How can we build walls against Russian aggression without destroying the bridges within our society that connect different national, cultural, linguistic, and religious communities?

“Bridges Instead of Walls” is a joint project of Ukrainian PEN and Novoe Vremya, in which leading Ukrainian intellectuals – writers, philosophers, journalists, and scholars – reflect on what unites Ukrainians. All texts can be found under the hashtag #BridgesInsteadOfWalls.

Human beings are destined to live with other human beings. Even a hermit cannot escape this fate. The very word itself points us towards this meaning, since one can only be a hermit in relation to other people. This allows the key line from “My Society” by the German band De-Phazz to be captured precisely in Ukrainian translation: “In my society I’m only solitary, not alone.” The German philosopher Edmund Husserl believed that a critically minded thinker can say nothing about life after death except that it certainly lacks this world shared with others. The negative counterpart of this in our world is madness. It is no coincidence that another German thinker, Karl Jaspers, regarded autism as the core of mental pathology. Be that as it may, in this life the feeling of complete separation from others and from the world we share with them is profoundly painful. This painful sense of being enclosed in absolute solitude was brilliantly expressed by the Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy in his poem “Walls”:

Without consideration, without pity, without shame,
they have built great and high walls around me.
And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;
for I had many things to do outside.
Ah, when they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed?
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they shut me off from the outside world.

(Translated into Ukrainian by Andrii Savenko.)

Perhaps, however, the greatest work of art devoted to the different forms of the wall that separates a person from the rest of the world is the rock opera The Wall and the phantasmagorical musical film of the same name by the British band Pink Floyd.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, by contrast, believed that “Hell is other people.” I need recognition from the Other, but as soon as I manage to attract their attention and find myself under their gaze, I encounter a reciprocal demand from the Other – that I recognise them. I am uncertain of my own being. To gain this certainty, I need the Other to recognise my being. Yet instead of receiving this recognition, I must recognise the Other so that they may overcome their uncertainty about their own being. And so it continues throughout life: I need the gaze of the Other, but as soon as I find myself beneath that gaze, I try to escape it. A rather bleak picture of human existence!

If this picture were entirely accurate, our lives would indeed be nothing but hell. Thankfully, human life unfolds between these extremes – complete solitude and the loss of oneself in the endless pursuit of recognition by Others. A delicate balance is the foundation of mental health and a condition for individual success. We need walls to protect ourselves from the encroachments of Others, but at the same time we are not destined to survive without bridges connecting us to them.

In human relationships, bridges and walls are metaphors. In the existence of cities, they are real bridges and walls. Cities need walls to defend themselves against invading enemies and bridges to welcome friends and maintain communication with the outside world. The free medieval European city, surrounded by walls and moats crossed by bridges, is ultimately a prototype of the modern city. More broadly, those ancient cities governed by their own systems of law are prototypes of modern Western civilisation. Indeed, the very concept of civilisation derives from the word “city,” since the Latin word for city is civitas. Yet the prototype of civilisation is not just any city, but specifically the medieval European city, inhabited by free and responsible citizens whose lives did not depend on the arbitrary will of a dictator but were regulated by a clear system of law. Such a legal system could exist only in cities well protected by walls from barbarian attacks and connected by bridges to other civilised cities. The balance between walls and bridges symbolises the balance between security and freedom – two of the most important values of our civilisation. They sometimes contradict one another, but precisely for this reason it is only through balancing them that a truly civilised way of life becomes possible.

The predecessors of the free European cities were evidently the ancient Greek poleis – the only political formations known to us that practised direct democracy. Every citizen of the polis was obliged to defend it and participate in its government, making decisions together with others in the agora, the central square of the city. For Aristotle, therefore, the human being is a political animal – that is, a free being responsible both for their own life and for the lives of other free people living alongside them. This interconnection between freedom and responsibility is fundamental both to medieval cities and to modern Western civilisation. We are free to the extent that we are responsible for our own fate and the fate of those around us. My freedom cannot threaten the freedom of others, nor can their freedom threaten mine. We are free and at the same time protected from one another’s arbitrary will. Moreover, only genuinely free people can live in security, because slaves are always vulnerable, since they depend on the arbitrary will of a tyrant. Thus, when you surrender freedom for the sake of security, you first lose freedom and eventually lose security as well.

As is well known, a large number of free Ukrainian cities had systems of European law, whether Magdeburg Law or another form. For this reason, it seems to me that perhaps the most important symbol of our belonging to Western civilisation is the Monument to Magdeburg Rights on the slopes of the Dnipro in Kyiv. Our cities have also inscribed this legal heritage into their own topography: freedom means bridges; security means walls. But when our freedom is endangered, we need walls to defend it. This is how the barricades of the Maidan arose in central Kyiv in 2013 – Kyiv being the last free Ukrainian city to be deprived of Magdeburg Law by the Muscovite empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our historical memory compelled us to build walls in the heart of our native city against a criminal gang of Kremlin puppets. The Kremlin’s own high walls have for centuries protected not free people from invading barbarians, but monstrous dictators from their own people and from the entire civilised world.

