Sarkozy and Russian-European Relations

Sarkozy and Russian-European Relations

William Pfaff

Paris, October 23, 2008 – Andrei Grachev, the former official spokesman of Mikhail Gorbachev during the final period of the Soviet Union's existence and one of the most thoughtful survivors of the Soviet Union, made an interesting point about Russia's new president, Dimitri Medvedev, during a recent talk at the American University of Paris. He said that Medvedev's greatest importance is that he embodies generational change in Russia. Vladimir Putin is a man of the Soviet era, formed in its most important ruling institution, the KGB. He sees and reacts to the world from that perspective.

While Medvedev came to power by the grace and favor of Putin, he was formed in a Russia where the Soviet Union was over and done with. The West's influences were the most important issues for his generation. The urgent problem was how to westernize Russia itself, in the sense of finding the place for it in global institutions dominated by the United States and Europe.

Vladimir Putin as president offered a chance for changed relations with the West, but it was not taken up. The language still was of partnership and cooperation, when George W. Bush remained convinced that he had looked into Putin's soul and found it good; but Washington was interested in drawing Russia into western institutions on American terms.
The enlargement of NATO to the former Warsaw Pact states, and then to states formerly part of the Soviet Union itself, has been crucial, in my opinion. There had to be hostility in Moscow to what clearly seemed military encirclement of Russia. The opportunity was lost to create, with Putin, a new relationship between Russia and the West.
With Medvedev, there may be a second chance to spare the world a sterile reenactment of a cold war that no longer has any serious purpose.

When Russia was a Leninist state it had an ideological mission to remake human society, a messianism historically linked to the era when the Russian church believed Russia the "Third Rome" (after Rome itself, and Constantinople), with God's final message of salvation for the world. That all ended in the horrors of the second world war and then the cold war.

Now the situation is different, and for this reason the European reaction to the war in Georgia, as Nicolas Sarkozy quickly formulated it, may have been extremely important.
While Washington and most West European capitals were unreflectively denouncing Russian "aggression" and offering proposals for "punishing" Russia (throwing it out of western institutions, and the like), Sarkozy was trying to move it towards the West. He immediately sent his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, to Tbilissi, to ascertain the facts and find what was necessary to obtain a cease-fire.

Two days later Sarkozy himself was shuttling between Moscow and Tbilissi negotiating the truce in the name of the European Union, and offering its diplomatic resources and ability quickly to supply professional observation of how truce agreements were carried out. They were eventually carried out correctly: the Russian outposts deep in Georgia were dismantled, and Russian withdrawals made as promised.

This was possible because Sarkozy spoke to Medvedev as European to European, and moreover because (as Grachev said in Paris) Sarkozy was solving problems for Medvedev and Putin too. He showed them how their intervention could be wound up quickly and constructively, on terms proposed by Western Europe and grudgingly accepted by Washington.

The European Union has the ability to supply Russia with something it badly needs: an interlocutor in the West that is independent of the United States.
This brings me back to Mikhail Gorbachev, and to someone else I've written about recently, the American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan.
In was in 1987, at the beginning of Gorbachev's effort to reform the Soviet Union through the unprecedented method of encouraging everyone to tell the truth about the system in which they lived. (This was Glasnost. Structural reform – Perestroika, would come next.)

Kennan was in Washington and was invited to a reception at the Soviet Embassy, which he ordinarily would have turned down but on this occasion was convinced by his wife to attend. Gorbachev sought him out at the reception, and said to him: "Mr. Kennan. We in our country can believe that a man may be a friend of another country and remain, at the same time, a loyal and devoted citizen of his own; and that is the way we view you."

That is the kind of friendship the new Russia needs, and it is possible that Western Europe could provide it, and stop the reconstitution of the hostile military and political blocs of the cold war. Germany as well as France would have to take the lead, which would be useful to Germany, already suspect in some American circles because of the rising influence of the Social Democrats and the new left.

The instrument of a new European leadership could be the one Sarkozy seized on when he first took the lead, with Gordon Brown and Angela Merkel, to solve the credit crisis: the Eurogroup. This is the existing European core institution in charge of the euro-currency economy. It needs an expanded mandate.

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This article comes from William PFAFF
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