EAST EUROPE NOW NEAR TO RUSSIA?

Eastern Europeans are bowing to Putin’s power

JACKSON DIEHL, THE WASHINGTON POST, OCTOBER 12

To grasp how Vladi­mir Putin is progressing in his campaign to overturn the post-Cold War order in Europe, it’s worth looking beyond eastern Ukraine, where the Kremlin is busy consolidating a breakaway puppet state. After all, Ukraine, as President Obama likes to point out, is not a member of NATO — which has extended Western security and democratic governance to a dozen nations that had been dominated by Soviet dictatorship.

So let’s consider Hungary, a NATO member whose prime minister recently named Putin’s Russia as a political model to be emulated. Or NATO member Slovakia, whose leftist prime minister likened the possible deployment of NATO troops in his country to the Soviet invasion of 1968. Or NATO member Czech Republic, where the defense minister made a similar comparison and where the government joined Slovakia and Hungary in fighting the European Union’s sanctions against Russia. Or Serbia, a member of NATO’s “partnership for peace” that has invited Putin to visit Belgrade this month for a military parade to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s “liberation” of the city.

Obama has been congratulating himself on leading a “unified response” by the West that, he claims, has isolated Putin. In reality, a big chunk of the NATO alliance has quietly begun to lean toward Moscow. These governments do so in part for economic reasons: Dependent on Russia for energy as well as export markets, they fear the consequences of escalating sanctions.Then there is Poland, which until recently was leading the effort within NATO and the European Union to support Ukraine’s beleaguered pro-Western government and punish Putin’s aggression. This month its new prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, ordered her new foreign minister to urgently revise its policy.As the Wall Street Journal reported, she told parliament she was concerned about “an isolation of Poland” within Europe that could come from setting “unrealistic goals” in Ukraine.

But some also seem to be hedging their security and ideological bets. They figure it’s not worth testing whether Putin’s reported threat to invadeformer Soviet-bloc countries was really in jest — or whether a NATO led by Obama would really come to their defense. Why else preemptively announce, as did the Czech prime minister Bohuslav Sobotka, that his country did not want the troops NATO dispatched to Poland and the Baltic States as a deterrent to Russia?

Sobotka was trumped by Slovakia’s Roberto Fico, a former Communist, who followed up his rejection of NATO troops by dismissing Obama's appeal for increased defense spending and calling sanctions against Russia “suicidal” and “nonsensical.” Fico’s pandering, in turn, looked weak compared with the speech delivered in late July by Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who described Russia as an exemplar of how “we have to abandon liberal methods and principles of organizing a society . . . because liberal values [in the United States] today incorporate corruption, sex and violence.”

If this is a “unified response,” it looks orchestrated more by Putin than by Obama. “Some Central European politicians are angling either to remain below the radar screen — don’t speak up and make your nation the target of Putin’s ire — or to ingratiate themselves with Putin and therefore fare better than other allies when the waters get even choppier,” Damon Wilson, the executive vice president of the Atlantic Council, told me. “The issue for many politicians will be how to survive when the Russians are back, nastier than ever . . . and the Americans are remote, available only for genuine 911 calls.”

Remarkably, the wobbling in Eastern Europe comes only a decade after NATO’s big 2004 expansion and a dozen years after Poland and the Czech Republic gratefully and enthusiastically backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. What happened? As Robert Coalson of Radio Free Europe suggested, one answer can be found in the “open letter” political leaders and intellectuals from those countries sent to Obama in July 2009, when, during his first year in office, he launched his “reset” with Putin’s regime.

“Many American officials have now concluded that our region is fixed once and for all,” the letter warned. “That view is premature.”

JOSEPH NYE ON U.S. POLITICAL FUTURE

How concerning is US political gridlock?

By Joseph S. Nye

Oct 7 2014

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM

With the approach of the US Congressional elections, questions about the health of America’s political institutions and the future of its global leadership have become rampant, with some citing partisan gridlock as evidence of America’s decline. But is the situation really that bad?

According to the political scientist Sarah Binder, the ideological divide between America’s two main political parties has not been as large as it is now since the end of the nineteenth century. Despite the current gridlock, however, the 111th Congress managed to pass a major fiscal stimulus, health care reform, financial regulation, an arms control treaty, and revision of the military policy on homosexuality. Clearly, the US political system cannot be written off (especially if partisan gridlock is cyclical).