The image of the city can be extended to culture as a whole. Cultural topography also requires both walls and bridges. In the cultural sphere, moreover, they are often products of the social imagination. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson defines nations as narratives. Nations are political and cultural constructs created through shared stories about their own history and visions of their own future. Ultimately, not only nations but all social formations are such constructs. Their boundaries are marked by imaginary walls, while their connections with other formations are represented by imaginary bridges. Yet despite being imaginary, they can have very real effects. The Iron Curtain, which separated the peoples colonised by Russia within the Soviet Union from the civilised world, remained a metaphor while nevertheless damaging the lives of real people by restricting their freedom. Imaginary walls sometimes became real walls, as in the case of the Berlin Wall. Incidentally, after its fall, the site hosted a spectacular musical performance of the aforementioned rock opera The Wall. The destruction of the Berlin Wall physically embodied the collapse of the Iron Curtain, making possible the emancipation of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union and their integration into European civilisation. Communist totalitarianism was defeated almost fifty years after the collapse of Nazism and fascism. Soon afterwards, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. It seemed that Europe was finally recovering from all the pathological forms of anti-human radical ideologies and the political regimes they had produced. At the end of the twentieth century, both virtual and physical walls between the peoples of Europe were crumbling, collapsing, and disappearing.

Yet at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the question of Europe’s boundaries arose once again. And today this concerns not only external but also internal boundaries – no longer boundaries between the peoples of Europe, but boundaries within European states themselves: between European values and the European way of life, on the one hand, and manifestations of what threatens them not merely as something foreign, but as something hostile, on the other.

So Should We Tear Down All the Walls?

On the one hand, we should agree with the contemporary German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels that the degree of civilisation of a society depends on the level of xenophobia within it. The higher the level of xenophobia, the lower the level of civilisation. Identifying what is foreign with what is hostile is characteristic of primitive individuals and societies. By contrast, a willingness to accept what is foreign, curiosity towards it, and a desire to understand it are signs of a developed individual and a developed society. Yet Waldenfels himself notes that the foreign must remain foreign, without dissolving into the homogeneity of what is our own. Only then can we speak of genuine tolerance and the overcoming of xenophobia. For this reason, alongside bridges towards what is foreign, we must preserve walls – walls that protect not so much us from the foreign as the foreign from us, safeguarding its unique and alluring otherness. In the cultural sphere, these virtual walls sometimes become the physical walls of museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions. They preserve artefacts of foreign cultures as well as those of our own culture which, because of historical distance, have become partly foreign to us. This enables the wider public to encounter them and scholars to study them.

On the other hand, what are we to do when what is foreign itself becomes hostile – when it does not merely provoke and encourage us to respond constructively, but threatens to destroy us or dissolve us into itself? What are we to do when we encounter an Other that itself regards everything foreign as hostile, displaying the highest degree of xenophobia?

In the twentieth century, we witnessed two strategies for destroying the Other. One was cynical and brazen – the strategy of German Nazism. According to this approach, the Other had to be destroyed or subjugated for the survival and prosperity of one’s own: Jews and Roma were to be killed, while other non-Aryan peoples, above all the Slavs, were to be turned into slaves of the Aryan race. This horrific strategy towards the Other led to millions of deaths, but precisely because of its repulsive brazenness it was defeated and condemned by the entire civilised world.

The other strategy for destroying the Other is its gradual dissolution into one’s own. To achieve this, the Russian Bolsheviks invented a vile hybrid – the “Soviet people,” in which all differences among the peoples colonised by Russia were supposed to dissolve into an artificial unity centred on Moscow. This strategy also resulted in millions of victims, yet unfortunately it has still not received unequivocal condemnation.

Today, in its so-called hybrid war against Ukraine, Russia employs both strategies. Russian troops and the terrorists it supports kill and destroy in Crimea and Donbas, while inside our country pro-Russian forces cynically tell us about “brotherly peoples,” the “great Russian culture” of which we are supposedly a part, and so on.

How should we act in such a situation? How can we defend ourselves against the “Russian world” without becoming infected by the “science of hatred” with which it is saturated? How can we build walls against external and internal Russian aggression without destroying the bridges within our society that connect different national, cultural, linguistic, and religious communities?

After all, once the virus of hatred enters the body of society, it can infect not only our attitude towards the hostile “Russian world,” but all our internal and external social relationships.

There are no unequivocal answers to these questions. The only advice that can be offered is this: when building walls, do not forget about bridges; when building bridges, remember the walls.

Source: NV