Culture, Political Economy and Civilisation in a Multipolar World Order

The Case of Russia

Ray Silvius

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367085698
• eBook ISBN: 9781317353539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book seeks to understand how Russia's multifaceted rejection of American unipolarity and de-territorialised neo-liberal capitalism has contributed to the gestation of the present multipolar moment in the global political economy. Analysing Western world order precepts via the actions of a powerful, albeit precarious, national political economy and state structure situated on the periphery of Western world order, Silvius explores the manner in which culture and ideas are mobilised for the purposes of national, regional and international political and economic projects in a post-global age.

The book:

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• Explains and analyses the tensions of post-Soviet Russia's integration into, and simultaneous partial rejection of, the capitalist global political economy.
• Provides an overview of the social, political and historical origins of Russian samobytnost' (uniqueness) after the fall of the Soviet Union and demonstrates their significance to contemporary understandings of world order.
• Explores how structures of cultural difference and practices of cultural differentiation interact with the normative legacies of American hegemonic aspirations in contemporary world order structures.
• Evaluates how cultural and civilisational representations are mobilised for state-projects and their corresponding regional and international dimensions within the global political economy.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Russian Foreign Policy, IPE and comparative political economy.

1 Introduction and methodology

The introductory chapter proceeds as follows. Section 1 consists of an introduction, during which I situate the book thematically. In Section 2, I state my research problem and questions. Section 3 is comprised of the methodology. Section 4 contains key concepts of this work and a rationale for their use. The chapter concludes with Section 5, in which I outline the structure of the work.

1 Introduction

In this book, I explore the limits to liberal democratic universalism and US hegemony at both the material and ideational level by way of the example of contemporary Russia, and how select Russian officials, state bodies, and ‘political technologists’, a term I describe below, represent the contemporary global political economy. As the Russian political economy becomes selectively integrated into the global capitalist political economy, it would appear that there is little discursive space for articulating Russia’s samobytnost’ or uniqueness. However, such integration involves considerable state involvement, which is reflected in Russian state attempts to articulate a response to liberal democratic universalism and American hegemony in an environment of geoeconomic and geopolitical contestation. In this response, select Russian officials seek to reject Western triumphalism by appealing to ‘home grown’, but ‘polysemic’, ideas and cultural frames that valorise Russian conduct and question the moral and practical legitimacy of American hegemonic precepts. Collectively, these efforts provide the basis for what may be considered Russian alternative ‘state-sanctioned’ understandings of world order.

This book is about the emergence of such understandings during the post-Soviet conjuncture, with a particular emphasis on the ‘Putin era’ (2000–present) and the unevenly ‘resurgent’ Russia of this era. It is a work that accentuates the ‘semiotic’ (symbolic) and ‘extra-semiotic’ (material) dimensions of state projects amid the prolonged ‘transitional’ Russian political economy. In suggesting here that beliefs are produced by the state, my contribution gauges the role of key state officials and state organs in both opening and circumscribing political imaginations in accordance with projects of ‘world order’ significance.

As it engages with historical materialist and historicist modes of analysis, this book reflects an interest with the state’s role vis-à-vis social forces and its attempts to articulate a hegemonic consensus about Russia’s place in, and nature of, world order. The Russian state strives to produce a relatively coherent set of concepts about world order, which it attempts to establish as a new normal, common-sense thinking about global affairs to rival liberal internationalism. It then attempts to convince the Russian citizenry and the external world of the veracity of such concepts. Thus I conceive of the Russian state as a multitudinous agent which, in addition to its authoritative, bureaucratic and coercive role in administering the Russian economic base, articulates a particular vision of national, international, and ‘civilisational’ political and economic life. In addition to its role of organising the Russian economy along a combination of statist and market principles, official Russia develops concepts and ideas that render these moves intelligible according to longer Russian intellectual and cultural legacies. It does so by developing and utilising ‘cultural’ terminology – understood as collective intelligibility, purported tendencies, shared intersubjective meanings and familiar frames – as a means of rendering political decisions intelligible and fostering legitimacy and consent.

