next - main - previous
The Eurasian Politician - Issue 2 (October 2000)
by Anssi K. Kullberg, July 2000
There are many who speak about stability – preservation of the Russian Empire in fear of its collapse, and fighting the threat of separatism, a source of all evil and instability in our world that is divided between sovereign but not always legitimate states. Certain empires have sometimes temporarily recognised that the world does change and empires meet their dusk, time for transformation: For instance Russia in 1989-1993 during Gaidar’s regime, when even Yeltsin still was a "national liberationist" for Russians and not the post-1992 aggressive tsar who invaded Moldavia, Georgia and Chechnya; and like Indonesia during Habibie’s regime (after the imperialism of Sukarno and Suharto’s eras). Unfortunately it is far more common that empires get stuck in the past’s destructive state models. Impotent to reform and repair their state form, in the way Germany did under Erhart and Adenauer, and Turkey under Atatürk, they degenerate into mere terror regimes. This happened in Russia since 1993 and it may happen in Indonesia, too, although Gus Dur first promised same rights to Aceh, the Moluccas and Irian Jaya, that were guaranteed to East Timor’s separatists, thank to the Western world’s sympathies.
In the modern times it has been the "international community" (i.e. the West in dialogue with the Eurasian hegemons Russia, China and India) that has dictated which empires shall be disintegrated and which should not, which "new" nations might have the right to exist (East Timor, Palestine) and which not (Chechnya, Kosova, Kashmir, Tibet). A yet bigger shame it is that it has actually been the very same international community that has encouraged empires in their dusk – for example Russia, Yugoslavia and Indonesia – to maintain their imperial state form, even in violent means. To make a provocative suggestion, without this encouragement we might already have a democratic Russia, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosova, some small North Caucasian states without any kind of extremism whatsoever, and peace on the Sundas. No order and stability can be reached by maintaining such a status quo that is no longer legitimate (or has never been). Order and stability follow spontaneous development, including integration in legitimate and peaceful regions and disintegration in illegitimate constructions and hegemonies.
When looking at Estonia, one looks at what has become out of one example of a country where this so much feared separatism, struggle for national liberty, took part less than ten years ago. According to those who fear so much the fall of imperial dominion, we should now see around us anarchy and instability in Estonia – a nation that was far too small to deserve the status of a republic, according to those Russians within the Soviet elite who would have liked to deprive Estonia from the privilege of an SSR status. Let us take an unconventional example for comparison: The Estonian nation is about the size of the Chechen nation; or to be more exact, about the size of the Chechen nation as it was before the genocide in two Russian invasions during the last five years. We do not know how many Chechens are left today. In the genocide and deportation following Stalin’s decision to destroy the Chechen nation, more than 60 per cent of them were killed. Estonia lost 40 per cent of its population. In the first Chechen War in 1994-1996 already, more than 100’000 people were killed, of the less than one million inhabitants of Chechnya. Russia lost the war, but since the end of the war Russia still continued a total isolation and blockade of Chechnya from the outer world. With all the Chechen infrastructure, housing and living conditions destroyed in the massive bombings of the war, this meant thousands more of people dead in hunger and disease. In the new war that Putin started last summer, the Russian troops have been even more effective, the concentration camps more numerous, and no end is visible for the war, even if Grozny, or Dzoxar-Ghala, was wiped out from the surface of the earth like Thebes in Alexander’s times.
But Estonia, Estonia is fine. The little Baltic republic is among the first ones excepted to be integrated into the European Union. It has one of the most liberal regimes in Europe, excellent economic progress, and minority protection for the 30 per cent ethnically non-Estonian inhabitants, of whom most are Russians or nowadays mainly Russian-speaking representatives of other former Soviet nationalities. More than 80 per cent of the Russians living in Estonia stated already some years ago in the polls, that they are happier than if Estonia would still be a part of the Soviet Union or Russian Federation. There are hardly any people without apartment and Estonian welfare can also be observed in the fact that in this post-Soviet republic the access of young people to mobile phone and internet are already on the Western level. Estonia is a country that has liberated itself from the power of an empire, yet not without the support by the Western powers. Estonian success, thus, is what happens when an empire collapses. Where Moscow’s power was released, we can find welfare, peace and stability today. This is what a separatist country has become, thank to the recognition of the Estonian independence by some brave Western governments, tiny Iceland being the first.
