Our Security Predicament

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Policy. Russia is justly known as a country of paradoxes, which, in the words of poet Fyodor Tyutchev, cannot be "measured by a common rule." That is true even for such seemingly universal notions as the time and space in which our country exists. By time, I simply mean the level of historical development a country has attained; by space, I mean its geopolitical position. For most countries, those notions are clearly defined, having been well established by history.But Russia is different. It simultaneously straddles two continents and several historical epochs. Some elements of Russian society have clearly advanced to the post-industrial era, while others are stuck in the industrialism of the first five-year plans, or even in the backwardness of the Middle Ages. That is why it is so difficult to place Russia at any single level of development: Should it be seen as a developed, a developing, or simply a backward country?As a result of such historical heterogeneity, Russia faces many problems whose solutions complicate, or even contradict, yet other problems. That slows the overall movement toward an economically healthy liberal democracy. For instance, in the economic sphere we have to speed up industrial development even though we are already choked by the problems of postindustrialism and especially by those of Sovietstyle industrialization. Its legacy is a superabundance of nuclear weapons, a disastrous ecological situation, and a highly unsafe nuclear energy industry.In the social sphere, we are faced with the VLADIMIR P. LUKIN, ambassador of the Russian Feder-

Russian Conceptions of Europe

“…The best-known early expositions of this perspective were published by Sergey Stankevich (Nyezavisimaya gazeta, March 28, 1992, p. 4) and Vladimir Lukin (Lukin, 1992). 29 Stankevich noted Russia's need for a universal mission beyond merely opportunistic pragmatism and stressed the country's role as a connector of cultures of the world, a role that was natural, given Russia's own dualism.…”