First, there is a major delusion that affects a disturbing amount of the commentary surrounding the size of the American and Chinese economies. Newsflash: nominal GDP and real GDP are different things! China overtook Japan in nominal GDP this quarter, but its real level of output has been the world’s second largest for almost a decade*. The reason China’s nominal, or market exchange rate, GDP is twice lower than its real GDP is because its currency is undervalued relative to the US dollar – simply put, living in China is a lot cheaper than in America. But it’s not an accurate proxy for the actual output of the Chinese economy, which is now at around 2/3 of the US level (IMF)**. The “purchasing power parity” GDP is better suited for gauging a country’s real living standards and economic strength.

Furthermore, many analysts are making the stunningly incompetent, sub-Econ 101 mistake of projecting Chinese’s 10% real growth rates to its nominal GDP. (Needless to say, this is totally absurd; China’s nominal GDP is growing much faster than its real GDP, because as it gets richer its price levels begin to approach those of the developed world). The convenient result of such calculations is to delay China’s sorpasso of the US economy decades into the far future.

Applying linear projections of 10% growth for Chinese GDP and 3% growth for US GDP sees the Middle Kingdom overtaking its superpower rival by 2017. By 2025, China’s economy is 75% bigger than the US.

Now one may make the entirely valid observation that linear extrapolation of current trends is bad futurism. I agree. China’s GDP growth will like moderate in the years ahead, as China develops and gets less bang for each investment yuan. On the other hand, there is still plenty of scope for rapid catch-up. China today is where South Korea was in late 1980′s and its trend rate of growth is slightly higher at 10% relative to Korea’s 8% from the 1960′s to the 1980′s. As China gets richer, this growth rate can be expected to ease to 7-8% (Korea in the 1990′s) and 4-5% (Korea in the 2000′s).

The US cannot expect to see anything approaching 3% growth in the next decade. The realistic scenario is 1) a private sector deleveraging as households begin to rein back the debt-income ratios to some semblance of normality and 2) massive yearly budget deficits supporting a permanently weak economy at a 0-1% growth level. Think an American version of Japan’s Lost Decade.

In the graph below, China grows at 10% until 2015, 7% until 2020, and 5% thereafter – roughly replicating South Korea’s trajectory from 1985/1990. The US slugs along at 1% until 2020, then improves to 2%. In this scenario, China sails past the US in 2015 and is 60% larger by 2025.

In reality, the world is far more complex than macroeconomics alone can describe. As I argued in Shifting Winds, American hegemony is metastable: though outwardly imposing, an interlinked failure in critical nodes such as energy (e.g. oil shock), finance (e.g. currency flight) and geopolitics (e.g. Iran) can lead to a cascading collapse of the entire  system.  Few will risk sticking their neck out with such predictions beforehand, but once the collapse becomes visible in our rear-view mirror, it will acquire the tinge of historical inevitability.

The American service-based economy is reliant on cheap and reliable petroleum supplies to keep the office plankton fed and mobile, but is put at critical risk by the imminent peaking of global oil supplies. The financial / credit system relies on trust and belief (“credo”) in future growth to keep functioning as an economic fertilizer, but it is threatened by awning US economic disbalances and the possibility of disruptions in energy supplies. Finally, both the energy and the financial crisis can be triggered by a single geopolitical event, such as a successful Iranian blockade of the Straits of Hormuz (e.g. in retaliation for an Israeli strike against its nuclear facilities).

The risk of cascaded collapse would not exist if Pax Americana faced fewer challenges, or if its foundations were still strong and wholesome. They are most definitely not in our era of permanent deficits, tight oil supplies and imperial overstretch. In the worst case scenario, this collapse could manifest itself in a fall in GDP of up to 30% to a new “steady state” output level.

But at least the US will recover quickly, right? Not likely. Though a US dollar collapse will restore competitivity to some of its older industries, global resource constraints will prevent it from ever fully recovering. Why should increasingly scarce energy sources continue feeding the office plankton of American suburbia, as opposed to Chinese factory cities whose products the entire world wants?

Contrary to popular commentary, China is unlikely to be hurt much by an economic collapse in its prime market. Net exports only account for 7% of China’s GDP, so though exports will decline, so will the imports used to assemble exports, and the overall effect will be modest. Though ebbing US demand for Chinese goods will hurt coastal regions, create unemployment and incite low-level protests, it is unlikely to reach a critical level since China can refocus development efforts on the interior and raising domestic consumption (there are numerous signs that this is already happening).

China’s biggest challenge will be the peaking of its coal production and AGW-induced declines in crop yields within ten to twenty years. Mitigating these developments will require a great deal of capital and ingenuity, things China is fortunate to have in abundance. Ultimately, with 20% of the world’s population but just 7% of its arable land, the Limits to Growth may cap China’s peak GDP at not much more than America’s current level.

On to our third scenario. From 2011, some combination of critical system shocks initiates a cascading collapse of Pax Americana, resulting in a cumulative US GDP decline of 30% from peak (this is similar to Latvia’s collapse in 2007-2009). After that, there is a permanent zastoi – unlike in previous emerging market crises, a significant recovery will be impossible in the new world of neo-mercantilism and energy constraints. China will be able to leap past the US sometime around 2013-15 and grow to more than double its size by 2025 – despite the slowing of China’s own growth due to peak exergy and the natural effects of economic catch-up.

What is the probability of each of these scenarios happening? In my opinion, Scenario 1 is pure fantasy. Scenario 2 is what I’d vouch for in “respectable” conversation. Scenario 3 is what I really believe will happen (and what I tend to write about on this blog).

In any case, the general outline is clear: no matter which “prism” you see the world through – be it techno-cornucopian, “realist”, or peakist – it appears that China, by sheer virtue of combining 1.3bn souls with modern technics, is destined to soar past the US to become the leading pole, if not of the world system, then certainly of the Pacific region.

This breakout will be all the more dramatic under the American collapse scenario: wracked by internal decline and preoccupied with internecine politicking, it’s not impossible to imagine the US simply not noticing the ebbing of its influence in East Asia.  Of course, there’s a perfect precedent for this: see how post-Maoist China managed to break past the seemingly impregnable Soviet empire that collapsed into anarchic stasis in the early 1990′s.

[Angus Maddison's data adjusted to equalize with IMF 2008 data; note that "former USSR" is a very rough estimate].

* There’s a big debate on the reliability of official Chinese economic statistics. Are Chinese statistics manipulated? by Gao Xu is a recommended rebuttal h/t “in the loop”.

** That is also assuming that the 30% downwards revision to Chinese GDP by the World Bank and IMF a few years ago was well-founded and not undertaken out of political considerations to preserve America’s #1 status. If not, China’s real GDP may already be surging past America’s.

A 2007 Goldman Sachs report estimated India’s GDP growth potential at about 8% until 2020, reinforcing the hype of recent years over “India shining” and the vigorous IT industry springing up in oases like Bangalore. This may well be realistic, even despite India’s manifold social problems (low human capital, creaky infrastructure, caste-based inequalities, an unwieldy bureaucracy, sluggish courts, etc), under a global “business-as-usual” scenario. That however is highly unlikely, for the hard numbers suggest that India will be economically and geopolitically squeezed out of the resources it needs to prosper or even survive by its massive eastern neighbor, China. There are limits to growth on our planet and no guarantees that they will be distributed fairly or equitably in the coming age of scarcity industrialism.

Why India is not China

The two countries share fundamental similarities. Both have more than a billion inhabitants, sustained by great rivers like the Ganges, Huang He and Yangtze that are fed by the (melting) Himalayan glaciers. Both rely on coal to meet the bulk of their primary energy needs and will need to import ever more hydrocarbons, metals and food products from abroad to power future growth. Both are ancient hydraulic civilizations that got left behind during the Industrial Revolution and are now determined to make up lost time. But to realize these dreams, they must compete with each other – directly or indirectly – for the same global energy, mineral and water resources.

Unfortunately for India, its Chinese competitor is dominant across practically all indices of national power one cares to compare.

[Sources: GDP per capita; literacy; manufacturing; Internet penetration; infrastructure; naval].

Let’s now look at the significance of each of the above. First, the average Chinese is now substantially richer than the average Indian. This matters because state power is tied to the surplus it can extract in taxes from a recalcitrant citizenry. There is no better proof of the importance of technological advancement and per capita productivity than 19th century Qing China, which although still the world’s largest economy during the Opium Wars got casually trounced by British gunships with modern artillery and steam power. We aren’t talking about that kind of gap between India and China, of course, but it does exist. The Chinese are now simply better able to actualize advanced industrial and military technologies that they buy (or steal) from the developed world into forms of power that matter – renewable energy, supercomputers, naval C&C, etc…

China leapfrogged India despite the ruinous economic legacy of Maoism, which was surely far worse than that of the “License Raj”. The best way of explaining this puzzle is in terms of China’s better educational profile. The main determinant of long-term economic growth is a country’s human capital (see 1, 2, 3), which for the most part consists of the educational attainment of its population (which in turn is strongly correlated with its level of national IQ). Not only has China implemented basic schooling far more comprehensively than India (see the literacy rates), but in the past decade it has also charged ahead in tertiary enrollments. And there is some evidence that the Chinese have a big structural advantage in IQ over Indians; if that is truly the case, then convergence will be nigh impossible in principle.

As a result of its huge pool of well-educated workers, China enjoys an almost total industrial supremacy over India. China’s manufacturing sector was worth nine times India’s in 2008. This is reflected in practically any sector one cares to survey. Last year, China produced near half the world’s steel and almost ten times India’s output, and 13.8mn automobiles to India’s 2.6mn. In the most fundamental industrial sector, machine tool building, China was global first with 15bn $ of output, relative to India’s insignificant 268mn $. In summary: China is charging past America; India lingers at the level of France, Brazil and Russia.

No matter the hype around IT services off-shoring to India, its eastern rival is more “informatized” (despite the debilitating effects of China’s Great Firewall). Not only is China’s infrastructure already leagues ahead of India’s, it continues to spend three times as much on expanding it further.

Finally, China has a military edge over India – not only in numbers, but also qualitatively in crucial sectors such as naval, space, strategic nuclear and cyberwar. The PRC has a third of the world’s shipbuilding capacity (India has the world’s biggest shipbreaking industry) and some projections indicate the PLAN could have more warships than the USN by 2020. India does not have the industrial strength to embark on such an ambitious enterprise. Plus, a significant part of its military budget is tied up in maintaining military superiority over Pakistan on land; as a result, resources get diverted from the all-important Navy.

India in the Age of Scarcity Industrialism

Though both Asian giants are essentially world-islands (that is, civilizations so deep and self-contained as to constitute their own worlds), they are increasingly tied to the larger world system of capital and resource flows. Their economic progress and rising affluence has to be supported by outside energy sources. Meanwhile, trends such as climate change and urbanization are slated to suppress their agricultural yields, necessitating more imports of “virtual water” in the form of food from abroad. As such, it is vital for both China and India to develop both ways of paying for these life-giving imports (e.g. selling goods, accumulating foreign currency) or if necessary seizing them by force (using gunboats and expeditionary forces). Thus it is their common geopolitical prerogative to safeguard the sealanes carrying their bulk commodity inflows from the Middle East, Africa and South America.

Chinese naval modernization is proceeding in tandem with a far-sighted “string of pearls” strategy of naval base construction on its outlying coastal islands and friendly nations such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (they will host radar stations, anti-ship batteries and logistics hubs for naval operations). India has no such project at sea, while on land it is constrained by the hilly jungles of Indochina to the east, the impenetrable Himalayas to the north and a hostile Pakistan to the west. Though it does have a thin slice of access to chaotic, mineral-rich Afghanistan and Russian-dominated Central Asia, it is hard to see how India can marshal the political will and capital resources to build the necessary infrastructure to exploit them.

It should not be forgotten that India faces severe challenges managing its own subcontinent. Contrary to popular opinion, the Pakistani military is not the foremost strategic threat to India – even the worse-case scenario, a full-scale nuclear exchange, will not kill more than 1% of the Indian population. Far more worrying is the specter of the collapse of the Pakistani state. The region contains a 168mn strong population, growing at more than 2% a year, in a desert only made habitable by canal systems drawing on the Indus River, which is dependent on Himalayan glacial runoff for 90% of its water volume. Perpetually capital-poor, indebted and overpopulated, Pakistan faces the specter of a drying Indus by the 2040′s (if the more pessimistic studies are correct)… after that come the climate refugees, the collapse of the Punjab breadbasket, the raids from the Baloch highlands and general nuclearized anarchy. Bangladesh, most of whose 160mn people live just one or two meters above sea level in an area the size of England, could literally find itself underwater as the 21st century grinds on. No wonder India is pouring 1.2bn $ into a border fence sealing it off.

(Incidentally, the prospect of failed states spilling mass columns of refugees into India would make a great leverage point for China. By supporting Pakistan and Bangladesh just enough to prevent them from collapsing, they would become its vassals…)

India too will experience diminished river flows because of melting glaciers, but not to a critical extent like Pakistan, because the Ganges and Brahmaputra are far more monsoonal. (Nonetheless, like China, India has some very ambitious water megaprojects on the cards). In an abrupt reversal from the earlier successes of the Green Revolution, the rapid depletion of the fossil aquifers used for irrigation in India is contributing to stagnating food production. Though China also suffers from the same problem, it is better equipped to weather it by virtue of its economic strength (foods for goods deals) and strategic foresight (e.g. buying foreign farmlands).

India’s best strategy now is to push the Japan-Korea-Russia-India strategic alliance concept beyond mere rhetoric. If these countries remain splintered in the face of a waning American superpower, Chinese hegemony in the Pacific and Indian Oceans becomes near inevitable. On the other hand, Japanese and Korean capital and knowhow, Russian energy and military technology and Indian manpower and potential economic dynamism could balance out China (and their foreign policy experts worry at the prospect). This diplomacy should be pursued in conjunction with increased spending on ballistic missile defense (to neutralize the Pakistani strategic threat), buying back Sri Lanka (to break China’s string of pearls) and most importantly naval expansion (to exert control over the Indian Ocean littoral).

Conclusions

Some commentators believe India has a long-term advantage over China because of 1) its vibrant liberal democracy and 2) younger and more fertile population. I disagree on both counts.

First, there is no empirical evidence showing that democracies develop faster than authoritarian regimes; indeed, the converse is often true, since the latter can often suppress living standards to squeeze out more resources for investment (on the other hand democracies tend to be freer of the megalomaniac delusions indulged in by some autocrats and hence experience fewer absolute train-wrecks). There may well be a case to be made that a more authoritarian Indian government could have provided mass education and infrastructure better and earlier. Or maybe not: as Amartya Sen theorized in The Argumentative Indian, they do have a traditionally open and discursive culture, one that seems far closer to the West than “Oriental despotism”. Regardless, I think it is safe to say that at least until both Asian giants become fully developed – which will take decades if it ever happens at all – democracy won’t give India any significant advantages.

Second, the idea that China will grow old before it will grow rich is one that should die already. If you don’t want to read this Goldman Sachs report, consider that China’s current development level is the same as South Korea’s in the late 1980′s; its fertility transition lags by only a decade or so (Korea’s fertility fell below replacement level rates in 1983 and is now at 1.19 children per woman; China’s in 1993 and is now at 1.77 children per woman*). Doesn’t exactly sound like the makings of a demographic apocalypse. Meanwhile, India’s huge (and still growing at 1.3% per year) population will sooner be a liability than an asset.

In the final analysis, demography and democracy count for little in the hard, cold (or should that be hot?) world of the post-peak oil future. What matters is India’s capacity to build a modern, sustainable society, solve its environmental challenges and overcome its geopolitical dilemmas. So far it has been largely unsuccessful on all three fronts. Development is largely confined to urban oases, at the cost of further environmental strains and geopolitical dependencies. Its policy-makers do not appear to be pursuing a coherent grand strategy. And when it comes to the manifold impacts of scarcity industrialism – diminishing energy and food sources, climate change, failed states – India is subject to forces beyond its control. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that India faces an increasingly bleak future in a world of limits to growth.

* Adjust down to 1.60 to take into account the male-female gender imbalance.

2. Putin made a conciliatory speech on the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, much more so than the one a year ago. It was balanced and considered, condemning the crimes of totalitarianism, while avoiding any acknowledgement of modern Russia’s responsibility.

In a bitter irony for the Poles, three days later the firebrand Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s plane tumbled out of the sky while flying (uninvited) to attend a separate commemoration. Among the dead were assorted members of the Polish military, clergy, politicians, and Katyn victims’ families (see list).

First, putting all your eggs in one basket is pretty stupid. High-ranking politicians and generals are important national assets. They shouldn’t all be packed into one plane just to save a little money. In banana republics – which fortunately for Poland it is not – such accidents can cause state breakdown and revolution.

Second, the insistence on continuing to land in Smolensk against the advice of ground control is key to understanding the tragedy. Lech Kaczynski has a history of interference with pilots’ decisions. During the South Ossetian War, he threatened to fire the pilot for countermanding his orders to land in a war zone and instead continuing on to Azerbaijan. Though the threat wasn’t carried out, the pilot is known to have suffered from depression afterwards. The same pilot was flying the aircraft in this case. It will not be surprising if some similar, irresponsible stubbornness typical of Kaczynski was at play here. Or perhaps the pilot just really, really didn’t want to “fail” Kaczynski again.

Few people explicitly blamed Putin, the FSB, or even NKVD trees planters from the 1940′s for the crash. The exceptions were ultra-nationalist Artur Gorski (he who also tried to make Jesus Christ proclaimed King of Poland) and the ever reliable Russian liberast Novodvorskaya. There is absolutely nothing indicating a conspiracy, which in any case is highly unlikely given that this would have produced great risks for very limited payoffs.

Russia has been using the crash as an opportunity to mount a charm offensive towards Poland: Putin hugging Polish PM Donald Tusk; shows of solidarity towards Poland from Russia’s leaders and citizens; the prime-time airing of the Polish movie “Katyn”. I am almost certain that most of it is simulated, at least amongst the Russian leadership. Would America’s elites shed any real tears if Chavez, or Putin for that matter, fell out of the sky while flying to the United States? No, I don’t think so. But it seems to be working.

The fortuitous (for Russia) death of Kaczynski kills two birds with one stones. One of the most prominent and respected Polish proponents of the anti-Russian agenda is elimated, while relations with Poland can be improved so as to ease its concerns over Russia’s westwards-creeping sphere of influence.

3. In recent months, there has been talk of Poland’s reserves of shale gas, which – or so some commentators have suggested – will wean off east-central Europe from its dependency on Russian gas. US giants announced exploratory drilling will begin in Poland within the next few weeks. One oil and gas research group estimates there could be as much as 1.4tn cubic meters of unconventional gas in tight rock formations across northern and central Poland, which have recently become accessible thanks to American developments in hydraulic fracturing technology. These reserves would boost the EU proven reserves of natural gas, now at 2.8tn cubic meters, by 50%. Furthermore, Poland itself – whose own gas consumption is pretty low at 14bn cubic meters of gas (72% imported) – will become self-sufficient for decades. Poland is clearly very enthused about this, offering foreign companies excellent tax incentives for developing the shale gas.

Will this actually produce the desired results? First, the high costs mean that only 28% of gas-producing wells have generated decent profits, making investment risky. Second, they have amazingly huge decline rates – e.g., around 60% per year for the Barnett shale fields in Texas (and up to 80-90% in the Haynesville wells). This makes ramping up production quickly difficult since you have to run so hard just to keep still. Third, the projections indicate European gas production (now c. 200bn cubic meters) will decline while demand (now c. 520bn cubic meters) will increase. Poland’s 1.4tn cubic meters of shale gas reserves are insignificant relative to Russia’s 43tn cubic meters of conventional gas reserves, for which the infrastructure is already built. Finally, it is not even at all clear that Poland switching from coal to shale gas will even be that environmentally-friendly.

Now if there is the political will in Poland, it will probably be able to build up a shale gas infrastructure and ensure itself – and even its Visegrad and Baltic neighbors – energy independence for a few decades, starting from around 2020. (That period may also coincide with Nabucco coming onstream by 2015, if it gets the go ahead this year). The geopolitical configuration of Europe will change. Poland will become a far more significant pole in the European power balance than it is today, while Germany – and Britain further downstream – will become even more dependent on Russian gas, delivered by the Nord Stream pipeline bypassing Poland and the Baltics.

4. The Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupts, covering northern Europe with a haze of ash and disrupting transatlantic flights.

There are three things to be said about this. First, people in Britain have been reporting that the sky was unusually clear, with nary a cloud in sight, and that there was a spike in temperatures, with people even sunbathing. This was to be expected following the grounding of air fleets in the affected regions, since aircraft contrails, or vapor trails, are a major source of global dimming. This effect limits the amount of solar radiation hitting the surface of the Earth, and has caused the real extent of global warming to have been underestimated. (Or put another way, if all the world’s air fleets were to vanish today, temperatures would immediately spike by about 1C).

Second, the Eyjafjallajökull volcano could trigger off the much bigger Katla volcano. Katla has seen a significantly increased incidence of tremors in the past day. In the worst scenario, albeit a pretty unlikely one, the skies over Europe could remain ashen for up to two or three years – wrecking havoc on transatlantic transport and nudging already-strained airlines into bankruptcy. However, there shouldn’t be any major cooling effect, since even the larger Katla eruptions have historically been an order of magnitude less intense than that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991. (Unless the really big one blows off, that is Laki, whose eruption in 1783 caused dearth throughout Europe). That said, the global warming-induced melting of the Icelandic glaciers could make its volcano eruptions both bigger and more frequent in the decades to come.

Finally, see this Oil Drum post about The Possible Impact of the Icelandic Volcanoes on Energy Production. In short, major Icelandic eruptions could cause energy problems due to 1) a decrease in biofuel crop yields and 2) wind turbines having to be shut down so that their turbines don’t get damaged by air particles from the eruption.

5. With the British elections on May 6th 2010 fast approaching, the key debates center around the economy. During the recession, Britain experienced a peak-to-trough fall in GDP of 6.2% and its budget deficit this year will account for 12-13% of GDP. Foreigners are beginning to look at Britain as the new “sick man of Europe”. Below are three articles which, roughly speaking, offer an “optimistic”, a “realistic”, and a “pessimistic”, respectively, view on the British economy.

A) The pain to come: A terrible recession will be followed by a lacklustre recovery, but Britain is no basket-case (Economist). ”The economy may have been lopsided before the recession, but on nothing like the scale of southern Europe. In 2007 Spain’s current-account deficit ran at 10% of GDP; Greece ran one of 14.4%. By comparison, Britain’s 2.7% was a mere bagatelle. The fall in the pound has allowed the economy to regain competitiveness in a way not open to the weaker members of the euro area. As for the resemblances with the 1970s, history is not repeating itself. Inflation has recently flared up, but at 3% in February it is tame; the post-war high, reached in 1975, was 27%… But [Britain's debt figure] is inflated by London’s role as a global financial hub where foreign banks cluster to do international business. Adjusting for this, McKinsey reckoned that debt amounted to 380% of GDP in 2008. Although this was the second-highest after Japan (459%), four other countries – Spain, South Korea, Switzerland and France – had debt above 300%… Britain’s economy was overhyped before the recession, but the gloom has been overdone since the great fall.”

