Europe, Russia and the Liberal World Order

International Relations after the Cold War

Timofei Bordachev

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000435511
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Studi sull'etnia

This book analyses Russia-Europe/EU relations by exploring their practical essence and conceptualizing them in terms of the main categories of international relations research. It argues that the liberal world order, established in Cold War days, whereby international relations are underpinned by a global balance of power and a highly institutionalized framework of international relations, thereby balancing power and morality, continued after the Cold War, with high hopes in the early 1990s for a new order of security and cooperation for all Europe, including Russia. It goes on to show how the liberal world order has broken down, one manifestation of this being the new conflict between Russia and Europe in recent years, a conflict resulting from the failure of European countries/the EU to acknowledge the actual balance of military, economic and political power, the lack of limits on the policy of European countries in terms of infringing on Russia's interests, and Russia's consequent revision, after 1999, of its policy of co-operation. Overall, the book provides huge insight into the nature of Europe-Russia relations.

1Power, morality and justice in the liberal international order

The Cold War and the liberal international order

The roughly 40 years the Cold War lasted were a relatively brief episode in the history of international politics. And yet this period witnessed two seismic events with enormous implications for the central categories of power and morality in international relations: the development of nuclear weapons and the proliferation of international institutions. Nuclear weapons were the only technological invention that challenged the rationality of war as the primary means of resolving otherwise intractable disputes. And while there was nothing novel about international institutions that set norms, rules and practices, or international organisations that ensured compliance with them, after WWII they evolved into an instrument of political change.

Nuclear containment can be defined as the political expression of a situation when war ceases to be considered a rational option for a major state in a conflict, since it would result in complete annihilation or irreparable damage to all sides. War became irrational for nuclear powers with comparable arsenals. To some extent, this also holds for the possibility of aggression by major non-nuclear states against nuclear powers (Morgenthau, 1964). No matter how powerful, a non-nuclear state can never count on its military might to obtain concessions from a nuclear power that would outweigh the risk of facing total destruction in an armed conflict.

For the first time in history, a technological achievement and its political implications created an insurmountable power divide between members of the nuclear club and the rest of the world. This is what George Orwell had in mind when he wrote the following in 1945:

Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace¹.

Thus, state power became the defining factor in international politics, and the numerous states that did not make it into the nuclear club had to reckon with this new reality.

The laws of the Cold War reflected its unique nature as well as the objective distribution of national military power for years to come. The relative stability in the distribution of power paved the way to achieving political change through compromise. It was also the first time international organisations were able to rein in national foreign policies by virtue of norms and rules. Institutions tend to strengthen trust and the capacity for concerted action, and reduce the fallout from deception, without changing the anarchic nature of international politics. Institutions represent a contract between states undertaking to abide by the rules and keep their selfish aspirations in check (Stephan, 1999). The UN is the main international institution and the Security Council of five permanent members embodies the order it represents. All the P5 countries are members of the nuclear club, meaning not a single state of comparable military power was left out. International law, with the UN Charter at its foundation, guarantees the rights of all states around the world that adhere to the Charter. But only five countries enjoy the unique veto right enabling them to block any decision at the highest level. It is for this reason that the Cold War-era international order embodies the link between power and morality. International institutions and rules guarantee relative justice for all, while relying on a compromise between the dominating power of the few.

Because war had become an irrational choice for nuclear powers seeking to settle their differences, the conflict between the USSR and the United States ended peacefully and suddenly by the metrics of international relations theory as a result of internal changes in one of the rivals². The overwhelming dominance of the US power after WWII structured the international community of market democracies. This community defended the basic norms of the liberal international order including the free movement of goods, capital, services and people, rejecting the use or threat of force in relations between community members, using force solely in self-defence, and respecting territorial integrity. This order coexisted with a global collective security order (system) embodied in the UN, where two out of the five P5 nations (the USSR and China) were not part of the liberal international order. However, this order sought to achieve the same objective on the home front by ensuring that countries act within the confines of the law. Even more importantly, they pushed for changes to suit their interests and values without creating a revolutionary situation, which is to say, peacefully. Therefore, the UN-based collective security system operated as a universal structural regulator.

After the Cold War, the liberal international order expanded to cover almost the entire world, and most erstwhile opponents ended up adopting its rules. However, the international community remained bound to a system of institutions and norms shaped by a completely different historical environment. Cold War-era institutions such as the UN, the OSCE and arms control regimes and treaties existed alongside institutions and organisations of the liberal international order, such as those associated with European integration, NATO, GATT (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund. State power retained its decisive role in their bargaining regardless of the origins or sophistication of the institutions. The resulting unique combination of the power equilibrium and institutions as the main categories for two opposing schools of thought ensured that this complex international order would remain stable. Counting the post-1990 liberal international order, it actually represents the second-longest historical period in 500 years of international politics (after 1815 ̶1914), when great powers were not engaged in all-out war against each other. This period continues to this day.

