Russia in Global Affairs

New rules emerge from shifts in the balance of power and, if we take the modern-day world, the fact that small groups of countries are no longer able to tell the rest of the international community what to do.

In its academic version, the theory that world politics is centered around the ‘poles’ does not imply any democracy. It rather implies the physical number of relatively autonomous countries-dictators that extend their dominance to significant groups of middle and small powers.

To be sure, hierarchy has ended. However, it did not end with its complete triumph and the dissolution of the international order therein, but with the exhaustion of the possibilities that it offered. The unification efforts have had the reverse effect, as different cultures and peoples seek to emphasise their identity and distinctiveness even more. The current stage is transitional.

Russia’s relations with the Horde can be recognized as the most significant foreign policy interactions during the first 200 years of the existence of the state as we continue to enjoy its continuous sovereignty.

The sooner we understand that the basis of “soft power” is internal, and not in the activities of Russia’s representatives abroad, the sooner we will be able to benefit from our own objective advantages.

Nobody has any doubts that what is happening now in Ukraine is not simply a regional conflict but a test for the current international hierarchy. Predictions of the outcome would be woefully premature in any case, but one can try to imagine which principles may form the foundation of a future system of global co-existence and which will be relegated to the past.

World politics has begun to rapidly return to a state of anarchy built on force. “The end of history” culminated in the restoration of its usual course – the destruction of the international order resulting from large- scale conflicts between centres of power.

The ongoing debate over Russia’s place in world politics is a natural continuation of the historical, cultural, and philosophical experience of the late 19th century—the time when the country’s imperial statehood was in its prime but which also brought into light the problems that several decades later would lead to dramatic events in the last century.

Each new round of history changes the circumstances under which classic diplomacy becomes unnecessary, and national leaders, on the contrary, have to live up to the highest expectations.