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Ukraine and Russia

In this fully revised and updated in-depth analysis of the war in Ukraine,
Paul D’Anieri explores the dynamics within Ukraine, between Ukraine
and Russia, and between Russia and the West that emerged with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and eventually resulted in Russia’s invasion
in 2022. Proceeding chronologically, this book shows how Ukraine’s
separation from Russia in 1991, at the time called a “civilized divorce,”
led to Europe’s most violent conflict since World War II. It argues the
conflict came about because of three underlying factors – the security
dilemma, the impact of democratization on geopolitics, and the incom-
patible goals of a post-Cold War Europe. Rather than a peaceful situa-
tion that was squandered, D’Anieri argues that these were deep-seated,
preexisting disagreements that could not be bridged, with concerning
implications for the prospects of resolution of the Ukraine conflict.

Paul D’Anieri is a Professor of Political Science and Public ­Policy at


the University of California, Riverside. He is author of ­Understanding
Ukrainian Politics (2007) and Economic Interdependence in Ukrainian–­
Russian Relations (1999), as well as a widely-used textbook on inter­
national ­politics.

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Published online by Cambridge University Press
Ukraine and Russia
From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War

Second Edition

Paul D’Anieri
University of California, Riverside

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom
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Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment,


a department of the University of Cambridge.
We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009315500
DOI: 10.1017/9781009315555
© Paul D’Anieri 2023
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions
of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take
place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment.
First published 2023
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-009-31550-0 Hardback
ISBN 978-1-009-31554-8 Paperback
Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence
or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this
publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will
remain, accurate or appropriate.

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Contents

List of Mapspage vi
List of Tablesvii
Prefaceix
Acknowledgmentsxi
List of Key Peoplexiii

1 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine 1


2 New World Order? 1989–199329
3 Hope and Hardship, 1994–199966
4 Autocracy and Revolution, 1999–2004102
5 Reform and Reversal, 2004–2010135
6 Viktor Yanukovych and the Path
to Confrontation, 2010–2013170
7 From Revolution to War, 2013–2015204
8 The Conflict Smolders, 2015–2021243
9 War 272
10 Conclusion: From Cold War to Hot War 308

Bibliography333
Index367

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Maps

0.1 Ukraine, showing areas occupied by Russia


as of January 2022 page xii
7.1 Central Kyiv, November 2013–February 2014 207
7.2 Line of control, Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts,
February 2015–February 2022 240
9.1 Russian attacks, February–March, 2022 287
9.2 Line of Control, August 2022 294

vi

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Tables

5.1 2006 parliamentary election results page 139


5.2 2007 parliamentary election results 141
6.1 2012 parliamentary election results 176
7.1 2014 parliamentary election results 232
8.1 2019 presidential election results 259
8.2 2019 parliamentary election results 260

vii

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Published online by Cambridge University Press
Preface

The first edition of this book, published in 2019, aimed to explain Rus-
sia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014.
When Russia massively escalated its invasion in February 2022, readers
turned to the book to understand the background for the conflict. I have
been very gratified by the response. However, that narrative stopped in
early 2015, and the question on everyone’s mind was why did Russia
launch the much larger invasion of 2022. The need for a new edition,
updated to cover the developments leading up to this new invasion, was
self-evident.
Two practical problems arose in writing this revised edition. The first
comes with writing about a war that is still raging. The narrative stops
roughly in August 2022, when a great deal remained to be determined.
While this is not satisfying, the goal of the book is primarily to account for
how Ukraine and Russia came to all-out war, not to predict how it might
end. The new Chapter 8 covers the period from 2015 to 2021, which
sets the stage for the attack of 2022. It asks why Russia decided that
maintaining the status quo was not a better strategy than going to war.
The new Chapter 9 begins in 2021 with the crisis that began when
western intelligence agencies began reporting Russia’s preparations for
war and continues through the first six months of the war. While I cannot
foresee the future, there is plenty to discuss about the decision to launch
the war, the initial course of it, and the reaction in Russia, Ukraine,
the West, and around the world. Why did Putin choose war? Why did
Ukraine prove so resilient?
The new conclusion (Chapter 10) reconsiders themes from the first
edition concerning the long-term sources of the war, while also address-
ing of the implications of the escalation of 2022. While much will be
determined by events on the battlefield, some consequences of the inva-
sion are already clear and in need of analysis.
The second challenge in writing this edition is deciding how the inva-
sions of 2014 and 2022 relate to one another. In many respects, they are
part of the same war, but they represent two distinct invasions. Do they

ix

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press


x Preface

fit a single historical arc such that a single explanation captures both
events, or do they require distinct explanations? This comes up particu-
larly in Chapter 9, when I consider the argument that the 2022 invasion
was driven primarily by factors at the individual level, in the psychology
of Vladimir Putin, or at the level of his closest advisors. This sort of
explanation did not feature in the first edition.
The question of the locus and the rationality of Russia’s decision to
enlarge the war in 2022 relates to another theme. In contrast to 2014,
where there were identifiable events that triggered Russia’s invasion
(which is not to say that it was justifiable), the war in 2022 was more
clearly a war of choice. There was neither a clear opportunity nor an
impending loss to explain the decision to go to war. That is why it sur-
prised so many observers. Moreover, the scale of the aggression, the bru-
tality of war crimes, and the viciousness of the rhetoric makes it much
easier to attribute the war in 2022 simply to primordial Russian aggres-
sion, in contrast to the multi-causal account the first edition provided
regarding 2014.
This leads to the question of whether one should read the current
assessment of Russia’s aggression backward into the analysis of the pre-
ceding 30 years or read the earlier assessment, which focuses on mul-
tiple sources of the conflict, forward into 2022. I have chosen to do
neither. While I have edited the first seven chapters of the book, largely
for clarity and to make room for added material, I have not rewritten
my analysis of the long-term dynamics of the relationship. Nor have
I avoided attributing the war of 2022 to a clear decision by Russia to
attack Ukraine with the goal of subjugating it. That means that the
invasion of 2022 is explained slightly differently than that of 2014. Both
were the results of long-term incompatibilities of goals and norms, exac-
erbated by the nature of international politics. But if Russia’s invasion
of 2014 was based on a mixture of fear and opportunism, that of 2022
seems more based on a straightforward calculation, rational or not, that
Russia could attain its goals by force and only by force. Thanks to the
suggestions of reviewers, I have added a bibliography, while retaining
page-by-page footnotes, which I believe are most useful to the reader.
I have also added a list of major leaders, which should aid the non-
specialist reader with the many names in the book. I am grateful to Ray-
mond Finch III and to Emily Channel-Justice and her students at the
Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute, who provided valuable feedback
on the new chapters.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press


Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without the support of generous insti-
tutions, colleagues, and friends.
In the fall of 2017, I was fortunate to hold the Eugene and Daymel
Shklar Research Fellowship in Ukrainian Studies at Harvard Univer-
sity. I am grateful to the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and its
director, Serhii Plokhy, for providing an ideal environment in which to
develop the project. Oleh Kotsyuba and George Grabowicz encouraged
me to concentrate my thoughts in an article for Krytyka.
Early versions of the overall argument were presented at seminars at
Harvard University, Syracuse University, Kyiv Polytechnic Institute,
George Washington University, and at the Forsvarets Forskningsinsti-
tutt, Oslo. The discussions in these meetings were valuable as I refined
my analysis. I thank Kristina Conroy, Audie Klotz, Pavlo Kutuev and
Volodymyr Ishchenko, Peter Rollberg and Henry Hale, and Tor Buk-
kvoll for arranging these visits.
For many years, Taras Kuzio has been generous in sharing his
views and helping me make contacts in Kyiv. Eugene Fishel, Serhiy
Kudelia, Henry Hale, and Volodymyr Ischenko, as well as two anony-
mous reviewers, read drafts of the first edition manuscript and pro-
vided insightful comments. Their detailed suggestions have helped me
sharpen the argument in some places, to add nuance in others, and
to avoid some factual errors. Perhaps unwisely, I have not taken all
of their advice, and I am solely to blame for the shortcomings that
remain.
The University of California, Riverside, provided research funding as
well as a release from administrative and teaching duties.
I am especially grateful to a great group of friends who supported
me through a difficult time. Over many sets of tennis, countless meals,
and adventures in Europe, they have brought me immeasurable joy
and wisdom, and I dedicate this book to them. Grateful Eight, this is
for you!

xi

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xii Acknowledgments

Above all, I have to recognize the inspiration I receive from my wife,


Laura. She cannot have imagined when we met that twenty-five years
later, I would still be writing and talking about Ukraine and Russia. If
she is tired of it, she hides it well. Her encouragement has sustained me
at every stage of this project.

0 100 200 300 400 500 km


B E L A R U S
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 miles

Territory controlled by Russia


as of January 2019
POLAND

R
Kyiv
Lviv Kharkiv

U
SLOVAKIA U K R A I N E

S
Luhansk
Dnipro
Y Donetsk
AR

S
G
M
N

OL
HU

Mariupol
DO

I
VA

Odesa
Kherson

A
R O M A N I A Sea of Azov
Kerch
Crimea

SERBIA Sevastopol

B l a c k S e a

Map 0.1 Ukraine, showing areas occupied by Russia as of January 2022

Published online by Cambridge University Press


Key People

Akhmetov, Rinat – Ukrainian oligarch identified with the Party of


Regions.
Aksyonov, Sergei – separatist leader of Crimea.
Azarov, Nikolai – Prime Minister of Ukraine, 2010–2014; Minister of
Finance 2002–2005.
Chernomyrdin, Viktor – Prime Minister of Russia, 1992–1998;
Ambassador to Ukraine, 2001–2008.
Glazyev, Sergei – Head of Russia’s Customs Union Commission; ­advisor
to Putin on Ukraine.
Gorbachev, Mikhail – General Secretary, Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, 1985–1991.
Karaganov, Sergei – Russian political scientist, Head of Council on
Foreign and Defense Policy.
Klitschko, Vitaliy – Ukrainian opposition party leader, Mayor of Kyiv,
former boxing champion.
Kolomoisky, Ihor – Ukrainian oligarch; governor of Dnipropetrovsk
Oblast, 2014–2016.
Kozyrev, Andrei – Foreign Minister of Russia, 1992–1996.
Kravchuk, Leonid – President of Ukraine, 1991–1994.
Kuchma, Leonid – President of Ukraine, 1994–2004; Prime Minister of
Ukraine, 1992–1993.
Kwaśniewski, Aleksander – President of Poland, 1995–2005; EU envoy
on Ukraine, 2012–2013.
Lavrov, Sergei – Foreign Minister of Russia, 2004–; Russian Ambassador
to the UN, 1994–2004.
Lukyanov, Fyodor – Chairman, Russian Council for Foreign and
Defense Policy.
Macron, Emmanuel – President of France, 2017–.
Medvedchuk, Viktor – Ukrainian pro-Russian oligarch; confidant of
Vladimir Putin.
Medvedev, Dmitry – President of Russia 2008–2012; Prime Minister of
Russia, 2012–2020.

xiii

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xiv List of Key People

Merkel, Angela – Chancellor of Germany, 2005–2021.


