Depoliticising democracy through discourse: Reading Russia’s descent into autocracy and war with Jacques Rancière’s political theory

Mind the gap(s): The stage for politics

Rancière’s theory of depoliticisation naturally rests on his particular conception of politics and democracy. In my reading, the notion of gaps lies at the core of Rancière’s political theory. According to Rancière (1995, 1999, 2005), gaps – or splits, intervals, dualities – set the stage for politics proper because they represent the tension between the universal and the particular, between parts and totalities – between universal equality for everyone and the police order where everyone has their particular place. Rancière (1999: 62–63) writes that ‘[politics] works at the meeting point between police logics and the logic of equality [… and that] the whole problem is knowing how to interpret this gap’. Gaps between ‘equality and its absence’ constitute the ‘original split in the ‘nature’ of politics’ (Rancière, 1999: 89, 70), because the equality of citizens always co-exists with the inequality between men. A typical gap is the missing 1:1 overlap between the equality of citizens as a declared principle underpinning a political community, such as the nation-state, and the (lack of) equal rights within that community. In Rancière’s politics, such gaps are not meant to be ‘filled’ to reach some totality (unlike the idealised totality of knowledge sometimes invoked in academic articles claiming to fill a literature gap) – instead, gaps stage the always-momentary constitution of the people as political subject.

As such, gaps matter for another key concept of democracy: the people. The potency of gaps makes democracy possible because the basis for political action consists in confronting the gap between the ideal, equal people and the real people trapped in hierarchical police orders. When the demos (‘the part of no part’) holds up gaps, it unmasks the contingency of the social order and momentarily establishes itself as a political subject, undermining the status quo and its police logic (Rancière, 1999: 35–36). To use contemporary examples, campaigns such as ‘Trans women are women’ and ‘No one is illegal’ (regarding refugees) illustrate how politics reconfigures the political space and disrupts the taken-for-granted distribution of people within it. To maximise democratic power is to argue wrong by disclosing this split or gap, by demonstrating the difference of the people from itself, the difference between ‘the suffering-working people and the sovereign people’ (Rancière, 1999: 87). Put differently, politics is to dispute the universal (Rancière, 1995: 102) in the name of universal equality of all people. With Laclau and Mouffe (2001: x), we could say that politics is to unmask and dispute hegemony: a particular social force assuming representation as the universal. Conversely, the essence of depoliticisation is to interpret this gap in ways that neutralise it, thus removing the stage for politics that the gap constitutes.

Lastly, written egalitarian laws are crucial to Rancière, also because of gaps. Egalitarian laws are not ‘mere form’, but materialisations of equality – however fragile the inscriptions are, however far from experience, it means that an element of the power of the people exists (Rancière, 1999: 88). To do politics is to argue wrong by pointing to the universal equality that is inscribed, but not enacted, by demonstrating the gap between the two. An example given by Rancière (1999: 89) is to ask, ‘Are Frenchwomen included in the ‘Frenchmen’ who hold universal suffrage?’ In Deranty’s (2003: 153) reading of Rancière, egalitarian laws are ‘historical inscriptions of equality within inequality’, that nevertheless ‘can become ossified and lose their emancipatory inspiration, but they can also be reclaimed at any time by new struggles as references or principles’. As such, laws can be ‘elements integrated in the police system’ but can also be reinscribed in new contexts, ‘as reiterations of previous inscriptions’ (Deranty, 2003: 153). In today’s Russia, the formal law is clearly part of the police system, but is also reinscribed and reiterated in moments of democratic struggle. For example, a young Russian man peacefully protesting in Moscow in 2019 raised a copy of the Russian constitution in his hand as he ducked inside the riot police van (photographed by Feldman, 2019). For Rancière, constitutions matter in the fight for political equality exactly because staging the equality-inequality gap enables political action.

The disavowals of politics

At the core, the logics of depoliticisation are different ways of making ‘the principle of politics as an activity’ identical with its police opposite, ‘a way of determining the partition of the perceptible that defines the lot of individuals and parties’ (Rancière, 1999: 63). Rancière (1999: 62) holds that these logics were invented by political philosophy itself, presenting an ‘alternative to the unfounded state of politics’. The three logics of depoliticisation are epitomised by the arguments of Plato, Aristoteles and Marx (1999: 61–94). In the reading of Rancière presented here, I focus on how the depoliticisation logics uncovered by Rancière reinterpret politics’ key elements – gaps, people and laws – in ways that purge these elements of their political potential. The depoliticising interpretation of gaps, people and laws by each depoliticising discourse explained below is summarised in Table 1.

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Table 1.

Ideal-typical framework of discursive depoliticisation, based on Jacques Ranciére (1995, 1999, 2005).

