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Abstract
Following the end of the cold war and throughout the 1990s, Russia was described as the readily ‘joining’ international society. According to the English school perspective on IR, this meant that Russia was expected to adjust and accept the norms and rules established and propagated by mostly Western liberal states but hailed as common for the family of states. With Vladimir Putin’s ascendance to power and Russia’s economic recovery followed by Moscow’s more assertive stance on global affairs, Russia was increasingly seen as the supporter of a pluralist vision of the international society, i.e. one characterized by limited cooperation, respect for sovereignty and non-intervention. These depictions ignored the fundamental differences in Russia’s approach towards relations between states in the regional and global perspective. While on the global scale Russia cherishes norms of sovereignty and non-intervention, the regional realm has been subject to a variety of moves compromising the sovereignty of post-Soviet states. In the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia has been ready and willing to engage in undermining states’ sovereignty in a number of ways: attempting to establish a sphere of influence, directly intervening in a civil strives, policing borders, waging wars on ‘humanitarian’ grounds and stimulating separatisms, as well as undertaking less explicit interventionist activities of regional integration, security provision and development assistance. This article discusses these cases in order to make the point that Russia’s approach to its most immediate neighbours cannot be subsumed under pluralist or solidarist vision of interstate relations. It highlights the difficulty to approach the Russian global-regional split using the conceptual apparatus of the English school and links it to a more perennial problem – that of the English school disregard for the specifics of post-colonial situations.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the discussant and the participants to the panel for their useful comments.
Notes
1. Already in 1984, the Foreign Affairs review of Bull and Watson’s The Expansion of International Society assessed it as ‘Western in outlook’, with no profound discussion of the ‘Third’ or ‘Communist’ worlds. Foreign Affairs, Winter 1984/1985, review by John C. Campbell.
2. This affirmative stance with regard to Russia’s role in the international society has not prevented Bull from assessing that Russia in Europe ‘has always been perceived as semi-Asiatic in character’ (Bull Citation1984, 218).
3. The differences in Russia’s governance (its inability to meet Europe-wide standards) undermined its credentials to great-power-hood and resulted in Russia’s character as a European and civilised state being questioned (see Neumann Citation2008, 37–38). In his later work, Neumann offered a reconceptualization of Russia’s entry into the international society suggesting that it should not be framed in terms of expansion but in terms of the entrant passing from one system to another (Neumann Citation2011).
4. There is no consensus within the English school on this subject. Adam Watson (Citation1992, 290–298) saw the cold war international system as bipolar in structure but maintained that world remained as one international society, with a common structure of international law, diplomatic representation and rules inherited from European society.
5. The present day global international society, as the English school explanation suggests, is global but the community of liberal-constitutionalist states remains at its core. It has prevailed as the winning coalition following this century’s major conflicts, most recently the cold war. The core states have been principal agents in the production and reproduction of the practices underpinning international society (Buzan Citation2004). Their values shape the modern constitutional structure (Reus-Smit Citation1997, 584–585). In other words, the powerful are seen as privileged in relation to the rest of the international society members, despite formal equality of all states (Buzan Citation2004, 222–227). The ‘inner’ grouping interprets and implements the wishes of international society as a whole (Clark Citation2005, 159). The core is also presented as a homogenising force, a model others are expected to emulate (Buzan Citation2004, 60).
6. This view is shared by scholars whose work does not engage with the international society interpretative framework. They point to Russia’s ‘semi-peripheral’ status in the world capitalist economy (Hopf Citation2012).
7. It is a question of a much broader analysis than the present one but in the Russian case it is plausible that the return to the great power status, which has been the stated goal of Russian foreign policy under Putin (Jonson Citation2004, 135–136), has contradicted Russia’s potential role as a representative of Europe.
8. Bull’s approach strengthened the impression that pluralism and solidarism are mutually exclusive and the international society may represent only one type at any given time. Bull’s own position with regard to international society as pluralist or solidarist has not been constant. Bull’s pluralism has been much more prominent in his earlier work. It was in his later interventions that he leaned towards solidarism. His ambiguous position led Wheeler and Dunne to advocate for ‘Bull’s pluralism of the intellect and solidarism of the will’ (Wheeler and Dunne Citation1996). See also Hurrell (Citation2007, 58) for a discussion on the foundations of Bull’s notion of solidarism.
9. More recent debate postulates that pluralism and solidarism should be understood not as mutually exclusive but ‘as positions on a spectrum representing, respectively, thin and thick sets of shared norms, rules and institutions’ (Buzan Citation2004).
10. Izvestia, 7 August 1992.
11. The argument can be illustrated with an example. Russia’s political leadership on several occasions referred to the Eurasian Union as ‘the most civilised’ way of arranging regional relations’. See: Interview with Dmitri Medvedev for Georgian television Rustavi-2, 6 August 2013 (via Johnson’s Russia List 2013, #143, 7 August 2013).
12. The same authors suggest that a unique cultural and civilisational Eurasian historical heritage could become a normative framework of Eurasian integration (Podberezkin and Podberezkina Citation2013, 94).
13. Interview by the author, 18 October 2013, high-ranking state official of the Russian Federation, Moscow. See also Birichevskii and Safranchuk (Citation2013).
14. Additionally, a number of practical arrangements secure Russia’s preponderance. The signing of the Treaty on Collective Security meant that the high command of the CIS, which in practice means Russia, coordinated military security in the Central Asian region.
15. I have developed this thought further in a chapter engaging with the concept of regional international societies (Kaczmarska Citation2014).
16. This approach was usually assisted with providing individuals in the break-away provinces of independent states, such as Georgia and Moldova, with the Russian Federation’s passports.