Nobody can deny it: Estonia is doing very well without Moscow. To be honest, every single country that was in the years 1989-1992 truly liberated from the power of Moscow or Belgrade, has become more or less better-off, freer, richer, more democratic and more stable. They are countries that we may call European democracies today. Meanwhile, all the countries that have not fully been liberated from the power of Moscow or Belgrade regimes – including Russia and Serbia themselves – have faced serious troubles and in most cases also armed conflicts and massacres. The two separatist states who have managed best – Estonia and Slovenia – were not only the economically most advanced ones of their own reference groups in the communist times, but they were also the ones that escaped most clearly all ties of the imperial occupants. They were helped a lot by international recognition.
In Kosova and in Chechnya it can be seen very concretely what it has brought about that these separatist states have not been able to escape from the aggression of Russia and Serbia, and what it means that they have not been internationally recognised. Standing by the edge of a mass-grave in Kosova, or listening to the horrors told by the survivors of Russian ‘filtration camps’ in Mozdok, Kizlovodsk and in the Stavropol oblast, one could be supposed to realise why these nations desire not to stay as parts of Russian and Yugoslav empires.
There are only two countries that have started all the wars in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union: Russia and Serbia. They have started these wars in order to rehabilitate or keep in their power their lost, fallen empires. Considering this, how can we seriously claim that preservation of empires, of the integrity of Russian Federation or Yugoslavia, improves stability and order, when it seems that preservation of the unity of these collapsing empires is indeed the cause of war and most grotesque instability? It is like if one would claim that maintaining the power of the Nazi regime through IMF support to the Third Reich is the best way to avoid the Holocaust.
In Estonia, the happiness and relative prosperity, that whoever can witness, are prize of liberty, of recognised independence. The mass-graves, bloodshed, continuing war in Chechnya, and uncertainty about future in Kosova... All this misery is due to the preservation of two empires, that should have fallen by the liberation of the rest of the former communist bloc in Europe. This misery is not consequence of rebellion, of struggle for liberty. It is the consequence of failing to reach the full independence up to the level of international recognition and Western acceptance for the existence of Kosovar and Chechen nations. The Chechens and the Kosovars have not been massacred because they consider themselves as nations. They have been massacred because the Russians, the Serbs, and the West consider them to be parts of Russian Federation or Yugoslavia. It is a very fundamental disagreement considering the existence of two nations, and if it is the right of Chechens and Kosovars or of Russians and Serbians to decide of the fate of Chechnya and Kosova. As long as this disagreement will take place, the horrors of Kosova and Chechnya will be repeated, time after time, and there will be no peace in Europe.
Now of course some people, like maybe Professor Samuel Huntington, would tell that the examples of Estonia and Slovenia cannot be compared with the examples of Kosova and Chechnya, because the Estonians and Slovenians are civilised European nations, while the Kosovars and Chechens are Muslims and thereby inherently unable to adopt ‘Western values’ which democracy, market economy and secularism are supposed to be. Both Western and Panslavist right-wing extremists argument further that the Chechens and Kosovars cannot be granted the privilege of sovereignty "in the vicinity of Europe" for geopolitical reasons, but instead, they must be kept under the Slavonic yoke of Russians and Serbs. Otherwise they would "become fundamentalists" or "slip into the influence of Turkey or Pakistan" or, who knows, the Taliban. As if freedom, and not occupation, would lead to Islamic extremism, and as if Turkey or Pakistan’s influence would be more undesirable than that of Russia’s traditional allies, Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Taliban?
This kind of argumentation sounds absurd, but is being taken seriously by many, implicitly or explicitly. It seems this anti-Islamic propaganda has spread quite as much and identically as the anti-Semitic propaganda had spread in the 1800s and in the first three decades of the 1900s. It can be heard every day everywhere in Russia and in Serbia: tones that would sound entirely absurd in the free Europe. But even more alarming is that this is not the case only in ultra-nationalist authoritarian states like Russia and Serbia. Implicitly, the same rhetorics can be heard in the West as well, yet in a more diplomatic disguise. This is very sad and very dangerous and it should make every civilised human being deeply anxious. An eminent European, Arch-Duke Dr. Otto von Habsburg, President of the International Paneuropean Union, who has witnessed the rise and fall of two totalitarian empires, described his anxiety before a historical déjà vu in Strasbourg, December 1999, seeing alarming similarity between the development of the present relations between the West and Russia, and of the interwar metamorphosis of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, we need not speak about Chechnya or Kosova, which seem distant for many Nordic people. We can have another example, geographically much closer to our safe North, a land that has obediently stayed as a part of the Russian Federation, namely East Karelia, a.k.a. the Karelian Republic. The inhabitants of Karelia are not Muslims, and we have all the reasons to presume that historically Karelia, along with St. Petersburg, has had the strongest Western inheritance of all what is presently Russia. Do we find more stability, more prosperity, more respect for human rights and for minorities in Karelia than we can find in the former rebellious separatist republic of nationalist Estonians, who, among other ‘separatist nationalist’ nations preferred to break out of the Soviet Union thereby sabotaging Gorbachev’s nice perestroika and glasnost? [This is sarcasm.]
