Russia’s invasion of Georgia has prompted comparisons with the Munch crisis of 1938 and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. But a more revealing comparison is with 1848, writes David Clark, chairman of the Russia Foundation and former advisor in British Foreign Office.
The forty-eighters would also have recognised in Putin’s Russia the face of their enemy. In acknowledging that Russia’s war aims include the establishment of a zone of ‘privileged interest’, Putin’s ally, President Medvedev, was reviving a geopolitical doctrine straight from the nineteenth century school of European power politics. This is not a scheme in which notions of popular sovereignty and self-determination have any place. It is one in which autocracy and imperialism go hand in hand. Put simply, Russia’s governing elite rejects the idea that countries on its periphery have the right to choose domestic and foreign policies that conflict with Moscow’s wishes or that relations between them should be mediated by international law, sovereign equality or consent. Russia is a big power with privileged status and the right to assert its will over smaller neighbours by force. Forget Donald Rumsfeld: this is the real clash between old and new Europe.
Writing in the excellent on-line journal, Democratiya, Clark excoriates those commentators and realist experts, from the Left and the Right, who are happy to accept the Russian narrative, convincing themselves that Moscow represents a countervailing power to American hegemony:
The values that define the new Europe of independent, democratic nations are under attack from an older European tradition of based on a reverence for despotic power. The battles of 1848 are being played out in a modern form. Sadly, some progressives appear to be on the wrong side of the barricades.
[...] contrast to Georgia’s position, Russia’s international standing is worse now than at any time since 1991,” she said. “And the cost of this self-inflicted isolation [...]