B) A Prayer from the Death Bed: Great Britain Stars in Its Own Greek Tragedy (Spiegel). “The country that was once referred to as “Cool Britannia” is in a serious crisis, with a hole in its budget even bigger than Greece’s budget deficit, now at 12.2 percent. And nobody knows how to fix the problem. Indeed, the problem has become so worrisome, that the European Commission told London on Wednesday to do more to tighten its budget, … “The fiscal strategy outlined in the United Kingdom’s convergence program does not foresee the correction of the excessive deficit by the fiscal year 2014/2015, as recommended by the Council,” the European Commission said in a statement… The accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers have calculated that starting next year, Britain would have to make across-the-board budget cuts of 5 percent a year to come close to cutting the deficit in half by 2014. But because the Brown government has already declared the budgets for health, law enforcement and schools to be off-limits, cuts of up to 10 percent – per year – are to be expected in most areas… And things could even turn out to be much worse if there is no strong economic upturn during this period. … There will also be massive cuts in low-income housing construction and transportation, translating into even more dilapidated housing, more potholes on Britain’s already miserable roads, and new cutbacks in high-speed train service. Universities have already lost close to £1 billion in funding, and various think thanks predict that the defense budget could shrink by about 15 percent between now and 2015.”

C) Election 2010: Debt – A conspiracy of silence (The Independent). ”In 1975 the UK had government interest-bearing debt of about 45 per cent of the total economy (GDP) and the debt was rising at about 8 per cent per year. We then had to crawl to the IMF in 1976.Today, that interest-bearing debt is about 65 per cent of GDP, rising nearly 13 per cent a year. A degree in economics will not be necessary to spot that things are a lot worse than in 1975… The mid-1970s IMF crisis was triggered largely by the fact that foreign buyers of government debt were so nervous of the UK’s ability to repay debt that interest rates roared into the teens. Inflation was a much bigger issue then than now, and foreigners and Brits alike also feared we intended to “repay” our debt with relatively worthless scraps of paper. So there was a buyers’ strike on government debt and we had to be bailed out. Rationally, the currency collapsed in value, and as the cost of importing oil and the like rose, so did inflation. … So how can we get out of this financial hole before our creditors get to us? There are three ways to reduce our national debt: let inflation rip to destroy the debt; increased tax revenues from higher taxes and economic growth; cut government spending. … The political debate talks of a few hundred million here and there – it needs to be about tens and scores of billions. Neither party has plans to deploy actions for the economy remotely commensurate with the size of the problem.”

I lean towards the “realistic” / “pessimistic” sides of the debate. The Government’s rosy projections of 2.5%+ growth are unlikely to materialize. Consumption is going to be kept down by consumer indebtedness, the upcoming hikes in interest rates, and increases in tax rates. There’s little room for export growth, considering the deindustrialization of the British economy. Finally, there itsenergy problems. The North Sea oil and gas fields are fast depleting and Britain’s reliance on gas supplies is increasing. Having failed to make any long-term arrangements with suppliers like Gazprom on the cheap, it will be forced to bid at spot prices on the LNG market to a greater extent than the European nations. Finally, the emerging trends towards the unraveling of liberal globalization cannot bode well for a nation that derived so much of its prosperity from open markets and international financial, legal, and consulting services.

Now what about the elections? Below is a graph of party approval ratings. Of late, the Conservatives, New Labor, and the Liberal Democrats have been running neck and neck.

[Opinion polls on British election: Conservatives, New Labor, Liberal Democrats].

My suspicions are that if the Tories win, there will be attempts at a strong fiscal rentrenchment. The shrinking of the public sector will hurt living standards, but lay the foundations for eventual stabilization. On the other hand, New Labor or the Liberal Democrats will be unwilling, or unable, to follow through will this, and the eventual result would be one default or another accompanied by a sharp drop in living standards. Another possibility is a “hung parliament”, should the three parties all win roughly equal shares of the vote (as seems to be a strong likelihood today). Such a paralysis would delay any actions to address Britain’s imbalances.

6. Demography watch.

• U.S. Birth Rate Decline Linked to Recession – small fall in US birth rates in 2009.
• On migration and population in reunification-era Korea (Randy McDonald) and discussion.
• Russia’s demography Jan-Feb 2010: relative to same period last year, births fall 0.8%, deaths fall 2.0%. Not too surprising since Russia’s recession troughed some nine months back.
• Comparative demography in the CIS states (Demoscope).
• Таджикские трудовые мигранты во время кризиса (Demoscope).

7. Energy & climate blast – lots of important reads these last two weeks.

• Online World3 simulator @ http://live.simgua.com/World.
• Confidential document reveals Obama’s hardline US climate talk strategy.
• The dark side of coal – some historical insights on energy and the economy (Ugo Bardi). 1) In a world devoid of coal or other high-EROEI energy sources, life is hard and dependent on muscle power. 2) It is justifiable, and if so to what extent, to cite the economic ramifications of “peak coal” as a contribution factor to the European crisis of 1914-45 (since oil only began to expand in a big way from the 1950′s).
• Avoiding Collapse (Global Guerrillas)
• Easter Island : A Case Study in the Response to Resource Depletion.
• Hottest Jan-Feb-March on record in 2010. Could the deniers and fudgers STFU already? More.
• The Future of Capitalism – Profits and Growth (George Mobus).
• Peak asphalt: the return of gravel roads (Ugo Bardi).
• Social Security and Medicare Funding Issues: Even Worse when One Considers Resource Constraints (Gail Tverberg).
• Increasing Global Nonrenewable Natural Resource Scarcity—An Analysis (Chris Clugston) – important reference.
• Tipping towards the unknown – “Researchers propose critical planetary boundaries, transgressing them could be catastrophic. But there is hope.”
• You think only leftist losers go on about peak oil? US military warns oil output may dip causing massive shortages by 2015.
• Dancing with the devil known as geohacking & Birth control vs. geohacking (Lou Grinzo).
• The Twilight of the Machine & A Blindness to Systems (John Michael Greer).
• An Introduction to Global Warming Impacts – a summary from Climate Progress. For another key post on Limits, see World Oil Production Forecast – Update November 2009 from Oil Drum.
• A Superstorm for Global Warming Research, an 8-part skeptic series by Spiegel. Criticized here at Real Climate.

8. Eurasia watch.

• The Failure of the Anti-Russian “Freedom Agenda” (Daniel Larison).
• Yanukovych removes Ukraine’s application to join NATO, a move that is supported by the majority of the Ukrainian population.
• Russia’s industrial production in Q1 2010 continues a slow recovery. More encouragingly, after the sudden collapse in late 2008-early 2009, Russian consumer expectations are rapidly approaching their old boomtime highs. Merrill Lynch is particularly optimistic – Russian Economy May Get ‘Biggest Bounce’ in World, making the highest yet prediction of 7% growth  for 2010 (most analysts suggest 4-6%).
• Randy McDonald writes about Soviet computers.
• A detailed study from Russia’s VTsIOM polling agency on the Internet in Russia. Summary: 81% of Russians have cell phones; 46% have computers; 38% are Internet users (23% use it daily).
• Russia Weekly Sitrep (Patrick Armstrong).
• The Sirens of Russia. Post by A Good Treaty about Russia’smigalka culture of impunity – and how it is perhaps slowly beginning to retreat under public pressure and the influence of social media.
• Russian attitudes towards Katyn (Levada). Some 50% of Russians view Poland positively, 26% negatively (AK: these figures are likely the reverse in Poland). Only 43% of Russians have heard about Katyn. Asked who was responsible for it, 19% said the USSR, 28% Nazi Germany, and 53% didn’t know. Around 15% think it was “genocide”, 38% a “crime”, 14% consider it justified under wartime conditions, and 33% didn’t answer. Only 18% think Putin should apologize for Katyn in Russia’s name, while 46% disagree. Of the latter, 47% think he shouldn’t apologize because Nazi Germany was responsible; 34% – because today’s Russia shouldn’t answer for the USSR; and 8%, because it would weaken Russia’s position in relation to Poland.
• Russia: Other Points of View analyzes Stratfor’s coverage of Russia and The Dangers of Meddling in Russia’s North Caucasus.
• The new Journal of Eurasian Studies (h/t Sean) from South Korea. I checked out the first article in its first issue: Eurasian polities as hybrid regimes: The case of Putin’s Russia, which is basically accurate: “It is argued that Russian political development under Putin is best understood not as “authoritarianization” but as a process in which Russia transitioned from a system of “competing pyramids” of machine power to a “single-pyramid” system, a system dominated by one large political machine. It turns out that in single-pyramid systems that preserve contested elections, as does Russia, public opinion matters more than in typical authoritarian regimes.”

9. Mexico and the Failed State Revisited (free Stratfor) has the counter-intuitive take that far from challenging the state, the drug cartels are actually benefiting the Mexican economy because the immense profits reaped from selling drugs to the affluent US can be reinvested into Mexico.

…It is not clear to STRATFOR that Mexico is becoming a failed state. Instead, it appears the Mexican state has accommodated itself to the situation. Rather than failing, it has developed strategies designed both to ride out the storm and to maximize the benefits of that storm for Mexico. First, while the Mexican government has lost control over matters having to do with drugs and with the borderlands of the United States, Mexico City’s control over other regions — and over areas other than drug enforcement — has not collapsed (though its lack of control over drugs could well extend to other areas eventually). Second, while drugs reshape Mexican institutions dramatically, they also, paradoxically, stabilize Mexico. …

On the whole, Mexico is a tremendous beneficiary of the drug trade. Even if some of the profits are invested overseas, the pool of remaining money flowing into Mexico creates tremendous liquidity in the Mexican economy at a time of global recession. It is difficult to trace where the drug money is going, which follows from its illegality. Certainly, drug dealers would want their money in a jurisdiction where it could not be easily seized even if tracked. U.S. asset seizure laws for drug trafficking make the United States an unlikely haven. Though money clearly flows out of Mexico, the ability of the smugglers to influence the behavior of the Mexican government by investing some of it makes Mexico a likely destination for a substantial portion of such funds.

Of course, there’s also the problem that Mexico’s oil production is plummeting as the supergiant Canterell depletes. (the state oil company is blamed for managerial fecklessness, but geological reasons are more important). An interesting scenario: if Mexico becomes a net oil importer and the US relaxes its drug policies, could it experience a liquidity crisis?

10. Ahmed Karzai and the US have fallen into a blame game of necessity. Karzai criticizes the West for electoral fraud and legitimizing the insurgency. Since NATO troops are, one way or another, going to leave Afghanistan in a few years, Karzai needs to build a base of support amongst his own people and his neighbors (Iran, China) if he wants to survive. The US in turn blames Karzai’s corruption for the sabotage of the war effort, because the alternative would be an indictment of the entire American war strategy. As of now, Karzai may be rightly feeling like Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, – the US no longer regards him as a reliable asset and he is at risk of being overthrown in favor of someone more manageable.

11. From Stratfor. There is relative optimism in Iraq and the US about the security situation as American troops continue a steady withdrawal. However, there remain questions about the governing capability of the new government and the ability of the security forces to maintain stability. Iran retains the potential to inflame ethno-sectarian strife, albeit thus far it prefers to (successfully) exercise its influence through “softer” means. The main problem is that by invading Iraq, the US has destroyed the old Iran-Iraq balance of power – and the forthcoming withdrawal of US forces will actually give Iran much better opportunities for extending their sphere of influence over Mesopotamia.

According to another source, Iraq will take 5-10 years to (re)build a military capable of defending the country against Iran or Syria. “The Iraqi plan is to stock up on superior American weapons, and train Iraqis to use that stuff with effectiveness approaching that of the Americans. That takes money, and time. Iraq is buying second-hand F-16s, but it will take three or four years to get the pilots and ground crews up to an acceptable level of performance. Along with this, the Iraqis want to buy modern anti-aircraft missile systems, and get them into service.” Also recall that it will take about a decade to ramp up Iraqi oil production, if the effort is successful.

Conclusion? The US is withdrawing from Iraq, bogged down Afghanistan, and in uncertain fiscal straits. Iraq has the potential to stand on its own feet, but will need a few years of stability. Thus, Iran will now enjoy a “window of opportunity” of around 5 years to make a play for hegemony in the Persian Gulf.

12. Palestinians Try a Less Violent Path to Resistance.

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Senior Palestinian leaders — men who once commanded militias — are joining unarmed protest marches against Israeli policies and are being arrested. Goods produced in Israeli settlements have been burned in public demonstrations. The Palestinian prime minister has entered West Bank areas officially off limits to his authority, to plant trees and declare the land part of a future state.

Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance. …

Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent. But the current set of campaigns is trying to incorporate peaceful pressure in limited ways. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march. Next week, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak here at a conference on nonviolence.

Reminds me a bit of this scene from A Sum of All Fears.

13. Peter Lavelle interviews Middle East journalist Robert Fisk back in September 2009. If you want a ten minute video summary of why the West fails in Dar al-Islam – this is it.

14. United States watch.

• Obama Limits When U.S. Would Use Nuclear Arms to states that have nuclear weapons or haven’t renounced or violence the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is rational and profitable for US interests.
• US gunships attack Iraqi civilians in Wikileaks scandal (see video). This is a non-story – mistakes do occasionally happen (if you really want to get all moral and uptight about this, the relevant question is why the US is in Iraq in the first place). Some might complain the soldiers were cold-hearted by laughing and making morbid jokes, but humor is a typical defense mechanism to scenes of carnage.
• Obama administration ‘looks backwards’ to punish heroes. As I’ve said before, most of the Obama administration’s “change” is more cosmetic than real. It is a continuation of Bush post-2006.
• The march to American Caesarism continues. When did it become legal to assassinate Americans? “Anwar al-Awlaqi, the New Mexico-born cleric living in Yemen, has been placed on a target list that makes him fair game for assassination by the U.S. military or CIA”. The problem isn’t so much the authorization of assassination, which is a useful anti-terrorist tool, but the fact that this further widens the gap between US liberal/rule-of-law pretensions and reality, and hence undermines its international legitimacy. After all, Israel or Russia, states that are not averse to assassinations on foreign soil, don’t portray themseves as guarantors of liberal internationalism. America does.

15. The consevative reaction in Europe spreads to Hungary, with the election of the Fidesz Party to power. By itself this is a normal development unworthy of much comment, except for the fact that the democratic left (the Socialists) have now been marginalized, and now enjoy about the same level of support as the far-right Jobbik and his Movement for a Better Hungary. This party is truly extremist – it has a “Magyar Garda” militia, its symbology draws on the banned Nazi-era Arrow Cross Party, and its rhetoric attacks the Jews above and the Roma below.

Hungary is going to face lean economic times in the years ahead and Viktor Orban of Fidesz can be expected to come under attack by a Jobbik energized by supporters dissilusioned of conventional politics. As Walter Mayr of Spiegel writes in “The Monster at Our Door”: Hungary Prepares for Shift in Power, the end result could be that Orban deserts austerity politics for the seemingly greener pastures of identity politics – for instance, it is known he is in favor of double citizenship for ethnic Hungarians outside Hungary, which could lead to clashes with Romania and Slovakia. (Though it should be stressed this is hardly unusual for Eastern Europe – for instance, Russia’s conferral of dual citizenship was one of the factors provoking conflict with Georgia over S. Ossetia and Abkhazia, and the Romanians themselves are at odds with Russia and Ukraine thanks to their issue of Romanian citizenship to Moldovans).

16. The Caucasus Emirate (Scott Stewart & Ben West), free Stratfor article about what is now the foremost jihadi group operating against Russia in the North Caucasus.

Umarov’s founding statement for the Caucasus Emirate, in which he called for the region to recognize the emirate as the rightful regional power and adopt Shariah, marked a shift from the motives of many previous militant leaders and groups, which were more nationalistic than jihadist. This trend of regional militants becoming more jihadist in their outlook increases the likelihood that they will forge substantial links with transnational jihadists such as al Qaeda — indeed, our Russian sources report that there are connections between the group and high-profile jihadists like Ilyas Kashmiri.

However, this alignment with transnational jihadists comes with a price. It could serve to distance the Caucasus Emirate from the general population, which practices a more moderate form of Islam (Sufi). This could help Moscow isolate and neutralize members of the Caucasus Emirate. Indeed, key individuals in the group such as Umarov and Kosolapov are operating in a very hostile environment and can name many of their predecessors who met their ends fighting the Russians. Both of these men have survived so far, but having prodded Moscow so provocatively, they are likely living on borrowed time.

17. Maoists kill 75 police in central India attack. Not much comment, except to note that many countries, including ostensibly succesful and democratic ones, have violent, festering insurgencies. Russia/Chechnya is hardly unique.

18. Turkey Overtaking Germany No Wishful Thinking on Paradigm Shift (h/t Randy McDonald). “Turkey’s $620-billion economy could move ahead of Germany’s to become the third-biggest in Europe by 2050, behind Russia and the UK”. Such long-term projections are pretty useless, but it’s true that in the medium-term Turkey has bright prospects, in part thanks to its demographic vigor and favorable geographical position.

19. @ any Asian readers or people familiar with the region – how accurate is this “Spenglerian” article on “Asia’s Permanent Advantage” by Chan Akya?

For the frequent traveler, there is a stark dichotomy across the world. Almost without exception, traveling with an Asian carrier to any Asian airport is a pleasure. In contrast, using any airline domiciled in Europe or North America with passage through airports in that part of the world is stunningly inconvenient. …

When you leave the airport in Shanghai and can get to the main city 30 kilometers away within eight minutes on the superfast magnetic levitation train, you cannot help but notice that the actual technology for this wonder comes from Germany. Yet, there are no such trains in operation anywhere in Europe, let alone Germany. …

Surely this is because, here in Asia, we are in the biggest cities you say. … Well, drive from Shanghai in virtually any direction and the first time you see roads that are any worse than those around the city you are a good 200 kilometers away. And even there, the roads are better than many American motorways.

Yeah alright, so the Chinese truck driver barreling towards you looks like he hasn’t slept in three days (very likely), and there is the occasional car wrapped into the milestone on the side of the road; but none of that detracts from the sheer robustness of the infrastructure. …

And then the last observation sinks in. Every single Asian city is heaving at the edges, with millions of people. Yet, crime rates are negligible and social tensions appear well under control. A far cry from the banlieu of Paris or the Turkish quarter of Berlin, for example, not to mention the public housing nightmares of Chicago or Detroit.

It is not the gargantuan dams of China or the super-efficient underground in Singapore that impresses you, but rather the fact that even the most economically backward parts of Asia have taken growth to be their mantra. What’s more, they have the financial muscle to push it through.

With that, your despondency turns to depression. How, you ask, can the “developed” world ever regain its luster?

For a start, all American and European cities will have to reinvest hundreds of billions into their cities to rejuvenate the existing infrastructure. Then the states/smaller countries will have to connect the cities to the rest of the region, install new technology infrastructure, focus on customer service and improve productivity to new heights to compete with the Asians.

Ah, but a minor detail intervenes. Who has got the money to do all that? Well, let us raise taxes you say. Problem is, no one in your country is making much money in the first place so raising taxes will simply drive consumption down and drive the deficit wider. Well, let us borrow the lot you say. Trouble is, no one has the money to lend to you at your abysmally low rates. Except the Asians – who you then recall can play tough once in a while.

And that’s about when you reconcile to the inevitable future – Asia with its apparently permanent advantage on infrastructure and operating efficiency leaving Europe and North America ever further behind. Nothing appears to have the ability to reverse this trend.

See also It’s China’s World. We’re Just Living in It (Rana Foroohar & Melinda Liu) - “The middle kingdom is rewriting the rules on trade, technology, currency, climate—you name it.” Another related post on the same theme is Coal and Treasuries by Gregor McDonald.

20. Military blast.

• The Post New START Nuclear Arsenal – a summary: “1,550 strategic warheads; 700 deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs and deployed nuclear capable heavy bombers; A combined limit of 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers and nuclear capable heavy bombers.” See Sublime News #7 for more details.
• Sizing Up Sukhoi’s PAK FA 5th Gen Fighter. Summary: it is a superb dog-fighter and its IRST may be the first to pick up a hostile stealth fighter, but there are questions over whether the Russian MIC is advanced enough to produce and maintain many of these complex planes (more).
• Chinese Fleet Closes In On Okinawa, increases tensions since China started drilling offshore gas halfway between Okinawa and the mainland. Also illustrates increasing ambitions of the Chinese Navy (PS. No longer PLAN) to carve out a maritime buffer space beyond its eastern seaboard.
• South Korea buys CBU-105 sensor fuzed weapons, a cluster-type bomb that is programmed to hunt for tanks below it. An excellent way of stopping any Northern armored assault, this tilts the militay balance on the peninsula further in the South’s favor.
• Andrew Barton describes environmental warfare as a “target-rich environment” and predicts it will become more prevalent. That is in line with my own thinking.
• Iran gets advanced military speedboats, illustrating its asymmetrical strategy geared at closing down the Straits of Hormuz in the event of war with Israel or the US.
• France Backs Away From The Chinese Threat – France won’t supply Pakistan with advanced military hardware since it would pass them on to Chna.
• Case in point – China copies Swedish Bv206 all-terrain vehicle.
• Russia has problems with their Yasen nuclear powers cruise-missile subs.
• Gates Says U.S. Has Conventionally Armed ICBMs. They are not a good idea.
• Iran boosts air defenses with new missile system – an upgraded version of the Hawk, a 1960′s system and probably vulnerable to Israeli/US jamming.
• India sets sights on killer drones.
• Smart trucks in Afghanistan.
• Global IT Supply-Chain Insecurity is important.
• From the Monitor scam to the Gorschkov scam, corruption in military procurement – an eternal scam.
• Future for US naval procurement looks bleak as costs rise and budgets are slashed. Substantial decline in Navy size is inevitable.

21. Things are getting more interesting in North Korea. There is danger of famine. The people are increasingly disillusioned, but unlikely to revolt. A coup by pro-Chinese military officers is a possibility. “Rumors of a North Korean submarine being responsible for the March 26th sinking of a South Korean corvette are growing more popular in the media… Survivors of the explosion agree that the blast came from outside the ship.” Watch this space.

22. Russophobe & liberast watch.

• Link to The Soviet Story propaganda flick. I haven’t yet seen it, or plan to, despite having had the chance. (The screening coincided with my gym-going time).
• David Satter, respected Russia-watched: “The present Russian leadership not only does not care about America’s security concerns, it is indifferent to Russia’s own.” Need more be said?
• The bear is back: Poland’s tragedy, Russia’s gain (Arthur Herman) – “the most insane column in the entire history of mankind”, according to Mark Adomanis.
• Putin wins again: Rebuilding imperial Russia (Ralph Peters), whom Mark Adomanis says is “very likely the single most repulsive figure in American  journalism”. More on Ralph Peters.
• Paul Goble the Propagandist flip-flops from “Muslims will take over Russia!” in 2006 to “Muslims are no longer a demographic reserve” in 2010. Either way, however, Russia is doomed according to according to Goble’s cherry-picked sources. There is something resembling a “discussion” of this article on SWP’s blog.

23. Remember what I wrote about Russians’ attitudes to Stalinism in Sublime News #7? An “interesting” discussion about it developed on a far-right forum.

