French Film Blurred

One of the great themes of cinema is the experience of youth. This is partly because the medium lends itself to communicating the physical and emotional thrills of those for whom the body is effortlessly responsive and so much of experience is novel. Consider Alana and Gary running along the street in Licorice Pizza, or Buddy leaping through the air in Belfast, to pick two recent examples. But it also reflects the popularity of cinema among the young, which in turn means the demand for constant rejuvenation in a manner closer to popular music than literary fiction. Older, established directors and screenwriters receive due respect and can (usually) still get films made, but we hunger for new ways of seeing, new ways of telling stories, and that means new ways of encountering youth on the screen. This inevitably fuels the iconoclasm of youth, but that phrase is just a tired cliché. More interesting is the resentment of the old, specifically the generation who came of age in the 1960s - a time when TV was taking over from cinema but for that very reason the straitjacket was being eased off the older medium. Just as they criticised their parent's generation then, and derided the tame fare of the BBC, now they are criticising their children's generation, which came of age after the millennium and social media. 

I'm going to discuss this further by looking at three French films: two recent releases and one classic from 1960. Paris, 13th District (Les Olympiades in the original French) is in cinemas now. Gagarine had a limited release at the end of last year but is available online. Breathless (Au Bout de Souffle), Jean-Luc Godard's famous (and infamous) debut, enjoyed its sixtieth anniversary during the first lockdown. That they are all French means they are related sociologically as well as cinematically, but the wider social and political points apply well beyond the boundaries of France. Looking at these issues at one remove from the UK avoids the risk of the parochial, which is something all too evident in films like Licorice Pizza and Belfast: the one an arch comedy about a self-satisfied society in which youth is a commodity, the other a sentimental erasure of the political in which aged wisdom schools the innocent young. While those films compartmentalise youth, the two recent French releases engage it as a problematic, but with very different intentions. One sees the problem as the deficiencies of the young themselves, as if these were somehow independent of society (or even a threat to it), while the other sees the problem as the growing antipathy displayed by society (i.e. the middle-aged and old) towards the young.

In Jacques Audiard's Paris, 13th District, Émilie (Lucie Zhang) and Camille (Makita Samba) are solipsistic and selfish twenty-somethings who come together for economic reasons (flat-sharing), enjoy a physical if catty relationship, change jobs and generally don't get anywhere with their lives while irritating their families. There are moments of grace and humour, and plenty of convincing sex, but neither character is sympathetic, despite subtle performances by the actors. At one point, having dissed his sister's plans to become a stand-up, Camille's father tells him, "No one gives a fuck what you think!" [because you don't care about anyone else]. This feels like the director talking. In the third strand, Nora (Noémie Merlant) is a thirty-something but still naive woman, fleeing provincial life and a coercive relationship, who has become a mature but still aimless student. Her path will cross with Émilie and Camille, the latter sexually, but her chief relationship, and arguably the film's saving grace as a story, is the burgeoning one she enjoys online with Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a cam-girl whom Nora is mistaken for by her younger classmates after donning a blonde wig at a freshers party. 

Though a technically accomplished film, notably in its black and white photography (more reminiscent of Manhattan than anything in the French tradition, unless you count The Battle of Algiers), it is an unfocused story. This is less because it is essentially a portmanteau - knitting together three tales by the American comic book artist Adrian Tomine, now combined in a screenplay with original elements written by Audiard, Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius - than because it seems fascinated by the shortcomings of its young protagonists, which I suspect reflects Audiard's interests more than those of his co-writers. That Nora is a more sympathetic character suggests that this is where Sciamma's hand is to be found, a suspicion reinforced by Merlant's previous role in Sciamma's 2019 film, A Portrait of a Woman on Fire. Audiard is no stranger to misanthropy - A Prophet is a Hobbesian parable, Dheepan a French Taxi Driver - but here his target is specifically youth rather than mankind in general, and the chief charge is that they are stupid and unreliable because they are self-absorbed. 

