This imovie by one of the students in my Nationalism class, Eki Ramadhan, documents the rise of a new national consciousness in East Timor after its occupation by Indonesia following the departure of the Portugese in 1974. Eki shows that it was Indonesia’s own policies to develop and assimilate the province (promoting literacy, teaching Bahasa Indonesia as a common language, encouraging the spread of Catholicism, selecting cultural features to represent a common East Timor identity) that ironically helped to forge a unified sense of identity as East Timorese.

At the end of  January, State Duma Deputy and Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov gave a blistering speech in the Duma attacking a new draft curriculum for high school students. He complained that beloved Russian classics from Alexander Pushkin to Anton Chekhov were being cut from the curriculum, while students are being exposed to the work of degenerate post-modern authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Asar Eppel.

Mironov also personally attacked Boris Lanin, a professor at the Academy of Education who headed the team drawing up the model curriculum. He accused Lanin of being a paid agent of the West since he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. Even worse, he is a Facebook friend of Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov joined the criticism, detecting the diversion of a “fifth column” bent on destroying Russian students through curricular reform at the behest of nefarious Western organizations such as the World Bank. Vladimir Nikitin, founder of the new Russian Style nationalist movement, attached to the Communist Party, complained about walking into a library in Pskov and seeing a display of books by poet Joseph Brodsky, whose works were denounced by Soviet authorities in the early 1960s for being  “pornographic and anti-Soviet.” Brodsky was later sentenced to five years of hard labor.

Mironov’s charges were picked up by President Vladimir Putin himself. A week ago, Putin unexpectedly appeared before a conservative group called Parents of Russia, where he said he regretted the disappearance from the curriculum of Pushkin, Chekhov, Nikolai Leskov and Alexei Tolstoi.

Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov also weighed in, accusing Lanin of pursuing a strategy of “hyperindividualism” aimed at undermining patriotism and respect for traditional Russian values.

The problem is that Mironov’s accusations are false. It seems that he did not read the draft curriculum he was criticizing. The section of the new curriculum introducing contemporary writers is confined to a mere two lessons. Classic Russian authors such as Alexander Griboyedov and Nikolai Gogol are absent from grades 10 and 11, but only because they were already assigned for grades 5-9. As for Chekhov’s “Lady With a Dog,” this work has not been taught in schools for many years because the subject of adultery is considered inappropriate for children. It is strange to see conservative defenders of family values demanding the inclusion of this story.

It is also worth bearing in mind that the model curriculum in question is just a guide for teachers, one of 18 published by the Institute of Education. Since there is no national curriculum in Russia, each school is free to set its own program of studies.

One of the main reasons the list of authors covered in the literature curriculum was shortened is to leave space for other subjects that have been added, such as introduction to religious studies and fundamentals of life safety, a course on civil defense. In the 10th and 11th grades, literature is reduced to two hours per week.

The theme of families and children has emerged as a central plank of Putin’s efforts to redefine Russian identity. First, he initiated an ambitious and expensive program to encourage Russians to have more children. Then, in retaliation for the passage of the U.S. Magnitsky Act, he signed into law a measure banning the adoption of Russian orphans by U.S. families, which was accompanied by instructions to authorities to support adoptions by Russian families.

Pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Kurginyan, who organized the Parents of Russia conference, has emerged as the leading ideologue of this new wave of Russian patriotism. A perennial feature of the Russian patriotic movement since the early 1990s, Kurginyan was one of the leaders of the pro-Putin demonstrations last winter. Kurginyan pledged to fight the “orange plague” lapping at Russia’s shores.

In any society, it is ugly to see politicians getting involved in telling teachers what to teach and hurling accusations of disloyalty at professionals who are just doing their job.

It is also regrettable that in the current political climate, Putin is trying so hard not to be rhetorically outdone by nationalist demagogues.

Peter Rutland

I was interviewed on this topic by Kourosh Ziabari for the Teheran-based Iran Review. His questions and my responses are here and below.

Q: As you know, the unipolar, hegemonic system of global governance led by the United State constitutes the basis and structure of current international order. In this regard, some people believe that the signs of the decline of the United States and a consequent transformation in the international order have begun to emerge. A change based on the founding of a power balance against the United States has begun to emerge in the global equations of political power. What’s your analysis of this change and the challenges it poses to U.S. hegemony?

A: The United States remains the single most powerful state in the world, especially in the military sphere. But in recent decades the world has become more complex and interdependent, and power has been dispersed around the globe. The U.S. is not able to exercise effective leadership in many important areas, such as climate change.

