Russia's Postcolonial Identity

A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World

V. Morozov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137409300
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Pushing postcolonial studies and constructivist International Relations towards an uneasy dialogue, this book looks at Russia as a subaltern empire. It demonstrates how the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial has produced a radically anti-Western regime, which nevertheless remains locked in a Eurocentric outlook.

1

The Postcolonial and the Imperial in the Space and Time of World Politics

This chapter’s formative question concerns the limits of the postcolonial. In order to introduce my project in the context of postcolonial theory, I need to demonstrate that this theory can benefit from looking at Russia as a subaltern empire – a space which is both imperial and postcolonial – while also showing that it has evolved as such in the historical time of European civilisation. To do this implies addressing the question of limits: where and when does the postcolonial space begin? Does the postcolonial begin where the imperial ends, meaning that both are mutually exclusive? Does it begin at the end of colonialism, that is, after decolonisation?

Anyone with a more than superficial exposure to postcolonial writing would not hesitate to dismiss the last two questions as hopelessly naïve. Of course, it is the entire humanity which has found itself affected by the postcolonial condition ever since the beginning of the European colonial expansion. It would not be an exaggeration to state that the postcolonial is co-dimensional, and even co-substantial, with modernity as such: the colonial Other¹ inheres in the European Enlightenment, all modern identities are therefore hybrid, and it is only our choice to see or not to see them this way. Yet, there are texts that construct the world as neatly divided between the empire and the postcolony, and some of them see the postcolony as having emerged ‘after’ colonialism. Since my argument would make no sense in a world like that, discussing the limits of the postcolonial is my top priority.

In terms of scholarly practice, my argument is that, first of all, Russia must be more systematically studied in the postcolonial context, and secondly, such study must pay enough attention to Russia’s subalternity, instead of focusing exclusively on the internal colonisation of Russia’s periphery. This book as a whole is devoted to presenting substantial arguments supporting this assertion. I argue that Russia is almost completely dependent on the West in both economic and normative terms, and it is increasingly trying to justify its foreign policy conduct by accusing the West of neocolonialism while pointing out the injustices inherent in the current international order. At the same time, Moscow continues to engage in imperial pursuits in its ‘near abroad’, explicitly relying on the Soviet legacy to secure and expand its ‘spheres of influence’. Contemporary Russia’s identity critically depends on its (post-)imperial self-image as a great power, where greatness is still defined by referring to the Soviet past. Last but not least, the Kremlin’s rhetoric regarding the need to democratise the international system by promoting a multipolar world coexists with increasingly repressive domestic policies, which seek to perpetuate the monopoly of the party of power. All of this suggests that describing Russia as a subaltern empire makes sense both as a tool to better understand Russian politics and for laying the ground for international comparisons.

In order to position this argument more clearly in the context of postcolonial studies and to discuss its implications, this chapter opens with several explanatory fragments whose main connection is the title and the subtitle of the book. I start with the term ‘subaltern’ and then briefly address a few possible objections in applying it to Russia. I then clarify what I mean by saying that Russia finds itself in a Eurocentric world. All of these explanations are no more than outlines whose main purpose is to give a general impression about where my analysis is going. It takes the entire book to fully develop my argument.

Having outlined my system of conceptual coordinates, I move on to provide my own interpretation of the strengths and weaknesses of postcolonial theory. It must be borne in mind that this is a case-oriented account, rather than a full review of a theoretical field. I concentrate on a few questions that are of key importance for my inquiry: the location and limits of postcoloniality and the representation of the subaltern. I argue that the postcolonial cannot be defined by any pre-given criteria: its identification must be situational rather than abstract and relational rather than ‘cultural’. The final part of the chapter critically examines the paradigm of internal colonisation in Russian studies. My contention is that the crucial external dimension of this phenomenon is trivialised and hence overlooked by this paradigm. The best way of correcting it is not just by taking postcolonialism seriously, but by supplementing it with such elements of the neo-Marxist conceptual toolkit as hegemony and uneven and combined development. Their significance, however, is more fully explicated in the subsequent chapters.

