Russia World Power Most Committed to Realist Paradigm of International Relations, Bordachev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 1 – More than any other of the great powers, Russia “openly and consistently” follows the realist paradigm of international relations and rejects its alternative, the liberal one, according to Timofey Bordachev, the Valdai Club program direction and researcher at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics.

            He says that there are currently two leading schools of international relations, the liberal and the realist. “The difference in their approaches is colossal.” Those who follow the first believe that human nature and international relations can be improved if the right conditions are created (profile.ru/politics/pochemu-v-rossii-ljubyat-realistskuju-shkolu-mezhdunarodnyh-otnoshenij-1149560/).

            Those who follow the realist one, Bordachev continues, consider the liberal position utopian and have “a more pessimistic” view. They are “convinced that man by his nature is aggressive and egoistic, strives for power, and always will. And they also believe that the nature of relations among states is unchanging as well.”

            According to the realists, countries will “eternally struggle for power and harmony in such cases won’t be achievable. Therefore, at the center of the realist conception lies ideas about power and the state and not ideology as it is with liberals,” he says. “Of all the great powers, Russia most openly and consistently professes realism” as the basis of its foreign policy.

            “Russia now,” Bordachev says, “is a country with a comparatively small population located in an exceptionally varied geopolitical environment. These conditions distinguish us from America, India or China” who are able to focus on ideas more rather than constantly assess numerous interests.

            Russian realists know, he argues, that “any force which pretends to be defending ‘the common good’ will in the end secure the interests of the country which supplies soldiers or financial support” toward that end.

            “This doesn’t mean that Russia doesn’t believe in international cooperation and organization,” Bordachev says. “On the contrary.” But it recognizes as those trapped in the liberal paradigm do not that such cooperation means that all participants have to recognize the interests and positions of others rather than insisting on imposing their own.

            Russians do not believe that “abstract moral considerations should play a role in international politics.” And they deny universal values as such and reject all attempts to impose them. What they do believe in is the balance of forces and arrangements that reflect these forces rather than any supposedly higher values.

            Further, Bordachev says, “Russia is sympathetic to realism because it requires moderation in the application of force. For this theory, war is only a continuation of politics and it can be rational only as long as specific political tasks are being resolved.” Going beyond that is a trap that must be avoided.

            “Another most important maxim of realism – ‘potential rather than intentions has importance’ – also corresponds to the experience acquired by the Russian state over the centuries of its sovereign history.” Several times it has been the object of aggression by the unified forces of the West. And today it is again.

            What the West is doing, he says, is very different from what it is saying. “Liberals lie when they talk about the withering away of the state and of the power of institutions. All practical actions under these slogans have been directed at the achievement of the selfish goals of the powers who would never agree to even a minimum restriction on their own sovereignty.”

Russians “love realism,” Berdachev says, “because its vision of the world corresponds to the true state of affairs and of the behavior of governments whatever any of them says.”