When the Cold War ended in Soviet collapse, the Western commentariat commenced an orgy of self-regarding futurism. The unacknowledged purpose of these paroxysms was to “fit” Russia into a well-ordered future so that the exertions of the Cold War could be said to have been truly worth the effort. Americans tended to see Russia transiting from despotism and imperialism into democracy and international cooperation as modulated through institutions largely fashioned by itself and its allies: NATO, the OSCE, the WTO, the IMF and, for some, the United Nations, which would at last be able to function as the agency of collective security its founders intended. West Europeans, soon joined by East and Central European elites, tended to see a new Russia rising under the aegis of a postmodern Europe. Even if Russia did not join this Europe soon, the European Union’s postmodern, soft-power-only politics would establish the basic templates of exchange in Eurasian space from which Russia would benefit and learn.
In short, Americans and Europeans projected their own overlapping if still distinct understandings and hopes onto Russia, persuading themselves that there was something universal and everything benign about so doing. Even when they did things that irritated the Russians, like expanding NATO into the territory of the former Soviet Union, most persuaded themselves that the Russians would in time come to understand the good reasons for such policies. It was as though Russia were a train on a track that could only go forward or backward. It seems rarely to have occurred to Western politicians and intellectuals that the losers of the Cold War would be doing some projecting of their own, based on their own history and experience, their own frustrations and hopes. When Russia eventually confounded rather than conformed to Western expectations, it began to dawn on some that Russia was not in transit to any Western-designated destination, but was instead headed somewhere else in a vehicle of its own choosing.
It took a long time for that conclusion to break through the walls of Western wishful thinking. Russia’s imitation democracy fooled many, and too much was at stake to contemplate an unhappy ending to what was otherwise an heroic tale. Today, however, nearly 17 years after the end of the Soviet Union, there is no avoiding the truth: Not only is Cold War Europe history, so is post-Cold War Europe. If that was not clear before the Russo-Georgian War, it is now. Well before that affair, the European Council on Foreign Relations had concluded that Russia is “setting itself up as an ideological alternative to the EU, with a different approach to sovereignty, power and world order.” Indeed, Vladimir Putin has turned Russia from a noun into a verb in international politics. “Russia, previously a Pluto in the Western solar system” during the first post-Cold War decade, “has spun out of its orbit . . . powered by a determination to found its own system”, observes Dmitri Trenin.11.
Trenin, Getting Russia Right (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007).
What does this Russian system look like, and is it sustainable? What is its intellectual basis—this thing called “sovereign democracy?” Above all, what does it mean for the triangular relationship among the United States, the European Union and Russia?
Putin’s Project
Putin inherited from Boris Yeltsin a system of so-called directed democracy, in which elites deployed political parties, elections and diverse media for the sole purpose of helping those in power to stay in power. Elections were held regularly not to provide an opportunity to transfer power, but to legitimize it. The key to the system was the creation of a parallel political reality. The goal was not just to establish a monopoly of power, but also to monopolize the competition for power—a goal that left no time or resources for actually governing the country. As Stephen Holmes, a specialist on Russian law, put it, in Yeltsin’s Russia, “Those at the top neither exploit nor oppress those at the bottom. They do not even govern them; they simply ignore them.”
The key element in the model of directed democracy was that the sources of regime legitimacy lay in the West. The project of faking democracy assumes that the faker accepts the superiority of the model he fakes. Being lectured by the West, and having to put up with a small army of Western consultants, were the prices the Russian elite paid for using the resources of the West to preserve its power. The regime’s strategy was to keep up the illusion of political representation and an open market while at the same time preventing the interests of the transition’s losers from being genuinely represented.
Putin, as Yeltsin’s choice of successor, might have continued this same system had it not been for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the jump in the oil prices. The events of 2004–05 in Kiev embodied the ultimate threat: remote-controlled popular revolt. Directed democracy was simply too dangerous, for with the Western rhetoric and consultants came NGOs that were interested in genuine broad participation and accountability, thus threatening the elite’s monopoly on power. Sovereign democracy, at first in practice and only later in theory, is Moscow’s response to this danger.
