From the Empire to Anarchy: Post-communist Foreign Policy and International Relations. - book reviews

ORBIS,  Fall, 1997  by Yaroslav Bilinsky

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

After the close reelection of an unwell President Boris Yeltsin in 1996, questions about the basic thrust of Russian foreign policy can no longer be ignored. This summer's NATO summit in Madrid saw formal invitations to join the alliance extended to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, but previously voiced Russian objections to the expansion raised a critical question for the United States and its allies: does the Kremlin merely aim to establish hegemony over its immediate neighbors, or is it rebuilding a full-fledged Russian empire?

The study of post-1991 Russian foreign policy goes far beyond the usual academic concern over whether a tenable national interest exists and who defines it. What, in fact, is the Russian nation? Does it comprise all the citizens of the present Russian federation? Or is it much broader, embracing the federation's citizens as well as the approximately twenty-five million ethnic Russians who live outside the federation, both in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and in the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? Or does the Russian nation include all Russian-speaking people in the former Soviet Union, which may increase the number to as many as thirty million? Given the large Russian-minority populations in Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Moldova, to name only the Western successor states of the USSR, are Russian efforts to reintegrate the CIS and the Baltic states into a real federal state a legitimate pursuit of national interest? And if so, will Moscow feel compelled to extend Russian hegemony over East-Central Europe in order to safeguard the new "states of Eurasia"? Will the twenty-First century see a return to the atmosphere that prevailed in 1949 when the Soviet Union developed and tested nuclear weapons?

Hegemon or Imperial Power?

The four books under review here deal with Russian foreign policy and the accompanying questions directly and indirectly. The first is a festschrift dedicated to Professor Boris Meissner on his eightieth birthday by the members of the Goettingen Study Group, which he has chaired for thirty years. It is a selection of eleven of Meissner's articles published from 1983-95, with a conclusion written especially for this book by Meissner. His familiarity with Russian foreign policy comes from firsthand experience as a West German diplomat stationed in Moscow in the 1950s. Meissner has since taught Sovietology at the Universities of Kiel and Cologne and has continued to advise the German chancellor - for instance, during the negotiations on German reunification.

Regrettably, Meissner's volume lacks an index, which would have helped the reader to trace the many actors and events he touches on. The first third of the book covers the Soviet period, while the remainder is devoted to Russia's foreign policy and its interplay with Russian domestic politics, phenomena that are of greater concern today. In general, Meissner's articles read like detailed political and diplomatic commentaries on relatively recent events. Well-ordered and almost exhaustive evidence makes them eminently persuasive. (Zbigniew Brzezinski once commented that Meissner had his fries arranged with the precision of an officer of the German general staff.)

One of the best articles on the post-cold war period is Meissner's analysis of "The Two Baselines of Russian Foreign Policy." In it, he briefly sketches the "Eurasianist" conception, then that of the "neo-Slavophiles" - who, on balance, have sided with the "Eurasianists" - and lastly deals with the "Atlanticists," best personified by Andrei V. Kozyrev, the former Russian minister of foreign affairs. Meissner documents Kozyrev's and Yeltsin's capitulation to their critics among the ranks of the Eurasianists and the neo-Slavophiles since the spring of 1992. Although Yeltsin won the popular referendum in April 1993 (with a small majority) and prevailed in the bloody confrontation with his parliament in October 1993, Eurasianist pressure forced him to adjust Russia's foreign policy to the right. Indeed, vis-a-vis the states of the CIS, Russia has become more hegemonic. In the space of one year, from 1992 to 1993, those states went from the status of good neighbors to candidates for a firm confederation under Russian leadership. Russia also claimed it should be recognized as the main peacekeeper throughout the territory of the former Soviet Union, something that both the United States and Great Britain ostensibly rejected. More ominous still, since late 1992 Russia has asserted that it has the right to intervene in other states to punish violations of the rights of ethnic Russians, or even Russian speakers. While this punishment would preferably take the form of diplomatic and economic sanctions, Moscow did not rule out the use of military force.(1)

In other articles Meissner analyzes the changes in power relations within the CIS; details the end of Soviet hegemony in East-Central Europe and the beginning of a would-be-hegemonic Russian policy toward the very same states; and documents Yeltsin's vacillations on Poland's entry into NATO.(2) But the most important piece in this volume is Meissner's new study of Yeltsin's foreign policy in the interplay of domestic and foreign politics, which comes with its own extensive bibliography.(3) He points out that Yeltsin thanked the Russian armed forces for their help against his parliamentary opposition by endorsing a new military doctrine in November 1993. That doctrine called for developing collective security arrangements in the CIS and coordinating military and defense policies between individual CIS states and Russia - in short, emphasizing the rapid reintegration of the CIS.