Putin attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022. No matter the outcome of the war, on the losing side stand Ukraine and Ukrainians. This is because, in the present world order, sovereignty is wielded equally by dictators and democrats, but not by its supposed foundational structure, a nation-state.
The attack against Ukraine is yet another show of how sovereignty is, in reality, determined much as it was before World War I—by those powerful enough to impose how we see and understand world politics, even if today its façade is that of the nation-state. Behind this nation-state façade lie imperial structures that reveal the coloniality of sovereignty—that is, how sovereign power is unequally distributed, falsely attributed to national self-determination, yet legitimized through a rhetoric of nation-statehood, and thereby subject to manipulation.
The outcome is that states and actors with power beyond their nation determine if and when the sovereignty of others matters. Such decisions arise from the the internal interests of great powers in interaction with relations between those powers, in other words, from the dynamics of intra- and inter-imperial relations.
The problem is that dictators like Putin can partake in this game just the same as the United States, the European Union, or China. As such, nation-state politics and sovereignty offer no escape from imperial domination and, furthermore, promote a pervasive rhetorical framework and political imagination that prevents us from seeing or finding other alternatives for legitimately advancing struggles for political autonomy or anti-imperialism. The coloniality of sovereignty doubly holds back such struggles, in terms of both possible action and possible thought. Politics that are anchored in the nation-state can always be undermined through the coloniality of sovereignty. Instead of direct domination, this is a form of symbolic and definitional power that is no different from the imperial rhetoric and discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In this article, I will clarify this argument both historically as well as in reference to Ukraine’s treatment in foreign policy debates before and after the February attack.
Ukraine’s Sovereignty
Before the recent invasion, Ukraine’s sovereignty was freely compromised by great powers in foreign policy debates. Clear manifestations of this were the foreign policy discussions about a possible “Finlandization” type of solution for Ukraine, reportedly discussed among others by Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brezezinski, and French President Emmanuel Macron (login required). Finlandization refers to Finland’s position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The term “Finlandization” was coined during a West German political debate to describe a country that is able to maintain nominal independence and some political and economic gains, with the agreement that external powers can interfere and compromise sovereignty. A 1972 U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report describes Finlandization as a policy of reassurance that demanded “a highly developed sensitivity to Soviet wishes on a wide range of subjects and the ability and willingness to voluntarily restrict their own courses of action.”
However, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent war, Ukraine’s sovereignty has transformed in great power debates into something opposite: a defense of democracy and Western values. Russia’s infringement on an ideal of sovereign rule has been highlighted by many of the same foreign policy power brokers who failed to do so after the 2014 invasion. These two approaches stand in clear contradiction with each other.
Let me be clear, this is a Russian invasion of Ukraine. But it is the structures of world politics anchored in unequal and defunct ideas of national sovereignty that allow for the war and emphasize a sensitivity to changes in the attitudes of great power foreign policy (those states who have the most say in world politics) while overlooking Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine’s sovereignty was and continues to be devalued. In other words, it is not anchored in the Ukrainian nation-state, but rather depends on great power rhetoric and the dynamics of intra- and inter-imperial relations of those powers who control world politics. Yet, those relations are occluded from sight, as national sovereignty is praised one moment and compromised the other. This veil that the coloniality of sovereignty upholds prevents recognition of underlying imperial relations and presents them as nation-state issues, for Ukraine and globally.
Stories and narratives of Russian aggression against democracy, on one hand, and of Ukrainian resistance and global solidarity on the other are real but are narrowly presented through a particular worldview that masks the unequal distribution power and influence. Western support for Ukraine goes hand in hand with a pretense that NATO and the West are not at war, that only an imagined and supposedly sovereign state of Ukraine is at war. Now it is hard to even remember how before February 2022 Ukrainians had to try and tell the rest of the world that Putin in 2014 had already started his invasion of a sovereign state.
