Carr goes east: reconsidering power and inequality in a post-liberal Eurasia

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses Western policies towards Russia from the realist perspective of E.H. Carr. His critique of inter-war liberal ‘utopianism’ pointed to the tendency of liberal states to disregard the role of power in shaping an international normative order of their making; their discounting of contingency in favour of a progressive, teleological view of history; and their insensitivity to the structural inequalities reproduced by that order. These predispositions can also be observed in the liberal West’s policies towards Russia since the end of the Cold War. A teleologically expanding ‘Kantian zone of peace’ centred on the EU and NATO – and based on the liberal tripod of institutions, democracy, and free trade – became the core of Europe’s de facto security regime. Uncovering the power-political behind the normative, a Carrian perspective explains the gradual deterioration in relations between the West and Russia through the latter’s exclusion from institutions shaped at a time of its acute weakness, its inability to counter the symbolic power of democracy through political reforms, and its structural consignation to the semi-periphery of the globalised economic system. The article concludes by proposing a realist alternative for future engagement with Moscow.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• realism
• NATO
• EU
• democracy
• E.H. Carr

ORCID

Kevork K. Oskanian http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5188-924X

Notes

1. Here, ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ refer to a broad ideology emerging from the Western enlightenment, combining a belief in free individual reason with a preference for liberal democracy, free markets, and international institutions/international law as the foundations of international order. These ideas provide the core of the ‘utopianism’ criticised by Carr (2001, pp. 12–41) in his day, founded as it was on these three latter principles. As argued by Ikenberry and others, this ‘liberalism’ became the bedrock of the post-World War Two order envisaged and shaped by the United States (Ikenberry, 2009, 2012; Manners, 2008).

2. Thus, ‘the nascent identity of the liberal democratic Czech Republic was as much sustained through the narrative of the Czech “Return to [democratic] Europe”, as it was through the “othering” against both the communist totalitarian past and the present of inimical Russia’ (Kratochvíl, Cibulková, & Beneš, 2006, p. 502). Comparative quantitative studies in Central and Eastern Europe also found a correlation between a fear of Russia and support for westward integration, including the attendant reforms (see Kostadinova, 2000).

3. A sarcastic neologism constructed through a combination of the Russian words for ‘grab’ and ‘privatisation’ (see Andreff, 2003, pp. 50–52).