War in Eastern Europe: The afterlife of empire

For the second time since 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Europe faces its worst security crisis since the Cold War. To most Europeans, war came as a shock, but in Eastern Europe, it has been a frequent experience even in recent decades. For centuries, warfare had been an almost permanent feature of our history. In the 'long eighteenth century', of the 125 years between the Glorious Revolution in England and Waterloo, European powers spent 64 years on the battlefields. War was so central to European life that historians saw it as the cradle of the modern nation state – in Tilly's famous aphorism, "war made the state, and the state made war". Wars have become much less common by the late nineteenth century, and after the horrors of two world wars, the western half of the continent enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history. By contrast, Eastern Europe has suffered from violent conflict much more frequently, for more years, and with much more devastating consequences over the past hundred years. The world wars brought more destruction, death, displacement, and disintegration to Eastern Europe than to any other region of the world (https://voxeu.org/article/recovery-and-reconstruction-europe-after-wwii), and they left a long shadow. Eastern European nations also witnessed countless civil wars and long years of intra- and interstate warfare both after World War I and since the end of the Cold War. But why have they experienced war so frequently?

Western and Eastern Europe differ historically. The modern history of the west is a history of nation states. The east lived in the afterlife of empires: from the collapse of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires after 1918 to the dissolution of the federalist empires of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union after 1990. They disintegrated at different times and in different ways, but with some uniform outcomes. When multi-ethnic empires disintegrate, political and ethnic boundaries rarely match. For many, disintegration brings independence, but for the dominant nations of the former empire, it means loss of territory and injustice. The first uniform outcome is violence. War among the Habsburg successor states lasted only two years after World War I; the former Ottoman lands in the Middle East remained a global hotspot for conflict. The post-Yugoslav wars we can all remember, but the dismemberment of the Soviet Union was no less violent. Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought four wars. There were civil wars in Moldova and Tajikistan, and two devastating wars between Chechen separatists and the Russian state. Even in the absence of violence, separatism and revisionism hindered political consolidation. They dominated Central European politics between the world wars and still provide ammunition for the most radical nationalists today. In former Yugoslav and Soviet republics, they undermined external security and effective centralization and, therefore, disrupted successful democratic transitions. They also fueled populist nationalism. In Serbia today, it is still a political suicide not to wish for the eventual return of Kosovo to the motherland, a quarter century after its secession.

Russian grievances after the collapse of the Soviet Union did not start with Putin. His views echoed those of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who dominated the Russian parliament between 1995 and 2003 and came close to defeating Boris Yeltsin in the presidential election in 1996. Russian concerns remained unchanged since 1991. First, of all Soviet citizens who identified themselves as of Russian ethnicity in the last Soviet census in 1989, almost 25 million lived outside of Russia, predominantly in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Belarus. Second, Russia had strategic assets on the territory of its neighbors: the Black-Sea Fleet in Ukraine, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and nuclear warheads in both countries plus Belarus. Third, violent disintegration could have endangered these populations and access to these strategic assets. Maintaining close partnership, economic and political, with these countries was paramount for the Kremlin post-independence.

Therefore, Moscow had a strong incentive to support post-Soviet leaders in newly independent republics who were willing to maintain close ties with Russia and repress anti-Russian nationalism. Propping up these authoritarian regimes was a low-cost alternative to full control. Russian leaders have been well aware of their diminished power. If the Soviet Union with a standing army of five million and the world's third largest economy could not keep the empire together, then how could a new Russia with dramatically reduced resources restore it? Since 1991, Moscow undertook military intervention in post-Soviet republics only when these were falling out of the Russian orbit, typically with the narrow objective of capturing territories ethno-culturally close to Russia so that de jure or de facto Russian control would be popular enough to maintain at relatively low cost. Intervention in the Transnistrian War in 1991-2 created the breakaway Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, an unrecognized Russian speaking entity that has only survived with Russian financial and military assistance. A similar playbook was implemented in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War over the separatist self-declared republics of Abkhazia and South-Ossetia.

Taking over the larger Russian enclaves of the Crimea and Donbas was neither necessary nor planned. As long as Kiev maintained close ties with Moscow, millions of ethnic Russian voters could influence political outcomes in Ukraine. Without the votes from the Crimea as well as Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, pro-Russian presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych, both criticized for their corruption and authoritarian practices, may not have won the 1994 and 2010 elections respectively, and Ukrainian politics may have taken a very different course. Putin invaded only after the 2014 revolution had revealed the preference of Ukrainians for westernization over an economic union with Russia and for reviewing the status of the Russian navy in Sevastopol. Annexing the territories strategically most important and most likely to be loyal to Moscow appeared to be the least bad outcome for the Kremlin. After eight years of stalemate, the inability of Russia to gain international recognition for its land grab, as well as Kiev's ever-increasing willingness to join the western alliances prompted Putin to make a dangerous step and embark on full-scale war.

Only successful democratic transitions can make successor states of multi-ethnic empires viable, but the manner in which the former imperialist nations address the disintegration of their empire can thwart these transitions. This happened in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia just as much as in both Russia and her post-Soviet neighbors. The support of authoritarian leaders by the Kremlin aimed at oppressing nationalism instead oppressed democratic opposition, conserved corrupt institutions, and prevented the development of inclusive economies. However, association with these regimes made Russian leaders more authoritarian and more aggressive, too. Where democracy prevailed, nationalist leaders willing to loosen ties with Moscow heightened ethnic tensions and separatism, undermining external security and internal political stability. In turn, insufficient progress achieved in the afterlife of the Soviet empire kept both the yearning for the lost imperial grandeur in Russia and separatist ambitions in post-Soviet successor states with ethnic Russian minorities alive, preventing a successful consolidation of the new independent nations. As the history of the former Yugoslav republics and the Baltic nations have shown, western institutions can help in this consolidation, but this requires strong and sustained commitment. The European Union now seems willing to make such commitments, but western support for Ukraine may have come too late and, in any case, must last.