36 minute read
EUROPEAN ALLIANCE OF ACADEMIES
Since 2020, the current sixty-eight institutions of the European Alliance of Academies have been campaigning for the freedom of the arts in Europe. The Alliance – initiated by Akademie der Künste President Jeanine Meerapfel in 2020 – is united by its desire to take a collective stand against nationalist appropriations in art and culture and to initiate transnational cooperation between the institutions. Several members of the Akademie der Künste, including Robert Menasse, Nele Hertling, Aleš Šteger, A. L. Kennedy, Cécile Wajsbrot, Arnold Dreyblatt, and Siegfried Zielinski – as well as the Akademie President herself – are contributing their expertise and vision to the initiative. All those participating are convinced that cooperation among artists can go a long way towards overcoming Europe’s socio-political challenges. In his text “How Does Political Radicalisation Threaten Artistic Freedom in Europe?”, Aleš Šteger explains the complex political, economic, and social conditions that are needed to safeguard freedom of the arts. In 2021, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Alliance of Academies issued its first appeal for the submission of projects on the subject of “Ignorance is Strength? Artistic Expression and Biopower in the Post-pandemic Age”. Digital residences provided artists of the allied institutions the space to think about their own practice in the context of current social and political changes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. All the works are being published on the platform LOOM – Interweaving the Arts in Europe, a digital space in which artists’ positions are juxtaposed with current political challenges; a digital territory that extends beyond artists’ local range and which “interweaves” art practices in Europe beyond borders.
María José Crespo’s video work Govern Yourself Accordingly is one of the ten selected positions. She reveals the interplay of the administrative, geographical, and psychological effects of the border wall between the USA and Mexico.
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Further details on LOOM – Interweaving the Arts in Europe www.loom.allianceofacademies.eu
Further details on the European Alliance of Academies www.allianceofacademies.eu
Left: María José Crespo, Govern Yourself Accordingly, 2022. Aleš Šteger
Writer and Academy member Aleš Šteger poses the question of political radicalisation and the influence it has on artistic freedom in Europe. The text was originally a contribution to the annual conference of the Alliance of Academies in December 2021. A year later, the text has not lost its topicality, its theme exacerbated by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. This renewed relevance is addressed by Aleš Šteger himself in a postscript.
The question is not easy and requires a couple of initial clarifications. The classic strategy of crime novels in looking for the perpetrator is to start from the end, that is, from the crime scene, and to slowly work back toward the beginning.
So, let’s start at the end with this question and ask: what is meant by the term “Europe”? I know we can easily find ourselves on very shaky ground here. All useful attempts at definitions have so far failed. Let me just point out that fifty years ago, many people in Western Europe did not perceive parts of the former Soviet Bloc – the Baltic States, Ukraine, and so on – as parts of Europe, not economically, and much less culturally. But today, these countries are, of course, an integral part of our territorial and cultural conception of Europe, which means that our understanding of the concept of Europe is changing dramatically according to the current geopolitical mood. Today, we keep asking ourselves quietly whether Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Northern Macedonia, and, last but by no means least, Israel should be included somewhere, when we talk generally about “Europe”. We also cannot stop asking questions that have become somewhat unfashionable to ask today, but that were very topical after 1989, namely: are Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Istanbul, and increasingly London also part of what we mean when we talk about Europe? For our question, this has enormous consequences, which I will not go into in this brief introduction to our debate, but it is crucial, in my view, to think about these questions when we ask about artistic freedom in Europe. In our alliance of academies in any case, we do not think, and cannot in any way allow ourselves to think, only of the Schengen area or the European Union when we talk about Europe.
The coinage of “artistic freedom” in itself implies that there are different forms of freedoms and liberties for different groups of people, depending on who they are and what they do. Fundamental human rights, the freedoms of children, migrants, minority groups, LGBTQ+, and so on are something other than “artistic freedom”. Artistic freedom itself evades general definitions; most applicable is perhaps its definition by UNESCO (2005) in the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. There, artistic freedom is understood as: “The freedom to imagine, create and distribute diverse cultural expressions free of governmental censorship, political interference or the pressures of non-state actors.”
