International Affairs No. 5, 2015 – Table of Contents

Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme

MANY THANKS for inviting me to speak in this Golden Collection speaker series in this critical year for development. In my comments today I will speak on the emerging post-2015 agenda, and on the important contribution Russia can make. I will also comment on the strong partnership Russia and UNDP are developing. …

THE PRESENT transitory post-bipolar world system manifests several trends: globalization, transformation of international relations, gradual shift toward a multipolar world and the emergence of new centers of a future world order. These and other trends of the transitory period have been exhaustively described in academic and political writings. The sum-total of factors responsible for the essence and the far from simple nature of current transformations require further specification and even more comprehensive analysis. The polycentric nature of international relations is not a recent phenomenon yet the present stage of its development goes to the depths where the so far practically indiscernible elements of a future world order are taking shape. The transitory period of the post-bipolar world has not yet ended. The theory of international relations has no use for the “transitory period” category and its highly specific historical content: Indeed, the bipolar world system took some time to develop after 1945. The transitory period is characterized by an intertwining of old and new elements and factors that, on the one hand, ensures continuity of international relations and, on the other, creates the outlines (configuration) of a new world order.

The Cold War ended twenty-five years ago, a very short time in the terms of history, yet this quarter of a century brimmed with a huge amount of world, regional and national events that, under different conditions, could have filled several centuries. The course of history has accelerated; time has become compressed. The world development trends of the past have been pushed aside hence the recent fashion for scenarios of future developments with the starting points placed in the 2020s and 2030s and the forecasts stretching into 2050. The process of transformation has entered a new stage at which the world is accumulating the factors that will change the moving forces of the development process. …

LAZY like all other South Europeans, Greeks have been living beyond the means for many years. This is what the core EU countries (Germany in the first place) and the United States think about the roots and causes of the grave economic crisis in Greece. This answers the first question. The answer to the second has been already supplied by the so-called friends of Greece from among the EU members and the notorious “masters of disasters” of the IMF: The Greeks should trim social spending, tighten their belts and wait for the light at the end of the tunnel.

Both the diagnosis and the treatment prescribed by the medics from Washington and Brussels are off-target. They are far removed from the truth and, as a classic said in his time, from the people. The Greek people in this case. …

BY THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the United States and China found themselves strategically and economically interconnected at the global level with elements of military-political rivalry. Chinese diplomacy carefully avoided direct confrontation with America on the world arena,¹ that probably meant that Beijing was biding its time to multiply its political might (very much in line with Deng Xiaoping’s taoguang yanghui tactics – “conceal our capabilities, avoid the limelight”). Much of what China is doing – building up its military budget, undertaking military modernization, seeking access to natural resources outside its territory, etc. – was interpreted as a movement in this direction.

The United States, on the other hand, having formulated the policy of regional containment of China was busy building up partner relations with its neighbors. Its efforts were well accepted by China’s closest and close neighbors concerned with the PRC’s growing economic and military-political might, their apprehensions confirmed by territorial disagreements between China and many of its neighbors. Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and India are well disposed to the prospect of closer military and political cooperation with the United States in a hope to stem China’s expansionist intentions. Beijing calls this “strategic encirclement of China.” …

ECONOMIC INTEGRATION in the APR has come close to fundamental qualitative changes launched by the emerging mechanisms of multi-sided integration in trade and economies. In November 2014, in Beijing the APEC summit discussed a future Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP), a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) on the basis of ASEAN and its partners, and a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) lobbied by the U.S.

