< < <
Date Index > > > |
Russia's role in the emerging world system by Louis Proyect 24 January 2002 14:58 UTC |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |
REAPING BENEFITS FROM THE "CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS": RUSSIA'S RULING CLASS AMID GLOBAL CRISIS By Dmitri Glinski-Vassiliev (dmitriglinski@yahoo.com) At first glance, Russia's potential impact on the global system, as regards advanced economic indicators, is virtually negligible. After a decade of plundering and devastation on a continental scale, previously unseen among industrial countries (initiated by the "shock therapy" policies of former president Boris Yeltsin and his team of economic reformers led by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais), Russia is not a significant player in the world market for industrial goods, not to speak of the "new economy" - the two fields immediately affected by the currently spreading recession. As of now, it produces 1.6% of world GDP and its share of global export is 1.4%. Russia's total market capitalization is reported to be $50 bln., compared to $130 bln. of Johnson & Johnson. The capitalization of all Russian banks taken together is less than that of Chase Manhattan alone. Its recent splash of economic growth resulted from the drastic devaluation of the rouble as a consequence of the financial collapse and debt default in August 1998, plus the nearly 300 percent rise in the price of oil in the international markets since then. And, in spite of these favorable circumstances, the rate of GDP growth in Russia has been steadily declining (from almost 11% in the third quarter of 1999 when the growth began, to 8.3% in 2000 and somewhat above 5% in 2001). While upbeat forecasts envision 3.5% growth for 2002, evidence suggests that, in fact, it apparently grounded to a halt in the last months of 2001. However, such raw economic data are no more than one determinant of the role that Russia may assume among the various actors given the potential upheaval in the world system. In the event of a crisis unfolding in the context of the post-modern "virtual reality", it would be shaped by power politics and propaganda at least as much as by "objective" economic developments. As will be argued further in this paper, it is in this regard that Russia - or, for the sake of accuracy, its ruling class - is likely to play a pivotal role in the escalation and "management" of a would-be global crisis. The Kremlin's recent emergence as the United States' and NATO's foremost geopolitical ally in the ill-defined anti-terrorist struggle potentially pitting the West against an increasing number of developing nations is the most visible sign of this potential role - but only one in a series. The economic underpinning of this role is Russia's tectonic shift in the international division of labor - from producing industrial goods and manufacturing tools for the developing world to being largely an exporter of natural resources. In this capacity, Russia is competing primarily with the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) for the share of Western oil markets, and with such countries as Turkey and Georgia for the Western financing of transportation routes. Russia now provides 10% of global oil sales and is its second-largest individual trader, after Saudi Arabia. Raw commodities now make about 85% of Russia's total exports, while Russia imports those higher value-added goods it previously produced for itself. This fundamental structural change - coupled with the fervent ideological loyalty of most of Russia's ruling class to the present unipolar world order and key elements of the "Washington Consensus" - appears to be the defining element of Russia's overall weight, far above its "objective" share of the global economy. It is also a crucial determinant of its ruling elite's motivations and behavior that are geared to the goal of legitimizing its oppressive rule inside the country by becoming one of the major and most valuable bulwarks of the international status quo. The "Saudization" of the Russian Economy Over the past twelve years or so, the size of Russia's economy declined, by various estimates, by 50 to 80%, and the institutional foundations of its relative self-sufficiency as the core of a cluster of the so-called "Second World" countries that had been largely isolated from the U.S.