration of Eurasian supremacy.

The philosophical inconsistency of Dugin’s approach

Cultural essentialism owes itself to a complex and reflexive operation that provides, as if it were ‘behind’ the concrete linguistic and life practices of situated subjects, a primordial cultural ground consisting of the linguistic disclosure of the world. The reconstruction of this ground takes place through the projection of a structure that is virtually distilled out of a diffuse fabric of acts. Precisely this reflexive operation, which demands an interpretation of the acts as determined by the structure, is negated on the object side of the structure, which is considered self-contained and ‘essential’. This basically metaphysical self-negation of its own inherent reflexivity corresponds to the fact that the determination of the Russian cultural essence in the sense of Dugin as an anti-individualistic and anti-democratic substance cannot convincingly be carried out. As Bernard-Henri Lévi pointed out in a public dialogue with Dugin, deep tendencies towards individual self-determination and rejection of autocratic rule exist in Russian literature and culture itself. ²⁴ One can easily recall Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, in which for the first time in European history the concept of ‘nihilism’ emerges; Dostoevsky’s Idiot thematizes the precarious balance between social recognition and moral authenticity; and even in the great epics from Tolstoy to Sholokhov, the individual subject is not merely the plaything of objective powers. It much rather grasps, as an existentially situated self aiming to realize herself, the inescapable face of uncontrollable events in which humans are entangled.

The reduction of the Russian essence via a trans-subjective renunciation of the subject – that is, the construction of an unrestrained surrender to the collective whole – fails to do justice to the subtlety and differentiation of many expressions of Russian culture as such. Yet by doing just this, cultural essentialism – like any radical ahistorical structuralism – ignores the essential temporality of one’s collective background knowledge, the shared, and yet constantly contested, culture handed down through tradition. The essence of culture is rather to have no fixed essence, as it lives in responding creatively to new possibilities of form and expression, facing external influences and mediating internal needs. Individual subjects and their achievements amount to innovative and transformative contributions that give the never fully realized network of cultural meaning its inner dynamics and identity. ²⁵

As if to oppose such a challenge, Dugin cleverly tries to take advantage of the Western discourse on the relativity of alleged universal truth or validity claims. According to Wittgenstein and postmodernists, Western philosophy itself has proven that there is no universal truth, that no shared standards may apply across cultures. From the cultural or contextual relativity of all claims made, Dugin then wants to deduce that each cultural area counts as autonomous in the establishment of its own self-understandings. This means that the interpretative sovereignty of a culture’s own values must be recognized. However, this somewhat crude appropriation of the more recent discourse in philosophy, determined by a linguistic-philosophical turn, fails to deliver what Dugin wants. Indeed, the linguistic turn overcame the naïve absolutist Enlightenment philosophy, according to which universal truths and standards of reason could be simply recognized and generalized through cognitive processes of a solitary thinker. It was replaced by the insight that every insight and assertion of truth is itself determined within a language, and thus defined by contextual presuppositions. Yet it does not follow from this situatedness that there is no reference to truth in language use nor an understanding of overarching value orientations that transcend contexts. Language understanding is not separable from understanding or ‘having’ a world as such; we understand what we can hold to be real or true. This means, however, that we also must resort to commonly shared insinuations precisely in order to grasp the difference of contexts to which Dugin refers. It is only through the projection of shared bridgeheads of meaning, in relation to which we can invoke a shared world (and thus understand the Other), that linguistic utterances make sense at all. Whether one articulates this with Davidson as a ‘principle of charity’ (entailing that we have to maximize attributing true sentences to another in order to make sense), with Gadamer as a ‘fore-conception’ of rational completeness (entailing that we necessarily project our own taken-to-be-true preconceptions onto others), or with Habermas as the counter-factual presupposition of an ‘ideal speech situation’ (entailing that communicative practices assume certain idealizations to function), is of little concern here. One can concede that the contextual projections of one’s own presuppositions, according to which the Other can then appear to make sense, usually lead to an articulation of differences in worldviews rather than to a harmonious whole. But it is decisive that the emergence of knowledge of oneself as a culture, that is, one’s own self-understanding, is only possible through a dialogic attitude in which one’s own world becomes differentiated from others, which similarly entails mutual perspective-taking. The fiction of culture(s) as self-contained orders, which are supposed to be radically sealed off from external influence and criticism, is contradicted by this internal connectedness of all possible cultures, insofar as they are understood as cultures – including their understood difference.

