The Frustrating Partnership:Honor, Status, and Emotions in Russia’s Discourses of the West
Andrei P. Tsygankov
San Francisco State University
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Abstract:
This paper analyzes Russia’s presidential discourses and emotions of the West from March 2008 to December 2012. By studying the languages of inclusiveness and exclusiveness in annual addresses to the Federation Council and public statements, I identify several distinct stages in the Kremlin’s emotional evolution from fear to hope to frustration: the initial fear (March 2008-June 2009), hope (September 2009-the late 2010), and frustration (since the early 2011). The Russia’s emotional shifts are shaped by the country’s historically established social relations with the West and are not to be reduced to the dynamics of power and prestige/status. Russia’s deep emotional connection to the West as well as Russia’s own concept of national honor are the two factors that drive the nation’sleaders’ complex actions, feelings, and rhetoric. Russia displays emotions of hope each time it feels that its honor is being respected and those of frustration, fear and anger when in the eyes of Kremlin its identity/honor as not recognized.Keywords: emotions, foreign policy, honor, Medvedev, Putin, Russia, status
Introduction
Russia and the Western nations continue to feel uneasy about each other’s intentions. From issues of stabilizing Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe to those of strategic stability and human rights, Russian and Western leaders frequently disagree and that disagreement is partly shaped by different beliefs and emotions regarding what they view as a “good” and “virtuous” course of action vis-à-vis each other.[1] What further complicates the picture is that Russia’s actions and emotions fluctuate – and not necessarily in response to changes in Russia’s material capabilities or structure of the international system, as some scholars would expect. Understanding the formation of Russia’s actions and emotions behind them therefore remains an important challenge to scholars and policy-makers.
This paper selects for an investigation discourses and emotions of the West as displayed by Russia’s presidents from March 2008 to December 2012. This period is important for both methodological and political reasons. Methodologically, selecting it for a closer investigation assists us in establishing a broader pattern of Russia’s emotional shifts as reflected in the country’s history – from hope to frustration and fear and back to hope. Politically, the period is also important. Despite some expectations associated with the rise of Dmitri Medvedev, this rise did not produce a stable emotional or political environment for Russia-West relationships. As the paper shows, despite the common perception of Medvedev as more pro-Western and liberal than his patron Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s rhetoric reflected largely the same emotional dispositions and therefore need to be understood in terms of historically enduring social patterns in the Russia-West relations. The Medvedev-putinist and frustrated critic of the West may be viewed as a crucial case for establishing a theoretical potent interpretation of Russia’s international discourse.
My main basis for studying Russia’s official discourses of the West includes annual presidential addresses to the Federation Council and public statements on prominent foreign policy issues. Among those issues, three suggest themselves as especially visible and important: European security, Missile Defense System, and, more recently, instability in the Middle East. When studied across time and issues, public speeches and statements are helpful in capturing underlying emotions of state leaders. By studying the relative prominence of languages of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness in Russia’s discourses of the West, I have identified several distinct stages in Russia’s presidents’emotional evolution from fear to hope to frustration: the initial fear (March 2008-June 2009), hope (September 2009-the late 2010), and frustration (the early 2011-December 2012). Historical examples, metaphors, ethical lessons, predicates, and adjectives used by Russian presidents show their emotional dispositions.
I argue that these emotions have roots in Russia’s historically peculiar relations with Europe or the West as its significant other. Russia’s deep emotional connection to the West as well as Russia’s own concept of national honor are the two factors that continue to drive the country’s leaders’ complex actions, feelings, and rhetoric. Russia displays emotions of hope each time it feels that its honor is being respected and those of frustration, fear and anger when in the eyes of Kremlin its identity/honor as not recognized, other factors being equal.
The following three sections address the formation of Russia’s emotions of the West, the Kremlin’s discourses from fear to hope and frustration, and their explanation from a socially constructivist perspective, respectively. Conclusion summarizes the findings and implications.
Honor and Emotions in Russia’s Foreign Policy
Emotional Patterns in Russia’s Westpolitik
Scholars of Russia’s foreign policy often observe the Kremlin’s emotional swings and intensity of Russia’s public rhetoric regarding its relations with the West. Across history, the Russians initiated multiple projects of cooperation with Western nations from Alexander I’s Holy Alliance in the early 19th century to Mikhail Gorbachev’s New Thinking and Boris Yeltsin’s Integration in the late 20th century and Vladimir Putin’s War on Terror and Dmitri Medvedev’s Modernization Alliances in the early 21st century. Emotionally, each of these projects involved hope on part of the Russians to engage the West in projects of common significance and build lasting institutions of international peace. However, hope frequently turned into frustration with what Russia saw as the other side’s unwillingness to reciprocate and, ultimately, mistrust and fear that the Western nations indeed aim to undermine Russia’s sovereignty and security. Sustained fear and mistrust on occasions turned into anger[2] and anger-shaped policies of abandoning cooperative initiatives and adopting patterns of defensive or assertive behavior (Tsygankov, 2012a). On other occasions fear and mistrust subsided, generating new feelings of hope and new attempts at cooperation (this emotional cycle is presented intable 1).
