International Affairs No. 6, 2015 – Table of Contents

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Foreign Affairs

THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the UN has become a major international event of the year. The jubilee session of the UN General Assembly was attended by over 150 heads of state and government. This fact alone testifies to the recognition of the unique role that the UN, originally designed to prevent a repetition of the tragedy of World War II, plays in international relations as their central coordinating mechanism. …

MANY PEOPLE think of the UN as a place where people dressed in sharp business suits, with a serious air, make decisions that are often crucial for the fate of entire countries and nations. And they are not very far from the truth. The world’s universal organization, which is marking its 70th anniversary, indeed deals with very important things: the maintenance of international peace and security, development problems, the eradication of diseases and poverty, the promotion of social progress and providing better living standards for people throughout the world – in short, everything that is recorded in the UN Charter, which was adopted 70 years ago. This, as they say, is no joking matter. Suffice it to say that resolutions that are adopted by the UN’s leading body, the Security Council, are legally binding documents in international law. Failure to observe them can have very serious consequences, including enforcement measures, for a member state guilty of such transgression.

Of course, 70 years is a not a very long historical period but it is quite an impressive age for an international organization. All of these years, it has been developing according to its own rules, internal regulations and rules of procedure, improving its activity and methods of work. The UN Charter was signed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco. It came into force on October 24 of the same year, and this day is considered to be the UN’s official day. Considering this year’s anniversary, it will of course be marked on an especially large scale. …

THE UNITED NATIONS ORGANIZATION is, to a great extent, a faithful reflection of the stronger and weaker points of mankind; therefore, “Don’t blame the mirror,” as a Russian saying goes.

Its numerous trump cards, on the other hand, allow this global organization to claim the role of an instrument to be used to improve life on Earth. This claim stems from its legitimacy and moral authority that rests on its unique Charter (the backbone of international law), a vast intellectual luggage, a wide sphere of interests and competences, and its ability to attack the hardest problems and talk as an equal to world powers. …

THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the United Nations Organization is an international event of signal importance. Set up as a fundamental element of the international system, the UN remains its cornerstone with no alternatives no matter what its numerous critics are saying in chorus. Today amid the disarray and contradictions of the contemporary world, mankind, if confronted with the task of setting up a universal international structure to preserve peace and security, would have come up with an indifferent result if not a failure. Critics concentrate at individual aspects of the UN activity and talk about details: they stand too close to be aware of the grandiose panorama of this construction, hence their attention to arches and façades.

The UN is the result of tripartite efforts of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Great Britain that pushed aside their deeply rooted disagreements about the roads and prospects of social developments to agree on the principles of civilized coexistence of states and nations registered in the UN Charter that was and remains the cornerstone of international law. …

SHORTLY BEFORE THE UNITED NATIONS marked its 70th anniversary in October 2015, some countries mounted pressure for enlarging the number of seats on the UN Security Council. This campaign is spearheaded by the so-called Group of Four (G4) – Brazil, India, Germany, and Japan, which seek permanent membership in the Security Council. Russia as one of the council’s permanent members again finds itself confronted with questions of whose membership bids to support and what is the formula for reforming the United Nations’ main body that all UN member states would accept.

Dashed Hopes …

Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation; osce.ru

TODAY, the situation in the European security sphere is perhaps at its lowest. The current problems did not emerge yesterday: They have been accumulating for years. The prime cause of the serious cooling of the political climate in Europe was certainly not the Ukraine crisis. The roots of the contradictions that came to a head during the conflict in Ukraine go way back to the 1990s. …

TODAY, our Western partners seem ready to take into account the lessons of Iraq where the ruling Baath party and the army were disbanded during American occupation leaving the ungovernable country. History knows no examples of successful “regime change”: disintegration of all (including law and order) structures of state governance is inevitable. Successful “regime change” is a utopia; those who think differently are indulging in dangerous fantasies the price of which is unacceptably high. In the history of Russia abdication of Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty in 1917 marked the point of non-return. The law and order structures were relieved from the oath of allegiance, disintegration began. European history has its own periods of lawlessness and disorder. Not subjected to large-scale purges the law and order structures remained disoriented; they ceased to exist; the effects are easy to guess: the state was left defenseless in the face of internal and external threats.

