Face à la guerre menée par la Russie sur le sol européen,il est plus que jamais indispensable de parvenir à comprendre ce qui nous arrive, sur le plan politique, social mais aussi éthique et métaphysique.We have asked several philosophers and researchers to deliver their thoughts to us.
Spécialiste de la Sibérie, où il a mené de multiples enquêtes de terrain, l’anthropologueCharles Stépanofflivre un texte très personnel sur la guerre en Ukraine, qui lui rappelle notamment l’exil de son grand-père ukrainien dans les années 1920.He also regrets that the West and Russia have not woven more cultural and scientific ties since the fall of the wall, for example in the sharing of "ecological knowledge" and non -American ways "to live in the earth".
"Days of infinite sadness for those who remember having believed in 1989 and 1991 in the advent of a new world.With the Ukrainian tragedy, a terror of a terror we thought to have turned our backs suddenly in front of us, as if we had only turned around in circles.In the 1920s, among the thousands of Ukrainian refugees who fled the Red Army conquering their young country was my grandfather Anatolii Stepankov, who left with his mother in Poland, then in France."We will never see the fall of the iron curtain," he said when I was a child.In 1991, he died in Paris at the time of the end of the USSR without having been able to see his country free;I was 13 years old and I found it unfair, but I was sure that now the world was going to change.We were going to treat together, with the peoples of the East, the tears of the Cold War and invent a new Europe - and why not "from the Atlantic to the Urals".
Today it is already clear that Europe without iron curtain was only an ephemeral intermission that we have not been able to make last.In his speech of February 21 announcing the launch of the "military operation", Putin called into question the very existence of Ukraine and he declared war on the West.He has recalled for a long time in recent decades of relations between east and west, unpacking all the resentment of the Russians to have felt ostracized, despised, designated as enemies by the "civilized" world.Renouring with the purges, he announced on March 16 an "autopurification" of the Russian society which will spit "like flies" the friends of the West hidden within it.How did we get here ?Should we put everything on the account of Putin's individual psychology as our commentators do?
He did not break down on his own in paranoia, since millions of Russians support him in a terrifying phenomenon of collective radicalization which recalls Germany of the 1930s.The main feeling that animates the pro-war Russians, as I perceive it in the media and personal testimonies, it is not dreams of greatness or imperialism: it is the terror of being destroyed as a people by a“Russophobic West”.Twenty years of effort of scientific cooperation collapse for me when I see my Russian colleagues and friends divide between those who demonstrate the war and are arrested, and those who support the regime, sincerely believing that their existence is threatened bywest.We write to ourselves that we love each other, that science is above conflicts, but we know that injuries are such that we can no longer work together.
Dans les années 1990, au lieu de fonder l’Europe nouvelle sur la découverte réciproque et la diversité culturelle,nous l’avons basée sur le libre-échange des marchandises, la dérégulation, la monnaie et l’intégration militaire dans l’Otan.Instead of asking us together what are the multiple ways of being European, we have adopted a uniform Western model.The “shock therapy” prescribed by neoliberal experts had on Russian economic infrastructure an effect of mass destruction comparable to that of a war.Russia has sunk in poverty, inequalities, chaos.It has become the country of the world at the highest rate of violent death (221 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003, three times more than in France).In Siberia, in Tuva, where I conducted my doctoral surveys in the 2000s, the life expectancy of men has dropped eleven years to 56 years.
For our part, after the momentum of 1991, we gradually diverted the eyes of the East and we looked like never before in the west.Have we heard France interinding Gagaouzes songs?Has Bosnian cuisine spicy our canteens?Has Ukrainian and Russian cinema shaken Hollywood on our screens?It’s the opposite.The recent book by Jérôme Fourquet and Jean-Laurent Cassely, France before our eyes, shows: the years 1990-2000 were those of an accelerated cultural Americanization, all the more powerful as we did not talk about it anymore.Country clubs at Black Friday, "part of the American Way of Life has deeply penetrated our country in terms of both clothing, food and pop culture", write the two authors.Our body was in Europe, but our heart and our mind passed on the other side of the ocean.We have followed with effervescence the American elections and the Capitole skirmishes, and we remained indifferent to the tremendous popular uprisings on our doors, in kyiv and Minsk.We know the geography of California better than that of the countries of Eastern Europe whose existence we do not know.After 1991, the European cultural exchanges that the Communist parties had collapsed, and the number of French students learning Russian was divided by two.The murderous madness in which Russia sovers up today offers us the hideous image of our collective failure to build a European conscience together.
Avec cette guerre, ce que l’Europe est en train de perdre, ce qui se déchire à l’Est, c’est une part de son âme :une liberté résiliente, des modes de subsistance autonomes, des façons d’habiter la Terre.Ukraine, Belarus, these are unique treasures in Europe of traditional ecological knowledge in picking and culinary or medicinal preparation of berries, herbs, wild flowers of our temperate ecosystems.These ecological know-how often carried by women, this food sovereignty that we could have relearn from our Eastern neighbors, we looked at them as archaisms.We have not learned anything from these peoples, and, on our side, what did we taught them?Faith in market law, consumption and dependence on industrial food.Finally, converted, Eastern Europe, from Mazuria lakes to Kalmoukie's steppes, covered with a white mcdonalds and Auchan coat.Field surveys conducted in Poland, Estonia, Albania or Romania show that the years 1990-2000 were a period of collapse of local productions, family farms and ecological knowledge.
Dans la douleur, nous continuons d’“atterrir” au sens deBruno Latour.Two years of health crisis have made us discover that we are united biological beings to the rest of the lifetime by our vulnerability to viruses.The war in Ukraine makes us experience, in the fear that embraces us, our vulnerability of terrestrial geographic beings, hung at the end of the Eurasia whose tectonic pulsations we experience.The extraordinary popular impulse of aid to the Ukrainians who is manifesting itself at the moment in our cities and our villages shows that the feeling of European solidarity existed, unfathomable, silent, so buried, that it took a war forbecome aware and free it.This time, let's no longer turn it off.»»
