The last two weeks have seen an astonishing re-emergence of the ‘coalition of the unwilling’. This accidental posse of commentators, literati, politicians and TV-watchers has questioned the West’s right to lecture Russia on its bellicose behavior. By this, I do not mean Russian citizens, most of whom have been galvanized into a strident brand of nationalism by this contemporary version of the 1853 Crimea War – a distracting remedy to internal problems. Unity is best achieved by invoking an external threat and the “victory” over Georgia amounts to the conquest of a territory that could find itself under NATO’s influence. Naturally, the resumption of control over the country formerly dominated by Moscow constitutes a significant boost for Russians’ nationalistic ‘pride’. But such largely monolithic reaction of a population deprived of plurality of views is not surprising. On the other hand, the coincidental alliance that some sections of the polarized West have established with Russian nationalists is well worth investigating.
Contrary to the belief entertained by some hand-wringing neoconservatives, this western relativism does not stem from a ‘post-modern condition’. In reality, it draws on a variety of sources, affecting three categories of people: the realists, the apologists of power and the Russophiles.
THE REALISTS
This category can be further subdivided into two groups: the ‘slicers’ and the pragmatists. The ‘slicers’ claim that the world is, de facto, divided into unquestionable spheres of influence – Western, Russian and probably Chinese. “There is nothing you can do to stop the Russian bear” – they claim. Russia’s army is strong, its position in Southern Caucasus is unassailable and the 150-year long dominance in the region warrants the supposed legitimacy of “its security concerns”. American meddling with Russia’s ‘natural’ sphere of influence is asking for trouble. After all, the United States would not welcome Russian interference in its own backyard – in the Caribbean, in Latin America or the Canadian Arctic. So when François Fillon, the French prime minister spells out his opposition to Georgia’s and Ukraine’s NATO membership, he cynically evokes “the balance of power between Europe and Russia”. Such re-readings of Yalta pact would have been unimaginable several years ago, but they seem remarkably salonsfähig at Matignon today.
The pragmatists are technical-military ‘experts’ who argue that America cannot afford to confront, simultaneously, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Russia. There is, indeed, much to say about the overstretch of the US Armed Forces in the Middle East since the colossal blunder in Iraq.
The realists also indulge in dismissing the “Cold War” metaphors. They emphasize that contemporary Russia, unlike Soviet Union, does not pose an ideological challenge to the West. And since Russia has embraced a cut-throat form of capitalism, it is no longer a rival. Such wishful thinking stems from poor understanding of Russia’s history. The Soviet period was simply a continuation of Russian expansionism which, as Eva Thompson once calculated, had swallowed, on average, 55 square miles per day between 1683 and 1914. This expansionist trend has now outlived its Soviet parenthesis.
The ideological argument is also wrong on another account. It is true that an all-pervasive statism no longer defines Russia’s economic system. The land has been privatized and income taxes are flat at 13%. But Russian state corporatism today is very different from Western-style liberal capitalism. The power of the Russian state is being served through various means, and it resorts to market mechanisms only when it sees fit.
What welds together the two groups of realists is a conviction that the US has been “too aggressive” in its approach to Russia. The realists buy into the mythology promoted by Moscow for domestic consumption, which argues that “the West humiliated Russia in the 1990s”. It also questions the seriousness of diplomatic efforts deployed to address Russia’s supposedly legitimate concerns over the positioning of American anti-missile defenses in the otherwise sovereign states – allies of the Unites States. Such critical views have, unfortunately, been emboldened by the US actions in Iraq.
POWER APOLOGISTS
The second group is constituted by the apologists of power, awed by the might and the performance of might. This group correlates with the politically conservative, though economically liberal circles – from Silvio Berlusconi to Anglo-Saxon market commentators. They claim that the West should recognize the inherent attractiveness of other great powers as markets, as trade partners and as investment destinations.
Indeed, profits and power make exciting bedfellows. To be sure, no other country has exploited this crass naiveté better than China. The fracture in Russia’s capital formation which occurred when Putin attempted to redistribute the spoils captured by the Yeltsin-era oligarchs alarmed many in the West. It appeared much less opaque than equally brutal, though much more dispersed dog-eat-dog infighting for assets within the Chinese Communist Party. To the West, the assault on Yukos was, in short, bad PR. But at every asset grab – from Yukos, to Sakhalin 2 and Russneft, from BP-TNK to Mechel, the Kremlin’s PR disasters are papered over by those who still hope to squeeze their begging hand through the fast closing door. Still, such reversions foil the very love affair that brings big business into the arms of authoritarian regimes – the single-minded focus on “stability”.
Undoubtedly, the speed with which fabulous wealth was accumulated in the 1990s’ Russia presented irresistible lure to foreign corporations and investment banks. By 2003, Russian investment conferences in London would attract thousands of delegates whose long faces hesitated only between the multiple zeros printed in glossy brochures and the long legs of blonde hostesses who graced the crowd with their rounded vowels and unmistakably rolled “r”. The tragically less attractive British matrons must have stumbled against a similarly demeaning scene at the Harrods’ in Knightsbridge, where the most successful and acquisitive of Russian women were putting the Albion’s wallets to shame. From there to the UK companies’ board decision-making, there was only one tense conversation in the executives’ upholstered bedroom.
