Europe, Russia and the World of Magical Realism

Abstract

In the 1960s a new term entered the world of literary fiction: magical realism. It described the works of certain Latin American writers and had a very specific meaning that made it useful for critics. It was not, as many imagined, a description of escapist literature. The literature concerned was always serious, though it tried to convey the reality of one or several world views that actually exist or have existed. It was a kind of realism, but one different from the realism that most other cultures experience. It told its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world but experience a different reality from the one we call objective. It endeavoured to show the world through other eyes and in allowing the reader to inhabit this other reality so thoroughly, the ‘unreal’ element of the story became frighteningly real long after the novel had been read.

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In the 1960s a new term entered the world of literary fiction: magical realism. It described the works of certain Latin American writers and had a very specific meaning that made it useful for critics. It was not, as many imagined, a description of escapist literature. The literature concerned was always serious, though it tried to convey the reality of one or several world views that actually exist or have existed. It was a kind of realism, but one different from the realism that most other cultures experience. It told its stories from the perspective of people who live in our world but experience a different reality from the one we call objective. It endeavoured to show the world through other eyes and in allowing the reader to inhabit this other reality so thoroughly, the ‘unreal’ element of the story became frighteningly real long after the novel had been read.

The three main effects of this genre can be summed up as follows. Time does not march forward in a magical realist world view. The distant past is present in every moment. Time is a great repetition rather than a progression. Second the common is transformed into the awesome and the unreal; subjective experience is more important than the objective. Third, the miraculous is described with a precision that fits it into the ordinariness of human life. When looked at closely the miraculous in fact becomes mundane. What most works of magical realism have in common is an implicit rejection of western literary conventions.

It may seem strange to say so, but both Europe and Russia have been living in a magical realist world for some time. It now threatens to catch up with both of them. What magical realism actually is in the world of international politics is simply stated—it is spinning a tale that is believable only thanks to a suspension of disbelief.

In both cases, magical realism feeds on what philosophers calls a social imaginary, the concept associated perhaps most with the Canadian academic Charles Taylor. Taylor employs the term to describe the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others and what normative expectations they have of each other. ¹ A social imaginary, in other words, involves common stories, narratives and myths which make possible common practices which in turn, bind people to certain norms of behaviour. Institutionally, human beings come together with the aim of forming political entities with certain ends in view, including the primary end, security.

In other words, a social imaginary involves a common understanding of how the world works that makes possible common practices. It offers people a perspective on their own history; it explains where they stand in space and time, especially their relation with other societies. And every social imaginary offers a sense of how things work, interwoven with how they ought to, and from this derives a sense of disappointment when things go differently from what we expect.

Cosmopolitanism as Magical Realism

From the beginning the European Union saw itself as a distinctively new entity in history: a “civilian power”. And whereas the Americans continue to see war in Clausewitzian terms, “a continuation of politics by other means” the Europeans have tended to see the use of force (when applied at all) as the continuation of international law. America’s criteria for “just war” are essentially ethical in nature and their application is not subject to verification by international courts. The European preference writes the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, is for “cosmopolitan law enforcement”. ² In opposition to America’s “moralisation” of war, the Europeans prefer its “juridification”: the use of force is largely seen as policing. The Europeans would seem to prefer “lawfare”to “warfare”—to pursue traditional strategic objectives by using legal manoeuvres, and when the use of force becomes unavoidable, to constrain it within legal norms. What the Americans complain about most is that the Europeans talk the language of ultimate causes but practice the art of minimum risk.

None of which is to deny real successes when NATO and the EU work together. P. J. O’Rourke, as always provocative, may have lambasted the Kosovo War (1999): “Kosovo certainly taught the world a lesson. Whenever there is suffering, injustice and oppression, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.” ³ But the US did show up, and was responsible for 80 % of the air strikes. More impressive, if equally belated, was the success of the Bosnian operation. Bosnia-Herzegovina has been demilitarised: a million refugees have returned, and the main instigators of ethnic cleansing have been rounded up and sent to the International Criminal Court.

