Russia

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s Eastern Europe correspondent, raises a provocative point in his recent article for Standpoint Magazine.

It is certainly true that the worst aspects of the Russian system are often a concentrated form of our own worst shortcomings. Indeed, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed during the last Cold War. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.

So, after making such a nuanced, astute observation, what does Lucas go on to conclude? That Russia’s experience reveals some inherent, underlying flaw within modern society? That the West must seriously re-examine its own moral-philosophical underpinnings?

Nah!

How about: “just because we have many flaws does not mean that we are always wrong, or that somewhere else can’t be worse”.

That’s right! We might be greedy, corrupt and decadent, but there’s no case for moral equivalence with Russia, because they’re worse!!

Lucas brings up two cases in which the West has been charged with hypocrisy. Critics assert a double standard in the West’s push to for Kosovan statehood and its refusal to recognize the pro-Russian break-away regions of Transdniester and Abkhazia. Lucas recognises that this is one factor leading to the erosion of the West’s moral authority. So does he suggest a more consistent approach? A new politics of neutrality that could eventually transcend the east-west divide?

Erm, not quite:

“(the EU) is incomparably better than the thuggishness and mischief-making that are the hallmark of Kremlin policy in its former empire. We do not want Transdniester to become independent, because it will be like Russia. We do want Kosovo to be independent, because it will eventually be like us. Again, that is a blunt message, but one better spoken proudly than left unsaid.

Bottom line: We may be greedy, imperialistic, corrupt and undemocratic, but by jingo, our greed, imperialism, corruption and authoritarianism are still morally superior to Russia’s! Just because!!

Of course, there is a more reflective and reasonable, if alarming, lesson to be drawn from all this.

In his groundbreaking work Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman concluded that, far from being an irrational aberration, an “interruption in the normal flow of history”, or a “momentary madness among sanity”, the holocaust may in fact have been an inevitable outcome of an advanced, technological society in which politics had become decoupled from social controls.

“The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture”, he writes.

Likewise, the traits that Lucas and others criticise in modern Russia are not some kind of gross aberrations from Western norms: instead, they lay bare the problems and contradictions of Western society, civilization and culture.

Over the last 17 years, Russian society has undergone a condensed and accelerated version of the West’s slower, less extreme but equally steady drift towards greater intrusion of the market into politics and society, concentration of power and a weakening of civil society and democratic participation in politics.

Thus, far from providing smug confirmations of Western superiority, the excesses that Lucas sees and justly condemns in today’s Russia might just be warnings from our own future.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under democracy, Russia-US Relations, Russia-UK Relations, Cold War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.