However, instead of engaging in a truly informed and open discussion of the hermeneutical presuppositions of foreign understanding, Dugin stylizes the relativistic consequences of certain thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Foucault or even Nietzsche, without considering their internal contradictions and their refutations by others. ²⁶ This ideological intent at exploitation, which Nietzsche himself experienced particularly vehemently in National Socialism, is made abundantly clear by the fact that Dugin himself tries to influence the Russian leadership – or more precisely, Putin as the Russian leader. ²⁷ In a step-by-step program, he seeks to motivate a reinvigoration of the nation based on the allegedly intrinsic values of the Russian soul, culture and religion. This insular cultural essentialism, which assumes equally autochthonous worlds of meaning, thereby wonderfully accommodates the geopolitical claim to dominion over the Eurasian region. For what appears as a new world order of power centres is now even metaphysically justified. According to this discursive frame of the new world order, every conception of value or truth is based on a cultural worldview that is centred in itself. Universal value orientations fail to recognize this root and thus become visible as imperialistic. Since all values are essentially rooted in concrete cultures, the idea of a value system existing above all cultures becomes invalid, even morally objectionable. Since values are culturally relative, the valuation of other cultures or nations becomes an illegitimate as well as cognitively misguided business. If ‘human rights’ or ‘the rule of law’ are nevertheless asserted as universal values, they do not express a normative claim to truth, but instead an imperial claim to power. Dugin’s simultaneously culturally relativistic and culturally essentialist theory of radical difference of the Russian nation vis-à-vis the West thus ideally corresponds to a political stance that wants to make itself immune to moral criticism from the West, and thus to establish a new world order based on the power to control certain world regions. ²⁸

The fivefold matrix of Putin’s cultural-essentialist bio-politics

The distinct rationality of Putin’s strategy, the inherent logic of the Russian war of aggression, thus becomes understandable. It realizes itself as the biopolitical execution of the entire dispositive. The military implementation in its sheer violence and unrestrainedness – which from the point of view of ‘Western’ values can only appear as a negation of ‘human rights,’ the law of nations (‘Völkerrecht’), and even the law of war (‘Kriegsrecht’), and thus as ‘inconceivable,’ barbaric, archaic, uncivilized and so on – thus becomes recognizable in its inherent positivity. It is not a question here of violations of principles, but of their consistent realization.

On the moral scandal of demanding an unconditional peace

As I turn into the home stretch of this essay, the fortunes of the war seem to have tilted towards Ukraine. What started as a blitzkrieg to overrun a land and displace a government turned within weeks into an unforeseeably long trench warfare, with the momentum currently on Ukraine’s side. Not only did a Crimea-like scenario fail to materialize; Putin’s attack completely transformed previously unimpressive players like President Zelensky, a comedian-turned-politician with heavy corruption baggage, into an overnight national hero. Rather than pack up and run, he not only stayed put, stood steadfast in his role and for his country, but also managed to mobilize and orchestrate an immensely effective defensive strategy. His earned standing as a quasi-superhuman symbol of resistance is rightly seen as a political meltdown, a ‘Supergau’ for Putin (Neitzel). Whoever had doubts about the resilience, even existence of a Ukrainian people – the people now represented by Zelensky, in his and their relentless efforts to resist and defy, proved otherwise. Putin may not have foreseen this reaction led by Zelensky and the Ukrainian people; yet by triggering it, he created the very reality of a Ukrainian nation as nothing else could have done.

