Part I Theory
2 Honor in International Relations
“As long as there are States, so there will be national pride, and nothing can be more warranted.”
Although scholars frequently view human actions as if they were designed to meet rationally determined objectives, the world is full of examples of what can hardly be described as a rational behavior. Cognitive beliefs and human emotions expressing attachments, anger, and frustration are at least as significant in informing social interactions. Because humans are social beings, they can only be understood in relevant social settings and with the use of appropriate ethical categories. Beliefs and emotions define the meaning of actions that on the surface may seem rationally calculated.
Defining Honor
One powerful emotion underlying human interactions is honor. Honor is associated with the readiness of the self to preserve its dignity and its assumed commitments to the relevant social community.2 Historians and theoreticians frequently credit honor as important, even decisive, in determining human interactions. If moral purpose is essential for a community's existence,3 then an international community too must be shaped by moral considerations and obligations to honor them. The world's institutional arrangements, as well as alliances and power conquests, need to be understood in terms of their members’ social commitments. As a student of conflict acknowledges, pursuing and satisfying honor may be more difficult than achieving material gains,4 and “the reader may be surprised by how small a role…considerations of practical utility and material gain, and even ambition for power itself, play in bringing on wars, and how often some aspect of honor is decisive.”5
Which aspect of honor may be decisive depends on the social situation. A commonly used typology includes the “inner” and the “outer” aspects of honor.6 Inner honor refers to an individual's assessment – relating to notions of “integrity,” “veracity,” and “character” – of his or her obligation to a moral community. It pertains to children who learn to keep secrets “on their honor,” as well as to soldiers, whose notion of military honor includes a commitment to defend one group (nation) from potential attacks by others. Over time, through service to the community, inner honor also gains qualities of pride and dignity.7 Outer honor is linked more explicitly to assessment by others and is defined as “reputation” or “good name.”8 If one's reputation is besmirched, the pursuit of outer honor may lead its aspirants to competitive and even mutually destructive behavior. Outer honor then is viewed in exclusive and hierarchical terms: “when everyone attains equal honor, then there is no honor for anyone.”9 It is the honor that underlies great power competition and imperial rivalry.10 In sum, “honor requires trueness to one's word when given on one's honor; readiness to defend one's home, and the right of oneself and one's group, and to avenge violations.”11
Over time, honor has attained several distinctive meanings. The Athenians associated it with citizenship and civic obligations, but honor later became appropriated by the aristocracy, gaining hierarchical qualities. The Renaissance revived the notion of civil humanism, encouraging more egalitarian ties among individuals.12 Capitalism broke down old particularistic barriers in Western societies and – accompanied by the rise of democratic nationalism – established the idea of national honor. Although it destroyed the medieval European hero,13 the new capitalist era did not destroy a reformist zeal, but expanded its domestic boundaries.14 As Geoffrey Best described the process,
Nationalism and democracy marched together through the nineteenth century to harden this creed and to broaden its base, so that what had previously been a precise code for noblemen became a popular code for patriots: “the nationalization of honor” having among its products the concept of “national honor,” the importance of protecting or avenging it, the extension to the nation as a whole of the old personal preference of death to dishonor, and so on.15
It is during this transition to capitalism that honor became associated with defending nations, rather than dynastic political units, from external threats.
Honor in Realist Thought
Realist thinkers responded to this transition to capitalism and nation-state by putting forward the concepts of national interest and power as the ultimate justifications of international behavior. In their account, the notion of honor has become either indistinguishable from or secondary to that of rational interest.
Classical Realism
Realism is known for its sharp separation of rules guiding the domestic community from the realities of international politics. Thucydides was the first to defend domestic civic virtue from external interferences and to stress the absence of moral regulations in the world of nations that did not follow Greek ideals. He did not associate honor with power or profit, as some of his successors did, and was fearful of wartime's corrupting effects on the civic bonds within the Athenian community.16 Nor did he support the position of Athenian imperialism as expressed in Melian dialogue: “whatever one is mighty, he rules. And we neither laid down this law nor are we the first to have used it as laid down…if you become as powerful as we are, you would do the same.”17 Yet Thucydides clearly supported the position that war is permitted when a country is “forced to advance our dominion to what it is, out of the nature of the thing itself.”18
This perspective on honor as in need of protection from external upheavals was alien to modern thinkers such as Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes. Living in the age of collapsing religious authority and the emergence of independent secular states, they both sought to subjugate the domestic community and its social virtues to the objectives of the state. Machiavelli did not hold civic community in high esteem, linking honor directly to the Prince and his expansionist activities. Unlike Thucydides, Machiavelli felt threatened by domestic rather than foreign developments. He was one of the first modern thinkers to associate honor with the glory of foreign conquests:
We are lovers of glory.…We seek to rule or at least to avoid being oppressed. In either case we want more for ourselves and our states than just material welfare. Because other states with similar aims thereby threaten us, we prepare ourselves for expansion. Because our fellow citizens threaten us if we do not allow them to satisfy their ambition or to release their political energies, we expand. In so doing, we create a state of war – insecurity abroad as a way of mitigating, but never successfully eliminating, insecurity at home.19
Hobbes too associated political order with the state only and viewed pride and “social passions” as forces of destruction.20 “Before the names of Just and Unjust can have place, there must be some coercive Power.”21 He defined honor and morality in relation to state interests. As a scholar of realism commented, “good or bad was thus reduced to necessity and utility.”22
Jean-Jacques Rousseau revived the notion of civic honor by introducing the ideas of constitutionalism and the just social contract.23 The gradual consolidation of democratic institutions in the nineteenth century strengthened the thinking of those who, like Edward Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Raymond Aron, sought to preserve political accomplishments at home in face of critical upheavals abroad, such as World War I, World War II, and the Cold War.24 Like Thucydides, however, they did not associate honor with international politics, which they viewed as devoid of any moral rules. Instead, these thinkers viewed foreign relations in terms of rational interests in maximizing or preserving power among states. In the words of Morgenthau, “political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe.”25 Power should be recognized for what it is, echoed Carr, even when it “goes far to create the morality convenient to itself.”26 Even Christian pacifists, such as Martin Wight, subscribed to the view that “hope is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.”27
Neorealism
So-called structural realism or neorealism went further in denying significance to moral rules in international relations. By declaring the structure of the international system the key determining factor of state behavior, neorealists strengthened the classical realists’ argument that survival and self-preservation were the ultimate social principles.28 International politics was no longer about defending the social values of its participants – the argument occasionally advanced by some of neorealism's predecessors29; rather it was reduced to maximizing the “rational” interests of survival in the system. The triple classification of state motives in international politics advanced by classical realists – fear, interests, and honor30 – was abandoned in favor of the single explanation of rational interests. The notion of honor was therefore fully replaced by that of rational interest, which was now understood in terms of material capabilities, rather than prestige or reputation.
Still, the new way of realist thinking did not eliminate the distinction between those who described states as oriented toward the international status quo and those who emphasized states’ expansionist instincts. Both schools insisted on the “rationality” of such behavior, but could not agree on what constituted the correct response to pressures coming from the international system. Offensive realism expected states to maximize material power and, whenever possible, challenge existing political boundaries.31 Defensive realism offered different explanations for state action in international politics. Rather than emphasizing the accumulation of power, defensive realists32 focused on imperatives of security and survival and argued that states more commonly respond to security dilemmas by balancing or circling the bandwagons than with war or blackmail, as in offensive realism.33 As primary motivating factors, defensive realists delineated misperceptions and institutional biases that stood in the way of a correct reading of signals coming from the anarchical international system.34
This disagreement among neorealists has called into question their ability to agree on a definition of rationality and rationally defined national interests, suggesting the possibility that rationality itself is a product of perception by scholars and policy makers. The problem with the offensive realist explanation of state behavior is that it lacks nuance and a sense of proportion: it presents all states as uniform power maximizers responding to the international anarchy-driven security dilemma with an equally relentless determination to achieve hegemony over all other states in the system.35 The perspective from defensive realism is also not sufficiently sophisticated. Just as offensive realism assumes that the state's interest is to maximize power, defensive realism assumes without supportive evidence that the international system encourages security-seeking behavior. Even when defensive realism relies on explanatory factors other than power, such as misperceptions and institutional biases, it treats them as secondary to the role of the structure of the international system. In addition, neorealists occasionally apply in their analysis notions such as “will,” “resolve,” and “credibility” while continuing to claim the primacy of material factors.36
Neoclassical Realism
A new school of realist thinking – neoclassical realism – has developed these intangibles more explicitly.37 Its advocates have restored the complexity of classical realism in perceiving state foreign policy preferences, no longer reducing them to either power or security. They have also added to their analysis several domestic factors such as perception, domestic politics, the degree of state strength, and ideology. Finally, neoclassical realists have revived the notion of honor as a key motive in state behavior. For example, William Wohlforth took issue with neorealists’ materialist ontology by insisting that honor and prestige are critical for understanding state decisions to go to war, because leaders treat intangibles as vital interests.38 Using the case of Russia, he argued that since 1601, “Russia's rulers have taken risks, spilled their subjects’ blood, and emptied Kremlin coffers for the honor, prestige and reputation of the state.”39
However, neoclassical realists remain in principal agreement with neorealists about the primary significance of the structure of the international system to state behavior. Even when they employ factors other than power, such as perceptions and domestic politics, they assign them secondary roles relative to that attributed to the structure of the international system. From the neoclassical perspective, the structure of the international system itself determines the intangibles, and honor should be treated as an interest in preserving or enhancing the existing power position within the system, not as a locally shaped cultural concept with its own meaning. State ideas or visions of the world are therefore endogenous to the international power balance, not something that may have a potentially significant independent effect.40 Therefore introducing intangibles and other variables does not change the overall thrust of the realist analysis, according to which the international environment is anarchic in nature and states are driven by security and power (national interest).
Among the casualties of such a reductionist perspective is the opportunity to understand the true sources of opportunities and threats in international politics. By ignoring the independent effects of ideas and emotions, realists employ a very narrow perspective on “change,” limiting it to fluctuations of available power capabilities. As a result this perspective may miss opportunities in international politics. It is not that realism is necessarily wrong, but it is incomplete and therefore potentially wrong. For example, realists have overlooked or misinterpreted some far-reaching changes in Russia's foreign policy that were potent with potential for cooperation with Western nations; for example, Mikhail Gorbachev's New Thinking. In his polemic with two leading realists, Robert English pointed to the inaccuracy of presenting Gorbachev as the overseer of the Soviet strategic retreat. He argued that the origins of Gorbachev's New Thinking dated to the late 1950s and 1960s and had to do with domestic changes and the revival of cultural links to the West, not defense calculations and economic needs.41 In addition, realism never fully answers this question, What drives the perception of threat in international politics? For instance, it does not fully explain why the United States and NATO are viewed as major threats to Russia's security in the Caucasus and where the origin of the threat lies. Is it individual, institutional, or perhaps cultural? How, and under what conditions, is the threat triggered and perpetuated? And if a rationality standard is of limited value in explaining state behavior, which emotions may drive it? What is the substance of participants’ complains and frustrations? How and in response to which developments do these emotions consolidate to stand in the way of a “rational” calculation of interests?
