Why is Vladimir Putin
failing to win his war in Ukraine? The answers multiply: hubris, corruption and
incompetence on the Russian side; military valor, canny leadership and American
munitions on the Ukrainian side.
اضافة اعلان
But the death of
Queen Elizabeth II and the wave of antique pageantry help illuminate one of the
Russian president’s important weaknesses. He has been hobbled in his fight
because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy.
Legitimacy is not
the same thing as power. It is what enables power to be exercised effectively
amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It is what grounds
political authority even when that authority is not delivering prosperity and
peace. It is what rulers reach for when they call their societies to sacrifice.
In most of the
world today there are only two solid foundations for legitimacy: the demos and
the nation, democracy and national self-determination. The legitimacy that once
attached to imperial rule has washed away, and likewise, outside of the Middle
East and a few other places here and there, the legitimacy of hereditary
monarchy.
Alternative claims
to legitimacy exist — the ideological authority invoked by the Beijing
Politburo, the religious authority invoked by the mullahs in Tehran, Iran — but
those claimants rely more on repression for power and survival.
The Elizabethan
pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an
exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West
outside the Vatican, the British monarchy has retained a pre-modern,
pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still a
sense that the queen was somehow God-ordained to sit on the throne. But the
royal family has kept that legitimacy by giving up all but a fraction of its
personal power; it has legitimacy and little else.
In Moscow you have
the contrast: personal political power, far greater than the power of King
Charles III, that lacks deep legitimating structures. Putin is a pseudo-czar
but not a real one, with no divine anointing or ancient oath. He claims some
Russian nationalist legitimacy, but his system is actually a polyglot imperium.
He claims some democratic legitimacy by holding regular elections, but their
results are neither fair nor free.
So all he has to
really justify his power is success. Which he has delivered for most of his
career — a Russia richer and more stable than in the years before he took the
presidency, and a series of successful foreign policy gambits.
Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It is what enables power to be exercised effectively amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It is what grounds political authority even when that authority is not delivering prosperity and peace. It is what rulers reach for when they call their societies to sacrifice.
But now comes the
test, the gambit that has not delivered, the specter of defeat, and what does
he have to fall back upon? Not the authority of a czar: He cannot mobilize the
Russian people as feudal subjects, calling on them to treat imperial Russia’s
grand projects as their own. Not the authority of a national leader in a
struggle for self-determination: He is the invader; it is Ukraine that is
fighting for a nation. And not the authority of a democratic leader: He cannot
have his war policy vindicated in an election, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864,
because any election would be a masquerade.
In recent years,
as authoritarian leaders have gained ground around the world and democracy has
decayed, there has been fear that these figures have a stronger hand to play
than the dictators of the past, because their authoritarianism is gentler and
subtler, and also wrapped in the legitimating structures of elections.
But Putin’s
predicament suggests that this subtler authoritarianism is weaker than its
predecessors’ in a crisis. The 20th century’s totalitarian regimes often
co-opted the rhetoric of democracy and nationalism, but at bottom they made
their own unique (and dreadful) claims to legitimacy — the people’s republic,
the rule of the master race. Putin, lacking any such foundation, cannot just be
a proud imperialist or autocrat or revolutionary; he has to legitimize his
ambitions in the frameworks of his Western enemies, with absurd results
(Ukraine is not a real nation, Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, the
Russians are fighting for human rights).
There are
parallels to the internal politics of the US, where movements tempted toward
authoritarianism nevertheless legitimate themselves in the familiar language of
democracy. Thus Donald Trump has to claim that the will of the people was
thwarted in 2020, not that he had a right to autocratic rule. Likewise, the
push from the left to cancel or de-platform, to steer public opinion via
censorship, tends to be justified in the name of “safeguarding democracy”.
This pattern does
not mean there are no authoritarian perils in our politics, anymore than
Putin’s legitimacy problems make his invasion any less destructive. But it
helps to see our crises clearly if you recognize that they are still happening
inside the lines of late modernity — that as Elizabeth II is laid to rest,
nothing like her radically undemocratic legitimacy seems ready for rebirth.
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