		Depoliticising discourse
		Archipolitics	Ultrapolitics	Parapolitics	Metapolitics	Politics proper
		Rejects political disagreement, wants to heal politics	The radicalisation of archipolitics. The prioritising of external, conflictual relations over internal disagreements. State as primary political subject	Appropriates political disagreement, mimics politics	Politics is false, the real is beneath and above it	Its logic is disagreement
Ideal-typical representations	Gaps	Gaps are symptoms of false politics. In true politics, the community is a whole		Gaps are institutionalised through ‘spatialised’ politics	Gaps testimony to the falseness in and of politics itself	Gaps are wrongs to be argued; the stage for politics
	The people	Community members whose needs and roles are distributed in a natural, functional whole		The population, a collection of individuals, or groups of individuals who are parties to a dispute that can be settled	A radical difference between the false invention of an ideal sovereign people, and the real, suffering-working people	The political subject; marked by equality; having logos; internally split
	Laws/institutions	Phusis as nomos: The law is a perfect expression of the community’s nature, its harmonious ethos		The split nature (phusis) as law. Disagreement is institutionalised, as a practical government puzzle	‘Form’ stands in opposition to missing content. Dichotomies of ideal/real, form/content, appearances/reality	Material inscriptions of equality

Plato, who displays ‘resolute hatred of democracy’, equates politics and police through what Rancière dubs archipolitics: the opposition between republic and democracy (Rancière, 1999: 10, 68). Contrary to democracy, Plato holds, true politics embodies its own principle, and there is nothing left over: it is a functional whole, ‘a body animated by the one soul of the whole’ (Rancière, 1999: 69). In Plato’s vision, the people is reduced to community members, whose needs and roles are distributed organically (Rancière, 1999: 66), while the law is the perfect expression of the community’s way of being, it achieves ‘phusis as nomos’, nature as law (Rancière, 1999: 67–68). When the law is seen to express the harmonious spirit of the whole, there is no room for a gap between man and citizen: such a duality becomes a symptom of false politics (Rancière, 1999: 63) and in facing this duality, archipolitics evokes the true/false (republic/democracy) dichotomy (Rancière, 2005: 58).

While archipolitics rejects democracy, parapolitics mimics it (Rancière, 1999: xiii). Starting with Aristotle, it makes politics identical to the police order by appropriating the specificity of politics, namely disagreement (Rancière, 1999: 70). Parapolitics declares that all should share in ruling, but instead transforms political actors into the roles and forms characteristic of the police (Rancière, 1999: 72). Parapolitics mimics the people’s internal split by allocating groups to their respective places (Rancière, 1999: 75), thereby institutionalising gaps into a spatialised system. As such, it implies an oligarchy that nurtures the democratic desire for alterations (Rancière, 2005: 75). In parapolitics, laws and institutions incorporate the split nature of the people, in which the unequal count of the people becomes a mathematical task for government to solve. The people is broken down into factions or parties – groups to negotiate between (Rancière, 1999: 72). Hobbes is the second exponent of parapolitics. His social contract splits the demos into individuals, so that ‘there are only individuals and the power of the state’, eliminating the part with no part (Rancière, 1999: 77).

The key invention of metapolitics, established by Karl Marx, is ideology: this concept entails the abolition of the true/false opposition, contending that the only truth is the truth of the false. In metapolitics, the truth of politics rests only in its lie (Rancière, 1999: 82). The typical metapolitical dichotomy is between form and content, between political appearance and social reality. Metapolitics interprets the man/citizen duality as an opposition between a false, ideal sovereign people and a real, suffering-working people (Rancière, 1999: 87). As such, metapolitics neutralises gaps by interpreting them as signs of politics’ inherent falseness, concealing the real beneath it.

In Slavoj Žižek’s rendition of Rancière, he adds ultrapolitics, which Viacheslav Morozov (2015: 152–3) conceives as the radicalisation of archipolitics. The epitomic ultrapolitics is Carl Schmitt’s philosophy, and involves cancelling out politics by ‘bringing it to extremes, via the direct militarisation of politics’ (Žižek, 2006: 187). In this way, ultrapolitics eliminates politics proper by putting a taboo on internal disagreement in the face of an existentially threatening other, ‘fetishizing unity as the condition for existence and action […] by discursively outlawing dissent as suicidal naivety or as treason’ (Thorup, 2013: 75). ⁷ As such, ultrapolitics puts the internal-external dynamic into play, as the unity of the inside becomes crucial for the strength of the outside. Through prioritising external threats and challenges, the state becomes the privileged political subject, effacing politics as a possibility inside the state. Ultrapolitics thus parallels archipolitics in its effects – it depoliticises through negating internal disunity. As Thorup (2013: 75) puts it: ‘Ultra-politics is offered as the real, hard politics but is actually a way to avoid the truly hard fact of politics: disagreement’.

The concept of ultrapolitics may be juxtaposed with Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001: xvii) concept of antagonism, which they see as ineradicable, positing that ‘defining an adversary’ is pivotal to their project of radical democracy, similar to what I refer to as politics proper. ⁸ However, the crucially poststructuralist antagonistic frontiers of Laclau and Mouffe are formed within a field of differences (and identities) that is never fully fixed (2001: 105–114). In contrast, the depoliticising Schmittian antagonism of ultrapolitics ‘essentialis[es] the fixed boundary between inside and outside and thus present[s] the nation as the only thinkable locus of political subjectivity’ (Morozov, 2015: 152–3). And whereas democratic antagonism acknowledges that ‘any form of consensus is a result of hegemonic articulation’, that is, produced by discursive practice of creating relationships of equivalence and difference (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001: xviii, 105), ultrapolitics is a radicalised archipolitics which fetishises its fixed exterior as a natural and necessary outside of a the people as a given, pre-discursive totality (Morozov, 2015: 152–3).

