The Eastern Delay

The conflict in Ukraine illustrates something in geopolitics that I think should have a name. I call it "The Eastern Delay".

There were two great splits in the Catholic Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church split away in the Great Schism of the year 1054. The Protestants split away in the Reformation that began in 1517.

Following the Reformation, Europe was convulsed by more than a century of warfare between Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants succeeded in splitting away but it left Europe drained and devastated by war. However there was no comparable level of warfare when the Eastern Orthodox Church split away, even though that split was at least as consequential and acrimonious as the Protestant split.

The comparable conflict brought about by the Eastern Orthodox split actually did happen. But it was delayed into far in the future by what I call "The Eastern Delay". The conflict finally arrived in modern secular form, as Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, the eastern fronts of both world wars, and the Cold War. By this time the original religious conflict had been supplanted by the modern secular ideologies of Communism, Capitalism and, National Socialism, but had to be played out nonetheless.

In the early 1990s, after the end of traditional Communism, two multi-ethnic former Communist nations came apart. These were the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The Soviet Union came apart peacefully, but Yugoslavia didn't. Yugoslavia was composed of six republics, based on ethnicity, but a lot of ethnic mixing had taken place. The northernmost republic of Slovenia, where America's former first lady was from, slipped away with minimal combat. But there were Serbs living in Croatia, and in Bosnia, and Croatians living in Bosnia.

Each of these tried to split away into an ethnic enclave when the republic itself declared independence. The Serbs in Croatia tried to claim part of the eastern area of the new country, called Krajina. Serbs living in Bosnia declared "Republic Skrpsa", when Bosnia declared independence. 

The multi-faceted war that resulted was extremely nasty. Almost all of the conflict involved Serbs, first against Croatians and then against Bosnians. The goal was not to hold Yugoslavia together but to create a "Greater Serbia". There was a limited amount of combat between Croatians and Bosnians. Finally there was part of Serbia, that was populated by ethnic Albanians, called Kosovo that succeeded in breaking away from Serbia.

Even in our modern secular time religious history is a very powerful force. The Yugoslav conflict was not overtly about religion but the theaters of the multi-faceted conflict were almost all along traditional religious lines. Croatians were traditionally Catholic while Serbs were Eastern Orthodox. During rule by the Ottomans Islam was introduced into the area and many Bosnians were Muslim.

The breakup of the much-larger and more multi-ethnic Soviet Union, in contrast, was peaceful. But was it relatively peaceful in the same way that the splitting away of the Eastern Orthodox Church, in 1054, was relatively peaceful? With the combat just being delayed until later by what I have termed " The Eastern Delay"?

There was a medieval kingdom, known as Kievan Rus, that was the predecessor of Ukraine, Russia and, Belarus. As the name implies the central city of Kievan Rus was Kiev, now spelled Kyiv. The center of the Eastern Orthodox Church moved from Kiev (Kyiv), which is what made Moscow an important city, because Kiev (Kyiv) was so devastated in a Thirteenth Century attack by the Mongols.

The present conflict in Ukraine isn't really anything out of the ordinary. It is what might have happened at the breakup of the Soviet Union, matching the parallel conflict in Yugoslavia, except that it was delayed by thirty years by "The Eastern Delay".

OTHER FACTORS

There are other historical factors involved in the Ukraine conflict. One is the Mongols, that we saw in the posting on this blog "Why We Should Understand The Mongols". The Soviet Union lasted almost exactly the same amount of time that the Mongol Empire did. Although Russians are not rooted in the Mongols, and were victims of the Mongols, the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv was so devastated by the Mongols in the Thirteenth Century that it didn't regain it's importance for six hundred years. The Mongols came to Kyiv from the east, so Ukrainians might see Russia as the present incarnation of the Mongols.

If Ukraine were to join NATO it would match the route that the Nazis took to invade the Soviet Union. The largest of the three Nazi army groups was Army Group South, which advanced across Ukraine.

This invasion of Ukraine really isn't anything new or unprecedented. During the Cold War the Soviet Union intervened in European countries several times. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and, Czechoslovakia in 1968. 

The two pro-Russian breakaway regions of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk, are virtually a mirror image of the parallel situation in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. The breakaway regions there are Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Maybe the most important factor of all in this conflict is simply that peace gets boring after a while, and the stress on the world caused by Covid certainly didn't help. In 1914 the world had seen a long period with no major wars. But it must have gotten boring because many people on both sides were cheering the declarations of war, in 1914, that began the First World War. Both sides were under the delusion that the war would last only a few weeks, instead it turned into a war like the world had never seen before.