3.7. The Pipes Fall Silent

Нack: 27 September 2022, Baltic Sea, Exclusive Economic Zone of Denmark

On the night of 26–27 September 2022, seismic stations in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany register underwater tremors of an unusual character. At 00:03 Central European Time, Danish seismologist Björn Lund records the first impulse with a magnitude of 2.3. Seventeen hours later, when data analysis is complete, no doubt remains: this is not an earthquake. This is explosions.
The operator of the Nord Stream AG gas pipeline confirms: pressure in both strings of Nord Stream and in one string of Nord Stream 2 is dropping catastrophically. Huge bubbles of gas rise to the surface of the Baltic Sea. The diameter of one of them reaches a kilometre. The sea literally boils, ejecting into the atmosphere the fuel that was meant to heat Europe.
In the following days, experts, journalists, and military analysts attempt to understand what happened. Four of the five pipeline strings are put out of action. The damage is located at depths of 70–80 metres. The nature of the destruction indicates the use of powerful explosive devices — according to preliminary estimates, from 200 to 500 kilogrammes of TNT equivalent per explosion.
Who did it? The answer to this question hangs in the air along with the methane rising from the Baltic depths. Russian officials accuse the United States and the United Kingdom. American and British politicians point to Russia. European leaders speak of a "deliberate act of sabotage" but avoid direct accusations. Ukraine hints at its involvement but neither confirms nor denies.
Investigations are conducted by Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. Sweden and Denmark soon close their investigations without naming those responsible. Germany continues its work, but the results are classified. Western journalists publish investigations pointing variously to Ukrainian activists, to Russian intelligence services, or to a "pro-Ukrainian group" acting independently of official Kyiv.
A year passes. Two years pass. Those responsible are not named. Accountability is not established. International tribunals are not created. Compensation is not paid. The explosions on the Baltic seabed enter the category of events that occurred but remain without authorship, without a subject, without legal qualification.
The most expensive infrastructure project in Europe has been destroyed. And no one is held accountable.
Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 were not ordinary commercial projects. They were pipes intended to embody in steel and concrete an idea that dominated European thought for two centuries: the idea of progress through economic interdependence.
According to this idea, which goes back to Kant and Constant, through Smith and Cobden, peoples bound by trade will not wage war against each other, because war would destroy the sources of their welfare. Commerce, as Montesquieu wrote, "cures destructive prejudices, and it is an almost universal rule that wherever manners are gentle, there is commerce" (Montesquieu, 1989: 266).
This idea survived two world wars, the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s and 2000s, it acquired a second wind in the concept of globalisation. The world becomes flat, borders disappear, capital and goods flow freely, and this freedom of flow makes war impossible, archaic, unthinkable. The European Union, which arose from the union of coal and steel — those very resources that had for centuries been causes of war — seemed a living proof of this truth.
Nord Stream was the materialisation of this logic in the most literal sense. Pipes laid along the Baltic seabed connected Russia and Germany directly, bypassing transit countries. The gas flowing through these pipes was meant to create such a degree of interdependence that conflict would become economic suicide for both sides. Europe would receive cheap energy, Russia would receive stable foreign currency earnings. Everyone had an interest in peace.
The explosions of 27 September 2022 destroyed not only the pipes. They destroyed this conception of reality. War came to where, according to the logic of progress, it could not be. Infrastructure built for peace became the object of a military strike. Economic interdependence did not prevent conflict — it became its target.
Alexander Dugin, commenting on the explosions, called them "the death of globalism as an ideology." This is perhaps an exaggeration, but it captures the essence: the event exposed the falsity of the assumption on which the entire post-war architecture of Europe was built. The will to power, the will to dominate, the will to destroy the opponent proved stronger than economic rationality.