The question of artistic freedom is also necessarily a philosophical-ethical question. Do we artists have the right to express just about anything, regardless of the consequences and potential conflicts that our actions and creations may provoke? Can Europe and its societies allow themselves a laboratory of freedoms in which actions, articulations, and interrogations into the most difficult matters can take place, all of which are considered potentially questionable in other contexts, even inappropriate, sometimes morally objectionable, or offensive to sections of society? The case of Charlie Hebdo has perhaps become the most pointed and highly tragic example of the conflict between different experiences of spaces of freedom, the sacred and permissible among members of different ideological, religious, and political beliefs. Can we, in the changing Europe of the 21st century, afford art an autonomous territory of practices that can be potentially offensive or controversial to those who do not accept our division into art and everything else, who do not recognise the special status of art and thus the invisible shield which defends the practices of artists? Can we afford every type of art, and with them, the most extreme artistic positions; can we afford even potentially harmful art and bad art that sometimes, let’s face it, misuses the label of “artistic creation” as a cover for practices whose primary goal is not artistic creation but propaganda and the strengthening of certain ideologies?
These issues are by no means merely only theoretical. We who work within the field of art know that the question of whether art necessarily needs unquestioning freedom cannot be answered to other than in the affirmative. Even if we demand the irrevocable autonomy of art, we all know very well that, in reality, the bounds of our freedoms are most often very narrow, low set, and strongly culturally conditioned. Social taboos, the limits of good taste, questioning the neuralgic points of society, shedding light on cases of self-censorship are, in a way, a front on which our struggle is more or less subtle, constituting a radical process of self-examination that aims to slowly integrate its achievements into a broader society which is tolerant, open, and worth living in, a society that is, to put it bluntly, more immune to hatred, lies, intolerance, and other such nonsense. We who work within the field of art know that any systemic restriction of our already often-endangered and violently restricted freedoms would open a Pandora’s box in which each society and each government could set boundaries in its own way, thus establishing a free path to systemic censorship and the political persecution of artists.
The answer of many other global political, economic, religious, technological, and capital actors to our question of whether Europe can afford a free territory for art is, of course, the opposite of ours. This evident contradiction between the notions of artistic freedom has intensified sharply in the last ten, perhaps fifteen years. In some fields, the practices of implementing a general restriction of artistic activities and overt exploitation of the art sector have long been established. Years ago, I co-signed an open call by artists from all over the world to strengthen the privacy and rights of individuals on the net. Just as we have achieved nothing with our call to restrict technology giants in exploiting our use of the Internet, so the call for freedom of art online seems a distant utopian idea – for which it is, without a doubt, necessary to fight. It starts with economic subordination and a set of rules around what is allowed and what is not, with the often very problematic categories of political correctness and self-restraint in the online environment when it comes to art. While Facebook is censoring the posting of art photographs of Greek statues because they show an excessive degree of nudity, the darknet, a parallel world where just about anything is allowed, is flourishing. Our Western democratic governments technologically enable and even co-finance the schizophrenia of our everyday online reality.
When we think of threats to artistic freedom in Europe, they are usually imagined at quite a distance from the reality of rich Western societies, instead focusing on a couple of examples of mostly Eastern European countries, where democratically elected quasi-dictators systematically remould democratic principles and adapt them to strengthen their own power and the power of ruling elites. It is a very dangerous phenomenon, where there is a well-founded fear that the anomaly will become a normality, a kind of principle of the quasi-democratic rule of the future. In this, certainly justified criticism, we forget too quickly the intertwining of the world on a global level, the schizophrenia of the policies of countries that do not want to follow the model of Russia, Poland, or Hungary. In short, we forget all too often the pragmatic ignorance, brutal selfishness, and blindness of developed Western democracies when their interests are at a stake. Understood by many in a cynical way, the rights of artistic autonomy in societies where natural rights are endangered, where we face the disintegration of democracy and pluralism, in this sense become collateral damage.
Economic greed, colonial superiority, a low level of indepth knowledge of the intercultural diversity of European cultures, and a very frequent unwillingness to deepen integration and disarm local political rulers all make Europe a self-destructive monster, which too often allows the very practices it fears to become the future norm. Some time ago, I spoke to an experienced European politician. He waved his finger. He remarked that Europe can do nothing more next time a European leader blatantly violates the rule of European law, its agreements, and the rights of people, including artists. I often remember that moment; the gentleman was from a pro-European, liberal province and, as has been said, had decades of diplomatic experience, but the realisation was rather bitter. Whether we agree with him or not, I think it is undeniable that the greatest threat to Europe is Europe itself, it sowed the seeds responsible for the current situation as well as its possible solutions.