Today, FTAAP is being created amid a stiff competition between these integration projects, caused by different geoeconomic and geopolitical interests of the main players. The United States is actively promoting the TPP to remove the barriers in trade of services and commodities. China, where state protectionism in the most sensitive branches ensures economic growth and employment and, therefore, political stability, cannot accept the TPP conditions. Beijing suspects Washington of moving China away from integration processes by setting up a trade structure in which there will be no place for it. It is determined to fight the TPP with the help of RCEP, its own alternative integration project.¹ …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

“THE AMERICAN DREAM is dead, but I will bring it back” is the slogan with which Donald Trump literally burst into the presidential election race. The billionaire who made his fortune through real estate development and sales has seriously scared both the Democratic camp and some of his fellow party members, the Republicans. Despite all the attempts to marginalize him, Trump is confidently winning support and building up an electorate for himself. …

THE TERM “HYBRID WARFARE,” the recent favorite with the media, is an ad hoc invention of American military experts and political scientists used to describe the response of Russia and the population of the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine to the coup d’état in Kiev. It is openly stated: “Hybrid warfare – the term applied to Russia’s particular approach to irregular warfare in Ukraine.”¹ Time has come to look into the new term’s military-political and international-legal dimensions to find out who is waging “hybrid warfare” in Ukraine.

The Military-Political Meaning of the Term …

THE COMMONWEALTH of Independent States (CIS), a surprise substitute for the former Soviet Union that was born at the 1991 Belaya Vezha meeting of the then leaders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine but had its important details poorly thought out by them, right from its inception has had great difficulties to struggle with to survive as a strategic union of countries. The CIS was effectively the product of a serious crisis that culminated in the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it still embodies less-than-stable development processes in the vast expanse of Eurasia.

In addition, the leaders of the new independent states were divided on how far their countries should go with political and economic reforms – an issue pivotal to the future of the CIS as the existence of integration processes in the Commonwealth depended on it. …

THERE IS NO SINGLE generally accepted definition of the term “developing country.” The United Nations system has no standard criteria for a country to be categorized as developed or developing. There is, however, a loose consensus in the world’s academia on reasons for putting a country in either of the two groups. Such criteria are a country’s average per capita income; the degree of industrialization of its economy; the maturity of market relations; the structure of its foreign trade; its involvement in global financial and economic processes; and guarantees of property rights and human rights in it.

There can be no doubt that today’s Russia, despite its major scientific and technological achievements and vast experience of industrial development, can be considered a developing country. But neither can there be any doubt that the same industrial experience of Russia and its contribution to world science and technology, which are no less significant than those of developed countries, mean that Russia is intensively building a knowledge economy. …

WHEN WE THINK about the world of today, unfortunately, we have to recognize that the so-called end of the Cold War has made it neither more stable nor more secure. The bipolar geopolitical system, which had for nearly half a century kept the world away from a new global confrontation and which disappeared together with the Soviet Union, has still not found a replacement. Far from being formed, a new system of international relations has not even emerged in general outline. It seems that the U.S.-led unipolar model is unacceptable to anyone but the U.S. In any case, there are no indications that other states, even its closest allies, are ready to accept an official status as a vassal to the only superpower that has remained from the former bipolar world order.

In this context, an important question arises: Is the U.S. really the only superpower in today’s world and can a new world order materialize in a unipolar format? …

IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, the outlines of international relations have changed to a great extent and continue changing under the impact, in particular, of “soft power” that different countries apply to achieve their aims on the world scene. Having learned that its interests in the world community cannot be protected by military might alone, Beijing turned to “soft power”; today, it is used on a grand scale.

Back in 2007, at the 17th Party Congress, the then Secretary General of the CC CPC and Chairman of the PRC Hu Jintao said that the Communist Party should “enhance culture as part of the ‘soft power’ of our country to better guarantee the people’s basic cultural rights and interests.”¹ The Chinese leader said that in the contemporary world in which China dealt with different cultures it should develop its own specific and unique culture.² During the decade of Hu Jintao’s chairmanship, Confucius Institutes were opened in many countries while the number of people who study the Chinese language and culture was steadily increasing. Today, more than 40 million foreigners around the world are learning Chinese.³ …

THE IMPORTANCE of “soft power” politics, which, in conjunction with traditional diplomatic tools, enables the principal actors of international relations to ensure their national interests in a more effective way and on a long-term basis, objectively increases at the current transitional stage in world development, which is characterized by the exacerbation of a number of disagreements and problems, the escalation of conflicts and a lower level of predictability. More states, which are laying claim to global leadership, including Russia and other BRICS countries, use “soft power” in their political strategies to create a favorable external environment for internal development and address practical issues related to modernization and the expansion of the area of their influence.