Used as a general term defining post-Cold War world affairs, the liberal international order can be analysed through the prism of all major schools of international relations theory. It is widely viewed as an order based on rules and freedoms underwritten by the leadership of the United States and liberal market democracies as its allies (Ikenberry, 2018). This is not necessarily an academic view but rather a political one. It covers institutions and leadership, understood as the power held by one of the states, as the two basic categories of the liberal and realist schools. The latter offers a more scholarly perspective on this important phenomenon, since it is based on the structural factors that shape the nature of the international system in its various states.

At this point, we have to look beyond today's classic works of neorealism (Robert Gilpin, Paul Kennedy, and William Wohlforth) that offer a narrow vision of an international order as a situation when one power dominates until eventually losing its grip (Gilpin, 1981). From this perspective, a single power did not enjoy undisputed dominance of either the Cold War international security order or the post-1990 liberal international order, even though the United States has been the most significant international actor over the past 30 years in terms of its aggregate capabilities. If we conceive of the liberal international order as a set of rules, norms and practices defining the way states conduct their affairs to this day, the mere existence of the UN Security Council makes it impossible for a hegemon to emerge. In this study, the liberal international order is defined as the totality of rules, norms and practices governing the post-Cold War international system. At the time, all five members of the body at the pinnacle of the global security system voluntarily accepted the system of norms and practices created by a community of liberal market democracies before 1990.

Just like realist scholars, Edward Carr believed that power, especially military might, retains its central role in structuring international politics (Carr, 1964, 2001, 109). In this sense, any international order can be viewed as a product of power. It was Carr who identified morality and the related international legal norms as the second necessary ingredient of political change and the only alternative to revolutionary war for achieving peace (Carr, 1964, 2001, 219–222). This is what makes it so difficult to pin down where among the different schools of thought his main contribution to the field of international relations resides. Even if norms and rules result from power and reflect its distribution, as demonstrated later in this book, these institutions and their supporting organisations inevitably regulate the way states conduct their affairs. The rules and norms inevitably reflect the balance and scale of forces that shaped them, while also affecting that ability of states to project power. This is what creates the foundation for relative morality in international politics. In terms of neoclassical realism, law and morality in international relations operate as fairly independent external variables. Without them, no analysis would be complete, and it would be impossible to fully grasp the nature of any order.

Carr was spot on in his analysis of the nature of political change, and the latest research on post-Cold War international relations backs up the arguments he put forward. Classical realism distinguishes domestic morality from international politics where justice is hypothetical and relative and always operates as a short-term compromise. The liberal theory, especially institutionalism, offers a more cautious approach to achieving a compromise between morality and power by focusing on the way international institutions and organisations work and how states use them to maintain or even improve the order based on their relative power. When combined, these two approaches produce two essential, interrelated phenomena of the realist and liberal schools of thought: the balance of power and international institutions. In the theoretical part of this study, the goal is to integrate these two neighbouring theoretical approaches and explore the interface between their key categories.

It would not be possible to even frame the question of what “political change” is without constructivism. At the same time, this theory emphasises discursive practices that exceed the scope of this work. In my view, discourse reflects interests and values as viewed through the prism of a specific historical moment resulting from the objective capabilities of states. Many remarkable works focus on discursive practices when analysing Europe's relations with Russia in the Tsarist period (Lovell, 2007), in the 20th century (Romano, 2013) and today (Neumann, 2017). That said, they strike me as a mere reflection of phenomena central to more developed schools of thought in the field of international relations. In this sense, neoclassical realism, like any other theory characterised by synthesis, places the question of norms and rules within the general framework of the realist methodology without requiring any unnecessary compromises from either side (Waites, 2011). International institutions and rules influence but do not define the foreign policy of nations.

The general theoretical hypothesis explored in this work is relatively straightforward and based on Carr's insight that was revolutionary for his time and remains relevant today: power and morality balance each other in international politics and translate into an international order that affords relative justice to each participant and makes a revolutionary situation less likely (Carr, 1964, 2001, 209). The goal is to capture, as fully as possible, the political reality in which the two protagonists of this book, Russia and Europe, have operated. The liberal international order offers magnificent opportunities for such an expansive perspective, combining as it did the strategic balance of power, Western dominance beyond nuclear containment, its unrivalled ethical leadership and the resulting political distortions. There are also international institutions and norms to consider, as well as the gap between the actual capabilities of states and their subjective notion of their international standing and status.

