Edward Lucas, the Economist's man in Moscow, has a lot to answer for.
In 2008, he wrote a provocative book called “The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West” which paints a harrowing picture of the country's new assertiveness. A year on, his thesis continues to makes waves, with a review in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (which he has called 'the greatest accolade’) What follows is a review of that review.
Lucas's thesis is, roughly, that Putin's Russia is reverting to Cold War era behaviour by cracking down on freedoms at home and becoming aggressive and expansionist abroad.
Moreover, he warns that Russia is using capitalism and the strength of its energy and minerals exports to bully its neighbours and divide-and-conquer the West in a similar way that the USSR sought to drive a wedge between Europe and the US in the 1970s.
Most importantly, Lucas is troubled by the fact that despite having rejected Communism, Russia steadfastly refuses to adopt ‘Western norms’.
Naturally, this is a rather capricious position to take, and the NYRB's Christian Caryl, a critical journalist who has reported out of Russia, seems well placed to contend some of these very controversial points. Yet he targets all the wrong aspects of Lucas's argument, taking its most objectionable assumptions for granted.
1. NATO ENLARGEMENT
Caryl writes, agreeing with Lucas: “Contrary to popular belief, NATO enlargement was driven less by a grasping, hegemonic United States than by the desire of Washington's European allies to stabilize the belt of newborn democracies to the east. There is no question that they have succeeded in this aim…NATO's requirement that candidate countries resolve border conflicts with their neighbors before they can be admitted forced would-be members to confront and air old historical grievances that could have easily poisoned the region's future”.
This is patently inaccurate. Whatever the ‘motivations’ behind Nato expansion (and there is no evidence to suggest that they were nefarious), it flatly betrayed the promise made by Clinton to Yeltsin in 1992. That is a fact. The oft-cited argument that Eastern European nations such as Poland wanted to join Nato, and the US could not stop them is empty: the US is in charge and only the US can decide who to let into its club.
Caryl brings up a very obscure and marginal example of Hungary, a country with no significant border issues with its neighbours, as a testament to Nato peace making. Yet for every Hungary and Poland, there is a Kosovo.
In fact, NATO policy in the ex-Warsaw Pact is not even relevant. That Rubicon had been crossed back under Clinton. After much empty bluster, Russia came to terms (grudgingly) with the incorporation of the Warsaw Pact into Nato and could do nothing about it. The most painful issue today, many times more sensitive for Russian public opinion (which Caryl ignores) is the question of Nato membership for countries that were integral parts not of the Warsaw Pact but of the Soviet Union itself. This is a different situation entirely, and until recently was the ultimate taboo. The US and Western powers, keen to placate Russia over betraying her by letting in Eastern Europe into Nato, drew a line at the old USSR borders. Those commitments are now null and void.
Has the spectre of Nato membership for the ex-USSR republics contributed to peace? Not if one possible explanation for Saakashvili's assault on Abkhazia that precipitated the Georgia-Russia war 5 months ago is to be believed. According to this account, Georgia used the cover of satisfying NATO membership requirements as an argument for trying to retake Abkhazia by force. Is this what Caryl meant when he wrote that Nato offers a powerful incentive to “confront and air old historical grievances” and “confront long-running historical disputes”? Are similar bloody "confrontations’ to be expected in Transdniestr, Crimea and elsewhere?
Indeed, numerous current members of NATO joined the organisation precisely at that a time when they were in the full throes of civil war and territorial dispute: Turkey and its war in Cyprus and Kurdistan ; Spain and the Basques, France and Corsica, and England and Northern Ireland. Nato has not done much to end any of these conflicts, because it is a political-military bloc for the advancement of US strategic interests; if they are served by a certain country being a member, then it is allowed in regardless of whether it has fulfilled the entry conditions. Only the EU and its (dwindling) promise of prosperity has helped push these countries together.
Caryl then writes: “Were a pro-Western government in Kiev to vote on NATO accession, political turmoil would immediately ensue. The eastern part of the country‚ dominated by Russia and with a large proportion of Russians‚ would almost certainly respond with mass protests, possibly culminating in violent opposition to the central government or demands for secession”.
Caryl talks of Ukrainian membership of Nato (supported by its pro-Western government) in positive terms and sees only “the Russian dominated East” as a source of sabotage to such an enlightened move. Yet, a recent poll by the Taylor Nelson Sofrez Ukraine agency showed opposition to Nato membership at 63%, far more than the share of “Russians” could explain. I did not have to go far to get this fact: it is on Wikipedia.
Of course, this should come as no surprise, as governments’ decisions to join Nato are often staunchly opposed by their own people; take the case of Spain in the 1970s. But Caryl is being very disingenuous here in painting a conflict between a pro-Nato governmental elite and its anti-Nato population as one between a pro-Western Ukraine and a spoiler-Russia.
2. LA GUERRE FROIDE N'A PAS EU LIEU
Caryl's analysis succumbs to a much more fundamental flaw than a misunderstanding of NATO. In order to determine whether Russia is heading for a new cold war, it helps to understand the old one, and Caryl does not. Or rather, he subscribes to the same conventional narrative as Lucas, which makes it difficult for him to challenge the latter's arguments.
For a start, Caryl holds that the old cold war "the real, bipolar, Manichaean cold war, divided the world fairly neatly into friends and foes". This is of course a gross over-simplification, if only because it leaves no room for China, or India, Roumania, Yugoslavia, Ghana and Libya, the group of 77 etc etc. And even in charting the relationship between the USSR and the US, it throws détente and Khruschev's thaw into the same pot as the militant communist internationalism of the 1920s and the Stalinism of the 40s and 50s.