Realism is not well equipped to answer these critical questions. Having assumed a constant drive for power and security in the international system, and being preoccupied with various expressions of power, it brackets its social and emotional contexts, treating them as secondary at best.42 Why bother if the international system is a constant? As John Mearsheimer put it, the fact that anarchy has dominated the international relations discourse for centuries “strongly suggests that the basic structure of the international system…largely determines how states think and act toward each other.”43 Why should we care if participants have any feelings and what these feelings might be if, in the final analysis, they act as rational maximizers of their international objectives? This is the point at which we turn to social constructivism, which takes contexts and meanings of international actions seriously and does not treat them as predetermined by anarchy.
Honor and Social Constructivism
Honor and a Purpose of Social Action
Social constructivists view state behavior as shaped by both cognitive beliefs and emotions and by power. They are also united by the idea that power and the anarchical nature of the international system are by themselves not sufficient for defining state interests and policies. Power is a means, and not a purpose, of a social action. As Christian Reus-Smit argued, scholars ought to study normative fabrics of individual societies, especially their beliefs about the moral purpose of the state, because these beliefs are key to understanding state behavior and the resulting international system. These normative differences come before sovereignty, which is therefore only a secondary foundation of international society.44 Even if anarchy is out there somewhere, constructivists say, we ought to focus on everyday interactions to understand what anarchy means and how social contexts of power are formed and unformed.45 Without uncovering the meanings and emotions behind international relations, we are unlikely to adequately explain and predict state actions.
Although some classical realists acknowledge the importance of “differences in purpose for which power is sought,” they are preoccupied with how such differences account for “variations in the scope and intensity of the quest for influence and power.”46 For example, Hans Morgenthau wrote about a “policy of prestige” that aims to demonstrate power.47 Raymond Aron emphasized glory as “inseparable from the human dialogue” but “consecrated by victory and the enemy's submission.”48 Max Weber too was thinking in power terms when he wrote, “A nation forgives injury to its interests, but not injury to its honor.”49 Having separated material interests from nonmaterial honor, Weber had in mind state prestige within the international system. Treating honor as a rational interest, realists focused on considerations of standing within the international system at the expense of attention to states’ indigenous and culturally formed visions and worldviews.50 Even when classical realists, such as Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau, assumed that identities of states and their societies were mutually constitutive, they did not explicitly acknowledge this assumption.51 Their insights have yet to be systematically developed.
Constructivist theory places the notion of “meaning” at the center of understanding a social action; that is, state actions and interests are constructed by national and international environments. Constructivists argue that because particular social contexts define national interests, the formation of such interests should be carefully studied, rather than merely assumed to be rational or irrational. In the words of a prominent constructivist, “it is striking how little empirical research has been done investigating what kind of interests state actors actually have.”52 Although the international system assists states in their socialization and understanding of interests in world politics, one must not privilege international social practices at the expense of those of local origins. Local conditions, such as historical memory, the state of the military and the economy, relations among different social groups, or the type of political regime, are just as important in shaping national perceptions and formulating ideas of national self.53 Because each nation operates within a distinct social condition, each has distinct concerns and therefore views the world in its own way. For instance, perceptions of reality by rich nations will differ from those of poor countries. Some local concerns are more stable and are formed across a long time span, whereas others are more immediate and emerge in response to short-term developments. Yet in both cases, they serve as cultural lenses through which each nation views the outside world.
The concept of honor is often at the heart of how a nation expresses its historical experience and formulates a moral purpose in world politics. Honor defines what is a “good” and “virtuous” course of action for a state vis-à-vis other members of international society. Some international interactions are constructed to facilitate loyalty and commitment to allies, whereas others create the context in which an honorable action requires noncooperative behavior. The former tends to promote a definition of honor as a subjective duty, whereas the latter demands that honor be recognized as a right. In both cases, there is a clear expectation of reciprocity on the part of the self , which requires that we consider honor as a relational and interactive process, rather than something given.
The Self and Other in Honor-Based Interactions
More than some other virtues, “honor obliges its possessor to show others that he possesses honor.”54 We honor others, said Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, in virtue of something that they are or have done to merit the honor.55 As with other intangibles, nations define what they view as honorable behavior by interacting with other members of international society. Before they figure out how best to defend their interests with available material and diplomatic means, they first seek to understand what these interests in the international society are. Through social interactions, nations develop affiliations, attachments, and – ultimately – their own identities. Over time, some nations or cultural communities emerge as more significant in certain contexts, and it is through these significant others that national selves define their appropriate character and types of actions.56 The very existence of the self becomes difficult without recognition from the other. As a cultural phenomenon, honor assists the self in expressing its emotional and evaluative orientations toward its significant other. The significant other establishes the meaningful context for the self's existence and development and therefore exerts a decisive influence on the self.
The self is not a passive learner, and its emotional assessment of the other may be subject to variation, depending on the other's willingness to accept the self's influence. Scholars with constructivist sensitivities have advanced a series of arguments suggesting that in cross-cultural interactions the self and the other are different but morally equal, and for that reason, both are sources of potential learning. Critics of modernization theory have revealed its unilinear and progressive pro-Western bias.57 Postcolonial scholars have insisted that through modernization theory the Western other historically justified its colonial practices – offering no reciprocal engagement with the non-Western self, treating it as a dependent subject (“subaltern”), and expecting it to merely follow the other's lead.58 “Non-Western” feminists have scrutinized ethnocentric assumptions common in Western feminist scholarship.59 Scholars of world order and critical geopolitics have analyzed cultures and civilizations, viewing them as complex visualizations of the self and other's relationships across the globe, with a diversity of ideas and social visions coexisting, engaging in dialogue, and competing for influence.60
In their own way, each of these research circles has demonstrated that no matter how much the other may be willing to promote its vision of “virtue” and “good” to the outside world, the self is unlikely to fully accept a vision that undermines its own system of cultural meanings. Through its actions, the other then may reinforce or erode the earlier established meaning of honor. Depending on whether these influences are read by the self as extending or denying it recognition, they may generate either hope or resentment toward the other,61 thereby encouraging or discouraging the self to act cooperatively. A resentful attitude is typically accompanied by the self's insistence on independence in forming its own judgment vis-à-vis other members of the international community. Consider, for example, Bismarck's public statement made in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, conveying Prussia's resentment toward any potential criticisms of its actions: “Gentlemen, my honor lies in no-one's hand but my own, and it is not something that others can lavish on me…no-one is judge of it and able to decide whether I have it.”62
Honor and Foreign Policy
In state-to-state interactions, both local conditions and international influences affect the formation of honor and are critical in understanding the process of foreign policy formation and change. Although international influences contribute to creating the meaningful context in which the national self evolves and shapes foreign policy, local conditions and the national memory of past interactions with its external environment are no less important in establishing a social purpose, or a system of meanings in which to act.63 A national self then has relative autonomy in influencing foreign policy, and that autonomy is historically established. Such autonomy is confirmed by diverse economic, cultural, and political conditions in which nations act and that have long been a subject of foreign policy analysis. These conditions are critically important, and the constructivism that was initially oriented toward the international is now moving toward incorporating domestic-level variables.64 Foreign policy begins when the state manages to transcend the dichotomy of internal/external pressures and develops multiple strategies of responding to world challenges.65
A nation is not a homogeneous entity and rarely speaks with a unified voice. Different traditions or schools of thinking about the world develop in response to international and local conditions, and these schools compete for political influence. They hold different conceptions of a nation's identity, the nature of the external world, and the appropriate policy response. In a relatively open society, they compete openly for dominance and are supported by various social groups/coalitions. Constructivists do not view foreign policy as a product of a unitary state that advances its power, as in realism, or as a particular group pursuing modernization interests, as in liberalism. Rather, the role of a coalition is to put forward a particular image of national identity/honor that will speak to existing local conditions and be recognized by the significant other. Identity coalitions are broader and more fundamental than interest coalitions, and they seek to achieve social recognition, rather than to maximize wealth or power.
National honor is therefore a complex and contested concept that may become a product of discursive competition among different groups/coalitions drawing on different actions of the other and interpreting contemporary international and local influences in a way that suits their perceptions and interests. The process that links international and local conditions, national honor, and foreign policy is a complex one, and it includes vigorous debates over the nature of national honor and interests. Because international society contains multiple norms and influences, some of them may conflict in influencing the self. For instance, Western realists emphasize the need to be strong, whereas Western liberals insist that the world revolves around values of a free economy and society. Both strength and liberty can serve as powerful normative messages that the modern West sends to the outside world. However, just as realists and liberals disagree, the norms of strength and liberty can come into conflict in shaping an identity of the self and its perceptions of appropriate/honorable behavior.
Ultimately, “rationalist” theories are inadequate in identifying the nature and origins of various concepts of national honor that guide states’ international behavior. In particular, they ignore the fact that nations do not view power or modernization as their ultimate objectives. Rather, nations contextualize economic and political imperatives, viewing them as means of satisfying broader social ideas and purposes. Depending on a nation's internal self-confidence, external pressures may generate varying emotions at home and be viewed by political elites as either opportunities or threats to national development. When viewed as opportunities, external influences are likely to generate positive emotions of hope or camaraderie, strengthening those aspects of honor that favor international cooperation. However, when viewed as threats, foreign pressures tend to bring to life emotions of fear, resentment, anger, and righteousness, leading to a more nationalistic and exclusive definition of honor that frequently underlies competitive and conflictual behavior in international relations.66
During times of uncertainty, perceptions of honorable behavior may become highly contested with different honor coalitions being formed to promote their visions. Promoted in both public and private spaces, honor contestation is especially intense until one of the visions becomes predominant. The activities of political entrepreneurs, appropriate material and ideational resources, conducive institutional arrangements, and historical practices can considerably influence this process of persuading the general public and elites. When the persuasion part of the process is complete, the state appropriates the dominant vision of nationally honorable behavior as a guide in policy making. That vision may then be publicly presented as the national interest. Other things being equal, one can expect a reasonable degree of foreign policy consistency based on the adopted image of national honor (Figure 2.1 describes the causal influences on foreign policy as viewed from a honor-based perspective).
Figure 2.1. An Honor-Based Explanation of Foreign Policy
Notes
1 Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, p. 75.
2 Bowman, Honor, p. 4.
3 Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State.
4 Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, p. 569.
