|
|
|
WORLD POLICY JOURNAL
Russia:
Farewell to Empire?
Vladimir Putin’s immediate and strong support for Washington’s antiterrorism campaign after September 11, which represented a decisive break with both the Soviet past and the ambivalence of Russia’s first post-communist decade, surprised Russians and Americans alike. For most of the 1990s, many Russians had harbored resentments against the West, as they struggled to understand how the Soviet Union could have collapsed as a result of self-inflicted wounds rather than defeat in war. Even the most outwardly pro-Western Russian officials pursued a contradictory policy during this period: seeking to join Western "clubs," such as the Group of Seven highly industrialized nations (G-7), while simultaneously criticizing them and trying to change their rules. Although they asked the West to deal with Russia as a "normal" country, they also demanded that the outside world continue to treat Russia as a major power, despite its diminished resources and limited capabilities. Foreign policy analysts sparred over whether Russia should follow a Eurasian or a European path. The Eurasianists argued the case for Russian exceptionalism and for Russia’s continuing right to be treated as a great power. The Europeanists countered that it was finally time for Russia to disabuse itself of its great-power pretensions and join what they called the "civilized" world, i.e., the West. During the Clinton administration, the United States facilitated Russia’s entry into the G-7 and created a NATO-Russia partnership, but it also helped to perpetuate some of these great-power pretensions by turning the G-7 into the G-8, even though Russia’s GDP was less than that of the Netherlands. 1 President Putin has consistently claimed that he early on rejected Russia’s "Eurasian option" to cultivate ties with China and states to the south in favor of a pro-Western policy, and was only waiting for an opportunity to implement his new design. The destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center at the hands of Islamic terrorists enabled him to end the debate that had preoccupied the Russian political class for a decade over how Russia should define its identity and interests in the countries of the former Soviet Union and in the post–Cold War world. For Putin and his supporters, Russia’s future lay in the West, not in a nostalgic attempt to resurrect past Russian and Soviet imperial Eurasian might. However difficult it might be to accept the role of junior partner to the United States, they argued, it would prove to be of greater benefit to the Russian national interest in the long run. The two books under review—both written before September 11 but with brief acknowledgments of the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, and their aftermath—reflect the transformation of Russian foreign policy in the last ten years. While their authors agree on much about Russia’s past, they offer strikingly different views of its future. Igor Ivanov, who has been Russia’s foreign minister since 1998, presents a broad-ranging but traditional view of Russia’s global interests in The New Russian Diplomacy, as might be expected from someone still in office. But this means that a reader must look in vain—despite the promise of the book’s title—for the considerations that produced Putin’s turn toward the West. In contrast, Dmitri Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center—a beacon of enlightened discourse in the new Russia, housed in a modern building on Pushkin Square—explains in his creative and persuasive book, The End of Eurasia, that Russia has no option but to renounce "multipolarity"—a policy that advocates balancing Russia’s ties to the West with its ties to China and other Asian countries, and denies that the United States is the center of global power—and become a truly European nation. Both Ivanov and Trenin look to history in tackling the key question confronting the new Russia: how could a country that for four centuries had been at the center of a vast continental empire redefine its foreign policy as a post-imperial state? Russia was recognized as the legal successor to the Soviet Union, inheriting its seat on the U.N. Security Council and its embassies abroad. It also inherited its debts, a demoralized military, and a population struggling to understand how the once mighty USSR had imploded. As Russia began to look for a new identity, it searched for a "usable past," for examples in its own history when it had pursued a foreign policy based on something other than coercion and military might. But the search proved frustrating. In grappling with this unanticipated loss of status and territory that happened almost overnight, the intelligentsia returned to a traditional debate about Russia’s role and identity: Does Russia embody a unique Eurasian civilization that makes it different from and superior to the West? Or is it essentially a backward European country that should seek to catch up with and join the West? Russia’s three foreign ministers have personified