The first rule of thumb when trying to make sense of the fighting between Russia and Georgia is: don’t listen to any of the rhetoric coming out of Moscow, Washington, or Tbilisi.
The official Russian storyline is as follows. The largely ethnic Russian populations of South Ossetia and Abkhazia—the two breakaway regions of Georgia—suffer terribly under Georgian rule. Therefore, Russia must step in to “protect Russian citizens and their dignity” by guaranteeing regional sovereignty within Georgia or perhaps, at a later date, independence from Georgia. Ironically, this storyline is modeled closely on how the West framed the debate over Kosovo independence, only this time the roles are reversed. Instead of Putin renouncing independence and defending Serbia’s “just demands to restore the country’s territorial integrity,” we have Bush saying, “Georgia is a sovereign nation, and its territorial integrity must be respected.” In Kosovo, America framed the intervention as a humanitarian action, whereas in Ossetia, it is Russian president Medvedev who recently declared "Our task is to help overcome the consequences of the humanitarian catastrophe." By co-opting the Kosovo storyline, the Russians are hiding the true motives behind their actions while simultaneously sticking it to the West, giving them a taste of their own (bulls**t) medicine, so to speak.
The American storyline for the recent fighting in Georgia is equally bogus. As the Bush Administration would have us believe, Georgia must be defended against an expansionist Russia because it is a pro-Western democracy, which emerged out of the “flower revolution” movement of the early 2000’s. But after the Rose Revolution in 2003, Georgia did not become what any objective observer would call a stable or respectable democracy. By the end of 2007, Georgia’s president Saakashvili was acting like all the other authoritarian thugs in the region when he violently suppressed a 500,000-person opposition demonstration, shut down two opposition TV stations, declared a state of emergency, and then “won” a tainted election a few months later. Predictably, there was little grumbling about any of this from the White House. Mirroring its attitude towards Musharref in Pakistan, the United States was willing to overlook Saakashvili’s authoritarian tendencies in order to move forward with its hawkish Russia policy. Rather than being the model democracy the West must defend against the Russian bear, Georgia is exhibit A for why any talk of “democracy promotion” as a goal of U.S. foreign policy is a total joke.
So if both of these narratives don’t check out, what is really going on in Georgia?
The only way to make sense of the situation is to view it through the good old fashioned lens of great power politics. Georgia is a pawn in what has quickly and quietly become a low-grade cold war between Russia and the United States. Of course, it didn’t have to be this way. But thanks to the hawks in both countries (with the U.S., I think, bearing much of the blame), the two sides have saber-rattled and provoked their way into a self-fulfilling antagonistic relationship. Oh, and by the way, Georgia is a key transit country for oil flowing from the Caspian region to Europe. So that makes it an even more important battleground.
Under Bush, the hawkish U.S. attitude towards Russia has led to the following policies: bowing out of the ABM treaty, pursuing missile defense in Europe, declaring independence for Kosovo, building oil pipelines that bypass Russian territory, aggressively seeking NATO expansion to Russia’s doorstep, promoting anti-Russian candidates in Ukraine and Georgia, setting up military bases in Central Asian “-stans”, and criticizing human rights and authoritarian drift in Russia. Russia has obliged the American hawks by obstructing sanctions against Iran, opposing Kosovo independence, and by increasingly teaming up with China to counter American moves throughout the world.
But the American hawks have typically overestimated U.S power, underestimated Russian power, and overplayed their hand. They still can’t get the cold-war-losing, dysfunctional, poverty-stricken version of Russia out of their heads. But a newly confident and energy-rich Russia is beginning to seriously push back against American interests. Sending tanks and warplanes into Georgia is the first step in Russia’s attempt to re-establish its traditional sphere of influence in the former Soviet Republics. And they will probably succeed in due time, at least in Georgia and Central Asia.
As for what happens in the immediate future, there will be no cease-fire in South Ossetia until Russia has firmly established itself as the dominant military force in both breakaway regions. Russia, however, is unlikely to push forward into Georgia proper, unless they want to make things really ugly. As a result of the violence, NATO membership for Georgia is now unthinkable, Saakashvili will be seriously weakened, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia are on their way to becoming de-facto territories of Russia.