-dominated part of the global economy was completely dismantled. Two successive hyperinflations already in the course of the "reforms" wiped out the savings of the urban middle class while making the Soviet-era poor far poorer. The government's wholesale withdrawal from the big industry, coupled with free-wheeling and often legally untenable privatization of whole industries for next to nothing by government-affiliated tycoons (in association with the criminal underworld, on the one side, and a number of Western consultants, on the other), along with the collapse of the social safety net, have thrown Russia decades back in its economic and social development. In the words of a leading and one of the most compassionate Russia-watchers in American academia, Stephen Cohen, this amounted not only to a deindustrialization, but also to a virtual "demodernization" of the country. Meanwhile, the legislature critical of shock therapy was dispersed by artillery fire, and its successors were thorougly tamed by the "executive" (which warrants quotation marks becase, in fact, it never acquiesced to a genuine separation of powers). And a Western-style "free market" that is supposedly based on the entrepreneurship of autonomous small and medium-sized producers, never took hold in Russia, whose economic space remained tightly controlled by crony capitalists and criminal syndicates. Nevertheless, for most of the decade a number of mainstream Western media, academics, and government officials acted as cheerleaders for Russia's experiment in "market democracy", despite the overwhelming evidence of degeneration and decay in this country. The benefit that some Western actors drew from Russia's miracle-in-reverse was as much economic and military-strategic, as it was ideological: the self-dismantling of the only system that, however imperfectly, offered an alternative to the world capitalist order and some promise of legitimacy for the dissenters within this order, in the West as well as in the East. The resulting triumphalist mood among Western big business and Cold Warriors found its prevalent ideological expression in the conservative brand of neo-Hegelian teleology, trumpeting, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, "the end of history". This new framework imposed on the political discourse hardly concealed the understandable desire of the present-day winners to rationalize and perpetuate the status quo. As for Russia itself, it has, mutatis mutandis, reverted to its niche in the international economic order that it had occupied in the early 20th century (viewed by some in our days as "the first wave of globalization"): the niche of a semi-peripheral and "semi-capitalist" economy. One major difference between then and now is, of course, that as a result of a series of coercive "modernizations", from the Bolshevik to the neo-liberal, Russia's agriculture is in shatters and Russia is no more a leading exporter of grain that it was in 1913. On the contrary, in the years before the 1998 rouble crash it yielded more than 50% of its internal market to foreign foodstuff. The other difference is conditioned by the emergence of oil as one of the driving factors of contemporary global economy: since the waning years of the Soviet Union, Russia played an increasingly visible role on the international oil markets - which, in their turn, repeatedly produced dramatic effects upon the state of its budget revenues and hard currency reserves. Thus, the decline of oil prices in 1986 (allegedly assisted by some strategists of the Reagan Administration in collusion with Saudi Arabia) played a defining role in derailing Mikhail Gorbachev's initial program of acceleration of industrial development and forced him to dismantle, one by one, the basic elements of Soviet order and military might. In a similar way, the upward trend in oil price from 1999 on - following an agreement between Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov with the leaders of OPEC on cutting oil sales, with the tacit understanding of the West that this was better than an irreversible breakdown of Russia - was instrumental in stabilizing its post-reform politico-economic and social order and in the consolidation of Russia's ruling class. (After the left-leaning Primakov was pushed out by Yeltsin and his extended "family", allied with the export lobby and domestic security services, they entrusted the management of this order to their hand-picked Prime Minister and then President of Russia Vladimir Putin.) It is in this context of the commodities-driven economy that one can speak of the "Saudization" of Russia - while keeping in mind that the super-profits of the Russian "sheikhs", unlike in Saudi Arabia, have not trickled down to the lower strata of society to buy them low-cost education and health care. The latter is hardly surprising, given that 92% of the sources of the natural rent have been privatized. Their owners - typically the offspring of senior officials of the Soviet Communist Party apparatus and intelligence agencies - exhibit neither much affection for their country, nor reasons to fear an uprising by an exhausted and disoriented population. There is no pressure on them to channel their profits into higher value-added industries, research and development in high-tech, or the nurturing of the nation's human capital. Indeed, with capital outflow from the Russian economy totaling, by various estimates, $ 20-25 bln. per year - which implies the expatriation of about a half of the national savings - there is insufficient investment in maintaining and developing the productive capacities of the raw materials sector itself. And the Russian government displays an ideologically stubborn resistance to the very idea of nationalizing