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CIAO DATE: 07/04
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
Russia in the New Geopolitical Context
N. Narochnitshaia *
Any meaningful analysis of the geopolitical, legal–international and ideological aspects of the new political age can be obtained solely outside the formulas offered by the political–semantic technologies of global governance. At the same time anybody bold enough to disregard the “sacred cows” of the liberals of fin de sciecle will be running a danger of being accused of violating political correctness. One should admit, however, that the demagogic deliberations about the rivalry between totalitarianism and democracy and about globalization smack too much of the overused Marxist thesis about “transfer from capitalism to communism being the main content of our age.” The world is being divided once more before our eyes. One has to admit that the process does not reflect at all the ideological struggle of the 20th century; indeed, even during the Cold War it never completely dominated international relations.
Current developments confirm that the confrontation between the communist and liberal historical projects has embraced the stereotypes born by the earlier discussions inside Christian civilization. The “Eastern question” of Nikolai Danilevskiy and the Russia and Europe dilemma have become organic elements of the “great schism” of the post–modernist era in which the ideas stemming from the same root, the Enlightenment, were competing among themselves. Both communism and liberalism, first cousins of the philosophy of progress, are branded with universalism. They both identify their aims with universal ideals. They shared the same aim even if employed different means: creating a single uniform global super–society and reducing the world to a single pattern devoid of religious or national features. This was how “ideological struggle” became an independent foreign policy phenomenon that, in the latter half of the 20th century, pushed aside considerations of continuity.
The latter became obvious as soon as Russia lost, for a certain period, its great power nature and the role of a geopolitical and spiritual counterbalance of the entire West destined to guard the world's variety. Arnold Toynbee, the patriarch of Anglo–Saxon historical thought, spoke with a good deal of insight about the Western civilization’s universalist ambitions. He wrote that it aimed at uniting entire mankind into a single society and controlling everything on land, in the air and in the water that could be of any use for contemporary Western technologies. He added that what the West was doing to Islam he was doing at the same time to all existing civilizations: Christian Orthodox, Hindu and Far Eastern world. 1
Eurasia is being restructured in tune with the painfully familiar geopolitical and spiritual ideas of the Old World’s imperial past. By joining NATO Hungary and the Czech Republic do not distance themselves from communism. While moving away from Russia, a totally alien country, they come back to the “post–Habsburg” expanse. Catholic Poland sympathizes with the Chechen bandits, which is hardly amazing. Adam Mickiewicz, an idol of all Poles, “died away” (to borrow an expression from Aleksandr Herzen) somewhere in Constantinople where he went “to knock together a Polish Cossack legion” to join “civilized” Turkey against “barbarian” Russia in the Crimean War.
In fact, the Baltic–Black Sea salient (a project dating back to the 16th century) still lacks an important link – Byelorussia. It was designed to keep Russia a landlocked country. Today, like 100 years ago, Kosovo, the only land military route to Thessaloniki, connects Western Europe with the Straits area. Pope John Paul II who called the Ukrainians the only descendants of St. Vladimir and who is persistently setting up Catholic dioceses in Russia is acting as an heir to Pope Urban VII who responded to the Union of Brest of 1596 with: “Oh, my Rusins! I hope to reach out to the East through you!” Finally, the triumphant Anglo–Saxons who entered Kabul and Mesopotamia as peacemakers have realized the boldest dreams of Disraeli and Palmerston. Lord Judd, a comic imitator of the latter, is setting up so–called Chechen committees at the Council of Europe to emulate his idol who set up Circassian committees at the Paris Congress of 1856.
Control over natural resources and geostrategic and naval routes leading to them is the main reason why the world is carved up and the wars are waged. Russia is being gradually pushed to the Eurasian north–east, away from the major approaches (the Mediterranean–Black Sea–Caspian region) to major natural treasures. This area is the north boundary of the World Energy Ellipse that includes the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran, the Persian Gulf, northern Iran, the Russian Northern Caucasus, and Afghanistan. The world is divided in an effort to push Russia away from one of the key communication centers of the contemporary world in which resources are the key to everything.
