tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45572530340411621442024-03-13T23:09:51.376-07:00Europeans 101Exploring the flotsam and jetsam of European politicsAlex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.comBlogger18125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-84181634169177309622019-07-26T03:00:00.002-07:002019-07-26T03:24:49.193-07:00The Long Shadow of Ostpolitik: How Historical Memory of the Cold War Shapes the SPD’s Russia Strategy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EsoID1-NHVk/XTrO_ghhKGI/AAAAAAAAKDk/qPa7eqbHYz048fZIb0riCQre8bgr4CXHQCLcBGAs/s1600/Schmidt%2BBrezhnev%2B1981.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="594" data-original-width="912" height="260" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EsoID1-NHVk/XTrO_ghhKGI/AAAAAAAAKDk/qPa7eqbHYz048fZIb0riCQre8bgr4CXHQCLcBGAs/s400/Schmidt%2BBrezhnev%2B1981.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">As the fighting on the frontlines at the edge of East Ukraine has drifted into a brutal stalemate, the regular renewal by the EU of sanctions imposed on Russian state institutions and economic sectors in the summer of 2014 in response to the seizure of Ukrainian territory by the Putin regime has become a matter of routine. Occasionally moments of tension around flashpoints such as the Sea of Azov, where Ukrainian naval vessels were seized and twenty four sailors taken prisoner by the Russian Navy in November 2018, occasionally grip the headlines in Ukrainian, Russian and European media for a few days before receding swiftly again into the background. Over time, other serious geopolitical crises such as the Syrian War have opened up opportunities for a Russian state leadership trying to rollback this onerous sanctions regime to engage with European governments desperate to foster stability around the collective borders of the EU. With Vladimir Putin asserting that he will leave office by 2024 at the latest, emerging tensions over his succession within Russia’s state elite as well as growing social discontent among the wider Russian population have also opened up debate within EU member states about how far renewed engagement with Russia could help guide it towards a reform process that could promote the rule of law and help de-escalate regional tensions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">For Angela Merkel and her coalition partners in the SPD, a renewed focus on dialogue with the Russian state has increasingly shaped diplomatic strategy towards the EU’s Eastern borders five years after the Putin regime coordinated the annexation of Crimea and escalated to full conventional warfare against the Ukrainian army in Ukraine’s Eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. The necessity to sustain the EU’s credibility as a global actor coupled with fears of Russian expansionism among its East European member states make a softening of EU policy anytime soon extremely unlikely. By contrast, reversing the removal of Russian delegates in response to the crisis of 2014 from the Parliamentary Assembly for the Council of Europe, crucial to oversight of the European Court of Human Rights and wider attempts to secure the rule of law across Europe, has for Germany and other key EU member states become a means through which to reengage with the Russian state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">It is a move that has elicited a furious walkout from PACE by Ukrainian, Polish, Lithuanian and other East European delegations over what they considered to be an act of appeasement for which the payment of substantial contributions owed to the Council seems to be the only concession Russia has had to make. Despite these ferocious protests, the German and other European governments hoping to reengage with Russia without affecting the EU sanctions regime have systematically removed all obstructions to the return of the Russian delegation. While concerns over the financial health of the Council of Europe as well as access to the ECHR for Russian citizens did affect these calculations in Berlin and other EU capitals, the removal of PACE sanctions is an attempt to put relations with Russia on a less hostile footing without incurring the much greater wrath from a Ukrainian ally and East European member states of the EU that would flow from any move to loosen the EU’s economic sanctions regime. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">In the case of the CDU/CSU, business opportunities for German manufacturers in Russian regions as well as the North Stream 2 gas pipeline have dampened what are still substantial suspicions over the extent to which such engagement can effectively achieve Germany’s strategic goals. For the SPD, however, the possibility of renewed engagement with Russia strikes a much deeper emotional chord. As the reluctant junior partner of the CDU/CSU, the SPD has jealously guarded its power to shape key aspects of German foreign policy through control of the Auswärtiges Amt under Frank Walter Steinmeier, Sigmar Gabriel and now Heiko Maas. Ministers and parliamentary state secretaries deeply immersed in a particular party narrative surrounding the policies of engagement with the Soviet bloc promoted by the SPD governments led by Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt in the 1970s have played a key role in shaping Germany’s diplomatic relations with the Russian state before and after its seizure of Crimea. In the years since reunification, many senior German Social Democrats have remained mesmerised by a deeply entrenched historical consensus within the SPD over the extent to which these ‘Ostpolitik’ policies of engagement and dialogue with the USSR helped pave the way towards the dissolution of the Soviet bloc. As a consequence, SPD politicians and the diplomatic apparatus they have shaped over twenty years in power have often seemed to value dialogue with the Russian state as an end in itself, rather than as a means to achieve specific strategic ends through a combination of targeted pressure mixed with strategic incentives.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">This focus on achieving change in Russia through intensive engagement with the Russian state that so pervades German strategic thinking rests on a fundamental misreading of the actual strategic approach the SPD governments of the 1970s developed through Ostpolitik. In contrast to the more recent fixation of SPD leaders on grand bargains with Russia, Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt focused as much on expanding relations with neighbouring East European states such as Poland or Czechoslovakia as the USSR itself. Moreover, though dominated by Moscow, the ramshackle multi-national structure of the USSR was taken into account by both Helmut Schmidt and the CDU/CSU-dominated Helmut Kohl government that followed him. Both developed intensive contacts with the leaderships of various Soviet Republics, who often transitioned to dominate the politics of their successor states after they achieved independence in 1991. And while Ostpolitik certainly contributed towards intensifying the contacts between the Soviet bloc states with Western institutions and financial markets, their socio-political order ultimately collapsed because of the internal contradictions of their political systems rather than any action taken by West German governments.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Yet rather than reflecting on the complex and mixed legacies of Ostpolitik, the myths that have grown up around it in Germany since the late 1990s have led a succession of SPD leaders to focus on engagement with Russia at the expense of the concerns of the EU’s East European member states and its Ukrainian allies. This clumsy effort by the German government to use the Council of Europe as a stepping stone towards a policy of encouraging change in Russia through engagement with the Russian state based on such a faulty reading of history is actively undermining Germany’s wider strategic interests. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">By damaging its relations with East European EU partners such as Lithuania or Poland, it is alienating states whose help it needs to assert shared interests in the wider reform and consolidation process that is transforming European integration. Moreover, removing Council of Europe sanctions without receiving any clear Russian concessions in return has deeply weakened German credibility with a Ukraine that has built a formidable military and security apparatus of its own in response to the aggression of the Putin regime. Though Angela Merkel has shown a considerable level of sympathy with Ukrainian concerns, such empathy and engagement with Ukraine has often been lacking within the SPD leadership. With such a one-eyed focus on influencing the direction of travel of a Russian society that once again seems in flux, the SPD leadership has lost sight of the fact that binding in a Ukrainian state that now deploys one of the largest armies in Europe into shared norms of democratic governance and the rule of law is also of fundamental strategic importance to Germany and the European Union.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">In its pivotal role surrounding the removal of Council of Europe sanctions on Russia, the SPD leadership still does not seem to have been able to extricate itself from a party mythology surrounding Germany’s historic relations with the Russian state that often seem detached from the realities of Late Putinism. Often linked with the crude self-advancement of SPD politicians, these entanglements have more often than not caused embarrassment for their own party as well as Germany’s wider diplomatic position. Even in what are probably its final months in power, when it comes to Russia the SPD still seems to remember everything yet learn nothing.</span></div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-43570336267665671882019-05-21T04:36:00.001-07:002019-07-26T03:22:53.729-07:00Brexit Lessons: The British State Has Forgotten How To Listen<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As the dust settles after another
European Council meeting to manage the ongoing Brexit Crisis, there is a brief opportunity for those in British politics to ponder how they could
have ended up in such a mess. After more desperate manoeuvring, Westminster and
Whitehall need to step back and start thinking strategically about how to haul
the UK out of its self-inflicted predicament. As UK state institutions struggle
to cope with the challenges posed by Brexit, a fundamental reappraisal of the
British state’s behaviour towards European partners can no longer be avoided. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The extent to which so many in
the UK misread the behaviour of the EU27 states at this most recent EUCO
meeting underscored how far the British state still struggles to engage with
European partners. By singling out Emmanuel Macron as its supposed, many
British journalists generated an easy to follow narrative in which the French
were presented in their traditional role as Britain’s adversary. Yet those who
contrast what they see as German moderation with French hawkishness missed the increasing
exasperation in Germany over the inability of the UK parliament to face the
political realities of Brexit. For months articles by senior constitutional
scholars like <a href="https://verfassungsblog.de/collateral-damage-der-brexit-und-das-europaparlament/"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Franz Mayer</span></a> or journalists such as <a href="https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2018-12/populismus-eu-schuldzuweisung-brexit-gelbwesten-matteo-salvini-revolte"><span style="color: #1155cc;">Ulrich Ladurner</span></a> signalled that German patience
with the British is ebbing away. That other EU states such as Austria, Sweden
and even Greece registered concerns over the risks British instability poses to
EU institutions indicated that Macron’s grandstanding reflects wider doubts
over the UK’s trustworthiness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">British responses to how the EU
has extended Article 50 point to deeper structural problems in in how the UK interacts
with the EU. For decades, UK governments were accustomed to being one of the
EU’s big players despite remaining outside the Euro and Schengen. From this
position, British politicians and civil servants dispensed often unasked for
advice to European partners who still needed the assistance of such a large
state. Yet as EU membership became an increasingly fraught issue in UK politics
during the Eurozone and Syrian refugee crises, British politicians and civil
servants found themselves detached from the constant negotiations between other
European states working hard to stabilise the EU system. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Cut out from the EU’s top table
during such key moments of crisis, by 2016 senior UK politicians and civil
servants had become less skilled at engaging with the strategic priorities of
other European states. While the UK government under David Cameron focused
efforts on China and other emerging powers outside Europe, the day to day domestic
politics of many EU states the UK had become intertwined with were treated as a
secondary matter. In taking the politics of EU states such as Ireland or Italy
for granted, much of the British elite proved badly prepared for a post-2016 world
where engaging with the concerns of each EU27 state has become crucial to the
future of Britain’s economy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet it is not too late for UK
policymakers to finally listen to what EU27 counterparts are saying in order to
restore goodwill the UK has lost across the EU. Rather than wasting scarce
British military resources on grandiose global plans the UK can no longer
sustain, deep engagement with the needs of EU27 states can help rebuild
influence either as a close ally of the EU or still a full member of the EU.
This would involve devoting more resources to assisting military efforts by
France and many other EU states across West and Central Africa, while also helping
Italy manage the fallout from conflict in Libya. Hard work to support
democratic reform in Algeria and Tunisia would also reflect genuine engagement
with Mediterranean EU states for whom these developments are of existential
importance. A deepening of already extensive support for East European
societies facing Russian expansionism as well as struggling states in the
Western Balkans would demonstrate the UK’s commitment to stability in Europe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Such a shift towards deeper
engagement with the strategic priorities of EU27 states needs to be matched
with much greater focus on the EU’s institutions. UK governments locked out of
EU decision-making would have to devote extensive resources to ensuring that
their concerns are still listened to by its European partners. Even if the UK
remains in the EU, it would need to coordinate with powerful European
structures such as the ECB or Frontex that the British are unlikely to join.
Such a shift to making engagement with EU institutions that shape all aspects
of society and the state the central focus of British strategic thinking needs
to be embedded into every aspect of training and promotion in the UK civil
service. The centrality of the EU to everyday life in Britain should also impel
UK politicians to build much closer personal relationships with counterparts
across Europe whether the UK remains a member of the EU or not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This comprehensive strategic
effort to restore British influence in Europe would also require UK journalists,
politicians and civil servants to finally take the European Parliament
seriously. Even now a deeply counter-productive tendency of portraying the
European Parliament and its elections as a sideshow persists in the UK. Yet
year in year out the power of the European Parliament to shape policy outcomes
across Europe is growing. Whether inside the EU or not, the UK government as
well as British news media will need to put much greater effort into
understanding the European Parliament’s role in order to develop a more
realistic approach towards the EU.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Greater attention to the politics
and history of other EU states in UK media would also provide British audiences
with a better understanding of European societies whose politics will shape the
UK’s future. Television programmes about the history of France’s sphere of
influence in Africa, Poland’s struggle against Soviet dominance or Italy’s war
against the mafia would do more to help inform Brexit debate in the UK than
another docudrama repeating tired old tropes about the Tudors or Queen
Victoria. A renewed commitment to language learning in schools and universities
would help ensure that future UK governments could find more politicians and
civil servants able to understand everything their European partners are
saying. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Many of these measures will only
pay off for in the long term. But a government willing to initiate them would
at least signal to the EU27 that the UK was finally willing to not just make
demands but also to listen. For if the UK fails to engage with the EU properly,
then the British might find in future that European partners they need decide
that the UK will be seen but not heard.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-91716921559204454382017-08-01T18:27:00.002-07:002017-08-02T02:14:18.550-07:00Kenan Evren's Bitter Harvest: Legacies of a Coup that Changed Turkey and Europe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the final hours of 11 September 1980 diplomats in the West German consulate in Istanbul began to notice an unusually high level of military activity. With information of troop movements trickling in their colleagues at the embassy in Ankara tried to phone their usual contacts within Turkey's biggest political parties only to get no answer. By midnight the West German diplomats manning the phones decided that a scenario they had dismissed only a few weeks previously was now unfolding. In the first minutes of 12 September 1980 the chargé d'affaires at the German embassy in Ankara cabled a one sentence message to Bonn confirming that the Turkish military had deposed the elected government led by Süleyman Demirel and had seized power in a swift coup d'etat.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Over the next few days thousands of Turkish citizens the military considered to be a threat to the state were detained with brutal force. Along with members of radical Left movements, military units also arrested many extreme Right wing nationalists and Islamists who the generals believe were a threat to</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> the Republican social order established by </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kemal Atatürk</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. Frustrated with the weakness of Liberal and Conservative factions that Süleyman Demirel had struggled to keep united, intelligence agents also arrested many other politicians and prominent intellectuals to give the General Staff under the leadership of General Kenan Evren the space to reshape the political system to its liking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The third Turkish military intervention in less than twenty years, the 1980 coup would dramatically alter the course of a Republican order that had endured since the early 1920s. The full scale assault by the state against the Turkish Left marginalised movements that in the previous decades had mobilised a large support base in the cities. The militarisation of relations between the Kurdish community and the Turkish state fuelled a cycle of escalation that played into the hands of an insurgency led by the PKK, a movement governed along authoritarian Democratic Centralist lines. Violent Right wing gangs loyal to the ultra-nationalist MHP were suppressed to limit their ability to defy the intelligence services. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Crucially for Turkey's long term political trajectory, though activists loyal to Islamist movements such as the National Salvation Party and the Gülen network came under state pressure their social infrastructure survived the period of military rule intact. Encouraged by military support for an ideological model that came to be known as the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, Islamist networks consolidated their position in working class neighbourhoods across Turkey. In subsequent years these networks would fill social spaces once dominated by the Left to mount a systematic challenge to the Kemalist military establishment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the shattering impact the 1980 coup had on Turkish society has been relentlessly debated, there is a strong case for seeing it as a pivotal moment in wider European history as well. By the late 1970s it was increasingly clear that millions of Turkish migrants initially employed in West Germany and the Netherlands on temporary guest worker visas were settling permanently in the member states of the European Economic Community (EEC). Despite attempts by West German governments to encourage Turkish citizens to return to Turkey, the size of the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas in Europe expanded rapidly as former guest workers brought their family members over to the cities in which they had found a livelihood. To understand the response of these diasporas to developments such as the recent Turkish constitutional referendum in April 2016, it is essential to look at how the political seeds sown by Kenan Evren with the 1980 coup still shape the politics of Turkish and Kurdish communities today. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As a NATO member and potential applicant for membership of the EEC, Turkey's own internal crisis had already become a cause of major concern for the United States and West Germany. Though there are some indications that senior figures in the Turkish military consulted with West German and US intelligence officials over initiatives to restore order, Turkish officers had kept the timing and extent of their actions largely to themselves. Caught off guard, many US and West German officials displayed mixed feelings about the actions of the Turkish military in the weeks after the coup. At the highest levels of government in Washington and Bonn there was relief that the possibility of a takeover of major cities by the radical Left had been suppressed through ruthless military action. Yet in West Germany, where Social Democrats were the dominant partner in the governing coalition, state repression that quickly moved beyond radical movements to suppress the Turkish moderate Left and Liberal elite caused considerable controversy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With reports emerging of human rights abuses by the Turkish army, the West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt struggled to sustain parliamentary support for the extensive military and financial aid the West German state continued to provide to Turkey. In several West European states such concerns led to moves to limit cooperation with Turkey until democracy was restored. Yet the key position Turkey held in the NATO's effort to contain Soviet power meant that most NATO governments avoided taking firmer action. By the time a semblance of constitutional government was restored in 1982 such measures had largely been dropped by Turkey's NATO partners, who were willing to turn a blind eye to the Turkish military's continuing interference in the country's political life as well as its increasingly brutal war against Kurdish insurgents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the initial impact of the coup remained limited outside Turkey, its long term social consequences would have a profound impact on the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas. In the immediate aftermath, each of the four main milieus targeted by the military would shift considerable resources to their networks in West Germany. Under enormous pressure the Left, radical Turkish nationalists close to the MHP, Islamist groups and Kurdish nationalist networks discovered immigrant communities in Europe as a safe haven from which to organise against the state imposed interpretation of Kemalism that dominated public life in 1980s Turkey. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even with the gradual loosening of social life after 1982 the traumas of the coup provided an incentive for Turkish and Kurdish movements to organise an extensive political infrastructure in diaspora communities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of these four milieus the radical Left initially had the most extensive social networks to build on within the Turkish diaspora. The sudden expansion of Turkish guest worker migration to Western Europe after the Bonn-Ankara labour agreement of 1961 took place during a period in which Turkey itself was experiencing a vast process of migration from the countryside to the cities. Shaped by a surge in industrialisation and expansion of new Gecekondu slums, this mass movement of people within Turkey as well as from Turkey to West European states took place in a context of sharpening class divisions. In a fraught environment recovering from military intervention in 1961, trade union militancy and mobilisation efforts by activists from radical Left groups such as Devrimci Sol or TKP-ML fostered a significant base for Marxist movements </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">in expanding working class neighbourhoods</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. It was from these same communities that much of the initial cohort of Turkish workers was recruited by West German businesses in the early 1960s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even in the early phase of the guest worker programme Turkish workers immersed in trade union militancy and other forms of radical Left mobilisation set up social clubs affiliated to Marxist, Maoist, Trotskyite or Leninist movements that were battling for influence in the Turkish cities they had left. By the early 1970s such activists took a leading role in wildcat strikes over bad pay and conditions for guest workers that caused as much panic among West German trade unions as among factory managers. On a broader scale, many Turkish migrants that had experienced trade unions in Turkey established an extensive set of guest worker associations that by the early 1970s had federated into a wider organisation operating on a national scale in West Germany. </span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BbNWRk2q_p4/WYCnVmmlcXI/AAAAAAAADRU/MHxbzyxEKFg4_3HZz5O4H_-2Qt5-IvyqgCLcBGAs/s1600/ATIF%2BGerman%2B2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="601" data-original-width="406" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-BbNWRk2q_p4/WYCnVmmlcXI/AAAAAAAADRU/MHxbzyxEKFg4_3HZz5O4H_-2Qt5-IvyqgCLcBGAs/s400/ATIF%2BGerman%2B2.PNG" width="270" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">ATIF is a guest worker association clost to the TKP/ML, a Communist Party with Maoist leanings</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the Turkish Left had a head start, groups associated with the radical nationalist MHP also moved to find recruits in the diaspora. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the late 1970s Turkish trade unionists close to the West German SPD uncovered evidence of collusion between factory managers, local Turkish diplomats and MHP activists to elect Turkish nationalists to worker representation boards. But there were also strong indications that Turkish immigrants who had grown up in highly nationalist milieus in their regions of origin sought out representatives of the MHP in order to counteract the influence of Left wing rivals who they believed were seizing control of workplaces and neighbourhoods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By 1980 many West German cities contained community associations and meeting places controlled by representatives of the MHP. With a such a strong infrastructure MHP supporters in West Germany were regularly visited by the movement's leader, Alparslan Türkeş, who promoted his political network as a first line of defence against Communist infiltration in meetings with senior West German politicians such as Franz Josef Strauss. As violent confrontations between radical Turkish Leftists and the MHP's Grey Wolf street militia spilled over into the diaspora, the ideological turmoil engulfing Turkey itself in the run up to the 1980 coup became a security problem for the West German state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With radical Left and Right wing networks attracting so much attention from the West German media, the emergence of Islamist organisations in immigrant communities was often seen as less problematic by local authorities in cities such as West Berlin or Hanover. While Grey Wolf thugs and Devrimci Sol foot soldiers fought each other in street brawls, Islamist groups such as Milli Görüs linked to Necmettin Erbakan's National Salvation Party (a forerunner of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP), established a network of backstreet mosques and educational projects. By the early 1980s local Islamic associations linked to Milli G</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">örüs were insistently lobbying schools for the right to teach Koran classes to Turkish pupils, efforts that were rejected by officials in Länder ministries of education. A</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">s younger Turkish Islamists came into contact with extremist networks in Arab diaspora mosques more radical factions within </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">this milieu also began to gain the attention of West German security services. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though the role of devout Islamic organisations unsettled the SPD in particular, in the run up to the 1980 coup CDU/CSU politicians were willing to accept the notion that faith-based associations could act as a bulwark against Communists and other Left wing radicals within the Turkish diaspora. Odd as it may seem in our own contemporary environment shaped by security concerns over revolutionary Islamism, for West German politicians and intelligence agents in the late 1970s the expansion of Islamist networks was not seen as a significant problem. Only with the waning of the Cold War a decade later would attention shift to Islamist networks that were now entrenched among a significant minority within the Turkish diaspora.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In contrast to other milieus emerging among immigrants from the Turkish Republic, Kurdish networks in West Germany were still in a state of flux in the late 1970s. This partly reflected the evolution of Kurdish nationalist activism in Turkey, which had not yet exploded into the full-blown insurgency that was to consume most of the country's Southeastern provinces after the 1980 coup. Yet in the less restrictive legal environments of the Netherlands, Sweden and West Germany Kurdish organisations could celebrate forms of cultural and linguistic identity that could not be expressed openly in Turkey itself. The opportunities such European social spaces provided for activism banned in Turkey meant that control of diaspora political life became fiercely contested between nationalist organisations seeking to dominate a revival of Kurdish identity that was fiercely opposed by the Turkish military. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Clashes between the more moderate KOMKAR and the PKK were already causing serious rifts between Kurdish migrants in the late 1970s. While KOMKAR advocated a gradualist approach towards Kurdish autonomy, the PKK's focus on revolutionary confrontation with the Turkish state began to gain traction among younger members of the Kurdish diaspora. By 1980</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> the PKK had a strategy in place that explicitly linked the social difficulties faced by members of the Kurdish diaspora in Europe with the violence facing Kurdish communities in Turkey. By ruthlessly suppressing competitors and successfully promoting this narrative of shared struggle between Kurds in the diaspora and Kurds in the Turkish Republic, the PKK created foundations for a formidable power base that West German governments would struggle to keep under control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet until 1980 the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas remained a peripheral issue for most political movements in Turkey. Activists in the diaspora may have seen their political battles as central to a wider effort, but the leadership of the main movements remained focused on the escalating struggle to attain political hegemony in Turkey. Visits by leaders such as Alparslan Türkeş focused on fundraising to pay for campaigns in Turkey and using influence over diaspora as leverage to gain the support of West German politicians with a similar ideological outlook. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This dynamic between diaspora communities and their regions of origin was transformed by the 1980 coup. The Turkish military's reordering of Turkish society through imprisonment and repression against those it declared to be the enemies of the state shattered the social order that had existed in Turkey since the fall of Adnan Menderes's government to the army coup of 1961. As a result Turkish and Kurdish diasporas shifted from being a peripheral factor in Turkey's political life to one of its central battlegrounds. The shock of the coup further politicised Turkish and Kurdish communities in West Germany in ways that would leave deep social cleavages shaping the response of rival milieus to moments of crisis in the following decades. In particular, t</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">here were two crucial dynamics that drew these diasporas into political conflicts that continued to wrack Turkey long after 12 September 1980. The first was the exile of many activists from Turkey to the safe haven diasporas provided. The second was a surge in interest in diaspora communities by Turkish security services concerned that they could provide a springboard from which attempts to foment revolt in Turkey. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The influx of activists looking for a base after the 1980 coup helped the Turkish Left to entrench itself in West German cities in a way that helped define </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">diaspora society. The initial impact of this shift of personnel and resources into the diaspora was most visible with movements that were belonged to the Turkish Left. With their fundraising apparatus in Turkey wiped out by state repression, radical Marxist-Leninist or Maoist groups such as the TKP-ML and the DHKP-C needed donations from supporters within immigrant communities in West Germany to avoid becoming completely dependent on external state sponsors. This competition for the loyalty and funds of diaspora supporters led to clashes between rival radical Left groups that escalate</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> from street brawls to assassination attempts. </span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q65Z2mRawLA/WYCoYbRGr8I/AAAAAAAADRg/i_zXAUJaoL0zgqo5MsYtl21IQkZ-y5RvQCLcBGAs/s1600/Dev%2BSol%2BBerlin%2B1993%2Btrauermarsch.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="215" data-original-width="301" height="285" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q65Z2mRawLA/WYCoYbRGr8I/AAAAAAAADRg/i_zXAUJaoL0zgqo5MsYtl21IQkZ-y5RvQCLcBGAs/s400/Dev%2BSol%2BBerlin%2B1993%2Btrauermarsch.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MBBaJz0rZ78/WYCoOQgFBhI/AAAAAAAADRc/HvT6rS2tUPkeJXA476n2VLGfKs5JnH79wCEwYBhgL/s1600/Bolshevik%2BPartizan.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="153" data-original-width="435" height="140" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MBBaJz0rZ78/WYCoOQgFBhI/AAAAAAAADRc/HvT6rS2tUPkeJXA476n2VLGfKs5JnH79wCEwYBhgL/s400/Bolshevik%2BPartizan.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Bolshevik Partizan pamphlet condemning PKK attacks on its activists - Berlin 1991</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Such vicious infighting between rival Leftist groups also opened up greater space for MHP activists that were coming under the same pressures. Public rows and even street fights for control of Left wing migrant associations</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> often put off less ideologically driven Turkish-Germans searching for help from organisations willing to protect their interests. Hit by splits over the clash between loyalty to specific concepts of Turkish nationalism and a wider sense of transnational Islamic identity, divisions within Islamist organisations in West Germany also hampered their ability to recruit and retain members. This provided opportunities for better organised MHP and Grey Wolf affiliates to expand their support base in Germany. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As political divisions within Turkish communities deepened, developments in the Kurdish diaspora took a different turn. The dynamics in the diaspora shifted radically as the PKK came to dominate Kurdish politics in Turkey by taking advantage of radicalisation fuelled by the Turkish Army's brutal attempts to suppress the growing insurgency in Southeastern Anatolia. As in Turkey itself, PKK activists in West Germany used ruthless tactics not only against supporters of the Turkish state but also against rival movements within the Kurdish diaspora. Such organisations as KOMKAR or groups affiliated to various Iraqi or Iranian Kurdish movements experienced intimidation and even assassination at the hands of operatives working to cement the PKK's hegemony over the politics and culture of the Kurdish diaspora.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the late 1980s the PKK and a whole array of front organisations disguised as cultural clubs or welfare groups dominated the political life of Kurdish communities across Europe. Activists that would have faced repression in Turkey could operate relatively freely in European cities despite attempts by West German and Turkish security services to contain their influence. This enabled the PKK to develop fundraising opportunities, from voluntary donations to protection rackets imposed on more reluctant Kurdish businesses, that enabled it to maintain a degree of autonomy from external state sponsors. Most importantly to the PKK's long term strategy, its ability to dominate Kurdish communities enabled it to present itself to influential West German political milieus around the SPD, the alternative Left and the Green Party as the sole representative of the collective will of the Kurdish people. Much to the frustration of Kurdish activists hostile to the PKK, by 1990 the PKK had built a formidable lobbying network among sympathetic Germans in the radical and Centre Left to promote its agenda within a post-reunification Germany whose influence on the global stage was growing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vGRVypebX10/WYCnp8OJsNI/AAAAAAAADRY/pV_84-mMqgYajd7uY03kZectyuHD3BkuwCLcBGAs/s1600/PKK%2BGerman.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="404" data-original-width="288" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vGRVypebX10/WYCnp8OJsNI/AAAAAAAADRY/pV_84-mMqgYajd7uY03kZectyuHD3BkuwCLcBGAs/s320/PKK%2BGerman.PNG" width="228" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the turmoil in Turkey having such clear knock on effects on the diaspora in the 1970s, there are indications that the Turkish military had anticipated a degree of radicalisation in the diaspora before it seized power on 12 September. Senior officials in the foreign and interior ministries had already discussed greater efforts by the Turkish state to intervene in Turkish and Kurdish communities in Europe with counterparts on the German federal and regional levels. Struggling to manage conflict within immigrant communities, politicians and security officials on the West German side were very open to an expanded role of Turkish state institutions in West Germany that offered to stabilise and discipline unruly migrants. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mirroring the military's strategy in Turkey, a mix of repressive measures as well as active intervention in the institutional structures of the diaspora was designed to increase the Turkish state's control over diaspora life. By 1981 West German regional security officials began to complain about increasingly brazen intimidation of diaspora Kurds and diaspora Turks by the MIT (Turkey's primary intelligence agency) and its various allies and proxies among extreme Turkish nationalists and organised crime. Such covert repression was supplemented with open intimidation of dissidents within diaspora communities in the Bonn embassy as well as the Turkish consulates located in every regional capital. Blacklisted immigrants would suddenly find they could not renew passports or gain much-needed documents from the Turkish state. These measures could often cause whole families considerable trouble with West German authorities, who demanded confirmation of Turkish citizenship and other consular documentation before providing social services.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Along with such punitive measures, Turkish state institutions tried to develop more positive incentives to ensure the loyalty of the Kurdish and Turkish diasporas in Europe. Three months after the coup Kenan Evren addressed the diaspora directly in a speech justifying military intervention and defending his government's record broadcast on ZDF, one of the two main West German television channels. After 1981, the military regime heavily expanded funding and support for mosques in West Germany coordinated by Diyanet, the state institution in Turkey that regulated Islamic religious life. Turkish diplomats provided financial support for charitable organisations connected to Diyanet mosques in European cities and heavily lobbied regional West German politicians to treat these organisations as the primary intermediaries with the Turkish and Kurdish diaspora. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the late 1980s Ankara managed to consolidate influence over diaspora communities by providing imams and language teachers that were trained and certified by the Turkish state. Promoting a state-backed blend of traditional nationalism and Islamic conservatism based on the so-called Turkish-Islamic synthesis, Diyanet mosques and West German school programmes using Turkish Education Ministry textbooks backed a worldview that emphasised the Turkish language and Sunni Islam as defining elements of Turkish identity. Despite these pressures Left wing, nationalist and Islamist alternatives to Diyanet continued to sustain considerable networks of their own in Germany. Yet this consolidation of Turkish state power within the diaspora provided every government in Ankara after 1982 with a source of leverage it could use to put pressure on West European states.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Attempts by the Evren regime to rein in the influence of the PKK over the Kurdish diaspora met with less success. The MIT's use of ultra-nationalist proxies to intimidate activists fighting for Kurdish rights proved deeply counter-productive. Waves of street violence between Turkish nationalists and Kurdish activists drove many members of the Kurdish diaspora initially sceptical of the PKK into its network of cultural associations and self-defence organisations. Each campaign by the Turkish state to break the influence of Kurdish nationalist thought over the diaspora only helped to consolidate the PKK's grip further over Kurdish communities in Western Europe. This open struggle, in which West German police and security services at times colluded with the MIT, also mobilised support of a broad spectrum of the German Left for various PKK front organisations that claimed to represent the Kurdish diaspora as a whole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the early 1990s these PKK front organisations were organising massive rallies in stadiums with thousands of participants bussed in from across Germany. Despite an official ban of the PKK and affiliated groups by the Kohl government in 1993, this network was too deeply entrenched in the Kurdish diaspora to be dislodged by a more confrontational approach. The success the PKK had in mobilising large swathes of the Kurdish community against the German government caused such disruption in German cities that by the early 2000s local police and politicians turned a blind eye to the open activity of ostensibly banned PKK networks. Deeply frustrated by the resilience of the PKK within the Kurdish diaspora, Turkish governments never abandoned efforts to limit its influence. This dynamic has continued to fuel a cycle of confrontation between Kurdish and Turkish activists in German cities that has flared up again in response to current battles between the AKP government in Ankara and PKK groups expanding their power across Turkey, Syria and Iraq.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The rapid expansion of Turkish and Kurdish communities across Western Europe over the course of the 1970s meant developments in Turkey that in previous decades had remained largely a foreign policy problem for West European states began to have a disruptive impact on their domestic politics as well. With Ankara taking an interventionist approach, West German authorities had to find a balance between assuaging a strategic NATO partner and ensuring that Turkish state institutions or security services did not fuel further conflict in diaspora communities. These acute political tensions fed into the wider social challenge of managing and integrating immigrants from across Southern Europe and the Middle East at a time when many in the West German political establishment still struggled to accept that immigrants were there to stay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The social dynamics that took shape in the aftermath of the 1980 coup shaped the Turkish and Kurdish diasporas in ways that are still recognisable today. Though the military formally handed power to civilian governments, it continued to exert influence over parties and state institutions. In the diaspora a militarised blend of Kemalist nationalism and Islamic conservatism shaped the ideological outlook of Diyanet imams, textbooks used in community schooling or the television programming on satellite channels that were common in many immigrant households. This extensive network based on Diyanet structures provided the Islamist-nationalist AKP party a platform with which to consolidate its influence over conservative diaspora milieus after it took power in 2002. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though still a significant presence, the MHP and other radical nationalist groups lost members to organisations linked with the AKP as its access to state patronage grew. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With senior leaders (including then Prime Minister Erdogan) regularly staging rallies in Germany to retain the loyalty of diaspora milieus, the Turkish state structures that Kenan Evren's government had put in place to promote support for the military became co-opted by AKP networks pursuing a rather different ideological agenda. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Having secured its position of dominance within the Kurdish diaspora, by the late 1990s the PKK used front organisations to work with the German Centre-Left and Left on a local level to exert influence over the political life of several German cities. In the process, what was once a network of violent activists in permanent conflict with the German state has become a slick lobbying operation using every legal means at its disposal to promote the goals of its parent organisation in German media and politics. Within the Turkish diaspora a</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> large swathe of the generation of Left wing activists that fled Turkey in 1980 went on to build close partnerships with German movements and organisations that shared their ideological outlook. Over time the emergence of movements such as Antifa Genclik provided a platform through which Left wing Turkish-Germans could make the first steps towards taking an active part in German local politics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As a result, the influence of the 1970s Turkish Left is in some ways stronger in German cities than it is in Turkey. Such increased integration into German political life, particularly among the second generation of Left wing Turkish-Germans, led to a decreasing level of engagement with the day to day controversies wracking Turkey in the 2000s. This marked a central paradox of diaspora politics, that as supporters of the Turkish Left merged into German milieus the centre of gravity of diaspora politics in Germany shifted to the advantage of culturally conservative milieus less willing to support the full integration of their members into German society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In West Germany and other West European states the impact of the 1980 coup was therefore felt in the many cities and regions whose political life had become deeply intertwined with the fate of the Turkish Republic after decades of Turkish and Kurdish immigration. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though they initially assumed this disruption would peter out once the Evren regime consolidated its grip on power, over the following decades West German officials and politicians were regularly confronted with cycles of protest and violence in Turkish and Kurdish communities triggered by continuing instability in Turkey. From 1980 onwards developments such as the wars against the PKK, sectarian conflict between Alevis and Sunnis, military crackdowns on the Left as well as Islamists or Erdogan's attempt to entrench his power after the Gezi protests of 2013 all had an immediate impact on German society through </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kurdish and Turkish diaspora communities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The legacies of the 1980 coup in Turkey, Germany and the rest of Europe present something of a paradox. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The massive social changes Turkey is experiencing are not a purely foreign policy matter that can be handled at a distance. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By entrenching interconnections between the domestic politics of Turkey and Germany the 1980 coup ensured that the stability of the Turkish Republic has become a matter of fundamental strategic importance to the member states of the European Union. With political conflict and economic disruption in Turkey having immediate knock-on effects on Germany and other EU states, European Union governments have considerable incentives to continue providing financial and military aid to Turkey.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Such a dynamic could have a positive effect. The lasting impact of the 1980 coup on German as well as the Turkish society belies the notion that events in Turkey are not part of European history. The legacies of the Ottoman era as well as the presence of ethnic Turkish communities across Southeast Europe are strong enough evidence of how much Turkey is part of a shared European cultural and political space. The emergence of extensive transnational Turkish and Kurdish diasporas has reinforced the pivotal role events in modern Turkey can play in the politics of the European Union and its member states. In strengthening these longstanding ties between Turkey and other European societies, diaspora communities could help provide the basis for intensifying Turkey's role in the European integration process.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet it is the very sensitivity in Germany to every shift and twitch of Turkish politics that is currently fuelling a rapid deterioration in relations between Berlin and Ankara. As activists and voters, large parts of the Turkish community hostile to President Erdogan can put German politicians under pressure to oppose the authoritarian trajectory of an AKP-dominated state. At the same time, Kurdish-Germans supportive of the PKK's agenda take part in open mass demonstrations and fundraising activities that infuriate the Turkish government. Those significant parts of the Turkish diaspora still loyal to President Erdogan are regularly mobilised to intimidate opponents and aggressively pressure the German state by such AKP affiliates as the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD). In response, German governments concerned over the loyalty of Turkish-Germans have worked much harder to create incentives for them to integrate into German society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In such a volatile context, attempts to work together strategically over such issues as managing Syrian migration or counter-terror operations are severely affected by shifts in Turkish or German domestic politics. With the imprisonment of German journalists and activists after the 15 July 2016 coup, the accelerating deterioration in relations between Berlin and Ankara resulting from the intertwined nature of both societies risks leading to a breakdown of cooperation. This core paradox of relations between Turkey and Germany, that the diaspora that has fostered such deep links can also become a source of such deep conflict, is the bitter harvest of decisions made by Kenan Evren and his generals on a cold September day thirty-seven years ago.</span></div>
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<br />Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-77461957450214941632016-12-29T08:49:00.000-08:002016-12-29T09:27:59.217-08:00Orange is Not the New Brexit: Why America and Britain Face Very Different Challenges<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since Donald Trump's shock victory in the US presidential elections many commentators have compared his rise with the victory of the anti-EU Leave campaign in the 23 June referendum over Britain's membership of the European Union. Throughout 2016 the ups and downs of America's tangerine titan and the chaotic aftermath of the UK's date with European destiny have often been portrayed as part of a global populist wave undermining the established post-Cold War order. And undoubtedly<span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> there are parallels between</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> both cases. The impact of deindustrialisation on many communities entrenched discontent with the political status quo in both countries. Specific parts of the British and American voter demographic were also drawn to themes that played on fear of migration as well as nostalgia for a mythical golden age in which their society seemed to operate autonomously from the wider world.</span></div>
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But if you dig deeper there are major differences between two political earthquakes that will shape how 2016 will be remembered. In Britain the anti-EU Leave campaign was made up of a disparate coalition of factions from across the ideological spectrum. Left Exit socialists, who believed the EU was holding the UK back from becoming the Marxist utopia they hoped for, worked hand in hand with so-called <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Liberal Leavers, who are convinced EU regulation is keeping Britain from achieving its economic potential as a global trading power. While both of these groups are not bothered about immigration, the referendum debate was often dominated by UKIP anti-immigrant isolationists who are as hostile to Scottish or Irish aspirations as any other society or culture they see as endangering their definition of English (not British) identity. The story since the referendum has been about the struggle by anti-EU Brexiteers to keep this coalition together even as the realities of Brexit come to undermine its cohesion. With clear majorities of voters below the age of 45 voting for Remain, British eurosceptics also face a demographic trap over the next few years as many elderly Leave voters who helped sustain their majority gradually disappear from the electoral roll. Faced with these pressures, Theresa May (who campaigned </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">for Remain) and other politicians now committed to leaving the EU are desperate to complete the negotiation process as quickly as possible before demographic change and disagreement over models of departure weaken the Leave coalition and plunge the Brexit project into doubt.</span></div>
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The uncertainties surrounding Brexit in the UK stand in great contrast to some of the ideological and structural trends that helped bring about the rise of Donald Trump. U<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">ntil David Cameron announced the EU referendum in 2013,</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> absolutist euroscepticism that aims for a complete break with European institutions was the primary goal of only a particular faction within the British Conservative Party. Agreement that the UK needed to leave the European Union often masked very divergent views about what kind of social order should take shape in the aftermath. By contrast, Trump's rise is the culmination of long term ideological trends in the United States that came to reshape the political outlook of much mainstream thought within the American Republican Party. Trade wars, isolationism mixed with hyper-imperialism, a penchant for courting authoritarian regimes rather than less ideologically (in GOP terms) reliable democracies, hostility to the principles of the EU and the emergence of China, all of these themes have been floating around the heart of US Republicanism for twenty years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Attempts to suppress the votes of African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and other minorities while trying to peel off culturally conservative elements of those communities have also been core elements of the GOP approach towards electoral politics since Richard Nixon's Southern strategy of the early 1970s. Moreover, Paul Ryan's Randian war on state institutions provided the foundations for his alliance with Trump's populist machismo. Though many Republicans have promoted</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> free trade, the use of America First rhetoric by many mainstream GOP leaders also paved the way for Trump's bellicose threat to initiate trade wars with China and the European Union if foreign leaders do not bend to his will. As a movement hostile to the extension of electoral rights to minorities and preoccupied with the defence of the economic privileges of specific social groups, the GOP has evolved into a Far Right party since the 1990s. The key to Trump's success was his ability to ideologically outflank very right wing GOP candidates in a way that made it difficult for them to respond without alienating a base they have been cultivating for three decades. The only crucial difference between pre- and post-Trump Republicanism is that Russia's Vladimir Putin now plays the role of friendly conservative authoritarian that the Saudis or Pinochet once did under Bush and Reagan. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Despite structural similarities in certain respects, it is likely that Brexit Britain and Trump's America will</span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;"> find themselves on quite different paths over the next decade. The success of the Leave campaign was the product of an ideologically diverse alliance of convenience that was able to sell leaving the European Union as all things to all people. This enabled a referendum campaign that claimed it was both open to the world as well as defending England from the rest of the world to achieve a victory that seemed unlikely only six months before. Yet the very ideological diversity of the Leave coalition is also its greatest long term weakness. As the tough business of establishing which specific institutional forms Brexit should take consumes the energies of the British state, divisions within the Leave camp over what Brexit actually means have the potential to grind the whole process to a halt even before Remainers can organise a coherent alternative model for Britain's relationship with the rest of Europe. </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">By contrast Trump took advantage of internal contradictions within the GOP to isolate and marginalise factions within the US Right that promoted an internationalist outlook divorced from the hyper-imperialist isolationism of much of the Republican Party's base. Trump's ability to build his rise on long term ideological trends demonstrate that he does not represent a profound break with established trends in American society. By taking pre-existing institutional dysfunction and ideological polarisation within the American political system to its logical extremes, Trump was able to outmanoeuvre political opponents unwilling to believe that the US constitutional order was no longer able to guarantee stable social outcomes. </span></div>
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That so many commentators emphasise parallels between Brexit and Trumpism while ignoring fundamental differences between these two moments of crisis arises from a tendency to narrowly focus on economic pressures that helped fuel their rise. For all the similarities between both cases when it comes to the impact of deindustrialisation, the importance of key institutional factors that opened up the space for such major political shocks have been given much less attention. Yet the impact of economic transformation on a society is often shaped by the particular state institutions and constitutional frameworks that sustain its political order. In this respect both Brexit and Trumpism are symptoms of distinct forms of state crisis unique to the respective constitutional orders through which they have emerged.</div>
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The roots of the state crisis that culminate in Brexit lie in the years between the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 and the return of the Stone of Scone, a key symbol of Scottish sovereignty, from Westminster to Edinburgh in 1996. Along with the emerging foundations of the devolution settlements that reshaped the internal politics of the United Kingdom, those ten years saw the adoption of a Maastricht Treaty that bound the UK into transnational legal and political structures in a much more systematic way than was the case in the 1960s or 1970s. By the early 2000s, the unwritten constitutional order of the United Kingdom had been fundamentally transformed. With the shift from the Law Lords to a Supreme Court and an increasingly firm convention that the Prime Minister has to consult Parliament before declaring war in the wake of Tony Blair's disastrous blunders in Iraq, the constitutional order of the United Kingdom on New Year's Eve 2015 had experienced an extraordinary transformation from the political world that Margaret Thatcher dominated in 1985. </div>
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Despite these clear indications of a constitutional transformation of the United Kingdom, large swathes of the British political elite in the UK parliament and London-based news media continue to behave as if nothing has changed since Thatcher's time. Many leaders of the Leave campaign blithely ignored the complex nature of overlapping political jurisdictions within the United Kingdom as well as how the British state has become deeply intertwined with transnational institutions in crucial policy areas. At the same time many prominent figures within the Remain campaign glossed over the extent to which the imbalances of a devolution process that gave parts of the UK more power than others and a relationship with the EU in which the British were merely observers of Eurozone and Schengen decision-making processes were inherently unstable. Even if some kind of return into the EU can be engineered, it will be most likely under very different conditions determined by the Copenhagen Criteria than the ones the UK enjoyed before 2016. Looking back at the referendum debate, what is so remarkable is not the polarisation between the two sides but rather the extent to which both Remain and Leave leaders shared assumptions about the stability and power of the British state rooted in a constitutional order that ended thirty years ago.</div>
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It is this sense of complacency that lost the Remain campaign the Brexit war before the referendum and is losing Leave the Brexit peace after it. Prominent journalists demanding that pessimism over leaving the EU must end compound an unwillingness within much of British society to recognise how a fundamental process of constitutional change already underway before 2016 necessitates a basic reconsideration of how political life is organised in order to sustain a stable and democratic United Kingdom. Yet an illusion of continuity, perhaps reinforced by the sheer longevity of Queen Elizabeth II's reign, has slowed this much needed reassessment of British politics. Trapped by the twin cult of Attlee and Churchill, Theresa May risks being crushed by the same unrealistic public and elite expectations of the office of Prime Minister that helped destroy the careers of David Cameron and Gordon Brown. Despite an illusion of near absolute power symbolised by the worship of Margaret Thatcher in much of the British news media, in reality the role of Prime Minister has come to more resemble that of the German Chancellor. Just as Angela Merkel can at most arbitrate between rival power centres within the Federal Republic and balance conflicting interests within the European Union as first among equals, a British Prime Minister will have to contend with a whole range of policy areas where power is shared with actors as diverse as the Secretary General of NATO, the First Minister of Scotland or the Irish Taoiseach whether the UK leaves the EU or not.</div>
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A Remain campaign that built its strategy around an outmoded understanding of the power and influence of the Prime Minister was therefore as culpable for fuelling this crisis of the British constitutional order as Leave politicians are now doing in expecting Theresa May to suddenly find a quick solution to their Brexit problems. While the shock of the Brexit referendum and the institutional chaos that immediately followed it made the impact of the transformation of the UK's constitutional order clear, there is no guarantee that the outcome of this long-standing crisis will be a positive one. The London riots of 2011 and the assassination of Jo Cox act as a warning that institutional breakdown and economic pressures can often foster a recourse to violence by social groups that feel they have nothing to lose. A successful effort to restructure the UK's relationship with the European Union as well as Westminster's relationship with the British nations and English regions could complete the transformation of the British constitutional order in a way that secures stability and democracy. But a failure to harness the forces of constitutional change unleashed in the early 1990s could just as well lead to a break up of the United Kingdom and a collapse in relations with Europe that will have dangerously destabilising consequences.</div>
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In contrast to the decades of constitutional experimentation and improvisation that created the foundations for the battles over Brexit, the crisis that has fostered the emergence of Trump as a political force is the product of constitutional stagnation and state paralysis in the United States. During the Cold War informal bipartisan conventions and shared experience of World War Two mitigated the institutional impact of vicious political conflict over US military intervention, civil rights and the expansion of the welfare state. By the early 1990s, however, generational shifts within the American political elite as well deepening ideological cleavages between Democrats and Republicans living in socially homogeneous geographical bastions began to undermine many of the informal procedural understandings that had enabled the US constitutional order to sustain stable and democratic government. Pat Buchanan's ferocious 'Culture War' speech at the GOP convention of 1992 and the takeover of the House of Representatives by New Gingrich and a Republican leadership focused on strategies of base mobilisation and voter polarisation marked the beginning of an era of aggressive winner takes all politics for which a US constitution designed in the late eighteenth century was not designed to cope.</div>
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In a zero sum environment where an embrace of ideological polarisation and the complete obstruction of the opposing party's agenda by all means possible seemed to promise the clearest path to political success, any attempts to change the US constitution to ensure that this change in political culture does not undermine stability and democracy has become impossible. The last major changes to the US system of government with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and introduction of elections to the Senate took place in 1913 and almost no further measures were taken to adapt the US constitution in the century that followed. A <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">cult-like popular reverence of the eighteenth century gentlemen of means who became the Founding Fathers of the US constitution stifles debate about whether a political system that invests enormous foreign policy power in a president yet entrenches domestic political paralysis in its legislatures is stable or just. </span><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">The deep public discontent in US politics that Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump managed to use in different ways to rise to political prominence is to a significant extent the product of this mismatch between public expectations of presidents, senators and congressmen and their inability to deliver within the confines of a dysfunctional constitutional order designed three hundred years ago. The extent to which such political frustrations from all parts of the ideological spectrum have reinforced a worship of the military as the only institution that seems to get things done should be of profound concern not just to officers and national security experts but to anyone who believes that the survival of US democracy is essential to global peace.</span></div>
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Donald Trump's victory in November's presidential elections was not a freakish outcome beyond the bounds of the established American constitutional order. His rise to power was very much the product of pre-existing ideological trends with the Republican Party that have accelerated the decay of the American political system. Though the Democratic Party's obsession with technocratic processes and its abandonment of large swathes of the United States to its political opponents have been major contributions to this crisis of the American state, it was a GOP drift to the Far Right that gained momentum in the early 1990s that enabled a figure with such authoritarian tendencies as Trump to gain control of the presidency. With his rise to power triggering existential struggles between and within both main parties, it is difficult to see how the root and branch reform needed to secure the survival of American democracy can take place anytime soon. </div>
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Brexit and Trumpism are the product of an interplay between similar economic pressures and very different constitutional crisis. Though an examination of economic parallels between the two societies can provide a useful basis for reflection on the impact of deindustrialisation, the distinct political context of these two great crises of 2016 means that the search for stability, prosperity and liberty may go in very different directions. When it comes down to it, the difference between the United States and the United Kingdom in 2016 has been the difference between the death throes of a late Republic and the emergence of a new one.</div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-91072408399568002922016-12-06T19:17:00.000-08:002017-09-19T05:41:30.173-07:00Trapped in a War Bubble: Kaliningrad's Struggle for Survival<br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Kaliningrad 2016</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In a turbulent year, Russia's interventions in the Middle East and the United States have absorbed the attention of the global news media. Though its effort to regain influence over Ukraine has slid into stalemate, the seeming geopolitical successes the Kremlin has enjoyed have generated the impression that Vladimir Putin's regime is successfully undermining the cohesion of the Western alliance system. With blatant computer hacking and aid to populist parties designed to influence the internal politics of the European Union and United States or deepening involvement in the Syrian war, the Russian government has certainly managed to project the image of an expanding power on the cusp of overcoming internal and external challenges to its position.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Amplifying such growing concern over Russian expansionism in the West have been developments in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. A Russian region on the Baltic Sea cut off </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">at the end of the Cold War </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">by Lithuania and Poland as well as nearby Belarus from the rest of the Russian Federation, Kaliningrad has become a key part of a wider Kremlin strategy focused on military rearmament and expansion of strategic infrastructure. Even before Russia's seizure of Crimea and the creeping invasion of Donbas, moves by the Russian military to increase the numbers of troops and ships stationed in Kaliningrad raised concerns among the states surrounding it. With Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, further initiatives to increase the reach of the anti-aircraft systems stationed in the region as well as repeated threats to station Iskander medium range missiles there only stoked this sense of alarm over the extent to which Russian forces in Kaliningrad represent a deadly threat to the security of NATO states. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> hostilities escalating in Ukraine, large scale military exercises in 2014 involving amphibious landings in Kaliningrad as well as incidents off the Swedish coastline that seemed to indicate that naval forces stationed there were being used for covert operations led to considerable focus withing NATO on the Kremlin's strategic plans for the region. Concern that Russian tank brigades using Belarus as a springboard could use the so-called Suwalki gap to cut off the Baltic Republics from the rest of NATO by linking up with units in Kaliningrad led the Polish and Lithuanian governments to step up security measures around the exclave. With the Russian military following through on its threats to station Iskander missiles in the summer of 2016, a wider range of NATO states including Germany and Denmark have come to focus on the threats that developments in Kaliningrad seem to pose to Europe's security. The resulting spiral of NATO exercises around Kaliningrad and Russian military exercises within the exclave have cemented the impression that the Kremlin's policy towards the region is part of of a grand strategy to cement Russia's status as a global power.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet as with so much of the Russia's military posturing in Europe and the Middle East, there are more complex internal political dynamics shaping the Kremlin's actions in Kaliningrad. While geopolitical analysts remain fixated on debates over the seeming success of hybrid warfare and hacking attacks whose impact is still not entirely clear, internal social and economic pressures within the region remain largely ignored in assessments of the factors motivating the Russian state to turn it into a fortress at the heart of Europe. This neglect by analysts focused on grand strategy of internal dynamics within the exclave that have long been noted by scholars specialised in the history of the Baltic region may lead policymakers to fail to appreciate the importance of factors that could help de-escalate tensions around Kaliningrad. Conversely such potential blindness among Western policymakers to how internal developments within the Kaliningrad region may be shaping the Kremlin's aggressive stance could turn the region into a geopolitical flashpoint that could make the Ukraine crisis look like a late afternoon tea party by comparison.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">From East Prussia to Kaliningrad Oblast - 1945</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The unique social and political dynamics of the Kaliningrad region that are causing the Kremlin such concern remain rooted in the way in which Moscow originally acquired the territories that now constitute this exclave. Though most German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers were handed to Poland, a large swath of East Prussia was taken over by the USSR and</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> apportioned to the Russian union republic rather than the Soviet successor Republics of the once independent Baltic states. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the short term, attempts by the Soviet government to ensure the near complete suppression of any German legacy from pre-1945 East Prussia in the newly reconstitute oblast of Kaliningrad seemed to be destined for success. The mass expulsion of the German population was followed by the colonisation of the cleared territory by settlers from across the USSR. With large parts of Kaliningrad deemed a military zone closed to foreigners under Stalin and Khrushchev, the new Soviet settlers in the city were discouraged from discussing the region’s pre-1945 history. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The settler population itself was made up of former Red Army soldiers as well as rural and urban professionals that had been effectively press ganged from across the Soviet Union into settling in ruined towns and villages. While farmers or industrial workers from far flung cities in the Soviet north and Siberia such as Murmansk and Norilsk volunteered with great enthusiasm, city dwellers from Ukraine sent to rebuild the city of Kaliningad and staff its various institutions had to be coerced into remaining by the NKVD and police. Despite these initial pressures, by the late 1950s the population of the region had stabilised to the extent that reconstruction efforts made considerable progress. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Like other settler societies dominated by a strong military presence, Kaliningraders recreated much of the state culture of their society of origin in an environment unmediated by the influence of a strong indigenous presence. For such a regionally and culturally diverse group of settlers the key unifying factor remained the institutions and rituals of a shared Soviet experience. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This regional dynamic only began to shift once the reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev radically altered the social structures of the USSR as a whole. As separatist sentiment swept the Baltic Republics that divided it from the RSFSR, Kaliningrad became increasingly cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the collapse of Soviet state meant that the military institutions that had shaped Kaliningrad life since 1945 were suddenly less socially dominant. Moreover, the contraction of employment opportunities in what territorially isolated Kaliningraders were coming to call the Russian “mainland” created a situation where by the mid-1990s there were far fewer incentives for graduates to leave the region for Moscow or St Petersburg. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Facing their own severe economic downturn exacerbated by the region’s territorial position, local political and cultural elites were faced with a difficult set of choices. With the Yeltsin presidency mired in infighting and wars in the Caucasus, Kaliningrad remained a peripheral priority for the Russian state. As both the military and industrial pillars of the region’s economy fell apart, political leaders and academics who had once served the Communist Party of the Soviet Union searched for funding and trade opportunities that closer links with the European Union might generate. With the Soviet order that had once shaped the region’s cultural frames of reference defunct, both elites and the wider population also began to look for alternative historical and cultural frames through which to express a regional sense of identity increasingly distinct from a distant Russia Federation. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though interest in Kaliningrad’s pre-Soviet history had already been building within the universities in the late 1960s, this activity had remained largely focused on the preservation of the remnants of Prussian architecture. Such small scale activism that couched critiques of the Soviet present through an interest in a German past began to gain a degree of momentum over the course of the 1980s as a growing number of Kaliningrad born residents took interest in city beautification initiatives at a moment of state decay. Though not yet a direct challenge to Soviet ideology, initiatives such as the establishment of the Deutsch-Russisches Haus in 1993 or the restoration of the Lutheran Salzburg church in the town of Gusev (or Gumbinnen before 1945) represented a major shift in historical discourse in a region where discussion of the pre-1945 past had been a taboo only a decade before. As the need for external investment became increasingly clear, even state officials provided some support to historical reconstruction efforts in an effort to explore possible routes to reviving the local economy.</span></div>
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T<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">he German Fish Market and the Soviet House of Culture</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With this growing willingness to open up debate about Kaliningrad’s pre-Soviet history, the conditions for a full blown process of reconciliation with potentially generous German partners were in place by the time the USSR ceased to exist in December 1991. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By the mid-1990s, German tourism as well as more limited inward investment from German individuals and businesses helped stabilise the region’s economy. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the removal of state travel restriction, better off Kaliningraders able to get visas at newly opened consulates could cross into Poland and even Germany with increasing frequency. Such regular access along with the chaotic and crime ridden politics of the exclave fuelled cross-border smuggling, causing concern among Polish law enforcement agencies worried that such instability that would hold up Poland’s accession to the EU. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Where tourism and trade provided the basis of formal cooperation, the illegal extraction of amber and extensive smuggling opportunities also created deep bonds between corrupt officials and organised crime on both sides of the Kaliningrad-Poland border. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet this pervasive criminal activity also increased daily interactions between Kaliningraders, Germans and Poles at a time at which the region’s population had significantly less contact with everyday life in the rest of Russia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The opening of German, Polish and Lithuanian consulates as well as cultural institutes and Catholic and Lutheran churches marked a period during which the EU developed ambitious plans to foster economic initiatives through which the exclave could act as a bridge to help Russia’s wider integration into Western institutions. As</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> Vladimir Putin's first wife was a Kaliningrad native, between 2000 and 2007 great interest was shown by the Kremlin in projects that could help improve the city's profile.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The exclave’s unique geostrategic position and the great interest of Germans and Poles of East Prussian origin helped turn the region’s pre-Soviet history from an ideologically embarrassing relic to be avoided into a major economic asset for the political and cultural elites of the region. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In an environment where all the certainties of Soviet society had collapsed, the economic opportunities as well as the yearning for a new sense of civic identity among large segments of the population created the basis for a re-engagement with the German past. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">However much such rapidly deepening contact between Kaliningraders and their European neighbours opened up new opportunities for local elites, it also heightened concerns in Moscow over the possibility of a creeping European or even German takeover of the exclave. As the Putin government concentrated power in the hands of the presidency the space for local officials in border oblasts like Kaliningrad to strengthen links with their European neighbours became more constricted. Russian security services fostered networks of nationalist and neo-Soviet organizations in the region to counter what they considered to be potential separatist tendencies. By 2008, even once obscure Cossack groups enjoyed funding in a region whose pre-1945 history and post-1945 population had little direct contact with Cossack traditions. Concerned that the bulk of the region’s population had <a href="https://rbth.com/articles/2012/09/25/authorities_fear_separatism_with_a_european_face_18537.html" target="_blank">repeatedly visited Europe</a> while only a minority had visited “mainland” Russia more than once, federal authorities also initiated a programme of state grants for school visits to Moscow and St Petersburg. Under pressure from Moscow, by 2013 local politicians began to distance themselves from the previous decade’s effort to engage with the region’s history, instead focusing on a revival of nostalgia for the supposed military greatness of Soviet society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These step by step moves to reimpose central control over the region were not entirely successful. Having eliminated gubernatorial elections in 2005, the Putin administration imposed an outsider to rule the region in the person of Georgy Boos. This proved an unfortunate choice, as Boos’s attempts to take control of various local forms of corrupt state revenue sharing pushed local elites too far and offended a wider population unwilling to pay additional fees to finance increases in institutional graft. These tensions culminated in a wave of protests that forced the removal of the governor and his replacement in 2010 by Nikolai Tsukanov, a locally born politician who balanced support from Kaliningrad power-brokers with demonstrations of loyalty to President Putin. Though Governor Tsukanov was heavily involved in deeply corrupt local business networks he remained unwavering in his loyalty to the Putin government. Yet as a locally rooted political figure, he also demonstrated commitment to the expansion of the university as well as the continued restoration and beautification of the historic quarters of Kaliningrad and other towns in the region. As part of a process to mollify local discontent, further state financial grants were disbursed to the local university and historical reconstruction efforts. At the same time, the Russian Ministry of Interior secure partial access to the Schengen area for Kaliningrad residents with the EU Commission and confirmed the continuation of the Special Economic Zone framework for a further five years. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even this rearguard action to preserve the profitable particularites Kaliningrad had come to enjoy within the Russian political system could not withstand the pressures unleashed by the Russian army’s occupation of Crimea and escalation against the Ukrainian state in the Donbas region. Though initial EU sanctions in response to the Kremlin's actions did not directly affect Kaliningrad, the counter-sanctions set by the Kremlin limiting exports of agricultural goods from the EU marked the first step towards the unravelling of the region’s special relationship with its German, Lithuanian and Polish neighbours. A succession of military exercises that were seen as provocative by the Polish government along with restrictions on the travel of police and judicial officials set a tone that disrupted cooperation between the region’s institutions and their EU counterparts. The cancellation of Kaliningrad’s privileges as a Special Economic Zone on 1 April 2016 effectively crippled the basis for business collaboration between the region and European Union countries overnight, while the replacement of Nikolai Tsukanov as governor in August 2016, initially by a former member of the FSO (the Kremlin's personal protection unit) and then a young technocrat linked to a rising circle of officials within the presidential administration, indicated a systematic attempt to limit the power of local cultural and business elites.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In this increasingly repressive environment, the basis for cultural and economic collaboration between Kaliningrad’s institutions and European partners was systematically undermined. Prominent Moscow commentators began openly speaking of concerns of German-backed separatism in Kaliningrad. This statement in 2014 by the editorial board of the influential and extreme nationalist <a href="http://xn--%20%20e%20a%20m-wlmamaawnnzek3gamb0bipt5eby4g9b5afe5a87a/" target="_blank">Zavtra magazine</a> was a characteristic example of such paranoia:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"Experts do not exclude the possibility that events similar to those in Kyiv could take place in Kaliningrad. According to them, we must clearly understand that is another question. If the West wants to take revenge for Crimea, it is likely that the object of this will be the Kaliningrad region, cutting it off from the main part of Russia."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Teaching of and public engagement with the region’s German history has now once again come under the scrutiny of the security services, f</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">orcing academics to take up positions at German universities or shift to less fraught research topics. In a region where for twenty-five years much of the population and local elites operated in an environment in which it was possible to consider oneself both a European as well as a good Russian, sudden shifts in the political outlook of the top echelons of government in Moscow are forcing individuals and institutions to choose between these two forms of identity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Whether the people of Kaliningrad are in a position to pursue economic and cultural projects increasingly at variance to Eurasianist rhetoric </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">that portrays Russia as a civilization separate from Europe that is</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> popular with the circle around Vladimir Putin is a more than open question. At a moment when meetings run by academics to discuss European culture such as the literature of Kafka and Orwell come under attack by pseudo-Cossacks who receive state funding, the space to engage with an identity narrative that reconciles a society built by Soviet settlers with the long German history of the region looks increasingly bleak. Though Moscow may succeed in eroding any sense of cultural distinctiveness in the region, it is equally possible that a particular regional sensibility built around regular contact with the region’s neighbours and engagement with the region’s diverse past may be difficult to eradicate. If that is that case, attempts by the Putin administration to impose political and cultural uniformity could become counter-productive, entrenching exactly the sense of distinctiveness within the Kaliningrad region that the Russian central government fears might become a foundation for separatist aspirations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is in the context of these complex internal social and economic fissures within Kaliningrad that part of the Kremlin's motivations to isolate the region through constant military sabre-rattling need to be understood. While stationing Iskander missiles, increasing troop numbers and running aggressive naval patrols all fit into the Kremlin's wider foreign policy strategy of keeping the West off balance, these military measures also fulfil a crucial domestic function in helping to keep Kaliningrad society tightly under Moscow's control. This use of military escalation helps suppress any potential local initiative that could entrench the region's sense of cultural and political distinctiveness from the rest of the Russian Federation in three ways.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">First, by increasing tensions with neighbouring states it undermines the extensive web of personal and business relationships between Kaliningraders and Poles, Germans and Lithuanians that could help provide the local population with sources of income and influence outside of the Kremlin's reach. Between 1992 and 2012 collaboration between intellectuals, businessmen, state officials, policemen and even gangsters on both sides of the border between Kaliningrad and the European Union opened up a path away from dependence on the Russian military or the Kremlin's patronage networks. The ostentatious military displays in Kaliningrad in the past two years have gone a long way to undermining these links. It was Russian exercises timed provocatively close to NATO meetings in Poland that led the new PiS government in Warsaw as well as the Lithuanians to terminate their support for the Schengen visa arrangements for Kaliningrad citizens. In conjunction with the drastic changes in the region's Special Economic Zone framework, this has put thousands of businesses dependent on trade and tourism with EU countries under enormous pressure, making the region even more dependent on subsidies from Moscow. From the Kremlin's point of view the very costly intense military activity in the region has proven good value for money by arresting Kaliningrad's drift to Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Secondly, constant sabre-rattling has distracted the West as well as many local inhabitants from an extensive local crackdown designed to further undermine institutional links between Kaliningrad and its Baltic neighbours. Since the summer of 2015, a whole range of initiatives that linked the region's cultural and educational life with that of other EU states have been severely cut or wound down entirely. The closure of the Klaus Mehnert Institute for European Studies and the impending threat to declare the Deutsch-Russisches Haus a foreign agent are part of a wider state assault on institutions that have fostered discussion over the Kaliningrad region's European history and strengthened close ties many Kaliningraders have built with artists and intellectuals from Germany, Poland or Lithuania. By declaring Kaliningrad a potential geopolitical flashpoint that needs to be defended at all costs, the Kremlin has effectively trapped Kaliningraders in a war bubble that isolates them from their neighbours and enables the FSB and other security services to crackdown on local civil society with a minimum of internal or external resistance. Shocked and demoralised, in the short term those milieus within Kaliningrad with a commitment to internal reform and close relations with EU states are too preoccupied with the struggle for survival to take any action that can counteract the social impact of militarization.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally an atmosphere in which war seems imminent can empower those parts of Kaliningrad society close to the military that were always hostile to attempts to engage with the legacies of the region's German history. Since 2012 the military build up has been accompanied by parades and battle re-enactments designed to emphasise narratives from Soviet history that focus on wars against German and other European states. Such constant propaganda bombardment coupled with repeated war scares has strengthened a sense of isolation among a large cross-section of the Kaliningrad population. Though a significant number of Kaliningraders are still willing to express discontent about local corruption or the chaotic turnover in the regional assembly and the governor’s office, the hostility of many fellow citizens towards dissent in a perceived time of war hampers such efforts. The way constant images and direct contact with a highly active military infrastructure reinforces this sense of mobilisation has sustained the loyalty of many Kaliningraders who had been willing to protest against Moscow only a decade before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The war bubble in which Kaliningrad remains trapped may stabilise the region in Moscow’s favour in the short term. But the high level of economic harm inflicted by the Kremlin on the region in the name of national greatness and local control is storing up problems for the future. Far more heavily exposed to the greater extent of prosperity and stability in Germany, Poland and Lithuania than the population of a distant Russian Federation, Kaliningraders remain deeply susceptible to economic frustration and social dissent. A sense of cultural distinctiveness based on a unique cultural relationship to a European present and a German past may prove impossible for the Kremlin to eradicate, creating further points of tension between the inhabitants of the region and distant rulers in Moscow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is not to suggest that the chimera of Kaliningrad separatism that hardliners in the Kremlin seem to fear as much as Putin's deepest opponents abroad such as Paul Goble hope for is a realistic scenario. Movements that have advocated separatist causes have remained a fringe phenomenon in the region. For all the local emphasis on distinctive cultural and social roots, the great majority of Kaliningraders still see themselves as loyal Russians. Despite the fascination with Immanuel Kant and other symbols of a German past, it is extremely unlikely that the local population would deliberately abandon the Russia Federation for some new form of Baltic statehood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nevertheless, the fact that so many in the exclave see no inherent contradiction in embracing both a shared European space of engagement with their neighbours as well as a strong commitment to Russian culture could help trigger a wider geopolitical crisis. As much a legacy of the very transnational Soviet founding moment of this society as any traces of East Prussia, a sense of distinctiveness based on an interaction between deep contact with a wider Europe and strong loyalty to Russian identity could foster ways of approaching confronting deteriorating conditions among Kaliningraders that could elicit a violent overreaction from Moscow. A sense shared by scholars, businessmen and even gangsters that things are done differently in Kaliningrad from the rest of Russia could revive a culture of protest against representatives of a central state that only seem to be worsening the region’s economic crisis. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As with other regions in Russia any mass protest in Kaliningrad will most likely focus on specific local economic concerns over issues such as factory closures or bureaucratic corruption. In the eyes of the more paranoid elements within the Kremlin, protests that would reach the scales of those that toppled Georgy Boos in 2009 could swiftly become interpreted as a form of so-called colour revolution driven by putative internal traitors and Western intelligence services it so deeply fears. Such a misreading of local protest in such a militarised region could elicit an escalatory response by a Russian leadership that believes that any hint of separatism in any part of Russia could mark the first steps towards the collapse of the state. Coupled with violently counter-productive police measures more likely to alienate than win over frustrated Kaliningraders, such a crisis would also very likely lead to a military surge in the Baltic to prevent European intervention in the region’s affairs that could have unpredictable consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While we are still some way from a Kaliningrad crisis, the risks a further deterioration of political and economic conditions in the region pose for global stability should not be underestimated. As long as the Kremlin remains hellbent on sacrificing the economic future of Kaliningraders at the altar of Russian greatness, pressures will continue to build up in the exclave that could burst open with unpredictable results. For the EU and the states neighbouring the region there remain few good choices. If they go too far in trying to restart the exclave’s integration in European institutional frameworks they risk stoking Kremlin paranoia that Berlin is plotting some form of reunification with the last remnants of East Prussia. Yet if Europeans allow Kaliningraders to remain trapped in Moscow’s war bubble they compound an atmosphere of isolation that makes a moment of crisis more likely. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the few measures the EU, Germany, Poland and Lithuania could pursue to reduce these risks would be a reinstatement of the limited Schengen visa access agreement for Kaliningraders that proved such a boon to the region’s economy. The PiS government in Warsaw may prove resistant to the return of easy mobility most likely to benefit Polish regions bordering Kaliningrad that are ruled by its political opponents in the opposition PO. Nevertheless, providing Kaliningraders with this lifeline could play help to act as a safety valve that stabilises the exclave’s economy and reduces the likelihood of a sudden explosion of discontent. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As a consequence Brussels, Berlin and Vilnius should exert the necessary pressure on PiS to reconsider. Contrary to the suspicions of more swivel eyed elements in the Kremlin, the European Union’s tendency to prize institutional evolution over revolutionary change would also make it more likely to encourage a de-escalation of any mass protests if they were to occur. Increased contact between Kaliningrad civil society and EU institutions through the restoration of the limited Schengen access agreement would actually reduce the risk of conflict by providing European officials greater means with which to encourage Kaliningraders to express discontent in ways that would avoid a dangerous crisis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It is therefore unfortunate that European states preoccupied with a range of other problems have allowed themselves to be distracted by Russian military bluster from the internal faultlines within Kaliningrad society. Unless this changes, Kaliningrad will become another one of those geopolitical crises that everyone sort of saw coming but did nothing to prevent.</span></div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-65371291503028807522016-04-14T07:52:00.000-07:002017-01-23T12:47:02.158-08:00Gunboat Absurdity: What is the Kremlin up to in the South China Sea?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Chinese and Vietnamese Coast Guard ships confront each other in the South China Sea</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It starts with vague rumours circulating among colleagues and then on the internet. The improbability of it leads you to dismiss the story as just more half-baked paranoia that sees the Kremlin's hand in every major event. Yet as the weeks pass more strange incidents, sightings of Russian personnel looking out of place in exotic locales and a sudden interest of Russian media in an issue it had once ignored begin to make you suspicious. Is it true? Could the Kremlin really be willing to take such an irresponsible set of risks? Would Putin really be willing to alienate this ally or that old partner? And then the rumours die down, the social media trail of Russian personnel runs cold and the attention of pro-Kremlin media abruptly moves on to other matters. But every once in a while...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the past two decades there have been enough </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">instances where initially unsubstantiated rumours dismissed by many journalists and Russia scholars have turned into very real moments of Kremlin escalation. In particular, Vladimir Putin's attempt to reassert Russia's position on the global stage by intervening in Ukraine and the Syrian civil war followed such a trajectory. Initial moves to establish a Russian or pro-Russian presence were developed covertly, often accompanied by mixed messages from the Kremlin to confuse external observers. At the same time a trickle of stories on the specific crisis the Kremlin was targeting turned into a torrent of propaganda to build Russian public support for intervention in an external conflict. Having prepared the ground, in the final stages the Russian military moved either covertly or openly to create facts on the ground that gave the Kremlin a decisive advantage in territory it deemed crucial to sustaining Russia's great power status.