Staunton, August 27 – After 20 years
of assuming that Russia wanted to join the rest of the world and play by the
rules, an assumption that was not without its problems, many in the West now
are governed by the opposite assumption, that Russia is capable of anything and
therefore must be opposed, according to Yevgeny Gontmakher.
And while Russians who now “spit on”
Europeans may feel good about that, he says, this shift creates a situation
that is potentially extremely dangerous precisely because what Moscow has done
and is doing in Ukraine touches the deepest beliefs that Europeans and
Americans had assumed were beyond challenge (echo.msk.ru/blog/gontmaher/1387828-echo/).
For
the last two decades, the Moscow commentator says, most Europeans focused
primarily on the internal affairs of their own countries and assumed that
Russia slowly but inevitably was going to do the same and that Moscow accepted
its underlying values of “stability, predictability, and willingness to
compromise.”
As a
result and until this past spring, Europeans generally passed over in silence
over the gradual reduction in civic freedoms in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s “harsh
rhetoric” as in his Munich speech, and “our armed clarification of relations
with Georgia” in 2008. Those were treated
as something Europeans could safely ignore.
But the Crimean Anschluss
changed all that, precisely because it happened not via military conquest but
rather in the remarkably peaceful way that it did, Gontmakher insists. That had the effect of raising the spectre
that similar changes in borders could happen in Europe regarding Catalonia,
Scotland and elsewhere.
“The most important part
of the European mentality is the unwillingness to change the existing rules of
public life. The times of revolution and shifts in borders are for our Western
neighbors something of the distant past which cannot be repeated,” the Russian
commentator argues.
Now, however, thanks to
Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Europeans are being forced to focus on foreign
affairs and to think what had been for them the unthinkable. “Of course,” Gontmakher says, “one can only
laugh over the fears of Estonians and Latvians concerning a hypothetical
invasion of them by Russian tanks.”
“But,” the Moscow
commentator says, “many residents of ‘old Europe sincerely believe in this.”
Having thought that Russia had become like them, they now fear that it is
capable of anything. “this is already a
very serious trend, which must not fail to worry us because of what it means
for relations between Russia and Europe now and in the future.
Russians can bleat on
about how “Russia is not Europe,” he continues, “but they must understand that
in the contemporary world the lines of division begin to pass not between
different models of states (from the democratic to the authoritarian) but
between the security of life of a resident and that which the Russian criminal
world calls ‘a life without rules.’”
“A typical European cannot
imagine” that basic communal services won’t work or that armed men will prowl
the streets and steal anything they want. (Gontmakher says that he thinks that “the
resident of a Chinese city cannot imagine this either.”) But when Europeans
look at what is happening in eastern Ukraine, they see that such things can
happen and not far away.
To the extent that they draw
conclusions that are too radical with regard to what Russia is now in fact capable
of, Europeans will not find it possible to cooperate with Russians against what
Gontmakher says is the common enemy of Islamist extremism. And that will be yet
another tragedy arising from what Vladimir Putin has done in Ukraine.
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