Russia and Europe in the Post-Cold War World

At the opening of the twenty-first century there was widespread optimism that the relationship between Russia and Europe was entering a new era of unprecedented cooperation and constructive engagement. Growing economic interdependence and the recognition of shared political, security and environmental challenges provided a powerful rationale for the development of a genuinely strategic partnership. However, by the summer of 2006 when this research project was completed it was clear that there was deep disappointment on both sides that so little had actually been achieved either in terms of practical outcomes or in developing mutual understanding and trust. As is usually the case when relationships are strained, the reasons are complex and rooted in the legacy of the past as much as in the difficulties of the present.

The sudden implosion of the Soviet-type system in central and eastern Europe (CEE) in 1989 and, ultimately, the Soviet Union two years later in 1991, initiated a traumatic period of socio-economic and political disruption and decline in Russia during the 1990s which was to culminate in the collapse of the rouble in August 1998 and the political humiliation of its impotence in the face of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led military intervention into Kosovo in 1999. During this decade there was a fundamental transformation of the European political landscape which introduced a situation of extreme uncertainty within the international community.

The study of sociology began as a practical discipline, concerned with the alleviation of social problems through rational, logical analyses of the nature of the community. Sociology is the quintessential Enlightenment product – based on the commitment to the value of objective reason – a means for achieving social progress and harmony. What now seems naivety to many was considered to be an achievable goal – that a new world was possible and the sociologist, as the scientist of the social, was best placed to assist in the production of such a world. Naïve or not, it meant that the idea of sociological theory as different in some way from applied sociological work was inconceivable. As Marx suggested, it was not sufficient to interpret the world, the world also needed a change – a sentiment that was common to the varying perspectives of classical sociology (as well as to some recent sociology such as feminist sociology). But agreement as to how sociology could best affect positive social change has been a contested issue. It also partially explains the idea that developed in contemporary sociology that there is an abstract realm of theoretical discourse which is separated from the empirical investigation of social problems and the application of the findings. As stated above, this viewpoint would have been antithetical to early sociology.

Introduction

In 1999 Javier Solana, the European Union (EU)'s newly appointed High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), described developing a partnership with Russia as ‘the most important, the most urgent and the most challenging task that the European Union faces at the beginning of the 21st Century’. It has also proved the greatest test of its credibility as a foreign policy actor, raising critical questions about its capacity for coherent and effective action. Although it has aspirations to play a global role, it is in Europe that the EU's most immediate interests and ambitions lie and Russia is recognized as the other key player on the continent. It is the EU's largest neighbour both in terms of population and territory and has immense reserves of natural resources, including oil and gas. Despite its loss of ‘superpower’ status, it is still a major military power in both conventional and nuclear terms and remains a key actor at the global level with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC) and membership of the Group of Eight (G8). It has strong interests and significant influence in regions central to the EU's security, such as eastern Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans and Central Asia. The long common border means that cooperation with Russia is extremely important in tackling soft security threats such as illegal immigration, international crime, terrorism, nuclear accidents and environmental pollution.

The assertion about the peculiarly intricate and complex character of social phenomena has, in much of social discourse, a virtually uncontested tradition. A significant part of the premise about the complexity of social phenomena is the conviction that it complicates, perhaps even inhibits the development and application of social scientific knowledge. Our paper explores the origins, the basis and the consequences of this assertion and asks in particular whether the classic complexity assertion still deserves to be invoked in analyses that ask about the production and the utilization of social scientific knowledge in modern society. We refer to one of the most prominent and politically influential social scientific theories, John Maynard Keynes' economic theory as an illustration. We conclude that, the practical value of social scientific knowledge is not necessarily dependent on a faithful, in the sense of complete, representation of (complex) social reality. Practical knowledge is context sensitive if not project bound. Social scientific knowledge that wants to optimize its practicality has to attend and attach itself to elements of practical social situations that can be altered or are actionable by relevant actors.

This chapter represents an effort to re-examine the relation between social reality, social scientific knowledge and its practical application. There is a widely accepted view about the potential social utility of social scientific knowledge that invokes the peculiar complexity of social reality as an impediment to good theoretical comprehension and hence to its applicability.

Introduction

The period since the end of the Cold War has witnessed a transformation of the European security map and – as a necessary precondition of this – of politicalmilitary relations between Russia and Europe. The withdrawal of former Soviet forces from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the conclusion of arms control arrangements – in particular the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty, CFE-1A agreement and Open Skies treaty – verbal agreements on nondeployment of tactical nuclear weapons, cooperative threat reduction programmes and establishment of confidence and security building measures were designed to end the period of confrontation and usher in a new era of security cooperation while preserving, at least in formal terms, a balance of military power. This has been complemented by the institutionalization of security arrangements with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) and active Russian involvement in regional security organizations. Since Europe needed Moscow's acquiescence to carry out the dual NATO/EU enlargements and stabilize the continent, and Russia needed access to ‘Western’ institutions, these developments have often been presented positively in diplomatic terms, not least in commentaries on the supposedly ‘pro-Western shift’ in foreign and security policy initiated by Putin in his first term.

