Russia's Foreign Policy by Tsygankov Andrei P.;

Author:Tsygankov, Andrei P.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

The New Westernist-Statist Consensus

The new vision rested on firm social support at home. Various media and political forces had long expressed their dissatisfaction with Primakov’s grandiose foreign policy philosophy that had the “integration” of the former Soviet area as its key component. Westernizers were critical of the “integration” strategy for its underestimation of domestic business interests and for continuing what they saw as harmful practices of paying the former republics in exchange for their political loyalty to Russia. Boris Berezovski, a prominent oligarch and a one-time CIS executive secretary, attacked the Primakov-inspired vision for its “antimarket spirit.” Scholars pointed to the pro-integration efforts running in a fundamentally different direction from the real economic interests of most of the former Soviet republics.39 Liberal politicians, such as Grigori Yavlinski, opposed the government’s attempts to entice Ukraine and Belarus into a closer relationship by subsidizing their energy payments and being soft on their debts to Russia. As early as 1994, pro-Western reformers such as Economics Minister Yegor Gaidar and Finance Minister Boris Fedorov resigned, due partly to their opposition to the negotiations over an economic union with Belarus. To Westernizers, the former republics were unreliable partners—too corrupt and conservative to develop economic relationships with Russia.

Some of Primakov’s Statist-oriented supporters, too, began to withdraw their support for the strategy of post-Soviet integration. Driven by nationalist, rather than free-market, considerations, they spoke against what they saw as Russia’s one-sided concessions and unwarranted exploitation of its resources. For instance, Andranik Migranyan, once a prominent critic of Kozyrev’s isolationism and a promoter of Russia’s “Monroe Doctrine” in the former Soviet area, now saw the CIS-centered integration as too costly and argued against Russia’s remaining a leader in such an integration. As he stated in his reevaluation, “During the last several years, it became absolutely clear that all the attempts to integrate the post-Soviet space have led to nothing. The CIS is barely able to function.”40

The new liberal-nationalist consensus was summarized in the document of the influential Council for Foreign and Defense Policy, titled “Strategy for Russia: Agenda for President—2000.” Both Westernizers, such as Deputy Foreign Minister Anatoli Adamishin, and Statists, such as the chairman of the Duma’s Committee on the CIS affairs Konstantin Zatulin, collaborated in writing the final draft of the document. They found Primakov’s vision of a multipolar world to be outdated, expensive, and potentially confrontational. Instead, the authors proposed the concept of “selective engagement,” which they compared with Russia’s nineteenth-century policy of “self-concentration” after its defeat in the war in the Crimea and with China’s policy since Deng Xiaoping. Regarding the former Soviet area, the authors recommended a “considerable revision” of policy, which would involve abandoning the “pseudointegration at Russia’s expense” and “tough defense of our national economic interests.” “We must begin by changing the very concept of integration. It should be built not from above, but from below—on the basis of supporting the integration of various markets of separate goods and services, creating transnational financial-industrial groups … exchanging debts for assets’ ownership. The

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