The southern salient begins in the Mediterranean and the Straits. It is designed to link together the Anglo–Saxon positions in Turkey through the Persian Gulf and Pakistan and reach Afghanistan. For a while the latter remained outside Anglo–Saxon control while Iraq was a stumbling block. Both were destroyed. Time is running out for Iran.
We should say that the northern boundary of the energy ellipse runs close to Ukraine, Moldova, the Northern and Southern Caucasus. This explains why the territories between the Baltic and the Black Sea are actively drawn into the Atlantic orbit, while Byelorussia, so far a missing part of the same picture, is being cruelly persecuted. We are watching how Russia is squeezed out of the Crimea, how the riot in Chechnia is being presented as a national–liberation movement and how Georgia is pulled into the American orbit.
Washington’s Eurasian strategy aims at a total control over the energy ellipse; the United States are working toward depriving all potential and the already existing centers of forces located much closer to the natural riches of any role in regulating their use.
The Chechen conflict serves both aims – for this reason a banal criminal riot was transformed into an instrument of the world project. It is only part of it that relates to the ideas of radical non–traditional Islam and its terrorist centers. At all times the Islamic expansionist impulse was guided by a non–Islamic mind that channeled it in the desirable geopolitical directions.
This is not new. Back in 1835, a British ship was caught off the Caucasian shores unloading weapons for the Circassians. Similar things happened later, in the 1950s. One can expect an attempt to revive the CENTO Pact under a fashionable name, like a Stability Pact. CENTO developed from the Baghdad Pact. This is needed to tie together all the strategically important points along the Mediterranean–Asia Minor–Persian Gulf–Pakistan line. This can be done if Iraq and Kuwait–Mesopotamia are made part of the same line. They are the cherished prize Britain was seeking in World War I (the Sykes–Picot agreement), the territory on that it repeatedly set up its bases and stationed its troops. To gain control over the huge Eurasian ellipse, the “fourth Rome” should destroy Iraq, the Carthage of the Persian Gulf.
The incantations about the end of the Cold War cause skepticism, nothing else. Serious Western researchers have already admitted that its history was greatly distorted and that these distortions came and went, like a tide, both in the anti–Soviet and anti–American contexts. Finally, we have become familiar with the earlier concealed “British” version according to which the Cold War was designated to “dissolve” Germany. The British “carefully” transferred this country to America, together with their anti–Germanic impulse. It was they who taught the Americans the classical vision of the European world order. 2
I am resolved to abandon as an anachronism the current vision of the Cold War as an unprecedented period more horrible than anything mankind has known so far.
International relations of the 20th century, including the present era of democracy, differ from the imperial past in two ways: unprecedented ideologization and far from aristocratic rudeness. There is another new feature: false hopes of the “demos” convinced of its importance while its fate is determined by the oligarchs. Social psychology reflects the general longing for an ideal model, for faith in progress and the kingdom of God. Mankind that has forgotten about peace with God and about its own sins is looking forward to a horizontal peace between peoples and states. Having failed to reach it, in an effort to cleanse itself of responsibility for the sins of the world mankind starts looking for a scapegoat. It is for some time now that “happiness of mankind,” “eternal peace,” and democracy have replaced national interests as a foreign policy aim therefore the opponent is presented as an enemy of mankind. The problems and contradictions that plagued international relations during the Cold War period copy the geopolitical constants and the historical–cultural preferences of the past.
