Suchergebnisse

"Russia's current foreign policy is both post-imperial and post-Soviet. The prefix 'post' does not mean impotence or uncertainty. It means that the present is predetermined by the past, it is the inheritor of the past. The inheritor is dissimilar from what it inherits and as long as the inheritor remains dissimilar and not fully aware of its own identity, it continues to be 'post'."

The essay is a comment on Larisa Deriglazova's article "Time Is Out of Joint": EU and Russia in Quest of Themselves in Time." The author argues that modernization does not mean an approximation to a certain normative, but the solution of one's own tasks, which cannot be achieved by means of simple reproduction or extensive growth of what already exists. Whereas the transfer of the European model of modernization to new EU member-states is supported by external control, for Russia the question of political modernization becomes radically more complex, as it implies not only a response to external challenges, but also the establishment of institutions adequate to domestic demands. The European institutions of liberal-democratic consensus, the very model of political participation that has looked triumphant at the end of the 20th century, is now in a deep crisis.

Capitalism and socialism, opposed to each other in the Cold War, began to gradually exchange their features: in the West, capitalism started incorporating socialist institutions of welfare state, and the soft version of socialism became an ideology of intellectuals. At the same time, in the East, socialism could not resist consumer culture, while intellectuals had switched to either conservative or purely liberal positions, both being sharply critical of the left. This game of two mirrors gradually became obvious and produced a large-scale neoliberal anti-socialist wave that started in the United States and then splashed over the Iron Curtain. It crushed everything behind that curtain, making it possible to build, to the applause of the intelligentsia, new cartoonish capitalism on the remains of the socialist scaffolding.