But there was also genuine fascination with the “new frontier”. The combination of the unknown, the spacious, the grand and the potentially enriching was irresistible for the apologists of power and the apologists of size. Those Westerners who trace their national origin to a former empire thrive on the challenge of size. It is more exciting and more open-ended to plan an investment project in the boundless reaches of Siberia or on the overpopulated coast of China than, say, in Malawi or in Laos. But exciting as the prospect might well be, it is wrong. On a risk-adjusted basis, it is always better to be a big fish in a large pond than a small fish in a hypothetically boundless, but also by definition measureless pond. Yet these were the times when few of my Anglo-Saxon friends, buried for weeks in the Lesson 2 of “Russian for Busy People”, wanted to listen.
RUSSOPHILES
The ‘new frontier’ brand of power apologists brings us closer to the most convincing group of pro-Russian westerners – the genuine Russophiles. Although never as influential in Washington as Sinophiles who have shaped the disastrous US foreign policy vis-à-vis Beijing since the beginning of Clinton’s first term, the Russophiles are by no means a spent force. And nowhere more than in the capitals of Western Europe.
Russophiles – both professional academics and amateurs – point to the role that Russian culture has played over centuries, expanding and enriching Europe’s vast civilizational treasure. There is no denying that few other languages have bequeathed comparable literary wealth. And yet, fascination with cultural heritage should not equate with appeasement of aggressive foreign policy. This is just too big a judgmental leap. Our recognition of the superiority of Flemish paintings does not automatically lead us to support the division of Belgium. Does it?
The cultural attraction is real. The Gorbomania I witnessed in Western Europe in the late 1980s reflected as much the relief at the gradual removal of the oppressive military threats, as it showcased the pent-up demand for contact with a poorly known part of the world. Young Western Europeans discovered the subjective beauty of the Russian language and female students traveled to Soviet Union to taste the local culture, sometimes in its more extreme forms.
France’s historical fascination with things Russian has been well documented and favored by the nature of Paris-centered administration topped with a variant of a neo-absolutist regime. In the second half of the 20th century, much of this attraction was bolstered by the surprisingly resilient epigones of the French Communist Party and the left bank intellectuals’ visceral dislike of America’s cultural expansionism.
But the real threat to European cohesion lies today on the Spree. Germany’s egalitarian instincts, the country’s propensity to form collectivist models of administration, and its discomfort with market-based organization of exchanges has pushed the country into Russia’s hands on more than one occasion. If the physical connection between the Bolshevik Revolution and German proletarian revolution in the early 1920s was thwarted by Polish ‘bourgeois’ army, the eventual alliance between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s Russia brought unprecedented suffering to Europe and the world. Soviet Union’s colonization of Prussia after the 2nd world war proved also to be the most ‘perfect’ (in Eichmannian terms) epiphenomenon of Orwellian nightmare. Nowhere else was the penetration of security apparatus as deep and pervasive as in Staatsicherheit’s country. That was only 20 years ago, lest you forget. And if you do, watch the masterful “The Lives of Others”, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.
As the purveyors of Europe’s most sophisticated intellectual tradition, Germans’ susceptibility to Russophile brainwash may owe much to their discomfort with America’s commercialized alternative. Many years ago a German woman told me about her ageing father who, after surviving Stalingrad, had spent 12 years in Russian Gulag with many other POWs. Married late and physically frail, he reacted with disgust at the post-Marshall Plan Americanization of West Germany, which accompanied an unprecedented “Wirtschaftswunder”. Ute remembered: “my father always said that, unlike Americans, Russians had real culture, a great culture”. Although this dramatic confession may have sounded like an outsized version of Stockholm Syndrome, the sentiment echoed Theodore Adorno’s disgust at the resilience of America’s popular culture after the exile of Frankfurt School scholars to the US.
When young German idealists fete today Barack Obama in Berlin, they see him not only as a refreshing savior from eight years of American unilateralism, but also as a liberator of a certain form of aggressive ‘market first’ dogmatism. A very attractive young German woman from a private equity fund complained to me recently at a party in Manhattan: “die jungen Leute in Deutschland verstehen einfach nicht mehr, wie Kapitalismus funktioniert”. Young people in Germany are, indeed, poorly prepared to play a decisive, leading role in the marketplace. Not only is their knowledge of credit markets and other asset markets poor. Their skill base may not be entirely geared up for the competition in the globalized marketplace. German SPD, a minority partner in Angela Merkel’s grand coalition builds its electoral base among these people. And Walter Steinmeier, SPD’s leader and current Minister of Foreign Affairs, occasionally sounds like a KGB agent himself.
