Health as International Politics: Combating Communicable Diseases in the Baltic Sea Region by Geir Honneland

Author:Geir Honneland [Honneland, Geir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351156660
Google: bJ1ADwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 36984241
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2004-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

‘Not Really Ours *-Distancing Oneself from Stigmatising Problems

A remarkable feature of our interviews was the tendency of the Russian and Baltic project participants to make comments, without being asked, about the origin of the problems addressed by the Task Force. A Russian HIV/AIDS specialist began the presentation of his project by pointing out that HIV came to the Russian Republic of Kalmykia in the late 1980s, when a Soviet sailor returned home from a visit in Angola. Discussing the HIV/AIDS problems in Kaliningrad Oblast with us, another Russian civil servant was at pains to emphasise that the virus had not originated there: ‘it’s actually from Poland’. In Arkhangelsk Oblast, we were informed that the virus was ‘imported’ from the Vologda and St Petersburg areas, so the region itself was originally ‘clean’. Our interviewees in the Baltic countries generally identified Russia as the source of most of the problems addressed by the Task Force. They also said that some of the underlying issues contributing to the spread of communicable diseases had been ‘imported’ to the post-Soviet area from outside. Drug addiction is an obvious example, frequently referred to in our interviews, but prostitution was also placed in the same category of problems by one of our interviewees:

Prostitution is not really a Russian phenomenon. In Russia, we treat our women [well and give them] good food and drinks and flowers, and what happens afterwards… who knows? But we don’t pay them to have sex with us. That’s not how things are done in Russia.

The interesting thing here is not so much whether it is ‘true’ that a problem is imported. It is widely known that HIV did not originate in the Soviet Union, and that social problems like drug use and HIV have flowed into the Baltic states in recent years from the Kaliningrad and St Petersburg areas in Russia. (More people would probably not agree that prostitution is alien to Russian culture.) The interesting thing is that many of the people in Russia and the Baltic states who are involved in Task Force projects want to distance themselves from the problems addressed by Western initiatives of this sort. Not only do Western governments and organisations occasionally ‘ride roughshod over Russia and the Baltics’ (often with simplistic ‘magic formulas’ and little knowledge of Russian and Baltic society, at that), they stigmatise the countries in their references to them as ‘AIDS-ridden’ and ‘overflowing with drugs and prostitution’. The general reaction seems to be something like ‘ok, we do have a problem at the moment, but it is not really something that is intrinsic to our society. We got them when the old borders were opened; they were never really ours’.

Both these and the ‘Cold Peace’ attitudes discussed above have several points in common. When our interviewees ask ‘Why are they so interested in us?’ they are alluding first to the putative interest of Western governments to exploit Russia or damage its competitiveness, second, to the perception in the West of Russia as a country particularly needy of aid.

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