It is not just that the U.S. state has become weaker, however. Just about all states around the world are facing similar challenges. The European Union is in crisis, and Russia and China both face political uncertainty and the problem of corruption. Power has shifted away from states and towards private business corporations and other non-state actors of all types, from religious groups and aid organizations to criminals and terrorists. This is the argument made by Philip Cerny in his book Rethinking World Politics (2010).

Q: So you believe that we have had the phenomenon of the plurality of the powers, with some considerations. Well, some political scientists believe that the United States is voluntarily retreating from its position as a global hegemon, as a result of a remarkable increase in the costs of the unipolar and hegemonic order and the considerable decrease in its utilities. What’s your viewpoint in this regard?

A: The United States is trying to reduce its global commitments, after the two costly and unsuccessful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “pivot to Asia” is mainly a pivot away from the Middle East. But the United States is not retreating from the world stage; it is not turning back into isolationism. Its military presence around the world, built up at great cost over the past century, is still in place.

The main risk for the future is of an escalating confrontation with China. The United States has no direct conflict of interest with China – on the contrary, the two countries benefit from their mutual trade and investment. But China’s territorial disputes with Japan, South Korea and Vietnam could conceivably drag the United States into a military confrontation. Both in China and the U.S. there seem to be elements in the military who are eager to prepare for such a conflict. Those very preparations, even if they have peaceful or at least defensive intentions, make conflict more likely. Clearly this would be a disaster for both sides.

Q: What I understand from your statements is that the U.S. is facing the danger of being entangled in a serious conflict with China. The global capitalistic economy is collapsing and its consequences for the uni-polar and hegemonic order are beginning to appear gradually. What do you think about the impact of the downfall of global economic recession and its effects on the compasses of the U.S. power?

A: The 2008 crash was a big blow to the U.S. economy, and the government debt problem remains a huge challenge. But the basic institutional structure of the United States is very strong and came through the economic crisis intact. In contrast the European Union faces more serious and unresolved challenges to its political and economic institutions.

There is still a lot of dynamism in the U.S. economy. It remains by far the world leader in the information revolution and technological change, attracting innovators from all around the world. It also has considerable natural resources – land, water and now thanks to new technology rapidly increasing oil and natural gas production.

Q: Right. My next question is about the challenges ahead of the U.S. socioeconomic establishment. It’s widely believed that based on the emergence and intensification of global resistance against capitalism and liberalism, especially resistance on the microphysical level of global power against the lifestyle of imperialist system, the political power and influence of the United States has been diminishing in the recent years. What’s your take on that?

A: The political power of the United States has diminished, but I think the cultural pull is still quite strong. Elements of the American model have been exported and adopted in places from South Korea to Brazil to South Africa. All those countries have preserved their own cultural distinctiveness and identity but they have basically adopted the institutions of free market capitalism and representative democracy which are associated with the American model, even if it is an idealized model that does not correspond to the daily reality. Even China, with the rise of consumerism, has been becoming more ‘American’ since the reforms launched by Deng Xiao Ping in 1978. Five of the nine Chinese Politburo members have children or grandchildren studying in US universities, including Vice President Xi Jingping, who has a daughter at Harvard. [See this Washington Post article for details.]

Q: According to some studies, the resistance and opposition of the United States’ domestic forces against the interventions of the U.S. government in the other countries and the imperialistic traits of the U.S. political system have been contributing to the weakening of the global position of the United States. Would you please share your perspective on that with us?

A: There are many serious problems in the U.S. domestic political system – over the budget, over health care. But foreign policy is quite insulated from domestic politics. National security issues were virtually absent from the competition between Obama and Romney for the presidency for example. So U.S. foreign policy is mainly made by insiders – the large national security bureaucracies, the experts, and the teams of lobbyists representing special interests.

It is true that growing popular dissatisfaction with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put pressure on both Democrats and Republicans to agree to quietly wind down those wars. Also fear of popular opposition might have been a factor in persuading Obama to avoid making more direct intervention in the civil war in Syria.
But the truth is that other controversial topics such as Guatanamo Bay or the reliance on drone strikes do not reach a broad section of the American public, nor do they have any impact on electoral politics.

Q: And finally, aside from these propositions which we’ve mentioned as the factors contributing to the decline of the U.S. socioeconomic and political power and the downfall of the imperialism, can you think of other possibilities which may in one way or another further and accelerate the demise of the U.S. Empire?

A: The United States is a very powerful country, but I would not agree that it is an “empire.” It is a different type of political entity, and to try to understand it in terms of a 19th century empire would be a mistake. The 19th century empires were based on direct control and so they could totally collapse when colonies demanded their independence. The U.S. does not have colonial possessions of that sort, so her influence is more indirect, harder to analyze, but still a strong presence.

