Selim Ibraimi -(CSSD)
The Other Challenges of Undemocratic Russia
Russia’s regional and global geopolitical influence is based primarily on the export of energy resources, putting high technology into its military forces, and sometimes conversely.
But as a result of Russia’s national interests, the country, in recent years, has gone through cycles of extremes of authoritarian mobilization and chaotic civil society and economic prosperity. On a global scale, other world geopolitical players, the US and UK, for almost half a century, have described the Russian self-perception as a state that refuses to be treated by international actors as a defeated nation and also as a second or third-rate nation in the international political system.
In addition to all these facts,russian policy makers rejects the fact which the Western world the democratic governments, prevailed over the ex-USSR’s red ideolog,y and this big victory, gives the US and other Western states the right and power to continue with unilateral military measures such as NATO and EU enlargement in former Soviet Republics and the Balkans.
However, in consequence, in many cases, the foreign policy of Russia has demanded equal treatment as a strong partner in international affairs. In recent years, Russia has been looking for new expansion of its energy power on a regional and global scale, with a possibility of projecting geopolitical power, especially in Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Balkans.
From this point, we can say that the post communist democratic development has been very painful and very slow in some countries of Eastern and Southern Europe, but more so than in Russia itself (Politkovskaya, 2004).
When the red socialist economy collapsed in the 1990s, many analysts and Western leaders considered that the new political and social reforms, in one way, would help Russia and the newly formed government to get better during the process of transition and political democratization. But as a case in – post-Cold War era, this didn’t happen as many EU States and friends of Russia wanted to be.
The new political leadership in the Kremlin, with the old policies of Lenin and Stalin, thought that the Russian nation could be reborn again in the new century and possibly change the course of history (Dimitri, 2009).
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NOTE: The introduction to this geopolitical monograph was written in 2010, 4 years before Russia invaded Crimea and played with the tools of soft diplomacy and propaganda in the Western Balkans.