Cui Zhiyuan, The Security Dilemma and Ukraine

Cui Zhiyuan, “The ‘Security Dilemma,’ Constructivism, and the Ukraine Crisis”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Cui Zhiyuan (b. 1963) is a professor in Tsinghua’s School of Public Management and a prominent member of China’s New Left.  He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Chicago in 1995 and taught at the Department of Political Science at MIT from 1995 to 2002 before returning to China.  He has maintained an international profile, having been a visiting fellow or visiting scholar at any number of institutions in North America and Europe over the years.
 
Like other members of the New Left, Cui’s primary concern, particularly early on in his career, was to resist Neoliberal claims concerning the “end of history” and to defend the continuing relevance and vitality of socialism as a realistic alternative.  In the context of reform and opening, “socialism” meant much more than “Chinese socialism,” and Cui ranged widely in time and space, recycling and readapting ideas and visions from 19th century European socialism and 21st century American postmodernism; his writings often remind me of those of Roberto Unger (b. 1947), with whom Cui has collaborated (Unger was a professor at Harvard Law School while Cui was at MIT) in that both are protean, creative, and thoughtful (for examples of Cui’s work available in English, click here and scroll down). 

When Bo Xilai (b. 1949) launched his “Chongqing model” in the late 2000s, which was largely inspired by New Left ideas, Cui look a leave from Tsinghua in the hopes of participating in the experiment, testament yet again to his interest in applied ideas and alternative socialisms.  The text translated here comes from Cui’s WeChat channel, entitled “empirical governance,” which suggests that Cui continues to participate in a much broader project underway in China on “governance”—not “government”—which, broadly speaking, focuses on outcomes rather than structures in evaluating political systems. 
 
I look forward to reading Cui’s thoughts on empirical governance, but the text translated here talks about Ukraine, which is obviously why I chose to translate it.  Cui’s essay belongs to a rather large group of texts published by Chinese establishment intellectuals since the beginning of the war which seek to explain the conflict without necessarily taking sides, i.e., they neither follow the official line nor condemn Russia for engaging in naked, unprovoked aggression (Jin Yan’s essay is in the same category, although her explanation is different). 
 
Cui bases his analysis on the concept of the “security dilemma,” the idea that what I perceive as defensive measures taken to preserve my security may well be seen by my neighbor as offensive moves that put his security in danger.  This is of course a well-known concept in international relations theory, and it clearly applies to the war in Ukraine, and Cui is not pretending to any particular insight that other scholars or diplomats have overlooked.  In certain parts of the world, the security dilemma is constant and must be managed.  Cui clearly thinks that, in the current crisis, both sides failed to manage the dilemma properly, although he dismisses Putin’s justification for the invasion, suggesting that the accords greater blame to Russia.
 
Cui also aims to defend China’s “neutrality” in the conflict by arguing that China’s basic philosophy of diplomacy insists on the equality of all nation-states, thus avoiding the “balance of power” and “sphere of influence” interventions that often trigger security dilemmas.  I suppose this is true in an abstract sense, but I am not sure that “just say no” is particularly effective in the rough and tumble world of international diplomacy.  I also wonder if the various equal nation-states with which China is almost constantly in conflict in the South China Sea would accept Cui’s characterization of the basic philosophy of Chinese diplomacy.     
 
My thanks to Beijing reader William Langran for pointing my toward Cui’s WeChat feed. 
 
Favorite Quotes

“I personally believe President Putin's notion of ‘double negation’ to be theoretically untenable. First of all, Putin believes that the Ukrainian state was created by Lenin, especially when he sent Russian workers into the sea of the Ukrainian ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (peasants), which to Putin means that Ukraine is not an independent state.
 
But Putin does not understand that a characteristic of Ukraine at the time was precisely that ethnic and class distinctions overlapped more than in other countries:  the peasantry was largely Ukrainian, the landowners were largely Polish and Russian, the small urban working class was also largely Russian, and the urban business bourgeoisie was largely Jewish. It follows from this that Lenin's expedition of the working class to Ukraine (and especially the inclusion of today's Donbass within Ukraine) to establish a Soviet state was not the incomprehensible and colossal error that Putin claims it to be, let alone a basis for denying that Ukraine is an independent state.
 
