The Sources Of Russian Foreign Policy After The Cold War

Celeste A Wallander, Anne Wildermuth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367295905
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000305609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In this timely and pathbreaking volume, scholars in comparative politics and international relations build upon earlier theoretical work on the interaction of domestic and international systems, applying it innovatively to the study of post-Soviet Russian policy and conduct. Individual chapters focus on regime type, leadership politics, interest group politics, nationalism as ideology, international conflict and threat, and international economic opportunities and constraints. The complex interplay between domestic and international factors is highlighted. Exploring both the origins and the outcomes of Russian policy and behavior, this book provides a telling measure of the direction and significance of political change since 1991.

Chapter 1
The Sources of Russian Conduct: Theories, Frameworks, and Approaches

Celeste A. Wallander

Faced with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the task of understanding and explaining Russian foreign policies, scholars can pursue one of two broad options. The first option—and the focus of most discussion and publication since December 1991—is description and documentation of Russian policy. The second option is explicitly and self-consciously theoretical and is less well represented in recent work. It begins with theoretical constructs rather than substantive policy concerns. Although this is not a purely academic exercise, researchers following this approach are less focused upon the policy itself and more intent on the dynamic processes of policy formation, evolution, and change

The advantage of the first approach lies in its concrete and fine-tuned exploration of the substantive context of Russian policy. Its weakness is twofold: It can become easily dated, and it cannot produce generalizable insights on Russian foreign policy. The weakness of the more theory-based approach is that it is unlikely to be useful as a direct guide to the content of policy. However, if done well, it will provide a more substantial basis for long-term and more general explanation. The contributing authors to this volume adopt a theory-focused approach to Russian foreign policy. They examine seven theoretical models that have been important in the study of Soviet foreign policy. These models focus on the impact of different factors on Russian foreign policy: type of government, ideology, leadership politics, bureaucratic and interest group politics, the European security system, Russia's historic borderlands and "empire," and the international economic system.

Increasing Access, Increasing Dissent: How Theory Guides Interpretation

Unlike researchers during the Soviet period, scholars no longer face the same severe restrictions on access to information about Russian foreign policy. Although Russia's political system is not a democratic one, its combination of greater openness with competing political sources has expanded our access to information enormously. So in Russian foreign policy studies, we know quite a lot. But as yet, it is not clear just how much we understand. To understand as well as to know, we need good theoretical frameworks that can make sense of events and information.¹

Most current disagreement about Russian foreign policy among U.S. scholars and policymakers arises not from varying access to information, which is generally available to any researcher, but on interpretation of events and explanation of the sources of behavior. For example, the influential journal Foreign Affairs has published many articles since 1991 in which authors disagree substantially on what Russia is up to in its foreign relations and on whether the United States should adopt a cooperative, competitive, or even hostile position toward the country.² For the most part, however, the authors agree on the basic facts: that the Yeltsin government is beset by economic and political problems of enormous dimensions and complexity and that Russian foreign policy has become more assertive and confrontational. Different policy prescriptions arise not from attention to different facts but from implicit explanatory models that try to make sense of what the available information means. These questions can be answered only by an understanding of how the Russian government operates, what are its bases of support, the relationship of society and interest groups to Russian political authority, and the relationship of Russian domestic politics to its foreign policy.

Rather than relying on implicit models of Russian foreign policy, it makes sense to think more systematically about alternative explanations and the factors that constitute them. The question is where to begin, especially in the study of a new country and a renewed subject of inquiry. An obvious place is with approaches and theoretical traditions in the study of Soviet foreign policy. These provide a good base for exploring alternative explanations for foreign policy, and they provide a good standard for assessing change and continuity from Soviet to Russian foreign policy. To the extent that models of Soviet foreign policy and behavior were based on distinctively Soviet factors, such as the political structure of the Soviet state or the imperatives of Soviet ideology, Russian foreign policy ought to look quite different.