The European social imaginary is more normative than the American, less value-affirming, for it is derived from trans-national values and translated into specific norms of behaviour. Norms acquire particular importance, writes Peter Katzenstein, when they crystallise through institutionalisation. Once institutionalised, they do not simply express individual preferences; they also become part of an objective reality. The social imaginaries of Europe and the US happen to differ significantly. To quote Katzenstein, the US too has norms, but they impact on identity formation (they are constitutive); the EU’s norms, by contrast, are regulatory; they define standards of appropriate behaviour. ⁴

The European Union as a community embraces global governance as a way of syndicating its values across the world. It seeks to bind countries through associative agreements, and has tried to promote norms such as anti-corruption, the rule of law, the application of international labour organisation standards when hiring locals. These are all deemed to be “public goods”. The Europeans have also endeavoured to invent a system of overlapping power networks, involving partnership between states, social advocacy groups and pressure groups. These can be seen as the building blocks of a cosmopolitan democratic view, which is not without criticism from outside Europe; NGOs and non-western governments often see it as a form of “regulatory imperialism”. The point about cosmopolitanism is that it is, by definition, a very specific European understanding of power and its ‘miraculous’ element was that it airbrushed out of the account altogether the importance of collective defence.

The result is that the EU has not been able to construct a security community. Europe, writes Barry Posen, has been ‘infantilised’ by American military dominance. Its members have preferred to spend only an average of 1.6 % of GDP on defence, to remain client-states, unable to contribute to military deterrence against a common threat, let alone prove useful in an actual war. The result is that the EU and NATO have been two distinct communities in search of a common purpose. One has dreamed of collective security, the other of collective defence. And even the members of NATO have been divided. The Poles, from the first, have consistently rejected the idea of NATO as an out-of-area enforcer, or a vehicle for the export of democracy to states outside the Atlantic area. They have always wanted it to curb its appetite and become a more functional defence organisation, a strong shield rather than a destabilising force in the world at large. It is a view that invited criticism. Even Edward Lucas, the author of The New Cold War (2008), who shares their fear of Russia, confesses that he finds it distinctly ironical that it should be the East Europeans “those ill-governed, tetchy and intolerant countries that are now the front line the West is trying to defend”. ⁵

The greatest conundrum of Europe’s magical realism was that it felt it could exist in a world without having to think strategically. The EU is simply not institutionally ready to run its own foreign policy, and its leaders are not intellectually up to it. One wonders whether they are intellectually up to facing down a country that is bent on challenging, or revising, the rules-based order that until 2014 they took for granted. These aspects are crucial in comprehending Europe’s approach towards Russia, and discussed more extensively by Janne Haaland Matlary in Chap. 3 and by Julian Lindley-French in Chap. 6.

Losing the Narrative

Look back to the preamble of the European Security Doctrine of 2003, which is in the process of being revised:

Europe has never been so prosperous, so secure, nor so free. The violence of the first half of the 20^th century has given way to a period of peace and stability unprecedented in European history. Large-scale aggression against any member state is now improbable. ⁶

Such was the comforting belief of the Europeans who drafted their first-ever security doctrine. The underlying idea behind it was that state-to-state threats had disappeared, and that the only challenges lay in non-state actors, or non-state forces such as global warming. Even earlier in the Kosovo War, the Alliance had been described as a “facilitator of globalisation”. The EU Doctrine was even more explicit. The Union saw itself as a ‘facilitator of global civil society’.

This comforting story lodged in the European collective consciousness. A year before the Crimean crisis the Transatlantic Trends Survey found that 72 % of European respondents preferred their governments to stay out of the conflict in Syria completely. On defence policy more broadly the same survey revealed that 38 % favoured a decrease in defence spending. Moreover when asked if war was sometimes necessary to obtain justice 68 % of Americans agreed as opposed to only 31 % of Europeans. The following year a poll in Germany found that a clear majority rejected any resort to war even on the basis of just war theory. ⁷

At the higher reaches of government the situation was even more depressing. The European Council on Foreign Policy produced a report, Europe’s Strategic Cacophony (2013) which concluded that Europe did not have a strategy; it had 27 individual national strategies, none of which showed much interest in the evolving geo-strategic scene (including the changing nature of the transatlantic relationship). Some countries seemed unable to think of a European strategy beyond Europe; others seemed unable to even think strategically at all, a point Matlary Haaland elaborates on in Chap. 4. Only the British and French identified geo-strategic trends and tried to match them to resources; full out strategists in Europe it concluded were few and far between. The Dutch and Spanish national strategies were globalist but engaged in wholly theoretical discussions about concepts and values. Some were localist—focussing on only one end of the strategic spectrum. As late as 2012 the Latvian strategy stated that its policy towards Baltic security was based on “openness and mutual trust in the dialogue with Russia.” Others were abstentionists—“whether out of conviction (abstentionists) or circumstances (‘drifters’)”. Some European states such as Ireland and Austria, Portugal and Belgium appeared to have largely forgone strategic thinking altogether. ⁸ Italy was a clear case of drifting—the most recent Italian white paper on defence was published in 2002.