Putin's second negation concerns the issue of Ukrainian national identity. It is true that the identity of many ethnic groups under the Tsarist Empire faced complex changes in their transformation into modern nations. An extreme example is the case of Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), the first Polish president after the First World War, who stipulated in his will that his body be buried in Poland and his heart in Lithuania.
 
However, the complexity of national identity does not negate the fact that for most people, once an identity is formed, it has a certain stability, and to say that a nation is an ‘imaginary community’ is not the same as calling it an ‘illusory community.’ Although Russia and Ukraine have linguistic and religious similarities, this cannot be used to deny Ukraine's independent status as a nation.”
 
Translation
 
China abstained when the UN voted on Crimea in 2014, and China abstained again when the UN voted on Ukraine in recent days. Some Western commentators have argued on this basis that China’s vote was unprincipled, a kind of opportunism that sought to avoid offending either side.  I disagree with this view and in this essay will propose an alternative explanation: China abstained precisely because of its insight into the "security dilemma" in international relations.
 
The "security dilemma" is a central concept in international relations theory. It refers to defensive measures that one state perceives as enhancing its own security, but which are perceived by other states as offensive behavior. When each party perceives the other's defensive behavior as potentially offensive, the defensive measures that one party sees as enhancing its security may ultimately reduce this own security (e.g., by inviting a pre-emptive strike from the other party), hence the term "security dilemma.”

For example, the former Warsaw Pact members (e.g., Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc.) who applied to join NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw themselves as engaging in defensive measures, but from a Russian perspective, such moves were potentially offensive.  Similarly, Russia's attempts to prevent former Warsaw Pact members and former Soviet republics (such as Georgia and Ukraine) from joining NATO were also defensive measures from a Russian perspective, but were potentially offensive measures in the eyes of countries like Poland and Georgia, as well as for NATO.
 
From the perspective of the "security dilemma," all countries have legitimate security concerns. It is not difficult to understand the defensive behavior of the former Soviet satellites who demand membership in NATO. In fact, Marx and Engels were highly supportive of the Polish uprising against the Tsarist Empire when they wrote the "Communist Manifesto" in 1848. While today’s Russia should not be equated with the Tsarist Russia of the past, the painful history of Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries has led these countries to want to enhance their security by joining NATO, which is their legitimate security concern. By the same token, Russia's demand that NATO not expand eastward is not difficult to understand either, given that it was through Soviet neighbors such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Finland that Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Russia's desire that NATO not deploy potentially offensive weapons on its own doorstep is also a legitimate security concern.
 
It is precisely because China respects the legitimate security concerns of all nations that it abstained in the UN vote on Crimea and Ukraine; this was not unprincipled, but instead embodies a high degree of principle. China's principle is based on its grasp of the "security dilemma," and is grounded in the deeper substantive content of the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence," which make up the core of Chinese diplomacy.
 
In the imperialistic diplomatic theory of the 19th century, the main response to the "security dilemma" was to include small states in the "spheres of influence" of the various great powers. The logic was that once clear and recognized "spheres of influence" were established by the major powers, conflicts were less likely to escalate due to the misunderstandings arising from the "security dilemma.” This is how the Austrian Prime Minister, Metternich, the main architect of the European security framework in the first half of the 19th century (what was known as the "Vienna Conference System"), argued that Italy fell within the Austrian "sphere of influence."[2]

However, in 1848, when national democratic revolutions broke out in various European countries, Metternich fled from Vienna to London in a panic, disguised as a woman. Nonetheless, Metternich's theory of "spheres of influence" has never completely disappeared (Kissinger's doctoral dissertation was a study of Metternich's diplomatic ideas). I would like to emphasize in this essay that China's Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, one principle of which is that "all nations are equal, regardless of their size," logically preclude the recognition of any state's "sphere of influence," because the equality of national sovereignty is incompatible with spheres of influence. This reasoning is not complicated, but we often fail to see the logical appeal of the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence" when analyzing specific international relations issues. Perhaps we can use a recent example to illustrate this appeal.
 
