By Fernando Mires
1.- Already before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden had suggested that the main contradiction of our time is The main contradiction of our time is that between democracies and autocracies. Naturally, he was speaking as president of the United States and therefore of his country’s interests in the world. The main rivals of the United States, one in the military field (Russia), the other in the economic field (China), are two autocracies, nations in which the elementary rules that gave rise, not to the geographical West, but to the political west.
There is no main contradiction valid for all nations and for all human beings . For Putin – he has said it countless times – the main contradiction is the one between the West, led by the US, and the rest of the planet. It aspires to give this «remnant» a global leadership, starting from the invasion war that is waging in a country whose government, in accordance with the mandate of the Maidan revolution (2013) and the 2000 presidential elections, tries to be included in the cartography of western democracies.
For a president like Zelenski , on the other hand, the main contradiction, the one that his country is living through blood and fire, is the one that arises between a territorial empire, such as the one that Putin has built, and a democratic and sovereign nation, such as , and wants to remain, Ukraine .
For rulers of other powers, the main contradiction acquires other connotations and is therefore different. Xi Jinping surely believes that this contradiction is the one that arises between the globalization of markets where China seeks to become a major player, and economic protectionism, such as those that the US tries to impose precisely to defend itself against China’s economic aggressiveness.
From a European perspective, the main contradiction is similar to that of the US, but not the same, as Putin tries to make believe. The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has recently specified it clearly: the main contradiction is the one that emerged between the political order that began to be born as a result of the democratic revolutions that put an end to the Soviet empire, and the revenge of Putin, who tries to reconstitute the old Russian empire under other forms and with other ideologies that prevailed in the times of the USSR. Something like an “anti-democratic counter-wave”, to put it in the terms of Samuel Huntington .
From all these visions we can draw at least one deduction. It is the one that tells us that, until the Martians declare war on us, there is no main planetary and objective contradiction and, therefore, the contradictions can only be defined according to the positions occupied by the governments of the earth. That means that every contradiction is subject to the subjectivity of the subject (and that is not a play on words)
When then does a contradiction stop being subjective? Well, when it is shared by at least two subjects, it would be the obvious answer. And yes: here comes the interesting part. Among the aforementioned contradictions, where there is the greatest equivalence is in those formulated by Biden and Putin, precisely the two most antagonistic international subjects of our time.
For Biden, let’s remember, the main contradiction is the one that is taking place between democracies and autocracies. For Putin, between the pro-American, pro-European West and the anti-Western nations he claims to lead. Now, if we consider that in all this conglomerate of nations to which Putin alludes we do not find any democracy, only autocracies and dictatorships, it means that the contradiction formulated by Biden is, in an indirect way, shared by Putin, and the one formulated by Putin it is shared, also in an indirect way, by Biden . Well, what Putin called the western empire is made up predominantly of democracies and the space of the Russian (and Chinese) empire by autocracies .
There is almost no democratic government that supports Putin in his war on Ukraine. Conversely, for clientelistic reasons, there are some non-democratic nations that do not support Putin, but are not loyal to the political West either (Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar, and in part, Hungary, Turkey). From the other side we see something similar, but not identical. The Latin American example is, on this point, very revealing.
2.- In Latin America there are three anti-democratic governments that can be considered strategic allies of Putin (Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela) and a large number of nations whose governments do not assume as their own the contradiction posed in Biden ‘s terms , that of autocracies against democracies, although they do not align with the Putin version (anti-Western war) either.
The one that rather predominates in the subcontinent is a version according to which the war in Ukraine is a problem that only concerns the great powers, thus assuming the Latin American rulers the self-assigned role of peripheries from which many of them say they distance themselves.
It may be that some Latin American countries are close, according to the indices, to abandoning economic underdevelopment. What they are far from abandoning -it is denoted by their muteness to define themselves in the face of any issue of a global nature- is their political underdevelopment. This last condition can be seen above all in the overload of economistic doses that characterizes Latin American political discourses, whether their representatives are left or right .
