Matt Broomfield
In his own overview of the global conflicts which have defined 2023, veteran foreign affairs journalist Patrick Cockburn deployed a familiar comparison in suggesting that the 2020s increasingly resemble a re-run of the 1930s, that ‘devil’s decade’ where economic catastrophe, exploitative nationalist politics and proxy conflict between great powers presaged the slaughter of the Second World War.
While there are certainly parallels to be drawn, Cockburn’s analysis obscures the ideological context which so profoundly shaped mid-20th century politics, in the era of the ‘great ideologies’. Following the First World War, Europe had teetered for a moment on the brink of revolution, with a socialist West a more genuine possibility than ever before or since. Fascist reaction followed, with the USSR-led project in state socialism achieving Nazism’s ultimate defeat through popular-front alliances between bourgeois-liberal and revolutionary forces unthinkable before or after.
In contrast, our own era has been marked by the resurgence of certain forms of nationalist reaction, as the inevitable cracks in the supposed liberal, free-market, post-USSR consensus have widened. Islamist violence in the supposedly post-ideological 1990s and thereafter was not just an aberration, but one particular expression of a patriarchal, statist, reactionary, anti-globalist message sure to appeal to many of those men who feel themselves excluded from their patriarchal birthright.
In this context, it’s harder to perceive the ideological contours which shape the great-power confrontations gradually coalescing from the Donbas to the Arabian Gulf to the South China Sea. The three once and future kings in Beijing, Washington and Moscow have all proven capable of deploying rhetoric from a vanished past of starkly divided ideological battle-grounds, variously referencing socialist ideals, de-Nazification and anti-fascist struggle while pursuing pragmatic policies intended to secure market access at any cost.
As such, Cockburn’s representation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as the Spanish Civil War of an incipient World War Three is misguided. The Spanish conflict was marked by extreme ideological bifurcation, a global failure to stand behind those forces capable of withstanding fascism, and the brief flourishing of a radical, progressive alternative whose bloody extermination under the boot of four decades of fascist rule could not prevent that alternative lending hope to future generations.
With each year that passes, it becomes increasingly clearer that it was the Syrian conflict which has presaged the coming era of violence. With resistance to authoritarianism rapidly taking Islamist form, it was unclear to many casual observers which states stood behind the violence or which forces could be trusted to end the conflict and bring about a better future. Meanwhile, the West missed its chance to demonstrate any genuine commitment to confronting Russian-backed brutality and power-expansion in the Global South – an inevitability, but one which has doubtless emboldened Washington’s rivals to steal marches throughout Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
All these factors and more – great-power conflict, proxy and drone warfare, the Islamification and radicalisation of anti-authoritarian and anti-centralisation sentiment, resource competition, partial state collapse and subsequent nationalist reaction – will recur throughout the Middle East and beyond in coming decades, as indeed we are currently witnessing in the fall-out from Israel’s callous, calculated brutality in Gaza. And it was in Syria, too, that a genuine if tentative alternative has emerged through the Kurdish-led project in democratic confederalism.
The precise conditions which allowed the emergence of this curious hybrid between organised, militarised, disciplined resistance to authoritarian reaction and grassroots, women-led, emancipatory democratic ideals are unlikely to recur elsewhere, and struggling peoples everywhere must find their own paths toward emancipation. But the Kurdish movement’s ability to endure in the cracks between warring great powers and pursue a community-based agenda capable of feeding, protecting and preserving millions does demonstrate that state collapse need not mean a return to reaction. Any emancipatory alternative must certainly demonstrate a similar degree of adaptability, willingness to compromise and forge broad-church, grassroots alliances, and clear-eyed recognition of the possibilities and dangers inherent in benefiting from transactional alliances with greater powers while building a revolutionary alternative.
In Turkey, the revolutionary Kurdish movement has learned once again that transactional alliances at the ballot-box can all too easily leave the weaker, more radical partner isolated and unable to achieve its laudable goals. In Iran, it has faced both authoritarian repression, and the co-option of a potentially radical, women-led agenda by liberal political actors solely interested in furthering US hegemony at Tehran’s expense. Across Iraq and Syria, it has faced such a devastating onslaught of alienated drone warfare conducted with the full support of its nominal partners in the fight against ISIS that it is remarkable civilian population or the political project have been able to endure. And yet it’s at the close of this annus horribilis that the Kurdish movement has released its new social contract, fiercely underscoring the urgent need for grassroots co-operation and co-existence in order to resist statist violence and great-power exploitation.
It may well be that the Syrian conflict comes to seem like a mere prelude to the nationalist violence set to sweep the globe. But like the Spanish Civil War, this conflict has brought with it a kernel of genuine, organised hope: and this hope has not yet been extinguished, but remains alive. We will have to learn these lessons again, and with more brutality again: but they are there, in the 20th century as in 2023, reminding us that struggle will continue throughout the world even and especially as the clouds of war gather above. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, in a world equally shadowed by great-power conflict, ‘these are not the days of victories, but of winning our defeats.’
*Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist, poet and activist. He writes for VICE, Medya News, the New Statesman and the New Arab; his prose has been published by The Mays, Anti-Heroin Chic and Plenitude; and his poetry by the National Poetry Society, the Independent, and Bare Fiction. His work was displayed across London by Poetry on the Underground, and he is a Foyle Young Poet of the Year.