The successful conclusion of talks with Iran on its nuclear program was a rare bright spot on the otherwise gloomy horizon of the Middle Eastern affairs. That is a fundamental breakthrough, including in terms of political psychology, upon which, in theory, a sustainable regional architecture could be built. …

WASHINGTON’S FOREIGN POLICY has played and continues to play one of the main roles in the international political and military crises in Ukraine, in the way they began and are unfolding. The American ruling circles spent twenty-five post-Soviet years tightening their grip on Ukraine and its people through a network of institutions ranging from the oligarchs with money in Western banks and numerous NGOs to rigidly controlled political parties and neo-fascist fighters – thrown into action at the opportune moment to bring a pro-American regime to power.

Why did the United States pour so much effort into its strategic domination in Ukraine? An answer to this question will reveal the roots of the acutest political crisis in Central Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. …

TOTAL CONTROL over the Asia-Pacific as a step toward world domination had been on America’s agenda for a long time before the dynamic shifts of recent decades, the status of the leading world powers reached by China and India and their membership, together with Russia, in the SCO and BRICS raised fairly high barriers to Washington’s global ambitions.

In November 2011, the White House announced a “pivot to Asia” as a shift of the center of gravity of its global strategy toward the APR. President Obama declared continued presence of the United States in the APR and its greater influence there as a “supreme priority” of his administration. Security through stronger American military presence, building up and modernization of defense potential and stronger military-political and economic ties with allies and, probably, new partners have been described as the key tasks. …

ANY NATIONAL CRISIS tests a country’s political system, exposing its latent vices and vulnerabilities. European countries have been plunged into such crises when, after times of affluent, carefree existence, they were spontaneously inundated by refugees from conflict-stricken areas in the Middle East and North Africa. One wonders, though, whether this flood of newcomers was spontaneous at all – too sudden to come from nowhere, it has had clear causes, the flows of refugees have had specific destinations and appear to have followed specific transit routes.

Obviously, this is the biggest-ever challenge of this kind for the West, which has got accustomed to quietly dealing with small-scale problems and to loudly proclaiming invented large-scale ones such as the “Russian threat.” …

Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

PEOPLE WONDER, “How come that the United States, a great democratic state and its no less democratic allies in Europe turn a blind eye to massive crimes against civilians in Donbass?” This is not accidental and this attitude has a pre-history of its own. …

THE PATH TO PEACE has always been thorny, unlike the path to war: It is always easier to walk down a slippery slope, while the expectations are often brighter than the results that are achieved, that is, of course unless the goal is to indulge in self-publicity on the captain’s bridge of an aircraft carrier, fly a victorious flag over Baghdad or “win a difficult victory over the opponents of democracy” ahead of elections in one’s own country.

We are the avowed proponents of the “if you want peace, prepare for peace” approach, but under different circumstances, at different historical and geopolitical periods, “preparations” can and should be different. In one situation, the reduction of the military capability and “disarmament” are regarded by opponents and partners/rivals as the striving for the relaxation of international tensions and the building of new relations, with a new substance and with the “friendly” proportions of positive and confrontational interaction. Experience shows that they can coexist at the same time, in parallel with each other; one does not rule out the other. However, under different circumstances, like today, the striving for peace is often seen as a sign of weakness, indecisiveness, a “victim’s complex,” the readiness to abandon one’s principles and take a step back in important geopolitical situations. And then Russia will be “chased” atop the wave of such “love of peace” to the end of the earth. Meanwhile, the world will come even closer to the brink of a big war. …

IN VARIOUS PERIODS in the past, states and territories of the Baltic region made successful economic and cultural use of the advantage of being located between Russia and Northern Europe.