[This oped of mine appeared in the New York Times/Herald Tribune on January 15, 2013]

WESTERN powers were taken by surprise by the sudden emergence of an Islamist regime in northern Mali, and are scrambling to understand what has transpired there. Increasingly, the narrative is one of militant Islam. But the core of the conflict is the nationalist secession movement of the Tuareg people — one that in recent months has been hijacked by Islamist radicals.

In the Cold War, the West had a hard time separating out communism from nationalism. That failure led to a string of disastrous interventions, from Cuba to Vietnam. It was easier to see leaders such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh as tools of Moscow than try to deal with their legitimate nationalist demands.

The same mistake is now being made in the “war on terror.” For many years the international community largely ignored the demands for self-determination by the Tuaregs who inhabit the northern half of Mali, known as Azawad. The Tuaregs are nomadic pastoralists who number about 1.5 million and speak Tamashek, one of the Berber languages. They are ethnically distinct from Arabs, who make up the nations to the north, and the Africans who inhabit southern Mali and control the national government.

Across Africa and the Middle East, Western powers supported the post-colonial state with economic and military aid, which more often than not was used to crush self-determination movements by ethnic minorities. Some of these were well-known, such as the Kurds; others were more or less invisible to Western eyes, such as the Berbers and Tuaregs in North Africa.

Mali achieved independence from France in 1960, and the first Tuareg uprising broke out in 1962. A second rebellion in 1990 resulted in the 1991 Tamanrasset Accords promising the Tuaregs self-government, which were abandoned by the Malian authorities. After 2001 the United States stepped up its military aid to the Malian government in the name of the war on terror, though this assistance could have been just as easily used to crush Tuareg rebels as against Islamist radicals.

The third Tuareg rebellion, which broke out in 2006, was complicated by the rise of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), meaning that there was now a three-way struggle among Islamists, Tuareg nationalists and the Malian state.

At first the Tuaregs and Malians formed an alliance against the Islamists, but in 2011 the Tuaregs switched sides and aligned with the Islamists. A new Islamist movement emerged, Ansar Dine, led by Iyad Ag Ghali, who had been one of the leaders of the 1990 and 2006 Tuareg revolts.

October 2011 saw an influx of Tuareg fighters and Islamist radicals from Libya following the defeat of the Qaddafi regime. A new unified National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) was formed, and it started an all-out war against the Malian government in January 2012.

After a string of military victories, they achieved in a few weeks the goal that had eluded them for decades — the expulsion of the Malian Army from northern Mali. The humiliation of the Malian armed forces led to a coup in March that brought down the democratically elected president, Amadou Toumani Touré. The independence of Azawad was declared on April 6, 2012.

However, Ansar Dine and some smaller jihadist groups turned on the MNLA — a contest in which they had the advantage of economic and military support from the transnational Islamist network. They imposed harsh Shariah rule on the towns under their control, causing at least 400,000 residents to flee.

It was their continued advance south — to spread Islamist rule, not to secure independence for the Tuaregs — that triggered French military action this past weekend after months of efforts by the African Union had failed to organize a military intervention to deal with the problem.

The position of the U.S. government (and the African Union) is still to ignore the Tuareg independence movement and instead call for democracy and reconciliation within a unified Mali. This despite the fact that previous attempts to form power-sharing governments repeatedly broke down due to failure to protect the rights of the Tuaregs.

At this stage, however, it might be too late for the Western forces that are entering the fray to distinguish and win over the moderate nationalists within the Tuareg ranks.

Canada’s attentiveness to the plight of its First Nations has been part of a broad upsurge in indigenous rights movements around the world. Increasingly, these movements demand not just protection of their culture, but also political power and a degree of self-rule. At the same time the pressure of economic development and cultural exposure tend to undermine the remaining elements of cultural distinctiveness.

The undergraduate students in the Nationalism class that I taught this past semester all prepare a 10 minute i-movie on a topic of their choosing. The challenges facing the Inuit people of Canada are explored in this presentation by Ryan Katz.

A terrific book on the fate of the Inuit is Melanie Mcgrath, The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic (Vintage, 2008). It tells the story of a Canadian government program in the 1950s to relocate Inuit families from Hudson Bay to the remote north, ostensibly to help preserve their way of life, but the real purpose of which was to forestall territorial claims from Denmark, which occupies Greenland.

One of the families sent to Ellesmere Island included the illegitimate son of Robert Flaherty, who made the classic 1922 documentary film Nanook of the North.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZLROkFqG-k

National identity can express itself in various ways in popular culture and daily life, including architectural styles, food, sport – and clothing. The keffiyeh headscarf is one of the most recognizable political items of clothing, coming to represent first Arab and then Palestinian national identity.