The term “soft power” gained ground in the Russian diplomatic, scholarly and political circles only recently. In 2008, Russian Foreign Minister S.V. Lavrov for the first time noted the importance of soft power in public, defining it as “the ability to impact on the outside world with the help of one’s civilizational, humanitarian, cultural, foreign policy and other forms of attractiveness.”³ In the updated Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation, which was approved by President V.V. Putin on February, 12, 2013, soft power is described as “an array of tools designed …

TODAY, the old conflict between political and economic structures of the West and the East is unfolding against the background of another global crisis. The countries and business structures of the “golden billion” have not relieved their economic pressure on the developing countries. The globalizers do not hesitate to pile political responsibility for regional tensions on the powers that the First World finds unpalatable. Something similar is going on in the information field.

We all know that a mounting psychological pressure (leaflets scattered from aircraft; calls from the officers of “psychological warfare” to the troops deployed along the front line to lay down arms and surrender; calls to sabotage broadcast by radio) is a sure sign of an imminent enemy attack. Today, these traditional methods used in contemporary (not metaphorical) wars have been supplemented with all sorts of rumors spread on social networks to undermine the spirit and morale of the enemy, etc. …

A. Arkhangelskaya

SOUTH AFRICA is today not only the leader in its region but also a significant player in the international arena. The country has a distinctive history abounding in events and facts that have evoked reaction all over the world. Russian-South African relations and the former Soviet Union’s influence on developments in South Africa, and in the south of the African continent in general, deserve a careful study and indisputably arouse interest among scholars and analysts. But despite the long history of South Africa’s relations with the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia, much less is going on now between our countries than one would have expected. …

WITH THE DEADLINE of the BRICS Summit in Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia, drawing near, it is logical to expect heightened interest in Brazil, Russia’s strategic partner and its partner in BRICS and the Group of Twenty (G20). Brazil is far away at the other end of the world, yet it shares this country’s approaches to major global problems, has nearly equal GDP and several other economic figures, and, no less important, possesses similar national emotional and psychological mindsets.

Economics, Politics, Emotions… …

THE INTERNATIONAL CYBER SECURITY problem has long been one of the top items on international agendas, largely because of the rapidly growing effects of information technology (IT) on global social and political affairs. IT is not just becoming a means of raising living standards and overcoming social inequalities but is increasingly seen both by state and non-state actors as a strategic resource, a means of attaining political, military and other goals.

Principal Threats to International Cyber Security …

INFORMATION SECURITY is one of the top issues on today’s global agenda. Awareness of growing threats in information space and of their potential effects prompts the need for a systemic search for solutions to information security problems.

In July 2013, the President of the Russian Federation approved the Fundamentals of the State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Field of International Information Security Effective until 2020. …

THIS WAS THE TITLE of the collection of documents and materials related to the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) (Helsinki 1975) published in Moscow in 1980. The conference was initiated by the Soviet Union and Finland and attended by 35 European states as well as the United States and Canada.* The West-Russia confrontation of our days and the Ukrainian developments added significance to this unprecedented event in the history of the West-West relationship (Helsinki being deliberately chosen as its venue) and rekindled an interest in it among the political, business and academic communities all over the world.

