Russia’s Eurasian past, present and future: rival international societies and Moscow’s place in the post-cold war world

ABSTRACT

The failure of post-Soviet Russia to integrate into the West became evident with the 2014 Ukraine crisis, leading Moscow to accelerate its declared “pivot to the East”. However, the increased dependence on China carries its own risks, such as the danger of becoming Beijing’s junior partner. For an erstwhile superpower that continues to declare and prize its autonomy in international affairs, this is a particularly unappealing prospect. Thus, it remains to be seen whether a genuinely balanced partnership can exist between both countries. This article uses insights from Adam Watson’s pendulum theory to explore Russia’s post-2014 Eurasian predicament. We argue that the rapid rightward swing of the pendulum in the Euro-Atlantic order following the end of the Cold War has proven indigestible for Moscow. The article then moves to discuss the Sino-Russian relationship in the context of the emerging Eurasian space. It concludes that the growing disillusionment of Russian leaders with the West since the 2000s, along with the normative convergence between Moscow and Beijing, has led to a closer partnership between the two. Yet the partnership is also riddled with a number of insecurities on Moscow’s side that could undermine the long-term prospects for cooperation between Russia and China.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• China
• Eurasia
• world order
• English school

ORCID

Camille-Renaud Merlen http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3398-1100

Notes

1. Several scholars have covered this topic. For example, Roy Allison (2013) shows how the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Western recognition of Kosovo influenced Russian foreign policy doctrines, while Richard Sakwa (2017) analyses how Western attempts to consolidate a unipolar order after the USSR’s collapse produced international disorder due to Moscow’s rejection of the notion that Western leadership is synonymous with order itself.

2. It is worth emphasizing that this article’s model of multiple societies to which Russia simultaneously belongs does not challenge the notion that there also exists a single, overarching, global international society.

3. From the verb sopryach’/sopriagat’, meaning to mate, combine, associate.