the fluctuations in this debate. Andrei Kozyrev, Boris Yeltsin’s first post-communist foreign minister, was a committed Westernizer, but he enjoyed little respect from his compatriots. Yevgeny Primakov, who replaced Kozyrev in 1996, was a seasoned Soviet diplomat and intelligence official, suspicious of the West, who espoused a foreign policy à tous azimuts, touting a multipolar world and a Russian-Indian-Chinese alliance as an alternative to slavish cooperation with the West. He was the last official to pursue Soviet-style grandeur. Igor Ivanov seeks a more evenhanded approach, taking something between a Eurasianist and a Euro-Atlanticist view favoring closer ties with the United States and Europe, but emphasizing the importance of ties to Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. These two books are a welcome addition to the sparse and often superficial literature on post-Soviet Russian foreign policy. This existing literature reflects the reality that Russian foreign policy in the 1990s was reactive and amorphous, and lacking clear direction or transparency in its formation. Indeed, one can question whether Russia, as it tried to come to terms with the transformation from ideological superpower to weak postimperial state, really had a foreign policy for much of the 1990s. While the debate over identity and interests raged among the intelligentsia, Russia had neither the resources nor the ability to pursue a coherent foreign policy. It lurched between accommodation and confrontation. Russia in fact did the sensible thing more often than not when faced with hard choices. For example, despite the sharp Russian rhetoric criticizing NATO enlargement and NATO’s operations in Bosnia and Kosovo (Primakov, it may be recalled, turned his plane around midway between Moscow and Washington when the air campaign against Kosovo began), Russian soldiers have been serving successfully with their NATO counterparts under American command in both Bosnia and Kosovo since 1996. On the other hand, Russia has been loathe to renounce its few remaining lucrative markets for nuclear exports, even when these involve so-called rogue states committed to developing their own weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, as the private sector—particularly the energy sector—has become more influential, one can no longer refer simply to "the Kremlin" when discussing the making of Russian foreign policy. The View
from Smolensk Square Despite his recognition of the importance of closer ties with the West, Ivanov’s criticisms of American policy and of NATO, especially during the Yugoslav wars, sound very much like "old" thinking. One can certainly dispute his claim that none of the NATO interventions ("aggressions," as he calls them) have solved the problems in the Balkans. After all, those wars are over, Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague, and Serbia is evolving into a democratic state. He endorses the idea of "multipolarity," rejects the concept of "rogue" states, and warns of dire consequences if the United States were to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. This view is not shared by Putin, who reacted calmly to Washington’s unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty this past June. Ivanov endorses the United Nations as the ultimate arbiter of the use of military force and disagrees with sanctions against Iraq. In other words, in this book he sees the world through a rather traditional Soviet/Russian lens and continues to view the West with suspicion. However, since September 11, Ivanov has used more conciliatory rhetoric vis-à-vis the United States and has supported the U.S.-led antiterrorist coalition. Ivanov criticizes the Council of Europe’s double standards in condemning Russia’s conduct in Chechnya while ignoring human rights abuses against ethnic Russians in the Baltic States, and he stresses the need for a partnership with the United States where Russia is treated as an equal. Yet, there are glimmers of a more forward-looking policy. Putin, he argues approvingly, wants to "use" foreign policy to achieve economic growth. Membership in the G-8 and in the World Trade Organization (WTO), he acknowledges, will be important for achieving these goals. This, of course, is the key to understanding Putin’s turn toward the West. The View