During the era of global rivalry, when liberté of the Third Estate competes with egalité of the proletarians the American presidents and the Soviet general secretaries brought up on mass culture rather than Mozart are far removed from the ethics of Prince Metternich and Prince Gorchakov with his “la Russie se recuelle.” The Korean War, the American invasion of Cuba or Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia offered nothing new to international relations yet they were accompanied by an unprecedented effort to identify national interests with the moral and ethical canons of the universe. This turned an opponent into the worst enemy of mankind and a fiend. Both creations of the philosophy of progress point to “happiness of mankind,” “democracy” or “proletarian internationalism” as the main foreign policy aims rather than national interests. This is very much in line with Wilsonianism and Lenin’s foreign policy principles that are very close to each other where their philosophies are concerned. As a result, in the 20th century the continuing geopolitical projects are contemplated within the Manichaen dichotomy of the good and evil.
The present “the only correct and therefore omnipotent” liberal teaching is going on together with the theologization of its historical project. The global super–community, something that Marxism preached and liberalism is still preaching smacks of an idea of a wandering metaphysical Rome (translatio imperii) that travels from the West to the East and back. Marxism and liberalism share many common features and condemn the aliens in a similar way: “While history is forging ahead to the triumph of market and democracy certain countries remain on the side of the highway.” 3 Here once more I am forced to offer a politically incorrect remark: today we see that all the constants of the centuries–long rivalry over the seacoast and raw materials are still present together with those traits of the Cold War that made it very close to the religious wars.
This is manifested by a return to the pre–Westphalian legal world outlook in which sovereignty and the classical international laws had no force.
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 ended religious wars, that is, the wars waged for ideological reasons. From that time on it was the state that was the subject of international law rather than an axiological system or a type of state. The Enlightenment and West European liberal democracy made the idea of the “sovereignty of people” their basic postulate. International public law relies on the principle of absolute sovereignty of a nation–state that cannot be divided into classes depending on the state’s degree of civilization.
Chapter I of the UN Charter dealing with the purposes of the United Nations betrays no preference to any of the religious–philosophical or socio–political system and does not mention democracy at all. It insists on sovereign equality of all varied subjects of international relations, that is, of republics, monarchies, religious communities (Christian, Islamic or Hindu alike), and liberal–democratic societies of the Western type. From the point of view of classical international law and the UN Charter they are absolutely equal and none of them can be described as progressive or backward.
Kant in his time said that the “war of retribution” (bellum punitivum) among states was unacceptable precisely because their relations were not of those between a superior and subordinates. Back in the 1980s, the thesis now completely refuted by the globalists dominated international relations: while state sovereignty is regarded as the basic principle an intervention designed to change not only the object’s behavior on the international arena but also influence its domestic policies should be regarded as contradicting the laws. This comment was offered by prominent political scientist S. Hoffman. 4
It was for a long time that the present challenge to the principles of sovereignty has been prepared. The Council of Europe was set up as a structure parallel to the UN, the “security organization.” Its Charter and other documents proceed from the standards of uniform civil society and totally ignore such concepts as sovereignty and non–interference. The Council of Europe is a purely ideological organization, a fourth, Liberal, International of sorts resolved to issue “maturity certificates.” It was the first to replace international law as a legal system applied to nations by the world law in which an individual rather than a state is regarded as its subject. This individual is convinced that “ubi bene, ibi patria” and relies on the world governance to protect his rights. It is in this context that the human rights issue is discussed while the philosophies of atheist liberalism and a religious society treat them in different ways.
It is for a long time now that theoretical quest in the field of “relative” or “functional” sovereignty has been exploited to provide a political justification for the use of force. The new conceptions have supplied the West with the right to protect human rights in the countries that are allegedly violating them. They resort to humanitarian interventions all the more willingly since the UN Charter banned wars. Trailblazer lawyers regret that international law regulates relationships among states rather than individuals and is designed to protect order rather than justice because it relies on sovereignty. At the same time (say they) “world law” as a new form of law is much better suited to serve the world community of people rather than that of states. 5
If preserved this trend may completely destroy the international public law system and bring the era of nation–states to the end. So far, smaller countries that have no nuclear weapons are at the mercy of the strong powers; treaties and agreements become protocols of intentions opened with “rebus sic standibus.”
The UN has to make a decision. In his address to the Federal Assembly President Putin described its continued functioning as the main decision–making mechanism as one of the priorities.
