Ivan Krastev: International Order as a Hall of Broken Mirrors

In 1995, in a lecture delivered in IWM in Vienna American anthropologist Clifford Geertz predicted that, contrary to the prevailing consensus at the time, the international order born out of the end of the Cold war would be defined not by convergence and the wholesale adoption of Western models but by an obsession with identity and difference in which “a stream of obscure divisions and strange instabilities” will rise to the surface” and we will be haunted by the questions: “What is a country if it is not a nation?” and “what is a Culture if it is not a consensus?” Russia’s war in Ukraine is a proof of his intuition. While many tend to frame it as a return of the Cold war, it is my argument that the ideological politics characteristic of the Cold War has yielded to identity politics on a global scale. While the conflict between democracy and authoritarianism continues to have an impact on the foreign policy of the states, it will be the cultural war between states and within states that will be of bigger importance for defining how will states behave in international politics. The identity politics is the fight over the power to define oneself and one’s enemies. It is a struggle to compel others to view you and treat you in the way you wish to be viewed and treated, while preserving the right to negatively define others. Humiliation and pride, rather than interests and rights, now dominate the rhetoric of international relations. Domestic polarization and fragmentation that we witness today in many parts of the world means that navigating international politics today makes it necessary to re-conceptualize the complex link between domestic and foreign policy. Speaker: Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna