International Affairs No. 1, 2015 – Table of Contents

THE UKRAINIAN STORM of 2013-2014 pushed the world dangerously close to Cold War II. The coup and the bloodshed which swept the country were caused by the refusal of the Yanukovich regime to draw closer to the EU no matter what rather than by the fairly acute social, economic and political disagreements inside the country.¹ The consecutive packages of anti-Russian sanctions imposed by the European Union and coordinated, to a great extent, with the U.S. and several other non-European allies look very logical in the context of the stalled dialogue between the two key European players. It was in 2012-2013 that many of the expert community recognized an absence of a more or less noticeable progress in moving toward a visa-free regime between the EU and Russia and in settling other important bilateral issues for what it really was: the EU’s unwillingness to develop equal partnership with Russia rather than technical discrepancies (according to Brussels). Its attention was riveted to the Eastern Partnership program designed, among other things, to detach CIS countries from Russia and draw new dividing lines in Europe. Is it correct to say that the anti-Russian rhetoric heard from Brussels and its active support of the radical Ukrainian nationalists who came to power in Kiev through an armed coup buried the Greater Europe idea? What is Greater Europe? This article demonstrates that it can live and flourish on the fairly strong foundation of sociocultural and economic

Alexei Kuznetsov, Deputy Director, Head, Center for European Studies, Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS); Corresponding Member, RAS; Professor, Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Science (Economics); kuznetsov.ru …

THE GAS CONFLICT that broke out between Russia and Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 coup in Kiev made it even more important to minimize the share of gas transported to Europe via Ukraine. The planned South Stream would be not enough to resolve the problem – the carrying capacities of the functioning gas corridors, the recently commissioned Nord Stream in the first place, which bypass Ukraine, should be increased.

This article looks at the wide range of issues related to the current stage of exploitation and the present economic efficiency of Nord Stream and the expected effects of tapping its potentials to the full if the exemption clauses of the European Union’s Third Energy Package are cancelled. …

THE GEOPOLITICAL BALANCE of the latter half of the 20th century was tipped in the early 1990s by the Soviet Union’s disintegration which buried the bipolar world order. There is a more or less common opinion that we are entering a Cold Peace era in which Russia might be pushed aside.

According to certain political scientists,¹ the post-Soviet period is fraught with fast and purposeful restoration of the political map of the world destroyed in the course of World War II. Those authors who support a different opinion² concentrate not so much at the changed geopolitical configuration and the balance of political forces but at the need to preserve this balance, to develop democracy and international cooperation steadily and consistently so that to help mankind cope with the dangers and global challenges. …

THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP (TPP) initiative was first launched by New Zealand, Singapore and Chile in 2003. Since the United States joined the process in 2011, this concept, significantly reformatted and with an expanded membership, has been regarded as a purely American one. It is also rightly seen as a (if not the) key element of the strategic shift of focus in U.S. foreign policy to the Asia-Pacific Region. It is also often viewed in conjunction with the conceptually symmetrical Transatlantic Partnership between the United States and the European Union. Many experts argue – with varying degrees of credibility – that the combination of these two initiatives is of central, systemic importance to the foreign-policy and foreign economic strategy of the Administration of Barack Obama.¹

The TPP is designed to unify the countries of three regional areas: the Asia-Pacific Region (APR), North America and South America. The partnership will include economic actors differing significantly in the size of their economy, level of industrialization, methods of governance, and involvement in global trade. …

THE HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE has always been accompanied by the most heated diplomatic and political debates, while the security issue of addressing new challenges and threats (NCT)* has been regarded by some experts as being devoid of politics, presumably making it easier for the states to negotiate common solutions. In the past few years, however, things have changed dramatically: balancing human rights and freedoms, on the one part, and measures designed to promote security, on the other, has become one of the most confrontational issues. This is evidenced by discussions held in various international organizations (UN, Council of Europe, OSCE), flaring up debates on human rights and their observance within the framework of counterterrorist struggle, with some states using the above issue as an instrument of political pressure. Particularly revealing in this context is the policy stand taken by the United States (and indeed by all other Western states) – especially against the backdrop of the actual situation in this area.