Current Western discourse on Russia speaks of the difference between Putin’s authoritarianism and the imperfect democracy of Yeltsin’s Russia as a contrast between worsening tyranny and growing freedom. In reality, Yeltsin’s liberalism and Putin’s sovereigntism represent two distinctive but related forms of non-representative political systems. They differ on the perceived role of the state in public life, the proper and necessary level of pluralism, and the sources of political legitimacy. The transition from Yeltsin to Putin was not a transition from frail democracy to authoritarianism, but from a failed state feigning democracy in return for Western largesse to an authoritarian oil-rich state that does not need it.
Putin’s consolidation of state power took the form of the nationalization of the elite and the marginalization of what Vladislav Surkov calls the “offshore aristocracy”—Berezovsky, Gusinsky and Russia’s other nomadic oligarchs. The Kremlin essentially nationalized the energy sector, placed the media under total control, and in effect criminalized Western-funded NGOs. The offshore oligarchs were replaced by state-serving oligarchs. The other components of Putin’s regime change recipe were Kremlin-sponsored party-building, the demonstrative criminal persecution of opponents (Mikhail Khodorkovsky being a key case in point), and the creation of structures that can support the regime in times of crisis (such as the Nashi [“Ours”] movement). Newly adopted anti-extremism legislation opens the door, as well, for the criminalization of any oppositional activity. Russia scholar Ken Jowitt is right to argue of Putin’s project that,
historically speaking, Putin and his cohort are attempting to create a ‘castle’ of an old type consisting of state mercantilism, a state nation, and state electoralism. This Russian neo-Mercantilist castle will ideally provide a barricaded site within which a Russian economy can be nurtured and shielded from what is seen as an intrusive and alien force of Americanization disguised as Globalization; behind which a new Russian nation can avoid premature exposure to powerful and ‘alien’ Western cultural identities, and allow for selective adaptation to the West from the vantage point of a secure non-Tsarist, non-Soviet, Russian cultural identity.
So it is no accident that, unlike his Central Asian fellow-presidents, Putin decided to relinquish the trappings of formal power after the end of his second term. It is no accident that Russian society enjoys consumer rights but not political rights, elections but not popular control of power, state sovereignty but not individual autonomy. Outwardly, Russia looks increasingly Western at least in two respects: There are elections and term limits, and there is a rhetoric of market economics. But if one rotates Russian reality to glimpse its third dimension, the Western mirage disappears. For while Putin’s sovereign democracy model has secured political stability of a sort, it has failed to create a stable political system along Western lines.
Political instability manifests itself in several ways. Putin today can speak and act for Russia to an extent that is rare in the modern world. Nonetheless, his cohabitation arrangement with Medvedev can hardly survive the clash of their particular personalities. The perfect coordination of the Putin-Medvedev tandem demonstrated lately should not mislead us. As Trenin puts it: “Despite having the double-headed eagle for their state emblem, Russians have traditionally dreaded duality of power as harbinger of intense struggle at the top, or even civil war.”22.
Trenin, “The Meaning of Medvedev”, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2008.
In Putin’s own words, “centralized power is in Russia’s DNA.”
Even more destabilizing than the personalistic nature of power in Russian political culture is the Putin legacy itself, at the heart of which is the Kremlin’s failure to build an effective state. Alas, an authoritarian state can be nearly as difficult to establish as a democracy, and Putin’s evident difficulties have helped make Russia a tangle of contradictions. Russia is in some senses a rising global power, but in others a weak state with corrupt and inefficient institutions. It is freer but less reliable than was the Soviet Union. The regime seems rock solid, yet extremely vulnerable at the same time. Russia’s economic growth looks both impressive and unsustainable, and the more capitalist and Westernized Russia becomes, the more anti-Western become its policies.
