NATO, as the most organised and effective military alliance in history, serves as an example of how significant for cooperation is the presence of a formal or informal leader. From the very beginning, this organisation was created under the leadership of the United States, which provided resources so that other participants fulfilled their obligations in a relatively disciplined manner.
The US, of course, also influenced European integration: it provided the project with all sorts of patronage and often very actively pushed its allies in Western Europe to reduce their sovereign rights in the economy. However, it was within NATO that this quality of a dictator and organiser of cooperation between formally independent countries turned out to be most in demand.
We cannot imagine NATO without the US: the notorious “security umbrella” is not really about protection from an external enemy. In fact, no one has ever particularly doubted that the US is not going to sacrifice its own survival for the sake of protecting its European allies. The true meaning of the American dictatorship within NATO, and the collective West, is that it makes cooperation among themselves possible for all the others. Without the will of Washington binding them together, they would have long ago dispersed to their respective houses of egotistical national interests. It’s most likely that they would have become victims of an external or internal threat. Perhaps even an internal one, since the real meaning of a country’s participation in NATO is the immutability of its political system and the irreplaceability of its elites. All the nationalist forces that came to power in Eastern Europe after 1991 entered into NATO, and they fear losing this more than anything else. It is precisely this role of NATO in their fate that is associated with the panicked moods among the European elites, given certain domestic political changes: the United States may reduce its participation in the life of the alliance, or even leave its ranks altogether.
Any attempts to create a space for cooperation at the level of one region, even one as large as Eurasia, represent a completely new phenomenon in the history of international politics, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev. This is the first part of the author’s reflections on the possible foundations of international cooperation in Greater Eurasia.
Any attempts to create a space of cooperation at the level of a single region, even one as large as Eurasia, represent a completely new phenomenon in the history of international politics.
The fact is that significant groups of states have always been able to cooperate on a relatively permanent basis only under the pressure of three factors.
First, if they had to deal with a significant external (or internal) threat, which in itself would pose a danger to the survival of their political systems and statehood.
Second, in the case when there was a power capable of uniting the rest within the framework of an alliance.
Finally, there should be geopolitical prerequisites for cooperation: countries entering into relations of constant positive interaction with each other (rather than competition) should be sufficiently near one another. This is precisely why, we note, it is European history that gives us examples of relatively systemic cooperation between states. In any event, there are exceptions.
The purpose of this and subsequent comments is to speculate on what can become the basis for international cooperation in Greater Eurasia in conditions where none of these classical factors can operate. The first of these factors has played a fundamental role in the emergence and development of all the examples we have seen in Europe in the past, including the most recent ones. The relative stability of the Vienna international order was based on the common victory of its founding countries over revolutionary France, which in Napoleonic times represented a challenge of colossal proportions. It does not matter at all that France was already included in the European “concert” during the Vienna Congress: ideologically, it was still based on a threat from a powerful enemy.
The most important thing for the creators of the Vienna order, of course, was the internal enemy. Kissinger, in one of his early works, quite rightly points out that the basis of a relatively stable order is the mutual recognition of legitimacy by its participants. By recognising each other’s legitimacy, the largest European powers – Austria, Britain, Russia, Prussia and royal France – directly or indirectly acted together against the internal enemy, i.e., a potential revolution against their order. Thus, the external enemy of the countries of the Vienna order was revolution as such: an attempt by internal or external forces to revise the existing order of things, which, of course, threatened the political systems of its founders.