Migranyan, Andranik – advisor to Boris Yeltsin.
Moroz, Oleksandr – leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine; Chair,
Verkhovna Rada, 2006–2007.
Navalny, Alexei – Russian anti-corruption activist; imprisoned since
2021.
Poroshenko, Petro – President of Ukraine, 2014–2019.
Primakov, Yevgeniy – Prime Minister of Russia, 1998–1999; Minister of
Foreign Affairs, 1996–1998.
Putin, Vladimir – President of Russia, 2000–2008; 2012–; Prime
Minister 1999, 2008–2012.
Scholz, Olaf – Chancellor of Germany, 2021–.
Schröder, Gerhard – Chancellor of Germany, 1998–2005; Head of Nord
Stream Board, 2006–.
Tarasiuk, Borys – Ukrainian Foreign Minister, 1998–2000; 2005–2007.
Tihipko, Serhiy – Ukrainian politician, Vice Prime Minister, 2010–2012.
Turchynov, Oleksandr – Acting President of Ukraine, 2014.
Tymoshenko, Yuliya – Prime Minister of Ukraine, 2005, 2007–2010.
Yanukovych, Viktor – President of Ukraine 2010–2014; Prime Minister
2002–2005, 2006–2007.
Yatseniuk, Arseniy – Prime Minister of Ukraine, 2014–2016.
Yeltsin, Boris – President of Russia, 1990–1999.
Yushchenko, Viktor – President of Ukraine, 2005–2010; Prime Minister,
1999–2001.
Zakharchenko, Alexander – separatist leader of Donetsk People’s
Republic, 2014–2018.
Zelenskyy, Volodymyr – President of Ukraine, 2019–.
Zhirinovsky, Vladimir – Head of Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.
Zlenko, Anatoliy – Foreign Minister of Ukraine, 1991–1994, 2000–2003.

Published online by Cambridge University Press


1 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

But our idea is that the wolves should be fed and the sheep kept safe.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

In the early morning of February 24, 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine


along four axes with over 150,000 soldiers backed by aircraft, missiles,
drones, artillery, and armor. While press around the world said that
Russia had “invaded” Ukraine, Ukrainians and their supporters stressed
that the invasion had actually begun eight years earlier, in 2014, when
Russia seized Crimea and attacked Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, a war
which killed over 13,000 people. By the autumn of 2022, despite thou-
sands of casualties on both sides, the war showed no signs of abating.
Instead, informed observers were girding for a long war.
What started as a “civilized divorce”1 when the Soviet Union collapsed
in 1991 became the largest war in Europe since 1945, with consequences
that ricocheted around the world. Ukraine’s independence in 1991 took
place without bloodshed. The East–West tensions that defined the Cold
War had fallen away. For years, Russian leaders stressed that Russians
and Ukrainians were one people. Yet in 2014, Russia invaded, seizing
Ukrainian territory and bringing Russia and the West to what many saw
as a new Cold War. And in 2022, Russia escalated the war dramatically,
targeting civilians and calling for the destruction of the Ukrainian state
and nation.
How did this happen, and why? How did two states as deeply con-
nected as Ukraine and Russia come to war? How did their relationship
come to drive the West’s conflict with Russia? How we answer these
questions will determine in large part how actors on all sides approach
the choices yet to come, including how to find peace between Ukraine
and Russia and how to rebuild post-war relations between Russia, its

1
The term “civilized divorce” was used to describe the dissolution of the Soviet Union even
prior to its collapse, and was used repeatedly throughout the early post-Soviet period.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press


2 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

neighbors, and the West. There is a great deal at stake in how we under-
stand this conflict, but prevailing understandings are deeply at odds with
one another: one school sees the conflict as being caused by Russian
revanchism; another attributes it to Putin’s need to bolster his autocratic
rule; and another blames western expansionism and Ukrainian national-
ism. The first two views point to a western strategy of waiting for Putin
to leave the scene, while containing Russia in the meantime. The third
points to accommodating Russia’s claimed security needs by acquiescing
to its desire to control Ukraine.
This book will show why neither of those strategies is likely to work
in the short term. The roots of the conflict are deeper than is com-
monly understood and therefore will resist a simple change in policy or
leadership. War between Russia and Ukraine, and between Russia and
the West, was the result of deep “tectonic” forces as well as short-term
triggers. Conflict between Ukraine and Russia is based on structural
factors inherent to international politics as well as profound normative
disagreements. While we can blame leaders for many of the decisions
they have made, their mistakes did not cause the underlying conflicts,
which were evident even in the 1990s, when post-Cold War mutual trust
was at its highest.
Therefore, simply waiting for Putin to depart the stage in Russia, or for
a more accommodating policy from the European Union or the United
States, will not bring reconciliation. A return to peace and security
would require agreement on a new architecture for security in Europe.
Such an architecture could not be negotiated even when the Cold War
ended and Russia was democratizing. With an increasingly autocratic
Russia, deep East–West antagonism, and a brutal war over Ukraine, a
new security architecture is even less attainable now than it was a few
years ago. Only profound changes, such as a new democratization in
Russia or an abandonment of the post-Word War II norms of the West,
will improve prospects. The border between Russia and Ukraine, and
by extension between free and unfree Europe, will be determined on the
battlefield. Even when the current war ends, confrontation between Rus-
sia and Ukraine, and between Russia and the West, will remain. Whether
anyone likes it or not, Ukraine and the West are destined to be in conflict
with Russia for many years to come.
This book has two connected goals. The first is to explain how and
why this conflict came about. The second is to provide an account of the
relationship between Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the United States
from the end of the Cold War in 1989 until the war of 2022. The chro-
nology is a goal in its own right, for no such overview of Ukraine–Russia
relations exists. It is also essential for understanding the conflict, since

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press


Competing Visions and Interests after the Cold War 3

one of the primary contentions of this book is that the problems that
led to war in 2014 and 2022 emerged at the beginning of the post-Cold
War period and became increasingly salient over time. The decisions to
go to war in 2014 and again in 2022 rested with Vladimir Putin, but the
underlying causes of conflict were much deeper. This book focuses on
the underlying causes, not because they made the war inevitable, but
because they show why Putin and the Russian leadership found that they
could not achieve their goals without war.

Competing Visions and Interests after the Cold War


To boil down the argument to its simplest version: the end of the Cold
War set in motion two forces that were necessarily in tension: democra-
tization in eastern Europe and Russia’s quest to regain its “great power”
status and its domination over its neighborhood. Ukraine was the place
where democracy and independence most challenged Russia’s concep-
tion of its national interests. It was not inevitable that this conflict would
lead to violence, but neither was it likely to resolve itself.2
While Russia was determined to remain a great power and a regional
hegemon, Ukraine was committed to independence. Even those Ukrai-
nian leaders who pursued close economic ties with Russia staunchly
defended Ukraine’s sovereignty. As long as Russia’s definition of its great
power status included controlling Ukraine, Russia and Ukraine would be
at odds. That was true in 1991 and has not changed fundamentally since.
Two broader dynamics – one a traditional problem in international
politics, the other new to the post-Cold War era – connected the Russia–
Ukraine conflict to broader European affairs in ways that made both
harder to deal with. First, the security dilemma, an enduring problem
in international relations, meant that the steps that each state took to
protect its security were inevitably seen as threatening by others, spur-
ring a cycle of action and reaction. Russia’s “peacekeeping” in Moldova
and Georgia was one example. The eastward enlargement of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was another.
Second, the spread of democracy fed the security dilemma, making
states in the West feel more secure but undermining Russia’s perceived
national interest. Because they believed in the importance of democracy,
and because they believed that democracy strengthened security, west-
ern leaders promoted the extension of democracy and the institutions

2
On conflicts of interest between Russia and the West, see William C. Wohlforth and
Vladislav Zubok, “An Abiding Antagonism: Realism, Idealism, and the Mirage of Western–
Russian Partnership after the Cold War,” International Politics 54, 4 (2017): 405–419.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press


4 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

that supported it. While Russia did not appear to oppose democracy
itself, it felt threatened as new democracies sought to join the principal
institutions of European democracy, NATO and the European Union.
The further this process went, the more resentful Russia became, and
Ukraine was more important to Russia’s perception of its interests, to
its national identity, and to Putin’s regime, than any other state. Fyodor
Lukyanov wrote that “[I]n their [Russians’] view, Russia’s subordinate
position is the illegitimate result of a never-ending U.S. campaign to
keep Russia down and prevent it from regaining its proper status.”3
This merger of democracy and geopolitics was new, but it had an
effect that looked familiar. To the extent that Russia turned away from
liberal democracy while Europe embraced it, it was inevitable that there
would be some border between democratic and nondemocratic Europe.
In an earlier era, this had been called the “iron curtain.” Would a new
dividing line be Russia’s border with Ukraine, Ukraine’s border with
Poland, or somewhere else? Could a zone of neutrals provide a “buffer”
between Europe’s democratic and nondemocratic regions? Perhaps, but
no one wanted to be in that zone, and the idea of it clashed with Euro-
pean norms. A new division of Europe could be avoided only if Russia
consolidated democracy and gave up its great power aspirations. The
first of these failed and the second was rejected. It has been Ukraine’s
bad luck to have the conflict played out on its territory, as has so often
been the case throughout history.