Table 1. The Emotional Cycle of Russia-West Relations
HOPE FRUSTRATION FEAR & ANGER HOPE
Emotions of hope and frustration are identifiable through Russia’s public statements. In Gorbachev’s missionary language, “We are all passengers aboard one ship, the Earth, and we must not allow it to be wrecked. There will be no second Noah’s Ark” (Gorbachev, 1987, p. 12). To Yeltsin, hope was tied to Russia’s integration with Western economic and political institutions, which the Russian leader presented in dramatic tones – either there will be a success or the West too will suffer greatly. For instance, in addressing a joint session of the United States Congress in June 1992, Yeltsin expressed hope for a massive external assistance by directly linking it to success of Russia’s reforms: “There will be no second try … If we [that is, you Americans] do not take measures now to support Russia, this will not be a collapse of Russia only, it will be a collapse of the United States, because it will mean new trillions of dollars for the arms race” (as cited in Breslauer, 2002, p. 157). To Putin (2002), hope served as the emotional basis for engaging the West in fighting with terrorism and preserving global stability, for which, he believed, “Russia and the United States bear a special responsibility.” Finally, Medvedev’s main hopes were in getting the United States and Europe interested in modernizing Russia’s economy and improving Russia-NATO security relations.
However, each time the Kremlin’s hopes failed to be validated, its public language describing relations with the West visibly changed from hope to frustration, fear, and anger. Gorbachev and Yeltsin could not hide their disappointment with lack of Western assistance and, later, with the decision to expand NATO. For example, Yeltsin’s foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev reported his frustration by warning in the early 1994 of “the chauvinistic new banners that flap in the Washington wind”
“I must say, sadly, that in these confused days sometimes we are neither understood nor adequately supported by our natural friends and allies in the West. Even at this critical moment in Moscow, when democracy needs all the help it can get, we hear Western threats to reduce economic cooperation with Russia … it appears that some Western politicians, in Washington and elsewhere, envision Russia not as an equal partner but as a junior partner. In this view a ‘good Russian’ is always a follower, never a leader” (Kozyrev,1994).
Putin’s transformation is even more instructive. From someone who courted president George W. Bush in the early 2000s hoping to strengthen relations with the United States, he evolved into a frustrated and occasionally angry politician convinced that the other side is primarily interested in undermining Russia. On one occasion, he responded to accusations of those experts “who do not understand what is happening in our country” by saying “To hell with you” (As cited in Foglesong, 2007, p. 227). In his Address to the State Duma in May 2006, Putin (2006) spoke of "Comrade Wolf" who "knows whom to eat" and doesn't listen to anyone else, a clear reference to the US attempts to put pressure on Russia. He objected to the American democracy promotion rhetoric by saying that it resembled to him the way colonialists had talked a hundred years earlier about how the white man needed to “civilize ‘primitive peoples’” (Myers and Kramer, 2006). In January 2007, Putin delivered his strongest critique of American “unipolarity” at the Munich Conference on Security Policy. Such criticisms of the United States as seeking to preserve global hegemony became common in Putin’s public statements especially when delivered for a non-American audience.
Approaches to Russia’s Emotions
There are at least two approaches to Russia’s emotions. The first approach tends to view emotions as a generally adequate public display of the leaders’ objectives and a signal of their intentions. The second approach presents emotional statements as deployed strategically to pressure other nations for concessions. Both versions agree that emotions should be read in the context of international competition for power, status, and prestige. In this respect Russians are no different from Chinese or other rising powers seeking to improve their political standing in the world. Their public display of hope or frustration should be interpreted in terms of their ability to achieve progress or fail to accomplish expected political outcomes. We should then expect that emotions of hope will be sustained so long as Russia improves its political standing and that emotions of frustration and fear will surface each time Russia’s political standing fails to improve.
In practice, however, emotional patterns and changes in standing are difficult to match. There are examples, when Russian leaders are hopeful even when Russia’s political standing doesn’t improve or doesn’t come close to matching that of the other side. For instance, before 2005, Putin sought to avoid challenging the United States and its dominance in the world. He remained hopeful for improving ties with the U.S. even after the latter unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty. The key emphasis of Russia’s National Security Concept was then not on resisting “unipolarity”, but on fighting economic decline, organized crime, corruption, terrorism and separatism. On the other hand, the Kremlin may be sometimes visibly frustrated and angry with the West even though Russia’s status and prestige are not challenged. Suffice is to recall Russia’s emergence from the Second World War as an essential member of the coalition which defeated Hitler. Such status did not satisfy Stalin who insisted on the Western nations respecting Soviet sphere of influence and ultimately on ideologically converting Eastern European states into “socialism.” As Martin Malia (1999, p. 360) wrote, from a realpolitik perspective, the Kremlin should have been satisfied with “a reasonable security alliance of East European states with the Soviet Union” without demanding that these states adopt a communist “social system.”