Nora's classmates are presented as little more than a mob that is triggered into slut-shaming by the most trivial prop and the pernicious effects of social media. (As a rule of thumb, anyone who thinks social media is leading to the decline of civilisation does not know what they are talking about.) Though Nora satisfyingly clocks one of her tormentors in the street, there is little realism in this part of the story: none of her classmates appears to doubt the rumour that she is a cam-girl, while they appear to be as familiar with Amber Sweet as with a pop star. The developing romance between Nora and Amber is satisfying (both actresses are excellent) but it's also fantastical, and apparently designed to serve up the banal observation that relationships in meatspace are superior to hyperspace. While Nora's strand works better than Émilie's or Camille's, this is because it is closer to a fairy-tale: an innocent girl suffers a near-magical transformation and is saved from a hostile crowd and various predatory wolves through the intercession of a semi-divine character combining Godmother and Prince Charming. There is even a kiss straight out of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In contrast, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's Gagarine is a story about youthful aspiration. The plot centres on the real-world decision to condemn and then demolish a Parisian housing project, the Cité Gagarine, which was named after the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gargarin, who ceremonially opened it in 1963 (we see archive footage, notable for showing an already racially mixed community who have all dressed up for the occasion). Alséni Bathily plays the suitably named Youri, a young man whose mother is absent but who is part of a clearly supportive community that tolerates eccentrics and a peripheral Roma family including Diana, played by Lina Khoudri (recently seen in Wes Anderson's The French Disptach). Youri has taken it upon himself, with assistance by his friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven), to repair as much of the project as possible in the hope, vain as it transpires, of stopping the demolition. As the residents are decanted and their community broken up, Youri retreats into his fantasy of space flight, transforming a hidden area of the project into a spacecraft with hydroponic cultivation. Diana and Dali (Finnegan Oldfield), a petty drug dealer who is also disgusted at the destruction of the community, discover Youri's secret but both are eventually forced out by the authorities and he is left on his own: increasingly ill and withdrawn in depression.

Though it nods towards social issues, such as poverty and racism, Gagarine is really a film about sociability - extended families as well as the compact family (or crew) Youri briefly creates with Diana and Dali. The iconic moment is when Youri organises a community get-together to view a solar eclipse, rigging up screens to shield eyes and pointing his community literally at the nearest star. It is a symbol not of oppression or pessimism but of optimism and common purpose, as was the naming of the housing project, even if it turns out to be as fleeting as the eclipse itself. Gagarine is a film of much lyricism. Some of the photography is gorgeous and stands as a testament to the art and ambition of the novice feature directors, and it is ably supported by a lovely score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, the Russian brothers who provided the music for Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2017 film Loveless. For a French film, there are some notable British echoes, from Charles Crichton's 1947 Hue and Cry (Youri has a loyal following among the local kids) to Ben Wheatley's 2015 High-Rise (in which the protagonist must improvise among the ruins).

What distinguishes Gagarine from Paris, 13th District is that the young are not only varied in their attitudes and clever in multiple ways, but they are well-integrated into their families and wider communities. Houssam and Diana choose their families over Youri but never lose their respect and love for him. Youri's alienation from his mother is clearly atypical and presented as problematic, while in contrast Émilie, Camille and Nora's distance from theirs is presented as all too typical if regrettable (but with the blame mainly on them, Nora being a partial exception). It is also noticeable, by its absence, that social media does not dominate the lives of the young in Gagarine. The local gang, with Dali prominent, sit on plastic chairs in a common area to debate life and mock passersby, as such youth have done since time immemorial (of the two films, Gagarine is much the closer to I Vitelloni). The younger kids are occupied running around, doing what kids do. There's obviously a degree of sentimentalisation here, though thankfully nothing on the scale of Belfast (the feel-good sectarian bigotry film of the year), but there's also a lot of truth. The film orginated in a documentary about the break-up of Cité Gagarine. It didn't invent the community's cohesion or the kids' sociable behaviour, let alone manufacture its regret.

Breathless provides an interesting contrast to both films. The shallowness and self-absorption of the characters in Godard's startling debut - Jean-Paul Belmondo's petty criminal Michel and Jean Seberg's American drifter Patricia - have obvious parallels with Camille and Émilie, even if the latter are better educated and less pliable respectively (that's progress for you). The shock of the film in 1960 had as much to do with the director's use of characters that we struggle to actively sympathise with as the jump cuts, which weren't novel but had never been used so extensively. The latter were attributed to Godard's desire to cut the running time down to 90 minutes without cutting entire scenes, but perhaps by happenstance they also served to emphasise the characters lack of focus and disregard for consequentiality. Another recurrent trope is Patricia's uncertainty over the meaning of French words, which gives her a noticeably affectless air (I suppose that's the disadvantage of not speaking a second language, as Wire sang). It remains an impressive work, despite its rebarbative qualities, that mixes a fascination with American cinema (specfically what would become known in the 1970s as film noir) with the verité of war reportage (the Algerian War was still going on and Raoul Coutard, the director of photography, had been in Indochina) and the influences of Italian neo-realism and Franco-German existentialism.

What links Breathless and Gagarine is what the former occludes, namely the humanism of those others pillars of the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Agnes Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) which bookend Godard's debut. In other words, if Paris, 13th District sits within a tradition of cinematic misanthropy and contempt (Godard would go on to make a film, Le Mepris, on just that subject in 1963), Gagarine sits in the non-Godardian tradition in which sympathy is central both to the main character's engagement with the world and their treatment by the filmmaker. One thing Breathless shares with The 400 Blows is the closing shot, in which Patricia and Antoine Doinel each look directly at the camera. But while both are challenging, Patricia's is a look that settles into disinterest and a reluctance to accept responsibility while Antoine's remains hopeful and engaged. Neither Paris, 13th District nor Gagarine attempt anything so provocative, but their endings are both different and comparable to those earlier works, the one urging compromise and maturation - in other words, surrender - the other that the young should hang on to their dreams and light up the world. Both films are worth the ticket price, but its is Gagarine that will leave you hopeful for humanity.

