1.11.2005
A Window on Europe
by Sergey Strokan
in «Kommersant»
The main foreign policy result for Russia in the past year was the most serious crisis in relations with the West since the time of the Cold War. Moreover, the relations that suffered most of all were not with America but with the European Union, which until recently seemed almost ideal to Moscow.
The year 2004 can quite rightly be called a “leap year” in Russian foreign policy. When I was discussing its results with an old friend, a Western journalist accredited in Moscow, with “pre-revolutionary experience” covering the period from Leonid Brezhnev to Vladimir Putin, I heard that a lot of people “on the other side” were talking about Russia today. Never before had this self-assured journalistic pundit looked so dispirited and dismayed. What had warmed him for more than a decade of Russia's “democratic development” – a belief in an irreversible strategic rapprochement between Moscow and the West, about which he and his colleagues had enthusiastically written millions of newspaper lines – was melting away before his very eyes. After telling me that one of his colleagues had recently been denied an extension of his accreditation after interviewing a “crazy Chechen” and referring to a draft law making provision for punitive measures against foreigners who showed “disrespect for Russia”, the journalist noted that this had never happened even in Soviet times. Today, this very pragmatic man, who has a family in Moscow and has no intention of going anywhere, is dead serious about preparing himself morally for the fact that he might soon have to switch from being a reporter for a leading Western publication to being an inconspicuous English teacher.
Russia's relations with the West started deteriorating at the very start of the year, bringing to mind the old truism that how you greet the year is how you'll spend it. The new foreign policy year opened with an article by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that appeared in Izvestiya right after the holidays. Written soon after the Russian parliamentary elections in December, it set the critical tone for the dialog between Moscow and the West in the year ahead. In his article, Powell highlighted the main pressure points in relations with Russia – the YUKOS affair; Russian regional and national elections, which raised questions in the US and the West as a whole about democratic standards; and Moscow's policy in Chechnya, as well as with respect to its neighbors, which at the time meant Georgia in particular. Responding to his counterpart “article for article”, the then Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov urged him not to dramatize the situation: “Specific actions will help dispel the clouds that have become noticeable in the United States”.
Alas, the specific actions on which the minister was pinning his hopes one after another turned the overcast into heavy black clouds. Perhaps the only ray of light, or as they say, the silver lining, was September 2, when on Moscow's initiative, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting in connection with the events in Beslan. The result of the discussions was unanimous adoption of a resolution calling on all countries to do everything possible to assist Russia in the war on terrorism. In Moscow, this resolution was regarded as a great moral victory putting an end to the protracted dispute with the West on double standards in world politics and “good and bad terrorists”.
The lowest point in Moscow's relations with the West seemed to have passed and now they were finally looking up. However, the “great moral victory” lasted less than a week; and by September 8, the State Department declared that, “the opinions of the United States and Russia regarding a number of Chechen separatists remain at odds”. And this was not an exclusively American position but a collective position of the West. Then, a powerful new blow awaited Moscow: the Russian government's antiterrorist reform plans promising the de facto appointment of governors provoked a squall of criticism, including from US President George Bush. Although Western officials still restrained themselves out of political correctness, observers outside of government service offered much harsher evaluations, one of which was an article by the famous Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who dared to call Putin's Russia a “fascist oil state”.
Moscow defended itself and snarled back as well as it could. The tone of the wrathful comments aimed at “some people in the West” by diplomats, parliamentarians hardened by battles in Strasbourg, political scientists close to the Kremlin, and numerous TV and newspaper commentators increasingly recalled the Cold War. The wall of alienation between Russia and the West continued to grow. The elections in Ukraine put a logical end to singling out “some people in the West”. To all appearances, having become firmly convinced that the West was now a hostile force bent on gradually pushing it out of the post-Soviet space and disposed to infringing on its interests in every possible way, Moscow began to view Ukraine as the arena for a decisive battle that it could not under any circumstances afford to lose. This was because its own fate was at stake: if Viktor Yushchenko won, the hostile West would acquire a tool for pressuring Russia such as it had never had before.
It is highly symbolic that anti-Westernism, as worked out by Russian political scientists and technocrats who descended on Kiev, became the core of the election campaign of Moscow's candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. In general, what was used in Ukraine is now clearer and more comprehensible to us. Many Ukrainians inexperienced in international politics who voted for Yanukovich did so out of fear that if he lost, they would be “sold to the West”, under whose heel they would become like their forebears – Ukrainian captives in the hands of Polish landowners or Turkish infidels.
When a fire brigade of European mediators arrived in Ukraine – the EU high representative for common foreign and security policy, Javier Solana; the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, Aleksander Kwasniewski and Valdus Adamkus; and the secretary general of the OSCE, Yan Kubis, who somehow overshadowed the speaker of the State Duma, Boris Gryzlov – Vladimir Putin himself started sounding pained. During recent visits to Lisbon, Delhi, and Ankara, the Russian president, dispensing with the events in Ukraine, made a number of symbolic generalizations that did nothing to increase the confidence of his Western partners that they shared common values with Russia. A description of strategic partners as “strict uncles in pith helmets” telling people “how they should live” attracted particular attention. And, “if a native objects, they'll punish him by bombing him like they did in Yugoslavia”.
