With Putin’s ‘return’ to the presidency, Russia is now officially a joke as a serious great power state. True, Putin has been ridiculous for awhile, what with those shirtless photo-ops that came across like desperate, bizarre geopolitical ‘ads’ that Russia is still a superpower. But this is different. Not even Chinese elites play the sorts of merry-go-round games at the top that Putin has engineered in the last 6 months. To their great credit, Chinese presidents and premiers serve and go. Russia is now the only one of the BRICS in which power does not rotate. Instead, Putin is starting to look like one of those oil-rich Arab dictators who never leaves, continually gimmicking the the ‘institutions’ and ‘constitution’ to justify how, mirabile dictu, he keeps staying in power. In the meantime, the real power structure morphs into an oil-dependent, rent-seeking, cronyistic despotism. And like those Arab dictators, Putin is facing a local resistance that increasingly realizes that Putinism is taking their country nowhere but nest-feathering. To paraphrase Helmut Schmidt, Russia’s pretty much a petro-state with nukes at this point.
I know a lot of people hate the term BRIC or BRICS. It comes off like a pseudotechnical buzzword for investment banker conference calls. It’s the kind of faux-concept CNN reporters use when they go to Davos and desperate undergrads roll out when term papers are due. But I do think it is a useful colloquialism for something Khanna captures well – rising ‘second world’ states whose sheer, and growing, demographic and economic size will inevitably impact global governance. But in contrast Russia isn’t rising from the second to the first world; it’s falling from the first to the second, and further if it’s not careful. This is what the protestors in Russia now, like the Arab Spring protestors before them, intuit – their badly governed states are stagnating in a world of rapid change and falling behind the exciting world of modernity available in the West and sizeable chunks of Asia and Latin America.
So let’s be honest, Russia isn’t a great power anymore. It’s not rising in any meaningful sense of that word in international relations theory. Its population is contracting at a startling rate. The average lifespan is declining. Alcoholism is a uniquely terrible scourge. Infrastructure is a mess. Its bureaucracy has scarcely budged in 20 years. It has basically missed the globalization boat that has linked in the other BRICS to the US and western economies, and that has allowed them to export their way into the middle class. (Russia’s still not in the WTO, and who wants to invest there now?) It suffers from a terrible brain drain. Consider that those ‘mail-order’ Russian brides represent young, healthy, reasonably educated Russians so desperate to flee that they prefer shot-gun marriages to scarcely-known obese foreign guys, over staying in Putin-land. Holding constant the otherwise very disturbing ethical issues, that actually says a lot about the contemporary state of Russia if you think about it, because ‘bride export’ is common trait of third world states.
And the list goes on: After 250 years, Siberia is still an undeveloped backwater. Russia’s budget is extraordinarily dependent on the price of carbon for a second world ‘riser.’ Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one major Russian manufactured export item, other than weapons. (Yes, I am sure I could dig one up, but the fact that nothing immediately, obviously comes to mind is a red-flag itself.) Unlike the other BRICS, its foreign policy obsesses over ephemeral ‘parity’ with the US and realpolitik ‘spheres of influence’, while the wealth-creating, day-to-day reality of the liberal world economy (the WTO, globalization) passes it by. In short, Russia’s a hugely corrupt, dysfunctional, authoritarian, oil rentier-state, just like so many others we know. Now why would that get lumped in with second risers like the other BRICS, Turkey, Indonesia, etc? It’s more reasonable to compare Russia to OPEC states at this point.
Placing Russia in a developmental category with Brazil, India, China, and South Africa does a disservice to the notions of quickening modernity, rapidly expanding GDP based on global integration and law, growing democratization and liberalization, greater responsibility for global governance, and, for lack of a better word, growing ‘normality’ that the other BRICS have striven so hard to achieve. Putin is going the other way; just go read his victory speech with the usual paranoia of foreign influences and all that. That’s exactly the kind of talk that the BRIC moniker implies is being jettisoned for more comfortable cosmopolitan outlook. Even the Chinese, the most politically closed among the other BRICS, don’t talk like that anymore. Brazil, China, India, and South Africa all have rotations of power at the top. All endorse some basic level of friendly interaction with the US, Western, and global governance institutions. All accept the basic structure of the world economy, even if they complain ceaselessly about US leadership. Russia doesn’t make this cut anymore; ten years ago, when Putin seemed to be bring much-needed order, yes. But not now. ‘Presidency-swapping’ is the kind of the thing the Kims of North Korea or the Assads of Syria do, not one of the rising BRICS whose opinions the rest of us should respect.