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Since the seizure of Crimea by the Russian military this form of strategic sequencing has often been misleadingly called hybrid war. In reality the hybridity of mixing limited military action with civilian activism is only an initial tactic designed to control the sequencing of a shift from peace to war or from non-involvement to intervention. This approach has of course been use by other states seeking to entrench their strategic position. Nevertheless, the autocratic structures that evolved since Yeltsin's shelling of Russia's parliament in 1993 have given the Kremlin a freedom of action that Western or Chinese leaders do not have. The Russian state's control of national media has enabled it to build public support for foreign policy adventures by controlling the domestic information space in a way that is impossible for European or American politicians. With Vladimir Putin centralising control over security strategy, the Kremlin also does not face the kind of collective decision-making that constrained the Chinese leadership until Xi Jinping's ruthless purge of Bo Xi Lai's faction in 2012 signalled the emergence of a new political order.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though foreign policy adventurism provided the Kremlin with a significant boost in support among the Russian public, as conflict with Ukraine has ground on it has resulted in economic sanctions from the EU and US and alienated a sizeable neighbour with significant military potential. It is still difficult to ascertain the long term impact of Putin's air campaign in Syria. Yet reasserting Russia's seat at the Middle Eastern great power table by sustaining Bashar al Assad has come at the price of alienating Turkey and risking open conflict with Saudi Arabia.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> F</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">acing economic problems at home, the temptation to seek another major foreign policy coup to sustain public support until the Duma elections (Russia's national parliament) in September 2016 must be strong. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With the need to distract from the ambiguous outcomes of the conflict in Ukraine, now that Vladimir Putin has decided to limit direct Russian military involvement in Syria, there is a strong likelihood that his inner circle is looking to another geopolitical flashpoint in which to assert his claim that Russia truly is a global power. In the Autumn of 2015 <a href="http://www.rcssmideast.org/en/Article/10601/Possible-Trajectories-for-the-Yemen-Crisis#.Vw7UCPkrLIU" target="_blank">meetings</a> between Russian diplomats and representatives of the Houthi movement as well as supposed humanitarian aid <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-sends-plane-carrying-humanitarian-aid-yemen-143249303.html?ref=gs" target="_blank">flights</a> to Sanaa indicated that there might at least be some consideration of providing support to Saudi Arabia's enemies in Yemen. More recently Foreign Minister Lavrov's threats to <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-libya-russia-idUSKCN0WG0ZM" target="_blank">block</a> United Nations consent to any European military operations in Libya as well as <a href="https://www.libyaherald.com/2015/04/15/in-moscow-thinni-accuses-west-of-supporting-muslim-brotherhood-calls-on-russia-and-china-to-support-libya/" target="_blank">contacts</a> with Libyan factions backing the Tobruk-based House of Representatives signal ambitions for a greater role in the Maghreb region.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are also hints of Russian interest in a very different geopolitical flashpoint that could cement Putin's great power ambitions. Initially announced by Russian defence officials at Singapore's Shangri La security forum in May 2015, plans for a Russian naval <a href="http://sputniknews.com/asia/20150530/1022753332.html" target="_blank">exercise </a>in the South China Sea are now beginning to take shape. Though the original announcement was not followed up by any systematic information campaign by pro-Kremlin media, since the beginning of 2016 there has been a trickle of <a href="http://ria.ru/radio_brief/20160414/1410642170.html" target="_blank">reports </a>and <a href="http://sputniknews.com/asia/20160305/1035837502/us-china-russia-south-china-sea.html" target="_blank">opinion pieces</a> discussing the relevance of Russia to a region that has become a focus for great power rivalries in East Asia. Intriguingly, there also seems to be an ongoing effort to deepen political relations with Brunei, the weakest and most autocratically ruled state on the South China Sea. This includes a startling <a href="http://www.bt.com.bn/news-national/2016/01/25/brunei-russia-trade-volume-jumped-us-25m-last-year" target="_blank">growth </a>in Russian investment in this oil sultanate from a mere $31 000 in 2014 to over $25 million in 2015. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the planned Russian naval exercise in the spring and summer of 2016 will involve <a href="http://www.bt.com.bn/news-national/2016/01/25/russian-warship-visit-brunei" target="_blank">cooperation </a>with units from the Royal Brunei Navy. With an upcoming <a href="http://sputniknews.com/world/20160126/1033714183/russia-asean-summit.html" target="_blank">summit</a> in Sochi between Russia and the Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN) there are signs of growing Kremlin engagement in a region where the risks of interstate conflict are high.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even if this expression of Russian interest in developments in the South China Sea remains limited to high profile symbolism, the Kremlin would be wading into a fraught and complex crisis. Though giving the Russian Navy its own starring role after the army's adventure in Crimea and the Air Force's prominence in Syria may make sense in terms of interservice rivalries and domestic political propaganda, intervening in the Asia-Pacific region could land Russia with the kind of complex dilemmas it faces in Ukraine or the Levant. The South China Sea is a geopolitical space in which tensions are escalating between a Chinese state asserting extensive territorial ambitions through military means and other powerful states in the with their own claims to islands and reefs. With sea lanes crucial to global trade </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">with China, Japan and Korea</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, the United States has come to play a pivotal role in trying to contain this wave of Chinese expansionism. At the same time, regular stand-offs between Chinese coast guard vessels and naval units from the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm89qRRthPY" target="_blank">Philippines </a>and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHHuCdeG9pc" target="_blank">Vietnam </a>over the control of islands or the provocative placement of oil drilling platforms have come very close to armed conflict since the summer of 2014. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For the Chinese, Vietnamese and Philippine governments the South China Sea dispute has become the focus for popular nationalist mobilisation. As the struggle for domination of the Chinese Communist Party between rival factions has <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-corruption-special-report-idUSBREA4M00120140523" target="_blank">worsened</a>, reasserting Chinese claims to a vast part of the South China Sea encompassed by the so-called <i>Nine Dash Line</i> has helped it to sustain public support. A Vietnamese Communist Party struggling to manage the impact of rapid economic change and a politically <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1KghqASDXU" target="_blank">assertive</a> population has found that resistance to Chinese encroachment on islands that it claims are Vietnam's under international law has helped maintain the Party's credentials as guardian of national independence. In the more democratic environment of the Philippines, defending Scarborough Shoal and other islands and atolls claimed by Manila against Chinese appropriation has become a political football, with no presidential candidate willing to risk accusations of weakness in the face of external pressure. Other states along the South China Sea such as Malaysia, Taiwan, Brunei and Indonesia are pursuing their own claims based on rival interpretations of how far their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) reach from their coastlines.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Competing territorial claims in the South China Sea</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">China's expansionism has pitted it against every major state in the region. Originally set out legally by the last Chinese Nationalist government in 1947, the <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5305/amerjintelaw.107.1.0098" target="_blank"><i>Nine Dash Line</i></a> is based on a set of claims that evolved from the early 1930s onwards to every group of islands and reefs from the Paracels south of Hainan right down to the Spratlys lying between Borneo, the Philippines and Vietnam. The mainland Chinese government has regularly reasserted these claims ever since, developing an elaborate legal case based on supposed evidence of sporadic Chinese settlement of these island groups from the seventh century onwards. In the late 1970s and 1980s tensions between China and Vietnam led to repeated skirmishes over atolls and islands, sometimes leading to casualties for both sides. After heavy clashes in 1988, both sides agreed to de-escalate naval operations without abandoning their disagreements over territorial control. In the ensuing two decades though every major state on the South China Sea filed legal claims over disputed territory to the Permanent Court of Arbitration for the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Beijing's focus on building strong economic ties with its neighbours restrained it from asserting its territorial goals through subterfuge or force.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This relative period of quiet ended with increasingly aggressive Chinese moves from 2011 onwards. Overshadowed by events in Egypt and Libya, East Asia saw a steady escalation of tensions as Chinese ships blocked, rammed and stormed Vietnamese vessels while attempting to cut the Philippine Navy's access to strategic reefs such as the Scarborough Shoal. By 2014 dozens of Vietnamese and Philippine naval vessel were engaging in high risk games of chicken with the Chinese coast guard as Beijing placed oil drilling platforms in disputed waters. At the height of the crisis, anti-Chinese <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lpJw9m7NWk" target="_blank">riots </a>sweeping Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City at the height of the crisis. Over the next eighteen months evidence also accumulated of a colossal Chinese <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/30/world/asia/what-china-has-been-building-in-the-south-china-sea.html" target="_blank">land reclamation</a> effort, turning reefs and atolls into full blown islands with naval bases, anti-aircraft batteries and landing strips for fighters that could assert control over every section of the South China Sea's shipping lanes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Such successive escalations since the ascension of Xi Jinping to a dominant position in Beijing have drawn a growing number of major powers into the South China Sea dispute. Concerned about the impact Chinese actions may have on international conventions that are fundamental to freedom of navigation, for the last six months the United States has run increasingly aggressive <i>Freedom of Navigation Operations</i> (<a href="http://amti.csis.org/fonops-primer/" target="_blank">FONOPs</a>). In the process, US Navy ships and aircraft have come close to islands with Chinese military installations in order to demonstrate that Washington does not accept Beijing's attempt to create facts on the ground. Accelerating US naval activity, in cooperation with local partners as well as India, Japan and Australia, also reflects widespread concerns that these Chinese military installations could prove the first step to excluding all other major powers from a key waterway. As James <a href="http://stockton.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1406&context=ils" target="_blank">Kraska</a> has pointed out, these operations have become more unpredictable since the Chinese military has come to use fishing trawlers and other seemingly civilian vessels to obstruct US and Vietnamese warships. The increasing frequency and scale of these confrontations have turned the South China Sea into a geopolitical flashpoint where considerable efforts have to be expended by diplomats on all sides to prevent further escalation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As tensions have worsened in East Asia, the Russian government has been forced into an uncomfortably <a href="http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/why-doesnt-russia-support-china-in-the-south-china-sea/" target="_blank">ambiguous </a>stance. The breakdown in relations with the EU and US after the seizure of Crimea has heightened the Kremlin's focus on building political and economic links with China. Desperate to balance the economic impact of American and European sanctions, Putin has played a personal role in completing natural gas pipeline deals with Beijing and trying to encourage Chinese investment in Russia's economy. Though this process of economic engagement has had less than satisfactory <a href="https://www.chathamhouse.org/event/sino-russian-oil-and-gas-cooperation" target="_blank">results </a>for the Kremlin, a whole range of military and naval cooperation initiatives have been put in place to shore up any potential <a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/russia-china-launch-largest-joint-naval-exercise-in-history/528346.html" target="_blank">rapprochement</a> between Moscow and Beijing that could help challenge American dominance of the international state system. In the process, the Kremlin has abandoned any qualms it might have had over supplying advanced weaponry to a potential geopolitical rival and has permitted the sale of anti-aircraft systems and the newest <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/china-get-russias-lethal-su-35-fighter-year-14968" target="_blank">Su-35</a> fighter bombers to China's Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). Particularly in the summer and autumn of 2014, Putin's attempt to court Xi was accompanied by a torrent of reports in Kremlin friendly Russian media praising China's leadership and condemning attempts to contain Beijing's ambitions in the South China Sea and other contested strategic spaces as driven by US jealousy of a rising power.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet hampering these clumsy Kremlin attempts to draw closer to a Chinese regime is the fact that Russia also has a long-standing military and economic partnership with Vietnam, Beijing's most intractable adversary when it comes to the South China Sea dispute. In the latter stages of the US-Vietnam War the USSR kept Hanoi afloat with extensive military and economic aid. During the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, Moscow's help proved crucial in enabling the National Vietnamese Army to survive a relentless Chinese assault along the Northern border. Such military assistance led to wider links fostered by the Soviet state, which have remained strong enough after the end of the Cold War to sustain a Vietnamese community of thousands of traders, businessmen and students in Moscow. Despite an economic shift through the Doi Moi reform programme after 1986, Russia has remained Vietnam's primary arms supplier. While the lifting of the US arms embargo on Vietnam in the past months may change this dynamic, in the last half decade Hanoi has ordered and received vast amounts of Russian <a href="http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/vietnams-russian-restocking-subs-ships-sukhois-and-more-05396/" target="_blank">weaponry</a>, from advanced fighter-bombers and anti-aircraft systems to dozens of ships and submarines designed to give the Vietnamese Navy a fighting chance in any conflict with China.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While successive waves of Vietnamese arms procurement have been a financial boon to Russia's arms industry, the ongoing assistance towards the modernization of the Vietnamese armed forces since 2008 has also been of crucial strategic importance to the Kremlin. For all the recent talk of Sino-Russian friendship, Moscow has remained wary of China's foreign policy ambitions.These anxieties are fuelled by growing Chinese economic influence over states Moscow considers to belong to its Central Asian sphere of influence and the massive demographic imbalance between thinly populated oblasts in Russia's Far East and the large Chinese cities on the other side of the border. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Faced with potential challenges from Beijing, the existence of various powers hostile to China's aspirations across the Asia-Pacific region remains useful to the Kremlin. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though Japan, India, Indonesia and the US are not states Russia can rely on, a strong Vietnam whose authoritarian political elite has close ties to the Kremlin is a partner that is more likely to provide some help to Russia if it ever comes under pressure from Beijing. It is no coincidence that Vietnam is one of the first non-Eurasian states to sign a trade <a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/vietnam-signs-free-trade-agreement-with-russian-led-economic-union/522691.html" target="_blank">agreement</a> with Putin's pet Eurasian Economic Union project. For a Kremlin with few reliable allies, the survival of a strong partnership with the Vietnamese state has remained one of the anchors of stability in a foreign policy framework that has experienced tumultuous changes over the past half decade.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For all the superficial attractions of taking a more prominent seat at East Asia's great power table, a more interventionist approach in the Asia-Pacific region would put both emerging pragmatic cooperation with China and decades of friendship with Vietnam at risk. As long as Moscow has scrupulously avoided deeper commitments to geopolitical flashpoints between China and rival regional powers as well as the United States, it has not had to choose between either collaborating with Beijing or maintaining its alliance with Vietnam. Yet even a largely symbolic commitment such as a small base in <a href="http://www.bt.com.bn/frontpage-news-national/2015/06/03/russia-brunei-plan-1st-naval-drill-next-year" target="_blank">Brunei</a> or regular naval patrols in crisis zones in the South China Sea would radically change this equation. Where previously a distant Kremlin could simply get away with recommending de-escalation and negotiations, every regional and great power directly involved in the conflict would demand that newly arrived Russian interlopers pick a side in complex disputes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As Bonnie <a href="http://www.cfr.org/asia-and-pacific/conflict-south-china-sea/p36377" target="_blank">Glaser </a>has pointed out, for external players trying to balance Chinese expansionism such as India, Japan or the United States the challenge the South China dispute represents is relatively straightforward. In trying to reassert freedom of navigation in the area while avoiding becoming too heavily associated with individual Vietnamese, Philippine or Malaysian territorial claims, these major players have converging interests that have led to intensified naval and intelligence coordination against perceived Chinese threats. At the same time, these external powers can focus on strengthening collective legal frameworks that could help reduce general military tensions in the region. With pre-existing commitments to both China and Vietnam, if Russia increases its presence in the South China Sea to assert great power ambitions the Kremlin will find it difficult to plot a similar course. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Simply joining US led freedom of navigation operations together with Japanese,Indian and Australian ships would effectively subordinate any Russian contribution to an international effort co-ordinated by Washington. The sight of Russian admirals taking orders from the commanders of far larger US or Japanese naval contingents would jar with Vladimir Putin's efforts to present Russia as an adversary and geopolitical equal of the United States. Though Russian engagement in a wider effort to counter Chinese expansionism would bolster the Kremlin's relationship with Vietnam, it would also place relations with Beijing in which Putin has invested considerable personal prestige under unsustainable strain. Such a path to great power influence in East Asia would only provoke the ire of a state with which Russia shares a long land boundary that is almost impossible to defend. The costs of such a move would therefore be far greater than any benefits the Kremlin could possibly accrue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By contrast, a more likely course even symbolic Russian intervention in the South China Sea would take would be one designed to obstruct the US Navy's attempts to defend key American strategic goals in the Asia-Pacific theatre. Running regular patrols in highly contested territory could disrupt efforts by the United States to run more aggressive FONOPs against islands under Chinese control. With Russian ships in the immediate vicinity, US or Japanese naval officers already dealing with aggressive Chinese counter-measures would be faced with a further unpredictable variable that could make access to key areas more difficult. With the ability of the British government to fully maintain its base in Brunei in question, a Brunei government looking for additional protection could be willing to provide the kind of permanent facilities the Russian Navy would need to sustain any effort in these waterways. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the process, the Kremlin could both strengthen an increasingly crucial relationship with Beijing as well as force itself in to a wider consultation and negotiation process that could determine the future of one of one of the most important sea lanes for global trade. Not only would such an approach based on disrupting an issue crucially important to US global strategy provide a further opportunity to reassert Vladimir Putin's obsession with great power status, it would also complement Kremlin propaganda targeted towards the Russian population that continues to portray Washington as Russia's primary adversary.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This more likely Russian approach towards the South China Sea dispute would not be cost free. For all the claims made by Russian analysts loyal to the Kremlin, it is unlikely that the Vietnamese government or public would accept any justifications that would portray a Russian Navy presence as purely designed to counter US attempts to assert global hegemony. Rather, the sight of Russian naval vessels openly or tacitly colluding with the Chinese would inevitably put at risk a close partnership with Hanoi that has lasted for sixty years. As Jonathan London has pointed out, the Vietnamese public as well as much of the political elite have come to see the struggle for control of islands in the South China Sea as fundamental to the <a href="http://blog.jonathanlondon.net/?p=538" target="_blank">survival of Vietnam</a> as a sovereign state. With a newly reconfigured Politburo in Hanoi under the continued leadership of Nguyen Phu Trong dependent on delicate compromises between factions, the Vietnamese government will find it difficult to resist wider pressure for some form of retaliation against Russian involvement in any further Chinese escalation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though the Vietnamese Communist Party would be very reluctant to see a collapse in relations it would be unlikely to continue providing support to some of the Kremlin's key strategic projects. At the very least, continued indulgence in Hanoi of Vladimir Putin's pet Eurasian Union project would not survive such tensions. If Beijing manages to encourage Russian naval visits to Chinese bases on disputed islands in the region by playing on the Kremlin's obsession with great power status, it is quite probable that the Russian armed forces will lose access to <a href="http://cogitasia.com/what-should-the-united-states-do-about-cam-ranh-bay-and-russias-place-in-vietnam/" target="_blank">Cam Ranh Bay</a> and other facilities on Vietnamese territory. Recent moves by the United States to drop the remnants of its arms embargo on Vietnam also mean that if there is a crisis with the Kremlin Hanoi now has a <a href="http://thediplomat.com/2014/10/united-states-lifts-vietnam-arms-embargo-with-a-catch/" target="_blank">clear alternative</a> to Russian weapons systems when it comes to modernizing its military. Most significantly, in alienating Vietnam and pushing it into a regional alliance system co-ordinated by Washington and Tokyo, the Kremlin would lose an ally that would be willing to help if a more expansionist Chinese regime turned its attention to Russia's Far East. Losing Vietnam in a short term bid for great power status would in the long term make Russia dependent on Beijing in a part of the world in</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> which the Kremlin has no other firm friends.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As is often the case, despite the hints and fleeting interest it is equally likely that in the foreseeable future the Kremlin decides to look for it's foreign policy successes elsewhere. The Russian naval exercises in the Asia-Pacific region could simply be another opportunity to advertise military equipment in a region with a growing number of potential buyers. And no doubt there are many in Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Defence that have a strong commitment to friendship with Vietnam. Yet d</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">espite all the risks, the South China Sea is exactly the kind of geopolitical space in which Vladimir Putin would try to sustain popularity at home through the aggressive assertion of great power status abroad. As Stephen Blank has pointed out, much of Vladimir Putin's adventurism in Ukraine and Syria is driven by a need to <a href="http://intersectionproject.eu/article/russia-world/putins-vision-road-away-damascus" target="_blank">mobilise</a> the support of the Russian public for a Kremlin elite that is no longer able to guarantee economic prosperity or political stability. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With Duma elections in September 2016 and presidential elections in 2018, the need for grand foreign policy successes is becoming more pressing. However absurd it seems, the Kremlin may see further gunboat diplomacy as the only way out of trouble. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Facing a stalemate in Ukraine and a volatile equilibrium in Syria, military adventurism in the Asia-Pacific region that forces other great powers to engage with Russia would provide the Kremlin with the exotic TV footage and exciting headlines that can help keep the Russian public distracted from economic woes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet the dilemmas that the Kremlin would face if it chose the South China Sea as its next geopolitical crisis to achieve a short term foreign policy high illustrate how Vladimir Putin's quest for global prestige is sabotaging Russia's long term security.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> By disrupting an established regional order h</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">is gambles in Syria and Ukraine may force other powers to take Russia into account. But they also alienate states that benefit from the status quo. With his gambits in Crimea and Donbas, Vladimir Putin shot to unprecedented levels of public support at home at the expense of alienating key political actors in Germany that have begun to see Russia as a strategic opponent rather than a friendly partner. Through his brutal Syrian adventure Putin may have reasserted Russia's position in the Middle East by saving Bashar al Assad from defeat, yet he also destroyed previously cordial relations with the Saudi and Turkish elites for an unsteady alliance with an Iranian regime whose interests may diverge from those of Russia. Whether in Libya, Yemen, the South China Sea or Venezuela, an attempt to reassert global power status by disrupting a regional status quo would simply repeat a dynamic whereby short term successes alienate powerful states that had previously been friendly towards Russia. Yet whether Vladimir Putin will ever learn that there are some geopolitical tables that are just not worth sitting at remains an open question. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<br />Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-15911079739135382572016-03-01T05:43:00.001-08:002017-02-08T03:49:36.755-08:00Searching for Stolypin: Democratization and the War against Corruption<br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At a time when the conflict over Crimea and skirmishing in Donetsk and Luhansk are driving an ever greater wedge between Ukrainians and Russians, the one political issue that seems to unite both societies is anger with endemic corruption. For the past decade, more or less robust <a href="http://imrussia.org/en/society/522-russian-corruption-on-the-transparency-internationals-barometer" target="_blank">social surveys</a> have put corruption at or <a href="http://glavcom.ua/articles/32614.html" target="_blank">near the top</a> of the list of issues that most concern the public in both countries. State dysfunction and social injustice that corrupt practices helped to entrench have undermined economic development in most societies struggling with Soviet legacies. The ways in which graft and bribery have become a feature of everyday life affecting every citizen have fostered deep public grievances against established elites that have a potentially destabilizing impact. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In Russia, significant levels of public disquiet over the persistence of corruption lingered even as a political equilibrium put in place by Vladimir Putin's power vertical managed to limit the socially disruptive effects of graft between 2000 and 2010. As <a href="http://eu.spb.ru/images/M_center/503-522_Gelman.pdf" target="_blank">Vladimir Gel'man</a> has pointed out, with memories of the social collapse of the 1990s still strong during the first Putin presidency the great bulk of the Russian population was willing to accept a degree of elite theft in exchange for a stable order in their everyday lives. The rapid increase in quality of life driven by a growing commodities boom helped to limit the extent to which public annoyance at tales of corruption seeping out from the Kremlin fostered discontent with an emerging authoritarian order. Yet the fact that the police and security services regularly made a show of arresting expendable members of the elite demonstrated the extent to which those ruling Russia were aware that public concern over corruption needed to be regularly assuaged in order to sustain Vladimir Putin's popularity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By contrast, until 2010 in Ukraine no one figure was able to entirely dominate the state. The competitive nature of a political system that sat somewhere between oligarchy and democracy survived during the first two decades of Ukraine’s independence despite Leonid Kuchma's moves to consolidate his position in the early 2000s and Viktor Yanukovych's attempt to manipulate the 2004 presidential elections. In both cases a mixture of popular and elite resistance stymied attempts to entrench a power vertical in Kyiv, helping to foster a relatively open society in which nascent activist networks and small enclaves of reformers within civilian and military institutions could lay the basis for reform of the state. Yet a parliament and presidency riven with factional rivalries also made it extremely difficult for reformers to make any headway in a political economy in which oligarchs were constantly fighting for survival. While Putin's power vertical set clear limits on the influence of economic elites, the lack of any equivalent power centre in Ukraine meant that graft, corruption and everyday bribery spiralled out of control in a manner that paved the way for the comeback of Viktor Yanukovych in 2010.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite these growing divergences between Ukraine and Russia, the financial crisis that began to unfold in 2008 created a range of social and political shocks that brought ever greater discontent out into the open. With a massive spike in gas and oil prices strengthening the hands of oligarchs more closely aligned with Russia, between 2010 and 2013 Viktor Yanukovich moved to consolidate power to an unprecedented extent. In Russia, the swift recovery in commodity prices enabled Vladimir Putin to invest massive sums in the military while still maintaining the ability to financially outbid any potential rival. Yet in both societies economic pressure after 2010 also heightened public frustration with the persistent impunity of those in control of the state and economy. Uniting the disparate groups involved in the mass protests in Moscow of 2011 and 2012 was anger at how the return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency signalled a lack of will to reform a system built on brazen plundering of the Russian economy. While the Russian protest movement failed to attract sufficient support outside of Moscow to threaten the Kremlin, in the following years similar fury at systemic corruption helped fuel the Maidan protests in Kyiv that culminated in the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Since the Putin regime’s manipulation of corrupt networks to achieve strategic goals in Donbas and Crimea a considerable proportion of the political elite in Kyiv now see the war against corruption as crucial to restoring national sovereignty and security. In Russia, the extent to which the Kremlin’s power vertical depends on corrupt deals between the security services and economic elites have led the opposition to primarily focus on anti-corruption activism, often at the expense of other key issues. Moreover, the extent to which key members of the Russian opposition such as Alexei Navalny have built their reputations on anti-corruption campaigning demonstrate how the war against corruption has remained one of the few issues that can still unite a fragmented opposition movement. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As a consequence, many analysts and activists have come to see a war against corruption as an unproblematic component of any wider democratization process. When providing recommendations for the democratic transformation of both Ukraine and Russia, Western think tanks, scholars and prominent local figures continue to often place the suppression of corrupt practices as the central priority of any reform process. EU and US officials, scholars and analysts at think tanks from the <a href="http://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/19/ukraine-reform-monitor-february-2016/iu83" target="_blank">Carnegie Foundation</a> to the <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/03/24-ukraine-future-thoburn-shapiro" target="_blank">Brookings Institution</a> regularly churn out recommendations for anti-corruption measures designed to restore the rule of law in the post-Soviet space. As the military situation in the Donbas region has stabilised, in Ukraine battles over corruption within the national government as well as on a regional level have shaped political debate, often determining the rise and fall of prominent leaders. While in Russia, the remnants of the non-system movement are trying to mobilise public support by emphasising the extent to which the corrupt practices so central to Putin's power vertical are compounding an escalating economic crisis. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet however crucial anti-corruption measures are to the restoration of the rule of law, it is worth asking whether wars on corruption in themselves inevitably lead to democratization. Western as well as local analysts often assume that those prominent political figures fighting for an end to corrupt practices, often at enormous risk to themselves and their families, are also automatically going to push for the democratization. But demands for a <a href="http://www.dif.org.ua/en/publications/focus_on_ukraine/antigra-na-publiku_.htm" target="_blank">"cleansing of society"</a> or a "strong hand" to fight powerful interests that are stealing from the people and subverting the state can also degenerate into a search for the kind of quick solutions that are more likely to be found through authoritarian methods than slower processes of democratic consultation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The authoritarian potential of any potential war on corruption can be seen in the historical figures anti-corruption campaigners in both societies have cited as examples. After the collapse of the USSR encouraged a reappraisal of the pre-1917 Tsarist Empire, both conservatives as well as liberals in Russia have often pointed to Pyotr Stolypin as a figure who could provide a model for those trying to rebuild Russia in the 1990s. Until his assassination in 1911, as prime minister and interior minister Stolypin initiated reforms designed to save the Tsarist system in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1904. The apparently progressive nature of measures designed to foster the emergence of a rural middle class and a more responsive state led many Russian reformers to present Stolypin as the kind of figure those rebuilding a new Russia in the 1990s and 2000s should emulate. Yet Stolypin was also notorious for the ruthlessly repressive means he used to impose his own institutional goals. His relentless war on corruption went hand in hand with a campaign against various ideological opponents of the Tsarist system so brutal that the "Stolypin necktie" became a euphemism for the noose used to execute those accused of revolutionary terrorism. A war against corruption building on a cult of Stolypin may help unite those in the security services frustrated with a corrupt status quo with activists close to the opposition. Yet it also hints at a willingness among many anti-corruption activists to entertain an alliance with individuals or groups who could provide the "strong hand" needed to "clean up" their country.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though some Ukrainian activists also cited Stolypin as a useful model for modern anti-corruption efforts in the 1990s, growing wariness towards Russia dampened enthusiasm for a politician whose main aim was to restore the strength of a Tsarist Empire focused on Moscow. Nevertheless, an authoritarian undercurrent can also be detected in some of the precedents many anti-corruption campaigners have pointed to as successful examples of reform that should be emulated. That some activists have pointed to Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew as an ideal for reformers despite his unflinching contempt for human rights indicates that quite a few anti-corruption warriors in Ukraine may be willing to cut a few democratic corners to achieve their goals. More recently, the popularity of Mikhail Saakashvili after his appointment as Governor Odessa by President Petro Poroshenko is a sign that a broad swathe of the electorate is willing to throw its support behind someone willing to do whatever it takes to fight corruption. That Saakashvili was toppled from the Georgian presidency in 2013 under a cloud of allegations over abuse of executive powers to coerce acceptance of reforms does not seem to unduly bother Ukrainian anti-corruption activists and voters rallying to his standard. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Other prominent activists involved in anti-corruption campaigning in Ukraine have become heavily involved with openly authoritarian movements. The paramilitarisation of the Maidan movement under the pressure of brutal police repression in January 2014 drew civil society activists into contact with radical nationalist as well as self-defence units that protected demonstrators from the state. These groups went on to provide the nucleus for the volunteer regiments that spearheaded the attempt by the Ukrainian military to regain control of the Donbas region from increasingly blatant Russian military infiltration. In the process, anti-corruption campaigners helping to coordinate public efforts to supply the military have drawn close to paramilitary groups and other military units. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A prominent example of this interaction between anti-corruption activists and nationalist volunteer regiments is the former journalist Tetyana Chornovol, who is now an MP in the Verkhovna Rada. Chornovol herself rose to prominence during the Maidan protests for her relentless investigation of the Yanukovych family's illegal assets. In the months after Yanukovych's fall, her husband joined the far right Azov regiment, and was killed in action near Ilovaisk. Following this personal tragedy, Chornovol joined an Azov unit fighting to defend Mariupol from seizure by Russian and Russian-backed forces in August 2014. This strong personal link along with her continued association with figures connected to the Azov movement indicates how a commitment to fighting corruption can be built as much on an authoritarian understanding of how social transformation should be achieved as it can on a desire to preserve democratic pluralism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As long as the European Union provides the prospect of even a partial integration process, there remain strong institutional incentives for Ukrainian activists and state reformers to frame their war against corruption in democratic terms. Having a battle over the reform of the Ukrainian state play out in an open debate in the media and parliament will also strengthen public understanding and elite acknowledgement that corruption is a symptom rather than a cause of a political crisis driven by deeply entrenched social injustice. As <a href="https://www.academia.edu/21548986/A_Decisive_Turn_Risks_for_Ukrainian_Democracy_After_the_Euromaidan" target="_blank">Mikhail Minakov</a> and <a href="http://uatoday.tv/opinion/waiting-room-ukraine-eu-integration-is-much-more-than-just-a-visa-free-regime-531291.html" target="_blank">Vitaly Portnikov</a> have pointed out, the potential risks of EU disengagement from a society in which there are no simple solutions to structural dysfunction are clear. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In an environment in which old civilian elites are discrediting themselves and the power and prestige of the military is on the rise, there is a strong risk that the fury of Maidan activists at the survival of corrupt practices could reinforce authoritarian rather than democratic trends in Ukrainian society.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While in Ukraine a public consensus in favour of an (often ill-defined) Europeanisation process provides an incentive to channel the war against corruption towards democratic ends, it is not clear whether similar external or internal pressures exist in Russia to prevent activists from being tantalised by the false promise of authoritarian solutions. Undoubtedly there are many key figures within the system and non-system Russian opposition who make great sacrifices in the hope of building a more open society. But the assassination of Boris Nemtsov removed a leading figure that still had the authority to sustain a commitment towards</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> democratic goals among </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">those frustrated with the status quo . With Nemtsov gone it remains unclear whether what remains of the Russian non-system opposition can produce a leader that can ensure that anti-corruption work remains part of a wider democratic project rather than becoming enmeshed with the authoritarian agendas of nationalist movements or factions within the state. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps that most prominent Russian opposition activist to have flirted with the authoritarian agenda of the nationalist Right is Alexei Navalny. As a prominent opposition activist</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, Navalny has been very successful at using anti-corruption activism as a springboard towards building a national political profile. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Most recently, Navalny played a central role in implicating <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXYQbgvzxdM" target="_blank">Prosecutor General Yury Chaika</a> in vast protection rackets that effectively turn the state prosecution service into a business partner of major organized crime groups.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Throughout </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Navalny has had to overcome enormous pressure from the Russian state. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet Navalny has also courted the support of Russian radical nationalists, even attending the so-called 'Russian March' in 2011, a notorious annual gathering of the Far Right in Moscow.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> In the process he has become difficult to pin down ideologically, at times espousing a national conservatism that would not seem out of place in the Lithuanian or Polish parliaments, at others indulging in the kind of opportunistic populism that would make Ukraine's Oleh Lyashko proud. This ideological ambiguity coupled with cooperation with deeply authoritarian radical nationalists is an indication of how prominent anti-corruption campaigners such as Navalny will not necessarily prove reliable supporters of any messy democratic Russian experiment that may follow a collapse of Putin's power vertical.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For democracy is not necessarily an inevitable outcome of any revolutionary moment that may unfold if the Putin regime is unable to reverse Russia's downward economic trajectory. The deeply corrupt relationships between the security services and business elites that provide the structural foundation for Putin's power vertical make both highly exposed to any public backlash that could emerge if Russia experiences internal destabilization. But there are other state institutions that have not been as weakened by the predatorial instincts of the Putin regime. In the last decade the military in particular has become ever more central to national life, profiting from rapidly expanding budgets while enjoying ever greater social prestige as celebration of the army becomes entrenched in cultural institutions and school curricula. With the personalized nature of Vladimir Putin's rule hollowing out a whole range of other state and political institutions, after his fall the military may be the only truly national institution able to act as a unifying force. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In this context, over the next decade those Russian activists fighting the war against corruption may be faced with a difficult set of choices. They could embrace a democratic transition that will involve complex political deals with many powerful figures who had prospered under the previous regime. Such a scenario would also put clear limits on the extent to which any crackdown against corrupt elites can ignore property law and human rights. Or they could work together with military leaders and radical nationalists willing to use all means available to crush business and security service networks that have stolen Russia's future for the last twenty years. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The tendency of many Russian activists to see corruption as the primary cause of Russia's ills, rather than as a symptom of deeper social and economic injustice, is a worrying sign that a significant proportion of Russia's opposition may very well be tempted by men in uniform who promise to do whatever it takes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the EU still has a wide range of incentives to ensure that anti-corruption warriors in Ukraine respect democratic norms, it is difficult to see how European states can influence the fateful choices activists fighting the war against corruption in Russia may have to make in coming years. A concerted effort to embed anti-corruption measures into a wider democratization process could help weaken the ability of established elites to manipulate economic reforms to their advantage. Such a success could mark a crucial step towards building the foundations for a more stable and just society. Yet in the chaos of the next Russian revolution it is entirely possible that rather than finding its Havel or Walesa, Russia's opposition may simply choose to fall in behind a Stolypin instead.</span><br />
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-14010216590103265862015-11-27T08:09:00.003-08:002015-11-27T08:09:22.856-08:00Coming to Terms with Odessa Ukraine: How Maidan Reshaped the Ukrainian Diaspora<div class="normal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Canadian Cossacks at Dauphin's Canadian National Ukrainian Festival, 2011.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For over a century Ukrainians </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">facing economic deprivation and political instability</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> have left their homeland to find work in distant countries. As successive waves of mass migration gained momentum Ukrainian communities emerged in Europe, North America
and even farther afield. From its very beginning, Ukrainian emigration to Europe and North America in the nineteenth century took place in parallel with
the first attempts by Ukrainian intellectuals to construct a shared sense of nationhood. A Ukrainian nation-building project that hoped to unite divided territories through a
shared linguistic and cultural heritage became intertwined with processes of
transnational migration and community-building. This expanding Ukrainian diaspora played a key role in
debates over Ukrainian identity as the boundaries of what constituted a possible
territorial space for Ukrainian statehood remained contested.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Starting with clusters </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">in Austria or Germany</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">of so-called
Ruthenians from Halychyna and Bukovyna who were heavily influenced by nascent forms of Ukrainian nationalism, by 1900
tens of thousands of migrants who self-identified as Ukrainians went on to settle in Canada and the United States. During the subsequent twenty years, war
and revolution displaced further thousands of Ukrainians from the former Austrian-Hungarian lands as well as a fragmenting Russian empire, with the reach of Ukrainian diaspora networks spreading to Brazil,
Argentina and Australia. These transnational communities became increasingly politicised, as political exiles including the followers of Hetman Skoropadsky, Nestor Makho
or Simon Peltiura set up rival politcal structures in diaspora communities to gain recruits for the political comeback in
Soviet-controlled Ukraine they pined for. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This increased politicisation of disapora milieus was reinforced by particular patterns of
migration experienced by Ukrainians from Halychyna and other parts of Ukraine controlled by Romania or Poland. In Canada in particular, the mass internment of citizens from Austro-Hungarian territories, including Ukrainians, helped reinforce the importance of community organisations working to protect members of the diaspora from the state. While most Ukrainians from these Western regions settled permanently in their new places of residence, a significant number
engaged in circulatory migration to non-Soviet Ukraine until 1939.
