China & Russia: Models and Modalities
Lee on Aug 03 2008 at 10:28 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page
Francis Fukuyama chats with Robert Kagan on a number of interesting things: Flash | WMV | MP3 (via: The American Interest).
Of immediate interest is Kagan’s notion that the the emergence of global multipolarity induces an imperfect, baseline bipolarity of ideological division in diplomacy, between the West and the surging authoritarians of the “New East.”
In the opening minutes, Fukuyama argues that while the recent diplomatic concord on Zimbabwe between China and Russia might suggest this, the two reborn Eastern powers have certain fundamental divisions of world-view which impact alliance structure, due to their historical relationship to power. He argues that China has traditionally perceived itself as a kind of destination for power and politics. The mandate of heaven makes China the imperial center of the universe, of which the rest of the world can only envy in political sinocentrism.
Whereas Russia –increasingly animated today by Soviet nostalgia– may again begin to see itself as a kind of departure point for power and politics. In Russia at least there is a political tradition of the country serving as a aggressive universalist tutor for the developing world. Perhaps Moscow could even perceive itself in the way Lenin saw the role of Russia in the context of international revolution. Lenin after all, went so far as to argue that the Soviet Union could not survive absent a world revolution driven by his exportable political principles.
In essence, Fukuyama seems to be wondering whether Russia could be an internationalist while China remains a nationalist,with both representing not dissimilar models for authoritarian power, but presumably finding difficulty in unified action at the United Nations and elsewhere.
There’s some appeal to this. While the problematic geography of the two countries has never lent itself easily to unified fronts (although an emerging post-European stage for Russia could change those dynamics), it was the specific modal conflict Fukuyama identifies that was at the heart of the Sino-Soviet split. From the 1930s on, the Soviet Union was endlessly peeved that Mao systematically ignored its advice as the benevolent ideological exporter, arguing as he did for Chinese solutions for a Chinese revolution.
But there are problems here too, given that Russia’s Soviet legacy isn’t pristine as ideological export state. While Mao resented Stalin’s interference in the revolution, it was by then no longer the case that Stalin was pursuing Lenin’s vision of Russia as internationalist. Indeed, Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s) idea of internationalism had been rather quickly and unceremoniously abandoned by Stalin, who was swift to promote Bukharin’s doctrine of “Socialism in One Country.” Imperial annexation and the creation of vassal states under Russian hegemony was the new nationalist order.
While it’s true that Stalin didn’t stick exactly to that principle and changed it postwar, it’s also true that his insular nationalist doctrine informed the leaderships which followed him as a kind of Russocentrism that was never fully abandoned. Even when interest in fomenting foreign revolutions under Soviet tutelage reemerged in the late 1950s and 1960s with the Cuban Revolution, it was no longer divorced from strategic considerations for the Soviet Union, rather than the Leninist assumption that the emancipation of the proletariat abroad would serve as its own security (something by then disproved by China).
As regards China, it’s interesting that Kagan responds to Fukuyama by acknowledging that the danger of China consists not in it suddenly becoming an ideological exporter, but by course of its mere existence as an illiberal economic success (in “defiance of gravity” as he puts it). Thereby it can serve as a model for emulation from afar, without need for intervention (and thus without blame).
That’s something that hasn’t escaped notice in Africa and Asia of course, but it’s also something that the Soviets always had trouble with from the start. The Soviet Union had a notable tendency to inherit and invest states and parties which were explicit about their ambitions to emulate them. Indeed it’s very difficult to avoid doing that, even if you don’t want to (as the USSR occasionally didn’t). When someone comes begging to you to shape their personality and ideas, the most dedicated disinterested neutralist can become an active tutor (and master) in short order.
We also run aground of a fundamental assumption here too, in that it is becoming increasingly clear that while China isn’t exporting ideology overtly, the Stalinist model of creating vassal states in revolutions from within is easy to back in to for China.
Expanding value in trade relationships often has an intensifying effect on that temptation too for historical world powers. The common argument that consists of paraphrasing Coolidge to say that the “business of China is business” is flawed in that it assumes trade, politics and security are ultimately separable. We should know that’s not true from our own experience. The business of the United States in Latin America was business also. Yet well before Coolidge became president, the maintenance and protection of commercial interests had become integrally wedded to political and security involvement on a massive scale. We should expect the same to happen as China becomes increasingly top heavy in highly unstable and poor African economies. Perhaps even for Russia as well, given that she’s not immune to such exposure.
It is also not entirely genuine to suggest that China is even today disinterested in the internal politics of foreign states or vassals. It perhaps says something that organizers have recently been compelled to combine three protests against China on Tibet, Burma, and Zimbabwe policy into one. At some point, for a number of situations, we will have to begin to ask whether the oligarchical governments China favors in Africa and Asia are expressions of apathy or advocacy.
Sphere: Related Content3 Responses to “China & Russia: Models and Modalities”
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interesting indeed…
Hm, interesting discussion here for sure.
Josh Xiong has pretty good discussion of Kagan and China here:
Chinese Exceptionalism
*Edited your comment to repair the link, Don.