“Are the bunkers in Albania still working?” my 11-year-old asked on hearing the news that Russia had invaded Ukraine. “Some,” I said. “Why?” “In case there is a war in Europe, and we need to find shelter,” he replied.
I was his age one of the last times we “practised war” at school. At that time, all the bunkers worked, not only some – indeed they were one of the few things to still “work” in communist Albania. Once or twice a year an alarm would ring and we would rush out of our classrooms into the nearest shelter: a long, dark, underground tunnel that, legend had it, stretched all the way to the border with Yugoslavia – though nobody dared to venture more than a couple of hundred metres inside.
When the cold war was over, the hundreds of thousands of bunkers built to allegedly protect people from the threat of nuclear war acquired a variety of new uses: from toilets in the wild to habitats for bats, from underground cafes to secret sites for lovers. It was a powerful symbol that the conflict between what we in Albania called the “imperialist west” and the “revisionist east” was now consigned to the past.
When I was growing up, the perpetual threat of war was the condition for securing a perpetual peace at home: the kind of peace in which all dissent is suppressed and people have little choice but to comply. Over the course of the 20th century, my country progressively cut ties with the rest of the world. The more isolated it became, the more paranoid its political elites grew, the tighter their grip became on those who dared to disagree.
This experience has been on my mind as I followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; I have become somewhat sceptical of the view that an extensive range of sanctions, which cuts off Russians from the rest of the world, will serve to delegitimise the Kremlin in their eyes. It has been impossible to not think about our own “war practice” as I’ve watched the chilling images of innocent Ukrainian citizens crowded in bunkers of the past, sheltering from bombs that must have seemed like an abstract, immaterial threat until they were not.
Like us, they are the chess pieces in a fatal game of great power politics. But only some will be fortunate enough to survive until the next round. For many, the end of hostilities will be akin to the kind of peace mentioned by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in Toward Perpetual Peace, one of the most famous anti-war texts of the European Enlightenment: the perpetual peace of the graveyard.
Written in 1795, at the height of the French revolutionary wars, Kant’s essay was heavily influenced by the French author Charles-Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint-Pierre. In 1712, shortly before the treaty of Utrecht, which inaugurated the era of great power politics that is alas still very much with us, Saint-Pierre advocated the creation of a European union of states that would include Russia. Both Saint-Pierre and Kant knew that a politics based on the balance of powers would never be able to produce a lasting peace. Future trade wars, civil wars and wars between states could hardly be avoided without the guarantee of a genuinely inclusive federation of states, where “the weakest would have enough security that the most powerful of the great powers would be unable to harm them”.
The world might have looked very different if those projects had been pursued. Today, confronted by the realities of contemporary Europe, where Germany has decided to reverse a decades-long defence policy to ramp up its military spending, where Sweden and Finland contemplate accelerated accession to Nato, and where the prospect of nuclear war haunts even an 11-year-old born in London, they have a distinctively utopian ring. Where does one find hope?
One misleading way to think about hope is as an attitude that sits somewhere between a desire and belief: a desire for a certain outcome and a belief that the outcome will be favourable. In that sense, to be hopeful means to observe the world and find evidence that the course of events supports a generally optimistic outlook. But when confronted with the brutality and destruction of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, it is difficult not to conclude, as Tolstoy does in War and Peace, that “the higher the human intellect goes in discovering more and more purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond comprehension”. As we all struggle and fail to read the mind and purposes of Vladimir Putin, fear replaces rationality, the Leviathan unleashes its power, and all hope seems lost.
But there is a different perspective from which to think about hope. Hope is needed most exactly when the world looks hopeless. For Kant, hope is not something you find in the world, it is a categorical imperative. We can retreat from each other or we can envisage political projects that are genuinely inclusive: a departure from the status quo, from the world of spheres of influence and boundaries that protect existing military and economic interests. Which of these attitudes prevails at any given point depends on the expectations we have for each other, on whether we see one another as targets to destroy or fellow humans with whom to engage.
The European project of a cosmopolitan federation of states, including Russia, is discussed in the opening pages of War and Peace. “Perpetual peace is possible,” Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov says, “but not by a balance of political power.” Tolstoy teaches us that even in the midst of fatal conflict, some confidence in the humanity of the enemy must remain. When hostilities degenerate into a war of extermination, Kant argues, all justice is destroyed and perpetual peace turns into “the vast burial ground of the human race”. In this world, no bunkers can be of any help. The greater the terror of war, the more pressing the moral duty to hope.
Lea Ypi is the author of Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, and is a professor in political theory at the London School of Economics
