From Rationality to Ritual: Demodernization of Politics

The man of understanding is he who has the ability to grasp and  ponder

the hidden causes of things. By hidden causes we mean those

 from which things originate,  and these are to be investigated

more by reason than by sensory experience.

Pierre Abélard, mid-1120

Maintaining religious and ethnic diversity is an important aspect of modernity currently under siege. Ethnic nationalism, tribalism, militancy under the banner of religion, and economic, social, and other kinds of exclusion gain legitimacy, where once relatively stable multicultural and multiethnic societies used to exist. These are signs of demodernization, in other words, regression on the scale of modernity. Demodernization need not be all-encompassing. Estonia or Israel, for example, exhibit technological alongside political demodernization.

Demodernization in Word and Deed

Knowledge is an essential ingredient of modernity. It can create or destroy ideologies, can establish or subvert dominance of a class. Today, the right to know is being eroded with respect to several foreign policy issues. Demodernization necessarily implies denial of knowledge and a challenge to rational thinking. Renaming streets, removing monuments and banning languages are part and parcel of demodernization. The language becomes ritualized and is used to spell magic rather than inform.

The use in the mainstream Western media of the expression “unprovoked full-scale” to denote Russia’s action in the Ukraine in a case in point. Established experts in geopolitics suggesting that the political West had provoked the war are promptly marginalized. Their analysis of “the hidden causes” – as Abélard would put it nearly a millennium ago –  of Western policies towards Russia is dismissed as “Kremlin’s propaganda”. Like all sociopolitical processes, the elimination of rational debate results from concerted efforts on the part of political actors. Discreditation, sanctions and even police are mobilized to silence or sideline respected specialists and thereby undermine scholarly expertise on Russia,.

However, the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, which would certainly warrants it no less, are yet to be termed “unprovoked” in legacy media, which become a tool not only of propaganda but of obscurantism. Understanding the adversary has become a term of opprobrium in Germany: “Putinversteher”.  Rational debate about alternative approaches to Russia has been supplanted with partisan self-righteous and self-serving rhetoric. Similarly, specious accusations of antisemitism stifle public discussion of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Appeals to emotions crowd out rational arguments. Passionate language used by otherwise lackluster State Department and E.U. bureaucrats suggests that cultural demodernization has reached deep in the corridors of power. Articulation of geopolitical interests morph into claims of moral superiority.

It was Ronald Reagan who introduced the expression “Evil Empire” in March 1983. This language might be appropriate before the National Association of Evangelicals which he addressed. Nearly two decades later, in January 2002, “Axis of Evil” appeared in an ostensibly more rational context, George W. Bush’s State of the Union address. It designated countries and movements resisting the U.S. and Israeli hegemony. The emotional charge was preparing the ground for the invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition in 2003. More recently, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has been also justified as a moral imperative aiming at “liberation of the Iranian people”.

A rational argument for both wars exists but is rarely voiced in polite company. They are part of the plan “A Clean Break: Securing the Realm” prepared for the incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. Western attacks on Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Iran have made that plan come true. The Israeli connection in unleashing these wars has now become a secret de Polichinelle.

Claims of moral superiority invoke democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law to prove that liberal democracies are inherently superior to other cultures. These pretentions take place of the hitherto widespread claims of religious and racial supremacy that provided steady support for the colonial conquests. For half a millennium this legitimized exploitation, violence and genocides. “Mission civilisatrice”, “White Man’s Burden”, “Support for Democracy”, “Regime Change” or “Responsibility to Protect” denote broadly similar interventions by Europeans and descendants of European settlers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Paradoxically, the Nazis, albeit known for their frequent appeals to emotions, couched their invasion of the Soviet Union in rational terms: an eastward expansion (Drang nach Osten) in search of living space (Lebensraum). Moreover, they used scientific concepts of the time in establishing a genocidal racial hierarchy.

Demodernization implies lasting degradation of material, health, and cultural conditions in a formerly modernized society, a return to “premodern” forms of life and collective identities. This provokes protests, uprisings, and insurrections. In Russia during the first post-Soviet decade, tanks and, later, electoral manipulation were used to quell them. The crisis in the Ukraine can also be seen from the perspective of demodernization. A vast region once at the forefront of Soviet industrial development underwent demodernization long before 2014 when outside forces transformed grassroot protest into a violent overthrow of the government.