Three quick prebuttals:
1. It doesn’t really matter that Russia has nukes. Yes, it looks like it matters. You can always wow people by invoking mushrooms clouds, the scariness of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and your cool submarines and MIRVs. And certainly, with so many other diminishing assets, Russia will waive the nuclear stick to get attention. But what exactly do nukes get Russia now, after the Cold War? Prestige? De Gaulle famously called nukes a short-cut to great-powerdom. Ok, but that is a ‘psychic’ benefit – that little tingle you get from saying ‘Russia is bada–!’ What else do nukes get Russia?
2. Russia’s size doesn’t matter – although it might if Russia could ever get its act together. Yes, Russia is really big and covers 11 time-zones, but again, what real tangible benefit does that capture for it? Siberia’s endemic backwardness is the obvious marker. Despite almost 3 centuries of control, no planner in Moscow has yet figured out how to sustainably access that potential. Anyone who’s anyone still lives in Moscow or St. Petersberg.
3. The UN Security Council veto, from its status as one of the permanent five (P-5) members, is a Soviet legacy prestige asset, not a real institutional one. Yes, the Russians can block R2P stuff at the UN for a little while. But that doesn’t really slow down the West (or China) too much if an issue is genuinely important to them. There is no way the other P-5s would give Russia real veto power like that. Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya showed that. Even on Syria, Obama has begun entertaining military options, regardless of what Putin thinks.
The only way out of this is for Russia to modernize its bureaucracy and open its economy to foreigners. The first is necessary so that people can trust the law and so feel safe investing and otherwise generating wealth locally. That is, if Russians feel like they’ll keep the fruits of their labor instead of seeing it ripped off by corrupt officials, they’ll start working harder and Russia will see real GDP growth outside of the resource sector. Second, as the other BRICS have shown, this process goes so much faster if foreigners are allowed in.
Remember that this is the stuff Medvedev said he would do and didn’t. Does anyone really believe Putin will, at this point? That answer’s itself, so good luck to the protestors.
Cross-posted on Asian Security Blog.
This seems pretty simple. What does it mean to say that a state is a “joke” as a great power? Certainly power rotation can’t be the criterion; the United States, after all, came pretty close to having Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton, or at counterfactually Bush VP-Bush Pres-Gore VP-Gore Pres. And since everyone pretty well understood that Putin was “in charge” during his stint as Prime Minister, there’s not all that much different going on.
Moreover, even if Russia is not growing as quickly as China, it’s still fairly well off:
https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=ny_gdp_pcap_kd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=region&idim=country:RUS:CHN&ifdim=region&tstart=-308952000000&tend=1300420800000&hl=en&dl=en&q=russia+gdp
And those nukes will still fire, even if they’re Soviet legacies (and increasingly they’re not, as Russia modernizes).
Great powers don’t have to be moral exemplars, or even particularly dynamic. And Russia may be on a trajectory to not be a great power, but it is for now.
Well, I tried to list a lot of ways in there that Russia breaks with the sorts of cosmpolitan, globalizing attributes the BRICS moniker implies.
But this makes the nuke thing more problematic, given that the B and S of BRICS don’t have nukes.
As for power rotation, C is pretty problematic, isn’t it? And so is S, since both of them (like R) are now one-party states with varying degrees of competition. Only B and I have claims to be democracies.
My interest was more developmental than realist-theoretical. On re-reading the post, it was a bridge to far to say that Russia isn’t a great power anymore. It still is, by the skin of its teeth. Nukes compensate for other areas of decline, I suppose, as you are suggesting. De Gaulle saw this, as did N Korea.