Rancière’s ‘figures of displacement of politics’ are different ways of muting the play between the ‘ontic’ politics and the ‘ontological’ political (Marchart, 2007: 159–162). Archipolitics makes the ontological side, the political, into the foundation for ontic politics, dictated by the founding essence of the community, as decided by the philosopher (Marchart, 2007: 160). In contrast, parapolitics obliterates the ontological side as the ‘ontic’ politics of competition becomes dominant, domesticating the instituting antagonism of the political (Marchart, 2007: 160). Metapolitics, in a symmetrical fashion to archipolitics, denies any ontological grounding of the ontic side of politics and sees the latter as ‘a false appearance of deeper-lying social structures’ (Marchart, 2007: 160). Lastly, in ultrapolitics, the ontic disappears completely as ‘the political’ comes to dominate fully with its emphasis on destructing the enemy, to potentially catastrophic effects such as civil war (Marchart, 2007: 160). There are affinities between my emphasis on (neutralised) gaps and Marchart’s focus on (displaced) ‘difference’, and it would be possible to expand on that theoretically. However, this article’s main aim is not conceptual but to read Rancière in a way that enables empirical analysis of deepening authoritarianism. I turn to that effort now.

A new framework: Towards discursive depoliticisation

The above section presented Rancière’s depoliticisation logics (1999, 2005) as ways of interpretating gaps, people, and laws that produce sameness between politics and the police, resulting in a depoliticised space. This article combines Rancière’s theory with poststructuralist discourse theory and analysis by casting Rancière’s depoliticisation logics as ideal-typical (Weber, 1949) depoliticising discourses, systematised in Table 1: this is the proposed framework of discursive depoliticisation. Grounded in poststructuralist discourse analysis (Laclau and Mouffe, 2001 [1985]), the proposed framework holds that discourses affect political outcomes because they define the range of the possible (Dunn and Neumann, 2016: 45) and endow some actors with agency while depriving others of it (Milliken, 1999). Drawing on the large literature on how discourses can be subjected to empirical study (cf. Hansen, 2006; Dunn and Neumann, 2016), the synthesised framework enables in-depth empirical analysis of ‘the logic governing a set of discourses and practices which turn democracy into its contrary’ (Rancière, 2009: 116). As demonstrated in the empirical section, to examine representations of gaps, the people, and laws/institutions proved a useful analytical heuristic.

I contend that the synthesis is justified because Rancière and poststructuralist discourse analysis share key theoretical assumptions, in particular that social reality is produced through language and thus contingent, and that power naturalises the contingency of the status quo (Rancière, 1999: 28–30; Dunn and Neumann, 2016: 54, 2016). For Rancière (1999: 32), what makes an action political is not the subject or the place, but ‘solely its form’; it is to set the stage for disagreement through positing equality. In other words, the essence of politics is to deconstruct a discourse that naturalises inequality and to rearticulate it as conflict presupposing equality. Rancière highlights the contingency of any order and the need for ‘the police’ to guard and legitimise the status quo, while politics proper unmasks this contingency and disrupts the order.

Archipolitics/ultrapolitics: Externally threatened, internally united

From 2015 to early 2022, archipolitics was the most pronounced depoliticising discourse in Russia – perhaps unsurprisingly, given scholarly observations of Russia’s ‘value turn’ from 2012 onwards (Laruelle, 2016; Morozov, 2015; Østbø, 2017; Sharafutdinova, 2014). The discourse constructs certain tasks and values as intrinsic to the community’s nature, which is quintessentially archipolitical: institutions exist primarily as expressions of spirit and are followed to the extent that they correspond with the people’s ethos. In particular, archipolitics dominates the domestic discourse on demography and education, geared towards the goal ‘to preserve the nation’, a priority independent of electoral institutions:

We have a long-term agenda that should be independent of election cycles and current market conditions. And, obviously, that is to preserve the nation, to raise children and unveil their talents – which determines the future of any country, including ours. (Putin, 2015b)

In many instances, archipolitics is radicalised and strengthened through ultrapolitics. The discourse repeatedly constructs the community’s spirit as essential for Russia’s survival and success and emphasises a harmonious ordering of society made necessary by external pressures. In analysing the domestic discourse, this ultrapolitical justification for a society united around one archipolitically conceived value set is a consistent finding. The discourse repeatedly constructs the causal link between a Russia united around family values and an internationally successful and safe Russia. The following quote is a typical example:

It is very important that [children and youth] accept the authentic values of a large family, that the family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that the family is a strong bond of several generations, where respect for elders and care for children always unite, give a sense of confidence, protection, reliability. If all this becomes a natural moral norm for the younger generations, an integral part and pillar of their adult life, we can really solve the historical task of guaranteeing the development of Russia as a large and successful country. (Putin, 2020)

In general, the state’s needs and subjectivity tend to supersede those of the people in the domestic discourse. Ranging from infrastructure projects to education, domestic policy initiatives, including the so-called National Projects, ¹⁰ are repeatedly justified with reference to the needs of the country in a challenging global environment (Putin, 2019, 2020).

