
The
political fallout of the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008 affects far
more than the main combatants: it has had a profound impact on the
post-Soviet space, the United States, the European Union, even China
and Turkey. Ivan Krastev draws up a balance-sheet of a toxic conflict,
and looks ahead.
It took less than a hundred days for the
Russia-Georgia war of 8-12 August 2008 to be eclipsed as a
history-shaping event. The guns of August were silenced by the
thunders
on Wall Street. A war that seemed momentous at the time became subject
to instant amnesia: a non-event. But it was a non-event with
consequences.
A year on, a measure of these consequences
seems appropriate. The post-war balance-sheets of the leading actors -
Georgia and Russia themselves, but also the United States and the
European Union - in many respects resemble those of the Wall Street
financial institutions hit by the global economic
crisis: undeclared losses and inflated profits.
Indeed, amid the fallout of this toxic conflict it is easier to see losers than victors. In August 2008, Georgia
lost its dreams, the Kremlin lost its complexes, Washington lost its
nerves and the European Union lost its sleep. But as the poet said,
there's no success like failure; and the messy aftermath also reveals
collateral benefits for some of these and other powers.
Russia is at the centre of every calculation. The war was the occasion
of Moscow's first large-scale military operation outside the territory
of the Russian Federation since the end of the cold war. The Kremlin's
subsequent recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and
Abkhazia was the first revision of inter-state borders on the territory
of the former Soviet Union. Russia emerged from the war as a
revisionist power and broke the illusion of the existence of European
order. The Russian analyst Sergei Markedonov is right to assert that August 2008 was also a "final reloading of conflicts in Eurasia."
This assessment of the war's outcome examines the role of all the main
players, and looks at the war's implications for the future of European
order.
A Georgian balance-sheet
Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's president, made a strategic miscalculation in deciding to launch
a rocket assault on Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. He
gambled and he lost. Georgia lost too. It sssss Abkhazia and South
Ossetia, for at the end of the war these already detached statelets
were further than ever from its grasp. It lost its military
infrastructure and the hope for rapid economic development. Georgia's
strategic ambition to be an Israel in the Caucusas turned into a nightmare.
At the same time, Saakashvili survived the defeat and has managed - despite intense domestic
political criticism - to remain in power. Georgia under his leadership
has also adapted to its defeat by turning itself in 2008-09 from
America's client into the European Union's project. This is Tbilisi's
strategic gain.
A Washington balance-sheet
The United States made a strategic mistake in the early months of 2008 by ignoring the signals that its ally in Tbilisi was moving towards a military option
with respect to the breakaway territories. George W Bush's White House
failed to grasp the real intentions of Mikheil Saakashvili's
government, and it equally misjudged Moscow's readiness to use force
against Georgia. As a result, US power suffered a major crisis of
credibility. Washington paid the price for its strategic overstretch
and for its obsession with symbolic politics.
The outcome
was devastating. The five days of the Russia-Georgia conflict
demonstrated that the Washington did not have leverage over Moscow, and
that Bush's commitment to guarantee the territorial integrity of
Georgia was mere rhetoric. In the end, Nato's generals were not ready to send Nato soldiers to die in defence of Gori, birthplace of Joseph Stalin.
All this increased the polarisation within the American foreign-policy
community, deepening the confrontation between "realists" and
"moralists".
The arrival
of the Barack Obama administration in January 2009 has signalled change
in the US's policy towards Russia. At the heart of the proclaimed
"reset strategy" is Washington's willingness to focus on improving relations with Moscow by cooperating on global issues such as the reduction of nuclear arsenals and the containment of Iran's nuclear ambitions while leaving EU in charge of managing the tensions in the post-Soviet space.
The new reality is that the US is no longer a European power in the way it was during the cold war or in the 1990s.
A Russian balance-sheet
In military terms, Russia won the August 2008 war (though the success
was partially spoiled by the malfunctioning of the Russian armed
forces). It strengthened the legitimacy of the Vladimir Putin-Dmitry Medvedev
regime; it was popular with the Russian public and - especially for
many Russians who still live with the traumas of the 1990s - this
"small victorious war" was a welcome reversal of almost two decades of
humiliation. The domestic opinion-polls found that even teenage
street-kids regarded Georgia and the United States as Russia's major
enemies. More widely, in the wake of the war the prospect of Georgia or Ukraine joining Nato in the next decade has been almost extinguished.
At the same time Russia's strong military response brought in its wake strategic losses. The war did not make the Caucasus more secure. The recognition by Russia of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent entities (in which it has been joined by Nicaragua
alone) increases the risks of instability in the region. The growing
number of political assassinations in places like Ingushetia
demonstrates the growing ungovernability of the region. The Russian analyst Nikolai Petrov argues that Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya's president, is already promoting an "Abkhaz" status for Chechnya.
The Kremlin's
revisionism was rebuked too by other post-Soviet states. The day after
it recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia found itself in a
position of total diplomatic isolation.
This is an
indication that in another of history's twists, Russia strategically
could lose more out of its victory in Georgia then it lost from its
defeat during the period of the "colour revolutions" in 2003-05. At
that time, Russia lost both prestige and position in Georgia and
Ukraine; but it responded by finding common cause with the autocratic
leaders in the post-Soviet space, and this increased its leverage over
some parts of the region (see "Russia's post-orange empire", 20 October 2005).
This, however, carries a cost: now that Russia has more clearly become
a revisionist power, feared and resisted by its neighbours, its stance
and rhetoric (including the claim of interest in protecting the rights
of its compatriots in the the post-Soviet states) has profoundly changed the way Russian minorities are perceived in the "near abroad".
The Kremlin recognised
the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia with the clearly stated
purpose to "break the west's monopoly on double standards." The act
was meant as a demonstration of strength - a direct response to the
west's recognition of the independence of Kosovo
in February 2008 - but it turned out to be a demonstration of weakness.
The real difference between the "Kosovo case" and the "South Ossetia
case" is that Serbia, even after being bombed by Nato and (in its view
illegally) deprived of Kosovo, still sees its future as a part of Nato
and the European Union - not as their enemy.
The contrast
with Georgia is total: the only future Georgia can dream about is as
far as possible from Russia's sphere of influence.
Barack Obama's arrival in the White House touches everything, and his fresh foreign-policy approach
has also reduced Russia's attractiveness as the leader of transnational
anti-American resistance. Now that the multipolar world has arrived,
Russia has much more to fear than to celebrate. The global financial
crisis, reinforcing the existing squeeze on energy prices and revenues,
adds a further layer of concern by weakening Russia's economy and investment attractiveness. In 2008-09, the BRIC network
(Brazil, Russia, India, China) has been transformed into
BIC-plus-Russia. The crisis has consolidated the global position and
prospects of China, India and Brazil; but it has raised even more
doubts about the long-term perspective of Russia as a global power.
A European Union balance-sheet
The European Union's credit-rating increased in the aftermath of the
Georgia-Russia war, in part because of its active diplomatic engagement
in bringing the initial military confrontation to an end. The union
managed to preserve its coherence in an explosive situation, built on
its brokering of the peace, and out of the war established a more
active and visible presence in the Caucasus and in the post-Soviet
space in general. For example, the offer by the EU of the Eastern Partnership to six post-Soviet countries was in many aspects a direct response to the war.
But the EU's increase of responsibility in relation to the Caucasus
also carries a major risk, for at present the union lacks both a
working strategy and public support for deeper involvement in the
region. Any belief in Brussels or the member-states that the EU can
simply repeat its Balkan strategy is an illusion. Georgia's insistence
that the United States should be part of the EU monitoring mission
in a radical form will press Brussels to make a critical choice: to "do
Georgia on its own", thus reducing the tensions with Russia, or to go
for a transatlantic strategy for the Caucasus.
The real winners
China and Turkey have, at least for the moment, turned out to be the
only clear winners of the Russia-Georgia war. China used the war to
converge its economic leverage into political influence in the
post-Soviet space. It was China that de facto encouraged the
post-Soviet republics to resist Russia's pressures for recognition of
South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The combination of the war and the global
economic crisis has transformed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) from a Moscow-dominated into a Beijing-dominated grouping.
Turkey emerged from the war as an autonomous regional power that has
the will, capacity and legitimacy to mediate in almost all of the
conflicts in the region. The unfreezing of Turkey-Armenia relations is one of the war's positive side-effects.
It is important to stress that Ankara's "soft power" - in contrast to
Moscow's version - is built not on resisting the west but by Turkey's success in adopting the western model while preserving
its political character and defending its sovereignty and national
interests. In its regional policy Turkey is skilfully deploying its
many identities - Muslim democracy, secular Muslim republic, European
Union candidate country, United States strategic partner - but also
acting as an independent-minded power able and willing to defend a
position of its own.
The dilemmas of state-building
The Russia-Georgia war demonstrated that the key to Europe's security
is to grasp the logics of the complex and diverse processes of
state-building, which simultaneously are taking place all over
Eurasia.
Europe in and since the 1990s has been in this
context reminiscent of Africa in the 1960s. The continent has become
the biggest state-construction site in the world. In the same period,
Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus struggled to build sovereign nation-states; the European Union
tried to build its own postmodern empire; Russia is still in the
process of constructing the first non-imperial state in its history.
All these state-building exercises are highly risky, and setbacks are
unavoidable. They have different logics and a series of unintended
consequences.
What happened in the 2000s, almost everywhere
in the region, is that the elites in the post-Soviet republics shifted
from Moscow's reluctant clients or passionate opponents to Tito-minded
pragmatists who cleverly use the competitive tensions between Russia
and the west to entrench their own state-building projects and maximise
their own power.
The diverse logics of these state projects
under construction gave birth to three different views on sovereignty.
