On postcolonialism and Westsplaining.
Ohh, and Eastsplaining too.
I can’t find an entry for Eastsplaining on Wikipedia.1 Instead, under the entry for Westsplaining we get a response by Yanis Varoufakis, the sleekly domed, motorcycling Former Minister of Finance of Greece, defending himself against accusations he’s a Westsplainer based on his writings concerning the Russian invasion of Ukraine.2
To be scrupulously fair, Varoufakis stresses his desire to see the fighting cease as soon as possible; he argues he is just as entitled to his opinions as are people in Czechia or Poland. Furthermore, he’s clear that his scepticism of NATO stems from its support for the fascistic Colonels’ regime in Greece, 1967-74; a not unreasonable position from a Hellenistic perspective (unless of course, you think Europe’s transition to democracy began in 1989).3
Whether you buy what he’s selling or not, the idea that Mr Varoufakis is somehow representative of the ‘West’ or the ‘Left’ is questionable.4 I am not convinced he’s even representative of views across the eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, there he sits on Wikipedia, Westsplainer-in-chief alongside the likes of Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer and President Emmanuel Macron — who has now reformed his stance.
There’s a problem with flinging accusations of Westsplaining around, and not because they’re wrong (they’re very often spot on5), rather it’s because the term is designed to shut down any discussion, as was its predecessor Whataboutism, and the dread term Appeasement. These are weapons in a furious propaganda war, and from that perspective, they’re perfectly comprehensible, although whether they’re quite as effective globally as they might be locally, is questionable.
On one level, this is old-fashioned gatekeeping, policing who can discuss what about CEE, foreigners are allowed to but so long as they agree on certain issues, no dissent is allowed. By the same logic, only Westerners can comment about the West, although when you put it that way it just sounds stupid.
Yes, there are good reasons for this approach, decades of Soviet repression, murders, deportations and the struggles to restore control over your own history, culture and language.6 But it’s not ‘the why it should be done’ that’s the issue, it’s the ‘how it can be achieved’ and who is paying attention that’s at stake.
There’s a broader, and arguably more significant, dimension to this war of words and that’s influence over policy; arguing that you, and only you, know ‘what must be done’ is the surest route to a clusterfuck of epic propositions I can think of.
Not convinced?
Groupthink has long been a clear and present danger for policymakers irrespective of origin or location. Shut down options (however absurd or offensive they might appear), limit your perspectives, close off discussion of the devil’s alternatives and there’s a good possibility you’ll end up on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs or Da Nang or riding atop an APC into Bagdad, Beruit, Kabul or through the outskirts of Kyiv.
I don’t say this merely to be contrarian; global attention spans are short and easily diverted: before 7 October 2023, Ukraine was at the centre of much of the World’s attention, now not so much. Get the tone wrong and you lose your audience; you fail to implement the policy you seek to advocate; you lose the battle and the war.
If all this wasn’t complicated enough three extra dimensions have been appended to the Westsplaining mantra: imperialism, colonialism and post-colonialism, subjects you’d think the West had some expertise in, but no, that’s wrong too. It’s the wrong kind of imperialism, to paraphrase the Woody Allen joke.7
By these accounts, Russian imperialism is another area of incomprehension and befuddlement for the West and the Global South, about which they must be reeducated ‘by those who know’. And here’s the rub, the vistas of imperial history are vast and have been scrutinised for millennia by a veritable Greek chorus of observers, if you start to confuse current political necessities on these contested grounds you’ll be outflanked quicker than Roman Centurions marching through the Teutoburg Forest.
A lot of rubbish has been written about CEE for centuries,8 both by outsiders and by some inhabitants; many western, southern and northern Europeans (let alone North Americans) are profoundly ignorant about the region; the newer members of the EU and NATO are not treated equally by their wealthier neighbours (and wealth IS a key factor here); the debates about the merits of NATO’s enlargement have often been inane, and a significant proportion of what’s been written about Ukraine by some Western commentators is ignorant, ill-informed, condescending crap.
Westsplaining is real enough and there’s more than enough of it to go around. It’s no revelation to argue such ignorance should be called out and corrected. I suspect anyone with any knowledge of the region would instantly recognise the problem's parameters. Just recall the flood of ‘expert’ opinions about the ‘Balkans’ in the early 1990s, or, for that matter, back in the 1870s.
At the same time, CEE is hardly unique in its being patronised, ignored and spoken over by voices from the ‘West’. Sadly, there’s a global commonality to such behaviour and plenty of robust responses rebutting it [insert a supercilious reference to Edward Said’s Orientalism here. Ed. ]. If you’re not quite sure what I mean, think about what you’ve read about the Vietnam War(s) written by Vietnamese, Laotian or Chinese scholars, as opposed to American or French researchers. Now do the same for Afghanistan, China, Iran, Palestine, or Haiti. How’d you do?
That’s not to excuse such conduct or to normalise such behaviour, but it really shouldn’t come as too great a shock. Surely the issue is how to ameliorate the problem, and how to educate the ignorant, or maybe it’s just to score cheap points.
