Future and disharmony
19.02.2009 | Andres Herkel | English news
At the Munich security conference, US Vice-President Joe Biden signalled that the new administration wants a fresh start to Russia relations. While important as a message, giving substance to this desire will be a complicated task.
Consider the kinds of fresh starts we have seen from Munich in recent years. Two years ago, then Russian president Vladimir Putin surprised even the greatest Russia sceptics. delivering a vitriolic presentation full of sharp contrasts and references to Cold War and geopolitical imperialism.
Last year in Munich, Vice Premier Minister Ivanov provoked the West, declaring that recognizing Kosovo would open a Pandora's box. If we consider Russia's aggression against Georgia and Moscow's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia to be the opening of that box, then we can say that Russia made good on its promise, half a year later.
Thus the pressure policy seen in Munich in the past three years can be seen as fairly worrisome. In 2007, Russia had an verbal attack, in 2008 it threatened, and now America is offering an olive branch. True, Biden did clearly indicate that the US does not ever intend to accept the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
And while some analysts thought that the new vice-president might also disown the Eastern European missile shield Moscow opposes, this did not happen, either. Biden was heralding the beginning of a new presidential era in America, one that will offer new opportunities - for Russia, Europe and the United States.
The Russian media covered Biden's proffered hand in friendship as a triumph for the current pressure policy, but it is far from certain that the future will bear out such a facile interpretation. It was actually more as if Biden was giving the Kremlin a chance to get off to a new start, so that it could move away from the confrontationism expressed by Putin to a more open dialogue.
Now that the economic crisis has deepened, it may be better understood in Moscow that any new flexing of geopolitical muscles (Chechnya, Georgia) will prove a Pyrrhic victory. But we can't hold our breath, either, for common sense to return.
As for assessing various development scenarios, it is a very unfavourable time to predict anything. The crisis is creating its own harsh realities, and predictions made on the basis of what we know today have a short shelf life.
Indeed, Western politicians were not able to draw adequate conclusions from the geopolitical message in Putin's Munich speech, even though there was a year and a half in which to do that. Then came the August war and - maybe even a greater factor - the economic crisis and collapse in the price of oil.
Analyzing Putin's Munich speech spawned conclusions, of course - take for instance Edward Lucas's The New Cold War, a book that has received good reviews in Estonia as well. Of course, Lucas examines Russia's development over a longer perspective, and Putin's aggressive language only gives credence to his observations that Russia has dug in for a Cold War.
But when the architect of Kosovo's independence Martti Ahtisaari came to Estonia several months ago as a fresh Nobel laureate, he asserted that talk of a new Cold War is "utter nonsense". It might have been more accurate to say that talk of Cold War no longer made sense, as the price of crude oil had started dropping during this time and Russia's capability to play the leading role in the global conflict declined with each day.
We should also take note the so-called power audit conducted by Mark Leonardi and Micu Popescu regarding EU-Russia relations at the behest of the European Foreign Relations council in November 2007.
Yes, it is true that even some of the positions in what is otherwise a brilliant analysis have become dated in just a short period of time.
For example, Leonard and Popescu argue that while in the early 1990s Russia depended on Western credit, now Russia has one of the largest currency reserves and the West depends on Russian gas. Gas dependence still persists, but Russia's cash reserves are bring depleted at an unforeseen rate. Leonard and Popescu say that Europe must be able to get its position across, too, by making clear that not only is Europe dependent on Russia, but that Russia is dependent on the possibility of selling energy to Europe.
Now, 15 months later, Russia is seeing what the dependency on the European market actually means. However severely the crisis will hit the West, it isn't likely that its impact on the West will be quite as extensive as it will be for the Russian economy. Even if the oil price were to hold steady at an optimistic level of 50 dollars per barrel, some estimate Russian export revenue would be halved. We haven't even reached the drop in the price of gas; it still lies ahead.
Other problems include bad loans, decaying infrastructure and capital flight. In a general depression, everyone suffers and no doubt Estonia will suffer more than the average, but the tragedy facing our big eastern neighbour is that their entire economy is built on raw material and energy prices.
At the same time, we cannot be too optimistic that the West will be able to take advantage of a weaker Russia in global competition or call it more forcefully back to the fold of democracy and rule of law, as Leonard and Popescu recommend.
Instead, a second Great Depression will force countries to become more introverted and adopt protectionist measures. President Obama's administration is shying away from the US's role as global policeman created by Bush - an image that has in many respects been a failure,
Let us recall that during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the democratic form of government tended to be supplanted by an authoritarian regime even in some "normal" countries. I wouldn't want to forecast such a dark scenario for our near future, but the question of the future of "semi-free" countries and societies is certainly relevant.
The hope that the loss of oil revenue could make Russia a more liberal country would seem credible if the West were a more open and stronger role model than it is capable of being in the years to come. The FSB and Putin faction have achieved such sovereign control of power that it would be naïve to hope for a peaceful easing based on simple politico-economic expediency.
In the long term, I side with the theoreticians who note that Russia has always had repeated periods of authoritarian mobilization but that the repressions are always followed by a new thaw. This was the case after Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Stalin. No doubt a thaw will arrive after Putin.
At the same time, I am not at all sure that we have seen everything yet from the latter -- the war in Chechnya, muzzling of the opposition and destruction of the free press and civic society. Cynically speaking, this is child's play next to the large-scale repressions seen earlier in history. But when the economic collapse is really upon us and power is put to the test, this regime could go much further.
Thus the question is whether Russia's depression will prove to be also full of repression or - in the best case scenario - whether depression will itself be considered sufficiently repressive. No doubt it will last a fairly long time, and if radical reforms are reached, it will only be through great hardship. Yet if Russia completes this torturous and long cycle, it can be much stronger than before and hopefully more democratic as well.
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I find myself leaving aside the wisdom in hindsight - that all this was inevitable in light of all the bad loans and global pyramid schemes - and thinking increasingly about the crisis in terms of a purifying force. The rhetorically noble part of the international system that protects freedom and humanistic values has long been rusty - or rather, it has run up against opposing forces that are too strong.
Actually, by August of last year, Russia's development had become a threat to the humanitarian aspect of the international cooperative system as a whole. The August war simply put the formal seal on the geopolitical hegemony. The Estonian, Lithuanian and Polish presidents are not enough to stand up against it.
At the same time, a new, unforeseen and, for players on the political spectrum, undesirable force began exerting an influence - the global crisis. It will change the world significantly, but we do not yet know how. It's a matter of guesswork. I concur strongly with David Vseviov, who said in Postimees on 10 February that the current crisis cannot be seen narrowly in terms of weighing its economic root causes or conclusions. It is a crisis of values.
I would add here that it also appears that way in the international perspective. Only that we are dealing with different types of societies and value systems that are all entering a change phase at the same time.
And to come back to Biden's speech, what America was saying, in all its new openness, is that it actually has no idea as to what colour the light will be when it appears at the end of the tunnel.
Source: www.herkel.net