5 Ibid., p. 8.
6 Stewart, Honor.
7 Freyberg-Inan, What Moves Man, p. 25.
8 Stewart, Honor, pp. 11–12.
9 Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics, pp. 271–3.
10 Kagan, On the Origins of War, pp. 38, 8.
11 O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, p. 87.
12 Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 72.
13 Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests, p. 11.
14 For different interpretations of honor's disappearance, see Bowman, Honor and MacIntyre, After Virtue.
15 Best, Honor among Men and Nations, xii.
16 Freyberg-Inan, What Moves Man, pp. 25–30.
17 Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, pp. 17–18.
18 Freyberg-Inan, What Moves Man, p. 9.
19 Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, p. 105.
20 Freyberg-Inan, What Moves Man, p. 51.
22 Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity, p. 31.
23 Doyle, Ways of War and Peace, pp. 137–48.
24 For recent reconstructions of classical realism as an ethical tradition, see Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations and Lieven and Hulsman, Ethical Realism.
25 Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 12.
26 Freyberg-Inan, What Moves Man, p. 51.
27 Ibid.
28 For example, see Morgenthau's references to state self-preservation as a “moral principle” and a “duty” (Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, p. 227).
29 Ibid, p. 226.
30 Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics. Aron wrote of security, glory, and honor (Aron, Peace and War).
31 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers.
32 See, for example, Jervis, “Cooperation under Security Dilemma”; Waltz, Theory of International Politics; Snyder, Myths of Empire.
33 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers, p. 138.
34 Jervis, “Cooperation under Security Dilemma”; Walt, Origins of Alliances; Snyder Myths of Empire.
35 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers, p. 40.
36 As one scholar wrote, today “honor” is seldom mentioned by its own name, but it has survived under different names (O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, p. 245).
37 For overviews, see Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy”; Lobell, Ripsman, and Taliaferro, eds., Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy.
38 Wohlforth, “Honor as Interest in Russian Decisions for War, 1600–1995.” For a similar argument, see Wohlforth, “Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War.”
39 Wohlforth, “Honor as Interest,” 22.
40 In a similar fashion, two realists analyzed the role played by Mikhail Gorbachev's New Thinking in changing Soviet behavior and ending the Cold War (Brooks and Wohlforth, “Power, Globalization and the End of the Cold War”). Rather than viewing Gorbachev as a conceptual innovator with a new vision for the world, Brooks and Wohlforth presented him as the overseer of the Soviet strategic retreat. For a constructivist response, see English, “Power, Ideas, and New Evidence on the Cold War's End.”
41 English, “Power, Ideas, and New Evidence.”
42 Classical realism too was mainly interested in expressions of power, although it paid greater attention to the context, origins, and formation of that power.
43 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Powers, p. 369.
44 Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State.
45 Guzzini, Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy; Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics; Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics.
47 Donnelly, Realism and International Relations, p. 46.
48 Aron, Peace and War, p. 73.
49 Donelan, Honor in Foreign Policy, p. 117.
50 Realists normally do not separate inner and outer aspects of honor and view them as interchangeable with prestige, glory, and status. For realist treatments of honor, see also Joshi, Honor in International Relations.
51 Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics, p. 268.
52 Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, p. 133.
53 The literature on ideas and their role in shaping cultural identities is large. See, for instance, Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia; Habermas, Theory and Practice; Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Wolfe, Whose Keeper?; Said, Culture and Imperialism; Suny and Kennedy, eds., Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Mandelbaum, The Ideas That Conquered the World; Oren, Our Enemy and US; Helleiner and Pickel, eds., Economic Nationalism in a Globalizing World.
54 O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, p. 244.
55 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 116.
56 Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe; Neumann, Uses of the Other; Ringman, “The Recognition Game”; Oren, Our Enemy and US.
57 Wiarda, “The Ethnocentrism of the Social Science; Oren, “Is Culture Independent of National Security?”
58 Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture”; Inayatullah and Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference; Jones, ed., Decolonizing International Relations.
59 Oyewumi, The Invention of Women; Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes.”
60 Cox, “Civilizations: Encounters and Transformations”; Alker, Amin, Biersteker, and Inoguchi, “How Should We Theorize Contemporary Macro-Encounters”; O’Hagan, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations; Tsygankov, Whose World Order; Tsygankov, “Self and Other in International Relations Theory.”
61 Suny, Why We Hate You.
62 Bowman, Honor, p. 89.
63 Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security; Lieven, America Right or Wrong; Legro, Rethinking the World; Haas, The Ideological Origins of Great Power Politics.
64 As one scholar suggests, “identity explanations are likely to become ‘foreign policy-ized’ by connecting identity to other factors and theories that have long been part of the FPA agenda” (Kaarbo, “Foreign Policy Analysis in the Twenty-First Century,” 160). International relations scholars have recognized the internal/external bind by referring to it as a “two level game” (Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics”).
65 For additional hypotheses about international influences and their interaction with local conditions, see Snyder, “International Leverage on Soviet Domestic Change”; Richter, Khrushchev's Double Bind.
66 Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoirs as if honor had prevented the United States from withdrawing from the Vietnam War. Similarly, some prominent American officials favored nuclear retaliation in case of potential Soviet attack on the West even if such retaliation meant incineration of American cities (O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War, pp. 85–6). In the latter case, honor was equal to the reputation of power to be feared, rather than trusted.
3 The Russian State and Its Honor
“The task of our internal history has been to enlighten the people's community with the community of the Church.…The task of our external history has been to defend political independence of the same ideal not only for Russia, but for all Slavs, and to do so by establishing a strong state that neither replaces, nor constrains the communal ideal.”
The Russian myth of honor has been established over the course of millennia. Rooted in Eastern Christianity, it came to include a distinctive concept of spiritual freedom and the ideal of a strong and socially protective state capable of defending its own subjects from abuses at home and threats from abroad. Over time, this notion of honor has also incorporated a component of state loyalty to those who shared the Russian idea of honor but lived outside its borders. It is this combination of domestic institutions and commitments to cultural allies that has constituted the myth of honor, providing the state's international policy with a sense of purpose.
The Honor of the Russian State: Origins and Content of the Myth
International politics is not and should not be viewed as primarily a struggle for power. What on the surface often appears to be a political competition among states for power and the preservation of sovereignty may have the deeper purpose of protecting and advancing moral values. As Christian Reus-Smit wrote, the states of ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, and absolutist Europe all “faced the problem of stabilizing territorial property rights, yet they each constructed different fundamental institutions to serve this task.”2 Fundamental institutions captured these states’ moral purpose. The ancient Greeks were believers in informed political involvement and the exercise of discursive justice within the community of the polis. The Italian city-states cultivated a moral purpose defined as civic glory, designed to spur the city on to greatness and to prevent the development of factionalism by enacting norms of procedural justice. The European states that emerged out of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established Christian and dynastic values as their fundamental principles, guiding the exercise of hierarchical and authoritative justice by their monarchs. Finally, modern states’ moral purpose centers around the notion of individual freedom and potentiality and of legislative justice.3
This thinking can be helpful in reconstructing institutions and values shared by other political communities. For example China, with its social hierarchy, is close to the European absolutist states, albeit without their Christian beliefs. In contrast, Russia is a species of European Christian absolutism but with its own characteristics, the most important being Orthodox or Eastern Christianity as a moral basis of Russian statehood. Prince Vladimir, in selecting Christianity for the Russians in 988, was not only making a religious choice but was also deciding on the long-term basis for social consensus, national honor, and external recognition of his country.4 To Russians, Eastern Christianity became a critically important part of their identity for centuries to follow.5 Internally, the Church promoted a new type of social relations, arguing against blood revenge and advocating stable marriage and humane treatment of the lower classes. In Sergei Platonov's words, “the Church provided the secular society with an example of a better and more humane life, in which both rich and poor could be defended.…The Church influenced all sides of [the] social system including political deeds of Princes and [the] private life of each family.”6 Another prominent Russian historian, Vasili Kluchevski, believed that the search for justice reflected in the principles of Russkaya pravda (the Russian truth) of the twelfth century had its roots in Eastern Christianity.7
It was also within the Eastern Christian tradition that the Russians established the state's duty to provide, to the extent possible, its citizens with decent living conditions. Before Russia embarked on territorial expansion in the fifteenth century, Russian princes had been guided by detailed community-based and religious welfare principles. Rooted in Orthodox Christianity, these principles included a foremost respect for the land [zemlya], support for a community of free peasants [mir] with the power to decide critical issues and choose a prince [veche],8 and mutual responsibility, which meant that if one household was unable to contribute the required dues and taxes, the others were expected to make up the difference. Introduced in the Kievan Rus’, the principle of mutual responsibility was codified in 1649.9 The voice of the people was viewed, in the words of Patriarch Job (1589–1605), as the “voice of God.”10 Later, when serfdom emerged in the mid-nineteenth century in response to the peasants’ accumulated debt to the nobles and the state ban on free migration,11 many in Russia viewed the system as an emergency, rather than normal or natural condition.12
Similarly, the principle of autocracy was first introduced not to support the absolute control of Russia's political rights and economic wealth, but rather to provide ordinary Russians with the stability required to improve their living conditions and protect them from possible abuses by local authorities and nobles.13 The Church and the existing self-governing institutions were not established to interfere with the monarch's duties, but to facilitate them by developing specific locally sensitive responses. The autocrat, in turn, had no plans to control the entire social life of Russia, but only to serve as the ultimate guarantor of citizens’ rights. As Nicholas Petro argued, “In contrast to the prevailing view that nationality and religion served only to prop up the autocracy…they constrained the autocracy by emphasizing the monarch's accountability to the popular will and to the Church.”14 Such a perspective governed Muscovy and only changed after the Time of Troubles, especially under Patriarch Nikon's reforms15 and the absolutist rule of Peter the Great. Before then, as another scholar wrote, “The Russian tsar was not the master of slaves…for the Muscovites the language of servitude implied mutual obligations: the ‘master’ protected the ‘slave’ and the latter served the former.”16 The vision of a socially responsible state survived Peter's rule and was later revived in the writings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, such as Ivan Ilyin, Sergei Gessen, Pavel Novgorodtsev, and Pyetr Struve.