The Collapse of the Teleology of Progress

The philosophy of history of the nineteenth century, from Comte to Spencer, from Hegel to Marx, was permeated by a teleology of progress. History was understood as a directed movement from lower to higher, from simple to complex, from barbarism to civilisation, from conflict to harmony.
Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, saw in history a successive succession of three stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive. At the final, positive stage, humanity outgrows religious and philosophical illusions and enters an era of scientific management of society. Wars, conflicts, violence remain in the past as survivals of lower stages (Comte, 2003).
Herbert Spencer, applying Darwinian evolutionary theory to society, described history as a movement from the "military type of society" to the "industrial type." In military society, coercion, hierarchy, and violence dominate. In industrial society — voluntary cooperation, contract, exchange. History, for Spencer, is an irreversible transition from the former to the latter (Spencer, 1997).
Karl Marx, for all his revolutionary character, also thought within the framework of a teleology of progress. History is a successive succession of socio-economic formations, leading to communism — the realm of freedom, where classes, exploitation, and ultimately the state itself as an apparatus of violence disappear. Capitalism, for all its contradictions, creates the material preconditions for this future, developing the productive forces and uniting the world into a single economic space (Marx, 1955).
The explosions on Nord Stream strike at the very core of this teleology. It turns out that economic interdependence does not abolish conflict but merely changes its forms. Moreover, it creates new objects for conflict, new vulnerabilities, new targets. Pipes connect — and pipes can be exploded. Markets unite — and markets can be destabilised. Energy flows — and the flow can be cut off.
Francis Fukuyama, in his famous article "The End of History?" (1989) and the subsequent book, proclaimed that with the fall of communism, liberal democracy had achieved the final form of human government. History as a struggle of ideologies is finished; what remains is merely the gradual spread of liberal institutions and market economies throughout the world (Fukuyama, 1992).
The explosions in the Baltic show that the "end of history" was an illusion. History has returned in its most archaic form — as a struggle for power, as a war of infrastructure destruction, as violence without rules and without borders. And it has returned not on the periphery but in the very centre of Europe, in the waters of the Baltic Sea, which in the twentieth century was already the arena of two world wars and the Cold War.
Raymond Aron, criticising theories of industrial society, warned as early as the 1960s: "Industrial civilisation does not abolish politics, it merely gives it new forms." Conflict is irremovable; it merely shifts from one sphere to another (Aron, 2000). The explosions on Nord Stream confirm this diagnosis with frightening clarity.

War Without an Author: The Crisis of Legal Subjectivity

Yet the deepest philosophical shift exposed by the Baltic explosions lies not in the domain of the philosophy of history but in the domain of the ontology of the subject.
Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, defined sovereignty through the capacity to make the decision on war and peace. The sovereign is he who can say "friend" and "enemy," who can draw the boundary separating one's own from the foreign, and mobilise one's own to fight the foreign. War, for Schmitt, is an act that presupposes a subject — he who wages war, who declares war, who bears responsibility for war (Schmitt, 2007).
Classical international law, formed after the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, was built on the principle of state sovereignty. States are the only legitimate subjects of international relations. They declare war, conclude peace, bear responsibility for the actions of their citizens. Even in the most brutal conflicts of the twentieth century, this principle was preserved: there were sides, there were commanders, there were those responsible.
The explosions on Nord Stream call this principle into question. Who exploded the pipes? There is no answer to this question. There are many possible respondents — Russia, the United States, Ukraine, activist groups, private military companies, intelligence services of undetermined affiliation. But none of them has assumed responsibility. None has acknowledged authorship.
We find ourselves in a situation that can be called war without a subject. War is waged, objects are destroyed, damage is inflicted, but authorship remains undetermined. This is not merely an absence of acknowledgement (the guilty party may be hiding), but an ontological uncertainty: it is possible that the single author sought by investigators does not exist at all.
Hannah Arendt, in On Violence, distinguished between power, strength, and violence. Power, for Arendt, belongs to a group and exists only as long as the group maintains its unity. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental and can be exercised by a single person (Arendt, 1970). The Baltic explosions demonstrate a new configuration: violence is exercised, but its author is not identifiable as a subject. This is violence without a face, without a name, without responsibility.
Carl Schmitt, in The Nomos of the Earth, wrote that war in classical international law presupposed a justus hostis — a just enemy, that is, an enemy recognised as such, with whom war can be waged according to rules. The enemy was respected precisely as an enemy, as an equal in status, as a subject of law (Schmitt, 2003). The Baltic explosions belong to a different logic: here the enemy is not recognised, not named, not respected. He is simply destroyed — but in such a way that it cannot be proved who did it.
Maurice Blanchot, in "Letter to Jacques Derrida," introduced the concept of the "effacement of the name" (effacement du nom). The name is erased, the author disappears, the text remains (Blanchot, 1998). The Baltic explosions are such a text without an author. The event occurred, the destruction is documented, the consequences are tangible. But there is no name. The signature is absent. Responsibility is dissolved.

