The West is undergoing a spiritual crisis. It lost its religion, Christianity. It is not allowed to be nationalistic, which is a sentiment that replaced Christianity for a while and then got banned. So, it needs a new project-a war with Russia, for the sake of Ukraine, became such a project. Ukraine in incidental here, it is an excuse. A different country could occupy its place. Such is the view of Emmanuel Todd, communicated in the ‘Defeat of the West’.
The loss of religion, and the loss of nationalism as a form of civic religion, the spread of nihilism are undoubted. One only needs to look at the figures: in a nutshell, not many attend churches or not many are prepared to defend their own country. There is no God, Devil or indeed an enemy. All that is true. It is also true, a point that Todd does not make but I do, that there is quite a bit of the competition for the European post-Christian and post-national soul. Looking at hyper-politics of today shows you who these demons are: radical climate activism, pro-Palestinianism.
Just how exactly this spiritual crisis translates into a policy that leads to an outcome as major as the war-Todd does not say. European elites ‘leading’ or leading however spiritually starved populations use concrete policy instruments and organizations. Spiritually vacuous populations do not wage wars on others using rakes and garden scissors, knives and forks. The elites controls the means of the modern war exclusively. The elites use structures and institutions. A major budget allocation for Ukraine is not being signed because a leader felt spiritually starved on that morning. It is signed because there is a framework for doing so, the bosses’ demands, the requirements of coalition, the pressures of the Military-industrial complex. Institutions matter, they convey and enable actions.
It is for this reason that the analysis of the NATO evolution is important. And it is for this reason that I decided to dedicate a whole video to it. The NATO, a defensive alliance originally meant to stand up to the Soviet influence, woke up without an enemy in December 1991, when the USSR collapsed. The loss of an enemy did not lead to the NATO collapse, the NATO was re-purposed. And re-purposed it was. Not a single voice in research in political science, diplomacy, or history, can give a coherent account of the reasons for the NATO expansion after 1991 and non-inclusion of Russia in that project explicitly. The war, in my view, was inevitable because the formula for co-existence with the new, non-communist, Russia has not been invented and the institutions through which a conflict-by -inertia could be exercised were not dismantled or adapted.
Spiritual crisis affecting the West is a backdrop to all this, but I struggle to see how it is THE REASON behind the war.