As soon as Moscow threatens to protect a minority affiliated to Russia somewhere in Europe, the world must be wary. The previous two times that the Russians successfully applied this doctrine, their country ended up in a world war.
While it still officially maintains that it is not a party to the conflict in neighboring Ukraine, Moscow has repeatedly threatened to intervene in the war-ravaged neighboring country to "protect the interests of ethnic Russians." This argument, the protection of minorities somehow allied to Russia, has been the Russian excuse of choice for going to war for a century. Twice before Russia successfully applied this doctrine, the country ended up in a world war. The world must therefore be wary and convince Moscow in time that a major conflict will not bring them any profit this time.
In 1914, coincidentally exactly a century ago this year, a similar crisis culminated in the First World War. As then, a seemingly insignificant area of Eastern Europe is once again being contested. In 1914 it was Bosnia-Herzegovina, annexed by the great Austria-Hungary but claimed by South Slav nationalists. And as now, Russia stoked the fire, promising to come to the aid of a Slavic minority, a "brother people" in a disputed territory. The rhetoric was time and place bound. In reality, the Russians were concerned with preventing the German-Austrian influence in the strategically important Balkans from becoming too great. Russia was the first to escalate the threatening situation by mobilizing its army.
In 1939, coincidentally this autumn exactly three quarters of a century ago, the Soviet Union plunged into the next world war. On September 17, Josef Stalin invaded Poland from the east, officially to protect Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities as the Polish state already destroyed by Hitler was no longer capable of doing so. A largely nonsensical argument. Stalin himself had already exterminated tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Belarusians as “class enemies” in the 1930s. In reality, Moscow was all about creating a defensive buffer zone in the west between the Soviet heartland and nemesis Nazi Germany.
During the short war that Russia waged against Georgia in 2008, an argument of Russian-speaking minorities in Georgia was also advanced. In the Yugoslavia wars of the 1990s, it was an argument for the Russians to be furious about the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, even though the country was then far from being able to respond militarily. That might be different now.
The turbulent year 2014 marks the return of history. Conflicts that we thought had calmed down in the twenty-first century suddenly seem alive again. Russia's annexation of Crimea in March this year — though unrecognized by anyone — marked the first time since World War II that a European state forcibly expanded its own territory. History is back, and so are the political doctrines of the twentieth century.
Russia will always find a minority somewhere to protect if it wants to go to war. This is an important insight, and the West would now be wise to take this signal seriously. The Second World War had a strategically favorable outcome for the Soviet Union. Given the economic and military superiority of the West, that will certainly not be the case this time. But Europe and the US must make this convincingly clear to the Kremlin.