Debating the Causes of the War


Since the outbreak of conflict in 2014, a great deal of literature has
emerged on it, which has three defining characteristics. First, much of it
focuses on assigning blame. Second, much of it focuses on events begin-
ning in 2013, and examines earlier developments only selectively. Third,
it tends to focus either on the international or domestic sources of behav-
ior, rather than investigating how they interact.
While much of the work published in the West takes it for granted that
Russia is responsible for the conflict, a strident minority takes a position,
closer to that of the Russian government, that the West and Ukraine
forced Russia into a corner where it had no choice but to act.4

3
Fyodor Lukyanov, “Putin’s Foreign Policy: The Quest to Restore Russia’s Rightful
Place,” Foreign Affairs 95, 3 (May/June 2016): 30–37.
4
The tendency to focus on blame is discussed in Paul D’Anieri, “Ukraine, Russia, and
the West: The Battle over Blame,” The Russian Review 75 (July 2016): 498–503. For
other reviews of the literature, see Peter Rutland, “Geopolitics and the Roots of Putin’s

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press


Debating the Causes of the War 5

While assigning blame is irresistible, work that focuses on prosecut-


ing one side or another tends to choose facts and assemble them selec-
tively in ways that are at best one-sided and at worst misleading. Even
excellent scholars have resorted to simplistic renderings of blame: John
Mearsheimer stated that “the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” while
Andrew Wilson wrote that “the Russians went ape.”5
Assigning blame leads us to attribute considerable freedom of choice
to leaders, minimizing the constraints they faced. Even those works that
are more balanced in assigning blame tend to stress the ability of lead-
ers to shape events and to underestimate the international and domestic
political constraints on their policy choices. Some authors criticize the
West for what it did, others for not doing more,6 the common assump-
tion being that leaders had a great deal of latitude to choose. Examina-
tion of the debates at the time makes clear that leaders frequently did
not see the situation that way themselves. Policy makers often felt tightly
constrained. The explanation developed here explores those constraints,
which include the security dilemma, the impact of democratization, and
domestic politics.
Second, much of the scholarship on the conflict has been incomplete
temporally. Much of it has focused, quite reasonably, either on the

Foreign Policy,” Russian History 43, 3–4 (2016): 425–436 and Michael E. Aleprete, Jr.,
“Minimizing Loss: Explaining Russian Policy: Choices during the Ukrainian Crisis,”
Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 44 (2017): 53–75. Among those blaming the West and
Ukrainian nationalists are two very prominent scholars of Russian politics, Richard
Sakwa and Stephen Cohen, and two prominent scholars of international security, John
Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, as well as the scholar of Russian foreign policy Andrei
Tsygankov. See Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London: I.
B. Tauris, 2014); Katrina Vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen, “Cold War against
Russia – Without Debate,” The Nation, May 19, 2014; John Mearsheimer, “Why the
Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,”
Foreign Affairs 93, 5 (September/October 2014): 77–89; Stephen M. Walt, “What Would
a Realist World Have Looked Like,” ForeignPolicy.com, January 8, 2016; and Andrei
Tsygankov, “Vladimir Putin’s Last Stand: The Sources of Russia’s Ukraine Policy,” Post-
Soviet Affairs 31, 4 (2015): 279–303. For those who put the blame on Russia, see Andrew
Wilson, Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2014); Taras Kuzio, Putin’s War against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and
Crime (Toronto: Chair of Ukrainian Studies, University of Toronto); Charles Clover,
Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2016); and Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American
Ambassador in Putin’s Russia (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), especially
chapter 23. For a work that assigns blame more evenly, see Samuel Charap and Timothy
Colton, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia
(London: Routledge, 2017).
5
Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” 1; Wilson, Ukraine Crisis, vii.
6
See Kathryn Stoner and Michael McFaul, “Who Lost Russia (This Time)? Vladimir
Putin,” The Washington Quarterly 38, 2 (2015): 167–187.

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6 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

period from November 2013 through spring 2014 or the outbreak of


war in 2022 (about which scholarship is just beginning to emerge). Dan-
iel Treisman zeroed in on Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Crimea,
identifying four schools of thought: “Putin the defender,” responding to
the potential for Ukraine to join NATO; “Putin the imperialist,” seizing
Crimea as part of a broader project to recreate the Soviet Union; “Putin
the populist,” using the annexation of Crimea to build public support
in the face of economic decline; and “Putin the improviser,” seizing a
fantastic opportunity.7 Exploring that decision is crucial, but it does not
explain how we got to that point, or why Putin then pursued a much
wider conflict in 2022.
The conflict of 2014 was not caused simply by the overthrow of the
Yanukovych government any more than World War I was caused only
by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. In both cases, deep
mutual fears that the status quo in eastern Europe might change irre-
versibly prompted leaders to be more risk acceptant than they normally
would be (the crucial difference was that in 2014, unlike in 1914, the
other European powers did not rush to join the war). Similarly, the much
larger war of 2022 was not caused by the crisis that emerged in late 2021,
or even by events since 2014, but by dynamics that emerged when the
Cold War ended.
Because the long-term antecedents of the invasion are crucial to our
overall understanding of the conflict, this book chronicles the evolution
of Ukrainian–Russian relations since 1991, showing that while violence
was never inevitable, conflict over Ukraine’s status emerged prior to the
breakup of the Soviet Union and never receded. Similarly, while the col-
lapse of communism ended the Cold War, it did not create a shared under-
standing of Russia’s role relative to the West in post-Cold War Europe.
While it seemed reasonable to believe that these disagreements would be
resolved over time, the opposite happened, and we need to understand
the forces that widened differences rather than narrowing them.
Third, the complexity of the relationships involved has been neglected,
because it is difficult to focus at the same time on internal affairs in
Ukraine and Russia, on their relationship with each other, and their
relationships with the West. However, doing so is essential, because by

7
Daniel Treisman, The New Autocracy: Information, Politics, and Policy in Putin’s Russia
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2018), chapter 11. Treisman finds problems
with all four explanations, and ends up arguing that the primary goal was preventing
the loss of the naval base at Sevastopol. He points out that while the military part of
the operation seemed well prepared and ran very smoothly, the political arrangements,
including who would be in charge in Crimea and whether Crimea would seek autonomy
or to join Russia, seemed chaotic and improvised.

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Locating the Sources of International Conflict 7

the time of the Orange Revolution in 2004, Ukraine’s domestic battle


between pluralism and authoritarianism was tightly connected both to
its battle for greater autonomy from Russia and to Russia’s burgeoning
conflict with the West. This conflict is neither simply a domestic Ukrai-
nian conflict that became internationalized nor a great power conflict
fought over Ukraine. It is first and foremost a conflict between Ukraine
and Russia, but is connected to domestic politics in both countries and
to both countries’ relationships with Europe and the US.

Locating the Sources of International Conflict


Few of the existing works make use of the large literature on interna-
tional conflict. Using that literature, we can reframe the question in
terms of where we look for sources.8 One set of works locates its explana-
tion inside of the Russian government, in the nature of the Putin regime
itself. A common argument is that Putin’s need to bolster his autocracy
was a driving force in the decision to go to war. In this view, Putin has a
great deal of agency.9
Two other schools of thought see Russia responding to external rather
than internal factors. One of these sees Russia as seeking expansion,
but for international rather than domestic reasons. Another sees Russia
as reacting against western expansion. While these approaches put the
blame on different actors, they both fit into the school known as “defen-
sive realism,” which posits that states can usually manage the challenges
inherent in the anarchic international system, absent an aggressive “rogue
state.” The assumption that conflict depends on aggression leads these
authors to identify one side or the other as taking actions to undermine
the region’s security.10
The school of “offensive realism” is more pessimistic, in that it sees the
international system as bringing even nonaggressive states into conflict,
as states that seek only security unintentionally cause security threats
to others. In this view, one does not need to identify an aggressor to
explain conflict. This book takes that perspective seriously. Russia chose
to attack Ukraine, both in 2014 and in 2022, but it did not do so in a

8
This categorization follows loosely that of Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and
Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51 (October 1998): 144–172.
9
Wilson, Ukraine Crisis, and Stoner and McFaul, “Who Lost Russia,” share this perspec-
tive. A deeper discussion of this perspective is in Chapter 9.
10
Not all the authors who advance these arguments have always been identified with
defensive realism. Mearsheimer’s extensive scholarship generally falls into the school
of “offensive” realism, but his argument that the misguided West provoked the war in
Ukraine is consistent with “defensive” realism.

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8 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

vacuum. While Russia, Ukraine, and the West can all be criticized for the
policies they chose, there were, I contend, dynamics in post-Cold War
Europe that resisted resolution. While Russia was at fault for resorting
to force, it is important to recognize that it perceived security challenges
that caused considerable concern. One does not need to see Russia’s
desire to control Ukraine as a “legitimate interest,” as some authors do,
to acknowledge that Russia considered the loss of Ukraine to be intoler-
able. Similarly, even if one considers NATO enlargement to have been
a mistake, it was a response to a security problem that did not have
another easy solution.
The focus on international and domestic sources need not be mutu-
ally exclusive. It seems likely that invading Ukraine advanced both inter-
national and domestic goals for Putin and may have been especially
attractive because it did. Therefore, this book seeks to analyze how
international and domestic factors interacted. Among the key themes are
the way that the state of democracy in Ukraine interacted with its inter-
national orientation, and the fact that the Ukrainian state was always
weak, and then nearly collapsed in 2014. The Russian state, after going
through a period of decay in the 1990s, gradually strengthened such that
by 2014 it could deploy a highly effective “hybrid” war in Ukraine and
by 2022 it could launch a massive invasion.
Overall, then, the approach here is consistent with the school of
thought known as “neoclassical realism,” which finds that the secu-
rity dilemma conditions international politics, but that internal factors
influence how states respond to it. This approach differs from prevailing
interpretations by acknowledging that the various leaders saw themselves
as being constrained by both international factors and domestic politics,
such that they had less freedom of maneuver than many analyses have
attributed to them. We should be more cautious in charging aggression
or stupidity. In order to understand these constraints, we need to exam-
ine both the security dilemma that existed in Europe after the collapse
of the Soviet Union and the domestic politics of the various countries
involved, especially Ukraine. In particular, we need to understand the
ways in which democratization became merged with geopolitics, repeat-
edly disrupting the status quo and putting a core value of the West at
odds with Russia’s sense of its security.

