JULES EVANS, LONDON
IS RUSSIA TURNING AWAY FROM WESTERN CIVILIZATION?
I’ve been reading a speech that Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, gave to the Russian Council for Foreign and Defence Policy last month. He was discussing president Putin’s speech in Munich, and he had this to say:
“The West is losing its monopoly on globalization, and this is probably why current events are presented as threatening to the West, its values and lifestyle.
Russia is opposed to attempts to split the planet, even if in a civilized manner, into so-called civilized humankind and the rest of the world, for this is a sure path to global catastrophe.”
The speech touches on many very interesting issues, not least, what does it mean to be civilized, and can we use this term at all, in a post-colonial and multi-polar age?
After all, it’s a binary term. We can’t use the term civilized unless something or someone is deemed uncivilized. So must we abandon the term altogether, out of political correctness?
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That the term ‘civilized’, however politically incorrect, does mean something to most of us, is clear. In a 2001 poll by the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow, for example, 49% of Russians said they agreed that some countries were civilized while others were uncivilized, and just 17% disagreed.
What did they think ‘civilized’ meant? 25% of Russians and 19% of Muscovites believed it meant a prosperous society. Tellingly, only 7% of Russians believed being civilized had anything to do with human rights or democracy. So by this definition, Russia is becoming more civilized by the day as the price of oil rises.
‘Civilized’ is a highly charged term because, as Lavrov notes, for decades, if not centuries, civilization has been equated with the West. In the poll I mentioned, 92% of Russians equated the ‘Civilized World’ with western countries or Japan, and only 8% with Russia and China.
When asked which countries they thought were uncivilized, 14% said Russia itself. So 92% of Russians walk around with this feeling of inferiority with regard to the civilized West, or they did back in 2001 anyway.
Civilization has tended to mean ‘western liberal civilization’. The western term ‘civilization’ is very much rooted in a liberal context. It goes back to the idea, first put forward by the Greek philosopher Protagoras (who the philosopher Karl Popper thought was the founding father of liberalism) that Greek civilization had naturally ‘evolved’ along a scale of development which had savagery at one end and civilization at the other. Athens was at one end of this scale, at the civilized end, and the rest of the world was scattered somewhere lower down the scale.
Humans had developed from a state of nature where men lived “alone, naked and shoeless”, to small bands carrying weapons to defend against wild animals, to rustic communities, and finally to modern cities with their open markets, rule of law and vast trading networks.
As humans joined into larger and larger groups, they had to evolve social codes to stop themselves killing each other. So they developed shame and justice – the latter to govern what was lawful and unlawful, and the former to govern what was appropriate and inappropriate. To be ‘civilized’, therefore, was to feel shame, and to behave in a modest and considerate way before others. It evolved out of the big city, which threw us together, and forced us to be polite (derived from the Greek for city, polis) and urbane (derived from the Latin for city, urbs). We learnt to control our behaviour and be civilized out of fear of the Public Gaze, fear of “those looks that wound” as Pericles, leader of Athens at the time, put it.
So humans could be placed on a scale of civilization, from savages; to rustic, provincial people; to cosmopolitan urbanites. This scale deeply informs how we think today. For example, a friend of mine described a girl in his office as ‘rustic’. What he meant was that the girl did not know how to behave in a modern urban environment. She didn’t know the rules of the game. She was uncivilized, backwards. Politically uncorrect, of course, but such thinking is nonetheless common currency.
What was new about this liberal theory of civilization was it was secular, not religious. Athenians weren’t civilized because their Gods were the best. Nor was it racist or essentialist. Other states and ethnicities could follow the Athenians up the scale. Civilization was something that could be taught. Less developed nations, through study and emulation, could hope to grow up to be good little Athenians.
This idea of spreading Athenian civilization became, in the fifth century BC, a justification for Athenian dominance and expansionism over other Greek states. Athens became the “school of Greece” in Herodotus’ phrase.
But eventually, other Greek states would declare that all this talk of spreading civilization was simply rhetoric, behind which Athens ruthlessly pursued its own national interests. Putin would echo this argument last year, when he accused ‘Comrade Wolf’ (ie America) of following its own private interests in the name of the ‘civilized world’ or the ‘international community’.
In the eighteenth century, liberal theorists in England and Scotland used Protagoras’ theory as an argument for the morality of free trade and the benefits of spreading it around the world.