Sovereign Democracy, in Theory
Few Western observers have taken the concept of “sovereign democracy”, synthesized in the Kremlin’s ideological laboratory, very seriously. They have ascribed it to the occasional need of Russian leaders to make grand speeches, and they have interpreted actual Russian behavior—whether using energy supplies as an instrument of political intimidation, fulminating over U.S. anti-missile plans for Poland and the Czech Republic, or slapping down Georgian upstarts—as motivated by tactical considerations or mere bad habit. This is a mistake. It is true that the concept of sovereign democracy followed as justification for Russia’s new system, which was built out of necessity amid the play of interests and fears after 1991, but this does not mean that the leadership does not take seriously the concept as it exists today.
The concept of sovereign democracy succeeds in confronting the Kremlin’s two ideological enemies of choice at a single blow: the liberal democracy of the West and the populist democracy admired by the rest. It reconciles, at least in theory, Russia’s urgent need for Western-style modernization and Russia’s will to defend its independence from the West. It accommodates Russia’s need to be a great power, yet it limits the uses of Russian nationalism. How did sovereign democracy arise as a concept, and on what do its authors and advocates base themselves?
Before it was theory, sovereign democracy was unself-conscious praxis—an almost Marxian dynamic, ironically enough. The Kremlin used traditional Russian nationalism to consolidate its control when it needed to, but it has generally been in the business of controlling Russian nationalism, not mobilizing it. In the Kremlin’s view, sovereign democracy is the Russian version of European civic nationalism. Natural resources, the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II and the promise of Russia as a revived great power are the pillars of the project. The new prominence of the Orthodox Church, too, is a central element of Russia’s new post-imperial identity that reaches back before the Soviet great power epoch. As Pierre Hassner has insightfully observed, “one of the most shocking features of Putin’s policies is his attempt to claim continuity with both the Czarist and the Soviet pasts.”33.
Hassner, “Russia’s Transition to Autocracy”, Journal of Democracy (April 2008).
Contrary to the assertions of Putin’s critics, the concept of sovereign democracy does not mark Russia’s break with European tradition. Instead, it embodies Russia’s ideological ambition to be “the other Europe”, an alternative to the European Union. It is telling that the ideologues of sovereign democracy are not interested in the various “Russian uniqueness” or Asianist theories in building their project. In constructing the theoretical justification for sovereign democracy, they have turned to the intellectual legacy of continental Europe: specifically, the French political rationalism of François Guizot and Carl Schmitt’s infamous Nazi “decisionism.” Indeed, Guizot and Schmitt, along with the conservative Russian philosopher Ivan Ilin (1883–1954), have emerged as the intellectual pillars of sovereign democracy. Hence, anti-populism and anti-pluralism are the two distinctive ideological features of the current regime.
Michael Nesterov’s 1922 portrait of Ivan Ilin [credit: ]
Populism would stress the powers of the weak Russian state beyond the breaking point, and pluralism would wreck the ethnically polyglot Russian Federation. Thus, what attracts the Kremlin to Guizot and Schmitt is their fundamental mistrust of the two reigning concepts of the present democratic age: the idea of representation as the expression of the pluralist nature of the modern society, and the idea of popular sovereignty that defines democracy as the rule of the popular will. Following Schmitt, the theorists of sovereign democracy prefer to define democracy as “identity of the governors and the governed.”4 Following Guizot, the sovereign for them is not the people or the voters, but the reason embodied in the consensus of the responsible national elites. In the Kremlin-brewed mixture of Guizot’s anti-populism and Schmitt’s anti-liberalism, elections serve not as an instrument for enabling conflicting interests to engage and reconcile; they exist to show the people who has power.
Though most Western observers underestimate the conceptual depth of sovereign democracy, that does not mean it is a rock-solid solution to the regime’s problems. The sovereign democracy system creates relative stability (certainly compared to the Yeltsin years), but it lacks the dynamism Russia needs to genuinely transform itself into an effective polity. As things stand now, any change in the power elite takes the form of a crisis. Any loss of power means a loss of property. Any attempt to modernize the society from above clashes with the vested interests of Russia’s “sovereign bureaucracy”, the real beneficiary of Putin’s rule.55.
