ArchiveRussian Geopolitical Concepts in Eurasia. A Short Overview
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Martin Malek
Abstract
Since 1999, soaring gas and oil prices have made resource-rich Russia both more powerful and intransigent, but also less co-operative. This, too, determines the emphasis Moscow puts on geopolitical initiatives. This paper sets out from looking at the “multi-polar world” and the “triangle” formed between Russia–China–India, two concepts which have shaped Moscow’s foreign, security, and military policy since the 1990s. Then, it discusses the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, which can be regarded as a realization of Russia’s geopolitical approach to international relations.
The Revival of Geopolitics in Russia
Due to the dramatic loss of influence of Marxism-Leninism both as internal ideology of justification as well as an instrument for analyzing the international relations, the USSR towards the end of the 1980s and, after its collapse in 1991, Russia, the prime successor state, increasingly felt the need for alternatives. A study published by the Center for Geopolitical Research at the Institute of Geography of the Russian Academy of Sciences presented the plausible view that countries, particularly in times of crisis and transition, are “prone” to geopolitical world concepts.1 Such concepts are, at least in part, able to “fill the ideological vacuum” in post-Soviet Russia. Sometimes they are even used to assess not only events of the present, but the past altogether. Thus, President Vladimir Putin, in his Annual Address to the Federal Assembly (Parliament) of Russia on April 25, 2005 labelled the collapse of the USSR as “a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama.”2
Dmitri Trenin, senior associate of the Carnegie Moscow Center and well-known analyst of Russia’s foreign and security policy, voiced the opinion that at the beginning of the 1990s the “substitute religion of geopolitics” replaced Marxism-Leninism.3 Paul Goble, also referring to the Russian globalisation critic Boris Kagarlitsky, hit the same tune: “For many Russian analysts geopolitics now fills the gap left by the collapse of Soviet Marxism, providing them with yet another
simplified model of a world divided between good and evil, encouraging them to believe that Moscow remains a far more central player in world affairs than is actually the case.”4
Dealing with geopolitics may be discredited in Western Europe today or permissible only if limited to a concept of “political geography,” because some of its proponents were involved with Nazi ideology. In Russia, by contrast, geopolitics is much more than an academic debate aloof public interest. It plays a crucial role in official foreign and security policy. Not even the Communist Party, or KPRF, has any qualms with it. Under the name of its chairman Gennady Zyuganov several books and articles about geopolitics were published.5 As of 1998, Alexander Dugin, a well-known ideologue of Neo-Eurasianism, was geopolitical adviser to Gennady Selesnyov, the Communist Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, or State Duma, which had – a unique phenomenon among parliaments worldwide – a Commission for Geopolitics. From 2002 to 2003, it was chaired by the Communist Alexander Shabanov.
Dmitri Trenin, senior associate of the Carnegie Moscow Center and well-known analyst of Russia’s foreign and security policy, voiced the opinion that at the beginning of the 1990s the “substitute religion of geopolitics” replaced Marxism-Leninism.3 Paul Goble, also referring to the Russian globalisation critic Boris Kagarlitsky, hit the same tune: “For many Russian analysts geopolitics now fills the gap left by the collapse of Soviet Marxism, providing them with yet another
simplified model of a world divided between good and evil, encouraging them to believe that Moscow remains a far more central player in world affairs than is actually the case.”4
Dealing with geopolitics may be discredited in Western Europe today or permissible only if limited to a concept of “political geography,” because some of its proponents were involved with Nazi ideology. In Russia, by contrast, geopolitics is much more than an academic debate aloof public interest. It plays a crucial role in official foreign and security policy. Not even the Communist Party, or KPRF, has any qualms with it. Under the name of its chairman Gennady Zyuganov several books and articles about geopolitics were published.5 As of 1998, Alexander Dugin, a well-known ideologue of Neo-Eurasianism, was geopolitical adviser to Gennady Selesnyov, the Communist Speaker of the Lower House of Parliament, or State Duma, which had – a unique phenomenon among parliaments worldwide – a Commission for Geopolitics. From 2002 to 2003, it was chaired by the Communist Alexander Shabanov.
