ABSTRACT
The study of foreign policy was traditionally a study of how different agents vied with one another in order to secure specific outcomes. This is not such a study. The point here is to say something about the aggregated social and historical context within which the clash between different positions happens. The object of study is the clash of reality claims that result in identities. I focus on discursive work – how different agents draw on available representations of particular phenomena such as ‘Europe’, but also ‘Russia’, ‘the West’, etc., to define not only those phenomena, but also, and in extension thereof, the specific foreign policy processes that shape outcomes. This mapping of how different representations vie with one another to define a specific phenomenon is of interest in itself, but the ultimate point of the exercise is to say something about what makes it possible to add to a specific representation of Europe by saying, for example, ‘Europe is a model for us in terms of oil extraction’ or ‘Europe is rotten’. Put more technically, I study utterances or statements by Russians in order to understand what makes it possible to have such statements accepted as truth claims. I call these representations. What makes it possible to make statements at all, that is, the system for the formulation of statements, is discourse (Dunn & Neumann, 2016). The Russian debate about Europe is a clash of representations. When representations are materialised – that is, when they and their bearers are streamlined and organised by bringing institutional resources to bear, I talk about a position. For example, when the Russian state proclaimed an Official Nationalism in 1833, a specific representation of Europe was made into the state’s position. Specific heed has to be paid to the state’s position, for in the period studied here, the state was the key institution in bringing resources to bear on representations, and so a major force in the debate. This way of studying foreign policy as a boundary-producing identity practice
was trail-blazed by scholars of international relations such as Richard Ashley (1987a), David Campbell (1992) and Ole Wæver (2002). Their sources of
inspiration included postcolonial literature, especially Edward Said’s 1977 book Orientalism. The basic idea in that book is that ‘the East’ is a so-called constitutive outside for ‘the West’, which means that the East is the Other from which the West has to delimit or limn its identity. Said placed the terrain on which this happens not in the psychic system, where many previous scholars had placed it, but in the social system. It is the social representations of the Other, and not the mental constructs thereof, which are of the essence. This had the immediate methodological effect that textual and visual presentations become the place to look for the emergence of the Other. Behind Said stood the French post-structuralists, particularly Michel Foucault,
who argued that knowledge – which is the overall object of study for all the people mentioned here – is inextricably tied to power. Power/knowledge is a single entity. Knowledge, as a representational system, is about producing social reality. This means that representation is productive, which means that it has social effects. Where this book is concerned, the key point is that Russian knowledge produced about what Europe ‘is’, has immediate effects on what the Russian state does. To put the point differently, the Russian discourse on Europe is a precondition for Russian foreign policy (but it is not, of course, a fully determining condition; Hansen, 2006). As such, it is also the study of how a structural precondition – Russia’s place in the states system – becomes a tangible precondition for decision making. A social analysis of foreign policy cannot assume that structure has a direct impact on action. It is not structure understood analytically, but structure as represented by foreign policy makers, that preconditions a state’s foreign policy. Knowledge production is a wide phenomenon. The knowledge production
discussed here, about how to limn Russia from Europe, overlaps with another knowledge-producing discourse, the one on how Russians should organise themselves politically. Perhaps the most innovative work on Russian foreign policy that has come out since the first edition of this book is Ted Hopf’s work on how everyday Russian practices constrain the possibility for new political projects, and particularly liberal political projects such as the building of a Rechtsstaat and other democratic institutions (Hopf, 2002, 2013). In Russia itself, discourse on how Russia should be organised politically has, for
reasons discussed throughout the book, rather come to be dominated by the idea that the boundaries of the Russian cultural area should coincide with the boundaries of the Russian political unit. This is the doctrine of nationalism. From it flows the idea that the Russian state has a special responsibility not only to Russians living abroad, but also to people whom the Russian state itself defines as something called ‘the Russian world’ and which increasingly seems to include everyone who was once a part of the Russian-dominated Soviet Union or descendant of the same, whether they themselves think so or not (see Kazharski, forthcoming). The delineation of Russia from Europe under discussion here, then, is not only a question that has abstract repercussions on foreign policy. Since Russian discourse sees Russia as sharing a boundary with ‘Europe’ to its west, the question of what falls where also has a territorial component. I will touch on this question throughout, so for now
suffice it to say that this study, which focuses on how Russians delineate their nation and their state, is therefore also necessarily a study of Russian nationalism. As Said would have been the first to point out, Russia is not alone in delineating
itself in relation to ‘Europe’ and ‘the West’. So does Turkey and its predecessors (Wigen, 2016), and so, arguably, do polities that have no direct territorial boundary with Europe, such as Iran, China and Japan. The reason for this is obvious. By dint of the colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond, the structural force of European models impinged not only on Russia, but on the entire world. In postcolonial studies, the ensuing challenge to non-European thinking about politics and international relations is known as Chakrabarty’s (2000) problem: should non-European thinkers consider political developments in terms of the incoming European models, or should they stick to local models? Since Russia is the polity that has had the longest direct exposure to this problem, the history of the Russian discourse on Europe is longer than the others, but that should not keep us from seeing the striking parallels between them all (for China, see Zhang, 1991; for Greece, see Stivachtis, 1998; for Japan, see Suzuki, 2005; for Turkey, see Wigen, 2016; for nine Eastern European and Balkan states, see Ejdus, 2016; for Iran, see Shams-Lahijani, forthcoming; see also Sharp, 2003). In this sense, the present study has a place in the burgeoning literature on postcolonialism (Prozorov, 2006; Morozov, 2015), where the primary object of study is exactly knowledge production from a dominated or subaltern position, of the kind that is on display throughout this book. Debate about Europe is a traditional staple of Russian intellectual life (Berlin,
1963). Indeed, the idea of Europe is the main ‘Other’ in relation to which the idea of Russia is defined. This book demonstrates how Russians, when they make out they discuss Europe, also discuss themselves. Like other identities, the Russian one does not reside in essential and readily identifiable cultural traits but in relations, and the question of where and how borders with ‘the Other’ should be drawn therefore becomes crucial (Neumann, 1994b). The role of external ‘Others’ for the identity formation of nations and states
reveals the relevance of these processes for the student of international relations. The making of Russian policy is dependent on what sort of political project its politically leading citizens want Russia to be. Since the fight about this is conducted as a question of how it should relate to Europe, ideas about Europe emerge as a key background determinant for both domestic and foreign policy.1