The Approach: Historical and Analytical


This book combines historical and social science approaches. The ques-
tions of what happened and why are tightly linked. Therefore, we com-
bine a chronological narrative with a set of social science concepts that

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Analytical Themes 9

help reveal the dynamics and patterns that connect events over more
than thirty years. The book is not, strictly speaking, a work of history, as
it is not based primarily on archival sources. But considerable attention
is given to describing what happened, and to looking at how the actors at
the time explained what they were doing. Their views are gleaned from
the statements they made at the time, as well as later accounts and inter-
views conducted in Ukraine.
The narrative account, which traces the evolution of Ukraine–Russia
and Russia–West relations since 1989, is structured by a set of analytical
themes that identify the underlying dynamics of the conflict, and that
show the connections between this case and broader patterns in world
politics. This approach requires a theoretical eclecticism that brings mul-
tiple theories to bear on the problem rather than insisting on fitting the
complexities of the case into a single perspective.11

Analytical Themes
The conflict that turned violent in 2014 and escalated in 2022 was rooted
in deep disagreements about what the post-Cold War world should look
like. Those differences emerged with the end of the Cold War and have
endured. They constitute each side’s perception of what the status quo
was or should be. Actors were willing to take heightened risks when it
appeared their conception of the status quo was under threat. Three
dynamics explain why those conflicts of interest could not be mitigated
despite the presumably benign environment after the end of the Cold
War. First, the security dilemma, a common phenomenon in interna-
tional politics, meant that actions that each state took to preserve its
security created problems for others and induced fears about actors’
intentions. Second, the spread of democracy complicated matters con-
siderably. Because new democracies sought to join Europe’s democratic
international institutions, the European Union and NATO, democrati-
zation took on geopolitical consequences that the West saw as benign and
that Russia saw as threatening. With Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution
the merger of democratization and geopolitics became nearly complete.
Moreover, the progress – and the backsliding – of democratization in the
region meant that the status quo was repeatedly disrupted, raising new
fears and new conflicts. Third, regardless of the level of democracy in
the various states, domestic politics repeatedly undermined cooperation

11
Rudra Sil and Peter J. Katzenstein, “Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics:
Reconfiguring Problems and Mechanisms across Research Traditions,” Perspectives on
Politics 8, 2 (2010): 411–431.

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10 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

and concessions. In the United States, in Russia, and in Ukraine there


was almost always more to lose and less to gain domestically from taking
a conciliatory policy than from taking a harder line. Moreover, the fact
that Russia rebuilt a strong state after 2000, while Ukraine’s remained
weak and divided, made it increasingly possible for Russia to see a mili-
tary solution as viable.
In sum, while the end of the Cold War resolved some questions, it
created several more, including the status of Russia and Ukraine in rela-
tion to each other and to Europe more generally. Traditional security
challenges such as the security dilemma remained, and a new one – the
merger of democratization with geopolitics – emerged. Oddly, the end
of the Cold War did not make conciliatory policies popular with vot-
ers or elites in the United States, Ukraine, or Russia. Taken together,
the recipe was corrosive: conflicts of interest were reinforced and where
strong, skilled leadership might have reduced conflict, leaders repeatedly
faced countervailing domestic pressures.
These dynamics have been largely ignored in accounts of relations
between Ukraine, Russia, and the West, but if we take them seriously,
we need to look much less hard for someone to blame for the fact that
Russia’s goals collided with those of Ukraine and the West. The actors
were impelled to step on each other’s toes whether they wanted to or
not. This did not make war inevitable or justifiable, but it did guarantee
a certain amount of friction, and it meant that unusual leadership would
be required to manage the conflicts of interest and hard feelings that
resulted.

Competing Goals and Incompatible


Perceptions of the Status Quo
As the Cold War ended in 1989–1991, leaders in Russia, Europe, and the
United States perceived a dramatic reduction in tension and an increas-
ing harmony of interests and values. But Russia and Ukraine held vastly
different expectations about whether their relationship would be based
on sovereign equality or on traditional Russian hegemony. Similarly,
while the West believed that the end of the Cold War meant that Russia
was becoming a “normal” European country, Russia strongly believed
that it would retain its traditional role as a great power, with privileges
like a sphere of influence and a veto over security arrangements.
The actors had very different understandings of what the status quo was,
and therefore which changes were “legitimate” or “illegitimate,” which
were benign or harmful, and which were signs of bad faith or aggressive
intent on the part of others. While most Russians welcomed the end of

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Goals and Perceptions of the Status Quo 11

communism and the end of the Cold War, they did not accept the loss
of Ukraine. In 1992, Joseph Brodsky, the Russian émigré poet, Nobel
Prize winner and, at the time, the Poet Laureate of the US, performed
a poem bitterly condemning Ukrainian independence and disparaging
Ukrainians.12 In the 1990s, even one of the leading liberals in Russia,
Boris Nemtsov, advocated regaining Sevastopol by having Russian firms
buy assets there: “Historical justice should be restored through capitalist
methods.”13 In Nemtsov’s view, increasing Russian control of Crimea
would be a restoration, not a new gain for Russia. In 2014, Alexei Navalny,
who became Russia’s leading pro-democracy political prisoner, said “I
don’t see any difference at all between Russians and Ukrainians.”14
Russia’s inability to reconcile itself to the loss of Ukraine is unsur-
prising. The belief that Ukraine is part of Russia is rooted in a Russian
foundation myth which sees the origins of today’s Russia in medieval
Kyiv, in the hundreds of years in which much of Ukraine was part of
the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, and in the important role played
by people from Ukraine – the writers Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulga-
kov, the revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky and the Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev among many others – in Russian/Soviet culture and politics.
The sense of something important being lost was profound.15 Vladimir
Putin invoked this history to justify the seizure of Crimea in 2014.16
Gerard Toal applies the concept of “thick geopolitics” and Elizabeth
Wood refers to “imagined geography” to show how Russia’s perception
of its geopolitical situation shaped Russian policy in its “near abroad.”17

12
Joseph Brodsky, “Na nezavisimost’ Ukrainy” (1992), www.culture.ru/poems/30468/
na-nezavisimost-ukrainy. For a discussion, see Keith Gessen, “A Note on Brodsky and
Ukraine,” The New Yorker, August 21, 2011.
13
OMRI Daily Digest Part I, February 19, 1997, as cited in Paul D’Anieri, Economic
Interdependence in Ukrainian–Russian Relations (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999), p. 211.
14
Anna Dolgov, “Navalny Wouldn’t Return Crimea, Considers Immigration Bigger Issue
than Ukraine,” Moscow Times, October 16, 2014. See also Marlene Laruelle, “Alexei
Navalny and Challenges in Reconciling ‘Nationalism’ and ‘Liberalism’,” Post-Soviet
Affairs 30, 4 (2014): 276–297.
15
See Peter J. Potichnyj, Marc Raeff, Jaroslaw Pelenski, and Gleb N. Zekulin., eds.,
Ukraine and Russia in Their Historical Encounter (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of
Ukrainian Studies, 1982).
16
“Address by President of the Russian Federation,” March 18, 2014, President of Russia
website.
17
Gerard Toal, Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Toal deliberately takes an “empathetic”
approach to understanding Russia’s perception of its role in the region. Elizabeth A.
Wood, “Introduction,” in Elizabeth A. Wood, William E. Pomeranz, E. Wayne Merry,
and Maxim Trudolyubov, Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine (Washington, DC: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press, 2016), pp. 3–6.

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12 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

“Status quo bias,” or “loss aversion,” the study of which earned Dan-
iel Kahneman a Nobel Prize, is a phenomenon widely studied in psy-
chology and behavioral economics. As Kahneman and Amos Tversky
put it succinctly, “losses loom larger than gains.”18 Actors are willing to
take disproportionate risks to avoid a perceived loss. Applied to interna-
tional relations, states will try very hard to preserve the status quo or to
restore it when they perceive it has been disrupted for the worse. Henry
Kissinger, relying on history rather than behavioral economics, similarly
argued that whether great powers accepted the status quo was crucial
to the maintenance of stability.19 After 1991, Ukraine, Russia, and the
West had different understandings of the new status quo. Therefore,
each saw itself as defending the status quo, and saw others’ efforts to
overturn it as signs of malicious intent.
It is tempting to see Russia’s determination to control Ukraine as the
only explanation needed for this war. Absent this factor, it is hard to
see how the conflict emerges, let alone results in war. However, such a
view is incomplete, because it fails to account for Ukraine’s resistance to
Russia’s goals, for the West’s increasing interest in supporting Ukraine’s
independence, and for the merger of Russia’s conflict with Ukraine into
a much larger conflict between Russia and the West. It is a truism that
war takes at least two parties: If one side capitulates, there is no need
for war. Focusing only on Russian aggression ignores Ukraine’s agency,
which not only was central in the demise of the Soviet Union but also
meant that Russia’s strategy of peaceful coercion could not work. With-
out Ukraine’s determination to remain separate, Ukraine’s indepen-
dence after 1991 might have been fleeting, as it was after World War I.
Without the West’s willingness to support Ukraine, the conflict between
Russia and Ukraine would likely have turned out very differently.
While Ukraine and the West saw Russia trying to overturn the post-
Cold War status quo, Russia saw the West trying to overturn it by
expanding NATO eastward and by promoting “colored revolutions”
against governments that Russia supported. In 2005, Andrei Zagorsky
lamented that “Russia acts as a status quo power that is no longer

18
Daniel S. Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision
under Risk,” Econometrica 47, 2 (March 1979): 279. On the application of prospect
theory to international politics, see Jack S. Levy, “Prospect Theory and International
Relations: Theoretical Approaches and Analytical Problems,” Political Psychology 13,
2 (1992): 283–310; and Jonathan Mercer, “Prospect Theory and Political Science,”
Annual Review of Political Science 8 (2005): 1–21.
19
Kissinger divided great powers into “status quo” powers, which were satisfied with the
status quo and defended it, and revolutionary powers, which were dissatisfied with the
status quo and sought to overturn it. See Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich,
Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812‒22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).

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The Security Dilemma 13

able to prevent or resist the rise of change.”20 Kahneman and Tversky


stressed that this sense of having lost something is especially dangerous:
“[A] person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept
gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.”21 As Kissinger
argued, in a situation where the status quo is not mutually agreed upon,
states see each other as acting in bad faith, as unreasonable, and as sub-
verting the established order.22 That increasingly characterized diplo-
macy over Ukraine.23

The Security Dilemma


The underlying dynamics of international politics were stubborn, and
the measures that each state took to improve its security naturally looked
threatening to others, even if they were not intended that way. The result
was a self-reinforcing cycle. With Russia making claims on Ukrainian ter-
ritory, Ukraine considered keeping nuclear weapons on its territory. This
was seen as threatening not only by Russia, but by the United States. Simi-
larly, central European states, after decades of occupation, sought to join
NATO, which Russia feared. Russia’s own actions reinforced the belief
that it might again become a threat to its neighbors, and so on. In a letter to
voters before his first election as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin stated:
“It is unreasonable to fear a strong Russia, but she must be reckoned with.
To offend us would cost anyone dearly.”24 Many of Russia’s neighbors,
based on recent history, felt that there was a lot to fear from a strong Russia,
and the statement that offending Russia “would cost anyone dearly” was
likely read as a threat against which precautions would be advisable.
To scholars of international politics, this vicious circle, known as
the “security dilemma,” recurs throughout history, and is hard or
even impossible to escape.25 In this view, even peaceful states, as they

20
Andrei Zagorski, “Russia and the Shared Neighborhood,” in Dov Lynch, ed., What
Russia Sees, Chaillot Paper No. 74, Institute for Security Studies, January 2005, p. 69.
21
Kahneman and Tversky, “Prospect Theory,” p. 287. Levy (“Prospect Theory and
International Relations,” p. 286) applies this point to international politics: “A state
which perceives itself to be in a deteriorating situation might be willing to take exces-
sively risky actions in order to maintain the status quo.”
22
Kissinger, A World Restored, p. 2.
23
The theory of loss aversion is applied specifically to the conflicts in Crimea and eastern
Ukraine by Aleprete, “Minimizing Loss.”
24
“Putin’s Foreign Policy Riddle,” BBC News Online, March 28, 2000, http://news.bbc
.co.uk/2/hi/europe/693526.stm.
25
There is an enormous literature on the security dilemma, its consequences, and the
potential to resolve it. For a good short treatment, see Robert Jervis, “Cooperation
under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, 2 (January 1978): 167–214.