The European Parliament has repeatedly insisted on the need for a White Book on European defence. In 2010, Felipe Gonzalez’s reflection group on the future of the EU also argued for just such a strategic stocktaking. But individual countries have continued to block it. As pointed out by Lindley-French in Chap. 6, the UK did not want to talk about Europe; Germany did not want to talk about Russia. And there are other minor, but still telling, points about the incoherence of European strategic thinking. English is now largely the EU language; it is certainly the only language of security. Yet Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Portugal do not even bother to translate their national security documents into English. There is little likelihood that even the Eurozone governments will put to scrutiny their national budget planning or their national defence plans, as they do their budgets every year.

And what of the EU? The idea of a European Defence Force floated by the President of the Commission Jean-Claude Junker in March 2015 is just that—an idea (part of Europe’s magical realism). The German Army has shrunk to 180,000 soldiers; the French to 213,000; the British Army is already below 100,000 troops, the smallest number since the early nineteenth century. The Royal Navy, the strongest in Europe for 300 years, is now behind the French, and numbers 19 ships in all. The rest of Europe has little to show for itself either. The Czech Republic reduced its defence budget by 10 % in 2011. Latvia reduced it even further, by 20 % in 2008 and another 21 % the following year, and Lithuania a whopping 36 % in 2010 alone. In 2009–2011, European states discharged 160,000 soldiers and reduced military spending at a rate equivalent of slashing the entire German military budget. ⁹

The demand for a European Defence Force makes sense logically (it would force the Europeans to confront the reality of their situation); but that is not its purpose. Its purpose is actually to justify further cuts. Where would the Army be deployed, and who should be in control, or authorise its use? The call for a European Army remains a symbolic commitment to more Europe, situated in the far future, that only distracts from the real problems of European defence in the here-and-now.

The Europeanisation of Europe’s defence forces has so far been confined very largely to the defence industry, a point Øyvind Østerud elaborates further on with regard to France in Chap. 7. The merger between the French and German armoured vehicle manufacturers Nexter and KMW is one example, as is the development of a European Surveillance Drone System following a decision of the European Council in December 2013. But when it comes to the actual deployment of forces—mobilising the Eurocorps for example in Mali or Central African Republic—think again. It took a long series of negotiations before 60 European soldiers were deployed alongside French and African troops in the last conflict. It all paints a very bleak picture, made even worse when compared with US military capabilities. The entire combined Air Forces of Cyprus, Lithuania, Austria, the Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Ireland and Slovenia, could comfortably fit on the US Aircraft Carrier John C. Stennis, while simultaneously the entire Armies of Malta, Luxembourg and Estonia could be accommodated on board. By 2020, Britain will be left with a force one-third smaller than the force it deployed beside the Americans in Iraq in 2003. The US has more troops deployed in Japan and South Korea than Britain has soldiers. And while the Europeans like to talk up their efforts in Libya (2011) and Mali (2014), they were in fact heavily reliant on US support in the shape of intelligence, ammunition stocks, missiles, refuelling and transport aircraft, as well as drones.

At the time that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Europe found itself in trouble. With impeccable timing, the last American main battle tank had left the continent a few months earlier. During the Cold War, the US Army kept 5000 tanks in Europe to defend its allies; a few hundred have now been subsequently redeployed. And if you think that the world’s only Superpower can rustle up some heavy armour pretty quickly in the event of an emergency, think again. General Richard Sherriff, NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, claims that America would need between 6 and 12 months to deploy one armoured division in Europe, ¹⁰ and the Alliance’s second largest military power, Britain, is in no better shape. The era when Britain could field hundreds of the heaviest machines of war now seems impossibly distant. Back in 1979 it had 900 Chieftain tanks; today it is down to 36 operational tanks in all.

The picture at the national level is little better. Even the forces that remain have been hollowed out by a shortage of spare parts and trained personnel. On paper, the Spanish Air Force has 39 Typhoon fighters, but only six are actually ready for combat. Of Germany’s 109 Typhoons, only 42 are in any condition to defend the country’s airspace. It is clear that an entire continent has chosen the path of wholesale disarmament. Jumping on the 9/11 bandwagon of the War on Terror, the Europeans came to the conclusion that state-on-state conflict was irrelevant; the sole purpose of what was left of their armed forces was to fight non-state actors such as ISIS.

