Journal of International Relations and Development

Volume 2, No. 3 (September 1999)

 

Representation and State Action: The Case of Russia’s Place in Europe
By Iver B. Neumann _*

 

Introduction

One of the main achievements of International Relations (IR) theory in the 1990s has been the production of a body of work illuminating the prerequisites for political action. Doing away with the ready-made assumptions of traditionalist scholarship, it has been demonstrated how representations of key concepts (e.g. sovereignty), situations (e.g. crises) and agencies (e.g. Russia) must be understood not only as a by-product of ready-made assumptions about the state system and the national interest, but have to be understood in their historicity. One of the loci of this new production of knowledge has been the so-called Copenhagen School. The work of scholars with an affinity to the University of Minnesota, marked among other things by their use of the marker ‘state interest’ to capture their key focus of interest, has been another. In David Campbell’s recent (1998) overview of post-positivist scholarship, both groups of scholars are referred to as being wedged between post-structuralist and constructivist approaches (Campbell 1998). If the author is not entirely mistaken, the idea behind this panel ₁ is for these two groups to feel one another out. My contribution to this exercise is to present an overview of my previous work on the representations of Russia in the European order — first Russian representations of Europe and their place within it, secondly European representations of ditto — and then to speculate about how this material can be systematically used for a better understanding of state action (or, if one likes, Russian foreign policy). The paper, then, is a response to the call for illuminating state action. Similar calls for illumination of the nexus between representation and policy have also recently been made from within the Copenhagen School (Hansen 1998).

The notion that geographical Europe stretches from the Atlantic to the Ural is one of the main constructions of current European-Russian discourse. What is often not realised is how this construction started as part of Peter the Great’s campaign to have Russia accepted as part of Europe. In order to take care of the geographical side of things and to do away with the ancient idea that Europe went only as far as the Tana, that is the River Don, he enlisted the help of the leading Russian geographer of his day, Vassiliy Tatishchev:

Tatishchev, a tireless partisan of Peter’s reforms, had been charged by the tsar with writing a full geographical description of the ‘new’ reformed Russia. [The solution to the Europe-Asia border problem] was formulated by Tatishchev himself. Rejecting the various river routes, he asserted that ‘it would be much more appropriate and true to the natural configuration’ of the landscape to take the Ural mountain range ... as the principal segment of the Europe-Asia boundary ... (Bassin 1991:6).

 

Russia/Europe

Russian discourse about Europe over the past ten years has been particularly contested, tied up as it was first in the demise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, and then in the question of the place of the new Russia in the post-Cold War world. Today, with the four broad nationalist, communist, centrist and Westernising political tendencies congealing and beginning to find working relations in formal arenas as well as informally, the distance between the different views has perhaps shrunk and a new dominant version begun to be authorised. There remain nationalists who see ‘Europe’ as a concept wholly distinct from Russia, from which one should wall oneself off in as many ways as possible. There also remain Westernisers who want to see no walls at all, with Russia being just another European country, as fast as possible. Thus, the matrix of the discourse of the late 1980s and early 1990s may be said to be intact. And yet, the major development since the passing of the ‘European moment’ or the ‘romantic period’ in Russia some time in the autumn of 1992 has been a contraction of the scope of discourse around the ideas of Russia as a great power, with an ambiguous status as a Eurasian state. The change in former foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev’s statements admirably mirrored this shift. Starting from a high-strung Westernisation, in 1993 it veered in the direction of worrying about the construction of a new political boundary in Europe along the border between the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the states bent on applying for memberships of the European Communities and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and then onto a stress on how Europe was failing to take Russia’s status as a European great power into consideration, thereby cordoning itself off by a cultural boundary. Here we have an object lesson in how a foreign minister tries to play the cultural broker, mediating between the dominant social construction of the outside world prevalent in the country he is said to represent on the one hand, and the outside world’s social constructions of that country on the other. When Kozyrev was finally removed, it mirrored the further shift in discourse on Europe, towards an ever-increasing stress on specific Russian conditions (the need for economic protectionism, the need for strong leadership rather than a strong Rechtsstaat, the need to clamp down on Chechnya in order to maintain a unitary Russian state). That this removal followed hot on the heels of an electoral score for the Communist Party which stressed the need for a Russia-centred, Eurasian and geopolitical approach to foreign policy, was of course no coincidence. The idea of Russia as a world unto itself, having its very own geographical and cultural space walled up between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, is rapidly being authorised by the speeches and statements of foreign ministers and intellectuals, as well as by voter behaviour. It is, again, no coincidence that the slogan of ‘Eurasia’ was the only one to be used by both sides whose recent ten-year struggle forms the immediate trajectory out of which today’s situation has emerged.

Westernisers

Part and parcel of what triggered the ongoing geopolitical shift in Europe was Gorbachev raising precisely this issue of the Soviet Union’s relations with Europe. In his longest text on perestroyka, he wrote:

Some in the West are trying to ‘exclude’ the Soviet Union from Europe. Now and then, as if inadvertently, they equate ‘Europe’ with ‘Western Europe’. Such ploys, however, cannot change the geographic and historical realities. Russia’s trade, cultural and political links with other European nations and states have deep roots in history. We are Europeans. Old Russia was united with Europe by Christianity [...]. The history of Russia is an organic part of the great European history (Gorbachev 1988:190).

This was a call to start relativising boundaries of all kinds (how far, however, was not specified). For years, the Russian debate about how to relate to the West in general, and Europe in particular, had been intermeshed with the question of Russian identity. Indeed — and this is a proposal that the author will try to substantiate empirically below — the forging of Russian identity by a process of internal integration has its twin in the external differentiation of Russia from Europe.

The Russian debate about Europe which evolved following Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost pitted Westernisers against nationalists in a moment of struggle which presumably configured Russian discourse for years to come. Liberal Westernisers emerged both out of the dissident movement and out of Gorbachev’s entourage of reform Communists. The framework within which Europe was seen by these aspiring liberals was a cultural one, with a stress on humanist ideas about the integrity of the individual and the limited rights of the state vis-à-vis the citizen as the common political goals of all mankind. Russia was not held to be morally superior to Europe: rather it was seen as its potential equal and in certain respects contemporary inferior.

For example, the writer Chingiz Aitmatov told the Congress of People’s Deputies meeting in the summer of 1989 that the Soviet Union should learn a new brand of socialism from ‘the flourishing law-governed societies of Sweden, Austria, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain and, finally, Canada across the ocean.’ As the aspiring liberals stopped taking the existence of two different social systems as the starting point for their thinking and it was therefore no longer self-evident that Russia had any claim to a special status within Europe, the question of whether there was not still a need for some specific Russian identity gave rise to a bifurcation of views. Some liberals presented the need to copy and learn from the West as a question of qualifying for membership in ‘civilisation’. In formulating the preferred relationship between Russia and Europe in this way, these liberals followed their pre-revolutionary predecessors in seeing the Russian people’s own lack of ‘European democratic consciousness’ as perhaps the main problem. “Civilised democracy never had a good chance in this country”, Liliya Shevtsova wrote at the end of 1990 (Shevtsova 1990:4).

There is in these writings the same thrust as can be found in pre-revolutionary liberal writing: the writers set themselves up as belonging to an endangered species of Russian Europeans, somehow managing to keep the torch of civilisation alight in the presumed non-European twilight within the self-imposed boundaries of Russian mass culture.

