Meeting held on Monday 21st March 2022
10 people welcomed a guest of the group. Six sent their apologies.
We immediately settled on Ukraine as our topic for discussion. We considered the context of NATO and its increased membership since the collapse of the USSR. Did Putin’s aggression in Ukraine arise as a consequence of NATO expansion (and the possibility that Ukraine would join NATO), or was his expansionist policy and aggression more a part of his wider project to reclaim the Soviet Union, which Russia had lost? It was certainly part of a project to increase Putin’s and Russia’s power on the global stage. We noted, however, that America, particularly under Trump, and UK under Johnson, were also obsessed with become powerful globally.
While NATO is a defensive alliance it is understandable that Ukranian wish for the protection that NATO membership would provide. From the Russian perspective, however, NATO is a threat to peace with American missiles based near Russian territory. We wondered whether a neutral Ukraine, or a Ukraine under the protection of NATO, would be better for us, for the Ukrainians, for the Russians or for world peace.
We noted that Putin’s expansionist policies are underpinned by a narrative of victimisation.
However, all these general considerations are overshadowed by the present horrors of war in Ukraine. We were appalled by the government’s slow response to the needs of refugees from Ukraine (while their response to the needs of refugees from Syria was even worse).
These developments threatened notions of ‘global citizenship’. But this idea was open to different interpretations. The ‘global citizen’ as a player in the capitalist markets of liberal economies on the one had, and the global citizen as a progressive internationalist member of the human race. At a local level, we considered the influx of largely Chinese students to the Hope Valley. On the one hand this offers the possibility of widening our cultural connections. But on the other, such students are generally very privileged members of wealthy Chinese, who keep to themselves and are maximising their chances of educational attainment in their national curriculum which gives this area of the Peak District as a subject for study.
We concluded the meeting with feelings of powerlessness regarding Ukraine.