From "Deep War" to "Hybrid Peace"

The phenomenon manifested in the Baltic Sea also has another dimension, which can be designated by a term that entered circulation in the 2010s: "hybrid war." But this term requires philosophical refinement.
"Hybrid war" is usually understood as a mixture of military and non-military means, regular and irregular formations, overt and covert operations. However, the deeper meaning of this phenomenon lies in the erosion of the boundary between war and peace, between front and rear, between combatants and civilians.
In classical war (taking the Second World War as a model), there were clear front lines, there were territories occupied by the enemy, there were targets of military significance and targets not of such significance. Infrastructure — bridges, roads, factories — was a military objective, but its destruction was subject to certain rules and was part of an overall strategy.
The Nord Stream explosions demonstrate a different logic. The pipes were not a military objective in the traditional sense. They did not belong to any of the belligerent parties (the war between Russia and Ukraine was being fought on land, hundreds of kilometres from the Baltic). They were located in the exclusive economic zones of neutral countries (Denmark and Sweden). They could not be used for military purposes. Their destruction was an act of pure, unjustified (except by symbolic significance) destruction.
This can be called infrastructure war — a war in which the target is not the enemy's army, not its military potential, but the very fabric of peaceful life, the very conditions of existence of civil society. By destroying the pipes, someone (or something) was sending a signal: there are no more safe places. There is nothing that cannot be blown up. There are no borders that will protect.
Michel Foucault, in his lectures on biopolitics, described the transition from the power of the sovereign (the right to kill) to power over life (to govern, optimise, prolong). Infrastructure is the materialisation of biopolitics: water and gas supply networks, electrical and communication lines — these are what make life possible in the modern city. By destroying infrastructure, contemporary war attacks the very possibility of life (Foucault, 2008).
Peter Sloterdijk, in Spheres, introduced the concept of "immunity" as the capacity of a system to protect itself from intrusions. The immunity of modern society is largely ensured by its infrastructural complexity: networks are duplicated, systems are backed up, vulnerabilities are minimised. But the same complexity creates new vulnerabilities: the more complex the system, the more points it contains, an impact on which can cause catastrophic consequences (Sloterdijk, 1998).
The Baltic explosions are an attack on the immune system of Europe. They show that complexity does not protect but makes vulnerable. That the networks that bind us can be torn apart. That the infrastructure that sustains life can become an object of death.

Deconstruction of Interdependence: From Economics to Archaics

The Nord Stream explosions call into question the fundamental assumption of modern economic thought: the assumption that economic interests are the primary determinants of human behaviour.
Classical political economy, from Adam Smith to David Ricardo, proceeded from the idea that man is a being who seeks gain and avoids loss. Economic interest was understood as a universal motive explaining the behaviour of individuals and states. If two states can profit from trade, they will trade rather than fight, because war destroys the sources of profit.
This model explained the functioning of markets perfectly but worked poorly in situations where existential rather than economic interests collided. The Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War — all were difficult to rationalise economically. But they could be explained by strategic, ideological, geopolitical motives.
The Nord Stream explosions cannot be rationalised in any way. They brought profit to no one. Russia lost a sales market and an important source of income. Europe lost a source of cheap gas and suffered colossal losses. The United States may have gained from supplying its LNG to Europe, but the price of this gas was much higher than Russian gas, and this is more a side effect than a goal.
Economic logic is powerless here. The explanation, if it is possible at all, lies in a different plane — in the plane of what Friedrich Nietzsche called the "will to power." Not profit, not utility, not rational calculation, but the pure striving for domination, for the destruction of the opponent, for the assertion of one's superiority.
Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, wrote: "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker, oppression, harshness, forcing one's own forms upon something, annexation, and at the very least, exploitation" (Nietzsche, 1966: 342). Economic interest, for Nietzsche, is merely one form of this will, and a late, rationalised, weakened form at that. In crisis situations, the will to power breaks through the economic masks and manifests itself in its pure form.
The Baltic explosions are such a breakthrough. They show that beneath the thin crust of economic rationality, an archaic element continues to seethe. That calculations of profit are powerless in the face of hatred, fear, the desire to destroy. That "progress," understood as the displacement of the archaic by the economic, is an illusion.
Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, showed that the market economy is not the natural state of humanity but a historical construct that arose under specific conditions and requires constant maintenance. When these conditions are destroyed, society reverts to more archaic forms of organisation (Polanyi, 1944). The Nord Stream explosions are a symptom of such a reversion. The archaic has returned in the very centre of Europe, in that very place that was considered a bastion of economic rationality and post-historical calm.