My real goal was to developmentally differentiate between Russia and the other BRICS. That BRICS moniker is to imply some level of cosmopolitan comfort with the modern world economy and rapid growth to greater weight within that economy (hence my reference to Khanna). The other 4 BRICS capture that upward trend – as do other economies like Turkey, S Korea, Mexico, or Indonesia (hence my preference for Khanna’s term ‘second world’). But Russia really doesn’t. Russia is slipping, not rising and has been, more or less, since the late 1970s. That’s quite a hegemonic decline. Its internal rot is pretty severe now. Its Transparency International score in 2011 is a staggering 143 out of 182 (https://en.rian.ru/crime/20111201/169195312.html), obviously calling into question not just its BRIC credentials, but its great power ones too. And the shirtless one’s return puts off a turn-around for another six to twelve years. Given that China rose to the ‘G-2’ in just 30 years, 20+ long years of Putinism (after 10 years of Yeltsin chaos plus late Soviet stagnation) portends a disaster for Russia. This is the real reason for the Moscow protests. They see this now.
Rotation at the top is just one marker for BRIC normalization, but other obvious red flags include the relentless xenophobia of the Putin regime, the alienation from the WTO, the huge missed opportunities of globalization, the blow-out levels corruption and state capriciousness including the murder of journalists, the reliance on carbon and weapons exports, the 19th century ‘spheres of influence’ obsession with countering the West in Eurasia, the confiscatory attitude toward private wealth most obvious displayed in the Khodorkovsky case, or Putin’s laughably ridiculous throwback-to-Kaiser-Wilhelm bravado of hunting on TV with a crossbow or fighting stage-managed martial arts contests. Does that sound like a BRIC or Khanna’s ‘second world’? Not really. It sounds like Venezuela or Iran. Hence the argument that BRIC/second world is the wrong developmental category for Russia.
For more of this, ‘should the R be taken out of the BRICS’ debate, try: https://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/12/02/kick_russia_out_of_bric?page=0,0 and https://www.forbes.com/2010/02/24/russia-brazil-bric-entrepreneurs-finance-wharton.html.
I’m not sure why Khanna is a useful interlocutor, but I may be biased.
I’m just not convinced that BRICs (of either membership) is a useful analytic category. Let’s never forget the origins of the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC
I was trying to use Khanna to bring some social science discipline to the BRIC term. In the post, I lament ‘BRICS’ for the same reason I presume you do.
No matter how important and real a fact when you use wikipedia as source you lose all the momentary attention the world has ever given you
Why does the graphic have the flag of Singapore? How did they sneak into the BRICS category and what did they do with South Africa? ;)
Yikes, I didn’t even catch that. So here’s a little orwellian correction…
At first I thought you post was a satire of the usual anti-russian doom and gloom. It is a much better article if read that way.
I won’t address you opinions, but I leave you with some basic facts:
– Russia’s population has stabilized and is slowly growing. It’s not “contracting at a startling rate”. It’s not 2000 anymore.
– The average livespan is increasing.
– Deaths from alcoholism are declining quickly.
– There is no “terrible brain drain”. Show us the data if you can. In the last years the migration balance with developed countries is approaching zero.
Your post is very light on facts, so I’ll stop here. I’ll just add that it’s ridiculously arrogant on your part to lecture Brazil, China, India and South Africa on who they should invite to their little club.
Actually there’s lots of data on this that’s pretty easy to find with Google. I suppose I should have included more links orignally, but I thought a lot of this was common knowledge at this point. But here you go; all the following links come from the last few years:
1. On demography, I was thinking of Nicolas Eberstadt’s work. He’s been writing on this for a long time now, most recently November 2011: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136511/nicholas-eberstadt/the-dying-bear. His title, ‘The Dying Bear,’ is pretty blunt about the population contraction.
2. It is downright heroic, if not irresponsible, to suggest that alcoholism is not a huge problem in modern Russia and severely impacting men’s health and mortality: https://www.europeaninstitute.org/20090721767/July-2009/russia-shares-eus-population-decline-worsened-by-mens-shortening-lifespan.html, or https://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/19/russia.health/index.html. Just look at those estimates of average male lifespan – around 60! Gorbachev even thought alcoholism imperiled the very existence of the USSR and launched a major government campaign against it.
3. On the brain drain: https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704816604576333030245934982.html. Note the big listed reason – problems with the Putinist regime – and their profile: “vast majority of those who admitted wanting to leave were under 35 years old, lived in a major city, and spoke a foreign language.”
For what it’s worth, this wasn’t intended to be ‘anti-russian gloom and doom.’ I studied in Russia for a bit and spoke it reasonably well once; I’d like to think I am sympathetic. But simply denying Russia’s internal decay is not really a response – as the Moscow protestors themselves understand.