An immediate response to the Russian president came from Colin Powell, the politician who had opened the foreign-policy year with respect to Moscow and also closed it. “We are not competing for or fighting for these territories,” the US secretary of state declared at an OSCE meeting in Sofia, speaking of the countries in the post-Soviet space. “We are not compelling them to choose between East and West. We live in an entirely different world, in which people are striving for freedom and democracy. They want to be able to choose their leaders, their partners, and their friends independently.” Javier Solana noted that the Russian president had gone too far in his opinions.
Moscow's reaction to the OSCE meeting in Sofia was also highly symptomatic. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) declared that Russia was not bound by the conclusions and recommendations made at the meeting. Dmitry Rogozin, the leader of the Motherland (Rodina) faction, playing the role of authoritative Russian accuser, declared that Russia should cease all cooperation with the OSCE: “The OSCE has exhausted its resources; we have to stop financing this organization and withdraw all Russian specialists from it”. In addition, he suggested bringing up “the question of abolishing the OSCE as an organization without any prospects”.
Meanwhile, Western observers are noting that the crisis in relations between Russia and Europe, which became most acute during the Ukrainian elections, is a phenomenon that did not even exist a year ago. “Russian paranoia about American aspirations has been around for a long time, but the paranoia with respect to the EU is something new. In two years, EU–Russian relations have gone from cordial to antagonistic; and as a result, Russian politicians now regard the EU as an enemy encroaching on Russia's interests,” notes Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform. Similar opinions are heard at the opposite pole. “Russia and the EU are on the verge of a crisis of mutual trust, which could lead to an explosion at any moment,” notes political scientist Sergey Markov, who worked actively in the fall for the would-be victory of the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine.
The European Union is already drawing a conclusion from all this. Until recently, there was no burning desire in the EU to admit Ukraine to its ranks in future – from the EU's standpoint, it was a semi-authoritarian, corrupt, and predominantly agricultural country that would need the investment of considerable effort and money to bring it up to common European standards. The former head of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, has said that Ukraine has “the same grounds for admittance to the EU as New Zealand”. But today, this position will undoubtedly be gradually reconsidered.
in «Kommersant»
The main foreign policy result for Russia in the past year was the most serious crisis in relations with the West since the time of the Cold War. Moreover, the relations that suffered most of all were not with America but with the European Union, which until recently seemed almost ideal to Moscow.
The year 2004 can quite rightly be called a “leap year” in Russian foreign policy. When I was discussing its results with an old friend, a Western journalist accredited in Moscow, with “pre-revolutionary experience” covering the period from Leonid Brezhnev to Vladimir Putin, I heard that a lot of people “on the other side” were talking about Russia today. Never before had this self-assured journalistic pundit looked so dispirited and dismayed. What had warmed him for more than a decade of Russia's “democratic development” – a belief in an irreversible strategic rapprochement between Moscow and the West, about which he and his colleagues had enthusiastically written millions of newspaper lines – was melting away before his very eyes. After telling me that one of his colleagues had recently been denied an extension of his accreditation after interviewing a “crazy Chechen” and referring to a draft law making provision for punitive measures against foreigners who showed “disrespect for Russia”, the journalist noted that this had never happened even in Soviet times. Today, this very pragmatic man, who has a family in Moscow and has no intention of going anywhere, is dead serious about preparing himself morally for the fact that he might soon have to switch from being a reporter for a leading Western publication to being an inconspicuous English teacher.
Russia's relations with the West started deteriorating at the very start of the year, bringing to mind the old truism that how you greet the year is how you'll spend it. The new foreign policy year opened with an article by US Secretary of State Colin Powell that appeared in Izvestiya right after the holidays. Written soon after the Russian parliamentary elections in December, it set the critical tone for the dialog between Moscow and the West in the year ahead. In his article, Powell highlighted the main pressure points in relations with Russia – the YUKOS affair; Russian regional and national elections, which raised questions in the US and the West as a whole about democratic standards; and Moscow's policy in Chechnya, as well as with respect to its neighbors, which at the time meant Georgia in particular. Responding to his counterpart “article for article”, the then Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov urged him not to dramatize the situation: “Specific actions will help dispel the clouds that have become noticeable in the United States”.
Alas, the specific actions on which the minister was pinning his hopes one after another turned the overcast into heavy black clouds. Perhaps the only ray of light, or as they say, the silver lining, was September 2, when on Moscow's initiative, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting in connection with the events in Beslan. The result of the discussions was unanimous adoption of a resolution calling on all countries to do everything possible to assist Russia in the war on terrorism. In Moscow, this resolution was regarded as a great moral victory putting an end to the protracted dispute with the West on double standards in world politics and “good and bad terrorists”.