Sanctions

If Oliver Bullough's recently published Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals has been fortunate in its timing, the same could also be said of Nicholas Mulder's The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. What these works share, apart from explanatory subtitles with a slightly antique air, is a focus on international relations. Though Bullough employs the prism of Britain and provides anecdotes about status-hungry oligarchs and privacy-obsessed money launderers, the economic regime he describes is simply that of globalised capital: deracinated wealth moving through the City of London in search of high returns as much as the avoidance of tax. Likewise, Mulder's concern is with states as the monopolists of violence. But sanctions are also a tool that governments increasingly deploy against their own citizens. Where once this would be seen mainly in the form of financial measures against organised labour, such as the sequestration of trade union funds in the 1980s, today its chief form is that of benefit sanctions: the disciplining of atomised labour through the conditional withholding of welfare. Another form is restrictions and fines based on probability rather than proven guilt, such as criminal behaviour orders (the successors of ASBOs) and fixed penalty notices.

Sanctions can also be deployed against businesses and other economic actors, as we've seen with the freezing of Russian oligarch assets or the threats to penalise social media platforms that don't adequately police content. But generally government is reluctant to sanction business when it is exercising the prerogatives of capital, particularly when it does so in direct conflict with labour, such as P&O firing its UK staff so that it can employ foreign workers on lower wages and worse conditions. The greater willingness to sanction oligarchs arises from changing attitudes towards private property. While proprietarianism remains hegemonic, the galloping wealth inequality of the last forty years, and the tendency for the super-rich to distribute their assets across multiple jurisdictions, has seen tentative steps towards the acceptance of expropriation as a legitimate tool of the liberal state at the margin. But this isn't to suggest that the state has decided to embrace the prescriptions of Piketty et al and tax excessive wealth across the board, any more than it has decided that oligarch mansions can be squatted. Rather it aims to preserve the bulk of wealth by sacrificing those deemed lacking in virtue, such as Roman Abramovich. It's also no coincidence that those singled out happen to be foreigners.

The current exception to the principle that property is sacrosanct is premised on the idea that UK-based property owned by foreigners may be ill-gotten: the product of corruption or looting in other countries. The introduction of unexplained wealth orders in 2017 provided a legal basis for confiscation, but these instruments have rarely been used and are likely to be successful only in the most egregious cases. What UWOs have done however is normalise the idea that the UK-based assets of foreigners are essentially held on licence. Behind this emergent idea lies the xenophobic belief that a foreigner owning British property is inherently questionable. This is part of a wider prejudice that occasionally breaks the surface, for example in the suspicion that immigrants get preferential treatment in the allocation of social housing, or in bigots like Jim Davidson claiming that homeless ex-service people should be prioritised over Ukrainian refugees. Implicit in this is the idea of a national patrimony, which in turn drives the popular distaste for benefit cheats and the consequent acceptance of benefit sanctions: protecting "our" money.

It's worth dwelling for a moment on the concept of ill-gotten gains, given that this is central to the "culture war" over the history and representation of empire. It's also worth noting that the suspicion that great wealth repatriated to the UK was the product of corruption and looting in other countries is not a recent development. Consider the impact of the East India Company's nabobs on eighteenth century aristocratic society or the trial of Warren Hastings. While current debates understandably focus on the great crime of slavery in the Caribbean, we shouldn't forget that wealth was criminally extracted from every corner of the empire and invested in the UK, and in nascent industry as much as stately homes. The excuse offered for the persistence of this money in British society, and the corresponding refusal to consider reparations, is the passage of time. Thus David Cameron's inheritance of wealth built on slavery did not preclude him from becoming Prime Minister, any more than his responsibility for an austerity programme that increased poverty precludes him from volunteering for a food-bank. We can see this process in real-time too as Evgeny Lebedev disassociates himself from his own father and pledges loyalty to a UK that generously ennobled him in return for his opaque wealth being funneled into British journalism. 

The truth is that money-laundering and reputation-laundering were both central to the development of empire, rather than being a new grift that the UK stumbled on after the 1956 Suez crisis in Bullough's telling. Indeed the apogee of this was the formalisation of empire in the mid-nineteenth century as the privateering approach of the merchant companies gave way to imperial government and the self-serving idea that Britain was engaged in a civilising mission. In practice, much of this mission was trade-oriented policing operations against weaker states, particularly in Africa and the Far East, most famously the humiliations suffered by China at the hands of multiple imperial powers. While gunboat diplomacy often meant war, it increasingly meant economic sanctions as well, particularly during the first era of globalisation after 1870. The preference for sanctions in the twentieth century was not simply revulsion over the carnage occasioned by the First World War - blockade and sanctions killed millions, after all - but a recognition that the world was governed by international capital. The UK was the world's policeman because of the City of London as much as the Royal Navy. 