or even properly taxing some of the mega-profits of oil and gas baronies - which account for two thirds of the national income, while supplying only 20 percent of the tax revenues. Against the opinion of Russia's most authoritative economists, it taxes natural rent much more sparingly than wages and value-added production of the manufacturing industries. Thus, the notion of semi-periphery that was used above refers to Russia's virtual split between the few highly profitable or highly advanced industries that would potentially make it a respectable partner of the world system's "Core" - versus most of the economy that is stagnating or decaying even as vast export earnings keep replenishing government coffers and foreign bank accounts of wealthy Russians. Around 80% of profits and investment in the Russian economy as a whole are accounted for by enterprises linked to the commodities sectors. And, as implied by the above-made distinction, Russia's technologically advanced industries - developed in the past mostly for military purposes - are not among those highly profitable, at least in comparison with the extraction of raw materials. In the absense of government investment and strategic industrial policies, as argued for by Russia's senior economists, these previously advanced modern industries are cash-starved, suffering from the haemorrhage of qualified personnel, and destined to slip ever futher into the bottom part of Russia's "dual economy". The conditions described here at the moment foreclose the possibility of Russia's upward move on the ladder of the international division of labor, as experienced by the previously semi-peripheral economies of East Asia between 1950s and 1980s, or as is currently undergone by India. In the long term, this leaves a choice between stagnation and further decline - thus making Russia's present position in the system perhaps the most precarious and unstable among the nations of the semi-periphery. Having seemingly escaped from "the horrors of totalitarianism" by reverting to its pre-revolutionary "golden past", Russia may find itself again "the weakest link in the chain" of the global order - the image that defined its prospects a century ago. The "Super-Structure": The Strengthening of a Privatized State The use of the term "super-structure" - once the trademark of conventional Marxism denoting the political and ideological realm as allegedly fully determined by the economic interests of the hegemonic class - sounds oddly apposite with regard to the present-day Russian government: the elite perceives the function of the state as designed to service the domestic and foreign interests of the big money. Generally speaking, "post-communist" Russia lives in a perverted quasi-Marxist reality where, as the popular saying goes, everything that Marx promised about socialism failed, but everything he said about capitalism - especially its primitive stage of development - happens to be true. The country is run by an authoritarian super-presidency whose constitutional and factual authority increasingly approximates that of the Russian Tsar on the eve of the 1917 Revolution. The rest of the "super-structure" is subsumed by Ken Jowitt's description of semi-peripheralism that he used with regard to late imperial Russia: "1) a moral and psychological chasm between the oligarchic, bureaucratic elite and the lower classes; 2) mechanical transfer of liberal institutional facades from the West; 3) external power as an ideological-cultural referent and patron for the local elite." The economic demodernization has been fully matched by the progressing demodernization of institutional design and political culture. Thus, early Yeltsin years saw the abolition of legislative oversight and independent control mechanisms that existed in the twilight of the Soviet period; their new surrogate was a relative pluralism of the media resulting from the political rivalry of financial tycoons and providing some leeway for the self-expression by independent political forces. Even this, however, has been eliminated by President Putin, under the false pretext of struggle against the "oligarchs". It is often heard in the West that the capturing of government institutions by "oligarchical" interests, known as the "privatization of the state", was a Yeltsin-era phenomenon that is now fading due to the "strengthening of the power vertical" announced by President Putin and his "equidistance" from corporate interests. From a Russian perspective, this is a propaganda that is breathtakingly at odds with reality: the privileged position of the Yeltsin-era corporate giants in setting the parameters of economic policy has remained intact. The extent of the privatization of government institutions across the country has been manifested by a series of gubernatorial elections in the Siberian areas particularly rich in natural resources (Chukotka, Taimyr, Evenkiya, Yakutia) where Moscow-based zillionaires trading in oil and diamonds sailed through electoral contests against phony rivals. Their outright purchase of votes by