NATO: The only West that Russia has?

A year ago, Leonid Radzikhovsky, one of Russia's more thoughtful journalists, wrote that Russia should put aside its reservations and make the most of its chances for cooperation with the real, existing West. The point was to stop waiting for the West to become nicer to Russia; the reason was that Russia needs the West, strategically as well as economically. And whatever kind of West Russia might like to have in an ideal world, the one that is out there right now is the only West that Russia has.

That real, existing West organizes its common strategic affairs through NATO. Radzikhovsky's advice to his country, thus, would seem to be reducible to this: make your peace with NATO, do everything to make cooperation with NATO effective, bend every diplomatic effort to build this relationship into a real alliance because in security affairs, NATO is the only West we have.

Is that what Radzikhovsky's advice really boils down to? Does the Russian elite agree that NATO is, in a basic sense, the only West it has? To a great extent it does. However, the path to that conclusion has been tortuous and the result remains largely an abstraction. It is not yet in a definitive, stabilized form; it remains a dependent function of the further development of Russia-NATO relations.

When President Putin came to office in 1999, the Russian elite certainly did not accept NATO as "its" West. It was fed up with NATO. It saw no prospect for Russia's entry into the alliance. It saw no prospect, either, for a meaningful partnership based on mutual attentiveness; quite the opposite, it was given to depicting the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Permanent Joint Council as a fraud and a deception. Its mindset was deeply affected by the Kosovo war and by its own rhetorical campaign against NATO's role in that war. Some in the new Putin government were blaming the country's problems in Chechnya on a supposed U.S.-NATO strategy of driving Russia out of the Caucasus.

Putin himself, while speaking more carefully and proclaiming Russia's European credentials, did so not in a language of Euro-Atlanticism, but in the name of a non-Atlantic Europe, one potentially compatible with Eurasianism. Even after a year in power, when Putin spoke of eventually joining the EU and of meanwhile supporting the euro and joining a new EU defense force, it was with the transparent intention of damaging the dollar and displacing NATO.

It was reminiscent of the Brezhnev years in the early 1970s, when a "Common European Home" was a slogan that meant a home from the Atlantic to the Urals, excluding America as an unwelcome guest. It was as if the elite had forgotten everything it had learned in the meantime, during the years of glasnost.

The Learning Experience in Russia, 1985-91

In the intermediate years after 1985, Russia had begun a more serious and honest pursuit of a "Common European Home." It quickly discovered that it could not afford to try to exclude America from that home or there would be no space for Russia either. The only options were (a) a Little Europe, "from Brest to Brest," or (b) a Greater Europe, a "Europe from Vancouver to Vladivostok." Gorbachev began polemicizing after 1989 against the formulations of the Little Europe of the EU, which stopped at Brest, and welcoming the formulations of James Baker on the Greater Europe, the one from Vancouver to Vladivostok. That Greater Europe was labeled by Baker a "New Atlanticism."' Russians took note: their only prospective home was in the Atlantic world.

By 1990, there was discussion in the Moscow media on NATO becoming one of the permanent foundations of the Common Home. The East Bloc home of the Warsaw Pact was coming apart at the seams, and the inner Soviet home was threatened with the same fate; but no real, common, all-European home was yet on the horizon. Chaos was feared. Late 1990 saw a pro forma institutionalization of the Conference on security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE); due to Western suspicions it was kept in a weak form and did nothing to alleviate the concern for getting a roof over the head of the emerging countries. Civil wars were already starting at the core of Yugoslavia and in peripheral areas of the Soviet Union.

By 1991, there was discussion in Moscow of joining NATO, which would have provided a common home of real substance, one with a real roof (the NATO "security umbrella") and walls strong enough to steady Russia in its new identity as a Western ally. On 20 December 1991, the Russian government, in one of its first acts as a fully sovereign subject of international relations, sent a letter to NATO "raising the question" of Russia's membership in the alliance.

In preceding months, the same Russian government, as an intra-USSR entity, had sent out feelers to NATO. Nevertheless NATO had not readied its thinking and failed to give a response to the overture in December. Within a short time, the Russian government withdrew the letter, saying that it was a mistranslation and was supposed to have read, "we are NOT raising the question of Russia's membership in NATO, but we are prepared to regard this as a long-term objective."2 The reality was that the government had immediately come under attack for this letter from powerful communist and nationalist oppositions at home. It was accused of having sold Russia out to NATO, offering up the Russian people as cannon fodder for the imperialist wars of the West against the Third World-and all this for the favor of a NATO that did not want Russia anyway. The Russian democratic elite had to retreat. The elites of other Eastern European countries, where there was a pro-Western consensus, could afford the humiliation of being ignored by NATO when they knocked on its door; the elite of Russia could not.