The Russians may be bombing ISIS, but they never went out of the state-on-state conflict. They told themselves a different story, one that anchored them to the past. Indeed, Russia has been re-arming on a huge scale. It has seen a 230 % increase in defence spending in the last 10 years. If Russia were to invade a NATO member—Estonia, for example—then the Alliance’s conventional forces would be too weak to repel the attack, even supposing they arrived in time. NATO leaders would then face the dilemma: either to go nuclear, or allow Russia to destroy the Alliance by taking out an ally. Julian Lindley-French elaborates on this point in Chap. 6.

All of this constitutes, in effect, what the insurance industry calls a moral hazard. Europe disarmed because it could, because it has relied so much on the United States. It now confronts the very real prospect that the Americans may be going home. General Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, may have identified Russia as the only existential threat to the US, but for that very reason, it may not want to risk a major confrontation with the world’s third largest military power. And given the fortunate geographical position in which it finds itself—flanked by weak neighbours, and an ocean away from Europe and China—Washington has incredible latitude in setting its geopolitical course. Unconstrained by necessity, American foreign policy makers can afford to let their imagination run wild in determining national interests, or in fashioning major threats of which Iraq’s non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction was just one example.

And the relationship between the EU and NATO has been dysfunctional from the beginning. But the EU continues to show little enthusiasm for taking its co-operation with NATO any further, or for folding NATO itself into this cosmopolitan imaginary. EU-NATO co-operation was especially poor in Afghanistan. Javier Solana did not visit the country until 2008 (and only after intense British lobbying). One of the most egregious examples of lack of co-operation was the EU Police Training Mission (EUPOL). The mission was so dysfunctional that NATO had to arrange bilateral security arrangements with each of its members. One frustrated Canadian Ambassador asked why his country, though not a member of the EU, ended up being the mission’s fifth largest contributor. ¹¹ There were other visions including the suggestion that the EU do the “civil mission” and work more closely with NGOs and international agencies but nothing came of them.

The working relationship between the two organisations has never been very close which is not to say that they do not exist. The Eurocorps has been deployed three times under NATO command (in Bosnia under SFOR in 1998–2000; in Kosovo in April–October 2000; and in Afghanistan in 2004–2005 as the core of ISAF HQ), but the co-operation is not underpinned by a grand bargain or striking political vision. Later the EU worked closely with NATO in the joint strategic air transport cell in Addis Ababa for the Africa Union mission in Darfur. The EU also uses the European Airlift Centre at Eindhoven. The problem is that these incremental advances are not the result of strategic planning.

The most likely scope for co-operation is between the EU’s battle groups and NATO’s Rapid Reaction Force but the former’s lack of dedicated strategic airlift is a major deficiency and the battle groups also vary in quality of training, in their military capability, and in their readiness to deploy. And there is another problem—the relationship between the two forces could easily tend towards either co-operation or competition and this is a real challenge since Europe’s armed forces are triple hatted—i.e. available for national purposes, as well as EU and NATO deployment. Rotation schedules were drawn up in 2006 to ensure that there would be no conflict in commitments but there is no guarantee that the agreement will hold in a crisis. The consequences of this dysfunctional relationship are certainly exploited by Russia, a point elaborated on by Tormod Heier in this volume’s concluding chapter.

Magical Realism in Russia

If Europe has been living a fantasy for the past 20 years, so has Russia. Here too magical realism is alive and well. Putinism is popular with the public for a reason. The West largely took Russia for granted for the first 20 years of the post-Cold war era. One critic with impeccable liberal credentials, the poet Joseph Brodsky, was quick to seize upon that mistake. In an Open Letter to Vaclav Havel in 1994, he accused America of treating the Russians as Red Indians, and seeing Russia as the Wild West. The choice the Indians had faced was either to imitate the cowboys or consult their ancestral spirits. Brodsky was in no doubt that the ancestors were to be preferred. ¹²

In an ironic twist of fate many Russians came to the conclusion that the West was only interested in business. In an article published a few years ago, Zbigneuw Brzezinski claimed that Russian foreign policy was no longer driven by ideology but only money, and that it would be forced to come to terms with the West whether it liked to or not. Russian money interests were too deeply entangled with the West to make confrontation feasible. It could not even play its strategic card: the denial of energy to Western Europe as it had done with the denial of energy to Belarus and the Ukraine. And had not Putin urged Russian businessmen to go on a spending spree and buy new industries and technologies, just as the Chinese had bought up American companies? And didn’t some of Russia’s most important businessmen close to the government have direct personal stakes in the continued prosperity of Western Europe; business relationships to maintain; investments to protect; children at schools in countries like Britain? If Russian companies could not go toe-to-toe with the best companies in Europe, then surely they could forget the whole game?