This book also reflects my view of the state’s coercive and consensual role as being embedded within certain cultural and historical understandings while the state works to cultivate such understandings. Situated within the field of International Political Economy (IPE), the work embodies a concern with the relationship between the domestic and international and upholds the argument that the two may only be understood dialectically. Moreover, it develops out of reflections upon a specific body of literature found in IPE – that which focuses on the phenomenon of world order, global capitalism and the internationalisation/transnationalisation of the state – and a questioning of some of its theoretical and practical implications when it comes to investigating developments beyond the mature capitalist core. As such, this book grows out of discussions within the field of IPE and is particularly concerned with examining national-cultural contexts in which large-scale historical shifts occur. Central to the concern is the manner by which national representations – how the nation and its members have been imagined – have accompanied shifting social and economic orders whereby members of Russian society have negotiated, accepted, or rejected new forms of capitalist sociability.

I develop a synopsis and critique of the materialist precepts of world order thinking in critical IPE in Chapter 2. For the purposes of locating the project here, it is sufficient to allude to the strengths and insights as well as the shortcomings of this literature. This literature, which develops the thinking of Robert Cox in various ways, is implicitly concerned with the extension of American hegemony over the global periphery in transforming statist developmental regimes to (neo)liberal-capitalist models (and in some cases the role of European capital in transforming its sphere of influence). The transnational variant of this literature, represented by scholars such as William Robinson and those of the Amsterdam School, conceives of social relations across national borders as the primary motor for global political and economic change, particularly by way of transforming and disciplining national units within the global periphery. In doing so this literature is able to perceive the constitution of social classes across borders and escape narrow methodological nationalism to tell us much about the nature of contemporary transformations in the global political economy.

Nonetheless, these insights warrant further reflection. Where does Russia fit in the context of understanding America’s ambitions towards global systems management? Historically, where does the Soviet Union’s attempt at forging a state-socialist alternative world order fit amid theorising on the American world order? And if in fact post-socialist Russia is in the process of adopting a liberal-capitalist, or state-capitalist, or quasi-capitalist order, what does this look like and how has it been accomplished? As it pertains to Russia, what does the disassembling of the Soviet empire, a prolonged transition to a market economy and the reconstitution of political authority look like? Rendering comparable those national political economies and societies deemed peripheral, or semi-peripheral, to the global capitalist core comes at the cost of specificity and overlooks emerging fault lines within the US-led global liberal democratic project. Furthermore, broad comparative sweeps mask the manner by which historicised ideas become activated in the present amidst emerging geopolitical and geoeconomic tensions. On the one hand, only on a most generic level was Russia’s emergence from the Soviet period comparable to fellow post-Soviet states and other ‘transitioning’ economies, due to its size, geopolitical position, imperial history and aspirations to global prominence. On the other, Russia faces broad systemic pressures and resulting political struggles while selectively integrating into the global political economy. This book, therefore, takes as its starting point Russia’s distancing from Soviet economic practices in becoming a ‘state capitalist’ political economy, while official Russia has nonetheless made selective appeals to Russian difference, particularity and identity on the terrain of ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’. Collectively, such appeals constitute Russian state-sanctioned alternative understandings of world order.

My entry into the question of world order comes through an analysis of the ‘ideational’ limits of liberal internationalism as represented by Putin-era Russia, which provides us with a case which manifests the failure of any easy transmission of the ideas associated with a Western-inspired liberal democracy or global capitalist ‘sociability’. Components of world order as articulated by official Russia result from a perceived need to offer a vision of Russia in the world which captures Russia’s reputed uniqueness and reflects a wealthier, more assertive and ‘sovereign’ Russia than was evident in the immediate post-Soviet period. This is by no means a straightforward process: for example, ideas about a modern, democratising and market-friendly Russia, which is increasingly integrated into global economic structures, have also figured prominently in Putin’s readings of world order, particularly during his first term as president. However, the uncontested adoption of Western liberal thought deemed to correspond with American liberal hegemony did not occur, as a particularly Russian ‘filter’ was tacitly or overtly employed to shape understandings of global political life and Russia’s place within it. In addition to reflecting material conflicts arising out of economic competition and military threats, Russian state-sanctioned alternative understandings of world order display a thoroughly intersubjective or ideational component, whereby global political life is translated through shared understandings of moral appropriateness, legitimacy and manageability. An investigation of these understandings forms the basis of this work. The result is a series of ideational and material practices which are temporally conjoined but whose logical relationships reflect the messy world of political volition.