The undergraduate students in the Nationalism class that I taught this past semester all prepare a 10 minute i-movie on a topic of their choosing. Zainab Khan made this presentation exploring the struggle for ‘ownership’ of the keffiyeh over the past 10 years. Western fashion houses started using keffiyeh fabric in their designs, and then some Israeli designers started using it – with a Star of David motif.

I published this commentary in the Moscow Times, 26 November 2012.

Another Blow to Russia’s Bid to Boost Soft Power

The re-election of Barack Obama raised hopes that U.S.-Russian relations could be launched on a fresh course. The nightmare scenario of a Mitt Romney presidency staffed with neocons has been averted.

But the ink was barely dry on Obama’s electoral returns when the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Magnitsky Act, sanctioning individuals deemed to be involved in the persecution and death of Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. The bill now goes to the Senate for approval, where it is likely to pass, although some senators favor widening the bill so that it does not uniquely target Russia.

The good news is that the bill is tied to a repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, clearing the way for the granting of permanent normal trade relations, in conformity with Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov condemned the bill, arguing that it violates principles of “mutual respect, equal rights and noninterference in internal affairs.” As with the Pussy Riot affair, Moscow has a neuralgic reaction to any Western criticism of its human rights record.

But the Magnitsky case is not a purely internal Russian affair. It began with the seizure of assets of Hermitage Capital, and Magnitsky worked for the Firestone Duncan law firm, which was founded by American lawyers. Even aside from human rights considerations, the U.S. has a clear and legitimate interest in sending a signal to other countries that if you abuse Western businesses and their personnel, there will be consequences.

Russian critics are convinced that the Magnitsky Act is part of some devious scheme to isolate Russia, but they cannot come up with any specific ways in which the U.S. would benefit from such a strategy. On the contrary, the U.S. stands to pay a considerable price if Russia were to respond by, for example, shutting down the northern route that gives the U.S. transit access to Afghanistan.

The primary factor motivating the U.S. response are the outrageous facts of Magnitsky’s treatment. Then-President Dmitri Medvedev’s own human rights commission reported in July 2011 that Magnitsky was probably beaten prior to his death.

Russia will never succeed in its campaign to be accepted as a regular member of the community of nations if it doesn’t realize that human rights really matter. Nor will there be any benefit from spending millions of dollars on campaigns to promote Russia’s “soft power” if the message those media carry is a crude defense of indefensible actions by Russian officials.

PUZZLED BY 2012 PEACE PRIZE, Moscow Times, 17 October 2012
By Peter Rutland

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union has brought both praise and puzzlement. The International Crisis Group lauded the EU as “one of the greatest conflict resolution mechanisms ever devised.” Others questioned why a body whose economic policies are associated with political turmoil and social unrest in Greece and Spain should be singled out for promoting peace.

The prize is awarded by a committee nominated by the Norwegian parliament. Critics were quick to argue that the decision was driven by purely political considerations, that is, by the desire to help the EU ride out the severe crisis facing its common currency. They also pointed to the hypocrisy of Norway praising a body that Norwegian citizens have twice voted against joining.

Europe is certainly a more peaceful place today than at any time in its past, but does the EU deserve all the credit for this? Defenders of the committee’s decision argue that the EU has ended the centuries-old proclivity of European states to invade each other. It’s true that most of Europe has enjoyed six decades without war. But it was the Cold War, not the Brussels bureaucracy, that created and maintained the peace in Europe.

The United States and the Soviet Union physically occupied the Continent in 1945, dismantled its armies and took responsibility for providing security in their respective halves of the continent. NATO and the Warsaw Pact were in place well before the Treaty of Rome establishing the European Economic Community was signed in 1957. In subsequent years, peace was preserved thanks to the deployment of nuclear weapons and the deterrence of Mutually Assured Destruction.

The EU certainly deserves credit for integrating the economies of its member countries and cultivating a spirit of joint endeavor so that when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s, a return to a 19th-century Europe of heavily militarized states threatening war with each other was inconceivable. But this was possible only because European states had already been stripped of their war-making functions for nearly half a century.

The enlargement of the EU into Eastern Europe over the past decade is also lauded for extending the zone of peace and stability into the former Soviet bloc. The prospect of EU entry was indeed important in tamping down nationalist conflict in Slovakia and Romania, both of which were home to Hungarian minorities eager to defend their cultural rights.

But these positive achievements have to be balanced against the military conflict in Yugoslavia during the late 1990s, which left more than 100,000 dead. Not only did the EU fail to prevent the conflict, but you could also argue that the precipitate recognition of the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina by Germany and others helped accelerate the violence.