Individuals or even whole families would spend a few years in North America
before returning to Halychyna or Bukovyna. In Europe intellectuals and
labourers would regularly move back and forth between German, Austrian or
French cities and their home regions. As various radical Organisation of
Ukrainian Nationalist (OUN) factions rose to prominence in the 1920s, the ideas
of influential figures aligned with the movement such as Stepan Bandera and
Dmytro Dontsov began to spread to diaspora milieus. By 1939 the
political life of the Ukrainian diaspora mirrored religious and political
trends reshaping non-Soviet Ukraine. This dynamic helped to anchor a set of
linguistic and ethno-nationalist assumptions about Ukrainian identity that
shape the stance of most diaspora organisations to this day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The strong cultural cohesion of Ukrainian communities in North America meant that their institutions were in a position to integrate a large influx of refugees that fled Ukraine after the Second World War. The arrival of many supporters of the OUN and the Ukrainian Patriotic Army (UPA) who had fought Germans, Soviets and Poles in turn helped reinforce a romanticised ethno-nationalist historical narrative in churches, Sunday schools and youth movements such as CYM (Спілка Української Молоді/Ukrainian Youth Organisation) or the Plast scouting federation. Stepan Bandera's presence in Munich until his assassination in 1958 and Dmytro Dontsov's exile in Montreal until his death in 1973 meant that diaspora milieus came into direct contact with the dominant figures of interwar Ukrainian nationalist thought. Though a surprising number of Ukrainian-Canadians and Ukrainian-Americans were able to visit Soviet Ukraine after the mid-1960s, the barriers to regular interaction between Ukraine and its diaspora led to significant cultural divergences between the two sides. In Germany, communities that were predominantly the product of refugee migration contained many senior OUN/UPA activists. Strong community ties with West European conservative movements and security services reinforced deep hostility to any aspect of Soviet society right up until the collapse
of the USSR.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-05lwzag2S3E/VlhrBFoo2VI/AAAAAAAAC5o/G_fnUVJl6NY/s1600/UA%2BDiaspora%2B1950s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-05lwzag2S3E/VlhrBFoo2VI/AAAAAAAAC5o/G_fnUVJl6NY/s320/UA%2BDiaspora%2B1950s.jpg" width="218" /></a><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IQ2kYib-twM/Vlhq8z3cScI/AAAAAAAAC5g/A0l7l7MepxM/s1600/UPA%2Bliterature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-IQ2kYib-twM/Vlhq8z3cScI/AAAAAAAAC5g/A0l7l7MepxM/s320/UPA%2Bliterature.jpg" width="220" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cold War texts promoting the Ukrainian national cause</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nevertheless, the collapse of the Soviet Union had a very different impact on the diaspora in Germany than on Ukrainian communities in North America. Though both Canada and the United States saw renewed growth in immigrant numbers from Ukraine, it did not fundamentally reshape community institutions. By contrast in Germany a numerically smaller community was overwhelmed by new
immigrants that continued to circulate back and
forth between Ukraine and the cities they had moved to in a way that would have been impossible before 1990. As a consequence, while North American diasporas only had a limited degree of contact with the cultural and political context of post-Soviet Ukraine many of the tensions over language,
identity and national myth that were a crucial feature of 1990s Ukrainian
politics had a strong impact on the internal development of communities in the EU.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These structural differences need to be kept
in mind when approaching diaspora responses to the Orange and Maidan Revolutions. Since 1990, Ukrainians in Canada and the United States remained largely insulated from the cultural
shifts that led to the emergence of what one could call a Russophone <i>Odessa Ukraine</i> nationalism that now complements what Andrew Wilson once defined as
Ukrainophone <i>Halychyna Ukraine</i> nationalism and linguistically mixed <i>Dnieper
Ukraine</i> nationalism. Within the diaspora in the EU, however, frustration with highly corrupt state institutions was more central to shaping attitudes towards developments in the homeland. In order to understand how the diaspora in North America has responded to the emergence of a militant civic Ukrainian
nationalism since the occupation of Crimea, we therefore need to reflect on how these differences in social structure and identity narratives between the diaspora in the EU and in North America has led to distinct patterns of engagement with the politics of post-Maidan Ukraine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'helvetica neue', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">A collective reframing of identity narratives among diaspora communities as well as in Ukraine was already apparent at key moments of escalation during the Maidan protests. The adoption of
the symbols of the Bandera OUN by both Ukrainophone and Russophone
demonstrators who had not previously been associated with nationalist ideologies led to ambivalent responses among many diaspora organizations and international support groups for the protest movement. Undoubtedly the
revival of aspects of Stepan Bandera and Dmytro Dontsov’s radical ideology among Ukrainian
nationalists and their adoption by many Russophone Ukrainians after Maidan was endorsed with enthusiasm by certain diaspora milieus. Even in the 1990s, quite a few diaspora activists in Canada would have seen the revival of Bandera symbols as a sign of national renewal. Yet in 2014 key stakeholders within the social mainstream of diaspora
communities such as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress were perfectly aware of how fraught a revival of OUN
symbols would be within Ukraine as well as with EU partners.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ukrainian Youth Association meeting in Acton Ontario, 2012</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Once armed conflict gained momentum in the Donbas
region an exclusive focus on </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the Ukrainian language,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> another pillar of diaspora identity discourse, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">also became a problematic basis for mobilizing support to halt Russian infiltration. Contrary to deep suspicion over the loyalty of Russophone Ukrainians harboured by much of the diaspora in North
America, many volunteer fighters and regular soldiers came from communities in which
Russian was the predominant language. As a consequence, Ukrainian-Canadian and
Ukrainian-American organisations pledged to defend the dominance of the
Ukrainian language found themselves fundraising for nationalist volunteer battalions dominated by Russian-speakers. This
dynamic was reinforced by a shaky interim Ukrainian government doing its best
to shore up the support of Russian-speakers after self-inflicted
propaganda disasters over the language issue. In this
context, while the preservation of Ukrainian as a language of state was still
seen as a crucial means of differentiation from neighbouring societies, Russian-speakers were also recognized as fully Ukrainian if
they adopted a set of shared symbols and cultural norms defining the
relationship between the individual and the nation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While Ukrainian communities
in Europe had already struggled with the integration of Russian-speakers since the early 1990s, the notion of Russian-speakers willing to fight
and die for Ukraine represented a fundamental challenge to ethno-nationalist
assumptions underpinning diaspora identity in North America. With a profound threat to Ukrainian independence after the loss of
Crimea forcing swift action by civil society to compensate for state paralysis,
diaspora organisations engaged with efforts to contain
the crisis in the Donbas region in a way that gave them little time
to openly oppose an increasing emphasis within Ukraine on the civic components of Ukrainian
national identity. As a
consequence, diaspora networks acquiesced to the
priorities of Ukrainian military, political and civil society leaders rather than trying to actively reshape the debate to reflect their own priorities. The depth of
the crisis of 2014 and the way in which Russian-speakers became a key component
of a rapidly expanding Ukrainian security sector forced
diaspora communities to accept a redefinition of Ukrainian identity that until then had largely been resisted in North America and evaded in Europe. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet there were also social and institutional factors that helped diaspora communities adjust to a shift towards a civic
basis for Ukrainian identity while still retaining a sense of cultural
continuity that integrated Maidan, the struggles for Odessa and
Kharkiv as well as the Donbas war that followed into a familiar historical narrative. In searching for explanations why civil society, business milieus and
even established political factions had been willing to engage in tenacious acts of protest, many diaspora activists emphasised a long standing national foundation myth </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">that located the basis of modern Ukrainian
nationhood in Cossack polities of the sixteenth century that were the
product of fierce defiance of external authority. This shared Cossack myth was also appropriated by volunteer battalions attempting to bind an often diverse range of recruits into an emerging post-Maidan military ethos.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This emphasis on a Cossack myth familiar to anyone with experience of diaspora church and educational structures helped link a brutal and
confusing war with a recognisable narrative of betrayal, survival and
liberation. By providing shared symbols that could
link diverse milieus in Ukraine with European and North American
diaspora communities, the Cossack myth
provided a means through which more problematic aspects of
Ukrainian identity discourse could be put aside. Building on</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">a tradition going back to Hrushevsky’s initial historical works of the late nineteenth century, in the process deeply problematic </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">aspects of
early modern Cossack history such as Khmelnytsky’s pact with the tsars of
Muscovy or anti-Jewish pogroms were glossed over. Rather it was the image
of a Cossack republic made up of self-organized bands that decide the fate of their Hetman that helped a diverse range of milieus in Ukraine and the wider diaspora build a shared identity narrative in the face of crisis during the Maidan protests and the military campaigns that
followed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When witnessing the Maidan protests first hand or from
afar through social media, diaspora commentators quickly recognised
the symbolic and rhetoric allusions to the Cossack myth that permeated Maidan
from its very beginnings. It was this shared imagery of the Cossack warrior
defending his or he freedom from a tyrannical ruler that enabled diaspora communities to
reconcile their own traditionally ethno-nationalist narrative of Ukrainian
identity with the multi-lingual and multi-religious realities of early twenty
first century Ukraine that manifested themselves in their country of origin. Key moments such as clashes between Maidan protesters and
Berkut police units for control of Hrushevsky street or the final street
battles of late February 2014 were interpreted with familiar frames of
reference based on the Cossack myth that enabled diaspora observers and
supporters to revise their assumptions about Ukrainian society while still retaining a sense of cultural continuity.
The appearance of protesters in Cossack dress, the ritual “warning” drumming on
Hrushevsky street, the creation of relatively disciplined paramilitary units
within Maidan self-defence that consciously modelled their structure of
military organization on the Cossack bands, all these factors were key to
enabling this enormous conceptual leap from one model of identity to another in a
very compressed period of time. </span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kth-95BXe4k/Vlh7DCdxewI/AAAAAAAAC6M/ISN20XxK7hw/s1600/Ukraine%2BRada%2B22%2BFeb%2B2014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kth-95BXe4k/Vlh7DCdxewI/AAAAAAAAC6M/ISN20XxK7hw/s400/Ukraine%2BRada%2B22%2BFeb%2B2014.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maidan 'Hundreds' in front of the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament), 22 February 2014</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This use of the Cossack narrative to reinforce shared
narratives of identity despite linguistic and religious diversity gained
redoubled importance in the military mobilisation efforts that followed the fall of Yanukovych. With the
Ukrainian Army in a near terminal crisis in April and May 2014, the use of
Cossack titles, symbols and language provided a unifying element that could
anchor a chaotic war effort with a familiar warrior
ethos. This shared symbolic resource became a key feature of volunteer
battalions, in terms of dress, rhetoric and symbols to the extent of even
shaping responses to combat on the battlefield. Despite the often underrated
ideological differences between various nationalist battalions as well as
within the Ukrainian military and intelligence services, the language of the
Cossack myth helped instil a particular warrior
codex that could be presented as uniquely Ukrainian. From the perspective of
diaspora networks not particularly familiar with the ideological worldview shaping volunteer battalions or the neo-Soviet traditions of regular military
units, the Cossack myth again provided a key theme that provided a point of
identifiable connection with a wider effort for communities in North America
that were both geographically and culturally distant from the
social order of contemporary Ukraine.</span><br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--iHFQKbwr6A/Vlh7qODfPrI/AAAAAAAAC6U/7eB55xn3jwU/s1600/UA%2BArmy%2BRepin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/--iHFQKbwr6A/Vlh7qODfPrI/AAAAAAAAC6U/7eB55xn3jwU/s400/UA%2BArmy%2BRepin.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Troops from the 79th Airmobile Brigade mock Vladimir Putin in the summer of 2014 by re-enacting Repin's 1891 painting, 'Reply of the Zaporizhian Cossacks to the Sultan'.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the Cossack myth was a crucial symbolic resource
that strengthened the commitment of Ukrainian diaspora communities to Ukraine's fraught national
mobilisation efforts, it was the survival of the modern Ukrainian state that proved crucial in shaping the form this engagement took. In and of itself the Maidan Revolution was to a large extent
driven by a profound distrust of state institutions that came to be seen as
corrupt and oppressive. Both the popular defiance of police intimidation and
the seizure of administrative buildings after the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian parliament) enacted the so-called
Dictatorship Laws of 16 January 2014 represented the culmination of deep popular
resentment over the extent to which the state was failing its citizens at home and abroad. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This hostility to Ukrainian state institutions found
considerable resonance across the diaspora. Many members of Ukrainian
communities in North America who have worked or lived in Ukraine over the past two decades have come away
with a profound sense of disillusionment as the realities of an oligarch dominated society clashed with the myths of their own identity narrative. For large swathes of the Canadian and American diaspora, Kuchma’s
equivocation about the role of the Russian language and Yanukovych’s comeback in
2010 were taken as profoundly frustrating signs that the state was
dominated by Russified elites unwilling to protect Ukrainian culture. By contrast, for Ukrainian communities in EU member states the
disillusion was often more the result of regular contact with
corrupt state institutions that obstructed business projects, property
purchases and other forms of engagement with day to day life in
Ukraine. In this context, the Maidan movement's demand for state reform
resonated strongly with diaspora communities disappointed in the fact that the
post-Soviet Ukrainian state had not built the Cossack utopia that nationalists had yearned for when dreaming of an independent Ukraine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Despite such profound disappointments diaspora organizations and activists </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">engaged with civil society initiatives focused on reform of existing state institutions rather than a utopian vision of dismantling them and starting
anew. Though more radical milieus within diaspora communities actively supported nationalist groups such as the Svoboda Party or Praviy Sector, the main
community organizations in Canada, the United States, the UK and Germany worked with organizations and state institutions that had a
reformist rather than a revolutionary emphasis. Similarly, in the rush to rebuild Ukraine’s
security infrastructure after March 2014, diaspora communities provided far more aid to volunteer regiments
that cooperated with the state such as Donbass, Dnipro-1 and even
the radical nationalist Azov rather than units such as
Praviy Sektor or Sich that openly threatened to use violence against institutions that did not fulfil their demands.</span><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2xXvbKSYo2s/Vlh9p49HFwI/AAAAAAAAC6g/kA_uOv_HPT4/s1600/Euromaidan%2BMeeting%2BTor.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2xXvbKSYo2s/Vlh9p49HFwI/AAAAAAAAC6g/kA_uOv_HPT4/s400/Euromaidan%2BMeeting%2BTor.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Euromaidan Canada fundraising dinner in Toronto, 26 April 2014.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Note the ticket price.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By contrast, indications of how the diaspora could have responded had Maidan protests or Russian military
operations led to a complete collapse of the Ukrainian state can be seen in the
traumatic experience of other immigrant milieus. From Turkish guest workers in 1980s
Germany through to transnational networks from various Arab societies over the
last two decades, a crisis resulting in a collapse of trust in
the state has often had a radicalising effect on diaspora communities. Such knock-on effects of destabilisation in a country of origin has regularly drawn deeply alienated immigrant communities into civil conflicts on the side of political movements whose actions accelerated a conflict spiral. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Other diasporas faced with armed conflict in their countries of origin have often become a major source of funding and personnel for movements that operated outside state control. In societies where the state has collapsed such as Yemen or where an armed group at war with the state becomes politically dominant</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> as in the case with Kurdish communities, diasporas have often become enmeshed with insurgencies that fostered profound hostility towards state institutions of their country of origin. </span><span style="font-family: 'helvetica neue', arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">With considerable levels of
population circulation between EU member states and Ukraine as well as a rose-tinted view of the ethno-nationalist legacy of Stepan Bandera
in Canada and the United States, in the hyper-charged atmosphere of 2014 the risks were high of a similar radicalising effect on diaspora milieus
feeding back into events in Ukraine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the Maidan
protests were driven by mass defiance of state authority, the speed of President Yanukovych's fall ensured that hostility within diaspora communities
towards Ukrainian state institutions dissipated quickly. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though such diaspora support efforts were initially linked to civil society and volunteer paramilitaries resisting Russian aggression, these groups gradually connected this mobilisation with a wider effort to restore state power in a framework based on the rule of law. This shift was also reflected in a level of engagement with state institutions in countries of settlement not seen since the Cold War, as diaspora organisations in the EU and North America worked hard to lobby their governments to provide weapons and financial support to a Ukrainian state struggling for survival. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">For many
diaspora activists and organisations support for an uprising against the misuse
of state power swiftly shifted to a support effort for a national mobilisation
effort to save Ukrainian statehood.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The past two years have not just proven a remarkable period of
turmoil in Ukraine, they have also fostered a shift in attitudes among large
parts of the Ukrainian diaspora that would have been considered barely imaginable for previous generations. Even a decade ago, many diaspora organisations in North
America pushed Ukrainian governments to adopt a more clearly defined ethno-nationalist agenda and looked at what they considered to be the neo-Soviet
tendencies of the Ukrainian state with great scepticism. For Ukrainian communities in the EU, a deep disillusion with the deep-seated
corruption that had created the conditions necessitating emigration also
fostered scepticism over national identity debates that dominated
Ukrainian politics and state institutions impervious to change.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6yAk-hwoZ3M/Vlh_PU_h8pI/AAAAAAAAC6s/ILefEE3xJeQ/s1600/Odessa%2BUA.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="291" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6yAk-hwoZ3M/Vlh_PU_h8pI/AAAAAAAAC6s/ILefEE3xJeQ/s400/Odessa%2BUA.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Odessa Ukraine </i>Nationalism: Russophone Ukrainian Patriots</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Maidan protests helped accelerate a cultural and political process of reassessment
among diaspora communities in both the EU and North America. The intensity with which both
supporters of civic models of Ukrainian identity as well as ultra-nationalist groups for which language debates only played a secondary role helped
drive the Maidan protests forward had a profound impact on identity
discourses within diaspora milieus. Increasingly it seems that intellectual
debates within Ukraine are coming to reshape diaspora attitudes as well, fostering acceptance that a Russophone <i>Odessa Ukraine</i> could be
as loyal and worth defending as more established forms of <i>Dnieper Ukraine</i> or <i>Halychyna Ukraine</i> identities. The manner in which a diaspora mobilisation effort became linked with the defence
of Ukrainian statehood also revived a focus on institutional engagement and
reform that had largely gone into abeyance after profound disappointment set in over
the stagnation of the 1990s and the failures of the Orange Revolution. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Crucially, by reaching back to the Cossack myth to build a shared
framework for debate and defiance, the movements on the Maidan and the military units struggling to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression used a
symbolic resource that was immediately recognisable to diaspora communities that were not
necessarily familiar with the complexities and nuances of contemporary
Ukrainian society. By building their symbolic Cossack fortress, the Maidan
protesters not only used a shared ideological language that could mobilise
resistance within Ukraine, they also created a dynamic that is transforming
identity discourses across the diaspora in ways that will continue to resonate
over the coming decades.</span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-46390031393346996042015-09-09T07:40:00.000-07:002015-09-09T16:11:26.079-07:00Go Big or Go Home?: The Kremlin's Syrian Dilemma<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img src="http://blogs.voanews.com/russia-watch/files/2012/02/RTR2WN27.jpg" height="297" width="400" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Syrian protesters in Kafranbel, 2012.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since the illegal seizure of Crimea, every rhetorical twitch from Russia's political elite has been dissected by observers desperate to establish where exactly Vladimir Putin is taking Russia. Faced with an increasingly erratic Kremlin, each policy shift or photo opportunity has unleashed rampant speculation. From the assassination of Boris Nemtsov and Putin's ten day disappearance to a surreal photo session at a gym with the ever hopeful Dmitri Medvedev, such obsessive scrutiny of every move Russia's leaders make has not necessarily had a positive impact on debates over the future course of Kremlin policy. Having witnessed various covert attempts to subvert the Ukrainian state after the Maidan protests brought down Viktor Yanukovich, many mainstream observers immediately see conspiracy and master strategy in every action taken by Putin and his political partners. As a consequence, such analysis often portrays Putin's actions as the product of a coherent covert strategy, though the evidence often suggests they are actually chaotic improvisations from a figure struggling to retain control of Russian society.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Until recently, this tendency among analysts to overinterpret often quite mundane measures as evidence of some deeper agenda has made me reluctant to set out suspicions I shared with many colleagues about a developing shift in Russian foreign policy. Though signs of an expanding Russian presence in Syria started becoming apparent by May this year, too often such rumours, images and social media chatter have proven to be exaggerations or even outright fabrications. As many of those who recently shared a report based on <a href="http://www.stopfake.org/en/debunking-the-fake-article-on-2000-russian-soldiers-killed-in-donbas-everyone-fell-for/" target="_blank">fabricated</a> documents about Russian casualties in Donetsk and Luhansk realised, it is usually best to verify such vague rumours and cross-check striking social media information with experienced colleagues before making any firm claims. Though snippets of information provided tantalizing hints of a growing Russian military presence in Syria, reports were too fragmented to dispel the concern that this would prove to be just another red herring reflecting wishful thinking among external observers and activists on the ground.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet in the last ten days there have been a growing signs that what had once been vague rumours may have a basis in fact. Two weeks ago images of Russian soldiers in Syria around the Russian Navy's maintenance base in Tartus circulated on social media. Following this up, the <a href="http://spioenkop.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Russia" target="_blank">Oryx blog</a> produced reports minutely analysing recent Syrian television reports of combat in Latakia province and discovered voices shouting in Russian from modern armoured personnel carriers. Western media outlets also picked up reports of growing numbers of Russian military personnel in <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/05/exposing-russia-s-secret-army-in-syria.html" target="_blank">Damascus</a>, though much of this information is difficult to verify. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A hardy band of ship-spotters in Istanbul noted increases in the number of <a href="http://turkishnavy.net/" target="_blank">Russian naval supply</a> vessels moving through the Bosphorus from Sevastapol to Tartus. By early September <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/news/mena/2015/09/07/are-there-russian-troops-fighting-in-syria/" target="_blank">Ruslan Leviev</a> established that the Kremlin has systematically reinforced its position in Tartus, and is taking a more active role in the Assad regime's military campaign in Latakia with UAVs and crews for modern APCs. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As evidence mounted over the past two weeks, a whole range of pro-Kremlin figures in such as the German lobbyist and media personality <a href="http://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kommentare/dein-feind-ist-auch-mein-feind-ld.1694" target="_blank">Alexander Rahr</a>, have kept repeating that Putin's upcoming speech at the United Nations General Assembly might prove the basis for a "grand bargain". Though impossible to achieve anywhere outside of Putin's own propaganda universe, Rahr and other pro-Kremlin media conduits express the belief that such a bargain could be based on Russian concessions in Syria in exchange for Western concessions in Ukraine. At the same time, there have been</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> a spate of on the ground television reports by Russian journalists glorifying Assad's Syrian Arab Army (SAA) on Moscow media outlets such as<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZkNiCPvpQc" target="_blank"> Lifenews</a> or <a href="http://syriawatch.intoxvs.info/1329928617.html" target="_blank">Rossiya 24</a>. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By 4 September reports in the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/05/world/middleeast/russian-moves-in-syria-pose-concerns-for-us.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a> and <a href="http://www.novayagazeta.ru/columns/69811.html" target="_blank">Novaya Gazeta</a> provided more detail about how what the latter called Vladimir Putin's "Second Hybrid War" in Syria may end even more badly for Russia than the first in Ukraine's Donbass region. The US State Department released a transcript in which Secretary of State John Kerry expressed deep concerns over the possibility of a Russian military build up in Syria to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Within four days and after chaotic denials the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledged the implementation of a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/world/middleeast/russia-syria-military-advisers.html" target="_blank">train and equip</a> programme for the Assad regime's Syrian Arab Army.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With this confirmation that the Kremlin is embarking on its own Levantine adventure, it is worth establishing why Vladimir Putin should take an enormous gamble that risks dragging Russia into another political quagmire so soon after his efforts in Ukraine have fallen apart. Setting out key strategic factors that may have shaped such a massive change in course could help us establish the possible long term impact it could have on the Middle East and the Putin regime. In particular, there are two key strategic factors that may have played a decisive role in encouraging the Kremlin to opt for escalation. The first is the sudden shift of fortunes in the battle for control of Idlib and Latakia provinces. The second lies in the very nature of the relationship between the Assad regime and the Russian state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When it comes to recent developments in the battlefield, the swift collapse of the Syrian Army in Idlib province between February and May 2015 has already been described in great detail by perceptive analysts such as <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2015/05/05-assad-losing-syria-lister" target="_blank">Charles Lister</a> or <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/28/syrias-revitalized-rebels-make-big-gains-in-assads-heartland/" target="_blank">Hassan Hassan</a>. Between mid-February to early June 2015, the Assad regime's SAA lost complete control of Idlib City as well as all other cities and towns in Idlib province. By July, only the Shiite majority market town of Fu'ah held out against besieging rebel forces. From Idlib City onwards, each of these assaults was announced in advance by a new alliance of rebel factions called Jaish al Fatah. Though dominated by Ahrar-Ash-Sham, a mix hard line Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters, other factions in Jaish al Fatah include more moderate nationalist militias that emerged after the collapse of the Free Syrian Army as well as Jabhat al-Nusra, which has openly declared its allegiance to Al-Qaida. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Backed with a large influx of Anti-Tank-Guided-Missiles (ATGM) supplied by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia with the likely knowledge if not consent of the United States, Jaish al Fatah was able to execute tactical battlefield plans and target strategic goals in a disciplined fashion that went far beyond previous Syrian rebel campaigns. From February onwards, daily ATGM attacks devastated the regime's armour and artillery units. Sudden raids in early March cut the regime's supply lines between key towns. By the time Jaish al Fatah announced its assault on Idlib City, the SAA's ability to respond and bring in fresh troops without weakening its positions around Damascus and Latakia had fallen away. On 24 March Jaish al Fatah forces entered the city, which was cleared within four days. Over the next month every other city in Idlib province was picked off in a similar fashion, beginning with days of ATGM strikes before a lightning seizure of regime positions. By 23 April rebels stormed the city of Jisr al Shughur in a single day, opening up the main highway to rebel held territory in Latakia province and enabling Jaish al Fatah to start offensive operations in the Ghab plain to the south, the gateway for any campaign to seize Hama City. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along with the new found cohesion and discipline of rebel forces in the Jaish al Fatah alliance, two factors will have caused consternation among those in the Kremlin and the Russian Ministry of Defence who believe Assad's fall would be serious blow to Russia's prestige as a great power. Of especially great concern to both Moscow and Tehran would have been the difficulties the Assad regime has recently founded in recruiting fresh manpower into the SAA. These problems have been made worse by a reluctance among those who have joined a network of militias </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">known as the National Defence Forces (NDF), </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">funded and trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), to fight far from their local communities. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Researchers with a deep understanding of regime milieus such as <a href="http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle-east/pro-regime-syrians-support-army-but-dodge-draft" target="_blank">Joshua Landis</a> or </span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/the-assassination-of-sheikh-abu-fahad-al-balous-context-and-analysis/" target="_blank">Aymenn Al-Tamimi</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> have noted that many core supporters within the Assad family's own Alawite community or other key minority groups such as the Druze are increasingly unwilling to risk their lives for a regime that seems unable to secure victory or peace. While Iran has supplied allied Hezbollah and Iraqi militia forces for several years, these units have increasingly been used to solidify the defence of Damascus from another increasingly assertive and well-supplied rebel alliance in the Southern provinces of Deraa and Quneitra. With fewer and fewer fresh troops willing to be moved away from their towns at its disposal, the Assad regime has found it difficult to reinforce strategic positions at moments of crisis. As a consequence, once under pressure and without support from a strong local NDF presence, the SAA has been prone to sudden routs. Since January 2015 these chaotic retreats have become ever more frequent, with the loss of Idlib to Jaish al Fatah and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/20/syrian-city-of-palmyra-falls-under-control-of-isis" target="_blank">Palmyra</a> to the so-called Islamic State (IS) only the most well known examples.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What is likely to be of equally grave concern to strategic planners in Moscow is the greater willingness of external backers of Syrian rebel groups to coordinate efforts and provide Jaish al Fatah with a seemingly unlimited supply of ATGMs. And this despite its cooperation with Jabhat al Nusra and other groups with a jihadi orientation. In previous years it was exactly this form of collaboration between more moderate Syrian rebel groups and jihadi militias that kept American agencies in particular from providing crucial support to Saudi, Qatari or Turkish efforts to arm opposition forces. Even as late as 2014, moves by Nusra-affiliated units to take apart a rebel group run by the nominally pro-Western <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-rise-and-ugly-fall-of-a-moderate-syrian-rebel-offers-lessons-for-the-west/2015/01/04/3889db38-80da-4974-b1ef-1886f4183624_story.html" target="_blank">Jamal Maarouf</a>, ostensibly because of his links to organized crime, seemed to have ended the possibility of any external support for rebels in Idlib province. Though the reasons why the Americans got out of the way are still a matter of speculation, the fact that the assertive behaviour of Nusra did not sabotage the Jaish al Fatah project indicated that key states in the region were prepared to go much further to weaken the Assad regime than ever before.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With an attempt by regime forces to regain control of the Ghab plain led by the rather eccentric '<a href="https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/NewsReports/565760-syria-minister-fired-after-seen-hugging-regime-hero" target="_blank">Tiger' Suhail al-Hassan</a> ending in fiasco by 27 August, it has become clear that the SAA is no longer able to conduct effective offensive operations without extensive external support. Though Iran has channelled enormous efforts into building the NDF militia network and providing thousands of Shiite foreign fighters through Hezbollah, the sustained losses these units have had to endure have forced it to focus its efforts on securing Damascus and the Lebanese border. Moreover, facing the tasks of keeping Assad afloat in Syria, Hezbollah dominant in Lebanon and Islamic State out of Baghdad, Iran may be experiencing strategic overstretch with few spare resources to help reinforce areas of strategic interest to Russia if they come under attack.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since February 2015 the Kremlin has therefore had to watch a battlefield dynamic unfold in Syria that is bringing rebel forces backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia within striking distance of the regime's area of core support in Latakia and Russia's naval facilities in Tartus. At the same time, in the east IS has seized the final set of <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/09/08/us-mideast-crisis-syria-oilfield-idUSKCN0R80JQ20150908" target="_blank">oil fields</a> that were once supposed to provide the basis for cooperation between the Assad regime and Rosneft as well as other Russian corporations. Rather than representing a piece of a master strategy to defeat the West as several excitable commentators in the United States have suggested, the Russian surge in Syria is actually a response to the accelerating breakdown of the ability of its only ally in the region to sustain effective military campaigns. Though a collapse of the SAA would not mean Syrian rebels or IS would be able to overcome the NDF or Hezbollah in regions where Alawites or Shia communities are dominant, it would reduce Assad's ability to prevent the further political fragmentation of these regions into the playground of rival militia warlords who have emerged through the NDF. Without a cohesive military and intelligence structure directly under the control of the Assad family, there will be no Syrian regime left to sustain the Kremlin's role in the Middle East, a role Vladimir Putin seems to believe is crucial to Russia's great power status.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet the Kremlin's current Syrian dilemma should not necessarily have made a direct Russian military intervention inevitable. With greater diplomatic room for manoeuvre in which Putin may have sustained better relations with France or the United States by not doing things like, say, invading Ukraine, the Kremlin could have been in a better position to strike an agreement with various powers involved that sustained its perceived interests. Even in an environment in which it faces deep distrust from the United States, the Europeans and the Saudis, greater openness to proposals to replace Assad with a less morally compromised figure from within the pre-2011 state structures such as <a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/profiles/2013/07/09/Farouk-al-Sharaa-Syrian-leader-who-wanted-compromise-.html" target="_blank">Farouk al Sharaa</a>, could have given the Kremlin the diplomatic flexibility to pursue some kind of compromise agreement that allowed it to save face. By opting to "go home" rather than to "go big", even now Vladimir Putin could use the slight improvement in relations with Washington over the nuclear deal with Iran to maintain some influence in any new Syrian government involving both regime and rebel elements while winding down a costly commitment eating up resources Russia needs elsewhere. If he were still alive, this is perhaps the course Yevgeny Primakov, with his vast experience of the Middle East and better appreciation of the limits of Russian power, would have recommended to the Kremlin's current Vozhd.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beyond Vladimir Putin's own great power complex, however, there are also some deeper structural factors embedded in the very nature of the Kremlin's long-standing relationship with the Assad regime that are likely to have increased the pressure on him to "go big". For the way in which the Kremlin has provided support to the regime since the Syrian revolt of 2011 has been shaped by the longstanding relationships built through forty years of Soviet and then Russian collaboration with the Assad family. As <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=a7MA1F1TD08C&oi=fnd&pg=PA140&dq=Syria+Soviet+military+Karsh&ots=6BKJlZQwoK&sig=rPrq7ZuYF0KFln8FQGCBesrPIIM#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">Efraim Karsh</a> pointed out in 1993, the foundations of an often fraught alliance between Moscow and Damascus were based on extensive military cooperation, arms deals and limited intelligence sharing. Though Moscow did not provide unlimited support in order to avoid going too far in provoking Israel and the United States, this military cooperation was extensive enough to build deep links between the Russian army and intelligence services and their Syrian counterparts. Most recently, the capture of an extensive <a href="http://spioenkop.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/captured-russian-spy-facility-reveals.html" target="_blank">GRU listening post</a> near the Golan Heights in October 2014 only just abandoned by Russian technical staff provided further proof of how this well-established relationship was sustained even after the Assad regime embroiled itself in a civil war.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These established structures of military cooperation provided the basis for the Russian effort to support its Syrian ally and sustain its influence in the Middle East since 2011. The large deliveries of Russian arms and equipment have been usually designed to sustain the power of a Syrian military reeling from the mass desertion of Sunni conscripts and officers. In a similar fashion, intelligence cooperation between Moscow and Damascus has run through established institutional relationships between the GRU and the gaggle of intelligence agencies that Hafez al Assad, Bashar's father and predecessor, established in the 1970s to cement his control over Syria and influence in Lebanon. Without any alternative institutions or social movements through which it can project its power in the Levant, the Kremlin is completely dependent on these links with the pre-2011 Syrian military and intelligence establishment to sustain its position in the Middle East. Even if Bashar al Assad were to survive in some capacity, the final crumbling of the Syrian army and intelligence services into just one group of militias among many would severely limit the ability of the Kremlin to influence outcomes in any grand bargain over the future of the Middle East between the EU, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Iran. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Moreover, while Vladimir Putin may be dependent on the old pre-2011 establishment to keep his place at the Middle Eastern diplomatic table, the Iranian government has pursued a course in Syria that provides it with options in case Assad falls. Rather than relying on established institutions, by setting up a new institutional framework around the NDF network of militias coordinated by Hezbollah, Tehran ensured that it would have an extensive range of proxies around Damascus, Homs and Latakia to protect its interests in any post-Assad settlement. At times Tehran's focus on strengthening the NDF has run completely counter to the Kremlin's attempts to rebuild the SAA, with pro-Assad militias pressuring the leadership into diverting Russian arms deliveries to their fighters rather than an increasingly fragile army. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even in a future peace settlement, the integration of NDF militias alongside rebel armies such as Jaish al Fatah can enable Iran to retain significant influence in Syria through a new security framework that would see a reduced role for exactly those pre-2011 elites on which Russia relies so heavily. While many commentators have viewed the Russian surge as a sign of a solidifying alliance between Russia and Iran, it is in fact the product of a situation in which Tehran has gradually expanded its diplomatic and military flexibility in Syria through means that have severely narrowed Moscow's own freedom of action. Such a growing divergence of interests in the Levant indicates that the high point of cooperation between both sides has been reached and that a more fraught period in Russian-Iranian relations may lie before us. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a result of both recent major shifts on the battlefield and deeper structural factors, it seems the Kremlin had decided that to "go home" it has to "go big" first. A Russian surge based on an extensive train and equip programme for the SAA would rebuild a Syrian military primarily dependent on Moscow that can balance the power of Hezbollah and NDF forces loyal to Tehran. In its ideal scenario, the Kremlin presumably believes that through a revival of the pre-2011 Syrian security infrastructure it can entrench its position in the Levant, help defeat IS and play a primary role in shaping the development of a post-Assad order. Without this direct influence, it is doubtful whether the remaining diplomatic tools at Moscow's disposal such as its seat at the UN Security Council would be enough to provide it with the leverage to remain a major player outside Europe and Central Asia. In this context, while <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/daily-vertical-putin-changes-the-subject/27234995.html" target="_blank">Brian Whitmore</a> is right in pointing how the Russian surge is part of wider diplomatic strategy to encourage the West into considering a second "reset" in relations with Russia, the emerging train and equip programme for the SAA is the central pillar to this last ditch Kremlin attempt to restore its great power status rather than an afterthought.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No doubt Vladimir Putin and his allies in Russia's elites have convinced themselves that they have the military means to restore the SAA and even make a major contribution to defeating both IS and Syrian rebel armies. But to any observer of both Russia and the Syrian civil war outside the Kremlin information bubble, this strategy seems loaded with borderline-insane levels of risk. Following a string of defeats on all fronts against Syrian rebel armies, IS and on a more covert level the Kurdish YPG, it is increasingly apparent that Assad's Syrian army is closely approaching the point of no return. At the same time, there are signs that Iran is using its influence over the NDF to prepare for a post-Assad future in which any preservation of the Kremlin's influence is at best a secondary concern. Just as the British and Americans faced pressures to escalate their involvement further in Iraq or Afghanistan every time local security forces proved unable to hold on, in a few months the Kremlin may be confronted with the same dilemmas it faces now over deepening involvement or abandoning the SAA. Yet the introduction of further Russian troops into Syria risks bringing the moment closer when Russian families start asking why their husbands and sons are dying in Qardaha or Homs, compounding a domestic crisis from which Vladimir Putin is so desperately trying to escape.</span><br />
