Untimely Russia: Hysteresis in Russian-Western relations over the past millennium

Security Studies

Volumn 20, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 105-137

  Neumann, Iver B ^a   Pouliot, Vincent ^b  

^a NORWEGIAN INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS NUPI   (Norway)

^b MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79952806627     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636412.2011.549021     Document Type: Article

References (137)

1. William C. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neorealism," Review of International Studies 27, no. 5 (2001): 214.
2. William C. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neorealism," Review of International Studies 27, no. 5 (2001):, 217.
3. William C. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neorealism," Review of International Studies 27, no. 5 (2001):, 218.
4. William C. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire: A Test of Neorealism," Review of International Studies 27, no. 5 (2001):, 218.
5. For a parallel argument about Russia's economy, see Stefan Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence (London: Routledge, 2005).
6. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire," 228.
7. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire,", 216.
8. For instance, Wohlforth writes about Russia that "[i]f the quest for status becomes an end in itself, divorced from power politics and security, it may fit far more comfortably into a British School or constructivist theoretical framework than neorealism." Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire,", 234.
9. We do welcome the challenge, but with a crucial nuance: contrary to most theories of social action, we do not assume that people act on the basis of a goal hierarchy (whether the main purpose is status-seeking or else) but rather out of repertoires of practices that form socially distinct logics of practicality. See Vincent Pouliot, "The Logic of Practicality: A Theory of Practice of Security Communities," International Organization 62, no. 1 (2008): 257-88.
10. We do not hold the meaning of "the diplomatic practice" constant over the millennium. We define "diplomacy" in the simplest way possible in order to allow its form to evolve considerably over the millennium; for the sake of this article, "diplomacy" is official contact between polities. Of course, the way that these contacts are run has evolved tremendously over time and space. See Christian Reus-Smit, The Moral Purpose of the State: Culture, Social Identity, and Institutional Rationality in International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
11. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, "The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology (The Chicago Workshop)," in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, eds., Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120-21.
12. See also Pouliot, "The Logic of Practicality";
13. Vincent Pouliot, International Security in Practice: The Politics of NATO-Russia Diplomacy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
14. Loïc J. D. Wacquant, "Toward a Social Praxeology: The Structure and Logic of Bourdieu's Sociology," in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 19.
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d'une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d'ethnologie kabyle (Paris: Minuit, 1972; Paris: Seuil, 2000), 261 (authors' translation). Citations are to the Seuil edition.
16. Frédéric Mérand, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Birth of European Defense," Security Studies 19, no. 2 (2010): 347.
17. See Pouliot, "The Logic of Practicality," 267-68.
18. Arthur Reber defines "implicit learning" as "the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired." Arthur S. Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5.
19. According to Raymond Gibbs, "embodiment" occurs when "people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for language and thought." Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9.
20. See Ted Hopf, "The Logic of Habit in International Relations," European Journal of International Relations (forthcoming).
21. Alexandra Gheciu, NATO in the 'New Europe': The Politics of International Socialization after the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005);
22. Pouliot, International Security in Practice, 150-55.
23. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Paris: Minuit, 1980; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 62.
24. Our claim is not that hysteresis necessarily leads to unsuccessful practices. In fact, on a number of occasions, Russia's awkwardness (in Western eyes) has proven instrumental in obtaining diplomatic attention and even advantages. In the longer term, however, hysteresis in world politics tends to create symbolic tensions conducive to security concerns.
25. Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, "International Practices," International Theory 3, no. 1 (2011).
26. This is a foreign policy elite matter, and it may occur with both parties concurrently. It does not matter much whether politically marginal groups of people within the polity disapprove of changes -if a group of twentieth-century German peasants experienced German diplomats as intolerably supercilious, say, or whether members of the Soviet intelligentsia disapproved of Khrushchev's shoe banging. That said, the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian revolutions are among the reminders of what may happen if large numbers of a polity experience the changes induced in social practices as being intolerably rapid and radical.
27. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1962).
28. See also Jack Snyder, "Russian Backwardness and the Future of Europe," Daedalus 123, no. 2 (1994): 179-201.
29. On the Khipchak Khanate, see Iver B. Neumann, "Entry into International Society Reconceptualised: The Case of Russia," Review of International Studies (forthcoming).
30. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Society (London: Macmillan, 1977).
31. Michael C. Williams, Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30.
32. Snyder, "Russian Backwardness," 184.