24. Flotsam and jetsam.

• GDP by… language (Randy McDonald).
• Phrases people search for to arrive at poemless blog.
• Spiegel has a 7-part series on The Failed Papacy of Benedict XVI.
• Richard Dawkins plans to arrest the Pope. George Monbiot approves.
• The “Pedophile’s Paradise” (Brendan Kiley) – “Alaska Natives are accusing the Catholic Church of using their remote villages as a “dumping ground” for child-molesting priests—and blaming the president of Seattle University for letting it happen.”
• Just An ‘Average Brunette’ from the Banlieue – the three female challengers to Sarkozy from the Socialist, Communist, and Green Parties. I hope they win!
• Journalist on the run from Israel is hiding in Britain: ‘Haaretz’ writer fled to London fearing charges over exposé on Palestinian’s killing. Now while there’s no argument Israel is a liberal democracy, it is highly influenced by the prerogatives of the national security state.
• Why are so many girls lesbian or bisexual?
• Ending the Myth of ‘Market Fundamentalism’ (Dean Baker)
• «Я опознал свою дочь» – the Moscow shahidka‘s father speaks out.
• For all their problems, North Korea remains firmly committed to Juche, release “Red Star” operating system based on Linux. (h/t Randy)
• Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics.
• San Francisco “anti-war” rally (are commies, Islamists) according to this conservative-leaning blogger.
• Stalinist Icon (h/t Jason)
• The East German bunker that was to have been the Warsaw Pact operational center for conducting a nuclear war against NATO forces in Europe.
• Cannibal trial halted after juror falls ill looking at pictures of girl, 16, who was ‘eaten with potatoes’. Why did Russia have to cancel the death penalty in deference to European cultural Diktat?
• Dmitry Rogozin: “Sergey Kovalev is a parody and a loser compared with the great human rights activist and intellectual Andrey Sakharov”. Links to К портрету Сергея Ковалёва.
• Tourist attractions… wait a second, how can that be?!
• How do you perform in this Zombie Survival Quiz?

2. Some Westerners like to condemn Russians for their ambivalence towards Stalin, since he killed far more Russians than Hitler! (This is a constant theme of anti-Stalin* and general Russophobe propaganda). Quite apart from this being simply wrong according to all objective estimates, Russians themselves say they suffered far more under four years of the Nazi assault than twenty plus years of Stalinism.

According to polls, 50% had a close relative die in the Great Patriotic War (33% – injured, 16% – missing in action). Only 14% say that nothing particularly bad happened to a close relative during the war. These answers are in line with the statistics on wartime demographic losses – some 27mn Soviet citizens died in that war (13mn Russian), of them 8.7mn soldiers (5.8mn Russian). In contrast, in response to the question, “Did anyone in your family suffer from the repressions shortly before or after the war?”, 22% of Russians said “yes”, while 63% said “no”. (Furthermore note that “suffer” does not imply death, since contrary to the popular anti-Soviet mythology most Gulag inmates survived).

* And before some fanatical ideologue comes out with the cheap “You’re a filthy Stalinist!” card, I would note that it is quite possible to condemn Stalin on the basis of his real crimes, without resorting to neo-Goebbelsian propaganda about “62 million victims of Communism” or “Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler”. If anything such rhetoric actually encourages the rehabilitation of Stalinism.

3. Related: The illiberalism of anti-Putinism (Mark Adomanis). Now make no mistake – as of now, I think he is one of the best, if not the best, “popular” Anglophone bloggers on Russian politics. Of course, I don’t agree with everything he writes, sometimes quite forcefully. Such as the following:

In short, if you’re willing to believe that, by virtue of opposing Putin, Russian communists aren’textremely nasty and scary people, you’re the sort of person who will believe anything.

Myself, I find it arrogant, narrow-minded, and frankly presumptuous to label a major stratum of a population as “extremely nasty and scary”. As another commentator pointed out, this is very similar to the rhetoric of the Russian “liberals” whom Mark attacks as conceited and illiberal. But instead of hearing it from me, feel free to go to the discussion in question and make you own conclusion.

4. The Return of the Reich watch. Carrying on from Sublime News #6, more from Stratfor on how Germany is becoming a “normal country” and unsettling traditional European arrangements in the process. First, Germany is no longer willing to underwrite EU stability, i.e. see the punitive terms of the bailout offered to Greece. Down the road, this might result in acrimony over the Common Agricultural Policy (benefiting France and the new Visegrad members) and the UK rebate, since a resurgent Germany is unlikely to want to pay for them as before. Second, the traditional Bismarckian policy of Germany is to “make a good treaty with Russia”; together with Nord Stream, this should increase the distance between Germany and Poland. A future consequence may be to reinforce the Visegrad-US relationship at the expense of EU integration.

Timothy Garton Ash has a quite brilliant historical overview in Berlin has cut the motor, but now Europe is stalled which I can’t help but quote in extenso:

On Saturday Helmut Kohl, the “chancellor of German unity“, will turn 80. To mark the occasion the chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many others in Germany will deliver nice tributes to old king Kohl; yet his country’s current approach to Europe, and especially to the embattled eurozone, risks dismantling his European legacy. If you ask why the European project is faltering today, one of the main reasons is that the German motor has stalled. And if you ask why that has happened, the short answer is: because Germany has become a “normal” nation, like France and Britain. Assuming, that is, anyone in their right mind would call us normal.

In the steps of his mentor, Konrad Adenauer, Kohl tirelessly insisted that German and European unity were “two sides of the same coin”. That coin eventually became the euro. Kohl, like most of his predecessors, was committed to European integration for two reasons: because, out of personal wartime experience, he believed in it; and because he understood that it served the German national interest. Only by reassuring Germany’s neighbours that Germany had changed, and was utterly devoted to integrating itself into Europe, could the Germans hope to achieve their national goal: the reunification of Germany in peace and freedom. It worked. When the chance came, unexpectedly, in 1989, Kohl seized it with both hands – and all Europe has benefited. We could not have a Europe whole and free without a Germany whole and free in its centre. …

Had he been chancellor today, Kohl’s response would surely have been to take the next step: putting the long-term politics of European unity before the short-term cost, but also moving towards a stronger fiscal, and by extension political, union. In the meantime, however, this has become a different Germany. Until unification, Germany wanted to be super-European, for reasons of personal memory, idealism and historical responsibility; but it also needed to be, in its own national interest. After unification, at last a fully independent, sovereign country, it no longer needed to be. Everything would now depend on the inner power of wanting.

Students of Germany then watched with interest to see if it would continue the exceptional European commitment of the Adenauer-to-Kohl Federal Republic. Or would it become a more “normal” nation state, like France and Britain, pursuing its own national interests, through European channels for choice, but on its own account, even at the expense of others, when it considered that necessary? The special relationship it developed with Russia, including the bilateral securing of its energy needs, gave a clear indication which way post-unification Germany was leaning. Now its response to the first historic crisis of the eurozone makes the conclusion definite.

Some critics blame Merkel personally for this. The former foreign ministerJoschka Fischer quips that the one-time Ms Europe seems to have become Frau Germania. Indeed, this cautious, consensus-building “chancellor of the centre” does not have the strategic boldness of an Adenauer or a Kohl; but even a bolder leader could only go so far against the grain of domestic opinion. And from the shrieking headlines of the tabloid Bild newspaper to the costive judgments of the German constitutional court it is plain that the Germans are not prepared to make any more sacrifices for the sake of “Europe”. For preference, they would probably rather have the D-mark back. Or, failing that, a right, tight little north European “nordo” (or perhaps “neuro”), leaving the feckless south Europeans to cope with a weaker “sudo” (or “pseudo” – hat-tip to the former Barclays boss Martin Taylor for this coinage). The economic ramifications are complex and uncertain, but this spring may yet be seen as the beginning of the end of the eurozone – that final, most daring step of postwar German Europeanism. …

So instead of complaining I note this final irony. Twenty years ago Eurosceptic British Conservatives shrieked with alarm at the prospect of a united Germany imposing a federal European superstate upon us. Some even cried: “A Fourth Reich!” Today, as Eurosceptic British Conservatives edge back towards power, we can see that the unintended result of German unification has actually been the emergence of a more British Europe: dramatically enlarged to the east, inter-governmental rather than federal, with Germany too calmly pursuing its own national interests in its own national way, like Britain and France. Come to think of it, Margaret Thatcher is the one who should be posting a message of thanks on Kohl’s 80th birthday website. Whether the old man would appreciate it is another question.

5. Lou Grinzo of Cost of Energy offers a useful graph summarizing the estimated cost / effectiveness ratios of various geoengineering options.

See also Hacking the planet: who decides?

6. Energy & climate blast.

• Copper Peak (Jean Laherrère) projected at c. 2020. (Gold peaked in 2000).

• James Lovelock: Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change - ”Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.” Welcome to the ecotechnic dictatorship! (But really, kudos to Lovelock for having the balls to state this obvious but unpalatable fact).
• How Close will the U.K. Come to Running Out of Natural Gas in Storage this Spring? Britain’s minimum natural gas storage levels have seen a steady pattern of decline since 2005, in large part due to the depletion of its indigenous gas sources. Soon there will have to be additional LNG and Russian gas imports to prevent Britain from freezing during late winter. See also Power crunch looms for Britain. It is important to note that the UK is not only one of the most fiscally overstretched European nations (10%+ budget deficits for the next two years assuming reasonable growth), but also has one of the most precaurious energy situations.
• Riddles in the Dark (John Michael Greer)
• Our Future and the End of the Oil Age: Building Resilience in a Resource-Constrained World – a presentation by Dmitry Orlov.
• It’s STILL the coal, stupid (Lou Grinzo), or in other words, the brouhaha over Obama’s loosening of restrictions on offshore oil drilling is somewhat misplaced.
• The Copenhagen Accord at Three Months: 110 Countries Now Support a New Global Effort to Achieve Climate Safety. With interactive map.
• Koch Industries’ diabolical 20-year campaign to discredit AGW.
• Climate-row professor Phil Jones cleared of charges as anyone familiar with the situation would have expected from a neutral jury (note the hysterical denier rage in the comments). See the detailed write-up by Climate Progress.

7. Pavel Podvig writes on the New START treaty in numbers. The main conclusion is that the reductions are in fact very modest. See reproduced table below.

Russia

The United States (UPDATED 02/29/10)

8. Military blast.

• All Raucous On Cyber War Front
• China buys air defense systems from Russia. Some 15 S-300 batteries for around 2bn $. This sale isn’t detrimental to Russia, since 1) the Chinese already have a similar system in the HQ-9 “adapted” from stolen Russian and American data anyway, and 2) Moscow has the S-400 with incipient anti-ballistic missile capabilities and is developing the S-500 which is supposed to be a full-fledged ABM system.
• China’s DF-21 “carrier killer” ballistic missile and US plans to defend against it.
• F-16 Beats The F-35 – Romania to get 48 F-16C’s over 4.5bn $ by 2020.
• Russia’s fifth-generation tank the T-95 may be outed in 2010.
• RAF jets intercepted Russian bombers flying in British airspace, an increasingly frequent occurrence. AFAIK this is a two-way game – Russians too have complained of NATO aircraft violating their airspace.
• Dam Busting Russian Bombers At Work – apparently Russia uses bombers to blow away ice dams to prevent flooding. Cute.
• Russia begins constructing the 4th Borei submarine.

9. It appears the emerging consensus on the sinking of the South Korean corvette is that it detonated an old North Korean mine, though the hostile torpedo theory isn’t ruled out. Things may become clearer in a month once the ship is recovered and analyzed. Meanwhile, many rumors indicate that the hermit kingdom is now suffering from severe turbulence in the wake of the failed currency reforms.

One of the more damaging stories to spread through North Korea recently was the one about the several billion dollars Kim Jong Il has stashed in foreign banks. Bank secrecy laws in Europe, particularly Switzerland, have been under attack by major world economic powers, and it’s been getting harder to keep money hidden. The fact that Dear Leader Kim has billions stashed overseas, while millions go hungry in North Korea, is not very good PR.

An increasing unstable, and perhaps dangerous, situation. But at least they’ve finally completed Pyongyang’s first skyscraper after 23 years.

10. Serbians say sorry for 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Serbia’s parliament has apologised for the Serb massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 but stopped short of calling the killings genocide, after a debate showed deep divisions over the country’s role during the Balkans conflict.

A document put forward by Belgrade’s ruling coalition of democrats and socialists condemning “the crime” and apologising that “not all was done to prevent this tragedy” was narrowly carried as Serbia continued its bid to become a member of the EU and attract business investors. …

They denied western accusations of mass executions and one, Slobodan Samardzic, warned: “Serbia will sign its own guilt with this declaration.” Another, Velimir Ilic, said that in Srebrenica, “the crime was no greater than in other places”, citing Croatian moves against Serbs.

Why should Serbia apologize for the Bosnian Serbs who were clearly not even under its control? Why apologize for it at all when doing so implies taking responsibility for genocide? I can’t believe the Serbs are naive or stupid enough to do it out of altruism, so clearly short-sighted economic reasons connected to EU membership are the cause. And the funny thing is that this act of false contrition only got them more humiliation from the Europeans.

The European Union, which has been coaxing Serbia into a historical reckoning about its bloody role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, gave a cautious welcome Wednesday to a declaration by the Serbian Parliament that condemned the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. But it warned that what amounted to reluctant, latter-day contrition about the worst massacre in Europe since World War II was insufficient if Serbia wanted closer ties with the bloc.

I would venture to guess that Germany wants an admission of genocide from Serbia particularly badly. After all, it is weighted down by the unique guilt of the Holocaust, and getting another European nation – in particular the Serbs whom they tried to exterminate in WW2 – to explicitly admit to genocide would lessen the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust and help justify Germany returning to acting like a “normal nation” in the international sphere, as it is already beginning to do (see above).

11. Venezuela / “Rise of the Rest” watch. Putin will help us get nuclear power, says Chávez, causing Western chauvinists to squirm with indignation.

Russia has said that it will help Venezuela to set up its own space industry and develop nuclear energy, the Latin American country’s President announced yesterday. The two have also signed a new contract to exploit Venezuelan oil and are discussing a raft of further military and energy deals.

The deal will allow Moscow to entrench its foothold in Latin America through a deepening alliance with America’s main regional foe. As the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Caracas, Venezuela’s vocal, anti-imperialist leader, President Chávez, said that the allies were building “a new, multipolar world”. …

They discussed a range of military deals and a $2 billion (£1.3 billion) line of credit for weapons purchases secured by Mr Chávez during a visit to Moscow in September… Venezuela has spent more than $4 billion on Russian weaponry since 2005, including tanks, helicopters, Sukhoi fighters and the S300 anti- aircraft missile system. The deals helped Russia to oust the US as the No 1 arms supplier to Latin America. …

Mr Chavez took the opportunity of the anniversary of the Falklands war to demand the UK relinquish this “bastion of colonialism”, cheering: “Long live the Malvinas, they are Argentina’s”. He reiterated that Venezuela would stand beside Argentina in any war although he added “we don’t want conflict”.

A few comments. First, developing a nuclear industry would be highly beneficial for Venezuela. Though it theoretically has a lot of oil, most of it is unconventional heavy stuff locked up in the Orinoco belt that will probably never be exploited on a large scale because of the massive energy and water costs. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s current oil production is in slow decline. Second, Venezuelan arms acquisitions appear to be essentially defensive in nature, and perhaps partly aimed at buying off the conservative officer class. They certainly don’t constitute a real offensive threat to Colombia, whose terrain is unsuited for mobile armored warfare and is defended by a large, experienced army (not to mention 2,000 US troops).

Finally, one big, ongoing thing in Venezuela is the electricity crisis. This is due to a confluence of several factors: 1) a severe drought that has severely reduced water levels on the three dams that generate 70% of its electricity, – caused by this year’s El Nino and seen in China too, 2) the big rise in electricity demand during recent years, fueled by Venezuelans’ rising prosperity, while investment into the electricity-generating sector was slow to react. (Charmingly, one of the measures used to contain the crisis is to get soldiers to give out free energy-efficient light bulbs). This is all of course highly inconvenient for Chavez, but there is very little likelihood that it will topple him.

12. Interesting tidbit on Poland. In Sublime News 3, I referenced a discussion I had on Adomanis’ blog on Poland’s demographic and economic future. One of the major reasons for pessimism is that even if Polish fertility rates climb back up, labor demand from aging Western European states like Germany will only result in an accelerating exodus of young Polish workers, which will undermine any hopes of “convergence” to German levels of income. I disagreed with this:

I am not a big fan of the idea that West European labor shortages will prove an irresistible magnet to East-Central European laborers.

First, the economic disparity is no longer as big as it once was. Poland already has nearly 60% [AK edit: actually 52%] of Germany’s GDP per capita, and is more economically dynamic (because it is catching up). And Poland is one of the poorer Visegrad nations.

Second, migrants are drawn to economic dynamism – the highest inflows in the last ten years went to Britain, Ireland, Spain, etc, not Italy or Germany (which are demographically worse off). You say that Germany, Italy, etc will face labor shortages. But that assumes economic growth and growth of demand for labor can sustainably continue there. I think that assumption is questionable.

Why work in foreign nations who look down on you and where you pay a large chunk of your (stagnant) salary to support their elderly, when you can work in a still-growing Poland?

Article from March 22, 2010: Germans travel to Poland for work. “Unemployed Germans have begun travelling to Poland in search of jobs – in a dramatic reversal of the usual trend for immigrant workers.”

13. Russia watch. Detailed GDP stats revealed for 2010 (7.9% decline). In summary: agriculture 0%, extractive -3%, manufacturing -15%, construction -17%, retail -9%, finance 2% (!), government expenditures 2%. As shown in the graph below, the crisis essentially knocked Russia back to 2007.

Nonetheless, the emerging consensus is that it was a short-lived shock. Russia – Europe’s Bright Light of Growth. Not a headline you normally expect from CNBC, but with most commentators now predicting growth of 4-6% in 2010, there you go:

As the investment community gains confidence in the likelihood of a sustained economic rebound, Russia has emerged in far better shape than many other European markets. In fact, with low debt, inflation under control, a large consumer base primed to buy goods and services, and the price of oil recovering, Russia may well be the most dynamic place on the continent.

14. More on Eurasia.

• Russian Leader Meets Burjanadze: What is on Putin’s Mind? (Jamestown)
• Имя модернизации — социализм – Zyuganov, KPRF chief, on Medvedev’s modernization plans.
• Govt OKs Stalin Monument, Flirts With USSR 2 (Ukrainiana)

15. Ever wonder why Afghan insurgents love IED’s so much? The Weakness of Taliban Marksmanship…

16. Not often that I agree with Daniel Pipes, Iraq’s Cosmetic Election is an exception…

“It takes a cynical mind not to share in the achievement of Iraq’s national elections.” So writes the Wall Street Journal editorial board today. I’m no cynic, but my mood about Iraq could variously be described as depressed, despairing, despondent, dejected, pessimistic, melancholic, and gloomy.

That’s because the Iraqi regime (along with those of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Palestinian Authority) is a kept institution that cannot survive without constant American support. As long as Washington pumps money and sacrifices lives to maintain the Baghdad government, the latter can hobble along. Remove those props and Iranian-backed Islamists soon take over.

17. Floatsam and Jetsam.

• Я “живущий в США российский экономист”.
• Check out Alexa Meade’s art. Normally, paintings try to imitate photography. Here, photography tries to imitate paintings!
• Google Shows How HTML5 Can Run Quake In The Browser.
• Krugman: GOP taken over by nutters.
• I Was Colonel Schultz’s Private Bitch. “Pocket books called Stalags were practically the only pornography available in the conservative Israeli society of the early 1960s. Though it was claimed that the Stalags were translated from English, they were actually created and written by Israelis.”
• Briton recalls his risky view of Auschwitz horror
• The Sex Scholar: Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps
• Pfizer ordered to pay up over ‘AIDS-like’ virus infections; creates dummy corporation to do it as to as not interrupt its relations with Medicare and Medicaid. Quoting a commentator, “Wow, I wish I could create a dummy corporation to take the rap for any illegal activity that I could get involved with.” (h/t eXiled Online)
• Welcome to Flatland! Way out of line…

18. Хрїстóсъ воскрéсе! Воистину воскресе! (My recommended Paschal reading: Three Versions of Judas by Jorge Luis Borges).

1. Rising tensions over the Falkland Islands between Argentina and the UK, following the discovery of oil in the region and Britain’s decision to start exploration drilling. Contrary to media hype, war is not imminent; even though Britain, like the US, suffers from “imperial overstretch” and a military-industrial “death spiral”, it is still far, far more powerful than Argentina. The Royal Navy has the world’s second best “power projection” capabilities (amphibious, logistics, aeronaval). Argentina’s military power, never impressive to begin with, has only stagnated since 1982.

On the other hand, this episode does represent two important things. First, the geopolitical factors that constitute negative feedback loops to the resource extraction sector that supports the global industrial system. For instance, as oil production peaks, we can expect an accelerating scramble for the remaining reserves. This may yield short-term benefits for the stronger Powers that will emerge victorious in the neo-colonial gunboat wars of the future, but will accelerate the decline at the global level. Second, we find that most Latin American countries expressed their support for Argentina, even including regional rivals like Brazil and Chile. This illustrates the rising prominence of the “World Without the West” / “Clash of Civilizations” paradigms that will replace neoliberal internationalism in the coming age of scarcity industrialism.

However, I must emphasize that these are incipient trends, not current realities. For now, the overwhelming fact on the ground is that 1) Argentina is weak and 2) it can only count on rhetorical support from its neighbors, not military (Brazil has no particular interest in allowing Argentina to become a potential challenger to its regional hegemony). However, many things can change within a decade. As I wrote earlier, Britain faces a panoply of problems – fiscal, debt, energy, separatism, etc – that will critically undermine its international power, including the ability to sustain the current scope of its armed forces. (In this respect, it is essentially a microcosm of the United States). Meanwhile, though it has plenty of its own problems, Argentina has shown signs that it has outgrown out of its traditional fiscal problems. Following six years of very fast growth, it was little affected by the 2008 economic crisis, its public finances are not unduly bad by global standards, and looking further ahead, its agricultural and natural resource wealth stand it in good stead for the coming age of scarcity industrialism.

If Argentina pursues a rational military procurement and modernization program (amphibious ships, cruise missiles, modern diesel subs, UAV’s, etc) - and assuming it is not once again derailed by the mismanagement and corruption that made it into a unique specimen of a country that went from “developed” to “developing” status after 1950 – then the military balance may swing sufficiently wide in its favor as to enable it to contemplate a successful military solution to the Las Malvinas issue by 2020.

2. Shortly after penning an anti-guvmint screed, Joe Stack crashed his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a symbolic copycatting of 9/11. Though legally an unequivocal terrorist (as defined by the PATRIOT Act), he is fast becoming a folk hero amongst the Tea Partiers.

Though I don’t care to comment much on the ethical and moral issues, this does shed light on pertinent current trends. Foremost, the growing disillusionment with the System, the increasing perception by the citizenry that the United States is becoming a “hypertrophied state” hijacked by connected elites, who use it to cushion themselves with corporate socialism while pushing capitalism on the rest. In terms of the Belief Matrix, the country is beginning to lose belief in itself (“rejection of tradition”) and move away from rational-liberalism towards the illiberal populism and patrimonialism that is the common refuge of many post-collapse societies. Also recalls this line from Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies:

According to RM Adams, “By the fifth century, men were ready to abandon civilization itself in order to escape the fearful load of taxes”.

Would this action have any real effect? Rehashing the arguments of proponents of the “propaganda of the deed”, Baudrillard would argue that it would have a profound symbolic impact.

The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system’s violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals.

But in this case Trotsky’s analysis is the more persuasive.

