Ideology & Politics
John Laughland, RIA Novosti
President Dmitri Medvedev’s speech to the Evian political forum on 8 Oct has been greeted with near-total silence by the European commentariat. In it, he proposed the creation of a pan-European security structure to include the present Euro-Atlantic organisation, i.e. NATO. The reason for the lack of much reaction might be that people’s minds have been concentrated on the world financial crisis. It is also possible that the silence is better explained by the fact that Western politicians and commentators simply do not know what to say. On one level, the speech can be seen in the context of a long historical continuity in Russian foreign policy, renewing as it does Moscow’s decades-old desire for institutional inclusion into world affairs, from Brezhnev’s signature of the Helsinki accords in 1975 to Gorbachev’s call for a “Common European Home” throughout the 1980s. Russia has been an enthusiastic member of the United Nations ever since it was created in 1945, and so it was natural that Medvedev should call for that institution to be respected and strengthened. At a deeper level, however, the speech expressed a frustration with Western policy which is particularly acute at the moment, and for well-known reasons. It contained an excellent one-liner, “Sovietology, like paranoia, is a dangerous disease” — Western policy-making towards Russia is indeed severely infected by both — but also a reference to something whose importance even the Russian president himself may perhaps under-estimate. Medvedev expressed regret that an earlier attempt to “de-ideologise international relations” had been missed. He was referring to the way in which the USA spurned Russia’s offer to help in the war on terror. He offered a new way of achieving the same result with his proposal for a new European security pact based on the mutual respect of state’s rights.
Medvedev’s problem is that de-ideologising international relations is exactly what most Western politicians are absolutely determined to avoid. Of course American foreign policy is dominated by ideology, that of neo-conservatism. It is a strange hybrid of militaristic nationalism, old-fashioned Low Church millennarianism, with a good dose of neo-Trotskyite dreaming about global democratic revolution. In fact, this is exactly why US foreign policy is so dangerous: ideology destroys politics, because it encourages leaders to think that they are the bearers of a universal idea, not representatives of a state with finite and special interests. The latter view presupposes that other states have legitimate interests too, which can be balanced out in the give and take of international negotiation. By contrast, universal ideas brook no dissent, and states which do not share them are regarded not just as enemies to be defeated, but even as a threat to humanity itself, who must be comprehensively destroyed. However, the same is also true of those European leaders whom Medvedev was evidently trying to woo. The very existence of the European Union is based on ideology — on the view that the harshness of “old politics” can be overcome with a new, softer “European ideology”, and that narrow national interests can be overcome and transfigured into universal ones within the post-modern, post-national and unpolitical Euro-structure. The one thing that is guaranteed to make any Euro-politician quake with hostility and fear is any hint at the notion of the balance of power: power is a dirty word in Europe, because European leaders, like Americans, hypocritically think of themselves as pursuing ideology, not politics.
The mindset of Russian political leaders could not be more different. If the Communist experience taught the men in Moscow one thing, it is that ideology is fatal for both domestic politics and international relations. They know that the ideologies of socialism and the international class struggle brought Russia to her knees. In 2007, Vladimir Putin specifically attacked Lenin for destroying Russia by putting the ideology of world revolution first. Post-Soviet Russian leaders have learned that politics is better than ideology — much better. Because the faith of European and American politicians in ideology remains unshakeable, they retain a hatred for politics in the true sense of the term. Hence their hatred of Russia. Just as Marx and Engels regarded Christian Russia as a threat to their ideology, so EU officials understand that the Russia of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev behaves politically, not ideologically. Moreover, since Russia is both indisputably a European state, and yet also physically too big and too powerful to be “integrated” (that word which fully expresses the dull suppression of all national difference within a single anonymous euro-technocracy) into either the EU or NATO, EU policy-makers rail against it in frustration; because its very existence threatens their most deeply cherished beliefs about the world. So, when Dmitry Medvedev says he wants international relations to be de-ideologised, he is asking for something which Western policy-makers (especially Europeans) have either never thought about, or against which they react with fury. De-ideologising international relations would mean abandoning the European ideology. It would mean precisely re-introducing politics itself, that delicate art of reconciling what are recognised as legitimate competing national interests. The EU, based as it is on the ideological denial of the very notion of the nation-state (and even of the nation itself), has spent the last fifty years trying to do the opposite. Until Moscow fully understands this strange mindset of European leaders, its attempts to overcome it will be doomed to failure.
Niqnaq 