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14 The Sources of Conflict over Ukraine

pursue security, unintentionally create threats to others. Some recog-


nized that the end of the Cold War did not solve this problem. After the
fall of the Berlin Wall, John Mearsheimer predicted that if the United
States withdrew from Europe, security fears would prompt Germany
to acquire nuclear weapons.26 That prediction was one reason why
the United States did not depart and why NATO did not disband,
but many worried that it was unclear where NATO expansion would
stop or how far it could go “before the West more or less permanently
alienates Russia.”27 The essence of the security dilemma is that either
pursuing new security measures or not doing so can leave one feeling
vulnerable. In this perspective it is the situation, or the system, which
is to blame, not the individual actors, who find themselves trapped in
this dynamic.
Escaping the security dilemma would have required one side or the
other – or both – to abandon its understanding of what was acceptable as
the status quo after the Cold War. Either the West and Ukraine would
have to give up on the idea that in the new Europe democracy was the
norm and democratic institutions were free to grow, or Russia would have
to give up on its claims over Ukraine. Along the way, both sides had the
opportunity to make smaller concessions. Whether one places the blame
for the eventual conflict on Russia, Ukraine, or the West depends largely
on which state one thinks should have revised its expectations, and by
extension on whose vision for post-Cold War Europe was more just.

Democracy and Power Politics


The end of the Cold War represented a massive geopolitical shift driven
by mostly peaceful democratic revolutions in eastern Europe. Leaders
in the West learned that democratization – something that people in
the West fervently believed in – also brought important security gains.
However, democratization repeatedly undid the status quo, each time
with geopolitical consequences that Russia feared. Initially, new democ-
racies sought to join NATO. Then “colored revolutions” overturned
pro-Russian governments in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. “The emer-
gence of the European Union as an economic superpower harnessed to a
NATO alliance and steadily marching eastward confronted the new Rus-
sia with a prospect that has in the past represented the ultimate security

26
John J. Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,”
International Security 15, 1 (Summer 1990): 5–56.
27
Robert J. Art, “Creating a Disaster: NATO’s Open Door Policy,” Political Science
Quarterly 113, 3 (1998): 383.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009315555.002 Published online by Cambridge University Press


Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“The number of immigrants of all nations was 720,045 in 1881. Of
these 20,711 were Chinese. There is no record in the Bureau of
Statistics of the number who departed within the year. But a very
high anti-Chinese authority places it above 10,000. Perhaps the
expectation that the hostile legislation under the treaty would not
affect persons who entered before it took effect stimulated somewhat
their coming. But the addition to the Chinese population was less
than one seventy-second of the whole immigration. All the Chinese
in the country do not exceed the population of its sixteenth city. All
the Chinese in California hardly surpass the number which is easily
governed in Shanghai by a police of one hundred men. There are as
many pure blooded Gypsies wandering about the country as there
are Chinese in California. What an insult to American intelligence to
ask leave of China to keep out her people, because this little handful
of almond-eyed Asiatics threaten to destroy our boasted civilization.
We go boasting of our democracy, and our superiority, and our
strength. The flag bears the stars of hope to all nations. A hundred
thousand Chinese land in California and everything is changed. God
has not made of one blood all the nations any longer. The self-
evident truth becomes a self-evident lie. The golden rule does not
apply to the natives of the continent where it was first uttered. The
United States surrender to China, the Republic to the despot,
America to Asia, Jesus to Joss.
“There is another most remarkable example of this prejudice of
race which has happily almost died out here, which has come down
from the dark ages and which survives with unabated ferocity in
Eastern Europe. I mean the hatred of the Jew. The persecution of the
Hebrew has never, so far as I know, taken the form of an affront to
labor. In every other particular the reproaches which for ten
centuries have been leveled at him are reproduced to do service
against the Chinese. The Hebrew, so it was said, was not a Christian.
He did not affiliate or assimilate into the nations where he dwelt. He
was an unclean thing, a dog, to whom the crime of the crucifixion of
his Saviour was never to be forgiven. The Chinese quarter of San
Francisco had its type in every city of Europe. If the Jew ventured
from his hiding-place he was stoned. His wealth made him the prey
of the rapacity of the noble, and his poverty and weakness the victim
of the rabble. Yet how has this Oriental conquered Christendom by
the sublimity of his patience? The great poet of New England, who
sits by every American fireside a beloved and perpetual guest, in that
masterpiece of his art, the Jewish Cemetery at Newport, has
described the degradation and the triumph of these persecuted
children of God.
How came they here? What burst of Christian hate,
What persecution, merciless and blind,
Drove o’er the sea—that desert desolate—
These Ishmaels and Hagars of mankind?
They lived in narrow streets and lanes obscure,
Ghetto and Judenstrass, in mirk and mire;
Taught in the school of patience to endure
The life of anguish and the death of fire.

· · · · ·

Anathema maranatha! was the cry


That rang from town to town, from street to street;
At every gate the accursed Mordecai
Was mocked and jeered, and spurned by Christian feet.

Pride and humiliation hand in hand


Walked with them through the world where’er they went;
Trampled and beaten were they as the sand,
And yet unshaken as the continent.

Forty years ago—


Says Lord Beaconsfield, that great Jew who held England in the
hollow of his hand, and who played on her aristocracy as on an
organ, who made himself the master of an alien nation, its ruler, its
oracle, and through it, and in despite of it, for a time the master of
Europe—
Forty years ago—not a longer period than the children of Israel
were wandering in the desert—the two most dishonored races in
Europe were the Attic and the Hebrew. The world has probably by
this discovered that it is impossible to destroy the Jews. The attempt
to extirpate them has been made under the most favorable auspices
and on the largest scale; the most considerable means that man
could command have been pertinaciously applied to this object for
the longest period of recorded time. Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrian
kings, Roman emperors, Scandinavian crusaders, Gothic princes,
and holy inquisitors, have alike devoted their energies to the
fulfillment of this common purpose. Expatriation, exile, captivity,
confiscation, torture on the most ingenious and massacre on the
most extensive scale, a curious system of degrading customs and
debasing laws which would have broken the heart of any other
people, have been tried, and in vain.
“Lord Beaconsfield admits that the Jews contribute more than
their proportion to the aggregate of the vile; that the lowest class of
Jews are obdurate, malignant, odious, and revolting. And yet this
race of dogs, as it has been often termed in scorn, furnishes Europe
to-day its masters in finance and oratory and statesmanship and art
and music. Rachel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Disraeli, Rothschild,
Benjamin, Heine, are but samples of the intellectual power of a race
which to-day controls the finance and the press of Europe.
“I do not controvert the evidence which is relied upon to show that
there are great abuses, great dangers, great offenses, which have
grown out of the coming of this people. Much of the evil I believe
might be cured by State and municipal authority. Congress may
rightfully be called upon to go to the limit of the just exercise of the
powers of government in rendering its aid.
“We should have capable and vigilant consular officers in the
Asiatic ports from which these immigrants come, without whose
certificate they should not be received on board ship, and who should
see to it that no person except those of good character and no person
whose labor is not his own property be allowed to come over.
Especially should the trade in human labor under all disguises be
suppressed. Filthy habits of living must surely be within the control
of municipal regulation. Every State may by legislation or by
municipal ordinance in its towns and cities prescribe the dimension
of dwellings and limit the number who may occupy the same
tenement.
“But it is urged—and this in my judgment is the greatest argument
for the bill—that the introduction of the labor of the Chinese reduces
the wages of the American laborer. ‘We are ruined by Chinese cheap
labor’ is a cry not limited to the class to whose representative the
brilliant humorist of California first ascribed it. I am not in favor of
lowering any where the wages of any American labor, skilled or
unskilled. On the contrary, I believe the maintenance and the
increase of the purchasing power of the wages of the American
working man should be the one principal object of our legislation.
The share in the product of agriculture or manufacture which goes to
labor should, and I believe will, steadily increase. For that, and for
that only, exists our protective system. The acquisition of wealth,
national or individual, is to be desired only for that. The statement of
the accomplished Senator from California on this point meets my
heartiest concurrence. I have no sympathy with any men, if such
there be, who favor high protection and cheap labor.
“But I believe that the Chinese, to whom the terms of the
California Senator attribute skill enough to displace the American in
every field requiring intellectual vigor, will learn very soon to insist
on his full share of the product of his work. But whether that be true
or not, the wealth he creates will make better and not worse the
condition of every higher class of labor. There may be trouble or
failure in adjusting new relations. But sooner or later every new class
of industrious and productive laborers elevates the class it displaces.
The dread of an injury to our labor from the Chinese rests on the
same fallacy that opposed the introduction of labor-saving
machinery, and which opposed the coming of the Irishman and the
German and the Swede. Within my memory in New England all the
lower places in factories, all places of domestic service, were filled by
the sons and daughters of American farmers. The Irishmen came
over to take their places; but the American farmer’s son and
daughter did not suffer; they were only elevated to a higher plane. In
the increased wealth of the community their share is much greater.
The Irishman rose from the bog or the hovel of his native land to the
comfort of a New England home, and placed his children in a New
England school. The Yankee rises from the loom and the spinning-
jenny to be the teacher, the skilled laborer in the machine shop, the
inventor, the merchant, or the opulent landholder and farmer of the
West.”