The term was coined by the Russian-American sociologist Georgi Derluguian.
And so the system’s stability is in reality a straitjacket.
Even as the regime’s options are limited, the sources of its legitimacy are eroding. Putin’s support has rested largely on three factors: comparisons with the chaotic Yeltsin years, economic growth that benefits the majority and Russia’s restoration as a great power. The first two of these are wasting assets. Most Russians have already forgotten the Yeltsin years, and economic growth, which has not yet helped the majority thanks to the structural corruption in the system, depends largely on the price of oil, which Moscow cannot control. This means that foreign policy is increasingly becoming the key factor in preserving the legitimacy of the regime. Thus, Moscow’s invasion of Georgia in August—which came in response to Mikheil Saakashvili’s miscalculation, destroyed portions of the country’s infrastructure, and placed Russian troops in occupation of parts of its territory—should not be interpreted as a one-off act of pique. It is rather a manifestation of a deeper pattern in Russian politics whose foreign-policy source goes to the heart of the regime’s survival strategy. The further militarization of the Russian state and society in support of a revanchist foreign policy is thus the most likely scenario for the evolution of Putin-Medvedev’s Russia.
That strategy faces an historical problem, however. Putin’s Russian system is odd but not entirely sui generis. Leading Russian economists have argued that in the past 150 years, Russia has been confronted several times with a similar scenario: reforms that produce impressive but narrow economic growth, the resulting wars between elites over the redistribution of power and spoils, and finally the temptation to use newly obtained economic power to advance geopolitical ambitions. The unintended result in the past has been the escalation of social tensions, the end of reforms and ultimately social and political catastrophe. Sergei Witte’s reforms were followed by the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution; Peter Stolypin’s reforms were followed by World War I and the Bolshevik revolution; and the abundance of oil money in the 1970s and 1980s ended with the invasion of Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union.66.
See Igor Yurgens, ed., Russia’s Future under Medvedev (Centre for Global Studies, 2008).
The question today is, can the Putin-Medvedev biumverate avoid showing this same film yet again? The future not just of Russia, but of Europe, depends on the answer.
Sovereign Democracy’s Foreign Policy
Just as sovereign democracy has deeper roots than most Westerners appreciate, so too is Russia’s new assertive foreign policy more than an opportunistic cobbling together of irritating and occasionally dramatic tactics. The Kremlin’s new foreign policy rests on two key assumptions and one strategic calculation.
The first assumption is that U.S. global hegemony is unsustainable, and the decline of American power irreversible. Russians tend to view the current crisis of American global power as analogous to the crisis of the Soviet power in the 1980s—in other words, they project their own experience onto that of the United States. The Russian media present the U.S. debacle in Iraq as “America’s Afghanistan.” The post-invasion bickering of the Transatlantic alliance heralds, in the Russian view, the dismantling of the informal U.S. empire in Europe, paralleling the Russian loss of its Warsaw Pact satellites. And the U.S. financial crisis demonstrates the fundamental weakness of the American economy, analogous to Russia’s post-imperial financial collapse. All this is useful in perpetuating the view that Russia did not lose the Cold War; rather, its end marked major global systemic changes that are now buffeting the Americans, as well, a mere decade and a half later.
The second assumption is that the European Union is a threat to Russian interests by dint of its very existence as a postmodern empire. In Russia’s view, however, the European Union is a temporary phenomenon. Russia’s European strategy is based on the expectation that sovereign nation-states will determine Europe’s future, and that the European Union’s utopian experiment is rapidly failing. Russian analysts understand that American power has enabled the European Union’s experiment both in economic and security terms, so if American power wanes, the European Union will likely be unable to defend its conception of the postmodern, post-state order. Even under today’s benign circumstances, EU leaders do not appear to Russia to know how to advance their own “ideals-above-interests” project, as illustrated by the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty.
