Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 10 – Speaking at
the Valdai Club meeting this year, Vladimir Putin said that “trade and sanction
wars are the reality of the contemporary global economy” and are “used among
other things as instruments of unfair competition.” But he is wrong, Vladislav Inozemtsev says.
“In the contemporary world, sanctions are not becoming the rule.”
By drawing this false conclusion,
the Moscow economist continues, “Russian political analysts and government
officials are deceiving themselves” into thinking that the corner into which
they have driven themselves is somehow normal and that autarky is the best
possible response (rbc.ru/opinions/politics/09/11/2015/5640448e9a7947db07ddf7fc).
Indeed, “by
defining sanctions as ‘the most important instrument of international
politics,’ we involuntarily solidarize with those countries to which they are
applied or have been applied and in this way accelerate our transformation into
a global outcast,” Inozemtsev argues; and that in turn will lead to ever more
inadequate choices and actions.
According to the Moscow economist,
“the conceptual innovation of the Valdai Club is interesting above all because
it marks a new stage in the mythologization of domestic political
thought.” In the 2000s, the Kremlin
promoted the idea that Russia was so unique that it “could not be subordinate
to general rules of any kind.
Now, “we see an entirely different
effort: to present an anomalous situation in which Russia finds itself as the
new norm of the contemporary world.” Sanctions in this view are entirely normal
as is the forcible seizure of territory from a neighboring state, but both
notions are false. Neither is “the new normal.”
“Sanctions which Western countries
have introduced against Russia unquestionably do not promote the development of
[Russia’s] economy and limit the financial possibilities of the country,” but
they are neither so severe that they will destroy it or so typical that they
should be accepted as what everyone does.
If that happens, Inozemtsev says,
that will distort Russian thinking to the point that it will not be able to
interact in any useful way with the contemporary world as it actually is. And he pointedly reminds that “economic
realities change quite quickly, but phobias and myths at times last for
decades.”
In support of his conclusions, the
Moscow economist points out that there have always been conflicts in the
international system and that they have always involved both geopolitical and
economic components. Countries have always had allies and opponents, and
thinking that this is something entirely new or that things have somehow
significantly changed is “at a minimum an essential exaggeration.”
On the one hand, he says, economic
differences have led to military actions, but “wars to acquire resources and
territories remain in the past, and on this basis, Russia’s Crimean ‘adventure’
looks like a shocking exception. The loss of the economic foundation of war is
a fundamental aspets of international politics of the 21st century.”
And on the other hand, “economic
responses ever more often are given to political provocations, although there
is nothing new in this.” The US introduced a Trading with the Enemy Act in
1917, and in the course of the 20th century, trade and financial
sanctions became quite widespread,” affecting “more than 50 countries.”
“Today, their number is much less:
there are only nine countries under sanctions of which two of them which had
been subject to complex sanctions earlier (Cuba and Iran) will escape this
regime in the current year,” Inozemtsev says.
“The sanctions applied in 2014 to
Russia rea objectively quite soft and will not influence the economy of the country
in catastrophic ways, in contrast, for example, form the Serbian case.” In other words, he says, “the contemporary
world, although it remains a world of political inequality and contradictions
should in no way be called a world of lawlessness and sanctions.”
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