Finally, let us return to the initial question of political radicalisation in many European countries. The radicalisation itself is, of course, not a cause for, but rather a consequence of, a long process. For radicalisation to occur at all, there must be the ground, fertile with discontent and rebellion, unresolved past traumas, and an inability to see one’s own potential future within positive European values. Unlike other classical totalitarian regimes, political coups, and violent state takeovers, here we see a radicalisation of the understanding of democratically elected systems of power, one that goes hand in hand with the broadest possible legal interpretations of the frameworks agreed upon by the founders of Europe. The new generations of Eastern European leaders – who learned of the threat of war, its horrors and devastations only from school textbooks – too often make public and media appearances without their historically inaccurate statements being subject to corrections. On the contrary, they use the reinterpretation of historical facts and alleged historic injustices as the central momentum for mass activation. In the agendas of these politicians, historic traumas exist in order to be used and abused. These are populist structures that have learned from democracy that, with a powerful legal apparatus and a democratically elected parliamentary majority, it is possible to democratically change everything, including the principles of democracy itself – and the principles of freedom. These are perfidious, amoral practices that are officially sanctioned in laws and legislative measures. For any curtailment of rights or deprivation of certain social groups, there is a corresponding decree, ordinance, or law, as well as the legal right of appeal, although this is doomed to failure.
The coexistence of opposing views and the systemic support of often diametrically opposed ideological and
artistic views, present as a rule in the vast majority of European countries from the 1990s until the economic crisis of 2007, has been subject to strong internal pressure and political division, with an increasing lack of tolerance and understanding between opposing sides. The brutality of the simple law is: you are an enemy if you are not on our side, that is, the middle path. The path of free choice has become less and less negotiable, and the systemic coercion into corruption and the removal of freethinking and creative people, given the bureaucratic perfidy and silencing of the media by the opposition, is difficult to prove. Various forms of intimidation, the redistribution of state funds only to its own supporters, the limits placed on public speech, the marginalisation of opponents in public space, occasional witch-hunts, and the abolition of free associations under various pretexts, false speech, and the constant creation of states of exception, emergency measures, and radical propaganda, we have already seen all of this, and in the face of its repetition before our eyes, we are powerless once again.
UNESCO’s fundamental postulates of artistic freedom include the right to create without censorship or intimidation; the right to have artistic work supported, distributed, and remunerated; the right to freedom of movement; the right to freedom of association; the right to the protection of social and economic rights; the right to participate in cultural life. All this is more and more becoming just smoke in the eyes of those who still believe in fairy tales.
Even if we do not believe in fairy tales, if we believe in crime novels instead, and with them believe in the fact that there is no perfect crime, and even the most skilful perpetrator can overlook the traces that will eventually reveal them, it is indisputable that we must establish alternative forms of support for the most vulnerable. When a country fails – and every country can fail, coming from Slovenia I know this as well as you from Germany or from Spain or from other countries – we need a Europe that works. There is no freedom other than the one that has been fought for and preserved, and I understand our socialising here and our joint efforts in this light.
POSTSCRIPT
The editors of Journal der Künste have asked me if I would like to update the text above in light of the geopolitical changes from 24 February 2022. Without any doubt, Russian aggression against Ukraine will define our thinking about Europe, democracy, and freedom of creation and speech for decades to come, about the geopolitical division of the world and about the construction of a European identity in the future. The war in Ukraine has ended the dream of a single, highly interdependent and interconnected world and returned our planet to the political, economic, and cultural multipolar divisions of the Cold War. At the same time, it has defined the horizon of our thinking, with all the ethical issues and the modern modes of geostrategic warfare, in which the media, culture, and arts play a key role. When we think about questions of European identity and artistic freedoms, we secretly feel that we cannot do so without, at the same time, waging war ourselves in our minds, let alone in our art. In the light of current events, it seems practically impossible to speak of “artistic freedom”, since every work of art is necessarily contextualised by the shadow of a war of aggression, the fate of thousands of dead and millions displaced and on the run. At the same time, only six months after the outbreak of the war, we feel the exhaustion and fatigue of the war narrative in European societies where the war in Ukraine, above all, raises concerns about preserving our own prosperity and neo-colonial privileges, how it may become key in the strategies of those who want to radicalise others and weaken the idea of a more cohesive and autonomous Europe. Within the new cleavages, we artists are not only fighting to preserve our fragile, often quite illusory, or even utopian autonomies, but are forced to embark on a struggle for the conditions for free artistic creation in general in the future.
