Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas after the Cold War

Andrei P. Tsygankov. Whose World Order? Russia's Perception of American Ideas after the Cold War. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. xv, 205 pp. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $45.00, cloth. $22.00, paper.In his publications, Andrei P. Tsygankov often stresses that ideas and cultural perceptions, in addition to static material interests, strongly influence international relations. This work is no exception. By using discourse analysis, he examines how two high-profile American theories on the post-cold war world order shaped domestic debates about Russian security, with implications for foreign policy and institutional development, at a time when Russia was redefining its identity and role in world politics. Tsygankov explains in Chapter 2 why world order should be viewed "as dialectical and multicultural, with a diversity of ideas and social visions coexisting and often competing for hegemonic influence" (p. 21).Chapter 3 is especially useful to students of Russian politics and history due to its classification of five key discourses or schools of thought that emerged and evolved between the late 1980s and 1990s, as cultural identities changed. The schools, which often lacked internal consistency, reflected different views of Russia's identity, external threats, and role in the world. National Democrats (i.e., Mikhail Gorbachev) and Westernizers (i.e., Andrei Kozyrev) represented liberal ideologies that supported more pro-Western notions of security and globalist values. In contrast, Statists (i.e., Evgenii Primakov), National Communists (i.e., Gennadii Zyuganov), and Eurasianists (i.e., Vladimir Zhirinovskii) embraced conservative, nationalist ideologies that sought to compete with the West, whose culture they viewed as inferior to that of Russia. The hegemonic discourse evolved over three major stages. First, the late 1980s marked the high point of Russian receptivity to Western ideas with the introduction of Gorbachev's "New Thinking." second, Kozyrev's strategic partnership with the West (1992-1993) was based on a radical Western political and economic liberalization model, but was soon undermined by international (NATO expansion) and domestic (shock therapy failures and the rise of the statist perspective) developments. Lastly, Primakov's multipolar world approach gained ascendancy in 1995 and is still prevalent today; it is statist in orientation and advocates a pragmatic combination of balancing against the West and co-operating with it, in pursuing Russia's national interests.In the next two chapters, Tsygankov analyzes reactions to Francis Fukuyama's cosmopolitan and expansionist vision of the "end of history" in 1989, with liberal democracies and capitalism as the victors, and Samuel P. Huntington's realist and isolationist vision in 1993 of a "clash of civilizations." He chose them because they were "highly influential ethnocentric ideas" that closely-knit Russian academic and foreign policy circles hotly debated (p. …