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Russia and the Euro-Atlantic World

Dr. Christian Wipperfürth - 11/30/2011

What is behind the endless ups and downs in Russian-Western relations since 2000? Many observers blame this instability on the Kremlin. Others point the finger at the West. Representatives of both camps can produce countless facts that fit together to create a perfectly conclusive overall picture. Yet they all tend to present their arguments in an emotionally and morally-charged tone. This raises doubts over whether they have sufficiently taken into account the evidence that contradicts their views. Furthermore, the dynamics that drive Russian politics are extremely complex and open to interpretation, which also explains why the analyses of observers often diverge sharply.


Domestic Political Factors

A number of experts have noted that, after the year 2000, the Kremlin first allowed itself to be guided by Western values, but then strove to distance itself from the West. These observers argue that Vladimir Putin may have sought this distancing for quite some time, but that this was only possible after he consolidated his domestic power base in 2003-2004. With the completion of domestic political reforms and the symbolically important breakup of the Yukos energy concern, they say that he introduced a new phase in both domestic and foreign policy, and Russia began to challenge the West. They argue that Putin increasingly relied on representatives of the intelligence agencies, who are marked by a strong sense of nationalism, and in a bid to secure their power and newfound wealth, these individuals thus fueled the perception that Russia was surrounded by enemies.

How valid is this interpretation? A certain change in course in Russian domestic policy could, in fact, be observed in 2003-2004. Democratic freedoms were further curtailed and representatives of the intelligence agencies gained an appreciable amount of influence in business circles. There is no doubt that these were generally etatists who wanted a strong state, both domestically and abroad.

The above interpretation would only be compelling if, during the first years after he took office, Putin's democratic virtues had been significantly more pronounced than those of former President Boris Yeltsin. This is not the contention of Putin's critics, however, who tend to point to differences between him and his democratic predecessor, Yeltsin. What's more, both the tone and the content of Russian policies toward the West were doubtlessly more cooperative between 2000 and 2004 than during the previous four years under Yeltsin. Even between 2004 and 2008, the conflicts seldom achieved the same degree of intensity as during the late 1990s.

Instead, there are many indications that the general population and members of the elite would have preferred a more power-driven policy toward the West than what Putin's administration felt was appropriate. This was clearly reflected, for example, in the strong criticism of Putin's policies in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. From around 2004, the Kremlin was merely more inclined to respond to this mood. This became clear with regard to Russia's policy on Iran, for instance. The Kremlin cooperated with the West, but Moscow gave the impression on a number of occasions that it saw itself as Teheran's protector. Nevertheless, China has far more extensive interests in Iran. Beijing was also fundamentally sceptical of sanctions, but in the West Moscow, and not Beijing, was perceived as Teheran's leading supporter. This may also have to do with a particularly critical view of Russia that is widespread among observers in the West, however such a view cannot sufficiently explain this phenomenon: Russia shows an almost pressing need to be respected – even if it means playing the adversary.

According to an opinion poll conducted in early 2007, Putin was still criticized by some for being too indulgent toward the West (16%), while 8% said he was too harsh and 61% felt that his policies were balanced. The population seems to feel that it is paramount that the West take Russia seriously, and is prepared to accept heightened tensions to achieve this. This also explains the much more positive ratings in the opinion polls of Putin's foreign policy accomplishments in 2008. In addition, studies show that a relative majority of Russians feel that Russia's image abroad is inappropriately negative. The higher the level of education of respondents, the greater the percentage who agree with this statement.