During the recently concluded Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, the visiting Argentine president signed a "Belt and Road memorandum" with China.  The United States has always considered Latin America as its sphere of influence (or backyard) according to the so-called Monroe Doctrine, but we do not recognize this "sphere of influence," so as long as Argentina, a sovereign country, is willing to participate in the Belt and Road initiative, we will not reject it based on the U.S. claim of a regional "sphere of influence."  Similarly, we do not recognize Eastern European countries and the former Soviet republics as parts of Russia's "sphere of influence.”
 
For this reason, China's basic diplomatic outlook—the "Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence"—logically precludes the use of "spheres of influence" to deal with the "security dilemma."  Does this mean that the "security dilemma" is insoluble? Of course not. In fact, various schools of current international relations theory offer unique perspectives on resolving the dilemma.  The more popular ones in China are "defensive realism" and "offensive realism," but I prefer "constructivism," the basic starting point of which is that the "security dilemma" is not a product of international anarchy or of nature, but is instead the result mutual mistrust between states (i.e., thinking the worst of each other's motives).[3] Hence, the key to resolving the "security dilemma" lies in the gradual construction of mechanisms of mutual trust.
 
It is worth noting that Russia has clearly expressed its problems with the United States and NATO in terms of a "security dilemma." In December 2021, the Russian Foreign Ministry drafted a "Russian-U.S. Security Assurances Agreement"[4] and requested separate written answers from the US and NATO. Russia demanded not only the "neutralization of Ukraine," but also a pledge that NATO would not accept new members and would return the current military configuration to the 1997 status quo, when Poland, Hungary, Estonia and other countries were not yet NATO members. This can easily be interpreted as a demand for a complete reconfiguration of the European security architecture since the end of the Cold War and the re-establishment of the former Soviet sphere of influence.

Russia argues that the legitimacy of its claim is based on the concept of "indivisibility of security" found in the 1975 Helsinki agreement, i.e., the idea that one state cannot enhance its own security at the expense of another state's security, which in fact can be interpreted as merely another expression of the "security dilemma." The full text of the U.S. reply to Russia was not published, but it was leaked to the Spanish newspaper El País, which published the main points on February 2, 2022. In its reply, the United States rejected Russia's request for a NATO promise to not accept new members and to return the military configuration to the status quo ante, but agreed to discuss the "indivisibility of security" and proposed a series of mechanisms to gradually build mutual trust (There has been some progress in building military mutual trust mechanisms since 1990; see the annual "Vienna Document").  

For example, the United States has proposed establishing a "transparency mechanism" that would allow Russia to inspect NATO's "missile defense system" in Romania and Bulgaria to ensure that there are no satellite-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles that can reach Russia. In exchange, the U.S. demanded that the Russians also open two U.S.-selected missile sites for U.S. inspection. This is a de-escalation of the intensification of the U.S.-Russian conflict which has occurred since Russia "took back" Crimea in 2014 (e.g., increased U.S. military assistance to Ukraine).  In July 2014, the U.S. accused Russia's 9M729 missile deployment of violating the 1987 U.S.-Soviet Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, in which both sides pledged not to maintain, test or produce land-based missiles and ballistic missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. Russia countered by pointing out that the U.S. missile defense system deployed in Romania could easily be converted into an intermediate-range missile, thus also violating the 1987 agreement.
 
President Putin did not reply to the U.S. letter, stating that NATO's reply was not fully consistent with that of the U.S., since NATO had not expressed its willingness to negotiate with Russia on the concept of  the "indivisibility of security.” He subsequently launched a "special military operation" against Ukraine without waiting for the US and NATO to offer a unified response. Nevertheless, I do not exclude the possibility that Russia, after reaching an armistice agreement with Ukraine (which I admit is a rather optimistic view), will gradually establish mutual trust mechanisms with the US and NATO, so that the "security dilemma" will not escalate into [a larger] war. Why do I think so?
 
The key issue is that in Putin's televised speech on the evening of February 21, 2022, when he announced Russia's recognition of the two breakaway republics in the Donbas region of Ukraine, his emphasis was on the "double negation" of Ukraine (i.e., the insistence that that Ukraine is neither an independent state nor a separate nation).[5] At the end of his speech, Putin commented on NATO’s threat to Ukraine, saying “if it does not happen tomorrow, then it will happen the day after tomorrow. What does it change from the historical perspective? Nothing at all.”

