AT PRESENT crises and conflicts have a worldwide dimension, the result of globalisation. Even after the financial crisis, we should be aware of a generally fragile financial system. Global warming affects the entire planet. The Covid-19 pandemic has spared no region on Earth. Species extinction on land and sea is accelerating.

Oceans, continents and space are scarred by the waste from the commodification of our scientific and technological achievements. Digitalisation is global and involves a whole number of very different implications. The increasing gulf between rich and poor has become a significant characteristic of the Western world.

Migration movements to this Western world are perceived here as a “refugee crisis.” What is not seen as a crisis is that we have ongoing wars accompanied by a huge build-up of armaments that are being continually refined and could destroy civilisation several times over.  

Nobody has had the declared aim of wilfully striving to bring about even one of these crises. Taken together, they represent a highly complex process. In the interests of future generations, it would therefore be obvious to think of our living space, the planet and the people in it, as a whole.  

The percipient and astonishingly prophetic Stanislav Lem noted in 1983: “The constantly deteriorating quality of the leading political elites is a consequence of the growing complexity of our world. Because no-one can fully grasp this world anymore, those who are least worried about it are elbowing their way to power.”

In Lem’s time, this complexity was also largely hidden behind the antagonism between capitalism and socialism — the attempt to find an economic and social alternative.

Within this antagonism and on both sides, political concepts of the enemy were created. And these antagonisms were fought out in real terms, both within the parameters of a cold war as well as in hot proxy wars.

The victor was capitalism — or more precisely, the Western economic and military alliance led by the US.

Hot and cold wars always require acceptance, passive or otherwise, of a significant majority of the people in the societies concerned. This acceptance is best gained by convincing individuals in those societies of the superiority of their own way of life.

From such hubris it is only a small step to adopt a missionary approach and take on board a militant propagation of that way of life. However, such a mission is conditional on the roles played by completely different interests.

The attempt to build socialism imploded as a result of the cold war, but there were also a considerable number of internal causes, among other things, because ideas for the further development and improvement of the socialist systems were characterised and rejected as political symptoms of enemy ideology.

The implosion was certainly not wholly based on a yearning for Western-style capitalism. What had been learned on a theoretical level (in the socialist world), became a concrete learning process only later (with the imposition of capitalism).

With the implosion of state socialism, the former West was deprived of its enemy and could no longer utilise a manifest anti-communism. In the meantime, however, this does not appear to have become an insurmountable problem because new enemy images continue to be conjured up. These do not include, for example, the democracies of the Philippines or Brazil — but Russia does qualify as one.

After the implosion of the Soviet Union, capitalism was introduced by shock therapy on the basis of Western advice. However, the legal and administrative underpinnings of capitalism that had emerged in the West could not be developed so rapidly in Russia.

So canny individuals and groups took matters into their own hands and became “oligarchs” with catastrophic consequences for wider society. Stabilisation has come to be identified with the figure of Putin. This helps explain his continued popularity within Russia even after the invasion of Ukraine.

So now, at last, we have a new enemy: Russia. The creation of such enemy constructs always involves a subtle process. The construct of an enemy has to be based on the fact that the hostile subject be perceived and behave as such — ie like an enemy.

Enemy constructs have the immensely helpful side effect that one does not have to have an interest in or knowledge of the history of the enemy or of its people.

Interestingly, though, this enemy construct does not work everywhere, as can be seen among the population in the former territory of the GDR in the east of Germany.

This has to do with the fact that former GDR citizens had an empirical knowledge about Russia and its people and have also read a lot of literature from the Soviet Union.

This kind of nuance is rare in the west of Germany and the West in general; after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Green Party Foreign Minister, announced that we, the West, must “ruin” Russia, the largest country in the world in terms of area and with a population of about 145 million people.

But perhaps the greatest contribution to the ruination of Russian society is the presently powerful clique around Putin. This clique has defined its own internal enemy alongside the West — those engaged individuals who are against war and who are imprisoned or are leaving the country in large numbers.

Thus, Baerbock and Putin are working towards the same goal, with their respective enemy constructs.

In a history of several centuries, western culture has now become globally hegemonic. A push first came from its “discovery of the new world” and the colonisation that followed. This led to a competitive division of spheres of interest and newly defined state borders.

This was carried out on the back of several genocides as well as 300 years of the transatlantic slave trade. Tribal or ethnically structured cultures were destroyed in the process. Much of what we see today can be explained by this process.

After the end of colonialism, the West had the opportunity of maintaining and expanding its market power by exploiting the natural resources in the former colonies, including the people living there.

This gave individuals from those other cultures the opportunity of integrating themselves profitably into capitalist market mechanisms. The export of personnel and a competitive party-based democracy was certainly utilised for this purpose.

All in all, it has led to Western cultures becoming the benchmark for progress and civilisation. To impose this worldwide required a sense of mission — and Western culture has a long tradition of this missionary approach dating back to the Christian crusades.

Today it we hear of it as attempts at “regime change” and “nation building” in those unfortunate “failed states.” This begs the question — are “failed states” causes or consequences of western policies?

This so-called progress and civilisation still failed to prevent two world wars during the 20th century. After the second, formerly hostile Western participants allied on the basis of their capitalist economic system. An economic and socio-cultural comfort zone emerged.

That later became a hope of survival for people from the “rest” of the world. They risk their lives in their attempts to reach this promised land and in the process they perish in unknown numbers.

Today there is a 5,000-year-old culture in faraway Asia, a nation state of 1.4 billion people. There, after its liberation from colonisation, its “long march” and attempts at “great leaps forward” and a “cultural revolution,” with some catastrophic consequences for the people, a centrally correcting leadership has managed to drag the mass of the people out of absolute poverty.

But this country has now become the chief enemy and therefore not worthy of closer interest and is to be judged according to Western criteria.  

With this enemy, missionary zeal is useless. But when crusading impulses do not work because a new age has dawned, military solutions are sought: rearmament.

Concepts of the enemy prevent us from not sufficiently perceiving the dangers that are emerging in our own world. Perhaps they are also a result of decisions to ruin the enemy?
   
In view of our highly threatened habitat and its people, in view of the “crises” mentioned above, thinking in the interests of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren: co-operation wherever possible instead of confrontation must be prioritised, and looking for win-win solutions, for a paradigm shift becomes essential.

Where in the “rest” of the world are there signs of this? There are none in the West.