Riga, for instance, during the Holy Roman Empire had the status of a free imperial city and was a port through which Russia exported large amounts of goods such as furs, honey, resin, and timber, and imported various manufactured products from Europe. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, Riga, Reval (Tallinn) and Memel (Klaipeda), all of which were Hanseatic cities, were prosperous regional trading and financial hubs, where German, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and English could be heard spoken. …

RUSSIA’S RELATIONS with the European Union and the United States are centered today on the Ukrainian crisis – and not on Ukraine itself, which has been and remains an inseparable cultural and historical part of the East Slavdom, while the crisis is a product of the forcible, foreign-instigated seizure of power by the current Ukrainian leadership and is being made worse by its incompetence. Objective assessments of the situation are making the foreign sponsors gradually reshuffle the central governmental bodies and local administrations in Ukraine by replacing former demonstration leaders with external managers. The latter may not be scintillatingly talented but at least one can be sure of their loyalty and obedience. These reshuffles amaze some outside observers but don’t mean any revolution – they represent the use of models that have been tested out over the past two decades in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where the office of head of state and other key governmental positions were given to people invited from abroad.

The external governance of the Baltic countries has been considered as effective. Governance structures and practices evolved in the course of it have motivated its authors to extend its Baltic experience to other countries. Among other things, external governance is an increasingly significant factor in competition among foreign investors. …

IN AUGUST 2015, one more page was written in the dynamic history of Russian-Egyptian relations. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi paid an official visit to Moscow on August 24-25. He held negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin on a wide range of subjects, both bilateral issues and aspects of the situation in the Middle East in general.

The United States and Western Europe saw the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi as a commonplace coup and suspended the provision of aid to Egypt, but Russia reacted in a different way. …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs: Grigory Petrovich, there have been many cases where researchers in different countries, including in Russia, made important discoveries, but they were patented by the Americans. How does this happen?

Q: As far as is known, this country is behind the United States, China and the European Union in the number of patents. Why are there so many innovations there, many times more than in Russia? …

THEY DO NOT LOOK relaxed or relieved, let alone pleased – two men who extend their hands to each other in the evening of September 13. 1955 in the famous photo: Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin have just signed a final communiqué after several days of talks in Moscow and agreed to establish diplomatic relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the USSR. Does this mean that Adenauer had just cemented the division of Germany after the second German state, along with the GDR, established full-fledged relations with the Soviet Union? Does this mean that Bulganin went too far in accepting the formula that “the establishment…. of normal relations…. should help resolve the main pan-national problem of the German people, i.e., the unification of Germany as a single democratic state”?

At least, Adenauer achieved his primary humanitarian purpose: The Soviet side assured him, albeit only verbally, that the last of the almost 10,000 POWs, who were still held in the Soviet Union, would be released and allowed to return to their motherland. And – which was of crucial importance in the long term – 10 years after the end of the terrible World War II, which was unleashed by Germany and which produced a severe backlash against it, the Federal Republic of Germany, which was integrated into the Western world, and the leading Warsaw Pact power opened dialogue and started cautiously building normal relations. …

IN SEPTEMBER 1955, ten years after the end of the war in Europe, the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. The reason why this event had taken so long to come about was that the two countries first had to go through a multitude of extremely complicated problems, and that took time.

Those were not only bilateral problems. During the first postwar decade, the international situation was marked by frictions between the world’s main powers over the future world order and over what roles they were to play in new alignments of forces in Europe and worldwide. …

THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY of the incorporation of the German Democratic Republic into the Federal Republic of Germany fell at the year of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II, which saved the world from Nazism. This is an extra reason to try to see what conclusions the Germans drew from events that had become turning points not only in their own but in world history. One would be able to describe today’s Germany with its determining influence on the policies of the European Union as a mini-great power, a country on which a lot depends worldwide. Periods when Germany was a great power properly speaking, both as the empire of the Kaisers and as the Third Reich, ended up in global disasters. Have the Germans learned those painful lessons of history? Before this question is answered, even approximate forecasting of the future of our continent is impossible.

The “Older” Federal Republic of Germany …

TODAY, Russian-Chinese relations are officially described by Moscow and Beijing as a comprehensive, wide-ranging, equal and trusting partnership and strategic interaction (according to the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation of July 16, 2001). Based on this geopolitical and geo-economic paradigm, effective and pragmatic practice has evolved, which has become a positive factor in global development and global governance in the 21st century.