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

3. Yushenko goes out with a provocative bang, making Galician nationalist / Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera into a “Hero of Ukraine”. With Tymoshenko’s challenge to the election results dismissed, the new Ukrainian President is now Yanukovych, who represents the Russophone, pro-Russian eastern and southern regions and Donbass oligarchs. This should come as no surprise to S/O readers, given that I predicted Yanukovych would win the second round from the beginning. (Pic h/t @ Ukrainiana).

According to the election results, the final tally was Yanukovych 49%, Tymoshenko 45%. This was stunningly similar to the result I predicted from analyzing which other candidates’ supporters would vote for Mr. Blue or the Gas Princess.

Adding up these figures, Yanukovych gets 50% of the votes, whereas Tymoshenko gets 46%.

The only question now remaining is how fast Yanukovych will now move Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, perhaps starting with entry into the Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan customs union.

4. The Airborne Laser (ABL), mounted on a modified Boeing 747, finally succeeded in “killing” a low-tech Scud missile in testing. Yes, not very impressive so far. The range was short and the second test failed anyway. But the regular mechanical breakdowns of the first WW1 tanks, far from invalidating the concepts of armored warfare, were instead portents of the future. What we are seeing is nothing less than the dawning of the age of automated laser weaponry.

5. Its official. Russia’s population grew by 23,300 souls in 2009, for the first time since 1995. Though the rate of natural increase remained slightly negative for Russia as a whole (the Siberian and Urals Federal Regions actually saw positive natural population growth for the first time in 19 years), this was more than compensated for by immigration.

This improvement was in large part thanks to an impressive increase in the life expectancy, which rose to 69 years in 2009 – almost as high as in 1963-68 (before the alcoholism epidemic) and 1986-91 (Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. Birth rates also increased by 3%, hysterical Russophobe predictions of a crisis-induced “abortion apocalypse” to the contrary.

This of course should come as no great surprise to S/O readers, since back in mid-2008 my projections indicated that:

Russia will see positive population growth starting from 2010 at the latest.

Natural population increase will occur starting from 2013 at the latest.

Russia’s total life expectancy will exceed 68 years by 2010 and reach 75 years by 2020.

Now according to my models, in the case of a total fertility rate of 1.5 (i.e., the same as in 2008, when it was 1.49, so that is actually discounting any further increases) and assuming a very modest life expectancy rise (74 years by 2025 – it is already close at 69), and 300k annual migration (currently around 200-250k), “the population size will remain basically stagnant, going from 142mn to 143mn by 2023 before slowly slipping down to 138mn by 2050″. Of course it is also entirely possible that Russia’s LE will converge to developed-country levels quicker and that the TFR will stabilize at 1.7-1.8, in which case its population may grow back to around 150mn by 2025.

Thus far, the reality of Russia’s demographic turn-around is actually exceeding both Rosstat‘s and my own most optimistic forecasts (not to even mention “pessimists” like Eberstadt, Steyn, etc). No wonder that pundits are beginning to read and propagandize the gist of my articles, e.g. from Mark Adomanis at True Slant (h/t poemless).

1) Its population is in steep decline and chronically afflicted by alcoholism.

These are actually two very separate issues, but what the hell, why not, we’ll combine them. As I’ve argued before Russia’s population decline has actually abated rather dramatically. What is Russia’s demographic future? No one really knows (predictions are hard, especially about the future!), but it stands to reason that it’s not nearly as bad as Black, Eberstadt, Steyn, Feshbach, and all the other nameless neocon apparatchiks,  most of whom have made crude linear projections decades into the future, think. And alcoholism in Russia is not some eternal unchanging constant: the country’s current high rates of alcoholism are the result of a trend that started in the 1960’s, not in prehistory. Alcoholism in Russia was and is largely a reaction to bleak socioeconomic conditions and the easy availability and cheapness of alcohol,not the result of some quasi-mythical Russian predilection for booze and penchant for self destruction. Will this trend be reversed? Perhaps! Perhaps not! The truth is no one really knows, but to pretend that Russians are utterly passive in the face of some all-powerful and immutable force known as “alcoholism” is as condescending as it is stupid.

Now the next question – should I now rest on my laurels, or should I continue trying to refute the demographic doomers who continue to insist that Russia’s population will fall to 128mn within two decades?

6. Goldman Sachs helped Greece conceal its deficit spending shenanigans by providing it with loans disguised as currency trades. Can this get any dodgier? This also introduces an interesting philosophical exercise – who’s more responsible, the bank(st)ers or the politicos? (The drug pushers or the drug abusers?). And of course Greece is far from alone. The real elephant in the room is the United States.

7. Russian Twitter hero and unabashed patriot, Dmitri Rogozin, proves that Western diplomats are girly men.

8. Two stories that represent the two most important trends of our world systems – shortage of Rare Earth Metals could thwart innovation (limits to growth) and 10 profound innovations ahead (technological progress). If we could find some way to figure out which trend is the stronger and more stable one, you could make a good guess as to the meaning of the 21st century.

9. What blogging is all about… (h/t Lou).

10. Yulia Latynina, Russian liberal par excellence (that is, in the anti-democratic 19th century sense of “liberal”), on why Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous. At least she is brave enough (or stupid enough?) to say what many liberasts think, but don’t have the guts to do so outright. H/t Sean.

Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in Sunday’s presidential election — not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler — once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader. Unfortunately, only wealthy people are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner. Poor people elect politicians like Yanukovych or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

When the Orange Revolution hit Ukraine five years ago, the people arose in a united wave and did not allow themselves to be deceived by the corrupt elite. That elite had reached an agreement with the criminals and oligarchs of Donetsk to make a minor criminal, who could not string two sentences together, the successor to former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

And by far my favorite bit:

Can you imagine U.S. voters putting a leader in the White House who is a puppet of the ruling elite and criminal clans?

Socialist democrat Allende = genocidal maniac Hitler? The same US whose regulatory bodies are captured by Wall Street, which confirmed itself as an oligarchy with the recent removal of campaign funding limits for corporations? (I can just about see a few post-peak oil decades down the line Exxon oligarchs sending American conscripts to fight national liberation movements in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria).

Really, why the fuck does anyone act surprised that Russia’s limousine liberals – part disconnected elitist, part neo-Bolshevik, part plain insane – only have the support of 3% of the Russian population?

PS. More inane rantings from Latynina. It appears her disdain for facts extends well beyond Russian politics.

“The global warming is an invention of the global bureaucracy,” says one of Russia’s leading journalists and authors, Yulia Latynina, who in most of her publications exposes controversial activities by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The IPCC are unable to explain to me why the 10th century and the 16th century in Europe were far warmer than it is today. They are unable even to tell what the weather tomorrow is going to be like, that is doing something that can be verified,” Latynina says in a weekly magazine. “One simple question – why do they think that warmth is bad? Did the human race drown or perish in the 10-13th centuries?”

The global warming threat, she believes “is one of the brightest illustrations of the Global Bureaucracy’s ideology, a phenomenon that is still largely embryonic. But if the current trend continues, it may spell the end of the Western civilization, freedom and progress in science and engineering.”

11. Back in the real world, the news from the climate front, as usual, gets worse by the month if not the week.

Organizers of the recent climate conference in Copenhagen sought, unsuccessfully, to forge agreements to limit global warming to 2 degrees C by the end of the century. But even an increase that small would cause deadly harm. And far greater damage is likely if we do nothing.The numbers — and there are many to choose from — paint a grim picture. According to recent estimates from the Integrated Global Systems Model at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the median forecast is for a climb of 5 degrees C by century’s end, in the absence of effective countermeasures. That forecast, however, may underestimate the increase. According to the same M.I.T. model, there is a 10 percent chance that the average global temperature will rise more than 7 degrees C by 2100, and a 3 percent chance it will climb more than 8 degrees C. Warming on that scale would be truly catastrophic. Scientists say that even the 2-degree increase would spell widespread loss of life, so it’s hardly alarmist to view the risk of inaction as frightening… (The M.I.T. model estimates a zero probability of the temperature rising by less than 3.6 degrees by 2100.)

You bet. A rise of more than 5 degrees C will result in a global collapse of food production and the almost certain demise of industrial civilization. At above 7 degrees C, we may well be looking at human extinction as “zones of uninhabitability” begin to overspread much of the world.

An adaptability limit for large warmings–are we accounting for it?

Steven Sherwood(1), M Huber(2)
(1) Yale University, Department of Geology and Geophysics, New Haven, CT, USA
(2) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

The consequences of large warmings (>4C), which on current trends look increasingly likely in the 21stcentury if not the 20th, have received little attention. It seems to be widely assumed that humans can adapt to any amount of warming, on the basis that humans live in such a wide variety of climates now. We show that when examined in terms of the peak value of the wet-bulb temperature (Tw), which ultimately governs the possibility of transfer of metabolic heat to the environment, the world’s present-day climates are far less variable than one might think based on mean temperature. A warming of only a few degrees will cause large parts of the globe to experience peak Tw values that never occur today; 7C would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses (periods when the shedding of metabolic heat isthermodynamically impossible); and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today’s population. It is unknown how much of our present 7-10C cushion we can live without before experiencing significant problems, making it difficult to draw conclusions about more modest climatechanges, but the limits themselves rest squarely on basic thermodynamics. These inferences stand in contradiction to damage functions currently used in economic cost-benefit calculations. In these, climate damages increase with global mean temperature according to a polynomial form, and remain moderate (typically <30% of GDP) even for 10C or more despite the implication that most of the surface wouldbecome uninhabitable by humans and most livestock during the warm season…

12. Meanwhile, AGW deniers continue spreading their malicious lies and propaganda over the Internet like a horde of virtual locusts. See IPCC errors: facts and spin at Real Climate for a thorough debunking of their mendacious drivel.

13. Something a bit more encouraging. Old dude beats up pathetic wannabe gangsta on a public bus.

14. An intriguing attempt to rank national naval strengths from Strategy Page – Naval Forces of the World. Unsurprisingly, the US completely dominates with more than half the global naval power. The only other navies of real strength are considered to be the UK, Russia, Japan, China, and France. I more or less agree with this analysis, excpet to note that 1) the importance of specifics – whereas the UK has much better “power projection”, Russia’s strategic naval forces are far ahead and second only to the US, and 2) China’s naval power is growing rapidly, it will soon overtake Japan if it hasn’t already, and by 2020 may even be ahead of the US.

15. China sells $34.2bn of US treasury bonds, indicating its loss of confidence in the credibility of any US promises to ever rein back on its fiscal overstretch. The only nations still buying up US Treasuries are geopolitically-aligned ones (e.g. Japan) and private investors, but the endgame for Pax Americana has begun and the next global credit or geopolitical shock may finish it. Meanwhile, Tokyo welcomes Chinese destroyer. Perhaps this doesn’t mean anything important, or perhaps it is just the beginning of Japan’s road towards bandwagoning with China.

16. Andrey Ternovskiy, a Russian, is behind the site ChatRoulette which anonymously pairs you up with random Internet strangers via webcam. Sounds like the perfect hangout for weirdos… and it is. Wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re interested in live gay porn.

17. Turkish Foreign Minister Calls for Eurasian Union (Leos Tomicek). Turkey is a rising power with energy, cultural, and political interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and it will be freer to expand once NATO / the West starts becoming irrelevant.

18. Economic catastrophe in Latvia, previously hailed as a “Baltic tiger”. Latvia’s Economy Contracts Almost 18 Percent in Q4 2009 (Ed Hughes). From his Facebook updates:

“Latvia’s GDP fell by 17.7% year on year in the last quarter of 2009,meaning the economy has now shrunk by more than 25 percent in twoyears. The IMF projects another 4 percent drop this year and predictsthat the total loss of output from peak to bottom will reach 30percent. This would make Latvia’s loss more than that of the U.S. Great Depression downturn of 1929-1933.”

“The consequence of this strong recession in Latvia – more and moreLatvians are leaving in search of work elsewhere, while fewer andfewer young people feel confident enough to have children, making thelong term future of the country even more uncertain.”

There follows a graph of Latvia’s birth rates plummeting by around 8% in 2009 y/y, with the rate of decline accelerating to 12% by December 2009.

Perhaps a timely reminder of the dangers of too much economic openness, the (prior?) dogma of our times? In comparison, Russia’s GDP fell by 7.9% and Belarus’ GDP actually grew 0.2% in 2009, and both saw continuing demographic improvements.

19. On my reading list:

The Lucifer Principle – Nietzschean book by Howard Bloom. (h/t Lou).

The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima, my new hero, whose ritual suicide consitutes the epitome of artistic holism.

The Rediscovery of the Mind – Cognitive science is ”the ongoing research program of showing Searle’s Chinese Room Argument to be false”, and it’s not hard to see why.

Towards a New Socialism – Haven’t started reading this year, but looking forwards to it since it’s connected with many of my own ideas about how advances in cybernetics and computer science is making central planning feasible, even for highly complex and advanced economic systems.

Getting ready to post reviews of The Peak Oil Books, When the Rivers Run Dry (Pearce), and The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil).

Meadows, Donella & J. Randers, D. Meadows – Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (2004)
Category: world systems, resource depletion, pollution; Rating: 5*/5
Summary: wiki; synopsis; WSJ story

The first book was published in 1972, commissioned by a circle of statesmen, businesspeople, and scientists called the Club of Rome. The LTG models, using the latest advances in systems theory and computer modeling, suggested that business-as-usual economic growth on a finite planet would eventually lead to stagnating and then falling living standards, as ever more industrial capital has to be diverted towards mitigating the consequences of growth, e.g. soil degradation, resource depletion, and runaway pollution.

Cornucopians and establishment “experts” have tried to discredit LTG by claiming that its predictions of global apocalypse failed to materialize; instead, hasn’t the world seen remarkable economic growth since 1972? These criticisms are unfounded. First, the LTG modelers did not make any concrete forecasts, but merely a range of scenarios based on varying initial conditions (e.g. global resource endowments) and future political choices. Not all the scenarios led to collapse – a reasonable global standard of living is preserved under scenarios in which humanity makes a transition back below the limits towards sustainable development.  Second, none of those scenarios projected a collapse before 2015 at the earliest, so the claim is invalidated even if you treat the worst case scenario as a prediction. As such, we can only conclude that these critics are either liers or haven’t actually read the book.

In this 30-year update, the authors note that their more pessimistic conclusions are already coming true – for instance, in per capita terms, global grain production peaked in 1984 and the marine catch reached an all-time high in 1988. Both have been on a slow, downward plateau since. (This finally culminated in the global foot riots of 2008 and rising “food protectionism” on the part of agricultural net exporters). Contrary to the hype surrounding globalization, the “new economy”, the flat world, etc, global GDP growth rates peaked in the 1960′s, and have since settled down to a lower level practically everywhere outside emerging Asia (and they may yet go into outright stagnation in the 2010′s due to the convergence of peak oil, geopolitical stresses, and the decline of the West). Furthermore, this slowdown was accompanied by rising inequality, between and within countries. Overall, the authors believe that humanity’s ecological footprint overtook the carrying capacity of the Earth sometime around 1980, ushering in “overshoot”.

A few things we should note before going further. LTG is not about particular phenomena, such as peak oil – though in itself very important, it is but a symptom of much deeper, underlying trends (the limits to growth). Second, the models indicate that growth will only begin to really falter once the system is in severe overshoot, so for the 1970-2010 period the LTG authors did not expect any major divergence between the unending growth predicted by neo-classical macroeconomics, and their own biophysical / systems dynamics models which account for the vital role of energy and ecological factors to sustaining growth. As the authors note, “we must all wait another decade for conclusive evidence about who has the better understanding” (and so far the economists are off to a bad start).

Exponential Growth, Limits, and Overshoot

The definition of exponential growth from the Sublime Glossary.

Exponential growth: Occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function’s current value, e.g. x = exp(t). In other words, self-reproducing entities exhibit exponential growth, as do any further entities driven by them. When you have both exponential growth and limits to growth, the eventual result is overshoot and collapse. (AK, see Wiki fables for allegories)

The human population naturally exhibits exponential growth. Whenever total fertility rates are substantially above the 2.1 children per woman needed for simple population replacement, the population will usually grow very rapidly. In Malthusian, pre-industrial societies, this population growth typically exceeded the rate of growth of the carrying capacity; when the two drew level, population growth ceased as lower wages, elite predation, and food dearth raised mortality rates and lowered fertility rates. This increasing brittleness of the system, which made it vulnerable to shocks like poor harvests or peasant uprisings, is the single most convincing explanation for the cyclical emergence and collapse of empires.

In modern industrial societies, the effects of exponential population growth are modulated by the demographic transition, the tendency for fertily rates to transition to or below population replacement rates with increasing wealth. However, the effects of these gains on reducing the human impact on the environment is more than balanced out by the growth of the stock of industrial capital. This growth is inherently exponential, because the machine tool building sector that constitutes the base of the industrial ecosystem essentially reproduces itself, i.e. you need machines to build more machines. Labor and capital factor inputs, in their turn, are the motors of exponential growth in all other spheres of the human economy – food production, goods production, resource extraction, pollution emissions, services provision, etc.

[Representation of the industrial system].

Therefore, population and industrial capital can be said to have “an inherent system structure to produce the behavior of exponential growth”, which in turn drive increases in the food, energy, goods, and services needed to sustain that same growing population and industrial system. This increases the system’s level of physical throughput, the “continuous flows of energy and materials needed to keep people, cars, houses, and factories functioning”. However, both the materials-providing planetary sources (hydrocarbons, metals, minerals, etc) and the pollution-absorbing planetary sinks (soils, oceans, air, etc) needed to sustain a certain level of physical throughput are limited (the former can be depleted, the latter can be overfilled). There are hard planetary limits to the “rate at which humanity can extract resources (crops, grass, wood, fish) and emit wastes (greenhouse gases, toxic substances) without exceeding the productive or absorptive capacities of the world”. Once those limits are breached, development becomes unsustainable and we enter a state of overshoot.

To overshoot means to go too far, to grow so large so quickly that limits are exceeded. When an overshoot occurs, it induces stresses that begin to slow and stop growth. The three causes of overshoot are always the same, at any scale from personal to planetary. First, there is growth, acceleration, rapid change. Second, there is some form of limit or barrier, beyond which the moving system may not safely go. Third, there is a delay or mistake in the perceptions and the responses that try to keep the system within its limits. The delays can arise from inattention, faulty data, a false theory about how the system responds, deliberate efforts to mislead, or from momentum that prevents the system from being stopped quickly.

Although the planetary sources usually appear large on paper, only a small fraction of them tend to be economically recoverable due to the law of diminishing returns. All the low-hanging fruit are picked first, such as “supergiant” oil fields, rich copper ore deposits, etc, or in other words energy sources with high energy return on energy invested (EROEI), thus leaving only remoter, deeper and more dilute resources such as polar oil, unconventional liquids, etc. Their extraction costs soar exponentially and requisition an ever greater share of the industrial base, leaving less room for consumer products (vital for political stability), the agricultural base (to prevent starvation), investment in capital stock renewal (to prevent the depreciation of the industrial base), and environmental mitigation (to prevent runaway pollution from wrecking other sectors).

Due to the dropping EROEI of newer energy sources, ever greater volumes have to be excavated and processed just to keep standing in place (e.g. coal’s gross energy content peaked in 1998 in the US, despite that volumes have continued increasing since). These diminishing returns per unit of capital employed towards resource extraction lead to rising pollution, which negatively feeds back into the agricultural base and human health. We could divert resources from other sectors to combat this pollution, e.g. through emissions reductions or geoengineering. Alternatively, rapid climate change coupled with declining oil and fertiliser output may lead to catastrophic falls in agricultural output, which could only be mitigated for a time by diverting capital and energy into this vital sector – but which would hurt the long-term prospects for renewal in the energy extraction and industrial sectors! And so goes our Faustian trap…

Below are four examples of these phenomena in action.

An example of diminishing returns / lowest fruit being picked first. The quality of copper ore being mined is falling, and more and more energy needs to be expended to get the same quantity of copper. Eventually, the returns may become so low that mining it will no longer be at all profitable, at which point the system collapses to a lower level of complexity and salvage becomes an attrative strategy.

PS. Note the counter-intuitive spike in the early 1930′s, correlating to the Great Depression. Economic retreat forces the shutdown of the least efficient mines, because the efforts they have to expend on extraction now surpass what they get back in profits. Unless the state takes increasingly coercive measure to maintain physical output at all costs, requisitioning labor and capital in a last-ditch Stakhanovite effort to prolong industrialism in a game of “last man standing”, the end of the industrial age will see the same general pattern.

As the ore grade falls, more and more material has to be extracted and processed to get the same amount of copper. This naturally results in soaring pollution emissions, which will put increasing stress on regional and global biocapacity.

An explanation for the drastic improvements in air quality, river health, fuel economy, etc, in advanced industrial nations in the 1970′s-1980′s – picking the lowest-hanging fruit is pretty cheap. But beyond a certain point, reducing pollution becomes without a direct fall in physical output becomes prohibitively expensive.

One more example of limits (the main ones, resource depletion and CO2 pollution, are covered elsewhere in this blog) - arable land availability. The amount of land devoted to agriculture has remained constant in recent decades, though its quality has decreased as good land becomes exhausted and more marginal lands were brought into exploitation. Crop yields have risen and continue to rise, but 1) they are overly dependent on the intensification of farming, e.g. using (natural-gas dependent) fertilizers that mask the decline in natural soil fertility and 2) as noted above, they have not kept up with population growth since the 1980′s.

The graph shows possible food futures: if no more land is lost and crop yields double, then the world’s 8bn people can be fed on a comfortable West European diet. If on the other hand “erosion, climate change, costly fossil fuels, falling water tables… reduce yields from present levels”, then there will be a global Malthusian crisis. Possible solutions: “farming methods that conserve and enhance soil – such as terracing, contour plowing, composting, cover cropping, polyculture, and crop rotation”, and in the tropics, “alley cropping and agroforestry” – all methods that achieve high yields, improve the soil, and don’t require prodigious fossil fuel and fertilizer inputs.

Basically, LTG gives one a valuable sense of how interconnected all these global systems are, about just how universal the law of diminishing returns is, and how the failure to move decisively towards a sustainable economy now will lead to collapse further down the road (and the later we postpone this transition, the greater will be the eventual collision).

The most important thing is to make the human industrial ecosystem a closed loop, in which population ceases to grow, and a recycling sector feeds back wastes as inputs into the system instead of continuing drawdown to maintain an unsustainably-high “phantom” carrying capacity.

Why recycling matters: “undiscovered reserves” (sources) and the sinks for “solid waste” are both limited; hence, a high standard of living can only be preserved by 1) redirecting most wastes back within the loop and 2) directly reducing material throughput by technological innovation (energy efficiency, ecotechnology, informatics).

The World3 Scenarios

All of these are feedback loops that I’ve described form the basis of the World3 computer models that the LTG authors used in making their scenarios. They are reproduced below, in concise detail.

The central feedback loops of the World3 model govern the growth of population and of industrial capital. Two positive feedback loops involving births and investment generate the exponential growth behavior of population and capital. The two negative feedback loops involving deaths and depreciation tend to regulate this exponential growth. The relative strengths of the various loops depend on many other factors in the system.

Some of the interconnections between population and industrial capital operate through agricultural capital, cultivated land, and pollution. Each arrow indicates a casual relationship, which may be immediate or delayed, large or small, positive or negative, depending on the assumptions included in each model run.

Population and industrial capital are also influenced by the levels of service capital (such as health and education services) and of non-renewable resources.

