Russia's potential futures in the Euro-Atlantic-OECD world

Ira Straus is a Fulbright professor at Moscow State University and Moscow State University for International Relations during 2001-2002. He is also the U.S. Coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO.

A country's international identity forms a supplementary yet integral part of its national identity. The nature and handling of the international identity play a critical role in determining the health and character of the national identity.

In the twentieth century, international institutions have emerged as bearers of international identity. In some cases they have carried enough weight and visibility to provide an effective anchor for their member countries' national identities. The European Union (EU) and NATO, to take the most important examples, have provided a healthy balance between national and international identities for Germany. This is something that was painfully lacking in previous generations, and its absence tempted the nation-state to reduce its international identity to a function of its own nationalism. The problem was particularly severe in the modernizing latecomers among the great powers--Germany, Russia, Japan, and China--which could not view liberal democracy as a national achievement of their own. Left to its own devices in these countries, national identity led from liberal nationalism to integral nationalism, and then to military adventurism, totalitarianism, and national suicide 1

Russia has suffered historically as badly as Germany from the depredations of national identity left to its own devices. Thanks to the unchecked evolution of national sentiment, the Russian empire walked into the Crimean War and World War I, and thence to its destruction. Communism, although formally antinationalist, realized the substance of integral nationalism in totalitarian form, nationalizing all large-scale aspects of socioeconomic life, vilifying all socially autonomous formations as potentially treasonous, and conducting a bitter assault against the external world order. The Russian body politic today, in the aftermath of communism, is infected with various forms of nationalist revivalism, many of them rabid.

At the same time, Russia has a historic European identity. This identity always came to a shipwreck in previous centuries, when Russia was trying to join a Europe that was self-contradictory on the international level, thanks to the adversarial balance of power system that prevailed prior to 1947. Yet the European identity has always returned, and for good reason: it is Russia's natural identity within the world as a whole, one that is based on the most powerful objective factors.

Today, unlike the days before 1947, there are institutions, such as the EU and NATO, which seem to hold forth an option of embedding Russia's European identity within their powerful embrace. The abandonment of communism and of its autarchic empire was motivated in significant part by the idea of becoming part of an integrated Europe; the hope of a "common European home," both in its continental and its wider Atlantic version, was at the core of the new thinking. Integration would serve to supplement the Russian national identity, anchor it, and validate it in its essential Europeanness. On the other hand, failure to consummate integration with the West would have damaging effects on Russia's European identity; the option being visible and the goal avowed by Russian Westernists, its fulfillment has become necessary for the validation of Westernism in Russia. Indeed, the weakening of hope in it since 1991 has already served as a severe invalidation for Russian radical Westernizers.

This invalidation is what has led the government to fall back from the Atlanticism of the Kozyrev years to what might be called an "official Eurasianism" of the Viktor Chernomyrdin and Vladimir Putin years. Just as the official nationality of Nicholas I was not the romantic nationalism of the Slavophile wing of the intelligentsia, so official Eurasianism is not the fire-breathing, anti-Western, ideological Eurasianism of Alexander Dugin or Prokhanov or the Communists; it is rather an attempt by the elite to find a pragmatic space for retrenchment, in a period when Euro-Atlanticism has been proving politically unviable and questionable as a basis for Russian diplomacy. It deliberately leaves unresolved the issue of whether this breathing space will be a prelude to a return to Euro-Atlanticism or to a further turn toward a full-scale ideological Eurasianism. The preference of the elite is for Euro-Atlanticism, if it becomes viable, that is, if there are openings for Russian integration with the relevant Western institutions. But if it does not become viable soon, the default option is a further slide into a Eurasianism that becomes increasingly ideological.

Despite the victory of Eurasianism on the surface, the Westernist strand remains powerful in Russia. Chernomyrdin remained an Atlanticist in practice. Under Putin, hope has been transferred from NATO to the EU as the locus of seeking integration. Putin has shown remarkable enthusiasm for Europeanism. Whether it is realistic to think that Russia will any day soon get into the EU, one thing certainly is realistic: some such hope of institutional integration with the West is necessary for the survival of Westernism in Russian politics. The alternative is to abandon Westernism and embrace Eurasianism fully.