Furthermore, the ultrapolitical goal of tackling challenges in a changing world justifies an archipolitical distribution of people staying in their proper place. The discourse states that ‘national development depends on [people] and the results of their labour’ and happens when ‘the striving for being needed and useful is supported, and finds work according to their calling and their liking’ (Putin, 2019). In this way, the archipolitical gearing of the inside – the functional whole of the single-spirited community – is constructed as necessary for the community to survive and thrive internationally, and the state replaces the people as the main political subject in a manner of ultrapolitics.

In Russian official discourse from international settings, ultrapolitics is manifest in the mobilisation of a narrative of the dangerous, chaos-creating West. In general, the discourse naturalises the ultrapolitical assumption that the only guard against chaos is to preserve the state as the privileged political subject. The discourse constructs a narrative of a dangerous international situation in which an ailing and intolerant West tries to impose its models by all available means, including military, on political systems that are different – and its remedy, namely the indisputable primacy of state sovereignty. This way, international anti-Westernism and domestic anti-pluralism bolsters each other through archi-/ultrapolitics.

A prominent instance of such ultrapolitics is the discursive emphasis on ‘inner stability’ as vital to preserving statehood in an unstable global environment. The backdrop narrative constructs instability as a threat to the very existence of the state and the West as instability’s source, since in this storyline, fixed through numerous representations, the West routinely disregards other states’ sovereignty and right to security. The logic of this narrative is ultrapolitical since it dictates that inside the state, the people must honour statehood and promote stability at almost any cost – the alternative is collapse.

The Russian official discourse construes stability as internal-external: while threatened continuously from the outside, stability can also deteriorate from within. This logic permeates the following answer from President Putin’s to a question regarding Russia’s prospects in a world of polarisation and dissatisfaction with leaders:

[You ask] for how long Russia will sense that she is a stable country? The longer, the better. Because a lot depends on stability, internal political stability, one’s position in the world depends on it. And ultimately, perhaps, and most importantly, people’s well-being depends on it. And naturally, one of the reasons for the Soviet Union’s collapse was that it was difficult to live, people’s real incomes were very low, and the shelves in shops were empty, so people’s immune system for preserving statehood got weaker. (Putin and Barber, 2019)

The analysis illustrates that ultrapolitics and archipolitics are mutually reinforcing. On the topic of Russia’s then-recent intervention in Syria, President Putin praised and explained the public support for the operation. The threat was ultrapolitically framed, namely as ‘total’, and the representation of the supportive Russian community was archipolitical, as a having one mind, one understanding, one ethos:

In the fight against terrorism, Russia has demonstrated extreme responsibility and leadership. These resolute actions are supported by the Russian society. And in this absolutely determined position of our citizens lies a deep understanding of the total threat of terrorism, the demonstration of genuine (istinnye) patriotic feelings and high moral qualities, the confidence that the national interest, their history, and traditions, our values, must be protected. (Putin, 2015b)

In this example, the archipolitical and ultrapolitical elements are closely intertwined, and they firmly support each other. The community has an archipolitical ‘deep understanding’ of the ultrapolitical threat. The ultrapolitical peril threatens the very archipolitical spirit of the community; its history, traditions, and values, but also the state-centred ‘national interest’. The ‘genuine patriotic’ feelings underscore that the ethos of the archipolitical community concerns the state itself. In this way, the people are rid of political agency as the archipolitical representation cancels out any disagreement – here is only support – and the ultrapolitics of the ‘total threat’ delegates all agency to the essentialised state agent. The result of such discursive processes – also indicated by the passive phrasing ‘the decision on a military operation was made’ (Putin, 2015b) – is a depoliticised space inside Russia.

Internationally, archipolitics permeates the Russian discourse on the ‘dangerous, chaos-creating West’, who does not understand, or refuses to understand, that all countries are different. This discourse holds that institutions should express individual states’ particularities instead of the West’s imposed and misconceived universal standards. The archipolitical underlying assumption is that institutions merely express a community’s nature – law is epiphenomenal to spirit. Thus, the vision of respect for international diversity promoted by Russia is one of archipolitically conceived states. As Putin says:

[…] regarding the party and the construction of the party-state in China, the Chinese people should decide this for themselves, we don’t interfere with that, we don’t meddle. Today’s Russia has one set of principles and life norms, an own set of rules, and in China, with 1,35 billion people – there are other rules. Try yourself to rule a country with 1,35 billion. This is not Luxembourg, after all, with all due respect to that wonderful country. (Putin and Barber, 2019)

Beyond archipolitical visions of individual states, the international community as a whole is also archipolitically framed. The discourse represents the monotheistic religions as the root of the world community’s shared value set, and that these values should be the basis for international cooperation (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016; Putin and Barber, 2019). For instance, the discourse constructs a ‘necessity of forming a value base of cooperation supported by the common spiritual-moral potential of the foundational world religions, and also principles and understandings of striving for peace and stability’ (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016). Crucially however, the harmonious and value-based international order articulated by the Russian discourse is hierarchical, as some states are assigned special roles and places. Russia is represented as a country that plays a critical role in bringing harmony and balance to world affairs, both due to Russia’s multiconfessional nature and its ‘unique role, developed through centuries, as a balancing factor in international affairs and in the development of global civilisation’ (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016). Russia’s privileged position in this archipolitical image is reflected in its status as a veto power in the UN Security Council – again, institutions express ethos. The disagreements structuring the UN, including the practice of veto, are ‘completely natural’, because the ‘core’ of the UN consist of the different opinions expressed in the UN and the compromises reached, according to the discourse (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016). Thus, the discourse frames the UN and the international community archipolitically and assigns Russia a special place.

