Boris Makarenko, first deputy general director of the Center for Political Technologies
Photo: Dmitry Lebedev
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A Nice House with Nice Neighbors
// The price of the question
Is Georgia's attempt to enter NATO a sovereign decision? Do rush with your answer – there's always time to say no. Georgin and all the rest of the members of the former “world system of socialism” were not sovereign before as either “subjects of the federation” known at the USSR or outright satellites of it. If anything has changed with their acquisition of formal sovereignty, it is that they have gained the opportunity to choose for themselves a “protector” in the form of the West or to spread their interests out among Moscow, Washington and Brussels. If Russia has anything to bemoan, it is its loss of its role as a pole of attraction that Moscow had for a good 150 years for most Slavs, almost all Orthodox Christians, it Central Asian and Caucasian holdings and, later, for communists and the leftists of the world.
The losses Moscow suffered with the collapse of the USSR are not only territorial and demographic. No less important is the loss of a great part of its soft strength – the ability to convince and attract by its own example. It is not by chance that the programs of Dmitry Medvedev call for making Russia the best place in the world to live. That is the only way to restore the country's authority among its near and far neighbors. So far, the perception of Russia in the West has worked differently. The lawyers f the Russian government probably have something to say in response to many of the accusations in the Georgian suit in international court. But when the whole world sees the situation as tiny Georgia being mistreated by the big Russian bear, one black mark wipes out a whole string of gold stars. When it failed to reprimand publicly the idiot colonel who suggested gathering information on the Georgian children enrolled in Moscow schools, Russia reduced its own opportunities and immeasurably complicated its case before the international court. We are overturning our own soft power and pushing our neighbors into the arms of NATO.
If Georgia acquires new status as a seeker of NATO membership, two things will happen. NATO will violate an unwritten rule not to accept countries burdened with territorial conflicts. And Georgia would lose almost all hope of ever gaining control over Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But the world wouldn't stop spinning, just as it went on even after Kosovo declared its independence. But international law took another blow and, if Georgia joins NATO, tensions in the Caucasus will become that much worse. A little warming has occurred in Russian-Georgian relations, and at that very moment, the slow wheels of European justice arrived at the consideration of the Georgian suit filed at the low point of those relations. It is hard to stop those wheels once they start moving. It is hard to stop Georgia's movement westward. But relations have to be restored to a normal condition any way. There are at least two reasons to do so. The first is that, whether Georgia will be in NATO or not, it will always be Russia's neighbor. The second is that the best country in the world to live in cannot have such bad relations with its neighbors.
Boris Makarenko, first deputy general director of the Center for Political Technologies
All the Article in Russian as of Feb. 27, 2008
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