hand-outs of money and goods left Moscow totally unperturbed. And the standard fees paid by other tycoons to regional authorities for being appointed as their representatives to the upper chamber of the federal parliament are no secret for the Moscow political establishment. The few business magnates that have actually lost their clout under Putin were those that had acted as public political entrepreneurs, allying themselves with non-establishment players and thus violating the requirement of a monolithic "consolidation" of Russia's ruling class vis-a-vis the rest of society. The only one of them who was stripped of his assets and thoroughly silenced - Vladimir Gusinsky -was not, strictly speaking, an "oligarch", as he already had no political leverage with the government: his real "guilt" was to provide some media support to the liberal-democratic and left-leaning part of the Yeltsin-era establishment that was eventually to be defeated by Putin. The elimination of financially independent political entrepreneurs from the stage was conditioned as much by the security interests of the regime as by those foreign businesses that the government expected to invest in Russia and that were loudly complaining about the reign of "instability" and "chaos". The satisfaction presently displayed by some business-oriented Western media about the flattening of Russia's political landscape attests to the ideological militancy of the top-down globalization whose standard-bearers do not tolerate as much political pluralism in peripheral societies as they do in their home countries. The Resurgence and Limits of Market Fundamentalism While political developments in Russia are under tight control by intelligence and security agencies, the economic policies of the government are overwhelmingly determined by the interests of the raw materials exporters and the so-called natural monopolies, notably in the energy sector. Their unwillingness to invest in their own country in spite of the dilapidated condition of their own industry accounts for the schizophrenic twist in government priorities: they are geared toward wooing foreign investment in the economy while at the same time allowing domestic capital to flow freely out of the country. While the former is supposed to be achieved through an accelerated accession to WTO and the driving down of tax rates and labor costs in a competitive "race to the bottom", the latter implies further liberalization of the currency regime. As noted earlier, the Putin presidency has thrived upon the favorable external conditions and the legacy of the consolidation of elites around the idea of restoring a strong and sovereign state. This consolidation was achieved in the brief period of the Primakov premiership, when the shady privatizers of the state and radical market reformers of the shock therapy brand were on the retreat. Replenished state coffers due to the devalued rouble, increased export earnings and initial anti-corruption measures allowed, first, to pay outstanding wages and pensions, and then to raise them (not, of course, in comparison to pre-reform levels, but relative to nearly worthless and irregular salaries of recent years). This relative increase in the population's purchasing power, coupled with the prohibitive price of foreign goods, expanded domestic demand for Russian products and personal consumption, which helped fuel further growth in the real economy. It was increasingly possible that this internally-generated growth would gradually supplant export earnings as the prime mover of the Russian economy. However, the political climate of fear in the country (generated by the new president's reliance upon the intelligence agencies and mysterious apartment explosions in major cities that accompanied Putin's ascendancy to power) and continuing stabilization of living standards under Putin enabled the cartel of economic elites to marginalize all those political forces that were disloyal to the radical market orthodoxy. The elements of neo-Keynesian expansionary policies pursued by Primakov and his leftovers in the government were cast aside. By now, the widely resented initiators and strategists of Russia's double collapse of 1991-92 and 1998 are back in the driving seat. In the first days of 2002, a Moscow weekly generally loyal to the government confirmed, for those who still doubted, that "Gaidar's economic program is being [implemented] ... although the authorities prefer not to talk about it [for] obvious reasons." The only economic "pluralism" currently tolerated in the mainstream is between the ideologists of the "undistilled" free market preaching total government withdrawal from the economy and the rejection of the IMF conditionalities as "interfering with the market" (this current is exemplified by the President's adviser Andrei Illarionov) and the old-"young" privatizers accustomed to using and abusing Western aid, along with government property and coffers (the "St.Petersburg gang", headed by electricity monopoly CEO and right-wing politician Anatoly Chubais along with his