Parapolitics: Rotation and pluralism support status quo

Turning to parapolitics, the Russian domestic discourse spatialises institutions by splitting up main governmental and societal institutions into opposing parts – President-cabinet, federal-regional, executive branch-bureaucracy, bureaucracy-civil society – in a state of dissent and/or dissatisfaction with each other. For instance, one text (Putin, 2020) constructs dispute the subject of food programs for schoolchildren (‘I will not hide that we had big discussions in this regard’) and the responsibilities of the regional versus the federal level on the subject of teachers (‘Here there was much controversy, as well’). Recurring parapolitical tropes include suggestions, instructions and reprimands from the President to other branches of government, representing decisions as debated or deliberated, and to contrast the federal and local bureaucracy with watchful and/or authentic civil society organisations. This illustrates how parapolitics depoliticises by feeding the need for change and rotation without real disagreement (Rancière, 2005: 74–75).

Furthermore, civil society is spatialised in itself, as divisions are constructed between different parts: On one side is the ‘millions and millions’ of volunteers in healthcare, education and environmental protection who ‘simply help people’, which is ‘great’ (Putin and Vadenko, 2020a). On the other there is the part of society that does ‘not agree’ with its authorities – which is also ‘great’ (Putin and Vadenko, 2020a). This way, parapolitics makes gaps, but these are depoliticising gaps: Although Russian institutions and society are construed as different groups with differing views, the disagreements are not truly political as theorised by Rancière – where the ‘the place, the object, and the subjects of the discussion are themselves in dispute’ (Rancière, 1999: 51). On the contrary, this mimicked disagreement ends up naturalising consensus and the status quo.

One way by which parapolitical disagreements transform into consensus is through archipolitics. This also points to a considerable flexibility in depoliticisation discourses and how they act together. The above example of the apparent disagreement concerning food programs in schools illustrated this: while the discourse constructs both sides of the disagreements as ‘logical’, only one of the solutions corresponds to ‘the logic characteristic to our society: everyone should feel that they are on equal footing’ (Putin, 2020 my emphasis) – a quintessentially archipolitical idea. The parapolitical mimicking of dispute is thus archipolitically solved through this premise and justified as ‘extremely important for our society’ (Putin, 2020). Similar flexibility is also detected elsewhere. This integration of depoliticising discourses is not considered by previous applications of Rancière, and is further discussed below.

Parapolitics also constructs the Russian people as a collection of individuals, which precludes political subject formation à la Rancière. The overarching relationship constructed by the discourse is between an active, caring state and individuals receiving support, in which the state provides individually tailored help. Moreover, the sovereign President presides over his subjects and judges which matters to lift up, as exemplified in one text (Putin, 2015b) in which Putin asks the Duma parliamentary deputies to prioritise the issue of corruption because the issue ‘worries the society’. As such, Russian discourse is permeated by Hobbesian parapolitics in which ‘there are only individuals and the power of the state’ (Rancière, 1999: 77).

Metapolitics: False formalities and false West versus Putin in touch with ‘the real’

As for metapolitics, the Russian official discourse constructs numerous metapolitical dichotomies between form and content, real and ideal, concrete and abstract. These metapolitical gaps represent politics as a sphere removed from people’s reality, antithetical to a place where real solutions are found. Supporting this, the discourse in domestic contexts consistently constructs formalities as irrelevant for solving real problems (Putin, 2020). Often, numbers, statistics, and bureaucratic documents are framed as separate from, or even a threat to, real help needed by real people.

Related to this, metapolitical representations of the Russian people proliferate: the people is constructed as real, working-suffering, sick, needing, worried and honest. For example, Russians are ‘very sincere, understanding and candid’, ‘ordinary people [who] speak from their soul’ (Putin and Vadenko, 2020b), and ‘concrete people’ are the ones who will suffer if disorder breaks out (Putin and Vadenko, 2020a). People ‘worry what the state will do after [the cash benefit program ends]’. People ‘are not fooled. They acutely feel hypocrisy […] and the important thing for them is what is really done for their life and the life of their families. And not sometime, but now’ (Putin, 2019). The discursive construction of the metapolitical real sphere underneath politics also allows for constructing ties between groups or institutions to one of two spheres, either real or ideal/formal. For example, journalists are discursively placed at a ‘terrible distance’ from the people (Putin and Vadenko, 2020b). In contrast, Putin presents himself as knowing the struggles of real people in these examples.