But like most other great powers Russia doesn’t live by bread alone. Long before the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 Russia had come back into Europe’s collective consciousness. And the social imaginary that animates it is not one which can make any European feel comfortable. It is not that Europe faces the prospect of another Cold War (or at least not yet). Putin’s Russia is not a messianic power. Unlike the former Soviet Union, it may pose a military threat to Europe, but not an existential one, politically or culturally. There is no Russian Model. There is very little Russian soft-power. European Leftists do not wear Russian suits, or listen to Russian pop music (not even Pussy Riot) and left wing students don’t even type undergraduate essays onto Russian laptops. Its soft power, such as it is, is still largely nineteenth century: Dostoevsky still walks tall, but that is hardly comforting for the average Russian citizen.

The challenge is that Russia will remain a relatively under-developed country, unable to tap into its immense social and human capital as long as Putin remains in power. While Russia’s economy has, by its own standards, performed quite well over the past 12 years, the country’s overall level of development remains very far behind that of an advanced Western country. In the decade from 1998, the economy, it is true, grew much more rapidly than the American in the decade from 1948. But what is interesting is that in 2008, at the peak of the energy boom, and after a decade of runaway growth, Russia’s GDP per capita was still lower than the United States’ had been back in 1950. In other words, despite all the bluster about being an ‘energy superpower’ and all of the triumphalism that Russia is back, the Russian economy is less developed than was the United States more than half a century ago. ¹³ Does it matter? Without Western money—and specifically European/German investment—it is simply not going to catch up. It is going to remain a broken-backed economy, the only major industrial power to remain almost totally dependent on energy exports.

But then Russia may be becoming increasingly autarchic. As Sergei Lavrov remarked, Russia is a minority stakeholder in globalisation. It took 20 years for Russia to be invited to join the World Trade Organisation (WTO). It has only nominal membership of a limited number of other trading organisations. It is insufficiently intertwining with the thick-end of the globalised world. All of which is largely its own fault: it has failed to take seriously any of the organisations it has joined such as the G8 (from which it has now been expelled), the OSCE and Council of Europe. Its exports are largely predicated on a commodity markets monopoly which has hampered the development of the customer-orientated commercial dynamic with the outside world. The consequence of course is that its foreign economic policy is all too often viewed in zero-sum terms embedded in a geo-strategic dynamic. It is almost like seeing the European integration progress back to front.

None of which is to deny that Russia is linked into the international system more than ever (and is hence susceptible to sanctions). It is not de-linked in the way that the Soviet Union was in the 1930s. It has put Communism behind it for good. More Russians travel the world than have ever done before in its history, and more stare at the rest of the world through the internet. It is part of the global economy thanks to radical tax reforms and stock flotations, mostly in foreign markets.

Still, Europe is confronted with a reality that it did not expect 10 years ago: a country which is stuck in an under-development trap just as Argentina has been for most of its recent history. And while Argentina has been hobbled by Peronism, the magical realism of Eva Peron, Russia is likely to be hobbled by the magical realism of Putin, who trades on the reassertion of Russian power overseas, and its ability to frighten its neighbours, Europe’s Front Line States, while treating its own citizens as a captive audience before whom it can re-enact an idealised version of Russian life.

Rather than speak of Russia we should speak of a regime. The Russian state is now thoroughly corrupt, almost at the bottom of the Transparency Index’s corruption league. It is less a functioning nation-state than a collection of vested interests. It is the middle ground of society—the natural liberals, most of the middle class—who are fighting for their life within the economy and society in general. The Putin regime now presents Europe as a threat, while at the same time dismissing the world’s ultimate middle ground power (the EU) as a historical irrelevance (the “hamster” Putin calls it).