ALEŠ ŠTEGER lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, novels, and essays that have been published in more than twenty languages. Most recently published in English are the poetry collections Above the Sky beneath the Earth (White Pine Press, 2019) and Burning Tongues: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2022) and his novel Absolution (Istros Books, 2017). His latest books in German translation are the novel Neverend (Wallstein, 2022) and the collection of essays Gebrauchsanweisung Slowenien (Piper, 2022). Aleš Šteger has also collaborated on various projects with musicians (Vito Žuraj and Jure Tori), visual artists (Stojan Kerbler), and filmmakers (Peter Zach for Beyond Boundaries/Brezmejno).
GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY
Three-channel digital video, 7:23 min., 2022
María José Crespo Departing from her hometown Tijuana, Maria José Crespo’s threechannel-video work investigates zones that are unclear as spaces of possibilities. The work is a collage of experiences and stories, images from the Internet, surveillance footage from a Tijuana–San Diego border website, a police chat, daily updates on the best currency against the dollar, and much more. The following pages display excerpts from this work
I am inside a car, driving across a road divided by a fence that now forms two sides of the same road. I can see that this road bends in different zones of the hill. Meanwhile, the fence traverses the same space in a quasi-straight line. I don’t know whose car is this and why this person is driving me across the fenced land. I’m feeling suspicious and accomplice at the same time. I see a red building painted with a circular logo showing black letters on green, white, and red colours on the other side. The colours have faded on the outside wall of the building. The ugly green has been replaced by different gradients of what looks like burnt-out objects. This wall is very close to the metallic one, and in between both, there is a busy transit zone called La Internacional. Serious businesses are happening there right now. Unconscious people are crossing between the narrow, fenced roads, which also have another fence. Where are they going? There is no more land where to go, but there is an ongoing becoming at the borders, and a shared sense of disorientation between us. We know it is dangerous and somehow beautiful. We have come to appreciate watching our things burnt to ashes. It is a hazy feeling.
First, it started with a non-non-existent line – imaginary, dis - puted, negotiated, drawn, and unfindable. Then, bloody, peaceful, useful, administered, industrialized, fun, sexua lized, smuggled, and violent. Materialities, like everyday traces of people’s passages at the borderlands, are important because they compose an ex tension of entangled bodies: objects, memories, and feelings clash with the institutional ways that administer them through structures and laws.
The viewfinder we are looking through flickers at all times with new currencies, making it impossible to grasp how these events may unfold and set. Unforgiving environments. The multiple layers of the city are hidden and in plain sight.
A border is a place of limitation and a crossing space. It is also a fiction. Its administration methods trace distances when everything is tight and close, making everyone a witness, a co-pilot, driving in the border patrol car. Ma king everyone a collaborator performing night and day at its gates. When close, the border wall disappears, like when something is too close to your face and gets blurred. Through these images, I trespass the city. I know what to expect, where not to step, who not to say hello to, or when to feel worried. I become within the skin of the places I inhabit.
MARÍA JOSÉ CRESPO completed her BA in Fine Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California (UABC) in Tijuana, Mexico, and her MA in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. By questioning how she inhabits certain boundaries as a woman, she is interested in studying remains, glimpses, and traces that administrative powers leave behind in undefined territories.
For this image, the digital rights of use are not only available.
NAN GOLDIN’S TRIBUTE TO THE BEAUTY OF OTHERS
Nan Goldin, Berlin, 1992
For this image, the digital rights of use are not only available.
Colette modeling in the Beauty Parade, Boston, 1973.
For this image, the digital rights of use are not only available.