What do you mean, “second-world”? Brazil was never a second world country, neither was South Africa. India was a non-aligned nation.
I honestly stopped reading when I saw you used the term second-world, and I’m sure I won’t regret having skipped this article.
As I noted, I was pulling from Parag Khanna on the use of that term: https://www.paragkhanna.com/?p=262. It seems to me a reasonably good effort to capture the distinction between these states and ‘old core’ states like the West.
You have lots of good points but you give them a sort of unwarranted cascading doomsday momentum.
For example, at least one normally even-handed commentator says that Russia’s “mortality rate from vices” is on the decline. https://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2012/03/07/russias-mortality-from-vices-on-the-decline/ And others have noted that the demographic decline is no longer “startling” (even though it remains a serious challenge in the long run).
My main problems with your post:
1) If you have any empathy for the Russians as people and as a nation, it is well hidden. And without this it is very easy to slip into glib generalities. To hazard a generalization, one of the biggest problems in Russia is cynicism, which is a constant counterforce in the struggle against corruption. Overly simplistic analyses with blanket prescriptions (“modernize the bureaucracy,” “open its economy to foreigners”) don’t address this mentality, they just add to it.
2) This is a nation of proud, energetic, creative people who often get things done despite the power vertical, not because of it. If civic life on a mass scale seems underdeveloped, civic virtue on the micro scale flourishes and makes life here very much worth living. Where is the recognition of this grassroots dynamism?
3) Globalization has come to Russia. It even affects emigration. I get the impression that those who emigrate from Russia (more than I wish would happen) are, in a way, just extending Russia’s borders. Many of them keep a very active presence here. This is not just true of Russia’s diaspora, of course, but it’s an important corrective to the impression of rats abandoning a sinking ship.
Your basic summary of the challenges faced by this country is probably right, but I believe that all the corrective resources–intellectual as well as material–are here. These resources include a synthetic vision that goes beyond the ancient willingness of elites to exploit the masses, who in turn treat all state authority (good and bad) with relentless passive-aggressiveness. It’s a vision that is in active conversation with the West as well as its own internal traditions. The issue to me is whether these resources and forces will coalesce fast enough to overpower the forces of criminality and entropy.
What I would love to see is external observers and commentators who engage with these resources in a spirit of robust good will, ignoring the pseudo-patriotism of those who want the old patterns to continue. Prescriptions that rely on wholesale top-down “reforms” probably won’t work, at least not in the long run.
Thank you for this polite disagreement. Your response is so civil you make me feel bad for having written this. Most of the criticism, both here and at my home site (https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/its-time-to-de-russianize-the-brics/), has been sharp and somewhat ad hominem. It’s pleasant that you disagree with me without calling me an idiot or something. Maybe sometimes blogging encourages us to be more confrontational than we should be. Thanks. Well said.
1. On empathy, try this: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/remember-the-russians-on-d-day/. Long before this flap, I noted how Americans vastly underestimate how much Russia did to win the Second World War and that our Spielbergian self-congratulation lead us to overlook the huge suffering of Russians at the hands of the SS: “I didn’t really realize this much until I went to Russia to learn the language and travelled around. The legacy of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ is everywhere. Everyone lost someone, and frequently in brutal circumstances Americans can’t imagine. Every Russian guide you get will tell you how Americans don’t know much about war, because we were never invaded, occupied, and exterminated. The first time I heard that, I just didn’t know what to say. You can only listen in silent horror as the guides tell you about how the SS massacred everyone with more than a grammar school degree in some village you never heard of before, or how tens of thousands of those Kiev PoWs starved or froze to death because the Wehrmacht was unprepared for such numbers and the Nazi leadership just didn’t care.” Please note that I even got a Russian to graciously comment there about how rare it is for Americans so say stuff like that. I did study in Russia; I did have friends there; I do have some language and culture skills. So I’d like to think of myself as a sympathetic critic. My real concern is that Putin’s awful misgovernment of Russia is pushing it towards irrelevance, as Niall Ferguson argues (https://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/11/in-decline-putin-s-russia-is-on-its-way-to-global-irrelevance.html), and as I think the protestors intuit. Putin has become a global laughingstock, and he’s pulling Russia down with it.
