The West at War: On the Self-Enclosure of the Liberal Mind

Boris Buden, e-flux:

The system of parliamentary oligarchy that upholds Putin, with its authoritarian and violent character, is not an exclusively Russian invention. It’s the system that best serves the interests of the global ruling class today. This is why there has been so much sympathy for Putin among right-wing circles around the world. If Putin dies, someone else will carry his flag onward, not only in Russia but in many other places around the world, including the West.

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The West still has no vision of democracy beyond the nation-state, which is why an entity like “the West” exists in the first place: as a cultural and normative ersatz for its own lack of utopian imagination and revolutionary courage. This is why, when faced with a crisis, the EU suddenly forgets its noble values and relies on something much more sinister: The president of the European Council, when addressing the question of why the EU treats refugees from Ukraine differently from those of other war-torn countries, declared that Ukrainians and Europeans belong to the same “European family.”⁸ However sweet and benevolent, this metaphor can only mean that the EU is a community united by blood. Can unity through “soil” be far behind?