Paul Sanders - Narratives, Geopolitics and The 'cost of The Cold'

Narratives, Geopolitics and The 'cost of The Cold'

Engaging the new Russia confronts as many obstacles as it solicits differences in approaches. Compared to a promising start in the 1990s, today there is more that separates than unites Russia and the West. Some have pointed to geopolitics, others to culture or the 'value gap' as the underlying cause of tension. Less attention has been attributed to cognitive barriers, despite evidence that they constitute formidable barriers. How important perception is for the Western understanding of contemporary Russia can be gauged from media or academic discussions, many of which are anachronistic ('New Cold War'). The negatives memes associated with this perception are reactivated on a regular basis. The pinnacle of this asymmetric perception was the 2008 Georgia crisis (s. BBC Newsnight, 28 Oct 2008 "What really happened in South Ossetia?"). Once the widely shared assumption of "unilateral Russian aggression" was put to the test, it emerged that initial assessments had lacked the necessary caution; alas, too late to revise the critical media threshold, vital to keeping negative images of Russia alive.

It is for reasons like this that narratives should attract more academic attention. Narratives and memory are more significant and politically charged than they may appear. One good example would be the acrimonious dispute and geopolitcal fall-out resulting from the removal of a Soviet-era war memorial in the Estonian capital, Tallinn, in May 2007. A social science loan from literary theory, narratives represent "compelling story lines which can explain events convincingly and from which inferences can be drawn" (Freedman, 2006, 22). They are not necessarily analytical or evidence-based, can be more or less virtual, and correspond to a "'telescoping' of logic and temporality" (Barthes, 1977). Narratives rely on deliberate gaps and fashion collective blind spots (Jarausch, 2002). However, their purpose transcends (possible) manipulation, they have a far more important function in the formation and formulation of collective identity (Ronfeldt and Arquilla, 2001), as well as in the structuring of the responses of others to developing events (Freedman, 2006). This link to identity formation explains the persistence and power of narratives. 'Story-telling' responds to an elementary human need for meaning (Sinnstiftung). Although one may deplore the distortion of reality through narratives, in one form or another narrativity always prevails.

Examples of the instrumental role of narratives in the Western relationship with Russia emerge from Martin Malia's The Bronze Horseman (1999) and David Foglesong's The American Mission and the Evil Empire (2007). Looking at the post-Soviet context Stephen Cohen described the principal Western master narrative of the Russian 1990s as the confrontation of "liberals" (supported by the West) and Soviet "reactionaries" or reform opponents. The central tenet of this master narrative was (and is) "democratization". Accordingly, President Yeltsin's liberal policies as well as the efforts of Western governments, NGOs and international organisations were allegedly motivated by a concern for "promoting freedom" (Failed Crusade: America and the tragedy of post-Communist Russia, New York, 2001). This narrative omits that the illiberal seeds of 'managed democracy' were laid in Yeltsin's Russia. Also, Western displeasure with Putin did not commence in 2000 - when the West was undecided - nor as late as the 'Colour Revolutions'. The most plausible chronology for a worsening of relations is 2003-04, when Western hopes of easy access to Russia's energy riches were dashed in the wake of the YUKOS affair. Only then did Western opinion start to interpret Putin's ascent to power in 2000 as the "return of the old guard" and the beginning of a "New Cold War".

Asymmetric vision of Russia is nothing new. In fact, the currently operating Western meta-narrative of relations with Russia is a 'super-story' of engagement driven by the ideological notions of liberty, freedom and, recently, democratisation. It emerged in the early 19th century and, since, has alternated between a quixotic Orientalist search for a Russian civilisational 'black box' (de Custine, A., La Russie en 1839, 1843), and missionary visions oscillating between two extremes: a determination to recreate Russia in the Western image; or the 'abandonment' of Russia, on the basis of 'essentialist incompatibility' (s. Foglesong). During the Cold War era these memes were enriched by the new scientific narratives of 'path dependency' and 'patrimonialism', of which Richard Pipes was the most significant proponent. The recent 'New Cold War' strain belongs into this tradition. The meta-narrative itself has never proceeded in a straight functional line, but, as indicated by Malia and Foglesong, in cyclical movements of indifference-engagement-disengagement. Naturally, as befits Western pluralism, the meta-narrative has never been uncontested; but at the same time it has maintained itself as the towering consensus view in terms of framing historical and current relations between Russia and the West.

Both 'path dependency' and 'patrimonialism' are superseded. Not only do they downgrade the importance of basic environmental and geopolitical factors. They also trivalise the present situation, reducing it to a simplistic dichotomy between 'dictatorship' or 'democracy'. The current deadlock of Russian society points to a profounder dilemma, which is itself the result of a specific type of historical development: while Russia needs change, too much change - and nobody knows where the threshold is - may lead to the disintegration of Russia (witness the 1990s). To understand the mainstay of this dilemma one requires an alternative meta-narrative. This exists within the debate on the impact of physical geography on economic development. If the old Western meta-narrative ended the 'story' with the platitude that Russia is handicapped by her history (indicatively Pipes 1974), then the new geopolitical narrative rightly reduces history (and politics) to a function of geography. The argument is sustained by the triple constraint of climate, distance and reliance on overland transport. Termed the 'Cost of the cold', this factor severely impacts Russian costs of production; in a way that even many raw materials extractions in Russia are not profitable under free market conditions (Lynch 2005; Gaddy & Hill 2003). Faced with 'illiberal geography', a liberal economic regime therefore appears quite dispensable; the traditional allocative role of the Russian state, on the other hand, emerges as quite indispensable (Lynch 2005, p. 238). The very visible hand of the state is also needed in another sense: the current raw materials bonanza is not sustainable, as the sources of supply went on-stream during the Soviet period, when ‘funds’ were not an issue. Current-day Russia is living off this substance: once the supply dries up, the shortfall may not be replaced, as the prohibitive start-up investments required for new development projects make these uncompetitive under market conditions. For Russia to be sustainable at all, it must grow organically, clustering in strategic pockets; first, however, it needs to contract, and this includes the de-urbanisation of parts of Siberia where human settlement is unsustainable. While, in the long run, liberalism is something a downsized Russia could live with quite well, the structurally distorted and unsustainable Russia of today is dependent on state intervention. The catch (or tragedy) is that this contention holds despite the massive levels of predation by Russian bureaucrats. The solution is the problem.