Other liberals, presumably seeing the political dead-end into which this proposed relationship with Europe would lead, insisted on trying to replace the fading Soviet Russian identity with something else, and came up with the slogan of ‘Eurasia’. For example, when asked whether Russians had not always “felt themselves to be of Europe, yet disputed everything European” in the summer of 1989, the historian Mikhail Gefter (1989:23) answered that “We are not a country. We are a country of countries [...] a centaur by birth”, and therefore dependent on the development of all mankind. Although Gefter was also a Westerniser, he did not seek to dissolve Russia in Europe, but rather to carve out a new identity to replace that furnished by the old Soviet Communist one. Gefter’s was a strategy of pointing to the inevitability of all kinds of boundaries inside the Soviet realm, and then to go in for the relativisation of the boundary between Russia and Europe so that it would lose its pre-eminence as the literally epoch-making marker of a Cold War between the two. Gefter was hardly alone in this undertaking. For example, the idea of a ‘Eurasian’ destiny for the Soviet Union had already cropped up in the writings of foreign affairs specialists. In groping for a strategic goal for Soviet foreign policy to take the place of the defunct ideological struggle with the West, Vladimir Lukin came up with

the formation of a European community from the Atlantic to the Urals in the West and the joining of the Pacific integration process in the east. If that succeeds, we would become the bridge between the two ‘Europes’. It may sound utopian today, but this variant seems highly realistic to me, perhaps the only way our country may enter the upcoming Millennium in a worthy manner (Bovin and Lukin 1989:67).

Westernising and Eurasianist liberals proposed relationships with Europe based on two different variants of partnership. Whereas liberals advocated a ‘return to civilisation’ — that is, a relationship with Europe where Russia was seen as an apprentice with no clear additional and specified identity — others saw this as a poor way of rallying mass Russian support behind a programme based on individual rights, a market economy and political pluralism. Instead, they evolved the slogan of ‘Eurasia’ as a proposed group-identity for a Russian-based state which should secure the electorate’s support for closer relations with Europe. The out-and-out Westernisers wanted to do away with walls altogether, whereas Eurasianist liberals acknowledged the inevitability of walls but wanted to open new gates, build new bridges and increase the flow of contacts.

Nationalists

If the emerging liberals and Westernising Eurasianists dominated the Russian debate about Europe in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, a nationalist opposition was also clearly present. Often, as in the writings of sometime Solzhenitsyn ally Igor Shafarevich, it comes with a strong anti-Semitic flavour. Shafarevich attacks Russia’s detractors, those who see it as an Asiatic despotism populated by slaves, and who hold that Communism was only the last in a series of totalitarian reigns. Shafarevich points out that the idea of the totalitarian state was developed in the West, by Hobbes and others, and not in Russia. So was the idea of socialism, which “had no roots at all in Russian tradition before the nineteenth century. Russia did not have any authors of More’s and Campanella’s type” (Shafarevich 1989:171). As a matter of fact, he concludes, the characteristics singled out by Russia’s detractors as “typically Russian” were not Russian at all: to the contrary they were “the price for Russia’s joining the sphere of the new Western culture” (ibid.). To Shafarevich, Westernism is the root of all Russia’s evils:

By all appearances, the Western multi-party system is a dying social order. It is possible to appraise its role in history highly: it came with a guarantee for civil war, for defence from government terror (but not from ‘Red brigades’) and for increase in material well-being (and the threat of economic crisis) (Shafarevich 1989:176).

Nevertheless, Russia’s detractors want to impose this system on Russia, and they want to do it in the manner of an ‘OCCUPATION’, Shafarevich writes. The implication is clear: Russia needs to maintain its cultural, economic and strategic boundaries in order to keep Europe at bay.

Statist nationalists have also dabbled in Eurasianist thinking. For example, El’giz Pozdnyakov (1991:46) complained that “The disease of ‘Europeanism’, of ‘Westernism’, came to Russia” with Peter the Great. Since then, Pozdnyakov charged, a number of Russians have seen Russia through the eyes of an outsider, and not of an insider. These ‘Westernisers’ have either held that Russia’s destiny lay with European civilisation, or they have not seen a destiny for it at all. In either case, they have been wrong. Russia’s particular destiny is to maintain a strong state so that it can act as the holder of the balance between East and West, a task “vitally important both for Russia and the entire planet.” And Pozdnyakov goes on to write that

Russia cannot return to Europe because it never belonged to it. Russia cannot join it because it is part of another type of civilisation, another cultural and religious type. [...] Any attempt to make us common with Western civilisation and even to force us to join it undertaken in the past resulted in superficial borrowings, deceptive reforms, useless luxury and moral lapses. [...] in nature there does not exist such a thing as a ‘Common Civilisation’. The term in fact denotes the pretension of Western European civilisation to the exclusive rights to universal significance (Pozdnyakov 1991:49, 54).

Pozdnyakov’s is a cultural boundary, between two reified civilisations which are simply different and the exchanges between which will of necessity be characterised by uneasiness. The givenness of the two entities could hardly be more explicit; geographical and cultural nature come together in two distinct geopolitical entities. Since these entities have their roots in different soil, they exist as separate organisms. In one sense it would, therefore, be misleading to talk about reification, since Pozdnyakov does not see ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’ as things, but as living, bounded organisms. Yet, since what interests us here is first and foremost the interface between ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’, we may still talk about reification, since this interface between two separate entities must necessarily take on the character of being a thing, something with substance.

Other nationalists presented a rhetoric grounded not in the need for a strong state, but in the need for spiritual regeneration. For example, in 1990 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published a long philippic against modernity: Russia should not expend its energies on being a superpower, but on attaining spiritual clarity; free elections and a multi-party system were harmful onslaughts against the organic Russian nation; Russia should concentrate on restructuring its own house rather than building any common European one. For Solzhenitsyn, once again, cultures are bounded, resting in themselves and separated by walls (Solzhenitsyn 1990).

Russia/Europe: the Historical Trajectory

It would be a mistake to see the Russian debate about Europe which has emerged since the mid-1980s as a unique response to contemporary challenges. To the contrary, both the conflict between Westernisers and nationalists and their internal debates can be traced in the samizdat writings of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as in writings of the tsarist period. For example, the most striking thing about Solzhenitsyn’s piece from 1990 quoted above is, arguably, its almost verbatim repetition of the views set out in the samizdat articles collected in From under the Rubble (Solzhenitsyn et al. 1975). These articles attacked both Westernisers like Sakharov and a nameless cluster of ‘national Bolsheviks’, one variant of what the author chooses to call statist nationalism. Sakharov was attacked for parroting false Western ideas about freedom.

Where Sakharov’s suggestion for introducing the multi-party system was concerned, Solzhenitsyn wanted nothing to do with it: “[A] society in which political parties are active never rises in the moral scale [...] can we not, we wonder, rise above the two-party or multi-party parliamentary system? Are there no extraparty or strictly nonparty paths of national development?”, Solzhenitsyn asked, lamenting that the “almost perfect” Westernising unanimity in circles outspokenly critical of Soviet power was

an example of our traditional passive imitation of the West: Russia can only recapitulate, it is too great a strain to seek other paths. As Sergei Bulgakov aptly remarked: ‘Westernism is spiritual surrender to superior cultural strength’ (Solzhenitsyn et al. 1975:20; original emphasis).

If this article of Solzhenitsyn’s took on the West and Russian Westernisers, then another contribution printed in From Under the Rubble drew the line against what Solzhenitsyn referred to as “National Bolsheviks”. “The nation”, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “is mystically welded together in a community of guilt, and its inescapable destiny is common repentance” (Solzhenitsyn et al. 1975:113). Yet, not any nationalism is worthy of support. A harsh, cold current of opinion

has become discernible of late. Stripped to essentials, but not distorted, it goes like this: the Russian people is the noblest in the world; its ancient and its modern history are alike unblemished; tsarism and Bolshevism are equally irreproachable, the nation neither erred nor sinned either before 1917 or after; we have suffered no loss of moral stature and therefore have no need of self-improvement; there are no nationality problems in relations with the border republics — Lenin’s and Stalin’s solution was ideal; [...] God need not be written with a capital letter, but [Gosudarstvo, that is,] the state must be. Their general name for all this is ‘the Russian idea’. (A more precise name for this trend would be ‘National Bolshevism.’) (Solzhenitsyn et al. 1975:119-20).

