blogoir

PSPS

2008-08-20 14:40:14

This reads well:

Imagine what modern Europe would look like now if Poland had the political status of Georgia, lying in some sort of political-moral twilight zone with former Soviet interests linked to the KGB having a far freer time to penetrate into that society and play games with Polish assets.

As does this:

NATO membership brings with it unyielding civilian control of the military. Far greater transparency in everything, including budgets and procurement. No more GRU-style military secret police subverting and spying on their own political processes. Reasonable good faith attempts to work together to look back into history to cast full light on possible past abuses (Katyn). No more bombastic obnoxious military rhetoric shaping public life.

Not all this is perfect or implemented overnight or at all. But much of it is. That compounds up over time into a powerful package, with deep policy and moral implications for the way society as a whole is run.

It represents a sense of respecting Limits on Power, the far opposite of what these countries experienced under Soviet rule.

This is why Polish democrats were so keen to get Poland into NATO, in the face of energetic former communist objections. The Poles opted for Democracy against Communism. And good grief, how right they were to do so.

More brilliant insights here.

This analysis explains why Poland and the USA have signed the Missile Defence deal. It is about state of the art military hardware, but (no less importantly) about demonstrating that Poland is not part of Post-Soviet Psychological Space (PSPS). Well done Kaczynski/Tusk.

PSPS is a fascinating phenomenon. It has no trace of the universalist Marxist claims which gave some spurious legitimacy to the USSR's positions in the Cold war. Rather it is all about Russia and Russians, not offering much to non-Russians.

A new doctrine is being articulated by the current Moscow leadership. Namely that Russia reserves the right to intervene as it sees fit to 'defend' its citizens anywhere, but especially in the former Soviet space.

Sounds scary. But is it going to be deliverable in practice?

The self-serving Russian attempt to rewrite the rules of international order in Georgia is starting to look like an embarrassing blunder, as even many Bambi-like European countries who normally would want to keep their heads down are obliged to stare aghast at Russia's self-absorbed violence spilling beyond its borders.

Plus, of course, anti-Americans in European capitals and indeed in the USA are reeling. Russian lunges into the territory of small neighbours really can't be blamed on President Bush or American imperialism. And US leadership with some energetic help from the British government is knocking NATO into a somewhat better position. (Note: US voters still like the idea of US leadership.)

In due course Ukraine will move from Awkward to Very Difficult. A large European country where many people speak Russian and feel Russian, but many more want to turn their backs firmly on Soviet attitudes and practices as championed these days by Moscow. The EU hitherto has tried to avoid being 'confrontational' over Ukraine. That position is unlikely to be tenable in the no-so long term.

Elsewhere in the rather less European parts of the CIS, even the leaders who choose subservience to Moscow over substantive pluralism must be wondering what their future holds. Pretending to taking orders at interminable CIS banquets is one thing - being invaded is another.

The basic problem for the Russian leadership is that by defining Russia's interests in such banal psychological/political terms, they give too many people a reason to want not to be in it.

At least everything is uncharacteristically clear.

Russian Joker

2008-08-19 13:02:15

Foreign Secretary David Miliband spells out the UK position on Georgia:

The Georgian crisis is about more than vital issues of humanitarian need and rule of law over rule of force. It raises a fundamental issue of whether, and if so how, Russia can play a full and legitimate part in a rules-based international political system, exercising its rights but respecting those of others...

... Russian mind games on withdrawal do them no credit...

... International law must be obeyed. This goes to the heart of the question of how Russia comes to terms with its past, and how it sees its future; above all, whether it recognises that the old frontiers of the Soviet Union are now history, and whether Russia sees its future as part of a rules-based international system.

That sort of analysis rests on certain ... psychological assumptions.

One of them is that the reply will not be something like this:

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Do we really look like a country with a plan? We don't have a plan.

The EU has plans, the World Bank has plans. You know what we are, West? We're a dog chasing cars. We wouldn't know what to do if we caught one.

