An absurd coffee hour
Or, cognitive dissonance personified
Last summer, I was responsible for partially organising the NATO Public Forum, a side event for the NATO Summit here in The Hague. This was my job as prior to moving here I was a staffer for NATO back in the US.
What was odd though is that my relationship with NATO, and the whole international security world, had changed. Not that I’m against a transatlantic tie per se. I would call my view ‘strongly reformist’, in that I don’t think the institution delivers what it should anymore, and has become more centred on its own existence rather than actually doing something good. It needs to change.
So, when I saw that the weekend before last year’s summit that there was a large Counter Summit protest event, I had to go. Along with my wife and some friends from Leiden University, we went and sat through speeches and lectures on Gaza, feminist foreign policy, the excesses of capitalism, and yes, the dangers of NATO and militarism.
The strangest part of the whole experience though, was doing a conference call with the NATO organisers from the coffee area of the Counter Summit. There I was, surrounded by dissidents and protestors of all types, and on my screen is the agenda and planning for the very thing they were there to organise against.
Talk about cognitive dissonance. What am I to make of myself? Am I betraying one side? Both sides? Myself? I thought about the social and professional consequences of picking one side or the other. I internally cringed about my laptop sticker socialism as I worked away writing and organising on European defence.
At the Summit a few days later, I brought the book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War by the Ukrainian sociologist Volodomyr Ishchenko, a very active critic of the Zelenskyy government and activitist of the Ukrainian left. I was reading the book in between sessions during my small breaks back stage. What I was reading would have been considered pure heresy by just about everyone around me. A Ukrainian who is a critical scholar, dislikes the government, and routinely tracks and publishes on the far-right in Ukraine, including the during the Maidan revolution? Not very welcome discussion topics for those around me.
I feel dishonest in both circles. I have critiques of both circles. The Counter Summit group is too dismissive of Russian fascism and imperialism. The NATO crowd is too dismissive of American fascism and imperialism. The Counter Summit crowd struggles with political organising. The NATO crowd does nothing but hawkish rhetoric. And so on.
I suppose I now self-describe myself first as an historian, second as a peace strategist, or in the field of “strategic peace studies” described by friend of this blog (and my podcast Official Positions) Van Jackson (see Un-Diplomatic!).
This is not the comfiest position. Neither total dove, nor total hawk. Myself and plenty of others at places like the Center for International Policy in the US, the European Leadership Network here, and the Foundation for European Progressive Studies are trying to contest this space. Certainly easier said than done.
Maybe this was just to share the strange anecdote from last year’s Summits. Maybe just a stream of consciousness as I watch my home country tear itself apart. I don’t have any answers yet, just a small piece of a pie amongst those far more advanced and successful than I trying to bridge a normative committment to peace with a willingness to stand up to fascism through force.
In the meantime, you can catch me reading Mark Fisher at the Munich Security Conference.
I have been navigating many of these ideas and feelings since retiring from the Foreign Service and beginning to teach undergrads and graduate students at a major university. I sell myself, in a way, as a “professor of practice”, but I try hard to draw on a developing ideological perspective that is rooted in world systems theory and class-based analysis - ideas from my academic training way back when, updated for today. It is not always easy. My analysis of developments is pretty solid, I think, but mainly I just want to challenge The Blob and explode the foreign policy consensus. Please keep writing and sharing insights that you glean along the way. I really enjoyed this piece.
" don’t think the institution delivers what it should anymore, and has become more centred on its own existence."
It is very interesting to hear that position from someone who was within the organization itself; it is a position I have written about in the context of how organizations after a length of time inevitable drift toward this position, however my outside view is not the same as someone who experienced these same pressures first hand.