This understanding in turn explains Moscow’s stress on bilateral relations with the major European member states and its reluctance to deal with the European Union. In the early years of his presidency, Putin tended to view the European Union as a benevolent competitor and a strategic ally in Moscow’s desire for a multipolar world. But the Orange Revolution in Ukraine—in effect Russia’s 9/11—jolted Putin and his entourage into recognizing that the European Union is the only great power with unsettled borders, and that the urge to expand its principles and institutions are hard-wired into the European project.
Moscow’s key strategic calculation is, as Sergei Karaganov puts it, that “the West is losing its monopoly on the globalization processes”, rendering the next decade a window of opportunity for restoring Russia’s regional hegemony and global influence.77.
Karaganov, “A New Epoch of Confrontation”, Russia in Global Affairs (October–December 2007).
If Russia fails to seize this opportunity, it will fall behind China and remain an economy-class great power at best. Russia’s newfound taste for confrontation with the West, as illustrated in Georgia, is thus not an emotional overreaction or theatrical grandstanding but a strategic choice.
A change of personalities in the Kremlin is unlikely to change this strategic consensus. It is false to hope that Russia’s anti-Western sentiments can be solved by more evenly distributed economic growth, the emergence of a larger middle class or the emergence of a new generation. As Sarah Mendelson and Theodore Gerber write,
Although young Russians have embraced lattes, iPods, and other consumer goods enjoyed by the youth in the Western countries, their political views tend to be neither pro-Western, nor pro-democracy. . . . The highly educated males living in Moscow are actually the most anti-American within Russia’s youth.8
The contrasting nature of the political elites in Russia and Europe today is one more reason for concern over the future of the relationship. Unlike the Soviet elites who were bureaucratic, risk-averse and competent when it came to international relations and security policies, the new Russian elite consists of the winners of the zero-sum games of the post-Soviet epoch. They are highly self-confident, immensely wealthy risk-takers. Europeans, particularly those who have imbibed the European Union’s soft-power Kool-Aid, don’t know how to deal with these people. European political elites who have made their careers by practicing compromise, avoiding conflicts and worrying about global warming are now confronted by Russian elites who take pride in their “take no prisoners” attitude. Things could get ugly.
The New Sovereignty Wars
“What came to an end in 1989”, says Robert Cooper in The Breaking of Nations (2003), “was not just the Cold War or even the Second World War. What came to an end in Europe (but perhaps only in Europe) were the political systems of three centuries: the balance of power and the imperial urge.” The European policy elite assumed that the end of the Cold War meant the emergence of a new European order characterized by a highly developed system of mutual interference in each other’s domestic affairs, and by security based on openness and transparency. The postmodern system does not rely on the balance of power, nor does it emphasize sovereignty or the separation of domestic and foreign affairs. It rejects the use of force to settle conflicts and promotes mutual dependency among states. The construction of the common European legal space, based on the priority of human rights as institutionalized in the European Convention on Human Rights, is the embodiment of post-Cold War Europe as Europeanists see it. The essence of the ultimate postmodern order is the eventual, gradual transformation of al traditional nation-states into EU member states or EU-compatible states.
The Russia of the 1990s was not a postmodern state, but it was part of the postmodern European order—or so most Europeans believed. The intrusive inspections and active monitoring called for in the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe remained in force. The OSCE still functioned. Russia was a member in good standing of the Council of Europe, had instituted a formal relationship with NATO, and had entered the G-8. All this enabled the illusion that Russia had accepted the postmodern imperatives of openness and interdependency, even while it still suffered from a certain economic dysfunction and a political identity crisis. Russia’s weakness, too, deepened the illusion that Moscow had submitted ideologically to the post-Cold War European order.
This illusion has now dissolved. The European hope that Russia would be the European Union’s partner in a struggle for a multipolar world based on international law is now revealed for the tactical feint it always was—essentially a device to contest or blunt American hegemony. As soon as Moscow sensed it had a choice in parting with the trappings of postmodernity, it did so, aiming to build up its sovereign statehood according to 19th-century European practices and ideologies rather than 21st-century ones.