Putin’s magical realism combines elements of the rational and irrational. He dazzles the Russian people while evading dealing with the country’s real problems. Toxic fantasies fuel a long-existent resentment at the loss of empire and power. The empire can never be won back; and the power is often less real than it seems, but anti-US and NATO feeling fuelled by the state-owned media, continue to create a sense of grievance and fear of encirclement, a point elaborated further on by Geir Haagen Karlsen in Chap. 9. This was also expressed by Konstantin Kosachov, the Chairman of the Federation Council’s Foreign Affairs Committee in November 2014 when he claimed that a full-scale war was being waged against the concept of the “Russian world”. Its goal was “an attempt to perpetuate the world’s belief in the guilt of Russia, to embed elements of Russophobia in the social consciousness, and to present Russia as the source of all evil in the world”. ¹⁴

In recent years the Russians have also invoked the language of values rather than interests, and conjured up fears first stated in a thesis made famous by the late Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilisations (1993). The West is now accused of wanting to shape an atmosphere of ethnic intolerance, comparable to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s; to foster hatred towards Russia in the world at large, in order to destabilise the situation in the “post-Soviet space”; and to create domestic problems for Russia at home by fostering a liberal fifth column. What makes all this “magical” is that it assumes that Ukrainians and Belarusians should also give up their national identity in favour of belonging to a “Russian world”. And it presupposes that the interests of the Putin regime are those of the Russian people, when the opposite is in fact the case. Putin runs a kleptocracy of oligarchs and family members which identifies one very real threat: the appeal of democracy and the remote possibility that the West might attempt an exercise in regime change. If Europe confronts an existential threat as in the case of Russian missiles, the regime confronts an existential threat in the case of the European democratic discourse. The present crisis, after all, began with the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, and the prospect that Russia’s largest European neighbour would be swallowed up into an EU sphere of influence.

In sum, Russia is heading nowhere—while it struts the world stage the economy remains unmodernised; the elite continues to rob the country and underinvests in its greatest asset, its human capital. Like Europe, Russia has found strategy very difficult—Putin is not the masterful Bismarckian statesman his many admirers in the West often like to think. For one expert Putin faces an ongoing form of Manilovshchina (a term based on a character’s name in Gogol’s Dead Souls) that reflects the difficulties of true planning; for another the regime resembles Ivan Krylov’s fable “Quartet”—it does not matter in which position the musicians sit, they would still not make music. ¹⁵

Hybrid Warfare as Magical Realism

The seizure of the Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine represents a final confirmation following the cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 and the invasion of Georgia the following year: the attempted dialogue between NATO and Russia has expired. The West may be accused of taking Russia too much for granted in the 1990s, but NATO did try to find a common cause. The NATO Russia Founding Act (1997) was meant to be the foundation, and the NATO-Russia Council was meant to make the relationship more transparent, and open up scope for greater co-operation. Throughout this period as the Russian position hardened, the Alliance largely responded to Russian initiatives, opting for “smart defence” in reaction to the invasion of Georgia, and adopting the Readiness Action Plan in response to the Crimean crisis (2014). It has now had to accept the fact that the Russians probably intend the Eastern Ukraine to remain a “frozen conflict” for the foreseeable future, one which will put Ukraine itself on the back foot for years to come, as it struggles to deal with corruption and economic reform. And then there is the prospect that Russia will use hybrid warfare to keep the Europeans permanently on the defensive, too. This approach should not come as a surprise, a point which is elaborated on by Palle Ydstebø in Chap. 8.

Are Russia and America stumbling to war?, a question raised by a Harvard Professor, Graham Allison and the Russian analyst Dimitri Simes in an article in the National Interest. ¹⁶ What the Europeans really fear is that America and Russia might one day choose to do a deal over their heads, especially if the Europeans show only limited interest in beefing up their own conventional deterrence. The nuclear element is a trump card for Russia. A hybrid operation—the taking of a town in Estonia—could lead to a dilemma over whether and how to respond. As pointed out in this book’s concluding remarks, hybrid operations are a means of circumventing NATO’s Article 5 and simply striking at the heart of political solidarity inside the Alliance. And the issue is exacerbated by Russia’s “nuclear signalling” to the rest of Europe (as Putin’s claim that nuclear forces were put on alert during the Crimea takeover). Such hints at a readiness to escalate beyond the threshold of conventional warfare (it is called “de-escalation” in Russian security debates) suggests Russia is playing both below and potentially beyond the threshold of conventional warfare. ¹⁷

In May 2015, Finland’s Defence Ministry sent letters to 900,000 citizens (one-sixth of the population) telling them to prepare for conscription in case of a “crisis situation”. Lithuania has reinstituted military conscription. Poland in June appointed a general who would take over as military commander in case of war. In one of the most blatant acts of all, a Russian unit blanketed an Estonia-Russia border crossing with tear gas, stormed across and kidnapped an Estonian State Security officer. It was something like an act of geo-political trolling: aggressive enough to assert Russian dominion over Estonia, but not so aggressive as to be considered a formal act of war. ¹⁸