A letter from F. A. Bee, Chinese Consul, approving the


management of the estate, accompanied the report of the referee:
“Mr. President, I will not detain the Senate by reading the
abundant testimony, of which this is but the sample, of the
possession by the people of this race of the possibility of a
development of every quality of intellect, art, character, which fits
them for citizenship, for republicanism, for Christianity.
“Humanity, capable of infinite depths of degradation, is capable
also of infinite heights of excellence. The Chinese, like all other races,
has given us its examples of both. To rescue humanity from this
degradation is, we are taught to believe, the great object of God’s
moral government on earth. It is not by injustice, exclusion, caste,
but by reverence for the individual soul that we can aid in this
consummation. It is not by Chinese policies that China is to be
civilized. I believe that the immortal truths of the Declaration of
Independence came from the same source with the Golden Rule and
the Sermon on the Mount. We can trust Him who promulgated these
laws to keep the country safe that obeys them. The laws of the
universe have their own sanction. They will not fail. The power that
causes the compass to point to the north, that dismisses the star on
its pathway through the skies, promising that in a thousand years it
shall return again true to its hour and keep His word, will vindicate
His own moral law. As surely as the path on which our fathers
entered a hundred years ago led to safety, to strength, to glory, so
surely will the path on which we now propose to enter ring us to
shame, to weakness, and to peril.”
On the 3d of March the debate was renewed. Senator Farley
protested that unless Chinese immigration is prohibited it will be
impossible to protect the Chinese on the Pacific coast. The feeling
against them now is such that restraint is difficult, as the people,
forced out of employment by them, and irritated by their constantly
increasing numbers, are not in a condition to submit to the
deprivations they suffer by the presence of a Chinese population
imported as slaves and absorbing to their own benefit the labor of
the country. A remark of Mr. Farley about the Chinese led Mr. Hoar
to ask if they were not the inventors of the printing press and of
gunpowder. To this question Mr. Jones, of Nevada, made a brief
speech, which was considered remarkable, principally because it was
one of the very few speeches of any length that he has made since he
became a Senator. Instead of agreeing with Mr. Hoar that the
Chinese had invented the printing press and gunpowder, he said that
information he had received led him to believe that the Chinese were
not entitled to the credit of either of these inventions. On the
contrary, they had stolen them from Aryans or Caucasians who
wandered into the kingdom. Mr. Hoar smiled incredulously and
made a remark to the effect that he had never heard of those Aryans
or Caucasians before.
Continuing his remarks, Mr. Farley expressed his belief that
should the Mongolian population increase and the Chinese come in
contact with the Africans, the contact would result in demoralization
and bloodshed which the laws could not prevent. Pig-tailed
Chinamen would take the place everywhere of the working girl unless
Congress extended its protection to California and her white people,
who had by their votes demanded a prohibition of Chinese
immigration. Mr. Maxey, interpreting the Constitution in such a way
as to bring out of it an argument against Chinese immigration, said
he found nothing in it to justify the conclusion that the framers of it
intended to bring into this country all nations and races. The only
people the fathers had in view as citizens were those of the Caucasian
race, and they contemplated naturalization only for such, for they
had distinctly set forth that the heritage of freedom was to be for
their posterity. Nobody would pretend to express the opinion that it
was expected that the American people should become mixed up
with all sorts of races and call the result “our posterity.” While the
American people had, in consequence of their Anglo-Saxon origin,
been able to withstand the contact with the African, the Africans
would never stand before the Chinese. Mr. Maxey opposed the
Chinese because they do not come here to be citizens, because the
lower classes of Chinese alone are immigrants, and because by
contact they poison the minds of the less intelligent.
Mr. Saulsbury had something to say in favor of the bill, and Mr.
Garland, who voted against the last bill because the treaty had not
been modified, expressed his belief that the Government could
exercise properly all the powers proposed to be bestowed by this bill.
Some time was consumed by Mr. Ingalls in advocacy of an
amendment offered by him, proposing to limit the suspension of
immigration to 10 instead of 20 years. Mr. Miller and Mr. Bayard
opposed the amendment, Mr. Bayard taking the ground that
Congress ought not to disregard the substantially unanimous wish of
the people of California, as expressed at the polls, for absolute
prohibition. The debate was interrupted by a motion for an executive
session, and the bill went over until Monday, to be taken up then as
the unfinished business.
On March 6th a vote was ordered on Senator Ingalls’ amendment.
It was defeated on a tie vote—yeas 23, nays 23.
The vote in detail is as follows:
Yeas—Messrs. Aldrich, Allison, Blair, Brown, Cockrell, Conger,
Davis of Illinois, Dawes, Edmunds, Frye, Harris, Hoar, Ingalls,
Jackson, Lapham, McDill, McMillan, Mitchell, Morrell, Saunders,
Sewell, Sherman and Teller—23.
Nays—Messrs. Bayard, Beck, Call, Cameron of Wisconsin, Coke,
Fair, Farley, Garland, George, Hale, Hampton, Hill of Colorado,
Jonas, Jones of Nevada, McPherson, Marcy, Miller of California,
Miller of New York, Morgan, Ransom, Slater, Vest and Walker—23.
Pairs were announced between Davis, of West Virginia, Saulsbury,
Butler, Johnson, Kellogg, Jones, of Florida, and Grover, against the
amendment, and Messrs. Windom, Ferry, Hawley, Platt, Pugh,
Rollins and Van Wyck in the affirmative. Mr. Camden was also
paired.
Mr. Edmunds, partially in reply to Mr. Hoar argued that the right
to decide what constitutes the moral law was one inherent in the
Government, and by analogy the right to regulate the character of the
people who shall come into it belonged to a Government. This
depended upon national polity and the fact as to most of the ancient
republics that they did not possess homogeneity was the cause of
their fall. As to the Swiss Republic, it was untrue that it was not
homogeneous. The difference there was not one of race but of
different varieties of the same race, all of which are analogous and
consistent with each other. It would not be contended that it is an
advantage to a republic that its citizens should be made of diverse
races, with diverse views and diverse obligations as to what the
common prosperity of all required. Therefore there was no
foundation for the charge of a violation of moral and public law in
our making a distinction as to the foreigners we admit. He
challenged Mr. Hoar to produce an authority on national law which
denied the right of one nation to declare what people of other nations
should come among them. John Hancock and Samuel Adams, not
unworthy citizens of Massachusetts, joined in asserting in the
Declaration of Independence the right of the colonies to establish for
themselves, not for other peoples, a Government of their own, not
the Government of somebody else. The declaration asserted the
family or consolidated right of a people within any Territory to
determine the conditions upon which they would go on, and this
included the matter of receiving the people from other shores into
their family. This idea was followed in the Constitution by requiring
naturalization. The Chinaman may be with us, but he is not of us.
One of the conditions of his naturalization is that he must be friendly
to the institutions and intrinsic polity of our Government. Upon the
theory of the Massachusetts Senators, that there is a universal
oneness of one human being with every other human being on the
globe, this traditional and fundamental principle was entirely
ignored. Such a theory as applied to Government was contrary to all
human experience, to all discussion, and to every step of the
founders of our Government. He said that Mr. Sumner, the
predecessor of Mr. Hoar, was the author of the law on the coolie
traffic, which imposes fines and penalties more severe than those in
this bill upon any master of an American vessel carrying a Chinaman
who is a servant. The present bill followed that legislation. Mr.
Edmunds added that he would vote against the bill if the twenty-year
clause was retained, but would maintain the soundness of principle
he had enunciated.
Mr. Hoar argued in reply that the right of expatriation carried with
it the right to a home for the citizen in the country to which he
comes, and that the bill violated not only this but the principles of
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments which made citizenship
the birthright of every one born on our soil, and prohibited an
abridgement of the suffrage because of race, color, etc.
Mr. Ingalls moved an amendment postponing the time at which
the act shall take effect until sixty days after information of its
passage has been communicated to China.
After remarks by Messrs. Dawes, Teller and Bayard, at the
suggestion of Mr. Brown Mr. Ingalls modified his amendment by
providing that the act shall not go into effect until ninety days after
its passage, and the amendment was adopted.
On motion of Mr. Bayard, amendments were adopted making the
second section read as follows: “That any master of any vessel of
whatever nationality, who shall knowingly on such vessel bring
within the jurisdiction of the United States and permit to be landed
any Chinese laborer,” &c.
Mr. Hoar moved to amend by adding the following: “Provided,
that this bill shall not apply to any skilled laborer who shall establish
that he comes to this country without any contract beyond which his
labor is the property of any person besides himself.”
Mr. Farley suggested that all the Chinese would claim to be skilled
laborers.
Mr. Hoar replied that it would test whether the bill struck at
coolies or at skilled labor.
The amendment was rejected—Yeas, 17; nays, 27.
Mr. Call moved to strike out the section which forfeits the vessel
for the offense of the master. Lost.
Mr. Hoar moved to amend by inserting: “Provided that any laborer
who shall receive a certificate from the U.S. Consul at the port where
he shall embark that he is an artisan coming to this country at his
own expense and of his own will, shall not be affected by this bill.”
Lost—yeas 19, nays 24.
On motion of Mr. Miller, of California, the provision directing the
removal of any Chinese unlawfully found in a Customs Collection
district by the Collector, was amended to direct that he shall be
removed to the place from whence he came.
On motion of Mr. Brown an amendment was adopted providing
that the mark of a Chinese immigrant, duly attested by a witness,
may be taken as his signature upon the certificate of resignation or
registration issued to him.
The question then recurred on the amendment offered by Mr.
Farley that hereafter no State Court or United States Court shall
admit Chinese to citizenship.
Mr. Hawley, of Conn., on the following day spoke against what he
denounced as “a bill of iniquities.”
On the 9th of March what proved a long and interesting debate
was closed, the leading speech being made by Senator Jones (Rep.)
of Nevada, in favor of the bill. After showing the disastrous effects of
the influx of the Chinese upon the Pacific coast and answering some
of the arguments of the opponents of restriction, Mr. Jones said that
he had noticed that most of those favoring Chinese immigration were
advocates of a high tariff to protect American labor. But, judging
from indications, it is not the American laborer, but the lordly
manufacturing capitalist who is to be protected as against the
European capitalist, and who is to sell everything he has to sell in an
American market, one in which other capitalists cannot compete
with him, while he buys that which he has to buy—the labor of men—
in the most open market. He demands for the latter free trade in its
broadest sense, and would have not only free trade in bringing in
laborers of our own race, but the Chinese, the most skilful and
cunning laborers of the world. The laborer, however, is to buy from
his capitalist master in a protective market, but that which he himself
has to sell, his labor, and which he must sell every day (for he cannot
wait, like the capitalist, for better times or travel here and there to
dispose of it), he must sell in the openest market of the world. When
the artisans of this country shall be made to understand that the
market in which they sell the only thing they have to sell is an open
one they will demand, as one of the conditions of their existence, that
they shall have an open market in which to buy what they want. As
the Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Dawes) said he wanted the
people to know that the bill was a blow struck at labor, Mr. Jones
said he reiterated the assertion with the qualification that it was not a
blow at our own, but at underpaid pauper labor. That cheap labor
produces national wealth is a fallacy, as shown by the home
condition of the 350,000,000 of Chinamen.
“Was the bringing of the little brown man a sort of counter balance
to the trades unions of this country? If he may be brought here, why
may not the products of his toil come in? Now, when the laborer is
allowed to get that share from his labor that civilization has decided
he shall have, the little brown man is introduced. He (Mr. Jones)
believed in protection, and had no prejudice against the capitalist,
but he would have capital and labor equally protected. Enlarging
upon the consideration that the intelligence or creative genius of a
country in overcoming obstacles, not its material resources,
constitutes its wealth, and that the low wages of the Chinese, while
benefiting individual employers, would ultimately impoverish the
country by removing the stimulant to create labor-saving machinery
and like inventions. Mr. Jones spoke of what he called the dearth of
intellectual activity in the South in every department but one, that of
politics.
“This was because of the presence of a servile race there. The
absence of Southern names in the Patent Office is an illustration. We
would not welcome the Africans here. Their presence was not a
blessing to us, but an impediment in our way. The relations of the
white and colored races of the South were now no nearer adjustment
than they were years ago. He would prophesy that the African race
would never be permitted to dominate any State of the South. The
experiment to that end had been a dismal failure, and a failure not
because we have not tried to make it succeed, but because laws away
above human laws have placed the one race superior to and far above
the other. The votes of the ignorant class might preponderate, but
intellect, not numbers, is the superior force in this world. We clothed
the African in the Union blue and the belief that he was one day to be
free was the candle-light in his soul, but it is one thing to aspire to be
free and another thing to have the intelligence and sterling qualities
of character that can maintain free government. Mr. Jones here
expressed his belief that, if left alone to maintain a government, the
negro would gradually retrograde and go back to the methods of his
ancestors. This, he added, may be heresy, but I believe it to be the
truth. If, when the first ship-load of African slaves came to this
country the belief had spread that they would be the cause of political
agitation, a civil war, and the future had been foreseen, would they
have been allowed to land?
“How much of this country would now be worth preserving if the
North had been covered by Africans as is South Carolina to-day, in
view of their non-assimilative character? The wisest policy would
have been to exclude them at the outset. So we say of the Chinese to-
day, he exclaimed, and for greater reason, because their skill makes
them more formidable competitors than the negro. Subtle and adept
in manipulation, the Chinaman can be put into almost any kind of a
factory. His race is as obnoxious to us and as impossible for us to
assimilate with as was the negro race. His race has outlived every
other because it is homogeneous, and for that reason alone. It has
imposed its religion and peculiarities upon its conquerors and still
lived. If the immigration is not checked now, when it is within
manageable limits, it will be too late to check it. What do we find in
the condition of the Indian or the African to induce us to admit
another race into our midst? It is because the Pacific coast favor our
own civilization, not that of another race, that they discourage the
coming of these people. They believe in the homogeneity of our race,
and that upon this depends the progress of our institutions and
everything on which we build our hopes.
Mr. Morill, (Rep.) of Vt., said he appreciated the necessity of
restricting Chinese immigration, but desired that the bill should
strictly conform to treaty requirements and be so perfected that
questions arising under it might enable it to pass the ordeal of
judicial scrutiny.
Mr. Sherman, (Rep.) of Ohio, referring to the passport system,
said the bill adopted some of the most offensive features of European
despotism. He was averse to hot haste in applying a policy foreign to
the habits of our people, and regarded the measure as too sweeping
in many of its provisions and as reversing our immigration policy.
After remarks by Messrs. Ingalls, Farley, Maxey, Brown and Teller,
the amendment of Mr. Farley, which provides that hereafter no court
shall admit Chinese to citizenship, was adopted—yeas 25, nays 22.
The following is the vote:
Yeas—Messrs. Bayard, Beck, Call, Cameron of Wisconsin, Cockrell,
Coke, Fair, Farley, Garland, George, Gorman, Harris, Jackson,
Jonas, Jones of Nevada, Maxey, Morgan, Pugh, Ransom, Slater,
Teller, Vance, Vest, Voorhees and Walker—25.
Nays—Messrs. Aldrich, Allison, Blair, Brown, Conger, Davis of
Illinois, Dawes, Edmunds, Frye, Hale, Hill of Colorado, Hoar,
Ingalls, Lapham, McDill, McMillan, Miller of New York, Mitchell,
Morrill, Plumb, Saunders and Sawyer—22.
Mr. Grover’s amendment construing the words “Chinese laborers,”
wherever used in the act, to mean both skilled and unskilled laborers
and Chinese employed in mining prevailed by the same vote—yeas
25, nays 22.
Mr. Brown, (Dem.) of Ga., moved to strike out the requirement
for the production of passports by the permitted classes whenever
demanded by the United States authorities. Carried on a viva voce
vote, the Chair (Mr. Davis, of Illinois) creating no little merriment by
announcing, “The nays are loud but there are not many of them.”
MR. INGALLS’ AMENDMENT.

