The intreview was conducted by Slobodan G. Markovich
Prof. Christopher Coker is the director of a leading academic foreign policy think-tank LSE IDEAS. For many years he was professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a regular lecturer at defence colleges in the UK, USA, Rome, Singapore and Tokyo. His books and analyses have dealt with international relations, NATO, and defence policies of the UK and the USA.
He has written extensively on history, anatomy, and prospects of war. In his book The Future of War (2004) he made several disomforting remarks for those who believe in Kantian “end of war“ prospects. “War has a future” he claimed, and added “One of the things we have done particularly well over the centuries has been war, and there is nothing to suggest that we will be going out of the war business – indeed, quite the opposite.” In his study Can War be eliminated (2014) he echoed similar concerns. Commenting this study British historian Michael Burleigh concluded on its author: “He is not only Britain’s leading philosopher of warfare, but a prolific historian who puts competition to shame.”
In several of his books he treated philosophical roots of the concept of the West and its tranformation. He warned back in 1998 in his book Twilight of the West that Western alliance faced serious challenges. “The Western alliance is in trouble. Drifting without a purpose, it is frequently unable to coordinate its policies even when it can agree on common principles.” In his recent book The Rise of the Civilizational State he discusses both liberal values of the West and their illeberal contenders and identifies the civilizational states of China and Russia as maing global challengers of liberal democracy.
Three of his books have been translated into Serbian: Sumrak Zapada in 2006 (Twilight of the West, 1998), Budućnost rata in 2010 (The Future of War, 2004), and Filozofi varvari. Razmatranja o prirodi rata of Heraklita do Hajzenberga in 2012 (Barbarous Philosophers, 2010). In the previous two decades he was a frequent visitor to Romania and Seriba. In Belgrade he took part in panels organised by the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence, the Centre for British Studies and other institutions. In his interview for Novi Magazin he speaks about challenges that the West, NATO and liberal democracies have been facing.
Your book The Rise of the Civilizational State was published in 2019. You described in it two case studies of contemporary civilizational states: Russia and China. These states tend to believe that they are special and unique civilizations. What does that mean for the international order? Is the emergence of civilizational states something that inevitably leads to the end of the international order that we have known since 1989?
Civilizational States consider themselves to be superior to nation states. Most nation states are less than 200 years old. Civilisations are much older. China and India are the oldest of all. They do not consider themselves bound by international rules that were drawn up by western powers in the 19th and the 20the centuries. Especially by a parvenu US which only came into being as recently as 1776. The Chinese say they are developing a new set of rules based on mutual respect for each other’s values, a variation of peaceful coexistence in the Cold War but this time centred on culture not ideology. They preach value pluralism which is a challenge to the idea of universal values on which human rights and other ideas rest. And they embrace the idea of civilizational spheres of interest which give them the right to police their own values at home.
Russia experienced a huge cultural transfer from Europe since the era of Peter the Great. In your book you turn attention to the fact that Russian authorities under Putin have had problems with spreading the idea of Euroasianism and that Russian elites may not easily accept to abandon their self-definition as being a part of Europe. Could the current Russian war against Ukraine change it. Could Dugin’s vision of Euroasian Russia now prevail in this country?
In February 2020, the Kremlin guru Vladislav Suslov wrote that there is no Ukraine only Ukraine-ness which was “a specific disorder of the mind.” In his essay on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians Putin described Ukraine as part of an anti-Russian project. This is a rerun of the 19th century debate about whether Russia is defined by its Muscovite destiny as an autocratic empire – nation with its own distinctly collectivist forms of social organisation –, or whether it is on the road to convergence with the rest of Europe. Ironically, by his attempts to influence and dominate Ukraine, Putin has intensified its civic, and national identity. More ironically still, he has shattered the European values of his own country. In 2000 Putin was a westerniser; since 2012 he’s made his choice. He is now a Eurasianist in the Dugin mould.
Are there other candidates for civilizational states: Erdogan’s Turkey, or Modi’s India, for example?
Modi is pursuing his own agenda – to transform India into what Nehru feared it might one day become – a Hindu Pakistan. Consistent with a distinguishing feature of the civilisation state he is insisting on mandatory patriotism – in this case the rewriting of Indian history to exclude Muslims, 1/5 of the population, as the scions of an alien invasion in the 15th century. In Turkey, Erdogan is trying to realise a neo-Ottoman project. He has recently even changed the country’s name. Interestingly Iran which was on the way to becoming a civilisational state under the Shah – with an emphasis on the Iranians’ Aryan ethnicity and 3000 years old history – has chosen to go down a different path. It remains an Islamic Republic dedicated to advancing the interests of the Islamic world. This was true also of ISIS and Al Qaeda which wanted to restore the Islamic Caliphate and were opposed to national identities like pan-Arabism. The ISIS Caliphate was a short-lived civilizational state.
Before the Russian attack on Ukraine there were claims that NATO was “clinically dead”. However, there is a display of its unity since the Russian attack on Ukraine. Where is NATO now?
