Constructing National Values: The Nationally Distinctive Turn in Russian IR Theory and Foreign Policy

Abstract

As the world moves away from the West-centered international system, IR scholars are increasingly turning their attention to substance and formation of national values. Using the case of Russia, we show how distinct schools of IR theory and foreign policy dominant in the country have come to recognize the importance of national values as a lens through which to assess the country's means and goals of development. Each in its way, these schools—Civilizationists, Statists, and Westernizers—have prioritized “the national” in the country's future. We explain Russia's turn to the national by stressing the country's ontological insecurity, the role of the Russian state, and Western actions that contribute to creating and exacerbating the conditions of ontological insecurity. The case of Russia has important implications for understanding the role of national values in the formation of foreign policy and IR theory.

Russia as a Civilization-State: Making Sense of Moscow’s 2023 Foreign Policy Concept

“…Hopf (2013) conducted an extensive study to explore the concept of "common sense" with the Russian case through school textbooks, best-seller novels, and over a thousand texts of elites' public speeches. Tsygankov and Tsygankov (2021) explain how competing "identities" in Russia, namely, "Civilizationism," "Westernism," and "Statism," have been shaping the foreign policy identity of Moscow. From the opposite angle, Morozov and Rumelili (2012) show how Russia has played the role of the Other in the process of identity formation of Europe.…”

Moscow and the World: From Soviet Active Measures to Russian Information Warfare

“…In effect, the Russian political leadership's initial commitment to integration into the "community of civilised states," to use Yeltsin's phrase [15], and its willingness to follow the Western lead on major international political issues, were short-lived. Even before 1995, President Yeltsin and Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev,5 the primary architect of this pro-Western emphasis in Russian policy, were forced to redefine Russian foreign and security policy in a much more realistic and nationalistic direction than they had done initially [17]. Yet, the issue that raised the most serious response in Moscow in this period remained the question of NATO's expansion eastward.…”

Russia in Latin America: Why support Venezuela in a crisis?

“…According to constructivist perspectives, foreign policy is directed by a notion of Russian identity heavily influenced by Russia's past and present linkages and exchanges with the West, a hostile West bent on undermining Russian interests. Whilst the Russian ideational narrative might explain actions towards Russia's immediate neighbours, a historical and cultural connection to Russia in and of itself cannot fully explain Putin's actions (Tsygankov and Tsygankov, 2021).…”

“…Further motives are strong links between the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Vladimir Putin before the Venezuelan crisis began to unravel (Katz, 2006), so that geopolitics, security‐based vulnerabilities and balancing power relations against Western powers can be identified as Putin's principal motivations (Blank and Kim, 2015). The constructivist IR paradigm asserts that structural approaches that seek to shed light on foreign policy do not properly account for the centrality of identity and path‐dependent explanations (Tsygankov and Tsygankov, 2021) that is inherent in “Putin's emerging foreign policy narrative” (Roberts, 2017, p. 28). Thus, they represent an oversimplification of the “multiple influences on Russian foreign policy” (Roberts, 2017, p. 29).…”