The Kremlin sometimes takes a hard line to meet the domestic demands placed upon it. In other words, anyone who is suspected of harboring sympathies for the West, and whose "national loyalty" could thus be called into question, believes that he has to show himself to be a particularly intrepid patriot in defense of Russian interests. This has tended to be the case with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which probably explains why in early November 2010 he traveled to Russia's Far East and visited one of the disputed Kuril Islands claimed by Japan. His visit led to a sharp deterioration in Russian-Japanese relations, which were still fraught with tension in late 2011. Every single one of Medvedev's Soviet and Russian predecessors had refrained from setting foot on one of the islands. When Putin took office as president, he even offered to transfer two of the disputed Islands to Japan. From a foreign policy perspective, Medvedev's posturing was unnecessary, even highly damaging. Good relations with Japan are extremely desirable, both in terms of economic policy, to boost the development of Russia's Far East, and in terms of foreign policy, to act as a counterweight to China and to help limit Japan's dependency on the US. Medvedev presumably accepted a certain amount of damage on the foreign policy front to score points on the domestic policy front.

Russia's hard-line approach has more to do with domestic policy maneuvers than foreign policy goals. The elite in particular are afraid of tense relations with the West – where their children often live and they have considerable business and other material interests.

According to studies conducted by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, the following percentages of respondents have a positive attitude toward the United States:

99/2000 2002 2004 2006 2008
Germany 78% 60% 38% 37% 31%
France 62% 62% 37% 39% 42%
United Kingdom 83% 75% 58% 56% 53%
Russia 37% 61% 46% 43% 46%

The population's widespread critical view of the West is not of a fundamental nature. Its attitude toward the US tended to improve under President Putin and people in Russia generally have a more positive image of the United States than respondents in Germany and France.

The US tends not to be rejected – but rather admired. Anti-American sentiment does not stem from the fact that a Russian power-driven policy is met by categorical rejection from the US. Instead, it is an expression of concern that Washington is turning, or could turn, against Moscow – and jealousy that the US is acting without Russia. A large number of respondents indicate that they favor close cooperation, in the interests of both parties.

The Russian people are also hoping that their living conditions will come into line with those of the Euro-Atlantic world. This definitely goes beyond materialist aspects to include the rule of law and due process. Although there is a widespread view that modernization has to take into account the country's particular conditions, the West still indirectly serves as a model.

The situation with human rights and democracy in Russia is still a relevant factor in Russian-Western relations, even if some criticism tends to be excessive. In the Euro-Atlantic world there is a consensus that preference should be given to partnerships with democratic states, not authoritarian ones, which do not share certain key Western values, and where there is a much greater risk than in Western nations of an abrupt change in course in terms of foreign policy. According to this view, cooperation with authoritarian regimes can only extend to certain areas and has relatively uncertain prospects for the future.

Presidents Putin and Medvedev have repeatedly and emphatically stressed that Russia is committed to European values. But even many open-minded observers doubt whether the country is prepared and able to substantially (further) adopt these values in the near future. From a Western perspective, a strategic partnership may perhaps only become a reality when conditions within Russia converge with European standards. On the other hand, it would be easier to meet this challenge if Russia and the Euro-Atlantic world cooperated more closely. Conflicts not only create an aversion toward the West, but could also increase reservations toward its values. In this sense, the repeated conflicts between 2004 and 2008 very likely also contributed to a further hardening of attitudes on the Russian domestic policy front.

The following should be noted: Russia did not turn away from the West in 2003-2004 for domestic policy reasons. There remains a strong desire for very close relations with the West. Russia's occasionally hard-line and even provocative stance stems from its domestic policy, but is also motivated by its foreign policy: The Russians are defending national interests and would like to be treated with respect. On the other hand, due to domestic policy considerations and their possible repercussions with regard to foreign policy, the West is perhaps not in a position to pursue a strategic partnership. Based on the conclusiveness of these considerations as presented in the current debate, we still find no explanation for why Russian-Western relations were characterized by tensions from 2004 to 2008-2009.


Foreign Policy Factors

There is a second argument that blames Russia for the deterioration of relations. According to this line of reasoning, starting in 2003-2004 the Kremlin was no longer as dependent on Western loans and financing. The phase of relative dependence had come to a close and problems plaguing the West, such as in Afghanistan, had presumably significantly boosted Russia's self-confidence. It's argued that this prompted Russia to leave the "Western solar system," where it had orbited as "Pluto," and chart its own course.

