Fri, May 25 2012

The guns of August: non-event with consequences

Wed, Aug 19 2009 14:21 CET

byIvan Krastev

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The guns of August: non-event with consequences

Ivan Krastev.

Photo: Цветелина Белутова

After the funerals

In assessing the consequences of the Russia-Georgia war the real question is: does the post-August 2008 world giving us a better chance for negotiating a legitimate and just European order, or is it making such a order even less likely?

Two answers are possible: the desperately pessimistic or the moderately optimistic.

Pessimists will claim that by turning the Russia-Georgia war into a non-event the west has encouraged the Kremlin to repeat its "success" in other parts of the post-Soviet space - thus making European order an illusion.

Optimists tend to believe that the Russia-Georgia war marks the simultaneous failure of two projects: Russia's for reviving sphere-of-influence politics in Europe, and the west's for constructing Europe without Russia.

If the pessimists are right, these are the early stages of a long night. If the optimists are correct, the death of these two projects means that now is a proper time to start thinking about the gestation of a third.
 
 
Ivan Krastev is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is  visiting fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM)  in Vienna, from June-December 2009

Ivan Krastev is the editor-in-chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy, and a frequent contributor to Transit - Europäische Revue(edited at the IWM)

His publications in English include: Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anti-Corruption (CEU Press, 2004); (co-editor, with Alina Mungiu-Pippidi) Nationalism after Communism: Lessons Learned  (CEU Press, 2004); and (co-editor, with Alan McPherson) The Anti-American Century (CEU Press, 2007)

This article is republished from the openDemocracy website

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