As witnessed by Solzhenitsyn’s attack on the “National Bolsheviks”, today’s statist nationalists also have their precedents in the 1960s. We have here a quarrel between people who share the idea of ‘Russia’ and ‘Europe’ as bounded entities, but who diverge as to the character of those entities. Where the nature of the boundaries are concerned, organic nationalists of Solzhenitsyn’s type will tend towards stressing the boundary as a broad cultural phenomenon. Statist nationalists will acknowledge this as a relevant overall idea; but, given the stress they put on the role of the state as the shell and defender of the nation, they will tend to stress the boundary’s physical function of separating administrative and specifically military-strategic entities. It is the boundary in its physical aspect, as a fortified border, as a line on the map of the military strategist, which is in the foreground here. Today, these two types of nationalists seem to have colluded in presenting a programme of ‘Eurasianism’ where the boundary is present in both these aspects. Against this background, we may venture the guess that it is, for example, only a question of time before the issue of European Union (EU) membership for Central and Eastern European countries will be enrolled in the military-strategic discourse in which the question of NATO expansion is now so unequivocally lodged.

The internal nationalist debate between spiritual and statist nationalists has a much longer history. Traces of it can be found in the Russian semi-official life of the 1920s, and it was a fixture of the political debate in tsarist times. In the early post-revolutionary years, spiritual nationalism was represented by Nikolay Berdyaev — whose thinking now enjoys a far from incidental revival in Russia — and other contributors to the volume which had appeared in 1909 under the name of Vekhi and instantly become a common point of reference for the debate (and which also has been re-published recently). Statist nationalism was represented among others by the original Eurasianists, a coterie of Russian ÉmigrÉ intellectuals. For example, in a closely argued book published in 1920, Europe and Humanity, Prince Nikolay Sergeevich Trubetskoy delivered a blistering attack against the very idea that Russia and other non-European countries should look to Europe for political and economic models. National unity will suffer. And to what end? No matter how hard it tries, some of its specific traits will remain, and it will, “from the European point of view, always look ‘backward’ (otstalyy)”. The result is that “only the government and the ruling political circles” will retain a national outlook, while the rest of the people will be demoralised and self-loathing. This state of affairs will be aggravated by the sporadic events of the backward people mustering its forces and making a dash to catch up (nagnat’), trying to take in its stride developments which the Romano-Germans may have undergone over a prolonged period of time.

The result of such ‘evolution’ by fits and starts [skachyshchiy] is indeed horrific. Every leap is inevitably followed by a period of seeming (from the European point of view) stagnation [zastoy], during which the results of the leap must be made to dovetail with the backward elements of the culture (Trubetskoy 1920:68-9).

Istorical Trajectory

Not all Eurasianist writings were equally profound. In another volume of Eurasianist writings, P.N. Savitskiy argued that

the centre of world culture had moved along a declining temperature gradient at a rate of five degrees centigrade approximately every thousand years: from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt with an average yearly temperature of 20°C; to Greece and Rome at 15°C; to Gaul (10°C); to northern Europe (5°C). No historical evidence could be decisive, he admitted, but this trend boded well for Canada and Russia in the third millennium AD (quoted in Burbank 1986:216-7).

The differences of opinion and emphasis between the spiritual and the statist nationalists in the 1920s echoed the debate between Nikolay Danilevskiy and Vladimir Solov’ev in the 1880s. Whereas Danilevskiy (1888 [1869]) held that Russia was simply a different civilisation from the ‘Franco-Germanic’ European one hostile to it, Solov’ev retorted that Danilevskiy was mistaken in ascribing Europe’s hostility to Russia in terms of the envy of a dying culture upon beholding its successors. Rather, Europe’s hostility was to a large extent of Russia’s own making, provoked by things like Danilevskiy’s very writing. Russia should grasp that its relations with Europe are fraternal. Instead of railing against Europe, it should confess its sins and put its own house in order. Bearing in mind history’s intention, it should brace itself for the path towards spiritual perfection, Solov’ev (1905? [1888/91]) held.

Since the tensions between variants of statist nationalism such as the so-called official nationality of the state and pan-slavism on the one hand, and the spiritual nationalism of most early slavophiles on the other during the first half of the 19th century — have been so thoroughly discussed in the literature, this dichotomy will not be pursued further here (but see Neumann 1995). Suffice it to say that since the early Russian nationalists adopted German romantic nationalist thinking for their own uses, there has existed a tension between those who have focused on the divine strength of the people, and those who have focused on the strength of the state. The main point is simple: today’s discourse is characterised by themes and constellations whose precedents are constantly evoked. By means of this discursive mechanism, the idea that there is a cultural and military-strategic wall between Russia and Europe is, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophesy, presented as an almost metahistorical fact. Whereas this short discussion of the historicity of the idea should be enough to show that one has here a socially constructed item, Russian nationalists nonetheless insist on the givenness of the wall, in all its aspects.

Turning now to the precedents of today’s internal Westernising debate, one is immediately confronted by the question of how to categorise Stalinism. From Bukharin and Trotsky onwards, anti-Stalinist communists have insisted that Stalin was certainly no Westerniser, but an Asian despot, a Ghengis Khan, etc. (That, of course, did not keep them from representing him in the cloak of ‘European’ images such as a Bonapartist in other contexts.) Stalin, on the contrary, often represented his programme as the epitome of European thinking. Yet there is a passage in that basic statement of Stalinism — the Short Course of the history of the Party — which explicitly states that Stalinists saw themselves as fighting Westernisation inside the Party. The reader is told that the Bolsheviks tried

to create a new Party, to create a party of a new type, different from the usual Social-Democratic parties of the West, one that was free of opportunist elements and capable of leading the proletariat in a struggle for power. In fighting the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks of all shades, from Axelrod and Martynov to Martov and Trotsky, invariably used weapons borrowed from the arsenal of the West-European Social-Democrats. They wanted in Russia a party similar, let us say, to the German or French Social-Democratic Party. They fought the Bolsheviks just because they sensed something new in them, something unusual and different from the Social-Democrats of the West (Short Course 1983 [1948]:171-2; original emphasis).

E. H. Carr (1958:17-8) has indeed suggested that the Mensheviks were the ‘Westernisers’ of the Party, and the Bolsheviks the ‘slavophiles’. At the very least, one may note that Communists of all shades invested large amounts of energy in presenting themselves as the true Europeans — in Stalin’s case, indeed as the only true European. Furthermore, Carr, in his catalogue of examples, refers to the late 19th century debates between Marxists and populists as paradigmatic of the debate between Westernisers and nationalists. This is not entirely accurate, inasmuch as many populists, too, saw themselves as Westernisers in at least some senses of that word. For example, someone like Nikolay Ivanovich Ziber, a Marxist scholar, could hardly have been clearer in his insistence on the necessity of Russian industrialisation for individualisation when he wrote in the early 1870s that “We shall have no sense in this country until the Russian muzhik is cooked up in the factory boiler” (quoted in Kindersley 1962:9). But the populists, who still preferred their peasants raw, also argued in terms of European precedents. Writing in 1869, for example, Tkachev maintained that individualism, as espoused by Russian Westernisers, was first formulated by Protagoras and the Sophists, the ideologists of the urban, bourgeois civilisation of Athens. Against this individualism, he set the anti-individualism of the Sparta celebrated by Plato (Walicki 1969:41-5). Tkachev’s remarks are interesting not least for the choice of comparative case. At that time, ancient Greece was almost universally held to be not only the ‘proto-European’ phase of history, but also the cradle of European civilisation as such. By choosing this particular point of reference for a comparison of Russia and Europe, Tkachev is able to present his own programme as a European one.

