Tag: Konstantin Gaaze

Roman Holiday

A still from the motion picture Roman Holiday (1953). Courtesy of Republic

The debate about whether Schengen visas should cease to be issued to Russian nationals has tilted in a completely wrongheaded direction. In fact, it should not focus on the right of Russian nationals to visit European countries, including as tourists, but on Europe’s right to protect itself and to take measures that establish a direct political and legal link between citizens and the actions of their state. No one can or should deprive refugees or persons who are persecuted for their anti-war stance of the right to request asylum in EU countries. But this right should not be confused with the right to tourism, recreation, use of property or trouble-free business dealings in Europe.

What arguments are made by those who think that European countries cannot and do not have the right to stop issuing certain types of visas to Russian nationals?

Argument No. 1. The Russian intelligentsia argues that Europe, as an axiological benchmark for educated and non-war-supporting Russian nationals, has no right to close its borders to such nationals. This argument is based on a double omission.

Omission No. 1. It is not a matter of defending the right of all Russian nationals to vacation in Europe or find refuge there, but of the rights of only those Russian nationals who have linked their lives to Europe as an axiological (or consumerist) beacon. Everyone else, they imply, can do without visas — meaning it is a matter of triage, not a matter of rights or their lack. But this kind of sorting is a blatant injustice vis-a-vis one’s fellow citizens. Why should Russian nationals who know who Caravaggio and Ibsen are have visas, while those who don’t know who they are do without them?

Omission No. 2. Europe as a political entity is supposed to have a moral obligation toward certain nationals of a state that for six months now has been bombing European cities, from Lviv and Vinnytsia to Mykolaiv and Odesa, without cause and without declaring war. Europe has no such moral obligation.

Europe has a political obligation to protect its nationals from the belligerent state and its “soft” power. It also has a moral obligation to take all necessary, sufficient or at least potentially effective measures to protect the European state that has been subjected to the aggression — meaning Ukraine (which is European, so far, only in a geographical, not legal sense). In this case, everything has been working as it should. The EU has welcomed several million refugees from Ukraine and granted them legal status.

Argument No. 2. A crackdown has begun in Russia: opponents of the war, cultural figures, academics, and artists have been persecuted for their stance. If European visa are canceled, these people will not be able to escape. An analogy is immediately drawn with the philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom the Spanish border service did not let into the country from occupied France during the Second World War. Benjamin committed suicide.

Although this analogy is flattering to those who make it, it has nothing to do with real life. There are at least four countries where it is possible to evacuate from Russia quickly, cheaply, and nearly risk-free: Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. There are flights there from Russia, the Russian language is in widespread use there, and no visas are required to stay there. Moreover, you can enter Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan without your foreign travel passport.

So it’s not that there is nowhere to run, but that people want to escape “poshly.” They want to escape to Europe. This raises another objection. Fleeing to the EU on a tourist visa not only means slyly embellishing the hopelessness of the situation, but also engaging in deception. Either you choose Kant’s Europe and apply for refugee status and prove the right to be called a refugee, as the President of Ukraine has advised Russian nationals to do. Or you don’t bother with Europe at all if you want to go to there because you want to live according to Kant, but think you can cheat a little to get there.

Argument No. 3 against visa restrictions is that the European countries, by introducing such restrictions, will punish the innocent and encourage those who are not involved. That is, they will consolidate the majority supporting the war and make life difficult for those who do not support the war and just want to travel to Europe. This argument is based on the false and harmful premise that for some unknown reason the EU countries should play a part in Russia’s internal politics as an insider.

For thirty years, Europe invested a great deal of effort and resources in developing civil society in Russia, in supporting education, science, and culture in the country. These investments all went up in smoke on February 24. They proved completely and absolutely unproductive from a political point of view. Despite the possibly credible opinion that popular support for the war is imaginary, and Russian society is actually opposed to it, it is impossible to understand whether this is true or not. How can one continue investing in something that either exists or does not exist, but should exist?

Argument No. 4 is even simpler: Russian nationals have the right to travel to Europe. Period. It is an inalienable human right. This is simply not the case. If we take the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a standard, it states that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state,” “[e]veryone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country,” and “[e]veryone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.” Neither the spirit nor the letter of a ban by European countries on issuing tourist visas to Russian nationals will violate these three principles governing freedom of movement as a basic human right.

Argument No. 5 is made in desperation and looks completely ridiculous: defamation. First-rate countries versus second-rate countries. These can versus those cannot. I needn’t remind readers about refugees from Syria, that the EU continues to issue visas to people in countries whose standard of living is much lower than in Russia, and so on. It’s not a question of “quality.” The fact is that every day on the social networks I personally see wholly content Russian nationals (including those who support the war, work for the Kremlin, and get paid for producing propaganda and maintaining the infrastructure that simulates “popular” support for the war inside the country) roaming peaceful European landscapes. Every single day.