Trade and commerce were ‘good’, argued Whig thinkers like Adam Smith and David Hume, because it brought us out of rustic isolation and brought us into contact with other people, with strangers, with whom we traded and came to depend on. We had to consider their interests and temperaments, had to be polite and reliable. We became ‘polished’ through the process of commerce – that’s why businessmen, particularly bankers, tend to be the most worldly and polite people. It’s in their economic interests to be affable.
Adam Smith developed a whole theory of morality that suggested we do good because we want to look good to others, because we fear the ridicule of the Public Gaze and desire its approval. So we learn to control our emotions, to behave in a temperate and ‘civilized’ fashion, rather than giving vent to wild or violent emotions.
It’s a morality ideally suited to the stock market, where businessmen who can present themselves as calm, considerate, temperate and investor-friendly are likely to win resources, while those who are rude, wild, inhospitable or aggressive are likely to face the wrath of ‘market discipline’.
Again, this eighteenth century concept of civilization was used as a justification for commercial (and then military) expansion. As British capital was spreading around the world with the help of the British Navy, it wasn’t just making enormous profits for its shareholders, it was ‘civilizing’ the backward countries it exploited, by connecting them with the global market, by introducing civilized rules of business, by introducing new technology into them like banking or the telegraph, by teaching the locals how to be reliable and hospitable trading partners, by teaching them how to behave like little English people.
Of course, some sceptics would suggest the British empire was far more interested in profits than spreading civilization. Didn’t it go to war to defend its right to sell opium to the Chinese? In an even more egregious example, Leopold II of Belgium would represent himself as a disinterested champion of civilization in the Belgian Congo, when in fact he was running a giant slave-empire for his own personal profit.
Others would say that, in their excessively rigid adherence to the doctrine of laissez-faire economics, the British government was deaf to the terrible suffering their policies caused in the poor countries where they operated. Millions died of famine in rural parts of India and Ireland in the nineteenth century, because the British government argued such famine was a necessary part of the ‘natural development’ away from rustic societies towards urban, civilized societies.
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The 1990s saw this liberal ideology (updated to ‘neo-liberalism’) spread around the world as western capital went on another great wave of expansion after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both governments and companies outside the West had to go through the humiliating but necessary process of trying to adapt themselves to western ‘civilized’ standards to attract western capital.
That meant “doing the striptease” as Moscow analyst Eric Kraus puts it – exposing one’s activities to the gaze of investors, being seen to be transparent and accountable, investor-friendly, cosmopolitan, all those liberal buzzwords. It meant trying to act like a good little westerner to win the approval of the IMF and western markets.
President Putin seemed to be embracing this process. He re-established the state’s monopoly on violence, which, as the sociologist Norbert Elias wrote in his great work The Civilizing Process, is a fundamental for the development of civilization. If the state doesn’t have a monopoly on violence, then people don’t settle disputes in ‘civilized ways’ but by physically threatening or attacking each other, as they often did in Russia in the 1990s.
The results were impressive: according to the Russian Internal Affairs Ministry, there were 70 contract killings in Russia in 2002, compared with 600 to 800 annually a few years earlier. A local journalist told Business Week in 2003: "Under Yeltsin we were freer, but under Putin it is more civilized.”
Putin seemed to be enjoying his role in leading Russia back to civilization. He said as much on a trip to the US in 2003, when he told the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad that Russia had “rejoined the family of civilized nations”. He even, in April 2005, reasserted the importance of Russia’s “civilizing mission” in central Asia (elitist imperial talk if ever one heard it).
With the help of Putin’s steady hand on the tiller, and with western money increasingly being tempted back into Russia after the shock of the 1998 crisis, Russian business also became more and more ‘civilized’. The lead example was Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Yukos, which led the way in adopting western business practices in order to attract western investors. Forbes magazine declared, in 2002: “The Russian monstrosity even liberal politicians call "gangster capitalism" is giving way to a more civilized market…Mikhail Khodorkovsky is leading the charge.”
Yukos’ PR department declared proudly: “Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the first Russian businessman to realize that the Russian economy and Russian business have no future if they do not make the switch to international standards of corporate governance, financial transparency, and social responsibility as quickly as possible. Khodorkovsky was the first to place the importance of business ethics and a good business reputation on a par with such corporate fundamentals as economic efficiency and consistent growth. And, he was the first to actually start running his business fully in line with these principles of civilized corporate behaviour.”
Khodorkovsky himself told CNN: “at some point we understood that you could live differently, that if it's more open, more transparent, more friendly, then the result will be better for us, our company will be worth more, we will have a higher standing in the community…now we're doing it the right way, the way they're doing it in the West, in civilized countries.”
