Emma Reynolds and the Odd British Dislike of Russia

15 january 2013

Emma Reynolds, the Labour Party’s shadow minister for Europe, presumably has an awfully large number of things to worry about. In case you’ve been in a Rip Van Winkle-like stasis for the past several years,  the European Union has a thankfully declining but still decidedly non-trivial chance of catastrophically imploding into some sort of deflationary Mad-Max-like nightmare. And just in case you thought that things were looking up the Eurozone is once again mired in recession and choked by austerity, and the UK, after its experiment with expansionary austerity, is performing only marginally better.

It was quite curious then that, in the midst of a systemic crisis of the very foundations of modern Europe, Reynolds found the time to write a remarkably confused and confusing op-ed for the Huffington Post about the need to do something about those dastardly Russians who might or might not have just tried to assassinate a banker in London.* Although her argument is somewhat hard to suss out, I think the following paragraphs provide a faithful and accurate account of her main points:

Issues to do with democratic standards, human rights, relations with neighbouring countries and Russia’s behaviour as an energy supplier have a much greater impact on us, either directly or through the nexus of relations that binds us to the rest of our continent.

So our relationship with Russia can’t just be reduced to a series of business transactions. It also has to address real and unresolved issues about the nature of the Russian state, the way it relates to its own people and its willingness to adhere to the rule of law. The dismantling of Yukos oil, the refusal of the Russian authorities to cooperate over the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the appalling circumstances of Sergei Magnitsky’s death in state custody, are three cases among many that raise serious concerns.

The government should be working with other countries to put these issues high on the agenda of our dealings with Russia instead of continuing to brush them under the carpet. President-elect Vladimir Putin must be held to his pre-election promises to tackle corruption. Cooperation on trade, investment and economic modernisation should be conditional on measurable progress in improving property rights and the rule of law. The government should use Russia’s forthcoming entry to the WTO to maximum legal effect in improving its business environment.

I am not being deliberately obtuse when I say that I have absolutely no idea how she gets to there (“we need to aggressively compel Russia to change its internal political arrangements”) from here (“we’re geographically proximate to Russia”). There are, I will grant, a number of arguments to be made in favor of a position of “morality” in foreign policy, some of which I might even agree with. But Reynolds literally seems to jump from a banality, due to historic and geographic factors the UK is much more intertwined with Russia than the United States, to a quite controversial point about the proper conduct of foreign policy without presenting any argument at all.

Why, at a time that unemployment is persistently elevated and the UK’s economy is preforming worse that it did during the 1930′s, should Britain not relentlessly focus on boosting economic growth? Isn’t “fostering trade and economic growth” rather higher on the British list of priorities than “giving democracy lessons to the Russians?” Would Reynolds feel comfortable telling those British workers who could otherwise be employed but will remain idled that their unemployment is an acceptable price to pay for moral superiority vis-a-vi Vladimir Putin?

When one compares the frosty, and sometimes downright nasty, UK-Russia relationship to the far friendlier relationships Russia enjoys with France, Germany, and even Italy, it seems clear that there is something else going on besides a British reaction against Russian “authoritarianism.” Despite occasional caricatures to the contrary, neither the Germans nor the French are amoral realists cackling in laughter as they conspire with Vladimir Putin to embezzle funds and steal elections. Rather, most other European countries have judged (accurately, I would say) that economic engagement with Russia is a win-win: it helps stabilize their own precarious finances and helps bring Russia ever more fully into the world economy.

One does not need to romanticize doing business with the Russians to understand that trade and economic engagement are far better than the alternative of sanctions and isolation. I don’t know how many times sanctions have to horrifically fail at their stated purpose for us to realize that economically isolating authoritarian governments only serves to bolster their power for the obvious reason that, since they tend to control most resources, the governments are far less effected than average citizens. So even if the UK could economically isolate Russia, and it is nowhere near powerful enough to do so on its own, it would be a bad idea to do so, despite Reynolds’ confused plea for confrontation.

 

 

* I say “might or might not” not out of crippling naivete, the Russians are more than capable of doing something like that, but because guilt hasn’t yet been established.