Eastern Christianity also became the basis for unifying the Russian lands while enabling coexistence with culturally diverse groups. Although there were tensions between the Russians and other nationalities in the Russian empire, these tensions were not as pronounced as in overseas empires. As Geoffrey Hosking wrote, “annexed territories became full components of the empire as soon as practicable.”17 The relationships between Christians and Muslims were the most difficult, yet over time the state learned to coexist with Islam. Beginning with Catherine the Great, the Russian empire developed special ties with Islam by supporting those Muslim authorities who were willing to submit to the empire's general authority, and it even served as an arbitrator in disputes between Muslims from the Volga River to Central Asia.18
Finally, Vladimir's choice to accept Christianity in 988 was critical from the perspective of foreign relations and security. No longer an isolated and provincial land, Russia found itself in the orbit of the great Byzantine civilization, which was then at the center of the world's cultural development. Having adopted Orthodox Christianity in 988, before the Schism of 1054, Russia became a student of Byzantium's spirituality and high culture.19 The acculturation process continued until the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans in 1453, even throughout the years of the Mongol Yoke from submission to Khan Batyi in 1237 to the victorious Battle of Kulikovo in 1380. In addition to assisting the Russians in unifying their lands and building a common identity, Christianity gave Russia greater visibility in the world and a connection to the West's cultural center.20
Russia's Security Imperatives and State Honor
As the geopolitically insecure state became preoccupied with defending its borders since the fifteenth century, political independence and the international reputation of a great power figured prominently in Russia's idea of honor. The country was often in an uncertain and volatile external environment and could only survive by constantly defending its unstable borders from the expansionist ambitions of its neighbors. Located in the middle of Eurasia, Russia had few natural boundaries and was frequently attacked by outsiders, from the Mongols to Napoleon and Hitler. In addition, the rules of European great power politics since the days of Louis XIV often encouraged, rather than constrained, territorial expansion and war.21 As Dominic Lieven wrote, “In the European system all great powers were bent on increasing their strength in order to secure their interests in an extremely ruthless and competitive world.”22
Such security predicaments dictated Russia's constant preoccupation with territorial self-sufficiency and secure borders. In addition to insisting on its cultural autonomy after declining the offer to join the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century,23 Russia demanded political independence. Since then political independence has remained one of Russia's important objectives,24 inspiring much of Russian geopolitical writing. Influenced partly by local realities and partly by the works of European geographers,25 Russian thinkers believed in the “inevitable logic of geography,”26 which prescribed that their country expand in several directions by obtaining “natural boundaries.” According to the same logic of geography Russia needed to become a great power to sustain itself amid strong outside pressures. Vladimir Putin reflected the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Russian leaders when he said, “Russia can only survive and develop within the existing borders if it stays as a great power” and that “during all of its times of weakness…Russia was invariably confronted with the threat of disintegration.”27
Threatened from several directions, Russia had to fight multiple wars, many of which were defensive. Immediately following the defeat of the Mongols, Russia expanded to establish its influence on the Volga river and forestall possible future attacks from the south. During the modern era, Russia shared a long border with hostile European powers and “was invaded more often and with more force than any other early modern empire.”28 The invasions included those by the Poles, Ottomans, and Swedes in the seventeenth century; by the Swedes, Austrians, and Ottomans in the eighteenth century; the French, British, and Ottomans in the nineteenth century; and the Germans (twice) and the Allies in the twentieth century.29 It was this logic of competition with the most powerful European nations that often drove Russia's decisions to wage war and expand its territory. From the beginning of Europe's world domination in the seventeenth century, the economically backward Russians strove to become a great power and accept the realities of militarism. Avoiding wars was not an option, because the very rules of inclusion in the great power club “were simple and brutal: to belong, you had to defeat a current member in war.”30 As Prince Baryatinsky, the viceroy of the Caucasus, noted in the second half of the nineteenth century, “England displays its power with gold. Russia which is poor in gold has to compete with force of arms.”31 Expansion in Asia was especially aggressive – partly because the region was more vulnerable than Europe and partly because the Russians too believed that they were performing a European mission to civilize Asia.32
In addition to increasing the importance of political independence, the grim reality of insecurity made it difficult for Russia to act on domestic components of its myth of honor. In the early seventeenth century, Russia's political and economic system was not much different from those of the Western European states.33 Since that time, however, Russia's state-building institutions moved toward centralization at the expense of spiritual freedom and strong social welfare policies. After liberating itself from Mongol occupation, Muscovy was in a generally favorable strategic situation until an arms revolution took place in Europe. Gunpowder and drill provided European armies with better armed and more disciplined troops, and Russia had to rise to the challenge.34 The state could no longer afford to share the clerical authorities’ position on gunpowder as spiritually harmful.35 Autocracy too had to be transformed to comply with the imperatives of military modernization, because the likely alternative was the colonization of Russia by Western powers, following the fate of China and India.36
Russia's traditional institutions were transformed in response to the new strategic situation. The Church and other autonomous centers of social life yielded gradually to state centralization. Soon after being re-created from below following the Time of Troubles, the state displayed new tendencies to suppress potential checks and balances of its power. In the era of increasingly secular sovereign statehood in Europe, Peter the Great imposed a new ideology of state patriotism, or loyalty to the state37 – a sharp break with the religious Russia that had emerged after 200 years of rule by the Mongols. European politics was centered around the accumulation of national power, and religion was increasingly subjugated to the considerations of the state. Relative to Europe, however, the Russian state possessed a much greater capacity to undermine sources of autonomous political power. By the time of European secularization, Russia had legalized serfdom, which simplified the collection of taxes and military mobilization. Poverty and relative economic backwardness proved an asset in at least two respects – the state was able to defeat opposition from the nobles38 and to impose the command system of long-service conscription. From a military standpoint, it was precisely “because Russia was so ‘backward’, according to European standards, that it was so powerful.”39
The price of becoming competitive in military terms was the degradation of important aspects of Russia's honor. As the state was taking on burdens of external defense, the autocracy was increasingly neglecting its traditional responsibility to protect social freedoms from abuses at home. In George Vernadsky's words, “Autocracy and serfdom were the price the Russian people had to pay for national survival.”40 Many observers, especially in the West, became convinced that Russia had no honor except the honor of power and strength. “The role of Orthodoxy, and of moral principles in general, in the formulation of a grand strategy is very difficult to assess.…Their [Russians’] only interest was to impose the empire's supremacy in Europe and Asia,”41 wrote one historian recently. “When Russian statesmen debated among themselves, when they quarreled with each other about the sort of policies Russia ought to pursue, they generally employed the cold-blooded language of strategy and analysis…they justified their policies in terms of the benefits they anticipated for Russian power and security,”42 echoed another. Military superiority was being gradually turned from a means of people's welfare into an end of state policies. With increasingly weak checks on autocracy, it was up to the monarch and the royal court to articulate and sustain the objectives of social honor.
Russia and Its Cultural Allies
In addition to spiritual freedom, a strong state, and great power status, the Russian myth of state honor included the reputational aspect of protecting cultural allies (see Table 3.1). Having established the Orthodox foundations of its statehood, Russia felt responsible for the livelihood of those co-religionists who resided outside the Russian state. After the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans in the mid-fifteenth century, Russia proclaimed itself to be the Third Rome, or the center of Orthodox Christianity worldwide. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia fought multiple wars with Turkey in part to protect the rights of the millions of Christians living within the Turkish empire – more than a third of its population. A complex system of treaties between St. Petersburg and Constantinople had to be developed before the Russian Empire could feel satisfied that its reputation as a protector of cultural allies was secure.
Table 3.1. Content of Russia's Honor Myth
The definition of cultural allies changed over time. In the twentieth century, the ideologically transformed Soviet Russia was no longer committed to defending Christians or Slavs as it had been a century earlier. Instead, the state's international assistance was geared to support the honor of socialism and egalitarian ideology. The Soviet rulers provided financial assistance and political support for communist parties across the world. The Kremlin also intervened abroad to suppress influences of the alternative “capitalist” system; the best known interventions were Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979, and Poland in 1981. The Cold War was as much about ideology and propaganda as it was about power and geopolitics.43 The Soviet Union was in the business of defending and promoting an alternative idea of freedom, an idea that resonated with many outside the West partly because it was defined as freedom from the expansionist ambitions of Western powers.
After the disintegration of the communist system in 1989, Russia has proposed a different definition of its cultural allies. Although still a work in progress, the new ideological project includes the Kremlin's commitment to ethnic Russians and to those who have historically gravitated toward Russia. In the mid-1990s, the state began to advocate for dual citizenship in the former Soviet region, responding in part to pressure from those living outside Russia who continued to identify with the country. High-profile state officials, such as Foreign Minister Yevgeni Primakov, also supported the idea of Eurasia as a multicultural, multiethnic, and multireligious community in place of the former Soviet Union.44 In August 2008, Russia intervened in the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict; fearing a humanitarian catastrophe in South Ossetia, the Kremlin justified this intervention by the need to protect Russian citizens in the region. Acting on this definition of its cultural allies, Russia then recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia's independence from Georgia.
Russia and the West: Similarity versus Distinctiveness
Russia's idea of honor has developed in tension with that of Western nations. Historically a part of Western civilization, Russia has also been unmistakably different.
As a Christian power, Russia has had a distinct religious tradition to defend in the world. By adopting Christianity as the state religion, Russia established its belongingness with Western, at the time Byzantine, civilization. Less than a century later the Russian rulers had to take a side in the schism between Orthodoxy and the Catholic West. Two centuries of Mongol domination added to Russia's traumatic experience. When in 1453 the Ottomans conquered Byzantium, Russia found itself standing alone between Islam and Catholic Europe. To indicate to the Holy Roman Empire its cultural autonomy, Grand Duke of Muscovy Ivan III refused to accept the Catholic empire's superiority and famously signed his written answer to the emperor with the title, “Great Ruler of all of Rus’ by God's grace.”45 He later married Sophia Paleologue, a niece of the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX to claim a blood relation to the fallen Eastern Roman Empire. Forty years later, the idea of cultural autonomy crystallized in the notion of Muscovy as the Third Rome.46
Russia's communist system too had its similarities and differences from the political systems of the Western European states. Communism and social democracy had emerged from the same egalitarian roots of the French Revolution. Many Soviet policies were socially and economically egalitarian and therefore compatible with European practices. However, the Soviet objective was to stimulate a revolutionary new order, at the expense of liberal political reforms pursued by advanced European states. For some seventy years until the end of the Cold War, Soviet Russia avoided integrating European liberal and democratic values and traditions.
Table 3.2 summarizes some of Russia's values in comparison with those of the West.
The Historical Evolution of Russian Honor
Aspects of the Russian myth of honor – Eastern Christianity, the strong state, and loyalty to cultural allies – functioned differently throughout Russia's long history. The nineteenth-century construction of honor included the triad of Orthodox Christianity, autocracy, and support for Orthodox and Slav people abroad. In the early twentieth century, in response to what some historians have called the European “civil war”47 between liberalism and autocracy, the Russian state underwent a major mutation. The new vision rested on communist ideology, the practice of a single-party state, and commitment to communist parties and socialist states across the world. An aberration, rather than a natural phase of Russia's historic statehood,48 the Soviet system reproduced parts of the old honor myth in a sharply disfigured form. Religion was replaced with communist ideology, the autocratic state with the rule of the single party, and the commitment to co-religionists with that to ideological allies. Yet, no matter the absolutist and centralized nature of the Soviet state, it provided citizens with important social and economic rights, and many of them had reasons to honor the new system and be proud of it. Finally, Russia's post-Soviet state is in the process of designing a new ideological construction that incorporates the notions of Russian civilization, revived state strength, and support for Russian and pro-Russian communities abroad. These days the Kremlin ideologists argue that, although Russia is a part of the West, it is a culturally distinct “sovereign democracy” with important obligations at home and abroad.49
Table 3.3 summarizes the three distinct constructions of Russian honor.
