On the Mutual Inherence of Regional and Global References: The Case of the “Near-Abroad” and “Post-Bipolarity”

Introduction

Depending on its outcome, the ongoing war in Ukraine may constitute a decisive event in re-shaping a particular region and the generality of the international environment simultaneously. This would not be a novelty, given that war events with radical systemic impacts, either as to its nature like in the case of the Second World War that engendered bipolarity, or as to the shape of it such as the First World War, French revolutionary/ Napoleonic Wars, Seven Years’ War or the Thirty Years’ War within the multipolar structure of the interstate interactions. Still, the Ukrainian war contrasts to them on another, equally fundamental issue. These major wars began as regional events that engendered/ become, through preceding alignments or those having been formed following the original occurrence, global events. They presented, between regionality and globality, a relationship of causality in ontological and of consecutiveness in temporal senses. As related to the war in Ukraine, causality and consecutiveness appear to be replaced by something else that would define regionality and globality in ontological and temporal terms: They appear co-temporally/ at the same time and they have no apparent relationship of cause and consequence between them, but of being two aspects of the same givenness.

Here a specific region and the general shape (or structure) of the interstate interactions form an unusual kind of synthetic unity expressible on the ground-term of mutual inherence. This region is expressible as the “near-abroad”, beyond the usual, precedingly geography-referring definitions and focusing on a specific meaning ground, an intersubjective reference to Russia’s centrality in her interactions with a number of countries. The shape/ structure of the interstate interactions is expressible as the “post-bipolarity”, again as intersubjective reference that precedes its theoretical “explanations” and further terminology attributed to it through them. These two terms are certainly borrowed as well. Yet they are employed here in their their immediate, intersubjective, pre-theoretical appearances but not their as to their theoretical grounds and explanations. The Ukrainian war constitutes the current event which manifests the mutual inherence of the near-abroad and post-bipolarity and possibly its ontological and temporal “achievement”, its end, depending on its outcome.

This chapter is an attempt to conduct an ontological and temporal study of the case of the mutual inherence between the near-abroad and post-bipolarity as the two specific manifestations of regional and global meaning grounds of interstate interactions in their synthetic unity. To this aim, the initial part of the first section is reserved to a debate on the questions of epistemology, the study’s self-distancing from the current IR theorising for a phenomenological approach. The current axes of the IR theorising shall be debated as to ontological and temporal complications they bring into the study of the IR, due to the purely intersubjective nature of the field and its incompatibilities with the act of theorising in general sense. Here, phenomenology’s and phenomenological ontology’s use in studying the phenomena and events of a pure intersubjective sphere shall be outlined. The second sub-section will focus, on this ground, on the phenomena of “regionality” and “globality” of the phenomena and events as well as their relationship in the IR field, namely the causality/ consecutiveness and the mutual inherence.

In the second section the case of the mutual inherence between a specific regional setup (the near-abroad) and a specific the global/ international system (the post-bipolarity) shall be studied. Here, the first sub-section will describe the earlier phase of the mutual inherence between the near-abroad and the post-bipolarity which provided a subsequent (current) phase with ontological/ temporal grounds and as such, is retained in its givenness. The second sub-section shall describe this subsequent phase of the mutual inherence and the war in Ukraine itself as the ultimate, decisive event of its temporal course, with a debate on its future/ anticipatory horizon as appresented by the actuality of that war.