Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

This posting on Russia/Kosovo/Georgia prompted a pointed comment from reader Will:

Fascinating philosophy question: if X responds badly to your action and cites your action as a reason for that bad behaviour, how far are you responsible for what X does?

Seems to me that the answer depends on what you think of X – what you think X actually is.

Three scenarios:

Mineral:   you can take the long road round the base of the mountain, or attempt a short-cut across a steep slope covered in loose stones. You know that the stones may slip and cause damage to houses in the valley. You go for the short-cut. The stones slide and cause such damage.

You suspect that your footsteps prompted the mini-landslide. If they did, the stones simply made a Newtonian response to some or other physical force you exerted. They had no choice but to slide. You had no real options to calibrate the stones’ response to your steps, other than not to attempt the slope at all.

Vegetable:   you decide not to weed the whole of the garden. Nasty weeds/brambles grow strongly in the most neglected areas, less strongly in the places where you keep nature at bay.

Here the response of the weeds/brambles is ‘inanimate, but dynamic. Your actions do calibrate to a generally predictable extent what happens in which part of the garden. Your ‘responsibility’ is more subtle.

Animal:    you live in a nature reserve where some fierce bears roam. How far to avoid the bears? When you can not avoid them, act kindly towards them or beat them back?

You start to feed one bear in a kindly but wary fashion. One day he eats one of your pets. You whack him with a stick. He responds angrily by eating a neighbour’s infant. Did you cause that tragedy to happen, not just by hitting the bear but by deluding yourself that a friendly relationship with the creature was possible and altering its consciousness..? 

* * * * *

All this is a convoluted way of pointing to the contradictions in much of the analysis about Russia and whether/why Western actions are ‘provocative’ to Moscow.

Do we treat Russia’s ‘fear of encirclement’, ‘insecurities’ and ‘anxieties’ as, so to speak, inanimate facts of life over which we (and they) have no control other than to top-toe widely round them?

Or are they simple genetically coded facts of life which do respond in a predictable but insensate way to what we do?

Or are they animate/sensate facts of life, where we need keener judgement to get the response we want?  

Or are they human, even reasonable fears?

What if they are human but basically unreasonable paranoid fears?

The gushing Western punditry on Russia contains confusing contradictory elements of all these ideas.

Some people appear to suggest that Russia for reasons of obvious history/geography/Tsars/Communism/vodka has no choice but to behave the way it does. Safest is to adopt a Finlandish stance to avoid risking trouble.

Others argue that Russia of course does have choices, hence all the more reason to behave in a subtle respectful way: keep that bear calm and happy, even if he eats some of your rabbits now and again.

And then there are those who say that Russia of course makes its own decisions, but we have to strive to set a robust context in which they know that bad decisions have bad consequences for them. Eventually they will come to see that they have no more reason to fear ‘encirclement’ by democratic NATO states than eg Switzerland does.

To answer Will’s question.  

I expected Russia to play tough in the CIS if key Western countries went ahead and recognised Kosovo as independent without having secured first a reasonable global consensus and in the face of explicit Russian objections.

NB this was separate from my view on whether and when Kosovo ‘should’ be independent, or whether Serbia ‘deserved’ to keep Kosovo.

The vital point was and is that the Kosovo independence issue is partly about Kosovo, but also about a bigger vision of global order. Acts of state recognition are at the very heart of diplomacy – it is a high risk strategy to mishandle them when a UN Security Council member is closely engaged and has Views.

I expected a tough Russian response not so much because Russia cares tuppence about Serbia or Kosovo – rather because Russia does care a lot about some other issues, whose handling turns on a sort of informal shifting balance of power as between differing accepted principles. This balance is not easily defined or articulated at any one moment, but top politicians and diplomats are paid to sense it and manage it. 

To conclude. It may look worthwhile to take a calculated risk. You know that your move can lead to a bad outcome, because you know that someone prone to lashing out may well lash out in response.

You move, and the lashing-out occurs.

You are not in any moral causation sense ‘responsible’ for that lashing-out when it occurs. Yet you can not complain much when people say you miscalculated somewhere. And you end up having to deal with the damage.

Some actions may be well motivated. Perhaps even Right.

But not, all things considered, Wise.