Dominique Fache, for example, who used to head the Russian branches of Schlumberger and Enel, is convinced that a gradual movement toward restored normalcy in the relationships between the West and Russia should proceed from the principles of the 1975 Final Act. “It is advisable to put a new stage of cooperation on the same principles. The plan should not only bring pacification; it should give a fresh impetus to the economies of Europe and Russia through a joint program of energy conservation, a fund of joint initiatives and enterprises, wider student exchange programs… “¹ …

THE FIRST DAY of August of this year was the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, the final result of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) which was the central theme of the international relations of the early and mid-1970s. That pan-European conference, which continued for more than two years, is a forum unparalleled in scale in postwar history and can only be compared to the Congress of Vienna, a meeting that was the reason for another anniversary date in the 2015 calendar – the bicentennial of its closure was marked in June. The essence of the Helsinki process is impossible to fathom out without analyzing the stance of France in the sixties and seventies. In that period, France took a position different from what was advocated by the rest of Western civilization, and stood for cooperation between the two mutually opposing blocs.

Socialist countries were the first to come up with an initiative for a pan-European conference on security (initial projects did not include the term “cooperation” in their names). Back in 1957, the then Polish foreign minister, Adam Rapacki, proposed creating a nuclear-free zone to comprise West and East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In 1964, he suggested a pan-European conference with the participation of the Soviet Union and the United States. At a meeting in Budapest in 1969, the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty Organization issued an appeal to all European nations that is considered the starting point of the process that led to the CSCE. …

WORLD WAR I, which began 100 years ago, was the prologue to an age of blood. In those days, the values and achievements of refined European civilization were mercilessly thrown into the furnace of war. They were replaced by dirt and blood that became the lot of millions upon millions of people. Barbarity crushed human dignity, distorted people’s thinking, and played havoc with their emotions. Death and terror became an everyday nightmare and stuck firmly in people’s minds. Overwhelmed, they started seeing the true face of the war: devastated cities, burned villages, battlefields covered with dead bodies, the groans of the wounded lying in “no man’s land,” the agonies of dying soldiers, and the suffering of survivors. They came to know the sickening smell of war.

Depersonalized official documents such as military orders, reports, or dispatches fail to convey the human or moral dimension of that war. That comes across if one reads letters from the front. Then one can see the war with all its horrors “from within,” through the eyes of an ordinary combatant. That is the chief and eternal value of frontline letters as a source of historical research. …

THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR of 1941-1945 was the most disastrous and bloody war in world history. The very existence of the Russian state and Russian nation had never before been so dramatically challenged. By winning the Victory in that war, Russia has saved itself, Europe and the entire world from the Nazi subjugation.

This country celebrated the Victory’s 70th anniversary amid heavy geopolitical, economic and ideological pressure. Attempts to revise the history of World War II have become an integral component of such a pressure. …

I HAVE spent a total of 10 years working in Berlin. This is long enough to become a genuine Berliner. But am I a genuine Berliner? I’m hardly genuine because, after all, I have mostly had to be a sideline observer of what’s happening in this city, although it is always with great interest, with tremendous warmness and affection, with sympathy and at times empathy that I do my observations.

This attitude took a while to take shape. More than that, my first visit to Berlin in 1986 was a depressing experience if anything. Particularly, of course, the wall, which caught my attention as soon as I for the first time left the embassy premises to take a look around, and semi-destroyed buildings that had survived the last days of the war – I saw them standing on the opposite side of the Spree River. Sadly taking a pull at my cigarette (I was still a smoker in those days), I said to myself: come hell or high water, I must get to love this city, for otherwise I won’t be able to live and work here. …