The war in Ukraine is not a dictator’s safari. It is a terminal event for Russian statehood. Meaning that it is a terminal event for Russian nationals, too. Europe would be in its rights to underscore this fact by taking a simple decision. Peaceful tourism for nationals of a belligerent country is a political oxymoron. Therefore, and for this reason alone, such tourism should be halted at least for the duration of the war.

Source: Konstantin Gaaze, “No, Europe doesn’t owe us anything: In defense of visa restrictions for Russian nationals,” Republic, 18 August 2022. Konstantin Gaaze is a sociologist and journalist. Translated by the Russian Reader

What Does the FSB Want from Russian Academics?

russland-fsb

What the FSB Wants from Russian Education and Science
Either Professors and Students Defend the Autonomy of Scholarship, or the Only Thing Left Will Be the “Science” of Russia’s Security in a Global World
Konstantin Gaaze
Vedomosti
November 28, 2019

On the evening of November 27, the FSB’s Border Service barred the well-known French sociologist Carine Clément from entering Russia. She was stopped at passport control in Sheremtyevo Airport and later informed that, as a “threat” to “national security,” she had been banned from entering Russia for ten years. Clément was slated to chair a panel on social stratification and the subjectivation of social status at a conference marking the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of the late sociologist Vladimir Yadov.

It is pointless to attempt to interpret the travel ban on Clement in the light of her planned lecture on resemblances between the so-called Yellow Vests [Gilets jaunes] and the so-called Quilted Jackets [vatniki]. The trouble is not with parallels, but with the fact that the FSB, the supreme authority on the life of the mind in Russia, has long ago decided that castrating the Runet is not enough to set people’s brains straight. It is time to strike—and strike hard—at the bourgeoning social sciences and the humanities.

We often forget that FSB has not one sword at its disposal—the Russian federal communications watchdog Roskomnadzor—but two swords: Roskomnadzor and Rosobrnadzor, the Russian federal education watchdog. When my own university, the so-called Shaninka, was stripped of its accreditation in the summer of 2018, the only rumor that explained the absurdity and inconsistencies of the inspection procedure and the accreditation commission’s final report was that Lieutenant General Alexei Sedov, head of the FSB’s constitutional security service, had personally made the decision not to extend our accreditation.

The legendary spook realized back then, apparently, that the real enemies were not professional opposition activists, but young men and women with books by Bourdieu and Arendt tucked under their arms. One day you read the structuralists, the next day you record a video and post it on YouTube, and the day after that you take to the streets to show you exist and are still capable of acting. Who needs scholarship that has such a dangerous effect on people’s minds?

Especially since there is a different kind of scholarship, which churns out piles of monographs dealing with Russia’s “special path,” the country’s security in a global world, and the degradation of the west’s “spiritual culture,” and which dominates the universities where students are marked down for reading primary sources: they have to read the textbooks written by their professors, not the works of “foreign agents.” Such universities hold an endless stream of events celebrating the founders of allegedly original schools of thought who, in fact, are plagiarists and fools who have not bothered to crack open a new book since 1991, if not since 1980. They organize online conferences where 18-year-old bachelors of sociology have to discuss such burning topics as whether women can serve in the police and in what capacity with students from Interior Ministry academies in neighboring regions.

What is at stake for the FSB in this case is not isolating Clément from her Russian audience, but ensuring the victory of one type of education and scholarly production over another—the victory of textbooks over primary sources, the victory of rote phrases over real knowledge, the victory of articles chockablock with references to the president’s annual state of the union address over articles that quote Foucault and Judith Butler.

This decision has been ripening for a long time, but it was hampered by other players in the bureaucracy, including major universities, officials, and Kremlin-backed pollsters, who understood that Russia’s current model of governance could not countenance the total ideologization of the social sciences. But all these nuances lost their significance after the protests in Moscow this past summer. The enemy must be defeated. So, beginning this autumn, the Kremlin and the capital’s universities have been hotly discussing whether there are too many students studying sociology and political science. Wouldn’t it be better to send them all to culinary school?

It is time we understood that it is not a matter of who reads the classics correctly and who doesn’t. It is a matter of the very opportunity to read—not in a closed reading group, but in an open lecture hall; not under a blanket, but at the university, in the company of students. We cannot hide behind the walls of our oases—the Higher School of Economics, RANEPA, the European University in St. Petersburg, and the Shaninka, among others. Either faculty and students will join together and defend scholarly autonomy, or, ten years from now there will be nothing left except the indigenous “science” of national security.  It is clear we could all emigrate. It is equally clear this would be a betrayal not only of future students but also of scholarship itself.

Konstantin Gaaze is a sociologist who lectures in the Fundamental Sociology program at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (the Shaninka).

Photo courtesy of Stern. Translated by the Russian Reader