DIVIDE ET IMPERA
There is little doubt that Russian security services are well implanted in Germany. Putin himself was for years based in Dresden and made a priority of wooing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder with his fluent German. Schröder’s major decisions in geostrategically pregnant energy field reveal as much fascination with Russia as personal greed and cupidity. But they have durably affected the aforementioned ‘balance of power’ in Europe, tipping it in Russia’s favor.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s soft-spoken foreign minister, addressed both the power apologists and the Russophiles when he flattered the large Western European countries in an article published in April 2007 in FT. He outlined Moscow’s vision of a “strong Europe”, with “strong Germany and France”, living in peace and harmony with “strong Russia”. This selectivity in Lavrov’s definition of what constitutes Europe was revealing. Europe’s unity has been, and will always be a threat to Russia’s monopolizing energy ambitions. Undermining the cohesion of the economic, political and military alliance that now binds Western and Central European countries and the US is the ultimate goal that this policy should help to achieve.
The condescending attitude towards the “smaller” nations is a trademark of Russia’s policy and its roots go back to the role that Russian chauvinism played in the former Soviet Union. When in 1988 a group of carefully selected Russian students visited one of the European universities, they were asked about the future of the Baltic countries. An articulate girl with a Lenin pin in her lapel responded confidently: “but those small nations would never be able to survive without us and without the sacrifices of the Russian people”.
The empire’s borders may have shifted now, but the smaller countries on the eastern fringes of European Union are often considered to be little more than poorly understood irritants. Western Europeans were never properly prepared to welcome these new members into EU. No major marketing effort was made to promote the accession to those for whom “Europe” was but a rump of four or five largest countries in the Western part of the continent. In fact, statistics revealed that only Austrians had visited the prospective new members regularly and uniquely among “Westerners” had a good grasp of European geography, realizing that Prague lies to the West, not the East of Vienna.
Not surprisingly, Russian propaganda falls on friendly ears when it pinpoints the culprits who dare to ‘destabilize’ the partnership between Moscow, Paris or Berlin. The villain of the day is Saakashvili, the ‘madman criminal’, but also American intransigence in encroaching on Russia’s near border, as well as Polish and Baltic anti-Russian adventurism. This is only a step away from brandishing a supposedly Euro-centric, but fiendishly anti-Anglo-Saxon card, so reminiscent of Vichy propaganda in the 1940s. Even if Moscow does not quite venture there yet – it is keen to divide Europe into the poodles (the “pragmatic” capitals of Paris, Berlin and Rome), the brethren (notably Greece, and Serbia) and the bulldogs (the irresponsible firebrands in the UK, Nordic countries, Poland and the Baltics).
The Baltic countries’ fear of Russia’s resurgence is often dismissed as paranoia and the Central European members’ close relations with the United States grate among Euro-centric intellectuals. Shortly before the accession of new members into EU, I recall watching a shocking TV documentary on German ZDF. A German academic morosely cautioned that the entry of Poland into European Union would bring an “American Trojan horse” into the community. This was not the language that the freshly liberated nations of central Europe expected from what they still idealized holistically as “the West”.
The dismissal of the new members as annoyingly pro-American spoilers reached its zenith in the run-up to the Iraqi war. France’s president Chirac famously dismissed the new members as countries that “ont raté une belle occasion de se taire” (they missed a perfect opportunity to shut up). Such displays of public arrogance reveal little more than frustration and a sense of impotence. Just ask Putin and Medvedev. Russian verbal onslaughts were equally disproportionate when Moscow realized that its diplomatic mistakes in Georgia had spurred Poland and US to overcome the differences over missile defense shields, to be now installed on Polish soil. Moscow’s harsh and unwieldy diplomatic efforts to turn Paris and Berlin against Washington over this issue have also had the opposite effect. There is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy here. Through perennial denunciations of external enemies, Moscow has succeeded in creating them.
NOTHING ‘FLAT’ ABOUT IT
Although our brains are better at detecting differences than similarities, continued exposure to distinctive features is necessary to keep our minds alert that dissimilarities do matter. Just like our sense of directions gets numbed if we move to a city with a regular checkerboard street grid, lack of exposure to various cultures, languages and viewpoints creates a comforting Gestalt illusion of homogeneity.
But it is time we recalled that not everyone on this planet shares the rationality taken for granted in the Western world. That rationality may not necessarily privilege the same freedoms, the same form of wealth creation and distribution, or the same ordering of collective versus individual identity, of rights and responsibilities.
Despite the Western (and mostly American) optimism of the last twenty years, the commercial decisions of other groups and nations may be little more than a tool to achieve very different objectives. Some of these objectives may clash with the Western values and the Western priorities. The politically correct mainstream fawners like Thomas “the world is flat” Friedman may fail to comprehend this. But when jingoistic “pride” is at stake, when the mythology of past “humiliation” is glorified as a unifying national dogma, when the groups who do not share the nationalistic identity are ruthlessly marginalized and ridiculed, then successful trade and investment fade as the main organizing principles. It was no different in the years leading to the First World War. Or indeed, during Germany’s post-Versailles “humiliation”.
American optimism and Western European naiveté are poorly equipped to deal with the Russian, or Chinese challenge. It is time we all accepted that rationality of even the most soft-spoken partners on the other side of the divide may differ radically from ours. At the end of a Hollywood-produced fairy tale, the hero is often applauded by a crowd, mysteriously familiar with his adventures. These days, few scripts without such happy ending are making it to the box office. But in the traditional Russian fables, the story line differs. The fox always eats the chicken.
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