Was Russia so self-assured that it decided on its own initiative to turn away from the West? The country's rising economic strength, particularly during the two years running up to the autumn of 2008, doubtlessly led to the imperious and, at times, challenging demeanor of the Russian leadership. The limits of America's power became apparent, and there was an increasing awareness in Russia that the economic supremacy of the West was diminishing; while in the late 1970s the G7 countries were still responsible for 60% of worldwide economic output, this share had dropped to just over 40% by 2008.

Behind Russia's self-confident and even brash surface something else exerts a dominating influence. The unexpected collapse of the USSR was the defining political experience of the generations born in the 1970s and earlier. Ethnic tensions and the country's apparent weaknesses accentuated the impression of an unstable and frail state. President Medvedev declared in late 2008 that Eastern Siberia would be lost if Russia didn't muster the strength to develop this region. This wouldn't be the first unforeseen development in the history of the country, he added. The allusion to the end of the USSR was unmistakable. Over the past 20 years there has been no lack of similar comments. It's possible to regard these concerns as being instrumentalized by the country's leadership to mobilize the support of the population, but they are shared by representatives of all political camps. Ultimately, Russia desperately needs to be treated with respect because it suffers from pangs of self-doubt.

Russia is fully aware of its weakness. Official documents issued by Russian government agencies in the spring and early summer of 2008 declared for the first time that Russia was not a superpower, but rather a country that wanted to become one.

The Kremlin indicated to the West on a number of occasions that it was interested in substantially increasing cooperation. But the West only reacted to a certain degree. Did Russia end up taking a tougher stance between 2004 and 2008 than was actually intended to heighten the West's interest in pursuing a collaboration?

Based on the current stage of the debate we can draw the following conclusions: Interpretations that blame Russian-Western tensions on a conscious turning of the Kremlin against the Euro-Atlantic world remain ultimately unconvincing, regardless of whether they are based on domestic or foreign policy motives. This leaves us with the observers who argue that Russia reacted, with a certain delay, to the Western, US-dominated policy of exclusion and even containment. They say that Russia under Putin first sought an alliance of sorts with the West, but either shifted away from this in 2004 or attempted to attract the interest of the West through demonstrations of severity. According to this argument, it is not the Kremlin that bears responsibility for this alienation.

This view is promulgated, often quite vehemently, by the vast majority of experts on Russia. They say that the West reacted with resentment to Russia's stabilization and growing strength. Furthermore, they argue that young Putin's policy on the West was characterized by a willingness to find common ground and make concessions, despite the war in Kosovo, the termination of the ABM treaty and NATO's expansion into the Baltic republics. Putin only decided to take a more hard-line approach, they say, when the West refused to abandon its unfriendly, at times even hostile, attitude.

Russian-Western relations could have been much better if US foreign policy had not been so strongly characterized by a unilateral approach. This by no means entails that Russia and the West could have forged an alliance of sorts. The Kremlin undoubtedly also added to the tensions. In Russia there is a tendency, in all political camps, to strongly overestimate the extent to which large countries dominate smaller ones. The repeated and, at least from Moscow's perspective, unfriendly and provocative signals from the Baltic republics, Georgia and Ukraine were seen as maneuvers that were staged by the West – just as the outbreak of war in the Caucasus in 2008 was ultimately blamed on the US. This is probably also because the Kremlin believed that it could use manipulative tactics to control developments in its own country. It assumed that other countries have similar abilities.

In reality, though, the evidence indicates that it is primarily large countries that are manipulated by small ones. The political leaders of a number of post-Soviet countries tried to create the impression that they served as a bulwark against alleged Russian neo-imperialism. They benefited from Russian-Western tensions and helped to create new ones and exacerbate old ones to gain the support of the West – and they were successful, just as Belarus and, at times, Kyrgyzstan managed to play this game in the opposite direction.