The pressure of internal developments has often tended to push politicalmilitary relations between Russia and Europe into the background.

Applied sociology has been around for a long time. Lester Ward's distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ sociology in 1906 and the Outline of Applied Sociology, written by Yale's Henry Fairchild in 1916 are two of the most well-known indicators of the attention applied sociology received during sociology's emergent stage. After all, applied sociology as social reform – attracted many to the field of sociology – as illustrated by the Chicago School, making it an important part of sociology.

Lester Ward, the acknowledged founder of American sociology, wrote the classic Applied Sociology: A Treatise on the Conscious Improvement of Society by Society that provided an excellent illustration of the early integration of application and sociological knowledge. Furthermore, Ward, by training a botanist and zoologist, was attracted to the social world by his desire for its improvement. He states in his ‘Treatise’: ‘The purpose of applied sociology is to harmonize achievement with improvement’ (Ward, 1906). Like many of his contemporaries, Ward thought social knowledge should be used for social improvement and reform – ‘pure’ should result in ‘applied’, or ‘applied’ should be integral with ‘pure’.

An early example of this reform-oriented sociology is the ‘fivedollar day plan’ by Henry Ford and the development of the Ford Sociological Department within the company to conduct research to determine not only who should participate in the plan but also to suggest ways that non-qualifiers could alter their behaviour to qualify (Loizedes & Sonnad, 2004).

Introduction

It has been suggested that relations between the European Union (EU) and Russia can be seen as that between an elephant (being the EU) and a bear (being Russia) in the sense that there are few commonalities, few meeting points, and little common understanding. From this perspective, Russia is stuck in the nineteenth century geopolitical state-to-state thinking, while the EU approaches the external world from a unique, postmodern standpoint. The scope for misunderstanding would thus appear to be very significant.

The EU' s policy towards Russia is sometimes criticized as a failure. Some commentators argue that in fact there has not been much of a common policy at all. Member states often seem to pursue their own interests with Russia, led mainly by trade and energy considerations, to the detriment of common EU positions. While there may be elements of truth in both assertions, we will argue that EU-Russia relations have advanced significantly over the past years. Extreme scepticism is misplaced.

In the past two years, the EU and Russia have agreed to work towards increasingly close cooperation (possibly containing elements of convergence and integration in selected areas) in four broad domains that encompass nearly the whole range of the EU's multifaceted relations with Russia. These broad areas are now known as the ‘four common spaces’, which were initially agreed at the St Petersburg summit of May 2003: a Common Economic Space (CES); a Common Space of Freedom, Security and Justice; a Common Space of External Security; and a Common Space of Research and Education.

The last two chapters provide means how to grapple with some real systems with variables and parameters that keep on changing. Although these could be mathematized, there exist approaches that require few more notions, types, definitions, theorems etc. There are many for theorizing, in some more depth, ideas on bifurcation, and catastrophes. We begin with a resume of what we have learnt in the earlier chapters. We take bifurcation first, then catastrophes and after that, interweaving one with the other to the extent they facilitate both in understanding of and pushing further concepts. But at every stage, we reckon non-linearity whose effect is to bend the solution branches, which we have already met in the example -u″ (x) = λ ∥u∥2u(x), 0 < x < π. We can call this as a mildly non-linear problem, in the sense, that ∥u∥2u does not reflect a genuine non-linearity (or pseudo non-linearity) so well represented by, say, f(xu)u where f(u) is nothing but a vector, which turns the vector to a new direction in the space.

Resumé on Bifurcations

Let us recall that our objective has been not merely to solve the system of equations in variables x = (x1, x2, …, xn)∈ Rn of the form

but also to investigate the behaviour of solution of (1) as the real scalar parameter λ varies; F = (F1, F2, …, Fm) is a non-linear mapping with the values in Rm.

Poincare–Bendixson theorem

Any text on nonlinear systems can hardly afford, not to refer to the celebrated result called ‘Poincare–Bendixson Theorem’. It was first established by the French mathematician Henri Poincare, in 1880 and later on, simplified by the Swiss mathematician Ivan Bendixson in 1901. It is known to be an indispensably vital result that asserts the existence of a periodic solution for a general class of non-linear systems. The theorem has been stated earlier without a formal proof, in connection with periodic orbits, which, of course, focus its primary concern. The ideas in its proof are relatively difficult and so, the proof is not set forth on the first exposure to this theorem. Perhaps, it will now be fairly comfortable to have glimpses of ways and ideas leading to the proof of this theorem. The proofs are achieved apparently in different ways but they do depend on concepts and results treated in the early part of this book. Poincare-Bendixson theorem (PB) has, on the face of it, different versions, as shown below in different sections.

Revisiting concepts treated earlier

We look upon the PB theorem as a basic wherewithal even for understanding planar dynamical systems, which we have already met. For this, we need to bank upon some properties of the limiting behaviour of orbits at the level of abstract topological dynamics, followed by an analysis of the flow near non-equilibrium points of a dynamical system.