Let’s just hope the parties agree to a cease-fire soon and there aren’t too many more innocent victims of the violence. And let’s hope our next president has a more sober understanding of America's relative power and pursues more realistic policies towards Russia.
9 comments:
Thank you for the very excellent summary of a confusing situation. This was a truly educational post and I enjoyed reading it.
I wanted to point out one thing, though - not particularly central to the post - which is that South Ossetia is not populated mainly by "ethnic Russians," but in fact by a distinct ethnic group, Ossetians - my wife is about 1/2 Ossetian - which have a language, culture and history separate from both the Russians and the Georgians. In recent years Russia has been granting them Russian citizenship as a matter of policy, so that when they say they are acting in South Ossetia to protect the lives of their citizens, they are technically correct (70% or so of Ossetians are citizens of Russia; however, the number of actual ethnic Russians living in Ossetia is fairly minor - less than 5%, certainly).
The Ossetian viewpoint is rarely reported in this conflict, and in a sense they are the real "lost" people of this conflict. My sense is that they would like to be granted full independence, but would also be enthusiastic about autonomy within Russia in a administrative region along with North Ossetia. Again, though, no one ever seems to bother to ask the Ossetians what they want, so I'm not at all sure about this.
The other thing I wanted to briefly comment on was the relationship of the current crisis to the situation in Kosovo. While I agree that the rhetoric Russia is using is reminiscent of that employed by the U.S. during the Kosovo crisis, I don't believe (and I may be wrong) that any Russian official has explicitly linked the two, and for good reason. There are a number of factors which distinguish the two conflicts. To choose two of the most obvious:
1) Although I am sure it is true that Ossetians "suffer horribly" under Georgian rule, we should be very careful to draw parallels to the Serb treatment of Kosovar Albanians. To my knowledge, Georgia has never tried to actually eliminate the physical presence of all Ossetians through military force. I do not mean to discount the suffering of Ossetians (of which I confess I am largely ignorant), but the Serbian aim for Kosovo was complete elimination of the Albanian population through military means, and the resulting policy was brutal in the extreme.
2) There is a long and spirited dispute about whether Kosovo was, in fact, a legal part of Serbia, and also about whether its status as an autonomous region within Serbia (as opposed to a republic within Yugoslavia) was legitimate under the Yugoslav constitution. To my knowledge, there is no similar LEGAL dispute about whether South Ossetia is a part of Georgia.
Again, this is not to say that South Ossetia does not have valid arguments for its independence or autonomy, merely that those arguments are different from those used by Kosovar Albanians, and that we should be careful about equating the two issues.
Nate,
I was not aware that South Ossetians are considered (and, more importantly, consider themselves) a distinct ethnic group. Thank you very much for pointing that out. It is not surprising that the Russian government chooses to mislabel them “Russian” in order to further its own self-interested designs. The formation of ethnic identities—and their continued evolution—in Russia and in the former Soviet Republics is a fascinating subject all to itself. Moscow has a long history of implementing contradictory ‘nationalities’ policies that aim to shape the identity of particular groups of people. The handing out of Russian passports to people in South Ossetia fits right in line with their past actions in the Russian “near-abroad.”
Nate, you are also right to point out the differences between the conflicts in Kosovo and South Ossetia. The comparison of the two is only relevant in so far as it highlights the absurdity of the rhetorical jousting over issues of “sovereignty/independence” and “humanitarian aid.” The use of a similar rhetorical framework, despite the vast differences between the two conflicts, points to the inadequacy of the language of both sides.
As Harold Pinter is fond of pointing out, in politics, language often serves to obscure the reality of the policies and actions of governments. This is Pinter: "I think what we're talking about is an extraordinary, fundamental hypocrisy and a misunderstanding of language altogether - or a distortion of language, or abuse of language - which is in itself extremely destructive, because language leads us, politically it leads us into all sorts of fields... What I find really dangerous and, shall we say, disgusting, is where the kind of language used recently - humanitarian intervention, don't forget freedom and democracy and all the rest of it - actually is justifying simply assertive acts to control power and keep power." Both Russia and the United States are worthy objects of Pinter’s critique.
Peter,
I totally agree. I'd never thought of it in that way before. The depressing truth is that we seem to evaluate the justice of secessionist movements not by the validity of their arguments but by the strength (often the military strength) of their allies . . .and then we retrospectively concoct moral justifications for what were clearly pragmatic considerations.
