Paper for the 13th Aleksanteri Conference ”Russia and the World”, University of Helsinki, 23rd to 25th October 2013.
While some scholars argue that Russian foreign policy is one of short- termism this paper sees Russia as representing a peculiar strategic culture – one of social Darwinism (‘кто кого’) close to neorealism. Within this broad framework Russia pursues multiple grand strategies, implying that there are several valid ways to interpret Russia’s behaviour as a security policy actor: Copycat conduct & interventionism, Gorchakovism, i.e. internal balancing bordering on military revisionism or, conversely, geoeconomics and last, but not least soft balancing. These are but a handfuld of actual strategies pursued by contemporary Russia. The key point to observe is the absence of liberal strategic culture.
Introduction to the argument
Three years have passed since Oxford Analytica (2010) published a brief, but thoughtful essay on the syndrome of short-termism characterizing Russian foreign and security policy. While acknowledging that Russian foreign policy-making has become less chaotic than during the Yeltsin years – cf. Skak (1996: 137-191) – Oxford Analytica (2010) insists that Russia’s external conduct too often contradicts Russia’s self-proclaimed long-term strategic goals such as the absolute priority of entertaining great power status and upholding principles like territorial integrity. Regarding the latter, Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia ”flagrantly ignored this principle” (ibid.). Similarly, all Russian foreign and security policy doctrines as well as each and every Russian foreign policy decision-maker cite CIS integration as a vital national interest, yet ”very little effort has been put into achiveing this goal” (ibid.). Russia’s entry into the WTO is of paramount importance if Russia is ever to ’modernize’ i.e. move beyond its current status of exporting just oil, gas and arms. But Russia’s recent effort of coercing Ukraine and others into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s EurAsEC project threatens to torpedo not just Ukraine’s agenda of modernization, but Russia’s as well.
Indeed, there is much to be said for the insights of the anonymous Oxford Analytica (2010) authors whose views seem close to those held by the British government traditionally biased against Russia. There have been instances of Russian sudden and untenable foreign policy reorientations, for instance when Putin overnight – on the occasion of the ’9/11’ terror attacks upon the United States - decided to align Russia firmly with U.S. President George W. Bush and his war on terror (Blank, 2002). Russia’s policy during the current civil war in Syria has also been rich on improvisations and short-termism. However, if one takes the larger, if complex pattern of Russian foreign and security policy ever since so-called Eurasianism popped up in early 1992 (Skak, 1996: 143) one sees exactly that: a pattern. Patterned behaviour is what the approach of strategic culture is all about. What follows will be an attempt to establish the contents of this particular pattern and to pinpoint policy implications for the outside world in its own policy towards Russia.
As for my particular argument, it is this: Russia does not really pursue an improvised foreign and security policy of short-termism. On the contrary, Russia displays an entire strategic culture close to neorealism based on the Russian maxim кто кого (who will beat whom?). This broad framework allows Russia to pursue multiple strategies resulting in a perplexing pattern of interpretations offered within the scholarly study of Russian affairs. However, one option of strategic culture remains absent, namely a genuinely liberal strategic culture. I shall address the broader siginificance of this illiberal configuration of Russian strategic culture in the concluding part of the paper.
The analysis begins by briefly presenting the concept and methodology of strategic culture. It goes on by presenting examples of strategic culture interpretations of the Russian case including a couple of widely cited and respected monographs on Russian foreign policy. Already this exercise will turn my contribution into a research review. Then follows the empirical part sensu strictu - an examination of Russia’s multiple grand strategies of …
· copycat conduct and interventionism
· Gorchakovism, i. e. internal balancing
· military revisionism
· geoeconomics
· soft balancing.
The penultimate section of the paper is perhaps the most important as it contains my attempt of explaining the above overrepresentation of neorealist grand strategies. It will employ a methodology of its own by establishing a path depedendency from Russia’s recent Soviet past.