At present, Russia’s view of the European order is a mixture of nostalgia for the Concert of Europe and envy of China, a nation that is managing to balance economic openness to the West with the rejection of Western interference in its domestic politics. Like China, Russia believes in power, unilateralism and unrestrained pursuit of the national interest. In the Kremlin’s view, sovereignty is not a right, and its highest expression is not a seat in the United Nations; it is a capacity that implies economic independence, military strength and cultural assertion. For Moscow, EU postmodernism is what vegetarianism is to cannibals: irritating irrelevance.
The divergence of contemporary Russian and European political cultures should come as no surprise. After all, the European Union evolved as a response to the perils of nationalism and the catastrophic rivalries of European nation-states in the first half of the 20th century. Russia’s foreign policy thinking, however, is shaped by the perils of post-national politics and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. European nightmares are rooted in the experience of 1930s; Russia’s nightmares are shaped by the experience of the 1980s and 1990s. EU elites view the lack of democracy as a major source of instability in Eurasia; Russian elites view weak democracies and the Western policy of exporting democracy as a major source of instability in the post-Soviet space.
The clash between these contrasting views of the European order has always been unavoidable, and Europeans now face unhappy choices as a result. Sticking to the integrationist/neo-containment policies of the 1990s centered on the enlargement of NATO and the European Union will risk an escalation of conflict with Russia. In any event, neither U.S. nor EU policy, separately or together, can bring about the pro-Western democratic Russia of their post-Cold War imaginations. Certainly, the West today has far less leverage to catalyze change in Russia from the outside than it did a decade and a half ago. But breaking with the policy rationale of the 1990s and accepting Russia’s rules of the game throw the very existence of the European Union as a global policy player into question. It does so in two ways: by showing the European Union’s soft-power approach to be unavailing, and by dividing the European Union against itself between those who fear Moscow’s armies and those who hunger for its energy. So the West cannot entirely contain Russia, and the European Union, if not the United States, lacks a formula to successfully engage it.
Neo-containment as a policy amounts to a quintessential case of old vocabulary having been overcome by new circumstances. What exactly could the West contain: Russia’s ideology, its anticipated territorial expansion, its economic presence in Europe? There is no point in containing “sovereign democracy.” It is not an exportable ideology; as a foreign policy phenomenon it is merely the confluence of Russian oil wealth with the penchant of Russian companies for corrupting weaker authoritarian regimes who like the money that is today at the heart of Moscow’s soft power.
Containing Russia’s territorial aspirations makes even less sense, because Russia has none to speak of. Moscow is dreaming not about restoring its territorial empire, but about gaining control over the energy infrastructure in the post-Soviet states and neutralizing Western influences there. Hence the nature of its path into and partially back out of Georgia.
When it comes to Russia’s economic presence in Europe, any notion of “containment” contradicts the very logic of the free market on which the West is founded. Anti-Russian protectionism would only retard Europe’s own economic growth. Unlike the Soviet Union, which was determined to destroy capitalism, Putin’s Kremlin is in the business of exploiting, corrupting and enjoying it.
Neo-containment, then, is merely an atavistic reflex devoid of content—or, as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov likes to say, a “mentality.”99.
Lavrov, “Containing Russia: Back to the Future?”, Russia in Global Affairs (October–December 2007). Engagement, however, is little more than a slogan. There’s no denying that Russia and the West share strategic interests. The West needs Russia’s cooperation in dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, fighting international terrorism and managing the rise of Asia. Russia needs the West for its technological and institutional modernization. But a policy of engagement defined solely in terms of interests represents a radical departure from a values-based foreign policy back to 19th-century realpolitik. Is this really a workable option for relations between Russia and the West today? And how will the Kremlin reconcile its economic interest to cooperate with the West with its political interest to confront the West in order to strengthen its control over Russian society?
It is at least theoretically possible that the next U.S. administration could adopt a de facto realist policy toward Russia. That is, after all, what George W. Bush’s policy, particularly in his first term, came down to, despite all the high-flown rhetoric about freedom and democracy. But U.S. realpolitik toward Russia has two limitations that make a “grand bargain” between Russia and the West untenable.