The lowest point in Moscow's relations with the West seemed to have passed and now they were finally looking up. However, the “great moral victory” lasted less than a week; and by September 8, the State Department declared that, “the opinions of the United States and Russia regarding a number of Chechen separatists remain at odds”. And this was not an exclusively American position but a collective position of the West. Then, a powerful new blow awaited Moscow: the Russian government's antiterrorist reform plans promising the de facto appointment of governors provoked a squall of criticism, including from US President George Bush. Although Western officials still restrained themselves out of political correctness, observers outside of government service offered much harsher evaluations, one of which was an article by the famous Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who dared to call Putin's Russia a “fascist oil state”.
Moscow defended itself and snarled back as well as it could. The tone of the wrathful comments aimed at “some people in the West” by diplomats, parliamentarians hardened by battles in Strasbourg, political scientists close to the Kremlin, and numerous TV and newspaper commentators increasingly recalled the Cold War. The wall of alienation between Russia and the West continued to grow. The elections in Ukraine put a logical end to singling out “some people in the West”. To all appearances, having become firmly convinced that the West was now a hostile force bent on gradually pushing it out of the post-Soviet space and disposed to infringing on its interests in every possible way, Moscow began to view Ukraine as the arena for a decisive battle that it could not under any circumstances afford to lose. This was because its own fate was at stake: if Viktor Yushchenko won, the hostile West would acquire a tool for pressuring Russia such as it had never had before.
It is highly symbolic that anti-Westernism, as worked out by Russian political scientists and technocrats who descended on Kiev, became the core of the election campaign of Moscow's candidate, Viktor Yanukovich. In general, what was used in Ukraine is now clearer and more comprehensible to us. Many Ukrainians inexperienced in international politics who voted for Yanukovich did so out of fear that if he lost, they would be “sold to the West”, under whose heel they would become like their forebears – Ukrainian captives in the hands of Polish landowners or Turkish infidels.
When a fire brigade of European mediators arrived in Ukraine – the EU high representative for common foreign and security policy, Javier Solana; the presidents of Poland and Lithuania, Aleksander Kwasniewski and Valdus Adamkus; and the secretary general of the OSCE, Yan Kubis, who somehow overshadowed the speaker of the State Duma, Boris Gryzlov – Vladimir Putin himself started sounding pained. During recent visits to Lisbon, Delhi, and Ankara, the Russian president, dispensing with the events in Ukraine, made a number of symbolic generalizations that did nothing to increase the confidence of his Western partners that they shared common values with Russia. A description of strategic partners as “strict uncles in pith helmets” telling people “how they should live” attracted particular attention. And, “if a native objects, they'll punish him by bombing him like they did in Yugoslavia”.
An immediate response to the Russian president came from Colin Powell, the politician who had opened the foreign-policy year with respect to Moscow and also closed it. “We are not competing for or fighting for these territories,” the US secretary of state declared at an OSCE meeting in Sofia, speaking of the countries in the post-Soviet space. “We are not compelling them to choose between East and West. We live in an entirely different world, in which people are striving for freedom and democracy. They want to be able to choose their leaders, their partners, and their friends independently.” Javier Solana noted that the Russian president had gone too far in his opinions.
Moscow's reaction to the OSCE meeting in Sofia was also highly symptomatic. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MID) declared that Russia was not bound by the conclusions and recommendations made at the meeting. Dmitry Rogozin, the leader of the Motherland (Rodina) faction, playing the role of authoritative Russian accuser, declared that Russia should cease all cooperation with the OSCE: “The OSCE has exhausted its resources; we have to stop financing this organization and withdraw all Russian specialists from it”. In addition, he suggested bringing up “the question of abolishing the OSCE as an organization without any prospects”.
Meanwhile, Western observers are noting that the crisis in relations between Russia and Europe, which became most acute during the Ukrainian elections, is a phenomenon that did not even exist a year ago. “Russian paranoia about American aspirations has been around for a long time, but the paranoia with respect to the EU is something new. In two years, EU–Russian relations have gone from cordial to antagonistic; and as a result, Russian politicians now regard the EU as an enemy encroaching on Russia's interests,” notes Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform. Similar opinions are heard at the opposite pole. “Russia and the EU are on the verge of a crisis of mutual trust, which could lead to an explosion at any moment,” notes political scientist Sergey Markov, who worked actively in the fall for the would-be victory of the pro-Russian candidate in Ukraine.
The European Union is already drawing a conclusion from all this. Until recently, there was no burning desire in the EU to admit Ukraine to its ranks in future – from the EU's standpoint, it was a semi-authoritarian, corrupt, and predominantly agricultural country that would need the investment of considerable effort and money to bring it up to common European standards. The former head of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, has said that Ukraine has “the same grounds for admittance to the EU as New Zealand”. But today, this position will undoubtedly be gradually reconsidered.