If one regards the Security Council’s approval of lifting the sanctions against Iraq as “returning the conflict into its legal context and restoring the UN role” one has to admit that it was the UN that created the crisis in the first place. There are attempts at destroying its authority and those behind them have their reasons. They are rooted in the post–war international legal mechanism’s failure to prevent a deliberately created conflict and a military destruction of Iraq (a regional structural element of the bipolar world of the past), which the U.S. needed to redivide the world. This is not a UN crisis – this is a crisis of the world system.
Apprehensive of veto the United States had to remove from voting their draft resolution that would sanction an aggression. This can hardly be described as a crisis. This rather demonstrated that there were still rudiments of the legitimacy era when all violations of international law were qualified as such and the UN principles and role were valid. It was the parity of forces that kept the sides within certain limits.
The philosophy of international law was crippled as soon as the conception about the states of first and second order had been gradually accepted. It is for the self–proclaimed arbiters of the first order to classify the rest; the “model” states are allowed to wield weapons to punish the states of the second order. In the past the Christian as well as the magnanimous liberal thought condemned social Darwinism that manifested itself in the concept of survival struggle among the states. The ethos of a warfare in which a “superior” nation removes the non–historical nations from the stage as well as the Deutschland über alles slogan were formulated by the German historian von Treitschke in the Bismarck era.
The very idea that the state that threatens nobody and attacks nobody should be disarmed by force points to the crisis of legal consciousness and sovereign equality. The UN Charter bans the use of force while the refusal to use force as well as sovereign equality of all subjects of international law belong to the key principles of international law. They open the UN Charter and all textbooks of international public law. In his statement of 20 March, UN Secretary–General Kofi Annan carefully avoided any condemnation of the aggression.
“Perhaps if we had persevered a little longer. . . the world could have taken action to solve this problem by a collective decision, endowing it with greater legitimacy, and therefore command wider support, than is now the case.” From this it follows that had a greater number of states supported the action the breach of law would have become more legitimate. Is it the UN task to endow breaches of law with legitimacy?
Time has come to decide whether the UN serves a certain order imposed on the world by strong powers or to formulate certain universally applied norms and principles of an international legal nature binding on the weak and strong alike. Otherwise the latter’s actions would not be recognized as legal even if it would be impossible to oppose them. In both cases the UN serves “a decision–making mechanism” but its impact on the world’s future will be different.
So far the United States has not become completely disenchanted with the UN therefore one can expect that it will try to alter the Charter. The principle of unanimity of the great powers in the Security Council will be the main target of attack. In fact, it was the stumbling block back in 1944–1945 when the draft UN Charter was being discussed. The same principle nearly failed the Dumbarton Oaks conference.
In 1944–1945, while discussing with the Litvinov commission various drafts the United States sought to replace the key sovereignty principles with a global governance mechanism endowed with the right to identify “threats to international peace” contained in the state’s domestic developments and to issue verdicts about “faulty domestic policies” that should fit certain standards. Its decisions should become binding even for the non–members. 6 Washington and London opposed the principle of the permanent members’ concurring votes and insisted on a procedure that would exclude the sides in a conflict from a discussion of their case even if it involved the permanent members. (To clarify the point let us imagine a situation when Russia conflicted with a neighboring state that had given asylum to Chechen bandits while the Security Council passed a decision, without Russia’s participation, on its enforced disarmament.)
The Soviet Union insisted on the member–states retaining the right to vote in all circumstances. At a much later stage the UN Charter acquired an ambiguous clause: if the contradictions among the subjects are describes as a “dispute” to be discussed by the Security Council the SC permanent member that is a side in the dispute loses its vote. If the contradictions are described as a “situation” permanent members retain their right to vote and to veto. Since all sides in the contradiction should agree on its description as a “dispute” or a “situation” in writing the permanent member can always prefer a “situation” to retain its right to vote and to veto.