The resilience of the Ukrainian resistance puts into sharper relief what this essay aims to foreground by different discursive means: that the demand of an unconditional peace now amounts to the morally obscene request to accept life under conditions of a bio-politically operating and culturally oppressive regime. The ethical urge to help, to be solidaric with those who are attacked or in danger, may be submerged and abstracted from by means of an allegedly more objective and fact-based ‘geopolitical perspective’. Its function should be unmasked as allowing for a moral abstraction from one’s own responsibility to act, to help, to provide support. While granting that circumstances must be valued carefully, and that dangers of an escalation and expansion are to be avoided, the moral core of solidarity should be freed from its cover-up in ideological constructions of illusions and impossibilities, including the normative equivalence of the involved imperial systems, the invincibility of the Russian army, or the unworthiness of Ukraine. Yet what now needs addressing is the assertive position that a peace – or at least an unconditional ceasefire under the existing circumstances – is to be brought about at almost any cost. It is usually paired with the aggressive imperative towards (more?) negotiation, as if an avalanche of diplomatic efforts before and after the beginning of the war were not already in place. The geopolitical cover-up and distancing from moral core intuitions is here complemented by a further, perhaps most damaging abstraction: the nature and intent of the Russian aggression as such. This is why the reconstruction of the ideological background of Putin’s war, which is put into practice by coherently aligned bio-political means, is so important. It brings out how morally challenging the claim towards negotiation really is, and how morally demanding, if not disastrous, the claim to accept a peace with Russia must appear. ³⁰ How do you negotiate with someone who aims at your destruction? How do you establish a basis for mutually binding and valid treaties with someone for whom your own status as a subject to negotiate such treaties – namely as the sovereign subjects of the state of Ukraine – is the declared target of annihilation?

It now becomes clear how decisive a critical-hermeneutic reconstruction of the symbolic and power-strategic backgrounds of the participants in these conflicts, all above the aggressive party of the Russian invaders, must be. The unconditional demand to accept a peace in the current situation would require that one accepts the allegedly legal and democratic annexation of the four regions in Eastern Ukraine. Such an acceptance would amount to a subordination of the totalitarian rule imposed there, to the Russification that is underway, and leave unaddressed the crimes against staunch defenders of Ukrainian sovereignty, the deportation of children, the rapes, besides the excessive violence against the civilian population that follows logically from the cultural-essentialist complex. But the demand for a ceasefire or ‘peace’ in the name of ‘saving human lives’ amounts to a much more dramatic perversion and destruction of human dignity. Based on the detailed fivefold syndrome of Putin’s biopolitical matrix, we can now clearly see that it demands the acceptance of peace solely in the name of naked life. What is to be preserved can possibly be no more than this, as the destruction of the political and national identity of the Ukraine is the declared goal of Putin’s war. To reject the support for the Ukrainian self-defence is to deny its people the right to assert their full human potential. The demand of the preservation of mere biological life – since this is what Putin’s Russians would accept to respect as it is conducive to their own nation-building purposes – takes precedence over the support and protection of the political, cultural and historical self-assertion of these people themselves. To be solidaric would then not address the self-determining, resisting, resilient people who oppose the aggressor. It would rather amount to an abstract valuation of the sheer survival of more individual lives, notably lives whose status as human beings has been reduced to their biological core. ³¹