Though the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations in the interwar period were held to be a failure in stopping the rise of Fascism (and Mulder would argue they perhaps encouraged it), there was no let up in their use after the Second World War, particularly by the new global policeman, the USA. What was also notable was the continuation of sanctions that directly affected the mass of the population in the form of basic commodities such as fuel, food and medicine, as seen in the coercive regimes imposed on Cuba, Iran and Iraq. The use of targeted sanctions against a country's social elite was often more controversial, for example in the case of sporting and cultural sanctions against South Africa. The current sanctions being imposed against named Russian oligarchs shouldn't lead us to imagine that there has been a shift in policy towards targeting the rich. This is simply a reflection of the fact that the Russian elite's wealth has been internationalised, much as it has been in other countries (see the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Swiss Leaks etc). What we're looking at is the product of globalisation and the consequent moves by the leading economies to start to rein in the worst abuses of tax havens, from Luxembourg to the Virgin Islands.

The reality is that sanctions are still being imposed on ordinary Russian people and they will suffer more than any oligarchs. While they may not own foreign bank assets, the freezing of these is causing an increase in the cost of imported goods as well as the cost of servicing overdrafts and mortgages. The withdrawal of foreign businesses and capital will also lead to higher unemployment, even allowing for greater import substitution. Many domestic producers are dependent on foreign technology and cannot substitute for imports. It probably won't be as bad as the shock therapy of the 1990s, but just as that was a form of purgative meant to extirpate homo sovieticus, so the new sanctions are intended to encourage regime change in Moscow rather than military withdrawal from Ukraine. But punishing ordinary Russians for the sins of Vladimir Putin is likely to be counter-productive. Russia has moved rapidly from a pro-Western position in the early-90s, hopeful even of joining NATO, to a position of mistrust and antagonistic chauvinism. Putin has been preparing Russian society for Western sanctions since the Georgian War of 2008, hence the growing paranoia and the insistence on a civilisational clash. While he might have optimistically hoped that the invasion of Ukraine would end with a swift victory, he can't have been under any illusions that sanctions, however patchy, would persist for a long time afterwards.

One part of the quickly-assembled consensus on the Ukraine catastrophe is that it had been coming since the Orange Revolution of 2004, and perhaps since the start of the Second Chechen War in 1999. But this geopolitical interpretation serves to obscure the material, specifically the turn against globalisation that began around the millennium and the division of society by age that this has given rise to: on the one hand, those who benefited from the original process in the form of property wealth but who resented the cultural disruption; on the other hand, those with no chance of benefiting to the same degree but for whom the cultural changes reflect their own history. This division is seen in all societies affected by globalisation, but it tends to be more acute in those areas where the old are more fearful of loss, whether because of past economic trauma or rapid social change, and the young more likely to leave due to limited opportunities, whether that be small towns in Northern England or small towns in Eastern Ukraine. 

Despite the emphasis on Zelensky's relative youth, Ukraine, like Russia, is an ageing society, and this is likely to be accelerated by the current movement of refugees into the European Union. In contrast, youth is becoming more politically important in countries like the UK, not least because migration is offsetting declining birth rates, even after Brexit. Resistance to this demographic change has prompted a regressive politics focused on the priorities of the old and the deliberate alienation of the young (Labour's ejection of the "Corbynistas" is largely a generational purge), but this looks like simply delaying the inevitable. One sign of the growing importance of youth is an increasing antipathy to domestic sanctions and the coercive functions of the state (such as the police), which disproportionately impact the young. In contrast, in countries like Russia and Ukraine there will likely be growing support for domestic sanctions as the population ages, which means repression of the young, performative bigotry (anti-gay rights, anti-immigrant etc) and the permanent hunt for internal enemies. This will only be exacerbated by external sanctions. In choosing financial measures and cultural boycotts over more risky intervention in Ukraine, the West is simply reinforcing the conditions that gave rise to the crisis. 

(I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea

It's remarkable that the sanctioning of a single Russian oligarch, albeit one who owns a major football club, should have led to a flurry of navel-gazing and breast-beating about the very nature of Britain. In fact, this concern is largely focused on the hermetic economy and elite society of London, or "the capital’s squalid love affair with Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy", as the Daily Telegraph so charmingly put it. Even the more analytical commentary, such as by Larry Elliott in the Guardian, has tended to see "Londongrad" as a symptom of domestic economic weakness, notably the need to suck in foreign capital to achieve a balance of payments: "we love living beyond our means", as he explained in a phrase that could have appeared in a British newspaper at any time over the last 70 years. But it's easy to get this out of proportion. All the billions spent on Central London townhouses and Home Counties mansions by Russian oligarchs are dwarfed by the larger sums flowing through the City of London from investment funds in East Asia and elsewhere into the wider property market, while foreign direct investment by Russia in the UK is little more than a fifth of the level of China. The issue isn't that much of the Premier League is now owned by foreigners, but that much of Britain's industry and capital stock is.