Nonetheless, today’s Congress is plagued by low legislative capacity. Though ideological consistency has more than doubled over the last two decades, from 10% to 21% of the public, most Americans do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views, and want their representatives to meet one another halfway. Political parties, however, have become more consistently ideological since the 1970s.

This is not a new problem for the US, whose constitution is based on the eighteenth-century liberal view that power is best controlled by fragmentation and countervailing checks and balances, with the president and Congress forced to compete for control in areas like foreign policy. In other words, the US government was designed to be inefficient, in order to ensure that it could not easily threaten the liberty of its citizens.

This inefficiency has likely contributed to the decline in confidence in American institutions. Today, less than one-fifth of the public trusts the federal government to do the right thing most of the time, compared to three-quarters in 1964. Of course, these figures surged occasionally during that period, such as after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; but the overall decline is considerable.

The federal government is not alone. Over the last several decades, public confidence in many influential institutions has plummeted. From 1964-1997, the share of Americans who trusted universities fell from 61% to 30%, while trust in major companies fell from 55% to 21%. Trust in medical institutions dropped from 73% to 29%, and in journalism from 29% to 14%. Over the last decade, confidence in educational institutions and the military has recovered, but trust in Wall Street and large corporations has continued to fall.

But these ostensibly alarming figures can be misleading. In fact, 82% of Americans still consider the US to be the world’s best place to live, and 90% like their democratic system of government. Americans may not be entirely satisfied with their leaders, but the country is certainly not on the brink of an Arab Spring-style revolution.

Moreover, though party politics have become more polarized in recent decades, this follows the 1950s and early 1960s, when the escape from the Great Depression and victory in World War II fuelled unusually high confidence in US institutions. In fact, the sharpest decline in public trust in the government occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Moreover, declining trust in the government has not been accompanied by significant changes in citizens’ behaviour. For example, the Internal Revenue Service is among the government institutions that inspire the least public confidence; yet there has been no major surge in tax evasion. In terms of controlling corruption, the US still scores in the 90th percentile. And though voting rates in presidential elections declined from 62% to 50% in the latter half of the twentieth century, they stabilized in 2000, and rose to 58% in 2012.

The loss of confidence that Americans have expressed may be rooted in a deeper shift in people’s attitudes toward individualism, which has brought about decreased deference to authority. Indeed, similar patterns are characteristic of most post-modern societies.

This social shift probably will not influence US institutions’ effectiveness as much as one might think, given America’s decentralized federal system. In fact, gridlock in the national capital is often accompanied by political cooperation and innovation at the state and municipal levels, leading citizens to view state and local governments, as well as many government agencies, much more favourably than the federal government.

This approach to governance has had a profound impact on the mentality of the American people. A 2002 study indicated that three-quarters of Americans feel connected to their communities, and consider their quality of life to be excellent or good, with nearly half of adults participating in a civic group or activity.

That is good news for the US. But it does not mean that America’s leaders can continue to ignore the political system’s shortcomings, such as the gerrymandered “safe seats” in the House of Representatives and obstructive processes in the Senate. Whether such sources of gridlock can be overcome remains to be seen. And there is legitimate reason to doubt America’s ability to maintain its “hyperpower” status, not least owing to the rise of major emerging economies.

But, as the conservative author David Frum notes, over the last two decades, the US has experienced a swift decline in crime, auto fatalities, alcohol and tobacco consumption, and emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, which cause acid rain – all while leading an internet revolution. Given this, dire comparisons to, say, the decline of Rome are simply unwarranted.

Published in collaboration with Project Syndicate

Author: Joseph S. Nye, a former US assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, is University Professor at Harvard University. 

Image: A lone worker passes by the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, October 8, 2013. REUTERS/Jason Reed

LA ARGENTINA EN LOS RANKINGS MUNDIALES

- INTERESANTE RANKING DEL CARI

Ciclo sobre los países de la región del Cáucaso - Paulo Botta PARTE 2

HOW THE WEST SEES PUTIN

UK-Russia crossviews: Celebrating Putin's birthday with some old cliches 
October 8, 2014 Nikolai Gorshkov, special to RBTH 
On Vladimir Putin’s 62th birthday barely a single self-respecting Western media outlet failed to mark the occasion with its own take on the man. Nikolai Gorshkov in London thumbs through British press birthday greetings to the Russian president.




