Boris Makarenko, the vice president of the Political Technologies Center, in Moscow on May 18, 2005.
Photo: Dmitry Lebedev
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Neighbors, Not Friends
// Russia and Europe in the Communal Kitchen
Imagine that President Bush telephones the Kremlin and requests that the Dissenters' March in Samara not be banned. What kind of answer would he receive? This, in fact, is just the kind of request made by Germany, the EU's current president, and the answer was positive. What's the difference? The difference is that we have a geopolitical competition with America, while with Europe we have a concrete competition, carried out in hundreds of everyday moments. For Russia, Europe is almost a neighbor in the communal kitchen: it has its own refrigerator, but everybody has to share the stove. Any problem can be escaped from, except for problems with your neighbors in a communal apartment. These problems actually have to be resolved, and – in the tradition of the Helsinki Accords – we will consider them in three groups.
The first group is foreign policy, which includes Kosovo, the CFE treaty, and American missile defense systems in Europe. In this group, Europe paradoxically has more in common with the US than with Russia.
The second group is trade and economic relations. Presumably not everyone in Old Europe is pleased that the "big agreement" between Russia and the EU is being blocked by the "new Europeans" according to motives that are more political than economic. The ambitions of Poland and the Czech Republic to cozy up to the United States and thereby to increase their geopolitical clout also does not inspire elation. Nevertheless, they are already "among their own" in Europe, and Moscow is left coping with difficulty with the idea that not only Prague and Warsaw but now also Sofia and Tallinn are part of Europe. Paris and Berlin can't very well ignore them, and they certainly have no intention of offending them.
The third group, traditionally the most difficult for Moscow, falls under the heading of humanitarian. This is the group of values. Europe has learned one lesson well: in the communal kitchen, you have to focus on what unites you with your neighbors, not what drives wedges between you. The Germans made up with the French and the Greeks with the Turks because their mutual grievances were in the past, while the Soviet threat was in the present. This condition requiring cooperation forged mutual values – specifically, that which it is currently fashionable to call the "European identity." When the Tallinn gravediggers removed the Bronze Soldier, Europe experienced mixed feelings: the Europeans didn't like the nationalist spirit of the Estonians' action, but – calling a spade a spade – they also didn't like to see a soldier (bronze or not) of the army that Europe rallied together to oppose half a century ago standing in the middle of a European capital. In the end, we ourselves gave Europe a reason to make a decision that wasn't in our favor, when pro-Kremlin youth groups called for the removal of the embassy of an EU country and the police couldn't (or didn't want to) clear the entrances to the building. The situation stopped just short of the kind of scene that took place at the Chinese embassy in Moscow in the end of the 1960s. I fear that in that moment, it seemed to many in Europe that Soviet times – and indeed Soviet morals – still haven't faded into history, and that means that we are strangers.
You try not to quarrel with strangers in the communal kitchen, but you definitely don't befriend them. There is less trust and more suspicions for strangers. That's why the atmosphere at the Samara summit is shaping up to be cold, and a lack of "conditions for friendship" will make it difficult to resolve any real problems.
Boris Makarenko, the first deputy director of the Center for Political Technology
All the Article in Russian as of May 15, 2007
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