The directives to the Soviet delegation at the Dumbarton Oaks conference declassified in the 1990s contained no illusions: “The cases and situations in which the organization could be used in our interests are few while America has many chances to use it in certain cases to promote its interests. . . We should do our best to prevent the use of the organization against our interests. This is a measure of our concessions at the coming negotiations.” 7 Today the task of preserving the UN role and the principle of the permanent members’ concurring vote is as urgent as ever.
The disputes about globalization being a progressive phenomenon or serving to destroy the variety of the world are going in the left Trotskyite and in the right Christian context. Nothing has been said yet about the religious–philosophical aspects of this phenomenon.
The world is too small, the flows of cultures, people, money, and resources cannot be stopped. This is what has caused natural globalization. It has nothing to do with the ideology of globalism that is imposed on the world. It is a legacy of ideological struggle that serves a banner of the worldwide liberal supra–community under American “global governance.” The very fact that the West and the post–communist world have embraced the ideology of globalism is a natural result of the notorious ideological struggle in which two kindred ideas of a uniform world competed against each other for global governance. The ideology of globalism is being imposed on the world with a nearly totalitarian fervor while it is invading international law. This is an outcome of the triumph of liberal over communist universality.
Kissinger has written about the conception with which America entered World War I and the world scene in general as a universal and basic harmony so far unrecognized by mankind. Today, in the rays of the first “new thinking” and the “democratic restructuring” of the world system the imperial thought of the Old World is growing dimmer. At the Paris Conference of 1919, President Wilson was holding forth about America’s unprecedented fate of realizing its predestination by saving the world. According to the students of American messianism and its religious and philosophical roots it was Wilson who brought together the liberal ideas, the Calvinist pathos of the Anglo–Saxon Puritans, the doctrines of the Redeemer Nation and the Manifest Destiny. 8 They formulated America’s moral right to expansion and its right to rule “savages and evil nations” (Senator Albert Beveridge). At all times there was Calvinist confidence that the Almighty will reward those worthy of His mercy here, on Earth. There was firm confidence that success and wealth on Earth were the sure signs of being elected and marked for Salvation. It is hard to correlate this with “Blessed are the poor in spirit; Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness.”
It seems that we are witnessing how the motto on the U.S. state seal that says Novus Ordo Seclorum is developing from a mystic aim into a synthesis of Theodore Roosevelt’s imperialism and Wilson’s messianism. “We rule you in your own interests. Those who refuse to recognize this are evil” since “the United States represents the lofty principles of political order, much superior to all other political orders. New American imperialism serves a lofty moral aim.” Export of behavioral cliches and stereotypes that can be described as ideological programming is one of the key requirements of global governance of nations split into free individuals. In all countries common people are duped with the pseudo–liberal idea of the cause of the Fatherland being alien to them while an illusion of being part of the world oligarchy is planted in the minds of national elites.
The non–Western world, however, interprets the sermon about the right to deal preventive blows at states with different, allegedly aggressive, types of government in the name of universal democracy as a failure of Western values. It was for a century that the West has been proud with them thus gaining geopolitical and economic points. The communist–universalist alternative of the past is no longer attractive. The non-Western world is free to choose – it has chosen “terrorism.”
Here again I have to leave the limits of political correctness to say that terrorism may become, and is becoming, the world’s structural component. It is one of the results of globalization or, rather, of global governance. The latter proved unable to protect its own citizens – never before security had been so fragile as now despite impressive military might invincible in traditional terms.
The Christian world cannot respond in kind not only because liberalism has lost its moral aims outside earthly existence and its ability to die for ideals. No Christian can accept, for moral reasons, murder of innocent people as a form of retribution for what a state or a terrorist group did. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries all terrorists in the Christian world were militant atheists, revolutionaries or Trotskyites. The terrorists of extremist dissident Islamic movements regard themselves as the “weapon of God.” They look at their victims as inanimate objects rather than living creatures, to which they should address their demands. Christian culture, on the other hand, insists on people’s equality in the eyes of God; it is therefore impossible to transform man into a means.