33. Thomas S. Noonan, "Some Observations on the Economy of the Khazar Khaganate," in The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, eds., Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, and Andras Rona-Tas (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 243-44.
34. Thomas S. Noonan, "Some Observations on the Economy of the Khazar Khaganate," in The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives, eds., Peter B. Golden, Haggai Ben-Shammai, and Andras Rona-Tas (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 243-44.
35. George Vernadsky, Ancient Russia: A History of Russia, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 216-17, 293.
36. George Vernadsky, Ancient Russia: A History of Russia, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 94.
37. Thomas S. Noonan, "Why the Vikings First Came to Russia," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 34 (1986): 339.
38. Thomas S. Noonan, "Why the Vikings First Came to Russia," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 34 (1986): 339.
39. Peter B. Golden, "Nomads in the Sedentary World: The Case of Pre-Chinggisid Rus' and Georgia," in Nomads in the Sedentary World, eds., Anatoly M. Khazanov and André Wink (Richmond, UK: Curzon, 2001), 32.
40. Noonan, "The Khazar Qaghanate," 90.
41. Vernadsky, Ancient Russia, 282.
42. Anatoliy P. Novoseltsev, "K voprosu ob odnom iz drevneyshikh titulov russkogo knyazya," Istoriya SSSR, 4th ed. (Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1982);
43. Noonan, "The Khazar Qaghanate."
44. Noonan, "The Khazar Qaghanate."
45. Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (London: Longman, 2001).
46. Marshall T. Poe, "A People Born to Slavery": Russia in Early European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
47. John L.I. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia 1200-1304 (London: Longman, 1983).
48. Igor de Rachewiltz, Papal Envoys to the Great Khans (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 207.
49. Poe, "A People Born to Slavery," 12-13.
50. Poe, "A People Born to Slavery,", 209-10.
51. Already in 1481, Emperor Frederick III addressed an appeal on behalf of the Germans in Livonia to Poland and Lithania, Sweden, and the Hanseatic Cities about this polity.
52. V. A. Zorin et al., eds., Istoriya diplomatii, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1959), 262.
53. Iver B. Neumann, "Russia as a Great Power, 1815-2007," Journal of International Relations and Development 11, no. 2 (2008): 128-51.
54. Charles J. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 8.
55. See Michael Cherniavsky, "Khan or Basileus: An Aspect of Russian Medieval Political Theory," in The Structure of Russian History, ed. Michael Cherniavsky (New York: Random House, 1970), 195-211.
56. Charles J. Halperin, "Muscovite Political Institutions in the 14th Century," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 2 (2000): 237.
57. Zorin, Istoriya diplomatii.
58. Pouliot, International Security in Practice, 132-34.
59. Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 92. For more on extensive Russian borrowings from the Mongols
60. see Neumann, "Entry into International Society."
61. Baron Sigismund von Herberstein, Notes upon Russia: Being a Translation of the Earliest Account of that Country Entitled "Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii" (London: Hakluyt Society, 1851-52).
62. Krizhanich, quoted in Poe, "A People Born to Slavery," 83.
63. Krizhanich, quoted in Poe, "A People Born to Slavery,", 41.
64. Paul Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism 1613-1801, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1990), 13.
65. This attempt was only partly successful, however. When Ivan the Terrible's son Dmitry died in 1591 and there was no other Ryurikid prince to take over, the polity was gripped by a deep legitimation crisis. The Poles rose to the occasion by repeatedly attacking Muscovy in the period 1605-18, actually succeeding in invading Moscow in 1610. In Russian historiography, this period goes by the name of "Time of Troubles," where it ranks with the "Tatar Yoke" as a particularly challenging time for what is usually referred to-and characteristically elided-as Russian statehood.
66. Jaroslaw Pelenski, "State and Society in Muscovite Russia and the Mongol-Turkic System in the Sixteenth century," Forschungen zur Osteurop̈aischen Geschichte 27 (1980): 156-67;
67. Leo de Hartog, Russia and the Mongol Yoke: The History of the Russian Principalities and the Golden Horde, 1221-1502 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1995).
68. "As late as the seventeenth century, the emigré Muscovite bureaucrat Gregorii Kotoshikin explained that the ruler of Muscovy was a tsar 'by virtue of Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan.' " Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 100.
69. "As late as the seventeenth century, the emigré Muscovite bureaucrat Gregorii Kotoshikin explained that the ruler of Muscovy was a tsar 'by virtue of Ivan IV's conquest of Kazan.' " Halperin, Russia and the Golden Horde, 113.
70. See Adam Watson, "Russia and the European States System," in The Expansion of International Society, eds., Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 61-74.
71. New century indeed: "[t]ime itself was made to recognize the grandiose ideas for change that the Tsar had developed during the Great Embassy, as the calendar was adapted for the year to begin on 1 January rather than 1 September and to be numbered from the birth of Christ rather than the supposed creation of the world"; Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 69.
72. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 (London: Fontana, 1988), 96.
73. Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 112, 72.
74. Zorin, Istoriya diplomatii, 337.
75. E. V. Anisimov, "The Imperial Heritage of Peter the Great in the Foreign Policy of His Early Successors," in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, ed. Hugh Ragsdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25.
76. Janet Hartley, "'Losing my Best Days': Charles Whitworth, First British Ambassador to Russia," History Today 51, no. 6 (2001): 40-46.
77. English under-secretary of state, quoted in Janet Hartley, "'Losing my Best Days': Charles Whitworth, First British Ambassador to Russia," History Today 51, no. 6 (2001), 54.
