Russia, like other rising powers, faces three broad options in its relations with the world: seek to integrate further with the world economy as China has done (globalist), insist on a great power relationship with the United States that highlights things like arms control negotiations and respect for the internal sovereignty of all nations (great power), or revive Russian nationalism and self-confidence and reassert its hegemonic role in the former Soviet space (nationalist). These options are not exclusive. But they do tilt in different directions. Russia as a stakeholder in the global economy will become more entangled with foreign markets including the U.S. market. Russia as a great power partner will focus on nuclear and military issues and insist on operating through the United Nations Security Council and similar great power forums. And Russia as a revitalized imperial aspirant will inevitably rival and potentially clash with the United States and other Western powers as well as with China and Japan.
Which way is Russia going? The Rising Powers Initiative (RPI) at the Elliott School of International Affairs asked this question, initially in a volume published by Oxford University Press in September 2012, and then at a followup conference on March 18, 2013 sponsored jointly by two projects at the Elliott School, the RPI Project on Worldviews of Aspiring Powers in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) in the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Which way Russia goes, of course, is up to Russia. In a keynote address to the conference, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987-1991, Jack Matlock, stressed the importance of what goes on inside countries rather than outside them. The Soviet Union ended the Cold War for internal reasons not because the United States forced it to break up. Today, he pointed out, Russia makes too much of Western interference or encirclement. What happens in places like Georgia, Central Asia, or Ukraine will tend to reflect more what Russia does than what the United States does. Thus, as the Worldviews and PONARS Eurasia projects highlight, the debate inside Russia remains key.
The conference brought to Washington three proponents of the different points of view on Russia’s future. While wearing no specific labels, Vladislav Inozemtsev, Director, Centre for Post-Industrial Studies, Andranik Migranyan, Director, Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, and Fyodor Lukyanov, Presidium Chairman, Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and Editor-in-Chief, Russia in Global Affairs , laid out globalist, nationalist and realist (great power) perspectives on Russia’s relations with the United States and the world. An American panel then responded to these Russian views. Again, without specific labels, Leon Aron at the American Enterprise Institute, Paul Saunders at Center for the National Interest, Samuel Charap at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and E. Wayne Merry at the American Foreign Policy Council spelled out nationalist, realist and globalist (both liberal and conservative) views on the American side. In this brief report, we set out and elaborate these views on the range of issues Russia confronts as a rising power. Attached to this report are the agenda and full list of speakers at the conference on Russian worldviews.
