| Summary/Abstract |
Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, illegal in terms of the pre-1990s
international law and probably a geopolitical miscalculation, has caused
a shock incomparable even with that of the 2003 American attack on Iraq
that was proudly baptised Operation Shock and Awe. Remarkably, neither
the twenty-year-long war in Afghanistan waged by the U.S. and its allies, nor
the destruction of Libya in 2011, nor the multiple military interventions in
Africa, nor even NATO’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999—the first unlawful
use of force in post-WWII Europe—have caused such anger. There is always
a whiff of racism in the fact that wars waged against people who have
chosen to be on the “wrong side of history” are not condemned by those
on “right side of history” as they must be. How did it happen that after the
fall of the Berlin Wall and reasonable expectations of a peaceful future, the
world found itself in a situation where the use of military force has become
nearly normal unless it is used against Europeans who chose the “right
side of history”? How and why, in the race towards “the end of history” the
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