But that's not even the main problem with Caryl's account. The problem lies with his reason for why the Cold War cannot return: the real reason "is that Russia, contrary to all the feverish talk about its presumed status as a revived superpower, is nothing of the kind. It is a rising regional power that enjoys the benefit of immense geographical reach and huge natural resources. Yes, it has a nuclear arsenal and a big army‚ but, as Lucas correctly notes, the former is outdated and poorly maintained, and the latter, as its less-than-stellar performance against Georgia's tiny army demonstrated, is still a long way away from a state-of-the-art modern force".
He then goes on to recount all the ways in which Russia is weak: militarily, economically, demographically, politically.
All of which raises an important question about the fundamental origins of the Cold War. If the Cold War cannot return because Russia is too weak, is not a superpower, then the first cold war started precisely because Russia was a strong power, a super-regional rival to the USSR, and not due to some "Manichean' ideological struggle suggested by Caryl in an earlier paragraph.
So which is it, Caryl? Perhaps the truth is, pace Baudrillard, that the "cold war' never happened at all.
If the Cold War were really an ideological struggle, then the change of regime from Communism should have fundamentally altered the US approach to Russia. However, this did not happen: far from disbanding, NATO continued to expand unabated and the Bush white house recently actually scrapped Soviet era arms control agreements.
If the Cold War were really caused by Russia's superpower status, in the sense that it presented a military threat to the US, then why did successive US leaders see it fit to exaggerate the Soviet military might throughout the post war years? (See: the Missile Gap and Bomber Gap controversies). The fact is that the USSR was never a match for the US and Western Europe militarily or economically, lacked the capacity to project decisive force beyond its hemisphere and throughout the 20th century remained an overwhelmingly regional power rather than a global superpower. In this sense, while Russia has become much weaker since the fall of the USSR, it had always been very weak.
So, if Russia was neither an ideological nor a military threat, what the hell was going on in the 60 years since world war II?
It's time to return to William Appleman Williams. In the 1950s and 60s, he led the revisionist school of Cold War scholarship in arguing primarily that the cold war was had very little to do with the USSR and a lot to do with the US's "open door policy' of forcibly opening up foreign markets to American capitalism.
This can explain the relentless drive into Eastern Europe and within Russia even after the "official' end of the "cold war' in Malta in 1989. The US would not be done until Eastern European and Russian state enterprises were dismantled and saturated with American business interests through the mechanism of the "free market'. However, because at that time the free market was dominated by the US, it created an idea condition to fulfill the open door prophesy. During the 1990s, and even before, US policymakers routinely conflated "free market capitalism' with "democracy' and, in cases of conflicts between the two, routinely defaulted to the former over the latter.
All through the 1990s, Russia, under American tutelage and with a bit of help from the IMF, was encouraged towards the triumph of the free market over democracy. Kotz and Weir, Boris Kagarlitsky and Stephen F Cohen have comprehensively detailed the slow death of political pluralism, democracy and free speech during the Yeltsin years. Political parties that had huge popular support but rejected the market integration (the Communist Party, CPRF) paid a huge price: Yeltsin, aided by cash from oligarchs in exchange for vastly deflated natural resource concessions (Loans for Shares Scandal) was abetted by the US in rigging the 1996 presidential election.
So after a decade of reinforced learning, Russia has finally, under Putin, learned the precedence of the free market over political democracy. And what does it get for its troubles? People like Lucas from the Economist, a magazine that has been consistently cheerleading its anti-democratic marketisation during the 1990s, now condemns it for playing the West's game, the same game it has been taught during the last decade and a half. There's just no winning, is there?
That is what's so weird about the central tenant underlying Lucas's book:
“If you believe that capitalism is a system in which money matters more than freedom, you are doomed when people who don't believe in freedom attack using money.
If that sounds like a bizarre position for an Economist journalist to take, it is; yet the NYRB's Caryl rather charitably calls it only “something of an intellectual leap”.
Funnily enough, after being shown and told since 1991 that capitalism is the only game in town; after learning the hard way the techniques that the US utilized in wedding big business to national power politics to bully countries like Russia to do its bidding; after having beated out of its system any notion of justice and freedom at odds with "the market'; after mastering the same techniques and philosophy with an amorality and ruthlessness undreamed of in the hypocritical and politically correct west, and after beating the West at its own game by having Gazprom stock snapped up by eager shareholders at the London stock exchange and gaudy Russian villas infest Courchevel, Russia is now told: stop!!! Where are your morals? Where are your values?
In light of recent history, these complaints, which were legitimate when voiced by dissidents in the early 1990s resisting the Yeltin-US marketi "reforms, can be nothing more than the laments of a sore-loser when voiced by The Economist and its apologists at the NYRB.
But even in remembering, all of a sudden, about the centrality of liberal values, morality and the rule of law (where were you in 1991-2000, Lucas and Caryl?), Lucas has still failed to repent and eschew the authoritarian approach that characterized the West's market evangelism at the expense of democracy. Only now, it's liberal evangelism at the expense of democracy.
The sentiment underpins Lucas's very philosophy, which, like Fareed Zakaria's theory of ‘illiberal democracy’, elavates liberalism, a particular political-economic conception, over democracy, majority rule. While democracy is a process, liberalism is but one of several particular outcomes of that process. Lucas only seems to support democracy when its outcome is ‘in accordance with Western values’ (ie. to his personal liking).
When I met the gracious and self-deprecating Lucas at the book's launch in Washington, what surprised me most about him was his deep affection for Russia; in that light, I realised that he harbours none of the anti-Russian racism of a Richard Pipes.
Lucas's ire is directed at the Russian regime, not its people. And because of this, he must put aside his fanatical liberal proselytizing and trust in them to choose their own way.