Alternatively, election results can be simply annulled (Roumania), manipulated (Moldova) or rigged (Armenia) under the pretext of “Kremlin’s meddling”.  In other countries, popular movements such as Indignados in Spain or “les gilets jaunes” in France petered out without consequences. This reflects transformation of citizens as political actors into depoliticized consumers, which facilitates narrative control.

Demodernization breeds essentialism, i.e., attribution to one’s own or other groups of certain immutable properties and values. This enables Israelis to believe that God gave them exceptional rights on the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and that their army if “the most moral in the world”. According to most Israelis’ essentialist logic, the Arabs understand only force, which justifies Israel’s incessant violence in the region.

Prejudice and its Sequels

Normalization of prejudice is another manifestation of demodernization. It is contingent on deprivation of knowledge.Positive information about Russia and the Russians in Western media has disappeared for nearly two decades. This breeds Russophobia that attempts to present Russia and the Russians as congenitally evil.

While Russophobia has a long history, its contemporary rebirth was a focus of a recent conference held in the medieval Russian city of Pskov in June 2026. It was part of the Forum “On This We Stand”. The title paraphrases the finale of Eisenstein’s film classic “Alexander Nevsky”: “Go and tell foreign lands that Russia lives. They can visit her without fear. But whoever comes to us with a sword, shall perish with the sword. Upon this stood and shall stand the land of Russia.” Produced in 1938, the film depicts the defeat of the knights of the Teutonic Order near Pskov in 1242 and was a thinly veiled warning to the Nazis and their European allies who, sadly, ignored it and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941.

 Scholars gathered from several countries to explore roots and manifestations of Russophobia. This included a survey of Russophobic phenomena within the Russian intelligentsia. Another paper dealt with ethnonationalist demodernization of several former Soviet republics which cast “the Russians” – a remnant of the Soviet multiethnic population rather than ethnic Russians proper – as foreigners. In the nearby Estonia, they are often called “occupiers”. Rather than building an inclusive civil nationalism, Estonian authorities cultivate issues of ethnic belonging, which tend to enhance Russophobia. It also results from the positioning of the Baltic republics as NATO’s frontline states on Russia’s borders.

Russophobia is a Western phenomenon. A survey conducted around the world in 2024 posed the question “What is your overall perception of Russia?” the results showed an exceptional position of the political West. While most European and European settlement countries show negative attitudes, the Global South, from Egypt and Nigeria to China and India display the dominance of positive attitudes to Russia.

The conference also discussed measures to counter Russophobia. Several speakers showed that Russophobia can provoke anti-Western reaction and, in turn, lead to isolationism and demodernization. The conference demonstrated a broad range of views being debated in Russia as it faces Western sanctions imposed on it since 2014 and particularly since 2022.

The idea of splitting Europe from Russia and China is eminently rational in the framework of Sir Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical theories. But to sell it you need emotional arguments, control information and punish dissidence. This led the Europeans to believe in their own self-righteous narrative. Bans on cultural exchanges with Russia, boycotting opera singers, prohibiting conferences on Dostoyevsky or concerts including pieces by Rachmaninov have been normalized. E.U. broke train and plane connections with Russia even though these functioned despite political tensions under Stalin and the rest of the Cold War. Being obliged to transit via Istanbul to get by air from Saint-Petersburg to Helsinki, a flight which lasted 40 minutes,  is a true sign of demodernization.

Thus, Russophobia, like all racism, can veer to the absurd. A summit on peace in the Ukraine convened in Switzerland in 2014 excluded Russia, one of the belligerents. The organizers deemed an invitation to Russia immoral and a step towards “moral equivalence”.

Russophobia as a manifestation of demodernization dovetails with rehabilitation of colonialism which relies on excluding and dehumanizing the Other. A few years ago, a French president called on his compatriots to be proud of the achievements that France brought to its former colonies. And at the 2026 security conference in Munich, the U.S. Secretary of State Rubio praised the European colonization of America as “a sacred inheritance.” He also called on Europeans to be “unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance.” Comparing Europe to a garden in the jungle by Josep Borrel, then head of the European Commission, is part of the same trend.

The late Chief Rabbi of Britain Jonathan Sachs once observed that “righteousness and self-righteousness are mutually exclusive”. Russophobia wrapped in claims of moral superiority increases the chances of a nuclear war. So does the fledgling movement to reject all things Western in Russia. Both are manifestations of demodernization. Both pose an existential threat for humanity.