The “initial conditions” and assumptions are overall rather optimistic, for instance, the ones dealing with the power of the environment to clean up toxic pollution.  The model leaves out corruption, military expenditures, wars and political disruptions – although vital, they are too hard to model with any degree of rigor (I write about these in my posts on Collapse Ethics and Ecotechnic Dictatorship). Chronic food and energy shortages will lead to civil unrest and political instability, necessitating greater expenditures on law enforcement and assorted populist gimmicks (e.g. the tinpot dictatorships that will rise up in the pre-Collapse period), taking away industrial capital and managerial resources from the industrial base, agriculture, and other critical sectors.

Statistical bodies will manipulate inflation and GDP growth figures to preserve an image of stability, even as creeping normalcy converges to an ever darker reality. There will be a scramble to secure the world’s remaining sources of high-density resources, which will lead to a greater share of the industrial base being devoted to (unproductive) military production. Elites will mobilize support for permanent war and surveillance by citing the moral imperative of fighting freedom-hating terrorists, evil empires, and/or maintaining global peace, security and stability. And so on.

Basically, by excluding these political and geopolitical variables, the World3 model presents the uppermost possibilities for the “real” world, even in the standard run which leads to collapse. This standard run is reproduced below.

[LTG standard run. Click to enlarge.]

As you can see, it leads to overshoot and collapse. Why? Because signals and responses to problems are delayed, and limits are erodable.

Examples of erosion – 1) as hunger returns, resources are concentrated into intensifying agricultural exploitation at the cost of preserving longterm soil fertility, 2) as more industrial capital is needed to maintain a certain level of resource extraction, pollution abatement, and agricultural production, less is left over to counteract the depreciation of the industrial capital stock, which begins to wither away, 3) worst of all, increasing pollution can erode the pollution absorption mechanisms themselves, thus increasing the rate of pollution buildup – this is already evident in the reduced ability of the biosphere (forests, oceans, etc) to soak up human carbon emissions.

Symptoms of overshoot, many of which are already becoming self-evident:

Primary Physical Symptoms – Resource stocks fall, and wastes and pollution accumulate.

• Capital, resources, and labor diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services that were formerly provided without cost by nature (for example, sewage treatment, air purification, water purification, flood control, pest control, restoration of soil nutrients, pollination, or the preservation of species) – AK: In the worst case scenario, geoengineering would mean that the most basic function previously performed by Gaia, maintaining planetary homeostasis, becomes a human responsibility.
• Capital, resources, and labor diverted from final goods production to exploitation of scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources. – AK: See the declining EROEI of oil sources, talk of seabed mining, the increasing emphasis on unconventional & remote energy sources like tar sands, deep-sea, polar oil, shale gas, coal seam gas, etc…
• Technologies invented to make use of lower-quality, smaller, more dispersed, less valuable resources, because the higher-value ones are gone. – AK: See greentech (greenwash?), the “hydrogen economy”, electric batteries, etc.
• Failing natural pollution cleanup mechanisms; rising levels of pollution. – AK: See climate change.

Resulting Physical Symptoms - As resource stocks fall and wastes accumulate the behavior of natural systems may change with consequences for ecosystems and human communities.

• Growing chaos in natural systems, with “natural” disasters more frequent and more severe because of less resilience in the environmental system. – AK: More heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, etc, are already observed.

Resulting Social Symptoms - Society tries to live with, compensate for, and adapt to the primary physical symptoms  (note: these symptoms do not include responses that address the decline of the resource base in the first place,  such responses are catalogued in Signs of Life Within Limits).

• Capital depreciation exceeding investment, and maintenance deferred, so there is deterioration in capital stocks, especially long-lived infrastructure. - AK: See US infrastructure problems, paralleling that of the late Soviet Union.
• Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor used by the military or industry to gain access to, secure, and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions. - AK: See resource wars, of which Iraq 2003 is one of the first in a long series to come; the US, China, and Russia have all ramped up military spending since about 2000.
• Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) postponed in order to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts. - AK: We’ll see plenty of that in the next few years as Western states fall into insolvency like dominoes.
• Debts a rising percentage of annual real output. – AK: Debt levels have exploded throughout the developed world since 2000, and went into overdrive following the 2008 economic crisis & bailouts of politically-connected corporate groups.
• Eroding goals for health and environment.
• Increasing conflicts, especially conflicts over sources or sinks. - AK: Conflicts over sources = resource wars (see above), over sinks = “ecological warfare” (PLA colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote about this in their prophetic book on Unrestricted Warfare).
• Shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford. – AK: That is basically another way of saying people will become poorer.
• Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base. - AK: Predatory elites always become a heavy burden on the peasantry and middle classes during times of imminent Malthusian dearth. Applied to the modern world, see the rise of the “surveillance state”, the emphasis on waging a (by definition endless) “war on terror”, the creeping militarization of internal security forces, universal databases, etc… Meanwhile, internal inequality has risen in every major region of the world – the US, Eastern Europe, Japan, China, India, etc – since 1970.

Do you observe any of these symptoms in your “real world?” If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot.

Finally, here are the central assumptions in World3 that give it the tendency to overshoot and collapse: 1) growth in the physical economy is considered desirable and central to our socio-political systems; this growth tends to be exponential, 2) there are “physical limits to the sources of materials and energy that sustain the population and economy, and there are limits to the sinks that absorb the waste products of human activity”, 3) the world system receives signals about these physical limits that are “distorted, noisy, delayed, confused, or denied”, and responses are hence delayed and non-optimal, and 4) the “system’s limits are not only finite, but erodable when they are overstresses or overused”, and furthermore, there are “thresholds beyond which damage rises quickly and can become irreversible” (e.g. see tipping points in climate change). The authors note that if you want to refute LTG, you will have to show that one of the statements above is invalid.

Markets and Technology to the Rescue?

Maybe not. Here are three explanations. First from one of my older posts.

The criticisms from markets and technology also fall flat on their faces. Markets are implicitly modeled in World3 as resource allocations are typically automatically transferred to the sector of most pressing need. (Actually, if anything the models are more market-driven than our own world, since we don’t have perfect information and instant responses in the real world, as opposed to the model). As for technology, unless concrete steps are taken to reduce material throughput, improvements are simply soaked up by the Jevons paradox. Unless technological progress is extremely rapid (e.g. as envisioned by singularitarians), there will sometime come a tipping point when efficiency improvements no longer make up for decling agricultural and resource yields and soaring pollution, and world population and human welfare collapse.

Second from Limits to Growth synopsis.

The most common criticisms of the original World3 model were that it underestimated the power of technology and that it did not represent adequately the adaptive resilience of the free market. Impressive —and even sufficient— technological advance is conceivable, but only as a consequence of determined societal decisions and willingness to follow up such decisions with action and money.

Technological advance and the market are reflected in the model in many ways. The authors assume in World3 that markets function to allocate limited investment capital among competing needs, essentially without delay. Some technical improvements are built into the model, such as birth control, resource substitution, and the green revolution in agriculture. But even with the most effective technologies and the greatest economic resilience that seems possible, if those are the only changes, the model tends to generate scenarios of collapse.

One reason technology and markets are unlikely to prevent over shoot and collapse is that technology and markets are merely tools to serve goals of society as a whole. If society’s implicit goals are to exploit nature, enrich the elites, and ignore the long term, then society will develop technologies and markets that destroy the environment, widen the gap between rich and poor, and optimize for short‑term gain. In short, society develops technologies and markets that hasten a collapse instead of preventing it.

The second reason for the vulnerability of technology is that adjustment mechanisms have costs. The costs of technology and the market are reckoned in resources, energy, money, labor, and capital.

Third from my post on ecotechnic dictatorship to criticize the technology element of Korotayev’s cliodynamics model, but which happens to apply somewhat to LTG as well.

However, a closer examination shows that 1) their models of technological growth are flawed – they do not account for the diminishing returns seen for technological progress in recent decades, nor 2) do they note that in most cases post-industrial technology has not been in the form of low-maintenance knowledge, but embodied in the (fossil fuel-dependent) machines of industrial civilization.

I.e., 1) to get technological growth, you have to divert resources from industrial capital and services to sustain it, 2) many spheres of technological growth themselves show diminishing returns on investment, e.g. electricity-generating turbine efficiency has more or less plateaued, electric batteries are showing signs of plateauing, etc, 3) a lot of the technology we did create in the fossil fuel age is not even at all suitable for sustainable development and are thus essentially worse than useless, i.e. only ecotechnologies can be sustainably supported, and 4) technology requires a electro-industrial base for its very sustenance: if the latter gives way, so will technology, and we will see a collapse in spheres like energy efficiency, made even worse by the fact that the available energy sources would be increasingly depleted and low-EROEI.

Conclusion. Since technology itself relies on a material base for its sustenance, which in turn requires energy inputs to sustain itself. Thus, it will probably be one of the first things to be downsized when physical limits start pressing down on the economy. The hen that lays the golden eggs will probably be the first to get cooked. Second, there may be sudden and catastrophic increases in pollution. Climate change may be abrupt and catastrophic. A collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels by several meters and wipe the world’s ports and more importantly, much of its prime agricultural land. The Amazon is increasingly vulnerable to a conflagration that will turn it into desert, releasing more CO2 than I care to look up in the scientific literature. Increasing temperatures may unleash uncontrolled methane emissions from melting Siberian permafrost and oceanic clathrates.

Past the point of irreversible decline a controlled retreat to sustainability becomes ever more and more unlikely, because of a) the inertia of past pollution emissions and capital investments, b) political crisis in a society predicated on permanent growth will lead to short-term thinking and ever more exclusively stopgap solutions and c) eventually institutional collapse will make it impossible to fund and implement new energy-efficiency or pollution-control technologies on any sufficiently large scale or even maintain already existing infrastructure devoted for those purposes.

That is why we need an ecotechnic transition to begin now.

Further Reading:

• A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality (Graham Turner) – It adds up.
• Peak Oil and “The Limits to Growth”: two parallel stories (Ugo Bardi) – explores the parallels.
• A New World Model Including Energy and Climate Change Data (Dolores García) – model run incorporating more detail on climate change in particular on Vensim, conclusion: ”if the world continues behaving as we have so far, decline is inevitable in the long run”.
• New World Model – EROEI issues (Dolores García) – explains how to incorporate EROEI with the World3 model, update of above post.
• Mind-sized Hubbert (Ugo Bardi) – LTG without too many graphs.
• Environmental and Natural Resource Economics (Tom Tietenberg)
• Russia and Limits to Growth – my old post on LTG.
• Qu’y a-t-il donc dans le “Rapport du Club de Rome” ? – synopsis of LTG and World3 for Francophones.

The most powerful and influential member of this new world is China, which has become the “workshop of the world” since its graduated opening up from the late 1970′s. Accounting for half of global steel and cement production, China has built up an enormous infrastructure of roads, railways, and ports to support its mercantile expansion. In 2009 it became the world’s largest automobile market. Furthermore, China is now advancing higher up the ladder of added-value industries by expanding into hi-tech areas such as commercial aircraft, renewable energy, and supercomputers.

One of the most important factor making China’s rise all the more significant is that it is concurrent with the accelerating decline of Pax Americana that is spurred on by the end of cheap oil, US economic weakness, and regional threats to American hegemony from the “challenger Powers” (e.g. Russia, Iran, and China itself). Should the current international order suffer a “cascading collapse” – which is not unlikely, given the brittleness of the world financial and energy system – then it is possible that China will emerge as an equal, or even superior, pole to the US superpower as soon as 2020.

The Inevitability of China’s Return to Hegemony

Critics aver that ordinary Chinese remain much poorer than Americans, but they miss the obvious fact that with its 1.3bn+ population, China needs only a Romanian level of per capita economic output to equal the US; should they reach Portugal’s level, China’s economy would be double America’s size. (Economic power underpins military power). Nor is there any reason for supposing that China’s growth will soon falter due to social and regional inequality, environmental degradation, bad loans, population aging, or social unrest (though it may well experience a Malthusian collapse along with the rest of the world by 2050). For a refutation of the major concerns, see my old post A Long Wait at the Gate of Delusions, or in summary:

1. Regional disparities. The sharp divide between the affluent coastal and poorer internal regions is not new in Chinese history. In the absence of firm central control, this has in the past led to fragmentation – coastal administrations orientating themselves to foreign commercial interests, the interior sinking beneath a morass of poverty and corruption. However, modern China is not the ailing China of the 19th century in the throes of Malthusian stagnation. It is now a proud and rising Great Power, its regional separatist movements are quelled, and it is under the firm control of the CCP. As such, the chances of a jaded Japan or declining USA successfully exploiting this divide are very slim.
2. Income inequality. There is also a great deal of inequality between China’s urban and rural, between its new oligarchs and itinerant indigents, and between the privileged and non-privileged. However, this is entirely typical of capitalist societies at the height of the industrialization drive, and levels of inequality tend to fall once a more affluent state decides on expanding social welfare schemes to contain labor unrest. As will be covered in a later, related post on China’s internal debates, the ideological underpinnings for such a shift are already coming into place with the concept of the “Harmonious Society“.
3. Environmental degradation. A major problem. An innovative attempt to start measuring economic performance with “Green GDP” (accounting for pollution costs) was quietly squashed when it indicated that China had almost no real growth. That said, localized pollution per se, like city smog or collapsed ecosystems, won’t bring about China’s fall just as they haven’t led to the fall of any other post-agrarian society. The same certainly cannot be said for anthropogenic climate change, whose effects will become devastating to China by the 2030′s (floods, droughts, desertification, dust storms, etc). The most ominous prospect is the melting of the Himalayan glaciers, though some point out that this may be a centuries-long process. Nonetheless, these potential disasters won’t come in time to prevent China’s assumption of its superpower mantle, which I predict for 2020.
4. Bad loans. A valid point, but they only tend to result in – or more accurately, contribute to – long-term stagnation by the time high growth rates falters, such as when a developing society nears convergency with the rich world (e.g. Japan in the early 1990′s). South Korea got a severe economic shock in 1997 stemming from its structural weaknesses, but respectable rates of growth continued up until the 2008 economic crisis. Speaking of which, Western critics should be doubly cautious now when criticizing China for its bad loans. As recent history might have proven, investing in industrial overcapacity may be rather less useless than building suburbs with no future, printing money under euphemisms like quantitative easing, or whatever the latest bondoogles are.
5. Will China get old before it gets rich? The concerns over aging are ridiculous because 1) China’s TFR is at a respectable 1.8 (OK, more like 1.6-1.7 if one accounts for their skewed sex ratios, but still…), 2) its labor force will continue growing until 2030, and 3) it still has massive labor armies locked up in the countryside which can be drawn into higher-added value economic sectors. The real problem cases in the aging department are Central Europe, the Mediterranean, and Japan. See Will China Grow Old Before Getting Rich? (Goldman Sachs) for a more comprehensive analysis which reaches the same basic conclusion.
6. Excessive export dependency. Frankly, I’ve always thought the image of the heroic American consumer saving the world by kindly consuming much of what the the world produces to be somewhat ridiculous – and this image is already being revealed for the hallucination it really is, thanks largely to US fiscal profligacy, imperial overstretch and peak oil. But I digress. First, China’s export dependency is nowhere near as high as suggested by the official figures because much of its exports are merely assembled in China from parts made in and imported from Korea, Japan, etc. Whereas gross exports are near 40% of GDP, net exports are at just 7% of GDP. In 2008, China clocked up a respectable 8% GDP growth rate (albeit, one only enabled by prodigious credit infusions), even though its exports fell by 20%. Second, the main reason for Chimerica – Chinese saving / production – American dissaving / consumption – in the first place was it allowed China to acquire the foreign currency to pay for resource imports, build up its industrial base, and acquire advanced technologies, while the US got back cheaper goods to cushion its rising inequality and industrial stagnation. But China interest in this deal is flagging. It already has by far the world’s largest industrial base by volume and it has bought up, or stolen, most of the key technologies needed for advanced industrialism. From now on, growth will be slower as it is curbed by stagnant world demand, accumulating bad loans, diminishing returns, etc, – it will likely be around 5-7% a year in the 2010′s, rather than the 10% typical of the 1980′s to 2000′s. Nonetheless, growth should continue at a fast enough rate to soak up the new landless labor, ease social tensions and enable China to launch a geopolitical breakout. The inevitable transition from a centrally-weak, disbalanced and commercialized nation-state, to a more centralized, balanced, hegemonic empire will not be smooth, but China’s forward momentum is simply too large to derail its rise to superpower status.
7. Social unrest. Unlikely to happen in a big way as long as fast economic growth continues, which it likely will for the next decade. China still has plenty of room for economic convergence, and its investments in human capital are going to be paying off handsomely in this period – “during the past decade, China has produced college and university graduates at a significantly faster pace than Korea and Japan did during their fastest-growing periods” (Goldman Sachs). Nor are resource or ecological limits to growth likely to intrude in the next ten years. Of course, this situation won’t last forever and by 2030 at the latest, China will be forced to radically reform its model to hold together, e.g. to nationalist expansionism or ecotechnic dictatorship.
8. China’s monolithic and non-democratic nature. Though the CCP projects an image of internal unity on the world, under its placid exterior there is a flux of dynamic debates about how China should reconcile growth with environmentalism, capitalism with socialism, democracy with stability, and cultural influence with military strength. The necessity of liberal democracy for success is a figment of the Western end-of-history mentality, and will be recognized as such by the time the West realizes history doesn’t end.

In conclusion, China has the tools at its disposal to become the world’s last industrial superpower (the US and Japan are in relative decline, Russia has too few people, India is coming to the party too late). The creeping dissipation of the global financial system will remove the US from its position as the system’s intermediator, and with it will go a key pillar of neoliberal internationalism. This will clear the foundations for the emergence of a new symbiosis between the oil-exporting nations of the Middle East and a China which can provide them with cheap consumer goods and security guarantees in place of a deindustrialized, unpopular, and increasingly insular America. These trends will become the conventional wisdom by 2020.

China and the World: Coal, CO2, and Geopolitics

By that date, the age of scarcity industrialism will be in full bloom. Three issues will come to the forefront of all discussions about China’s global significance.

First, the impact of 1.3bn people enjoying rising levels of personal affluence on the global environment. Its electricity generation fueled almost entirely by coal, China has recently overtaken the US to become the world’s biggest CO2 emitter. Today, given the absence of any egalitarian, spiritual, or ultra-nationalist ideology keeping the country together, China requires rapid growth to prevent spiraling unemployment and social unrest. The CCP wants to remain in power, and for that it needs stability, and that needs growth, and that needs more and more coal plants every year. Hence the reason for China’s unwillingness to agree to any but the weakest CO2 emissions targets – i.e., a non-binding resolution to a 45% reduction in Co2 intensity per unit of GDP by 2020 from the levels of 2005. However, since China’s GDP is expected to treble or even quadruple from 2005 to 2020, its emissions will grow by 50-100% even if it achieves this non-binding target. Needless to say, this will be catastrophic for our efforts to contain climate change to a global temperature rise of below 2C, at which point runaway dynamics are expected to become predominant. As the last superpower, I expect China to take the lead in any global or national “final gambit” at geoengineering our way out of runaway climate change.

Second, China’s ability to generate industrial growth from its own resources is shrinking. It is already a major oil importer and its grain production is on a slowly dipping plateau, thanks to increasing urbanization and environmental damage (desertification, salination, depletion of fossil aquifers, etc). It is already restricting exports of the strategic Rare Earth Metals that constitute key components of hi-tech devices such as hard drives, wind turbines, and electric cars. This is a major problem for the world outside China, since China accounts for a stunning 95% of global REM production. It will take a decade to reopen the old mines, and in the interval the West could experience a severe “tech crunch”.

Since the bulk of Chinese electricity consumption comes from coal and its geo-economy is not structurally dependent on cheap oil on the same massive scale as the US, China will not be as hard hit by peak oil as the Anglo-Saxon world; besides, its manufacturing prowess and foreign currency reserves will allow it to outbid most competitors for the black gold. However, the downside to using coal is that it too will peak – in China’s case, perhaps within 10 to 15 years, after which it will go into a rapid decline. As such, China can be expected to “lock in” foreign energy supplies with long-term contracts, increase exploitation of unconventional fossil fuel sources such as coal seam gas, and accelerate its current attempts to force through a renewable transition. In 2009, China became the world’s largest producer of both wind turbines and PV panels; however, they have made nary a dent in its CO2 emissions, and are unlikely to do so any time soon. Coal is much cheaper and more importantly, provides the vital base load power that intermittent wind and solar flows cannot.

Third, China’s military power and neo-colonial influence is set to increase in the coming decades. After suppressing military spending from the late 1970′s to the early 2000′s in order to free up its energies for rapid economic growth, the People’s Liberation Army is now being paid back handsomely for its patience. A prescient quotation from the Economist in 1986, from the days when the magazine was still worth reading:

For China’s military men with the patience to see the economic reforms through, there is a payoff. If Mr. Deng’s plans for the economy as a whole are allowed to run their course, and the value of China’s output quadruples, as planned, between 1980 and 2000 (admittedly big ifs), then 10 to 15 years down the line the civilian economy should have picked up enough steam to haul the military sector along more rapidly. That is when China’s army, its neighbors and the big powers will really have something to think about.

That time is now. Defense spending is now rising faster than GDP, as China intensifies military modernization and acquires new capabilities in electronic, information, and anti-satellite warfare. The overall strategic balance has also changed. The dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that the old Chinese fear of a tank invasion from the north has dissipated; coupled with the growing importance of maritime trade and foreign energy supplies, this has produced a reorientation to coastal defense and broader power projection to the south and east. China’s most ambitious military project is its decision to embark on the construction of a real blue-water navy, a vital tool in the renewed “gunboat diplomacy” we are likely to see in the years ahead.

In the short term, this has extended to China acquiring Russian weapons such as four Sovremenny-class guided missile destroyers, twelve Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines, and advanced anti-ship missiles and supercavitating torpedoes such as the Sunburn, Sizzler, and Shkval. Domestic production of naval vessels is expanding rapidly: whereas US shipbuilding is withering away, China now accounts for a third of global shipbuilding and “is in the midst of a shipbuilding and acquisition craze that will result in the People’s Liberation Army Navy having more ships than the U.S. Navy sometime in the next decade”, including four aircraft carriers by 2020. China’s military modernization has already tipped the regional balance of power. A recent RAND study indicates that China is already be able to establish air superiority over Taiwan in the event of a hot war over the straits, and on current trends it will probably be able to conquer it outright within the decade.

In tandem with its military modernization, which is mostly geared to fighting and winning possible local wars in south-east Asia (Taiwan, Spratly Islands, Vietnam), China is pursuing a far-sighted “string of pearls” strategy of naval base construction on its outlying coastal islands and friendly nations such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. They will host radar stations and anti-ship batteries, and will form logistics hubs for naval operations. The underlying strategy is to reinforce China’s coast against foreign encroachment and to protect its sea lines of communication (SLOC) – especially the vital energy routes supplying it with Middle East oil.

Finally, the broadest form of China’s projection of influence is its rush to buy out mines, arable land, oil field concessions, and foreign national elites, from Australia to Brazil to Ukraine to Angola; indeed, Africa is a focal point of interest, with up to half a million Chinese already working on building up the continent’s industrial infrastructure and tapping its energy and mineral wealth. Closer to home in South-East Asia, most nations are both appreciative and fearful of China’s rise, bandwagoning with the US on security while engaging with China economically. The fact of America’s accelerating decline means that this state of affairs is not permanent. Any future “downsized” US empire will have minimal interests in East Asia, and will concentrate its energies on the Americas, Africa, and perhaps the Middle East (though it will be largely displaced by Turkey and China there).