In November 1999, a conference on the Northern Dimension (a regional idea of Finnish geopolitics), was held in Jyväskylä, Finland. One of the lecturers was Olga Chevchuk, who represented the Orthodox Church of Petroskoi (Petrozavodsk in Russian, had also a short-lived Finnish name Äänislinna during the war), the capital of the Karelian Republic. She was herself Russian like 80 per cent of the inhabitants of the Karelian Republic nowadays, due to the deportations and genocide of Finns (Karelians) during Stalin’s era, and importing of Russians and heavy Russification ever since. Mrs Chevchuk told about the situation in Petroskoi, where people are living on the edge of starvation – just beyond the eastern borders of Finland, Norway and Estonia. After the border between South and North Korea, the Karelian border is the deepest gap of living standard in the whole world. Especially the children are starving, since their alcoholic parents do not give them food at home, expecting the state, the Church as well as the Finnish charity aid to feed their children. Situation is not this bad only with a small marginalised share of the population. Masses have been totally marginalised all around Russia, as another Russian lecturer, Aleksandr Shestakov, pointed out in the same conference.
The core of the problem is manifested by the reluctance of the Russian authorities in allowing humanitarian aid organised by churches: The Russian authorities were concerned that "the Finns are trying to manipulate loyalty of the Russian citizens now inhabiting former Finnish or Karelian villages and towns" for the favour of "Finnish-inspired separatism and regionalism that leads to loss of authority of the central power". As we know how skeptical today’s Finns generally are at any ideas of "getting Karelia back", let alone to "inspire separatism", these absurd arguments of the Russian authorities to stop humanitarian aid are actually directed against the present fashion concept of Finnish geopolitics, the Northern Dimension, i.e. regionalism. The Russian message is clear: Russia does not believe in spontaneous forms of international co-operation, but in statism, centralism and imperialism.
An official Russian representative in the same conference, Vladimir Churov, a St. Petersburg politician, listed the greatest hazards to the Baltic Sea Region from the Russian point of view. He did not speak about starving children. Instead, he considered the greatest threats for the stability in the region to lie in the "political criminality" of "separatism and terrorism", the threat of extremist Islam (how many extremist Muslims there are in the Baltic Sea Region?), regionalism – because according to Mr Churov it leads to separatism –, and the lack of a common discipline and order among the former Soviet states. Instead of "undisciplined" bunch of independent states, Churov, and the Russian government, wanted to see a strong bloc in the leadership of Moscow. Moreover, he saw a threat in the "unconstructive attitudes of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians towards St. Petersburg’s kind aspirations to ‘develop’ the Baltic region economically"! This is what Russia has become: in its rhetorics, an Orwellian parallel reality to the one that prevails in ‘normal’ states – in Sweden, Finland as well as in Estonia. Who can still recall the jolly days of Gaidar and others, the days when everyone saw Russia changed, when the KGB’s archives were open and when dissidents could freely speak in free media without being shot the day after?
The terrible danger, the shadow of which at least the three smallest and militarily weakest of the states surrounding the Baltic Sea live, is very easy to underestimate, if one is judging the situation from the viewpoint of Washington or Brussels, or even Stockholm. In Estonia one should always remember that all that great advance that one sees, all this glory of success due to liberty, and the normal, democratic, European life that one can see in the streets of this nation; it is all very fragile, since there is an aggressive superpower in the neighbour, loaded with nuclear arsenal enough to blow up half of Europe. It is a very sinister shadow to live in. The new Russian regime has done quite little to convince us to believe in a genesis of a new Russia that would not resemble its czarist and communist predecessors. Instead, it has given a very concrete and convincing evidence for the fear that what is facing the Chechen nation today, might face Georgia or Moldavia tomorrow, and when finished in the South, is there any reason to presume that the Evil Empire would not turn its eyes to the Baltics again? That is what it has done so many times throughout the history; to be exact, every single time of a major war in Europe Russia has sought expansion in the Baltic region. This is the reason of why Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians so much want to be part of the NATO, as banal and simple as it may sound.