government proxy, deputy prime minister Alexey Kudrin). As mentioned above, the hegemonic interests of the commodities sector have defined the priorities of government economic policy. The landmarks of this policy over the past two years included: further liberalization of currency regime; the adoption of the flat tax rate of 13% that is unheard of in other European countries and was a losing proposition even in the U.S. presidential campaign of 2000; the enactment of a draconian labor code virtually eliminating independent unions; and the drive toward accelerated entry into WTO. Lax and selective currency regime characterized most of the Yeltsin era. As a result of this, as well as of the lack of a credible banking system capable of - and willing to - channel savings to productive use rather than speculation and offshore ventures, capital export throughout the decade exceeded the overall amount of foreign aid flowing into Russia. With the resumption of growth, capital outflow has been eating up at the country's impressive savings rate - 37% GDP - roughly half of which is expatriated to foreign bank accounts. But if in the 1990s legal chaos and lack of enforcement in this area was typically justified by institutional breakdown, under the new president, capital leakage, continuing in spite of the "strengthening of the state", has been rationalized by the logic of market fundamentalism. Thus, presidential adviser Illarionov believes that letting "excess" petrodollars out of the country actually works as an anti-inflationary policy. They should be allowed to leave through liberal capital controls and early repayment of foreign debt, rather than invested in the country. This curious approach was somewhat discredited by the fact that, in spite of the massive capital outflow and debt repayments, inflation in 2001 ended up above its 18% target (which may explain Illarionov's recent attempts at positioning himself as an independent critic of the government and denying any responsibility for its economic policies). The labor code adopted in December 2001 in spite of a prolonged resistance by the unions and misgivings on the part of even business-friendly liberals, is another typical manifestation of market fundamentalism Russian-style. To cite just a few examples: it legalizes payments in kind, which may constitute up to 20% of the wage amount; it sanctions the collection of personal information about employees from outside sources and transmission of such data to third parties; it eliminates the rights of alternative unions that comprise less than a half of employees of a given company, thus effectively handing out a monopoly on the representation of labor interests to official Soviet-era union (Federation of Independent Unions of Russia) that had been thoroughly tamed by decades of political repression and is virtually under the control of the government. This latter provision puts in a legal limbo such long-existing professional associations as the national union of air traffic controllers that are now denied the right to strike under the pretext that they constitute a minority in every airport taken as a single enterprise. Meanwhile, the new code strips workers' representatives chosen to negotiate with the management of their immunity from being fired in the course of negotiations. Under the new code, the system of short-term contracts is being spread throughout the economy, including university professors who in Russia were traditionally rewarded for their miserable pay by mostly unlimited tenure. And the employers are given broad authority as regards extending working hours as well as shifting the time of holidays and vacations, in the latter case from one year to another. It is worth noting that even before the adoption of this code the Economist's Intelligence Unit ranked Russia among the ten cheapest countries as measured by the cost of its labor. So far, however, these drastic measures have not payed off. Foreign direct investment is still meager, even in comparison to other East European countries. As noted above, inflation did not stay within the expected target. The campaign of "strengthening the state" and "building up the power vertical" did not succeed in reducing the amount of corruption, an area where Russia still ranks the second most expensive country with regard to bribe-taking, right after Indonesia. According to none other but Andrei Illarionov, the scale of corruption under Putin is actually higher than under his predecessor. Growth figures have been less and less impressive, especially against the background of Russia's immediate neighbors, some of which fared better without adopting as radical free market policies as Russia did. Thus, Kazakhstan recorded growth of 10% GDP, and Ukraine 7% GDP in the year 2001. And in November 2001, after a month of stagnation, Russia's GDP apparently declined - from 857 bn to 820.7 bn roubles. The only indicator with an unquestionably robust performance has been Russia's bubbling stock market of some $2 bln. that grew at a whopping rate of 60%. This puts it in a