Mar 2, 2022
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. This oft-quoted passage from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks sounds eerily apt to describe Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine over the past week and its shock effect on the so-called rules-based international order. We at Uncommon Decency began our journey into podcasting a little over a year ago with an episode titled "Europe’s Paradise Lost". In it, our esteemed friend Ben Haddad warned us that Europe had been enjoying a geopolitical bliss since the end of the Cold War that could not be indefinitely sustained. The European Union (EU), he argued, should urgently graduate from America’s security patronage and become a geopolitical actor in its own right. Ben’s argument has aged, well, spectacularly well. In response to a scale of violence unseen on the European continent since World War II, the EU’s member states have beefed up their sanctions on Russia to what they hope will be a choke point, pledging to end their dependence on Russian gas and raise their defense spending up to the 2%-of-GDP required by NATO. In this latest bonus episode with our regular guest Juilan Graham, we ask: in what ways is the war over Ukraine reshaping the contours of the international order?
As always, rate and review Uncommon Decency on Apple Podcasts, and send us your comments or questions at @UnDecencyPod or undecencypod@gmail.com. Please consider supporting the show through Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/undecencypod.