But there’s a corollary here too: the idea that there’s some glowing kernel of eternal ‘truth’ residing in the minds of everyone living east of the Rhine should be treated with equal scepticism; not least as these abilities mysteriously dissipate further east you travel. Cross one more river, one more border and they’re gone.
I write this sitting by the shores of the Bay of Riga, so the nearest demarcation point is the Narva River, dividing Estonia from the Russian Federation. You can’t cross the Narva bridge at the moment, it’s shut, but if you did you’d presumably feel the sudden drop in comprehension.9
The real problem is in making patronising, reductive generalisations about peoples’ opinions based on where they live, the languages they speak, political inclinations or religious beliefs. Equally problematic are attempts to silence these voices simply because you disagree with them, or because they advocate policies you oppose.
A balance should be struck, we all have to add, listen to and learn critically from other (subaltern) voices: critically being the operative word. Sadly, the critical bit often gets dropped in these East/Westsplaining online screamfests. Doing so shouldn’t mean simply replacing one monologue with another, as some advocate: we don’t study the Holocaust based only on the victim’s testimonies, as vital as they are, but combine them with studies of the perpetrators and the bystanders to develop a holistic comprehension of the process and its consequences. (Sometimes it seems only the victims, and only the victims of communist crimes, get a hearing in this arena.)
Doing this is far easier said than done and I am fully aware the ‘being critical’ bit runs the risk of merely replicating Westsplaining in a more palatable form [at least for me]. Getting this balance right is not easy. Who decides who is allowed to comment, what constitutes creditability, and who are the gatekeepers? Professor Maria Todorova has her own strident opinions on this issue.
For example, I recall being first told about the ‘Czech Hell’ some years back, the 1945 slaughter of Estonian SS volunteers by Czechoslovak partisans, events I’d never heard of, but which appear in all Estonian history books. Enquiries with Czech colleagues revealed a more complicated, less clear-cut story. Eastsplainers might argue the victims’ stories are the ‘truth’, a tragedy of soldiers just trying to save their nation from Bolshevism, yet that’s not the whole story. Is it Westsplaining to root out the complexities, yet still recognise the brutal repression of Estonia by the Soviets and 40 years of occupation?
Most of these arguments are concentrated around Russia’s illegal invasion(s) of Ukraine since 2014, and support, or lack of it, for the government in Kyiv. Leftist Westsplainers, so the theory goes, are the dupes of Putin and undermine Ukraine’s defence, Varoufakis among them. Some undoubtedly are, but are they all on the left and from the West?
This thesis soon falls flat if we look at Hungary and Slovakia’s positions, amongst others. More worryingly the upcoming US elections threaten a second term for Donald Trump, and while he’s clearly from the West he surely isn’t on the left. Neither is Reform UK’s leader Nigel Farage, whose comments about Ukraine are just the latest addition to this roster of ignorance.
To make myself clear: I’m not convinced Leftist Westsplainers are the core concern, and even adapting the term doesn’t seem to cover all the bases. Not that I have any answers to offer, I don’t. What little I know about CEE provides me with no solutions to the current crises, and offers no insights into future ones. I am even less convinced that the addition of post-colonialism to the discussion is helpful, although there’s an opportunity it might.
Exactly when Imperialism/postcolonialism was bolted on to Westsplaining is tricky to establish. Maria Mälksoo’s provocative 2022 piece in the Journal Of Genocide Studies is spot on when she discusses The Political Imperative of Decolonizing Russia’s Historical Memory. Her analysis is also rightly critical of the Realist school of International Relations theory, as is Kseniya Oksamytna. IR theory and those, predominantly white, western males, who write it have long been regarded as ‘problematic’. Quite rightly. Seventeen years ago Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan lamented the lack of non-Western IR theory. 90 years before that, W.E.B. Du Bois was regularly writing for the Journal of Race Development explaining African American hesitant views about the First World War, a publication later rebranded as Foreign Affairs in 1922.
Mälksoo’s and Oksamytna’s articles are judicious and well-founded critiques, others are not. Subsequent pieces go further, accusing the ‘West’ of ignorance about Russia’s Imperial legacy and of confusion over the Soviet Union’s stance on decolonisation — again, there’s a grain of truth here but much obfuscation as well.
Plenty of people in the West are probably fairly hazy on both issues, just as many inhabitants of CEE are probably a bit hazy about the United States’ relations with Queen Liliʻuokalani and the annexation of Hawaii, its occupation of the Philippines, or Britain and the Chagos islands.
We tend to stick with the atrocities and calamities we know best, we cannot know them all, but it should be possible to keep several in mind at once, as Michael Rothberg suggests. Instead, some Eastsplainers seem to be intent on supplanting one with another, rather than allowing multiple memories to exist in parallel. It’s understandable but not to be recommended, especially as the hectoring, know-it-all-all tone is decidedly off-putting.
