Grand Strategy | Shift in Europe’s framing of the Ukraine conflict

Therefore, the change in question marks a major change in the Western narrative about the Ukraine war compared to a year or two ago. Faced with sharp moral shaming by the Western countries, countries such as India either pushed back or called out the Western double standards and hypocrisy, neither of which helped the interests of Ukraine or the Europeans. The West has likely recognised its mistake of using an accusatory tone towards the fence-sitters and is quickly moving from a moral framing of the Ukraine war to one that is rooted in national security interests. On the face of it, this may look like an inconsequential shift, but this has the potential to make the Europeans and non-Europeans more aware of each other’s security calculus.

As the war in Ukraine broke out in early 2022, the dominant rallying cry used by the United States and Europe framed it as a conflict between democracies and non-democracies/authoritarian regimes. This was both an ideological positioning and a clever strategy to unite the European States as well as the United States (US) and its allies behind the Ukraine cause. As a unifying strategy, it worked well. Moreover, since Ukraine is not part of the European Union or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), it would have been difficult for the US and Europe to use a direct security argument. Instead, they used a “moral, normative and international legal argument” to make their case. It worked among friends and allies but wasn’t impactful outside Europe and North America.

While the argument made by the West was a moral one, it felt like an interests-driven one, because many of us felt that it was an argument from self-interest masquerading as a normative one.

Moral arguments — democracies versus non-democracies, the sanctity of territorial sovereignty, non-aggression, and adherence to international law — aren’t inherently undesirable or useless. And yet, when the US and the West foreground such arguments, they ring hollow for several reasons. Given the West’s colonial past or imperial practices and the continuing disregard for the Global South’s concerns, moral crusades by the West in world politics are difficult for a lot of people around the world to appreciate. Secondly, the collective West and the US have a certain track record on issues such as the sanctity of territorial sovereignty, non-aggression, and international law which is hardly inspiring. Then there is a serious charge of hypocrisy — the West worries about moral questions only when one of their friends is harmed and maintains silence when they or their friends violate the same norms. Many in the Global South would say that the West and the US routinely engage in the selective application of norms. Consider, for instance, the push to bring the Russian president before the International Criminal Court contrasts sharply with their relative silence at the same court’s pronouncements about the Israeli leader.

Moreover, the democracy versus non-democracy argument didn’t resonate in the Global South, as issues of war and peace are hardly determined by a country’s type of government.

The growing criticism of the West’s moral plank regarding Ukraine and the US and European inability to stop the killings in Gaza appears to have forced a change in the Western narrative. As a result, the Western argument about the Ukraine war is increasingly framed in a national interest/national security language rather than relying on moral shaming.

Everyone gets it when a State argues that it has security concerns arising out of a certain development, even if they don’t fully agree with the assessment. National security is a good conversation starter among States.

While the new language of interest is more accessible and understandable for a lot of non-Europeans, there are competing perspectives in such framing too. There are several ways in which the question of interests is articulated in the context of the Ukraine war. Europeans tend to frame it in security terms; that Russia has invaded a country next to Europe and they could be next. Another argument is that the Ukraine war is a function of the Russian imperial mindset.

Outside of Europe, the war is framed differently — either as a manifestation of great power competition between the US and Russia or as Moscow’s attempt to preserve its sphere of influence which it believes has been steadily shrinking. What is common among all of them is that they use national security or national interests as the basis of their framing.

Going forward, it is likely that the West will continue to foreground the national security arguments in its dialogues with its interlocutors, stepping back from moral posturing. This change in the Western narratives about the Ukraine war gives India an important opportunity to begin a series of conversations with its European partners centred on mutual interests, national security considerations, and shared threat perceptions.

Happymon Jacob teaches India’s foreign policy at JNU and is the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defence Research. The views expressed are personal