The debates between Marxists and populists were preceded by the debates between liberals and ‘Russian socialists’. There exists an almost paradigmatic exchange of letters between Turgenev and Hertzen from the early 1860s, where Hertzen held that Russia was a cousin of Europe, who had taken little part in the family chronicle, but whose “rustic charms were fresher and more commendable than her cousins” (Herzen 1968:1747). Turgenev begged to differ. “Russia is not a maltreated and bonded Venus of Milo, she is a girl just like her older sisters — only a little broader in the beam”, he held (Turgenev 1963 [1862] :64). Indeed, both Hertzen and Turgenev saw the relationship in terms of family metaphors, but when it came to degree of kinship and to relative desirability, their ways parted.

And as early as in 1847-1848, Botkin and Hertzen discussed the pros and cons of industrialisation and the need for an indigenous working class in Russia. Botkin, a tea merchant, prayed that “God give Russia a bourgeoisie!”, only to be met with a counter-prayer from Hertzen: “God save Russia from the bourgeoisie!” Belinskiy, in a letter to Botkin, declared that “So far all I have seen is that countries without a middle class are doomed to eternal insignificance” (quoted in Gerschenkron 1962:164-6).

The family is a kind of network. With Russian Westernisers, we are very far from the idea that a multidimensional and metahistorical wall separates Russia and Europe. In all their varieties, Russian Westernisers, once they postulate a wall, always regret its existence, and always insist on its character as a human-made artifice. That is to say, they insist that walls must be understood in their historicity and may, by that very token, be changed by means of human agency. It is not the case that Westernisers do not acknowledge the existence of walls: Westernism is not necessarily ‘romantic’, as Russian nationalists often insist. What unites Westernisers are rather the ideas that walls are negotiable, that relations between Russia and Europe are characterised by the existence not only of walls but also of networks, and that one should follow a policy of maximising the latter and minimising the former.

 

Europe/Russia

As should be clear from Gorbachev’s insecurity about the extent to which ‘Europeans’ include Russians amongst their numbers, Russian discourse about Europe is intertwined with European discourse about Russia. And, just as Russian constructions of Europe cannot be forged independently of the historical trajectory from which they necessarily emerge, so current European constructions of Russia are also made up by the discursive flotsam and jetsam of history.

Current Debates

Today, the social construction of Russia concerns its future more than its present. Russia is widely seen as a learner of European economic and political practices. Economically, it has emerged from under the ruins of a failed modernisation strategy and is now in the process of putting in place the prerequisites of a capitalist economy: a market with supporting institutions, and a middle class to run it. Politically, it is beginning to develop a differentiated elite structure with supporting institutions and a legal system based on the idea that written laws bind all actors. However, to a degree unheard of in contemporary Europe, political power is presented as being bound to the bodies of persons, and not to the bodies of institutions. Hence, the importance of a European policy of supporting the leader (Gorbachev, Yeltsin) rather than the emerging system in abstracto.

If the idea of Russia as a learner is widespread, it comes in many shapes and colours. The explicitly teleological view of Russia as a happy and eager learner which would rapidly become yet another European country may still be found, but it has lost the pre-eminence which it enjoyed as little as three years ago. The view of Russia as a reticent and even unwilling learner, one who grudgingly adopts what he needs and turns his back on the rest, now seems to be in the ascendant. Increasingly we hear about Russia’s lack of a democratic past, the need for a strong hand, for a different approach to politics etc. Crucially, however, the core idea remains that of a learner who lacks insight in his own need to learn, but who will eventually, after various self-inflicted knocks, see the value of going to school with Europe.

The anthropomorphisation of Russia as a learner plays down the importance of physical borders, and plays up the importance of cultural ones — the barriers to knowing the ‘received’ way of political and economic life. The borders are given an existence in time, with Russia seen as lagging behind, trying to break through the self-imposed border of its own backwardness. The whole notion of one-way learning is, furthermore, incompatible with the ideal of a network pure and simple. It does, however, sit well with the idea of a network whose centre is in Western Europe and on whose periphery one finds, amongst others, Russia.

Other constructions do exist. The Estonian politician Tiit Maade, for example, went on record with the view that, because Russian women had for centuries been raped by Mongol and Tatar men, today’s Russians were a people untamed and wild, and tended to spread like a blot all over the territory they could find (Svenska Dagbladet [Stockholm] (24 July). This is definitely not the idea of the learner, but rather of the barbarian at the gate, at home not in classrooms but in tents. The postulation of a biologically founded wall invariably suggests the racialist notion that Europe should construct a well to keep, as it were, the nomadic genes from entering. During and immediately after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, other Baltic politicians frequently spoke in similar terms. At present, this construction has to some extent been superseded by the version of ‘learner’ just given, but it remains what one Lithuanian ambassador calls ‘common folk wisdom’ in the Baltic states. In the following, it will be shown that such biologically based, or essentialist, constructions have a rich European genealogy.

The idea of Russia as a learner of course implies that Russia is becoming more like ‘us’, less ‘different’. It is sometimes stressed how Russia’s being a bad learner in one particular but crucial area — that of human rights in general and minority policy in particular — shows that the possibility of an aggressive nationalist policy vis-à-vis Europe may be imminent. One points to Russia’s seeming inability to treat its ethnic minorities such as Chechens and also the ‘near abroad’, perhaps even the Baltics, as nations on a par with itself, and sees an insecurity of self which may also result in an aggressive nationalist policy vis-à-vis Europe. Since the issue of minorities and their status relative to majorities is such a hot potato all over Europe, we have here an example of the dynamics by dint of which something becomes a test for Russian ‘Europeanness’. Learners should pass tests or, to stay in the metaphor, break through the walls of their lack of knowledge. Chechnya was made a test of Russia’s prospective European policy. Less conspicuously, Russian reactions to EU and NATO expansion are seen as testing the extent to which Russians have learnt that these particular institutionalisations of European and Western selves are not and cannot be potential threats to Russia. To the extent that Russia is held to be a great power, it is first and foremost by courtesy. Russia is seen as part of Europe in the sense that it is its apprentice, and a potential apostate. The possibility of networking is offered to the learner, who is by that very token denied the possibility of being treated as a cultural entity in its own right. In this sense, the European discourse on Russia is thoroughly ethnocentric.

The Historical Trajectory of the Debate: the Cold War

Things were rather different only a handful of years ago. The social construction of the Soviet Union as an actual military and, to some extent, also a political threat was so pervasive as to be used in the delineation of a period of European history: the Cold War. The Other inscribed itself in the temporal dimension of the European self’s identity by giving a name to a period of its history. Indeed, the metaphor of the wall packs a lot of its power from the existence of the physical and heavily fortified wall, which separated East Berlin from West Berlin, East Germany from West Germany, ‘East’ from ‘West’. It is no coincidence that the central symbol of the end of the Cold War came to be the hacking down of this physical wall.

During the Cold War period there were two pervasive constructions of the Soviet Union. One was of an Asiatic/barbarian political power which had availed itself of the opportunity offered by World War II to intrude into Europe by military means. In 1945, Churchill maintained, with reference to the Soviet Union, that the barbarian stood at the heart of Europe (Charlton 1984:43) and the following year Konrad Adenauer wrote to William Sollmann that “Asia stands on the Elbe” (Adenauer 1983: 191).