In the presence of an unabated terrorist threat and the escalation of other criminal threats many countries, including the U.S., came under …

GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS of the last few decades have affected, to a great extent, international space: globalization which added mobility to global population and vagueness to national borders; information technologies and transport infrastructure which are developing by leaps and bounds, etc. are changing the nature of human contacts and the relationships between transnational companies, organizations and states.

Today, the states previously described as “periphery” have moved to the fore; the “code of behavior” on the international political scene has acquired new positive trends and also retreated, in many respects, to the conservative models of the past. …

THE CONVENTION on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction (Chemical Weapons Convention or CWC) has become nearly equal in terms of universality to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (Non-Proliferation Treaty or NPT) in a comparatively short period of 16 years.

This is the result of persistent efforts by CWC signatory states, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the United Nations. …

“RUSSIA’S VLADIMIR PUTIN is a brilliant tactician who does not crack under pressure….Thank the Lord that Putin has publicly avowed his unswerving dedication to protecting Christianity and Christians.” The above is a fairly representative example of the positions currently surfacing in world-policy blogs.

The American Conservative favorably quotes Putin as saying at the Valdai forum: “We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.” No Western leader in the recent past could have adopted such a stance, comments the journal with a tinge of envy. …

THE RECENT EVENTS in Ukraine and the OSCE’s constructive role in settling the crisis in the country’s southeast (its active involvement under Swiss chairmanship in drafting and realizing the Geneva and Minsk Agreements, dispatch of OSCE observer mission charged with ceasefire and human rights monitoring) confirmed its relevance as an instrument of international crisis diplomacy indispensable when it comes to dealing with the military and political aspects of the Ukrainian crisis.

This is a paradox: for the first time in postwar history the anti-crisis potential of OSCE as a universal regional organization was used to deal with the political repercussions of a vast crisis triggered by a conflict of interests launched by the decision of the EU and Ukraine to speed up Ukraine’s trade and economic association with the EU in disregard of the interests of Russia and its partners in the Customs Union (Eurasian Economic Union). …

AZERBAIJAN is one of the main countries in international energy policy, particularly in the Caucasus. Moreover, it has experienced rapid economic growth in the last 15 years. This is why economic and energy cooperation between Russia and Azerbaijan has been developing quite actively.

In 2010, Azerbaijan-Russia trade reached $1.9 billion, up 5.5% from the previous year. In the period from 1992 to 2010, total trade between the two countries increased 3.2-fold, with Azerbaijan exports to Russia rising 2.2-fold, and imports from Russia, 4.6-fold.³ …

MUCH HAS BEEN SAID and written about the “shale gas fever” that hit the United States and will spread to other regions to negatively affect supplies of natural gas by long-established exporters.

According to one view, for example, Qatar, the world leader in sales of liquefied natural gas (LNG) for several years, will lose its firm positions on the Asian and European markets. Gazprom is predicted to face similar difficulties on its usual markets. Other views speak, however, of a shale gas bubble and inflated expectations of gas exports from the U.S. Here I will discuss risks faced by one set of potential exporters and different areas targeted for deliveries of gas. …

Genesis of the Republic of Cyprus and Its 1960 Constitution

THE REPUBLIC OF CYPRUS* was proclaimed on August 16, 1960, in keeping with the Zurich-London Agreements of February 11 and 19, 1959. …

THERE IS EVERY REASON to describe the Syrian conflict as an open confrontation between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) in the Middle East. “Iran and the Saudis are two main political opponents in the region. Today when the fog which enveloped their relations for a long time finally dissipated this has become even more obvious than before.”¹ Saudi Arabia which relies on the Sunni doctrine of Islam as the cornerstone of its statehood is acutely aware of Iranian pressure too close to its borders: pro-Iranian Iraq in the north, Shi’a disturbances in Bahrain which echo in the kingdom’s Eastern Province and clashes between the government troops and Houthi rebels in Yemen. This leaves the KSA no other alternative but to wipe the Ba’ath regime in Syria, one of Iran’s loyal allies, off the political map of the world. The escalating revolution in Syria has offered the members of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) a unique chance to try harder to isolate Iran and weaken its regional influence.²