He spent a fortune making his company attractive to the Western Gaze, through multi-million-dollar contracts with PR firms like APCO and the UK’s Public Policy Partnership. He refashioned himself too, to appeal to the Western Gaze. Out went the Soviet glasses, the shabby suits, the dodgy moustache. Like Peter the Great before him, he associated the West with being clean-shaven, and shaved off his Slavic moustache, then donned an Armani suit and some flashy rimless glasses.
His strategy worked – by 2002, Yukos’ capitalization had soared to $22 billion, making it the biggest company in Russia by market capitalization, bigger than the colossal Gazprom, which didn’t know how to be polite to foreign investors, so was worth half that much, even though it had 25% of the world’s gas reserves.
Khodorkovsky succeeded in selling himself as ‘Western’ to the West, even if this brand was rather simplistic. It was nonetheless typical of western markets to find some figure or group of figures in an emerging market and define them as ‘western’, therefore ‘good’, and to pin all their hopes on these figures.
One can compare Khodorkovsky’s success in this respect to that of Anatoly Chubais in the 1990s. The journalist Janine Wedel wrote in 2000 that the Chubais team “advertised themselves, and were advertised by their promoters, as the ‘Young Reformers’.…Western donors tended to identify Russians as reformers not on the basis of their commitment to the free market but because they possessed personal attributes to which the Westerners responded favourably: proficiency in the English language; a Western look; an ability to parrot the slogans of ‘markets’, ‘reform’ and ‘democracy’; and name recognition by well-credentialed fellow Westerners.”
As Khodorkovsky hob-nobbed more and more with the elite of the Civilized West, he really started to get into this whole civilization business. Forbes called him ‘the best friend of the West’. He started, perhaps, to see himself as the main civilizing influence in modern Russia. He started to understand civilization in the political sense of having a genuine civil society that held government to account.
He put around $200 million a year into supporting civil society through his Open Russia foundation, into programmes like the New Civilization programme, which educated 200,000 young people around the country. They’d go on summer camps, and be led in discussions of questions like ‘what is a parliament?’ or ‘what rights do I have?’ The youth who invented the best entrepreneurial project at the camp would win a prize. It was all fairly surreal.
The Yukos PR service declared: “These YUKOS philanthropic programs and others like them aim to integrate the new Russia with the rest of the civilized world through education, communication, and personal contacts. For too long, Russia has been isolated and somehow "different". Khodorkovsky firmly believes that the time has come for Russia to become an integral part of the world, and he is willing to put up his money to see that it happens.”
Khodorkovsky started to see himself as more and more of a political figure, as the driver for the civilization of his country, the only person who could lead it to the West. In this respect, he started to operate as an independent foreign policy voice, travelling around the world meeting with foreign leaders, promising them that Russia would move towards a more civilized, western-style, parliamentary form of government.
This naturally annoyed Putin, the man who had established the political framework in which businessmen like Khodorkovsky could act civilized. Who was Khodorkovsky to waltz around the West as if he was the embodiment of progress and the Kremlin were backward thugs? Wasn’t all his civility just PR, spin, a paint of coat, behind which Khodorkovsky was a tax-dodger and a killer?
And hadn’t he become overly seduced by the flattery of the West, to the point where he’d forgotten what country he came from, and to whom he owed his loyalties? He was, if anything, too cosmopolitan. He’d forgotten who he was amid all the western flattery. He was selling out Russian interests to international finance, just as Anatoly Chubais had done in the 1990s.
The Kremlin attack on Khodorkovsky ended Putin’s love affair with western civilization. The West no longer saw Putin as a Peter the Great-style civilizing influence. Instead, many saw the Kremlin attack as an assault to ‘civilized values’, as a return to the USSR’s Asiatic despotism. After all, this was an assault on property rights, on western shareholders in Yukos. This was inhospitable, rude, barbarous. One western analyst expressed shock that Putin should throw a political opponent into the gulag “before the eyes of the civilized world”.
Things got worse with the cutting off of Russian gas to the Ukraine in 2006. After democratic revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s former colonies were becoming increasingly hostile to the Kremlin, while also becoming increasingly feted in the West.
Barely a month went buy without Viktor Yushchenko receiving awards and accolades in the West. The International Republican Institute, for example, declared in 2005: “the U.S. is now obligated to support Ukraine’s heartfelt desire to return to the civilized world of nations after centuries of foreign rule and decades of totalitarian regimes”. Even the Queen of England gave Yushchenko a medal. It was like he’d taken Khodorkovsky’s place as the West’s favourite, as the great white hope for civilization in the CIS, against Putin the barbaric tyrant.