This construction was also widespread in academic literature. For example, de Reynold (1950:25-8) wrote that Russia cannot be judged by European measures, that there exists a primordial geographical antithesis between Europe and Russia, and that the former is sedentary and thus civilised, while the latter is nomadic and thus barbarian. We have here the theme of the barbarian at the gate of Europe, which may be traced throughout the period and which in the 1980s was kept alive in the discourse on ‘Central Europe’. Central Europe was, in Milan Kundera’s phrase, seen as Un occidente kidnapp é, a part of the West occupied by the Russians (Neumann 1993). There is a dual emphasis here, with the military ingredient being mixed with one of Kulturkampf. European civilisation was under siege by the Soviet barbarians, whose main distinguishing trait (but by no means the only one) was their politico-economic system. Such ideas came through with most clarity in the idea of tiersmondisme — that the industrialised West constituted the First, the Communist world the Second, and everybody else the Third World. We can note a similarity between the classifying schemes of civilised-barbarian-savage (where the barbarian stands out by being politico-economically organised on a grand scale, whereas the savage is not) on the one hand, and tiersmondisme on the other. There is the uneasy mix between the generalised symbol of the Great Wall of China, built by ‘cultured’ people to keep ‘barbarians’ at bay, and that of the Berlin Wall, built by the ‘barbarians’ to keep out what was deemed another ‘culture’. The Berlin Wall was simply not a ‘Chinese Wall’ in this generalised sense, it belonged to a different symbolic economy. The Berlin Wall was built by ‘the East’ as a defensive measure against a culture which was deemed to hold a certain attraction; from ‘the West’, it was therefore made a symbol of the ‘East’s’ weakness, its lack of faith in its own ability to withstand that attraction.

The Communist politico-economic model was sometimes lumped together with that of the vanquished Nazi enemy and labelled ‘totalitarian’, to be distinguished from the model of the West. When not used, the dichotomy was nonetheless upheld by substituting the epithet ‘authoritarian’ for it. This dichotomy democratic/totali- or authoritarian substituted for the master dichotomies of civilised/barbarian and European/Asian, and had affinities to several others such as free/unfree, market/plan, West/East, defensive/offensive, etc.

If the military threat emanating from the Soviet Union was deemed to be massive, the morale of the soldiers was often held to mirror an alleged Russian Volksgeist of sloth, drunkenness and laziness. As a rule, however, there was seen to be no contradiction between the two. The rickety social and economic foundations on which Soviet power, including its nuclear capability, was deemed to rest nevertheless made it a unidimensional superpower. (The contemporary concerns about Russia’s nuclear capability are very different from the situation during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were widely seen as the only plank in the Soviet foundation not at least partly rotten. In this key area, there has recently been a very marked geopolitical shift.) The construction became complete with a discussion of whether the superpower was a ‘status quo’ (satiated) power, or whether it was ‘revisionist’ (expansionist). In the beginning of the Cold War period, when the political threat was in focus, the tendency was to see it as expansionist, in Europe and elsewhere, even as grasping for world-wide hegemony. Towards the end of the period, the tendency was to see it as status quo-oriented in Europe, but to some extent expansionist elsewhere. Again, this was a conceptually constipated debate, enacted within a tightly restricted register.

An alternative social construction of the Soviet Union saw this state not only as the deliverer of Europe from the scourge of Nazism (the ‘halo of Stalingrad’), but also as a model for Europe to emulate. “I have looked, but I just cannot find any evidence of an aggressive impulse on the part of the Russians in the last three decades.” “[The Soviet citizen] criticises [the regime] more frequently and more effectively than us”, Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed in the early 1950s, in defiance of the construction of Russia as the military and non-democratic aggressor (quoted in Judt 1992:154, 156). Linked first and foremost to the organised Communist movement whose strength in Europe was highly uneven, this alternative construction was also perpetuated by others (but by no means all) who invoked a socialist identity. Within a totalising, evolution and teleological historiography, the Soviet Union was seen as more advanced than capitalist Europe, not so much in empirical terms, as by virtue of its politico-economic model. Thus, at the core of the construction there lay not the celebration of the domestic economic or political performance, but primarily a celebration of the model in abstracto. This model was seen as having an evolutionary invigorating potential on Europe, and Europe (or parts thereof) were in turn seen as a possible sophisticating influence. As Martin Brionne wrote in 1946:

This old civilisation that it is assaulting will absorb and enrich it. This, indeed, could be France’s essential contribution. Russia saw the Communist breakthrough; France could lead it into maturity (quoted in Judt 1992:160).

This is a construction of Russia as the land of the future. The Soviet Union, and not Western Europe, is seen as the centre of a network between the two entities. In the years immediately after World War II, the clash of these two constructions of the Soviet Union took place at the very core of European politics. In some countries, notably in Northern Europe, developments in Czechoslovakia in 1948 were seen as a Communist coup with Soviet backing. Consequently, most social democrats viewed it as confirmation of the authorised construction of the Soviet Union. The Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956 had a similar effect in France.

Three features stand out where European constructions of the Soviet Union during the Cold War are concerned. One is the very close fit between the two versions, the authorised and the alternative ones, and the general right/left divide within which political life was generally seen as being organised. The social construction of the Soviet Union was integral to Europeans’ social construction of political identity as such, and thus a part of everyday politics. Another point is the way in which the authorised and alternative versions were able to define the entire discourse on the Soviet Union. Particularly immediately after World War II, few attempts were made to present alternative constructions of the Soviet Union. Several ideas were floated about particulars, but the main outlines were barely questioned. At times a conversion thesis was advanced, one which saw a coming together of modern systems simply because of some studiously unspecified contingencies of modern systems. It hardly said more than that ‘we’ would assimilate ‘them’ in some unspecified long term, and become somewhat transformed in the process. Perhaps the one notable exception was to be found in the marginal anthroposophist discourse. This included the idea that just below the surface of the Soviet state there remained alive a spiritual Russia with the potential to enrich and indeed even renew the spiritual life of Europe.

Yet another feature of the discourse at large was how the shift in backing for the two versions invariably went in the direction of the authorised version, and seemed invariably tied to developments in what was called Eastern Europe, that is, the lands between the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic of Germany, which were under Moscow’s political sway. The examples of Czechoslovakia 1948 and Hungary 1956 have been mentioned, as should reactions to the intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and perhaps also that in Afghanistan in 1979. Defections from the alternative version could come about in this manner because they did not depend on what was seen as developments internal to the Soviet Union itself (economic output, span of published opinions or the like), and thus could not be judged on these grounds. They could be judged only in relations which were seen as being more external, such as those between socialist countries. We may, however, also speculate about the degree to which the tangible geographical aspect of these events played a role. The events of 1948, 1956 and 1968 were all widely seen as a question of how to delineate Soviet power relative to European countries; this is one of the main reasons why the idea of un occidente kidnapp é could be so effective. Each intervention was to some degree seen as an onslaught not on the particular country in question, but on Europe as such. And, as each intervention had the effect of confirming and adding to the military threat, so, inversely, by detracting from the attractiveness of the Soviet Union as a political model, with each one the political threat became dulled.

