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Ukraine should be making allies, not enemies, in the Global South [1]
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Date: 2023-07
Ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, president Volodymyr Zelenskyi declared Russia to be “the biggest anti-European force of the modern world” in a speech to the European Parliament.
By “European”, Zelenskyi was referring to the continent’s “way of life”, which was, he said, “steeped in rules, values, equality and fairness”. Europe, he added, was “a place where Ukraine is firmly at home”.
It was a prominent example of how Ukraine has come to focus on its relationship to ‘Western civilisation’ in its wartime public diplomacy. Other examples include popular rhetoric about Russia becoming “more Asian” as a result of its illegal war on Ukraine, or that Ukraine’s struggle for national survival amounts to “extending Europe’s borders eastwards”.
But at a time when struggles for the values of democracy, equality and fairness are taking place not only in Ukraine, but elsewhere in the world from Myanmar to Palestine, this emphasis on the supposedly superior value of Western or European civilisation is limiting, to say the least.
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This presentation of Ukraine’s struggle is set in a framework that sidelines similar fights in many countries in the Global South. It focuses public attention on the prospect of a new, exclusionary European future – rather than a more consistently and universally shared, equal and humane one.
Indonesia
Several actions by Ukraine’s diplomats in the Global South in the past year have made me critical of the country’s overall approach to wartime diplomacy.
Take Indonesia, whose years of domestic military dictatorship opened with the mass killings of communist sympathisers and others in 1965 and 1966. Those events led to the overthrow of nationalist leader and Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, and his replacement by the Western-backed military dictator Suharto.
Although the country was a firm US ally during the dictatorship, which lasted until 1998, many enough Indonesians have retained a fond appreciation for, and memories of, their years of cooperation with the Soviet Union, especially via exchanges in culture, education and a shared politics of moving towards a non-capitalist, postcolonial future and a new world order.
Indonesia has not been neutral over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (although domestically, there have been debates on whether the country could have done more for Ukraine.) It has voted in favour of all UN General Assembly resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.
Moreover, as the chair of the G20 summit in 2022, not only did Indonesian president Joko Widodo (or ‘Jokowi’) become the first statesman from the Global South to visit wartime Kyiv, but he also allowed Zelenskyi to present (virtually) his ten-point peace plan for the first time to the world at the summit.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-diplomacy-global-south-us-vietnam-indonesia/
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