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-79223533028778644532015-08-20T04:18:00.003-07:002015-09-09T16:12:10.434-07:00Sanctuaries Burning: The Impact of Anti-Refugee Activism on German Politics <div style="background-color: white;">
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<span style="color: #222222;">A little more than ten months ago the streets of Dresden saw the first demonstration by the Pegida movement. Initially Pegida, short for <i>Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes</i>, mobilised only a few hundred participants in response to clashes </span></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">over the Battle of Kobane</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> in German cities between Kurdish activists and jihadi sympathizers. For Pegida's organizers, these disturbances symbolized the German government's inability to keep Islamists out of Germany and migrants under control. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">To the surprise of many, perhaps even the Pegida organizers themselves, by October 2014 tens of thousands of demonstrators were taking part in weekly marches directed against the so-called Islamicisation of Europe, mass migration as well as political or media elites many participants believed were directly enabling such perceived threats to German identity. While civil society and local politicians in Saxony were slow to respond for specific regional reasons I have outlined <a href="http://markets.ft.com/research/markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IB.1:IEU" target="_blank">elsewhere</a>, attempts to organise Pegida demonstrations in other German cities they were swiftly confronted by larger numbers of counter-demonstrators opposed to what they considered to be a revival of the worst excesses of the 1990s radical right. With such initiatives in support of diversity enjoying the backing of the main political parties and mobilizing significant numbers not only across the country but even in Leipzig, Saxony's other major city, by March 2015 the Pegida protests seemed to lose momentum. Within months a steep decline in numbers taking part even in Pegida's core events in Dresden raised hopes that the islamophobic and anti-migrant agendas this movement represented were not going to have a transformative effect on the German political system.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">Yet while the Pegida demonstrations have largely disappeared from the scene, six months later a continuing wave of street <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-unnerved-by-scores-of-xenophobic-attacks-against-refugees/2015/08/16/eada9284-3fb1-11e5-b2c4-af4c6183b8b4_story.html" target="_blank">violence </a>and <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/21/us-germany-asylum-arson-idUSKCN0PV1QS20150721" target="_blank">arson attacks</a> directed at migrants and refugee accommodation indicates that this movement emboldened many who feel threatened by mass immigration and cultural diversity. Though the vigorous response of civil society and some politicians in the Green Party, SPD and CDU halted the momentum of the Pegida protests, the sense that they gave expression to widespread discontent with immigrants as well as political elites has given many in the radical right the feeling that they can now challenge the constitutional order of the Federal Republic through direct action. </span><span style="color: #222222;">For the newly founded Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), association with Pegida helped national conservatives within a party unsure of its ideological direction to recruit more right wing members and to force out any remaining economic liberals. </span><span style="color: #222222;">That leading conservatives in the CDU and the CSU often picked up on such Islamophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric to prevent their voters from shifting to the AfD only further opened a space for the radical right. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">In the years preceding the Pegida protests, social trends seemed to point against the re-emergence of this kind of vicious circle. As the massive migration surge triggered by the collapse of Yugoslavia and the USSR waned in the mid-1990s and more people of migrant origin became German citizens, centre-left and centre-right politicians largely distanced themselves from anti-migrant populism. The bombings and shootings committed by small networks of neo-Nazi terrorists such as the NSU were taken to be a sign of the isolation of an extreme right unable to mobilise large numbers of people rather than its resurgence. Yet crude islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment never disappeared among a sizeable number of voters in the Federal Republic. Crucially, however, the disastrous lack of coordinated resistance against the Pegida movement by local political elites in Saxony created an environment in which such attitudes managed to regain a sheen of respectability. Suddenly</span><span style="color: #222222;">, obscure local figures on the radical right realised that they could gain national notoriety with escalatory rhetoric that often tacitly encouraged individuals to use force against migrants and refugees or anyone willing to help them settle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222;">As a consequence it seems unlikely that a surge of localized protest against refugee housing across Germany will abate any time soon. These protests are often accompanied by violence against migrants as well as volunteers, police and public servants responsible for their protection. In towns such as Saxony's <a href="http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2015-07/freital-buergerversammlung-tumulte" target="_blank">Freital</a>, leading figures from various Pegida splinter groups are now involved in agitating against refugee housing in ways that have focussed the anger of right wing demonstrators as much at local politicians and civil society activists as refugees. It is now clear that despite its implosion, the </span><span style="color: #222222;">Pegida movement enabled more radical elements to connect with one another directly or online. This network effect means that what would once have been minor local protests against refugee accommodation now quickly attract right wing activists from other cities or regions to the latest flashpoint. </span><span style="color: #222222;">These campaigns have also seen ever greater cooperation between figures who relentlessly support the Kremlin's anti-Western stance, many of whom like the editor of Compact magazine, <a href="http://www.tagesspiegel.de/medien/juergen-elsaesser-und-sein-compact-magazin-ein-netzwerk-fuer-putin-und-pegida/12194382.html" target="_blank">Jürgen Elsässer</a>, were once part of the pro-Soviet Left, and radical right groups who often still claim that Slavs are racially inferior</span><span style="color: #222222; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">The response of German police and intelligence services to this growing threat is hampered by the way the structures of such radical right networks have evolved. Unlike the more hierarchically structured neo-Nazi groups in the early 1990s, radical right networks now tend to be organized in a networked fashion through social media without any clear central leadership. This means that many attacks on migrants, civil society or representatives of the state are the result of local disgruntled individuals or groupuscules that are difficult to track. As with similar trends in jihadi milieus, it is becoming more difficult for the security services to penetrate and anticipate where the next radical right attack or destabilizing local protest may take place. </span><span style="color: #222222;">For many who in the early 1990s witnessed how anti-migrant populism from mainstream politicians helped tri</span><span style="color: #222222;">gger the anti-foreigner pogroms of Hoyerswerda, Solingen and Rostock and many similar incidents, these are all disturbing signs. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">Yet this is not just about social struggles over repeated waves of mass migration. Rather, the post-1989 radical right has always portrayed mass migration as a symptom of what it considers to be a wider attack by the German state and its Western allies on <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14782800600892291#.VdWwsvl_Oko" target="_blank">"traditional Germanic culture"</a>. </span><span style="color: #222222;">In this context, representatives of established political parties, which accept or at least are willing to discuss immigration reform and the acceptance of refugees are presented by the radical right as <a href="https://archive.org/stream/Friedman-Michel-Interview-mit-Horst-Mahler-und-Sylvia-Stolz/FriedmanMichel-InterviewMitHorstMahlerUndSylviaStolz200789S.Text_djvu.txt" target="_blank">"un-German"</a> in accepting greater diversity. </span><span style="color: #222222;">It is therefore no coincidence that communities in which the radical right has stoked tension over migration hav</span><span style="color: #222222;">e also seen growing attacks on civil society activists, more mainstream politicians and representatives of the state. </span><span style="color: #222222;">Some of the most prominent cases, such as a <a href="http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-07/achsen-sprengstoff-anschlag-auto-michael-richter" target="_blank">bomb attack</a> on a Die Linke city councillor in Freital or the burning down of a barn owned by civil society <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/polizei-vermutet-brandstiftung-in-jamel-13748340.html" target="_blank">activists</a> in Mecklenburg Vorpommern already hark back to the relentless campaigns of intimidation in the 1990s by radical right groups who hoped to create what they called "National Liberated Zones" (<a href="http://www.verfassungsschutz.brandenburg.de/media_fast/4055/national_befreite_zonen.pdf" target="_blank">National Befreite Zonen</a>). That a decade later members of the NSU terror group gunned down police officers as well as migrants fits into this underlying ideological pattern. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #222222;">The strength of civil society as well as the fact that there are now more politicians and media organizations willing to protect diversity despite the populism of certain tabloids and parts of the CDU/CSU, indicate that the current surge of activity by the radical right won't lead to a broader shift in social attitudes towards migration among most Germans. Of course many people will remain fearful of migration, but they will largely try to communicate their concerns through established civic institutions. Yet small emboldened minorities can still do a lot of damage to community relations and cause security services a lot of trouble. Once again it seems that certain members of the political establishment have forgotten that such radical networks are as much a threat to them as they are to every new migrant and refugee seeking sanctuary in the Federal Republic of Germany.</span></span><br />
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-36244130293150446672015-05-20T18:22:00.000-07:002017-11-21T10:26:36.053-08:00Putinism's Middle East Echoes - Part 3: Post-Putinism and Ali Abdullah Saleh's War of Revenge<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Post-Putinism and Ali Abdullah Saleh's War of Revenge</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A few weeks after the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, odd reports emerged concerning the seeming disappearance of Vladimir Putin. On 5 March, rumours in Moscow about the lack of any sightings of Russia's President began to be picked up by journalists and on social media. In the following days, a wave of speculation attracted the attention of the wider media. From outlandish theories over the birth of a son to mutterings that a coup d'etat may be imminent, the botched and chaotic handling of Putin's vanishing act by his public relations team reinforced the perception that a power battle was taking place within the Kremlin. Though Putin's resurfacing on March 16 helped to dampen such speculation, the barely suppressed panic his absence had caused among Moscow as well as regional elites has added considerable momentum to a wider debate over what might happen if he was permanently removed from the scene. Though the Kremlin swiftly shifted to business as usual upon Putin's return, the way in which his absence has concentrated minds about the manner and consequences of his fall may be the most damaging legacy this episode has left for his regime.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of the most interesting aspects of the debate about how Putin may fall is what most analysts assume will not happen. A general consensus has taken hold among Russia scholars that the Kremlin, for all its obsession with 'color revolutions', is not likely to be brought down through mass protest. While there are some milieus in Moscow and St. Petersburg that may be willing to protest, <a href="https://moscowonthames.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/all-fall-down/#more-270" target="_blank">Sam Greene</a> and other analysts have concluded that they simply don't have the numbers to overwhelm the massive security presence the regime has built up in Russia's two dominant urban centres. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though economic protest may take a political turn in key regions such as Kaliningrad, Karelia or perhaps even Tatarstan if the Kremlin botches its response, it is difficult to see how such local demonstrations could reach a national scale, particularly if the regime accuses regional activists of <a href="http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/patrushev-says-helsinki-stirring-up.html" target="_blank">separatism</a>. Other possibilities such as a violent military coup were also <a href="https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/no-coups-today/" target="_blank">dismissed</a>, with Russia watchers setting out how difficult it would be for officers outside the Kremlin inner circle to conspire before being stopped by the FSB. Though the proliferation of armed nationalist groups and the influence of Chechen units in Moscow is likely to become a deepening source of instability, they do not have the capacity or necessarily even the will to attempt to bring down the regime without powerful allies within the highest levels of government. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As these other options were dismissed, many prominent Russia watchers such as <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/podcast-three-weeks-that-shook-the-kremlin/26912136.html" target="_blank">Mark Galeotti</a>, <a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/opinion/article/putin-must-change-direction-or-face-a-coup/512204.html" target="_blank">Vladimir Ryzhkov</a> or <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/03/17/has-russias-agony-begun/" target="_blank">Lilia Shevtsova</a> set out what they believed to be the most likely scenario for Putin's eventual fall. Often described as the 'soft coup' or 'Khruschev option', this is presented as a potential moment of elite consensus where all key figures within the leadership come to the conclusion that Vladimir Putin is no longer able to safeguard the survival of the status quo and their position within it. As with the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in August 1964, key figures would move swiftly to remove the current President's access to the levers of power before replacing him with a more pliant successor who could both stabilise relations with Ukraine and the West (hopefully on Russia's terms), while also ensuring that any necessary reforms did not impinge on the power base of each of the key Kremlin factions. While popular protest over economic matters, a military quagmire in the Donbass and a severe economic recession may all contribute to this scenario, ultimately this would be a meeting of grey men in grey suits ensuring the peaceful removal of the president as part of a wider drive to stabilise the regime rather than to replace it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The popularity of this scenario among so many perceptive observers of Russian affairs is based on a notion that it is rooted in regime practice in recent Russian and Soviet history. The removals of Nikita Khrushchev and Boris Yeltsin are used as precedents, where a similar confluence of internal and external crises (which in the Khrushchev case included an <a href="https://libcom.org/library/1962-novocherkassk-tragedy" target="_blank">uprising </a>in the regions) led key decision makers to come together and force the figure at the apex of the Soviet or Russian power vertical to leave without putting up a fight. The way in which these historical examples played out has fostered the assumption that the path to Post-Putinism would be similar, in that a figure that dominates the Russian state would be forced to quietly bow out and watch as his subordinates openly disavow significant parts of his political agenda.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">If one considers how Russia under Putin has evolved away from the industrial structures of its Twentieth century and towards a patrimonial social framework closer to that of contemporary Middle Eastern regimes, then these assumptions become decidedly problematic. The manner in which the crisis of the modernization project of High Putinism flowed into the fragmentation of power and state paranoia of Late Putinism parallels developments in Egypt and Pakistan has been outlined in the two previous posts in this series. Yet in both cases the culmination of these crises played out in the aftermath of the sudden death of the central figure within both regimes, an outcome that is less likely in Russia. In Egypt, the death of Nasser in 1969 gave his successor, Anwar Sadat, an opportunity to reorient the regime through a so-called de-Nasserization programme. In Pakistan, the rather suspicious death of Zia ul Haq in a plane crash in 1988 enabled the return of elite pluralism with the political comeback of the Bhutto family, a form of resurgence of former opposition groups which may take considerably more time in the Russian context.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There is, however, one example in the Greater Middle East of an attempted peaceful removal of an authoritarian leader steeped in the use of disinformation and hybrid tactics that should attract the attention of Russia watchers. Along with Putin's disappearance, March 2015 saw another major geopolitical surprise with the Saudi bombing campaign against the Yemeni Houthi movement and troops loyal to its ally former President Ali Abdullah Saleh. This external intervention was the culmination of developments in Yemen that have interesting parallels to the proliferation of crises that may face the Putin regime over the next few years. It is not just that Saleh's <a href="http://www.france24.com/en/20120228-can-yemen-new-president-dance-heads-snakes-hadi-saleh-handover" target="_blank">quip </a>that "ruling Yemen is like dancing on the heads of snakes" is also a pretty apt description of the challenges Putin faces in sustaining control over contemporary Russian politics. The slow collapse of the Yemeni state in the final years of Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule and his current campaign against all those who expedited his peaceful removal indicates that an authoritarian leader removed from power in a soft coup can remain in a position to sabotage his successors. While the language with which Yemeni and Russian society are described may differ enormously, below the surface many of the dynamics that led to Saleh's war of revenge can also be found in Late Putinism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Ali Abdullah Saleh provides his own take own take on the origins of the 'Arab Spring</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though it is difficult to imagine now, there was a time when Saleh was seen as a figure who could guarantee the unity and stability of an impoverished and fractious society. His early military career took shape in an environment marked by civil war and political turmoil. In the late 1950s a Republican revolt failed to dislodge the Imamate, a quasi-monarchical hereditary autocracy backed by Saudi Arabia. An Egyptian military intervention ordered by Nasser to support the Republican side quickly followed, leading to a long civil war that only ended after Cairo withdrew its forces in 1967 and the Saudis abandoned their support of the Imam in 1970. Having largely fought on the Republican side of the conflict, Saleh emerged as a young but experienced officer with a reputation for getting things done in the newly consolidated Yemen Arab Republic. As older officers became enmeshed in factional infighting, Saleh slowly built complex tribal alliances with established regional clan leaders while presenting himself to the wider world as a modernizing leader in the Nasser tradition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Thus, when his predecessor, North Yemen President Ahmed Hussein Al-Ghashmi was assassinated in 1978, Saleh was ideally positioned to gather support both from traditional leaders with strong links to Saudi Arabia as well as American and European diplomats who saw opportunities in a reformed and modernized North Yemen. In the ensuing decade, Saleh was able to entrench his power network to the extent that when financial pressures led to the unification of North Yemen with the neighbouring People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1990, he was in a position to maintain strong influence over all levels of government despite sharing power with Southern leaders. Though the breakdown of this agreement ultimately led to civil war in 1994, Saleh’s dominance in the North enabled him to mobilise a coalition of forces that pulverised a divided Southern leadership in Aden,. The successful suppression of the Southern elite ensured that tribes and interest groups allied to Saleh would benefit from Yemen’s newly found oil wealth. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet it was the manner in which Saleh secured this dominance which sowed the seeds for his downfall and war of revenge two decades later. Rather than relying on a brittle military, Saleh used semi-feudal tribal levies as well as jihadi veterans of the Afghanistan War as shock troops. In the final assault on Aden, the Southern capital, Saleh deployed hybrid tactics that would have been familiar to Pakistani or Russian leaders. After the sacking of Aden and other Southern cities, Saleh's Northern jihadi and tribal supporters were rewarded with property and businesses expropriated from those that had lost out in the conquered territories. While this secured their loyalty in the short term, it enabled senior Northern tribal leaders such as the Ahmar clan to expand their personal power bases, while, as <a href="http://carnegieendowment.org/files/yemen_south_movement.pdf" target="_blank">Stephen Day</a> has indicated, alienating a large proportion of the Southern population in the process.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Moreover, the Saudi-backed jihadi networks Saleh invited in to help seize Aden slowly expanded their reach in an increasingly destabilizing fashion, as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Refuge-al-Qaeda-Americas/dp/0393349977" target="_blank">Gregory Johnsen</a> has explored in great detail. Some turned on the Saleh regime and merged with Al Qaeda by the early 2000s, attracting the unwanted attention of the United States and its expanding drone assassination operations. As corrosive was the aggressive missionizing of former Sunni jihadis who remained loyal to Saleh. By challenging the established social order in Northern provinces such as Saada, the aggressive approach taken by radical Salafists and former jihadis provoked an uprising by a Zaidi Shia traditionalist movement led by Hussein al-Houthi, which went to war several times with the Yemeni state between 2004 and 2011.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">By relying on non-state actors to secure his position in 1994 and retain control in the ensuing two decades, as <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00396338.2011.555605" target="_blank">Sarah Phillips</a> indicated even before the mass protests of 2011, Saleh ultimately created the foundations for his own downfall. With his claims to be an agent of modernization a long distant memory, by the time the first Arab Spring protests gained momentum in Sanaa and became intermingled with separatist resentments in Aden the state institutions which Saleh needed to either satisfy the demands of protesters or quash them through swift action had been hollowed out. With military and police units loyal to individual commanders connected to tribal networks, Saleh again was reduced to calling in the help of tribal allies to keep control. The very corruption based on oil revenue and foreign aid which fuelled the 2011 protests thus remained essential to Saleh's hold on power. Without these cash transfers his remaining allies were likely to join the clans and officers that had already defected. His temporary removal from the scene to a Riyadh hospital after barely surviving a bomb attack on 3 June 2011 was enough to convince his allies that a deal was needed to force his resignation and end the state paralysis that was undermining whatever stability remained in Yemen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Thus followed the kind of peaceful removal of an authoritarian leader that matches scenario many Russia watchers would assume would play out in the final days of the Putin regime. Concerned that tension between Saleh and senior figures that had abandoned the regime such as General Mohsen Ali and the head of the Ahmar tribal confederation could escalate into a civil war, external powers such as the Saudis, the US and the UN worked together with local elites to ensure a peaceful handover of power. Despite such foreign mediation, Saleh's peaceful removal from power had the hallmarks of an elite coup. Once core regime loyalists within the General People's Congress (GPC), his personal political party, began negotiating with senior protest leaders and the powerful Muslim Brotherhood-oriented Islah Party, as <a href="http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_yemens_transitional_road_map_to_chaos" target="_blank">Adam Baron</a> and <a href="http://ioc.sagepub.com/content/42/3/114.short" target="_blank">Iona Craig</a> observed there were clear signs of an elite consensus that his resignation was overdue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In order to prevent the Northern Houthi movement and Southern separatists taking advantage of the situation, a so-called 'National Dialogue' was put in place which was to act as a form of constitutional convention to modernize and democratize the Yemeni state. Not coincidentally, this was to go hand in hand with an extensive restructuring and re-equipping of the Yemeni Army to enable it to suppress Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and wrest restore the state's monopoly of violence over such political actors as the Houthis, tribal networks or the Hirak separatists. While Saleh resigned with as good grace as he could muster, he was promised immunity and his supporters were able to retain positions within the military and state bureaucracy. In order to secure the political transition, a former Southern ally of Saleh's, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi was allowed to stand for president unopposed to ensure the stable functioning of government as changes were slowly put in place. By the spring of 2012, as American and European leaders touted the 'Yemen Model' as an example of successful political transition in the Middle East, Saleh seemed to be settling in to a comfortable retirement in his Sanaa villa.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Minus the foreign involvement (though China could take a direct interest), this easing out of Saleh by members of his own power vertical comes close to the elite coup model that many Russia scholars see as the only way in which Vladimir Putin's rule could be ended relatively smoothly. Just as Saleh's GPC core reached out to military defectors, tribal leaders, and protest coordinators, Kremlin loyalists could work with disaffected members of the elite, alienated regional leaders and prominent members of the opposition to arrange a stage-managed removal of Putin in a way that does not threaten the core interests of those involved. Putin's fate would be determined by the willingness of his supporters to arrange a meeting in the Kremlin where he would be clearly told that his time is up before being sent to enjoy quiet retirement under intense surveillance. In that context, the 'Yemen Model' touted by Western officials was often presented as a format that could be used to manage transition processes in other parts of the world. As late as January 2014, the US State Department was promoting the political process in Yemen as a success as other aspects of the Obama team's foreign policy approach came under pressure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A year later the situation looks very different. Once the Hadi government failed to come to grips with a growing lack of security and botched reforms of petrol subsidies, the Houthi movement took the opportunity to use mass protests to attack pro-government militias and seize control of Sanaa by October 2014. In the ensuing months, the Houthis gradually forced members of the political elite loyal to Hadi to flee Northern Yemen and by late February 2015 had launched an offensive on the main Southern centres of Taiz and Aden, leaving the National Dialogue process in tatters. Building on initially tenuous links with the Tehran, the Houthis did their best to court Iranian support for their increasingly open takeover of the Yemeni state.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet as the country drifted into chaos, what took observers most by surprise is how GPC factions and elements within the security services loyal to Saleh played an active role in aiding the Houthis to seize strategic targets. Once bitter rivals now collaborated in systematically eliminating shared opponents and courting an Iranian government interested in causing trouble for Saudi Arabia in a neighbouring state. This improbable Saleh/Houthi partnership culminated with the continuing assault on Aden that ultimately triggered a Saudi military intervention driven by fear of growing Iranian influence in Yemen. As Saudi jets hammer Sanaa and Houthi artillery pounds Aden, Saleh has tried to reposition himself as a major player in a way that those that had arranged his removal from power would have thought unimaginable in 2012.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As we watch Saleh hold rousing patriotic speeches to his supporters in front of his bombed out residence and try to manoeuvre his family back into contention on the international stage, it is worth pondering what lessons his war of revenge may teach us about any effort by Russian elites to quietly topple Vladimir Putin. For Saleh's bloody comeback has been enabled by the kind of hollowing out of state cohesion and the use of non-state actors to achieve strategic goals that have been a hallmark of Putin's survival strategy since the Bolotnaya protests. While the internationally backed deal within Yemen's elite around the National Dialogue process helped remove Saleh from power, as <a href="http://carnegie-mec.org/2015/05/06/gulf-s-failure-in-yemen/i8ar" target="_blank">Farea al-Muslimi</a> warned, neither Hadi nor his allies were in a strong enough position to remove the many officers and officials in the security services loyal to the old regime. Deep rivalries between Yemeni military units and security agencies meant that those that had turned on Saleh were often more distracted with bureaucratic turf battles than keeping an eye on what the Saleh clan were getting up to. Saleh's extensive arming of non-state tribal and jihadist allies as well as the militarization of his Houthi and Southern opponents meant that it he could find enough potential allies throughout Yemen who he could work with to undermine the stability of a state no longer under his control.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The sudden successes of Al Qaeda affiliates in Hadhramaut province in 2012, weeks after Saleh had been forced to resign, were in retrospect a clear indication not only of state weakness but also of active attempts by officers unhappy with the new order to undermine any attempt to entrench a post-Saleh power structure. Despite their long standing rivalry with his own patronage network, Saleh found in the Houthis a well-armed and highly motivated movement equally disatisfied with the National Dialogue and willing to do anything to disrupt it. Thus while the West and the GCC promoted the 'Yemen model' and Sanaa elites wrangled over the constitutional details, the Houthis began their direct assault on a fragile Yemeni state while Saleh's allies quietly undermined it from within. Yet rather than achieving a shared swift victory and a new division of spoils, from September 2014 onwards each move by this Saleh/Houthi alliance to consolidate power only fractured the country further into warring fiefdoms and set the stage for a Saudi military intervention whose relentlessness few had anticipated.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Die-hard Saleh supporters denounce Saudi airstrikes, 10 May 2015</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Just as Saleh was able to build on a network of supporters within state institutions and armed non-state actors, any newly reconstituted Kremlin elite would have to contend with Putin loyalists in the security services as well as militarized social milieus that may not take kindly to any attempt to change course. As we have seen in the previous post exploring legacy of High Putinism, the personalized nature of Putin's control of the Russian state is likely to make it extremely difficult for any of his successors to rein in institutions seeking to regain their autonomy. If Putin is ushered off the scene in a way that permanently isolates him from those still loyal to him within federal and regional institutions, then it might be possible for a new president to reassert central control over time. Yet any elite coup which simply removes Putin from power without rooting out his underlying support network provides him with opportunities to sabotage any post-Putinist settlement. Even if Putin were to lose his life in any Kremlin turmoil, there is a strong likelihood that many unhappy with a new order would take up the standard of Putinism in a counter-offensive against a new power vertical. Unlike Khrushchev, it is highly unlikely that Putin will simply sit quietly in his dacha writing bitter memoirs out of loyalty to an overarching institution like the Soviet-era Communist Party. Rather, the likelihood is greater that he, like Saleh, would work with any allies he could find to reassert his political influence and demonstrate that without his consent Russia cannot remain stable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In this context, the proliferation of armed non-state actors that has become a characteristic of Late Putinism would provide Putin with opportunities for revenge against his opponents which Khrushchev simply had no access to. Just as Saleh could make deals with armed tribal networks and even former enemies in the Houthi movement who disapproved of Yemen's new political course, Putin can work with pseudo-Cossack groups, Chechen units under Ramzan Kadyrov's control, nationalist militias in Donbass, organized crime and discontented regional leaders who have the means with which to disrupt the state's monopoly of violence. Unless any successor is willing to engage in ruthless purges that in themselves could destabilize the state, Putin loyalists within the security apparatus and key ministries would be likely to find opportunities to paralyse the state's response to any armed opposition and discredit its new leadership in the eyes of the wider Russian public. In any post-Putinism scenario, a deposed leader who has relied so heavily on hybrid tactics to secure his position when in power is unlikely to abandon them when seeking revenge against his successors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As an example of how an attempt to remove an entrenched leader can go disastrously wrong, the resilience of Ali Abdullah Saleh should give Russia watchers pause for thought. The widespread consensus that an elite coup could head off popular discontent without destabilizing the Kremlin's power structure presupposes the kind of institutional stability Soviet leaders could count on when they plotted against Nikita Khrushchev. Yet as we have seen in this and the previous two posts in this series, key aspects of the contemporary Russian state bare a greater structural resemblance to certain societies in the Greater Middle East than to the institutional framework of the Soviet Union. In a context in which the loyalty of semi-autonomous bureaucracies and regional barons is defined through their relationship to a specific leader and a proliferation of armed groups erode the state's monopoly of violence, a quick recalibration of the power vertical after Putin's fall seems unlikely. Even in such an initially benign scenario, the risks would remain high that a vengeful former Vozhd would rather bring down the state than see allies who had betrayed him prosper after a successful transition. The disastrous consequences of such an act of revenge by a deposed authoritarian leader are there for all to see in the bombed out streets of Aden and Sanaa.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Any historian using comparative methods to explore a contemporary political debate needs to acknowledge the limitations of this approach. For all the structural parallels that may exist between societies that are the subject of analysis, important differences in economic, political and cultural development that need to be kept in mind. There are therefore a number of important caveats when trying to establish what lessons can be learned from the contemporary history of the Greater Middle East when it comes to developing insights into the possible paths Russia may take.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When looking at the remarkable parallels between the highly personalized nature of the Egyptian political system that emerged under Gamal Abdel Nasser and the High Putinist era between 2000 and 2012, then key differences in economic structure also become apparent. The challenges the Kremlin faces in managing post-industrial decline and a rentier economy based on oil prices are very different from those Nasserist economic planners had to cope with when trying to industrialize a post-colonial economy heavily dependent on agriculture and cotton production. The major differences in economic development between 1990s Russia and 1950s Egypt meant that in certain key policy areas Putin and Nasser opted for very different ways of managing their relationships with business and regional elites.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The similar ways in which Vladimir Putin and Muhammad Zia ul Haq used hybrid tactics to pursue internal and external political strategies make the trajectory of Pakistani politics after 1988 an interesting case study for those trying to establish what the historical legacy of Late Putinism may become. Yet Zia himself was the product of military and religious traditions very different from those of the entrepreneurial security circles to which Putin belongs. As Shuja Nawaz has explored, Zia's formative years serving in the British Empire's Indian Army and within the Pakistani military meant that his contact with the world outside the officer corps remained limited. However much it also served his strategic goals, Zia's emphasis on the Islamicization of Pakistani society stemmed from a deep sense of personal faith. In particular, Zia always kept his distance from a business elite with which he did not feel culturally at ease. By contrast, Putin's rise began in a St Petersburg mayor's office in which former intelligence operatives, businessmen and gangsters mixed easily in the pursuit of profit. Moreover, for all the noisiness of Putin's apparent devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church, it remains as yet unclear whether this is a result of any deeply held religious beliefs or out of purely tactical considerations. These differences in outlook and leadership style need to be taken into account when one looks at the parallels between the legacies of the Zia and Putin regimes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With all the useful analogies one can draw between the circumstances that brought down Ali Abdullah Saleh and those that may lead to Vladimir Putin's fall, one of course needs to remain conscious of the major differences in the international position of their respective countries. As a resource poor state surrounded by wealthier and more militarily powerful neighbours, Yemen has regularly suffered from covert meddling and open armed interventions that have had a deeply disruptive effect. During his long period in power, Saleh has had to balance the competing demands of the Saudis, the Americans, the Europeans and Iran, who each have tried to influence Yemeni politics in ways that benefited their own economic or strategic interests. By contrast, despite the Kremlin's constant warnings about foreign meddling in Russian affairs, as the leader of a nuclear armed former superpower Putin has military, media and financial resources to assert his power on the international stage that Saleh can only dream of. As a result, the impact rival states have on Putin's political calculations are very different to the kind of external pressures faced by Saleh and his current Houthi partners.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet for all these important differences between contemporary Russia and states in the Greater Middle East, the structural parallels between these societies are far greater than those between the Putin regime and its Soviet or Tsarist predecessors. The personalized style of Putin's power vertical is far removed from the way in which even under Brezhnev, the Communist Party created an institutional and ideological framework that limited the freedom of action of rival factions within the Kremlin. Moreover, by the mid-nineteenth century, the legitimacy of Tsarist autocracy was anchored on a centuries old dynastic myth of which the fifteen year old Putin regime can only dream of. Yet a power vertical based on mutual dependencies between a corrupted leadership and state, business or regional elites that relies on a proliferation of armed non-state actors is a combination you can find both in Russia and states in the Greater Middle East. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That does not mean that Russia will inevitably suffer the various forms of societal breakdown we are witnessing today in Egypt, Pakistan or Yemen. Rather, a clearer understanding of how these societies drifted into a state of near permanent crisis would help scholars and policy makers to develop insights that can help prevent similar outcomes in the Russian Federation. The highly personalized nature of Nasser's regime ultimately eroded institutional mechanisms a central executive needs to hold strong state bureaucracies in check. Those in Russia trying to restore an institutional framework not dependent on a specific individual could draw key lessons about how such a process can go awry from recent developments in Egypt. Any post-Putin government struggling to restore the state monopoly of violence in the face of armed non-state actors could do well to examine the ongoing struggle in Pakistan to overcome the social damage caused by hybrid warfare. And perhaps most importantly, the dire consequences of the inability of a new Yemeni leadership in 2012 to uproot the power network of a former dictator may provide some indications of the tough decisions Russian politicians and civil society leaders may have to make in the immediate aftermath of any form of elite coup.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Over the past seventy years there has been a long history of political interaction and cultural exchange between Russia and the societies of the Greater Middle East. How these links between Moscow, Cairo, Islamabad and Sanaa may have contributed to the emerging structural parallels between Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union and several states in the region would be a very useful topic for further research. At the very least, it would move away from a focus on the Kremlin's evolving relationship with the West towards setting out how contemporary Russian politics may have been the product of a variety of different external cultural and economic influences. Future scholars may even uncover how commercial and political links built between Russian and Middle Eastern elites from the 1950s onwards played a role in shaping the conditions that made the Kremlin's current power vertical possible. In that case, perhaps the next edition of Roger Owen's excellent book <i><a href="http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/5307/new-texts-out-now_roger-owen-the-rise-and-fall-of-" target="_blank">The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life</a></i> may even end up with a chapter about a certain Vladimir Putin.