The moral scandal of the demand for peace with Putin consists in this reduction of the Ukrainian fate to mere survival. The abstention from one’s immediate call to help, enabled and enhanced by geopolitical perspectives that sustain one’s abstinence from taking a moral side in the conflict, comes home to roost. In a sense, the deniers of effective solidarity with the Ukraine, that is, those that reject military assistance, are the Western complement to Putin’s own denial of Ukrainian citizenship. Those who deny effective assistance for self-defence – in as much as it in our capabilities and is cautiously invested to avoid, as much as possible, the escalation of the conflict – ultimately deny the Ukrainian people their right to self-determination. The right to mere life – naked, biological, pure – is to trump the culturally reflective, politically assertive and collectively enacted self-defence in response to an invading, unprovoked, militarily superior aggressor. Wolf Biermann’s statement that those who demand a peace with Russia now are like ‘second-degree war criminals’ makes sense in our context. They abstract from the concreteness of this war and the political, cultural and historical stakes in it, to call for peace in the name of human life. As allegedly all wars are bad – ‘all wars are barbaric’ (Krone-Schmalz) – as they destroy lives, submerge humanity and so on, any differentiation of the actual stakes of the involved agents seems futile as much as unnecessary. Yet in conflicts like these, to not take sides is no moral option. We are faced with an inescapable choice. This is not to simplify the situation in terms of good versus evil, as if there are no shades or as if contexts need not matter. But it is to avoid reduction to placid and empty formula that helps one to abstract from one’s otherwise intuitive call to help and be solidaric, and to sustain the Other in his or her concrete resistance against an overwhelming and oppressive power. As Elie Wiesel put it long ago: ‘We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim’. ³²

The motivations behind the call for peace with Russia now

Yet we still need to address the concrete arguments in support of this position. I leave aside those expressions and ‘arguments’ that articulate a clearly self-interested orientation – not because they may not be influential and effective. Mentioning the irreplaceable need for Russian gas (Saxony premier Kretschmar) or the fear to be drawn into a Third World War (Gregor Gysi) may constitute powerful motives to abstain from a solidaric but potentially self-damaging support. ³³ But as they fail to reach even the level of an empathetic moral discourse, we shall focus here on those arguments that pertain to either an alleged internal inconsistency of those who favour effective solidarity (including military support) and those who argue explicitly from a moral point of view. The first position pertaining to an alleged ‘lack of clear action directives’ is perhaps the most easily dismissed, as it is also intrinsically cynical. The entailed cynicism, which amounts to a sign of a morally debilitated stance, asserts that the current war – which now lingers on for almost a year – lacks any clear purpose. Military assistance is supposed to not be ‘zielführend’ since it lacks clearly defined goals and action-directives (Welzer). To address this claim, we need to explicitly rehearse something which, of course, everyone knows: that the actual war aggression, that is, the military intervention into the Ukrainian territory with a vast army addressing the total territory of the Ukraine, including (at the outset) its capital, was undertaken by one side. ³⁴ We also need to keep in mind that the goals formulated by the attacking side could not have been more clear – despite later adjustments both in terms of declared military objectives and occupying interests – namely that the political-legal, cultural and national annihilation of the Ukraine as an independent state is at stake. Considering these premises, we must ask: how can the defence, aimed at a refutation of the attacker, not be a clearly defined, value-based goal ex negativo? The goal would thus consist in the preservation of Ukraine as a self-determining, autonomous, culturally, politically and nationally self-governed entity. What could be more clearly ‘zielführend’ since the definition of the goal is concerned? The value-oriented goal of the military defence – understood to be, considering the military nature of the attack, the necessary means – is thus the preservation and reassertion of the ethical-political status as a self-governing body that is precisely to be negated, that is, that is ‘questioned’ in the most basic and violent way, by the Russian invaders. Accordingly, on the level of ethical reflection, the defence does not lack a clear purpose at all. To be sure, in a second step, one could and should redefine this claim as one related to more narrowly defined militaristic or strategic questions, that is, as to whether the self-defensive war – however it may as such be justified – could possibly be won against the overwhelming Russian might. In this military regard, aid may be adjusted to the goal, that is, as much given as it is necessary to obstruct the Russian intent at annihilation. Or it could be said that a vision for a post-war scenario of the global order must be created which has to include Russia in some way (which is true but does not address the specific moral-political issue of the justification of a military defence against Russia as of now). Yet all these subsequent questions already transcend the one basic goal, conceived as an ideal vantage point, and which is aimed, first and foremost, towards the preservation of Ukraine’s integrity and existence. Accordingly, as far as the ethical support for military assistance for self-defence goes, the argument from lack of purpose fails.

