Near abroad: Putin, the West and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus

Extract

The breakup of the Soviet Union created new states with unfamiliar borders that inherited old memories and relationships. This vast upheaval of territorial and imagined space led to a swirling confusion of legacies, identities and aspirations that will take years, even decades, to harden into stable configurations.

Gerald Toal's original and thought-provoking study explores these themes through the lens of ‘critical geopolitics’: the study of how states give meaning to their place, their relations with others and their mission in the world. According to critical geography, space is ‘what states make of it’ and it is shaped by identity, myth and narrative. Its emotional and ‘affective’ character can have the force of bodily, sometimes gendered, sensations. Even Yegor Gaidar, Russia's most liberal prime minister, described the country's sense of loss after the Soviet breakup as ‘phantom limb pain’ (p. 47).

Critical geopolitics differs from two more familiar discourses: the sparse logic of realism that defines space in terms of military security and the partisan claims of ‘moral geopolitics’ that define—and often anathematize—others in terms of their essential national character. In different ways, both argue that geopolitics is immutable: the first says that Russia is driven by orthodox interests and the second that Russia is inescapably imperial. Instead, critical geopolitics holds that a state's sense of self and space is contingent, can change and may be contested. Rival power networks compete to define the official narrative. For example, economic interests promote a narrative of modernization and accumulation, while power structures emphasize threats of insecurity and instability. Toal identifies three such discourses that jostled in Russia in the 1990s: a liberal European culture; a revived imperial Russia; and an independent Great Power. He is clear that Putin's ‘revanchist agenda’, a version of the last, was implicit even in the Millennium Manifesto, Putin's first public speech on becoming president.