Silence and Responsibility

One year after the explosions, two years after, three years after — the truth has still not been established. Investigations are closed. Documents are classified. Those responsible are not named.
This silence requires separate philosophical reflection. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote that lies and concealment of truth are not merely a violation of norms but a way of destroying reality itself. When facts can be denied, when truth is replaced by an official version, when an event disappears into a fog of contradictory narratives, people lose their capacity to orient themselves in the world. Reality becomes unstable, elusive, unreliable (Arendt, 1973).
The Nord Stream explosions exist as an event — they were recorded by seismographs, they were seen by satellites, their consequences were felt by millions of people. But they do not exist as a narrative. They have no author, no guilty party, no story that can be told. They are, but they are not.
Paul Ricœur, in his works on memory and history, distinguished three levels: the documentary (establishment of facts), the explanatory (understanding of causes), and the narrative (inclusion in a coherent story). Without narrative, for Ricœur, there is no history in the full sense; there is only a chaos of unrelated facts (Ricœur, 2004).
The Baltic explosions resist narrativisation. They cannot be included in a coherent story because the actors are unknown. This is an event without a subject, without an intrigue, without a moral. It occurs but does not become history.
Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, introduced the concept of the hema — a spectre that is present but is not. A spectre can neither be confirmed nor refuted, neither exorcised nor conjured. It hangs between being and non-being, between past and future, between reality and illusion (Derrida, 1994). The Nord Stream explosions are such a spectre. They are, but they are not. They influence reality but have no author. They demand a response, but a response is impossible.
Jürgen Habermas, in his theory of communicative action, linked the legitimacy of the social order to the possibility of rational discussion. If an event cannot be discussed, if facts cannot be established, if the guilty cannot be named, then the very foundation of the social contract is undermined (Habermas, 1984). The Baltic explosions undermine this contract. They show that there is a zone where communication is powerless, where rationality retreats, where only force and silence remain.

From Peace as Contract to Peace as Wager

The Nord Stream explosions draw a line under an entire epoch of European history — an epoch in which peace was thought of as the result of a contract, as a product of negotiation, as a consequence of a balance of interests.
For thousands of years, philosophical thought, from Plato to Kant, from Grotius to Rawls, constructed theories of just peace. Peace was understood as a state to be achieved, as a goal to be striven for, as an ideal to be realised. War was an exception, a deviation, a pathology.
The Baltic explosions demonstrate a different picture. War is not an exception but a background. Peace is not a goal but a wager. Infrastructure is not a good but a target. Interdependence is not a guarantee but a vulnerability.
Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, insisted that the distinction between friend and enemy is constitutive of the political. Politics is not reducible to economics, to morality, to law. Politics is the sphere where the question of life and death is decided, of one's own and the foreign, of what is worth dying for and what is worth destroying (Schmitt, 2007). The Nord Stream explosions return us to this harsh truth. Beneath economic calculations, beneath legal norms, beneath diplomatic protocols, the archaic element of the political continues to pulsate.
Lev Gumilev, in his theory of passionarity, described ethnogenesis as a process driven by excess energy that finds no rational explanation. Passionaries are people driven not by the instinct of self-preservation, not by calculation of profit, but by an internal impulse that pushes them to heroic deeds and crimes (Gumilev, 1990). The Baltic explosions are a passionary act in Gumilev's sense. They are irrational, they bring no profit, they destroy what was built over decades. But they happen.
And the question this situation poses to us is this: how to think politics after the illusion of economic determinism has collapsed? How to build peace knowing that any contract can be blown up? How to live in conditions where the archaic and the modern, economics and war, law and violence are inextricably intertwined?
The bubbles of methane rising from the Baltic depths on the night of 27 September 2022 — an image that will remain in the history of philosophy as a reminder that nothing is guaranteed. Neither pipes, nor contracts, nor decades of peace. The archaic is always near, always ready to break through the thin crust of civilisation. And the task of thought is not definitively to overcome this archaic (that is impossible), but to hold the tension between it and order, allowing neither pole to definitively prevail.
The pipes lie silent on the Baltic seabed. But their silence is not the end of history; it is its continuation in a different mode. A mode in which the stakes are higher, the guarantees fewer, and the responsibility for holding the conflict within productive limits lies on all who are still capable of thinking and acting.