#12 - JRL 9106 - JRL Home
Moscow Times
March 29, 2005
More Missed CIS Opportunities
By Ira Straus
Ira Straus is U.S. coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO, an independent nongovernmental international association that advances consideration of NATO expansion and transformation. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

From Ukraine to Moldova to Kyrgyzstan, there is a pattern of rapid learning by Russia and the United States. It is hopeful, but as yet artificially limited. In Ukraine there was mutual opposition and in Kyrgyzstan mutual caution, to avoid tearing the country apart. Both Russia and the West perceive a need to go further and cooperate to stabilize Kyrgyzstan, but have yet to do so. Moldova is the missing link, indicating where the obstacles lie.

A strange thing happened in Moldova earlier this month. Russia and the West were essentially on the same side regarding the elections there March 6 -- a remarkable fact, considering their real differences over Transdnestr. Yet no one heard about this. Just the opposite: A fair amount of noise was made, particularly in the media, as if the two sides were adversaries on Moldova, just as they had been a few months earlier on Ukraine.

Both Russia and the West called for freer campaign conditions before the elections. Both could have hoped for the moderate Democratic Moldova bloc to do as well as possible against the nationalistic Communist Party government. In the end, Democratic Moldova got 28 percent of the vote and the Communists 46 percent, much less than the large majority the Communists won during previous elections, when they had run on a pro-Russia platform. The change gives DM significantly increased bargaining power. But fairer elections would have given it even more votes and bargaining power.

Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe both criticized a string of unfair campaign practices. It would have made sense for them to apply pressure together: As a joint force, this pressure would have been hard for the Moldovan regime to resist.

Yet there was no active or visible Russia-West solidarity. Instead, there was the appearance of friction, which to a slight extent reflected reality. The Russian and U.S. media portrayed their two countries as somehow on opposing sides in Moldova.

Russia, trapped by its own polemic against OSCE interference in CIS countries, simply didn't think of joining hands with the OSCE on Moldova. The Russian media polemicized against supposed Western designs for the next Orange Revolution, even though such a revolution would have been Russia's best hope due to its rocky relations with Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin. It did not help, to be sure, that the color orange was usurped in Moldova by the Christian Democrats, a small, anti-Russian, Romanian-nationalist party well to the right of DM.

Here we see in operation the way vicious circles are created. First, the Western and Russian media both pinned a misleading, oversimplified anti-Russian label on the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Then, anti-Russian ethno-nationalists in Moldova proceed to take up the orange banner as their own. Finally, Russians attacked any prospect of anything orange in Moldova.

Some Western papers wrote, as if totally ignorant of the country, that Moldova was a Russian-controlled dictatorship. In this way, they managed to reconcile their anti-Russian sentiments with their distaste for the authoritarianism of the Moldovan Communist regime. Moldova was often lumped together with Belarus, and anything wrong in either country was blamed on Moscow.

The facts didn't seem to matter much to the Western media, perhaps because none of them really cared about Moldova. What mattered was to present data -- real or imagined -- in the form of arguing against the "other side" and creating the impression of a Russia-West conflict. That was, after all, more interesting to reporters and editors than internal Moldovan issues, and it fit within their pre-established storyline about U.S.-Russia relations.

In short, some of the basic facts about the elections in Moldova simply failed to register unless they could be fit into an anti-American or anti-Russian mold.

Fortunately, all this background noise did little immediate damage to Russia-West relations at the diplomatic level. But it helped prevent the gain that was readily available -- that is, the cooperation between the two sides that would have made perfect sense. The habits of mutual competition trumped the opportunity for collaboration, even though the two sides had separately arrived at substantially the same conclusions and were pursuing the same goals in this election.

Their true interest would have been -- and would still be -- to enhance their joint power and influence in Moldova and similar CIS areas. But the habit of each, dating back to the Cold War, has been to act to undermine the other's influence. This confounds their ability to perceive and pursue national interests.

The experience of the Moldovan election shows that the mere passive fact of shared U.S.-Russia interests is not enough to overcome old habits of conflict and confrontation. Solidarity would require a deliberate effort to work out a strategy in common, followed by a visible effort to implement it in common. Only then, it seems, will it be understood at the core of national institutions -- the media, the military, the state bureaucracy -- that the West and Russia really are in the business of cooperating, not competing.

Sergei Markov, one of Moscow's "spin masters" who lost in Ukraine, has proposed setting up Russia-West committees to formulate joint approaches to regime successions in CIS countries. Since, he figures, successions are inevitable, it would be better to have the United States and Russia on the same page than at loggerheads about them time after time.

It is significant that it is Markov who has proposed this, at a time when most of Russia is reeling in a phobic reaction to the United States' penetration of Ukraine and the rest of the CIS. It indicates that there is space for such an initiative now.

If the United States and Russia were to seriously pursue joint strategizing, it would mean identifying forces in each CIS country that are acceptable to both Russia and the West and working out shared strategies for supporting them. The strategies could range all the way from encouraging a regime to co-opt opposition forces to helping an opposition party defend an election victory against attempted cheating.

A common strategy would also entail agreeing on reforms that should be pushed for in each country. Joint U.S.-Russian pressure for reform would have a powerful influence. At present, when the United States urges a CIS regime to reform, Russia "answers" by offering the regime support free of conditions, hoping to get back some influence that way.

A joint strategy would require many compromises. The two sides would have to find the golden mean between the United States' ideological demands and Russia's knowledge of local realities. Prominent personalities on both sides would denounce such cooperation as a sell-out. Nevertheless, Russia and the United States would both gain more than they would give. The main thing would not be the compromises, but the combination of the two countries' influence, which would enhance their ability to achieve shared goals.

In Moldova, the two sides had a chance to gain election results somewhat better for both of them and, in the process, to repair their mutual relations after the Ukrainian revolution. In Kyrgyzstan, they had a chance to smooth the transition, in the process building positive mutual relations. The need is still there: The situation in Kyrgyzstan remains unstable, and difficult reconciliations are needed.

Russia and the United States missed their chance in Moldova. They need to ask themselves how many more opportunities they can afford to miss.