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

DEAR FRIENDS, …

THE CORRESPONDENCE between the leaders of the anti-Nazi coalition during the Great Patriotic War, which was first published in our country upon the Foreign Ministry’s initiative almost 60 years ago, holds a special place in the study of the diplomatic history of the war. It is a major source recognized throughout the world as an authentic and reliable collection of messages exchanged among Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt (then Harry Truman) and Winston Churchill on key issues of the joint conduct of the war and the postwar settlement. Even at the height of the Cold War, the pickiest critics in the West could find no fault with this work. I remember very well what a big event this publication was, as this happened a long time before the relevant Anglo-American documents were declassified, and it became a real breakthrough in world historiography. However, many years have passed since then. The main archival wartime documents have become available to researchers; a huge amount of memoirs and specialist literature have appeared, and the historical science has made great progress in studying the political and diplomatic history of the war. All of this has laid the groundwork for revisiting the famous correspondence for an in-depth re-reading thereof through the prism of new historical knowledge. It is encouraging that this research was initiated by V.O. Pechatnov, a Russian scholar, a prominent historian, an expert on the Americas, and head of a department at the Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, who was subsequently joined by his young co-author I.E. Magadeyev. The result was a two-volume work, which is of considerable scholarly and practical interest, “Stalin’s Correspondence with Roosevelt and Churchill During the Great Patriotic War.”*

* V.O. Pechatnov, I.E. Magadeyev. Perepiska Stalina s Ruzvel’tom i Cherchillem v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. Dokumental’noe issledovanie. V 2-x tomakh. M., Olma Media Group, 2015 …

ACADEMICS and man-in-the street are equally interested in the institute of monarchy, albeit for different reasons. The institute of British monarchy is doubly interesting: On the one hand, it has been smoothly functioning since the seventeenth century; on the other, embedded in the country’s democratic system it has retained some of its independent functions. Galina Ostapenko, D. Sc. (History), the author of “The British Monarchy From Queen Victoria to the Heirs of Elizabeth II: The Concept of Governance and Personality of the Sovereign,”* has posed herself the task to “dissipate the illusions of Russian monarchists” through an analysis of the contemporary constitutional monarchy in Great Britain and transformation of its functions (pp. 3-4). This explains the chronological limits – from Queen Victoria (1837-1901) to the transfer of royal prerogatives from Elizabeth II to heir apparent Prince Charles.

The author has successfully combined the strictly academic approach and captivating style to disclose the phenomenon of the British monarchy’s amazing tenacity: It survived amid the revolutionary upsurges on the continent when other monarchies disappeared and thrones tumbled down. Dr. Ostapenko has looked into the ways the objective historical trends and purely subjective factors (the monarch’s or the prime minister’s personal traits and dramas in the royal family) affected the transformations of the institute of monarchy in the context of the country’s objective need to modernize the legislative and executive power (traced down to our days). …

THE PRESENTATION of a monograph about Cuba’s leader Raul Castro has been recently held in the Big Mansion of Russia’s Foreign Ministry. Its author is Nikolai Leonov, a KGB Lieutenant-General, and also a historian and an author. Raul Castro and Nikolai Leonov met each other by pure chance. When travelling to Mexico to continue his undergraduate training, Nikolai Leonov met on board a ship a guy from Cuba, Raul Castro, and they have become solid friends ever since.

The presentation of Nikolai Leonov’s book about Raul Castro was opened by Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov who spoke in praise of the monograph’s hero, focusing on the many years of Raul Castro’s service for the benefit of his country and people. …

THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR of 1941-1945 in Russia has become an inexhaustible source of historical research, each day and each episode of which requires a thorough analysis. Historians are deeply in the debt of those who have saved the world, defending humanity from a gruesome Nazi regime and its accomplices. The history of WWII should be reconstructed in all details, documenting the lives of all soldiers and officers who were fighting against Nazism.

The book “The Great Patriotic War: An Illustrated Chronicle”* by Igor Bondarenko and Dmitry Klimov does not claim to be an all-embracing and detailed academic publication (which could have consisted of several hundred thousand volumes). Rather, the authors have made an attempt to present in a concise form a daily chronicle of the most disastrous war in the history of mankind, by relating concrete episodes of the Soviet troops’ struggle on the fronts, picturing war heroes and presenting combat materiel, as well as describing major military operations. Of particular value is their day-by-day presentation of major events. Such an approach can significantly limit the possibility of an arbitrary interpretation of history by those who up until now cannot “forgive” our nation for winning WWII and keep trying to get their own back on “paper battlefields.” …