The Kremlin decided that if Ukraine and Georgia were so keen to join to abandon the CIS and join the civilized world (ie the EU and NATO), then it should stop subsidizing their gas. It would institute a new policy in the CIS, in an attempt to introduce “more civilized relations” in the region – ie relations on normal, commercial terms, rather than barter deals.
But the attempt back-fired again. The western press and western governments rushed to condemn the Kremlin for its unpredictable and uncivilized behaviour. An editorial in the Warsaw Voice, for example, said: “cutting gas deliveries should not be among the range of measures used by civilized countries”.
Meanwhile, the governments in Ukraine and Georgia increasingly lambasted Russia as a barbaric nation. The Ukranian National Assembly issued a declaration that “if Russia wishes to be a player in the civilized world community, it needs to act appropriately. Civility, not to mention international accords, mandates respecting Ukraine’s independence”. Georgia’s parliamentary speaker, Nino Burdjanadze, accused Russia of “violating all civilized and democratic norms”.
It began to seem to the Kremlin that this term ‘civilized’ was being used as a stick to beat them with, no matter what they did. Western countries used it as rhetoric to mask their self-interest in the region, just like Britain had, just like Athens had. The US treasury and the IMF scolded weaker countries into behaving in a ‘civilized fashion’, when really this just meant kow-towing to the interests of Wall Street or Texas oil firms.
Khodorkovsky was deemed ‘civilized’ because he was prepared to sell out Russia to western financial groups. Yushchenko was deemed ‘civilized’ because he was the puppet of the West. Civilized seemed to mean well-behaved and submissive, like a school-boy. And anyone with even a brief knowledge of Ukraine and Georgia knew these countries weren’t nearly as developed or civilized as Russia, at least in a commercial sense.
Nonetheless, the West was endlessly presenting Russia with report cards, saying ‘could do better’, like a scolding nanny. Russia was right down on the list of transparency, apparently. It was more corrupt than Ghana. It was slipping down Freedom House’s freedom rating, which also somehow stated that Iraq was now ‘more free’. The UK’s Foreign Policy Centre even presented the Kremlin with a ‘G8 scorecard’, according to which Russia was “neither politically nor economically free”. Bad Putin! No dinner for you!
When Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London last year, the wave of anti-Russian sentiment reached cacophonic levels. Russia seemed to be defined as the barbarian at the gate of Europe. Litvinenko himself zeroed in on this Russian inferiority complex when he declared, in his dying statement, that Putin’s “barbaric actions” showed a disregard for “any civilized value”.
It was deeply humiliating, this feeling of constantly being labelled as barbaric by the West, constantly trying to join the ‘civilized world’, but never quite being accepted. Hadn’t the country reached investment grade rating? Weren’t its companies now among the biggest in the world? But still, it faced what it felt were these racist attitudes, this ‘Russo-phobia’. Russia was expected to open up and be ‘hospitable’ to foreign investors, but when they tried to join European companies, it was ‘guess who’s coming to dinner?’
You can compare the country with Turkey, a country that shares much of the features of Russia – a collapsed empire, a country with a ‘European’ tip and a vast hinterland behind it, a country that has tried to turn to the West, tried to reform and become ‘civilized’ in the Western sense, whose elite have tried to absorb western business and cultural codes, but which still feels rebuffed and rejected, perhaps for racist reasons.
And young people in Turkey, and elsewhere in the non-western world, begin to wonder what is the point of this liberalism, when it seems to involve sacrificing your own values and culture, abandoning your own people, trying to ape the customs of the West, feeling humiliated in the condescending eyes of the West, and still not being accepted by them, still not being treated as an equal.
The Nobel prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk describes it well in his novel Snow, where a young man from Anatolia imagines he moves to Germany and meets a westerner: “I’d still mistrust him, just for being a westerner. I’d still worry that this man was looking down on me. Because in Germany, they can spot people from Turkey just by the way they look. There’s no avoiding humiliation except by proving at the first opportunity that you think exactly as they do. But this is impossible, and it can break a man’s heart to try.”
And this feeling of anxiety and humiliation before the Western Gaze leads some to reject that gaze, not to do the ‘striptease’ in front of it, but to cover oneself, to reject the Public Gaze in favour of God. This is at least one explanation for the popularity of the headscarf among educated young Muslim women. It’s like facial hair among hippies, or hoods among African-Americans. It’s a rejection of the need to sacrifice one’s own interests or values to the Public Gaze.