Yet it may be fallacious to trust in the West. In the interwar period the Western powers were favouring Russia and showing constant hesitation and reluctance in the issue of granting the Baltic republics with international recognition, sovereign status, diplomatic importance, let alone security guarantee. Besides not helping the Baltic states against the threat Soviet Russia constituted, the West even sabotaged the "frontier nations" to help themselves, as France’s decisive role in breaking the looming "margin-state co-operation" between Poland, the Baltic States and Finland (on some level even extending south to Romania) by pressuring Poland to break ties with Lithuania. At the times of Yalta, both Roosevelt and Churchill were more than eager to give Stalin everything he wanted, including the Baltic states. In the Summit of Helsinki in 1997, President Clinton promised to President Yeltsin that NATO would not accept any former Soviet republics to become its members. Understandably, in countries like the Baltic states, Moldavia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, this caused a lot of concern and whispers of a new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to divide Europe into two blocs of hegemony. It is also easy to recognise the same gloomy moral weakness in West European attitudes prevailing in the interwar period, when the West was trying to keep its eyes closed for the reality in Germany, until it was too late.
Summa summarum: What do we learn, or what should we learn, from the differences that we can observe prevailing between Estonia and regions still within the boundaries of the Russian Federation, or Yugoslavia, or any empire that needs to be preserved by extreme violence and supported by IMF loan? Can we really believe in all the claims that the rise of national and religious awakening against imperial central power is causing all the instability beyond the Western security umbrella’s cover? Does it not rather seem that the power of falling empires itself is the source of instability and terror? The situation in Estonia does not indicate sufferance due to the loss of Moscow’s central power. On the other hand, the situation in Petroskoi, Stavropol, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok, let alone all the non-Russian lands in the nominal Russian control, does not indicate that Moscow’s central power would provide any stability or prosperity.
Perhaps some readers still draw the conclusion of all this, that the misery calls for ever stronger involvement, that is, coercion and use of force, by Russian state, and I do not doubt at all that some left-wing analysts interpret the situation in this way. They will, however, be indirectly responsible for the results of such policy: Ever more massacred Chechens, Ingushes and Dagestanis, ever more dead Russian soldiers and hungry children, eliminated dissidents and destroyed structures of democracy, federalism and freedom of speech and press. Ever more new conflicts, rebellions and resistance looming in the horizon of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Volga region and the Balkans. This will happen because prosperity and welfare cannot be built upon coercion and violence. Only legitimacy and liberty can create stability.
When an empire witnesses its autumn or dusk, and liberty and free will of citizens to choose for self-determination witness their dawn, should we not desire the fall of what was even called the Evil Empire? Should we not encourage and favour a new, more legitimate, order of political map to take place; one that can provide true stability? If the Western governments desire stability and true reform in Russia, and if they take the lesson that the examples of Estonia and Slovenia in comparison with, for instance, Republic of Karelia, can teach; should they not desire burial of the dysfunctioning empires instead of their preservation with such costs in human life? Why should such a world order be preserved, which has proved to lead to constant instability and repeated genocide? Finishing the dynamic shift towards a new Europe, which witnessed its dawn in Gdansk (Danzig) in 1980 and got its breakthrough in 1989-1991, could spread the success of Estonia to the Balkans, to the Caucasus and to Eurasia. Such a shift would eventually liberate the Russians themselves from the yoke of an imperialist Russia, "Europe’s last colonial power", as quite correctly expressed by Otto von Habsburg.
The Paneuropean Union has dedicated itself to the advocacy for integration and for a united, peaceful and free Europe since the 1920s, when Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Union in the interwar situation that resembled the present situation in our Europe in many senses. Today the Franco-German dilemma has been removed from Europe’s way toward a better future, but the dilemma of Zwischeneuropa – of insecurity in the neighbourhood of Russia (and in the Balkan context Serbia) – is yet to be solved. The integration, however, must take place in the terms of desire by all European people. Such integration will bring about peace, prosperity, and stability, while integration by coercion and preservation of empires by armed violence, the method that the empires have used to preserve their dominions, can only lead to instability. If unity must be reached through violent coercion, it indicates that such unity has failed, and does not deserve to exist any more. It is time for change. The strength of European unity must lie in attraction, not in power. The Paneuropean project is not a project of Western imperialism and expansion to Russian dominions. It is a project of welcoming all the nations of Europe that respect liberty and human dignity, to build a new Europe, a whole Europe, which is the meaning of the name Paneurope.
AKK