The second greatest East Asian Power, Japan, will have neither the will to mount a serious challenge to China’s emerging hegemony, nor the strategic foundations. Japan is almost entirely reliant on foreign supplies of energy, and as soon as the PLA Navy surpasses the Imperial Japanese Navy, it will be utterly eclipsed by China. Why struggle, when Japan can instead exist as in a comfortable symbiosis with a China whose post-1978 growth it actively nourished – spats over their wartime history to the contrary? Japan is capital-rich, China is labor-rich; both share Asian values based on paternalism, state capitalism, and national sovereignty… Japan has two choices. It can try to construct an encircling alliance encompassing Russia, Korea, India, and the US to contain China, but this is a truly ambitious undertaking because 1) Russia has – and by that point the US will have – no overriding reason to confront China, 2) the “pan-Asian” appeal of China, 3) Japan has territorial disputes with Russia, whereas Russia in turn has close if suspicious relations with China through the SCO, and 4) as argued by the late Samuel Huntington, Asian societies have a tendency to bandwagon with the leading regional power – now it’s the US, in the future it will be China. The other alternative, and I would argue the likelier and more natural one, is for Japan to acknowledge Chinese regional hegemony. Once Japan takes this plunge, every other nation in in the region will follow.

Conclusion

It is no exaggeration to say that whither goes China goes the world. It is already the world’s greatest industrial power, at least as measured by physical throughput, energy consumption, and pollution emissions. Though still technologically backward, it is much less so than 10 years ago. China’s purchases of foreign technology, copying, and industrial espionage are rapidly closing the gap, and China’s rapidly expanding R&D workforce will be able to successfully hit the ground running once there arises the need for indigenous innovation.

The extent to which China will be able to solve its energy, minerals, food, and water problems will have major impacts domestic and international, and its success or lack of at reducing – or mitigating – its greenhouse gas emissions, is probably going to determine whether the world as a whole will be able to wriggle out of its Limits to Growth predicament. Finally, China’s cultural, economic, and neo-colonial influence is going to metastasize – in the process transforming it into an East Asian regional hegemon and primary pole in world geopolitics.

China’s greatest challenges lie in geopolitics (how to manage its own rise?), coal (how to power growth?), and CO2 (how to grow, or just stay still, sustainably?). The answers to these questions will determine its future political, social, and economic trajectory. It is therefore vital to to find out how its elites are planning to stand up to this panoply of perils and opportunities, which will be the subject of my next post on China.

Please make any comments at Andy’s blog Siberian Light.

Those of you with long memories will remember the series of interviews I did with top Russia bloggers, back in early 2007. Well, after a very long hiatus, I’ve decided it’s time to resurrect the series again – and who better to start with than Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion.

Previously blogging at Da Russophile, Anatoly has made quite a mark for himself in quite a short space of time,. Over the past couple of years, he has published plenty of insightful and in-depth articles over the past year or so, quite a few of which have been re-published in Johnsons Russia List and, as you’ll see from the interview, is already working on a book (although sadly it won’t be about Russia).

So, without further ado, over to Anatoly.

Why did you start blogging about Russia?

First off, I would like to thank Andy for the interview and express my sincere admiration for his work in bringing together such a cluster of diverging and often highly-charged viewpoints together in a civil “interview” format over the years, as well as to offer my apologies for the six month delay in completing this interview.

Let’s start at the beginning. As I’ve spent the majority of my life as a Russian immigrant in the UK, I became acutely aware of how the sentiments of many Westerners towards Russia ranged from ignorance to disdain, with a large degree of overlap. This is unsurprising and understandable, of course. The countries in the NATO alliance had spent the last fifty years living under the threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. And the inhabitants of Western Christendom have had a primal aversion to the dark steppe to the east since times immemorial. Scratch a Westerner, and you wound a Russophobe.

This essentialist worldview is systematically reinforced by the Western media, whose distortion of Russia ranges from the blatant and despicable – e.g. referring to Chechen terrorists as “freedom fighters” during the Beslan crisis; to the more subtly mendacious, in which it sees fit to assume the role of judge, juror and executioner regarding the Kremlin’s exclusive guilt in reducing gas subsidies to Ukraine (“energy blackmail”), the death of Litvinenko (“FSB assassinations”), and the 2008 war in South Ossetia (“revanchist Russian imperialism against a beacon of democracy”). All this constitutes a real information war against Russia by Western media outlets working to the “propaganda model“. (So what if I cite Chomsky? All he does is point out the obvious).

As if the Western media on Russia being little more than a brief for the prosecution wasn’t enough, I then happened upon a certain blogger who gloried in calling “herself” a “Russophobe” and tried “her” best to attach a stigma on a word supposed to have much more positive connotations – “Russophile”, in the most underhanded and low-life ways imaginable. Even semantics are ammunition in the information war. And this was the ultimate trigger that inspired me to create the original Da Russophile in January 2008. Translitered into Russian, it’s supposed to read, “Да – Руссофил!”, that is, “Yes – I’m a Russophile!” (and proud of it).

What spurred me to action was not the even the perceived duplicity of most Russia coverage, but the lack of an opposing interpretation. I believe the prosecution has made its case and as such I didn’t bother laying claim to objectivity; instead, I explicitly admitted to my pro-Russia partisan bias (as Howard Zinn said, “you can’t be neutral on a moving train”, and those who pretend otherwise are hypocrites or naïve). This is in stark contrast to most bloggers (journalists, humans, institutions, etc), who present themselves as – and even frequently believe themselves to be – paragons of objectivity. The former Economist Russia journalist Gideon Lichfield put it best: “The truth is like a quantum superposition state: it is not one version or the other, but a strange combination of all them”.

What are your goals for Sublime Oblivion?

First, the need for alternate Russia coverage is far less pressing now than it was a year ago. The Kremlin is realizing the value of soft power and has acquired some heavy artillery over the past two years, such as the Russia Today TV channel and the Russia: Other Points of View information portal. As such, I now rarely feel the need to comment on current Russian news – demolishing the same Russophobe myths gets repetitive and boring after a while (much like grenade fishing), – speaking of which, I think I now understand why similar “Russophile” bloggers like Konstantin, Fedia Kriukov, and Kirill Pankratov jumped ship after a year or two.

Second, after a few months of blogging, I became more adventurous in my scope and ambitions. This moved me to make some major changes to the original Da Russophile, the biggest of which were: the transition from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress, the abandonment of the pseudonym stalker (yes, I love the film) in favor of my “true name“, and a certain moderation in rhetoric. I have largely abandoned activism in favor of observation and analysis. Most importantly, I’ve expanded the blog beyond focusing exclusively on Russia, to a more of an about-me-and-my-interests kind of thing – which at the moment and for the foreseeable future happen to be Russia, geopolitics, and future global trends.

As for my current plans:

• Continue my series of Sublime Strategic Reports on the global trends, regions, and geopolitical dynamics that will shape the 21st century.
• Build up the Sublime Oblivion Forums community.
• Do more Russian-English translations of uncommon and interesting material.
• Continue monitoring developments in Russia’s demography, on which I have an extensive and original portfolio.
• Expand my presence on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (videoblog), and LiveJournal (на русском).
• Make forays into journalism and / or related research as time permits.
• My most ambitious project is my forthcoming book on future history, which I hope to finish by spring 2010 and publish soon after. See the last question for more details.

What have been your best & worst experiences about blogging so far?

I’ll be indecently honest here. By far the best experience is the ego trip. I love fan mail and Googling my name to find snippets like this or this. Best of all is getting recognized by the VIP’s. It feeds my narcissism and encourages me in my endeavours.

I think that praise and criticism are really two sides of the same coin, so I’m 100% cool with the latter – even of the sort La Russophobe and “her” minions like to dish out. In fact, especially of that sort – they provide lots of lols, just read the list of insults Russophobes have thrown against me! I sympathize with Andy on how there are too many zealots polarizing the Russia “debate”, but I don’t think it annoys me quite as much as it does him. After all, it’s been a constant feature of the Russia debate throughout history. (That said, the attacks do tend to become boringly repetitive after a while, hence I tried to automatize their refutation by compiling a list of Responses to common Russophobe “Arguments”, in addition to the classic Top 50 Russophobe Myths and Russophile Core Articles.)

As for the worst experiences, they are stunningly banal. Writer’s block – I spend at least as much time procrastinating on teh internets as actually writing, and managing complexity – juggling between a big number of online projects, academia, and social life can be enervating. Not that terrible, but still vastly more aggravating than the sum wrath of the LR collective.

Which blogs about Russia and the FSU do you most enjoy reading?

There is a Zen temple in Japan, Ryōan-ji, which has a rock garden arranged in such a way that you can only ever see a maximum of fourteen rocks out of a total of fifteen from any horizontal vantage point. I think it is an excellent metaphor for truth; though it is always elusive when sought from a single perspective, it can be probabilistically narrowed down to an ever smaller region by looking at things from different locations, different interpretations, etc. If you are serious about attaining enlightenment on any subject, it is best to become acquainted with all interpretations – in Russia’s case, be they “Russophile” (Peter Lavelle, Nicolai Petro), Marxist (Sean Guillory), postmodern “virtual-political” (Andrew Wilson), cultural path-dependency theoretic (Streetwise Professor, Stratfor, the Eurasianists, etc), and – yes – all-out “Russophobe”.

As such, I subscribe to most of the main Russia blogs on my Google Reader, though I certainly don’t read all or even the majority of the posts. Life is short. After all, some interpretations aren’t really about observing rocks, but crawling under one. That said, here’s a list of my favorite Russia blogs:

• Sean Guillory @ Sean’s Russia Blog – intelligent, eminently readable.
• Andy Young @ Siberian Light – I love(d) the weekly best blog posts and interviews. (*hint*)
• Eternal Remont – for the lolz.
• Eric Kraus @ Truth and Beauty (…and Russian Finance) – his newsletters are far more interesting than the admittedly goofy-sounding name suggests. PS – get a proper blog!
• Fedia Kriukov @ Russia in the Media – used to be an excellent blog for debunking Russophobe drivel, now sadly dead of ennui (just like Konstantin @ Russian Blog & Kirill Pankratov
• poemless – lovely humorous blog that exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade.
• Yuri Mamchur, Charles Ganske et al @ Russia Blog – somewhat dull and too “official”, but they published my stuff so they’re cool.
• Craig Pirrong @ Streetwise Professor – an unremitting “Russophobe” with a penchant for distortion, but intelligent unlike the others.
• “Untimely Thoughts” – An Expert Discussion Group on Russia, Johnson’s Russia List, and Stratfor – not blogs, of course, but all three are IMO excellent sources of information for amateur and professional Russia-watchers alike.
• State statistics service Rosstat, polling company Levada Center, and demography portal Demoscope are invaluable resources, which I highly recommend to all fact-challenged Russia-watchers.

What first sparked your interest in Russia?

The central theme of my identity is my lack of one. I was sundered from my native Russian land at a young age and I assimilated most of my “cultural assets” during my period of exile in Britain. The reason I call it an “exile” is that I always felt as a a stranger in a strange land there; I was never accepted as British by its denizens, even though I spent the vast majority of my life there. My resulting mentality is aptly labeled “diasporic” by Konstantin Krylov; a state of profound amorality, rationalism, and apathy for the host society’s values – for someone who sees all values as relative cannot have any other attitude.

However, the “diasporic mentality” is a profoundly unnatural – and hence unstable – state of affairs, since the human soul yearns for unity, belief, and sobornost. This may explain the dawning of my sentimental interest towards Russia, which was only reinforced by my socio-cultural alienation and rising political awareness (e.g. of the nauseating moral hypocrisy inherent in Western cultural imperialism towards nations pursuing sovereignty like Russia and Venezuela).

I do not recall there being any “first spark” to my interest in Russia, the ideological evolution began in my mid-teens and is an ongoing process. We shouldn’t forget that dismissing and dissing Russia was fashionable in the 1990’s, when Yeltsin’s “family” were pillaging the nation and many Russians, especially émigrés, felt “betrayed” by the Russian state (partially to justify their own flight abroad and spiritual descent into self-interested, amoral poshlost). There’s also a generational aspect here. Whereas the “fathers” tended to gleefully indulge in Russia-bashing – and embraced all aspects of Westernization with the fanaticism of the new convert – the effect was sometimes quite different on Russia’s “sons”. As Susan Richards points out, contrary to Western delusions, it the youngest Russians which constitute the most “anti-Western” cohort, who according to Nicolai Petro “embraced patriotism as a defense mechanism against the blanket criticism of Russia’s past that left them with nothing of their own to believe in”.

Though I personally have no doubt been influenced by the above developments, I cannot really partake of this spiritual reawakening in Russia. Whenever I visited Russia, most of my relatives insisted on labeling me as English; and if I tried protesting it, many rejoined that I was talking nonsense, or had no idea of “how Russia really works”. The message is clear. I am rejected as Russian by the Russian narod, which correctly perceives me as contaminated; a spiritual threat to the cohesiveness of the community. Like the typical second-generation European Muslim emigrant, divorced from both their indigenous culture and their host society, I have no “real” identity. I’m not just an inostranets (foreigner), but a bezstranets, a dude without a country, a rootless cosmopolitan who ought to be hunted down and shot for treason by all humanity.

It is thus of no surprise that I’ve found a home, of a kind, in California – a state which Fukuyama identified as the most “post-historical part of the United States”, and more specifically, in the liberal oasis that is The Bay. It is here that I realized that I could reconcile my “Russophilia” with my social liberalism, environmentalism, Marxism, predilection for postmodernist thinking, and dislike of Western chauvinism, by embracing Third-Worldism. This perhaps finally resolves my internal contradictions in a way that is both logically consistent and politically correct.

Anyway, the point I was making was that my interest in Russia is not whimsical or academic (that would be China), but lifelong and quasi-spiritual.

What do you most love / hate about Russia?

Drinking vodka with friends. Cheap flying, parachuting, and bootleg IP. The unsettling but intoxicating blend of license and insecurity. The Russian village and peasant wisdom, now sadly in its death throes. The greater “reality” of life in Russia. The profound mysticism of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the primeval mysticism of Russia’s endless plains, dark forests and Slavic skies.

Aggravating though it frequently is, the bureaucracy is tolerable. I’ve never been forced to pay bribes, with the exception of traffic police requisitions. There seem to be many more daily quirks, inefficiencies, and stupidities of various kinds. But ultimately, are these not just affirmations of Russia’s greater scope of humanity, life, and spirit?

My greatest concern about Russia is its continuing lack of civilizational confidence and cultural submissiveness before the West (the “преклонение перед Западом” that Soviet ideologists rightly warned against), which manifests itself – and I might add to a much greater degree that in Western countries – in the crass materialism and historyless ideologies of its current crop of elites.

If you could recommend one book about Russia, what would it be?

As Oswald Spengler said, Tolstoy is Russia’s past and Dostoevsky is its future, so “The Brothers Karamazov” would make as good a choice as any.

On balance, do you think Vladimir Putin’s Presidency has been good or bad for Russia?

Let’s approach this from the viewpoint of the Russian “silent majority”, instead of the quack Kremlinologists and limousine liberals who claim to speak for them. First, there can be no doubt that the vast majority of socio-economic indicators improved markedly under Putin. This is not to deny that many Russians lead hard lives, and that the prevalence of material poverty remains much higher than in the West (which contrary to some common Russian rose-tinged perceptions, is not itself a land of limitless milk and honey) – but exactly where did I claim otherwise?

With that caveat, I daresay – to a greater extent than Russians living in Russia – that on average their living standards have improved greatly since 1998. Though they may go on about how inflation and bureaucracy makes their lives unbearable, it does not resound well when set against their ringing cell phones and new cars parked outside (consumerism exploded in the 2000’s). This is an excellent example of creeping normalcy – some Russians fail to appreciate the strong secular trend towards improving average real living standards since 1998, focusing more on present day concerns like rising prices and poor government services. Nor is this improvement limited to Moscow and the rich, as some Russophobes like to assert. Statistics hint that the economic revival is broadbased across regions and social classes, and I can personally confirm that even small, depressed towns like Kolomna and Volokolamsk have seen vigorous economic expansion in recent years. This has been matched, from around 2006, by an accelerating cultural and demographic revival.

Second, the more sophisticated Russophobes counter that yes, there have been real economic improvements, but only at the cost of shrinking democratic freedoms; in their view, a more liberal regime would have would have undoubtedly performed better. The problems with this viewpoint are manifold. First, most Russians believe they live in a democracy and as pointed out in a BBC poll, some 64% of them believe Putin has had a positive impact on Russian democracy – and who are we to say otherwise? Second, they conflate “democracy” and “liberalism”, which are in fact two very different things. As Vlad Sobell points out, Russia remains “an evolving, post-totalitarian democracy, which unsurprisingly continues to suffer from the baggage of its difficult history” – heck, even Khodorkovsky admitted that Putin is “more liberal and more democratic than 70% of the population” – and as argued by Nicolai Petro, the second phase of the “Putin Plan” for Russia’s modernization is liberalization, which follows on from the first phase – “consolidation” of the Russian state. In their view, Putin’s “soft authoritarianism” was necessary to curb the “roving banditry” of the 1990’s predatory-oligarchic state to allow the development of real liberalism. (The sad experiences of 1990’s Russia and post-Orange Revolution Ukraine illustrate the perils of “anarchic liberalization”). Third, they arrogantly assume that Western-style democracy is an unalloyed good thing, even an end-of-history eschatology, whereas in reality, it is just an expression of hubristic Western egocentricity. In my opinion, nations like Russia and China are fully capable of developing their own, indigenous versions of democracy; if anything, Russia needs a “sovereign democracy”, unbeholden to foreign influence, in order to organically evolve the institutions required for the long-term survival and incubation of liberal ideals within its borders.

Though at times he may be diverted from the task by national security exigencies and adjudication of disputes amongst the Kremlin clans, I believe this is precisely the long-term goal Putin is pursuing – consolidation, modernization, liberalization (in this order of priority). The recent moves by an alliance of Surkov’s “GRU” clan and the civiliki (economic liberals) to investigate corruption and mismanagement of strategic companies under Sechin’s “FSB” clan – which has the implicit blessing of the Russian President, Medvedev – may be the opening shots in a coming purge of the most egregiously corrupt siloviki. This will help the Kremlin in its efforts to modernize Russia, which may in turn lay the foundations for an eventual liberalization by the 2020’s.

On the modernization front, there have been some little-noted successes, e.g. a partial revival of manufacturing from its post-Soviet nadir, helped in part by a new mercantilist industrial policy (contrary to popular belief, a calculated measure of state intervention has been central to all successful development stories). The state reigned in the most rapacious oligarchs and since the mid-2000’s expanded its support for the hi-tech sector (e.g. nanotechnology) and strategic industries. That said, a great deal of work remains to be done, such as reviving the hypertrophied military-industrial complex and developing a real “innovation economy” – these will be some of the big projects of the 2010’s.

I will refrain from making value judgments on whether Putin was “good” or “bad” for Russia, except to the extent of noting that his consistently sky-high approval ratings amongst Russians, usually above 70% since 1999, indicate the former (though then again, some would ascribe this to a “traditional” Russian penchant for a paternalistic Tsar-savior). Instead, the argument may be advanced that a Putin was inevitable.

The Russian Empire has always been subject to cyclical collapses due to its inherent tendencies towards illiberal anarchy (the “Time of Troubles”, the Civil War, the 1990’s). These collapses were followed by ”white riders” (the early Romanovs, Lenin, Putin) who checked the collapse, restored order with a firm hand, and reconstituted “the Empire”. Bismarck remarked that “the art of statesmanship is to steer a course on the stream of time”; as an inheritor of the Tsarist and Soviet historical and cultural legacy, it is to be hoped that the Putin system eventually manages to fulfill the Kremlin’s dreams of reconciling sovereignty with liberalism, instead of succumbing to anarchy like Boris Godunov or metamorphosing into a “dark rider” like the late Ivan Grozny or Stalin. We’ll see.

Do you think the average Russian’s life today is better, or worse than it was in 1989? Why?

On the one hand, the “average” Russian became unprecedentedly empowered as a consumer by the mid-2000’s, though this was accompanied by massive new inequalities (the 1970’s-80’s Soviet Union had no concept of consumer sovereignty and devoted all its additional, shrinking production growth to the military-industrial sector). There were also a great many more social and political freedoms, despite the continued social prevalence of illiberal “post-totalitarian” attitudes, especially amongst the bureaucracy and security forces. Russians also opine that they became happier.

However, the only people to immediately benefit from the Soviet collapse were the ambitious, unscrupulous, and well-connected; and even today, for a great many Russians – especially in the provinces and amongst the elderly – real living standards remain both substantially worse and buffered by a much weaker social safety net. The comparison becomes even worse when one also accounts for a host of social ills (crime rates, alcoholism, ethnic tensions, AIDS, etc) that germinated in the late USSR, but only exploded once society was opened up. Some 45% of Russians believe people are now worse off than under Communism, whereas only 33% take the opposite stand (though it should be noted that this is slightly better than average for the former socialist bloc). I can personally sympathize with this viewpoint. Furthermore, this pattern of nostalgia for an imagined past of a bright socialist future, to a greater or lesser extent, is common to all post-socialist nations (for instance, 57% of East Germans now defend the GDR).

Why? The fundamental reason is that though there undoubtedly appeared a general apathy in late Soviet society, it still retained a deep sense of social solidarity, or sobornost – a catch-all term for a deep sense of internal peace and unity between races, religions, sexes, etc, within a society, or in the words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky, “the combination of freedom and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values”. However, by the late 1980’s the costs of keeping the Soviet system were perceived to exceed the benefits; the burden of complexity became too great to bear. The Soviet state, bereft of its most powerful tools (economic coercion) yet still burdened by immense obligations (welfare and warfare), unraveled under the strain. By the early 1990’s, the “Empire” crumbled and Russia reverted to anarchic stasis in an economic hyper-depression – a neo-feudal oligopoly extracting rents from a demoralized population wracked by social insecurity and demographic crisis, under the guise of virtual politics. Russia’s place on the Belief Matrix shifted towards poshlost – another untranslatable Russian word which denotes cultures that have lost belief in themselves and their own future in favor of vulgarity, commercialism, and pessimism. Most Russians viewed this development as an unmitigated disaster (hence Putin’s infamous comment that the Soviet collapse was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”), and yearned for a “white rider” who would restore order and return them to the future. They got Putin.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Russia’s resurgence – especially visible after 2006 – has been marked by what I perceive as an accelerating drift back towards a Eurasian Empire (not only or even mainly in the territorial sense); a more informal, smarter, and reinvigorated USSR-2. As I outlined in “VII. Return to the Future” in Russia’s Sisyphean Loop, the evidence for this includes: a) the continued consolidation of state power, including Surkov’s ideological invention of “sovereign democracy” (in 2006), and its increasing overspill into active management of Russia’s economic development in what is the latest round of Russia’s “defensive modernizations”, b) a marked improvement in social morale, as attested to by opinion polls and a demographic stabilization that is likely to be sustained in the long-term, and c) the continued deterioration of social attitudes towards the West (especially the US), coupled with increasingly active – and successful – Kremlin efforts to restore its hegemony over the post-Soviet space.