The objective axiology criterion shows the value of various aspects related to the organization and utilization of this experience in the evolution of bilateral, regional (transregional) and global integration (in the broad sense of the word) processes and spaces. These include action plans and specific achievements in the implementation of the provisions of the aforementioned treaty in 2005-2008, 2009-2012, and 2013-2016, an array of more than 300 intergovernmental treaties and agreements covering practically all areas of cooperation. It received new stimuli for development following the Moscow summit (May 2015), when Russian President V.V. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping paved the road to the signing of important political documents and intergovernmental, interagency and commercial agreements. …

IT IS WITH GOOD REASON that we speak of the legal thought of Russia, and the school of Fyodor Martens, in the first place, as part of the contemporary doctrine of international law, a common heritage of the European legal tradition. His school was completely devoted to the principles of international law and the rule of law as the linchpin of foreign policy of all civilized states that rejected force as a means of settling interstate disagreements and a tool of prevention of European clashes.

The science of international law and European legal consciousness recognizes Fyodor Martens, Professor at St. Petersburg University and the Imperial Alexander Lyceum (a very close analogue of MGIMO, as one of the leading jurists who insisted on the primacy of law in international relations, who spared no effort to establish an international court with the right to pass binding decisions and who was known as a “Russian politician.”¹ In Germany, the international legal doctrine of which disagreed with the Russian doctrine on many issues of fundamental importance, Martens was still regarded as “one of the founders of the contemporary international law”² to quote Hans Wehberg, jurist with a vast theoretical heritage to his name. It was generally recognized that “Martens’ theoretical works accelerated the changes that moved international law into modern times.”³ Baron Boris Nolde believed that “there had been no modern international law” prior to Martens’ school and that its emergence was, to a great extent, Fyodor Martens’ achievement. …

TWO HUNDRED YEARS have passed since the Vienna Congress (1815) when Europe’s leading monarchs led by the Russian autocrat Alexander I produced yet another scenario for the world following the routing of Napoleon Bonaparte’s empire; the Congress determined also the status of Polish lands.

The Fourth Partition of Poland or the Pacification of Aggressors? …

RECENTLY I received from Vladimir Churov a copy of his book A Trip to Morocco with Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan,* for which I am sincerely grateful to him.

It’s an amazing book both due to its informative and fascinating content and due to the variety of literary and historical ploys and methods used by the author. It may be called a bestseller among Russian books about Morocco. …

UKRAINE has become a pet subject with those who have something to say and with even a greater number of those who have not. This explains why it is not easy to find a profound, balanced and comprehensive study based on rational arguments. Too much of what has been written so far is a heap of propaganda clichés hence a lot of attention to the recent fundamental work by Igor Ivanov “Ukrainian Crisis through the Prism of International Relations”* about the sources, evolution and prospects of the Ukrainian crisis. The author is a well-known figure with a huge amount of practical experience in international affairs in his past capacity of the foreign minister of Russia and due to his active participation in public and political life in his present capacity of President of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC). He is well-known all over the world as one of the most respected experts in international relations and international security personally acquainted with the main characters of the drama unfolding in Ukraine and around it.

The author has demonstrated once more his abilities of a profound analyst, whose generalizations and conclusions are indispensable for all political actors. The volume is a collection of articles written throughout the crisis and, therefore, connected by a common subject, a common line of argumentation and generalization, and documentary and chronological appendices. …

THIS IS A COLLECTION of essays about politicians who have been prominent in the Middle East in the period from the mid-20th century to this day. The collection “Political Portraits of the Statesmen of the Near and Middle East”* launches a new research project at the Institute for International Studies of the Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations (MGIMO), “Political Portraits.”

The editors of the book are among Russia’s best-known Middle East experts. Professor and Doctor of Science (History) Vitaly Naumkin is Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Candidate of Science (History) Veniamin Popov is a prominent diplomat with the rank of ambassador and a former special representative of the Russian president for relations with the Organization of the Islamic Conference. In their foreword, Naumkin and Popov emphasize the importance and novelty of this collection. The book largely fills gaps that are left by the majority of academic studies on Middle East issues, which are limited to analyzing domestic and external factors in various developments, and to describing various aspects of such developments and their outcomes, but hardly ever make any reference to personalities instrumental in them. …