Letter, counter letter, third letter – a debate is taking place in Western Europe, which carries the apparent clarity of attitude since the attack on Ukraine on broader grounds. The peace movement is back, as is anti-Americanism. There are comparisons in the field, whether accurate or not. Allegations of warmongering and naive opposition to the war are also common.
A look at what is happening in Ukraine shows that there are no signs of a quick end to the conflicts – especially since Russian head of state Vladimir Putin’s speech on May 9, which was expected with some preliminary fanfare, which went unnoticed by Russia. intensified war rhetoric expected in many places. In the opinion of many analysts, Putin expects a longer war and, as the “Frankfurter Rundschau” (“FR”) recently wrote, “a determination to sink the West”. The range of opinions could also widen in debates about the course of the war.
Prolonged debate for more than a month
Voices against a clear pro-Ukraine stance could already be heard before the return letter controversy. As early as mid-April, writer Christian Baron claimed that intellectual debates had lost their “calm” since the Russian attack on Ukraine: “The bright, angry, fiery tone reigns supreme.” “Stern” was shocked by “how quickly a narrative that originated before World War I can be activated”. And Richard David Precht, who has never lost opinion in any field, had already received a rejection for his statements. “It is clear that Ukraine has a right to self-defense, but it also has a duty to be prudent when it comes to surrendering,” Precht said.
debate
Ukraine: how to achieve peace?
Indeed, especially in the elite camp, the climate of opinion about Ukraine was not as clear as women’s rights activist Alice Schwarzer recently argued in her suggestion to write the letter in “Emma” also to the ORF. If you look at the feedback from the most recently published article on ORF.at, the vast majority of the reactions don’t seem to be from Schwarzer’s camp – however, the author was also urged to objectify the tone here.
Did pacifism have its day?
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not running out of reading material at the moment: last week he received an open letter from well-known intellectuals and cultural workers, including Alice Schwarzer, Peter Weibel, Lars Eidinger and Juli Zeh. They speak out against arms deliveries to Ukraine in hopes of averting further escalation and the threat of world war as a result. A storm of media outrage erupted over Schwarzer and Co. The charge: Ukraine would be indirectly invited to capitulate.
Three publishing banners next to the emotions
In the field of the debate between letters, so to speak, three trends stand out:
- First, publications that try to do quick fact checks – an example of this is former “Standard” editor-in-chief Gerfried Sperl, who in the “Putin’s War Against Europe” volume (along with the Dossier platform) did a quick fact check facts on the subject of Putin and NATO – attempted expansion of the East.
- Second, eyewitness accounts from war zones, which contrast analysis with the element of personal experience. As shown here on ORF.at, this happens in all types of media, not just written form. “This is real life. This is not a movie. Or how life can change”, reads the story.a volume “24. February” based on the TikTok feed of Ukrainian Valeria Schaschenok (@valerisssh).
- And finally there are the meta-analyses, which want to look at the most fundamental aspects of the current war. As early as April 28, Jürgen Habermas published a key discussion on the topics of “war and outrage” in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (“SZ”).
At the moment, the West can only choose between two evils, “the defeat of Ukraine or the escalation of a limited conflict into World War III”. According to Habermas, it was necessary to learn from the Cold War that “a war against a nuclear power can no longer be won in a reasonable ‘sense’, at least not through military force in the foreseeable future of a hot conflict” – the According to Habermas, resorting to the field of pragmatics, the conflict can be ended “at best with a compromise that saves the face of both sides”.
texts for debate
- Jürgen Habermas: War and indignation. “SZ”, April 28, 2022.
- Marlene Streeruwitz: Handbook Against War. Bahoe Books.
- Alexander Bogner: The epistemization of the political. Complaint.
- Valeria Shashenok: February 24th… and the sky was no longer blue. History.a.
- Gerfried Sperl: Putin’s War on Europe. Phoenix/Self-publishing.
Habermas: a generational issue
In any case, Habermas identified a generation gap in dealing with this war. From the boys, who gave the impression “as if the completely new reality of the war had wrenched them from their pacifist illusions” – having as an “icon” a young foreign minister who “spontaneously identified with the impetuously moralizing impulses of the Ukrainians determined to conquer leadership convincingly.”
