Us Against Them? We Need to Think about Freedom in Order to Face Putin’s Russia

Roberta de Monticelli
Former Chair of Philosophy of Personhood, San Raffaele University, Milan; 1989- 2005 Chair of Modern and contemporary Philosophy, University of Geneva; Chief Editor of “Philosophy and Mind”.

There we are. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, said it clearly: there is a global nuclear threat, and that’s because of a United States’ proxy war against the Russian Federation. From Kiev, the U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and the Head of the Pentagon Lloyd Austin do not deny it at all: Austin explains that the ever-increasing involvement of western military power in the Ukrainian war aims to outplay the Russian one. No one could have thought that this could be the Ukrainian goal, before the country was properly armed -for many years now- to be capable of doing just that.

The events in Italy on April 25^th [the day celebrating the liberation from the fascist regime, Transl. Note] did not silence the arguments between those who uphold this escalation and those who think it is crazy. The thing is that this topic has shadowy contours, in which it is easy to lose one’s head. The point of the debate is the freedom that the Russian autocrat is threatening in Ukraine, or even elsewhere after that; the question is what should we do to help Ukraine.

The shadow regards the question: we who? We need to think with a fresh approach about freedom in order to shed light on that question and to argue with reason, and not in the throes of blind passion.

The new thought we need is new just because the western conscience has removed from memory two of its biggest civilization builders.

Altiero Spinelli and Mikhail Sergheevic Gorbachev, both defeated now, apparently, are united in a symbolic passing of the baton, that Spinelli gave, just before his death, to the President of the Soviet Union, who took office the year before.

BELLA CIAO’S FREEDOM

On the 25th of April, the song Bella Ciao resonated in the streets of all Italy, expressing what must be saved from the idea of freedom that we have today. It starts with the words “the invader”. It ends with the flower of freedom sprouting from a partisan’s grave.

In its own way, the song reaffirms the core connection that Plato established between the soul and the City, between the person and the ideal civilization, which we the citizens can identify ourselves with. The song puts it in the simplest terms: there is no freedom for the people (i.e. civil, political, social and cultural rights) if there is no freedom from the invader, that is, the political independence of the State.

But what is the connection between the freedom of the people and the independence of a nation state? Only one, which the song, that is now sung all over the world, does not say but preserves in its melody: democracy.

Because repelling the invader and regaining one’s own independence is certainly not a sufficient condition for the freedom of the citizens of a State if it still lacks democracy, the only regime that allows them to say (in principle) “the State is us”.

Altiero Spinelli is not just the author of the Ventotene Manifesto, along with Ernesto Rossi and, ideally, Eugenio Colorni and Ursula Hirschmann. Starting from the Italian “Euro-communist” political turn that allowed him to work in the European Commission and then in the European Parliament – which were still phantasmagorical until the 1970’s –, Spinelli is also the solitary theorist and tireless builder of the institutional design of the European Union, today still hanging from the national sovereignties of the member States. That design which, if fully realized, would lead to the federation of the United States of Europe, with its political sovereignty, its fiscal unity, and, obviously, its common defense.

SOVEREIGNTY DISSOCIATED FROM THE NATION

The simple and grandiose idea that underpins this design is that, in a globalized world defined by economic interdependencies and the multinational dimension of corporations, even the idea of democratic sovereignty (Art.1 of the Italian Constitution) must be dissociated from that of nationhood.

Indeed, the Italian Constitution incorporates this idea in its 2^nd Article, where it recognizes and guarantees “the inviolable rights of the human being” (not restricting them just to its own citizens). Thus, the Italian Republic put in its own Constitution the respect of human rights, which will be soon after articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and which the Charter of Rights of the European Union will deepen to an astonishing degree.

This idea allows for the first time a precise distinction to be made between nationalism and love for one's country. Nationalism today is a disvalue for democracy. It is called sovereignism.

Looking back thirty years after his defeat, Gorbachev’s thought is surprising for his lucidity and its breadth of vision. His lucidity allows him to see that in the century of nuclear weapons “humanity has ceased to be immortal”. His breadth of vision gives him a perspective that embraces not just the end of the Cold War and the defeat of one of its two poles, but even the future construction of a new world order that must truly replace the imperialism of the great powers with the rule of law, and thus give strength to the United Nations Organization.

In his vision, the point of origin and then dissemination of this new true order of lasting peace is Europe, of which Russia is not only a geographical part, not only a great and profound soul, but can and must also become a constitutive part, through the bridge of all the republics (Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic Republics in the first place!) of the renewed Federation of Independent States into which the Soviet Union should have and could have peacefully transformed itself.

So articulate and concrete was this immense chance in the dramatic years prior to the defeat in 1991, and then prior to the chaotic dissolution of the enormous Soviet body, under the violent thrusts of many nationalisms, first and foremost the one of Boris Yeltsin's Russia, that we will have to return later to reconsider that idea, limpidly expounded in Gorbachev's Memoirs. But for now, it is urgent to dwell on its most crucial aspect, which is the new thought of freedom.

THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION OF MINDS

Everyone may remember Reykjavik, 1986. Just arrived at the summit, Gorby persuaded Reagan to resume the negotiations launched the year before, in Geneva, for a bilateral nuclear disarmament. A year later, in fact, the US-USSR agreement on the elimination of short- and medium-range missiles was signed.

At the time, however, few understood that this was for the new Russian leader the “external” or global aspect of perestrojka. That is, of that “democratic revolution of minds” – and institutions – that produced, together with a flowering of cultural and civic life never seen in Russia since the 1920s, the first truly democratic election: the one that brought Yeltsin to the presidency of the Russian Republic in 1990.

The first and last democratic election: because Yeltsin was careful not to ever allow another one, especially after he had his parliament cannon-bombed in 1993, causing a massacre whose true numerical size was never disclosed, speaking of glasnost or transparency... What followed was the coup d’état with which Yeltsin carried out the sheer dissolution of the Soviet Union, initiating what Gorbachev called ‘a parade of sovereignties’ and which prompted Yeltsin shortly afterwards to wage the ill-fated Chechen war. But the so-called West did not understand.

It supported Yeltsin, but above all it did not understand why it was wrong. It was wrong because of the essential link between internal democratization and the true realization of a new democratic international order, starting with the “Common European House”.

“An agreement had been reached on a possible entry of the USSR into the European Union with the status of associate member, and shortly afterwards into the International Monetary Fund as a full member”.

THE THOUGHT OF FREEDOM

The new idea of freedom was on the verge of becoming the steel core of the institutions of the so-called West. A fully supranational democratic order for regulating the coexistence of nations. Yet, even before the Soviet empire, the Yugoslav system had already dissolved: in the blood that nationalisms have always carried with them since the First World War.

What an immense chance was lost - and how brutally it is trampled upon today in Lavrov's statements and in Blinken's and Austin's responses.

And to close the circle on the other great builder defeated today, here is what Spinelli wrote in 1986 in his diary shortly before his death, mocking an Italian communist of the time who had not yet realised who the new Secretary of the CCP was. He wrote: "In vain I suggest that if 8 May is to be commemorated, it is not as the victory of anti-fascism, but as the end of 30 years of disastrous European civil war, and the beginning of a new chapter in European history".

Gorby said in 1991, on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize: "If perestroika fails, the prospect of entering a new period of peace in history will vanish".

We have seen how this is playing out. "We" is becoming again the awful word that opposes "them", as Blinken and Austin oppose Lavrov. Russian pride versus American pride.

No, we were not that “we”. Maybe, can we still not be forced to become it?