</span></div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-32235882930618646382015-05-20T04:15:00.000-07:002017-11-21T10:19:47.003-08:00Putinism's Middle East Echoes - Part 2: Late Putinism and the Hybrid Dictatorship of Zia ul Haq<div style="text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gGfMwMy8HW4/WbqmW99gwnI/AAAAAAAADWk/LDWn9ejH7Ts9KgvbwlYrgJrTCjyq9dRRgCLcBGAs/s1600/OrtArmy.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="637" height="208" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gGfMwMy8HW4/WbqmW99gwnI/AAAAAAAADWk/LDWn9ejH7Ts9KgvbwlYrgJrTCjyq9dRRgCLcBGAs/s400/OrtArmy.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Members of the 'Russian Orthodox Army' prepare for Battle in Donetsk, 2014.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b>Late Putinism and the Hybrid Dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul Haq</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the aftermath of the seizure of Crimea by the Russian military, an old tactical concept gained an unprecedented degree of interest from a European public shocked by the sudden turn of events. Over the spring of 2014, European and Ukrainian media </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">suddenly</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">saw a proliferation of instant experts in hybrid warfare, the tactical approach by which the Putin regime paralysed Kyiv and its allies in order to seize territory with barely a shot fired. Using disinformation, allied local political activists, proxy militias and special forces to destabilize an opponent militarily while maintaining plausible deniability, hybrid warfare tactics proved very effective in destabilizing a vulnerable Ukrainian state already reeling from the political turmoil surrounding the fall of Victor Yanukovich. Prominent scholars with a background in Security Studies such as <a href="https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war/" target="_blank">Mark Galeotti</a> and <a href="https://www.iiss.org/en/publications/survival/sections/2014-4667/survival--global-politics-and-strategy-december-2014-january-2015-bf83/56-6-02-freedman-6983" target="_blank">Lawrence Freedman</a> pointed to how this campaign built on Russian and Soviet traditions of using hybrid tactics in such conflicts as the Afghan war, Chechnya or various interventions in Cold War Eastern Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What remains so problematic about much analysis of the Putin regime's use of hybrid tactics is that it tends to present this form of covert warfare as a particularly Russian approach to waging war. Yet most of the techniques that shocked Europe in the spring of 2014 would have seemed depressingly familiar to any observer of political conflict in the Greater Middle East. During the Lebanese Civil War the Assad regime, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Saddam Hussein, Israel and Saudi Arabia used variants of hybrid tactics to influence the course of events. In North Africa, Muammar Ghaddafi used infiltration, disinformation and proxy militias to try to gain control over Chad before eventually getting sucked into a conventional war in which the Libyan army performed miserably. In neighbouring Algeria, security services under the oversight of the notorious DRS used disinformation and other hybrid tactics to brutal effect to counter an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of all the states in the Greater Middle East, however, it is Pakistan that has used hybrid warfare most extensively against more powerful neighbours. Unresolved territorial disputes with India have repeatedly led to moments of high tension. With India's significant conventional and nuclear military advantages, from an early point the Pakistani security services became fixated on the use of hybrid tactics against stronger opponents to achieve strategic goals. Yet over time, the central role played by hybrid warfare in the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) and Pakistani Army's attempt to gain control over Kashmir and Afghanistan helped to undermine the internal stability of the Pakistani state itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Since partition and independence in 1947, Pakistan has remained heavily influenced by ideological trends from the Arab world. Despite the long-lasting theoretical debate about whether Pakistan belongs to what American military strategists call the Greater Middle East, deep relationships between Islamabad and key states in the region including Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have had a profound impact on the Pakistani state. Though Pakistan's alignment with the West and Saudi Arabia caused considerable friction with the Nasser regime, many of its key features including an emphasis on secular institutions, a strong social role for politically neutral Islamic institutions or a focus on a strong state role within the economy also defined Pakistani politics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the Egyptian state plunged into a period of acute instability after the 1967 war, the Pakistani political order that had been shaped by Jinnah in the independence period experienced a severe crisis after the loss of Bangladesh in 1971. As </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> the increasingly unpopular head of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">moved aggressively to suppress opponents in ways that threatened civil conflict, there were growing calls within elite circles for the military to intervene. Accusations of PPP vote rigging at a key election in 1977 proved to be the breaking point. Once opposition parties declared the Bhutto government illegitimate, the military under the leadership of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq had the pretext it needed to suspend the constitutional order and seize control of the state. Though he claimed that he would call elections months after the coup, Zia quickly consolidated his position and set about restoring state power. With the coup d'etat successfully completed on 5 April 1977, Zia was now faced with the challenge of legitimizing his rule and restoring support for state institutions many Pakistanis had come to see as incompetent and corrupt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the ensuing decade, the military and security service elite around Zia often pursued contradictory goals. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3_quwziioA" target="_blank">Ayesha Jalal</a>'s study of the Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Zia years outlines how tightening relationships between army and security service officials with senior members of the Pakistani business elite clashed with the anti-corruption agenda that had been used to justify military rule. While Zia himself worked strenuously to maintain an image of rectitude, the families of many of his loyalists within the security services benefited from his ascendancy in a noticeable fashion. Attempts to consolidate state power had to be balanced with backroom deals sealed with powerful regional elites who could help the military solidify political control in a way that confirmed its image as a guarantor of stability. Thus the Zia era saw an enormous increase of the central power of the military without significantly undermining the neo-feudal social order in the countryside or the incestuous business networks in the cities that had so hindered attempts to modernize and democratize the Pakistani state.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In foreign policy terms, the clique of generals and spooks around Zia was confronted with challenges that defied easy solutions. Though the Pakistani army still had greater prestige than other dysfunctional state institutions, its defeats at the hands of the Indian Army and Bangladeshi insurgents had weakened its levels of public support. Attempts to take the initiative in disputed border areas of the Kashmir or Punjab regions in the 1960s and 1970s ended in stalemate, as the Indian Army after was usually able to reinforce exposed positions and push Pakistani military units operating openly or covertly out of territory they had seized. The collapse of the Afghan monarchy in the early 1970s and the brittle Socialist regimes that ruled Kabul in the aftermath also caused the Pakistani military increasing difficulties. Struggling to maintain control, a new Afghan political elite aligned with the Soviet Union began back ethnic Pushtun irredentist claims on large swathes of Pakistani territory. Thus when the USSR intervened in Afghanistan with a large military contingent in 1979 to secure the survival of its local allies, the Zia regime saw itself confronted with both an ideological threat from Soviet Communism and an ethno-national threat from the Pushtun factions allied with Moscow.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As <a href="http://ambijat.wdfiles.com/local--files/admin:manage/weinbaum.pdf" target="_blank">Marvin Weinbaum</a> illustrated at the time, it was in this febrile atmosphere driven by internal instability and foreign policy challenges that Zia opted to deploy hybrid warfare tactics to secure the survival of his regime. Like Putin's shift to what could be called a Late Putinist paradigm, a crisis of legitimacy triggered by the convergence of internal instabilty with perceived external threats led to an extensive use of hybrid warfare as part of a wider ideological reorientation of the state. After the crisis of 2011, Putin abandoned an ostensible commitment to national modernization and deeper integration with the West for isolationist nationalism oriented around a revival of Russian Orthodox religious symbols. In a remarkably similar fashion, in the late 1970s Zia intensified state cooperation with radical Islamist groups whose influence until then had been balanced by more secular-oriented social milieus that dominated Bhutto's PPP. In both cases, what had been relatively politically marginal movements were not only empowered in order to provide a new ideological source of legitimacy, they became a key means through which hybrid warfare tactics were implemented to strengthen internal control and ward off external threats.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the Pakistani case the alliance between security services and radical Islamist movements played out on multiple levels. Internally, Zia and his allies within the Ministry of Interior placed a strong emphasis on the introduction of sharia courts and the strengthening of a Koran based legal system running in parallel to the established judiciary. This provided the regime with new tools of social control which enjoyed support among a large proportion of the population and bypassed more secular oriented milieus that remained suspicious of military rule. Not only did the Zia regime provide institutional backing for these Islamization campaigns, </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Zia used symbolic actions </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">such as the first declamation of Koranic verses before a leader's speech at the UN General Assembly </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">as a way of indicating to state elites that they needed to adjust to this new course</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">. As <a href="http://cprid.com/history/4-%20Aqil%20Shah,%20Democracy%20on%20Hold.pdf" target="_blank">Aqil Shah</a> has pointed out this internal use of Islamist movements also enabled the security services to apply pressure on opponents indirectly, providing a means with which the ISI or the police could feign neutrality while mobilizing the more religiously conservative elements of society against their opponents.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When it came to dealing with external challenges, Islamist movements organised proxy militias that could be deployed either against a secular Indian state or a Soviet-backed Afghan government in the name of the defence of Islam. While the Afghan revolt against a Socialist regime and the Soviet occupation that followed was driven by internal discontent, the ISI used links between theologically conservative groups dominated by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Pakistani Islamist organizations as the basis around which to build strong militia networks loyal to Islamabad. However much the United States tried to funnel support to Afghan militias with more of a nationalist or ethnic base, the CIA's dependence on the ISI's local contacts on the ground meant that the vast influx American aid fuelling the Afghan insurgency reinforced the strength of Islamist militias loyal to Pakistan. Moreover, with a growing number of volunteers joining Islamist Afghan militias or setting up groups of their own to fight the Soviets, the ISI's pivotal role enabled the Pakistani security services to strengthen links with conservative Arab regimes and jihadi networks.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the short term, engaging in these kinds of hybrid tactics enabled the ISI to achieve several goals. For all the religious and anti-Communist rhetoric used by Zia and the ISI in promoting their role in the Afghan war, their primary focus was on securing and extending the position of the Pakistani military. The use of Islamist organizations to build proxy militias in Afghanistan ensured that a US backed campaign to limit Soviet expansionism was dominated by groups loyal to Pakistan and ideologically averse to engaging in Afghan irredentist projects after the war had been won. With an in-built hostility to secular regimes, groups such as the Hekmatyar network would also be extremely unlikely to work with India, Pakistan's primary enemy. By supplying arms to multiple groups, Islamabad also did its best to prevent the rise of any united Afghan mujahideen command whose dominance could potentially threaten Pakistan's ability to use the 'strategic depth' of an alliance with Afghanistan in any battle against the Indian army. Heavy involvement in the importation and training of Arab foreign fighters also deepened links with political networks in key Arab states that could be used to promote Pakistani interests across the Greater Middle East.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As <a href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1711800/posts" target="_blank">Lawrence Wright</a> has illustrated, the involvement of Arab foreign fighters also finalised the shift within many of these recruitment networks in Pakistan and the Arab world from more moderate strands of Islamism towards out and out jihadi ideologies. Rather than putting a brake on this shift to ever more extreme ideologies, the ISI deployed jihadi networks established in response to the war in Afghanistan against the Indian military in Kashmir. Though such tactics against India had been intermittently used since the mid-1960s, the late 1980s saw a surge in operations to enable the Pakistani military to exert dominance in Kashmir without having to invade directly. Whenever Indian governments in the 1980s and 1990s furiously accused Islamabad of stoking a vicious jihadi insurgency across Jammu and Kashmir, Zia and his successors would simply lean back and claim that the fighters were either locals or volunteers over which they had little control. For at least a decade, this use of disinformation, proxy militias and other hybrid tactics kept India off balance and, as <a href="http://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/casi.sas.upenn.edu/files/iit/India%20%26%20Pakistan's%20Unstable%20Peace%20-%202005.pdf" target="_blank">Paul Kapur</a> and other observers have set out, weakened its ability to put Pakistan under pressure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The legacy of the use of disinformation, proxy </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">militia groups and other hybrid tactics against internal and external opponents by the Zia regime contains valuable lessons for analysts trying to determine what impact Late Putinism will have on Russia's political future. That there are quite a few parallels between the Zia regime's linkage of hybrid tactics with the embrace of radical political movements and the actions the Putin regime took in response to the Bolotnaya protests should fill Russia watchers with great concern. As <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jun/05/pakistan-worse-than-we-knew/" target="_blank">Ahmed Rashid</a> has outlined repeatedly, the short term strategic advantage the Zia regime gained through the use of hybrid tactics and jihadi proxies was at the price of the long term destabilization of Pakistani society.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Zia ul Haq appeals to the UK for an alliance against the USSR, 1981</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In a phenomenon that has come to be known as blowback, local and international jihadi networks that the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan backed during the war against Soviet occupation turned on their sponsors. With the Saudi regime's embrace of American military support during the first Iraq War, many jihadi veterans of Afghanistan's conflicts came to identify both the United States and the al Saud dynasties as the primary obstacles to the achievement of their ideological goals. This turn against the main sources of Pakistan's financial support put Pakistani governments coping with the fall out from Zia's sudden death in 1988 and the resurgence of the PPP under Benazir Bhutto in the early 1990s under enormous pressure. For the military and the ISI, which relied on radical Islamist movements to keep India under pressure and Afghanistan weak and loyal, endless war between jihadis and the United States created a strategic dilemma that constrained the Pakistani state's freedom of action. By 1999, the risks involved in either provoking American and Saudi anger or losing control over jihadi networks that could wreak enormous damage had paralysed strategic decision-making, with attempts at finding a middle path satisfying neither side.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Linkage between hybrid warfare and alliances with radical movements had a devastating impact on the internal stability of Pakistan as well. Since Zia's death, factions within the military and ISI have colluded with jihadi movements to intimidate or even, as is rumoured in the case of Benazir Bhutto, assassinate shared opponents. The intense cooperation between the ISI and jihadi networks in particular has led to growing radicalisation within parts of the military and security services. Even at senior levels, many officers and intelligence agents have over time absorbed a jihadi outlook from militants or Taliban commanders with which they have cooperated with so intensely over decades. With this protection from high level supporters, influence over armed groups enabled Islamist movements that did not necessarily represent a majority of public opinion to put intense pressure on state institutions to back their ideological agenda. As a consequence, political conflict within Pakistan has become ever more violent, as non-religious political groups also resort to the use of armed groups to assert their interests against Islamist and other rivals.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The near collapse of the Pakistani state after the fall of Pervez Musharraf in 2008, another military ruler who meddled in Kashmir and Afghanistan, was a direct consequence of the reorientation of the Pakistani state under Zia ul Haq. The so-called Pakistani Taliban which has plunged large swathes of Northwest Pakistan into near civil war conditions punctuated by American drone strikes is a direct successor of the movements Zia had armed and coddled in the early 1980s. Initially designed to shore up the power of the military in a pious and stable society, the internal and external components of Zia's hybrid dictatorship crippled the ability of the state to respond to fundamental internal and external threats.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The parallels between the political approach of the Zia regime and the methods used by the Late Putinist Kremlin have worrying implications for the future development of Russian society. Though cooperation with extreme nationalist groups was already a feature of High Putinism, such relationships remained on an arms length basis and were balanced through regime alliances with liberal figures. But through a shift towards a more openly aggressive stance towards external and internal opponents, particularly in the wake of Ukraine's Maidan Revolution, the Putin regime has publicly adopted irredentist aspects of the Russian nationalist agenda. Prominent Russian nationalists have been extensively used as proxies in the hybrid warfare phase of the Kremlin's military campaign against Ukraine. By the final months of 2014, nationalist networks that had previously been kept at a distance were used extensively by the security services to man pro-Russian military units in Eastern Ukraine. Adopting this expansionist agenda, Ramzan Kadyrov and other Chechen figures have used Russian nationalist rhetoric to increase influence through participation in a shared territorial project. There are also strong signs that many figures across the Putinist hierarchy have embraced ultra-nationalist ideology. As former members such as <a href="http://www.bramaby.com/ls/blog/rus/1841.html" target="_blank">Aleksandr Sytin</a> have revealed even key intelligence think tanks such as RISI are now controlled by members of the intelligence establishment who share the world view of once marginal nationalist ideologues such as Alexander Prokhanov and Aleksandr Dugin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet the Pakistani example demonstrates that while such an alliance with radical groups built around cooperation in forms of hybrid warfare may give a a regime short term tactical advantage, it can also breakdown the cohesion of the political elite and undermine the state in the long term. The growing political influence of radical groups can alienate other constituencies equally vital to the stability of the regime, leading to conflict over the future course of domestic or foreign policy. The armed nationalist volunteer networks the FSB and GRU have helped establish may prove difficult to dismantle, and are now in a position to cause significant damage if their members decide that the Putin government has turned against them. While the seizure of parts of the Donbass through hybrid tactics may have given the Kremlin temporary advantage in relation to the Ukrainian government, a political vacuum within the Donbass also provides various radical groups a safe haven they could use as much to organise operations against opponents in Russia as the Ukrainian state. While the conquest of Crimea may prove the high point of Late Putinism, the dependence on nationalist proxies to carry out forms of hybrid warfare in the Donbass has opened up a political dynamic which could wreak the kind of long term havoc in Russia the Pakistani public is all too familiar with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The fevered speculation surrounding the assassination of Boris Nemtsov is already an indication of the corrosive effect the methods of the Late Putinist Kremlin have had on its ability to maintain internal stability. One of the main theories put forward by dissidents such as Alexei Navalny or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/leonid.m.volkov/posts/880783811944253" target="_blank">Leonid Volkov</a> is that the assassination was carried out by groups closely associated to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, causing deep irritation within a dismayed FSB. While these figures tend to assume that Putin must have initiated the assassination, alternative explanations suggest that Putin is no longer the <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/the-warlord-checkmates-the-tsar/26908144.html" target="_blank">master </a>of events.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Even if inaccurate, such widespread speculation about the extent to which Kremlin is fully aware of actions take by elements within official or informal security structures punctures the Putin myth of a strong power vertical guaranteeing national stability. The erratic actions of a whole range of pro-Russian and Russian nationalist militias in East Ukraine also indicate that the Kremlin may be finding it difficult to restrain proxies the Russian military has armed to the teeth. The implications of such a radical erosion of Putin's power vertical and the resulting threat to the stability of a state he has subordinated to his personalised form of government would represent a worrying outcome for Western policy makers. While a situation in which Putin carries direct responsibility for criminal acts committed by regime supporters provides the hope that pressure on his circle could get him to rein in his allies, US, EU and Ukrainian officials would have very few means with which to influence a situation in which Putin has lost control over factions his security services have armed and trained.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Pakistani experience during and after the Zia era provides a clear precedent for what can unfold if a personalised authoritarian regime shores up its internal and external position through alliances with radicals and the use of hybrid tactics. The clear parallels between Zia's hybrid dictatorship and the methods of the Late Putinist Kremlin are an indication that specialists in the study of Russian politics have much to gain by exploring recent Pakistani history. For policy makers and analysts, understanding how the actions of a Pakistani military elite in the early 1980s sowed the seeds of the chaos their successors are struggling to stem today may provide some clues to working to ensure that Late Putinism does not push Russia towards a similarly disastrous course.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Where such a course might lead if nothing is done to counteract it can be seen most vividly today on the battlefields of Yemen, the country to which the<a href="http://europeans101.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/putinisms-middle-east-echoes-part-3.html" target="_blank"> final post</a> in this series will turn.</span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-84650014996085309272015-05-19T02:35:00.001-07:002017-01-18T09:30:25.240-08:00Putinism's Middle East Echoes - Part 1: High Putinism and Gamel Abdel Nasser's Rais-State<div class="blogaway-section">
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">A poster welcoming Vladimir Putin to Cairo on his February 2015 state visit to Egypt</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the wake of the very public death of Boris Nemtsov within a stone's throw of the Kremlin, many commentators have done their best to establish whether President Vladimir Putin may have personally given the order to kill a political rival. Senior figures within the remnants of Russia's organized opposition such as Alexei Navalny and Leonid Volkov remain convinced that only Putin himself has the strength to order such a high profile killing. By contrast scholars and journalists such as Mark Galeotti or the investigative team at </span><a href="http://www.novayagazeta.ru/inquests/67575.html" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Novaya Gazeta</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> have speculated that Nemtsov's death was the product of actions by nationalists, security services or individuals loyal to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov who may be increasingly operating outside of the Kremlin's control. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Confronted with the assassination of Nemtsov and Putin's subsequent disappearance, these attempts at making sense of an unpredictable regime used comparisons with key moments in Russian history to help frame their own interpretation of events. Such grand historical moments as the rise of the oprichniki under Ivan the Terrible, the Black Hundreds of the late nineteenth century, Stalin's purges and even Gorbachev's 'conservative turn' have been used to help explain Putin's actions and his own future legacy. Yet when looked at more closely such comparisons of events in contemporary Russia with past crises in Russian history are deeply flawed, potentially distorting our analysis of the emergence, structures and impact of the Putin regime. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Imperial autocracy under the Romanov dynasty contained factors underpinning its identity and institutions that have few equivalents in Putin's Russia. The existence of a land-holding nobility whose legitimacy was based on the dynastic continuity of the Romanov dynasty was a pillar of pre-1914 Imperial Russia. Political debate was defined by how conflicts between the nobility and emerging social groups in the cities affected repeated attempts by a tsarist elite to centralise state power. Though a siloviki nomenklatura has provided a degree of continuity within the security services and parts of the state capitalist elite, under the Putin regime it cannot draw on the long term continuity and ritualised dynastic legitimacy that even incompetent tsars could rely on until the late nineteenth century.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Comparisons with the Soviet Union also fall short. Throughout its existence, the USSR nominally adhered to an ideological framework that cut across ethnicity and religion. Though </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">the state often promoted de facto russification </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">under Stalin and Brezhnev</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">, Communist ideology put limits on what could be said and done openly. Moreover, the institutional structures of the post-Stalinist Communist Party placed constraints on the leadership's freedom of manoeuvre, while also connecting the Soviet elite with a transnational movement that could be used to promote its interests. Despite Putin's attempts to use various ideological networks to mobilise support for his regime, there is no equivalent within contemporary Russia to the overarching ideological discourse that defined the Soviet experiment. Rather, the Putin regime uses Russian history as a symbolic resource that helps it justify its actions through references that are recognizeable to the Russian public. Yet such instrumentalization of history by an authoritarian regime does not necessarily mean that the underlying structures its leadership has put into place match those of previous eras in their country's history.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Rather than using such problematic historical models, it may be preferable to develop comparisons with forms of political organization and mobilization in other parts of the world that bear greater similarities to the structures and direction of travel of the Putin regime. In particular, a particular form of security service driven quasi-plebiscitary dictatorship initially developed by Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser in the 1950s </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">contains remarkable parallels with the kind of state that Putin has constructed over the past fifteen years. Over the past sixty years, this Egyptian template has been</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> emulated by authoritarian regimes from Libya to Pakistan and Syria to Sudan, a political space that many International Relations scholars such as <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2008/12/middle-east-haass" target="_blank">Richard Haass</a> have come to call the Greater Middle East.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In three posts this blog will outline how exploring the echoes within the Putinist state of regimes built by authoritarian leaders such as Nasser can provide us with a better understanding of how Russia has arrived at its current impasse and how it may evolve in future. The first section, <b>High Putinism and Gamel Abdel Nasser's Rais State</b>, will outline how Putin's mobilisation and consolidation strategies contain striking similarities with the efforts by Nasser to construct a power vertical in mid-Twentieth century Egypt. Examining the weaknesses and strengths of Nasser's experiment may help us understand the impact of what <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/podcast-the-new-putinism/26654603.html" target="_blank">Brian Whitmore</a> has described as the era of High Putinism, which came to a close with the Bolotnaya demonstration of 6 May 2012. In the second section, <b>Late Putinism and the Hybrid Dictatorship of Muhammad Zia ul Haq</b>, we will look at the parallels between the hybrid warfare strategies deployed by the Putin regime in Ukraine and Chechnya and the methods used by Pakistan's General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s. His search for new sources for ideological legitimacy after a quasi-Nasserist approach to state mobilisation entered a period of crisis hold important lessons for those analysing the current Late Putinist phase Russia seems to have entered. The final section, <b>Post-Putinism and Ali Abdallah Saleh's War of Revenge</b>, will point to how the actions of Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh after his ouster from power could foreshadow the kind of behaviour Putin may display if he is no longer able to dominate the Russian political system. A better sense of such parallels between Putin and Saleh, whose attempt to consolidate power in the Nasserist style fractured Yemeni society in 1994, could help Ukrainian and European policy-makers ensure that Russia avoids the kind of state fracture that we are currently witnessing in Yemen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><b><b>High Putinism and Gamel Abdel Nasser's 'Rais-State'</b></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">On the surface you could find few more different politicians than Vladimir Putin and Gamel Abdel Nasser. While Putin's talents as a public speaker are limited, Nasser was legendary for flamboyant speeches that galvanised the support of vast crowds. Given to sardonic quips, Putin has built an image of cool detachment, providing many Russians with a sense that their president can calmly guide their country through periods of crisis. Though Putin has tried to work crowds at such events as the annual regime youth convention at Lake Seliger, he has tended to fall flat in anything but the most controlled exchanges with large groups of people outside the elite. By contrast, as a talented demagogue Nasser could enthusiastically engage with Egyptians and other Arabs of all backgrounds. This 1966 clip of Nasser pouring scorn on the Muslim Brotherhood is one of many examples of a wit and charm which Putin has never been able to match:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nasser mocks the Muslim Brotherhood, 1966.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But if one looks beyond these differences in style, the strong similarities between the substance of the Nasser regime and the first, High Putinist, decade of Putin's time in office stand out. As a young officer Nasser was part of a coalition of military, business and political factions including the Muslim Brotherhood which came together to bring down the Egyptian monarchy through the 'Free Officers' coup of 1952. Yet as <a href="https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1810/244816/Alexander_brothersinarms_JNAS_AAM.pdf?sequence=1" target="_blank">Anne Alexander</a> has pointed out, as leader of the 'Free Officers' Nasser was initially only one of several key figures operating under the leadership of General Muhammad Naguib. Although public agitation played a role, Nasser managed to attain a dominant position after the Muslim Brotherhood and other factions overplayed their hand and Naguib was outmanoeuvred through opaque in-fighting within the military. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Though much has been made of Nasser's charismatic public persona by biographers such as <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gDsuAQAAIAAJ&dq=Aburish%20Nasser&source=gbs_book_other_versions" target="_blank">Said Aburish</a>, his rise combined covert elite factional battles with open political campaigning that paved the rise of a relative outsider from obscurity to dominance within four years. In fact, Nasser's legendary status as Egypt's charismatic Rais (President) who could sway a crowd through wit and quickness of thought was only cemented after his calm response to an assassination attempt by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954. It is this managed rise, with its public campaigning concealing equally significant battles for turf and dominance behind the scenes that one can already see the parallels with the spectacular career of an obscure former KGB officer in 1990s Russia. For Nasser, as with Putin, every move from 1950 onwards combined an increasingly public presence with various covert moves to intimidate his opponents and strengthen the position of his faction within the military, state and economy. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The actions Nasser took to cement his hold on power also have some similarities with the actions Putin took in the first two years of his presidency. In ruthlessly turning on his erstwhile allies within the Muslim Brotherhood and engaging in confrontations with former colonial powers France and Britain, Nasser was able to mobilise a significant proportion of the population behind his social and pan-Arab foreign policy agendas. In a contemporary echo of these strategies, Putin used war against an internal enemy in the Chechens along with a more assertive Russian stance on the international political stage to solidify public support for the centralisation of state power. Admittedly, the kind of conflicts Nasser and Putin used to consolidate their positions were very different in nature, reflecting the distinct challenges they faced at specific historical junctures. While Nasser used an anti-colonial quasi-socialist ideological framework to legitimate his political project, Putin emphasised Russia's great power status and at least outwardly claimed to support the creation of a functioning free market. Yet the structural outcomes that both sought to bring about have remarkable parallels. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In both cases authoritarian leaders who had recently seized power focused public anger against internal as well as external enemies to help build an increasingly centralised power vertical. Putin used the brutal suppression of the Chechen insurgency to symbolically turn the tide in what was seen as a crisis of Russian statehood. Nasser's ruthless political campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood marked a means through which he could impose central discipline on the Egyptian state. In 1950s and 1960s Egypt as in early 2000s Russia appeals to national pride and a greater role in global affairs helped cement the image of the ruler as the protector of national greatness. To create a facade of democratic legitimacy, Putin and Nasser used dubious electoral processes as a quasi-plebiscitary element that could be used to claim that the public had concretely express its full support for the president and his factions. <a href="http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Ryan_C_2001_Political_Strategies.pdf" target="_blank">Curtis Ryan</a> illustrated how the Nasser government also used various means to control opposition actions in order to simulate acceptance of its rule across different milieus in a way that would have made Putin's former Chief of Staff for internal affairs Vladislav Surkov proud.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In the process, Putin and Nasser presented themselves as modernisers who centralised power at the expense of previously autonomous regional and business elites who were deemed to be holding the nation back. However much corruption still marred the day to day life of citizens, intermittent attempts to crack down on corrupt officials maintained a degree of discipline within the state, cementing the impression of a benevolent leader toiling away at all hours to protect the people. This attempted modernization of the economy and society through intensive centralization of a power vertical was legitimised through appeals to national pride, with Putin and Nasser equating a restoration of centralized state power with a restoration of national greatness. Though the strategic implications of an increased invocation of pan-Arabism in the late 1950s Middle East and some sort of cross-border 'Russian world' after 2005 remain distinct from one another, both reflected a deep conviction within state elites of that intervention in culturally related states, the 'near abroad' as many post-1990 Russians called them, was an entirely legitimate course of action. In both cases though there were often profound disagreements within the elite about the extent to which the state should seize coordinate economic activity, the central leadership remained focussed on economic and technological modernization as a means with which to challenge rival powers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">What remained of the old order was forced to lobby for support for their pet projects from a powerful and clannish elite centred on a presidential court. Both Putin and Nasser moved to displace previously powerful economic figures by empowering cronies in key sections of the economy. This put them in a position to arbitrate between various factions and if necessary buy off potential threats from within what remained of a middle class and business networks. As <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YOP_AwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Nasser+Waterbury&ots=e_RlBR3-BP&sig=YliUTGuj8on_df69EQ1ICqsIiI4#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">John Waterbury</a> pointed out, during the first decade and half of Nasser's rule the security services came to play an increasingly central role in this process, entrenching their position along with the military as arbiters far beyond their initial intelligence remit. While the sources of national wealth remain quite distinct between mid-twentieth century Egypt and 1990s Russia, this systematic co-optation of great chunks of the economy by military and intelligence leaders in order to create a form of centrally coordinated state capitalism became a feature of both the Nasser and Putin regimes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The resulting intertwined nature between military, intelligence service and business elites, which<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EVYlAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=Roberto+Roccu&ots=Q9H6MoPiGP&sig=vT7Wv1pSOrhHcj8hum2DLPd5EqM#v=onepage&q=Roberto%20Roccu&f=false" target="_blank"> Roberto Roccu</a> explores in an excellent study of the political economy of modern Egypt, have become a lasting legacy of the Nasser era that remained at the core of the most recent attempts to roll back the democratic gains of the 2011 revolution. Moreover, Nasser's enormous political influence across the Arab world after outmanoeuvring the British, French and Israelis during the Suez crisis and strengthening ties with non-Western powers including the Soviet Union encouraged many leaders who seized power in the Greater Middle East during this period to consciously emulate his model of government. Political strongmen emerged in states as varied as Libya, North Yemen, Iraq and even in some ways Pakistan, who both absorbed aspects of Nasser's ideological model and adopted many of the state modernization initiatives that seemed to be pushing Egypt to the cusp of great power status by the mid-1960s. These state structures, and the way they have thrown their support behind a leader from the intelligence services who is willing to protect their interests, be it in the early 1960s or now under General Sisi, continue to reproduce power relations that would be more than familiar to most Russia watchers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Structural parallels between the era of High Putinism between 2000 - 2008 and the Nasser regime of the 1950s and 1960s could then provide a few possible hints as to the internal balance of power the lies behind the curtain within the Kremlin. Exploring the rivalries, institutional frameworks and mobilization strategies of such an analogous regime may therefore be a more useful methodological tool for budding kremlinologists than any number of references to Stolypin or Beria. There are in particular three fundamental ways the rise of the Nasser regime in the mid-1950s as well as the growing problems it faced by the late 1960s can help us develop useful insights into how political structures developed by the Putin regime at its height have helped lead it into its current impasse.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The first is dependence on a form of charismatic leadership that lacks a strong basis of legitimacy in long-established dynastic traditions or a well-formulated political ideology. Though pan-Arabism and massive infrastructure projects have became part of the Rais myth that shaped popular memory of Nasser, as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/422632?uid=3739256&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106869522733" target="_blank">Fouad Ajami</a> pointed out at the time attempts by his regime to develop a more systematic ideology often veered into incoherence. While pan-Arabist rhetoric provided a recognizeable core to Nasserism, the lack of any systematic economic or social analysis underpinning it gave the Nasserist political elite considerable political flexibility. Without such a coherent socio-economic ideological programme, Nasser's successors from Sadat to Sisi were in a position to simply eject most projects and ideals he claimed to espouse when they became inconvenient. While the profoundly repressive and increasingly corrupt institutional framework established by Nasser survived his death in 1969, the great bulk of his personal political agenda was largely been abandoned a decade later. The ephemeral nature of much of what defined Nasserism should be kept in mind when discussing the extent to which the particular ideological projects Vladimir Putin's inner circle are trying to promote will survive after he has left the scene.