A second, especially in the German context, powerful argument is the need to abstain from any military involvement at all, which is to include the abstention of the support for attacked and annihilation-threatened nations. The crux and morally debilitating nature of this position lies entailed in the second subphrase. As to the main phrase, it seems a coherent position to resist any involvement in military action – to categorically make war impossible – especially as a member of nation who brought about two world wars and inconceivable horrors of inhumanity upon the world. But can such a stance really be invoked when the defence of those who are attacked is at stake, when those are threatened with horrific crimes against humanity themselves? Indeed, the problematic idea that an ‘imperative of absolute military non-involvement’ follows from the crimes of Germany’s Hitler regime is based on a moral abstraction from the real-historical embeddedness of ideal values. The social fact that their realization and defence as values requires material means is obstructed from this ‘idealistic’ vision, as it ceases to be visible in the lofty heights of such moralistic self-absorption. Yet the material defence of such values is not hypocrisy but amounts to the prudent application and ethical commitment to the very ideas at stake. In any event, to directly infer from past crimes of one’s national history a normatively imposed responsibility of total restraint would involve the fallacious assumption of a collective guilt, which erroneously attributes to individual subjects a moral responsibility of actions undertaken by previous generations and agents. Yet to demand such an abstention from military support based on the remembrance of such a collective history – which seems much more reasonable as the memory of these events must be preserved in the collective consciousness as a warning and moral compass for future generation – still repeats, if invoked in an action-restrictive fashion, the same erroneous conflation of individual and collective identity. It does so since it is the current individuals who are reflectively to decide how to act and whom to support, and their actions would otherwise be pre-decided, as if they were ‘over-ruled’ by the collective history of one’s nation.

What this collectively defined demand, that is, as the politically enacted prohibition of any German military involvement or support, really amounts to is a distortion of the lesson to be learned from Germany’s past. First, it obstructs from view that fact that the previous destruction and overcoming of the Hitler regime was possible only because certain (individual and collective) agents were able and willing to practically, that is, with military means, oppose the fascist powers. Without the combined military efforts of the allies, Europe’s history would have unfolded quite differently. Second, it ignores that the invading Russian army’s mission shares – with all caution not to overdraw the comparison – some deeply concerning parallels with Hitler’s racist and bio-political regime. The elimination of the Ukrainian people into the Russian Volkskörper, the preservation and re-employment of the biological selves as building blocks for integrated Russian citizens, was similarly pursued by the Nazi-regime regarding Eastern European, especially Polish people. Finally, it ignores the fact that the current German people have largely made their political commitment to a deliberative democracy, anchored in the constitution, based on broadly ‘Western’ values like freedom, equality, and solidarity. This puts them into the position of those who may defend these values. They are substantially not any longer the same subjects as previous German generations; they are now those who exist in opposition to those who challenge or aim to destroy democratic systems. Thus again, only an inexcusable collective identification of the individuals of today’s Germany with the former collective identity of Nazi Germany would allow for a direct link in responsibility that would justify or even make plausible the abstention of the same group of people from certain actions. Indeed, if anything seems to be normatively inferential, it should be the willingness to now pay back one’s received liberation from Nazism by becoming a reliable and committed defender of the ultimately acquired moral and democratic stance. ³⁵ In any event, the collective catastrophe brought about by previous German regimes may not and should not function as an ultimately denialist excuse from supporting Ukraine.