Talking of international terrorism as a formula of world politics one should say that the term is deliberately applied to highly varied phenomena while the “struggle against international terrorism” developed into a political doctrine. It was discovered to be a handy diplomatic and political instrument to be used within the international legal context. One should say that the same “terrorist centers” train people to fight the United States and Russia. One should bear in mind, however, that the terrorists pursue different aims in relation to both countries. “Terrorism” wants the United States to stop interfering with the domestic affairs of other worlds. The incentives of the United States and the “terrorists” constitute a novel phenomenon with frightening aims and no less frightening methods.
The aims the Chechen criminal bands, or “terrorists” are pursuing against Russia were not brought to life by any of the new phenomena in world politics. They are pursuing geopolitical goals of the past: detaching the Caucasus from the Stavropol and Krasnodar Territory (with the latter marked in their maps as “the Islamic republic of Adyghea”). “Terrorism” is a method employed to seize by force the territories that Russia defended from the Ottoman Empire and Persia acting at Britain’s instigation.
The United States is fighting for its imperial interests and “global governance” while Russia is fighting for its continued existence. Russia’s ally fails to demonstrate due solidarity with Russia when it comes to its territorial integrity and its spheres of influence stretching from the Balkans to the Black Sea. In fact, “anti–terrorist solidarity” is of an ad hoc nature.
Protest develops into terrorism when the factor of force comes to the fore while military technology achieves fantastic heights. Conventional armaments have reached the unprecedentedly high qualitative level while the means of their use (electronic homing devices and delivery methods) have radically changed both strategy and tactics. Conventional weapons are following the road earlier traversed by nuclear weapons that have already reached the stage when their destructive potential made them inapplicable. It was missile defense that served the containment purposes. In the same way, it is few countries with latest anti–air complexes that can oppose America’s latest conventional armament systems tested in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
This has already changed the very idea of war. The attacking armies are only nominally involved while the most selfless opposition of an even large army has become technically impossible. Solders are no longer expected to fight at close range: computers are doing the fighting against an army unable to beat off strikes of high–tech conventional weapons. What the army can do is to find a shelter against them – something that cannot be done in a nuclear attack. In this way, contrary to what pseudo–humanitarian rhetoric insists on, the new methods of a “conventional” warfare are aimed mainly at the civilians.
Indeed, in Yugoslavia life–support systems of large cities were consistently destroyed. The Serbian army lost about 100 people while the losses among the non–combatants were much larger: several thousands of adults and over 400 children. What did inspire those who took hostages in a Moscow theater?
Urban industrial civilization surrenders when water supply and sewage in megalopolises fail and not when the army is defeated. The authorities are much more susceptible to yield to blackmailing with humanitarian interventions and terrorist acts when the liberal conscience of the “citizens of the world” alien to the fates of the Fatherland fails to identify them with the nation, its past, and its army. This conscience is a product of globalism and the idea of an open civil society.
The new world has put on the agenda a host of issues, two of which are the ever–topical historical and philosophic dilemmas: “Russia and Europe” and “Russia together with America or against it.” There are several new problems such as “America and the rest of the world” and “America and Europe.” It is for Russia itself to find its place in the complex intertwining that has already produced a system of international relations, no matter how incomplete. An independent decision alone can restore to Russia its system–forming function.
The first decade of the “unipolar” world produced an unprecedentedly high wave of anti–Americanism in Europe and a crisis in NATO. So far, Europe has failed to demonstrate that it possesses the necessary willpower and an ability to formulate a new cultural–historical and political alternative to what has already created global governance to which it fell victim together with the others.
The re–division of the world that is taking place before our eyes has a geopolitical script of its own and is reshuffling international political forces into new patterns. As soon as Russia finally loses all acquisitions of Peter the Great’s that have been troubling Europe since the 18th century “the decline of Europe” will become a fact. It will lose its role of a center of historical events of world importance. For a short while Old Europe was aware that as a result its own role and its value as Washington’s ally would decline. Europe has still to come to an inevitable conclusion that Russia’s great power role does not infringe on its own role in world politics. In fact, its role will diminish together with that of Russia’s.
