Abstract
This chapter has two central objectives: first, it examines the domestic Russian debates on foreign policy, and in particular on conceptions of the national interest, in order to identify any general trends and emerging consensus on these issues among Russia’s political elites. Second, it assesses the workings of, and the relationship between, parliament and president as they have evolved since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Lack of space prevents a detailed examination of other important institutions such as the military, or the numerous lobby groups that have formed in recent years.1 A focus on parliament and the presidency is justified, for they are the two critical representative institutions in any democracy, and an understanding of their roles and functions in determining the national interest and formulating foreign policy is important.
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Notes
On the military’s role see, for example, Andreas Heinemann-Grueder, ‘The Russian Military and the Crisis of the State’, Aussenpolitik, vol. 45, no. 1 (1994), pp. 79–89.
William Bloom, Personal Identify, National Identity and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Philip G. Cerny, ‘Foreign Policy Leadership and National Integration’, British Journal of International Studies, vol. 5 (1979), p. 71.
Alex Pravda, ‘The Politics of Foreign Policy’, in Developments in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics, ed. Stephen White, Alex Pravda and Zvi Gitelman (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 208–36.
Alexei Arbatov, ‘Russia’s Foreign Policy Alternatives’, International Security, vol. 18, no. 2 (1993), pp. 5–43.
Peter Shearman, ‘Russia’s Three Circles of Interests’, in Reshaping Regional Relations: Asia-Pacific and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Ramesh Thakur and Carlyle A. Thayer (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 45–64.
Vladimir Lukin, Tsentry sily: kontseptsii i real’nosti (Moscow, 1983).
See Andrei Kozyrev, ‘Partiia voiny nastupaet i v Moldove, i v Gruzii, i v Rossii’, Izvestiia (6 June 1992). He was warning here against aggressive policies designed ostensibly to support Russians resident in the near abroad but that could lead to dangerous forms of ultranationalism.
Quoted in Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 146.
Neil Malcolm, ‘The New Russian Foreign Policy’, The World Today, vol. 50 (February 1994), p. 11.
See also his chapter in Peter Shearman (ed.), Russian Foreign Policy since 1990 (Boulder: Westview, 1995, pp. 23–52).
See, for example, Graham T. Allison’s classic work Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little Brown, 1971).
Allison’s bureaucratic politics model of decision-making was used in an assessment of Soviet foreign policy. See Jiri Valenta, Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979 and 1991).
See Peter Shearman, ‘New Political Thinking Reassessed’, Review of International Studies, vol. 19, no. 2 (1993), pp. 139–58.
See Wendy Slater, ‘Russia’s Plebiscite on a New Constitution’, RFE/RL Research Report, vol. 3, no. 3 (1994), pp. 1–6.
See Peter Lentini, ‘Electoral Associations in the 1993 Elections to the Russian State Duma’, unpublished manuscript (Melbourne, Monash University, 1994).
Wendy Slater, ‘Russian Duma Sidelines Extremist Politicians’, RFE/RL Research Report, vol. 3, no. 7 (1994), p. 5.
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© 1997 Roger E. Kanet and Alexander V. Kozhemiakin
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Shearman, P. (1997). Defining the National Interest: Russian Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics. In: Kanet, R.E., Kozhemiakin, A.V. (eds) The Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25440-8_1
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