A SOVEREIGNTY FULL OF HOLES
On 28 July 2017, Russia suffered a diplomatic embarrassment. The Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin – who has been put under sanctions by both the USA and the EU – flew to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, and planned to go on from there to the region of Transnistria, which no country has recognized as a separate state. But the Romanian authorities would not allow him to fly over their territory; and the aeroplane with the Deputy Prime Minster on board returned to Minsk.
Of itself, this incident is not worthy of attention. Dmitry Rogozin is a comical figure, one moment suggesting building military bases on the Moon, the next, underwater cities in the Arctic; but this latest incident is an example of the wider problem facing modern Russia – it is rapidly losing its sovereignty in foreign policy. How can you describe it otherwise, when the government’s Deputy Prime Minister cannot fulfil his mission in a country in the near abroad because the route goes either through Romania (which is taking part in the sanctions against Russia) or through Ukraine (with whom Russia is at war)?
Now to a far more serious problem: the scandal involving turbines made by Siemens, which were illegally sent to Crimea in contravention of European sanctions. The export to the peninsula of technology and equipment had been banned more than a year earlier, after the EU condemned the occupation of Crimea. What was more, Vladimir Putin had given the company’s senior management his assurances that their goods would not be used in Crimea. Siemens filed a lawsuit with a demand to seize the four turbines, which were supposed to provide all the electricity to the peninsula. As a result, because of the European sanctions and Russia’s clumsy attempt to circumvent them, Russia was unable to provide electricity to a part of its strategic territory; in other words, Russia’s energy sovereignty was undermined.
Finally, the packet of American sanctions signed by Donald Trump on 2 August 2017. The full scale and effect of these sanctions has yet to be seen (including losing one third of exports of Russian gas to Europe); but what can be said is that they have significantly restricted Russia’s foreign policy and foreign trade capabilities. If we assess the overall situation over the past three years, Russia’s room for manoeuvre has been severely restricted and it has suffered political and reputational damage. It is impossible not to see that our country is steadily losing its sovereignty.
One of the recognized theoreticians on sovereignty in political science is the American, Stephen Krasner. In his textbook work from 1999, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (which is a clear reference to Max Weber’s definition of the state as ‘organized violence’), he writes that the word ‘sovereignty’ has four meanings: international legal sovereignty (the judicial recognition of a state within its own borders); Westphalian sovereignty (the exclusion of foreign interference on the authorities of a state); domestic sovereignty (the ability of the authorities to exercise control within their own borders); and interdependent sovereignty (the ability to conduct policy regarding transborder flows of information, people, ideas, goods and threats).[42] One glance at the policy of Putin’s Russia makes it clear that, for its sins, it can partially meet only these first two demands of sovereignty: the country is recognized by the United Nations (although without Crimea); and ‘foreign agents’ have been driven out of internal policy. At the same time, the ability of the authorities to exercise control over processes taking place within the country and, what’s more, to play a role in globalization have dramatically weakened.
The problem for the Russian political class is that it lives exclusively in the past. It sees international policy wistfully within the framework of some sort of ‘Yalta Agreement’, or even ‘the Congress of Vienna’; and internal policy in an even more ancient way – within the framework of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, which brought an end to the Thirty Years’ War, and for the first time recognized the state as sovereign within its own borders. The Russian elite does not want to acknowledge that ‘Westphalia’ ended long ago. States no longer control global flows; they share their authority with transnational organizations. It is no wonder that Krasner calls absolute sovereignty ‘hypocrisy’ and compares it to a Swiss cheese: full of holes.
If we take even the most basic meaning of the word ‘sovereignty’ from any political dictionary, it means the independence of the state in domestic and foreign policy. But what sort of independence can we talk about when Russia is dependent on Siemens to provide electricity to Crimea; on Romania for the Deputy Prime Minister to fly over Moldova; on America for all of its foreign policy; and on Ukraine for its domestic agenda? In actual fact, Russia’s foreign policy is nothing more than an agonizing and deep dialogue (with overtones of Freud or Dostoevsky) with America about spheres of influence, great power status and ambitions. And it is a dialogue that turns into a monologue about wounded pride. The obsession of the Russian authorities with the US elections; the childishly naive battles with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton; the vaudeville romance with Donald Trump; the attempts to interfere like an awkward bear in the American elections: these are all signs of the hopeless, pathological and psychological dependence of Moscow on Washington.
In the same way, Russia is dependent on a fragment of its empire, which has broken away: Ukraine. Russia has built its whole external and internal agenda on the demonizing of the Ukrainian Maidan, filling the air time on television and radio with endless talk shows about Ukraine, turning the Ukrainian agenda into an internal Russian one in such a way that, if Ukraine suddenly disappeared, Russia would be left hanging in the air and would crash to the ground. All this indicates that Russia simply does not have its own agenda or its own policy. These are just sporadic reactions to external irritating factors, an inability and a lack of desire to accept the world as it is and acknowledge its own dependence on this fact.
To understand its situation better, the Kremlin should look at those who have gone even further down the road of ‘sovereignty’: Iran, for example, or, even better, North Korea. Boasting about its absolute independence, North Korea finds itself in a state of total vulnerability. It lives under sanctions and under the permanent threat of a nuclear strike. The only way it can survive is by raising the stakes in a deadly game of poker; its sovereignty hangs by the narrow thread of nuclear bluff and mutual threats.
The irony of the situation is that at the root of Russia’s problems today lies this very striving for sovereignty that became the basis for Putin’s conservative about-turn. First, there was the YUKOS affair in 2003: the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the state’s capture of the largest oil company. Then there was the Beslan tragedy in 2004, when Chechen fighters seized a school and, thanks to the incompetence of the operation to free the hostages, more than three hundred children died. Putin suddenly blamed this terrorist act on the West, accusing them of trying to destroy Russia. Next there was Putin’s famous speech in Munich in 2007, in which he effectively declared a new cold war; then the war with Georgia in 2008; and after that came Crimea, the Donbass, the battle with separatism and ‘foreign agents’ in Russia, the destruction of Western sanctioned goods and the construction of a sovereign Internet. But the deeper Russia dug itself into the mud of an imagined Westphalian sovereignty, the more it lost its actual sovereignty, the independence of its foreign policy, control over its economy and society and the ability to adapt to globalization.
The key mistake in all of this was the annexation of Crimea (just like the saying: ‘This is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake’). It seemed as if Russia was strengthening its territorial sovereignty, beginning to gather in its lands; but by this action it radically blew up the nation’s independence. Four years on it is clear that Russia has lost its technological sovereignty (ask the oil men who cannot drill on the sovereign Arctic Shelf without Western technology); its sovereignty in foreign policy (by going over to a regime of confrontation with the West, every subsequent step taken by Russia narrowed down its room for manoeuvre until it hit the wall of sanctions); and even its internal sovereignty. As Krasner writes, rulers often confuse authority with control; and in Russia, while there has been a formal strengthening of the vertical of power, actual control over the economic and social situation grows weaker by the day. On closer inspection, one of the main achievements of Putin’s rule, which the propaganda constantly trumpets – the strengthening of sovereignty – is a myth.
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Stephen D. Krasner,