Another example is European integration in the second half of the 20th century. The powers that created this project, which was quite successful until a certain point, and their political elites were in a state of almost panic or horror about the growing popularity of left-wing parties and the military threat emanating from the USSR, which stood behind the European communists. Now this may seem like an exaggeration, but in the early 1950s, when the political concept of European integration appeared, the possibility of Western Europe being absorbed by the victorious USSR and the socialist camp seemed quite real. So real that it forced Western European political elites to agree to significant restrictions on their ability to fully manage national economies and the fate of the population. It is no coincidence that the strongest threat to the continuation of the European integration project was the sharp rise in France’s foreign policy positions under President De Gaulle. Having acquired its own nuclear weapons, Paris no longer felt so insecure in the face of the USSR. Moreover, by the mid-1960s, the threat from left-wing parties in Western Europe had been largely blocked. In some places, this was through their displacement to the side-lines of political life due to the economic achievements of the government, while in others, as in Italy, it was through direct or indirect terror.
Internal changes in the USSR and instability in the ranks of its immediate allies also helped – after the exposure of Stalin’s personality cult and the events in Hungary in 1956, the great neighbour in the East no longer posed such a threat to the rulers of Western Europe. In fact, this was also connected with the final farewell to the idea of federalisation in Europe, which had been quite popular before. External and internal pressure on states weakened – their willingness to cooperate and, therefore, to give up their sovereign rights decreased. Since the second half of the 1960s, European integration has been developing in such a way as not to pose a significant threat to the monopoly of the national elites on power.
NATO, as the most organised and effective military alliance in history, serves as an example of how significant for cooperation is the presence of a formal or informal leader. From the very beginning, this organisation was created under the leadership of the United States, which provided resources so that other participants fulfilled their obligations in a relatively disciplined manner.
The US, of course, also influenced European integration: it provided the project with all sorts of patronage and often very actively pushed its allies in Western Europe to reduce their sovereign rights in the economy. However, it was within NATO that this quality of a dictator and organiser of cooperation between formally independent countries turned out to be most in demand.
We cannot imagine NATO without the US: the notorious “security umbrella” is not really about protection from an external enemy. In fact, no one has ever particularly doubted that the US is not going to sacrifice its own survival for the sake of protecting its European allies. The true meaning of the American dictatorship within NATO, and the collective West, is that it makes cooperation among themselves possible for all the others. Without the will of Washington binding them together, they would have long ago dispersed to their respective houses of egotistical national interests. It’s most likely that they would have become victims of an external or internal threat. Perhaps even an internal one, since the real meaning of a country’s participation in NATO is the immutability of its political system and the irreplaceability of its elites. All the nationalist forces that came to power in Eastern Europe after 1991 entered into NATO, and they fear losing this more than anything else. It is precisely this role of NATO in their fate that is associated with the panicked moods among the European elites, given certain domestic political changes: the United States may reduce its participation in the life of the alliance, or even leave its ranks altogether.
However, this factor is increasingly in doubt now. Not because the importance of leadership is decreasing and is not sufficient for cooperation to be comparatively effective. It is simply that even with the strongest state taking on the main power and responsibility, the limits of power remain objective. The example of events related to Ukraine shows that even the strongest leader can find itself in a situation where its capabilities are insufficient. Modern Ukrainian rulers have clearly overestimated how important control over this territory is for the United States. They failed to take into account that a great power cannot threaten its own existence, even for the sake of its closest allies, not to mention countries that, although they express complete loyalty, are not historical allies.
If we compare the significance of Kiev or Paris for the United States, in that the Americans were not ready to sacrifice Washington to save one of the two, then the scale of the Ukrainian leadership’s over-assessment of its own place in the strategic plans of its patron look truly grandiose. Especially if we consider that even such a rich and powerful country as the United States may have a shortage of resources to ensure all its foreign policy priorities. Then we have to make a choice in favour of what is most significant not formally, but from the point of view of the immediate interests of its society and economy. The inevitable weakening of the leader’s control over the countries that he forces to cooperate inevitably leads to a weakening of the ability of all its participants to maintain such civilized relations among themselves. Which once again proves the importance of the leadership factor in this most difficult area of interstate relations. Needless to say, the countries of Greater Eurasia do not have either of these two most important factors that make cooperation possible. But the purely geopolitical prerequisites at first glance are also extremely limited.
Source: Valdai. Discussion club
