US President Abraham Lincoln once formulated the moral foundations of his political doctrine as follows: "Nothing is ever really settled, until it's settled right." Since Lincoln’s time, the idea of justice has become dominant in different ideological and political doctrines. In the 20th century, three ideological concepts gained fame and strength — liberal, communist, and national socialist, with fundamentally different ideas of justice.
The liberal doctrine proceeded from the assumption of the freedom of every person as the basic condition of justice. The US philosopher John Rawls, the founder of the liberal-statist concept of domestic and international law, which has been the basis of US policy for the past decades, wrote:
"Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others… Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason, justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others." That said, the principle of freedom should not contradict the principle of social protection of the least protected groups of citizens,"permitting socio-economic inequalities only insofar as they benefit the least advantaged."
Hence, the liberal interpretation of the idea of justice connects it with freedom and morality, in contrast to the communist and national socialist ones, denying individual freedom as a basic value and subordinating morality to the "public good", as this public good is seen by communists and national socialists.
Vladimir Lenin’s position on morality is well-known:
"We reject any such morality, taken from an inhuman, non-class concept. We say that this is deception, that this is fraud and the crushing of the conditions of workers and peasants, in the interests of landlords and capitalists. We say that our morality is completely subordinate to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. And what does this class struggle presume? To overthrow the tsar, overthrow the capitalists, destroy the capitalist class."
Regarding the Nazi understanding of morality, the Third Reich promoted a particularist morality supposed to replace the universalist tradition of Christian and Enlightenment ethics. The Nazi morality rested on the solidarity of Aryan Germans — Volksgemeinschaft. The Nazi regime viewed empathy, pity and mercy towards "racial strangers", especially Jews, "social strangers" and other individuals and groups as a threat or burden to Volksgemeinschaft. Instead, Aryans "should put collective needs above the individual greed" and resist class conflicts, materialism and profit for the sake of survival of the German nation.
The ideas of justice in Communism and National Socialism, "separated" from the ideas of freedom and morality, eventually became a screen that covered up the lack of justice in the societies built by the Communists and National Socialists.
The collapse of such societies on a global scale supposedly contributed to the establishment of the liberal understanding of justice all over the world, but the first decades of the 21st century brought a new trend — the emergence on the global arena of ideologies rejecting the idea of justice altogether. In fact, these ideologies are designed to justify the position of the forces that actively introduce injustice into this world and are guided by the "concept of an unjust world", presuming not only recognition of injustice of the world, but also the conviction that this is the right thing, in principle.
A typical example of such an approach to reality, set out in the form of an ideological doctrine, is to be found in the article "Where Did the Chaos Go? Unpacking Stability" by Vladislav Surkov, a former aide to Putin and one of the main ideologists of "Putinism", published on November 20, 2021, that is, three months before the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine (in fact, it is an apology of this aggression). Its content is reduced to the idea that social tension accumulated in Russia under Putin's regime (Surkov calls it "social entropy") must be brought out, exported from Russia: "Social entropy is very toxic. It is not recommended to work with it in our domestic conditions. It needs to be taken somewhere further. Export for disposal on foreign territory. Exporting chaos is not a new thing. Discharge of internal tension...through external expansion. Over centuries, the Russian state with its harsh and immobile political interior has been preserved solely thanks to the unrelenting drive out of its borders. It has long since unlearned, and most likely, it never knew how to survive in other ways. For Russia, permanent expansion is not just an idea but the real existence of our historical being. Imperial technologies are effective even today, when empires are renamed superpowers. The Crimean consensus is a vivid example of unity in society at the expense of chaos in a neighbouring country.
Surkov’s concept may be described in simple terms as follows: "If there are troubles in this world (and they always exist), then it is better that these troubles happen not to me, but to my neighbour. And I will not just hope for this but will do everything possible for them to happen to my neighbour, since I believe that this will spare me from such troubles." In other words, "the more injustice is inflicted on my neighbour, the less injustice is left for me."
The policy of Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban is based on a similar approach, assuring his voters that the war in Ukraine should not concern Hungary, and that any aid to Ukraine only drags Hungary into a foreign war that will not affect Hungary if it stays aside. Here, the "concept of an unjust world" smoothly turns the "concept of a hostile world" — because if everyone seeks to "shift injustice" onto his neighbour, his neighbour, according to this logic, will do the same. Nor accidentally Orban himself says that, in his opinion, Hungary is surrounded by enemies from all sides, to whom he primarily refers the European Union (of which Hungary is a member and from which it receives financial support) and Ukraine.
That is, forces that openly depart from the principle of justice, on which the world order was built after World War II, increasingly go into the forefront. Donald Trump's policy is also moving in this direction, which actually undermines the unity of the Western world, including support for right-wing political forces in Europe that stand on the positions of "national egoism", contrary to the idea of supranational solidarity and universal human values.
Ultimately, seeing reality through the prism of the "concept of an unjust world" and the "concept of a hostile world" leads to a split in the universal human civilization and emergence of more conflicts, interstate and intrastate alike — since it is impossible to effectively interact and unite, pursuing selfish interests.
This trend was noted in a recent speech by Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos:
"Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints. … It seems that every day we're reminded that … the rules based order is fading … The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP — the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. But let's be clear eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. We have a recognition of what's happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. … We know the old order is not coming back. … we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation."
https://razumkov.org.ua/statti/kontseptsiia-nespravedlyvogo-svitu