The government's relative slowness in sanctioning Abramovich and other Russian oligarchs was popularly put down to the compromised Conservative Party's reluctance to offend past and future donors, but the fact that it has now proceeded shows that it calculates the economic consequences to be marginal, and certainly a lot less politically painful than the increase in energy prices. Just as it is absurd to imagine that paying for a tennis match with Boris Johnson led to Brexit, so it is foolish to forget that separating rich foreigners from their money in exchange for social status and prestige has long been a British industry. Oliver Bullough's recently published 'Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals' dates this to the 1950s: "We needed a new business model after America took over as the world’s superpower". There's some truth to this, notably the City of London's revival around the Eurodollar market and the growth of tax avoidance through Crown Territories in the face of high marginal rates in North America and Europe, but it ignores that Britain outside the City was pursuing a very different, state-directed economic model based on investment in domestic industry (see David Edgerton's 2018 book 'The Rise and Fall of the British Nation').

Bullough's thesis also ignores that the concierge model was in place even at the height of Britain's global pre-eminence in the 1870s, when argricultural depression led to a wave of rich American heiresses becoming the wives of cash-strapped landed aristocrats (Winston Churchill being one famous consequence of this foreign direct investment). Other titled families sold off Rennaisance and Baroque masterpieces, acquired by forbears on European grand tours in the eighteenth century, to newly-minted American millionaires, a process detailed in David Cannadine's 1990 book, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. This highlights an important fact about British history: that monetising its cultural and symbolic capital, like flogging off the family silver, has been an ever-present feature rather than the recourse of hard times. Britain really is a nation of shop-keepers, which is why "exit through the gift shop" is wholly in keeping with the envrionment of a stately home rather than a category error. Likewise, the marketing of the Victoria and Albert Museum in the late-1980s as "An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached" was a perfect encapsulation of the period and even of the V&A's purpose as a celebration of commerical art and design.

Andy Beckett is one of the better writers still found on the comment pages of the Guardian, but even he succumbs to this false memory in a piece heavily-influenced by Bullough's book. Thus the servicing of the rich is held to have only extended to foreigners "in recent decades", Switzerland has been "doing it for longer" (the Swiss banking industry only really took off after 1848 and was boosted by World War One), and the City of London "used to finance the British empire but now largely works for its successors" (it always worked well beyond the formal empire, notably in South America and the Far East). Beckett does acknowledge Edgerton's counter-narrative, but only to imagine a fork in the road: "Could post-imperial Britain have chosen to provide different, less morally compromised services to the outside world? Arguably for much of the postwar period it did. From the 60s to the 90s, what Britain primarily sold to foreign visitors was the mass culture made possible by social democracy: innovations in pop music, street fashion and television, subsidised by more generous unemployment benefits, a more confident BBC and free university education."

But even this is misleading because it suggests a serial development that simply didn't happen: a democratic and meritocratic society, forged in wartime, that reverted after the 1970s to one of deference and cupidity, fuelled first by Arab oil money and then by the galloping inequality of Russia, China and India from the 90s onwards. 1979 appears in retrospect as a watershed between social democracy and neoliberalism, but the latter was evident in the work of Keynes and Beveridge while the former remains stubbornly rooted in popular attitudes, from support for rail and utility nationalisation to the defence of the NHS and BBC. The reality is that British culture has always been a combination, a dialectic even, between the democratic and the elitist. In the postwar era, we had continuing pretensions to social and geopolitical superiority coexisting with democratic impulses and class antagonism. This was nowhere more evident than in the vogue for spy novels. Consider the contrast of Ian Fleming's exceptional James Bond with Len Deighton's everyman Harry Palmer. Those polar opposites are essentially English characters, not British, but their slipperiness - Bond's Scottish ancestry, Palmer's anonymity - hints at an ambivalence and ambiguity that itself becomes character in the work of John Le Carré. 

English identity has been a mix of the high and low since the days of Chaucer, and it has always been open to foreign money and influence, irrespective of the fortunes of its domestic elites, since at least the emigrés of the 1790s (consider how few monarchs before George III even regarded English as their first language). The expansion of that identity to Britain as a whole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was also marked by the conscious absorption of vulgar forms, such as the sentimentalisation of Gaelic culture by Walter Scott. Parallel to this is the emergence of a genuine proletarian culture, as outlined by EP Thompson in 'The Making of the English Working Class'. Where Thompson breaks off his narrative we encounter the Chartists, who are arguably the first social democrats in the British tradition and would remain radical even in the context of 1945. All of this is happening before the zenith of British power. It's also worth noting that this zenith coincides with the popularisation of professional football and its subsequent expansion to global dominance in the early 20th century. Chelsea FC (a johnny-come-lately in English football terms) was founded in 1905.