So would Putin deliberately spark a conflict in the Baltics? The problem is the Article 5 guarantee is only really as compelling as Article 3—the ability of every member to actually defend itself. And unfortunately, the Baltic States are not in a position to do so. Of the three, Latvia is the most ill-placed. Sharing a 700 km border with Russia, it finds itself at a distinct disadvantage. It is the country with the largest regional differences in economic development; the deepest levels of social inequality; the highest level of political corruption; and a significant percentage of the population that watches Russian TV. NATO could not defend Latvia in the event that Russia were to invade. Only Latvia can. And here it labours under the disadvantage that it has allowed defence spending to decline; it has not pursued security sector reform; it has no sizeable or well-disciplined national territorial force capable of even putting up the limited resistance that the Estonian armies might, or that Lithuania hopes to, now that it is reintroducing conscription.

And were Latvia to be better placed, it would still face some imponderable security dilemmas. To defend the Baltics, NATO needs safe sea communications of the kind that made it possible for Germany to hold on longer than imagined to the last two Baltic redoubts in the last year of World War II. In the Cold War NATO did not seek to secure access to the Baltic States, only to deny sea routes in the southern Baltic Sea so that it was secure from any attempt to outflank the central front. Now the situation is very different. Imagine what would happen if the Russians tried to mine areas of the Baltic Sea, a point which Lindley-French explores further in Chap. 6. Add to this too the fact that the Baltic States cannot be defended without access to Swedish air space, and of course Sweden is not a member of NATO and is not likely to become so any time soon. For all these reasons, Brzezinski has suggested deploying a “tripwire” force of US troops. But the tripwire philosophy of the Cold War was very different. It was not a hostage to fortune. Behind the local force were follow-on-forces that would have been capable at short notice of reinforcing those in the front line. And in those days, of course, the Alliance did not rely on smart defence; it relied instead on real defence which translated in turn into deterrence.

Conclusions

Europe faces an uncertain future, and finds itself in an invidious strategic position. So what to do? The first, and most obvious step, is to rebuild its conventional forces as quickly as it can. Several European countries are now stabilising or even increasing their defence budgets though they remain disturbingly unwilling to up their commitments or contribute more to crisis management operations as the American ambassador to the UN complained in a speech in Brussels in March 2015. ¹⁹ The best offer by a European country to UN peacekeeping in Somalia and South Sudan was Britain’s pledge to commit 350 troops, compared to China’s offer of 8000. Only credible exercises such as Steadfast Pinnacle (2015) can ever act as a deterrent. Only forwardly deployed forces in Eastern Europe can act as a credible tripwire. Only the commitment to increase defence spending and thus reverse a 20-year cyclical decline will give it the confidence to actually reinforce sanctions (if need be), especially in the financial and services industries where they are likely to do most damage.

Second Europe must prepare for hybrid warfare. The doctrine is not new. It is a tailored mix of irregular behaviour and conventional weapons at the same time in the same place, and it is not even a Russian invention. Arguably, as Frank Hoffman writes, it is as old as war itself. It is not a Russian concept or a Russian strategy. We should see it for what it is: a methodology that combines psychological, physical and virtual (cyber) effects. It involves a larger element of propaganda, as Geir Haagen Karlsen explains further in Chap. 9. Russia knows that Europe is divided. It faces a host of other challenges, including terrorism and migration. It is able to manipulate European fears in the hope of immobilising Europe from acting to defend its interests. Europe is witnessing the return of non-mainstream political parties, mostly on the far right (but also in Greece, the far left) that take their cue from Putin and seek to revitalise the community of the nation with its traditions as a source of inspiration and mobilisation. Putin’s support for these parties comes in three forms. Informationally they are boosted on Russia’s propaganda networks such as the TV station RT. They are granted extensive coverage. Organisationally, Russia sends members to their party congresses. Financially, the Russians bankroll them. The €9m loan of the Russian-owned First Czech-Russian Bank to the French Front Nationale stands out. ²⁰ Above all, the Russians play upon European fears of a new Cold War. Hybrid warfare depends a lot on intimidation.

Recognising this threat, the European Council at its meeting in March 2015 decided to put together an action plan on strategic communications. Its overall objectives are (1) the communication and promotion of EU policies, particularly in the Eastern neighbourhood, (2) strengthening of the overall media environment and support for independent media organisations, and (3) increasing public awareness of Russian attempts to spread disinformation.