In addition to Russia’s special emotional patterns, it frequently demonstrates intense, even heated rhetoric in its relations with the West.Whereas China prefers to hide its emotions, Russian leaders tend to express their hopes and frustrations loudly and openly. To scholars of emotions, this aspect of Russia presents another challenge. How should we understand why Russia frequently uses a strong language bypresenting Western nations as “brothers” and “friends” or, alternatively, castigating them as “betraying” established principles and agreements?
Motivating Factors Behind Russia’s Emotions: Status versus Honor
Scholars of status study emotions as following country’s gains and losses in international prestige and deference. While gains are associated with satisfaction and generally positive sentiments, losses may lead to negative emotions such as anger, vengefulness, or shame.[3] This perspective moves us beyond considerations of material power and security and is helpful in highlighting factors of external recognition and prestige. For example, it helps us understand motivations and dynamics behind rising powers’ assertive international policies. However, the perspective may not be sufficient for explaining nuances of individual countries’ behavior and emotions because each of them has its own set of local values and culturally-specific relations with the outside world. Russia’s identity or sense of honor is not limited to protection of state international status/prestige in the eyes of other states, but also includes a distinctive idea of national self, or a system of nationally held meaningful beliefs. The latter consists of a distinctive concept of spiritual freedom, the notion of a socially paternalistic state, and commitment to protecting cultural allies from abuses at home and from abroad. For instance, as the largest Orthodox Christian power, Russia felt responsible for the livelihood of those co-religionists who resided outside the Russian state (Tsygankov, 2012a, chap. 3).
While holding these special values, Russia expects acceptance by the West as one of its own. Unlike China or other rising powers, Russia and its rulers identify with the Europe or the West as its significant other. Russian rulers view Europe as a unity in diversity regime, in which Russia’s locally specific values would not be seen as undermining the continent-wide beliefs, such as Christian origins, respect for sovereignty, and socially responsible state. For example, even while being critical of the European states’ policies, Putin (2012b) commonly presents Russia as “an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe.”The West has created the meaningful environment in which Russia’s rulers defended their visions of national honor and interests.[4] Russia has historically sought to be recognized by the Western Other and to modernize following the West’s lead. Russia’s claims to be a part of the Western world reflected a domestically strong motivating force in Russia’s foreign policy. Russia’s divided political class has contained a vocal pro-Western group which seeks to shape the country’s foreign policy. The strength of identification with Western civilization explains why historically Russia has sought to achieve its objectives in cooperation with Western, especially European, nations. Russia has always been responsive to the behavior of the West and – with progressive leaders in the Kremlin – prepared to mend fences and pursue cooperation, rather than confrontation. This identity connection explains Russia’s deep emotional engagement with the West and the identified emotional swings and rhetorical intensity frequently displayed by the Kremlin.
The identity/honor perspective differs from that of status and prestige in allowing more room for a culturally-specific interpretation of a country’s actions and display of emotions. It highlights two, rather than one, motivating factors – external recognition and internal values/ idea of the self. Both factors require external/Western validation, but in a different way. Whereas the prestige aspect requires the external validation of Russia’s power, the internal values aspect demands that Russia’s actions be validated by external and domestic audiences as morally legitimate. Other differences between honor and status involve value judgment and hierarchy (see table 2 for a summary). Honor claims rest on explicit moral judgment of self-other interaction – “honorable” behavior as opposed to “dishonorable” one or “insulting” – and, like “face”, require full recognition or rejection by the significant other. Unlike China, Russia cannot be satisfied with symmetrical gain in economic, political,or military areas of development. In its relations with Europe, Russia also wants integration and recognition of values. On the other hand, status depends on discourse of equality and does not require recognition of special values. Status is also hierarchical or competitive in the sense that one state may attain more status than another.[5]
Table 2 Status and Honor Compared
STATUS / HONORMotivating factors / External recognition of status / External recognition of the self’s identity & values
Moral reasoning / Demand for equality / Demand for recognition of values
Social hierarchy / Competitive (more/less) / Not competitive (Yes/No)
Because of the domestic honor dimension, Russia cannot act only on the basis of external recognition. Although Moscow needs such recognition, it also depends on domestic support and displays emotions of hope when it feels positive reactions at home and abroad. On the other hand, it is possible for Russia to display emotions of frustration, fear and anger even when the external recognition of status is in place.