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The second key parallel between the Nasser and Putin regimes at their height is the considerable autonomy state institutions were able to carve out as leading officials became personally answerable only to a specific leader at the apex of the power vertical. From the very start, s</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">tate modernization was hampered by the leader's need to foster rivalries between state institutions in order to prevent the formation of alliances within the bureaucracy that could represent a threat. As long as economic and political conditions enabled a single individual and his inner circle to exert tight control over every aspect of policy these state institutions displayed few signs of independence. Yet when the power vertical begins to fail, the lack of strong interconnections between key institutions leads to fragmentation, as each autonomous state entity from the judiciary through and security through to regulatory agencies do everything possible to prevent any challenge to their sphere of influence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The way in which such institutional balkanization can lead to profoundly dysfunctional outcomes for Egyptian society has been explored by <a href="http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/10/09/egypt-s-resurgent-authoritarianism-it-s-way-of-life/hrez" target="_blank">Nathan Brown</a> in his excellent work on the Egyptian judiciary. Brown's key insight was that once the power of the centre began to erode in the final years of the Sadat administration, the Egyptian judiciary effectively carved out semi-autonomous control over its sphere of responsibility, doing everything to fend off attempts by Mubarak to reassert stronger state control over the judicial process. Thus after the Tahrir revolution of 2011, the battles by judges to assert their independence against the security services did not result in any underlying democratization of the judiciary. Rather, once judges, lawyers and Ministry of Justice officials had received reassurances from the Ministry of Interior that their bureaucratic turf would not be impinged upon, most members of the judiciary enthusiastically joined the security services' campaign to reassert state power in order to protect their institutional autonomy. D</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">espite a facade of unified purpose under Mubarak or Sisi, w</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">ith these trends playing out across the bureaucracy the Egyptian state has therefore fragmented into semi-autonomous rival institutions whose interests occasionally align. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This precedent may provide some indication of what may have taken place within the Russian state behind the facade of High Putinism. The Kremlin's power vertical may have asserted dominance over state and society for a while. Yet by discouraging interconnections between agencies and ministries, below the surface it may have fostered the emergence of increasingly self-contained institutional actors. Rather than hollowing out the state, as <a href="https://moscowonthames.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/hide-and-seek/#more-251" target="_blank">Sam Greene</a> has speculated, the damage caused by Putinism to governance in Russia is therefore of a different nature. Once Putin or his successors lose the ability to sustain the power vertical, competing institutional verticals may come to the fore. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As early as 2007, the so-called siloviki wars between rival security services already indicated that such tensions were bubbling just below the surface.</span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As Egypt witnessed in the final years before the fall of Mubarak, when a system dependent on a highly personalised form of government breaks down, each agency, ministry and even the judiciary may rush to assert its control over the specific spheres of political and economic life that fall within their remit. Such turf wars between structurally distinct institutions could make it extraordinarily difficult for any future Russian president to restore cohesion and some semblance of good governance. Rather, it may face the limitations Nasser's inheritance has imposed on Egypt's current Sisi regime, faced as it is with institutions whose leaders are too weak to become dominant yet strong enough to prevent much needed change in their areas of responsibility.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps a final useful parallel between both regimes that could help us analyse the legacy of early 2000s High Putinism are the challenges they faced in mobilizing support without losing tight control of the public sphere. For Nasser, promoting Arab nationalism based on an assumption that Egypt was the cultural and political centre of the Arab speaking peoples was fundamental to his regime's legitimacy. It both justified deep Egyptian involvement in the affairs of its neighbouring states, while lessening the popular pressure on the regime to develop coherent reforms of the social order. With Egypt experiencing a period of economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, the Nasser regime had the financial leeway to expand parts of the welfare state and engage in prestige projects such as the building of the Aswan Dam designed to increase industrial and agricultural production.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Yet as <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/421461?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents" target="_blank">Clement Moore</a> pointed out, by the mid-1960s botched state attempts to consolidate control over the Egyptian economy were causing serious social problems that remained endemic in subsequent decades. Moreover, <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=1233716&fileId=S0020743807070535" target="_blank">Barbara Zollner</a> has set out how despite the execution of Sayid Qutb and other senior figures within the Muslim Brotherhood, attempts to eradicate its influence over Egyptian life never quite succeeded. </span><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Thus, after overcoming the British, French and Israeli intervention in Suez in 1956, the regime searched for repeated foreign policy successes that could help sustain the popular enthusiasm that enabled Nasser to entrench his position in the 1950s. Yet the use of foreign policy initiatives and pan-Arab projects to mobilize popular support led to short-term adventurism that only added to Egypt's long term instability. Thus the failed attempt at unification with Syria between 1958 and 1961, a botched military intervention in Yemen in 1962 and finally the disastrous war with Israel in 1967 were all the product of the regime's attempt to sustain legitimacy at a time when its efforts at state modernization were increasingly crowned with failure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Here again the evolution of the Nasser regime and the increased use of tactical foreign policy gambles by the Putin regime to maintain popular support in the face of deepening internal problems after 2008 demonstrate a remarkably similar trajectory. The siloviki wars of 2007 and the complex compromises surrounding Dmitri Medvdev's potemkin rise to the presidency were all strong indications that the modernization of the state and the economy, were beginning to run into serious difficulties. <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1428390" target="_blank">Stanislav Secrieru</a> among others pointed out how internal conflicts over the modernization agenda helped pave the way for a more aggressive approach to foreign policy which culminated on the war against Georgia in 2008. The way in which the failures of an modernization agenda can feed into increased foreign policy adventurism to sustain popular support is a common pattern for many authoritarian regimes. Yet the parallels between the Nasser and the Putin regimes and the role foreign policy played in a controlled mobilization of popular support around quasi-imperial nostalgia and transnational cultural identities indicates that the domestic impact of 1950s and 1960s Egyptian foreign policy could be a useful point of comparison for those examining the legacy of the first decade of Putin's rule.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With such remarkable structural parallels between the Nasser and early Putin regimes, exploring recent Egyptian history could provide historians and political scientists with a better understanding of how Putin's attempt to legitimize his own position as Russia's Rais has reshaped state institutions. Yet while Putin has remained in power long enough to be confronted with a crisis that destabilized his power vertical, Nasser died in office before the aftermath of the 1967 War forced the Egyptian political elite to engage in de-Nasserization. As a successor with his own distinct power base, Anwar Sadat was able to distance himself from Nasser's errors of judgement with the kind of radical break that the Medvedev-Putin 'tandem' never seemed capable of bringing about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">While the political direction of Egypt diverges after the death of Nasser diverges significantly from that of Russia after the 'castling' and Bolotnaya crises of 2011, there is another state in the Greater Middle East that experienced structural changes and developed mobilization strategies very similar to that of the Late Putinist period that is still unfolding today. With a collapse of established legitimization strategies for both civilian and military elites, late 1970s Pakistan saw a set of ideological and strategic shifts that very much mirror the course taken by the Kremlin since 2012. This period of elite transformation, which will be explored in the <a href="http://europeans101.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/putinisms-middle-east-echoes-part-2.html" target="_blank">next post</a>, was initiated and guided by an irascible military leader, General Muhammad Zia ul Haq.</span><br />
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-10449463368231773802015-01-21T05:49:00.004-08:002015-01-21T05:49:50.014-08:00Sometimes Everything Doesn't Change: The Aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo Attacks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The aftermath of an Algerian jihadi bomb attack in Paris, 1995</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A shocking attack at the heart of a major city that inflicts significant
casualties. Tens of thousands demonstrating solidarity with the victims.
Fraught debates on television and social media about freedom of speech and tolerance
of political movements connected to the perpetrators. And columnists and
politicians saying that ‘everything has changed’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the past years these scenes have repeated themselves in many Western
states. Most recently the attack by a gunman on the Canadian Houses of
Parliament and a hostage taking in Sydney already demonstrated the
vulnerability of major cities to acts of terror by supporters of jihadi
ideologies. In France itself, the attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket are only the latest in a succession of terrorist
incidents reaching back to the shooting of Jewish school students and soldiers
of Algerian origin by a supporter of jihadi ideology in March 2012. Looking
further, Paris experienced a wave of bombings by Algerian jihadis in the
mid-1990s while even earlier in the 1970s brutal acts of terror by radical
left-wing networks were a regular challenge faced by French governments. Each
of these terrible acts represented an attack on the fundamental values that
underpin the political order of the French Republic. Yet after initial weeks of
anxiety such attacks in themselves ultimately failed to cause the deep social
changes commentators predicted.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no doubt that in certain parts of Europe minority groups in
general and Muslim and Jewish communities in particular are coming under
increasing pressure as right wing populist movements promote ethnically
exclusivist agendas. Yet the kind of impact such right wing populist movements
are having do not necessarily follow a uniform pattern across Europe. Even
within larger European countries such as Germany, right wing populist movements
can have a major impact in certain provinces while barely registering in other
regions. In a country where Muslim communities are tiny such as Hungary, the
ethnic exclusivism of a movement such as Jobbik is far more likely to be
directed at established minorities such as Jews or Roma. In societies with
significant Magrhebi or Turkish minorities such as France or the Netherlands,
right wing populist movements campaigning against Muslim migrants often court more
conservative strands of the Jewish community in order to shield themselves from
accusations of extremism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Adding complexity to this picture are the deep ideological fractures
within Muslim immigrant communities. In Germany, the Turkish community remains
deeply divided between supporters of movements based on a Kemalist secular
tradition and more religiously oriented groups. Such profound differences
between secularists and Islamist milieus are now also beginning to play a
significant role in the development of Tunisian and Libyan diaspora communities
based in France and the UK. A growing sense of unease among such secular
milieus has made many Europeans of Maghrebi or Turkish origin willing to engage
with right wing populist movements as well as supporters of Israel, who they
see as potential allies against Jihadi threats to their way of life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As tragic as they are, acts of terror alone such as the shooting at Charlie Hebdo's offices often do not lead to the sweeping changes
analysts and pundits predict. Rather, different social groups interpret such
events in a way that confirms their own pre-established biases. In their
efforts to instrumentalize this event for their own political ambitions, right
wing populist leaders such as Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage are preaching to
the converted, solidifying their own political base rather than recruiting
undecided voters to their cause in a lasting fashion. Fears that such terrorist
acts may play into the hands of right wing populists are also more likely to
mobilize their political opponents in support of their own left-wing or
centre-right values rather than suddenly lead to a massive switch in political
allegiance. Whether right wing populists succeed in a way that threatens the
position of minorities in Europe such as Jewish and Muslim communities
therefore comes down far more to long term social factors specific to each
European region than the immediate shock a terrorist act can cause. However
overwhelming acts of terror can initially be when we witness their every on
social media, sometimes they don’t change very much at all.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-82240936185032005232015-01-12T04:12:00.003-08:002015-01-12T04:12:47.828-08:00Dresden People's Republic: The Regional Roots of Pegida's Rise and Coming Fall<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It has been a story that has crept up on most observers over the Autumn, until it dominated Germany's news agenda by the beginning of December. With only a few hundred participants in early October, within two months the Pegida's (Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) protests every Monday against a putative Islamisation of the Occident had attracted over fifteen thousand participants. While attempts to get similar protests under the same brand started in other parts of Germany have faltered, the momentum these islamophobic Pegida protests have built in Dresden have caused consternation in Germany. Suddenly, Dresden has seen an influx of German and international journalists trying to make sense of events.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the problems hampering this reporting about the Pegida protests is a tendency to equate it with distant historical events such as the rise of National Socialism. Yet in the case of Pegida, reading a little less about the 1930s and a little more about the 1990s could help develop a better understanding of why the movement has done well in Dresden and stuttered elsewhere in Germany. In the aftermath of unification the swift economic collapse of GDR industry hit Dresden and many other parts of Saxony particularly hard. Mass unemployment by 1991 led to swift disillusion with the promises made by West German political elites that reunification would lead to prosperity. The collapse of the GDR's border service coupled with war and political transformation in Eastern Europe also led to a massive influx of migrants, pushing public services across Germany already struggling to cope with reunification to the limit. This traumatic experience fostered a fundamental distrust of the German political elite among many East Germans. While in other parts of the former GDR such discontent led to a revival of the old East German SED, now in the guise of the Linkspartei as well as various other Green, left-wing or conservative movements, parts of Saxony quickly became strongholds of the radical right. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The emergence in Saxony of extensive right-wing extremist networks was part of a nationwide surge between 1991 and 1994 during which neo-Nazi skinhead gangs became a public order problem in both East and West German cities. Yet even in other major cities in the East, including Saxony's Leipzig, these gangs were often confronted with equally strong left-wing, migrant and pro-democracy conservative youth milieus that were more than willing to fight back in order to reclaim control of the streets. As a half-British/half-Ukrainian teenager growing up in Hannover, I witnessed first hand how such neo-Nazi skinhead groups were often fought and contained by all levels of society, ensuring they lost momentum and members by the mid-1990s. Yet in Dresden left-wing networks that proved so crucial in countering the radical right in Leipzig remained politically marginalised. Rather, the nationwide prominence of the left-alternative scene in Leipzig's Connewitz and Plagwitz neighbourhoods drew in young Dresdeners who would otherwise have made up the core of anti-Fascist activism in their home city. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a similar fashion, most migrants who were part of the 1990s immigration wave quickly moved out of Dresden to other cities in Germany because of an atmosphere of intimidation. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vietnamese and some Turkish Alevi groups, t</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he only two immigrant communities that remained in Dresden in any number, held on because they organised themselves in a way that deterred direct attacks. But these migrant milieus were not in a position to exert political influence. Conservative Christian movements that helped integrate migrants into the German centre-right also found it difficult to exert influence in Dresden, which had low church attendance rates in the 1990s. As a consequence, while neo-Nazi youth gangs saw a major decline in Dresden as the economic situation stabilised by the early 2000s, many social attitudes that had enabled their rise had not been challenged by regional political elites. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is therefore no surprise that Dresden has been particularly fertile ground for the emergence of such a protest movement. In the past decade Dresden has become a regular place of radical right protests commemorating those who died when the British Royal Air Force bombed the city in 1944. In a region which still grapples with social deprivation, there is a large section of the populace that feels abandoned by national and regional political elites. Though there has been an upswing in growth, the potential emergence of another wave of mass migration in the last two years coupled with the continuing pressures the Hartz IV social welfare reforms exert on the more economically vulnerable portions of the workforce have built up these local anxieties. With the emergence of the right-wing populist AfD marking a threat to its political dominance, the governing CDU has been reluctant to firmly criticise those who participate in Pegida because of concerns that it may lose conservative voters to this upstart challenger. As a member of Saxony's Sorbian Slavic minority, the region's Ministerpräsident (Prime Minister) Stanislaw Tillich is also under pressure to demonstrate that he understands the concerns of more conservative and nationally-oriented CDU voters, many of which remain suspicious of Sorb minority rights.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unlike Leipzig and other cities across East and West Germany, immigrant communities or left-wing and church-based political networks, that in themselves have a growing immigrant membership, were slow to challenge Pegida's momentum and demonstrate that those opposed to the radical right control the streets. By contrast, in cities where church organisations, the anti-Fascist left and members of immigrant communities are numerically strong, those organising Pegida demonstrations have been vastly outnumbered by counter-demonstrators who want to prevent a shift towards the radical right. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a political space, Dresden therefore has its own unique dynamic with its own underlying pressures and conflicts. The success of Pegida there may mark more of a local extreme right-wing bid to gain dominance in the region rather than any movement with truly nationwide ambitions. In the 1990s, one of the core strategic aims of radical right-wing networks in Saxony was the establishment of 'nationally liberated zones' (National befreite Zonen) in which they exerted de facto control undercutting state authority. Pegida's 'shadow Republic' whose leaders challenge the legitimacy of political elites, state authority and the media could perhaps be seen as an updated variant of this strategy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet in the last several days momentum seems to be shifting against the organizers of the Pegida movement. I</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">n the wake of the Charlie Hebdo murders in France, o</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">n 10 January, the CDU together with church, left-wing and migrant organisations were finally able to organise a counter-demonstration that outnumbered even the largest Pegida marches. The participation of senior CDU politicians, including Stanislaw Tillich, is of great significance and may point to a clear swing of conservative Saxon opinion against Pegida. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just as in the 1990s conservative milieus in Saxony only clearly turned against the radical right when disorder began to damage the Bundesland's national and European reputation, so such regional pride may begin to increase willingness among many conservative Saxons to distance themselves from Pegida. The ferocious mockery of Pegida across Germany may bring about a dynamic where, as in the 1990s, regional embarrassment rather than a deep commitment to minority rights leads many Saxon conservatives to turn against extremists and populists and return to the comforting embrace of the CDU.</span></div>
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Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-5056722066205175252015-01-07T14:26:00.003-08:002015-03-11T05:42:14.167-07:00The Paradox of Ukrainian Power<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></i><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"It is early April 2017 and the world is watching events in the Russian city of Kazan with grave concern. Initial protests </span></i><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">against the decline of Tatar language education and financial neglect of the region </span></i><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in the capital of the Tatarstan Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation barely gained attention. But central authorities struggling with economic problems and tensions with Ukraine overreacted, using special forces units brought in from across Russia against peaceful protesters. Marginalised by Moscow and experiencing a serious decline in illicit revenues, local security officials distanced themselves from the actions of OMON riot police, in some places even siding openly with protesters.</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet it was a sudden escalation in mid-February 2017 that overwhelmed central authorities and shocked observers. Where protesters had previously confronted external riot police with stones and makeshift clubs, trained militiamen emerged with automatic weapons to storm local state buildings and engage in clashes with military units. As conflict watchers on social media identified weapons sourced from Ukraine's Donbass region in Tatar insurgent hands, the Russian community in Kazan split between Moscow loyalists and those alienated by the brutality of Russian units and their proxies. With defections from local police increasing by the day </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and insurgents moving to</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> seize the Tatarstan Republic's administration</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, by early April large parts of Kazan were no go areas for Moscow loyalists. Meanwhile, polite people with Ukrainian-sounding accents quietly checked out of Kazan's Palace Hotel as chaos unfolded around them." </span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At a time when Russian-backed forces occupy parts of East Ukraine and the Kremlin piles pressure on Kyiv and its shattered intelligence service, a scenario where Ukrainian operatives take advantage of regional unrest to destabilize the Russian Federation seems quite far-fetched. But it is worth recalling that two years ago the creation of separatist quasi-states in Donetsk and Luhansk backed by </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Russian forces may have seemed equally implausible to even the most pessimistic observer of Ukrainian politics. In an environment in which economic crisis, growing tensions with the West and a conflict in Ukraine that has become a strategic quagmire are beginning to erode the stability of the Russian state, what once may have seemed improbable may quickly come to fruition as the unintended consequences of Kremlin actions and Western or Ukrainian responses come to the surface.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While scholars, journalists and diplomats spent much of 2014 preoccupied with anticipating the moves the Kremlin was about make, I would like to suggest that we now need to start focussing on what Ukraine's rapidly changing security services may do to protect what they define as the strategic interests of the Ukrainian nation. Just as misperceptions over the FSB, GRU and their pro-Kremlin proxies' willingness to escalate in 2014 slowed Western responses to their actions, so an underestimation of the lengths to which Ukrainians could go to exacerbate Russian weaknesses may lead to equally destabilising developments in 2015.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are two aspects two the post-Maidan transformation of the Ukrainian military and security services which those hoping to deescalate the Russo-Ukrainian conflict need to keep a particular eye on. First, attention needs to be paid to</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> debates within a National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) that has become central to Kyiv's strategic planning process. Secondly, policy makers and analysts need to keep track of the</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> specific security institutions that come to dominate intelligence work and the turf battles between them. Though the SBU (</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy</i>)</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> remains Ukraine's primary security service, the institutional devastation it suffered at the hands of Russian operatives in March 2014, recently described in an excellent piece by <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/12/30/russian-vs-ukrainian-spies/" target="_blank">Mashable's Christopher Miller</a>, has opened up opportunities for other institutions, special forces and paramilitary units to get involved in intelligence operations. How these pressures play out will shape the operational procedure and personnel that emerge within the SBU and its rivals as frantic reconstruction efforts after the collapse of spring 2014 reshape the Ukrainian security sector.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1. <b>The NSDC and the Strategic Goals of Post-Maidan Ukraine</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As with so many other parts of Ukraine's security and defence infrastructure, since its establishment by President Leonid Kravchuk the NSDC has led something of a shadow existence. In the two decades after independence, the heads of the NSDC have had to occasionally co-ordinate difficult security challenges such as nuclear disarmament, secessionist sentiment in Crimea and the accidental shooting down of a passenger jet in 2001. In general though, few Ukrainian governments seriously prioritised security matters, allowing corruption and a lack of investment to undermine Ukraine's defence and intelligence capabilities. With the army organising its involvement in UN peacekeeping operations and the Iraq War the NSDC's role gradually went into decline. In the last few years control of the NSDC has largely become a means through which presidents used appointments to reward supporters and punish opponents. This culminated during the ill-fated presidency of Viktor Yanukovich with the head of the NSDC, Andriy Kluyev, coordinating the hollowing out of Ukraine's democratic institutions</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> and suppression of opposition activists.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The institutional framework Andriy Parubiy</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">, the co-ordinator of the Maidan self-defence units,</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> took on immediately after the Maidan Revolution was largely inadequate for the task of organising the defence of the country. Moreover, little help could be expected from the fractured leadership of a military whose core units were either stripped of equipment through corruption or involved in peacekeeping operations in Africa. The security services were so deeply penetrated by Russia's FSB that many operatives defected to pro-Russian forces, taking hard drives containing key information with them. It is perhaps a sign of the measure of success Parubiy had in helping pull Ukraine back from the brink in the wake of the loss of Crimea and the collapse of state authority in the East that while the leadership of the Ministry of Defence experienced significant turnover, his reputation has survived largely intact. Now Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> (parliament), Parubiy played a key role in helping integrate the volunteer battalions that together with airborne regiments have become the professional core of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Throughout Parubiy's tenure, his team primarily struggled to craft short term responses to acts of Russian aggression, often scrambling to pull together whatever assets they could fine to hold ground that had not yet been lost.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Only with the lessening of combat intensity in the Donbass region after the Minsk Accords of 5 September 2014 has the NSDC leadership had the space to engage in long-term planning. With the former post-Maidan Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and Acting President Olexander Turchynov taking over, the NSDC has a political heavyweight in charge with the robustness to retain a high degree of authority over planning processes in the SBU and the military. It is therefore under Turchynov that the NSDC will come to a set of conclusions about Ukraine's national interests that may either lead it to prioritise defensive stabilising measures or take on a more aggressive stance that could have destabilising effects. At core lies the question of whether this emerging Ukrainian security elite sees a stable and influential Russia as a neighbour that can be managed or whether figures such as Turchynov come to the conclusion that an independent Ukraine can only survive if Russia remains politically and economically weak.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here the signals coming from Kyiv have been decidedly mixed. Senior figures around President Poroshenko have emphasised that a restoration of some kind of working relationship is in the interest of both nations. With Turchynov's Narodniy Front, the other key party in the governing coalition, employing more robust rhetoric towards pro-Russian forces Turchynov has already developed a reputation for being something of a hawk. How these various debates within the cabinet and NSDC over long term strategy for dealing with the Russian threat are resolved will then set the tone for measures taken lower down the security hierarchy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the NSDC decides that </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the international community is willing to maintain a level of pressure that deters the Kremlin from further undermining Ukrainian territorial sovereignty, it is likely to</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> set out a doctrine focussed on simply holding territory and shoring up the nation's defences against covert infiltration. Yet if Western resolve is seen as shaky, then there is a distinct possibility that the NSDC will evolve a security doctrine based on the understanding that Ukraine can only be safe if Russia is too weak to exert influence on neighbouring states. If such a view hardens across the new Ukrainian security establishment, then a tacit acceptance of more aggressive tactics across a range of economic, political and security targets designed to keep Russia permanently under pressure may become entrenched. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Already there are signs that the current Ukrainian government feels secure enough to use its control over infrastructure in Crimea and the Donbass in a way that puts the Kremlin on the back foot. A</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">t a time at which Russia is facing economic turmoil, moves by the Ukrainian government to cut off occupied Donetsk and Luhansk from the financial system and shut down Crimea's access to transport, electricity and water are driving up the costs of this conflict for the Kremlin. By effectively crippling the economy of both regions, such a Ukrainian blockade is stoking local discontent as well as divisions between pro-Russian groups that have seized power, making the zones under Russian occupation increasingly difficult to govern. That these forms of quite blunt pressure seem to have forced the Kremlin to come to a compromise when it comes to Ukrainian energy and coal imports may strengthen those within the NSDC who believe hardball tactics that take advantage of Russian weakness will keep the Kremlin at bay.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Without reliable support from Western allies, there is therefore a strong chance the NSDC will evolve a long term security doctrine with strong parallels to the Iron Wall paradigm that has shaped Israeli strategy for eighty years. Based on the writings of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a prominent Zionist in the 1920s, the Iron Wall model assumes that national survival can only be secured through strong military and security services with the ability to keep opponents off balance and divided. For Jabotinsky, an Iron Wall strategy needs to be pursued relentlessly until opponents are forced to accept the legitimacy and territorial integrity of a contested state. Evolving far beyond Jabotinsky's original goals, strategic doctrine based on the Iron Wall model has been used by various Israeli governments to justify actions such as invasions of Lebanon or assassinations of potential opponents that arguably go well beyond the security needs of the Israeli state. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Strong engagement by NATO and the EU with the NSDC is therefore imperative to avoid a sense of permanent insecurity fostering such an aggressive approach. Beyond long term support for the NSDC's capacity-building efforts, strong engagement by EU and NATO institutions with a small but growing band of security analysts in Kyiv such as Dmytro Tymchuk or Yuri Butusov could also help influence debate in a way that emphasises the advantages of a more defensive strategy. Extensive support from Western institutions and strong relationships with scholars and officials in Kyiv could do much to ensure the NSDC does not encourage institutions it is coordinating from engaging in preemptive moves that could close the door to rebuilding relations with any Russian regime that emerges after the fall of President Putin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the West fails to provide extensive aid and advice, an NSDC inclined to believe Ukraine can only be safe if Russia remains off balance is more likely to tolerate, perhaps even encourage, covert operations to sustain an Iron Wall strategy. Why various institutions and networks jostling for prominence in Ukraine's post-Maidan security landscape may be tempted to engage in such operations is what we will look at next.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>2. Competition Between Security Networks in Post-Maidan Ukraine </b> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since the fall of Yanukovich and the unfolding acts of Kremlin aggression that followed, the Ukrainian security institutions the NSDC has tried to coordinate have been in a state of flux. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whether any reformed successor organization to Ukraine's bloated and infiltrated Foreign Intelligence Service can provide reliable intelligence about developments in Russia, Belarus and Moldova is an open question. This intelligence vacuum along with t</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he moribund nature of the army and the sudden collapse of the SBU during the annexation of Crimea have opened up opportunities for new actors to take a leading role in Ukraine's security sector. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The establishment of volunteer battalions to counter the growing momentum of pro-Russian forces in May and June 2014 has added new, in many cases brigade-sized, units that will be part of the professional core of the Ukrainian military for some time to come. Together with troops from airborne and mechanized brigades that have taken the brunt of the fighting, veterans from these volunteer units are now the core recruitment pool for the military's intelligence directorate (HUR), which is being reconstructed from the ground up. The incorporation of many volunteer units into a reformed National Guard has revived a second force structure under the control of the Ministry of Interior that had largely been eliminated by the Yanukovich administration. With its own nascent intelligence gathering capabilities, the National Guard gives ambitious figures around Interior Minister Avakov the opportunity to pursue their own anti-Russian operations. That people as disparate as</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> business oligarchs, civic volunteer networks and radical political movements have become so essential to the fight against Russian aggression further complicates the challenge the NSDC faces in ensuring that everyone involved in the defence of Ukraine is working in harmony. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Understanding how potential institutional competition between these various actors will play out, and whether the NSDC can ultimately bring them into line, is complicated by the relative dearth of research about the Ukrainian security sector before the Maidan Revolution. Some researchers such as <a href="http://www.taraskuzio.net/media22_files/13.pdf" target="_blank">Taras Kuzio</a> or <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/088506099305043#.VK1nAyvz3NQ" target="_blank">Joseph Albini</a> have provided interesting insights into the internal development of the SBU. Yet there has been very little work on Ukraine that provides the kind of comprehensive analysis connecting the evolution of the policing and intelligence worlds with wider social trends that <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17440570601073947#.VK1nVSvz3NQ" target="_blank">Mark Galeotti</a> has pioneered in his research on the Russian security sector. Though in the aftermath of the Maidan Revolution and Crimea many scholars are working to close this gap, the scarcity of detailed research in this area makes it more difficult to establish how interaction between loyal veterans of the pre-Maidan security services and new 'revolutionary' recruits may influence the tactics they will use to </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">fulfil the NSDC's strategic goals.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there are some indications of the directions in which this institutional framework could evolve. In particular, the massive turnover in personnel experienced by all major Ukrainian security institutions in the last six months is a development that needs to be watched closely. With so many policemen, military officers and intelligence officials proving unreliable, thousands of new opportunities have opened up for Ukrainians who had no previous experience of combat or cover operations. Beyond institutional bureaucracies, a network of civic volunteers working together with patriotic oligarchs, best described</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/opinion/ukraines-facebook-warriors.html" target="_blank">David Patrikarakos</a>, </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">has bypassed established structures to supply front line troops with much-needed equipment and support police in detecting pro-Russian sympathizers trying to destabilise regions outside the area of combat operations. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While this massive infusion of fresh and loyal personnel has bogged down pro-Russian offensives and may ultimately help deter further Russian aggression, it could have a more problematic impact if the NSDC decides to focus on covert operations against various targets. With many of these new recruits still linked to their old volunteer battalions and in some cases even radical political movements, external actors may be in the position to use units within the SBU or other agencies to pursue their own agendas against Russian or pro-Russian targets. Such continued weakness in command and control could also make it tempting for operatives to run their own 'cowboy' operations, designed to destabilize Russian occupied territory or even parts of Russia itself </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">without the knowledge of the NSDC leadership</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The key role played by civic and oligarchic networks in helping reconstruct Ukraine's security sector could actually compound this problem. Military officers and security officials frustrated with the SBU's bureaucracy or desperate to show results can now draw on a wide range of activists and cash rich businessmen outside the security services to help fund and organize covert operations which may have unpredictable consequences. That such operations could be distorted by personal grudges, financial interests or a desire to enhance the reputation of a particular political movement is also a potential risk that arises if volunteer efforts that proved priceless in helping restore military strength become integrated in intelligence and infiltration work. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whether veterans of the pre-Maidan security services that have remained loyal will be willing or able to restrain their revolutionary colleagues remains questionable. As Christopher Miller, Taras Kuzio and others have pointed out, the risk that the FSB still has a network of informers within the security services remains high, making it more difficult for veteran operatives to exert authority over new recruits. Moreover, among the many genuine Ukrainian patriots within the SBU and the military there are indications that a desire for revenge against Russian opponents is barely lurking beneath the surface. The adoption of jingoistic rhetoric by ex-Berkut and SBU veterans in new security structures is certainly an act of expediency for those trying to distance themselves from the old regime. But I would contend that as it becomes internalized it may also encourage such figures to back impulsive plans. In the last six months Ukrainian 'siloviki' have lived through the greatest humiliation experienced by security services since the Second World War at the hands of an openly triumphalist FSB and GRU. For many old hands loyal to Kyiv, a desire to wipe this mark of shame from their records mixed with the need to prove their loyalty to the Ukrainian state increases the likelihood that they would willingly involve themselves in aggressive operations against Russian targets if they are encouraged to do so.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such a dynamic may be exacerbated by attempts by senior political figures within the current Ukrainian government to maximise their influence over the security sector. The institutional empire-building of Interior Minister Avakov is especially significant in this regard. Drawing on his own wide-ranging network of contacts, which includes former civil society activists as well as members of the radical right, Avakov has put loyalists in place throughout the security services and done as much as possible to expand the remit of agencies under his control. While his ruthless approach ensured the loyalty of the police and the National Guard, it is also helping to enhance the position of the Ministry of Interior to the extent that it may become a rival power structure to that of the NSDC. As a consequence, Avakov is coming into a position to launch his own alternative initiatives in ways that can bypass Turchynov and other NSDC officials responsible for coordinating intelligence work. A security sector split into a 'Turchynov vertical' and an 'Avakov vertical' would further increase the risks of potentially counter-productive actions, with covert operations against Russian targets becoming a means with which </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">rival factions will try </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to enhance their influence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such covert operations would not necessarily have to take place in Russia to cause Moscow serious difficulties. With so much Kremlin prestige on the line and borders between occupied territories and Russia wide open, actions that help turn Crimea and the 'People's Republics' in East Ukraine into ungovernable spaces will have knock-on effects on the Russian Federation itself. Not only is economic collapse</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> in these areas driving up the financial costs of occupation for the Kremlin, continuing political chaos in the Donbass region has already led to conflict between pro-Russian factions that has culminated in skirmishing and assassinations. The fragmentation of occupied territories into rival criminal fiefdoms increases the risk for the Kremlin that militia battles in Donetsk and Luhansk could spread to neighbouring Russian oblasts. In Crimea, there are enough disgruntled Ukrainians and Tatars around to provide the basis efforts toward destabilizing the peninsula if the SBU or another agency decided that this was a priority. However much the Crimean Tatar leadership and pro-Kyiv activists have emphasised non-violent resistance, if Russian authorities continue with a needlessly provocative approach, Ukrainian operatives who wish to use covert violence to pressure their rivals in the FSB are likely to find willing local recruits.