dubious company with Zimbabwe - a decidedly peripheral country whose stock market also remained suspiciously immune from world recession. The fragility of this economic stabilization has been an obvious source of worries both for the elements of Russia's ruling class capable of thinking in longer terms and for the Western missionaries of market fundamentalism with tremendous ideological as well as material stakes in the success of the Putin reforms. The latter have reverted to their early Yeltsin-era practices of "talking up" Russia while closing their eyes to the repressive features of its new regime and impatiently dismissing its human rights critics as perpetual grumblers. As for Russia's rulers themselves and their allies in the extractive sector, they have been desperate to draw in U.S. investment while simultaneously looking for an increase of their share on foreign, primarily U.S. markets. "The issue of market expansion is the key for Russia's oil industry," announced Kremlin-connected "oiligarch" Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the YUKOS company. It appears that some strategists of Russia's Big Oil and their political patrons have been increasingly looking toward extra-economic means to boost their attractiveness for the wealthiest buyers and undermine their immediate competitors from the Third World. From this point of view, the outbreak of terrorism that put major Western powers on the war footing and the aggravation of relations between the U.S. and the countries of OPEC could not have been more timely. The Clash of Civilizations and the New Energy Order As implied by the term itself, market fundamentalism in semi-peripheral countries is not so much a product of rational economic thinking as a blind creed that may perfectly coexist with economic illiteracy. As with every creed, its pathological manifestations are particularly characteristic of recent converts typically imbued with unrealistic expectations that their fervent devotion to the letter of the new gospel and evangelical militancy will bring them salvation in the immediate future. The basic feature of such a creed is intolerance to the unfaithful. Over the past decade, Russian elites eagerly paraded their intolerance with regard to the so-called "marginals", that is, parts of Russian society and economy that were slow to "marketize". These vast strata of "marginals" included Soviet-era intelligentsia (academics, teachers, engineers, physicians); workers of traditional manufacturing industries; pensioners; and rural dwellers. In the course of Russia's latest "revolution from above", intense hostility that is usually characteristic of the poor vis-a-vis the rich in typical revolutions from below, has run in the opposite direction. Yet this intolerance spread not only to those considered "maladaptive" but also to those that adapted to capitalism in a markedly different way. This refers first of all to ethnic and religious communities inside Russia that managed to avoid the extent of atomization experienced by ethnic Russian majority due to profound cultural differences that we will now leave aside. Of these non-Russian minorities, Muslims - or, more precisely, representatives of ethnic communities traditionally associate with Islam - have been by far the largest, comprising circa 20 million citizens. Trade competition with the Muslims, particularly Caucasians, and the resentment over their occasionally more efficient adaptation - or, perhaps, insulation - vis-a-vis the "wild market" fueled Islamophobia and racism inside Russia. Violent skinhead riots in Moscow of October 2001 are its latest evidence. At the elite level, this ethnic and cultural intolerance - intertwined with economic interests - was one of the prime movers of the two bloody and inconclusive wars conducted by the Kremlin in Chechnya. This unfriendliness was only aggravated by the evidence of generous support for the Russian Muslims coming from their better-off co-religionists from abroad. In the meantime, the processes of economic decay that were outlined above have confronted Russia with the Islamic world yet again, this time on the international oil market. Regardless of the purely religious and political dimensions of this relationship (including at times very real and threatening outbursts of ethnic and religious radicalism directed against Russia), the cultural intolerance of market fundamentalists apparently played an autonomous role in shaping the attitude of Russia's extractive elites toward their southern competitors. Wealthy Russians who spend their vacations in Abu Dhabi have often been struck by the Arabs' response to globalization that preserved national solidarity and provided for a relatively equitable redistribution of profits at the national level. The mindset that was accustomed to view Russia's southern neighbors as developing and backward experienced a cognitive dissonance when comparing the relative equilibrium of these societies with Russia's own social and moral breakdown in the course of the market reforms. Such a confluence of