Conceptual mapping

The term ‘subaltern’ has been established in the academic literature primarily due to the efforts of the Subaltern Studies Group, which promoted a research agenda focused on the relations of domination and especially on the experiences and agency of the dominated (Prakash 1994). The most sophisticated among its many existing interpretations, embraced, inter alia, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, goes back to Antonio Gramsci, who is customarily credited with introducing the term in the context of political theory.² In this tradition, the subaltern is defined as disenfranchised, having ‘insufficient access to modes of representation’ (Chattopadhyay and Sarkar 2005: 359), the one whose agency is limited (and constructed as limited, for example, in Orientalist discourses) by the existing social order – ‘a structured place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed’ (Morris 2010: 8). In Gramsci’s view, as Marcus Green (2011) has shown, subaltern groups can be completely excluded from the popular in a relationship of domination (in which the people is constructed as if the subaltern did not matter) or have their interests represented in a relationship of hegemony. In any case, however, what characterises the subaltern is the fact that the dominant groups tend to confuse two modes of representation: speaking about the subaltern (i.e. describing their situation, re-presenting it) and speaking for the subaltern (i.e. having them ‘voiced over’ by intermediaries who do not share their experience and hence silencing them). Being spoken for is probably the key criterion that defines subalternity for Spivak, while the representation of the subaltern is one of the main problems she struggles with (see Spivak 1988, 1999, Kapoor 2008: 41–59).

It is obvious that a concept like this cannot be directly applied to countries or states, because the latter, in particular, do have their own voice by definition. As sovereign participants of the international system and various international fora, even the smallest and weakest of states can speak with their own voice. Russia, which has been a very vocal opponent of the West and has made its position known not only verbally but also by using ‘hard power’, is an obvious case in point.

Yet, I do believe that the concept can and must be used in International Relations (IR) and that Russia is a good example of an identity that has been rendered subaltern in the existing world order. This is true in several ways. Firstly, in economic terms, Russia is dependent on the global capitalist core (this is the main topic of Chapter 3). It is important to emphasise that for Gramsci, economic subordination was an important element defining the position of the ‘subaltern classes’ (Green 2011). Moreover, as Eiman Zein-Elabdin (2004: 23) points out, the notion of subalternity ‘better captures the organic relationship between economic and cultural subordination (than the term dependency, for instance)’.

Secondly, as Chapter 4 makes clear, the language Russia speaks while challenging Western hegemony is the same Eurocentric language which cements the hegemonic order. Russia’s discursive space has been fully Europeanised during several centuries of catch-up modernisation, and its social structure has evolved in such a way that there are no groups within the country capable of developing an alternative articulation of Russian identity. The desperate attempts to promote conservative values and to strengthen the ‘spiritual bonds’ holding the nation together are all grounded in European romantic philosophy. They are defended by presenting Russia as the ‘true Europe’ (in contrast to the morally decadent West) and by alluding to the ‘civilised countries’ as a model which has unquestionable normative authority.

Russia has successfully colonised itself on behalf of Europe but has been unable to assimilate. There remains a powerful tension between, as Lene Hansen (2006) would say, linking and differentiation in its European identity, with a mirror structure functioning on the other side of the Schengen curtain. This tension evidently originates in the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial and appears to be the single most important driving force of Russian politics during the last couple of centuries. All of this is strikingly homologous with the condition of the subaltern, which is socially constructed as different and subordinate, and at the same time rendered speechless by the existing hegemonic order.

Thirdly and finally, there is the question of what is meant by Russia in this context. Throughout this book, I use it as a name for an identity and the corresponding political community, which is produced by forces of identification and antagonism, socio-economic practices and, of course, power – including, but not limited to, the power of the Russian state. I never refer to Russia when I only mean the state or the regime, using instead a range of easily decipherable synonyms (the Kremlin, the Russian state, etc.). However, it would be extremely naïve to reify the distinction between the state and the people: the former is not a fully autonomous unit; it ‘thinks’ and ‘acts’ through discourses that are generated and reproduced by the latter.