Internationally, metapolitical gaps structure Russia’s narrative of the West’s conduct on the global stage, outing the West as having a real agenda beneath their formal rules or ideology. A host of signs express that formal covers up the real, including ‘the rules’, ‘the rules-based order’ (Lavrov, 2019) ‘democratic’ (Putin, 2015a) (quotation marks in original), pretext, ideology, politicisation, double standards, instrument, and artificial (Lavrov, 2019; Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016; Putin, 2015a). These metapolitical tropes construct the West as promoting a set of ‘rules’ (in quotation marks) that serve as a mere pretext for their real interests. Metapolitics saturates Russia’s overarching narrative of wars and instability, in particular with reference to the Middle East.

Here, however, my analysis indicates a tension between politics and metapolitics. While metapolitical representations of gaps abound, these representations co-exist with political representations of gaps: The political gap between egalitarian international law and its noncompliance by the West is discursively used to stage an argument about equality. In the Russian discourse, the gap between the West’s ideology and the real interests beneath indicates false politics. However, the remedy for false politics lies in the egalitarian texts cherished by the Russian discourse, namely international law, and in particular the UN charter. Instead of metapolitically rejecting international politics tout court as false, this tension between politics and metapolitics seemingly produces a gap between false Western interpretations of laws and real international law. Thus, while parts of international law, such as the UN Charter, are interpreted in a political way, metapolitics dismisses as false what it represents as Western ‘rules’. As such, metapolitics in Russian discourse is mobilised to eliminate the political potential of Western interpretations of international rules, such as the responsibility to protect (R2P) principle, human rights and democracy. For example, the discourse constructs R2P as a threat to the law-based international order because it is used as a ‘pretext’ (‘pod predlogom realizatsiya kontseptsii ‘otvetstvennost’ po zashchite’) for military interventions and other forms of outside interference, thereby violating international law, in particular the sovereign equality of states (Ministerstvo inostrannykh del Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2016). However, as I explain below, while the gap held up has political potential, Russia’s argument falls short of being politics proper, since it is merely aimed at creating an alternative status quo with more agency for the Russian state.

The flexibility of depoliticising discourses and the double-speak on ‘sovereignty’

As mentioned, different depoliticising discourses are seamlessly combined throughout the body of texts. One domestic example of metapolitics and parapolitics in combination is when the President urges that malfunctioning medical centres in Russia be ‘put under control’ by The All-Russian Popular Front (Obshcherossiiskii Narodnyi Front, hereafter ONF) (Putin, 2020). The medical centres face a metapolitical problem: while average health numbers are improving, people are still lacking real medical help in the districts because local bureaucrats only care about statistics. By appealing to the ONF, parapolitics becomes the tool to address this metapolitical gap. The ONF is a patriotic movement formed by President Putin in 2011 and officially headed by him (Malle, 2016). The juxtaposition of ONF with local government illustrates how parapolitics spatialises politics and imitates the split of the people (Rancière, 1999: 75). The discourse constructs civil society in general in this depoliticising way, setting the ‘good’ civil society apart from the overly bureaucratic ‘bad’ system. Speaking about NGOs, the President says: ‘They often work more effectively, with better quality, with authentic care for people, there is less bureaucratism in their work’ (Putin, 2015b).

Moreover, metapolitics mixed with ultrapolitics helps separate these ‘good’ NGOs from the ‘bad’ ones, who are targeted by the Foreign Agent Law. Putin warns that some activities in civil society might be ‘disguised’ as humanitarian work, public health or environmental protection, and that people engaged in this may be ‘reluctant’ to disclose that they are receiving foreign funding for their involvement in domestic political activity (Putin and Vadenko, 2020a). Here, the metapolitics of the suggested ‘cover-up’ is combined with the ultrapolitics of essentialising domestic politics as a unitary privileged sphere that must be protected from interference.

As regards the metapolitical dichotomisation of ‘false’ (Western) and ‘real’ variants of democracy and human rights, metapolitics merges with the ultrapolitics of fetishising state sovereignty. As explained in the next subsection, the metapolitics-ultrapolitics combination is the key discursive depoliticisation mechanism pertaining to Russia’s war in Ukraine. On the topic of ‘the export of the now so-called ‘democratic’ revolutions’ in the Middle East (Putin, 2015a), the discourse articulates ‘what really happened’:

Aggressive outside intervention led to that, instead of reform of state institutions, the way of life itself was just unceremoniously destroyed. Instead of creating democracy and progress, there was violence, poverty, social catastrophe. And human rights, including the right to life, were not respected. (Putin, 2015a)

In the official Russian discourse, then, only state sovereignty is real – the equality of people inscribed in human rights declarations is represented as a metapolitical surface phenomenon unless state sovereignty is respected first. The metapolitical denial of Western interpretations of ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘responsibility to protect’ thus supports the ultrapolitical primacy of (certain) states before people.

