ABSTRACT
Are we living in a multipolar world? Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks so. In his 2012 Address to the Federal Assembly, Putin stated, ‘It is absolutely obvious to everyone that the modern world is becoming increasingly multipolar’ (Putin, 2012). But what does that signify? What signifies that? Putin’s statement is part of a broader trend in which key Russian officials cast multipolarity as a state of affairs that warrants little elaboration. Ambiguously but consistently, multipolarity has figured prominently in various iterations of official Russia’s desired world order throughout the post-Soviet period. In excavating the post-Soviet conjuncture for Russian state-sanctioned uses
of multipolarity, this chapter contributes to a nascent ‘multipolar turn’ in International Relations (IR) and International Political Economy (IPE) literature. The intention behind this chapter is twofold. First, it is meant as a theoretical contribution to broader discussions about globalisation, neo-liberalism, unipolarity and multipolarity. The historicist approach offered here invites us to problematise, if not efface, the divide between scholarly and political practices that produce concepts, theories and ideas pertaining to how the global political economy functions. Second, it is meant as an empirical ‘corrective’ to the aforementioned dis-
cussions through its demonstration of the longer-run tendencies of Russian state organs and prominent Russian officials to embed multipolar discourse in their respective visions of world order (Silvius, 2014; 2015). Russian state movements towards multipolarity gestate in the midst of, if not previous to, scholarship pertaining to ‘globalisation debates’, multipolarity, the emergence of the BRICS framework of global governance, and the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Such a corrective demonstrates that at a ‘political’ level, the Russian state has been embedding multipolarity in a ‘polysemic’ fashion before important scholarship deemed it warranted or possible. For the Russian state, the multipolar world order becomes over laden with signifiers that are as much normative and axiomatic as they are measurable. In the process multipolarity is portrayed as an objective material condition predicated on the dispersal of economic and political power beyond the Western core, a defense of cultural
integrity, and a solution to problems of global governability instigated by unipolarity. This chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2 considers the extent to which
Russian state practices of multipolarity challenge or contribute to globalisation paradigms in IPE. In Section 3, I consider how official Russia’s post-Soviet discourse and practices contribute to a nascent multipolar turn in IR/IPE. In Section 4, I demonstrate how major developments during the post-Soviet conjuncture shaped key elements of a discursive strategy of multipolarity: cultural and civilisational integrity, geopolitics, geoeconomics, and the promise of a just and better functioning world order. Section 5 contains the deeper empirics: analysis of statements and documents by Russian officials and Russian state organs which demonstrate how multipolarity has stabilised at the discursive level as a multifaceted critique of American unipolarity. Section 5 also demonstrates the ‘overdetermined’ nature of multipolarity: the range of qualitative, technical and normative qualities ascribed to multipolarity by Russian officials. Section 6 concludes the piece.