Coloniality of Sovereignty
What transformed through the emergence of the sovereign nation-state in Eastern Europe after World War I and after the fall of the Iron Curtain, was that nonnational and anti-imperial politics have been kept at an arm’s length from inter- and intra-imperial political dynamics. The mechanism is one where sovereignty, as well as nonsovereign autonomous politics, have been allowed to operate only through the imagined nation-state. And the discourse over the latter has been controlled by great power foreign policy. Postsocialist societies—from central Asia and the Caucasus to Eastern Europe—experienced this first hand when, after 1989 and 1991 they had to denounce existing local and transnational forms and knowledges of civil society organization and struggles as obsolete Soviet relics.
Putin attacked Ukraine not just because he is a dictator, but because the system and world order of sovereignty was designed to allow that, just as it allowed the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Ukraine never had real self-determination or sovereignty. It had always already been “Finlandized.” Yet, we analyze and frame the war as if the international issue and the threat to the world order of Putin’s attack was due to the breach of Ukraine’s sovereignty and self-determination. With the war lasting longer, Finlandization-type proposals, that undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty just as Putin’s attack does, are again making their way back to foreign policy debates.
This discrepancy between the coloniality of sovereignty, on the one hand, and the national framing and international rhetoric of sovereignty on the other constitutes a way of talking about the world and defining the world that hides imperial power while highlighting national politics. Such a worldview is, in itself, then a part of the reproduction of intra- and inter-imperial power, demonstrated in an extreme fashion by Putin’s war on Ukraine.
As the examples discussed here show, the way world politics is debated, from great power influence to the lack of a common vocabulary about nonnational relations and imperial power, makes it near impossible to succinctly point out the discrepancies between national sovereignty, the sources of sovereignty in the world order, and nonnational anti-imperialism. This is a part of the framework of understanding and of political imaginary within which Ukraine itself, as a sovereign nation-state, never had a real chance to prevent what the existing order allows to be done to it. While cynical acknowledgement of this contradiction is often called Finlandization, wholesale blindness to the contradiction takes a variety of guises—from nationhood and liberty to anticolonial nationalism or to acting as vanguard of the West or of democracy despite a lack of real sovereignty (or vanguard of socialism in Soviet times).
World political power wielded through the coloniality of sovereignty is not the domination of the strongest in a realist sense of international relations, or the result of a fundamentally anarchic context of international relations. This is a historically constructed system made to reproduce that very contradiction, and with it the conditions that allowed for Putin’s attack. The main function is the extension of intra-imperial power politics of nationalism and racism as conceived in the US, Europe, and the Soviet Union to the realm of inter-national relations, which elevates the domestic concerns of great powers to the role of defining what matters in world politics. Simultaneously, this worldview also maintains a rhetorical separation of those intra- and inter-imperial relations from world political debates by portraying them purely as the relations between equally sovereign nation-states—as inter-national.
For further historical reference, I discuss next the much touted comparison between an independent but weak Finland defending itself against the Soviet Union in 1939, and Ukraine today. Tellingly, as the rhetoric shifted from the pre-February suggestions of Ukraine’s Finlandization to the glorification of its imagined sovereignty, so too did the comparisons between Finland and Ukraine shift to Finland’s unexpectedly successful defense of its sovereignty before the Second World War.
From Finlandization to Comparisons with Finland in 1939
In 1939, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union attacked Finland. Not unlike Ukraine today, the only recourse for Finland fighting its Winter War alone, was to appeal to great power rhetoric. For example, the parliament of Finland wrote an appeal to foreign nations (published in the December 11, 1939, edition of the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat) stating that now Finland defends “all that civilized nations hold sacred … as a vanguard of Western civilization, our people now have the right to expect active help from other civilized nations.” Presumably, somehow through this one war, the fate of civilization was being decided in the forests of an accidentally sovereign periphery. Yet, Finland’s supposedly sovereign status was an insignificant blip of imperial world-making. Both Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill had initially considered Finnish independence a ridiculous suggestion, and most Finnish actors agreed. After Stalin’s attack, however, Finland somehow briefly became a representation of civilization against tyranny, a sentiment that soon faded after World War II. If we are to believe in the comparison between Finland’s Winter War and Ukraine’s struggle today, it would paint a bleak picture for the future of Ukrainian self-determination.