Here's a question I'd love for you (or others) to answer: what on earth was Saakashvili thinking? I see no way this crisis could have possibly ended well for Georgia as a nation or for him personally - so why precipitate it?
What on earth was Saakashvili thinking, indeed! I can come up with two possible explanations, neither particularly convincing.
The first is that he suffered a similar brain malfunction as Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait. Basically, he thought he could get away with it. For whatever reason he concocted in his head (Russian fear of upsetting the West, perhaps), he thought that Russia would not use military force and invade Georgia, when in fact Russia was salivating to do so.
The second is that he thought America or NATO would come to the rescue once Russia did invade. There is ample documentation that Georgian soldiers are upset at America, asking "Where is the cavalry!??" Perhaps Saakashvili had this same expectation.
Both of these explanations presuppose such a gross misreadings of the political landscape on Saakashvili's part that they are hard to believe.
His actions also beg the question--what role did the CIA play in this? Saakashvili, I believe, is basically the CIA's "guy," meaning the CIA to a greater or lesser degree calls many of the shots in Georgia. Would the CIA be so foolish as to give him a green light? I doubt it--the Americans seem genuinely shocked. But if the Americans had no idea this was coming, then it's a major embarrassment that they weren't asked to sign off on such a provocative action. In other words, the CIA has very poor client management of Saakashvili, who is clearly a bit of a loose cannon.
Any way you cut it, somebody somewhere made some shockingly poor decisions.
To take a cue from your last post, I think the international community has to take some blame here for sending mixed messages. They refused to give Georgia and Ukraine membership action plans for NATO, but then added into the document announcing that fact the bizarre phrase that, despite this, one day "Ukraine and Georgia will be members of NATO."
Hmmm. So they're members of NATO . . . someday . . . but not now . . . but we're committed . . . kind of . . . to their security . . . and you figure out the rest.
Not hard to see how Georgia and / or Russia could have had problems deciphering that one.
Saakashvili is CIA? What are you, a writer for Pravda?
Having spent about a third of the last twenty years teaching at St. Petersburg State University,in St. Petersburg, Russia I often suffer from "double vision" regarding the news as it is reported in Russia, where in recent years, it has been rare to hear anything good said officially about America, and news as it is is reported here, where it is equally rare to hear anything positive about Russia.
Aside from the political complexities involved in this situation, I'd like to shed a different kind of light on the case, that of personal knowledge of a few situations involving Russia's "near abroad" and its citizens.
My Russian husband was born in Lvov in Western Ukraine and lived there until he came to St. Petersburg to study at Vaganova Ballet School at the age of 13. His summers were always spent in Lvov which remained "home". Since these were Soviet times,living in Ukraine never never meant being separate from Russia. In pre-Soviet times, Ukraine had was usually been referred to as "Little Russia", and its capital Kiev, was where the Russian state originated. Lvov's population was a mix of Russians, Ukrainians and Poles. There were two Polish schools in my husband's neighborhood where everything was taught in Polish, others where everything was taught in Ukrainian and the same was true of Russian schools. Until the Molotov Ribbentrop pact, Lvov was a part of Poland.
As for the Crimea, which is now also part of Ukraine, Khrushchev "gave" it as a present to Ukraine (it had been part of Russia), which had little real importance, since both were part of the USSR. The population of Crimea is primarily Russian, although it is now Ukraine. The Tartars who lived there were ejected by Stalin during World War II as were Chechens who were removed from Chechnya and resettled.
Most families in the Ukraine and throughout the former Soviet Union have "mixed" nationalities, Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Ossetians, Kazaks. We have friends who live in Petersburg whose family was totally torn apart by the breakup of the USSR. The grandmother lived in Odessa, which is part of the Ukraine, the mother was a doctor living and working in Estonia, the father was a Russian military man, and the daughter was teaching in St. Petersburg. Until Russia and Ukraine made a visa free arrangement to go back and forth between them, the grandmother had to travel to Kiev in order to get permission to visit her granddaughter in Russia, and the entire family had to go through enormous contortions in order to get together at all. This situation was typical of many families after the breakup of the USSR.