The matrix in the background is usually the same. The liberal theoretical legacy and the Stalinist Marxist (which is what the Latin American leftists endorsed) starts from the premise that the economy is the mother of all things. For the liberals in its market form, for the left in the form of «development of the productive forces.» That is why it is not surprising that representatives of the different governments, when the time comes to explain their national policies, reduce their messages to exposing figures and statistics, as important as you want, but in no case sufficient to determine the political courses of every nation. In its two versions, left and right, Latin American politicians have been predominantly developmentalists. The fact that some give preference to private initiative, and others to the state, does not lessen the objective fact that for them governance is reduced to the simple administration of economic affairs. The economy is political, some will reply. True, but it is by no means a substitute for politics .
The ideal of governance in Latin America is that of a successful company management transferred without mediation to the space of politics. The abstinence in matters of international politics to which the governments of the region have condemned themselves – or what is similar, the refusal to align themselves internationally in favor of the democratic struggles that are sweeping the planet, among them in Ukraine and in Iran – are only a reflection of the abstinence that they practice internally with respect to the great political debates of our era.
The abandonment of political logic and its replacement by economic logic has led to the depoliticization of social relations . Let us remember, to better explain ourselves, that the public square among the ancient Greeks fulfilled two functions. It was the place of the market and it was the place of collective political discussion. In most Latin American countries, on the other hand, the public square is just the market. A polis without politics.
It could be argued that the absence of politics is the result of the dominance of populist movements and governments, or its end result, dictatorships and autocracies. However, it is also possible to reverse the argument. We could thus say that populisms (masses without polis) are also a result of the depoliticization of social relations that prevails in most countries of the subcontinent. The so-called intellectual elites, formed mostly by technocrats and not by thinkers from public life, by sociometricians and not by sociologists, by business managers and not by professional politicians, have contributed to this depoliticization.
The absence of politics has inevitably led to the appearance of anti-political leaders, in its two main versions: that of the humble man without professional training ( Castillo) and that of the uneducated but successful plutocrat, » minitrump » who will administer the nation like a big company ( Buckele ) For both, the main contradiction is that between backwardness and progress, or between development and underdevelopment. The issues of democracy, public liberties, and human rights are generally filed in the bottom drawer of presidential desks.
Today the world is experiencing a war, although not global, surely tendengly global. But Latin American voices do not participate in any world choir. One reads and rereads speeches and opinion articles in the various newspapers of each country. In most of them we observe a gloomy “ absence of world ”. The so-called intellectuals fail to understand -the truth is that they don’t even try- why in the countries adjoining Russia, Putin’s war on Ukraine can be felt and experienced as an existential danger. There have been no shortage of cynics who have reached the moral degradation of laughing at the European rulers for having made the «economic mistake» of showing solidarity with a nation attacked by an empire. In their mental coarseness disguised as financial expertise, they also do not want to understand why the EU does not force Zelensky to cede part of his territory to Russia and thus favor big business with Russia and China. Nor can they understand the meaning of a war if it does not leave gains, especially immediate ones. There are some so cynical that they have come to ridicule President Zelensky (and with it, support Putin) for the «crime» of not handing over their nation to the Russian empire, in the name of what they imagine should be «a new global economic order «.
In short, what those unfortunate anti-politics plumbers do not understand is that accepting the global contradiction that occurs between democracies and autocracies is the primary condition for assuming the fight for the defense of democracy in the countries they inhabit. To put it even more simply: you cannot be against Maduro, Ortega, and even against López Obrador, without raising even a hint of criticism of the genocidal Putin or the bloody ayatollahs of Iran, allies of those anti-democracies before which they are, or pretend to be, opponents.
Whoever does not oppose world autocracies will never be able to do so with local ones. Putin does not rule only over his empire. He is, to a large extent, the leader of a network of international autocracies, at least three of which are Latin American. A continental shame.
Latin America must be Western, that is, democratic, or it must not be.
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–Posted by Blogger in POLIS: Politics and Culture on Dec 15, 2022, 9:33