In fact, it is implied here that the main reason for sending troops is not a pre-emptive strike against NATO (because Putin understands that Ukraine is still quite far from being accepted by NATO, although cooperation between Ukraine and NATO has strengthened after 2014, as evidenced by the Ukrainian president's complaint that NATO heads of state did not grant his application for membership in NATO during a phone call after the war broke out), but to bring the Ukrainian "little brother" back into the arms of Russia.
 
It is worth noting in particular the considerable overlap between Putin's speech on the evening of February 21, 2022 and the long essay he published in July 2021, entitled "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians."  The essay was published as a book and distributed to all Russian soldiers sent off to war.  It is clear that the "double negation" of Ukraine played an important role in his decision to send troops. This is not to deny the enormous background role of NATO's eastward expansion, which undoubtedly reinforced in his mind the need to achieve the "double negation" as soon as possible, but the threat of NATO was not imminent. From another perspective, although NATO's main "mobile bases" are in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (under the 1997 NATO-Russia Convention on Basic Relations, NATO is not allowed to establish "permanent military bases" in new member states), Putin will not engage in a full-scale attack on these four countries because no “double negation” exists for them in his mind.
 
I personally believe President Putin's notion of "double negation" to be theoretically untenable. First of all, Putin believes that the Ukrainian state was created by Lenin, especially when he sent Russian workers into the sea of the Ukrainian "petty bourgeoisie" (peasants), which to Putin means that Ukraine is not an independent state.
 
But Putin does not understand that a characteristic of Ukraine at the time was precisely that ethnic and class distinctions overlapped more than in other countries:  the peasantry was largely Ukrainian, the landowners were largely Polish and Russian, the small urban working class was also largely Russian, and the urban business bourgeoisie was largely Jewish.[6] It follows from this that Lenin's expedition of the working class to Ukraine (and especially the inclusion of today's Donbass within Ukraine) to establish a Soviet state was not the incomprehensible and colossal error that Putin claims it to be, let alone a basis for denying that Ukraine is an independent state.
 
Putin's second negation concerns the issue of Ukrainian national identity. It is true that the identity of many ethnic groups under the Tsarist Empire faced complex changes in their transformation into modern nations. An extreme example is the case of Józef Piłsudski (1867-1935), the first Polish president after the First World War, who stipulated in his will that his body be buried in Poland and his heart in Lithuania.
 
However, the complexity of national identity does not negate the fact that for most people, once an identity is formed, it has a certain stability, and to say that a nation is an "imaginary community" is not the same as calling it an "illusory community.”[7] Although Russia and Ukraine have linguistic and religious similarities, this cannot be used to deny Ukraine's independent status as a nation.
 
However, because Putin's "double negation" of Ukraine is the ideological basis and the main motive for Russia's current "special military operation," he has inadvertently left open the possibility, following peace talks with Ukraine, of relaunching mutual trust mechanisms with NATO to resolve the "security dilemma." If the main motivation for the full-scale attack on Ukraine was the imminence of the NATO threat, there would be no room for the establishment of a mutual trust mechanisms. This is perhaps the "cunning of reason,"[8] to cite Hegel.
 
Notes

[1]崔之元, “’安全悖论’、建构主义与乌克兰危机,” published on Cui’s WeChat channel, “Empirical Governance/实验主义治理, on March 5, 2022.

[2]Robert Jervis, "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma," World Politics, 1978, 30. 2: 169.

[3]Alexander Wendt, "Anarchy is What States Make of It: The Social Construction of Power Politics", International Organization, Spring, 1992: 391-425.

[4]See https://mid.ru/ru/ foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790818/?lang=en. Translator’s note:  This website appears to be no longer available in North America.

[5]See the official Kremlin website http://en.kremlin.ru.  Translator’s note:  This website appears to no longer be available in North America.

[6]See Ronald Suny, The Revenge of the Past, Stanford University Press, 1993, p. 43.

[7]See Suny, ibid., p. 12.

[8]Translator’s note:  See here for a succinct explanation of the “cunning of reason.”  This appears to me to be an implicit indictment of Putin.