78. Janet Hartley, "'Losing my Best Days': Charles Whitworth, First British Ambassador to Russia," History Today 51, no. 6 (2001)., 61-62.
79. Hans Bagger, "The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy," in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, 36.
80. Hans Bagger, "The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy," in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, 36.
81. Shafirov, quoted in Hans Bagger, "The Role of the Baltic in Russian Foreign Policy," in Imperial Russian Foreign Policy, 37.
82. Shafirov to a French colleague in 1721, quoted in Dukes, The Making of Russian Absolutism, 77.
83. Neumann, "Russia as a Great Power."
84. G. A. Nekrasov, "Mezhdunarodnoe priznanie rossiyskogo velikoderzhaviya v XVIII veke," in Feodal'naya Rossiya vo vsemirno-istoricheskom protsesse, eds., V. T. Pashuto et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), 381-88.
85. Michael T. Florinsky, Russia: A History and an Interpretation, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 353.
86. Bagger, "The Role of the Baltic," 52.
87. Gordon A. Craig and Alexander L. George, Force and Statecraft: Diplomatic Challenges of Our Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 24.
88. Kappeler, The Russian Empire;
89. Neumann, "Entry into International Society."
90. John P. LeDonne, The Grand Strategy of the Russian Empire, 1650-1831 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 140-41.
91. David Hume, quoted in David Bayne Horn, British Public Opinion and the Partition of Poland (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1945), 18-19.
92. Graf d'Hédouville, quoted in Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, The Foreign Ministers of Alexander I: Political Attitudes and the Conduct of Russian Diplomacy, 1801-1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 19.
93. W. Bruce Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia's Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1982), 3, cf. 175.
94. Paul W. Schroeder, "The 19th Century International System: Changes in the Structure," World Politics 34, no. 1 (1986): 10.
95. Alan Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 334.
96. Lincoln, In the Vanguard of Reform, 175.
97. Cf. William C. Wohlforth, "Unipolarity, Status Competition and Great Power Politics," World Politics 61, no. 1 (2009): 28-57.
98. Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
99. Erik Ringmar, "The Recognition Game: Soviet Russia against the West," Cooperation and Conflict 37, no. 2 (2002): 122.
100. Erik Ringmar, "The Recognition Game: Soviet Russia against the West," Cooperation and Conflict 37, no. 2 (2002), 123.
101. Cf. Stephen White, The Origins of Détente: The Genoa Conference and Soviet-Western Relations, 1921-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
102. Instructively, this was, among other things, due to the Soviets maintaining tsarist diplomats in their service and Trotsky's insistence, against objections, that his diplomats dress up in traditional attire.
103. Ringmar, "The Recognition Game," 125.
104. Ringmar, "The Recognition Game,", 126.
105. Ringmar, "The Recognition Game,", 127.
106. See Deborah Welsh Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, "Shortcut to Greatness: The New Thinking and the Revolution in Soviet Foreign Policy," International Organization 57, no. 1 (2003): 77-109.
107. Benjamin Welles, "Khruschev Bangs His Shoe on Desk," New York Times, 12 October 1960.
108. "Mr. Khrushchev's Last Fling," New York Times, 14 October 1960.
109. Welles, "Khruschev Bangs His Shoe."
110. Thomas P. Whitney, "Khrushchev's Rowdyism Old Bolshevik Stunt," Washington Post, 30 October 1960.
111. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), xi.
112. Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 1996).
113. Pouliot, International Security in Practice.
114. Yevgeny Primakov, "Russia and the U.S. in Need of Trust and Cooperation," Russia in Global Affairs 8 (February 2006): 2, also available at http://www.eng.globalaffairs.ru/number/14/1005.html (accessed 5 April 2006).
115. This is but one of Russia's many (failed) attempts at recreating the European security architecture of the time. For a discussion, see Michael C. Williams and Iver B. Neumann, "From Alliance to Security Community: NATO, Russia, and the Power of Identity," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 357-87.
116. Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: AMemoir of Presidential Diplomacy (New York: Random House, 2002), 123.
117. James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: U.S. Policy toward Russia after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 199.
118. Talbott, The Russia Hand, 170.
119. Talbott, The Russia Hand, 186.
120. John Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia, and Kosovo (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 144.
121. Talbott, The Russia Hand, 303.
122. Vladimir Lukin, quoted in Gennady Charodeyev, "There's Only Person Who Could Have Given the Order: The President," Izvestia, 15 June 1999, trans. in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 51, no. 24.
123. Norris, Collision Course, 290.
124. U.S. State Department official, quoted in Norris, Collision Course, 308.
125. James Steinberg, quoted in Goldgeier and McFaul, Power and Purpose, 251.
126. Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
127. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 186.
128. Paul Pierson, Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
129. Mark Blyth, "Structures do not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas and Progress in Political Science," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 4 (2003): 695-703.
130. Bourdieu and Wacquant, "The Purpose of Reflexive Sociology," 133.
131. Pierre Bourdieu, "Men and Machines," in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, eds., Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 305.
132. Pierre Bourdieu, "Men and Machines," in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies, eds., Karin Knorr-Cetina and Aaron V. Cicourel (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 306.
133. Pierson, Politics in Time, 22;
134. see Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
135. Hedlund, Russian Path Dependence.
136. Wohlforth, "The Russian-Soviet Empire," 230.
137. Mérand, "Pierre Bourdieu," 352.