The third initiative must be to reduce dependence on the US. That means taking European defence seriously. And no country needs to accept this reality more than the United Kingdom. Back in the early days of the War on Terror Tom Friedman wrote an article in The New York Times. He told the following story: these days when you phone NATO you get a recorded message. “Thank you for contacting us. If you have a touch-dial phone please listen to the following options. If you would like to join us, Dial 1. If you would like a NATO Peacekeeping mission, Dial 2. If you would like to take part in Partnership for Peace, Dial 3. But if you would like to fight a war, please stay on the line and an English-speaking operator will be with you shortly”. These were the Blair-Bush years of the Anglosphere. Committing troops to two expeditionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan allowed the UK to imagine itself at the heart of history. Two failed missions later times have changed.

Assuming that the UK remains in the EU (which is by no means certain after the referendum in 2016) this will require that London moves from obstructionism to commitment. Alone, the UK vetoed the CSDP headquarters that everyone else agrees is necessary. Alone, the UK has blocked any increase in the European Defence Agency’s budget. When crises have erupted which called for the deployment of a British on-call battle group whether to the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008 or to the Central African Republic in 2013, London has turned a deaf ear. ²¹ This really must change. With 500m people and a GDP of more than £1.2trillion the EU is more than capable if it wishes of projecting economic and military power beyond its borders. The EU needs to start behaving like the great power that it actually is.

All of this presupposes above all a retreat from the magical realism of the last few years. In the case of Latin-American literature that retreat is already underway. Latin-American writers have become impatient of tall tales and narrative strategies that tend to gloss over the very real economic and social challenges the continent still confronts. They are re-engaging in the challenging, if damaging, exercise of remembering, returning to the past to find lessons for the future. Europe needs a wake-up call too; it lives in the most dangerous neighbourhood in the world. It needs to remember that the Russian behaviour is in keeping with its own past; that Putinism is not an aberration. On current form however whether it is dealing with Putin or ISIS, defeat looms. If Europe cannot re-engage with the past and aspire to secure itself against an uncertain future, then that future is likely to be grim. It needs, in a word, to “get real”.

Notes

• 1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 171.

• 2. Jurgen Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 101.

• 3. Patric J. O’Rourke, Peace Kills. America’s Fun New Imperialism (New York: Atlantic Books, 2004), xx.

• 4. Peter Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 19.

• 5. Edward Lucas, The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West (London: Palgrave, 2008), 23.

• 6. EU, “A Secure Europe in a Better World”, Brussels 3 December 2003, http://eu-un.europa.eu/articles/en/article_3087_en.htm.

• 7. Anand Menon, “Pressures and constraints” in Eva Gross and Anand Menon, CSDP: between internal constraints and external challenges, Issue 17, EU Institute for Security Studies, October 2013, 54.

• 8. Nick Witney, Europe’s Strategic Cacophony (European Council on Foreign Relations, 2013), 7.

• 9. http://www.atlantic-community.org/-/the.sorry.state.of.european.military.strength.

• 10. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11541639/The-Edge-By-Mark.

• 11. Michael Williams, The Good War: NATO and the Liberal Conscience in Afghanistan (London: Palgrave, 2011), 99.

• 12. Joseph Brodsky, “The post-communist nightmare: an exchange”, The New York Review of Books, 41(4) 1994, 223.

• 13. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadominis/2013/04/26/economically/russia/is/roughly.

• 14. Jolanta Darczewska and Piotr Zochowski, “Russophobia in the Kremlin’s strategy”, Point of View No. 56, Warsaw, Centre for Eastern Studies, October 2015, 18.

• 15. Andrew Monoghan, “Defibrilating the Vertikal? Putin and Russian Grand Strategy”, Research Paper, London, Chatham House, 2014, 20.

• 16. Graham Allison and Dimitri K. Simes, “Russia and America: Stumbling to War”, The National Interest, April 20 2015, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-america-stumbling-war-12662.

• 17. Nicu Popescu, “Hybrid Tactics: Rusia and the West”, Alert Issue No. 46, European Institute of Security Studies, 28 October 2015, 2.

• 18. http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war.

• 19. Lawrence Norman, U.S. Ambassador to UN Pushes Europe for More Peacekeepers”, Wall Street Journal, 9 March 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-ambassador-to-u-n-pushes-europe-for-more-peacekeepers-1425925668.

• 20. http://www.theweek.co.uk/europe/61498/russia-funds-french-national-front-is-moscow-sowing-european-unrest.

• 21. Nick Witney, “European Defence: an open goal for Britain”, RUSI Journal, October/November, 2015.