Order and Counter-Order

This article explores how today’s post-modern, interdependent European system of order interacts with a competing system led by a modern, realist Russian Federation. Russia’s great power identity is based on a long-standing statist tradition of foreign policy thinking combined with a legacy of conviction in the uniqueness of Eurasian civilization. Key to meeting the Russian challenge is systemic adaptation to engender cooperation in the common economic space, thereby permitting the two systems not only to co-exist, but co-evolve as stable, interdependent entities. I 2008, Charles King wrote the five-day Russian-Georgian war “will mark a time when Russia came to disregard existing international institutions and begin, however haltingly, to fashion its own.”1 The war was a manifestation of Russia’s claim to a key zone of “privileged interests,” and shocked the post-Cold War geopolitical order by challenging the expansion of NATO into post-Soviet Eurasia.2 The true significance of the crisis, however, was twofold. The unilateral intervention signaled Moscow’s general distrust of multilateral institutions as organs of global governance, thus affirming a Russian conviction that hard power was the true currency of international relations.3 Further, the intervention was proof a recalcitrant Russia would no longer accept western indifference to its Great Power aspirations or to its strategic interests in the newly independent neighboring republics. With US-Russia relations at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Obama administration extended an olive branch by proposing a “policy reset.” By acknowledging Russia’s leading role in the post-Soviet space, ending (temporarily) NATO expansion, reconfiguring the US concept for missile defense in Europe, supporting Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization, and deepening bilateral economic relations, the reset brought the relationship from the brink of collapse towards effective rapprochement.4 Although the reset policy did not return the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to full Georgian control, it was largely successful. In 2009, President 1 Charles King, “The Five-Day War: Managing Moscow after the Georgia Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 6 (November/December 2008): 2-11. 2 Jeffrey Mankoff, Russian Foreign Policy: The Return of Great Power Politics, 2nd ed. (Toronto, Canada: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 263-264. 3 In 2008 there was a lingering feeling among Russian leaders that multilateral institutions like the United Nations Security Council and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe existed only to promote the interests of the United States and its allies. See King, “The Five-Day War.” 4 Mankoff, Russian Foreign Policy, 89-93, 263. regionAl chAllenges Order and Counter-Order: The European System and Russia