Russia in the Post-Western World:the End of Normalization Paradigm?
By Andrei P. Tsygankov
In: Post-Soviet Affairs 25, 4, October-December 2009.
Word count: 9,554
“As regards the content of the new stage in humankind’s
development, there are two basic approaches to it among
countries. The first one holds that the world must gradually
become a Greater West through the adoption of Western values…
The other approach – advocated by Russia – holds that
competition is becoming truly global and acquiring a civilizational dimension; that is, the subject of competition now includes
values and development models.”
Sergei Lavrov (2008b), Russia’s Foreign Minister
”The contemporary international life with its increased
complexity and dynamics requires creative solutions that are
easier to find through network diplomacy rather than entangling
military-political alliances with their burdensome rigid
commitments… As a result flexible coalitions are being
formed everywhere.”
Sergei Lavrov (2009b)
1. Introduction
The fall of 2008 has changed the international context in which Russia had defended its interests. The West’s ability to project global power was challenged in two principal ways. The Russia-Georgia war undermined the United States and Europe’ monopoly for use of force in world politics; and the global financial meltdown revealed the West’s economic vulnerability. Although Russia too was hit hard by the global economic crisis, it is the altered position of the Western nations in the international system that is likely to affect the world for many years to come. If the West is indeed in a relative decline and the great power shift defined as “the rise of the rest” (Zakaria 2008, 2) is approaching, it has important implications for Russia’s foreign policy. The shift puts limitations on the Kremlin’s strategy of becoming a “normal great power” or gaining recognition of its interests through development of economic and political ties with the Western world.[1]
The paper offers a preliminary assessment of the post-Western world’s implications for Russia and its foreign policy. I argue that the Russia’s international challenge can no longer be satisfactorily described as integration with the Western world while preserving relevant great power attributes. Although the international system is not yet multicultural and multipolar, the fact that it is no longer West-centered and unipolar suggests that Russia should devise a transition from the normalization strategy to that of a post-Western power by strengthening ties with China, India and other emerging cultural and political centers of the world. I also argue that Russia has limited choices in becoming a post-Western power capable of defending its interests in the context of the still omnipresent United States and Europe, on the one hand, and rapidly rising non-Western powers, especially China, on the other. Despite the officially upbeat assessment of the nation’s great power capabilities, Russia continues to suffer from a number of economic, social and ideological problems that will further hinder its full-fledged international engagement. Under these conditions, and for the foreseeable future of the world’s transition to a genuinely multicultural world, Russia may need to adopt a version of the 19th century recueillement – an internal concentration and flexible international coalitions required for providing the nation with the necessary external calm.[2] During this period, the Western nations should not expect Russia to be a strategic partner, but would benefit from the Kremlin’s decision not to undermine the already declining position of the West in the world.
The paper first describes the challenge of the emerging post-Western world and manifestations of the West’s declining hard and soft power dimensions. The next section analyzes Russia’s discussion of the current international conditions and domestic capabilities. I identify several schools of thought highlighting the rising prominence of the civilizational thinking which places the Russia’s cultural status at the center of analysis. I then assess the Russia’s potential to act as a post-Western great power by evaluating its domestic conditions and various strategic options. I conclude by reflecting on the West’s choices regarding Russia and the new political and cultural shape of the world.
2. The Challenge of the Post-Western World
The second half of 2008 has revealed that the world is entering a principally new stage of development. The end of the Cold War produced the new expectations of increasing economic and political convergence across nations around the notion of the West-centered globalization (Fukuyama1989; Ohmae1991; Friedman2005; Mandelbaum2005). Today these expectations are frequently criticized as ethnocentric and unrealistic, and many observers are increasingly aware that the West-centered world is beginning to unravel. Structurally, it is still the familiar world of American primacy (Brooks and Wohlforth2008) with the Western – especially American – military predominance and the West’s global superiority in political, economic and cultural dimensions. But dynamically the world is moving away from its West-centeredness[3] even though the exact direction and result of the identified trajectory remains unclear. In sum, the world is entering its post-American (Zakaria 2008)[4] and – to the extent that America has shaped the West – a post-Western stage.[5]
At least four emerging features of the new world can be identified. The first feature has to do with declining hard power of the West. Its military decline is now evident in growing proliferation of nuclear weapons and emerged incidents of unsanctioned use of conventional weapons in non-Western regions. Its economic decline is no less obvious with rise of China and Asia-Pacific region as new centers of the world’s gravity. Instead of relying on protection and welfare of Western hegemony, nations increasingly seek refuge in reformulating their interests to better protect their societies and re-adjust to their regional environments (Stallings1995; Mansfield and Milner1997; Helleiner and Pickel2005).Instead of promising egalitarian trends in response to the West-centered globalization, critics point to new socio-economic divisions (Murphy 2001). Failure of the United States to successfully complete its military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, prevent Iran and Russia from developing their nuclear cooperation, or maintain a viable international economic order also indicate that the world is departing from its politically unipolar state of the 1990s.