My intention with this book is to add to the discussion about world order as found in the IPE tradition the extent to which semiotic and extra-semiotic, ideational and material elements of state projects need not directly coincide. In addition to being constituted by material practices, national political economies are consolidated through mediating devices in the form of intersubjectively held or produced beliefs, representations of national social orders whereby the limits of the possible are understood and circumscribed. To declare that such things matter is hardly controversial. But it has important ramifications for how the international/transnational is conceived in an era in which the concepts associated with American hegemony and global capitalism – those which are intended to provide the consensual basis for extended American leadership – are met by ‘rising’ non-Western political economies seeking their own ‘ideational stamp’ on world order. Do corresponding representations constitute a threat to global capitalist sociability? Do they contain counterhegemonic potential? Are they better thought as comprising an ideological veneer with which market practices are consolidated, albeit in new national or regional forms? Such questions animate this work.

2 Problem statement, research question and temporal parameters

In this work I examine Putin-era Russia by way of conceptions of Russian state, society and nation amid contemporary world order, as well as the nature of this world order itself. It is therefore designed to understand the creation, existence or perpetuation of national, if not ‘civilisational’, intersubjective ideas amid concrete transformations in Russia’s social, economic and political order and the production of new and reinvented concepts which accompany that order. The Russian case demonstrates that significant fault lines within contemporary world order exist at the material and ideational level. In the process, it provides clues as to what a post-hegemonic world order may look like according to prominent tendencies within official Russia’s self-representations.

The research questions I pose are situated with one eye on the manner by which Russian leadership interprets Russia’s collective place within world order and the other on how it understands and represents this order itself. How are we to understand state-sanctioned representations of Russia in the Putin era, and how do these representations stand in relation to the advent of a capitalist economy and social order? How has political authority cultivated particular intersubjective understandings to legitimize both its role within society and Russia’s place in the world? What does the terrain of national representation tell us about contemporary Russian state projects and how do we conceive of contemporary world order in light of this terrain?

This book has been developed to meet the following objectives. First, my intent is to bring critical scrutiny and a larger cultural component to the critical IPE literature through a specific case, Russia. In doing so, my objective is to assist in incorporating the phenomenon of Russian post-communist transitions into contemporary IPE thinking through granting attention to the Russian case. Specifically, I examine representations of state and society amid a transition to some form of capitalist society, and the state’s role in developing the imagery, concepts and ideas deemed suitable for the purposes of this order. Second, this book is a contribution to the emerging sub-discipline of Cultural Political Economy by developing an understanding of cultural representations in the case of post-Soviet and Putin-era Russia.

At the time of writing (Fall 2015), amidst open geopolitical and geoeconomic competition between Russia and the West over Ukraine and Syria, as well as Russian state efforts to further consolidate the Eurasian Economic Union, Russian ‘revisionism’ is a matter for much speculation in English language scholarship and popular commentary. However, my intention is to demonstrate official Russia’s longer run disarticulation of American hegemony and ‘concepts of control’. Such a disarticulation unevenly spans the longer post-Soviet moment, takes new shapes during Putin’s first two presidential terms (2000–2008) and that of Dmitri Medvedev (2008–2012), before manifesting itself more decisively in Putin’s third presidential term (2012–present). This book is an extended and updated version of my dissertation, which focused primarily on the period corresponding with Putin’s first two terms as president, and in which an earlier, but similar, case was made. There is a need to consider the longer trajectory of ideas and tendencies which predate, yet figure prominently in, the present geopolitical and geoeconomic conflicts between Russia and the West, in general, and Russia and the United States, more specifically.