First, the smaller post-Soviet republics tend to view sovereignty in
legal terms; they emphasise the equality of citizens-nations in the
global society. Second, Russia tends to view sovereignty not as a legal
fiction but as problem of capacity; this assumes military power, the
national economy and cultural identity (implying that "great powers"
alone are eligible for sovereignty). Third, the European Union views
sovereignty as "a seat at the table", a political arrival into an
established community of shared interest. The contrasts in these
notions of sovereignty are a key to understanding many of the
misperceptions in the politics of the Eurasian region.
These
logics are in turn embodied in the threefold contradictions that lie at
the heart of current European instability: a proliferation of weak and
dysfunctional states; the fact that Russia views control of the region
as a precondition for its security; the fact that the elites in the
post-Soviet states see anti-Russian sentiments and policies as the
major resource for their state-building projects.
The sources of Russia's revisionism
Russia's unashamed affirmation as a revisionist power is the most
important outcome of the August 2008 war. Russia's revisionism is a
reality but it is not the embodiment of Moscow's resurgence and
imperial ambition. The Kremlin's revisionism is the outcome of Moscow's
growing insecurity. It is at exactly the point when the Kremlin sought
to reclaim Moscow's global role that Russia discovered its
vulnerability (see "Russia and the Georgia war: the great-power trap", 19 August 2009).
The Russia of Vladimir Putin fears at the same time territorial
disintegration and the loss of global relevance. Both of these fears
are legitimate. The problem is that Russia is unwilling or unable to
express them in its dialogue with the west because in the Kremlin's
view a discourse of fear can be interpreted as a sign of weakness. The
ultimate objective
of the Kremlin's current foreign policy is that if it cannot be strong,
Russia should not look weak. In Vladimir Putin's words: "Russia will
either be a great power or it will not be at all".
Three sources of Russia's insecurity are of fundamental importance.
First, Putin's Russia, like Stalin's Soviet Union and imperial
Russia, is obsessed with a search for defensible borders. The huge
nuclear arsenal gave Russia the status of a great power, but it did not
give it security.
Second, insecurity is also a defining
characteristic of the Putin generation and is essential to
understanding the Kremlin's actions. Putin's generation is shaped by
the collapse
of the Soviet Union. There is an almost mystical sense of insecurity
injected into the current Russia's elite that saw the collapse of a
world "that was forever until it was not anymore." Putin's elite is
almost irrational in its search for absolute security.
Third, Moscow is deeply suspicious of the nature of the current world
order based on growing economic and political interdependency. It is
this profound sense of insecurity - shared both by the society and the
elites - that shapes Russia's worldview.
The sources of EU ambiguity
The European Union's problem is not insecurity but ambiguity: ambiguity
about its own role in the world and about the future of the model it
represents. Now, when the EU as the result
of the Russia-Georgia war has become a Caucasian power, it is vital to
clarify the EU's dilemmas. The union is torn between the imperative to
stay open for new members (this is the essence of its soft power);
political pressure to define the "final borders of Europe"; and closing
the door (this is the will of the majority of its citizens). The EU is
caught in a further historical twist, where the success of its
enlargement meets its publics' reluctance to recognise and celebrate
this success.
The Greek diplomat and policy-analyst Alex Rondos
brilliantly captured the EU's dilemma in observing that the difference
between America and Europe is the difference between the missionary
who travels around the world converting people to his faith and the nun
who wants to bring the world into her monastery. America will not be
America without its missionary zeal, but the EU will lose its identity when it closes the doors of the monastery to strangers.
The other source of the EU's ambiguity is the changing nature of the
geopolitical context. Despite the fact that in recent years Europe was
one of the sharpest critics of America's unipolar world, in reality
America's world was quite hospitable to the European project and the EU
was the major beneficiary of America's unipolarity. It was due to
America's global hegemony that the EU emerged onto the world stage as a
superpower. It was America's security umbrella that allowed EU to
become a global power without the need to become a real military power.
Now all this is going to change. The world as we knew it has vanished. American hegemony is over and Europe is going to face
a new and less hospitable world. In the new post-American world, the
international stage will be dominated most probably by
19th-century-minded traditional powers that fundamentally differ in
their assumptions from the Brussels consensus. The return of a
19th-century view of the world makes the EU a reluctant global player
and makes its ambiguity about the world and its own global role even
more dramatic.
After the funerals
In assessing the consequences of the Russia-Georgia war the real question is: does the post-August 2008 world
giving us a better chance for negotiating a legitimate and just
European order, or is it making such a order even less likely?
Two answers are possible: the desperately pessimistic or the moderately optimistic.
Pessimists will claim that by turning the Russia-Georgia war into a
non-event the west has encouraged the Kremlin to repeat its "success"
in other parts of the post-Soviet space - thus making European order an
illusion.
Optimists tend to believe that the Russia-Georgia
war marks the simultaneous failure of two projects: Russia's for
reviving the sphere-of-influence politics in Europe, and the west's for
constructing Europe without Russia.
If the pessimists are
right, these are the early stages of a long night. If the optimists are
correct, the death of these two projects means that now is a proper
time to start thinking about the gestation of a third.
This article is published by , and openDemocracy.net under a Creative Commons licence.
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