Conclusion

The material and ideational bases of geopolitical and geocultural difference remain underexplored in critical international political economy. That they are dependent on capitalist relations of production is but one part of the story. It is my assertion that during the Putin era, we have witnessed the development or prolongation of powerful fault lines between the Russian state and the liberal unipolarity of the United States. The former has challenged the latter in spite of the fact that the Russian political economy is increasingly capitalist and integrated within structures of the capitalist global and/or regional political economy. In cultivating a rival vernacular to express dissatisfaction with the fundamental premises of liberal internationalism, Russian officials demonstrate that liberal capitalist ‘concepts of control’ have not become fully engrained amongst the Russian elite or society as a whole. This contributes to a tendency in which the Russian state remains set on articulating its samobytnost’ or uniqueness. I view this phenomenon in the contours of a broad historical question: what are the various compatibilities and contradictions in Russia’s prolonged integration into a capitalist global political economy after the fall of the Soviet Union? It is unsurprising that imperial nostalgia and ideas about Russian cultural or civilisational particularity that largely predate the contemporary period should resonate in the present age in spite of the fact that Russia’s economy increasingly operates on market principles. Nonetheless, a political economy analysis must insist that such ideas are never entirely independent of the imperatives of political economy. Hence, we have seen these ideas reformulated and rearticulated by the Putin regime in order to foster legitimacy in Russian society and support national development imperatives. In this work, I explored the material and ideational limits to liberal demo-

cratic universalism through the example of the Putin-era Russian state and its alternative understandings of world order. The Russian ‘case’ is significant to contemporary studies of world order, as the Russian state resists a strong version of the American hegemonic neo-liberal imperative and challenges the geographical spread of the Western bloc – i.e. through active stances against NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. Russia’s integration into the contemporary global political economy is one that involves considerable state direction and an unwillingness to wholeheartedly accept liberal-democratic

precepts. Correspondingly, the Russian state has simultaneously rejected Western triumphalism by appealing to ‘homegrown’ ideas and cultural frames and seemingly felt compelled to demonstrate that it meets the criteria of a democratic polity in international society. State-produced Russian alternative understandings of world order are inflected with three qualities: 1) a defence of state power, loosely conceived; 2) a demonstration of the Russian state’s ambiguous relationship with global capitalism, whereby a strong version of liberal democratic norms and unfettered markets are criticised as components of American hegemony; and 3) ideas and cultural frames which sanctify Russian national/civilisational values and practices. Such alternative understandings constitute a form of common-sense thinking about global affairs for the Putin regime that is comprised of a series of polysemic ideas that challenge American liberal democratic triumphalism while granting the Russian state sufficient latitude to determine its internal form of government. Nonetheless, such thinking also represents a considerable departure from the comprehensive counter-hegemonic, counter-systemic position of the Soviet Union. State-sanctioned Russian alternative understandings of world order are

comprised of intersubjectively held, or produced, ideas and beliefs that have accompanied political consolidation and socio-economic transition under Putin. Throughout this work I have used a critical historicist approach to accentuate how representations of intersubjectivity have been fostered amid the prolonged ‘transitional’ Russian political economy. Russian state officials and political technologists have produced a proliferation of concepts about world order that contribute to a desired common-sense thinking about global affairs that rivals liberal internationalism. That such concepts cohere into stable understandings of world order is not due to some straightforward calculation of ‘power’, a given typology of ‘state society complex’, or any unproblematic deductive understanding of world order. In recycling, conveying and producing ideas about world order, the Russian state engages in acts of persuasion, attempting to convince the Russian citizenry and the external world of the veracity of such concepts. My point of departure for this work is to problematise any simplified

correspondence between the semiotic and extra-semiotic in contingent and complex historical transitions. While a ‘classical’ historical materialist approach might be more concerned about the place of social forces in the process of production, I have focused my approach to understand the ‘pedagogical’ role of the Russian state as producer of concepts and ideas about world order. We can conceive of the Russian state as having an authoritative, bureaucratic, and coercive role in administering the Russian economic base and also articulating a palpable and palatable vision of national political and economic life. In addition to its role of organising the Russian economy along statist and capitalist principles, the Russian state, exemplified by the Putin regime, develops concepts and ideas that seek to render these moves intelligible according to longer Russian intellectual and cultural legacies and acceptable according to the dictates of common sense.