Misty and Jimmy Paulette in a Taxi, 1991.
Anke Hervol
The Other Side is the title of a book published by the American photographer Nan Goldin in 1992 during her residency at the Artists-in-Berlin Programme of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in tribute to her glamorous drag queen friends.1 One of the main gay bars in Boston, The Other Side was where the homosexual scene, drag queens, transsexuals, pimps, and street kids met from 1965 to 1976, a place of freedom for society’s outsiders.2 Having met the photographer David Armstrong in Boston in the late 1960s, Goldin and Armstrong began photographing each other and their friends as teenagers, later living together in the Boston community.3 In 1972 at the age of 18, Goldin met her first group of drag queens – Ivy, Naomi, Colette – and was so enthralled by their beauty that she followed them with her Super 8 film camera. Armstrong, her boyfriend at the time, was also dressing in women’s clothes, and this topic, almost an obsession, has captivated her ever since.
The Other Side became the regular meeting place of this new circle of friends, with her first night at the bar constituting a new beginning for Goldin. She fell in love with Ivy, moved in with her and a female friend for two years, and shared what it was like to be a queen with them. In her pictures, Goldin expresses a fascination for the beauty of her friends, the glamour of the shows and parades, and the courageous lifestyle, rejected even by most male homosexuals at the time. What is special about these pictures is how the young photographer presented the beauty and humanity of the people regardless of their gender. She respectfully captured a lifestyle that was potentially dangerous, penetrating it deeply with her camera, and presenting the creative fantasies of her friends to the outside world. Gender assignment was irrelevant – representing “a third gender”,4 they were just others, with different thoughts and feelings, gender identities and ways of life that precipitated new family-like structures. Many of them never pursued the goal of becoming a woman. Nor were all those who chose the transsexual path and gender reassignment happy to have gone that way. In The Other Side, Goldin explicitly addresses the question of sexual freedom for people whose yearnings defy classification. In her photographs, she gives outsiders, the unemployed, prostitutes, and offenders a voice in society – and, in particular, in public space.5
As for Goldin, these early experiences of sexual freedom also developed into family structures that she herself calls a “family of friends”.6 The need for a protected space, for security, but also for intimate cohabitation without classic roles becoming fixed are integral aspects of this type of family model.
Enthusiasm for drag art returned in New York in the early 1990s and accompanied Goldin to her residency in Berlin in 1992, also taking her to Manila and Bangkok that same year, where she joined Jürgen Brüning in explorative filmmaking. Together with her friend, the photographer David Armstrong, and the Swiss journalist Walter Keller (who both died in 2014), she published The Other Side in Berlin in 1993. Thanks to David Armstrong and Bruce Balboni, she resumed her photographic exploration of drag queens in New York in the early 1990s but from a new angle: Goldin was older, more experienced in life and work, and drag queens enjoyed greater acceptance within the LGBT community. Together with confident queens, the photographer took her pictures into a world of temporary theatrical costuming
For this image, the digital rights of use are not only available.
Jimmy Paulette on David's Bike, NYC, 1991.
and lifestyles that moved between the sexes and in gender-free zones. The idea behind the pictures in The Other Side was to deliberately present people who adopted new lifestyles and transcended boundaries. Goldin ends her introduction by saying, “The people in these pictures are truly revolutionary: they are the real winners of the battle of the sexes because they have simply stepped out of the ring.”7 This insight has undoubtedly lost none of its topicality.
1 Nan Goldin, The Other Side (Zurich: Scalo, 1993), p. 5. The book was published alongside the exhibition Nan Goldin 1971–1992 at the daadgalerie in Berlin from 8 September to 4 October 1992. 2 Boston’s gay bar scene has a history dating back to the 1920s. Historically, they were places where LGBTQ people could meet, have fun, swap news, discuss political and social events, and socialise without putting themselves in danger. They were places where a wide range of social, political, and activist needs were met. 3 In 1994, the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York dedicated the exhibition Nan Goldin and David Armstrong: A Double Life to this friendship. To mark the occasion, Scalo
Verlag published the book: Walter Keller and Hans Werner
Holzwarth (eds), Nan Goldin and David Armstrong: A
Double Life (Zurich: Scalo, 1994). 4 Goldin, The Other Side, p. 5. 5 Soliciting prostitutes was a criminal offence according to the laws applicable in many US states until the beginning of the 21st century. It was not until Barak Obama’s presidency that effective steps were taken against the “Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. The acceptance and active enforcement of LGBT anti-discrimination laws in labour and civil law are still contentious in many US states today. While the Equality Act was passed in 2021 by a slim majority in the 117th Congress, a decision by the Senate is still pending. 6 The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986), Goldin’s visual – and as such, public – diary that exists as a videotape and as a multimedia presentation with some 700 slides and a soundtrack. 7 Goldin, The Other Side, p. 8.