Nonetheless, there are relevant divergent interests between Russia and the West. For instance, with regard to the Republic of Moldova and the breakaway territory of Transnistria in 2003, and Ukraine in 2004, there were indications that Moscow saw itself as such a dominant power capable of restoring order that Western governments, including the Chancellery in Berlin, legitimately voiced their objections. But this conflict became ideologically and morally charged, both in Russia and the West, to an extent that was irrational. True, second and third-rate Russian politicians and the national media display a tendency to adopt a tone tinged with imperialism. However, the Kremlin has sufficiently proven over the past 20 years that it is prepared to allow CIS members to take responsibility for their nations, sometimes to a greater extent than they would have liked, as was seen with the uprising in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 – and neither Putin nor Medvedev have ever spoken of their country's "spheres of influence."

At the same time, there was an increased tendency in Russia, as well as in the West, to perceive what was already expected from the other side – in other words, something negative. This even tended to occur when the facts pointed in the other direction. Putin, for example, repeatedly speculated that the West intended to weaken Russia, if not break up the country, to gain access to inexpensive raw materials. In the West it became common knowledge that Putin had characterized the end of the USSR as "the" greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, which was seen as proof of his imperialistic ambitions. He did not do this, however; he spoke of "one of the" greatest geopolitical disasters, and put these words in a context that made it clear that he was referring to the fate of millions of Russians who unexpectedly found themselves outside the borders of their mother country in 1991.

The issue of Afghanistan is another example of the widespread tendency toward selective perception among observers in the West. Since 2006, Russia has very clearly indicated its willingness to contribute to the country's stabilization in an indirect yet substantial manner. Berlin was aware of this, but it took over three years before this message also registered with Washington and Brussels. Negotiations were launched that led to a significantly stronger cooperation.

Russia's policy on Central Asia and Afghanistan was only dominated by competition with the West in 2005, although even this is doubtful. The Kremlin spoke out against permanent military bases by foreign powers in Central Asia, which was often interpreted in the Euro-Atlantic world as anti-Western, and there were certainly indications of this. According to Russia's interpretation of the term, however, foreign powers in the region also include China, which at times strove to establish a military base in Kyrgyzstan, but failed partly due to Russian resistance. The Kremlin was practically holding China at its doorstep.

Why have relations improved since 2009? New presidential administrations in Moscow and Washington have promoted this development. But a more decisive factor is that a new situation emerged, or least came to the fore, in 2008-2010: the military quagmire in Afghanistan and the financial crisis had diminished the power and prestige of the West. These factors minimized the ambitions of the Euro-Atlantic world and increased its willingness to cooperate with others, including Moscow. It's a similar story with Russia, which was harder hit by the financial and economic crisis of 2008-2009 than any other major economy, while China was able to extend its lead. Now that the conditions had changed, both sides did not allow themselves to be (mis)directed by their feelings to the same extent as before. Furthermore, the sobering experiences of the West, for example, with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, and Russia's headaches with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, have helped allow cooler heads to prevail. It is above all the West that has become more willing to cooperate.

Russia is in many respects a very important country, but the West didn't see much need to make concessions to the Russians. After all, it got from Russia what it wanted, both in respect to the Balkans in the 1990s, the post-9/11 world and with regard to non-proliferation. Russia was far more dependent on cooperation than the Euro-Atlantic world. What's more, it was at times not apparent what benefits were linked to a closer cooperation with Russia. The EU and NATO are so preoccupied with themselves that it would often make the situation more difficult if they also consulted with the Kremlin. In addition, Russia's defensive attitude is clear; while it officially insists on equality with the EU – a situation that would exclude unilateral adaptations – such measures are surreptitiously implemented on a practical level. The Kremlin is isolated (as was apparent, for example, with regard to recognizing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia). It is by no means willing to create an anti-Western alliance, for instance with China. The Western disinterest in forging a collaboration was however interpreted in Russia not as disinterest, but rather as an unfriendly, if not hostile, attitude. The Kremlin overestimates its own importance. This prompted countermeasures, which in turn led to Western reactions.