Table 3.3. Historical Constructions of Russian Honor
Notes
1 As cited in Zhaba, Russkiye mysliteli o Rossiyi i chelovechestve, p. 59.
2 Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State, p. 5.
3 Ibid., pp. 7–9.
4 On individual honor and the role of litigation practices in defending honor in Muscovite Russia, see Kollmann, By Honor Bound.
5 Berdyayev, Russkaya ideya; Billington, The Icon and the Axe; Duncan, Russian Messianism.
6 Platonov, Polnyi kurs lektsii po russkoi istoriyi, pp. 96–7. On the Church's social influence, see Riasanovsky, A History of Russia, p. 54; Hosking, Russia, p. 225; Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia.
7 Platonov, Polnyi kurs, p. 111.
8 Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy, p. 31; Pushkarev, Obzor russkoi istoriyi, pp. 49–60.
9 Hosking, Russia, p. 198.
10 Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy, p. 33.
11 Kovalevskii, “The Growth of Serfdom,” pp. 105–9.
12 As Nicholas I said in the State Council in 1842, “There is no doubt that serfdom, in its present form, is an evil obvious to all; but to touch it now would of course be an even more ruinous evil” (Hosking, Russia, p. 148).
13 Platonov, Polnyi kurs, p. 204; Solonevich, Narodnaya monarkhiya, p. 421.
14 Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy, p. 33.
15 Nikon introduced changes in religious rituals in 1652 to achieve uniformity between the Russian and Greek Orthodox practices, but he also had political ambitions. Tsar Alexei I thwarted Nikon's political ambitions, but supported the changes within the Church, one of which was that “the parishers, formerly democratic in structure, were deprived of independence. The election of the priests replaced by their nomination by the bishops” (Zenkovsky, “The Russian Church Schism,” 145).
16 Poe, “A People Born to Slavery,” p. 226.
17 Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, p. 40.
18 Crews, For Prophet and Tsar. The Ottoman Empire developed similar relations with its Jewish and Christian minorities (Lieven, Empire, p. 149). For reviews of Russia's historical experience with Muslims, see Lieven, Chechnya; Gadzhiyev, Geopolitika Kavkaza; Yemelyanova, “Islam in Russia: An Historical Perspective”; Sakwa, Chechnya.
19 Аverintsev, Кrescheniye Rusi i put’ russkoi kul'tury; Florovski, Puti russkogo bogosloviya, chapter 1.
20 Lieven, Empire, pp. 236–7; Utkin, Vyzov Zapada i otvet Rossiyi, pp. 45–6.
21 Holsti, Peace and War, p. 151. This is also the argument of John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which views such a state of affairs as natural for international politics in general.
22 Lieven, Empire, p. 267.
23 In response to Emperor Frederick III’s offer to confer on him the title of king, Ivan III answered, “By God's grace, we are the ruler of our land from the beginning, from the first of our ancestors, it has been given us by God, and as it was for ancestors, so it is for us” (Neumann, “Russia's Standing as a Great Power, 1494–1815,” 15).
24 On continuity in Russia's international objectives, see especially Black, “The Pattern of Russian Objectives”; Rieber, “Persistent Factors in Russian Foreign Policy; Legvold, ed. Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century and the Shadow of the Past.
25 Bassin and Aksenov, “Mackinder and the Heartland Theory in Post-Soviet Geopolitical Discourse”; Wohlforth, “Heartland Dreams.”
26 Vernadsky, A History of Russia, pp. 4–5.
27 Putin, “Poslaniye Federal'nomu Sobraniyu Rossiyskoy Federatsii,” May 16, 2003, http://president.kremlin.ru/mainpage.shtmle.
28 Poe, The Russian Moment in World History, p. 50.
29 Ibid., p. 66; Wohlforth, “Honor as Interest in Russian Decisions for War,” 38.
30 Wohlforth, “Honor as Interest,” 27.
31 Lieven, Empire, p. 267. For development of this argument, see especially Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia.
32 On Russian thinking about Asia, see Hauner, What Is Asia to Us?; Bassin, Imperial Visions; Schimmelpenninck Van Der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun; Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism.
33 Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled, p. 23.
34 Poe, The Russian Moment, pp. 44–5.
35 Ibid., p. 45.
36 Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled, p. 25.
37 Tolz, Russia, p. 27. See also Chernaya, “Ot ideyi ‘sluzheniya gosudaryu’ k ideye ‘sluzheniya otechestvu’ v russkoi obschestvennoi mysli.”
38 In Europe, state centralization was not as pervasive partly because it required negotiating complex deals among kings, merchants, and feudal lords (Spruyt, Sovereign State and Its Competitors).
39 Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, p. 455.
40 Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled, p. 18.
41 LeDunne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, p. 141.
42 Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, p. 132.
43 See, for example, Oren, Our Enemy and US; Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire.”
44 The issue was also related to preserving cultural balance inside Russia, which included by far the largest number of ethnic groups (some 140), with only five of its twenty-one ethnic republics having a clear majority of its titular nation: Chechnya, Chuvashia, Ingushetia, Tuva, and North Ossetia (Zevelev, Russia and Its New Diaspora, p. 175).
45 Neumann, “Russia's Standing as a Great Power,” 15.
46 Duncan, Russian Messianism, p. 11.
47 Roberts, A History of Europe.
48 McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea. What Western Sovietologists viewed as a norm was dictated in Russia's historical development by harsh imperatives of survival under external emergency conditions. The initial argument about continuity between the old and new Russia was formulated by Berdyayev, Istoki i smysl russkogo kommunizma.
49 For analysis of Russia's still emerging state ideology, see Chadayev, Putin i yego ideologiya; Tsygankov, “Finding a Civilizational Idea”; Feklyunina, “Battle for Perceptions”; Evans, Power and Ideology; Laruelle, In the Name of the Nation.
4 Russia's Relations with the West
“[T]he West is not necessarily most alarmed when Russia is in reality most alarming, nor most reassured when Russia is in fact most reassuring.”
Historical Traditions
Russia's Foreign Policy Traditions
Russia's political establishment has rarely acted uniformly when interpreting challenges to the nation's honor and security or proposing strategies for responding to them.2 At different times, different groups within the political class, depending on their social position and historical memory, have proposed different concepts of honorable international behavior. These concepts have generally complied with traditional Russian meanings of honor, defined as chestnost’ (commitment, reputation), dоstoinstvo (dignity, pride), or slava (glory, achievement).3 Guided by these meanings, Russia's leaders at various times have advanced policies of cooperation, defensiveness, or assertiveness in relation to the West. These policies differed in (1) their methods of advancing Russia's preferences, (2) their degree of commitment to relationships with Western nations, and (3) the opposition such policies elicited at home (see Table 4.1).
The tradition of cooperating with Western nations places the emphasis on Russia's similarity with them and advocates the notion of honorable behavior as loyalty to and cooperation with the West as a historic and cultural ally. Those defending a definition of honor that differentiates Russia from the West view Russia as an independent power free to choose international allies that best suit its vision and national interests. This group feels less committed to relationships with Western nations, especially when their actions are perceived as inconsiderate to Russia's identity and interests. Supporters of assertiveness in foreign policy also believe in Russia's special role in the world and are bound more by the nationalistic sense of honor and social obligations than by loyalty to Western nations. However, unlike those on the defensive side, assertiveness advocates argue for a more aggressive and unilateral defense of Russia's international position that goes beyond flexible alliances and soft balancing tactics. Each of these traditions has been brought to life by different historical developments and political conditions.
Cooperative Enhancement of Honor
Russia's tradition of cooperating with Western nations has its roots in Prince Vladimir's decision to accept Christianity. Throughout the long years of Mongol domination, Russians preserved their cultural affiliation with the West, which was reinforced by the sense of threat from culturally alien or non-Christian people of the South. Attempts by Muscovy's rulers to gain recognition by the Holy Roman Empire in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth century, including opening a permanent mission in Rome and obtaining the Holy Emperor's support in a war against Lithuania, continued the tradition of cooperation with the West as an important spiritual authority. The Romanov dynasty followed this tradition by participating in the First Northern War against Sweden (1655–60) as a member of the Western coalition that included the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Prussia, Rome, and Norway. Although the war was not irrelevant to Russia's geopolitical interests, the decision to participate also reflected Russia's cultural values. Also of importance was Russia's decision to join the Holy League (Austria–Poland–Venice) against the Ottoman Empire after signing the Eternal Peace with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1686), Russia's key rival.
Importantly, Peter the Great's foreign policy also began with an attempt to establish cooperative relations with Europe by assembling a strong coalition against Sweden during his Grand Embassy trip. Although the trip was not successful, Peter continued to move his country closer to the European system by strengthening contacts and sending Russia's ambassadors and representatives to the Netherlands, Sweden, Vienna, and other states.4 Peter's subsequent defeat of Sweden, which turned Russia into a great power and a critically important member of the European system of states, would have been impossible without his insistence on using Western technology to overcome Russia's backwardness. Russian Westernizers – those who emphasize Russia's similarity with the West and view the West as the most viable and progressive civilization in the world – often trace their intellectual roots to Peter,5 who admired the West for its technological superiority.
Peter's successors sought to build on his accomplishments and went even further in establishing cooperative arrangements with European states. Russia joined the Seven Years War (1756–63) against Prussia, and in 1766 Catherine the Great proclaimed that “Russia is a European power.” As part of the system of European great powers, Russia sought to present itself as a loyal member of the family of Western monarchies while not neglecting its geopolitical interests. For example, it participated in all of the late-eighteenth-century divisions of Poland among Austria, Prussia, and Russia to check the influence of the Ottoman Empire on the European continent. An even more prominent example was the early-nineteenth-century “Holy Alliance” with Germany and Austria to suppress revolutionary activities on the continent. After the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I championed the so-called legitimist policies, seeing himself as a consistent European in defending the values of autocratic Europe and vigorously opposing the spread of French egalitarian ideas.6 As Europe was becoming an arena for balance-of-power politics, Russia was holding to its “holy” principles longer than other powers.