The UK wasn't suddenly corrupted in the 1990s, though there's plenty of evidence that this was a period of particularly loose ethical behaviour (see Mandelson et al). That's not to say that there hasn't been an awful lot of corruption since then, but what we've seen isn't out of the ordinary. Viewed over the long term, Russian oligarchs have had negligible political influence in the UK. Evgeny Lebedev (now a British citizen and peer) is probably the most actively influential and he is regarded as a joke figure - a preening snob - by most of the domestic elite (this is, of course, a common attitude to parvenus and wealthy foreigners that can be seen across history and was notably fictionalised by the likes of Trollope and Thackeray). In terms of economic influence they are inconsequential, especially if compared to previous immigrant communities such as the Huguenots or East African Asians, or modern Indian and Chinese industrialists. Even in the field of sport Russian influence has been marginal. It is American billionaires and Middle Eastern petro-monarchies that dominate the Premier League. In imagining that the inscrutable Roman Abramovich tells us something about the state of the nation, we are once more being distracted from what is in front of our noses.

Schools of Thought

John Mearsheimer, the doyen of the American realist school of international relations, has become an unlikely YouTube star because of a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago in which he pinned the blame for Ukraine's woes firmly on NATO and the EU. A shorter article from 2014 makes much the same points but also usefully describes the liberal-realist dichotomy: "Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy." Though the Western discourse on Russia looks like it will be dominated by a clash of the realist and liberal schools, it's worth noting that there is also a third to consider: constructivism. This emphasises socially constructed ideas over material factors. These ideas include national identities (e.g. Vladimir Putin's insistence that Ukraine isn't really a nation), historical justification (e.g. Putin's reassesment of the Bolsheviks' support for national self-determination as a betrayal), and norms about state behaviour (e.g. if the population of Ukraine is being "liberated", civilian casualties must be avoided, or at least downplayed). 

The liberal IR school is founded on the idealist view that peace can best be achieved through cooperation, and not just between states but at all levels of society. To this end, it advocates the benefits of trade and the value of international institutions and NGOs. It also emphasises the pacific tendencies of democracy and the importance of a robust civil society in restraining adventurism (neither is entirely reliable, as 2003 proved). In contrast, realism is founded on the Hobbesian view that the natural condition of the world is anarchy, that the sovereign state is paramount and motivated by self-preservation, and that states collectively are in perpetual competition for resources, respect and hegemony (realism is subdivided into defensive and offensive perspectives that believe states prioritise balance and hegemony respectively - Mearsheimer is of the latter tendency, hence his belief that NATO expansion could only be considered an existential threat by Russia). Though the field of international relations traces its intellectual lineage back to Machiavelli, Hobbes and Kant, it's really a product of the twentieth century. That's not to say that theories of state relations didn't already exist, but that they were subsumed into broader ideas about empire, religion and race. The discipline really comes into its own after World War One and the dominance of the Wilsonian idealism that led to the creation of the League of Nations. 

Realism was a critique of this idealist tendency that was heavily influenced by first the rise of Fascism and Nazism, with their emphases on national competition and the struggle for resources, and then by the emergent Cold War and the revived idea of a balance of powers. The early 1950s marks the highpoint of realism in the form of the Truman Doctrine and the theory of containment.  But while this remained the dominant paradigm in terms of US-Soviet relations, it started to weaken as an all-purpose explanatory framework in the face of the Third World liberation struggles of the 50s and 60s and the growing nonaligned movement. This resulted in a revival of the idealist framework (now called liberal) with its emphasis on institutions, trade and soft power, culminating in the superpower détente of the early-70s. Superficially, the Reagan years marked a revival of hardnosed realism (despite fantasies like the "Star Wars" Strategic Defence Initiative), but in reality this was the beginning of the dominance of the liberal school in the form of the Washington Consensus and globalisation. Though it possessed a theory of peace, liberalism was obliged by its expansion to develop a theory of war, which birthed the liberal interventionism of the 1990s. This would eventually run into the sand in Iraq, and latterly exit down the runway of Kabul airport, prompting revived interest in the realist framework.

