Examination of Witnesses (Questions 115-119)
PROFESSOR MARTIN
MCCAULEY,
DR ROY
ALLISON AND
DR ALEX
PRAVDA
17 MARCH 2009
Q115 Chairman: Welcome to all of you
for this second part of the session. Would you like to introduce
yourselves and give the briefest of backgrounds of your interest
in this subject of Russia, please.
Professor McCauley: Martin McCauley.
I have spent 30 years teaching and researching Russian history
and politics at the University of London, and I continue researching
and writing on Russia and also on defence and security matters
and so on.
Dr Pravda: Alex Pravda. I am Director
of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre and a Fellow of St
Anthony's College, Oxford. I am also an Associate Fellow of the
Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. Like
my colleagues, I have, for more decades than I care to remember,
been involved in the study of Moscow's external policy, both in
Soviet and what we still call post-Soviet times. I am particularly
interested in the homemade nature of much foreign policy, and
we do well to pay close attention to domestic sources and domestic
politics of external actions, particularly in the case of systems
like the Russian and the intimate linkages with issues like pride,
which was mentioned, to explain and not to over-rationalise their
external actions.
Dr Allison: I am Roy Allison.
I am Reader in International Relations in the Department of International
Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science,
where I specialise on Russian/Eurasian foreign and security policies.
Prior to joining the LSE in 2005, for 12 years I was the head
of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, the Royal
Institute of International Affairs, where my interests spanned
Russian foreign policy, Central Asian and South Caucasian foreign
and security policy, and relations with the West. I have directed
a series of significant research projects, during that period
and since, at the LSE, where we investigated not only policy matters
at the level of decision-making but also the attitudes of elites,
elite thinking within Russia, and also public opinion through
survey material. We are looking at these different dimensions
of attitudes within Russia.
Q116 Chairman: Thank you. Does Russia
have an overall strategy for its foreign policy? I suppose that
means a long-term strategy.
Professor McCauley: It does because
it wishes to become like the Soviet Union. Its end goal is to
become a superpower—a great power and then a superpower.
You can say this is really myth making, but this is the goal.
If you look at foreign policy, you would have to look first at
security policy, which is made in the Security Council, which
consists of the Minister of Defence, the Minister of Internal
Affairs, the FSB (the political police) and others. They formulate
policy and that seems to be passed then to the Presidential Administration
which is a carry over from the former Soviet Union, the Politburo
of the communist party apparatus. Foreign policy is made there.
Underneath that, you have the Minister of Foreign Affairs and
the ambassadors, but the Presidential Administration has its own
sources. They are experts, they collect information, they get
papers from the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Therefore you have
a whole lot of people and institutions, if you like, pulling together
and making foreign policy, and if you ask for a single coherent
decision-maker, I suppose you would come back to Putin as the
Prime Minister, but it is very difficult to see. There is no ideology.
If they had an overbearing ideology under the Communists, they
did at least have an ideology. Therefore in many ways it is pragmatic.
Q117 Chairman: It comes back to Putin,
but is it not Medvedev who is in theory in charge of foreign policy?
Professor McCauley: No.
Q118 Chairman: In theory?
Professor McCauley: In theory
the President is responsible, but foreign policy is made in the
presidential administration, which is full of people appointed
by Putin or loyal to Putin, and Medvedev, when he goes abroad,
would be accompanied by the Head of the Presidential Administration
responsible for foreign policy, Serge Prikhodko, and others, and
they will advise him on foreign policy. He is not an individual
foreign policy maker, neither is the Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Sergei Lavrov. He just articulates the policy, I think.
Dr Pravda: I disagree in some
respects with what my colleague just said. I think the notion
of any state having a coherent overall foreign policy strategy
long-term is a difficult one to sustain in practice. Russia has
struggled more than most states with incoherence of strategy.
It has various visions, set out in long documents which are readily
issued, both on security and foreign policy. It has tactics, at
which it is quite adept, in a chess-playing way, self-consciously.