The roots of the present Syrian crisis go back to the 1970 military coup which brought Hafez al-Assad, father of President Bashar al-Assad, to power. The Shia Alawi president and his Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party steered the country toward socialism Arab style under the leadership of the country’s top military (mainly Alawi) crust. …

THE GENERAL ELECTION of 2014 in India, one of the most influential nations not only in the rapidly developing Asia-Pacific Region but also worldwide, has aroused special interest globally.

It is not just the statistics of the election process that are impressive but mainly the long-term effects of the returns of the polls. …

UNTIL RECENTLY, the African countries north of the equator and south of the Sahara and their problems remained, on the whole, at the periphery of not only Russian but also the world’s information and political field.

Everything changed on April 17, 2014 when Boko Haram fighters abducted 276 schoolgirls aged 12 to 17 from the school in Chibok (in northeast Nigeria) and threatened to sell them into slavery. According to the police, 53 girls escaped; 223 (the majority of them Christians) remained in the hands of the kidnappers. Later, in a video taken on May 19, some of them confessed that they had adopted Islam.¹ To explain their attack at the school, the abductors stated that “Western education should end. Girls should go and get married.” …

ONE OF THE MAIN POINTS on the agenda of the fifth meeting of the Elbe Group in Marrakesh (Morocco, March 22-24, 2014) was a discussion of the vulnerabilities of the international physical security and nuclear protection regime.

Ahead of The Hague Nuclear Security Summit (The Netherlands, March 24-25, 2014), Russian experts from the Elbe Group said that under present conditions, the development of a single universal standard to “lock up” nuclear materials and nuclear installations is hypothetically and practically impossible. It is difficult to create such a standard in a complicated international situation, amid the growing threats and challenges, and this can only materialize in the future as a result of a long-term interactive process. …

Session I

Personal information security amid information wars. International aid: domination or assistance. The new realities of digital communication. Media coverage of financial and economic crises …

THE WORLD has come dangerously close to a hot stage of World War III; today the war is in full swing albeit in a different form. It is not Kiev’s struggle against Novorossia for a united and indivisible Ukraine; it is not a firework of color revolutions and not a clash between Islamic “terrorists” and Atlantic “angels” who bring the light of so-called human values to the world. Confrontation has gone beyond scholarly and culturological discussions, political dialogues in the media, threats, and sanctions. Today, civilizations no longer clash for the right to follow their own paths, develop according to their traditions and their own vision of modernity. This is a struggle for survival and for the right to remain on the stage of history.

This is not an evil design of evil forces; the clash at the turn of a millennium reflects the objective process: the dominance of world development is shifting from the mercantile patriarchate to the spiritual matriar-chate; from universalism and globalism to variety and self-sufficiency of human values and development priorities; from the material to the spiritual. This happens approximately every millennium and does not mean that one variant is pushed away to be completely replaced with another. It is an objective and spiral process: priorities change while preserving the accumulated potential and achievements of the previous coil and throwing the need of changes into bolder relief. …

THERE IS a widely spreading opinion that we are living in a post-secular society. This is true: religion is gradually restoring its former authority which can be described as one of the main trends of social development. Two centuries of secularization have been replaced with the growth of religious feelings in the world very much disappointed with the ideas promoted by an absolutely secular society. Religion has become one of the main factors and instruments of world politics. Separated in the Age of the Enlightenment and earlier still by the Treaty of Westphalia politics and religion will never blend again yet the social and cultural transformation of the world is too obvious to be ignored. What triggered the changes?