Upon the bill being reported to the Senate from the Committee of
the Whole Mr. Ingalls again moved to limit the suspension of the
coming of Chinese laborers to ten years.
Mr. Jones, of Nevada, said this limit would hardly have the effect
of allaying agitation on the subject as the discussion would be
resumed in two or three years, and ten years, he feared, would not
even be a long enough period to enable Congress intelligently to base
upon it any future policy.
Mr. Miller, of California, also urged that the shorter period would
not measurably relieve the business interest of the Pacific slope,
inasmuch as the white immigrants, who were so much desired,
would not come there if they believed the Chinese were to be again
admitted in ten years. Being interrupted by Mr. Hoar, he asserted
that that Senator and other republican leaders, as also the last
republican nominee for President, had heretofore given the people of
the Pacific slope good reason to believe that they would secure to
them the relief they sought by the bill.
Mr. Hoar, (Rep.) of Mass., briefly replied.
The amendment was lost—yeas 20, nays 21.
The vote is as follows:
Yeas—Messrs. Aldrich, Allison, Blair, Brown, Conger, Davis of
Illinois, Dawes, Edmunds, Frye, Hale, Hoar, Ingalls, Lapham,
McDill, McMillan, Mahone, Morrill, Plumb, Sawyer and Teller—20.
Nays—Messrs. Bayard, Beck, Call, Cameron of Wisconsin, Coke,
Fair, Farley, Garland, George, Gorman, Jackson, Jonas, Jones of
Nevada, Miller of California, Miller of New York, Morgan, Ransom,
Slater, Yance, Voorhees and Walker—21.
Messrs. Butler, Camden, McPherson, Johnston, Davis of West
Virginia, Pendleton and Ransom were paired with Messrs. Hawley,
Anthony, Sewell, Platt, Van Wyck, Windom and Sherman.
Messrs. Hampton, Pugh, Vest, Rollins and Jones of Florida were
paired with absentees.

PASSAGE OF THE BILL.


The question recurred on the final passage of the bill, and Mr.
Edmunds closed the debate. He would vote against the bill as it now
stood, because he believed it to be an infraction of good faith as
pledged by the last treaty; because he believed it injurious to the
welfare of the people of the United States, and particularly the people
on the Pacific coast, by preventing the development of our great
trade with China.
The vote was then taken and the bill was passed—yeas 29, nays 15.
The following is the vote in detail:—
Yeas—Messrs. Bayard, Beck, Call, Cameron of Wisconsin, Cockrell,
Coke, Fair, Farley, Garland, George, Gorman, Hale, Harris, Hill of
Colorado, Jackson, Jonas, Jones of Nevada, Miller of California,
Miller of New York, Morgan, Pugh, Ransom, Sawyer, Teller, Vance,
Vest, Voorhees and Walker—29.
Nays—Messrs. Aldrich, Allison, Blair, Brown, Conger, Davis of
Illinois, Dawes, Edmunds, Frye, Hoar, Ingalls, Lapham, McDill,
McMillan and Morrill—15.
Pairs were announced of Messrs. Camden, Davis of West Virginia,
Grover, Hampton, Butler, McPherson, Johnston, Jones of Florida
and Pendleton in favor of the bill, with Messrs. Anthony, Windom,
Van Wyck, Mitchell, Hawley, Sewell, Platt, Rollins and Sherman
against it.
Mr. Frye, (Rep.) of Me., in casting his vote, stated that he was
paired with Mr. Hill, of Georgia, on all political questions, but that he
did not consider this a political question, and besides, had express
permission from Senator Hill to vote upon it.
Mr. Mitchell, (Rep.) of Pa., in announcing his pair with Mr.
Hampton stated that had it not been for that fact he would vote
against the bill, regarding it as un-American and inconsistent with
the principles which had obtained in the government.
The title of the bill was amended so as to read, “An act to execute
certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese,” though Mr. Hoar
suggested that “execute” ought to be stricken out and “violate”
inserted.
The Senate then, at twenty minutes to six, adjourned until to-
morrow.
PROVISIONS OF THE BILL.