Even when caught between two Europes – the liberal one associated with the French Revolution and the autocratic one – Russia tried to make its international choices not unilaterally, but in coalitions with other Western states. After the Holy Alliance, it participated in the Three Emperors League with Germany and Austro-Hungary, which came into existence in 1872–3 and which served to maintain Russia's cultural ties with its Orthodox allies in the Balkans.7 In the early twentieth century, Russia joined an entirely different coalition of France and Britain, the Triple Alliance – partly to prevent the dominance of Germany and partly to ally itself with the new European ideas of freedom and equality. Some rulers – most prominently Alexander II – attempted to redefine the country's identity in line with these new European ideas. Although Alexander III continued policies of repression at home and siding with European autocracies abroad, the strengthening European pressures of enlightenment, constitutionalism, and capitalism were increasingly difficult to ignore.
After the era of the Great Reforms when Russia shifted its alliance from Germany to France and Britain, the tsarist government seemed more willing to be open to the new European influences. Russia's decision to participate in World War I in part reflected its membership in the Triple Alliance and its cultural commitment to Europe. Pavel Milyukov, once a foreign minister and a leader of Russian liberals, took the most active pro-European position by insisting that Russia must stay in the war as an active member of the anti-German coalition. To Milyukov, support for the European allies – despite all the devastations that the war had brought to Russia – was a matter of principle and reflected the country's orientation.
Even the Soviet rulers, despite their fundamental conflict with the West, did not see the USSR as a non-European state. Soon after the first failures of the revolution, Bolshevik leaders began to seek recognition by the Western states and to advocate some accommodations with the “capitalist” West.8 Maxim Litvinov, for instance, supported a “collective security” system in Europe to prevent the rise of Fascism. Nikita Khrushchev wanted to break the taboos of isolationism and to bring Soviet Russia closer to Europe. He called for a return to Vladimir Lenin's principles of coexistence with the capitalist world, although he later engaged in several confrontations with the West. Both Litvinov and Khrushchev saw themselves as supporters of Lenin's later course, which abandoned the idea of world revolution in favor of learning to live and trade with the potentially dangerous capitalist world. The Soviet Union also cooperated with Western nations by participating in the grand alliance against Nazi Germany during World War II.
In 1975, the Soviets took part in the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and signed its Final Act, thereby pledging to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Signing this document indicated that prominent groups within the Soviet system saw Russia as standing not too far apart from European social-democratic ideas. For instance, one of Mikhail Gorbachev's favorite lines of thinking was that Soviet Union had to “purify” itself of Stalinist “distortions” and become a democratic, or “human,” version of socialism (gumannyi sotsializm). In his foreign policy, Gorbachev pursued the notion of mutual security with the West, presiding over a series of revolutionary arms control agreements with the United States and Soviet military withdrawals from Europe and the Third World. By introducing the idea of a “common European home” Gorbachev meant to achieve Russian-European integration based on the principles of European social democracy.
Russia's cooperative engagement with the West has continued after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Boris Yeltsin and his first foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev argued for the “natural” affinity of their country with the West based on such shared values as democracy, human rights, and a free market. They insisted that only by building Western liberal institutions and joining the coalition of what was frequently referred to as the community of “Western civilized nations” would Russia be able to preserve its true cultural identity and respond to key threats. Yeltsin's successor Vladimir Putin too sought to frame his country's international choices as pro-Western ones. In the context of growing terrorist threats in the world after 9/11, Putin worked hard to establish a partnership with the United States; his initial statements emphasized the common strategic threats of terrorism and political instability. It was only later when Russia departed from its initial definition of honorable behavior, and it did so in response to perceived humiliation by Western powers.9
Defensive Honor
If cooperation with Western nations reflected Russia's sense of honor as loyalty to the West, then defensiveness and assertiveness were frequently products of the nation's commitments to its Slavic and Orthodox allies. Russian rulers tried hard to pursue policies that would integrate both Western and Slavic/Orthodox commitments. However, doing so was not always possible, partly because the West was not always supportive of Russia's aspirations to defend its historic allies. For example, Nicholas I's assertiveness with regard to the Balkans and the Crimea found little support among Western powers. Indeed, his own foreign minister, Count Nesselrode, wrote to his master after the Crimean War had begun that “honor does not oblige us to hurl ourselves into a bottomless abyss.”10 Russia therefore did not always have the luxury of honoring commitments to its historic allies. Even when it opted in favor of the Slavic/Orthodox notion of honor, Russia had to seriously consider the balance-of-power imperatives. Such calculations of power often determined the choice whether to retreat into a period of defensiveness or pursue a more active policy.
Following its attempt to consolidate its statehood after the period of Mongol domination, Russia entered a period of anarchy, or Smuta, and could no longer continue with the “gathering of Russian lands” policy. Soon after recovery, however, Russia was determined to secure territories populated by Russians in Smolensk, Kiev, and other areas, and that meant confronting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. These skirmishes were not always successful, and Russia on occasion retreated into periods of defensiveness. In 1634, for example, Russia lost the Smolensk war to Warsaw, and Moscow did not resume military offensives for twenty years until 1654 when it subjugated Ukraine. Success in the Ukrainian war temporarily reconciled Russia with Poland, which considered Moscow a key ally because of its decision to join with the Polish-Lithuaniain Commonwealth in the First Northern War against Sweden.
In the eighteenth century, Catherine the Great exercised a defensive policy when she took a neutral stance and withdrew Russia from the Seven Years War against Prussia. Although it fought a successful war against Turkey, Russia did not engage in another major military campaign against Sweden until 1887. One of Catherine's key advisors, Nikita Panin, believed that Russia needed time after the Seven Years War to deal with financial and demographic issues, and he recommended minimizing the risk of a major war by avoiding foreign adventures that might catalyze coalitions of powerful enemies against Russia.11 A similar but even more pronounced defensive policy took place in the nineteenth century after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War. The Count Alexander Gorchakov, Alexander II's foreign minister, devised the policy of recueillement – developing a system of flexible alliances and limiting Russia's involvement in European affairs. The idea too was to recover Russia's lost honor.
The Soviet rulers acted in a similar fashion when they were in no position to act on their sense of obligation to spread their vision and values abroad and strengthen ties with cultural allies. Josef Stalin's doctrine of “socialism is one country” may be viewed as an example of consolidation in the face of security challenges by the “imperialist” West. Stalin sought to peacefully coexist with Western nations while pursuing an ambitious program of domestic recovery. When justifying the need for rapid industrialization, Stalin famously framed his argument in terms of responding to powerful external threats:
The history of the old Russia was the continual beating she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the English and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her – for her backwardness.…We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.12
Stalin's pact with Hitler, as well as Brezhnev's “correlation of forces” strategy, also reflected the will to defend Soviet honor against perceived dangerous influences from the outside world. By signing the treaty of friendship with Nazi Germany, Stalin hoped to isolate Russia from World War II or at least to buy enough time to prepare for it. His successors operated on a world scale, and with the “correlation for forces” doctrine, they intended to respond to the perceived growing global influence of the West. Both strategies meant to preserve Russia's independence in world affairs and had some elements of Gorchakov's strategy of consolidation.
Yevgeni Primakov's opposition to NATO expansion after the Soviet disintegration also resembled defensive policies of the past. He directly referred to Gorchakov as his inspiration, and he viewed Russia's honor in terms of its strength and ability to pursue historic obligations, including in the former Soviet region and the Balkans, without veto from the United States.13 In domestic policies, Primakov wanted to bring more order and control to social and political life by restoring state domination and controlling big business. He was also trying to rebuild the former Soviet Union and contain the United States through a strategic alliance with China and India.14 Primakov and his supporters agreed on the importance of developing ties with the West by building a market economy and political democracy. However, they were not prepared to sacrifice historically tested traditional allies and the notion of a strong state to these new values.
Assertive Enhancement of Honor
Russia has been assertive whenever it has acted from a position of perceived strength while differing from the West in its assessment of an international situation. Russia's assertive enhancement of honor may be traced to Muscovy's “gathering of Russian lands” policy in efforts to wrest control over Russian Orthodox subjects from the Mongols and from Poland. First bringing Smolensk into Moscow's orbit in 1514, Russia expanded to conquer Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberia. In the seventeenth century, following its recovery from the Time of Troubles, Russia returned to policies of assertiveness and fought multiple wars with the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; the Kremlin was not satisfied until it had added eastern Ukraine to Russia's area of domination. Moscow then signed the Eternal Peace with Warsaw in 1686 to challenge another cultural enemy of the Orthodox Christians – the Turks.
Competition with the Ottoman Empire became especially intense in the eighteenth century, as Peter and his successors attempted to protect Balkan Slavs and secure control over the Black Sea. In 1739, Russia defeated Turkey and gained part of the Black Sea coast through the Treaty of Belgrade. Catherine the Great then fought two more successful wars with Turkey and gained additional control over the areas of Azov, the Crimea, and Odessa. The empress wanted to “drive the Turks from Europe,” and some in her court urged her to go further by partitioning the Ottoman Empire.15 The policy of protecting Slav-Orthodox “brothers” continued in the nineteenth century when Russia fought Turkey over Greece's independence and even achieved a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians in the Danubian provinces of Moldova and Walachia.16 As far as Russia was concerned, the policy of protecting the Orthodox Christians was not inconsistent with the Holy Alliance's objectives of preserving Christian unity in Europe.
However, acting without explicit support from Western alliances had its costs, of which the Crimean War may be the prime example. Nicholas I started the war in part because he was convinced of Russia's military superiority over the declining Ottoman Empire and in part because he could not persuade Britain to join forces with Russia. He did not anticipate that Britain, as well as France, would join forces with the Sultan. Having recovered from the defeat, Russia returned to a foreign policy of assertiveness in the Balkans and Asia. In the Balkans, Russia mobilized its forces in response to Christian revolts in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1875–6.17 Facing another Crimean War-esque explicit denial of support from Western allies, Russia restrained the indignant Serbs when they revolted against Austro-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908.18 However, the preoccupation with pan-Slavism and great power prestige contributed to Russia's involvement in World War I. Influential supporters of moderate views, such as Sergei Witte, Pyotr Stolypin, and Vladimir Kokovtsev, were sidelined and replaced by ardent supporters of the culturally nationalist sense of honor. Russia also continued to pursue provocative policies in Asia, which resulted in defeat by Japan in 1905 and growing social unrest at home.
Other illustrations of Russia's assertiveness can be found in the Soviet era. The initial policy pursued by the Bolsheviks was not to be bound by any obligations to maintain relations with the West, which was a radically different attitude from the one held by the tsarist government. No matter how assertive, the tsars always attempted to achieve an understanding with influential European nations, and they were often involved in simultaneous multilateral arrangements with the West. The Bolsheviks were the first to challenge the core foundations of the West's system of values, insisting on the cultural superiority of Soviet Russia. The Lenin-Trotski doctrine of world revolution was an example of this thinking. In the early part of 1920, Bolshevik leaders expected that their offensive in Poland would result in social revolutions throughout the rest of Europe.19 Although this doctrine died as an official philosophy with Lenin's commitment to coexistence with capitalism in 1921, many members of the official and social circles remained convinced of the virtues of this thinking.