Meanwhile Old Europe is losing its meaning as a historical project. This looks strange against the impressive perspectives of the EU territorial expansion and the role of the Euro as the second world reserve currency. The EU, however, is nothing more than a huge “organizational project” not bold enough to include in the European convention aims and values outside its limited earthly existence. Being purely materialistic and rational it is one of the most boring samples of what liberal planning can do. It confirms what conservative–minded philosopher of law Schmitt said, not without a great deal of sarcasm, in the 1920s about similarity between the philosophical paradigms of Marxist and liberal economic doctrines: “The pictures of the world cherished by a contemporary industrialist and industrial proletariat can be taken for twins. . . The industrialist has no other ideal except that cherished by Lenin, viz. ‘electrification of the globe.’ Their disagreements are limited to the methods.” 9
The world and Europe as reflected in the minds of left Social–Democrats united into a new world–wide fraternité is nothing more than a huge economic venture in need of optimization to be able to satisfy the growing requirements of primitive individuals. In the past, Solana, D’Alema and Fischer being pink social#8211;democrats, red communists or ultra–lefts belonged to the cosmopolitan left Liberal set that eagerly embraced the idea of global super–community.
The new configurations will be of no use for Europe if it losses its spiritual destination that moved it at the times when it produced great powers and great cultures. Today, they are serving global governance and Washington’s Eurasian project.
One cannot take seriously the talks about a new Entente yet the new challenges and temptations of the material paradise force us to give a fresh look to the “Russia and Europe” dilemma that Europe has not yet resolved for itself. In the same way we should cast another glance at the sad and instructive experience of building a material paradise that killed the Orthodox empire. Russia's decline has demonstrated that neither the territory nor adequate economy nor even nuclear arms can stop the country from slipping to the margins of history: matter deprived of spirit is dead. The philosophy of hedonistic and Narcissist libertarianism challenges all great national and spiritual traditions and demands that these traditions be removed so that history be deprived of any moral purpose.
Liberalism that has reached the stage of degradation and has lost its moral aims and purposes is as alien to Europe as it is alien to Orthodox Russia. If both of them follow this road they will find themselves robbed of their rights to historical initiatives and pushed to the world's backyard. This will mean not only the end of liberal history according to Fukuyama but also the decline of Europe according to Spengler. Both of them, though, may acquire the badly needed historical impulse through their cultural and historical cooperation.
Emmanuel Todd, prominent French academic and public figure, began his widely acclaimed book with: “The United States of America are developing into a problem for the rest of the world” and concluded: “The ‘global’ American power has entered the stage of decline of its military, economic, and ideological might.” 10
In the short–term perspective, however, one should accept America and its attempts at global governance with new ideological and legal parameters as new geopolitical reality in which Russia, Europe, and America for that matter have still to find their places. One can see that the structure that Washington is building up is still shaky. To invest it with stability and to uproot the regional configurations of the bipolar past, America resorts to annual hysterics over conflicts of secondary importance. This is needed to occupy another region and to make use of the scare of “terrorism” to make permanent worldwide warfare an institution of sorts.
Wobbly “global governance” calls for additional efforts to reach stability. Any genuine system of international relations even if based on a single key element demonstrates an ability to regulate and reproduce itself. The war on Iraq launched in disregard of the German#8211;French protests, has clearly shown that Washington would rather control world resources and the military marine routes leading to them than remain loyal to its obsolete allied obligations. The trans–Atlantic Yalta platform of interests survived the Soviet Union’s disintegration; it was not strengthened by the movement to Belgrade and it split in Baghdad. This will probably become the starting point of a new stage of clash of civilizations that will offer new roles to old players.