As already indicated, the interesting conclusion to draw from the peculiar configuration of Russian grand strategies is the strategic cultural option which is never seriously considered by Russian foreign and security policy decision makers. Namely that of liberalism – of proceeding from a perception of win-win options, pursuing diplomacy out of confidence in the Western world, its institutions, its Enlightenment values of individualism, cosmopolitanism and secularism. Some readers may see this as a myopic, irrelevant measure for the sanity of Russian foreign policy and security policy making. I shall later argue why this is not so.
On the approach of strategic culture
The study of strategic culture as a way to gain insight into the security policy decision-making of states goes back to early Cold War sovietology in the shape of analyses of the Soviet Politburo’s ’operational code’ (Skak, 2011a). In recent years the field has gained new prominence as the way to undig the real agenda of Communist China and North Korea, but also encompasses in-depth studies of democracies like Israel and Denmark (Lantis & Howlett, 2013; Johnson, Kartchner & Larsen). The rediscovery of strategic culture is articulated in open opposition to neorealism in defence of cultural, local variables of geography, history, and regime type whereas neorealism relies on abstract global variables of polarity (Waltz, 1979). Thus, Colin S. Gray(1999) and his methodological rival Alastair Iain Johnston (Johnston, 1995) do agree on the need to treat the possible neorealism of any state and its decision-makers an empirical question, not something we can deduce from the global balance of power. Johnston, thus sees actual strategic cultures as being placed on a continuum stretching from the hard realism and aggressiveness of, say, Nazi Germany, on the one hand, to the soft idealpolitik of, say, Czechoslovakia (ibid.: 47). So what makes strategic culture studies relevant from security policy practicioners’ point of view is their ambition of pinpointing the attitude to the use of force of any given actor in world affairs (cf. Gray, 1999: 50). Tellingly, the term strategic culture was invented by a Sovietologist, Jack Snyder in 1977. His definition sounds:
”the sum total of ideas, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour that members of a national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to [nuclear] strategy (Snyder quoted from Gray, 2009: 226f.).
Indeed, when scholars are studying strategic culture they study ’group-think’ writ large (Janis, 1972) – or security ’political cultures’ to add a political science synonym opening another vast field of inquiry. They study the rise and consolidation of ’hegemonic discourses’ by ’process tracing’ their specific geopolitical, historical and political context, deconstruct their ontology altogether proceeding from a basic epistemological premise of security policy ’path dependency’ known from historical sociology (Mahoney, 2000). This research agenda sounds dangerously ambitous, way too complex and absolutely unfitting for just a brief conference paper. Luckily, veterans in the field like Gray (1999, 2009) happen to offer pragmatic advices of common sense and eclecticism. As for Johnston’s meticulous process tracing of contemporary Chinese strategic thinking several centuries backwards ”to the earliest point in history” (Johnston, 1995: 49f.), I believe his diachronic model of causality makes much more sense if turned upside down in order to emphasize the recent past, cf. figure 1 below:
My heresy towards Johnston (1995) draws inspiration from the far more straightforward methodology of Kanti Bajpai (2002) regarding India’s strategic culture as well as my own reasoning. Clearly, the most direct socializing of Russia’s geography, security policy history, norms and values onto today’s Russian decision-making elite must have taken place during that generation’s own formative years during the mid-to-late 20th century Soviet past. In other words, the explanatory analysis towards the end of the paper will dwell on the evolution of Soviet political culture and expose the strategic culture in the decades prior to the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev to Secretary General of the CPSU. In another respect I do build upon Johnston, namely by following his distinction into the overarching paradigm[1] of strategic culture and the resulting grand-strategic preferences in the plural (Johnston, 1995: 46-48). If one takes Johnston earnestly these must be consistent across different canonical texts and across time, criteria which can be difficult to live up to and maybe not that decisive at all as long as one is able to identify truly recurrent discoursive and behavioral security policy stereotypes. As will be demonstrated below it is possible to identify at minimum five such grand strategies within the Kremlin’s diplomacy. This is not to say that grand strategies never overlap or contradict one another, and they may also happen to embody idiosyncracies.