We just do things. We're a wrench in the gears. We hate plans. Yours, theirs, everyone's.

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.

So when I say that what happened to Georgia, your girlfriend, wasn't personal, you know I'm telling the truth.

You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you.

I just did what I do best. I took your Kosovo plan and turned it on itself. Look what I have done to this small country with a few tanks and a couple of bullets.

Nobody panics when the expected people get killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the Western media that tomorrow a gangbanger in Nagorno-Karabakh will get shot or a truckload of soldiers in Chechnya will get blown up, nobody panics.

But when I say one little country will get a small invasion, everyone loses their minds!

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It's fair.

Hmm. Doesn't this sound ... familiar?

Russian Limits

2008-08-18 14:47:27

More on Russia, always a rich seam for foreign policy First Principles.

Thus Max Hastings gives us a striking Russia metaphor:

The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife. They will become willing to play with the west by western rules only if or when they no longer perceive those rules as disadvantaging themselves. Today they cannot compete on the EU's terms, still less those of the US, so they make up their own.

It is unnecessary for the west silently to acquiesce in the Russians' excesses, but it must tread cautiously in the face of their sensitivities.

Maybe the fact that we in the UK tread cautiously in the face of the sensitivities of street kids with knives accounts for this?

Politics With Energy

2008-08-17 13:43:15

A lively piece of US-style political analysis:

Sure, Hillary’s fat and waddly and screechy and gives pantsuits a bad name. Sure, she’s the kind of gal my dad’s generation knew back in college in the Sixties, the one who wore granny dresses and never shaved her legs and slept with the poetry professor and had a “War is Harmful to Children and Other Living Things” poster on her dorm room wall and gave the Black Power salute to the other white kids and worshipped Saul Alinsky and Herbert Marcuse and always argued in class that communism had never really been given a proper try, so why not here and why not now?

But that generation was pretty tough. O.K., they lost Vietnam to a bunch of guys in pajamas but they took to the streets in Hillary’s hometown of Chicago and bloodied the pigs pretty good. They blew up buildings — Bambi’s mentor, Bill Ayers, comes to mind — and even killed some people. Charlie Manson gave the whole movement a bad name and the Rolling Stones didn’t help when that black guy got murdered at Altamont, but you see what I’m driving at: Hillary’s minions know how to party.

More Bad News For Europe?

2008-08-16 17:53:30

As if the EU's ambiguous response to the Georgia crisis was not depressing enough, life is getting tougher on the economic side too in Europe:

The eurozone as a whole shrank by 0.2pc, the first contraction since the launch of the single currency a decade ago. Germany led the slide with a fall of 0.5pc. France and Italy fell 0.3pc. The delayed effects of the strong euro, tight credit, and slowing exports have now kicked in with a vengeance.

Problems for my own British-based budget as we sit in muggy Orlando:

The pound could soon dive to barely more than a dollar and a half while gold prices plunge to $650, experts predicted yesterday amid fresh evidence that the commodity boom is ending and the dollar's resurgence is under way.

But whereas the UK can hope to use its currency as a set of buffers, the Eurozone faces much more searching internal strains:

... the euro is nothing like the dollar. It has no European government, tax, or social security system to back it up. Each member country is sovereign, each fiercely proud, answering to its own ancient rythms.

It lacks the mechanism of "fiscal transfers" to switch money to depressed regions. The Babel of languages keeps workers pinned down in their own country. The escape valve of labour mobility is half-blocked. We are about to find out whether EMU really has the levels of political solidarity of a nation, the kind that holds America's currency union together through storms.

My guess is that political protest will mark the next phase of this drama. Almost half a million people have lost their jobs in Spain alone over the last year. At some point, the feeling of national impotence in the face of monetary rule from Frankfurt will erupt into popular fury. The ECB will swallow its pride and opt for a weak euro policy, or face its own destruction.

Gulp.