The Chinese Immigration bill as passed provides that from and


after the expiration of ninety days after the passage of this act and
until the expiration of twenty years after its passage the coming of
Chinese laborers to the United States shall be suspended, and
prescribes a penalty of imprisonment not exceeding one year and a
fine of not more than $500 against the master of any vessel who
brings any Chinese laborer to this country during that period. It
further provides that the classes of Chinese excepted by the treaty
from such prohibition—such as merchants, teachers, students,
travelers, diplomatic agents and Chinese laborers who were in the
United States on the 17th of November, 1880—shall be required, as a
condition for their admission, to procure passports from the
government of China personally identifying them and showing that
they individually belong to one of the permitted classes, which
passports must have been indorsed by the diplomatic representative
of the United States in China or by the United States Consul at the
port of departure. It also provides elaborate machinery for carrying
out the purposes of the act, and additional sections prohibit the
admission of Chinese to citizenship by any United States or State
court and construes the words “Chinese laborers” to mean both
skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining.
The sentiment in favor of the passage of this bill has certainly
greatly increased since the control of the issue has passed to abler
hands than those of Kearney and Kalloch, whose conduct intensified
the opposition of the East to the measure, which in 1879 was
denounced as “violating the conscience of the nation.” Mr. Blaine’s
advocacy of the first bill limiting emigrants to fifteen on each vessel,
at the time excited much criticism in the Eastern states, and was
there a potent weapon against him in the nominating struggle for the
Presidency in 1880; but on the other hand it is believed that it gave
him strength in the Pacific States.
Chinese immigration and the attempt to restrict it presents a
question of the gravest importance, and was treated as such in the
Senate debate. The friends of the bill, under the leadership of
Senators Miller and Jones, certainly stood in a better and stronger
attitude than ever before.
The anti-Chinese bill passed the House just as it came from the
Senate, after a somewhat extended debate, on the 23d of March,
1882. Yeas 167, nays 65, (party lines not being drawn) as follows:
Yeas—Messrs. Aikin, Aldrich, Armfield, Atkins, Bayne, Belford,
Belmont, Berry, Bingham, Blackburn, Blanchard, Bliss, Blount,
Brewer, Brumm, Buckner, Burrows, of Missouri; Butterworth,
Cabell, Caldwell, Calkins, Campbell, Cannon, Casserley, Caswell,
Chalmers, Chapman, Clark, Clements, Cobb, Converse, Cook,
Cornell, Cox, of New York; Cox, of North Carolina; Covington,
Cravens, Culbertson, Curtin, Darrell, Davidson; Davis, of Illinois;
Davis, of Missouri; Demotte, Deuster, Dezendorf, Dibble, Dibrell,
Dowd, Dugro, Ermentrout, Errett, Farwell, of Illinois; Finley,
Flowers, Ford, Forney, Fulkerson, Garrison, Geddes, George, Gibson,
Guenther, Gunter, Hammond, of Georgia; Hardy, Harmer, Harris, of
New Jersey; Haseltine, Hatch, Hazelton, Heilman, Herndon, Hewitt,
of New York; Hill, Hiscock, Hoblitzell, Hoge, Hollman, Horr, Houk,
House, Hubbell, Hubbs, Hutchins, Jones, of Texas; Jones, of
Arkansas; Jorgenson, Kenna, King, Klotz, Knott, Ladd, Leedom,
Lewis, Marsh, Martin, Matson, McClure, McCook, McKenzie,
McKinley, McLane, McMillan, Miller, Mills, of Texas; Money, Morey,
Moulton, Murch, Mutchler, O’Neill, Pacheco, Page, Paul, Payson,
Pealse, Phelps, Phister, Pound, Randall, Reagan, Rice of Missouri,
Richardson, Robertson, Robinson, Rosecrans, Scranton,
Shallenberger, Sherwin, Simonton, Singleton, of Mississippi, Smith
of Pennsylvania, Smith of Illinois, Smith of New York, Sparks,
Spaulding, Spear, Springer, Stockslager, Strait, Talbott, Thomas,
Thompson of Kentucky, Tillman, Townsend of Ohio, Townsend of
Illinois, Tucker, Turner of Georgia, Turner of Kentucky, Updegraff,
of Ohio, Upson, Valentine, Vance, Van Horn, Warner, Washburne,
Webber, Welborn, Whitthorne, Williams of Alabama, Willis, Willetts,
Wilson, Wise of Pennsylvania, Wise of Virginia, and W. A. Wood of
New York—167.
The nays were Messrs. Anderson, Barr, Bragg, Briggs, Brown,
Buck, Camp, Candler, Carpenter, Chase, Crapo, Cullen, Dawes,
Deering, Dingley, Dunnell, Dwight, Farwell of Iowa, Grant, Hall,
Hammond, of New York, Hardenburgh, Harris, of Massachusetts,
Haskell, Hawk, Henderson, Hepburn, Hooker, Humphrey, Jacobs,
Jones of New Jersey, Joyce, Kasson, Ketchum, Lord, McCoid, Morse,
Norcross, Orth, Parker, Ramsey, Rice of Ohio, Rice of Massachusetts,
Rich, Richardson of New York, Ritchie, Robinson of Massachusetts,
Russel, Ryan, Shultz, Skinner, Scooner, Stone, Taylor, Thompson of
Iowa, Tyler, Updegraff of Iowa, Urner, Wadsworth, Wait, Walker,
Ward, Watson, White and Williams of Wisconsin—65.
In the House the debate was participated in by Messrs.
Richardson, of South Carolina; Wise and Brumm, of Pennsylvania;
Joyce, of Vermont; Dunnell, of Minnesota; Orth, of Indiana;
Sherwin, of Illinois; Hazelton, of Wisconsin; Pacheco, of California,
and Townsend, of Illinois, and others. An amendment offered by Mr.
Butterworth, of Ohio, reducing the period of suspension to fifteen
years, was rejected. Messrs. Robinson, of Massachusetts; Curtin, of
Pennsylvania, and Cannon, of Illinois, spoke upon the bill, the two
latter supporting it. The speech of Ex-Governor Curtin was strong
and attracted much attention. Mr. Page closed the debate in favor of
the measure. An amendment offered by Mr. Kasson, of Iowa,
reducing the time of suspension to ten years, was rejected—yeas 100,
nays 131—and the bill was passed exactly as it came from the Senate
by a vote of 167 to 65. The House then adjourned.
Our Merchant Marine.

An important current issue is the increase of the Navy and the


improvement of the Merchant Marine, and to these questions the
National Administration has latterly given attention. The New York
Herald has given much editorial ability and research to the advocacy
of an immediate change for the better in these respects, and in its
issue of March 10th, 1882, gave the proceedings of an important
meeting of the members of the United States Naval Institute held at
Annapolis the day before, on which occasion a prize essay on the
subject—“Our Merchant Marine; the Cause of its Decline and the
Means to be Taken for its Revival,” was read. The subject was chosen
nearly a year ago, because it was the belief of the members of the
institute that a navy cannot exist without a merchant marine. The
naval institute was organized in 1873 for the advancement of
professional and scientific knowledge in the navy. It has on its roll
500 members, principally naval officers, and its proceedings are
published quarterly. Rear Admiral C. R. P. Rodgers is president;
Captain J. M. Ramsay, vice president; Lieutenant Commander C. M.
Thomas, secretary; Lieutenant Murdock, corresponding secretary,
and Paymaster R. W. Allen, treasurer. There were eleven competitors
for the prize, which is of $100, and a gold medal valued at $50. The
judges were Messrs. Hamilton Fish, A. A. Low and J. D. Jones. They
awarded the prize to Lieutenant J. D. J. Kelley, U. S. N., whose motto
was “Nil Clarius Æquore,” and designated Master C. T. Calkins, U. S.
N., whose motto was “Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin” as next in the
order of merit, and further mentioned the essays of Lieutenant R.
Wainwright, United States Navy, whose motto was “Causa latet, vis
est notissima,” and Lieutenant Commander J. E. Chadwick, United
States Navy, whose motto was “Spes Meliora,” as worthy of
honorable mention, without being entirely agreed as to their
comparative merits.
STRIKING PASSAGES FROM THE PRIZE ESSAY.

From Lieut. Kelley’s prize essay many valuable facts can be


gathered, and such of these as contain information of permanent
value we quote:
“So far as commerce influences this country has a vital interest in
the carrying trade, let theorists befog the cool air as they may. Every
dollar paid for freight imported or exported in American vessels
accrues to American labor and capital, and the enterprise is as much
a productive industry as the raising of wheat, the spinning of fibre or
the smelting of ore. Had the acquired, the ‘full’ trade of 1860 been
maintained without increase $80,000,000 would have been added
last year to the national wealth, and the loss from diverted
shipbuilding would have swelled the sum to a total of $100,000,000.
“Our surplus products must find foreign markets, and to retain
them ships controlled by and employed in exclusively American
interests are essential instrumentalities. Whatever tends to stimulate
competition and to prevent combination benefits the producer, and
as the prices abroad establish values here, the barter we obtain for
the despised one tenth of exports—$665,000,000 in 1880—
determines the profit or loss of the remainder in the home market.
During the last fiscal year 11,500,000 gross tons of grain, oil, cotton,
tobacco, precious metals, &c., were exported from the United States,
and this exportation increases at the rate of 1,500,000 tons annually;
3,800,000 tons of goods are imported, or in all about 15,000,000
tons constitute the existing commerce of this country.
“If only one-half of the business of carrying our enormous wealth
of surplus products could be secured for American ships, our
tonnage would be instantly doubled, and we would have a greater
fleet engaged in a foreign trade, legitimately our own, than Great
Britain has to-day. The United States makes to the ocean carrying
trade its most valuable contribution, no other nation giving to
commerce so many bulky tons of commodities to be transported
those long voyages which in every age have been so eagerly coveted
by marine peoples. Of the 17,000 ships which enter and clear at
American ports every year, 4,600 seek a cargo empty and but 2,000
sail without obtaining it.
“Ships are profitable abroad and can be made profitable here, and
in truth during the last thirty years no other branch of industry has
made such progress as the carrying trade. To establish this there are
four points of comparison—commerce, railways, shipping tonnage
and carrying power of the world, limited to the years between 1850
and 1880:—

Increase Per
1850. 1880. Cent.
Commerce of all
nations $4,280,000,000 $14,405,000,000 240
Railways (miles
open) 44,400 222,600 398
Shipping tonnage 6,905,000 18,720,000 171
Carrying tonnage 8,464,000 34,280,060 304

“In 1850, therefore, for every $5,000,000 of international


commerce there were fifty-four miles of railway and a maritime
carrying power of 9,900 tons; and in 1880 the respective ratios had
risen to seventy-seven miles and 12,000 tons; this has saved one-
fourth freight and brought producer and consumers into such
contact that we no longer hear “of the earth’s products being wasted,
of wheat rotting in La Mancha, wool being used to mend wads and
sheep being burned for fuel in the Argentine Republic.” England has
mainly profited by this enormous development, the shipping of the
United Kingdom earning $300,000,000 yearly, and employing
200,000 seamen, whose industry is therefore equivalent to £300 per
man, as compared with £190 for each of the factory operatives. The
freight earned by all flags for sea-borne merchandise is
$500,000,000, or about 8 per cent. of the value transported. Hence
the toll which all nations pay to England for the carrying trade is
equal to 4 per cent. (nearly) of the exported values of the earth’s
products and manufactures; and pessimists who declare that ship
owners are losing money or making small profits must be wrong, for
the merchant marine is expanding every year.
“The maximum tonnage of this country at any time registered in
the foreign trade was in 1861, and then amounted to 5,539,813 tons;
Great Britain in the same year owning 5,895,369 tons, and all the

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