Russia's Engagement with the West:

Transformation and Integration in the Twenty-First Century

Alexander J. Motyl, Blair A. Ruble, Lilia Shevtsova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315497839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftsmathematik

The Putin and Bush presidencies, the 9/11 attack, and the war in Iraq have changed the dynamics of Russian-European-US relations and strained the Western alliance. Featuring contributions by leading experts in the field, this work is the first systematic effort to reassess the status of Russia's modernization efforts in this context. Part I examines political, economic, legal, and cultural developments in Russia for evidence of convergence with Western norms. In Part II, the contributors systematically analyze Russia's relations with the European Union, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the United States in light of new security concerns and changing economic and power relationships.

Part One

Transformation: Obstacles and Possibilities

1

Citizenship, Borders, and National Identity

Elizabeth Teague

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia gained its independence but lost both its superpower status and much of the empire over which it had ruled for centuries. As an independent state, Russia faced the challenges not only of building a democratic government and a market economy, but also of constructing a new national identity for its citizens. At the time of the last Soviet census, in 1989, ethnic Russians made up barely 50 percent of the population of the Soviet Union. By the time independent Russia held its first census in 2002, more than 80 percent of the country’s population identified themselves in that way.

How do Russians perceive themselves now that the multiethnic Soviet Union is no more and Russians make up the overwhelming majority in their own state? Russians have for centuries had a strong sense of cultural identity, yet Russian national identity has traditionally been weak. That is to say, Russians have tended not to see themselves as the core component of a Russian nation-state, but rather to view the state as something alien, inimical, and hostile to their vital interests. Historians attribute this lack of trust between the state and the nation to the fact that Russia became, early on, the center of a vast multiethnic empire. This, historians argue, impeded the development of a specific Russian national consciousness. Then, during the Soviet period, the authorities deliberately discouraged any sense of Russian national identity. Only since independence has Russia had the freedom to shed its imperial legacy and become a nation-state.

The editors of this book ask what Russia must do in order to become prosperous, well governed, and just. They conclude that today’s Russian state is too weak to pursue the authoritarian path successfully, and that Russia’s route to modernity must accordingly proceed along the path of democracy. For democracy to flourish, Russia requires a well-functioning civil society, that is, institutions that facilitate a productive relationship between society and the state. This presupposes not only effective state institutions but also citizens with a strong sense of themselves, their culture, and the place they occupy in the nation-state.

Russians have for centuries asked themselves whether their culture and their place in history is unique or whether, in order to achieve the just society they desire, they need first to integrate into the European mainstream. This ongoing debate over Russian national identity is clearly reflected in the issue of citizenship with which Russia’s leaders have been grappling ever since the country became independent. The fact that the country has, since 1991, operated under a succession of three quite different sets of citizenship legislation—and that President Putin in 2003 promised to make further revisions to the law—indicates that the dilemma remains a live issue. How it is resolved will determine how Russians see themselves, their society, and their neighbors, how they define their borders, and what kind of political system they develop. As this chapter attempts to show, the issue remains so far unresolved.

Russia’s Search for Identity

Russia’s attitude to the outside world, and to its own identity, has always been complex, and one issue over which Russians have long disagreed centers on the country’s relation to Europe. Russia’s most densely populated regions lie in Europe and it was in Europe that, in the ninth century, the first state of the eastern Slavs took shape. By the eleventh century, Kievan Rus was a major center of Christian civilization and a hub of European trade and manufacturing. To this day, the bulk of Russia’s population is concentrated in the western- and southern-European regions of the country. Yet Russia has traditionally seen itself also as a Eurasian country with vital trade and security interests in Asia as well as in Europe. Today, even after Russia has lost many of its imperial possessions, two-thirds of Russia’s territory and most of its natural wealth—oil, gas, timber, and precious metals—lie east of the Ural Mountains.