According to Habermas, the heart of the conflict lies in the foundation of experiences: here those “who, with empathy, but suddenly, assume the perspective of a nation that fights for its freedom, its rights and its lives”, as those “who, from the experiences of the Cold War, he learned a different lesson and (…) developed a different mindset”.
“One can only learn from war how to make peace”, quotes Habermas Alexander Kluge, who co-signed the “Emma” letter. By this he refers to the “post-heroic mentality” of the West, which developed in the second half of the 20th century “under the US nuclear protection umbrella” and which, aware of the possible devastation caused by the nuclear war option, “generally only ends international conflicts through diplomacy and sanctions” he wanted to resolve. According to Habermas, the fact that there is currently talk of a “turning point in time” can be explained by “a confusion between two mentalities that are simultaneously conflicting, but historically not simultaneous”.
Center: Arms Up, Arms Down – What will bring us peace again?
An open letter to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz sparked heated debates. A group of well-known intellectuals led by women’s rights icon Alice Schwarzer called for no more “additional heavy weapons” to be handed over to Ukraine and for efforts to be made for a quick ceasefire. The letter found tens of thousands of digital supporters, also in Austria, but it also received severe criticism. An answer was the result.
“War, the most stable model of how history is made”
The writer Streeruwitz wants to turn against an age-cohort reading of war in Habermas’ sense. “War is the most stable model of how history was made and therefore the most stable institution in our cultures,” she now writes in her “Handbook Against War,” which was created and published within a few weeks. “We don’t know about peace. We don’t learn peace,” she writes in this book, which gathers her basic insights into sentence-like chapters. According to Streeruwitz, the war is the “only reported event in our understanding of history”.
The logic of war, which all generations of our culture have learned, as Streeruwitz might summarize, inverts all the fundamental logics of life, including all the necessities of life. For her, the history of war includes economic history, “which only tells how people were crushed by what is called economic development”.
ORF.at Page from the “Handbook Against War” by Marlene Streeruwitz.
“The war is done,” says Streeruwitz, who advises, as usual, to be suspicious of narratives, no matter which side they come from. For her, war turns the whole logic of life upside down: “Our tears for the tears of war victims”, says the author, confirm the violence used: “We are all drawn to this abuse by war. (…) In the perversion of war, all our little efforts to help count as spoils for the belligerents. (…) This is the extreme form of blackmailing the well-meaning for the violent.”
Debate and assessment of the facts
Given the intensity of some debates in recent weeks, it is doubtful whether the debate over Ukraine, the war and the West’s attitude towards this conflict in the coming weeks and months will be based on reliable facts. On the other hand, this is also the normal aggregate state of democracies in the digital age, as the Austrian sociologist Alexander Bogner showed in his Reclam volume “The Epistemization of the Political”, published in 2021 in the shadow of the pandemic even before the Ukraine war. According to Bogner, knowledge “is not always a robust resource”. Often “the validity of knowledge is contested, sometimes uncertain or ambiguous”.
Especially in a historical debate, the validity of the fact is easily challenged by new framings. And the generational model mentioned by Habermas may play a role. In the course of this debate, established university experts in the category of professors are part of the 50+ cohort – and they take into account a different framework when assessing the facts, such as their own experiences of the Cold War. At the same time, this elite is accustomed to placing the mindsets of the younger generation under a general assumption: “A Ukrainian president familiar with the power of images conveys impressive messages,” writes Habermas, and locates a “self-reinforcing echo” that destruction found “in the social networks of the West”.
But, as the sociologist Bogner reminds us, there is also a general skepticism in society about specialized knowledge, whose roots go back to the 19th century. “Today,” says Bogner, “the anti-authoritarian revolt against science has a strange and alien face” because it is no longer supported only by groups known as “rebel students, critical intellectuals and socio-ecologically motivated people.” “The general belief in the omnipotence of knowledge,” says Bogner, “stimulates a general rejection of experts.” all sides of the political spectrum as an expression of genuine democratization”.