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THE OUTBREAK OF VIOLATION IN SOUTH OSSETIA IS AT ODDS WITH THE INTERESTS OF ALL THE PARTIES
ANDREY MAKARYCHEV,
Doctor of History, Professor, Nizhny Novgorod State Linguistic University, Russia
South Ossetia and Georgia have been at war with each other since last week. The towns and cities came under fire, the reservists were mobilized. There are the killed and the wounded, and a lot of refugees. The irony is that the outbreak of violation is at odds with the interests of all the parties involved in the conflict.
If to take a sensible view of things, it looks like the three “players” (Russia, Georgia and the European Union) can get more problems than benefits from this situation.
Russia faces several problems. The first one is any instability in this region may threaten the prospects of holding the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi in 2014. Now experts say that the situation in the North Caucasus is getting more and more similar to that in the Middle East. Can you imagine that the most important sporting competitions in the world are held at a distance of dozens (or even hundreds) of kilometers from a zone of the potential hostilities? Russia has already invested enormous material and image resources in the Sochi project that is of crucial importance to Russia’s acquiring a status of a great power and its being recognized as such.
The other problem is many refugees who went to Russia. This is quite a burden on the federal and regional budgets, which have no extra money for migrants.
For Georgia the armed conflict is also a problem, although of a different kind: the more Tbilisi will get bogged down in the war, the slimmer will be its chance of joining NATO, which is bad enough as it is. Anyway, only the states, which have showed their ability to build the relations with their neighbors without using force, can lay claim to membership in NATO that does not want the problems of other countries. So it would be more sensible of Georgia to maintain peace at any cost and to improve its relations with Russia.
At last, for the European Union the worsening of the situation challenges the whole strategy of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) in the Black Sea region. The EU follows this policy proceeding from the supposition that it is able either to set an example of integration of different cultures or to act as a go-between in settling the conflicts and to exert positive influence upon them. If a war in the North Caucasus breaks out, Brussels will have to acknowledge again that its peacemaking potential is limited and that it cannot influence the events in its “near abroad”.
The new book edited by British expert Noel Parker highlights the idea that the marginal areas have influence on the world politics, which is disproportionate to their status (economic weight, political knowledge etc). Professor Parker says frankly that one of the most efficient strategies of the marginal regions may consist in blackmail of the larger (central) actors and in the collection of a kind of “rent” from, at least, one of them [1]. This “rent” may be the creation of exclusive economic conditions and even the mass giving of citizenship of a neighboring country (Russia has the similar experience). I would add that the marginal territories are sometimes able to create the situations paving the way for the involvement of stronger powers in conflicts caused by the marginal players, which is fraught with the diplomatic, political or even military clashes among the different centers of power over a small area. Many marginal territories act confidently and would like the great powers to solve their problems. But the solution of those problems inevitably leads to large transaction expenses. It is not always sensible to finance them.
In addition, the unrecognized states’ appeals to the world powers are based on the presumption that supposedly the latter must do something and cannot keep aloof by definition. The unrecognized states themselves, which are not full-fledged international relations actors, rarely must do something for somebody. As a matter of fact, they impose their interests and preferences on the great powers.
For Russian President Dmitry Medvedev the Ossetian-Georgian crisis became the first serious foreign-policy challenge. The Russian elite should stop engaging in the battles, which they will not be able to win, and Russia should feel that it is a world power in the positive sense of the word. For the time being, ironically Russia prefers to prove its status of a “great power” (not always in a convincing way) at the regional level. According to the approach of Ole Vever and Barry Buzan, the global powers are the countries, which needn’t interfere in the affairs of specific regions, even if they border upon those regions, and which can vary the forms, methods and geography of their presence in the world. If Russia wants to become a world power, it should address the security issues more aggressively and seriously solve the problems of environment, climate change, transnational crime and corruption, exhaustion of natural resources, information security, etc. It should do that jointly with other global players, rather than with marginal ones.
[1] The Geopolitics of Europe’s Identity. Centers, Boundaries, and Margins. Edited by Noel Parker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
August 13, 2008
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