Abstract
A new tension in the relationship between Russia and its western neighbours, particularly Latvia, has emerged since countries in the former Russian sphere of influence were brought into the EU and NATO. The EU should make use of the new Member States' knowledge of Russia acquired during their forced coexistence, in order to promote the emergence of effective cooperation with Moscow. The author argues that a rapid reduction of Russia's labour force, corresponding to its demographic decline, will advance Russia's political ambitions to return to the politics of power that existed in the nineteenth century. Russia will not stop trying to interfere in regional politics and will find new tools, such as energy, to do so. Russia's inability to offer an honest evaluation of history, along with its resurgence as an authoritarian state and as a military and energy superpower, does not reveal Russia as a friend of a united Europe.
Russia has always been an important country for Europeans, but since the latest enlargement of the EU, relations between it and Russia have taken on several new dimensions. This is not only because the EU's border with Russia is now much longer than it used to be, but also because most of the new EU Member States have had a special history of relations with Russia, created by long-lasting and often forced coexistence. The knowledge that was acquired during that history is of great advantage, and it must be put to maximum use on behalf of the entire EU. This expertise is based not just on theory but also on practical knowledge which, if skilfully used, can promote the emergence of genuine and effective cooperation with Moscow.
At the same time, when we Europeans shape relations with Russia, we must not forget that in truth there are two sides to Russia. There is the official Russia, represented by the authoritarian regime of the governing elite, and there is the Russia that fights for democracy and the rule of law, in which human rights and freedom of expression are respected. During the Soviet era, European politicians were aware of this, and they offered moral support to the Soviet Union's prisoners of conscience while working pragmatically with Brezhnev or Andropov. Today, Russia's democrats and human rights activists need international support just as much as they did during the last decades of the Soviet empire, because they are battling over Russia's future. There are many human rights activists, including Anna Politkovskaya, who have paid the ultimate price for their love of their fatherland—they have paid with their lives.
I believe that when we think about Russia's place and role in European and global politics, insufficient attention is devoted to Russia's dramatic demographic situation. Since 1992, the size of Russia's population has declined by 12.3 million people, although to a certain extent the problem is made less severe by the fact that 5.7 million people have immigrated into the country ([2], 18). The future will be even more dramatic. It is possible that by 2025, the population of Russia may drop to just 128 million. The demographic emergency, indeed, is the most acute problem that faces Russia today.
This rapid reduction in the labour force will have an enormous effect on Russia's economy, but the psychological dimensions of the demographic collapse are no less important. Both the governing elite and the Russian people feel a sense of endangerment. True, Russia has always seen itself as a special country whose traditions differ from those of European democracies. This identity as a unique and chosen country, however, magnifies Russia's existing tendencies of isolationism during this period of demographic decline. It seems Russia no longer believes in international instruments, and its foreign policy ambitions have grown greater and greater. Europe and the rest of the world must count on the prospect of Russia's foreign policy relying increasingly on the use of force. Russia appears to be testing the international community on how far it can go in the demonstration of force. Contrary to the spirit of international cooperation that marks the twenty-first century, Russia is increasingly returning to the politics of power that existed in the nineteenth century.
This is clearly seen in Russia's foreign policy rhetoric, which is based on the idea of Russia standing alone and against everyone else. Russia has used energy resources to place political pressure on countries such as Ukraine or Georgia, which Moscow considers to be in its own sphere of influence. The most vivid and brutal demonstration of force by Russia was its aggression against Georgia, which was in gross violation of international law. Despite international pressure Russia is still occupying Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The degradation of Russia's demographic situation may keep it from implementing its ambitious programme of modernisation and economic diversification—a programme intended to ensure that by 2020 Russia has one of the world's leading knowledge-based economies. Russia's government understands that the country's economic structure does not satisfy the needs of a modern and sustainable state. That is why, in 2008, it approved the Concept of the Long-term Socioeconomic Development. Besides the demographic decline, however, obstacles against modernisation also include the contradiction between the government's centralised political control and its political intervention in the economy. A state-centred approach may thwart diversification. It is based on the idea that state-controlled economic enterprises are the best tools for promoting development and modernisation. It also assumes that the whole economic process must be directed from the top down. This reduces developmental potential, because creativity and initiative are prerequisites of innovation and relevant research. Another key prerequisite is a diversity of opinions; the absence of such diversity has been the greatest weakness in the autocratic Putin regime, which is known as ‘controlled democracy’. The ambitions of the Russian elite in regard to economic diversification are poorly served by the government's policies. The emphasis on domestic innovation with limited foreign involvement, the top-down management of the economy and the preservation of barriers against competition—all indicate that the rapid development of a knowledge-based economy is most unlikely.