From 1991 to 1995, it was the EU and United Nations that played the leading role in efforts to end the fighting. But they failed in that task, showing the structural inability of the EU to act decisively to bring about peace. This culminated in the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when 7,000 men and boys died at the hands of Serbian forces. It was only the subsequent U.S.-led NATO intervention that ended the fighting and imposed a peace that has held to the present. A similar cycle played out in Kosovo over the next four years, which festered until NATO military action brought closure in 1999.

The EU has also failed to bring about a peaceful resolution to the secessionist conflicts in Moldova, Azerbaijan and Georgia. True, these conflicts present a daunting challenge for peacemakers, whose task is complicated by Russia’s heavy-handed presence in these regions. But the Moldova conflict is far from intractable, and the EU’s failure to engineer a peace in this small, impoverished country is disappointing. Likewise, the EU accepted the divided island of Cyprus as a member state, much to Turkey’s annoyance. One can only assume that places like Moldova and Cyprus are not on Oslo’s radar screen.

In awarding the peace prize to the EU, the Norwegian Nobel committee is effectively erasing the Yugoslav wars and the post-Soviet conflicts from the historical record. The granting of the prize to the EU may be good politics, but it is bad history.

Two Steps Backwards in the Caucasus

By PETER RUTLAND

International Herald Tribune, September 11, 2012.

In recent days there have been two symbolic events that run the danger of igniting hostilities in an already tense neighborhood of the Caucasus.

On Aug. 31 a former Azerbaijan Army lieutenant, Ramil Safarov, flew back to Baku after serving eight years in a Budapest jail for killing Gurgen Margarian in 2004. The victim, an Armenian officer, had been a fellow participant in a NATO Partnership for Peace exercise. Safarov hacked him to death in his sleep with an ax.

The Hungarian government transferred the prisoner to Azerbaijan on the understanding that he would serve out the rest of his life sentence in his home country. But immediately upon his arrival in Baku, Lieutenant Safarov was pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev, restored to military duties, promoted to major, given an apartment and awarded back pay for his time in prison. These actions drew universal condemnation from Washington, Moscow and European governments.

Apart from the fact that such a step is an affront to basic notions of justice and the rule of law, even more troubling is the message that it sends to the rest of the world: that the Azerbaijani government thinks it is acceptable to kill Armenians. Apparently, the grievances they suffered in their defeat by Armenian forces in 1992-94 are so profound that even murder is excusable. It is hard, then, to ask the Armenians living in Karabakh to quietly accept the idea that the solution to their disputed territory is for them to return to living under Azerbaijani rule.

This one single act could undo the patient efforts of diplomats and activists over many years to try to rebuild connections and work toward mutual trust — without which any kind of peace settlement will be a pipe dream.

Compounding the problem was a less significant but still noteworthy gesture. On Sept. 3, Richard Morningstar, the new U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan, paid his respects to Heidar Aliyev, the deceased former president (and father of the incumbent), by laying a wreath at his statue in central Baku. Apparently it is standard protocol for U.S. ambassadors to include this stop in their round of duties when arriving in Baku. Photographs also clearly showed the ambassador bowing his head before the monument, though a State Department spokesman later denied this.

Mr. Morningstar’s far from empty gesture sent two wrong signals.

First, it is disheartening to Azerbaijani democratic activists to see the United States so cravenly supporting dictatorship as a suitable form of rule, a pattern all too familiar from U.S. policy toward the entire Middle East.

Second, it signals to Armenia — and its principal ally, Russia — that the United States is an unqualified backer of the Azerbaijani government, warts and all. Strategic interests — Caspian oil, access to Central Asia, containment of Iran — count for more than the niceties of human rights and democratic procedure.

This makes it all but impossible for Armenia to expect the United States to act as an honest broker in the peace process. And if the United States cannot play that role, no one else will.

Diplomacy has long revolved around such symbolic acts. In 1793, the Earl Macartney, British ambassador to China, was thrown out of the country when he refused to kowtow before the emperor. More recently, visits by Japanese government ministers to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, commemorating the souls of warriors, have triggered protests from China and South Korea.

By contrast, when Chancellor Willy Brandt fell to his knees before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 he turned a page in German atonement for its past atrocities. In the same spirit, Vladimir Putin sent a clear message of reconciliation when in 2010 he knelt at the monument to the Polish officers killed at Katyn on Stalin’s orders.

What we need in the Caucasus are leaders willing to follow the examples of Mr. Brandt and Mr. Putin, with the courage to show contrition and a willingness to meet with their former adversary and figure out a way to live together. We may be in for a long wait.