International relations studies offer two basic approaches to understanding the foreign policies of states: (1) the constraints and opportunities of the international system and (2) the economic, social, and political characteristics of states.³ In practice, explanations of national foreign policies combine both approaches. Adam Ulam's classic history of Soviet foreign policy, Expansion and Coexistence, explains the outcome of the first major event in Soviet foreign policy—the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918—in terms of both the constraints of a hostile international environment and the revolutionary ideals and objectives of the Bolshevik leadership.⁴ In the following section, I offer one framework for organizing explanations for Soviet (and Russian) foreign policy that draws upon both traditions and which is the basis for the seven chapters that follow. The framework includes theories of regime type, the role of ideology in foreign policy, leadership politics, bureaucratic and interest group politics, the external security environment, and the constraints and opportunities of the international economy.

Explanations for Soviet Foreign Policy

Regime Types and Political Institutions

Ιn one of the most influential articles written in the field of Soviet foreign policy studies, George Kennan sought to explain Soviet foreign policy in terms of the totalitarian structure of the Soviet political system and its revolutionary Leninist heritage.⁵ He argued that the Soviet regime lacked internal sources of legitimacy yet made severe political and economic demands upon its citizens that could not be sustained solely by repression. This led Soviet leaders to focus on the revolutionary Leninist ideology that would justify Soviet hardship and legitimate the Communist regime. Therefore, he argued, the repressive and illegitimate political institutions of the Soviet state produced a foreign policy focused upon the external revolutionary socialist mission and the presence of a hostile capitalist international system. This focus in turn produced expansionist Soviet foreign policies. The type of political regime has systematic effects on the content of foreign policy, according to this type of explanation, because the institutions and processes of the political order preclude certain policies and tend to produce others.

Lenin also explained the Soviet Union's hostile relations with the West in terms of regime types. He argued that the falling profits and insufficient domestic demand endemic to capitalist economic systems would not lead to internal collapse, as Marx had concluded, but to imperialism. Access to new sources of raw materials and to new markets in the colonial world could save capitalist interests in the short run, so those interests would use their control of states to seek colonies abroad. Thus, "imperialism" was intrinsic to capitalism, not an aberration. Since capitalist domestic political economic orders must expand on the international scene to survive, they could not tolerate the existence of different political economic orders—particularly socialist orders. From the economic nature of capitalism and its political guise in the form of nation-states, Lenin claimed to explain war, expansionism of the European great powers, and the West's hostility toward socialist countries.⁶

An important problem for a regime-type theory of Soviet foreign policy is that it implies a degree of continuity in Soviet foreign policy from 1917 to 1991 that is not borne out by the historical record. Although some authors have argued that the continuities in Soviet foreign policy and politics are more important than marginal and tactical shifts,⁷ most have focused on the importance of changes over time and have tried to explain them.

Some authors explained change in Soviet foreign policy while retaining a regime-type explanation by arguing that the Soviet domestic political order changed with Stalin's death. The end of political terror, in this view, fundamentally altered the rules of the Soviet political game and changed the system from Kennan's Stalinist totalitarianism to something less repressive and transformative.⁸ Foreign policy would be different because of the departure from Stalinist practices. In particular, the end of political terror meant that the Soviet political elite was more secure, which promoted the development of a competitive political process. Competition meant change in Soviet political processes, with attendant effects on foreign policy.⁹

Other authors argued that the post-Stalinist political order produced a foreign policy of caution and risk aversion. Dennis Ross characterized this post-Stalinist political regime as an oligarchy in which the Soviet elite most valued personal and bureaucratic security. The processes of the post-Stalinist Soviet state favored consensus decisionmaking and placed a premium on elite political coalition maintenance. The result was a foreign policy of caution and risk aversion.¹⁰ So Ross argued that in contrast to the Stalinist system, which required an expansionist foreign policy for regime legitimacy, the requirements of leadership consensus in the partial authoritarian regime produced a policy of cautious opportunism.