The emergence of the Cold War era saw a different example of Soviet assertiveness. Soviet leaders had readily participated in creating the United Nations, but they also felt they were owed a bigger role in shaping European security. They felt that the Soviet Union had single-handedly won the most important battles against the Nazis, including the battles for Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, and had contributed a disproportionally greater share of resources to overall victory. To Josef Stalin, victory meant a demonstration of his nation's social advantages: “our victory means…that our Soviet social system has won, that the Soviet social system has successfully withstood the trial in the flames of war and proved its perfect viability.”20 The West, however, was mistrustful of the Soviet Union, and the United States felt it had to play an active role in shaping world affairs – the belief in internationalism had predated the Pearl Harbor attack by Japan and emerged in response to the Nazi invasions of France and the Soviet Union.21 Other examples of assertive Soviet behavior include decisions to place nuclear missiles in Cuba in 1962 and send troops to Afghanistan in 1979.
Russia's more recent assertiveness stems from its determination to recover some of its lost international position. Around 2005, Russia signaled that it sought greater stakes in the international system and would no longer accept the status of junior partner to the West that it had during the 1990s. In addition to its desire to capitalize on its energy competitiveness and break into Western economic markets, Russia no longer viewed the old methods of preserving stability and security as sufficient. In August 2008, in response to Georgia's use of force against one of its autonomous areas, Russia cemented its military presence in the Caucasus by defeating Georgia and recognizing South Ossetia's independence. Putin's speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, which was extremely critical of U.S. “unilateralism,” became a high point in Russia's new assertiveness. Russia's president then accused the United States of “disdain for the basic principles of international law” and having “overstepped its national borders in…the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations.”22 Through its actions in the Caucasus, Russia has demonstrated that, while maintaining an essentially defensive security posture, it believes in a more assertive strategy in defense of national interests and is ready to use force in the areas that it views of critical importance.
Table 4.2 summarizes Russia's foreign policy traditions throughout its history.
Evaluating Russia's Foreign Policy
Russia's foreign policy decisions can be evaluated by whether they achieved their objectives, which include both the enhancement of honor and meeting the country's security, welfare, and autonomy interests. The security interest is met when there are no military threats to the nation, particularly (but not limited to) from the outside. The welfare interest is met when foreign policy choices create external conditions favorable for improvements to the standards of living, defined as economic growth, new jobs, and social services. Autonomy has to do with the state's ability to make decisions and withstand pressures from special interests inside and outside of the country.
Judged by these objectives, some of Russia's policies were successful and defensible, whereas others were not. Except for the Holy Alliance, Russia's attempts to cooperate with the West – whether by joining allies in World War I, entering the League of Nations in an attempt to stop Hitler, or seeking to rejoin the West after the Cold War – were not effective. In all three instances, Russia's engagement with the West neither prevented instability nor halted economic decline at home, and they all ultimately failed to enhance Russia's honor. The defensive foreign policy has had a mixed record of success. For example, Gorchakov's strategy of “concentration” provided the country with the necessary time to build up its resources and recover its lost international position. Stalin's doctrine of “socialism in one country” and his pact with Hitler won some time for Russia to prepare for the war, albeit not as much as Stalin had hoped. However, Primakov's policy of preventing NATO expansion proved to be a failure. Russia did not improve its international standing or its ability to protect its historic allies nor did it achieve greater security or prosperity. Russia's assertiveness has also brought mixed results. The Crimean War was a failure, and the Cold War was a success only in the sense that the Soviet Union was able to preserve its presence in the areas of perceived strategic importance for as long as did. It remains to be seen what will be the record of Putin/Medvedev's international assertiveness.
Russia's foreign policy has been successful when its leaders were accurate in their calculations of their own resources and the West's reaction to their policies. The historical record suggests that Russia is only successful in defending its perceived interests when its assessment of an international situation – and threats and opportunities that stem from it – is more similar to than different from that of Western nations. All too often, widely varying assessments, as well as Russia's internal weakness, prevented the country from defending its international position and making the necessary adjustments to enable economic modernization. Even when Russia's leaders were confident of success, it failed to achieve its objectives because of the West's concerted interference. During the Crimean War, Russia miscalculated both its own resources and the Western reaction. In the Cold War not only poor diplomacy and an inability to read the West's intentions but also Russia's confrontational ideological vision – accompanied by excessive military expenditures – made it practically impossible to arrive at an accurate assessment of an international situation. To succeed Moscow has to formulate its strategic vision in such a way that it does not principally contradict those of Western nations. It should strive to present to the world a clear perspective on its values and interests that is distinct and yet not incompatible with those of the West.
Honor and the Formation of Russia's Foreign Policy
Cultural Formation of Russia's Foreign Policy
Both external and local developments have contributed to validating or undermining Russia's sense of honor in international interactions.23 Externally, Europe in particular and the West in general have played the role of the significant other and prominently figured in Russia's debates about national identity. Europe and the West created the meaningful environment in which Russia's rulers defended their visions of national honor and interests.24 Even though the West rarely recognized Russia's claims to be a part of the Western world, those claims reflected a domestically strong motivating force in Russia's foreign policy. Throughout its history Russia has sought to be recognized by the Western other and to modernize in like manner. The strength of identification with Western civilization explains why Russia has sought to achieve its objectives in cooperation with Western, especially European, nations. Whether internally weak or strong, Russia has always been responsive to the behavior of the West and – when progressive leaders have wielded power in the Kremlin – prepared to mend fences and pursue cooperation, rather than confrontation.
However, honor is a relational concept, and its meaning may change in response to externally significant developments. Each time Russia began its movement toward its significant other, Moscow could only continue for as long as it felt a sufficiently progressive recognition of and reciprocation from Western capitals. Russia's cultural lenses are different from those of Western nations and have been formed by locally distinct historical memory, ties with historic allies, and contemporary challenges. For example, Russia has had traditionally strong ties with Slavic and Orthodox allies and could only act as a confident power when its actions were not disruptive to these historical ties. In the absence of external recognition of Russia's cooperative honor claims, the reform-minded leadership in the Kremlin would run into opposition from advocates of more defensive and assertive definitions of honor. As the previous chapter explains, the nation is not a homogeneous entity, and in times of relative openness, different concepts of honor compete for a dominant position within the ruling establishment and are supported by various political and social groups. Depending on how internally confident Russia felt to pursue an independent foreign policy,25 it could choose either a defensive or assertive direction. Table 4.3 summarizes the hypothesized effects of the West's recognition and the local sense of confidence on Russia's foreign policy.
Therefore the dynamics of honor in Russia's foreign policy are more complex than as seen in classical and neoclassical realism. Where realists emphasize the honor of a great power and its ability to shape the international system, a culturally sensitive account identifies three distinct meanings of honor, with great power prestige being only one of them. Constructivism views that prestige as merely an expression of a more general aspiration to be “like the West.” If the Western nations are great powers, Russia too aspires to such status. If, however, the West demonstrates accomplishments in institution building, economic prosperity, and human rights protection, Russian rulers are equally drawn to these accomplishments and attempt to replicate them at home. In addition to great power status and ability to shape the international system, Russia has a historically developed sense of internal honor that stems from its special religious (Orthodox Christian), ethnic (Slavic), and geographic background.
To illustrate the effects of external recognition and internal confidence, let us briefly consider Russia's far-reaching cooperation with the West immediately following the Cold War. Moscow's efforts to aggressively integrate with Western economic and political institutions soon stumbled over a relatively sanguine reaction from the Western nations. The new Russian leaders were decisively breaking with the Soviet past and were hoping for rapid and massive assistance from the West. In the words of Russia's first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, the country's very system of values was to be changed,26 and the expectation was that such change would assist greatly in bringing Russia to the front-rank status of countries, such as France, Germany, and the United States, within ten to twelve years. Russia was presented as a “naturally” pro-Western nation, and its success was predicated on support and recognition from the West.
No matter Russia's efforts, the West's response was either excessively cautious or insensitive.27 The decision made by the Western nations to expand NATO eastward, excluding Russia from the process, is a case in point. It came as a major blow to the reformers, dashing Moscow's hopes to transform the alliance into a nonmilitary one or to admit Russia as a full member. The exclusion of Russia strengthened the sense that Russia was not being accepted by Western civilization, and it provided critics of cooperating with the West with the required ammunition for questioning the objectives of the new government. In addition, the growing interference of Western nations in Yugoslavia without consulting Russia exacerbated its sense of failure to fulfill its obligations to Slavic/Orthodox allies.28 Joining the West was no longer viewed as honorable, because honor was increasingly associated with preserving Russia's autonomy and independence in international affairs.
In response to the sense of growing humiliation by the West, the Kremlin moved from cooperative to increasingly defensive policy actions. Because of a lack of internal confidence, assertiveness was not an option. The disintegration of the Soviet state led to a growing sense of national anxiety, creating a whole series of new conflicts in the Russian periphery and exacerbating the sense of identity crisis experienced by Russians.29 In addition, the domestic context of rising disorder, corruption, and poverty that had resulted from Yeltsin's reforms was not conducive to changing state policy in an assertive direction.
Realism and Its Limitations
As the dominant international relations theory, realism concentrates on considerations of state power, security and prestige. By emphasizing the notion of national interests, realists insist on the objectivity of their analysis and view moral principles as largely irrelevant to the conduct of foreign policy. Although classical realists recognize the power of moral principles, they dismiss them as too dangerous to rely on. In Hans Morgenthau's memorable formulation, a “foreign policy founded upon moral principles rather than the national interest issues, by its inner logic,” tends to evolve “into the tribalism or religious wars and of nationalistic crusades.”30 Other schools within realism – defensive, offensive, and neoclassical – go even further in excluding from the list of state motives national memory, emotions, beliefs, and other factors not defined by the structure of the international system.
Defensive realists focus on imperatives of security and survival, and they argue that states more commonly respond to security dilemmas with balancing or bandwagoning than with war or blackmail, as in offensive realism.31 To defensive realists, states are risk-averse entities, and they go to war or get involved in other types of aggressive behavior only when they incorrectly read signals coming from the international system. Specifically, this group of scholars delineates misperceptions and institutional biases as motivating factors for aggressive foreign policy actions.32 For example, defensive realists explained that World War I was caused by inaccurate perceptions of the security dilemma by key powers, including Russia. Rather than being rational, such perceptions or biases stemmed from parochial interests of the military that found their reflection in offensive war plans.33 Similarly, Jack Snyder explained Soviet security expansionism by the role played by imperial myths. The early Cold War, Khrushchev's missile diplomacy, and Brezhnev's assertiveness in the Third World occurred because leaders in the Kremlin held offensive beliefs and had the power to shape state policy.34
Scholars influenced by these perspectives may see Russia's policies as serving objectives of security consistent with the country's military capabilities. If psychological and institutional biases do not stand in the way of assessing its military capabilities, Russia should be expected to engage in cooperative behavior or bandwagoning with Western nations when it feels vulnerable. However, a more strong and confident Russia is more likely to pursue policies of balancing against the Western power. What I have described as defensiveness may be viewed by defensive realists as typical of a strong Russia. Assertiveness is a risky type of behavior that may result from internal bias or misperception, but is not commonly engaged in by a rational power coping with a security dilemma.