At the same time, ‘Russia’ is not an autonomous unit either: its very existence is conditioned by the social structure at all levels, from the global to the local. Russia exists as a state because it is part of the ‘Westphalian world’, organised around the idea of national sovereignty. It also exists because the Russians as a people share a certain common sense and engage in the ‘daily plebiscite’ (to use Ernest Renan’s famous formula) in their routine transactions. Analytically, we can separate different levels of social reality, as well as different subjectivities involved in any situation. From this point of view, the Russian state can also be conceived of as an agent of the global capitalist core, which colonises its ‘own’ periphery (which, in this case, includes the entire country – at least, as the Russians say, outside of the Garden Ring, or downtown Moscow). In this image, the subaltern position is occupied by the Russian people, which is continuously de-subjectified and silenced by the empire. Since roughly the 1830s, a part of the intelligentsia has been busy trying to give voice to the natives whom they see around themselves. It produces all sorts of romanticist doctrines, from Slavophilism to Vladimir Putin’s latest version of paleoconservatism, but inevitably ends up speaking for the people. The emergence of the popular subject is blocked by Eurocentric hegemony, which fears the Russian people as barbarian and rebellious.

It appears that there is a lot of value added in looking at modern Russia through the conceptual lens of subalternity. However, it is important to always keep in mind the presence of the imperial, which seems to be a constant attribute of the Russian subaltern. This also applies to the subalternity of the Russian people – as illustrated, inter alia, by the overwhelming support for the annexation of Crimea by Russian public opinion. One could try to describe this in terms of the ‘good’ people having been brainwashed by the ‘bad’ regime, but this, again, would be a reification. Instead of searching, in vain, for a pure and noble native, uncontaminated by the imperial element of Russia’s identity, it is much more productive to see the Russian people as a hybridised postcolonial subject, oppressed and longing to invert the oppressive relationship, to kill the Master and take his place.

The term ‘subaltern empire’ has been used by some scholars to describe Russia’s ambiguous position between the West and its own Orientalised periphery (e.g. Tlostanova 2008). Russia’s position in the international system is certainly not unique: the same expression is widely (and loosely) applied by historians also to Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman empire, China and Japan (see Mignolo 2005). Yet, in today’s world, this phenomenon manifests itself much more clearly in the Russian case. On the one hand, since its emergence as a sovereign polity in the fifteenth century, Russia has never been colonised by anyone but itself; more than that, it created a vast and powerful empire. This clearly differentiates Russia from most, if not all, other nations whose identity includes a visible subaltern element. On the other hand, Russia’s self-colonisation revealed a continuous pattern of economic and normative dependence on the West: even the search for an indigenous identity that was supposed to ensure an independent standing was framed in Orientalist terms borrowed from the Western tradition (Etkind 2011, see also Chapters 3–5 below). As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, this dependence is even more visible today, and as before, it coexists with imperial resentment.

Turkey is perhaps the only country whose position in the current international system in the most important respects is similar to Russia’s, and this similarity has recently become the focus of a number of comparative studies (Neumann 1999, Lieven 2000, Hill and Taspinar 2006, Sakwa 2010, Zarakol 2011). However, Russia’s discourse presents a much more explicit challenge to the political values promoted by the West, while Turkey, even with its new assertiveness in the international arena, continues to uphold the universalist interpretation of liberal democracy (Morozov and Rumelili 2012, Rumelili 2013).³ Thus, while subaltern imperialism is indeed a relatively frequent phenomenon in world politics, the Russian case can be expected to display its most characteristic features and therefore deserves particular attention.

Describing Russia as a subaltern empire is certainly controversial and needs to be justified on a number of grounds. First of all, this categorisation must not be read as an apology. This book is certainly not free from a normative agenda, but the latter by no means includes the idea that one always has to solidarise with the subaltern. I fully agree with Paul James’s (1997: 73) characterisation of ‘subjection within global capitalism’ as ‘a thoroughly double-sided and self-active process’, also in the sense that Third World policymakers are complicit in oppressive practices. In my view, the Russian case helps to highlight the fact that those speaking in the name of the subaltern are often fully incorporated in the global structure of domination as its local repressive agents. The question of the representation and normative standing of the subaltern is actually one of the core themes of this book.