The nature of the liberal international order

Our hypothesis, as we set out, is that between 1990 and 2020, when the liberal international order emerged as the most sophisticated system in the history of international relations in terms of the interplay between the key categories of realism and liberalism. From the first half of the 20th century, it inherited two essential concepts: the centrality of power and the importance of international institutions that reflected a maximum degree of justice in interstate relations. During the Cold War, the community of liberal market democracies developed a system of rules and practices based on the balance of power that ensured relative equality in terms of accessing economic and, more importantly, political benefits. But just like any other ideal state, this period did not last, as its participants sought to free themselves from constraints embedded in the system and capitalise on their objective advantages. These constraints hemmed in the power of the United States and its allies, although it was not uncommon for them to go beyond these limits. At the same time, prospective revisionist powers were unsatisfied with the foreign policy limitations they had to endure, but unlike post-World War I (WWI) Germany there was no enforced humiliation. Through its integration with the UN Security Council, the main Cold War institution, the liberal international order created the convincing and theoretically valid appearance of ensuring equal distribution of political as well as economic benefits (Mearsheimer, 2019).

In the post-1990 liberal international order, no group of countries had to live in a state of intolerable injustice that would require it to direct all its efforts toward effecting revolutionary change. In addition, the very nature of the liberal order encouraged the emergence of international institutions and rules, even when they did not produce any direct benefits for the most powerful group of states. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) or the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group were formed by states dissatisfied with the US policy, giving them a platform to make their collective voices heard (Roberts, 2019). Still, these associations have blended organically into the ecosystem of the liberal international order alongside NATO, ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) and the EU. Revisionist powers benefit from this system as long as they do not aspire to set the basic rules. Russia's revisionism took revolutionary form only in two instances – its interventions in Crimea and in Syria in 2014–2015. So far, China has not given any reason to suspect that its revisionist aspirations go beyond the existing order.

In theory, a general state of relative dissatisfaction can provide an adequate foundation for an order as stable and lasting as the 1815 Vienna system. Moreover, representatives of the liberal school have aptly noted that major powers were guided by uniform core values after 1990 (Cox, 2016). International politics have not been marred by a major war for 30 years now. It is true that mutual nuclear containment makes a military solution irrational, creating an important prerequisite for “lasting” peace, as noted earlier. This factor remains a central, albeit technical, element of the operation of rules and practices. Even today, with all the talk of the crisis of the liberal international order, a relatively just distribution of political and economic benefits among all members of the community, except pariahs, is the key factor in the stability of the order's main organisations. It can be argued that the liberal international order is too good, even theoretically, to even consider seeking an alternative. To this day, none of the existing alternatives has reflected the objective global balance of power. This is not to suggest, however, that the liberal international order ensures absolute justice, unachievable as it is in international power politics.

In the first 20 years after the fall of the iron curtain, Western countries could allow themselves less than they were entitled to, but this was still much more than the rest of the world could accept as fair. To maintain that China and Russia adopted revisionist policies only when they had the necessary resources to do so would be a superficial reading of the situation. In fact, these aspirations had been latent in their foreign policy doctrines since the end of the Cold War. At the same time, both enjoyed a privileged status within the liberal international order and benefited from it. In 2011, Moscow and Beijing gave a de facto green light to a NATO operation against the Libyan regime, since it did not conflict with their immediate security interests. However, they still believed that by giving its leading powers more rights than others, the liberal international order had a justice deficit.

The Cold War can be said to have two formal endings: the Malta Summit between the USSR and the United States on 2 ̶3 December 1989 and the signing on 21 November 1990 of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, a document that laid the foundation of the new European order, by heads of state and government at the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The first ending consisted of a decision by the most powerful military powers to exclude military contingencies from their foreign policy planning, which meant putting an end to the primacy of force in international politics. The Paris Charter became an institutional extension of the agreement between the USSR and the United States in the context of the new power equilibrium created by the fall of Eastern European communist regimes. This landmark event was not preceded by a war. There were no clear losers or certainty as to what caused the change in the balance of power. In 1989, the USSR gave up the fight and relinquished its satellites essentially without preconditions. It took just a few months for the socialist regimes from Sofia to Berlin to vanish, and just a year later, Russia had put an end to the USSR and adopted the economic and ethical platform of the West (Lieven, 1994).

As such, there was seemingly no cause to invoke the quote attributed to Ferdinand Foch on the Versailles Treaty: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” Western countries were not in a hurry to reveal their predatory intentions towards Russia, and even invited it to join all its institutions, except for the most important ones. George H. W....

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Power, morality and justice in the liberal international order
• 2 Harmony of interests
• 3 Russia and the post-Cold War European order
• 4 Justice in a changing environment
• Europe and Russia after the liberal world order
• References
• Index