domestic and foreign experiences produced a view of the Muslim culture as deviant, cunning and fundamentally hostile to Russia. Belief in the impending "clash of civilizations" - a doctrine developed in Harvard by Samuel Huntington - has gained increasingly wider currency in Russia's ruling circles. Given their intensifying competition with OPEC, it is not surprising to see Russian oil executives displaying genuine interests in the geopolitical developments in the Middle East and the Gulf. And if thirty or forty years ago Soviet foreign policy establishment was generally favorable to Arab radicals and occasionally veered into anti-Semitism, the structurally different economic relationship of the present-day de-modernized Russia to the Arab world has produced opposite effects. Rampant anti-Arab sentiments among Russia's business executives were openly expressed well before the terrorist strikes in the U.S. Russia's Big Oil was clearly interested in the aggravation of regional conflicts that would further drive up commodity prices. Thus, in a typical article posted on the Russian internet channel RusEnergy.com, affiliated with YUKOS, titled: "Will Russia's Oil Be Enough If Israel Occupies Palestine?", its author Ivan Gribanov opined that "the occupation of Palestine [by Israel] and the wiping out of the bandits would bring a sense of relief to many opponents of Islamic terrorism." And, in another posting, the same author wrote with characteristic frankness that "Russia may draw considerable political and economic benefit from the clash of civilizations, if Moscow is skillful enough to use the international situation in its interests." As suggested above, the events of 9/11 in the U.S. and the ensuing anti-terrorist campaign that heightened Western apprehensions about the "Arab" oil was seen by many in the Russian commodity sector as a golden opportunity for mega-profits. President Putin acted perhaps as less than a fully accomplished diplomat when he echoed these feelings by announcing in the course of his September visit to Germany that Russia "stands ready to increase its oil exports in case of world conflicts." Meanwhile, such mouthpieces of commodities' barons as RusEnergy.com have risen the intensity of their Islamophobia to new heights. To sum up, outside observers would be mistaken to see President Putin's rapprochement with the West and his embrace of the anti-terrorist coalition as a result of progressive developments and a comprehensive "Westernization" of Russia, whatever this may mean. Quite the contrary, in economic terms it stems from Russia's slipping way backward in its development - to a stage where, rather than competing with the West, as before, over the markets for industrial goods and technologies in the developing world, it is competing with the OPEC over Western oil markets. And the intesity of racism that is percolating through the ranks of Russia's ruling class and is incomparable to the superficially instrumental anti-Americanism of the Soviet era testifies to the extent of this historical rollback that has been experienced by Russia. If the anti-Westernism of the parts of the Soviet military-industrial complex was substantially moderated by the larger horizons of overall government policies, the present anti-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiment of Russia's oil salesmen is either completely accepted as a given or even occasionally fueled by government officials and government-affiliated media. In Russian history, international crises always reverberated not only through clashes of military forces and economic interests but - often more importantly and intensely - through ideological and cultural wars. Likewise, in our days, while Russia's decrepit and demoralized military does not represent a credible threat to anyone except, perhaps, to Russia itself, and the hegemonic corporate interests do not face any challenge to their dominance that would lead to a crisis, the ideological radicalization of Russia's ruling class that has run up against inherent constraints to its prosperity spells enough trouble to warrant a serious attention. Gradually turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy in the Russian elites' relations with various Muslim-populated states and Muslim ethnic groups within Russia, the clash of civilizations is threatening to become the most violent manifestation of the world-systemic crisis in the heart of Eurasia. Dmitri Glinski-Vassiliev is a Senior Associate at the Institute for World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dr. Glinski-Vassiliev graduated with a B.A. from Moscow State University in 1994. He received an M.A. in political science from Ohio State University in 1995 and an M.A. in international relations from John Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, in 2000. Glinski-Vassiliev received his Ph.D. from IMEMO in 2000. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
< < <
Date Index > > > |
World Systems Network List Archives at CSF | Subscribe to World Systems Network |
< < <
Thread Index > > > |