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As Russia begins to experience serious economic turbulence over the course of 2015, new opportunities will arise for Ukrainian operatives who want to extend payback into the Russian Federation itself. Recent audacious attacks by Chechen insurgents in Grozny and continuing fighting across the North Caucasus region provide a ready platform for any intelligence team tasked with putting the Kremlin under pressure. In the 1990s, several radical Ukrainian nationalists joined Chechen rebel groups to fight the Russian Army. These links have been renewed, with a number of anti-Kremlin Chechens fighting with Ukrainian forces in East Ukraine. Such existing links would give a starting point for any operatives who decide to fuel anti-Kremlin insurgencies with an infusion of lethal aid</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">with or without the knowledge of the NSDC</span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">. Further moves by the Kremlin to complete the centralisation of power which are putting ethnic minorities across the Russian Federation under greater pressure to undergo russification will also open up possibilities for initiatives designed to weaken the Russian state. Discontented minorities that no longer feel safe within the 'Russian World', regional elites whose income streams are being plundered by Moscow and even criminal gangs struggling to survive as profits decline could all provide useful levers for any destabilisation operations. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However, such a shift to more aggressive covert operations would contain enormous risks for the Ukrainian state. With FSB infiltration still a huge problem for all major security institutions, chances remain high that plans for any such an operation would leak, damaging Ukraine's international image. In such a situation, some form of Russian escalation would undoubtedly follow that would not necessarily elicit a firm Western response. Any operations that could actually come to fruition would still be difficult to keep secret. As we have seen over the past few years, conflict watchers on social media have become adept at identifying weaponry deployed by insurgents and establishing its source, making it more difficult for intelligence agencies fuelling insurgencies to mask their presence. In the past two decades, the single-minded pursuit of Iron Wall strategies has done enormous damage to both Croatia and Israel's relationships with their core allies. It is unlikely that an NSDC strategy based on the same assumptions would enable Ukraine to escape a similar fate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even successful covert destabilisation operations may trigger developments that could cause Ukrainians considerable trouble. Moves to help compound Russian economic difficulties would certainly make it more difficult for the Kremlin to act, but such turmoil could easily have knock-on effects on Ukraine's own fragile economy. Turning occupied territories into ungovernable spaces would also make it far more difficult and costly to reconstruct their institutions if they ever came back under Kyiv's control. Moves to undermine security in vulnerable Russian regions are likely to have the most dangerous impact, with the potential to trigger refugee flows and cross-border violence which could easily draw Kyiv into conflicts in the North Caucasus and elsewhere in the Russian Federation that are not of direct strategic relevance to the Ukrainian state.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And yet even with all these dangers the risks that the post-Maidan security services could be drawn into aggressive covert operations against Russia remain high. With the probability of Kremlin intervention, a full military offensive against pro-Russian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk remains out of the question.This leaves few other areas of action for the Ukrainian government if it feels under public pressure to retaliate against terror attacks by pro-Russian groups or Russian intelligence services against targets associated with the Ukrainian war effort. As <a href="http://www.odessatalk.com/2014/12/ukrainian-slide-troubles-terrorism-question/" target="_blank">Nikolai Holmov</a> has pointed out, this low-level terrorist campaign has become a challenge police and intelligence officials across the country are still struggling to cope with. A gradual escalation of such attacks will see a growing likelihood of a serious loss of civilian life leading to public fury at Russian and pro-Russian perpetrators. </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Coupled with continuing military casualties from skirmishes on the front line in the East and a general deterioration in the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian society, any such Kremlin instigated terrorist blunder will put the NSDC under enormous pressure to 'do something' and 'hit back'. In such a situation, developing an aggressive Iron Wall strategy and backing covert operations against pro-Russians and the Russian Federation will become a tempting path for Ukrainian security services with few other options.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Conclusion</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The scenarios and possibilities outlined in this text are not inevitable. There is much NATO, the EU and the wider Western Alliance can do to prevent the kind of covert escalation that has seriously blighted relations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. In any long-term aid packages for Ukraine, extensive engagement with the NSDC must therefore play a central role.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On a strategic level, EU member states need to ensure that a provisional settlement with Russia to deescalate the situation in East Ukraine gives Ukraine solid guarantees that any Russian breach of such a deal will trigger a robust economic and political response. More directly, NATO must provide financial aid and expertise to help Kyiv modernize its extensive arms industry and reform its army to enable it to deter any further escalations by the Kremlin. As long as Ukraine grapples with a sense of permanent national insecurity, the NSDC is likely to base its planning on an Iron Wall strategy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This partial integration of Ukraine into Western security and defence structures would also help give EU member states the leverage needed to restrain Kyiv from retaliating in kind to any Kremlin provocations that run out of control. Just as NATO expansion in the late 1990s was more about ensuring that East European states operated in accordance with international law rather than any concerns about Russia, so a similar gradual process of integration for Ukraine will strengthen the voices of those in Kyiv who believe that a national security strategy must remain in harmony with established European norms and values. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Specific aid packages and transfer of expertise targeted at reforming the SBU and Ministry of Interior on an institutional level are also an essential part of this process. By improving command and control capabilities and providing tactical training designed to enhance the professionalism of operatives and officials, much can be done to prevent individuals or small groups running their own private wars against enemies of the Ukrainian state. Such strong support from EU and NATO member states should also enable the Ukrainian state to develop clearer lines of responsibility in order to avoid a situation where rivalries between strong personalities within the government lead to turf wars between institutions they control. Such intensive cooperation between Western security services and their Ukrainian counterparts is essential not just for the reform of the Ukrainian state, but to securing peace and stability across the region once any agreement with Russia is reached.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is therefore the central paradox that will confront Ukrainian, European and Russian policy-makers over the next year. Since the beginning of the Maidan Revolution in November 2013, President Putin has taken enormous risks to prevent the integration of Ukraine into European institutions. Yet </span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by providing incentives for a potentially vengeful Ukrainian state to stick to the rules, in the long term this European integration process may prove the best guarantee of Russia's security the Kremlin will get.</span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-11646027380159972662014-12-15T07:51:00.000-08:002014-12-15T07:56:04.058-08:00What Happens in Thűringen, Stays in Thűringen: Bodo Ramelow's Rise is not a Gamechanger for Germany<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RWbJCsZNg1U/VI8AsC68ubI/AAAAAAAACc8/qsDtzO7XiqI/s1600/Ramelow%2BTh%C3%BCringen%2BWahl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-RWbJCsZNg1U/VI8AsC68ubI/AAAAAAAACc8/qsDtzO7XiqI/s1600/Ramelow%2BTh%C3%BCringen%2BWahl.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Standing outside Thüringen's Landtag in Erfurt ten days ago, <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/rot-rot-gruen-in-thueringen-ein-denkwuerdiger-tag-in-erfurt-13304983.html" target="_blank">several hundred protesters decried </a>what they saw as an imminent threat to German democracy. Made up of victims of the Stasi, Christian Democrats as well as a few supporters of the populist AfD and radical right wing movements, this demonstration represented a final attempt to halt the election of the Linkspartei's first Ministerpräsident (regional prime minister) by those who have not forgiven it for the crimes of its SED predecessor, the state party that once ruled the GDR. To some these fears may seem extreme, since the more toxic aspects of the SED's legacy were quietly acknowledged as the party transformed itself into the PDS in the 1990s and then merged with various West German radical left wing splinter groups to create the Linkspartei over a decade ago. Yet reluctance among its leaders to challenge GDR apologism as well as the doctrinaire dogmatism of the party's Communist wing, has fuelled concern among many Germans that Bodo Ramelow's election as a Ministerpräsident could mark the start of a process whereby a party with still suspect democratic credentials could take power on the federal level.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If one steps back a bit and looks at the wider context, however, there are signs that in the short to medium term these concerns are overstated. In the past decade the Linkspartei has repeatedly acted as a junior partner within SPD coalitions in East German Bundesländer and has rarely disrupted established social and economic policy. With the SPD experiencing drastic losses since the introduction of Hartz IV reforms in 2005, the likelihood the Linkspartei could become the senior partner in a coalition with the SPD and the Greens (the Red-Red-Green option) has increased with every electoral cycle. Yet at the moment the ability to realise such a coalition in practice very much depends on the specific regional context in which politicians on the Bundesland level are operating.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Under Bodo Ramelow's leadership the Linkspartei's rise to the status of second main party after the CDU in Thüringen has been impressive. But it is unlikely that the specific conditions of his success will be swiftly recreated elsewhere in Germany. As a church-going moderate who gets along with the local business community, in Thüringen Bodo Ramelow has largely defused the Linkspartei's reputation for radicalism, pushing more embarrassing Stasi apologists and committed Communists to the fringes of the local party. This strategy helped the Linkspartei in Thüringen deflect CDU rhetoric in September’s regional election designed to stoke fears that a coalition under Ramelow’s leadership would undermine the economic stability of the region and empower radicals with a revisionist attitude towards the GDR's legacy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet an ideological move to the centre is deeply opposed by more radical factions of the party whose bastions lie in the Western Bundesländer. Ramelow’s willingness to acknowledge that the GDR was an ‘<a href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/thueringen-rot-rot-gruen-nennt-ddr-unrechtsstaat-a-1004059.html" target="_blank">Unrechtstaat’ (literally an ‘unjust state’, i.e. a state without an impartial system of justice)</a> in a joint document with his new SPD and Green coalition partners is also quite controversial among parts of the Linkspartei in Eastern Bundesländer who remain unwilling to reject the legacy of the East German state. While Ramelow’s reformist model is influencing thinking among key Linkspartei circles in Sachsen, Brandenburg and Berlin, the level of resistance such initiatives are still encountering at all levels of the party indicate that the Linkspartei has a long way to go before it can assuage concerns among its potential Social Democrat and Green partners that it can be a stable partner in a coalition government in the Bundestag. </span></span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-903ee177-4ea9-89fc-9e86-15fe06f37120"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The current crisis over the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine has accentuated such worries among the Greens in particular, many of which are infuriated with the tendency among Linkspartei politicians to downplay the destabilizing impact of Russian aggression and belittle the political interests of the Ukrainian people. Splits over the Ukrainian crisis between effectively</span><a href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/linkspartei-in-der-krim-krise-putins-freunde-in-berlin-a-959041.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">pro-Russian legislators such as Sahra Wagenknecht or Sevim Dagdelen</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and senior party figures such as</span><a href="http://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2014-07/russland-ukraine-sanktionen-debatte-stefan-liebich" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stefan Liebich who acknowledge Ukrainian sovereignty,</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">have become intertwined with internal party battles over domestic policy as well. As a result of these vitriolic debates within the Linkspartei, many Social Democrats and Greens are still unconvinced that it would be able to act as an effective party of national government. Without any clear resolution to the Ukrainian crisis which could help the SPD, Greens and Linkspartei put foreign policy divisions to one side, it is highly unlikely that even a successful Red-Red-Green coalition under Ramelow could provide the basis for a similar arrangement under SPD leadership on the national level.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And that is assuming that the Red-Red-Green coalition in Thüringen is a success. With a wafer thin majority of <a href="http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/ltwth-hochrechnung-104.html" target="_blank">one seat in the Landtag</a>, Ramelow’s government will be constantly vulnerable to blackmail from disenchanted backbenchers in all three parties. Already in the run up to the initial vote for the coalition in the Landtag, the SPD had enormous trouble keeping its <a href="http://www.mdr.de/thueringen/spdthueringen100_zc-16f21569_zs-e86155ec.html" target="_blank">former regional party chairman</a> on side after he had come under attack from key Thüringen Social Democrats for running a disastrous election campaign. Throughout its legislative term, the Ramelow government will struggle to buy off backbenchers, many of whom harbour a deep dislike of their coalition partners, even when it comes to ensuring minor bills are passed. Such potential coalition infighting would not only disrupt the Red-Red-Green coalition in Erfurt. If a Ramelow government goes down in flames, it also could discredit advocates of such an option at the Bundestag, making a successful bid by SPD chairman Sigmar Gabriel for the Chancellorship in 2017 even less likely than it is now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along with internal tensions, a Ramelow government also faces the prospect of constant external attacks by a once dominant Thüringen CDU which believes it has had its rightful place in government stolen by the successors of the SED. Knowing full well that it would take one Landtag member to destabilise the Red-Red-Green project in Thüringen as well as nationally, Mike Mohring, <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/thueringens-cdu-hoffnung-mike-mohring-der-trickser-a-1006421.html" target="_blank">the Thüringen CDU’s ferociously ambitious new leader</a>, will do his utmost to bring defections about. With the right populist AfD now also in Thüringen’s Landtag, Mohring will undoubtedly be in a rush to ensure that the CDU gets back in power before its voter base potentially erodes at a future point when Merkel-fatigue may begin to drag down the party’s ratings. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Parallel to these open challenges within the Landtag, Ramelow also faces bureaucratic guerilla warfare from regional ministries, state agencies and a judiciary that have been stacked with CDU appointees over the past two decades. Already local prosecutors in Erfurt have put in a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bodo-ramelow-gericht-will-immunitaet-aufheben-lassen-a-1007540.html" target="_blank">dubious request</a> that Ramelow has his parliamentary immunity waived because of his participation in unauthorised anti-Nazi protests a few years ago. Though these charges are unlikely to stick, the leadership of all three governing parties in Erfurt now face the constant risk that hostile Christian Democratic loyalists within the state bureaucracy will leak embarrassing information in order to bring down a government they loathe. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such resistance is unlikely to remain limited to the confines of Thüringen’s state institutions. For one of the most misleading cliches about Germany’s Eastern Bundesländer has always been that the bulk of its population remembers the GDR years with fondness. In fact, just below the surface the legacy of the GDR and the SED political networks that ran it still have a deeply polarising effect on East German society. For all the voters with sunny recollections of job security and social homogeneity, there are just as many in the East for whom the memories of the GDR’s injustices are still traumatic twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These divisions have often been carried over to a new generation that never experienced ‘Real-Existing-Socialism’, with younger East Germans often absorbing their family’s particular historical memory of the Cold War era. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-903ee177-4e7c-28d0-87c8-cbbcb17c1734"></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Thus rather than gaining strength through a new coalition option with the Linkspartei, both the SPD and Greens <a href="http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/thueringer-spd-wehrt-sich-gegen-koalition-mit-den-linken-13271171.html" target="_blank">may lose voters</a> with a background in networks opposed to the GDR. Old dissidents may not particularly like the CDU, but many would rather see Angela Merkel in power rather than enable the successor party of their old oppressors to get a foothold in the federal government. With her own East German background, Angela Merkel is very well aware of how uneasy Greens in particular are about Ramelow’s rise in Thüringen. It is therefore no surprise that her recent speech at the CDU party conference hammered the SPD over its cooperation with the Linkspartei, <a href="http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/merkel-spricht-auf-cdu-parteitag-huldigungen-fuer-die-konkurrenzlose-1.2259693" target="_blank">yet expressed regret </a>over her own failed coalition negotiations with the Greens after the 2013 Bundestag elections. </span></span><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rather than opening up a new pathway to power for a severely weakened SPD, even mild conflicts within the Ramelow government in Erfurt could lead the Green Party leadership to back away from the Linkspartei and remove any further obstacles to a coalition with Merkel’s CDU after the 2017 elections. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">If such a scenario gains momentum, Social Democrat strategists in in their plush Willy-Brandt-Haus headquarters may rue the day they ever started preparing the ground for the Red-Red-Green option in Berlin.</span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4557253034041162144.post-90037898817212241762014-12-09T05:25:00.005-08:002014-12-15T07:58:59.273-08:00Donbass Order of Battle: Some Unanswered Questions<div dir="ltr">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Columns of Russian-made tanks flooding through the streets of Donetsk. So-called humanitarian aid convoys from Russia entering Luhansk with cargo unseen by external observers. Unmarked green Kamaz military trucks sweeping through East Ukrainian border towns hauling artillery and ammunition with buses full of armed men trundling on behind. Since the end of August these images, in what the Ukrainian government deems "temporarily occupied territories" in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, have become so frequent as to barely elicit comment even from those scholars and journalists focussing on the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such movement of military equipment from Russia into parts of Ukraine seized by Russian-backed militants and now partially occupied by barely concealed members of the Russian armed forces certainly constitute a serious breach of international law. Despite all denials by the Russian leadership, their current primary goal seems to be to entrench a frozen conflict, using emerging yet barely economically functional statelets in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts to destabilise the Ukrainian state and hamper its ability to follow through on European integration. In undermining the national sovereignty of a neighbouring country and trampling on innumerable international conventions, the Russian government has engaged in a course of action that is isolating it from the EU and the United States as well as cementing a deeply hostile relationship with post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While the long term goals of trying to prevent Ukraine from leaving an (ever-shrinking) Russian sphere of influence are quite clear, the short and medium term strategy and tactics the Russian government will use to pursue these goals remain much less so. During the most recent build up conflict media analysts such as Conflict_Report or UkraineatWar were initially inclined to assume that this was a build up for an imminent offensive designed to clear Ukrainian forces out of key strategic positions such as Donetsk Airport or the Debaltsevo salient. As evidence of a surge in Russian arms and equipment across Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts grew in the first week of November, concerns spread among journalists and scholars that these reinforcements could even be the first step of an operation to seize Mariupol, Berdyansk and Melitopol in order to take control of a 'land bridge' that could connect Crimea with the Russian Federation itself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet in the weeks since this surge by units that most likely belong to the Russian army there has been very little change in the front lines between the Ukrainian army and Russian or Russian-backed militias. Daily exchanges of artillery fire and skirmishing have continued, with all the unnecessary and tragic loss of life that entails. More Russian fighters and material have been sent in while OSCE observers and others on the ground have also seen the rotation of military units back into Russia proper. As temperatures plunge and the first snow storms hit Ukraine, the likelihood of a Russian charge suddenly overwhelming Ukrainian forces before they can inflict significant damage on attacking forces is beginning to seem less likely.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In fact, the continuing mystery surrounding the actual purpose of the Russian surge in material, equipment and to a lesser extent fighters in the first two weeks of November point to four unanswered questions about the order of battle in the Donbass region that need to be grappled with before analysts or policy-makers can come to firmer conclusions about the future direction of this conflict. While speculation about Russian capabilities and intentions (fuelled by the virtual rumour mill on social media) remains intense, the lack of clear information from observers on the ground that could help answer these four key questions makes it difficult to develop a clear sense of how the Russian surge affects the balance of forces on the ground and what this says about Russian intentions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These key questions are:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>1) How many available Ukrainian combat troops are there and how are they distributed in the conflict zone?</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In order to assess the impact of Russian reinforcement and resupply, it is necessary to develop a better picture of the forces opposing them. The Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council (NSDC) has, for understandable reasons, only provided vague figures varying from 35 000 to 50 000 Ukrainian combat troops on the battlefield at any one time. Indications whether this is a conservative or a wildly optimistic estimate could give observers an indication of how far recent Russian troop movements represent an acute threat to key targets, or whether they are faced by equally large forces that can match each attacking fighter with a soldier in a defensive emplacement. Since well-motivated defenders can often hold off even better equipped attackers for some time, information on the numerical balance between both sides could illuminate exact capabilities and intentions of Russian forces on the ground.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Directly connected to the issue of the exact size of Ukrainian combat forces is their distribution in the conflict zone and the extent of available reserves outside it which they can draw on it in an emergency. Looking back at the of the Battle of Ilyovaisk, which fundamentally changed the dynamic of the summer campaign for the</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Ukrainian military, force distribution and available reserves magnified a tactical fiasco into a strategic disaster. While Russian forces sweeping onto the battlefield had the advantage of surprise, the overstretched nature of Ukrainian military units combined with a lack of available reserves that could help cover a retreat south of Donetsk and west of Novoazovsk shattered a still fragile Ukrainian Army, giving it no time to recover once the extent of Russian intervention had become clear.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However unsatisfactory, the 5 September Minsk Agreement significantly lowered the pace of hostilities, giving the Ukrainian forces time to regain their balance and prepare defences across the region. Under constant pressure, Ukrainian troops have effectively been given a doctoral course in holding ground under heavy artillery fire, increasing levels of experience and steadiness that were sorely lacking in those crucial days in August. Of decisive importance to countering or preferably deterring a Russian assault in the next months, is whether these troops are distributed in a way that can maximise damage on any attacking force and whether there are mobile reserves available to counter potential moments of crisis in key areas such as the Bakhmutka road, the Debaltsevo salient or the roads connecting Volnokhava with Mariupol. As of yet, we still have little to go on when it comes to these factors.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>2) How high are the losses among Russian-backed militiants and regular Russian forces, and how are these losses affecting military cohesiveness?</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the great guessing games of this conflict has concerned the size and make up of pro-Russian forces in the occupied portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Most recently, Ukrainska Pravda and Joinfo described <a href="http://joinfo.ua/politic/1057527_Rossiyskie-aktivisti-opublikovali-polniy-spisok.html" target="_blank">claims by</a> Russian peace activists and more informed circles within Ukraine's NSDC putting the number of Russian backed fighters at 15 000 to 25 000 and the number of regular Russian forces at anywhere between 5 000 to 14 500 men. In terms of force distribution, the Kyiv military analyst Dmitro Tymchuk, who is close enough to Ukrainian security circles that we could see him as their 'nightingale', <a href="http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/tymchuk-four-strike-groups-consisting-of-nearly-30000-russians-and-kremlin-backed-proxies-formed-370426.html" target="_blank">has </a>claimed </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">that the bulk of these forces are manning frontlines with three separate mobile reserves massed to cover the Debaltsevo salient, areas near Donetsek and the districts near Mariupol respectively.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> As frustrating as these vague figures are, exact pro-Russian and Russian losses are even more difficult to get a handle on. Elena Vasilieva, a Russian human rights activist in contact with many military families, has claimed that losses among regular Russian Army personnel are <a href="http://www.unn.com.ua/uk/news/1397427-rosiyska-pravozakhisnitsya-narakhuvala-4-tis-360-rosiyskikh-viyskovikh-yaki-zaginuli-na-donbasi" target="_blank">nearing 5 000</a>, though she has remained vague as to the evidence she has to confirm that figure. The figures presented by the NSDC concerning pro-Russian and Russian losses have varied enough over the course of the conflict that they need to be treated with some scepticism. Yet mounting evidence from sources as varied as a <a href="http://www.daserste.de/information/politik-weltgeschehen/weltspiegel/sendung/ndr/2014/ukraine-154.html" target="_blank">recent harrowing documentary</a> for Germany's ARD, several reports by <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f28913f6-1d8f-11e4-8f0c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3LME5iQu1" target="_blank">experienced journalists </a>on the ground and a proliferation of posts spotted by conflict watchers on social media outlets such as VKontakte does indicate that losses among both pro-Russian fighters and regular Russian soldiers have been considerable in the last few months. More clearly sourced estimates of the exact quantity of losses among Russian-backed forces could give us a stronger idea of how the conflict has affected their ability to enact effective operations on the ground and whether the impact of these casualties on the home front may begin to act as a deterrent to any further Russian moves in the Donbass region.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Moreover, as important as the quantity of those killed or wounded in action is the experience and military quality of those who can no longer contribute to the pro-Russian campaign. From the first seizures of Ukrainian state buildings in April, Russian special forces and contract soldiers as well as local militants with extensive combat training have spearheaded pro-Russian military operations. Yet neither group is an infinite resource. While Russia has a considerable number of special forces units and regiments staffed by contract soldiers, Donbass is not the only area in which their services are required. Ongoing counterinsurgencies in various parts of the Northern Caucasus as well as the need to maintain special forces reserves to deal with potential crises in Central Asia and the Far East mean that only a fraction of the 40 000 or so of Russia's 'little green men' can be available to provide the discipline and expertise on the East Ukrainian battlefield that recently trained conscripts cannot. As casualties among special forces and contract soldiers mount, it is an open question as to whether Moscow can easily replace such highly trained and disciplined soldiers, or whether the combat capabilities of a key cornerstone of President Putin and Minister of Defence Shoigu's reforms of the Russian military is being slowly ground down in Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Meanwhile, often used as cannon fodder in such situations as the battle for control of Donetsk Airport, heavy losses have been reported among the initial wave of motivated local militants and enthusiastic nationalist volunteers from Russia committed to the formation of a new state of "Novorossiya" in Ukraine's Southeast. Such an accumulation of casualties month after month may in itself have an impact on the continued willingness and ability to fight among what was to become the core of any kind of "Novorossiya Armed Forces". Yet significant numbers of wounded or killed in action leading to a decline in numbers and fighting quality of such proxy forces could make it more difficult to establish military units to police and defend the territories now under pro-Russian control without a major commitment of regular Russian contract troops that are thinly spread as it is. </span><br />
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Throughout this conflict, the quantity and quality of Russian and pro-Russian losses has remained unclear. More details about these issues would enable observers and policy-makers to develop a better picture about the combat capabilities of those forces defending pro-Russian enclaves in the Donbass region. In particular, an understanding of how far losses have affected the ability of pro-Russian currently deployed to swiftly overwhelm dug-in Ukrainian troops rather than getting dragged into protracted battles of attrition could help us assess the likelihood of any sudden offensive action in the short to medium term.</span><br />
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<b>3) What kind of equipment are the Ukrainians using on the battlefield and how is it being deployed?</b></span><br />
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Throughout the conflict the consensus among analysts has been that the Ukrainian Army is technologically outclassed by its Russian adversaries. There is no doubt that if the Kremlin decided tomorrow to use the full range of military assets at its disposable and deployed the number of troops used in the Georgian and Chechen campaigns, the Ukrainian Army would ultimately be overwhelmed. However, despite the initial concentration of large numbers of Russian forces at the Ukrainian border in the run up to the seizure of Crimea, the Russian leadership has proven markedly reluctant to abandon so-called hybrid warfare tactics it has relied upon in its Ukrainian adventure. Backing putatively local partisan forces it has trained and financed, the Russian government has tried to maintain a sheen of plausible deniability, however threadbare, as much to avoid any opposition to open warfare in Russia itself as to confuse the Western Alliance over President Putin's intentions. </span><br />
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Yet attempting to defeat the Ukrainian Army while still trying to maintain the fiction that pro-Russian forces have armed themselves with advanced Russian military equipment that has miraculously appeared from thin air has put significant tactical limitations on the Kremlin's Donbass campaign. The drip-drip feeding in of special forces troops and equipment from May to August gave Ukrainian military units just enough time to pull themselves together and prevent an expansion of hostilities into oblasts neighbouring Donetsk and Luhansk. Even after the initial Russian offensive in August, the Kremlin quickly ramped down hostilities after having saved what remained of the pro-Russian militias in the forlorn hope that seeming moderation would avoid any retaliatory measures from the European Union. Most crucially, the Russian military has avoided deploying airpower in any decisive fashion in order to sustain the appearance of an internal revolt rather than an externally manipulated conflict.</span><br />
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As a consequence, after the Minsk Accords of 5 September the Ukrainian Army has had the space to replace losses of heavy equipment and bring forward more tanks, artillery and anti-tank weapons into the conflict zone to build a more effective line of defence. Facing Ukrainian troops are pro-Russian and Russian forces that have been equipped by the Kremlin, but have by no means been given every newest and most effective piece of kit in the hands of the regular Russian military. It is entirely possible that, while still on the back foot, a once badly equipped and underfunded Ukrainian Army may find itself on equal terms in some sections of the battlefield. Though there have been sporadic reports in the media of concentrations of Ukrainian equipment at key locations, there has been remarkably little investigation of such movement of tanks and artillery as well as whether new weapons deployed on the battlefield are balancing the inevitable losses incurred in combat.</span><br />
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Establishing the exact nature of Ukrainian military equipment as well as clearer estimates of the numbers of Ukrainian tanks, artillery and anti-tank weapons would provide some indications as to whether Ukraine is now in a position to deter any further impulsive actions by the Kremlin. Of course Russia ultimately has the power to destroy large amounts of military gear. But if Ukrainian forces are in a position to inflict major casualties on Russian troops first, giving the EU time to respond, then they are more likely to make the Kremlin think twice before taking such a vast gamble.</span><br />
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<b>4) How much ammunition and equipment are pro-Russian forces expending in the current positional battles around Donetsk Airport, Debaltsevo and the Bakhmutka road? And can the surge in Russian logistical support since November build up reserves that go beyond immediate needs?</b></span><br />
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War is always an expensive business. Even in minor skirmishes, hundreds of rounds of ammunition can be fired off without injuring combatants. As the conflict has dragged on, each side has deployed heavy artillery, tanks and Multi-Launch Rocket Systems in ever greater numbers, equipment which after a certain point requires extentensive logistics chains in order to remain effective on the battlefield. Not only do they need constant resupply with shells and diesel fuel to sustain operations, both the T 64 tanks used by the Ukrainian army as well as the T 72b tanks supplied to Russian and pro-Russian forces need constant access to spare parts that ensure that regular breakdowns do not impair the effectiveness of combat units. The constant shelling of key stretches of the front line ensure that artillery deployed by both sides consume a large number of shells over the course of a single day, also requiring near constant resupply.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet the most ammunition hungry weapons systems used extensively in the Donbass region are various Multi-Launch Rocket Systems commonly known as Grads. BM 27, BM 21, Smerch and Uragan systems in the possession of Ukrainian as well as pro-Russian forces can spread destruction over a wide area in a single salvo. Often inaccurate rockets can stray away from targets and cause terrible casualties among the civilian population. Yet in firing multiple rockets over and over again, a single Grad battery can use up enormous amounts of ammunition and require an extensive logistics chain to stay combat ready. For example, with each BM 27 MLRS truck firing 16 rockets at one blow, a standard six truck Grad battery can shoot off <a href="http://www.army-technology.com/projects/uragan/" target="_blank">96 rockets in a single salvo</a>, while BM 21 batteries can even reach 120 rockets fired. With multiple Grad batteries in operation several times a day, potentially thousands of Grad rockets are being fired at targets across the Donbass region each week.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While the Ukrainian Army can rely on an extensive, if ramshackle, network of arms factories across Ukraine to produce ammunition and spare parts needed to continue such a logistically demanding campaign, pro-Russian forces in the Donbass region do not have similar independent resources under their control. With the war severely undermining the industrial production capacity of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, pro-Russian militias as well as Russian regular forces are now almost entirely reliant on the Russian government for the logistical assistance needed to sustain the current stalemate. And this does not include the efforts required to clothe, feed and pay the thousands of Russian and pro-Russian troops who need stable numbers in order to avoid being gradually overwhelmed by an expanding Ukrainian military. At a time at which falling oil prices and a fluctuating ruble are putting the Russian economy under strain, such commitments are also likely to be drawing in ever greater financial resources from various Russian state agencies. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In this context, the sudden surge in ammunition and equipment from Russia as well as the near constant 'humanitarian convoys' that followed could be seen in another light. Rather than marking preparations for an offensive to achieve the Russian government's maximalist goals of a land bridge to Crimea or perhaps even the 'Novorossiya' project that at the moment only exists in the fevered imaginations of certain members of the Kremlin staff, this build up may merely be an effort to ensure that the minimum goals achieved in the battles of late August could be held in the medium term. Thus the constant shelling and other attacks on Ukrainian forces despite the ceasefire agreement could be designed to seize very limited slices of territory throttling whatever minimal economic viability pro-Russian enclaves have rather than marking the beginning of another grand offensive. Such attacks could also usefully keep Ukrainian forces off balance, though at great, perhaps unsustainable, cost to pro-Russian forces themselves. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More detailed information on these issues is therefore needed in order to determine whether the logistics chain the Russian state has established in the Donbass region represents an attempt to sustain an expensive status quo, or is actually a first step towards a much greater assault. Such calculations could also help analysts get a better grip on the financial costs this commitment is directly or indirectly exacting upon the Russian state budget, a consideration that may influence the Kremlin's stance towards this conflict. In particular, at least some rough expert calculations over pro-Russian forces' rate of ammunition expenditure could give us an indication as to whether the Kremlin's resupply effort is building up enough of a reserve in munitions and other key supplies to enable a concerted offensive by forces based in the Donbass area while still maintaining the thin veneer of deniability which seems so important to President Putin.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Conclusion</b></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since the Ukrainian crisis gained momentum in January 2014, there have been many outstanding examples of journalism and scholarship that have provided fascinating perspectives on the Maidan Revolution and the tragic conflicts that have followed. Yet there has also been a lot of commentary based on incomplete information (something I have occasionally been guilty of myself) that has helped to confuse rather than illuminate the debate surrounding the war in the Donbass region. The claims and counter-claims about Russian intentions and Ukrainian weakness during Russia's worrying and illegal military surge in early November was only the latest in a succession of moments in which a frenzy of speculation has clouded our understanding of this crisis. As the overestimation of Ukrainian strength by many observers before the disaster of Ilyovaisk demonstrated, fragments of information can be worse than useless if they fail to provide a systematic understanding of key tactical and strategic factors that can influence the direction of the conflict. Clearer estimates of current Ukrainian troop strengths in the conflict zone, casualty rates among Russian and pro-Russian troops, the equipment available to Ukrainian forces and expenditure rates of ammunition among pro-Russian forces could help provide scholars and journalists with the tools needed to develop robust analysis of the direction this conflict between Ukraine and Russia may take. </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These issues underline some of the problems that arise from our growing reliance on uploaded videos and other social media content to gain insights into evolving conflicts. Undoubtedly these new sources of information represent a remarkable new means with which to track developments on the battlefield as well as the responses of soldiers and civilians as warfare begins to grip their societies. Scholars have much to learn from the virtuosic ability of skilled conflict media analysts such as Eliot Higgins to <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/case-studies/2014/11/25/investigathon-war-and-pieces-social-media-investigations/" target="_blank">track the circulation of weapons systems</a> and even provide crucial evidence on the role played by specific units in war crimes. Yet in a conflict zone many developments take place beyond the lens of a camera while key structural issues such as the strength of logistics chains, fortifications and troop numbers are very difficult to determine through the kind of fragmented video material that usually circulates through social media. As a consequence, ominous video clips of seemingly endless hordes of enemy troops may sow panic among the public, potentially stampeding Ukrainian and Western leaders into taking impulsive and dangerous decisions.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And that may be exactly what the Kremlin wants.</span></div>
Alex Clarksonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04232716428923398953noreply@blogger.com1