I tried to resist, but I can’t. At the risk of being accused of pro-Soviet tendencies, I have to comment on a bizarre but real report in The Telegraph (March 6):
As European leaders [who else?] met in Brussels [where else?], President Barack Obama denounced plans for a referendum on whether the occupied Crimea region should join Russia as a “violation” of international law.
A violation of Ukrainian law, doubtless; but how does international law get into it? And just who is it that deliberates on international law, passes it, and provides for its amendment? Doubtless “European leaders.” So can they decide that Crimea should be part of Ukraine, despite all evidence that the majority of its population doesn’t want things that way? But to continue:
“We are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders,” he [President Obama] said.
I can’t make sense of that. Can you? Apparently, borders can be redrawn; that, in fact, is what he’s objecting to.
Now, there are strong arguments that borders should not be redrawn, no matter what. No matter what nationalisms are involved, no matter what petty religious or historical or linguistic disputes are available, the peace of Europe demands, or at least requests, that changes not take place in the continent’s frequently arbitrary borders. (I note, as I have before, that the Crimea became part of Ukraine by fiat of the Soviet dictatorship. So much for “law.”) Any people that wants to institute the kind of political changes that will bring it the blessings of prosperity would do well to drop its more exuberant forms of nationalism, accept whatever borders have been dealt to it, and think in terms of freedom for the individual, not vengeance for the ethnos.
None of this is a rational political philosophy. It’s just a dumber form of the old statist shell game.
But that’s not what Obama is saying. He’s saying, or seems to be saying, that “leaders,” who are also supposedly “democratic,” get to decide. Does that mean Putin? Apparently it must — though that’s not what Obama wants his words to mean. And how about the Ukrainian president, the one whom Ukrainian revolutionaries just kicked out? Also a democratic leader. Should he decide the fate of the Crimea? But what about the people who are being led? Do they get to say anything? No, they don’t. Not according to Obama. He wants no referendum. Does he suspect that it would be about as democratic as an election in Chicago? Or is he offended that he, the biggest of all democratic leaders, would have no say in its results?
None of this fits. None of it holds together. None of it is a rational political philosophy. It’s just a dumber form of the old statist shell game, in which the principle of legitimacy passes from “the people” to “the leaders” and back again, over and over, and where it lights is simply the place on the sidewalk where the politicians squat in a circle and play their games according to the rules they make up.
And what rules can we expect from a president who suggests, according to the same news report, that the Crimean crisis can be “resolved diplomatically in a way which would satisfy Ukraine, Russia and the international community.”
Satisfy them? Satisfy them all?