The Historical Trajectory of the Debate: the Interwar Period

Thus, by the end of the Cold War, very little was left of the idea of Soviet Russia being a political threat — which had been the main dimension of threat in the inter-war years. Once it emerged, this threat was held to be serious enough to warrant an intervention by the European Allies, yet it took time before the authorised version of an unstoppable threat was in place. With reference to the introduction of the New Economic Policy, The Times wrote in December 1921 that communism was at an end and that it was “only a matter of hitting on a suitable formula for reintroducing capitalism”. Two months earlier, Lloyd George had told the British Parliament that Lenin “admits they have been wrong, he admits they have been beaten” and that the partial “re-establishment of capitalism” to some extent involved a condemnation of the doctrines of Karl Marx (all quoted in White 1985:30). Such triumphalism, with its implicit idea of a learner gone astray, was soon seen to be misplaced, and the authorised version rather became one of how the Revolution devoured its own children. The pervasive idea of Soviet Russia as a political threat did have an adjunct inasmuch as there was much talk about a potential military threat. Nonetheless, even in Poland, which fought a war with Soviet Russia in 1920, Soviet Russia was seen by many as one of many threats — as an integral part of a hostile international environment, rather than as the threat par excellence (Neumann 1993). Its character of being a revolutionary political threat, with an extraterritorial presence through the organised Communist movement, made it a special case, here as elsewhere in Europe. Yet, in Poland as well as in, say, France or Germany, after the Revolution it was quickly seen to be once again a legitimate player on the European political scene. There is a need to stress this, since the situation during the Cold War is too often and too easily generalised to cover the entire Soviet period.

In 1921, the Third International (Comintern) was issuing its theses demanding absolute loyalty of its sundry detachments; and all over Europe, there were labour movement splits over the construction of Soviet Russia. These remained vibrant at least until the time of World War II. It would be a mistake, however, to extrapolate the Cold War situation of two relatively neatly separated and, between themselves, all-pervasive constructions of the Soviet Union into the interwar period, when the clashes over the construction were marked by considerably more flux. Three examples will follow. The first concerns that branch of racialist discourse — most conspicuously Nazi — which saw Slavs (not Russians specifically) as Untermenschen. Racialist discourse was quite widespread at the time, as was the idea of ranking different European races against one another. If there was often a biological tinge to the argument of excluding the ‘Asiatic’ Russians from the European self, the idea of excluding them from humankind tout court was radically new.

A second example concerns the idea of Russia as the land of the future. In 1923, the League of Nation’s Commissioner for Russian Refugees, Fridtjof Nansen, himself a nationalist and a royalist, wrote that for him,

it seems likely that Russia will one day not only deliver Europe materially, but also furnish its spiritual renewal (Nansen 1923:146).

This idea of the Russians as a nation whose ‘primitive health’ and unfathomable patience made for a particularly advanced spirituality was quite widespread at the time, within and outside of the Christian milieu. Nikolay Berdyaev wrote several books on the issue, published first from his exile in Paris and then more often than not translated into English, German and other European languages. In the interwar years, celebrating Soviet Russia became part of radical chic. The Webb’s book Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? appeared in 1925 and went into its second printing — without the question mark. “The success of the Five Year Plan is the only hope of the World”, George Bernard Shaw argued (Bell 1990:29).

A third example concerns the view of socialist economic organisation. In the inter-war period, a theoretician like Joseph Schumpeter could still advocate capitalist economic organisation on normative grounds, but predict that socialism would carry the day in what amounted to a struggle between two different economic organisation principles. In the Cold War period, when specialised argument of this type was subsumed by the catch-all constructions of the Soviet Union and those were again to a very high degree subsumed along a left-right axis, we do not find this type of pairing of arguments.

The inter-war period, then, saw a number of tentative constructions of Soviet Russia. With the radical exception of Nazi discourse, Russia was seen as part of Europe, but a somewhat errant part. Perhaps Carl Schmitt, who spent a life theorising about the delineation between friend from foe, encapsulated this when he referred to the country as “this extremist brother who took the European nineteenth century at its word” (Schmitt 1963:79-80).

The Historical Trajectory of the Debate: The 19th Century

Mention should also be made of some 19th century constructions. The Napoleonic Wars brought Russian soldiers to Paris. France was recognised as a great power; with the defeat of Napoleon, the other great powers — except Britain — made the Holy Alliance against it in 1815. Russia was to remain a fully-fledged player in European politics throughout the period. Bismarck summed up a century of geopolitical thinking and practice with his adage that one must always try to be a trois in a world of five great powers. There was a debate about Russian intentions, with the fortunes of Russia in its wars with Turkey and Persia (and, later, in 1905 with Japan) being the main factor in influencing assessments of its strengths and intentions. On the other hand, the question of a possible Russian hegemony in Europe was not allowed to solely rule the roost — within the discourses of other great powers, Russia was not alone in being suspected of such intentions. Similar things were being said about France, particularly at the beginning of the period, about Germany as the period drew to a close, and about Great Britain throughout. Furthermore, the view of Russia as a great-power rival came side by side with the idea that great powers could work out spheres of influence arrangements and formalise their responsibility for the workings of the international system. The strategic discourse focused on the Eastern question. Russia’s rivalry with Turkey was considered a question of pivotal interest for the balance of Europe, with the British Cabinet deciding on one occasion in 1829 that, should Russia attempt to occupy Constantinople, it must be opposed by force of arms (Gleason 1950:96). Once Britain and France did decide to go to war, in 1854-1856, emphasis on this intention of course became particularly strong.

The tension within the 19th century strategic discourse between constructions of Russia as being on the way to world hegemony vs. having a legitimate right to play a great-power role, may at first glance recall the configuration of the strategic discourse of the Cold War. This may seem particularly tempting for someone who is used to regarding strategic discourse in isolation from, as well as privileged in relation to, overall discourse. As our focus of inquiry here is constructions, however, the main point about how Russia was treated in the 19th century strategic discourse may not be the weighing of its intentions, but the very acceptance of Russia as a legitimate player in the Concert of Europe. At this time, considerations of the balance of power had become a vital part of the discourse about European identity at large. In this central regard, Russia would seem to have been included in Europe. And yet, although Russia’s inclusion in Europe which emanated from its inclusion in the balance of power is the main point, two other strands of 19th century strategic debate sound a relativising note. There is, first, the tendency to view Russia not only as a power grasping for hegemony, but also as doing this in the manner of a barbarian at the gate (as opposed to being seen as launching the attempt from the inside). And then there is the tendency to try to refashion the idea of the European balance of power itself, so that the very Europeanness conferred on Russia could be relativised. It is hardly surprising that both these themes are particularly pronounced among Napoleonic French writers. Napoleon at one point held that Europe and the rest of the world would soon be enmeshed either in the American republic or the Russian universal monarchy. After his fall, he is reported to have held that Europe would emerge as either Cossack or republican (cf. de Rougemont 1966:294; Cadot 1967 [1839/56]:516).

As part of the preparations for his Russian campaign, Napoleon issued orders for his Ministry of Foreign Affairs to orchestrate the publication of articles to show that “Europe is inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia” (if it did not become republican, that is, dominated by Napoleonic France). One upshot of this was the publication of two books by Charles Louis Lesur, which laid bare an alleged Testament of Peter the Great. As Lesur put it two years later in the follow-up volume on the Cossacks, “it is doubtful whether or not one can ever make them civilised [...] their land, which they seem to occupy always in passing, appears in our eyes as a vast camp seated upon the frontier of Europe”. The metaphor of the “vast camp” suggests what another Frenchman, de Bonald, explicitly referred to as the ‘nomadic character’ of the Russians (all quoted in McNally 1958:174).

Throughout the period, the theme of the barbarian at the gate was reinforced by focusing on the existence of Muslim and therefore presumably Asiatic national minorities inside Russia, and using these as a pars pro toto to underline the Asiatic nature of Russia as a whole. It is but a short step from this to the idea that, if you scratch on a Russian, the Tatar will emerge. Take away the borrowed plumage of European civilisation and the military might, and the barbarian (or even a savage if you scratch hard enough!) would emerge in the raw. As the founder of the Manchester Guardian, Richard Potter, put it to his fellow British MPs in 1832,

let a fleet be sent to the Baltic to close up the Russian ports, and what would the Emperor of Russia be then? A Calmuc surrounded by a few barbarian tribes, (Cheers) a savage, with no more power upon the sea, when opposed by England and France, than the Emperor of China had. (Cheers) (quoted in Gleason 1950:126).