Secondly, classifying Russia as a subaltern empire only makes sense if one abandons the view, typical for some ‘decolonial’ literature, of the world as neatly divided between (former) empires and colonised nations. Kevin Platt (2012a) believes that the persistence of this view is due to intellectual and political inertia of, on the one hand, the study of overseas empires and, on the other hand, of decolonisation, in which normally the border between the colonisers and the colonised was rather unambiguously defined. As pointed out above, Russia can be considered as both a colonial power and a colonised country, especially if one appreciates the extent to which colonial practices have been in operation everywhere across the geographical expanse of the country, including in the ethnic Russian heartland (Etkind 2011, Etkind et al. 2012). Since its early foundational texts, such as Franz Fanon’s (1968) Black Skin, White Masks, postcolonialism has been approaching the colonial relationship as deeply and irreversibly affecting both sides and leaving durable trace everywhere, in the core as well as in the periphery. As Iain Chambers (1996: 209) writes, the former designation of the postcolony as the ‘Third World’ ‘was intended to signal both spatial and temporal distance – “out there” and “back there” – the postcolonial perspective insists, in both spatial and temporal terms, that the “other” world is “in here” ’. Summarising the writings of Homi Bhabha and Spivak, Ilan Kapoor (2008: 8) concludes: ‘According to both theorists, colonial discourse had forever marked colonized and ex-colonized societies (and for that matter colonial and ex-colonial powers), so that it is impossible to recuperate any identity uncontaminated by it.’ I also follow Bhabha, along with Achilles Mbembe, in emphasising the hybridity of identities locked in any hegemonic relationship and thus their being co-constitutive in relation to each other.

My writing in the subsequent chapters assumes that we have enough knowledge about the imperial aspects of Russia’s domestic order, both historical and current. The vast literature on empire studies has also achieved a great deal in terms of comparing the Russian case with other empires, both continental and overseas, core and peripheral. Without attempting even a short overview, I would just refer to the writings of Dominic Lieven (2000, 2004), which build on the achievements of the entire field to provide an excellent comparative analysis of Russia’s imperial experience. What I concentrate on in my own analysis are, firstly, the subaltern aspects of Russia’s condition and, secondly, the dialectic of the subaltern and the imperial, especially in the international arena.

In a certain sense, subaltern imperialism is another facet of the phenomenon that in the world-systems literature has been described as semi-peripherality. I do, to some extent, rely on a world-systems analytical framework, especially when it comes to the analysis of the material aspects of Russia’s dependent position. Accordingly, I use the terms ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, but not necessarily with the same rigour as world-systems theorists would perhaps prefer to. I am mostly interested in relative peripherality, rather than in the exact location of a particular state or region on the core–periphery spectrum. Thus, I consider Russia as a periphery in relation to the West (or Western Europe, the European Union (EU)), while at the same time the Russian state occupies a position closer to the core in relation to Russia’s own colonised periphery. Mostly for this reason, I do not systematically label Russia as semi-peripheral, using this classification only when it makes sense in the relative terms.

At a more general level, categorising Russia as a subaltern empire, rather than just as semi-periphery, opens up a much wider horizon of meaning. It necessarily includes paying serious attention to discursive and normative structures of hegemony and not just to the place of individual states or regions in the international division of labour (cf. Wallerstein 1974: 349). Other aspects of how world-systems theory can be useful in studying Russia’s condition are discussed in Chapter 2, where I compare various approaches in Russian studies.

The statement that Russia finds itself in a Eurocentric world, contained in the subtitle of this book, must be read in a deconstructive manner. To an extent, it is an empirical statement about ‘the world out there’: there is by now a vast literature exposing the Eurocentrism behind the very foundational principles of the international system (for influential examples, see Anghie 2004, Darby 2004, Inayatullah and Blaney 2004, Hobson 2012). At the same time, I fully solidarise with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) scepticism about the feasibility of ‘provincialising Europe’ from within the academe. Being a scholar implies sharing certain rules of academic communication; moreover, it is these rules which make scholars (as...