INTERNATIONAL
A soft power tool-kit for dealing with Russia
Summer 2006
How should Europe be engaging with newly resurgent Russia? Charles William Maynes, President of the Eurasia Foundation, suggests that the European Union should develop new sources of soft power that will enable it to exert influence on Moscow
Commentary:
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In the decade that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse, Europe was concerned but not worried about the decline of Russia. The EU did not at that time regard its great neighbour as a political or economic problem; Russia was retreating from empire, and as it grew weaker it appeared less threatening. Over the past five years, though, the Russian economy has begun to revive and Russia’s government has gained in policy coherence, if not always in directions of Europe’s liking. Today, the question is whether Europe has the policy tools to deal with this new phenomenon.
For some time now, Europe has felt it could leave its Russia policy on autopilot. After all, Moscow had withdrawn peacefully from eastern Europe, it had agreed to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and even accepted the drift of some of its neighbours and former satellites into the tight embrace of the European Union. The ideological glue that had cemented Russian society for nearly a century had suddenly lost it power to adhere. The country tottered on the edge of chaos. The freeing up of prices bankrupted the middle class and stripped its citizens of most of their savings. Firms could not pay wages and the government could not meet its pension obligations.
At that time, the concern of many Europeans was that a flood of starving Russians would start to move westwards seeking food and employment. A few western strategists even suggested that Russia would have to sell Siberia to the Americans to survive, or accept the disintegration of Mother Russia into several mini-states as various regions adopted “sauve qui peût” strategies to deal with the collapse of authority emanating from Moscow.
NATO, meanwhile, moved relentlessly forward to the very borders of Russia, so that Russia itself seemed pushed further into Eurasia and away from Europe. NATO aircraft began patrolling the border only minutes in flying time from Russia’s second city of St. Petersburg. Russia might protest, but it could do nothing about its humiliation.
During these years, Europe’s approach to Russia was humanitarian and pedagogical, rather than strategic. Europe assisted in mounting relief efforts and provided experts to help the Russians understand the rudiments of free market economics and of democracy. One would not want to minimise this assistance, because though modest the help that Russia got from Europe and the United States during the 1990s was nonetheless crucial. Without it, Russia’s transformation would have been even harsher.
How different the picture is today. Russia is no longer an object of pity but of alarm. For the first time in a decade, it is pushing back. It is building a new pipeline to by-pass the central European states and it is taking independent positions on issues like the price of energy. It is also staking out an independent position on the Middle East and developing new military relationships in central Asia.
Europe is not quite sure how to react. The EU is dissatisfied with Russia’s political development and dislikes a number of it new diplomatic initiatives. But it needs Russian energy and it wants Russia in the alliance against terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Few in the western press nowadays write glibly about Russia as an “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons”. Under President Vladimir Putin, real wages in Russia have gone up by 75%, poverty has been halved and the budget surplus roars along at 12%. Moscow has used its rivers of oil money to pay off the majority of its cold war debts, so that Russia’s indebtedness is no longer a source of western leverage over Russian policies. Western consultants in Russia now play a much smaller role; the country can pay for what it needs and is no longer obliged to accept what the west wishes to provide.
Russia seems likely to continue on its path to prosperity and power. Demand for oil and gas is set to keep energy prices high for as long as the industrialisation of China and India stays on track. And in spite of the Kremlin’s exceedingly cruel judicial treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the Yukos oil company who is now in a Siberian jail, western businessmen do not seem concerned about sudden reversals in their fortunes brought about by an unexpected change in government policy. Instead, they are flocking to invest in Russia. In the 1990s, foreign direct investment in Hungary had been greater than in Russia, but today Russia attracts more than the whole of central Europe.
The economic revival of Russia is no doubt welcomed by all, but when it comes to its political development most western observers seem to have concluded that Russia is returning to its autocratic traditions. A number of leaders in Europe and the United States have signed open letters publicly denouncing the Putin government for its undemocratic ways.
Creating dialogue between Europe and Russia is made more difficult by the fact that many of these western criticisms are either off the mark or downright illogical. Why, for example, is it undemocratic for Russia to appoint rather than elect provincial governors, but not for Ukraine, Poland or France? And is Russia’s new NGO law so terrible?; the Council of Europe has established that it is technically more liberal than similar laws in Finland and France.
Yet even if outsiders overstate or misinterpret these things, there is nevertheless a troubling core of truth in their criticism. Few Finnish NGOs, for example, fear that bureaucrats there will misuse the laws; in Russia many fear precisely that. The steps that President Putin has taken may well have analogues in other democratic states, but taken together these trends seem to point in Russia towards ever more limited freedoms. The totality of these actions is that Russia is developing an increasingly undemocratic face, and this reality is beginning to frighten both Europe and the US.
Europe faces two major problems in trying to exercise a benign influence over Russia: (1) Europe’s most powerful tool of influence is the offer of membership, which in present circumstances Europe cannot credibly offer to any state east of Poland. (2) Europe has no collective foreign policy toward Russia. Yes, the EU has adopted a long list of possible areas of cooperation in the "Four Spaces" as a guideline for the European-Russian relationship, but these seem more a list of aspirations than a coherent policy.