The second feature points to the West’s growing difficulties with projecting its soft power across the globe. Here, the George W. Bush’s era too serves as an important threshold with America’s prestige greatly declining in the world (Nye 2004). The idea of Western-style democracy, while still attractive, no longer commands the same attention. In part decline of the idea’s attractiveness is related to the fact that democratization and democracy promotion outside the West are not infrequently accompanied by state weakness, lawlessnessand ethnic violence (Mansfield and Snyder2007).
The third and the forth features point to rise of alternative hard and soft power projects. In response to decline of the West’s hard power, attempts to dominate others by using tools of military and economic coercion are going to be increasingly de-centralized and undertaken without consultation with Western nations. Two events in the second half of 2008 are of importance here – beginning of the global economic crisis and the Russia-Georgia war in August. While the former has severely undermined the West-centered model of global economic expansion, the latter ended the West’s monopoly for unilateral use of force previously demonstrated by NATO’s military attacks on Yugoslavia and the United States’ invasion of Iraq. That Russiahas chosen to use force in the Caucasus in defiance of the West implies de-centralization of hard power usage and promises serious difficulties for Western nations with continuous expansion of NATO’s geopolitical responsibilities at the expense of political arrangements, such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Collective Security Treaty Organization.[6] Observers have also noted intensification of processes of cultural reformulations (Tsygankov2001; Birgerson2002; Blum2003)and rise of alternative soft power projects[7] which develop both within and outside the legitimizing language of democracy.[8]
3. Russia as a Post-Western Power: the Domestic Debate
Russia’s Conditions: Weakness or Strength?
Is Russia prepared to face the new post-Western world? The answer partly depends on whether Russia has emerged as sufficiently strong in terms of its domestic material capabilities, human capital and institutional capacity. A strong and competitive Russia would be in a position to successfully address most pressing problems of its security and development. Depending on its leadership’s preferences, the nation may then try to tackle its problems unilaterally or in concert with other powers. As a result, it may become a center of material power in the future multipolar world and a model of cultural gravitation.
If, however, a nation is relatively weak, it is hardly in a position to solve critical issues of its development and serve as a model of attraction for the outside world. In that case, Russia has to choose among at least three strategies. In an increasingly multipolar and/or multicultural world, it may choose to side with one of the more powerful states thereby engaging in hard or soft balancing against other powers. For example, a considerable part of Russia’s experience with the European international system of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century can be described as the experience of participating in alliances with and against powerful states. Another strategy might be to respond to potentially unfavorable external conditions by engaging in an internal balancing and disengaging from making explicit international choices (back-passing).[9] In the late-20th and the early 21st century, this strategy has been generally followed by China, yet it may not be available to Russia. The latter is too large and too central in its geographic location between Europe and Asia to delegate solution of critical issues of world politics to other powers.
Perhaps more appropriate for Russia is to consider a revised version of its 19th century recuiellement following the defeat in the Crimean War. The two key principles of the recueillement, as introduced by Russia’s new Chancellor Prince Alexander Gorchakov after his predecessor Count Karl Nesselrode, were relative isolation from European affairs and flexible alliances with other states. While the former was deemed necessary for conducting internal reforms after defeat in the war, the latter was designed to provide the required international calm for domestic recovery. “The circumstances have given us back a full freedom of action,” wrote Gorchakov referring to the collapsed Holy Alliance and the perceived betrayal of Austria (Bushuyev 1961, 82). To the outside world, the Chancellor sought to clarify that Russia adopted a new policy out of domestic needs, and not anger at European powers: “LaRussieneboudepas – elleserecueille” (Таrle 1945, 471).Scholars characterized the recueillement as moderate and defensive yet aiming at revising the status quo established by the Paris treaty (Fuller1992, 266; Splidsboel-Hansen 2002,381; Geyer1987, 31).
The Official View
In the perception by Russia’s officials, the nation has regained its strength and fully recovered from the material and institutional problems of the 1990s. Until the global economic crisis, and especially immediately following the crisis in the Caucasus, the dominant narrative in Russia had been that of a strong and rising power. Such rhetoric was supported by the official declarations that projected Russia to become the world’s fifth largest economy, free from dependence on exports of oil and a full-fledged member in a multi-polar international order, by 2020. The released “National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2020” opens by the statement that Russia “has overcame consequences of the systemic political and socio-economic crisis at end of 20thcentury” and has restored capacity to “defend national interests as a subject of multipolar international relations” (Solovyev 2008).