It often lacks the middle, which is the strategic element of how
to match the visions with means. Things have improved somewhat
and we conventionally compare the incoherence of the Yeltsin 1990s
with the increasing coherence and control of the Putin two administrations,
and that goes through to, in most people's analyses, the Putin-Medvedev
tandem era. However, I think that the two regional conflicts,
the armed conflict with Georgia, the gas conflict with Ukraine,
and the handling of the global crisis with which Russia has been
trying to grapple, show up the very important elements of lack
of co-ordination between various agencies, the high degree of
personalisation and decision-making, sometimes the improvisation
of decisions, because obviously crises tend to bring that out
even more strongly. I do not think one wants to look for enormous
differences among decision makers, but one wants to be realistic
about the degree of improvisation they have to undertake. From
their view of things, as often from inside, things look much more
chaotic than any smooth advance towards a strategic aim. He increasingly
comments on what they are aiming to achieve, the vision. The vision
is not a Soviet vision. No one I think in Russia wants to spend
what they saw as needless resources on maintaining some sort of
semblance of global reach. The moves to send warships to Venezuela
and so on, echoes of global ambition, are often more criticised
than supported in Moscow and they are very tentative. The aim
of the exercise—and this relates to the question you finished
your last session with: Russia's pride—is to be acknowledged
as a senior great power, not just any great power on a par with
France and Germany. Not a superpower, because that is too expensive
and beyond Russia's reach and ambition in a global sense, but
a senior great power which has particular droit de regard
in the former of Soviet space, dealing in a very difficult way
with post-Imperial situations. We have to at least emphasise—not
sympathise—with the difficulties of dealing with states
that were part of an imperial structure, linked up in gas pipelines,
security arrangements, mental outlooks, ethnic blood links; so
dealing with all that and yet achieving an equal great power status
with the large senior great powers of the world, and inclusion
in the clubs of senior great powers to work within the system.
Dr Allison: I agree with Dr Pravda
that in many ways it is easier to find a lack of co-ordination,
and a dysfunctionality of decision-making in foreign policy than
coherence and real design and strategy. One could argue that in
some respects this difficulty in co-ordinating and developing
a coherent consensual policy has increased as the decision-making
process has become even more centralised. This is a comment more
generally, of course, about the Russian political system as well.
In that system there is reluctance to provide information which
could be viewed as gloomy or negative, so there is not an effective
feedback process to assess and evaluate where things have gone
wrong. This is one way one could interpret some of the crises
that have taken place that seem to have been against Russia's
best interest in any measured sense. But Russia tries to present
a coherent set of principles or concerns in a programmatic way.
We have heard reports recently that President Medvedev commissioned
a new National Security Strategy for the period 2008 to 2020,
that this should be published soon, and conceptually that would
fit alongside the Foreign Policy Concept signed into force by
Medvedev last July and also the rather ambitious development plan
to 2020. These kind of documents do not allow one very clearly
to assess priorities in policy. Often they set out a range of
different objectives without really showing how they interact,
one with another.
Q119 Chairman: That document has
not been produced yet, has it?
Dr Allison: No. It has not, to
my knowledge. As far as ambitions and vision are concerned, this
has been driven by the Russian perception of its relative status
and influence globally. Here, certainly until last autumn, the
Russian ambition was to find itself or to work towards becoming
one of the top five economies in the world and a state still more
influential than that suggests. Its claim was that it was already
in the top ten, and I think this sense of becoming in the top
five has coloured much of its policy, how it relates to other
countries. This expectation is one of course that could be challenged
now, or maybe is under challenge, simply because of the fact that
the Russian economy now has moved into recession, perhaps in the
order of 2 or 3% this year; more than three-quarters of the stock
market value has been wiped out. Of course there is a question
of possibly sustained low energy prices. All of this is, I think,
creating an existential challenge to the fundamental Russian attitude
about its position in the international system and therefore its
global aspirations. It certainly still has the aspiration to be
a global player. It expects to receive the kind of response from
other countries that befits that status. As part of that is the
assumption that the world is moving in a multipolar direction
rather than sustaining a unipolar or America-centric system, and
that Russia is one of the rising poles within that conception,
alongside countries like China and India. How far this belief
about Russia being on the crest of a wave of the future is dented
by the economic misfortune it now has is something we need to
watch carefully.
Chairman: Thank you very much.
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