A lot of people want a New Cold War. After all, the War on Terror is just too confusing and troublesome and, let’s face it, terrifying. Poker-faced Soviet villains had hot side-kicks. Hollywood loved them. And for all of their bluster, they didn’t operate via sleeper cells or strap bombs onto women with mental disabilities just so they could blow up people and puppies. Medvedev’s no Osama, we can take him!
Oh, and backing Kosovo independence with no UN approval is totally not the same thing as backing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. At all. Hey, look over there, it’s a bear with a semi-automatic!
Of course, the Russian Federation’s own, rather special, government, was itching for this confrontation as well. How else to distract the rest of the country from the fact that, for all of Russia’s economic growth, an oil-based economy is not the greatest of ideas? Or the fact that journalists are getting shot in the head and the country’s free press has reached of the mythical Yeti, occasionally glimpsed, but mostly regarded as a figment of our collective imagination?
Between the two sides, it’s hard to decide which players are more hilarious. Is it Condoleeza “Of course, I didn’t imply fighting in South Ossetia was cool.” Rice? Is it Vladimir “Totally not Russia’s President anymore. Totally.” Putin?
Perhaps most hilarious of all are the regular people, the ones complaining loudly that the MI5 isn’t doing enough to stop visiting Russian businessmen from getting all the good restaurant tables, or else sending me e-mails which claim the cream of British society uses finely dusted Russian babies to powder their aristocratic noses.
Regular people are the true heroes when it comes to sustaining and, dare I say it? Glamourizing the entire conflict. Or, at the very least, they make it slightly less boring than all of the rest of the unchangeable news. These fine people may not possess dazzling intellects, hell, their entire knowledge of current affairs may be incidental to their interest in the latest Page 3 Girl (or the local equivalent thereof), but this never quite stops them from shutting up, and their Rocky-like dedication and persistence surely leaves something to be admired.
The origins of both Russophobia and the xenophobic currents in Russian thought were well-illustrated by Jacques Barzun who, in his famous From Dawn To Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life viciously tore into Czar Peter the Great and remarked, in passing, that Russians are essentially as repulsive to gentle, civilized Europeans as they were when Peter visited Europe (for all the praise heaped on that book, one still may have noticed the Russophobia in those comments).
Yet Barzun was not alone in this – Russians tear into Peter the Great as well, because of his interest in Europe, his desire to change Russia, his creation of utterly modern and, in many ways, foreign St. Petersburg. It is religious fundamentalists in particular who have many issues with Peter and how he changed the course of Russian history. I don’t find most of these people particularly pleasant but, at the very least, they represent a diversity of thought that isn’t commonly attributed to Russia.
The internal conflict over the definition of Peter the Great’s actions and reforms mirrors the greater ambivalence of Russia’s relationship with the West. This relationship is like a very strange affair between two highly unstable people who can’t be together but don’t really exist apart from each other, as if the rejection of the other helps define to them who they really are, though the definitions themselves are hopelessly self-delusional at best. Maybe they have tattoos of each other’s names on unmentionable body parts, but if they do, they’re not telling.
When the blow-up happened between Russia and Georgia, it felt as though a threshold had been crossed. Yet once you begin to consider history, you have to wonder whether the threshold is there at all.
Three quick comments:
First comment: A book by Chalmers Johnson, entitled “Sorrows of Empire,” published sometime between 2003 and 2005, details how the U.S. has been trying to get control of global energy sources since the fall of the USSR. Newly-independent Kosovo lies on the planned oil pipeline from the Black Sea to a port in Albania, which explains American support for Albania and for Kosovar independence. Chalmers Johnson is a former CIA agent and is well informed about American neoconservatives’ plans for gaining control of energy sources.
Second comment: In August 2008, during the Georgia-South Ossetia conflict, some website, either the BBC or Russia Today, cited a Russian foreign ministry (I think?) commentator who remarked that U.S. involvement in the independence of Kosovo resembled the maneuvering by the European great powers in the Balkans between 1900 and 1914 which led to World War I.
I think there’s some truth in that Russian comment. The European powers’ conflicts while landgrabbing the shrinking Ottoman jurisdiction in Europe from 1878 to 1913 does indeed foreshadow the U.S./EU/NATO involvement in the Balkans and the Caucasus following the collapse of Soviet hegemony in those regions. In fact, the Ottoman military collapse and territorial losses in Africa and the Balkans between 1878 and 1913, with the accompanying rise of Balkan, Arab, and Turkish nationalism,
really does foreshadow the military/territorial collapse of the USSR and the subsequent resurgence of Balkan and Caucasan (Caucasian?) ethnic/national conflicts. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire coincided with the growth in importance of petroleum in Western economies, and the Great Game between Russia and Britain (and Germany!) came to include competition for petroleum sources in the Persian Gulf and in the Caucasus, which is now also going on after the collapse of the USSR. The competition for territory and petroleum sources, accompanied by a series of military alliances from 1871 to 1914 designed to contain Germany and Austria, led to World War I. Something similar is happening in 2008, with the attempted expansion of the EU and NATO into the Balkans, Ukraine, and Caucasus.
Third comment: American voters have five-minute memories when remembering the reaction of the U.S. government to the collapse of the USSR. President George H. W. Bush (Bush Senior) recognized that the potential territorial breakup of the USSR would dangerously complicate relations between Russia and the West, so Bush Senior promised Gorbachev that America would not expand NATO beyond its then-current (1991) membership, and Bush Senior also initially opposed the independence of Ukraine and the breakup of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. Starting in 1992, Bill Clinton ignored the dangers inherent in expanding NATO and proceeded to expand NATO and to initiate NATO and U.S. military involvement in the Balkans. Finally, under George W. Bush (Bush Junior), American neoconservatives initiated the Project for a New American Century and the EU proceeded to expand its membership to include former Soviet bloc countries. When the above Russian commentator pointed out that this is the kind of activity by the West that could lead to another world war, Americans need to listen. Hopefully, the next U.S. President will be more historically aware than Clinton and GWB.