The poor, chaotic, and colorful interlude of poshlost is at an end, most poignantly symbolized by the demise of the eXile in 2008 (I’m sure they’d agree; one of their last issues bewailed the demise of the gopniki, Russia’s equivalent of “white trash”, and a good metaphor for poshlost). A new Eurasian Empire is coalescing in its place, which has started to and will probably return sobornost to Russian life within the decade. And that will mean far more to the average Russian than any amount of Chinese trinkets or London mansions.

Do you think Russia will ever embrace the style of democracy now favoured in most of the rest of Europe, or will it take a different path?

Probably not. For that matter, perhaps not even many European democracies will survive in the next few decades, or more specifically their liberal characteristics. They have a host of problems such as rapid aging, overly generous welfare states, below-replacement level fertility rates, simmering ethnic tensions, national rivalries and varying interests undermining the EU project, and severe structural economic and / or fiscal solvency problems. These will soon by joined by resource shortages and the effects of climate change.

As for Russia itself, I’ve identified several likely directions it could go in “VIII. Return to the Future: Forking Paths” in Russia’s Sisyphean Loop – “sovereign democratization”, “return to the natural state”, “liberalization”, and “totalitarian reversion”.

In “sovereign democratization”, Russia continues implementing Nicolai Petro’s vision of the “Putin Plan“, modernizing and liberalizing Russian society in a new “revolution from above”, or as Vlad Sobell puts it, “this new ‘USSR’ has shed its totalitarian and imperial character and is building genuine democracy à la russe”. Look to Gaullist France, with its emphasis on populism, sovereignty, and dirigisme, as an example. The Sechin silovik clan of ‘former’ FSB officers will be purged or sidelined and by the Year 2020 (a date which has assumed a somewhat millenarian status in Kremlin rhetoric on development), Russia will be a prosperous, innovative, liberal, and patriotic nation. I think this is an optimistic, though still realistic, vision; however, it is contingent on the survival of globalization and the continuation of Russia’s economic and demographic resurgence, both of which are far from assured.

Another strong possibility is a “return to the natural state”, i.e. the reinforcement of Russia’s current paternalistic and neo-feudal features, and continuing economic nationalism, silovik cronyism, and resource dependency. A powerful Tsar will dole out transitional rent-gathering rights unto his boyars, in return for their political loyalty and tax payments. This ‘Muscovite model’, or neo-Tsarism, is socially unjust, Pareto inefficient, and ineffective at either generating economic prosperity or sustaining resource mobilization. Russia will restore its Empire and military might, but as Steven Rosefielde noted, it will be a giant with feet of clay – weakened by economic frailty, undermined by separatist and dissident-revolutionary movements, and contained by the Atlantic powers, it will lapse into a zastoi reminiscent of the Brezhnev era. This ‘middle variant’ tends to be favored by analysts who perceive that Russia is run by a gang of kleptocratic neo-Soviet revanchists and believe the country is doomed to secular decline on account of what they perceive are its disastrous demography and moribund economic system.

“Liberalization” (in the anarchic 1990’s or today’s Ukrainian sense) or “totalitarian reversion” are very unlikely today. The Russian liberals, or “liberasts” as they are sometimes unflatteringly called, are now irrelevant, discredited relics of an older and not-too-soon-forgotten time (of troubles). Nor do Putin and his associates have a death wish to become all-out “dark riders” in a neo-Stalinist mold. Though there is now substantial support for disparate extremist movements (neo-Eurasianism, Strasserism, White Nationalism, etc), they remain confined to the political fringe as in the rest of Europe – though we shouldn’t forget that all it takes for this to change is a weakened state, social disillusionment, and a well-organized, ambitious Party with a skilful demagogue. That said, it is not impossible to imagine a scenario in which a Muscovite “natural state” collapses under its own failings by the 2020’s, unleashing a destructive wave of “liberalization” that returns Russia to poshlost, ushers in renewed social disillusionment, and engenders a violent reaction against liberal ideals that culminates in a totalitarian despotism, and one probably far more ‘racialist’ than its predecessors – not to mention armed with thousands of nukes.

Which of these paths Russia will go down is still impossible to predict with full certainty, though there are certainly signs, Aesopian language, etc, that the Kremlinologist should observe for hints of Russia’s future trajectory. In particular, the outcome of the brewing GRU / civiliki vs. FSB clan war will be a major portent of things to come.

If you could advise the Russian government to do one thing it isn’t already doing, what would it be?

No more mindless idolization of the West (преклонение перед Западом). Instead, develop civilizational confidence by rejecting “Europe” and recognizing Russia’s status as a unique Eurasian civilization, not inferior (or superior) to any other. This does not imply an irrational rejection of useful Western technological and even cultural imports, as urged by some extreme Slavophiles. That said, this does not mean Russia should worship everything Western, because many Western imports clash too much with indigenous Russian traditions to be of any real benefit. Furthermore, the speed, zeal, and “totality” with which Western imports were forced on Russia by its rulers tended to exceed anything seen in the West itself due to Russia’s habit of attempting to “leapfrog” the gap separating it from the West, as happened during the Bolshevik Revolution (from feudalism / early capitalism to socialism) or the 1990’s (from socialism to market fundamentalism) – i.e., to whatever utopian end-of-history the West appeared to be moving towards at the time. Needless to say, the short-term effects were tragic and the long-term effects were enervating, resulting in long periods of retreat and stagnation. It’s time to break this cycle.

If Russia’s elites were to fully embrace this wiser mentality, a number of consequences would follow. They would pay less attention to what foreigners think of their actions, and will thus possess greater freedom to act in Russia’s real national interests. For instance:

• More state control over natural resources extraction, mainly to limit activity so as to leave more reserves in the ground in a world of limits to growth.
• Free trade is only good as long as it really is free, which it isn’t. Russia should be bolder about incubating promising infant industries, encouraging domestic savings, and pursuing strategic trade.
• In particular, Russia must give the formation of a proper domestic financial system top priority in order to gain independence from Western credit flows – their sudden disruption in 2008 was the major cause of Russia’s economic crisis.
• Russia has no need for billionaire oligarchs, especially since they are almost all de facto employed by the state; a few millions should be enough of an incentive.
• Don’t be afraid to reintroduce the death penalty for corruption and sabotage – it works in China, it worked in the Soviet Union, and there is no reason it shouldn’t work in Russia again. The Council of Europe can fume all it wants.

That said, there’s no need to be impolite and in-your-face about all this. Again, follow China’s rhetoric on “peaceful rise” (even as it builds up the world’s largest industrial economy, acquires neo-colonial spheres of influence, steals the most advanced Western technologies, and pursues military modernization). Most importantly, remember that socio-economic modernization is most successful when generated indigenously, not forced upon from outside via Westernization, which is undesirable because of the internal social conflicts in provokes in non-Western societies. Don’t become blindfolded by Western ideological imports like Marxism or neoliberalism. Instead, work patiently and eruditely to explain to the domestic “liberast” intelligentsia – many of whom are actually patriotic, if misguided – why their prostration before the West is unproductive to Russia’s interests (or just ignore them). Breaking up their small rallies with the OMON just reveals insecurity and is counterproductive.

Finally, there is strength in numbers; as the greatest champion of “The Rest” against “The West” since the Revolution (or even gunpowder Muscovy), Russia should resume pushing for Third World solidarity and participating in its manifestations like the BRIC’s and G20. The words of Russian philosopher Nikolai Trubetzkoy are as relevant today as when he first wrote them in 1920:

Without the support of Europeanized peoples, the Romano-Germans will not be able to continue the spiritual enslavement of the whole world. Quite simply, upon realizing its mistake, the intelligentsia of Europeanized nations will not only stop helping the Romano-Germans, but it will try to thwart them, at the same time opening the eyes of other peoples to the true nature of the “benefits of civilization”.

In this great and difficult work to liberate the world from spiritual slavery and from the hypnosis of the “benefits of civilization”, the intelligentsia of all the non-Romano-Germanic nations that have set out on the path to Europeanization or are planning to do so must act together in the spirit of full cooperation and agreement. They must never lose sight of the true problem and not be distracted by nationalism or by partial, local solutions such as Pan-Slavism and other “pan-isms”. One must always remember that setting up an opposition between the Slavs and the Teutons or the Turanians and the Aryans will not solve the problem. There is only one true opposition: the Romano-Germans and all the other peoples of the world – Europe and Mankind.

Russia has developed a much more assertive and confrontational approach to foreign policy over the past couple of years, particularly in its Near Abroad. From Russia’s perspective, what do you think are the benefits and drawbacks of this approach?

As I pointed out above, Russia is returning to the Empire. The state is expanding its power on multiple dimensions – political, economic, geopolitical. It is almost inevitable that it will eventually expand territorially as well (as foreshadowed by 500 years of history); to an extent this is already happening, as South Ossetia and Abkhazia have become virtual Russian protectorates after it repelled Georgia’s invasion in August 2008. This is an accelerating process and I agree with Stratfor that in one form or another (ranging from closer integration into already-existing institutions like EurAsECand the CSTO, to a full-fledged neo-Soviet Union), a new empire will appear on the map of northern Eurasia by 2020 at the latest.

From Russia’s perspective, the effects will be almost entirely positive (at least until it reaches the point of ”imperial overstretch”, when the benefits are canceled out by Western containment and perhaps Polish- and Turkish-instigated separatism; but this is still far off). Rebuilding the Empire will 1) further legitimize the state, 2) increase sobornost, 3) expand the military-industrial power at Moscow’s disposal, and 4) provide a much larger “scope” for autonomous economic development. All these factors reinforce the Empire’s power and “sovereignty”.

Nor is this going to be a particularly difficult undertaking. Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Armenia are already firmly within Russia’s orbit. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are dependent on Russia for their security, and Uzbekistan realigned itself with Russia in 2006. The prize jewel is Ukraine – as Brzezinski pointed out, Russia has never been a proper Empire without it. However, Ukraine is now a weak, “failing state”, close to fiscal insolvency; the Orange movement is fully discredited (President Yushenko’s approval ratings hover in the low single digits and overall support for democracy fell from 72% in 1989 to just 30% in 2009); both the next two prospective Presidents, Timoshenko and Yanukovych, are campaigning on pro-Russian platforms; and there is more popular support for Eurasian integration than for entry into NATO or even the EU. Facing a resurgent Russia and an America increasingly absorbed with other problems, there is a moderate-to-high likelihood that Ukraine will either return to Russia’s orbit or split down the Dnieper River within the next five years.

The deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West, especially the US and its allies, went in tandem with Putin’s consolidation of the Kremlin’s power and Russia’s post-2006 “return to the Empire”. Considering the number of humiliations and broken promises Russia previously received from the West – NATO expansion, the bombing of Serbia, color revolutions, the media war, missile defense, etc – it is not at all surprising that Russia began to push back once it regained a position of strength by the mid-2000’s. Now that it has begun, I doubt it will stop. The late Soviet and Yeltsin-era naïveté about kind Western intentions towards Russia is gone, thanks largely to the West’s own exploitation of Russian weakness. Now Russia has reverted to thinking in 19th century terms, and back then its Army and Navy were its only friends.

You describe yourself as “not just an inostranets (foreigner), but a bezstranets, a dude without a country, a rootless cosmopolitan.” There’s been a bit of a trend recently of people with Russian roots (for want of a better term) returning to Russia, often to do business. Do you think Russia benefits from this influx of bezstrani?

Yes. Technological transfer, new management skills, etc. But its overall economic impact is minimal. Unfortunately, of the middle-aged researchers who left Russia in the 1990’s, only a few are going to go back even in a best case scenario. I applaud Medvedev’s recent initiatives to lure back Russian emigrants, but it is too little, too late.

Furthermore, I should also note that far from all emigrants have a favorable impression of Russia, even despite the spiritual revival mentioned above. Many are stuck with the clichés of the 1990’s with which they left Russia; on top, there are the clichés of the famously “objective” Western media. Gangster capitalism plus FSB authoritarianism drenched in vodka. This is not to imply that this caricature doesn’t contain a kernel of truth, but as Sean Guillory points out, going back to Russia for a while will give a much needed wider perspective. That said, many diaspora Russians are psychologically averse to equanimity on Russia; in many cases, they are huge fans of whatever country they immigrated to, and of the West in general, as if to justify their own immigration to themselves. Consequently, some even view any “defense” of Russia, no matter how justified, as a personal attack on themselves and respond ferociously. For obvious reasons, I do not see many of these people going back.

The only way to get a big stream of high-quality talent to come is to modernize and implement a good immigration system with minimal bureaucratic hassle (Canada is a good model, I think). Russia is currently lagging behind on all three factors. Perhaps that will change by the 2020’s, but by then it will have to be tailored to second-generation immigrants who will have minimal social investments in Russia (friends, relatives, lives, etc). I suspect it is a leap very few will be willing to take, no matter how many incentives the state gives.

I see you’re writing a book. I know you don’t want to give away too much at this stage, but could you give us a brief preview?

For more info see Sublime Oblivion – The Book. I hope to have it finished by spring 2010 and published soon thereafter.

It is essentially a work on future history – a vision of the effects today’s global trends are going to have on different regions and the world system in the decades to come. One of the wellsprings of my analysis is that we live in a time of change far more rapid than anything seen in history, and that anything at all is possible.

Let me demonstrate. Today, there are two particularly influential “schools” on the future. Both germinated in the 1970’s and are regarded as diametrically opposite each other. On the one hand, you have the technological singularitarians, who point out that computing power per dollar has been doubling every two years since the 1960’s and will “inevitably” continue to do so. This miniaturization will eventually allow us to scan the brain with enough precision to record all its details and replicate it electronically. Or perhaps a consciousness will emerge out of Web. The resulting “strong AI”, easily able to quickly replicate and recursively improve itself, will make biological humanity obsolete. Ray Kurzweil, one of the high priests of this school, places the Singularity at 2045.

On the other hand, the “Limits to Growth” schools asserts that our world is finite, and posits that industrial civilization will soon run up against limits to growth in the form of resource depletion and pollution overload. We will need to make ever greater efforts to achieve the same “benefits” in resource extraction and agricultural production, as the system comes under the strain of flattening agricultural yields, topsoil loss, peak oil, higher-EROEI energy sources, runaway climate change, global dimming, political and geopolitical flux, etc. Barring a rapid transition back towards sustainability or the discovery of a technological silver bullet, humanity will massively overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth, destroy the physical basis of its own existence, and usher in an unprecedented Malthusian dieoff in famine, plagues, and wars. The “standard”, business-as-usual Limits to Growth model places the date of collapse at around 2030-50 (furthermore, the current statistical evidence indicates that the world system closely tracked the original 1972 predictions to today).

So which trend will win out? Will we “transcend” just as industrial civilization begins to finally collapse? Or will the world’s last research lab be burned down by starving rioters just as the world’s first, and last, strong AI pops into super-consciousness inside? I think this is the big question of this century and it forms the defining theme of the book.

That is not all, of course. Other trends I will highlight encompass geopolitics, economics, demography, politics, culture, and wars, as well as the intersections between them and their impact on the world’s disparate regions, nations, and cultures. Russia-watchers will not be disappointed; as a potential superpower that stands to benefit from resource depletion and global warming (relatively speaking), Russia will play a major role.

This is a cyberpunk future – a world system wracked by neo-colonial resource wars and under severe ecological strain, tipping over into outright failure throughout the Third World; yet also a world ever more tightly intertwined into an information ether, where fantasy displaces reality. By the 2030’s, as mounting stresses approach critical levels, some of the Great Power-”fortresses” decide to cooperate in a last-ditch effort to save the System from collapse – they start on the construction of a massive, space-based power generation and geoengineering project. Simultaneously, there emerges a global super-conscience, a strong AI– “the last invention that man need ever make”, from within the cathedrals of cyberspace. Salvation beckons. Yet who can presume to know the mind of God?

RAFO

Russia’s Sisyphean Loop

The Eternal Return to the Future?

In this article I attempt to explain Russia’s historical cycles of failed Westernization and to project its future socio-political trajectory. First, I note the nature of and linkages between Russia’s geography, cultural traditions and imperial cycles. Second, using a ‘Belief Matrix’ model and drawing on historical observations, I accumulate evidence that Russia is caught in a ‘Sisyphean Loop’ in which all its attempts to Westernize – for a panoply of economic, cultural, and political reasons – merely end returning it to its imperial Eurasian past-and-future. In this century, there are three possible ‘steady state’ outcomes: either the Loop will continue as Russia returns to authoritarian stagnation or even succumbs to ‘totalitarian reversion’, or it will break – resulting in Russia’s entwinement within a ‘liberty cycle’ in which it finally manages to anchor liberal values onto its population.

I. The Curse of Geography

Russia’s physical geography can be characterized in three words – big, cold, and flat. This unique combination has left an indelible mark on the national character and the nature of the Russian state that cannot be ignored in any work on its political economy[1]. Let’s consider the deleterious effects of each of them in turn.

The early Rus’ state emerged in the coldest region to ever produce a settled population, a problem compounded by its post-16^th century eastern expansion into Eurasia. Growing seasons are short, late spring droughts are recurrent and grain yields are low. This made Russian agriculture outside the southern Black Earth regions, where the cold is mitigated by exception soil fertility, unproductive and barely sufficient for population subsistence. Peasants throughout the world have traditionally viewed merchants with suspicion, since capitalism’s profit motive undermined the egalitarian village social relations and support mechanisms[2] necessary to guarantee community survival in a Malthusian world predating modern economic growth. The especially precarious nature of Russian peasant life further amplified these psychological attributes, making Russia deeply averse to the development of capitalist enterprise, with its emphasis on individual initiative and steady capital accumulation[3].

The resultant low per capita surpluses and the difficulties of taxation rendered old Russia incapable of supporting an extensive institutional superstructure. Instead, it assumed the form of a “patrimonial state” based on absolutist rule, capable of concentrating scarce resources to fulfill crucial national tasks such as defense, “defensive modernization”, and the provision of food security. Even though industrialization and fossil energy reserves have somewhat mitigated the economic effects of the severe cold in Russia, the costs remain substantial: the construction and maintenance of infrastructure is far more expensive than in temperate regions, and the Soviet legacy of large population centers in deepest Siberia and the High Arctic necessitate subsidized energy flows to avert humanitarian catastrophe.

These climatic problems are compounded by Eurasia’s huge, unconnected landmass, a feature noted as early as the 18^th century by Adam Smith[4]. The low population density, relative lack of navigable rivers and distance from the seas starved Russia of capital, necessitating coercive state intervention in economic development. Though it is true that in the post-agrarian age the railways, telegraphs, telephones, radio, TV, and the Internet mitigated these factors, Russia continues to incur great costs on road and railway maintenance and the opportunity costs of missing out on the cargo freighter revolution of globalized late industrialism.

Furthermore, not only was Russia in a perpetual natural state of economic backwardness, but it was also surrounded by foreboding plains dominated by Asiatic horsemen to the east and Teutonic, Scandinavian and Polish encroachers to the west. This induced an acute sense of insecurity, at times overspilling into paranoia, in its rulers. Russia was impelled to expand from its Muscovite heartlands to suborn weak border regions (Ukraine, Poland, Central Asia, etc) and seize and hold natural buffers against powerful neighbors (the Caucasus, the Carpathians, etc). As Catherine the Great pithily put it, “I have no way to defend my borders except to extend them”. However, the initial economic gains of conquest were worn down as Moscow was forced to maintain strong standing armies on every potential front, administer the new lands and fund an extensive internal security apparatus, all of which constituted a constant drain on scarce resources and the productive labor pool.

[The Kremlin's view of the world - its strategic rear secured by the frozen Barents Sea, it feels “natural” to expand up to the Tien Shan, the Iranian border, the Caucasus, the Carpathians, and as far down the North European Plain as possible. Source: Stratfor].

Adding these factors together, it becomes clear why imperial overstretch, economic inefficiency and primitive consumer markets are features, not bugs, of any Eurasian empire. Although industrial, technological, and fossil energy sources have mitigated the curse of Russia’s geography during the last century, they were reinforced in the other direction by the Soviet physical legacy of “city-forming enterprises”, industrial “gigantism”, remote population centers, a metastasized military-industrial complex and “structural militarization”[5].

Much has been written on how developing nations can get locked into ‘dependency’ relations with the advanced ‘core’, in which a misguided focus on comparative advantage (bananas, oil, etc) contributes to the growth of strong structural and institutional barriers in the developing nation towards long-term, industrial growth – the only sure path to sustainable wealth[6]. It has also been pointed out that the only nations to have successfully ‘caught up’ with the original ‘leading’ industrial economy, Britain, were those which developed their indigenous manufacturing capabilities with active, large-scale state involvement (e.g. Germany, Japan, the Asian NIC’s)[7].

Not only does Russia suffer from the classic problem of economic backwardness (along with its associated tendency to develop unhealthy dependency relations), but its economy is further burdened by the aforementioned cold climate, huge landmass, poor riverine connections, strategic vulnerability, and a Soviet physical legacy which (somewhat) worked in the context of central planning, but which is a liability now that the Eurasian economic space has been opened up. In its open condition, the Russian economy is structurally uncompetitive on the world stage, relative to Europe, the US, and China; because manufacturing is inherently loss-making on the Eurasian plains, it is much more economically ‘efficient’ to just ship out Russia’s mineral resources to fuel manufacturing in warmer, coastal regions such as the Rhineland or the Pearl River Delta. No more than 20mn Russians are needed to service the pipelines and grow fat from the proceeds. The other 120mn are free to eke out a subsistence living on Russia’s marginal lands, or die out (as indeed many did during the post-Soviet era of neo-liberal reforms[8]).

Hence, it is hard to escape the conclusion that to achieve real, long-term economic growth and political sovereignty, as opposed to transitory commodity-bubble booms and political dependency, Russia needs to implement a degree of economic autarky – protective barriers, state backing of sunrise industries, buying (or stealing) of key industrial technologies, etc. True, this will doom it to eternal backwardness relative to the developed West. But so will openness – and at a far steeper social and political price, as will be demonstrated below.

II. Clash of Beliefs

Despite all the superficial similarities, Russia is most certainly not America. The US has a temperate climate, no significant external threats, abundant land, and excellent navigable river systems and sea ports on both coasts, all of which enabled its long legacy of free-wheeling capitalist development. Though the individual European nations tend to be strategically insecure and heavily-populated, entailing a more state-centered pattern of development, the continent’s geographical endowments – fertile river valleys, easy access to the sea and differentiated climatic zones – made it highly favorable for the development of commerce and capital accumulation[9].

These differences in starting conditions manifested themselves in lower growth rates for Russia relative to Europe. Although their absolute differences were infinitesimal and overwhelmed by the “noise” of annual climate / harvest variability and longer-term Malthusian cycles[10], this nonetheless led to a growing development gap between the two civilizations on a millennial timescale[11]. Russia’s historical backwardness was already evident by the 15^th century in the contrast between the achievements of Renaissance Europe, which was by then building up the foundations of the modern world – the printing press, mechanical clocks, caravels, etc – while medieval Muscovy, the precursor to the Russian Empire, was only beginning to emerge from its long Tatar-Mongol night. Thus, the Russian state’s first interactions with a self-confident, more advanced, and frequently predatory Europe, set the template for the next five hundred years of its tortuous relations with the West. This relationship made it into a “torn nation”, to use Samuel Huntington’s term from the Clash of Civilization – forever torn between succumbing to Western civilization and returning to its Eurasian legacy.