Russia is striving to play the role of a superpower; it has more neighbors and longer borders than any other country, and borders on a wide range of potential conflict regions: in the Caucasus, Central Asia and North Korea. Russia seems to be doomed to engage in world politics, yet it lacks the resources and allies to accomplish this successfully. It needs the West much more than the other way around. China enjoys a much more balanced relationship and, indeed, for a number of years Washington has been far more conciliatory toward Beijing than toward Moscow.

Until 2009, there was the overriding conviction in the West that reaching an understanding with Russia was neither necessary nor advisable because the West could deal with impending issues alone, Russia could not make a relevant contribution to solving the problems, and including Russia would further complicate the current convoluted decision-making processes within Western organizations.

But was Russia actually a country that unsuccessfully sought an understanding with the West? In this context, it's important to point to Russia's importance as an energy power. Isn't there an imbalance of power in favor of the supplier? In an extreme situation, in contrast with the Gulf States, Russia could not be pressured militarily. Isn't this motivation enough to reach a strong understanding with Russia, if not for the West to take a latent conciliatory approach toward Russia?

Russian financial assets are to a large extent located in the West, and access to them could thus be suspended. Nevertheless, not a single buyer assumes that there is even a theoretical potential for blackmail. Energy consumers would otherwise insist on a significant price reduction for Russian gas, for instance, because they would have to take costly measures to prepare for a possible interruption in supplies. In such a situation, potential new customers like China would not even have indicated their interest in the first place. None of this is the case, however. The dependency is mutual and cannot be used by either side as a form of pressure.

Russia continues to measure itself against the West – as it has done for the past three centuries. The West is a model that occasionally prompts demonstrative irritation, but more out of a sense of envy than a fundamental sense of antagonism. The Russians see themselves as a European people, and Russia sees itself as a European country. It needs a modernization partnership, particularly with the Euro-Atlantic world. Both Russia and the West are inherently status quo powers. There are many indications that Russia made a strategic decision in 2000-2001 in favor of the West – a decision that remains valid today.

Russia's orientation toward the West could have nevertheless been a tactical maneuver, a temporary phenomenon. It is possible that back under Yeltsin Russia decided to ultimately maintain its distance to the West. Perhaps it doesn't desire an alliance, but rather cooperative ties to secure its independence and ability to act? Is Moscow possibly striving to set a course that keeps it at roughly equal distances from the West and China?

Cooperative relations with China were also extremely valuable before 2005, yet Moscow has repeatedly used Beijing to attract the interest of the West. Although this pattern has continued to have an impact over the past few years, Moscow has increasingly made it clear that it is prepared to make significant sacrifices for close relations with China. Beijing has grown enormously in importance since its currency reserves soared from $250 billion in 1999 to over $2.7 trillion in early 2011. Russia still does approximately 50% of its foreign trade with EU countries, but China overtook Germany in 2010 to become Russia's main trading partner. The Chinese example has encouraged Russia not to look toward foreign approaches for the country's development, but rather to increasingly build on its own specific characteristics and needs. This adversely affects the prospects for Russian-Western cooperation and diminishes Russia's dependency on the Euro-Atlantic world.

Both in Russia and China there is the widespread belief that there is much to gain from good relations, and much to lose from bad ones – an attitude that has also long had a guiding influence on Germany's policy on Eastern Europe and Russia. The objective atmosphere between Moscow and Beijing has contributed to the fact that bilateral relations over the past 20 years have developed far more dynamically, and with fewer fluctuations, than ties between the Kremlin and the West.

China's robust growth increases Russia's chances for a cooperation. On the other hand, since the 1990s the balance has shifted so strongly out of Russia's favor that the Kremlin, for this reason alone, will most likely shrink back from an all-too-warm embrace with Beijing – if it has an opportunity to do so.