Over the past quarter century Russia’s strategy within multilateral organizations has been largely driven by considerations of power, status, and entanglement. In the 1990s, president Boris Yeltsin pursued membership in “Western” institutions, such as the Council of Europe and G7, mainly for status-related reasons. He sought to position Russia as an “autonomous member” of the “European civilization”—a nation cherishing its political, economic, and cultural ties with the West yet determined to pursue an independent course in foreign policy dictated by its national interests. For geopolitical reasons, these interests were expected by the Russian leaders of the past quarter century to differ substantially from those of major Western countries.
Both Yeltsin and his successor, Vladimir Putin, believed that Russia could increase its international clout by reintegrating with other post-Soviet republics, although both leaders appeared to be under no illusion about the chances and overall expediency of reincarnating the Soviet Union. In 2003, President Putin began to advance a Russia-led economic grouping that would include Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. While Kyiv, seeking rapprochement with and eventual membership in the European Union, pulled out of this project in the mid-2000s, Moscow never lost hope of luring Ukraine back into the customs union that Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan launched in 2009. Russia’s economic tug-of-war with the European Union over Ukraine led to the ouster of the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014, and to Ukraine’s ultimately inking an association agreement with the European Union (EU).
In the meantime, Moscow has also been working to strengthen the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). While it has not been clear how much this defense bloc actually magnified Russian power, Russian policymakers have believed that the CSTO could help Russia increase its status in relations with the expanding NATO. Moscow has been trying to arrange a direct dialogue between NATO and CSTO, something that the United States and other NATO members have been reluctant to concede to Russia.
In a similar vein, Moscow has sought to make the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) a source of status for Russia on the global scale, while Beijing has been gearing the SCO to China’s economic goals in Central Asia where Russia is increasingly wary of competition with China.
Moscow’s calculus appears to have changed during the conflict with the West over Ukraine. Determined to prevail in this new bout of rivalry with NATO and the EU, Russia put many of its integration plans on the back burner, instead undertaking a number of unilateral moves to counter Western pressure. While expressing certain solidarity with the Russian position, many Russian allies and partners refused to join Moscow openly in confrontation with the West, generating new difficult dilemmas of power and status for Russia to resolve within multilateral institutions.
In “The Role of the West in Evolving World Order, and Russian Politics,” Alexei D. Voskressenski analyzes the global context of Russia’s approach to multilateral institutions and diplomacy. He discusses the modernization trajectories of a wide variety of countries and looks at the implications of modernization for regional security in North America, Europe, and Asia. While open access to politics, typical of a mature democracy, has usually been conducive to economic growth and social cohesion, nondemocracies of different types have endured in recent decades and engaged in competition with modernized democracies over their ability to provide public goods and maintain international order.
Authoritarian states, represented by their vainglorious leaders, are usually inclined to take international interactions “personally,” being focused on the symbols of recognition of their status by other members of the international community. This generates serious potential for misunderstanding and conflict between such states and their more democratic counterparts. At the same time, the logic of socialization of states suggests that leaders of a certain country can facilitate its democratization and modernization by consciously choosing to prioritize relations and engagement within multilateral institutions with their more democratic counterparts.
In “The Critical Experience of Russia in Global Governance,” Maksim Kharkevich takes a different view, arguing that a “positivist approach” to global governance, whereby the leading states only seek to explain and assess—but not to understand—the sources of conduct of other countries, does not allow the full potential of conflict resolution and other governance mechanisms to be unlocked. Kharkevich points to the failure of philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to describe global governance in positivist terms.
According to Kharkevich, the more Russia is isolated from global governance mechanisms and related rule making as a result of the conflict around Ukraine, the more critical Moscow’s approach to governance becomes. He argues that the problem of Russia’s participation in governance structures runs deeper, taking root in the post–Cold War settlement, which did not envisage a high enough status for Russia in global governance. In the meantime, Russia promotes post-positivist principles of governance that would include two-way communication between the governing bodies and governed entities.
