Richard Sakwa (University of Kent)
The Cold Peace: Mimetic Cold Wars in the Post-Revolutionary Era
The paper examines the domestic roots of the ‘cold war’, which after 1945 took an external form in the Cold War struggle between ideo-political blocs. In the domestic cold war the protagonists were allegedly locked in battle until the end of history. All this was swept away in 1989-91, together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant Cold War played out on the larger stage. Emancipatory revolutionism had exhausted itself and with it the Leninist power system. Paradoxically, while the domestic sources of Cold War confrontation have been transcended, its external manifestations remain in the form of a ‘legacy’ geopolitical contest between the dominant hegemonic power (the United States) and a number of potential rising great powers, of which Russia is one. The post-revolutionary era is thus one of a ‘cold peace’. A cold peace is a mimetic cold war. In other words, while a cold war accepts the logic of conflict in the international system and between certain protagonists in particular, a cold peace reproduces the behavioural patterns of a cold war but suppresses acceptance of the logic of behaviour. A cold peace is accompanied by a singular stress on notions of victimhood for some and undigested and bitter victory for others. The perceived victim status of one set of actors provides the seedbed for renewed conflict, while the ‘victory’ of the others cannot be consolidated in some sort of relatively unchallenged post-conflict order.
Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs. Recent books include: Postcommunism (Open University Press, 1999), Contextualising Secession: Normative Aspects of Secession Struggles (Oxford University Press, 2003), co-edited with Bruno Coppieters; the edited volume Chechnya: From Past to Future ( Anthem Press, 2005); Russian Politics and Society (London & New York, Routledge, 4th edn 2008), and Putin: Russia’s Choice (Routledge, 2nd edn 2008). His book on The Quality of Freedom: Khodorkovsky, Putin and the Yukos Affair came out with Oxford University Press in 2009. He has just completed The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism, and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2010).