ANKE HERVOL is Secretary of the Visual Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.
Nan Goldin is the recipient of the 2022 Käthe Kollwitz Prize and will exhibit a selection of her works from five decades at Hanseatenweg from 20 January 2023.
A comment by Helmut C. Schulitz
Faced with the unilateral militaristic expansion strategies of belligerent autocrats, it makes no sense in a world of global dependencies to arm oneself militarily for the sake of one’s own security without keeping an eye on the consequences for the climate and hence for life and survival worldwide. Wars and rearmament are accelerating climate change, which is already almost past the point of no return, is already unleashing forces of nature that will make parts of this planet uninhabitable and has greater destructive potential than wars. The Ahr valley, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Australia are merely a precursor of such natural wars, which claim more lives every year due to droughts, wildfires, and flooding. Any additional waste of energy and resources, such as the destruction of cities and the production of weapons, accelerates this process.
What matters now is developing strategies to end the war in Ukraine as quickly as possible. Investing 100 billion euros in arms to safeguard oneself from attack in the long term, against the eventuality that the war could spread to the West, does nothing to end the war in Ukraine, and only helps German industry and job creation here at home. After the long period of peaceful coexistence between all the world’s industrialised nations, such rearmament may be called a “change of era” but it is less the beginning of a new era than a return to the mindset of defending oneself by using force against force. It puts one on a par with the aggressor.
But it is not so much a “change of era” that is the central problem of humanity today, it is climate change. Politicians have long since recognised the problem, but seem to have shied away from seeing the inherent conflict of interest between the goals of rearmament on the one hand and protecting the climate on the other. They see the problem of climate change primarily in the construction industry and in road transport, but not in the arms industry. For example, the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development has published a study on the environmental footprint of buildings in Germany, which focuses on the effects of building construction and building use on climate and the environment.1 However, it would be at least as pertinent in terms of saving the planet from the effects of climate change if the Ministry of Defence were also to commission a study on the “environmental footprint of tanks” and the effects their manufacture and use has on the climate and the environment. At the same time, the European Union has decided that from 2035 onwards, no new combustion engine vehicles may be manufactured or registered, but tanks, which consume between 300 and 500 litres of diesel per 100 kilometres, will presumably remain unaffected by this provision.
In the construction industry, efforts are being made to switch to renewable building materials, and wood is even being used instead of steel and concrete on highrise buildings. In the production of weapons, it will never be a matter of resorting to renewable raw materials. Howard Hughes demonstrated this with his wooden aircraft, the Spruce Goose, once metals became scarce during the Second World War. The Spruce Goose did not make it past its maiden flight. Efforts to build tanks from renewable raw materials such as wood would be even more unrealistic. It would also be utterly preposterous in terms of environmental friendliness to attempt to electrify tanks weighing between 40 and 60 tons with highly combustible and difficult-to-install batteries. Similarly, any drive towards improving the efficiency of weaponry would only increase their destructive power and thus present an even greater obstacle to climate protection. The fact that all the weapons systems produced today with huge inputs of materials and energy will be in line for scrapping in just a few years thanks to the pace of technological progress also conflicts with climate change targets.
When considering the issue of stocking up on arms, we should bear in mind that meeting climate change targets is difficult enough without adding to the problem with wars and rearmament, because climate change requires people to be willing to relinquish many of the comforts of everyday living. But in today’s affluent society, precedence still seems to lean towards self-interest and maintaining living standards. Rather than taking time to investigate in detail alternative strategies for Germany’s future security in wartime, the government immediately freed up resources for weapons to the tune of 100 billion euros.