from Pushkin Square Trenin argues that extending the definition of Eurasia to include Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the Soviet imperial era. The traditional Russian drive to expand led to imperial overstretch and to the USSR’s collapse. After 1945, Soviet control extended from the Elbe River, farther west than imperial influence had ever penetrated, east to the Sea of Okhotsk, with the occupation of the formerly Japanese Kurile Islands. But the gerontocratic Soviet leadership of the 1970s was unable to understand that expansion had its limits. The fateful decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979 was motivated by the fear that the Afghan leadership was about to change sides in the Cold War. This massive blunder, undertaken in the name of "historic irreversibility," led the Soviet Union into a war that it could not win because the military might of a superpower proved unable to conquer the religious and nationalistic commitment of Islamic guerrillas armed with American Stinger missiles. Eight months after Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. As Trenin sees it, the breakup of the Soviet Union was the culmination of a secular colonial decline, which was itself the product of the failure to reform economically, the demise of communist ideology, the paralysis of the over-centralized Communist system, and "the fiasco of Soviet foreign policy which squandered resources in various adventurous projects." Eurasia
Is Over However, the collapse of the Soviet Union should not be seen as just another reversal in the cyclical historical pattern of Russian expansionism tempered by coexistence that will eventually lead to renewed territorial expansion. This time, Trenin believes, Russia has a chance to break with its past—to renounce Eurasianism in favor of integration into the West. Although the process of internalizing a postimperial identity will take a long time, Russia has already begun to reorient its foreign policy. The establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) served as a form of civilized divorce between Russia and the former Soviet Republics, and has been a tool for nation-and state-building over the past decade. It has not been, as some in Russia had hoped and some in the West had feared, an instrument for imperial restoration. Despite the official union between Russia and Belarus, signed in 1996, Putin has taken a cautious approach toward integration with this outpost of authoritarianism and economic decline. In examining Russia’s three façades— the western, the southern, and the far eastern— Trenin shows that Russia has little choice but to ally with the West. Europe is Russia’s most stable neighbor. All is not quiet on Russia’s western front, however. The situation in the Kaliningrad exclave— a part of the Russian Federation that is separated from Russia by Lithuania and Poland —is particularly difficult. Kaliningrad’s future, once NATO and the European Union have expanded to include the Baltic states and Poland, will necessitate difficult choices and unpopular compromises from both Russia and its neighbors if they are to avoid confrontation. But with the exception of a few outstanding border issues, Russia’s relations with its neighbors in the West are stable. The domestic situation in the Western NIS—Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova—is unstable because of social and economic problems, and political decay, and Putin has been careful not to criticize his neighbors for their democratic deficits. Indeed, under Putin, Russia’s economic influence in these countries is increasing. Nevertheless, there are no signs that Putin is interested in reconstructing the Western NIS into an integrated bloc. The situation to Russia’s south is dangerous. According to Trenin, this is where Russia is most vulnerable to instability. Starting with the North Caucasus, Trenin presents a balanced view of the two Chechen wars. The first war broke out in 1994, after Chechnya declared its independence from Russia. It ended with a truce in 1996. The second began in 1999, after a series of Chechen incursions into neighboring territories and bombings in Moscow that were attributed to Chechen separatists. While citing the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism emanating from Chechnya, Trenin acknowledges the atrocities committed by Russian troops there. The solution for the breakaway region, he argues, is either a confederacy that gives Chechnya a high degree of autonomy or a Russian commitment to helping Chechens build a viable, modern state of their own. Neither side has so far been able to organize itself politically for peacetime reconstruction. Trenin worries about Russia’s lack of a coherent policy for the region as a whole, where fundamentalism, lawlessness, and ethnic conflict in the three Transcaucasian states (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia) add to the instability of the region. The U.S. presence in Georgia, as part of the anti-terrorist coalition, has done little to resolve these problems so far. Georgia’s domestic weaknesses and unresolved conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia have exacerbated Russia’s problems in the North Caucasus. Moreover, Chechen fighters have taken refuge in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge. Central Asia is more stable but potentially a source of Islamic terrorism that could jeopardize Russia’s security. Russia’s most crucial geopolitical problem, according to Trenin, is Siberia and the Russian Far East. The rapid disintegration of the region’s infrastructure since 1992 and the outmigration of Russians at a time when the overall Russian birthrate is falling dramatically, has exacerbated the Far East’s decline. The influx of Chinese migrants into the