While it’s more than reasonable to suggest Western Europeans are unenlightened about CEE, which many are, to then jump to ‘Westerners’ know nothing about colonisation and even less about Russian colonisation, is quite the flex. Oh, and the Global South would like a word too, especially because they’re pretty much responsible for post-colonial thought, much of it heavily spiced with Marxism. Which is awkward, and usually ignored.
It seems a bit ungenerous to focus on Natalia Antelava’s article to the exclusion of others, but it does neatly encapsulate the Eastsplaining meets Post-Colonialism genre:
I grew up here in CEE (Soviet-occupied Georgia, in this case), my personal story links to Ukraine here, and I met some people who didn’t know that, the West doesn’t understand this, and this is why I know best.
To give some examples:
The very nature of Russian colonialism doesn’t fit the Western definition of oppression. Over the centuries, while European powers conquered overseas territories, Russia ran a land empire that absorbed its neighbors.[…]
Presumably, the reader can spot the flaws here, or do we need to mention the Roman, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian Empires or America’s conquest of the West, which has numerous parallels to Russian imperial history? And what exactly is the West’s definition of oppression? I’ve no idea, although I’m guessing it may exclude Gaza.
Putin ordered his diplomats in Africa, Latin America and Asia to double down on the anti-colonial message. Using social media, the Russian propaganda machine beamed the same message, targeting newsfeeds of left-leaning audiences in the West, as well as immigrant and Black communities in the United States.
It worked.
The implication is certain audiences only take up anti-colonial, and thus anti-Ukrainian stances when prompted to by Russian propaganda, they lack any agency of their own. At best this is patronising, at worst it’s fully-fledged Eastsplaining.
After all, you don’t have to travel to West Africa to get a feel for imperialism’s legacy; Wales or Ireland would do. Yes, there are multiple parallels between Soviet and earlier Western forms of colonisation, so too there are comparisons to be made with the murkier forms of Cold War imperium, to paraphrase Hugh Wilford in his The CIA: An Imperial History.
It strikes me there’s a golden opportunity to use the legacy of colonisation and imperialism to reach out to disparate groups, to overcome Westsplaining and ease off on the Eastsplaining, and reach for some potential consensus. However, this would mean going beyond a parochial focus on Russia and CEE. Is this possible? Probably not, multiple insurmountable obstacles stand in the way; rival memories of the Global Cold War, Palestine, and China to name just a few. Instead, I fear we’ll get more of the same, and I’ll be dismissed as a Westsplainer, just like Mr Varoufakis.
I’ve made some small edits since posting this and some additions. Hopefully, it’s a bit clearer.
It’s been pointed out that earlier drafts were a bit confusing and unfair about Varoufakis’s position, truth be told I’m pretty ambivalent about him and his stances, but I understand how he annoys people.
I would recommend readers examine these claims and counter claims for themselves:
https://newrepublic.com/article/165603/carlson-russia-ukraine-imperialism-nato
If you want to get a feel for the sort of dialogue and language that probably drives many people across CEE to distraction, you can listen to Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis here.
Once you’ve done have a read of this prescient warning from Ernest Gellner, written in https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/55048/the-rest-of-history
Portugal, Spain, and Greece had a long, painful transition to democracy during the 1970s, and in the case of Portugal while involved in a long and bitter colonial conflict. I’ve yet to see any mention of these cases cited in any of the pieces complaining of Westsplaining. Happy to be proven wrong.
The use of terms such as West and Left often go uncommented on, but their usage is becoming ever more strained and strange. What exactly are they supposed to mean? Aren’t ALL members of the EU/NATO Western? If not, why not? And where you sit is where you stand, who in the Global South wouldn’t regard CEE countries as Western? Is Greece Western, why isn’t it in the Balkans?
I just stumbled across this ‘gem’ by Christopher Cadwell in the NYT, from February 2023, not only is it ignorant, it borders on batshit crazy, and he seems obsessed with Hitler.
People across CEE refound their voices after the Cold War, or rather some groups in these societies did, whether this ‘loss’ of voices in any way matches that of peoples in Empires or colonies is questionable: Michel-Rolph Trouillot Silencing the Past https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246609/silencing-the-past-by-michel-rolph-trouillot/
Party Guest : I finally had an orgasm, and my doctor said it was the wrong kind.
Isaac Davis : You had the wrong kind? I've never had the wrong kind, ever. My worst one was right on the money.
Norman Davies’s book, Europe: a History (1996) contains an unambiguous call to view Europe as a whole and to dismiss arbitrary East-West divisions, it also happens to be nearly 30 years old, so there’s nothing remotely new about this debate.
We should recognise its current phase re-started around 2003 with the invasion of Iraq with the revival of the phrase New Europe, repurposed from its First World War origins. See, Donald Rumsfeld, the Old versus the New Europe.
These views parallel the older Western view that Eastern Europe was permanently covered in snow; Ivan Turgenev, Torrents of Spring (1872) when the Roselli family asks Dmitry Sanin about the weather in Moscow