Such an investment must be viewed critically, if only because it is not only a question of halting climate change, but also of making life more secure and more bearable in times of climate change. For this as well, resources and energy must be mobilised. We have long been aware that rainwater, which devastates towns, cities, and the countryside in the form of torrential rain, must no longer be allowed to simply drain off via rivers into the oceans. It is a necessary commodity that, as groundwater, makes life and agriculture possible and counteracts droughts. Precautionary measures such as the renaturation of river courses, infrastructure to accommodate flooding, catchment structures, retention basins, and underground seepage systems are construction measures that are a lot more forward-looking than investments in military armaments.
Attitudes towards war have changed fundamentally since the First and Second World Wars. At that time, they were still seen as necessary, and there were no reservations about the impact on the climate. The English architectural historian Martin Pawley could still get hot under the collar about the fact, as far as architects and planners were concerned, that “Bombers are the planners’ best friend” and that one of his compatriots claimed: “This time is now better. We have thanks to German bombers, a much greater opportunity for physical reconstruction.”2 But even back then, some architects also took a stand against war. Frank Lloyd Wright even fell out with his admirer the historian Lewis Mumford, who had argued for the United States’ entry into the Second World War. For Wright, war was nothing but the negation of all possibilities and, from a historical point of view, a disease that brought down one culture after another because it countered violence with violence.3 Today, no architect will enthusiastically welcome devastation as an opportunity for modern planning and reconstruction; on the contrary, the Association of German Architects (BDA) is not alone in promoting environmentally compatible building with its programme “Haus der Erde” (“House of the Earth”).4
Regards the climate, the only thing to do today is basically to end wars and put an end to rearmament once and for all, too. But the number of failed attempts is high. Even after the Second World War, it was felt that national conflicts should no more be solved with weapons than with a policy of appeasement, as Britain and France had long tried to do with Hitler. Even then, the alleged territorial claim to a corridor to Danzig, in an attempt to reverse the separation of Germany from its eastern territories (Treaty of Versailles), could not be prevented from triggering another world war.
These experiences culminated in the strategy to prevent future world wars by having negotiations conducted solely through the United Nations and thus having conflicts resolved worldwide by the UN Security Council. This would have meant a real turning point: not rearmament, but disarmament. But the good intentions were thwarted by the UN’s flawed right of veto. Since the Security Council came into existence, resolutions have been blocked more than 200 times by this veto. But never has this absurdity been so obvious as in the Ukraine war. That one of the five veto powers would itself be the aggressor, throwing the entire world into turmoil with its war of aggression, had once seemed unthinkable. Never has a change in the right of veto been more urgent, because it must not be possible for the egocentricity of a single person to override the interests of the world community of billions of people. It was only through the UN’s powerlessness to act that Vladimir Putin was given free rein to implement his imperialist goals, with the UN being condemned to stand by and watch.
Wars are fought when one side believes it can achieve
its goals through military superiority. They can be ended prematurely as soon as the military resources of the two sides are balanced and they are thus forced to the negotiation table, or when a superior force threatens to intervene. Without Russia’s veto, the UN would have had the right to stop this war. The alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also realised too late that US President Joe Biden could have prevented this war had he not given his assurance not to intervene. The invasion of Ukraine began only days later.
However, the promise and international agreements were kept, not least because after Putin’s threats it was feared that the war could escalate into a Third World War. But due to global interdependencies, this has already happened and has long since crossed NATO’s borders. It is a global economic war, because people in poorer regions will not die from bombs and missiles, but from hunger. Countries will no longer be destroyed, but they are being economically and socially destabilised by shortages of raw materials and energy around the world.
We are mistaken if we believe we have only been transported back to the times of the Cold War. In fact, we are already in a new, complex, and hot terrorist war. To end it, we need totally new strategies that have nothing to do anymore with the conflicts of the past. The strategy of ending this war not through weapons but through sanctions was correct. But the global interdependencies make this strategy look less and less promising due to all the various countries’ different economic interests. Such an irrational economic world war can only be ended if all the nation-states concerned reach a consensus. But this can only be negotiated at international level with concessions on all sides and under pressure from the UN. For this to happen, however, the right of veto would first have to be abolished. As long as not even key points for negotiations of all the countries concerned can be defined, an environmentally acceptable end to the war is barely achievable. Only when the Western countries realise that there is much more at stake than saving Ukraine, when they are prepared not to respond to demands for long-term rearmament but to mobilise all their existing weaponry to enable Ukraine to wage war with Russia’s superior power on equal terms instead, will it be possible to keep the consequences for the climate within the limits agreed.