The question of Russia’s borders is of vital importance. Borders are not just lines on a map; they are markers of cultural, social, political, and fiscal difference. Writing in 1911, Ambrose Bierce defined a boundary as an “imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of the other.”¹ More recently, Benedict Anderson has described nations as “imagined communities.”² Once seen as primordial institutions, existing in embryonic form since the dawn of history, nations are now described by scholars as having been “imagined” or even “invented” only in the past few hundred years. By “imagined,” Anderson means that the nation is bigger than the earliest human communities such as the extended family or the tribe, where each individual was personally acquainted with the members of his or her social network. The idea of the nation-state came much later, as individuals began to develop a sense of solidarity with people, most of whom they might never see or meet in the flesh, but in whom they nonetheless recognized a collective purpose and a shared set of values. In the nation, this sense of shared values cuts across differences of class, age, and sex. And, while a nation commonly shares a single geographic area, borders are political constructions, determined in the modern world less by nature or geography than by political, social, and economic considerations.

Historians argue that one reason why Russians were slow to develop a strong sense of national identity is that nature did not endow them with easily defended borders. According to Richard Pipes, an important role was also played by the extreme northern location of the dense forests that formed the cradle of the Russian people. The region suffered from poor soil, unreliable rainfall, and a short growing season. The solution favored by the early inhabitants was to put more and more land under cultivation. The early Russians were accordingly continually on the move in search of virgin land, and the borders of their territory were constantly expanding.³ In addition, the early Russians had to defend themselves against numerous hostile tribes who dominated the steppes to the east and the south. Again, the solution they chose was to move into the steppe-land and to cultivate its rich black earth themselves.

This set in motion what Geoffrey Hosking has called a “perpetual dynamic of conquest” that fueled centuries of Russian imperial expansion.⁴ First, the Russians expanded northward toward the Baltic. Then they moved eastward across the Urals into Siberia until, in the seventeenth century, they arrived at the Pacific. Next, they moved southward into the Caucasus. In the late nineteenth century, Central Asia came under Russian rule.

As the empire expanded, so it came to include people of increasingly diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. This was what the historian O.V. Kliuchevskii meant when he described Russia’s premodern history as that of “a country that colonises itself.” That is to say, Russian history is a history of colonization.⁵ Russia was the center of the largest land empire history has known. For over four centuries, its territorial expansion averaged fifty square miles a day.⁶ Hosking has stressed the profound impact this rate of expansion had on the formation of Russian national identity. In particular, he attributes Russians’ abiding preoccupation with defining their identity to the fact that Russia became an empire before it had had time to become a nation. Hosking maintains that the demands of empire building obstructed the formation of the Russian nation and that, while Russia existed for centuries first as a Russian (russkii) people and later as an all-encompassing multinational Russian (rossiiskii) empire, it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union that it was able to begin to establish itself as a nation-state.⁷

The fact that Russia was a land empire meant it was never clear where the boundaries were between the metropolis and the colonies, and the inhabitants of the former were governed in much the same way as those of the latter. In her study of the “invention” of the Russian nation, Vera Tolz argues that, while Russians have had a strong sense of ethnic and cultural identity since the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the fact that Russia retained autocratic rule and serfdom long after these institutions had been abandoned by Russia’s Western European neighbors obstructed the development of the sense of common purpose that Anderson and Hosking identify as essential for nation building. Tolz points also to the lateness of Russia’s industrialization and to the gulf that existed between the imperial elite and the masses. This situation was perpetuated under the Soviet system, Tolz argues, when Russian ethnicity was downplayed in favor of the creation of a new “Soviet people” and the gap between the leaders and the led remained as wide as ever.⁸

Tolz argues that Russians have traditionally seen the West as the “Other” by comparison with which they have defined themselves. Russians have accordingly tended to regard Western Europe with mixed emotions. The famous debate between “Slavophiles” and “Westernizers” that began within the Russian intelligentsia in the 1840s exemplified this ambivalence. The Slavophiles put the case for Russian exceptionalism, arguing that destiny had fated Russia to follow its own path. While the Slavophiles did not reject Western values in themselves, they insisted that Russia’s unique combination of semi-Asiatic roots and Orthodox religious heritage could not be reconciled with the individualistic and materialistic values of the Western world. The Westernizers, for their part, did not deny the intrinsic value of Russia’s cultural heritage. But they argued that, if Russia was to overcome its backwardness and realize its potential as a great power, it must adopt some Western customs and find ways of integrating with the rest of Europe. Otherwise, it would be condemned to isolation, exclusion, and impotence.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 injected fresh life into this debate, insofar as it forced Russia to choose a new path. Stripped of much of its former empire, post-Soviet Russia found itself forced back within borders that lacked historical precedent and national logic. That is to say, Russia’s new frontiers were not coterminous with the space occupied by ethnic Russians; in 1991, 25 million ethnic Russians found themselves, overnight, living in one or another of the former Soviet republics on Russia’s borders. Since then, the border issue has become more acute. This is partly because of the perceived threat of global terrorism, partly because of European Union (EU) enlargement, and partly because Russia feels threatened by the prospect of high immigration.

