Which is plausible enough as a broad generalization. But the closer one looks, the murkier the “colonial” part of the story is. And today’s discussions of “colonial” factors isn’t exhausted with the formal version of colonialism in which a country like Britain takes over another area like India and rules the people in it as an official colony. Post-Second World War, the notion of “neoimperialism” became a part of the international vocabulary, along with related concepts like “center and periphery.” During the euro crisis of the 2010s, the center-periphery terminology became common in describing the relationship between the wealthier and less wealthy nations in the eurozone.
Historian Timothy Snyder in his 2022 lecture series on The Making of Modern Ukraine discusses the longer history of colonialism in that country.
The role of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union involves its own questions of imperial-colonial relations with Ukraine. And the Nazi German plans and actions in Ukraine and other parts of eastern Europe including Russia were very much part of an exceptionally brutal colonialist vision on Hitler’s part.
Does Western understanding of Ukraine need to be “decolonial”-ized?
I’m citing two left-leaning articles here that deal with the notion of a “decolonial” perspective as it relates to identitarian notions that are attracting new attention in the West because of the current Russia-Ukraine War. Various Russian-nationalist notions of civilizational/cultural conflicts are being discussed as ideological contributors to Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions. Or at least to their uses as justifications for the current war against Ukraine.
One article is by Neil Larsen in Catalyst (6:2 2022), the theoretical journal of Jacobin. The other is by a Ukrainian scholar, Volodymyr Ishcenko, and appears in New Left Review. They deal with the potential problems and multiple meanings in the idea of a “decolonial” perspective on the actions of nations, a viewpoint that has an academic meaning but also has implications for the Western public’s understanding of the identity rhetoric in the war polemics.
Larsen’s piece does not focus on Ukraine but on the larger concept, with particular attention to the work of scholar Walter Mignolo of Duke University, author of On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018) and The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (On Decoloniality) (2021). He explains his position at some length. But his basic judgment is harsh: “what prevails in Mignolo’s work is what I will refer to as the mere jargon of decoloniality, often descending into outright bombast.”
He also notes that Mignolo borrows from reactionary theorists like Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler. Mignolo specifically praises Brazil’s fascist-minded former President Jair Bolsonaro. And he has a vague notion of a desirable de-Westernization embodied by China, Russia, and Iran, which are giving rise to what he calls "civilization-states,” which he takes to be replacing nation-states. Larsen argues that this “exposes a flagrant decolonial flirtation with autocracy and great-nation chauvinisms” in Mignolo’s perspective.
Larsen sees both Mignolo’s academic emphasis and some more popular rhetoric on the need to “decolonize” as falling into a very dubious form of identity politics:
While, as a slogan, [a “vernacular” call to “decolonize”] does not necessarily ignore the historical impact of colonialism on questions of present-day racial injustice and struggles against the barriers set by national-imperial privilege, even the most practical and engaged demand for decolonizing does not usually get beyond the limits of identity politics and its conventional intellectual backdrop, culturalism.In other words, at least this brand of “decolonial” thinking has unpleasant similarities to pan-Slavist ideologies and other “civilizational” theories of history that are currently being by Russians ideologues and propagandists to justify the war on Ukraine. He also explicitly compares it to Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” notion, and to those, “more au courant, of the white-supremacist and often Christian-nationalist dystopian idylls of today’s far-right ‘populisms’ à la Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen.”
Culturalism amounts, in brief, to the theory that cultural and ethnic identities and differences are what ultimately explain the world. Accordingly, the cause of social emancipation comes to be defined and determined by — if not reduced to — the struggle against the myths of ethnocultural inferiority and superiority that underly an oppressive status quo. Mignolo and the jargon of decoloniality are no exceptions here: it is culturalism, in this sense, that constitutes the omnipresent horizon delimiting what can and cannot be said and thought in works such as [Mignolo’s]. [my emphasis]
Post-Colonialism and “decoloniality”
“Post-Colonialism” has established itself as an important framework for understanding the history of colonialism and imperialism and their continuing effects and legacies. Larsen suggests that “decoloniality” is a derivative of post-colonialism, but basically a superficial and reactionary one.
