An irony struck me about Putin’s speech in Munich. The Russian president made convincing, if rather blunt, points about the danger of one group having sole power in a political system.

He spoke of the threat of unilateralism, and said: “However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.”

He went on: “It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Putin is right, this is a dangerous situation, because that sole centre-of-power starts to see the rule of law as equivalent with their will. They define themselves as ‘the international community’ or ‘the state’, and if anyone speaks out against them, that means they are automatically an enemy of ‘the international community’ or ‘the state’.

As Putin suggests, it is much healthier to have a balance of power, so that one power acts as a check on another. As Putin says, in the end this is even in the interests of the dominant power, because otherwise it becomes over-confident, and damages itself in reckless activity, as the US has done in Iraq. Or it simply stagnates and becomes corrupted due to lack of competition and internal tension as, say, the Ottoman Empire did.

But if we agree with him that a political system in which there is just “one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making” is an unhealthy political system, how does he justify the political system he himself has made in Russia?

If the US dominates geo-economics and geo-politics, how much more so do the Russian president and his presidential administration dominate Russian economics and politics?

Think about it. The presidential administration directly controls Gazprom, Rosneft, Sberbank, UES, Russian Railways, Rosoboronexport, United Aircraft Manufacturing, Vneshtorgbank, Channel One, Rossiya, NTV, Ren-TV, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiskaya Gazeta, Izvestia, United Russia, Rodina, LDPR, the Duma, the Federation Council, almost all of the regional governorships, the FSB, the Judiciary, the Civil Council, the military, the Stabilization Fund, and the presidential administration property fund.

The US doesn’t control the world to nearly the same extent as the presidential administration controls Russia. And here’s another point – the US didn’t ask to control the world. It didn’t try to create a situation where it was the ‘sole centre of force’. In fact, if you read Paul Kennedy’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’, the US actually resisted becoming a global super-power for thirty years or so, from say 1910 to 1939, because it was more involved in its own internal affairs, leading to a situation where Britain was still behaving as global hegemon even though it didn’t have the economic resources to back up that role.

Putin, by contrast, has actively worked towards a situation where he is the sole centre of power in Russia. He has actively overseen the state takeover of the TV and newspapers, the weakening of civil society, and the use of Russian law for political (or even personal) aims during the Yukos affair.

And, just as he predicted, this is deeply dangerous for himself and his own regime, because “it destroys the sovereign from within”, because the sovereign only wants to hear positive remarks about its rule, and the sovereign treats any negative remarks, from journalists or civil society for example, as sedition or betrayal.

And that leads to a situation where, in the main press briefing of the year, hardly any domestic journalist asks difficult questions, but instead they shower the sovereign with almost amorous attention, and pre-figure their ‘questions’ to him with sycophantic remarks like ‘Mr President, you who know everything and can do everything’ (as one journalist spoke to Putin at the briefing on February 1).

Is such a situation healthy? We agree with Putin: No, it isn’t. Here’s to more multilateralism and power-sharing in both the world, and Russia.

Jules Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

February 12, 2007

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