Moscow's current attitude clearly has a constructivist dimension, not only in terms of Putin's ideas about Russia's historic role and the reality of Ukraine as an independent country, but also in a belief that the West looks down on Russia and is fundamentally malevolent. There is clearly a desire to humiliate the US and the EU as much as Ukraine's pro-Western government. Some of this can be attributed to blunders by the West, or more specifically the US, but it also points to a very real determination to block Russia's full integration into the first world order: to keep it as a second or even third-tier power in a unipolar world. The expansion of NATO in an essentially nominal manner (e.g. "tripwire" troop deployments in the Baltic states) was a liberal initiative intended to symbolically extend that order to Russia's borders but no futher. While this prompted a compensatory Eurasianism among some Russian thinkers, the main response was simple resentment at the all too obvious slight. This has been personalised by Western commentators as "the warped vision of one man", or as evidence of his "mental instability" and "sick political imagination". Such views are typical of a tradition that treats the rulers of Russia as all-powerful but prone to paranoid isolation and mania. This "personalism" avoids any realist engagement with Russia's actions - i.e. treating them as rationally self-interested and reflecting broader social forces than just the whims of the ruler. Instead, we end up with shallow psychoanalysis: a cross between old-style Kremlinology and a daytime TV inquisition.

It also plays into the liberal idea that international relations depends on cooperation at other levels within society: in other words, a form of soft decapitation strategy in which the head of state is bypassed and becomes little more than a figurehead, obliged to accept the international liberal order. This reached a peak in the 1990s when Boris Yeltsin (while actually laying the foundations of today's capitalist autocracy) became a parody of the disempowered and eccentric Tsar. From the perspective of Russians, this was deeply humiliating, but the shame arose not merely from Yeltsin's drunken incapacity but from the trashing of the economy during the years of shock-therapy and the failure to resist or moderate the West's interventions in the former Yuogslavia. It also became clear at this stage that Russia was being offered a particular development path that meant being held at arms-length by the West. The model of globalisation Russia was encouraged to adopt was based on a third world template: an extractive economy, dependent on foreign capital investment and imports, and vulnerable to the fluctuations of commodity markets and the predations of politically-connected criminals. It made some rich but it also rankled. In this context, NATO expansion was seen as part of a wider strategy of condescension and discipline.

Russia is poorer, more isolated and weaker than it should be given its history and resources (compare its trajectory with the other so-called BRICS, notably China and India). Some of this is self-inflicted, but much of it is down to the disaster capitalism of the 1990s and the subsequent inability, or lack of enthusiasm, to break away from the extractive economic model and invest sufficiently in its own productive and intellectual capital. It should not be forgotten that Putin came to power on a promise to end the chaos of that era. His realist offer of security was more compelling than the alternative offer of futher liberal adventure. While this has led to another era of stagnation, the liberal offer remains unattractive. Viewed from Russia, the liberal world is prone to financial crises and destabilising foreign interventions. The West's intentions do appear plausibly threatening - NATO has expanded and it and the EU have (perhaps carelessly) encouraged Ukraine and Georgia to believe that accession will happen. And we shouldn't ignore Putin's long-running campaign to paint the West as decadent - hence the instrumental homophobia, anti-feminism and Islamophobia that so thrills his rightwing Western admirers. While any resolution of the current crisis may require a strong dose of realism, it's important to recognise how much Russia sees international relations in ideational rather than material terms.

But the material remains important. We think of oligarchs as heading energy combines with murky origins, or having taken over factories in semi-criminal ways, but they're perhaps better thought of as a comprador class - i.e. as agents of international capital - taking a cut from imports as well as exports and facilitating foreign direct investment. This is one reason why they spend so much time in the world's financial centres. But despite being personally liberal in many cases, or at least happy to enjoy the fruits of a liberal society in their Italian Villas and London townhouses, the oligarchs aren't going to lead a bourgeois revolution against Putin precisely because their comprador status depends on the maintenance of the current economic model. The revolutionary class in Russia today is arguably the domestic middle class that formed after the recovery in 2000, who lack accessible foreign assets but have become dependent on foreign imported goods and so are vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations. These are the people trying to withdraw dollars and euros from Russian banks this week. The urban working class and pensioners bore the brunt of the shock therapy of the 1990s, but they are less exposed in today's economy because basic needs can still be supplied domestically in rubles. 

If Putin is to be challenged, it will come about through the anxiety of the class most likely to suffer from continuing economic sanctions by the West because of their restricted buying power. The Russian Central Bank can potentially hold out for a long time if oil and gas revenues (which aren't currently affected by the SWIFT embargo) continue to provide a flow of foreign exchange to offset frozen foreign assets, but the middle class will struggle to maintain their living standards in the face of rising prices for imported goods and high interest rates on mortgages and bank loans. This is also the class most likely to welcome a liberal future and thus urge a compromise with the West. The internal opposition to Putin, which coalesced around the mercurial Alexi Navalny, is a contradictory mix of a working class that wants protection from neoliberalism (which it identifies with the 1990s), a growing middle class that would happily embrace it (and which identifies it with the relative prosperity of Eastern European members of the EU), and an elite layer imbricated with the oligarchs and the upper classes of the media and culture that remains pro-capital and unenthusiastic about reducing inequality (e.g. by introducing progressive taxation).

