International Affairs No. 1, 2018 – Table of Contents

Opening Speeches

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to the Republic of Hungary (Russia) …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

NEW EUROPEAN INTEGRATION coincided with an intensive phase of the globalization process that was a stimulating and driving force in the evolution of the European Union. Today, the debates about the crisis of globalization and the troubling phenomena evident in European integration are occurring almost simultaneously. Polemics are raging in the European media as to who is to blame for the fact that globalization, which has brought a lot of positive elements to world development, has not become a universal and, most importantly, harmonizing model for the world at large. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: Valery Nikolayevich, the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences will be 50 years old in December 2017. It was created as a consulting and analytical center, a think tank focusing on the United States and Canada and working directly with the country’s foreign-policy makers. To what extent do the authorities today take the Institute’s opinion into account?

Q: It is known that during the war in Korea our pilots were engaged in dogfights with American airmen and shot down many planes of the U.S. Air Force. When do you think the level of Russian-American relations was lower: today or at that time, in the 1950s? …

AS THE MEMBERS of the alliance never tire of saying, the NATO countries are conducting the largest buildup of the bloc’s collective military forces since the end of the Cold War. Along with the programmed increase in military expenditures, the expansion of the alliance’s military potential, and the rise in the number of forward-based troops along Russia’s borders on the territory of the East European countries, the scale of military activity is expanding, and facilities for the stockpiling of weapons, heavy vehicles, and other materiel are being created or brought up to NATO standards.

The North Atlantic bloc has also signed host nation support agreements with Finland and Sweden that de facto legitimize the possibility of NATO contingents being on the territories of these countries and using their infrastructure to facilitate the transport of coalition troops to the eastern theater of military operations. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: Vitaly Vyacheslavovich, I get the impression that the correlation of forces in the Middle East is changing. For example, the American business news agency Bloomberg says: “If until recently the leaders of the Middle Eastern nations came only to Washington to solve their problems, America’s influence in the Middle East is now noticeably weaker.” How can this be, and why?

We’re hardly going to get into competition with the Americans. It’s another matter that we’re successfully conducting an operation in Syria in what I think is a unique multi-vector format. Our foreign policy allows us to build relations with the warring parties in such a manner that both sides see us as friendly. We have a lot of experience in competing, acquired over many decades – even since the time of the Soviet Union. Now that the ideological component is gone, we can do it much more easily. We’ve shown ourselves to be a strong, influential player that has a strong interest in the region. …

THE POSSIBLE AGENDA for Russian-American cooperation in the field of international information security (IIS) is determined mainly by the current state of Russian-American relations and the growing role of the ongoing scientific and technical revolution in world politics in general.

As RF President Vladimir Putin noted in speaking to the final session of the 14th annual meeting of the Valdai international discussion club. “Earlier, in assessing the role and influence of nations, we spoke about the importance of the geopolitical factor, territorial size, and possessing military might and natural resources. These indisputably continue to be factors of the greatest importance. Now, however, science and technology are without doubt becoming factors of equal significance, and their importance will only grow. It has, of course, always been this way, but today it will be of a breakthrough nature and very quickly have a decisive effect on the sphere of politics and security”¹ …

IN TODAY’S COMPLICATED and unstable international situation, a special role belongs to influential forces that cooperate with our country in trying to stop humankind from sliding toward a catastrophe.

For a long time, the views and attitudes of the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church were with good reason associated in Russian opinion with hardline conservatism and were definitely not pro-Russian. But an objective analysis of the current dialogue between Russia and the Vatican and developments based on it make clear that much has changed and that today there is a mutual desire for fruitful coordination. But let’s go to facts. …

RELATIONS BETWEEN INDIA and Russia are rooted in history, mutual trust and mutually beneficial cooperation. This is a strategic partnership that has withstood the test of time and that enjoys the support of the people of both countries.

Diplomatic relations between India and Russia began even before India achieved independence, on April 13, 1947. In the period immediately following independence, the goal for India was attaining economic self-sufficiency through investment in heavy industry. The Soviet Union invested in several new enterprises in the areas of heavy machine-building, mining, energy production, and steel plants. During India’s second Five Year Plan, from the sixteen heavy industry projects set up eight were initiated with the help of the Soviet Union. This included the establishment of the world-famous IIT Bombay. …

THIS YEAR Russia and Thailand are marking the 120th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. The kingdom attaches special importance to this event. During Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha’s visit to Russia in May 2016, the prime ministers of the two countries agreed to mark the anniversary together. Subsequently, each side established national entities responsible for organizing anniversary-related events and activities. Thailand and Russia announced plans to organize activities in honor of this historical event throughout 2017.

The Russia Festival – a central event organized by the Thai Foreign Ministry, other ministries, agencies and commercial entities, as well as the Russian embassy in Thailand – was held at a famous department store in the heart of Bangkok on July 14-16 under the slogan “Sharing the past, building a shared future.” …

FAKE NEWS played a very limited role in the presidential campaign in the United States that brought Donald Trump to the White House yet the despair of the Western liberal world attracted a lot of attention to this phenomenon.

The Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” the word of the year to describe the situation in which the truth surrendered to a long chain of so-called truths. The British linguists specified: “an adjective defined as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Extended a bit further fake news and false information can be described as the phenomenon of the year while the place of the hero of the year belongs to the Internet troll that, as many people believe, won the presidential election in the United States, triumphed at Brexit and, together with the hackers, joined the Kremlin’s vanguard in the so-called hybrid war. …

On October 1, the regional powers – the government and the Parliament of Catalonia – carried out a referendum on independence from Spain. The Spanish government (that had gone to all lengths to prevent it) declared its results null and void. Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy dismissed it as a “democratically deplorable spectacle.”*

Carles Puigdemont, President of the Generalitat (Catalan government), spoke of the plebiscite as an event of huge legal consequences by which he meant independence of Catalonia. …

WITH ITS ECONOMIES SHAKEN by financial woes and its system of fundamental values – democracy, the rule of law, and human rights – watered down, the European Union attaches special importance to cultural affairs, seeing them as the core of its foreign policy and the basis for its social and economic development.¹ Before 1992, cultural and creative industries in the EU had been under the exclusive jurisdiction of member states. However, after the Treaty of Maastricht was signed, cultural policy became the prerogative of EU authorities, speeded up the revision of the EU’s image, was one of the motives for reconsidering the European unity idea, which was rapidly losing its popularity, and, in a sense, counterbalanced European integration projects.

The EU has been revising its legislation on cultural and creative sectors to bring it into line with the Union’s foreign policy, social, and economic agendas. The EU has launched various cultural initiatives, some of them of global significance. Among its cultural projects are Creative Europe, European Capitals of Culture, European Heritage Label, European Year of Cultural Heritage, the Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor, Europe for Festivals, Festivals for Europe (EFFE), and various prizes such as the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture, the EU Prize for Cultural Heritage, the EU Prize for Literature, and the Lux film prize. …

EXPORT OF EDUCATION is a traditional instrument of soft power in foreign policy and simultaneously a wide-scale foreign economic activity.

For instance, foreign students who study in Australia and number between 480,000 and 520,000, about 30% of them Chinese, are the source of considerable state revenues for Australia, which grow by between 12% and 15% a year.¹ New Zealand has become another leader in the world education market.² Various studies have attempted to find out why Australia and New Zealand are such successful exporters of education. Those studies analyzed those countries’ education advertising policies, adjustment principles for education programs and ways of simplifying visa formalities as measures that have stimulated young people all over the world, primarily in China and India, to seek paid education in Australia or New Zealand. The fact that both these countries are English-speaking and their education systems are associated with British classical education is their chief marketing advantage in Asia. …

TODAY’S SOCIETY undergoes processes that, besides exceptional dynamism, are marked by a new kind of complexity as a result of interaction between social systems, subsystems and actors. Economics increasingly manifest themselves through politics – something that the founders of Marxism pointed out a long time ago, – and there are more and more spheres where the humanities overlap with politics. Issues that are rooted in the past have become a routine technology for political rivalry. So has the languages issue as a means of domination in a specific sociocultural space and as a mechanism for the pursuit of specific political interests.

It is hard to imagine the growing international prestige and influence of Russia without the increasing use of the Russian language in territories that are part of Russia’s spheres of interest. Russian is one of the recognized world languages – it ranks sixth globally in terms of the total number of speakers and is the mother tongue for eighth-largest proportion of the world population. …

IN 1816-1817, the flag of the Russian Empire was waving on the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai. The word “Don” appeared on the Kauai map as a new name for what had been the Hanapepe River. Three Russian forts, which were named Elizabeth, Alexander and Barclay, emerged at key strategic points on the island – at the mouth of the Waimea River in the south and on the shore of the picturesque Hanalei Bay in the north.

Today, nothing remains of two of the forts. A posh hotel stands on the site of Fort Alexander. But Fort Elizabeth has been restored. This building is one of two reminders of the history of “Russian Hawaii.” The other is a section in the Kauai Museum devoted to the Russia-related period on the island. The items in the section include a flag of the Russian-American Company, which established Russian presence on Kauai. …

THE GREAT RUSSIAN REVOLUTION echoed far and wide. The revolution of February 1917 catastrophically undermined Russia’s international positions; the revolution of October 1917 shifted its foreign policy vector by pushing it out of the coalitions trapped in World War I. The centenary of the events that changed the course of Russian and world history has given us another chance to ponder on how they affected the postwar international order known as the Versailles-Washington system.

By 1917, the Entente Powers outlined, in a series of secret agreements, the world order they intended to build when the Quadruple Alliance had been routed. The Western allies obviously, albeit unwillingly, accepted the Russian Empire’s greater role and might in postwar Europe. Hence their agreement to transfer Constantinople together with the Straits, the Polish lands of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Galicia, and Turkish Armenia to Russia; the allies badly needed Russia that shouldered the heaviest burden of the war. At that time and later, during WWII, the allied relationships were marred by latent yet strong tension that would have risen to the surface once the common enemy would be defeated. In his famous memorandum of February 1914, Minister of the Interior Pyotr Durnovo warned Nicholas II: “Even a victory over Germany promises Russia an exceedingly unfavorable prospect.”¹ …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: This year we are observing the anniversaries of two Russian revolutions. In this context, people often talk about reconciliation. There are different views with regard to what happened then and there are different assessments of the personalities who were the driving forces behind these revolutions, their heroes. What is your take on this?

Why do we have a completely different view of the revolution now compared to 30 years ago? Because there is a perception of the revolution as a deep split in society. This is a severe wound on the nation’s body that is taking a very long time to heal. Our task, the task of historians is to help heal this wound. …