Anti-Western ideology is spreading
Russia’s ideas may be a mishmash, but they are striking a chord among some.
Opinions about events beyond our borders.
March 28 2014 8:00 PM
Russia’s Anti-Western Rhetoric Is Spreading
And President Obama is wrong to ignore it.
TBILISI, Georgia—Halfway through an
otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer last week—the
topics included judges, the court system, the police—I was startled by a
comment he made about his country’s former government, led by
ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said,
conspiratorially.
What did that mean, I asked, surprised. Were they in favor of rights
for sexual minorities? For gay marriage? Were they actually gay? He
couldn’t really define it, though the conversation meandered in that
direction for a few more minutes, also touching on the subject of the
former president’s alleged marital infidelity, his promotion of female
politicians, his lack of respect for the church.
Afterward, I worked it out. The lawyer meant to say that
Saakashvili—who drove his country hard in the direction of Europe, who
pulled Georgia as close to NATO as possible, who used rough tactics to
fight the post-Soviet mafia that dominated his country—was “too
Western.” Not conservative enough. Not traditional enough. Too much of a
modernizer, a reformer, a European. In the past, such a critic might
have called Saakashvili a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But nowadays the
insulting code word for that sort of person in the former Soviet
space—regardless of what he or she actually thinks about gay people—is
“LGBT.”
It was an eye-opening moment. Like Ukraine, Georgia is a post-Soviet
republic that has tried to pull itself out of the sphere of Russian
influence. Unlike Ukraine, Georgia does not have a sizable
Russian-speaking population, and Georgians even have cause to fear
Russia. Since their 2008 invasion, Russian troops have occupied the
Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, about one-fifth of the
country. Russian tanks are parked a few hours drive from Georgia’s
capital.
Yet despite the absence of Russian speakers, a form of Russia’s
anti-Western ideology can be felt in Georgia, too. It’s a minority view
that drifts in through religious leaders—part of the Georgian Orthodox
Church retains old ties to Moscow—through some pro-Kremlin political
parties and Russian-backed media. But it finds indigenous support,
taking the form of xenophobic, anti-European—and nowadays—anti-gay
rhetoric. Sometimes it becomes an argument in favor of local oligarchs
or economic clans and against foreign investment or rules that would
create an even playing field. It always focuses on Western decadence,
economic or sexual, and welcomes any sign of Western hesitancy. When
President Barack Obama told the world this week that Georgia, which has
for a decade been striving with active U.S. encouragement to meet NATO
partnership standards, is “not on a path to NATO,” he immediately strengthened that set of arguments in Tbilisi.
Whether we like it or not, foreign policy choices increasingly have
domestic consequences in the post-Soviet world. An alignment with Russia
can bring Russian-style corruption and can inspire the rise of
Russian-style xenophobia and homophobia, too. An alignment with Europe
and NATO has different consequences. With Russian financial and
political support, for example, Ukraine’s ousted president, Viktor
Yanukovych, was able to rob his country’s coffers and destroy its army
and its bureaucracy. If the new Ukrainian government stays on its
current path and makes a different set of alliances—with the European
Union, the International Monetary Fund, even NATO—it will end up with
different domestic economic policies, too.
There are implications further afield as well. During his Brussels
speech, Obama also declared that Russia leads “no bloc of nations, no
global ideology.” This is true up to a point: Russia’s “ideology” isn’t
well-defined or clear. But the American president was wrong to imply
that the Russian president’s rhetoric, and his annexation of Crimea, has no wider echo.
Of course there were the predictable supporters of Russia in the United
Nations: Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, North Korea. More interesting are
his new European friends. Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom
Independence Party—an anti-European and anti-immigrant party gaining
momentum in Britain—declared this week that the EU “has blood on its
hands” for negotiating a free-trade agreement in Ukraine. Marine Le Pen,
leader of the French far-right National Front, has also said she prefers France to “lean towards Russia” rather than “submit to the United States.” Jobbik, Hungary’s far-right party, sent a representative to the Crimean referendum,
and declared it “exemplary.” These are all minority parties, but they
are all poised to make gains in European elections later this spring.
Russia’s ideology may be mishmash: the old Soviet critique of
hypocritical “bourgeois democracy,” plus some anti-Europeanism, some
anti-globalism and a homophobic twist for contemporary appeal. But let’s
not assume that competition between ideas is absurd and old-fashioned.
And let’s not pretend that ideologies don’t matter, because, like it or
not, they do.
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