A New Concept of Citizenship

If Russia’s development as a nation-state and a democracy is still a work in progress, it follows that developing a sense of citizenship will be crucially important. Citizenship is a key plank of any democratic society. It relies on members of a given society perceiving common interests and shared values and a sense of community even with people they do not know. If individuals do not perceive themselves as equal members of a wider community, each with a stake in the way that community develops and is organized, they are unlikely to believe that they can exert any influence over their leaders and shape their institutions to run for the benefit of the community. This is, of course, a problem that confronts many countries in addition to Russia.

Citizenship is the legal bond that connects the individual to the state and, through the state and its constitution, the individual to his or her fellow citizens, most of whom he or she will never meet. Being a citizen confers duties as well as rights, and in a democracy all members of the community on an equal basis share these. In a democracy, the state acts in the name and interests and under the control of its citizens. This control, exercised through the ballot box, is at times a blunt instrument. Nothing better has yet been devised, however. The nature of citizens’ rights and duties varies from state to state and is governed by no universal standard. But the bottom line is that a democratic state guarantees its citizens the power to determine national policy, gives them a claim to the community’s resources, and promises to protect them in time of need. It follows that, for a democracy, nothing is more important than its relation to its citizens. Because the relationship is so fundamental, states demand considerable latitude regarding how and to whom they will give their citizenship. In Russia, the Yeltsin and Putin leaderships have approached the issue of citizenship in very different ways.

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the leadership of President Boris Yeltsin found itself facing problems very different from those confronting the leaders of the other Soviet republics. Overnight, as noted above, an estimated 25 million ethnic Russian found themselves living “abroad,” that is, outside the borders of the Russian Federation in one or another of the newly independent former Soviet republics.

The status of the ethnic Russians in the countries on Russia’s borders became the focus of an impassioned debate both inside Russia and between Russia and the other newly independent states. At first, many Russian policy makers found it hard to come to terms with the idea that the new states were indeed independent and no longer a zone of automatic Russian interest and influence. Among other things, they claimed the right to protect the interests of the many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers living in what they called the “near abroad.” (This term was always unpopular among Russia’s neighbors, who saw it not only as demeaning but also as reflecting a Russian attitude that the former Soviet states remained within Russia’s sphere of influence and should follow its lead in their own policy decisions; the term was formally abandoned soon after Putin came to power.)

Russia had adopted its first law on citizenship in November 1991, before the Soviet Union broke up, but this legislation became obsolete when the Soviet Union collapsed one month later. An amended law was adopted in February 1992, but this too was before most Russian lawmakers had had time to grasp the full implications of the Soviet collapse. Many at that stage still hoped to preserve and reconstitute at least part of the Soviet empire.

Like all of the former Soviet republics except Estonia and Latvia, Russia adopted a citizenship policy popularly known as the “zero option.” Russia’s citizenship law of February 1992 offered Russian citizenship to any citizen of the Soviet Union who registered with the Russian authorities within three years (this deadline was subsequently extended) and who did not in the meantime take the citizenship of any other Soviet successor state.⁹ The law was amended in June 1993 to extend its application to the entire population of the former Soviet Union, that is, even to those former Soviet citizens who had already acquired citizenship in one of the other Soviet successor-states.¹⁰ The right to dual citizenship was moreover enshrined in Russia’s 1993 constitution. This alarmed Russia’s neighbors, almost all of which saw Russia’s claim to a legitimate interest in prote...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction: Russia’s Reintegration into the West: The Challenges Before Russia
• Part I. Transformation: Obstacles and Possibilities
• Part II. Integration: Obstacles and Possibilities
• Conclusion: Integrating Russia into the West: The Challenges Before the United States, Russia, and Europe
• Index