Bruno Naarden (1992) has highlighted how, in the first half of the 19th century, many intellectuals had been spellbound by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, above all because in reading it they could not help thinking of the Russia that had defeated Napoleon. Gibbon blamed Rome’s downfall primarily on internal weakness. Many of his readers believed likewise that Europe had now lost its vitality and was thus ripe for barbarian conquest. “The comparison between the fate of the ancient civilisation and the possible future Russification of Europe became such a cliché that people spoke of ‘the great parallel’,” Naarden (1992:13) concludes. And indeed, turning to Dieter Groh’s standard work on European discussions of Russia in this period, we may note that the index has no less than 29 references to this ‘great parallel’ (Groh 1961:15 et passim). These metaphors of the Russians as nomadic barbarians, always on the move, pegging their tents on the outskirts of Europe, looming like an incubus, belong to a fixed imagery which would also crop up occasionally in, say, contemporary French constructions of the British (or in British 20th century constructions of Germans). There is, however, a crucial difference: in the case of Russia, this is a stable feature of discourse throughout the 19th century and beyond.

Hand in hand with the construction of the barbarian at the gate was an auxiliary attempt to disrupt the idea that Russia has a place within the European balance of power by changing that construction itself. The crucial name here is L’abbé Dominique-Géorges-Frédéric de Pradt, who in a series of books exhorted Europeans to close ranks and gates against the Russians:

Russia is built up despotically and asiatically [...] Europe must draw closer together and as she shuts herself up, Europe should cooperate in outlawing all participation in her affairs by any power which does not have a direct interest in them and which has the force to weigh down the balance to suit her own interests (quoted in McNally 1958:182; also Groh 1961:128-31; Cadot 1967:174-5).

In several works published in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, de Pradt, who was an Archbishop and Napoleon’s former confessor, went on to develop the thesis that “l’Angleterre règne sur la mer, la Russie sur la terre: tel est la partage actuel du monde”. Russia must be kept from Europe, and the way to do that is to expand the idea of the balance of power to include America! Here is the genesis of the notion of Europe as situated between America and Russia, and that European power politics must be conducted on that basis. Crucially, by changing the balance of power from an intra-European to a European-focused phenomenon, this idea annuls the idea that inclusion in the balance of power in and of itself should confer Europeanness on a particular power. Coming at the exact time when there can no longer be any doubt about Russia’s pivotal role in the European balance of power, this is indeed a crucial point. Since, after the 19th century, the relevance of inclusion in the balance of power for inclusion in Europe clearly faded, it was also a move which was to prove productive in the long run.

The idea of the barbarian at the gate, then, lent a particular flavour to European strategic discourse on Russia. Russia was depicted as an ambiguous presence on the border — one which could be associated by Europe, but also by China. It is scarcely surprising to find as the central metaphor in a widely read book of the period the idea that Russia is cordoned off from Western Europe by a “Chinese Wall” (Cadot 1967 [1839-56] :540, 173). What should be particularly noted is where the Marquis de Custine (1950 [1849] ), writing at this time, locates this wall — namely on the Vistula. For de Custine, it is the military reach of Russia which determines where this wall is to be found, and not the cultural traits of the particular peoples who happen to live in the relevant territories. Bearing in mind the recent debate about the delineation of ‘Eastern’ from ‘Central’ Europe, this problematique is not without contemporary relevance.

De Custine’s book (1950 [1849] ) drew some of its popularity from its ability to reach out beyond the strategic discourse and link the image of the barbarian at the gate with the wider issue of a Kulturkampf between Russia and Europe. Nor was de Custine alone in this. One main reason why the clashes over constructions of Russia were so lively was that all three main political orientations to be found within Europe actively drew on these constructions, so as to uphold themselves. To liberals, conservatives and radicals alike, Russia offered a political regime which could be used to highlight the advantages of their preferred constructions of European identity as a political programme.

For conservatives like Joseph de Maistre, who served as the King of Sardinia’s representative in Petersburg from 1803 to 1817, Russia was the one power which could help Europe to regain its own proper self — that is, the self of the ancien régime. Baron von Haxthausen, a conservative whose study of Russian peasant life established him as a central Russianist, was convinced that it was their communal life that made Russians inherently peaceful (cf. Cadot, 1967:100-3).

In counterpoint to these different conservative constructions, liberals of the period were not only quick to criticise Russia as a reactionary country: they also drew on what they saw as the fortunate experiences of their own countries to explain why Russia lagged behind Europe. In 1822, there appeared a book in Paris by a certain M.P.D. which traced this back to one factor: Russia was held back by its lack of a substantial middle class (see McNally 1958:181-2). The idea that Russia needed a middle class was also an interesting point: here was a concrete proposal, where others saw either an undifferentiated mass of powerless subjects before the tsar, or distinctions of class which were held to be particularly in evidence: “In the Russian empire Man may somewhere be found to live in the rawest and most untamed state, in other places he lives in barbarous half-culture, while there are also those who may be counted amongst the most cultivated in the world”, according to a Danish geographical handbook of 1809 (quoted in Møller 1993:112). Russia, then, was ambiguous not only in terms of being chronologically in a state of transition from barbarism to civilisation, but also by spatially harbouring this process in all its unevenness. These ideas of the lack of a middle class and the gulf between elite and people, which lie at the core of today’s authorised version of Russia as learner, were thus already very popular with the liberal set nearly 200 years ago.

Radicals were perhaps even more insistent on using Russia as a foil to further their own identity politics. In his study of how European socialists saw Russia, Bruno Naarden notes that in 1864 Marx, in the first declaration of principles for the First International, referred to Russia as “that barbarous power, whose head is at St. Petersburg and whose hands are in every cabinet in Europe” (quoted in Naarden 1992:49). Crucially, Naarden then goes on to demonstrate the working of what he in no uncertain terms refers to as “Marx’s scheme of giving greater unity to the extremely heterogeneous and varied company of the First International by making use of the anti-Russian feelings which dominated public opinion in England” (ibid.:50). Engels was very explicit: Russia’s true history started only with the Crimean War, which opened space for public opinion and made the country part of Europe: “Russia remains difficult to attack and relatively weak on the offensive, but in other respects it became a European country like any other ...” (Engels 1952 [1890]:25, 46-7). The text makes a point of discussing and indeed pinpointing a year when Russia became “a European country like any other”.

Except for the period of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall built by ‘the East’ was read by ‘the West’ as a central symbol of ‘the East’s’ lack of faith in its own political and economic order, there has been a lack of explicit wall imagery in European discourse on Russia. Constructions of Russians as barbarians at the gate pop up in various guises — always with a new twist as to what exactly constitutes them as ‘barbarians’, with the one constant being a European insistence on seeing the ‘barbarians’ as being in the process of trying to break through the time-wall that separates them from Europe. European discourse on Russia may change, but the centrally held idea that Russia is on the periphery of a network whose centre is to be found in Western Europe has been a major discursive focus ever since the days of the Enlightenment.

 

Conclusion: Russian State Action

How do these representations matter for Russian foreign policy — or state action? An idea which is implicit in the idea of discourse may be spelled out as a first answer: the representations of which the discourse consists are part of social reality. Without a grasp on the classificational system within which policy is made — that is, of how the world inside which state action becomes possible is ordered — we lack an understanding of the field inside which policy is made. It is not enough simply to assume that the general marker ‘state’ applies to the specific entity of Russia; that entity is separated from other states in having a different history of representation, and to document this history is in and of itself of major importance. By the same token, it is important to illuminate how this history of representation is always a contested one: at any one given time, there will be more than one representation available when state action is to be undertaken. The same can be said about Europe, understood as represented from Moscow as a policy environment for state action. The first way in which representations are relevant, then, is what we may call a constitutive one. Representations may be understood as what anthropologists refer to as folk models — that is, mutually held models in terms of which members of a certain group understand the world (Hóly and Stuchlik 1981).

