ABSTRACT
While the USSR might have collapsed with relatively little violence, the disintegration of the great empires of the past suggests that the greatest danger comes from conflicts between successor states and the threat of outside powers seeking to take advantage of the power vacuum. The arbitrariness of the borders, the intermingling of populations, and a host of unresolved problems provided fertile ground for conflict. The ambiguities in Russian policy towards the successor states, twelve of which including Russia came to be members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), was one of the main charges against the liberal foreign policy of the early post-communist years. The nature and purpose of the CIS was contested. The CIS was not itself a state in the conventional sense and neither was it a subject of international law. Its member states actively pursued their own independent foreign policies, intended often to distance themselves from their former partners, above all Russia. This distancing tendency by the late 1990s took the form of the establishment of the GUUAM group of states (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova), while Russia itself sought ‘ever closer union’ with Belarus. Russian policy sought to incorporate the former Soviet states (excluding the three Baltic republics) into an expanded security zone and sphere of vital interests, while the other states sought to defend their sovereignty and independence. (See Table 16.1 for data on area and populations of the former Soviet states.) This chapter briefly examines the evolution of the CIS, Russia’s relations with the successor states, and analyses the problem of borders and the vexed question of individual and collective rights in nation-and state-building.