In a third defence of withholding military support, the alleged lack of purpose is combined with a demand that a future scenario of a world order that includes Russia would have to be provided to make sense of it. One may find such a demand problematic as it seems to suggest that the reason for self-defence against the annihilator is not sufficient. Support-providing parties to the conflict are asked to raise their allegedly narrow view to a higher, post-war context, one including Russia, apparently as a somehow ‘accepted’ or ‘respected’ player. It is not clear in what way – granted that the need to accommodate a world including Russia at some point after the war exists – this should suggest the abstention from support for the threatened Ukraine. Could the implicit or insinuated suggestion really be that a destruction and colonization of Ukraine by Russia would possibly, in some such scenario, be preferable to sustaining Ukraine? In a prominent German talk show, Julian Nida-Rümelin pushed the need for a such widened post-war-horizon, coupled with a plea for the legitimate demand for negotiation with Russia, by constructing an analogy to the Cold War. ³⁶ Apparently, the basic intuition here is driven by a geopolitical orientation according to which negotiations and treaties with non-democratic, even totalitarian powers must be accepted. Applied to current Russia, even the evilest assessment of Putin should thus not rule out treaties. In our context, the empirical obstacles to such a view are less interesting, even though the fact that Putin repeatedly deceived the global public, overthrew previously accepted treaties, and pushed for an excessively violent level of warfare, suggests otherwise. A diplomatic solution currently seems only realistically in reach when the military success of Russia is seriously in peril. Yet in terms of the normative dimension, what seems more prevalent is that such a position distorts the current situation. The quasi-nostalgic look back creates a delusional assessment, a Verklärung, of the Cold War which was in fact defined by a highly unstable, purely strategic scenario that at any point could have exploded into a world war disaster. The peace movement, in relation to which such views are now ironically articulated, emerged precisely in opposition to the madness of such an escalating ‘balance’ of nuclear powers, instead of guaranteeing stability and trust – as the Cuba crisis vividly showed – on a global scale. ³⁷ Nida-Rümelin rightly asserts that the West had then negotiated with Mao’s China, guilty of millions of dead, and the Soviet Empire, guilty of gulags, apparently with the aim to propose a similar approach to Putin. ³⁸ Yet the one basic geopolitical fact that indeed made the Cold War somewhat more stable as far as it went is missing today: Putin’s Russia is radically different from the Soviet Union as it constitutes a revisionist regime aimed at expanding its current reach, whereas the Soviet rule was defined by ‘divide and conquer’, by safeguarding and implementing what it gained after 1945. ³⁹ The somewhat shallow-ringing call, given the previous history, for negotiations with Putin morally abstracts, just as the other arguments for peace and ceasefire, from the concrete war situation. This situation is based on an aggressively attacking army, ideologically and militarily aimed at the brutal destruction and oppression of the Ukraine as a self-determining political, national and cultural entity. Demands for peace and ceasefire can only succeed as morally acceptable arguments if they fully position themselves empathetically and normatively vis-à-vis the real situation in which this conflict unfolds. ⁴⁰

A morally acceptable platform for negotiations with Putin’s Russia?