The collapse of the bipolar world in the 1990s can be described as one of the factors of religious revival in the West. Decades of ideological struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States left a void to be filled, among other things, with the lost and partially forgotten religious values. Today, the American neocons have successfully turned them into a political instrument of new ideology. French philosopher and sociologist Georges Corm has written in his La Question religieuse au XXIe siècle that the ideologues of a new world order are driven by an intellectual mechanism of the same type. Today, to protect the Judeo-Christian civilization, the masters of the new world order based on American force insist on the same disdain for the life of the Other, even though the Other is no longer a Bolshevik revolutionary but an Islamist adept of the “Fourth” world war.¹ Today, religion justifies a new ideology on par with new concentration camps, prisons, contactless wars which have already claimed numerous civilian lives; it also justifies the “new geopolitical order” established by the United States. …

IT CAME TO PASS that I had to defend my graduation thesis at the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School right on June 22, 1941, the day Hitler invaded the USSR. This rendered the usually festive occasion attended even by the curious into a perfunctory and hasty exercise.

The next day, I reported at Podlipki, Moscow region, where I was given a position six months ahead of the official graduation. …

CRIMEA’S ACCESSION to Russia (some people call it return or reintegration) is, without a doubt, one of the main issues on the Russian-Ukrainian agenda. Originally a purely internal affair of the Soviet state, the issue has acquired international significance. The West, which accuses Russia of hastily conducting a referendum on the peninsula, obviously has no doubts about the hasty transfer of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954. At that time this happened without any referendum, with complete disregard for public opinion in Russia in general and Crimea in particular.

The reasoning provided by the Union authorities for public consumption obviously differs considerably from the genuine reasons behind the decision by N.S. Khrushchev and his entourage to transfer a part of territory from one Union republic to another, a move that has no precedent in history. Most analysts believe that N. Khrushchev was guided by purely political motives. It is enough to recall that N. Khrushchev and the party leaders, who had rallied around him, first, arrested and then, in December 1953, executed L.P. Beria, one of his main rivals in the power struggle. …

AMID THE BLOODY EVENTS in Ukraine and the massive propaganda and economic attacks on Russia by the U.S. and its satellites, the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, which was unacceptable to the West, provides a series of instructive lessons. Incidentally, Slobodan himself predicted that everything that was used against Yugoslavia would soon be used against Russia, which he believed was the Americans’ main goal. It seems that the time for this has come.

As the ambassador of the Russian Federation, I worked with Yugoslav President S. Milosevic for exactly six months – from my arrival in Belgrade on April 5, 2000 until he was forcibly removed from power on October 6. I repeatedly met him, his close associates, opposition leaders, and my Western colleagues. I was also fairly well aware of the mood of the ordinary people with whom I often met in an informal environment, among other things due to my frequent trips across the country and visits to industrial facilities and agricultural enterprises. The most important of those meetings were reflected in my records, some of which are preserved in manuscript form in my archives. …

IN THE SPRING OF 2014, T.V. Zvereva, a research associate at the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, published a monograph on the foreign policy of modern France.* In June 2014, the author used it to defend her dissertation for the academic title of Doctor of Political Science.

Chronologically, the monograph covers a period between the start of the 21st century and June 2012. The main focus is on the study of the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-12). The book under review is not the first publication in domestic historiography on the subject at hand. Russian political scientists, historians, and diplomats give close attention to the foreign political activity of the French state. In the past several years, works by Yu.I. Rubinsky¹ and E.O. Obichkina² were published, which partly touch on Chirac’s and Sarkozy’s terms in office. However, T.V. Zvereva’s monograph has a number of incontestable objective advantages. It came out two years after Sarkozy left big politics. During this time, a wide range of studies appeared, primarily in France, providing a better insight into various decisions made by the French president. The monograph also analyzes President Francois Hollande’s first diplomatic steps, for the first time in Russian historiography. It should also be noted that amid the sharp exacerbation of relations between Russia and the West, an expert view of the evolution of the foreign policy of France, which has always stood out for its special position on the development of international relations, is highly relevant today. …