If representations are constitutive of the world, then representations of a self’s others is constitutive of the self. A second way in which representations matter to state policy is to do with the need to confirm the state in its present representation. For example, inasmuch as Norway was constituted as a breakaway project vis-à-vis Denmark and Sweden and Lithuania vis-à-vis Poland, Norwegian and Lithuanian policy towards those entities will be coloured by this history of the self. Whereas these historical experiences must be understood in their historicity, the point that the self is implicated policy may be generalised, for example by availing ourselves of the idea that representations of the other are part of the self’s emergent policy horizon. One theme which will always arise between self and other is the one of recognition. In IR, Erik Ringmar (1996) has recently addressed the importance for states of having other states — understood as parts of a geography of affection — to confirm the self. The theme of recognition becomes particularly pronounced in cases where there is doubt about whether the self is recognised by its others as being of the same kind. In the case of Russia, its dogged insistence on being part of Europe and the various actions taken to ensure inclusion in Europe are cases in point. So are the actions taken against Soviet Russia by (other) European powers in response to interwar actions which were conducted in a Comintern framework. These actions were represented by Russia as not having a state character, but since (other) European powers saw them as having such a character, the fact that they were presented by Russia as not having them was experienced as an onslaught of their state-ness. This importance of representation of self to state action is ontological. To Russian Westernisers, Russia must be recognised as a European state, or it is nothing, and they are willing to take a number of resource-consuming state actions to be recognised as a European state. This kind of importance of representations for state action may be called self-confirming.

Representations of self are hardly fully recognised by others. Perhaps the sociological idea of role may come in handy here. States may be ‘allies’, even ‘friends’, and state action will be taken with maintaining such a relational role in mind. When, during the Cold War, the US ventured to dole out a drubbing to its NATO allies, at a number of occasions it proved effective for those being drubbed to insist that this was no way to treat an ally. The representation of the role ‘ally’ could thus be invoked as a state action to parry pressure. Over the last ten years or so, Russia has insisted that its role as being a ‘great power’ in European politics be recognised. The need to do ‘something’ as a response to NATO’s expansion seems to emanate first and foremost from a fear of losing the role description (or status) of ‘great power’. Here is a third way in which representations of self may trigger state action, then. It may perhaps be referred to as ‘role-confirming’. The distinction between self-confirming and role-confirming is to do with how much, in the state’s own view, ‘we’ may change before we are no longer ‘we’. States which have a long history of struggling for self-confirmation or which have recently achieved that status, may tend to relate to more situations as implying a self-confirming aspect than others. Russia may be more touchy on this issue than, say, France. Stressing how all identities are necessarily protean, impossible to pin down etc. may occlude social differences of key importance to state action.

Roles are to do with routinised interaction. There is an expectation that the other will act in this or that manner, and the self will act on the expectation that the other will act in accordance with previous representations. These patterns will sediment themselves as institutional structures, a ‘second nature’. In our case, such structures may be found in the way specific state institutions have patterned interaction with Russia. It is instructive in this regard that Norway, when it reorganised its Foreign Ministry in 1996, subsumed relations with Russia in a department for security and CIS matters. Such institutionalisation will be made possible due to the existence of certain representations rather than others, and it will fortify the representation which made it possible in the first place. This will happen because the number of contexts in which a specific representation becomes relevant increases, not because other representations are necessarily weakened. We may call this importance of representation to state action routinised or institutionalised. It lends a structural and tangible social reality to representations which they are otherwise lacking. The more channels for interaction of this case which exist, the more discursive work it will probably take to change representations. In the case of Russia, the institutionalisation in other European countries of interaction with Russia based on the representation of it as a security challenge is very strong. In Copenhagen School phraseology (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde 1998), the number of contexts concerning interaction with Russia which are securitised is high. It is a key strength of post-structural scholarship to demonstrate how the fit between representations and contexts is regularised (despite being historically contingent or even fortuitous; e.g. Milliken and Sylvan 1997). We have here a set of institutionalised prerequisites for state action which is in need of being incorporated into our analyses to a greater degree than they have perhaps been so far. We may call this the institutionalised importance of representations to state action.

When routine state actions are undertaken, representations are fortified. But what about situations when routine is broken? Lyotard (1988) has identified the post-structuralist project as being exactly about this, that is, bringing about a short-circuiting of a totalising scheme of representation so as to open up for a number of small representational orders. We have in the material before us an example of such short-circuiting, namely the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Alexander Wendt’s (1992:419-22) reading of this process may serve as a launching pad here. In his reading, it is Gorbachev who breaks the representational scheme by means of what he, following social psychologists, refers to as alter-casting: Alter (Europe) is represented in a new way by Gorbachev, and this representation in and of itself the social fact in relation to which Gorbachev’s Russia begins to act. The idea is that this process will be self-confirming, inasmuch as it will bring about a change in European actions: when ‘Europe’ sees Russia behave in a new way which is predicated on a certain European behaviour, they will begin to behave in the way cast for it in order to secure the continued Russian flow of behaviour.

Two problems stand out. First, the statesman is seen as hovering above discourse and indeed above history and the social, in charge of the casting of representations. Policy needs are seen as dictating the ‘choice’ of representations to be invoked. This downplays the extent to which the new representations which are being sought implemented are themselves socially constructed (in this case, a representation of Russia as a ‘normal’ European country, whatever that may mean in terms of specifics). Gorbachev did not forge an entirely new representation of Europe, rather he changed emphasis form one existing representation to the other. The same was the case where Stalin was concerned: pairing down ‘true Europe’, was a case of radicalising already existing representations, not of forging entirely new ones. There is a limit beyond which new representations cannot be thought. Methodologically, this must mean that once we have mapped the discourse, new representations will most likely be found along trajectories already known. While the totally new is always a possibility, it is definitely a very remote possibility.

Secondly, one question which is not asked is to what extent state action can run ahead of collectively held representations like this. There exists a feedback-loop between state actions and representations. New state actions, in this case vis-à-vis Europe, will force themselves upon the representations held (and these representations are not only narrow elite phenomena, but exist on the level of the entire polity). If state actions do not confirm representations, either representations must be modified, or state action must change. In the case of Gorbachev, we first saw modification (Europe was re-presented as of a kind, as something to emulate), but then a threshold beyond which representations would not budge was reached, and it was state actions which had to change. The result was a slackening in the pace of Westernisation (but not a complete halt). The stiffness in the discourse posed limits which it would have taken more violence to do away with. Representations, then, put limits on state actions not only in terms of what is thinkable, but also by dint of defining the possible limits of what is doable.

These are some of the ways in which representations are important for state action. The kinds of importance have been referred to as constitutive, self-confirming, institutionalised, defining the thinkable, defining the doable. In keeping with the principles of ‘grounded theory’, the author hopes that we may proceed to scrutinise other sequences in order to whet these categories and establish new ones.

April 1999

 

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Notes:

*: Iver B. Neumann, D. Phil. (Oxon), is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His latest book is Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). His current research interest is diplomatic culture and practice. Back.

Note 1: This paper was presented to the Standing Group for International Relations of the European Consortium for Political Research’s third all-European conference, Vienna, 16-20 September 1998. The author thanks JIRD’s editorial team for its kind help in preparing it for publication. Back.