Since World War II, Europe’s power has derived primarily from the power to persuade, not compel, and this power has been most effective when coupled with an offer to include. By contrast, the United States has in the same period intervened militarily many times in other parts of the world. It has an abundance of the power to compel (though it is now learning in the Middle East the limitations of that power). Europe, by contrast, has developed as the most successful pacific power in history. Post-war Japan may have pacified itself, but the European Union was able to end the French-German enmity that had plunged Europe into two suicidal wars, and is well on the way to ending German-Polish rivalry. It has rendered inconceivable the very idea of war in the rest of western and central Europe. In the Balkans, its strongest argument is that if the states of that region behave properly toward one another, they too can join the European Union.
This is an extraordinary achievement; Americans and others should be much more respectful and understanding of what the Europeans have accomplished. But for their part, Europeans might want to be much more open about the limitations of that power now that their own willingness to consider membership of neighbouring states is declining.
Some time ago, I participated in a Moscow seminar on the paths to democracy. The question under discussion was why central European countries had made so much more progress than Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Some participants talked about the failure of these three countries to have taken part in the Renaissance or the Reformation, but an ambassador from central Europe provided the more compelling answer. His country and its neighbours had a roadmap, he said, that was called the acquis communautaire that would lead them not only to democracy but also to EU membership. Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, he argued, had been left to navigate without any roadmap because for them there could be no credible offer of EU membership.
Europe cannot of course expand indefinitely, and each country must secure its own future. Nonetheless, Europe must recognise that its soft power is substantially reduced when dealing with any country that is barred from membership. It must therefore seek new sources of soft power.
Where might the EU’s soft power lie in the case of Russia? Europe should consider three key steps: first, it should develop some middle ground between membership and rejection. Europe and Russia are today poised to pull the countries of Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine in two different directions. When the Orange Revolution took place in Kiev, major figures in Europe talked publicly about Ukraine now being on “their side.” Such an approach to the problems of Ukraine is disastrous. It is impossible to draw a new line between Russia and Ukraine without severe economic consequences for Ukraine, unless of course the European Union is willing to mount a major financial assistance programme.
Last winter’s gas imbroglio also sheds light on this issue. Whatever the deficiencies of the Russian approach, and there were many, it was and is a delusion for Europeans to believe that any Russian government would subsidise through cheap energy Ukraine’s drawing away from Russia to move closer to Europe. If Europe wants Ukraine “on its side”, it would need to mount an aid programme that would compensate Ukraine for the loss of an energy subsidy worth more than €1bn a year. By the same token, some American strategists are misguided if they believe that Russia would want to maintain its energy subsidy to Ukraine so as to ease its NATO entry. No government in the world would consent to such an arrangement, so why should we expect Russia to behave differently?
Finding a place for Russia in a larger European design could do much to alleviate the tension that is building up. One solution might be to design a special trading regime of wide-ranging cooperation with the specific aim of developing more organic ties between Europe and Russia. Could the EU and Russia cooperate on a major development in aircraft design? Could they work together on nuclear energy, now that it seems to be entering a new phase of development? What is needed is not so much a laundry list of objectives but a time-structured negotiation that would make progress possible. If more organic links between Europe and Russia could be encouraged, then, were Ukraine or Belarus to join the European Union in years to come, that would be far less traumatic for Russia than today.
The west, for its part, should begin speaking up in favour of altering NATO practices so that any further expansion of the alliance seems less of a threat to Russia. When the Baltic states joined NATO, American jets were soon flying along the Russia border only a few miles from St. Petersburg. There was no security reason at all for this provocative forward movement of American power. Today 95% of the still enormous nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States are dedicated to the destruction of the other side. It is as if the cold war had never ended.
The Europeans should press the United States and Russia to enter into serious discussions about substantial further reductions in their nuclear arsenals, so that they no longer pose a threat either to one another or to Europe. They should press the Americans and the Russians to enter into negotiations that would lead to a pledge of no-first-use of nuclear weapons in Europe. Such a stance would be soft power with an edge; after all, who has a greater stake in the reduction of continental arsenals than Europe?
Second, Europe should want to recognise more openly than in the past its shared interest with the US in Russia’s democratic development. Several years ago, I suggested to the former head of a European aid programme that US-European cooperation made sense when giving assistance to Russia, but received the answer that cooperation was impossible since America was “the enemy” because its real goal in helping Russia was to gain market share there.
That was a remarkably shortsighted view of the stakes involved in Russia’s political and economic evolution. Although Europe will of course want to fashion its own assistance programmes, internal EU regulations in any case now make it very difficult for Europe to cooperate with fellow democratic countries in supporting civil society in Russia. Yet in the difficult period through which Russian civil society is passing, a common approach at times involving a measure of co-funding could yield benefits. Together we could show much-needed solidarity with the struggling civil society community in Russia. The aim would be to find a common dialogue to encourage partnerships between civil society in Europe and America on the one hand, and in Russia on the other.
Third, Europe should develop a more audible policy voice on Russian issues. Many individual EU countries have special interests peculiar to their own circumstances that cause them to hesitate to address Russia’s larger political issues. Not every European country has the same degree of interest in these issues, and this lack of shared concern enables Russian officials to discount the importance of individual European voices and attribute allegedly anti-Russian feelings to criticisms from individual European states. A serious European policy could effectively short-circuit this tactic.
In developing more tools to deal with an emerging Russia, the stakes for Europe are enormous. What Europe has accomplished over the past 50 years should be the envy of the rest of the world, but much of that progress could be jeopardised if, as the Ukrainian government recently warned with respect to European efforts to disengage from some of its neighbours, we end up creating new “devils” to the east through policies of isolation or neglect.