Russia and ‘Europe’: Elite Discourses

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Russia re-emerged in the international arena as a geographically smaller state that had embarked on a path of radical economic and political reform. It is not surprising that this tremendous transformation was accompanied by a heated public debate on what model Russia should follow in its development. Inevitably, questions about the political and economic organisation of postcommunist society were part of a much broader debate about the country's position in the world and the meaning of being Russian. These attempts to rearticulate Russia's identity were often seen in the academic literature as evidence of an identity crisis that plagued the state's foreign policy making throughout the post-Soviet period. 1 Yet the debate was not new. It built on centuries-old traditions of a search for Russia's self-definition that, for example, had manifested itself in the 19th century dispute between Westernisers and Slavophiles (discussed in Chapter 1), or in the Eurasian movement that was born in Russian émigré circles in Prague and Paris in the 1920s. As Marlene Laruelle has argued, Eurasianism, with its emphasis on Russia's fundamental difference from the West and its closeness to Asia, was 'updating the traditional Slavophile ideology supposed to demonstrate the national specificity of Russia and the organic character of its empire'. 2 While in many ways shaped by these earlier intellectual traditions, Russia's post-Soviet imagery was not necessarily their direct descendant. Rather, it took the form of a creative reinterpretation of earlier arguments. The ideas of Eurasianism, for example, were rediscovered in the 1990s and incorporated into foreign policy thinking by a diverse group of actors, often without acknowledging their philosophical origins. This chapter examines the variants of Russia's identity that have been particularly prominent among Russia's political class over the past two decades. Predictably, the public debate continued to centre on issues of Russia's place vis-à-vis Europe and the West more broadly. In a rapidly growing academic literature that sought to analyse views of Russian elites, this debate was often conceived as split between two more or less well-defined positions-as neatly S. White et al., Identities and Foreign Policies in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus