How the war in Ukraine might change the state
Vladimir Putin repeatedly mentioned that the Ukrainian state should not exist. In his February 21, 2022, address, he explained that Ukraine had no stable statehood, that it stood on shaky foundations and that Russia had built it anyway, and was entitled to taking it all back.1 The destruction of the Ukrainian state is a long-standing goal for Vladimir Putin, in part because its very existence demonstrates to Russians that a post-Soviet state need not be a totalitarian dictatorship.
Even if not all Ukrainians fight to defend the state as it is, the war is, in large part, a war about statehood, were it only because the destruction of Ukrainian statehood is a Russian war aim.
On the one hand, Russia is the archetype of the mafia state where institutions such as parliaments, the judiciary or the media are entirely hollowed out and where power is regulated solely through interpersonal agreements. On the other hand, Ukraine stands in for a democratic state, where power flows through institutions, not people. While Ukraine was and is far from being a perfect democracy, there is little doubt that Ukrainians understand what is at stake and that the two state forms stand wide apart.
The war might decide what state form prevails.
That war influences how power is organized even in peace time is not a new idea. A state form, of course, results from the interplay of many factors. However, it is clear that the modern state emerged in the late 15th century in large part because royal houses had to raise taxes regularly to pay for standing armies (which replaced the temporary armies raised with one-off taxes previously). Later, and at the risk of over-simplifying, the idea of citizenship and nationalism also arose as a result of the massive, conscripted armies of the European wars of late 18th and early 19th century. Raising millions of men is easier if they believe they are fighting for something grander than the wishes of the powerful. (Again, this does not imply that coercion played no role in Napoleonic armies.) And the welfare state arose in the late 19th century as a solution to increase the fitness of soldiers.
The war in Ukraine already provides insights on what state forms are most adapted to survive 21st-century warfare.
The war’s first lesson is that the mafia state could not win. In 2022 and early 2023, the Russian force rested in large parts on mercenaries. The most powerful of them, Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner group, decided in June 2023 that it might be more advantageous for him to take on his master – Putin – rather than to fight the Ukrainians. Why he did not carry out his rebellion until the end will forever remain a mystery. However, his actions showed that it was impossible to wage a war without the one institution that allows a state to use force against another: an army.
This is not a recent discovery. Writing in the early 16th century, as modern states were emerging in Europe, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that auxiliaries and mercenaries were useless and dangerous. In a way, he foresaw the Wagner rebellion. “The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way,” he wrote to the prince.2
Since then, Putin reorganized Russia’s army, integrated former Wagner fighters and had Yevgeny Prigozhin killed. The soldiers’ motivation, though, remains pecuniary. It is hard to see that Russian nationalism plays a role in combats. While the Russian regime does rely on ethnonationalism, it is used to direct hatred away from the ruling clique, not as a motivating factor for soldiers. Ethnographic surveys of Russian soldiers would deliver better insights; I only note that neither Russian soldiers nor civilians rushed to protect the state during the Wagner rebellion.
Nationalism plays much less of a role in the war in Ukraine than it did in the 19th and 20th century, but that need not be a major issue. While both sides have trouble finding enough personnel, massive human assaults did not make a huge difference in the war – at least to the extent that it’s hard to imagine a battle with hundreds of thousands of combatants. On the contrary, the “transparent” battlefield, where drones and satellite imagery make it easy to identify any concentration of force, favours small units.
Professional soldiers with no emotional stake in the war seem to fight well enough for Russia to keep advancing, however slowly. The shape of Russia’s army, a hodgepodge of professionals, conscripts and mercenaries, resembles in a way the colonial armies of the 19th century. When the French government invaded Madagascar to destroy its state in 1895 for example, half of the infantry were from France proper, the rest came from other parts of the empire.3
Warfare as seen in Ukraine, which does not require a levĂ©e en masse but does require large amounts of capital for materiel and electronic warfare, cannot be waged by a mafia state but is compatible with an empire. The French government between Napoleon and the 3rd Republic directed the vast majority of public expenditure towards the military,4 did not impose conscription and did wage many colonial wars. While Putin’s Russia is not Restoration France, the comparison shows that such a state form can be stable over several decades.
The war in Ukraine is not over and European mobilization might still push Russia towards defeat. However, it is hard to see how European elites and the general population would do so. Conversely, the United States is fast transforming into a mafia state on the Russian model and might soon fight its own colonial wars. Donald Trump repeatedly denied Canadian statehood since his re-election, calling the prime minister a “governor” and the country the “51st state”.
Cover photo: Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar gives her last royal speech in 1895. UniversitĂ© de CĂ´te d’Azur.
Notes
1. CSPAN, Russian President Putin Statement on Ukraine, 21 Feb. 2022.
2. The Prince, translated by W. K. Marriott, p. 33.
3. The Madagascar Expedition of 1895–96. (1897). Royal United Services Institution. Journal, 41(232), 722–767. doi:10.1080/03071849709416037
4. Greenfield J. The Making of a Fiscal-Military State in Post-Revolutionary France. Cambridge University Press; 2022.