We also had Georgian friends who moved to Russia during the wars in the Caucusus after the collapse of the USSR, as well as Georgian friends who had lived in Russia their entire lives, and decided to go back at the time of Georgian independance, but then returned to Russia again during the war which broke out inside of Georgia during the nineties between different Georgian factions. One friend left his family in Georgia and came to work in Russia for many years in order to support them in Georgia, since conditions after the breakup were disastrous there. Another choreographer friend of my husband's left the theater where he was working in Petersburg to work at a Georgian theater, but later returned. Around the corner from our Petersburg apartment was a Russian Orthodox church next door to a Georgian Church which had been founded by Georgian residents of Russia.
Valery Gergiev, the internationally famed conductor and artistic director of the Marinsky (formerly Kirov) Theater in St. Petersburg and guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York is Ossetian. Yuri Temirkanov, another great conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, is also from the region. During Soviet times, there was active recruitment of people from the Caucusus into the cultural sphere. The artistic director of the Bolshoi Dramatic Theater in Petersburg is Timur Chkheidze (misspelled), who is Georgian, and there are several Georgian dance companies in Petersburg.
And now to our next door neighbors in Petersburg where we have had an apartment for the last ten years. They are from Abkhazia. We have had a close relationship with them for many years, and they go back every summer to visit family in Abkhazia. They are Georgian, but have Russian citizenship, and both of their children were born in Petersburg. The father is a member of our neighborhood militia, the mother and grandmother have a flower stand near the metro, and both daughters, who were born in Petersburg, have been studying Georgian dance for many years. The parents want the children to keep their Georgian cultural roots, but the children also think of themselves as being citizens of Petersburg.They all have Russian citizenship.
I cite all of this as an example of the kind of realities which underlie this entire political tragedy. There are no villains here, except those with political ambitions and a lust for oil.
Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Ossetians have too much common history to make neat conclusions about who is what and who should be calling the shots. The tragedy is trying to create villains when there are none, and a lack of knowledge of the real situations of people throughout the region who have suffered from all of the political posturing and attempts to portray Russia in highly stereotypical ways.
My mother, by the way, came from Odessa in the Ukraine, but she was a Russian Jew, since Ukraine was the Russian Pale of Settlement in pre-Soviet times, and most "Russians" who emigrated to the United States, were actually Russian Jews from Ukraine, and suffered through Ukrainian pogroms. My mother emigrated to Rumania and then Paris after the Russian Revolution, and came to the United States fleeing from the Nazi invasion of France. She is now buried in a Russian Orthodox cemetery in St. Petersburg, where nationalism is unfortunately on the rise, as it is elsewhere in Russia.
My father was from Vilnius, otherwise known as Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. He spoke Polish, Russian and Yiddish, since those were the three main "identities" there. When they came to America, both of them were always identified as "Russian".
Nationalism is often a response to a feeling of humiliation, and this is the present case in Russia. Saakashvili's nationalism is a more complicated brand. Is he really American?
OK, last comment, I am sorry to have abused The Pickle's hospitality so much - I spoke about Russia not explicitly mentioning the Kosovo precedent (to my knowledge). Putin himself dropped Iraq into the conversation, though, speaking sarcastically of the US attachment to Georgian leaders:
"Of course, Saddam Hussein ought to have been hanged for destroying several Shiite villages ... And the incumbent Georgian leaders who razed 10 Ossetian villages at once, who ran over elderly people and children with tanks, who burned civilians alive in their sheds -- these leaders must be taken under protection."
Reason #5,672,114 why the Iraq war was an insane mistake.
OK, I lied, I just read Ingrid's post and I wanted to thank her for taking the time to share that history, and to make the very important point that often the ethnic "differences" that are the supposed cause of these crises are almost entirely manufactured by individuals with a specific agenda. Certainly in the U.S. most commentary makes it seem as if this is a crisis between two monolithic entities, Russia and Georgia, one of them Democratic (and therefore good), the other Authoritarian (and therefore bad); when in fact there are millions of individual stories that complicate that storyline.
And that really is the last thing I'm going to say. Thank you again Ingrid, I enjoyed hearing what you had to say more than you can know!
Ingrid, thank you for your comments. The human element is too often left out of the conversation when wonkishly discussing "great power politics."
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