The parallels between Russia’s critique of Western liberalism bears pronounced resemblance to the critique penned by Carl Schmitt in the 1920s and 1930s, and reveals that Russia’s rhetorical defence of sovereignty is ultrapolitical rather than properly political – Schmitt is the thinker that epitomises Žižek's (2006) concept of ultrapolitics. Both Russia and Schmitt accused Western liberalism of usurping moral concepts at the detriment of state sovereignty. According to Schmitt, Western ‘normativism sought to replace the state by its law and to rid politics from the notion of sovereignty’ (Koskenniemi, 2010: 427). Schmitt lamented the reintroduction of ‘just war’ into international law, allocating authority to define ‘just’ to the international level (2010: 427). Echoing Schmitt, Russia revolts against normative judgements as a tool in international relations, stressing that states should refrain from judging domestic developments in other states (Putin and Barber, 2019). As Schmitt and Putin warn against substituting normativism for the political agency of states, they engage in ultrapolitics – such discourse fixes the boundary between inside and outside, thereby representing the state as 'the only thinkable locus of political subjectivity' (Morozov, 2015: 152–3). While it may be political to argue radical equality of sovereignty between states – as noted above – the argument amounts to ultrapolitics when the arguer is a state, because the argument assigns all political subjectivity to the state agent, thereby ridding the demos inside the state of independent political agency.

Crucially, while Russia preaches ‘sovereign equality’ it also praises ‘sovereignty’ as something particularly essential to Russia. Sovereignty and statehood are elevated as literally existential, and the reason for that is allegedly a foundational characteristic of the Russian political community: ‘[Russia] is either sovereign, or she is not at all. […] Other countries can [be states without being sovereign] – Russia cannot’ (Putin, 2019). In this way, Russia’s argument of sovereignty showcases how archipolitics and ultrapolitics reinforces each other’s depoliticising effects and reveals that Russia’s apparent appeal to equality is a call for influence for the Russian state rather than an appeal to universal equality. The ultrapolitics of this ‘sovereignty’ essentialises the (Russian) state as the sole political subject, and the archipolitics constructs sovereignty as the sine qua non for the implicitly undivided Russian political community. Furthermore, this representation shows the deep hypocrisy in Russia's self-appointed role as sovereign equality defender, because the notion of sovereignty as ultimately ‘Russian’ discursively paves the way for sidestepping the sovereignty of other countries less ‘entitled’ to sovereignty (see also Deyermond, 2016; Mälksoo, 2022). The foreign policy enabled by such discourse is on brutal display in Russia’s war on Ukraine as intensified from 2022, to which I now turn.

Discursive depoliticisation and Russia’s war in Ukraine

As explained above, there was a discursive tendency pre-2022 to give primacy to the state’s needs and agency. This ultrapolitical tendency is radicalised after Russia intensified its war on Ukraine from 24^th of February 2022. The full-scale invasion was discursively justified among other things by ultrapolitics in the form of very explicit articulations of threat to Russian state and sovereignty. In his invasion speech on the 24^th of February, Putin, 2022b stated that ‘the military development of the territories bordering us, if we allow it, will remain for decades, and maybe forever, and will create an ever-increasing, absolutely unacceptable threat for Russia’. Ukraine is represented as on the verge of getting nuclear weapons and as being run from NATO headquarters in practice, therefore posing ‘a direct threat to Russia’ (Putin, 2022a). While the West is still represented as the ultimate source of threat, this threat is becoming more existential and urgent through representing Ukraine as the West’s geopolitical proxy against Russia: ‘Step by step, they dragged Ukraine into a dangerous geopolitical game, the aim of which is to turn Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a bridgehead (platsdarm) against Russia’ (Putin, 2022b).

The construction of current threat was bolstered by historical references ‘evidencing’ that loss of state agency in the past was catastrophic:

In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union grew weaker and subsequently broke apart. That experience should serve as a good lesson for us, because it has shown us that the paralysis of power and will is the first step towards complete degradation and oblivion. We lost confidence for only one moment, but it was enough to disrupt the balance of forces in the world (Putin, 2022b, kremlin.ru translation).

The lesson drawn from the implosion of Soviet statehood is also that it could have been avoided, since it was the results of mistakes made by the political leadership at the time: Putin clearly states that ‘the breakup of historical Russia under the name of USSR is on their [the Bolsheviks, the party leadership’s] conscience’ (Putin, 2022d).

In the context of intensified war and the corresponding militarisation of Russian society, ultrapolitics mandates full unity of the inside to protect the security and sovereignty of the outside. Putin casts the future 2024 presidential elections in archipolitical terms bolstered by ultrapolitics, asserting that while elections are about ‘different approaches’ to ‘social and economic tasks’, ‘leading political forces’ are ‘united on the fundamental [issues]’, listing security, well-being of the people, sovereignty and national interest, and he quotes Petr Stolypin (prime minister and interior minister under tsar Nicholas II) that ‘all of us must unite and coordinate our efforts, our commitments and our rights to support one historical supreme right – the right of Russia to be strong’. Thus, through ultrapolitics, disagreement and political rights are quite explicitly articulated as subjugated to ‘national interest’ and Russia’s strength as a state.

