Victory After a Thousand Setbacks?
In his book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, Peter Turchin puts forward an important thesis about the key role of group identity and verve in the success of nations. It’s what the 14th century Islamic philosopher Ibn Khaldun famously called asabiyya. This Arabic word is difficult to define or translate, but it comes down to a level of tribal or national cohesion so strong and sinewy that it overcomes an opponent’s apparent advantages: whether through more advanced technology, better organization, or larger numbers. Moreover, asabiyya, can be generated or strengthened in a society that is adjacent to an antagonistic rival.
Turchin’s finely-honed book presents numerous examples of the formation and role of asabiyya during conflicts at civilizational fault-lines. Some examples include the Cossacks fighting the Tatars in 15th century Russia; the early Roman Republic duelling against its many foes, from nearby Italian states, to Celts and Carthaginians; and Christian Spain defeating the Islamic Andalus.
Many are not aware that the Romans lost consistently and badly to Hannibal during his 16-year invasion of Italy—including in one of the greatest defeats in military history at Cannae, where one third of Roman senatorial elites died—but were still ultimately victorious over the bold son of Carthage. The same applies for the Aragonese, Portuguese, and Castilian Christian kingdoms of Spain that mostly lost battles to the Muslims and yet ended up winning the peninsula.
Today, we can clearly see that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped create a Ukrainian asabiyya. In many ways, the Russian challenge has helped forge a Ukrainian sense of national identity that was unexpected and possibly latent. Indeed, this is central to Turchin’s thesis: asabiyya grows on the “metaethnic frontier”—those boundaries where two ethnicities meet and fight it out.
However, does this idea also provide a window onto Russia? Russia has not done well militarily in the war so far. Indeed, it can be said that it has suffered setback after setback. Will Turchin and Ibn Khaldun’s asabiyya principle apply to Russia? Could the Russians make a comeback over time to ultimately “win”? This demands some definition of what winning means. Is it small gains in Eastern Ukraine? A new regime in Kyiv? Negotiations with the Americans?
It is also an open question whether the setbacks will lead to infighting in Moscow that is effectively anti-asabiyya: a fragmentation of Russian political forces leading to a breakdown and a more final defeat. Or will we see Russian cohesion reassert itself over time, over years in fact, possibly under new leadership, allowing the country to take its battle into Ukraine further, and more broadly, until it achieves the gains it finds acceptable?
Of course, Russia is also effectively at war with the West, which has demonstrated more asabiyya than many would have predicted in supporting and arming Ukraine. So, the future configurations will also depend on Western actions. Westerners tend to calculate in terms of resources, which are always critical, and this partly explains the Western emphasis on economic sanctions.
However, as Ibn Khaldun presented seven centuries ago, and Turchin has intelligently renewed, the powerful notion of asabiyya has to be weighed against economic and other material considerations and given its proper place and weight. It is today a key factor in the longer term evolution of a war that some had thought, shallowly, would end in months..
RELATED STORIES