I acknowledge that powerful arguments can be made about the long-run historical antecedents to Russia’s contemporary global position, including relative ‘backwardness’ and the late development of capitalist, and then socialist, projects of national modernisation amid prevailing world orders.¹ There is no good reason to avoid incorporating this into a purportedly historical analysis other than to cite the limits dictated by feasibility and my desire to focus on the post-communist period and contemporary questions. Moreover, by concentrating on Putin’s first two presidential terms, insofar as ideas and practices associated with Russian difference became concrete during this time, this work serves as an ‘empirical corrective’² to disciplinary trends of forecasting globalised or multipolar political economies. This matter is taken up throughout the book.

3 Methodology

Rationales for employing particular methodologies in the social sciences range from informed to the dogmatic. The debate concerning the appropriateness of focusing solely on Russia, the former members of the Soviet Union, or assimilating both into wider comparative/positivist accounts of ‘democratic transition’ is not new and scarcely resolvable here (see Schmitter & Karl, 1994; Bunce, 1995 and 1999). The legitimacy of single cases is also firmly established within the universe of social science research. Single cases are indeed warranted as phenomena in their own right, as intrinsic case studies that are interesting for their own unique qualities (Berg, 2001). For the field of IPE, national cases are far from obsolete, as they serve as prisms through which broader global forces are refracted. They are therefore helpful in extending discussions on particular theoretical orientations. My critical historicist approach straddles what Eckstein (1975; see also Blaikie, 2000, pp. 219–225) refers to as the configurative-ideographic and heuristic case studies. In the former, a descriptive account is given to provide understanding of a phenomenon under examination. In the latter, a case is examined to provide tentative understandings towards the development of theory. A certain caveat applies here, though, with a rejection of strictly positivist methodologies: generalizable knowledge is not sought here nor understood as the appropriate standard for this project, yet appropriate attempts are made to provide tentative explanations within the case studied. Therefore, it is erroneous to view this as a purely descriptive exercise, and I am uncertain as to whether typologies within the social sciences consulted thus far aptly capture the logic of historical research.

An appropriate methodological strategy is required to understand complex and far reaching transformations. A critical historicist conception of the macro-historical transformation of society and economy is sensitive to historical change, contingency and social agency. It contains insights into the shared ideational and cultural frames through which political, economic and social orders are mediated, consolidated, or rejected. Furthermore, it views historically specific, particular social formations as the broader configurations in which human action is patterned. Sensitive to shared cognitive frameworks, this approach eschews economism and determinism and defends a non-reductionist reading of the relationship between economic base and political superstructure while redirecting attention to shared representations in understanding the prospects for collective social action.

Aspects of the historicist IPE approach bear a certain resemblance to the configurative approach as outlined by Katznelson (1997) with important distinctions. The configurative approach suggests that ‘variables’ are complicatedly conjoined in specific historical instances. Therefore, it rejects the positivist inclination to seek universal hypotheses. Furthermore, direct univariate causation is impossible to determine; variables are co-extensive and reciprocal. Actors are not atomistic, unfettered and rational in the abstract; they are embedded in a shared temporal milieu. An approach to historical inquiry within the configurative tradition therefore similarly emphasises the shared frameworks within which actors imagine and act. Historicist IPE similarly acknowledges historical complexity, with the important added condition of consciousness, perception and agency. In its critical variant, historicist IPE asks how political, economic and social institutions come about by way of the balance of social forces, but it remains sensitive to how ideas about collective social life endure despite radical political and economic transformations.

In developing configurative and contextual accounts of soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledements
• 1. Introduction and methodology
• 2. A critical historicism for post-Soviet Russia within international political economy
• 3. Examining Russia’s post-communist transitional political economy
• 4. The embedding of Russian state-sanctioned multipolarity in the post-Soviet conjuncture
• 5. The Russian state, Eurasianism and civilisations in the contemporary global political economy
• 6. Aleksandr Dugin’s Eurasianism: co-opting or co-opted in Russia’s Putin-era civilisational project?
• 7. The legacy of Vladislav Surkov: regime-sanctioned culture in the service of national political economy
• 8. Conclusion