Russia's New Authoritarianism

Russia’s New Authoritarianism 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd i 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM For Olivia 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd iiii 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM Russia’s New Authoritarianism Putin and the Politics of Order DAVID G. LEWIS 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd iiiiii 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © David G. Lewis, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/13 Giovanni by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5476 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5478 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5479 7 (epub) The right of David G. Lewis to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd iivv 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM CONTENTS Preface / vii Acknowledgements / xiv Note on Transliteration and Translation / xv ONE / Authoritarianism, Ideology and Order / 1 Understanding Russian Authoritarianism / 1 Order, Smuta and the Russian State / 6 Russia as Weimar / 12 Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Order / 17 TWO / Carl Schmitt and Russian Conservatism / 24 Carl Schmitt in Moscow / 29 Normalising Schmitt / 45 THREE / Sovereignty and the Exception / 49 The Centrality of Sovereignty / 49 Sovereignty in International Affairs / 52 Domestic Sovereignty: Deciding on the Exception / 61 The Dual State / 77 FOUR / Democracy and the People / 81 Putinism and Democracy / 81 The Decline of Parliamentarianism / 86 Constructing a Majority / 88 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd v 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM vi / Russia’s New Authoritarianism FIVE / Defi ning the Enemy / 100 Russia and Its Enemies / 102 The End of Consensus / 114 SIX / Dualism, Exceptionality and the Rule of Law / 117 Law in Russia / 119 Conceptualising Dualism / 123 Politicised Justice / 126 Mechanisms of Exception / 130 The Exception Becomes the Norm / 137 SEVEN / The Crimean Exception / 139 Crimea: The Sovereign Decision / 140 Legality as Imperialism / 144 Order and Orientation / 151 EIGHT / Großraum Thinking in Russian Foreign Policy / 161 A World of Great Spaces / 161 Russia’s Spatial Crisis / 165 The New Schmittians / 190 NINE / Apocalypse Delayed: Katechontic Thinking in Late Putinist Russia / 193 Russian Messianism / 197 Russia as Contemporary Katechon / 200 Katechontic Thinking and the Syrian Intervention / 206 CONCLUSION / 215 Bibliography / 223 Index / 268 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd vvii 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM PREFACE Post-Soviet Russia is the most signifi cant case study of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism in the post-Cold War world. The regime headed by Vladimir Putin after 2000 has often been studied as an isolated case – explained by Russia’s troubled political history, its limited experience of democracy, the kleptocracy of its business elites, or the legacy of seventy years of Soviet rule. Yet twenty-fi rst-century Russia also developed a new version of authoritarian politics with much wider international resonance. In many countries around the world – from Budapest to Beijing – many familiar elements of ‘Putinist’ politics could be identifi ed in the fi rst two decades of the twenty-fi rst century. Understanding the nature of ‘Putinism’ became critical for understanding wider trends in global politics, and the rise of a new wave of authoritarian and illiberal regimes. The rise of illiberal politics simultaneously in many parts of the world in the 2010s suggests that Russia’s political development under Putin should be understood as part of a broader global backlash against liberal ideas and liberal order. This reaction took multiple forms, ranging from radical Islamist movements in the Middle East to left-wing populist movements in Europe. But the most signifi cant trend has been towards forms of radical conservatism, which have produced right-wing populist movements in parts of the West, and authoritarian regimes in many countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. Disparate in form, in leadership and in vision, these political trends nevertheless had much in common in their worldviews and ideological frames. They shared, above all, a profound rejection of a form of liberal internationalism that had come to dominate global discourse and global institutions in the post-Cold War world. These political movements were not only ranged against modern lib- eralism and its proxies, but they also began to coalesce around emergent 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd vviiii 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM viii / Russia’s New Authoritarianism alternative visions of both domestic and international order. They rejected the claim that the international system was a benign form of liberal international order, a rules-based system that ultimately benefi ted all. Illiberal movements and authoritarian political leaders rejected universal values, such as human rights, and instead advocated essentialised national or reli- gious cultures and principles. Against a cosmopolitan vision that argued for diminished state sovereignty and porous borders, they instead promoted hard boundaries and frontiers, carving out national and civilisational spaces. At the centre of political life, once again, was the state, as a reasser- tion of centralised political power against global institutions, international civil society and multinational corporations. Within society, they advocated fi xed defi nitions of gender and sexual identity against notions of equality, LGBT rights and ‘gender fl uidity’. Instead of liquidity and movement, in personal life as in the international order, they advocated fi xity, hierarchy and order. Russia played a central role in this emerging trend of anti-liberal politics. In Russia, perhaps more than anywhere else, the post-Cold War liberal order appeared to represent an existential threat both to political order within the state and to Russia’s place in the international system. After 1991 Russia adopted all the institutions of liberal democracy, and permitted unprec- edented international infl uence within its domestic politics, from monitor- ing elections to shaping economic reforms. The result under President Boris Yeltsin was a regime beset by economic decline and internal factionalism, which had capitulated in the face of the Chechen insurgency, and which had been unceremoniously demoted from the role of superpower to a weak, troubled, regional player in a US-led global order. A reaction to Russia’s crisis of the 1990s was inevitable, and it was never likely to be in the direc- tion of greater liberalisation, as advocated by many Western critics. Russia instead became a political laboratory for the construction of new forms of authoritarian political order, which sought to consolidate decision-making power in the hands of a political leader, while remaining engaged with a global, neo-liberal economic system. Political scientists struggled to conceptualise this new type of authoritarianism. The dominance of theories of democratisation skewed political sci- ence towards a misleading frame of analysis that focused primarily on the movement of countries on a path between dictatorship and democracy. In Chapter 1 I argue that an alternative binary – that between chaos and order – has been more infl uential in Russian thinking about politics, and is more helpful in understanding the politics of Russia over the past two decades. Other values – democracy, justice, equality – were always secondary to a par- ticular understanding of political and social order. The form of political order 66256_Lewis.indd256_Lewis.indd vviiiiii 220/02/200/02/20 112:242:24 PPMM Preface / ix pursued by the Russian political elite was shaped by many infl uences, and was often contested within the system by different ideological and political forces. But while ‘Putinism’ never cohered into a clear belief system, there was suffi cient agreement across parts of the elite to talk about shared elements of a worldview, a collective agreement on the meanings of concepts, a para- digm that imposed meaning on the world and structured Russia’s potential responses. To understand the emergence of this anti-liberal political order in Russia, I turn to the most infl uential anti-liberal thinker of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political theorist who for a short time in the 1930s was described as the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’. Writing in 2000, Gopal Balakrishnan could still comment that Carl Schmitt’s writ- ings ‘form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original and yet still unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought’ (Balakrishnan 2000: 2). No longer. His work remains frequently ‘disconcerting’ – not only because of his disastrous association with the Nazis, and his virulent anti- Semitism, but also because of the implications of his arguments for contemporary politics. His work is often still strikingly original, but it is no longer unfamiliar – in the past two decades

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