Abstract
Cyril Hovorun explains the origin and nature of the conflict in Ukraine in connection with the notion of the “Russian world.” In support of this idea of Russian hegemonic power, the Russian Orthodox Church has been co-opted to promote a sense of external threats to Christian morality, its own superiority as a Russian Orthodox civilization, and an ethos of confrontation. Yet, contrary to Samuel Huntington’s prediction that post-Cold War conflicts would center on differences of civilization rather than of ideology, the conflicts in Georgia (2007) and Ukraine (2014) have pitted people of the same Russian (Orthodox) civilization against one another. Examining parallels with nineteenth-century German nationalism, the author finds that the conflict in Ukraine is not really between Russia and the West, but between the desire to return to “Soviet” statism and the contrary desire to establish the common good as a responsibility of the state.
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Notes
- 1.
Петр Щедровицкий, “Русский мир и Транснациональное русское,” in Русский журнал: http://old.russ.ru/politics/meta/20000302_schedr.html (published March 2, 2000, accessed December 21, 2014).
- 2.
Георгий Щедровицкий, Мышление. Понимание. Рефлексия (Москва, 2005); Знак и деятельность. Кн. I: Структура знака: смыслы, значения, знания. 14 лекций 1971 г., (Москва, 2005); Знак и деятельность. Кн. II: Понимание и мышление. Смысл и содержание. 7 лекций 1972 г. (Москва, 2006); О методе исследования мышления (Москва, 2006); Знак и деятельность. Кн. III: Методологический подход в языковедении. 11 лекций 1972–79 гг. (Москва, 2007).
- 3.
Published online: http://www.archipelag.ru/ru_mir/history/history95-97/gefter-zachin/ [accessed December 23, 2014].
- 4.
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).
- 5.
See Erica Benner, “Nationalism: Intellectual Origins,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, John Breuilly, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39.
- 6.
Ibid., 42.
- 7.
Ibid., 45–46.
- 8.
Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
- 9.
John Moses in Church and State in Old and New Worlds, Hilary Carey and John Gascoigne, eds. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2011), 82.
- 10.
Ibid., note 11, pp. 82–83.
- 11.
Ibid., 84–85.
- 12.
Ibid., 85.
- 13.
Martin Greschat, “Krieg und Kriegsbereitschaft im deutschen Protestantismus,” in Bereit zum Krieg: Kriegsmentalität im wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1890–1914. Beiträge zur historischen Friedensforschung, Jost Dulffer and Karl Holl, eds. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 33–36.
- 14.
Ferdinand Kattenbusch, Das sittliche Recht des Krieges (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1906).
- 15.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72:3 (August 1993). In 1996, the essay was expanded into the book: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
- 16.
Critical essays were published in: Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations? The Debate: 20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Foreign Affairs, 2013).
- 17.
Ibid., 2.
- 18.
See Robert N. Bellah “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 96:1 (January, 1967), 1–21; “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 134:4 (January, 2005), 40–55; The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Robert N. Bellah and Phillip Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).
- 19.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 2006), 6.
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Hovorun, C. (2016). Interpreting the “Russian World”. In: Krawchuk, A., Bremer, T. (eds) Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34144-6_8
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