area has led some Russians to question whether Russia can hold on to the region. Others have even begun to say that Russia might ultimately be better off if it were only a European country—if its borders ended at the Urals—but this is not Trenin’s argument. For now, Russia and China enjoy better relations than at any time during the last century, and their border issues have been settled in principle—but China’s rising economic and military power, and its dynamic population growth, raise questions about its ultimate designs on the Russian Far East. As for Russia’s continuing dispute with Japan over the Kurile Islands, Trenin is dubious that any settlement is in sight, since this would involve renouncing Russian territory to a country that most Russians do not trust. Europe Beckons
Trenin argues that the events of the past decade have created a geopolitical reality in which Russia’s choices are obvious. NATO and the EU will soon be on Russia’s door-step. Those Russians who continue to favor a Eurasian, as opposed to a Western orientation, represent the past, not the future. Trenin goes much further than most of the liberal Russian intelligentsia. He argues that NATO enlargement is a "peripheral" issue for Russia, that what counts is the nature of Russia’s relationship with the alliance, not who is a member. Of the three potential threats to Russia—invasion by the West, from Russia’s southern perimeter, and from China—the Western threat is virtually unthinkable. While Trenin does not say whether Russia should eventually join the NATO alliance, he does believe that it should make membership in the EU a long-term strategic goal. This will raise eyebrows in Brussels, where EU officials consider Russia to be too large and unwieldy for membership. However, the reforms Russia would have to undertake in order to be eligible for membership would greatly benefit its development. Trenin believes that Russia can modernize and succeed in a globalized world by opting for a European identity and a gradual integration into greater Europe. And he has a few words of advice for the United States: Don’t focus on preventing a Russian imperial renaissance because it is Russia’s weakness, rather than its strength, that is the real issue. And don’t become too involved in Eurasian disputes, which risks antagonizing Moscow. With its increasing military presence in Central Asia, America will need Russia as an ally in the region. Trenin’s book is at once farsighted and yet also unrepresentative of mainstream Russian thought. However, even though much of the foreign policy elite may not accept his assertion that "Eurasia is over," Vladimir Putin clearly does. His decision —against the advice of most of his military and security advisors—to support the United States unreservedly in its fight against terrorism was a decisive break with Russian tradition, a rejection of Eurasia in favor of institutional integration with the West. A year into the antiterrorist war, it is still not clear how many in the Russian political class share Putin’s views. They are not reflected in his foreign minister’s book, although Ivanov’s subsequent statements have been more supportive of Putin’s actions. Yet Putin continues to confound those outside Russia who believe that this lack of domestic support will constrain his policies. If Trenin is right and "Russia-Eurasia is over," Russia has only one alternative—to become part of the West. Since September 11, Putin’s actions suggest that his world-view is similar to Trenin’s. However, Russia’s continuing insistence, over American objections, that it has the right to increase its economic ties to Iran and Iraq, including in the nuclear energy sphere, remind us that Putin has not entirely renounced a foreign policy à tous azimuts, even if it differs from that of the United States. Nevertheless, for the time being, the United States should continue to back Russia’s membership in the WTO and its closer integration into NATO to encourage Moscow’s pro-Western orientation. If Russia is willing to undertake the reforms that will enable it to integrate into global and Euro-Atlantic institutions, its foreign policy re orientation toward the West will potentially become long-lasting. Without this Russian commitment, however, the Eurasian temptation could again become attractive. • *Angela E. Stent is professor of government and director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies in the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. She served in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning from 1999 to 2001. Notes 1. For an absorbing account of the Clinton administration’s view of the process, see Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002). 2. Angela Charlton, "Putin Cements Pro-Western Stance," quoted in Johnson’s Russia List, no. 6353, July 12, 2002. 3. The argument about these cycles in Russian foreign policy is developed in Adam Ulam’s classic work, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1967 (New York: Praeger, 1974). [Go to interactive discussion forum]
|
|
||