This year Europe is celebrating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we commemorate this event, we cannot help but highlight the great advances that have occurred in the Member States which were once victims of totalitarian Communist regimes. For Latvia, as for other captive nations, the collapse of the Iron Curtain brought with it a long-awaited reunification with Europe. It marked the end of an occupation and the reestablishment of free and independent nation states. Today we are proud members of the EU and NATO.
Early assumptions that Russia would simply accept the fact that our Central and Eastern European states were no longer within its sphere of influence and that it would stop trying to interfere in our regional politics were erroneous. Moscow still wants to have a recognised zone of special Russian interests and influence. It tries to exert pressure on our states and to interfere in new ways, using energy and other weapons of influence. Russia has sought to marginalise our countries within NATO and the EU by going over our heads. It uses both overt and covert means of pressure ranging from energy blockades to politically motivated investments, along with bribery and media manipulation, in order to advance its interests and to challenge the transatlantic orientation chosen by Central and Eastern Europe.
The people of Latvia were most upset about Russia's invasion of Georgia. Politicians and security specialists urged NATO to speed up the development of defence plans for Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. A solidarity clause could guarantee the security of NATO Member States only if there were specific defence plans, systematic training of troops and the presence of NATO in each Member State. There are still no defence plans for the Baltic states, and our countries are increasingly uncertain whether NATO will come to our rescue if a crisis erupts in our relations with Russia. Now that the US President Obama has decided not to place missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, the issue of NATO's commitment has become even more urgent. This has been particularly true since the military training manoeuvres of Russia and Belarus, which were based on a scenario of invading the Baltic states. An announcement from the Russian Defence Ministry spoke of some 12,500 troops, up to 40 aeroplanes and some 200 military transport units. The fact that this training was more extensive than that which took place on Georgia's frontier shortly before the invasion of that country means that NATO leaders must focus particular attention on this situation, especially because the world's serious economic crisis has offered Russia's leaders further pretexts to achieve their foreign policy ambitions.
At a time when the use of force is a growing element in Russian foreign policy, it is important to make sure that the involvement of the United States in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states does not diminish. We Latvians welcome the decision by the United States to reset its relationship with Russia. Of all the new Member States of the EU, we live closest to Russia, and no one is more interested in a better relationship between Moscow and the West than we are. At the same time, however, Latvia joins with other countries in the region in expecting the United States and the major powers of Europe, in their dialogue with Russia, to take into account the interests of Eastern European countries as well as the geopolitical fragility of the region. The ghost of Yalta has not disappeared from Eastern European minds. It will take generations to overcome this trauma, and that is why countries in the region are worried about the declining US involvement and commitment in the region. The fear that Eastern Europe may no longer be one of America's foreign policy priorities was expressed by 23 distinguished Eastern European politicians and opinion leaders in a letter to Obama in which we called on the US President to understand that ‘the US should reaffirm its vocation as a European power and make clear that it plans to stay fully engaged on the continent even while it faces the pressing challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the wider Middle East and Asia’ [1].
Energy issues play an important role in the relationship between Russia and Europe. One of the greatest challenges for the EU is to come up with an agreement on an integrative and effective common energy policy. Since the gas crisis in January 2006, when the EU came to understand that a common energy policy is strategically necessary, Member States have started to work on such a policy. Unfortunately, the results have not been impressive because too many Member States wish to maintain national control over the energy sector. Notwithstanding the effort to agree on more transparency, giant energy companies are continuing to strike separate bilateral deals with Gazprom without notifying EU authorities. Europe's continuing vulnerability was evident during the gas crisis of January 2009. Even this experience, however, did not increase the sense of urgency among some EU Member States for a common energy policy.
