Nassim Nicholas Taleb/A Clash of Two Systems

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The war in Ukraine is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, legalistic, decentralized and multicephalous; the other archaic, nationalistic, centralized and monocephalous

( This is a copyright compatible version of my side of a conversation with Laetitia Strauch-Bonart published in the French periodical l’Express.)

Offensive vs. Defensive Nationalism

This conflict shows a harmful confusion, among the Russians and their supporters, between the state as a nation in the ethnic sense and the state as an administrative entity.

A state that wants to base its legitimacy on cultural unity must be small; it is otherwise doomed to meet the hostility of others. A Francophone Swiss citizen, although culturally linked to his or her language, does not aspire to belong to France, and France does not try to invade French-speaking Switzerland under this pretext. Further, national identities can change quickly: Francophone Belgians have a different identity from French people. France itself went through an operation of internal colonialism to destroy Provençal, Languedoc, Picard, Savoyard, Breton, and other cultures and eradicate their languages under a centralized identity. Nationality is never defined and never fixed; administration is.

Cultural unity can make sense, but only in the form of something reduced such as a city-state –I would even go so far as to say that a state only works well in this way. In this case, nationalism is defensive — Catalan, Basque or Christian Lebanese — but in the case of a large state like Russia, nationalism becomes offensive. Notice that under the Pax Romana or the Pax Ottomana, there were no large states, but city-states gathered in an empire whose role was distant. But there is loose empire and rigid nation-state like empire, the latter being represented by Russia .

Coordination for Mafia-don Like Protection

There are now two imperial models: either a heavy model, like that of Russia, or a coordination of states on the model of NATO. We will see which one will emerge victorious from the current conflict. This war not only pits Ukraine and Russia against it, it is a confrontation between two systems, one modern, decentralized and multicephalous, the other archaic, centralized and autocephalous. Ukraine wants to belong to the liberal system: while being Slavic-speaking, like Poland, it wants to be part of the West.

What is it that We Call the West?

What we call “the West” is not a spiritual entity, but an administrative system first and last. Is is not an ethno-geographical ensemble, but a legal and institutional system: it includes Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan. It mixes the thalassocratic Phoenician world of network-based trade and that of Adam Smith, based on individual rights and freedom to transact, under the constraint of social progress. In the United States, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is minor when seen from a different century. Both sides wants social progress, but at different rates of growth.

On the other hand, nationalism requires the All-Mighty Centralized –worse, Hegelian — State, and one that curates cultural life to weed out individual variations.

Nationalism is often linked to a spiritual dimension — represented in the Patriarch of Moscow via the Russian-Slavo-Orthodox model –which horriifies me as an Orthodox myself. Moreover, this alleged proximity between Ukraine and Russia is questionable: Crimea has been Russian since Catherine II, and Stalin has russified it by displacing the Tatars. It is easy to say that Ukraine is the soul of Russia because it comes from the Rus’ of Kiev, but it can just as well be said that it is the Golden Horde of the sons of Genghis Khan.

And even if, spiritually, Ukraine were part of Russia, it would not mean that Ukrainians would not have the right to join the Western system. They could be emotionally Slavic but administratively organized in a Western system and militarily protected through an alliance between Westerners — which even includes, I remind you, Turkey. Putin cannot understand this, nor some specialists in international relations who are sometimes called “realists” — I am thinking, for example, of John Mearsheimer.

//add more later