Despite the pervasive criticism towards a call for an unconditional ‘peace’ or ceasefire now, which I based on a reconstruction of the ideological background and the nature of the military aggression by Putin’s Russia, normative conditions that would morally allow for such a negotiation – one which could be considered as leading to mutually acceptable treaties – can and should be named. Such an approach moves beyond the empty claim to an unconditional stop to military action now, as it outlines – albeit in an ‘idealistic’ fashion – necessary presuppositions for a morally acceptable and potentially lasting peace. Indeed, the following four conditions allow us to better determine the difference between a true peace and a mere ceasefire, as the former would be based on an earnest and mutual commitment to ethical principles, while the latter would merely be a cessation of active military aggression without true normative binding. The four principles follow somewhat ex negativo from their disregard and open contradiction by the aggressive party in this conflict. First, both sides would bind themselves to the unconditional recognition of the ethico-political and cultural sovereignty of other nations. To be sure, for Ukraine this was never at stake, but this is precisely questioned by the Russian attack, both practically and in terms of their ideological umbrella. The Russian side would thus have to rescind its declared war goals based on its cultural essentialism, or at least reinterpret them to such an extent that it allows for the parallel existence of ethico-national entities that assert their moral, cultural, national, and political independence. Second, the territorial integrity of existing states is to be respected. Even in case of disputes, the challenge, transformation or re-drawing of the territorial expression of an existing state is by no means to be undertaken by unilateral military action. Borders are to be changed only through the process of a mutually agreeable and multilateral agreement in which all sides have an adequate say. This leads, third, to the normative commitment of cultural and ethno-national recognition of all members of one’s political entity. Ethnic and religious minorities are to be protected and provided with individual rights and institutional capacities to enact their faith and traditions and to do so within the limits of the legal order of the state within which they exist. Fourth, and articulating implications of the previous points, the transformation of any of the existing identities, territories, rules or commitments must be undertaken in a strictly non-violent, diplomatic or dialogic manner. The unconditional claim for peace and for normatively grounded negotiations are similar in this regard: the means to accomplish any transformation must be through non-military methods. But the normative claims clearly articulates the necessary conditions for true peace. It thereby allows for the use of military means as a mode of self-defence in case these principles are damaged, which is currently the case. It thus avoids the shallow call for peace by integrating its peace claims into the given situation which currently undercuts its normative acceptability. But – and this is an important nod to the peace-now faction – it formulates these principles as strictly binding on both sides. Propagandistic arguments used by the Russian side regarding their much-needed protection of the Russian population in Eastern Ukraine are thus also addressed, in as much, for example, any previous or existing disregard of the rights of Russian civilians within Ukraine must be forcefully rejected and overcome. Similarly, Nazi-like factions or tendencies towards an exclusionary nationalism within the Ukraine can thus be criticized effectively. It binds, to repeat, both sides to these principles, and as such provides a normative basis to evaluate and assess further chances for peace.

The persistent demand for negotiations is thus not without value. The cry for diplomacy, however misguided as an acceptance of the status quo, serves as a reminder, a fore-shining of sorts, of what should be the case. But to do so it needs to be coupled with normative conditions, as otherwise it supports totalitarian violence and leaves unaccounted the crimes committed and the conditions to be established to move beyond the current situation. It thus also foreshadows even conditions for a ceasefire, which would have to be implemented such that the moral demands – which ideally must be asserted intentionally by the parties involved – are de facto respected. NATO observers would have to be on the ground to supervise its realization in the currently occupied territories which at this point would remain under Russian control. A ceasefire could thus only be accepted if the brute force as well as the ethno-national efforts of forceful integration would stop in the newly annexed parts of Ukraine. Yet what such a position would need – this is the red thread running throughout these reflections – is a clear commitment to the integrity of the Ukrainian defence, grounded in the empathetic call for support against a wrongfully attacking aggressor. It needs to abstain from certain ‘cognitive strategies’ to avoid such an involvement, to be able to not hear this call, including the primacy of an allegedly more realistic ‘geopolitical’ perspective, supported by the faulty arguments of the unworthiness of Ukraine, the alleged invincibility of Russia, and the normative equivalence of the involved imperial powers.