Together with ultrapolitics, metapolitics is the most prominent mode of discursive depoliticisation from at least February 2022 onwards. Two metapolitical tropes stand out: first, the dichotomisation of Western words versus action, between the West’s false promises of peace versus the real, belligerent motives – and real military build-up – covered up by them. For example, Putin says that ‘again and again they try to convince us that NATO is a peace-loving and strictly defensive alliance that poses no threat whatsoever to Russia. Again, they suggest trusting their words. But we know the real value of such words very well’ (Putin, 2022a). This dichotomisation in the discourse ultimately serves to dismiss international agreements altogether and to legitimise Putin playing the game of hard geopolitics that the West allegedly has played all along: For Putin, ruthless NATO/Western countries have served Russia nothing but ‘cynical deception and lies or attempts at pressure and blackmail’ stemming from Western ‘exceptionalism, infallibility and all-permissiveness’, displaying ‘contemptuous and disdainful attitude to our [Russia’s] interests’ (Putin, 2022b). Therefore, Putin concludes that ‘the old treaties and agreements are no longer effective. Entreaties and requests do not help. Anything that does not suit the dominant state, the powers that be, is denounced as archaic, obsolete and useless’ (Putin, 2022b, kremlin.ru translation).

Oftentimes, ultrapolitics and metapolitics work in tandem, for example by highlighting how Western ‘pseudo-values’ (metapolitics) is used with the aim to destroy (ultrapolitics) Russia. In the below quote we also see how the discourse now articulates that the metapolitical cover-up operation has been revealed, most of all by Western actors themselves, who have now openly disclosed their goal to break Russia. This ‘reveal’ is expressed multiple times in the 2022-2023 speeches:

… some Western elites […] are doing their utmost to preserve their domination, and with this aim in view are trying to block and suppress any sovereign and independent development centres in order to continue to aggressively force their will and pseudo-values on other countries and nations. The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia […] (Putin, 2022c, kremlin.ru translation).

We see the same combination of ultrapolitical threat and metapolitical assumed cover-up operation – which is now revealed – in this quote:

USA and NATO were rapidly deploying army bases and secret biological laboratories near our borders, they mastered the future theatre of war through war games, and they prepared the Kiev regime that they control, and Ukraine, which they had enslaved, for a big war. And today they admit it – they also admit it publicly, openly, without hesitation (Putin, 2023).

The second metapolitical trope is the dichotomy constructed between artificial Ukrainian politics, statehood and sovereignty as opposed to the sphere of ‘real’ Ukrainian people and the ‘real’ historical and spiritual bond between Russia and (especially Eastern) Ukraine. Ukraine is represented as having a surface layer of false politics – its ‘political and electoral procedures’ are nothing but ‘a cover, a screen for the redistribution of power and property between various oligarch clans’ (Putin, 2022a). The ‘real’ underneath is, on one hand, corrupt, self-serving Ukrainian politicians and on the other, the real-suffering Ukrainian people, whose wishes and interests were repeatedly ignored. The real of the latter is bolstered by archipolitics – millions of Ukrainian people who, according to Russian official discourse, harbour a genuine wish to develop ties with Russia, both culturally and economically (Putin, 2022a) – from the beginning, Ukrainian authorities ‘started building its sovereignty on the negation of everything that unites us, they strived to distort the consciousness and historical memory of millions of people, whole generations, living in Ukraine’ (Putin, 2022d). The ‘wall’ created in what is ‘essentially one historical and spiritual space’ is a ‘common calamity’ (beda) (Putin, 2021).

This second metapolitical tropе is bolstered by the first metapolitical trope, that of Western fakeness, because the false surface layer of Ukrainian politics is that which is associated with the West, Ukraine having turned into ‘a colony with a marionette regime’ (Putin, 2022a). The metapolitics of ‘fake’ Ukrainian statehood is also bolstered by a historical re-narration of why Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people, a united whole’ and how Ukraine never had any real sovereignty in the first place (Putin, 2021). We should note that the story Putin crafts about Ukraine is contradictory: Ukraine was never a real state, but Ukrainian elites also ‘sold out’ Ukrainian statehood to the West.

Looking beyond Putin’s speeches, the war effort manifests as a witch hunt for internal dissent in Russia that, with its demand for total unity and crackdown on ‘fakes’ (Amnesty International, 2022), is cast in ultrapolitical and metapolitical guises. The parapolitical element is relegated to the propaganda machinery on state TV and quasi-independent Telegram channels, a realm where a certain pluralism of opinion exists within an otherwise tightly controlled media landscape. For example, top TV propaganda host Vladimir Solovyov hosted guest Karen Shakhnazarov saying that Russia gravely underestimated Ukrainian capabilities and Western unity (clip via BBC’s Francis Scarr [@francis_scarr], 2023a), and Solovyov himself criticised the response to drone attacks on Russian soil (clip via BBC’s Francis Scarr [@francis_scarr], 2023b). The Telegram bloggers are pro-war ‘Russian patriots’ that may nonetheless disagree with authorities regarding warfare strategies (Beardsworth, 2022). As typical of parapolitics, these mimicked gaps must never threaten the general consensus, and the Kremlin still polices the discursive boundaries; for example, state media were allegedly ordered not to report on statements from Evgeny Prigozhin after he made a particularly critical comment about lack of ammunition supplies to the Wagner mercenary group (Meduza, 2023). And while Shaknazarov’s performance on Solovyev’s ‘debate’ certainly looked like disagreement – as underlined by the sceptical and disagreeing body language of his interlocutors – the conclusion to his polemic was highly ultrapolitical: ‘It is a dangerous situation and we can’t lose, therefore, we need to organise ourselves’ (translation by Francis Scarr [@francis_scarr], 2023a).