This brings me to one highly important observation by Gray (1999: 65 f.): Strategic cultures may be dysfunctional i.e. functionally irrational. In real life – i. e. in the necessary biological short-term perspective of just a few generations - political systems may be locked onto deeply counterproductive strategic cultures and yet survive for quite some time. This has to do with the fact that within cultural studies rationality is a question of what makes sense, not what pays off – in other words, the logic of appropriateness. Even so, students of strategic culture need not be cultural relativists blinding themselves to what is evidently a case of misguided and dangerous strategic culture – e.g. from the point of view of the citizenry like in the case of North Korea. On this vital point Gray himself refers to Russia whose strategic culture ”contributed massively to three wholesale Russian/Soviet collapses of the twentieth century, and might have yielded an utterly irretrievable collapse in 1941-2” (ibid.: 66).
’Stand der Forschung’
The revival of the strategic cultural analysis of Russia was pioneered by a bright young Finnish scholar, Henrikki Heikka (2000) who wrote a very well-documented monograph that portrayed Soviet strategic culture as a ’Cult of the Offensive’. He thus debunked the myth of Soviet caution, but went on to document a post-Soviet evolution of Russian strategic culture towards moderation as the point of departure for the entire Putin era. Nevertheless, concerning Russia’s striving for regional hegemony in its post-Soviet neighbourhood, Heikka stressed the ”violent ways in which Russia seeks to further its national interests” as both ”morally unacceptable” and dangerous (ibid.: 92). Regarding the equally delicate security situation of the Nordic-Baltic region, Heikka displayed curious confidence in the rationalistic logic of deterrence by indicating that the way to enhance security would be to extend NATO membership to not just the three Baltic states, but also to Finland and Sweden. Since then the Baltic states did enter NATO, yet there was a presumably Russian cyber war against Estonia in 2007 and multiple minor Russian provocations. So would a swifter extension of NATO membership to Georgia have moderated Russia’s behaviour there? Is Russia really a realible defensive neorealist – or only superficially so and in reality quite an idiosyncratic neorealist? It is doubts along these lines about e.g. Russia that inspired Gray (2009) to launch a frontal assault on neorealism due to its naïve belief in Western-style cost/benefit rationaliy in an agitated defence of the cultural approach to studying security policy. Still, Heikka’s work set a high standard as the best primer on Russian strategic cultural evolution through the 20th century.
The U.S. private consultant and intelligence officer Fritz W. Ermarth (2009) agrees with Heikka about the relative demilitarization of contemporary Russia compared to the vile standards of militarization set by Russian and Soviet (commie-)czars. He cites the modest figure of 2.7 per cent of Russia’s admittedly growing GDP spent on defence as ”akin to that of advanced European countries” (ibid.: 95). For all their anti-NATO rhetoric, ”Russian leaders actually perceive an historically mild threat environment” (loc. cit.) He continues: ”An old aphorism held that Russia had only two reliable allies, its army and navy. Today pundits rephrase this to proclaim that oil and gas are now Russia’s reliable allies” (ibid.).” This leads him to speculate about the possible ”civilizing“ influence upon Russian strategic culture from contemporary Russia’s political economy. However, Ermarth stops his brief contribution by reminding the reader about the possible revival of “[t]he combative and militaristic qualities of Russian strategic culture” (ibid.). And his key observation deserves to be quoted at length:
”In rhetoric and action, Russian foreign policy culture has often expressed a puzzling combination of contradictory attitudes: defensiveness bordering on paranoia, on one hand, combined with assertiveness bordering on pugnacity, on the other. In the Russian mentality, both an inferiority complex and a superiority complex can be simultaneously on display. The traumatic effect of the break up of the USSR and decline of Russia’s role as a great power have amplified these complexes, especially among Russia’s national security elites. The partial recovery of Russia’s international standing under Putin’s more disciplined and, as a result of energy revenues, better-funded regime, has produced another amplification of these complexes in the pronouncements of leaders and pundits.” (Ermarth, 2009: 88).
The perplexing message in these lines is this: Russia may be both better and worse than we expect it to be, the policy implication for our own policy towards Russia being … a big haw! Ermarth (2009) thus comes across as less certain than Heikka (2000) about the turn for the better within Russian strategic culture. Among other things he stresses the intimate link between Russian political culture in general – in his words one characterized by deep authoritarianism – and the particular strategic culture guiding security policy-making.