In “Measuring the Efficiency of Regional Institutions in Eurasia: Is There a Role for Public Diplomacy?” Yulia Nikitina considers regional organizations in Eurasia as “service providers” and builds a framework to assess their impact and efficiency. NATO and the European Union have consistently turned down proposals by the CSTO and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) for interbloc policy coordination, citing the low impact that Russia-led organizations have been producing on regional security and economy. The West views them as little more than extensions of Russia’s national ambitions and agendas.
Nikitina, in her turn, argues that the traditional Realist counterfactual analysis of the impact of international organizations has so far failed to offer clear quantifiable assessment criteria. Instead, societies in member states should be considered as “clients” receiving services from the respective organizations—in accordance with the impact assessment methodology used at the United Nations. Such society-oriented methodology makes evaluation of the record of Russia-led blocs more rigorous and therefore credible. This, in turn, could allow Moscow to raise the attractiveness of these blocs as partners for NATO and the EU.
The interplay between globalization and regionalization in Central Asia is at the heart of the debate about the future of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. This debate is analyzed by Igor Denisov and Ivan Safranchuk in “Four Problems of the SCO in Connection with Its Enlargement.” The authors point out the simmering controversy between two core SCO members—China and Russia—over approaches to adding new members to the SCO. At the SCO’s 2015 summit in Ufa, the decision was officially made to launch the procedure for accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO. Russia is the main motive force of the SCO enlargement process because Moscow seeks to position the SCO as a global organization geared toward balancing the influence of the United States and its alliances worldwide. China, however, remains lukewarm to the idea of expanding the SCO beyond Central Asia, as Beijing is trying to use SCO mechanisms to advance its economic agenda (mostly, trade and construction of transit infrastructure) in the region.
For a few years now, Moscow and Beijing have been sweeping these contradictions under the carpet. Interestingly, Russia’s current support for the accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO may signify a change in Russian priorities: the membership of two South Asian countries would foster the emergence of a greater Central–South Asia region—an outcome favored by Washington and previously opposed by Moscow. Other SCO members appear to tilt toward the Chinese position of “de-geopoliticization” of the SCO: just like Beijing, they see the organization as a means of managing regional relationships rather than global grandstanding.
Ekaterina Koldunova in “Russia and Regional Institutions in the Asia-Pacific Region” looks at the record of Russia’s “pivot to the East” actively pursued by President Putin since his return to the Kremlin in 2012. During its first years of independence, Russia focused on bilateral relations with major Asian countries. Initially, high expectations were pinned on partnership with Japan. When that partnership foundered on the unresolved territorial dispute over the Kurile Islands, Moscow turned toward China. Since the second half of the 1990s, Russia has also been seeking membership in multilateral structures, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), and the East Asia Summit.
However, until the 2012 APEC summit in Vladivostok, Russia’s economic interaction with Asian countries remained limited. Even after that summit, bilateral agendas prevailed in Russia’s relations with the Asia-Pacific over consistent strategies of participation in existing multilateral institutions and in helping to build new ones. In addition, by the early 2010s the Asia-Pacific turned into an arena for competition among several multilateral institution-building projects, the largest and most ambitious being the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and China’s “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) agenda of developing transit infrastructure in Central Eurasia.
In such a difficult context, Russian proposals for building an inclusive security architecture in the Asia-Pacific have not gained traction among the manifold competing actors. Signed in 2015, Moscow’s agreement with Beijing on coordination between OBOR and the Eurasian Economic Union is still very much work in progress; in any case, it has perpetuated Russia’s position as China’s junior economic partner in Central Asia. In December 2015 Russia proposed a groundbreaking “economic partnership” with the participation of the EEU, SCO, and ASEAN. This project appears to Koldunova to be the most promising among Russia’s multilateral initiatives in Asia. However, almost all of its details remain unclear, as does the real extent of interest in it among other major stakeholders.
Overall, by the late 2010s Russia’s approach to institution building in Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific has become hectic and ad hoc, with little strategic vision of how these institutions could help to position Russia on the global stage. This reflects the need for Moscow to avoid entanglements and engage in tactical maneuvering in the face of continuing tensions in relations with the West.