But just as the domestic opposition to Putin is fragmented and largely incoherent (repression and the corruption of Putin's inner circle have been the unifying factors), so the West hasn't presented a consistent front. This isn't simply a matter of the hypocrisy (or realpolitik, if you prefer) of Western leaders first cultivating Putin after the Second Chechen War and then admonishing him over Georgia and Crimea. Nor is it just about the different attitudes in the European Union correlating with dependency on Russian gas imports. More fundamentally it reflects the tension between the realist and liberal worldviews and their internal contradictions. For example, this week we have seen liberals eulogising Ukraine as a bastion of democracy but also demanding that NATO impose a no-fly zone at the risk of triggering a nuclear exchange on its territory: the perpetual peace of the grave. Meanwhile, realists have not been shy in blaming NATO, the EU and Ukraine for allowing the Minsk Agreements to curdle, yet seem almost blasé at the prospect of a massive increase in German military spending and the EU becoming a military actor.  

The left is divided on Ukraine. Though this has been portrayed by both media participants on the left (e.g. Paul Mason and George Monbiot) and critics on the right as a division between the instinctively anti-American (to the point of dismissing some of them as neo-Stalinist "tankies") and those demanding solidarity in support of national self-determination (in the tradition of Lenin and Trotsky), it is better seen as a more straightforward divide between liberals and realists. This isn't new. The left has always had this tension, founded on a materialism that bends towards realism and an idealism that bends towards the revolutionary and utopian urges of Kantian liberalism. The divide is perhaps more evident in the US than in the UK, the latter discourse being polluted by the opportunism of the current Labour leadership in labelling any call for peace a one-sided attack on NATO and grounds for expulsion. Ben Wallace-Wells describes the opposition to the liberal school in the US as "composed of China hawks, doctrinaire realists, anti-imperialists, and people exhausted by the forever wars. ... Their sensibility is tragic rather than romantic, and they come together conditionally, declaring all the while how much they can’t stand one another." The point is not merely the heterogeneity but the idea that an ecumenical realism is being constructed in opposition to the liberal orthodoxy.

That comment about the tragic and the romantic captures something essential about realism and liberalism respectively: the one pessimistic, the other optimistic (note the Gramscian echo). But the paradox is that it is optimism and romanticism on the part of the West that has led to disaster in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This isn't because, as thinkers such as John Gray would have it, liberalism in international affairs (or neoliberalism more broadly) is a teleological mania whose roots lie in 1789. If it were, NATO would now be approaching the gates of Kyiv just as it would have entered the gates of Damascus ten years ago. In reality, the US remains fundamentally realist in its outlook despite the liberal rhetoric. This is most obvious in its dealings with China and the wider Asia-Pacific arena. The truth is that there are certain parts of the world where the liberal worldview can be indulged, even through to strategic failure, simply because the consequences are limited (the War on Terror has produced relatively few casualties in the West while boosting the security state and military-industrial complex). Ukraine sits on the conceptual boundary between the liberal and realist worlds, and is further complicated by a constructivist adversary, which makes liberal adventurism too risky (though it also suggests the conflict will be contained).

Though the different schools of international relations seek to explain the world, we should also recognise that they have an instrumental value: that they are tools for changing the world. As the global hegemon, the US will employ both realist and liberal perspectives to suit the circumstances (you could even map this onto the Gramscian framework of the war of manoeuvre and the war of position). In Europe it remains liberal, in the Pacific it remains realist. Likewise, China will always bias towards realism. It does not share the idealism of the West, which reflects both its cultural chauvinism and a historically-conditioned respect for non-interference. While some commentators have worried that NATO's unwillingness to intervene militarily in Ukraine will embolden China in respect of Taiwan, it should be obvious that the Chinese dismay at Russia's actions suggests a healthy realism about the dangers of destabilisation (also, China has never swayed in its belief that Taiwan will eventually be reunited, but it remains, for now, strategically patient, as it was with Hong Kong). Russia is likely to remain imbued with a constructivist viewpoint because material reality hinders its ambition to operate as a global power within a realist framework, while its domestic politics will, short of a coup or revolution, stymie the adoption of a liberal perspective. 

As for the European Union, the epochal actions this week have been Germany's decisions on military expenditure and gas supplies, and the extension of the European Central Bank's disciplinary tools from EU member states to foreign states - a hybrid approach that shows its evolution from a purely liberal regime towards one with a new realist appreciation. It is likely that we will see an increasing congruence between the EU and NATO, which will suit the US, and the emergence of the idea that membership of the union entails security guarantees and corresponding obligations. In the UK, membership of NATO has this week clearly become a substitute for membership of the EU among the liberal political class. In other words, it has stopped being thought of in purely realist terms - we need to contain Germany in Europe and support the US globally so that they will support us locally - and has instead become the vehicle for a continuing idealist project on the continent. For some, which includes both Keir Starmer and Paul Mason, this is a transparent attempt to cleave to the EU, even if they might differ on operations outside of Europe in support of the US. For a disturbingly large number of liberals, it has revived dreams of regime change.