As Larsen recounts, the academic terminology of post-colonialism became significant four decades ago, and “decolonial” is a related but not (yet) equivalent descriptor of an analytical approach to understanding the same set of phenomena:
This was in the 1980s, thanks in part to the earlier appearance and impact of Edward Said’s landmark Orientalism. The intellectual ascendancy of poststructuralism and postmodernism had clearly left an imprint on this terminology as well. The postcolonial, comprising postcolonial theory, postcolonial studies, and postcolonial literature, seems so far to have resisted displacement by the decolonial. This is probably due to the rhetorical advantages of postcolonialism’s more narrowly descriptive and less militant resonance when it comes, for example, to such things as academic hiring and curricula. [my emphasis]In current rightwing political propaganda, “postmodern” is equated to “left,” to “cultural Marxism,” to “wokeness” and whatever else they are griping about at a given moment. In fact, the general field of “postmodernism” is not exclusively a left perspective. There are positivist criticisms of postmodernism that have a conservative bent, but also ones that place postmodern critics of natural science to the same corner of conservative ideology and evolution-denying Christian fundamentalism. To the extent that “left” means valuing empirical research in social science and economics, or some kind of materialist philosophical perspective, postmodernism is certainly not exclusively left. Jürgen Habermas, one of the best-known living left philosophers, criticized postmodernism at length in his 1985 book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.
This is also something important to keep in mind with the “jargon of decoloniality,” as well. Just because “decoloniality” sounds like it rejects colonialism and is anti-racist, some versions of it may make take a very different approach.
One problem with making arguments from a broad conceptual viewpoint is that they need to be formulated in a general way. But some claims may not be clearly founded on empirical social-science data. That doesn’t mean they are wrong, but rather that are more useful as large frameworks than as tools for analyzing news stories like the developments during a war.
Ukraine and colonialism right now
Volodymyr Ishcenko’s article focuses on what the bad-Russian-imperialist vs. anti-colonial-freedom-loving-Ukraine polemical construct leaves out:
Needless to say, it is not Russian recognition that Ukrainian identity politics is seeking. The idea of talking to Russians, even unambiguously anti-Putin and anti-war Russians, is constantly under attack. As one Ukrainian politician put it, ‘good Russians do not exist’. [Iryna Podolyak cited] Instead, Ukrainian identity politics primarily targets the West, which is held to be culpable for allowing the Russian invasion, trading with Russia, ‘appeasing’ Putin’s regime, providing insufficient support for Ukraine and reproducing ‘Russian imperialist’ narratives about Eastern Europe. [Olesya Khromeychuk cited] Yet if the West is to be blamed for Ukraine’s suffering, it could relatively easily redeem itself by providing unconditional support for ‘the Ukrainian’ and unconditional rejection of ‘the Russian’. For this politics, the problem is Russian imperialism, not imperialism in general. Ukraine’s dependency on the West tends not to be problematized at all. [my emphasis]In other words, the rhetoric against Russian imperialism is perfectly understandable and sensible in this context. But eventually - hopefully sooner rather than later - the postwar reconstruction of Ukraine will have to begin. And if that reconstruction resembles the kind of neoliberal “shock therapy” the West persuaded post-Soviet Russia to accept, that could be a very grim prospect for Ukraine. And scolding the West for not having been anti-Russian enough in the previous decade wiull likely be of limited use in addressing the practical problems of reconstruction.
Ishcenko is focused on broad ideological issues and not the more pressing immediate situation. But in the current moment, he does provide a reminder that there is more than one kind of foreign domination and that the kind of postwar society that will be built in Ukraine is an open question with some serious choices to be made. Adopting a Maggie Thatcher economic model on the TINA assumption (There Is No Alterative) would be a genuine disaster.
Even in the best-case scenario, Ukraine is now and will remain highly dependent on the West. A lot of the financial aid the West is currently providing is in the form of loans with deferred payments. Sticking to this model could lead among other things to a ruinous postwar sovereign debt crisis. The fact that the end of the war isn’t yet in sight doesn’t mean it’s too soon to worry about such implications.
(This post is also available on Substack with detailed footnotes.)
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