Offensive and neoclassical realists would expect states to engage in more aggressive behavior in attempting to maximize power or status in the international system. Russia then should be expected to pursue an assertive policy when it is strong and a defensive policy when it is weak.35 Cooperation, or bandwagoning, as offensive realism makes clear,36 does not commonly occur in a system that encourages aggression and power maximization. A number of studies have explained Russia's assertive or expansionist behavior using insights from offensive and neoclassical realism.37 Russian studies scholars, whether consciously or not, have reasoned about the motives of Russia's foreign policy using the offensive realist logic. They frequently advocate viewing Russia as a state that is expansionist and does not abide by acceptable rules of international behavior.38 As a revisionist state, Russia is expected to use available opportunities to upset the West's international policies.
Overall, realism views as typical some aspects of international behavior, but not others. Just like offensive realism assumes that the state interest is to maximize power, defensive realism assumes without testing that the international system encourages security-seeking behavior. As a result, as Table 4.4 shows, defensive and offensive realists tend to offer contradictory predictions of some examples of Russia's behavior, which casts doubt on their overall power to interpret the whole range of cases as summarized in Table 4.2. In addition, even when realists accurately predict the general direction of Russia's foreign policy, they are not always clear about the sources of such policy. Because of their emphasis on the role of the international system in determining foreign policy, realists tend to miss other important sources of state strategy, such as local historical memory and ideas of national honor. It is not that realism is necessarily wrong, but it is incomplete and therefore potentially wrong.
The approach taken in this book incorporates domestic ideas of honor, power, and recognition, and there is no expectation that an anarchical environment will necessarily determine the nature of foreign policy. Rather, I expect that both ideas and material capabilities will figure prominently in shaping Russia's international behavior. The most dangerous combination is its growing sense of humiliation by Western powers accompanied by Russia's rising material capabilities.
First Look at the Historical Cases
A first look at the cases in this book suggests the increased significance of the constructivist explanation in comparison to its likely rivals (see Table 4.4 for a summary of realist and constructivist expectations about Russia's relations with the West).
Both defensive and offensive realists have difficulties explaining Russia's cases of cooperative foreign policy. The Holy Alliance, for example, may seem like an engagement with the Western nations that is too far reaching for a nation that emerged victorious and potentially hegemonic after defeating Napoleon. Instead, realists would expect Russia to pursue a revisionist or back-passing strategy.39 The Triple Alliance with France and Britain that Russia entered in 1907 is also difficult for realists to explain. After the lost war with Japan and a revolution at home, Russia joined the alliance from a position of weakness, and at that point it was still unnecessary to balance against Germany. In addition, based on calculations of material power, it is not clear why Russia allied with the cumulatively stronger France and Britain, rather than Germany. It is similarly unclear why the weak Soviet Union engaged in the process of collective security in Europe, warning about the dangers of potential German revisionism, instead of letting France and Britain take the initiative. In addition, Putin's choice to build a strategic partnership with the United States after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, is puzzling in light of Russia's relative weakness and potential availability of alternative alliance options (China).
Although realist theories fare better at explaining Russia's defensive choices, their explanations are still not entirely satisfactory. Defensive realism would expect a weak Russia to bandwagon with stronger powers, yet the cases of the country's post–Crimean War recueillement, the postrevolutionary peaceful coexistence, and the post–Cold War containment of NATO expansion indicate a different strategy. Offensive and neoclassical realists may find Russia's behavior compelling, viewing it as an approximation of balancing against a potential hegemon. This interpretation is incomplete, however, and does not take into consideration Russia's damaged sense of honor and obligations to cultural allies. In the cases of recueillement and containment of NATO expansion, Russia acted on its perceived obligations to Slavic/Orthodox allies in the Balkans and the former Soviet region. Recovering lost honor was critical for a self-respected power, and Russia could not rest until it had recovered its lost strategic positions, as it did when it regained the right to have fleets in the Black Sea under Gorchakov. Similarly, a self-respecting Soviet power would have pursued a more assertive policy to maintain and extend a sphere of socialist influence if it were not for its weakness and the need, in Vladimir Lenin's expression, to “catch a breath.”
Finally, Russia's decisions to use an assertive strategy are also difficult to understand without considering its obligations to its cultural allies, on the one hand, and the lack of recognition from the Western nations, on the other. Defensive realists may find Russia's decision to enter the Crimean War, the Cold War, or the military conflict with Georgia as exemplars of irrationality, yet these choices made sense in terms of Russia's self-perceived honor. In each of these cases, the Kremlin acted consistently with its perceived historic obligations, using available material resources that it deemed sufficient for achieving its objectives. Offensive and neoclassical realists are better than their defensive counterparts in predicting the direction of Russia's international actions from a position of strength, but they misinterpret the sources of Russia's behavior. These sources have more to do with an honor-based purpose than a blind drive to maximize power or status. Realists sometimes correctly predict the foreign policy direction and arrive at what on the surface resembles a plausible interpretation of facts, but tend to miss important contextual factors and internal justifications of international actions. In policy terms, neglect of these contextual factors may translate into missed opportunities to cooperate with Russia whenever possible and avoid confrontation where unnecessary. The first look at the ten cases shows that they fit comfortably within the proposed honor-based theory of Russia's foreign policy (see Table 4.5). The following chapters explore the cases in greater detail and develop the proposed constructivist explanation.
Table 4.1. Russia's Concepts of Honorable Behavior toward the West
Table 4.2. Foreign Policy Traditions throughout Russian History
Table 4.3. Cultural Explanation of Russia's Foreign Policy
Table 4.4. Russia's Relations with the West: Realist and Constructivist Expectations
Table 4.5. A First Look at the Cases
Notes
1 Malia, Russia under Western Eyes, p. 8.
2 For classifications of Russia's foreign policy preferences and debates, see Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics; Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy; Tsygankov, Russia's Foreign Policy; Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence.
3 For example, these meanings are identified in the popular Russian dictionnary by Ozhegov, Slovar’ russkogo yazyka, pp. 880–1.
4 Neumann, “Russia's Standing as a Great Power,” 21.
5 For an overview of Peter's reception by Russian intellectual currents, see especially Riasanovsky, The Image of Peter the Great in Russian History and Thought.
6 In the eyes of European monarchs, Napoleon was “the embodiment of revolutionary objectives” (Orlik, Rossiya v mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniyakh, p. 19).
7 Holborn, “Russia and the European Political System,” 393–4.
8 Ringman, “The Recognition Game: Soviet Russia against the West.”
9 Tsygankov, “Russia's International Assertiveness.”
10 Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, p. 248.
11 Ibid., p. 134.
12 As cited in: Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union, 1917–199, pp. 187–8.
13 See Primakov, “Rossiya v mirovoi politike”; Ivanov, Vneshnyaya politika Rossiyi v epokhu globalizatsiyi, pp. 313–30; Strategiya dlia Rossiyi. Russian supporters of cooperation with the West, in contrast, are often critical of Gorchakov's diplomacy. See, for example, Fyodorov, “Krizis vneshnei politiki Rossiyi.”
14 For details, see Tsygankov, Russia's Foreign Policy, chapter 4.
15 Ragsdale, “Russian Projects of Conquest in the Eighteenth Century,” 100; Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia, p. 142; Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848, p. 20.
16 Donaldson and Nogee, The Foreign Policy of Russia, p. 9; Headley, Russia and the Balkans, pp. 14–16.
17 For details, see , Russian Nationalism since1856, pp. 90–113.
18 Headley, Russia and the Balkans, p. 18.
19 Mlechin, Ministry inostrannykh del, pp. 44–45.
20 Quoted in Banerjee, “Attribution, Identity, and Emotion in the Early Cold War,” 30.
21 In January 1941, only 39 percent of the public felt that U.S. intervention in World War I was a mistake, compared to 68 percent in October 1939 (Legro, Rethinking the World, p. 67).
22 Putin, “Speech at the Munich Conference on Security Policy.”
23 For discussion of international and domestic developments in the construction of Russia's identity, see especially Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics; Clunan, The Social Construction of Russia's Resurgence; Larson and Shevchenko, “Status Seekers.”
24 For a development of this argument, see Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe; English, Russia and the Idea of the West.
25 Internal confidence is partly a product of material power and partly of perception of power by the ruling elite. For details of complex calculations of Russia's power, see Wohlforth, “The Perception of Power” and Neumann, “Russia's Standing as a Great Power.”
26 See, for example, Kozyrev, “Rossiya v novom mire” and Kozyrev, “Russia and Human Rights.”
27 See, for example, Rutland, “Mission Impossible?”; Gould-Davies and Woods, “Russia and the IMF”; Black, Russia Faces NATO Expansion.
28 Headley, Russia and the Balkans, p. 483.
29 For greater details, see Sperling, Kay, and Papacosma, eds. Limiting Institutions?
30 Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice among Nations, p. 221.
31 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 138.
32 Jervis, “Cooperation under Security Dilemma”; Jervis and Snyder, eds. Dominous and Bandwagoning; Snyder, Myths of Empire.
33 Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive; Van Evera, Causes of War.
34 Snyder, Myths of Empire, chapter 6, “Soviet Politics and Strategic Learning.”
35 For example, some realists have explained Russia's liberal momentum of the late 1980s–early 1990s and the searches for active accommodation with the West by the Soviet defeat in the Cold War and the need to respond to the emergence of the American-centered global unipolar system. In this perspective, Russia's hegemonic policy in the former Soviet area and a nonconfrontational engagement with the West were the only rational strategies given the fundamental weakness of Russia's post–Cold War capabilities (Neil MacFarlane, “Realism and Russian Strategy after the Collapse of the USSR”; Lynch, “Realism of Russian Foreign Policy”).
36 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 139.
37 In addition to Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, see Wohlforth, “Honor as Interest” and Wohlforth, “A Test of Neorealism.” See also Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers; Fuller, Strategy and Power in Russia.
38 Luttwack, The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union; Pipes, “Is Russia Still an Enemy?”; Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard; Tuminez, Russian Nationalism since 1856; LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650–1830.
39 On revisionist and back-passing strategies, see Mearsheimer, The Tragedy, pp. 267–333.