2. I don’t disagree with any of that, but one could say that about almost any country. Most peoples like to think of themselves as proud, energetic, innovative, unique, etc. Americans love to call themselves exceptional, and Koreans regularly tell me how the ‘miracle on the Han’ proves how Korea is the most awesome, cohesive, energetic, team-work society in the world that overcome anything. Ironically, the most consequential grassroots/civil society movement in Russia is the anti-Putian protests, which fits my argument.
3. Ok, you sound like you know better than me. But first world states/superpowers/great powers/whatever aren’t supposed to export people, but to import them. As I said, the very disturbing ‘mail order’ phenomenon sends a really uncomfortable signal about young people’s desire to live in Russia.
Finally, you raise an interesting question about whether all the issues I discuss combine into real momentum for decline. I wonder how that could not be the case, unless the leadership changes. Russia’s traditionally been a top-down place. It’s hard to see turn-around coming from below. (Again, this is why the protests are so important; they’re trying to change that.) Russia’s been slipping for three decades now. I agree it hasn’t fallen off a cliff, like, say, the end of the Ming dynasty or something, but a generation’s worth of negative trends is slowly chewing away at Russian power. Please note in earlier comments above, that I do step back from the statement that Russia is not a great power; that was overreach. But the margins are narrowing.
I’ve tried to summarize my responses to critics of this post here: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/its-time-to-de-russianize-the-brics/. That might interest you.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks, Robert –
Not sure the BRICS ever had as much in common as you imply here, but certainly the Putin regime is incongruous among modern states, reminiscent of Berlusconi but with oil, nukes and the vastness of Siberia, and without the EU or a western tradition to hold it back. I do agree that Russia is unlikely to show Indian or Chinese growth rates anytime soon, for some of the reasons you offer. But visiting Moscow for the first time in four years, I saw a new international airport terminal this week, a new high-speed rail link from the airport to town, an entire new business district full of sleek high-rises, and other signs of growth. The stores are rich and full of quality goods, mostly imports as in the USA but from Europe rather than China. Things are moving along despite the regime, in other words, though sub-optimally. Compare this with the US, where the Obama stimulus has resulted only in patching a few roads and passing on a few tax breaks, but nothing new, and where monopolization of the economy is total, long-cherished constitutional norms are being abandoned, the military is tied up in permanent warfare, television has become a propaganda machine, and the highest percentage of citizens in the developed world are in jail. Would you say that we are still an example of the goal toward which developing nations should strive?
I agree, the BRICS are a strange body, too incongruous to really work, as just the latest summit shows again. In the comments at my own site (https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/its-time-to-de-russianize-the-brics/#comments), recent commenters made the interesting point that Russia really likes the BRICS club, because it supports Russia’s claim to relevance even as it devolves into a ‘largish middle power.’
As you say, Russia is in a weird place right now. It’s not a superpower, but it’s wealthier per capita than the other BRICS. It’s got nukes, but its economy is a corrupt mess (check that TI score!), and it can scarcely control its huge landmass, much less effectively project power. And Putin’s return will only aggravate all these problems yet again. I kinda like the idea of a ‘largish middle power,’ sorta like China under Mao. That does a nice job catching this awkward limbo state. I guess the next question then is whether the other BRICS want to be associated with so much kleptocracy and xenophobia. Putinism doesn’t exactly win over investors, which is sort of why Goldman Sachs created the acronym to begin with. Again, Russia is a weird fit in the BRICS, which probably helps explain why the BRICS summits are so underwhelming. Also, if you haven’t read my full response to the many comments so far, please do: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/its-time-to-de-russianize-the-brics/
As for your comments on the US, I don’t disagree at all. I’ve been (uncomfortably with embarrassment) teaching Asian students for years about why we invaded Iraq, tortured people, and drone-strike our own citizens without trial. Their disgust and astonishment has been a humbling, almost humiliating, experience, as I’ve noted again and again on my own site: https://asiansecurityblog.wordpress.com/category/conservatism/. If only the Tea Party knew what foreigners think of us post-GwoT…
Great post, but BICS doesn’t have the same ring to it as BRICS.
Also do we actually have the original source for the term? I am curious where it stemmed from.