The first is U.S. domestic politics, which all but precludes a policy totally devoid of idealist elements. The second, both more important and more surprising, is that such a U.S. policy would have to include Europe as a primary partner in order to work, and the European Union is incapable of supporting or affirming that kind of approach. The European Union is an ideological power by its nature: At the instant the European Union tries to shift to traditional 19th-century realpolitik, the very idea of a common EU foreign policy becomes unimaginable. A grand bargain with Russia would by definition contradict the ethos and dissolve the glue of the European Union itself. It would re-nationalize the foreign policies of the major EU member states, thus pushing the Union in the opposite direction to the one set out in the Reform Treaty.
The real source of the confrontation between Russia and the European Union is not primarily competing interests or economic policy imbalances; it is their fundamental political incompatibility. Russia’s challenge to the European Union cannot be reduced to energy dependency or Moscow’s ambition to dominate a “near abroad” that happens to be the European Union’s “new neighborhood.” At the heart of the dilemma is not a clash between democracy and authoritarianism. The Second World War demonstrates, after all, that democratic and authoritarian states can cooperate if they set their minds to it. It is the clash between the postmodern state embodied by the European Union and the traditional modern state embodied by Russia.
The two sides bring out the worst in each other at every turn. The European Union’s emphasis on post-statehood, human rights and openness threatens the Kremlin’s “sovereign democracy” project. Russia’s insistence on balance-of-power transactions and mercantilist geopolitical hardball threaten not only to re-nationalize the foreign policy of EU member states but also to divide old members from new ones, and Russia-friendly business elites from Russia-fearing security elites within each member state. In Moscow, the European Union’s policy of democracy promotion stirs nightmares of ethnic and religious politics and the threat of territorial disintegration. At the same time, the prospect of invasion by Russian state-minded companies tempts EU member states to fence off certain sectors of their economies, such as domestic energy markets, thus threatening the liberal economic order at the center of the European project. Russia feels threatened by Western-funded NGOs to the point that it is tempted to re-create elements of a police state to prevent foreign interference in its domestic politics. The European Union, on the other hand, is ready to cozy up to Central Asian autocrats in order to limit its dependence on Russian gas. What threatens Europe today is therefore not mutually destructive nuclear war, but the mutual destabilization of Russia and the European Union that flows from the inherent incompatibility of their respective political projects. This is an incompatibility that could lead to Russia’s destabilization, or to Europe’s marginalization in global politics, or both. It already limits the range of U.S. approaches to Russia.
To prevent the risk of mutual destabilization, the leaders of the European Union and those of the next U.S. administration need to jettison illusions inherent in the language of containment and engagement, for these illusions will only magnify the difficulties of understanding what is really going on. Rather, the West needs to re-invent institutional foundations for the coexistence of a postmodern European Union and a post-imperial but pre-postmodern Russia in the presence of a post-hegemonic United States.
This will not be easy, but one prerequisite for success is as obvious as it is important: All three sides will need to break the bad habit of projecting their own frames of reference onto others. Human nature being what it is, that may be the hardest part of all.
Trenin, Getting Russia Right (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007).
2.
Trenin, “The Meaning of Medvedev”, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2008.
3.
Hassner, “Russia’s Transition to Autocracy”, Journal of Democracy (April 2008).
4.
See Neil McInnes, “The Strange Journey of a Bad Idea”, The American Interest (Winter 2005); and Jan-Werner Müller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (Yale University Press, 2003).
5.
The term was coined by the Russian-American sociologist Georgi Derluguian.
6.
See Igor Yurgens, ed., Russia’s Future under Medvedev (Centre for Global Studies, 2008).
7.
Karaganov, “A New Epoch of Confrontation”, Russia in Global Affairs (October–December 2007).
8.
Mendelson and Gerber, “Us and Them: Anti-American Views of the Putin Generation”, Washington Quarterly (Spring 2008).
9.
Lavrov, “Containing Russia: Back to the Future?”, Russia in Global Affairs (October–December 2007).