Still others agreed that the post-Stalinist political system required consensus within the leadership. But instead of producing caution and risk aversion, the combination of old political institutions and new political processes produced an even more expansionist and predatory foreign policy than had been the case under Stalin. The persistence of Stalinist political institutions in a political environment where coalition politics mattered and new political groups made demands on the leadership produced "offensive détente" and "overcommitted, contradictory policies."¹¹

The change in domestic political constraints played a role in explanations of Khrushchev's intervention in Hungary in 1956, near-intervention in Poland in 1956, and the decision to deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba in 1962.¹² Similarly, according to this explanation, the incentives for an expansionist foreign policy grew in the Brezhnev period as he built his political coalition, exhibiting its effects first in growing Soviet interventionism in the Middle East by the late 1960s and in the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and culminating in the growth of Soviet Third World interventionism in the 1970s.

Explanations for Gorbachev's new thinking in foreign policy often focused on the domestic political and institutional changes he implemented beginning in 1987. These studies had a somewhat different focus: Instead of domestic political institutions and processes producing a certain type of Soviet foreign policy, the desire to develop a new Soviet foreign (and domestic) policy led Gorbachev to reform the Soviet domestic political system. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and acceptance of change in Eastern Europe, it was argued, were accomplished only because Gorbachev had succeeded in altering the political and institutional constraints on reformist directions in Soviet foreign policy.¹³ Moving farther from the post-Stalinist Soviet political system, according to this foreign policy model, permitted dramatic change in Soviet policies and behavior.

Ideology

An alternative tradition in Soviet foreign policy studies begins not with the Stalinist state as baseline but with Leninist ideas as the source of Soviet foreign policy behavior. The role of ideology as a belief system, or of more specific and particular ideas within that system, permeated the study of Soviet foreign policy, but some authors accorded it great weight in their explanations.¹⁴ The core premise of Leninist ideology was a belief in the fundamental conflict of interest between capitalist states and the new socialist states of the twentieth century. Lenin's thesis in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was not a dispassionate theory of foreign relations but became the ideological basis for Soviet foreign policy. Insofar as it posited inescapable hostility and threat, scholars argued that it would produce an unchangeable expansionist and aggressive Soviet foreign policy.¹⁵

One problem for explanations of Soviet foreign policy based on ideology was that there was a great deal of change and variation in Soviet policy. Soviet leaders pursued at different times over a seventy-four-year period expansionist, opportunistic, accommodating, and even reticent foreign policies. Alexander Dallin wrote: "Over the course of Soviet history the same formal ideology has permitted ... such a wide range of different, conflicting, and at times mutually incompatible courses of action that it cannot be properly seen as a 'guide to action.'"¹⁶ To cope with this anomaly, authors focused on two ways that ideology could be a guide to action in varying Soviet foreign policy.

One focus was the concept of an "operational code." Although particular policies might change in response to different circumstances, the basic prisms and principles of Leninist ideology remained intact and could serve to explain underlying consistencies in Soviet policy and behavior.¹⁷ Nathan Leites emphasized that Bolshevik ideology, through its view of the nature of politics and the world, prescribed rules of thumb for the conduct of domestic and foreign policy. These beliefs about politics, in Leites's view, provided a systematic guide to patterns in Soviet behavior. Ideology prescribes that the Communist Party "must never risk already conquered major positions for t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Sources of Russian Conduct: Theories, Frameworks, and Approaches
• 2 Democratization, War, and Nationalism in the Post-Communist States
• 3 Russian Nationalism and the National Interest in Russian Foreign Policy
• 4 Russian Foreign Policy and the Politics of National Identity
• 5 The Foreign Policy Preferences of Russian Defense Industrialists: Integration or Isolation?
• 6 Russia and Europe After the Cold War: The Interaction of Domestic and Foreign Policies
• 7 Russian Identity and Foreign Policy in Estonia and Uzbekistan
• 8 From Each According to Its Abilities: Competing Theoretical Approaches to the Post-Soviet Energy Sector
• 9 Ideas, Interests, and Institutions in Russian Foreign Policy
• About the Book
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index