NATO is now back with 2 new members Sweden and Finland waiting to join. And the idea – another Macron project- of strategic autonomy is dead in the water. The US is the only guarantor against further Russian aggression. Collective security which included everything from migration to terrorism has given way to the alliance’s traditional role: collective defence.
You argued as early as 1998 in Twilight of the West that the concept of the West as a liberal union of Western Europe and the United States faced its eclipse. What is the situation with the West now?
After the end of the Cold War the West was in search of another adversary. For a time it seemed to be Islamism but the war on terror was not a great success story. China and Russia present old-fashioned great power threats and represent values which are inimical to liberal internationalism. But the alliance against Russia in Ukraine encompasses Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. Is the West about to go Global?
In the conclusion to the same book you pointed out that the West “ensured that the communication between cultures would not be monolingual”. One may see now that countries that include three quarters of humanity have failed to join Western sanctions against Russia? Does the West now speak only to itself?
The West speaks for those countries in the world that embrace liberal democracy. That is perhaps enough. The late American philosopher Richard Rorty suspected that the 3 billion people coming into the world between now and 2050 would not choose to embrace the ideas of John Stuart Mill. But that, he insisted, should not detract from the importance of those ideas for the Western powers, any more than the impending collapse of the western Roman Empire dissuaded St Augustine from embracing Christianity.
Unlike many of your colleagues you have been warning that war was far from being over and would continue well into the 21st century and possibly beyond. Wars indeed continued to happen. You also warned about potential war of the United States with China. Do you think that the current war in Ukraine, or possible Sino-American war, brings humanity closer to the nuclear war?
Steven Pinker famously declared the end of Great Power war but then he also announced the end of global pandemics in his book Enlightenment Now! The endists ignored three facts. War was alive and well after 2001- there have been 106 since then though most have not appeared on television. Second, war has an enormous capacity for reinvention. Hybrid, latent, proxy, vicarious – these are just some of the titles of various books on what war has become. Third we live in a unique historical era of Unpeace – information war, cyber war. It has become difficult to tell the difference between war and peace. Something that would have surprised Aristotle who told us that the only purpose of war is peace. Arguably the West has been at war with Russia since 2014. Whether a conventional war between the US and China or Russia and the West would result in a nuclear conflict is impossible to say – what we can say with confidence is that the world is in the second nuclear age in which nuclear weapons are no longer seen as the first response to an existential threat; they will be used for diplomatic brinkmanship as Putin’s rhetoric in Ukraine makes plain. That someone will use them at some point is now probably inevitable.
How do you see the new world order after the end of the Russian war against Ukraine?
Whether the war ends in months or festers for years the world order has changed. We have lost our confidence in progress. We no longer talk about the end of war with the confidence we once did. China may not have come to Russia’s assistance much to Putin’s chagrin but the Russo- China alignment is now a reality; the US is back in the game and so is the West though it’s unity, as always will be tested.
Do you expect that a new Iron Curtain is inevitable and what would that mean for Europe? And are we all witnessing a new global Cold War?
Possibly, we are witnessing the onset of a new Cold War, though when historians come to date its onset, they will probably choose 2014 and the Crimea crisis. With regard to China the US, and possibly Europe is entering a period of cold peace. The rigid ideological divisions of the old Cold War are unlikely to be reprised. Financial interdependence (China’s reluctance to incur secondary sanctions over Ukraine) suggests that there will be far more flexibility in the relationship between the West and its main adversaries than was the case with the Cold War.
The European Union defines itself as the union based on values. Its values include the rule of law, human rights and all values associated with liberal democracy. The whole logic of European integration has been about preventing another war in Europe. How much does the Russian attack on Ukraine affect the so-called “European values”?
In the last month of his life Freud was asked whether he was witnessing the last European war. He replied that the Second World War was his last European war, but it was unlikely to be the last. I decided to opt for an academic career while working in the city when I read a book by John Lukas called The Last European War (1976). I thought it was foolish of the Nobel committee to give the EU the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 on the grounds that it had prevented another European conflict. It hadn’t as we saw in the Balkans and Trans Caucasus. The EU project was to prevent another war between Germany and France and in this it’s been very successful. The battle of Verdin (1916) for example is now remembered not as a German defeat or a French victory but a European catastrophe. This rewriting of history shows that the original European project is alive and well. But the EU is too weak, to deter a country like Russia from attacking it in future. Deterrence requires the Atlantic alliance, not the EU – something that the French seem unable to grasp in their pursuit of strategic autonomy. By which they mean autonomy from the US, not Russia. But there will be a price to pay – the Europeans will have to involve themselves in the Sino – American dispute as to some extent they already are in the Indo – Pacific theatre.
The United Kingdom left the EU on January 31, 2020, after 47 years of its membership in the EEC and EU. You were among many British professors who signed a petition against Brexit. How do you see Brexit now?
Brexit was the greatest foreign policy disaster for the UK since Suez crisis in 1956. It will take years to repair the damage, and even longer for the UK to reapply for membership as it undoubtedly will when this generation of politicians is out of office. What to do in the meantime? To work closely with European institutions particularly in the security field. The EU needs Britain more than Britain needs the EU as the Ukraine crisis shows very clearly.