Meanwhile, Russia sees the emergence of a common EU energy policy as a major concern. It is very actively applying the ‘divide and conquer’ method, establishing privileged bilateral relations with the EU's largest countries. The construction of Nord Stream and South Stream gas pipelines are about to begin. This is a major strategic achievement for Russia, because it will link Russia and its Western European partners directly, without the involvement of Russia's closest neighbours. Until now, Russia has been able to afford only short-term embargoes on deliveries, because Western Europe and Eastern Europe receive gas via a single pipeline. When deliveries to neighbouring countries are shut off, that also means a shutoff of deliveries to Western European countries—which seriously complicates Russian foreign policy. The new pipelines may resolve the problem of delivering gas to Western Europe, but they are a bitter blow to the development of EU's common energy policy: there is now less reason to hurry it along. The Baltic states and Poland are particularly upset about the way in which the agreement on the Nord Stream pipeline was reached. Germany and Russia concluded this major agreement without consulting with neighbours and allies in the region. No matter what Nord Stream supporters say about the commercial nature of the transaction, the fact is that this gas pipeline evokes memories of old divisions in Europe. It is no accident that several Eastern European politicians have compared this to a new version of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided Europe into the spheres of influence of two major powers. The nature of the EU today is such that no such dirty deal should be possible, but we must remember that the exclusion of Eastern Europe from the overall EU energy delivery structure weakens both the region and EU unity.
One of Latvia's fundamental goals ever since the restoration of its independence has been a reconciliation with its brutal history. A dramatic shift, however, has occurred in the way in which Russia interprets history since the collapse of the USSR. This blocks any chance of honest reconciliation. The Soviet principle of glasnost brought about access to information, an open dialogue about the atrocities of totalitarian Communism and, in 1989, a denunciation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act by the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies. Today, by contrast, Russia is content to glorify its totalitarian past for domestic and international gains.
History is being reinterpreted in Russia. Teachers' manuals and history books describe Stalin as an effective manager whose campaign of terror was a rational way of modernising the Soviet Union. This reinterpreted history is also being used as an obstacle to freedom of speech. Pending legislation in the Russian parliament would criminalise any denial or reinterpretation of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. Perhaps most dramatic for the Baltic states was Vladimir Putin's assertion in his 2005 state of the nation address that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’. Latvia has long since been working towards reconciliation with the Russian Federation, but we cannot permit the dismissal of certain facts of history. We cannot allow the fate of the millions of people who died at the hand of totalitarian Communist regimes to simply be forgotten or ignored.
Such mutilation of history impedes honest reconciliation among nations, and in Latvia it also has an adverse impact on the domestic cohesion of the nation. Many Latvians make extensive use of the Russian news media, and they find themselves believing in a historical fallacy. The official Russian version of Soviet history promoted in Latvia feeds a divergent set of views and a divided society. Latvia has tried hard to create a united society, ensuring state funding for minority schools, for instance. Despite this, Russian propaganda continues to hinder the integration of certain national values. The Russian Federation is fully aware of this domestic gap in Latvia, and it has been using both propaganda and a government-financed ‘compatriot programme’ to exploit that division for its own political needs.
During the last decade, reconciliation and repentance have been important phenomena in international relations. Increasingly, nations and peoples are looking at their past and reassessing actions that were once justified on the basis of a raison d'état. There are various ways of making peace with history and neighbours. Germany's acknowledgement of guilt vis-à-vis the crimes of Nazism helped to turn it into one of Europe's most democratic countries. Other nations have needed much more time to break the post-war silence. It was only in 1995 that Jacques Chirac admitted to the complicity of the French in allowing the Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust in that country. Jacques Chirac was followed by Bill Clinton, who expressed regret for slavery in the United States. Tony Blair decided that the time had come to apologise to the Irish for British colonialism and the terrible famine that struck Ireland in the nineteenth century. Pope John Paul II went further back into history, asking for the forgiveness of Arabs for the Crusades. In Latvia, too, there has been an active process of regaining and evaluating the country's history.
Reconciliation and repentance do more than simply improve international relations. They also help states and nations rid themselves of the spectres of the past and become reborn for the future. Against this background, the inability of the Russian elite to offer an honest evaluation of the role of Communism and Bolshevism in the twentieth-century history of Europe, and of Russia itself, is worrying. This is particularly so if we understand that Russia is turning into an authoritarian state in which leaders base the identity of the Russian nation and people on three pillars: the territorial heritage of the tsarist empire, the military might of Stalinism, and its status of an oil and gas superpower.
Russia is not an enemy at the gates, but neither is it a friend of united Europe. We Europeans must continue our difficult journey towards a common voice in speaking to Russia and working together with it.