Precisely the last argument deserves further a brief focus, as it not only also served as the absurd nostalgic idealization of the Cold War, but also functions as a strange call for abstention from any support at all. At times intellectually boosted by problematic interpretations of a Foucauldian power analysis turned global, such a ‘stance against Empire’ combines the critique of the current Russian war as aggression with a global denunciation and rejection of all things imperial and global. This brings to the fore war crimes and imperial actions committed by the US as well as by others, then shifting the grounds subtly – and sometimes not so subtly ⁴¹ – towards a real war culpability of US-American imperialism. While the analysis of staunch post-Soviet assumptions about ‘America’ and its system may play into this here, the response from a moral point of view should by no means be a rejection of the justified criticism of US or otherwise committed acts of imperial or colonial interference. Indeed, the overall moral stance is one in which such acts are as such the target of the critique. Yet as a defence of non-intervention and abstention from support in this specific case this view fails miserably. We do not condemn and judge a perpetrator less or not at all because others have done the same or worse. The invoked criticism of the United States or NATO rests itself, to even make sense, on a normative condemnation of their acts, as for instance vis-à-vis Rwanda or the Tamils, when interventions were not undertaken. Arguably, they should have. But the fact that they weren’t undertaken does not justify the claim that an intervention is not to be undertaken now. Granted that the assessment of when exactly such an intervention is justified is tricky. Yet as an argument against support for Ukraine, if based on the morally tainted nature of the United Stated or Europe, it fails, since the concrete situation here calls for precisely the kind of normatively justified support that was lacking in the invoked examples. What the public discourse calls ‘whataboutism’ senses that the change of focus and direction here falsely moves from the issues as such to the alleged morally unacceptable character of the involved parties. Yet to support an intervention with parties that have done wrong elsewhere does not amount to hypocrisy, but to a strategic coalition justified by the demonstrated commitment of Ukraine to their self-defence in terms of the democratic and morally grounded values. It is because of these commitments, paired with their own decisive will to survive – not as naked lives, but as fully dignified, culturally, politically and nationally self-governing subjects – that the military support is justified. But this differentiated level of articulation also makes clear that any such stance must in the fullest sense of the word hold accountable all parties to the same moral standards. No looking away when criminal acts are committed by ‘one’s own’. The past as well as the present of normatively unacceptable acts and interventions is to be revealed and reconstructed in all transparency on both sides, as the involved war crimes are to be reported, as Amnesty International did vis-à-vis Russia and Ukraine. With this radically self-reflexive and self-critical stance, the accusation of a partial application of normative standards may be addressed. The confused claim of an alleged hypocrisy – widespread among popular press and media – may be transformed into a more differentiated discourse that distinguishes the levels of the normative justification of principles, the concrete assessment of a case at hand, and the overall political, cultural and historical prospects of application so as to move into a direction of a both more inclusive and expansive realization of the core values.

The democratic horizon vis-à-vis this war is without alternative. No doubt the Russian aggression against Ukraine is a major setback. But in the poignant words of Zizek (2022), we cannot let Putin determine the parameters, neither of this war nor of the new global world order. The empathetic response to the unexpected and morally heroic self-defence by Ukrainians for their rights to self-determination expresses the commitment to further advance and defend, and not to accept defeat and acquiesce, a global democratic vision. To be sure, the prospects of its realization have not exactly increased. But as even Habermas in his cautious contributions asserts, one thing is clear: Putin is not to win this war. ⁴³ This must mean that he is not to dictate the terms of a new, purely power-based, neo-imperialist word order now defined perhaps by five, instead of one or two, major players. ⁴² The overwhelming support for Ukraine may be seen as a sign for an awakened sense of compassion, for a retrieval of a moral core usually covered up by a complacent existence within a democratic order not affected – or not understood to be affected – by external challenges. Ethical intuitions of deep empathy, of concern for the Other, of heeding a moral call for support of the vulnerable and attacked, do not seem out of reach for most subjects. Geopolitical discourses as well as half-baked justifications to abstain from help pale in comparison. The direst situation allows for such a response, as Viktor Frankl’s recounting of a memory from Auschwitz highlights. No one who was there, he recalls, forgot those subjects who went around the barracks in the camp to share their last piece of bread (Frankl 2000). In the most atrocious, hopeless and power-determined situation, subjects were able to choose their own stance, define the meaning they would give their situation by themselves. What is more, the meaning they chose was in direct opposition to the amoral and evil system in which they found themselves, as a compassionate, selfless, potentially self-harming stance. To come to the aid of vulnerable individuals finding themselves attacked in the fullest sense as human beings, to engage in a compassionate act of support, despite one’s own distance from the situation, and even at risk for oneself, defines a remarkable act of compassion and solidarity. To be forced by the situation to realize this compassion ‘by any means necessary’ – that is, by including military support which in the ideal world would as such cease to exist – constitutes the major moral challenge for a normatively oriented politics today.