What these comparisons to Finland reveal, in reality, is the powerlessness of nation-state sovereignty in the face of imperial politics. Furthermore, despite the comparisons between Finland and Ukraine, from Finlandization to the Winter War, Finland’s position in 1939 or during the Cold War was nothing like that of Ukraine’s now or historically. The two countries are, and have been, different politically, socially, and economically—and especially in terms of their global position and role. But the structures of sovereignty that affected both were the same. This is why the calls for Finlandization of Ukraine before February 24, 2022, were but a display of the disconnect between nation-statehood and the sources of sovereignty, and as such part of the imperial rhetoric that too easily has now shifted to valorizing Ukraine’s imagined sovereignty.
Comparing Finland and Ukraine is a form of ahistorical methodological nationalism. In terms of their inter- and intra-imperial positions, Finland and Ukraine are not, and have not been, comparable. Making the comparison relies on an inter-imperial outlook and is closely connected with the political façade that nation-state sovereignty itself serves. However, the inter-imperial politics that affected Finland in 1939 and Ukraine today, and upon which their sovereignty depends, are relational and historically continuous.
In both cases, the short twentieth century lullaby of pretending nation-state sovereignty somehow to be anti-imperialistic is just a tool for great power politics. This is then a reminder for activists and scholars to look elsewhere for anti-imperialism and autonomous politics.
Intra-Imperial Racism Meets Inter-Imperial Sovereignty
Why then does the war in Ukraine shock the world order more than previous and continuing wars elsewhere? Why does the nationalist right wing of the West so eagerly support Ukraine when they do not support similar struggles elsewhere? Racism is a part of it—racism stemming from the intra-imperial social relations of great powers.
The coloniality of sovereignty is a particular imperial structure that was designed to make national sovereignty a supposed foundation and legitimization of the world, when most of the world would not even be identified as such nations due to racist hierarchies underlying it. It was Eastern Europe for whom national sovereignty was invented in the wake of WWI. Soviets similarly reserved it for recognized nationalities in the union in order to define and control them. When Finland’s independence was debated by the Western powers in 1919, the extremely racist worldview and political agenda of Woodrow Wilson, among others, initially placed Finns outside the small group of nations deemed worthy of independence, and US diplomats worried that recognition of Finland would lead to the recognition of colonies like Madagascar and Indochina. However, once independence was granted, the Finns were all of a sudden portrayed as a race that had gone through “every cycle that the world could demand in political evolution, to the point of an independent people.”
National sovereignty as a universal right is such only to the extent that it creates hierarchies between those deciding on that right and those struggling for it. As Zoltán Ginelli, among many others, has argued, part of the renewed national sovereignty after 89/91 in Eastern Europe was a “return to whiteness,” not unlike the hierarchical elevation suddenly granted to Finland with its independence. This was exacerbated by the veil of historical ignorance regarding Eastern Europe’s role in imperial and anti-imperial relations, a forgetfulness brought about by the reset called “end of history” in 89/91 and a reimagined understanding of Eastern European agency only through a supposedly newly regained national sovereignty.
Taken together, both the façade of national sovereignty and its flip side, the position of (Eastern) European nation-states in global racist hierarchies brings together intra-imperial racism and inter-imperial rhetoric of nationalism in a mutually reinforcing manner—a dynamic that highlights the coloniality of sovereignty. This reality, and its accompanying instrumentality for reproducing the intra- and inter-imperial interests of great powers, should be dismantled to restore nonnational anti-imperial politics and the agency of nonsovereign autonomy seeking actors. This requires analyzing why a rhetoric of nation-state sovereignty has come to dominate over other possibilities and how it reproduces the inequalities of its origins. In other words, it requires provincializing it, just as Manuela Boatca has suggested of the closely related coloniality of citizenship.
Revealing the coloniality inherent in sovereignty shows that alternative politics of nonsovereign autonomy and self-determination—ones that reject racism, authoritarianism, nationalist bigotry, and colonial world politics—are possible. This requires historically contextualizing and contemporarily comparing differing spatialities and temporalities of national sovereignty to reveal political interests and motivations steeped in intra- and inter-imperial politics, as has been made starkly visible by the temporal divider of February 24, 2022, in Ukraine’s case.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