There is a shared opinion in the expert community that Europe will look for new forms of opposing America’s Eurasian strategy as the latter will step up its expansionism. It depends mainly on Russia whether the first decade of the 21st century will produce a more or less equilateral triangle of the centers of force (America–Europe–Russia) as an indispensable element of the new geopolitical arrangement. A strong European role requires strong Asian politics.
It seems that Russia is gradually restoring its traditional multisided strategy – something that befits a great Eurasian power. In fact, this policy is part of Russia's natural historical mission of balancing the West and the East. As soon as Russia abandoned it the world set in motion; civilizations started competing among themselves in an effort to grasp its heritage and to gain toeholds in the key regions. It was Petr Stolypin who said the following: “We inherited our double–headed eagle from Byzantium. One–headed eagles are equally powerful yet if we cut off the East–oriented head of our eagle it will bleed to death.”
Russia’s balancing role that the world needs very much can be restored: Russia has not lost its strategically central position in Eurasia. It is even much more important than the naive Sakharov–Gorbachev school believed it to be and much more resilient than Brzezinski imagined it to be. His “grand chess match” was meant to do away with this role. One should bear in mind, however, that Russia will remain the political axis of the Eurasian geopolitical expanse as long as it opposes the efforts to deprive it of an access to the Baltic and the Black seas.
Russia should not be late – it should find its place in each of the system–forming or large structures. It should not afford any of its partners to use it in an opposition between America and Islam, between China and America, between India and Pakistan, and between Europe and America. The unipolar world is a temporary phenomenon of the short period of transition from the bipolar to a multipolar system. Its outlines can be seen today. China has made spectacular progress in space research while the Islamic world will obviously continue developing and consolidating.
Russia should not choose between “together with America against Europe” and “together with Europe against America.” There is no choice between confrontation and eternal friendship in international relations. Official anti–Americanism today would be nothing but bluff, something like the commotion around the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. While pursuing strategic aims of its own that do not coincide with those of the United States Russia needs good working relations with Washington. In his time George Kennan described the relations between the two countries in the following way: they should be reasonably good and reasonably distant. Translated into present realities this means: shared interests and no ideology.
In its time Prince Gorchakov’s “la Russie se recuelle” (Russia is concentrating) produced a much greater impression that Nikita Khrushchev’s antics. In this connection we should bear in mind that “strategic partnership” implies “strategic rivalry.”
Endnotes
Note *: Natalia Narochnitskaia, deputy of the State Duma; Doctor of Sciences (History). Back
Note 1: A.G. Toynbee, Vizantiiskoe nasledie Rossii. Tsivilizatsia pered sudom istorii, Moscow, 1996, p. 116. Back
Note 2: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, Oxford, 1997; The Long Peace, Inquiries into the History of Cold War, N.Y.&-;Oxford, 1982; Ann Deighton, The Impossible Peace: Britain, the Division of Germany and the Origins of the Cold War, Oxford, 1990. Back
Note 3: Condoleezza Rice, “Vo imia natsional’nykh interesov,” Pro et Contra, Moscow, Spring 2000, p. 118. Back
Note 4: Intervention in World Politics. Ed. By Hedley Bull, Oxford, 1984, pp. 10–11, 95. Back
Note 5: International Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 3, July 1999, p. 547. Back
Note 6: RF Foreign Policy Archives, Record Group 0512, Inventory 4, Document 301, File 31, pp. 11–13, 16, 21, 23, 26–29. Back
Note 7: RF Foreign Policy Archives, Record Group 0512, Inventory 4, Document 299, File 37, pp. 39–43. Back
Note 8: Claude G. Bowers, Beveridge and the Progressive Era, N.Y., 1932; E.L. Tuverson, Redeemer Nation. The Idea of America’s Millennial Role, Chicago, 1980. Back
Note 9: K. Schmitt, Politicheskaia teologia, Moscow, 2000, p. 116. Back
Note 10: Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire. Essai sur la decomposition du système americain, Paris, 2002. Back