But even that will be difficult, for it is no longer a matter of conventional warfare. Putin has long recognised that Russia can make gains from “autonomous” electronically guided missiles that can erase infrastructure and entire cities with pinpoint accuracy from its own territory at a range of 200 to 500 kilometres. This war has thus developed into state-sanctioned terrorism.
Conventional means such as tanks and ground troops are only deployed by Russia to occupy the destroyed cities and gained territory. Only if Ukraine is also given the means to destroy Russian infrastructure and launch pads on Russian soil as well as warships off its ports with pinpoint accuracy over long distances without deploying troops, will it be able to act on an equal footing with Putin and ultimately also be able to negotiate an end to this war.
The symbolic gesture of the European Union potentially admitting Ukraine as a member state should be the first step towards putting the country on an equal footing with Russia. But the EU’s support of around two billion euros so far is only a fraction of what Germany invests in its own NATO security. It only confirms to Putin that his strategy of spreading fear through threats has been successful. This might even prompt him not only to wipe out Ukraine but also to subjugate the neighbouring non-NATO countries. He could thus move Russia to the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. It is therefore now a matter of stopping this expansionist mania through the cooperation of all Western countries, before it is too late. Politicians of all countries on this planet that are affected by this global economic war urgently need to take a joint stand to bring those responsible for the war before an international criminal court immediately to contribute to ending the war. However, this must be done independently of any right of veto and avoid lengthy legal procedures, because it is not very effective for institutions such as the UN to document genocides and terrorist acts of aggression only once the crimes have been accomplished in the hope of putting a terrorist president on trial later. It is too late for the millions of war-damaged and in some cases murdered Ukrainian citizens if a political mass murderer is only sentenced years after his crimes. This has already been demonstrated by the trial of the first-ever indicted former head of state, Slobodan Milošević, which ended after four years due to the death of the accused. The world community must act before it is too late, because otherwise the worldwide economic and cultural cooperation of all countries will end in a division – two warring, global hemispheres – and all efforts to stem climate change will then be futile. Right now, it seems it is Kyiv alone seeking to bring Putin to justice.
It is imperative that all countries realise the pointlessness of the Ukraine war and that even China, in relation to Taiwan, understands that wars make no sense even with military superiority. This could also bring other warmongers to their senses and help to make this nonsensical war the last one on our planet. It would certainly also make the need for Germany’s own policy on national security, conjured up by the military, politicians, and the arms industry, seem obsolete. The investment of 100 billion euros in rearmament should then be put back on the negotiating table. The sum of 100 billion euros to avert the climate catastrophe would be a better future investment.
Only by a worldwide limitation to the production of all weapons can we save our planet’s climate from catastrophe. We may ridicule the American firearms industry lobby, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) suggestion that to prevent killings it wants to give all citizens (including schoolchildren) guns, but we do not want to acknowledge that the rearmament of all the planet’s countries does not reduce war crimes either, rather it increases them.
1 BBSR, ed., Umweltfussabdruck von Gebäuden in Deutschland: Kurzstudie zu sektorübergreifenden Wirkungen des
Handlungsfelds “Errichtung und Nutzung von Hochbauten” auf Klima und Umwelt. Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) online publication, no. 17/2020, carried out on behalf of the Federal Ministry of the Interior for
Construction and Home Affairs (BMI). 2 Martin Pawley, Architecture versus Housing (New York:
Praeger, 1971), p. 45. 3 Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford, correspondence between the architect and critic, in Bauwelt 28/2002, p. 26. 4 Bund Deutscher Architekten (Federation of German
Architects – BDA), ed., Das Haus der Erde, Positionen für eine klimagerechte Architektur in Stadt und Land (Berlin: BDA, 2019).
HELMUT C. SCHULITZ Architect, is a member of the Architecture Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. Between 1969 and 1982 he was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and from 1982 to 2002 a professor at the Technische Universität Braunschweig.
