Transnistria

Daniel Hamilton must be thinking of Kosovo, or of Georgia, or increasingly of Bosnia.

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh have never been governed in practice by post-Soviet Georgia, Moldovo or Azerbaijan. Nor were they ever part of pre-Soviet Georgia, Moldavia or Azerbaijan. Do they want, as Kosovo did and as Chechnya does, to join globalisation, European federalism, and American military-industrial hegemony?

And the militant Islam to which those forces pretend to be opposed but are in fact closely allied. After all, look at 1980s Afghanistan, at 1990s Bosnia, and at today’s Kosovo, Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Look at how a bulwark against Islamic militancy has been taken out in Iraq, with all the predictable consequences. Look at how the global capitalist economic system depends on mass migration, not least to the West from the Islamic world. And look out for Xinjiang.

Do the people of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh want into this? Or do they want out of states moving in that very direction? The latter. They therefore deserve full recognition and every possible support.

Russia is leading that recognition and support. In common with all the Slavs, Russia is the gatekeeper of the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is the True West, not the secularised, consumerised, de-historicised, borderless, culturally debased, morally bankrupt pseudo-West, a wasteland without an Eliot, aimlessly waiting to be incorporated into the Dar al-Islam.

If Moldavia simply went back to Romania (assuming that she would take the poor relation), or otherwise pursued integration with the EU under overall American control, and if Transnistria became a nominally independent state effectively run by Russia, then it is not even be a matter of whether anyone would mind. Would anyone even notice? And why, where borders are concerned, should Stalin have the last word?