As a result of such self-perception, the Kremlin has advocated the strategy of great power normalization. The strategy assumed an increasing cooperation with the world’s economic and political system, but not at the expense of Russia’s traditional security interests and preservation of statehood (Tsygankov 2005). Around 2005 – partly in response to Russia’s dissatisfaction with the United States’ policy of regime change in Iraq and the former Soviet region, and partly to reflect Russia’s new economic confidence – the Kremlin adopted a more assertive stance to defend its vision. The Kremlin also introduced the concept of energy superpower to capitalize on Russia’s natural resource advantage and position the country as a global player and a maker of new global rules (Tsygankov 2008). Russia’s new President, Dmitri Medvedev, built on the vision of his predecessor proposing a new pan-European Treaty to establish a new security architecture beyond NATO expansion (ITAR-TASS, June 11, 2008)[10] and to overhaul the international economic order (Medvedev 2008a). Russia did not become anti-American and did not call for any concerted effort to undermine the U.S. global position. Instead, it defended the notion of collective leadership and multilateral diplomacy as the alternative to unilateralism and hegemony in international relations.[11] Medvedev also emphasized that Russia and the West shared the same values although they had to assure the “values [were] understood in the same way” (ITAR-TASS, December 5, 2008).
The deep economic crisis has not altered the generally optimistic assessment by the Russia’s officials. Russia's new National Security Strategy to the year 2020 has provided a long list of potential threats to the country’s security, but it has stated in its preamble confidence in the country’s ability "to reliably prevent internal and external threats to national security and to dynamically develop the Russian Federation and to turn it into a leading power in terms of technological progress, people's quality of life and influence on global processes" (Interfax-AVN, May 13, 2009.)[12] In Medvedev’s own words, "Russia is totally differentnowandithasgonethrough a transitional period, it is developingconfidently and steadily, and it has reached a qualitatively new level of long-term, strategic development" (Interfax, March 24, 2009).Although the global economic crisis created a divide within the Kremlin – with some advocating a sharper diversification of the economy and other continuing support for energy corporations[13] – the officials are yet to revise their initial assessments and draw more fundamental lessons from the crisis.
Westernizers
Liberal Westernizers within the Russian foreign policy community have been critical of the country’s domestic conditions and its ability to become a great power. According to this group, Russia’s principal problem has been the chosen model of economic and political development under Vladimir Putin. Excessively centralized and energy-oriented, the model is blocking the country’s modernization and integration with Western institutions. Politicians and experts, such as Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Milov (Nemtsov and Milov 2009), Yevgeni Gontmakher (2009) and Igor’ Yurgens (Kramer 2009), have challenged the government Strategy until 2020 as misguided and unrealistic. They have criticized Russia’s involvement in the war with Georgia and offered a bleak assessment of the country’s prospects of recovering from the economic crisis without dismantling the existing model of development (Illarionov 2009; Goltz 2009; Ryzhkov 2009).
Externally, Westernizers have positioned Russia as a country of a Western identity. They have blamed the government for being in denial about the nation’s internal weakness and the rising China problem (Khramchikhin 2009). In words of one commentator, “we do not discuss our ‘China problem’ at all because … that makes it too frightening to even bring up the subject” (Latynina 2008). The group has recognized the West’s relative decline, but argued that both culturally and politically Russia’s choice in addressing its principal economic and security problems should be with Europe and the United States. As Fyodor Lukyanov (2008) stated, “the world without the West” may be “even more dangerous a place than the hateful‘mono-polar world’.” Director of Moscow Carnegie Center Dmitri Trenin (2009) made an even more pronounced cultural argument in favor of Russia choosing the Western orientation.[14] According to him, “Russia is not a distinct civilization or a world unto itself” and therefore “it cannot seriously expect to be a power center on par with China -- or the United States for that matter. Thus, Russia's non-inclusion into the European security architecture is a problem, while China's absence from the U.S.-led system of security arrangements in Asia is not.” Trenin (2008) has been among a few in the Westernist group who has granted Russia the right to intervene in the Caucasus in August 2008, but not the right to recognize independence of South Ossetia and Abkhasia – partly because of the risk of Russia’s being isolated by the West.
The Rise of Civilizational Discourse
Perhaps the most interesting intellectual response to the West’s relative decline is the revival of Russia’s civilizational discourse. Formerly marginalized, the discourse of Russia as a distinct cultural entity, not just a great power as in the official description, is gaining currency in the political circles. The Kremlin too is increasingly aware of the Russia’s soft power potential that includes historical, ethnic and religious characteristics shared by the nation with its neighbors. As Vladimir Putin (2004) stated on one occasion, “the historical credits of trust and friendship, the close ties that link the peoples of our countries” continue to present the “existing potential of influence” for Russia.[15]