Sky put out a report on Russian attitudes to Mr Putin: “Beyond the gleaming skyscrapers of the capital, there is another Russia”. A scene of old wooden huts and a broken down Lada illustrate this “other” provincial Russia. This reminds me of how Soviet media used to contrast the “neon lights of Western shopping malls” with the “slums and grime of capitalist cities’ back streets”. One up to the Russians: it was we who invented a cheap trick that has caught on with the free press. Sky's reporter takes a straw poll of what ordinary Russians think of Mr. Putin. They think well, and the reporter appears surprised that they don’t associate the difficulties of their daily lives with the president. Should they? We are shown “babushkas” (old women) selling homemade pickles and stuff at a local market stall to “supplement their pensions”. But we are not told that the pension age for women in Russia is still 55 years; at this tender age one can hardly call a woman “babushka”. I suspect the women in the report would be unpleasantly surprised to learn that if they were ever to settle in Britain they would have to wait for another 11 years to get their state pension. And if they find out that, unlike in Russia, pensions in Britain are subject to income tax they would have even more reason to thank their president. 

Small wonder, a man in his 70s in the Sky report calls Putin a real “muzhik” (tough guy). After all, it’s Putin who has been resisting calls from liberal economists to increase pension ages along Western lines. This is one Western standard Russians are really not keen on. I can almost hear voices arguing that Russian pensions are no match for British ones. Quite the opposite, the maximum Russian state pension is 42 percent of the country’s average salary, while the maximum British state pension is 22 percent of the British average salary.  As for the homemade pickles, jams and stuff, thank goodness we have those babushkas, as nothing in even the best shops can beat their produce for taste. 

Made in Russia 

Finally Sky comes finds a critic. A lorry driver says, “Russia does not produce anything”, echoing a recent statement by US President Obama. But shouldn’t he know better than the US president, since he drives a KAMAZ truck, which is as Russian as they come? And has won numerous international rallies including the Paris-Dakar in its heyday? The driver’s little rant about the spoiled view from the window of his suburban St Petersburg flat is lost in translation. It’s not the “houses”, which in Russian parlance means blocks of flats that have sprung up beyond his window, but “cottages”, the Russian term for country homes that are spreading all over rural Russia. Is that really a sign of tough times and falling living standards?

A Herculean feat 

The Guardian writes about Moscow exhibition 'The 12 Labours of Vladimir Putin', which depicts the president as Hercules, battling western nations disguised as serpents and monsters, or taming an ox bearing the symbol of Crimea, which he brought back into Russia’s fold. But not everything is hunky dory, the paper says, pointing to the Russian joke that, as Putin reaches 62, the rouble has dropped to 40 to the dollar as a result of Western sanctions. There's no mention of another figure: Putin’s approval rating of 86%. Putin supporting the ceasefire in Ukraine. Source: Moscow agency The Telegraph catalogues Putin’s achievements and failures since his last birthday, noting his “gracious” release of two members of punk group Pussy Riot, who "prayed to the Virgin Mary to cast him out of the Kremlin”. If swinging and screaming in tights and balaclavas on top of a church altar is called praying, then I'm the Pope. Among major failures it lists Putin’s attempts to pressurise his “ally Viktor Yanukovych, then president of Ukraine, into postponing an association deal with the EU”. Had Mr. Yanukovych indeed been as pro-Russian as we are led to believe by the Western press he would not bothered with the EU but jumped straight into bed with Russia and put Ukraine’s gas transit system squarely in Gazprom’s hands.
The Russian natural gas monopoly gets a mention in Sky’s journey through rural Russia, when the broadcaster stops at the magnificent Iversky monastery in Valdai. Desecrated by the Bolsheviks the monastery has been returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and restored to its former glory at considerable cost, partially paid for by Gazprom. Sky's reporter is surprised that the locals do not appear to resent the expenditure on the gleaming golden domes and chiming bell towers. Why would they? I, for one, would not mind Gazprom spending a bit of dosh on the housing estate next to where I live in London. 

Media circus 

We've only looked at British press reports on Putin’s birthday, although it has been marked internationally. Somehow the Russian president’s birthday has become the most talked about event in the world’s media. Anyone know the dates of birth of President Obama or Prime Minister Cameron?   

Nikolai Gorshkov is a freelance writer based in London. He served as a BBC correspondent and representative in Russia and the former Soviet Union from 2001-2012.