Or it provokes others to take pleasure in affronting that gaze. As an Islamic radical says in Snow: “If the Europeans are beautiful, I want to be ugly; if they’re intelligent, I want to be stupid; if they’re modern, let me be simple.”
But there’s always a lurking element of vanity in these rejections of the Western Gaze, always the hope: ‘they will finally respect me when I do not bow to them and seek their respect’.
This, for example, is a speech given a few years ago by the Muslim scholar Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi, on how Muslim immigrants should conduct themselves in the West: “if you slavishly imitate the Western lifestyle and degrade yourselves, there will not be and cannot be any distinction between you and the local people. In this case, they will not feel any attraction towards you. Nor will it make them reflect on you or hold you in esteem. They will not consider you a model to emulate.
However, when you present before them a unique way of life, it will make them curious. They will be forced to approach you, seeking the source of your worldview. They will naturally ask you how you learnt these high values and noble ideals”.
Occasionally, the leaders of non-western states will publicly be rude to the Western Gaze, as a calculated act of nationalism, designed to appeal to their domestic population, which shares in their feeling of humiliation before the eyes of the ‘Civilized West’.
This is particularly the case if the country has recently defaulted on its debt, which is basically sticking two fingers up at the West, or if it has nationalized its oil supplies. In both cases, the West tends to accuse the country of being barbarous and inhospitable.
Western investors, for example, accused Russia’s chief debt negotiator, Mikhail Kasyanov, of being uncivilized in their negotiations, because he would keep them waiting for hours, then turn up and shout, scream, bang the table, refuse all their proposals. “They were very offended” one banking source told Euromoney in 1998.
It was a similar situation in Argentina, which had previously been a darling of Wall Street in the 1990s, but then defaulted. The new government of Nelson Kirchner was increasingly happy to tell Western investors to go screw themselves, because there was no more money to be borrowed from them. The Financial Times may accuse Kirchner of “stubborn provincialism” (ie of being rude, uncouth and uncivilized) but what does he care? That only makes him more popular among the great unwashed in his own country.
Likewise, those non-Western governments who have their hands on large oil supplies can afford to stick two fingers up to the West. They are empowered to be “obnoxious”, as the US government described Putin’s speech in Munich. Hugo Chavez can compare president Bush to the devil at the UN, because his government has no need of American capital. And such overtly offensive and uncivilized speech only makes him more popular with the rest of the world, which still has to do the monkey dance for western money.
As the ‘resource nationalists’ like Putin and Chavez point out, who is America to lecture the world on being civilized? Is Guantanamo Bay civilized? Is Abu Ghraib?
Besides, the West is no longer the only source of capital in the world. Other economies are becoming increasingly rich. China is rising, and is prepared to lend its capital to projects that the West considers risky or uncivilized, such as striking oil deals with Sudan, or financing Rosneft’s takeover of Yukos. Who, increasingly, cares what the West thinks? They’re not the only show in town. There’s India, Iran, China, the Gulf states, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Algeria, South Korea…and all of these countries are tired of American arrogance, just like the Greek city-states were exasperated with Athenian arrogance.
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Where does this leave the term ‘civilization’? Is it meaningless, outdated?
We naturally baulk at dismissing the term completely, because even if the West is hypocritical, one still hopes that the desire to be accepted as ‘civilized’ by the world sometimes presents developing governments from acting in brutal or disruptive ways. Without the concept of civilization, what are we left with but brute force?
Perhaps we can suggest that there are no countries that simply ‘are civilized’ or countries that ‘are not civilized’. You cannot talk about ‘the Civilized West’, as if the West is essentially and immutably civilized, as if it has a monopoly on it.
Civilization amounts to decisions – the decision to take a bribe or not, the decision to observe legal processes or not, the decision to kill someone or not. There are no civilized countries, simply civilized behaviour. And western countries and individuals are just as capable of behaving in an uncivilized fashion as non-western countries. Guantanamo Bay is an affront to civilized values.
Civilization is also, ultimately, a process tied to economic processes, to the spread of economic interdependence, the creation of peaceful zones of exchange, the search for capital. It is the formulation of agreed codes of behaviour. That process is not going to go away, even if the West no longer takes the leading role in driving it. As the world becomes smaller, the formulation of agreed codes of behaviour will become ever more important.
Jules Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.
April 10, 2007
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