At a recent meeting with Russian liberals in Moscow, a well-known European intellectual started trying to convince them that, as he put it, "Russia is not a dictatorship these days. [President Dmitry] Medvedev is trying to liberalize the system, and with time Russia will become a democracy. You shouldn't try to hurry things." Not surprisingly, this advice provoked consternation among an audience that had expected at least some encouragement from Continental liberals.
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At a conference last month in Berlin, I witnessed another example of this divide. When I started to raise the question of democratic standards in Western-Russian relations, I was interrupted by another Western attendee. "You irritate us," he said. "International relations are not about values; they are about power!" If he is right, Russian liberals will have to reconsider their expectations about the Western opinion-leaders they have long counted on for moral support and understanding.
A consensus seems to be growing among Western policymakers and intellectuals that Russia is not ready for liberalism and that there are even certain advantages to dealing with the illiberal political order built by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This may be why Western policy toward Russia has only served to shore up the Russian powers that are pursuing anti-Western interests. The results could be catastrophic -- not merely for the activists who are working to make Russia a free country, but for the moral authority of those in the West who preach liberty but practice something quite different.
The U.S. "reset button" policy demonstrates this paradox nicely. The United States, of course, needs to have a dialogue with Russia on security issues, including arms control. But turning a nuclear arms pact into the main item on the agenda only reveals how reluctant both sides are to discuss the real issues at stake -- the fundamental political differences between the two societies. Instead, Moscow and Washington revive ghosts of the past and use a Cold-War era mechanism to try to imitate cooperation. In the end, the U.S.-Russian security dialogue will do little to help President Barack Obama accomplish his goals of reining in an aggressive Iran, ending the war in Afghanistan, and advancing a nonproliferation regime. Instead, it will work in the Kremlin's favor, bolstering Russia's great-power status and making it easier to prop up the current authoritarian system.
The European Union's policy on Russia is also helping to maintain the Russian status quo, buying Russian energy resources and raw materials, and helping to finance Russia's oligarch class and strengthen the political elite. Having accepted Russia into European institutions -- the Council of Europe in particular -- European leaders try not to notice that Russia's system does not conform to the very principles these organizations are designed to promote. One could get the impression that, for the sake of advancing their economic interests, European governments have decided not to make an issue out of these principles, convincing themselves that Russia is simply not ready for them yet.
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