This takes us to the crux of the problem. Russia’s seemingly-permanent backwardness ignited a prolonged debate between groups that would come to be known as its “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” / “Eurasianists”. One of the current and most influential iterations of the former is the argument set forth in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which in the heady, triumphalist days of 1992 proclaimed, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

First, this is backed by the empirical evidence. According to the Polity IV database, the number of countries qualifying as democracies rose from around a dozen before World War One, to more than ninety by 2008[12]. Second, Fukuyama noted the increasing influence of the “Mechanism” of natural science on societies, which emphasizes the primacy of rationalism and the desirability of optimal socio-economic arrangements. Third, he appropriated the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to argue that liberal democracy is the system best geared towards managing the conflicting thymias[13] of both “isothymiacs” – whose desire for equality is satisfied by classical liberalism and rule of law; and “megalothymiacs” – whose desire for power over others is satisfied through capital accumulation and the thrills of democratic politics. The theory goes that as nations embrace the scientific method and industrialize – whether to enjoy the fruits of consumerism, or only just to preserve their political sovereignty – the likelihood of their convergence to liberal democracy and integration into the “international community” approaches one.

These theories of secular progress have developed in an uneasy conjunction with the “civilizational school”, which believes that free markets and liberal democracy are specific features of Western civilization, i.e. of the Latino-Germanic peoples, and therefore cannot easily take root in other societies. One of the most powerful arguments against wholesale Westernization was made by Nikolai Trubetzkoy in Europe and Man, published in 1920 amidst the postwar disillusionment and revolutionary turbulence of those years. He states that the idea of world progress, with European civilization naturally at its forefront, is nothing more than a baseless assumption of European cosmopolitanism (which is itself merely a euphemism for “egocentric” “pan-Latino-Germanic chauvinism”). This is because “the scientific nature of the proof is illusory”, since to “reconstruct the evolutionary scheme, we must know its beginning and end points, and to ascertain its beginning and end points, we must reconstruct the evolutionary scheme”. Through a deft combination of psychological and philosophical arguments, he comes to the conclusion that all cultures – including “savages” – are essentially equal and should be evaluated on their own merits. Though cultural relativism is well-known today, at least on liberal university campuses, such ideas were ground-breaking at the time[14].

Following his reflections on the non-universality of Western culture, Trubetzkoy asks whether it is possible for a non-European culture to a) completely assimilate with it and b) whether doing so is desirable. To do so, he draws on the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, who argued that all cultures are defined by “the uninterrupted emergence of new cultural assets” (legal codes, political structures, scientific ideas, artistic styles, etc). All cultural assets are either “inventions” – a product of the indigenous culture, or “propagations” – imports from another culture. The former is much easier to assimilate because it is an organic product of the society in question, whereas the latter is copied from another society and whose transplantation will result in a clash with older pre-existing values, resulting in a long and bitter duel logique for supremacy.

When a culture like Russia tries to Westernize, the result is cultural schizophrenia. A good half of its inventions – those stemming from its “old Russian” side – will now be rejected out of hand for not conforming to the dominant European paradigm. Because of its “cultural dependency” on Europe, paralyzing social clefts develop across classes and generations – for instance, during the 18^th century “trivial, demeaning aping of Europe”, when the French-speaking upper classes were often unable to even understand their Russophone serfs. (Furthermore, “[Russia] must accept without protest everything that genuine Romano-Germans create and consider valuable, even if it conflicts with its national psychology and is poorly understood”. This basically defines Russia’s unsuccessful attempts to create a Western style free-market economy in the early 1990’s, which was carried out by ideologues and hijacked by insiders).

The resultant internal weaknesses and wastage of ideological energy on internal debates and conflicts cement a permanent cultural lag behind Europe. This breeds a burning inferiority complex within Russians, and causes Europeans to look down upon Russians, whom they criticize for either a) not Europeanizing far enough – for Russia’s indigenous cultural assets can never be fully extirpated, absent a full “anthropological merger” with the Romano-German world, or b) deceitfully repressing their “true nature” under a European veneer[15]. This further reinforces Russians’ disillusionment with the West.

The failure of Westernization, growing social tensions, and simmering ressentiment against the West, occasionally reach a critical point in which Russia attempts to “leap” the gap separating it from the West, as happened during the Bolshevik Revolution (leapfrogging from feudalism to socialism) or the 1990′s (from socialism to market fundamentalism) – i.e., to whatever utopian end-of-history the West appears to be moving towards at the time. However, these leaps are extremely enervating and result in long periods of stagnation as Russian society sets about resolving the contradictions opened up by its Sisyphean attempts to catch up to the West.

III. The Belief Matrix

One way to understand changes in a society’s belief systems is to graphically represent it within a Belief Matrix, as shown below for a ‘Sisyphean loop’ (encounter with the West).

The horizontal axis represents the degree of society’s faith in its own indigenous culture, which can be (roughly) proxied by measures such as demographic health, social solidarity, levels of social trust, the crime rate, and faith in the future. The rightmost part represents a state of “sobornost” (соборность) – a catch-all term for a deep sense of internal peace and unity between races, religions, sexes, etc, within a society, or in the words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Lossky, “the combination of freedom and unity of many persons on the basis of their common love for the same absolute values”[16]. An example of such a period in Russian history could be the Khrushchev thaw (1956-64), which saw the ebbing of the class war and Stalinist repressions, rapid industrial growth, and symbolic achievements in space; but before the onset of the Brezhnev stagnation, with its drunkenness, corruption and cynicism, which dimmed the lights of faith in a bright socialist future.

Its opposite is another untranslatable Russian word, poshlost (пошлость), which according to different commentators is a kind of “petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity”[17], “triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality”[18], “not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive”[19], and “corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature”[20]. This is another good catch-all term for categorizing declining cultures that have, or believe they have lost, their faith in themselves, prominent 20^th century examples being Weimar Germany and 1990’s Russia.

The vertical axis of the Belief Matrix represents a society’s degree of belief in Rationalism, that is, Enlightenment values such as liberalism, the rule of law, the scientific method, etc, or what Samuel Huntington ethnocentrically labels as the “Idea of the West”. Several caveats must be added. Rationalism does not necessarily imply democracy, for as thinkers from Aristotle to de Tocqueville pointed out, democracy has a tendency to degenerate into an (irrational) tyranny of the majority. However, some democracy, or at least some degree of popular consent, is needed to sustain a rational society, i.e. for ‘liberal democracy’ to become so ‘embedded’ as to be accepted as an integral part of the national culture, as it is in countries like France or the US.

That is much harder than it sounds. The scientific method is alien and unfamiliar to the peasant mind filled with images of rain gods and trickster demons. The rule of law cannot sit well in human societies based on on communal coercion, “big man” rule and sacrificial scapegoating. As pointed out in Part I, rational market forces are anathema in subsistence societies. Thus, reconciling sobornost with rationalism, or ironing out the internal contradiction inherent in ‘liberal democracy’, is a long and tortuous process that necessitates the development of economic surpluses, and consequently of a culture of tolerance and an argumentative tradition, for its fulfillment. The only nations that managed to fully accomplish this in their pre-industrial phase were Great Britain and the US. However, once a society resolves these contradictions it enters a powerful liberty loop, which ensures the long-term survival of liberal democracy within its territories, at least in the absence of very severe exogenous shocks. Finally, it should be emphasized that the “Idea of the West” is only an absolute ideal to which humans can only aspire to, but never reach unity with; as such, it should not be conflated with individual “Western countries” (France, the US, etc), which are composed of humans and hence frequently, understandably, and inevitably fail to fully live up to their Rationalist ideal.

This explains the frequent Russian, Muslim, Third World, etc, accusations of double standards and hypocrisy[21] on the part of the “West”, which presents itself as a universal, end-of-history civilization, but in reality often acts in ways to further its cultural and economic hegemony. Though part of the critique is accurate and justified, another part veers into being a Romantic reaction against the West, which Gustav Pauli tried to define as “irrationalism, the mystic welding together of subject and object, the tendency to intermingle the arts, the longing for the far-away and the strange, the feeling for the infinite and the continuity of historic development”[22] – much like postmodernism, it is very hard to define Romanticism, for (rational) definition is contrary to its very spirit!

I have designated this over-reaction in Russia’s context as Russian mysticism (Romanticism) or skeptical Russophilia[23], noting that their adherents share a common belief in the non-universality of the Western project and in Russia’s unique civilizational identity and destiny – be it of a Slavophile, Eurasianist, or some other hue. Contrary to the ‘Western Russophobe’-imposed definition of a ‘Russophile’ as someone who uncritically praises Russia and its government, their defining trait is a simple acceptance of Russia for what it is; for unlike the case for (rational) Western civilization, resolving its own contradictions is not part of Russia’s historical mission – and one could add that attempts to do so on the part of its elites have led to usually led to tragic results. The essence of Russian Romanticism can be summed in just four lines by the famous Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev.

Умом Россию не понять, | You can’t understand Russia with intellect,
Аршином общим не измерить: | You can’t measure her with a common scale,
У ней особенная стать — | She has a special kind of grace,
В Россию можно только верить.  | You can only believe in Russia.

This anti-Western reaction can sometimes spiral out of control, transcending its aesthetic, mystical origins into the realm of ‘metapolitics’[24].  The intersection between sobornost and mysticism is the dark region where totalitarianisms arise and democides are unleashed, as their spiritually tortured societies attempt to go back to an imagined past using the most modern tools – as Goebbels himself said, “National Socialism has understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time”. Speaking of which, the prime example of this during the 20^th century is German Nazism, which ‘scorns personal freedom and objectivity and all universal, unnational values as being the “superficial” civilization of the sunny Mediterranean, in contrast with the “deeper” Kultur of northern fogs, that misty metapolitics, that “queer mixture of mysticism and brutality”’[25]. A modern example would be the Islamists using modern technology (bombs, airplanes, etc) and modern ideology (Islamized ‘Third Worldism’) to recreate their vision of a pure, idyllic imagined past[26].

In conclusion, there are four utterly distinct socio-psychological states on the Belief Matrix. First, at the bottom right (rationalism / sobornost), we have stable societies where liberalism enjoys a substantial degree of popular consensus, locking them into self-perpetuating ‘liberty cycles’. Second, at the bottom left (rationalism / poshlost), we have peoples with minimal internal social solidarity and a rational mindset, which one could call “diasporic”[27] (in that it is typical amongst “diaspora peoples” like the Jews, Armenians, the Chinese ‘bamboo network’ in East Asia, etc). The diaspora mentality cannot be sustained within a non-diasporic society, for a society cannot be a parasite on itself indefinitely; it will have to move upwards, towards a state of “barbarism”, whose essence is a principled stand for pure parasitism – the top-left of the Belief Matrix (mysticism / poshlost), which is a form of nihilism. Yet this too is an unstable state, since it needs to feed off a functioning civilization for its material and cultural survival (i.e. one with a certain degree of sobornost), hence it will eventually come to an end – either when it is crushed by the civilizations it necessarily stands in opposition to, or when it conquers them itself but whose demise likewise eliminates the rents the barbarians had previously relied upon to sustain their civilization, thus forcing them into generating their own productive capabilities. Fourth, the region of the top-right (mysticism / sobornost) is the aforementioned realm of metapolitics, of the “charismatic authority”[28], of high “passionarity”[29], of the national will, of totalitarian despotism.

IV. The Sisyphean Loop

We are all prisoners of the belief matrix and its laws, even the ‘post-historical’ Europeans[30] entrenched within transnational liberalism. As such, it is imperative to understand these laws, especially as they apply to cultures in an uneasy relationship with the West. I will now try to put together a general model of how traditional cultures react to the Western challenge, before applying it to Russia’s five hundred year history of alternating acceptance and rejection of the West in Parts V-VII. I will be referring to the ‘Sisyphean Loop’ chart in Part III throughout.

As attested to by numerous chronicles, first contact with Westerners by less advanced civilizations typically results in a certain fascination with the strange, new Westerners, as well as a determination to catch up – especially to acquire the Western military-industrial technologies to defend against Western predation. (There are many exceptions, of course; for instance, 19^th century China believed the Europeans had nothing to teach them, and retreated in on itself to its cost. But in the long-term, the reality of Chinese stagnation and its exploitation by Western powers – including by a Western-armed Japan – eventually forced a tectonic shift). The two cleanest examples of countries repeatedly opting for ‘defensive modernization’ are Japan during the Tokugawa and Meiji eras, and successive incarnations of the Russian Empire under Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Alexander II, Stalin, Putin?

Many indigenous traditions are seen as incompatible with modernization and are rejected by the ruling elites – and as noted in Part II, since a Westernizing nation “borrows its evaluation of culture from the Romano-Germans”, it must then “accept without protest everything that genuine Romano-Germans create and consider valuable, even if it conflicts with its national psychology and is poorly understood”[31]. This creates internal tensions, conflicts, and unrest within society. There occurs a growing gap between the Westernizing elites and the traditional mass of society, a theme that typically comes to dominate vast swathes of its culture and literature, a classic sign of poshlost. Society moves to the bottom- left of the belief matrix, embracing Rationalism (synonymous with Westernization) at the expense of faith in itself. Social trust erodes, there is more internal strife, and society takes on a “diasporic” mentality – the debasing feeling of being a foreigner in one’s own land.

The cosmopolitan elites come to be seen as foreign leeches on indigenous soil, decadent and degenerate, by the common folks – many of whom retain, let us remind ourselves, peasant mentalities valuing egalitarian collectivism, and many of whom are now being uprooted from the soil to swelling cities, made literate and capable of reading agitprop, and made mobile by the new railways, as happened in the last decades of Tsarism (in modern times a similar role may be played by the spread of electronic social networking technologies[32]). Furthermore, these grievances tend to have more than a grain of truth, as the elites do tend to slavishly follow foreign manners (e.g. see the French-speaking Tsarist aristocracy, many of whom could not even understand their Russophone serfs) and exploit the indigenous population in the name of Western-associated ‘modernization’, forcing the country into a humiliating ‘dependency’ relationship with the already-developed core.

Over time these problems begin to discredit further Westernization, especially once the easiest (and ostensibly most useful) task of military modernization is completed. The people and the elites lose faith in the West – the former because they associate it with degeneracy and corruption (e.g. the Russian workers and peasants most aware of it: because of the development of the national railway system during late Tsarism, even a peasant from a rural backwater could now observe the parasitic decadence of the Court); the latter because of the shallow nationalism born of reinvigorated military, economic and cultural strength accruing from a limited modernization. Intellectually, there is a gradual movement back towards embracing indigenous culture, like the late Tsarist intelligentsia’s (narodniki) fad towards Slavophilia, with its (rather risible) idolization of Russian peasant life.

But now one of two things happens. A part of the elite realizes that their decadence is politically dangerous (a large gap between the masses and the elites presages revolution), and tries to move back towards indigenous traditions – back to the people, so to speak. This is opposed by another part of the elite that has gotten used to its perks and privileges, despite the spiritual anomie in which they are stuck because of this. The ruling elites become disunited and weak; the masses are increasingly disillusioned with the whole system; new ideologues appear, preaching about total rejection of the West (e.g. the Bolsheviks) and a return to an imagined past of purity and virtue, i.e. to tradition (e.g. amongst whom there were many admirers of Russian peasant communal traditions; non-Russian examples would be fascist movements or the radical Islamists who overthrew the Iranian Shah).

There appears a crisis, further straining divisions in the government and polarizing society in general (e.g. World War One). Eventually the government is forced to reform, but alas and alack, as per de Tocqueville, the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform. By reversing course and showing weakness, it delegitimizes itself in the face of crisis; furthermore, it frequently becomes more democratic just when the people (and newly-enfranchised electorate) are becoming more hardline, and extremists (the Bolsheviks in 1918, the Iranian Islamists in 1979, etc) are waiting in the wings. The extremists moderate their positions to win over the people and consolidate their control; after that they unleash terror, taking their captive nation into the far-top fringes of uncompromising rejection of Rationalism and anti-Western reaction.

On the other hand, if the elite remains united; if the crisis is not that severe; if the people retain a firm belief in Rationalism and the Idea of the West and are unswayed by the extremists, then a more moderate outcome can be expected – a reversion back to the past, the state of stasis (“traditional authority”), yet having assimilated some elements of the Idea of the West during its loop so that society is now “better” and perhaps “fairer” than before (by the yardstick of more Westernized states). They remain in this inert state until another shock (e.g. defeat in war by a more Westernized nation, or recognition of weakness) forces them to act, restarting the loop.

Why do I call this a Sisyphean loop? Because while it lasts, this basically explains a tortured nation’s attempts to catch up with “the West” (roll the rock to the top of the mountain), but never managing it (the rock keeps going back downhill). This is very pronounced in Russia – its entire history since gunpowder Muscovy has been one of quixotic attempts to catch up to and surpass the West, yet which all too often ended in catastrophes wrought of messianic delusions, followed by prolonged periods of frustration, stagnation, and collapse.

V. The Rise, Fall, and Rise of the Russian Empire

The hand of the Muscovite Leviathan lay heavy on a people always near the edge of subsistence, creating strong centrifugal forces that further reinforced the state’s natural penchant for coercive centralization and intensive legitimization (the main instruments in these endeavours being the Army, the bureaucracy, and the Church). This resulted in Russia oscillating between two equilibrium states – 1) a centralized autocracy attempting to consolidate state power over the Eurasian vastness – “Empire”, and 2) a natural state of illiberal, anarchic stasis – “Chaos”.

This is how this imperial cycle works. Following Russia’s cyclical collapses (the Mongol conquest, The Time of Troubles, the Civil War and the post-Soviet transition), in which the state withers away and foreign powers and their Russian proxies move in to take advantage of the Eurasian vacuum (the Poles during the ‘Time of Troubles’, the Civil War era interventions, Western ‘financial advisors’ during the 1990’s), there eventually emerges a messianic “white rider” who heavy-handedly drives out the usurpers, and restores order and national morale (the 15^th- and early 16^th-century princes of Muscovy, Peter the Great, Lenin). Putin is the current white rider, intimately cognizant of Russia’s weakness from his intelligence background and determined to once again play state-driven catch-up to the West.

However, this is rarely successful – these developments are stymied by the baleful economic and social effects of Westernization on Russia (see Part II). Disappointed by slow and stunted progress, the white rider “realizes that the challenges ahead are more formidable than he first believed and that his (relative) idealism is more a hindrance than an asset”[33]. Into this society riven by internal divisions and disillusionment (poshlost) – in steps the ‘dark rider’, who unburdens himself of the white rider’s moral restraints in an all-out drive to fulfil the state’s goals through strict internal controls, subjugation of the economy and military expansionism – he recreates the Empire, driving Russia to the (metapolitical) top-right of the Belief Matrix. The most famous examples are Stalin and Ivan Grozny in his later years.

This empire-building is accompanied by intense efforts at state legitimization (the “Third Rome”, the socialist future, etc – i.e., reincarnations of the mystical, messianic Russian ‘national idea’) and state coercion (from oprichnina to OGPU). Yet the people tend to go along willingly with this project, because of unfavorable memories of the era of collapse and disintegration, and their perception that this regime, though harsh, is a necessary and ‘national’ one. In his visit to the 1930’s USSR, John Scott noted that Stalin himself was regarded as a kind of beneficent Tsar, a father of the nation, and a competent ‘captain of state’ like the propaganda posters portrayed him[34]; the regime enjoyed popular support and Stalinist industrialization was fuelled not only by fear, but by immense enthusiasm and fervor too. The war correspondent Alexander Werth noted similar sentiments in 1941, e.g. Stalin was viewed as a paternal bashka (thinker)[35].

After the dark rider dies, his ‘charismatic authority’ is replaced by more traditional and bureaucratic institutions, i.e. a more rational order. However, his legacies and achievements – sobornost, autarky, sovereignty, i.e. the Empire – linger on, and continue legitimizing the regime. For the Empire is, at root, a social preservation mechanism to allow Russians to enjoy the benefits of sustained socio-political complexity – internal peace, a degree of security from foreign marauders, a large contiguous market space permitting economies of scale and autonomous economic development, and the aesthetic trappings of imperial splendor.

However, cursed with a geography highly unfavorable for settled life (let alone civilization), imperial overstretch, economic backwardness and primitive consumer markets are features, not bugs, of any Eurasian empire (see Part I). Furthermore, the dark rider also sows the seeds of destruction by overextending his realm, which eventually ushers in a period of stagnation and increasing socio-economic strains. Russia’s imperial cycles are basically a permanent struggle against dissolution. Sometimes, the costs of maintaining the imperial superstructure exceed the benefits, by which point a systemic shock could unravel the entire system – a good example would be Kerensky’s Russia in 1917, which collapsed once its coercive (military) and legitimizing (the Church) power was destroyed by defeats, defections, and Bolshevik propaganda.

Half-hearted attempts of the ancien régime at reform fail and the country slides from decline into a new collapse, thus closing the cycle. Though crises are generally rarer in Russia than in most European countries, once they occur – given the amount of stress holding the system together – they tend to be extremely catastrophic. Even as newly-empowered ideologues set about fulfilling their dreams of leapfrogging the West from within the collapsed shell of state, the real Russia outside the Kremlin crumbles reverts back to its natural state – the natural state, an anarchic state of stasis, decentralized Chaos; abandoning its cities, laws, and other accoutrements of civilization for the primeval mysticism of its endless plains, dark forests and Slavic skies.

VI. Patterns of the Past

In this and the next chapter, I will be putting together the above observations on Russia’s geographic-climatic idiosyncrasies, the derived cultural traditions, its special path along the Belief Matrix, and its imperial cycles, trying to link them together and apply them to its past. There appear to me to be several ‘Sisyphean Loops’ in the history of the post-Tatar Russian state, periodic ‘waves’ in which it actively tried to reconcile rationalization with its indigenous traditions – most intense under the rule of Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’), Peter the Great, Lenin and Stalin, and Yeltsin and Putin (though also identifiable under Catherine the Great, and Alexander II and Alexander III).

Thunderstorms over the Third Rome

First off, the reason I put apostrophes around Ivan IV’s epithet – in Russian, it is “Grozny”, an adjective formed from the Russian word “гроза” – “thunderstorm”. Not necessarily cruel and unjust; more appropriate translation are ‘fear-inspiring’, ‘mighty’, ‘superhuman’, ‘sublime’; an unpredictable force of nature that can bring the rains that save the harvest, or kill and destroy everything in its path.

Following Ivan IV’s recognition as ‘Tsar of All Russia’ in 1547, he proceeded to build a diverse, Eurasian empire – and thus cementing Russia’s conception of itself as an Empire ever since. Though criticized for his ‘repressions’, including the violent suppression of the Novgorod insurrection[36], most of the ‘evidence’[37] for his ‘tyranny’ comes from Andrei Kurbsky, the first Russian ‘dissident’ and traitor who turned to Poland-Lithuania in 1564. Actual historical records record only 4,000-5,000 executions under his reign, most of them recidivists who betrayed Ivan Grozny a second time; furthermore, in any case the numbers pale besides the violence seen in Western Europe at the time (e.g. St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in France with 5,000-30,000 dead, and Henry VIII’s anti-vagrant laws that resulted in the execution of 72,000 peasants misappropriated of their lands).

Ivan Grozny made a series of far-reaching reforms, some of which were surprisingly advanced for their time – e.g. the introduction of elected juries from the lower ranks, local self-government, medical quarantines for combating plague, a standing military (strel’tsy), and rationalizing reforms of the Church, the law code, tax collection, the bureaucracy (formation of permanent chanceries, or prikazy, in 1553), nobles’ service obligations (the 1553 ‘decree on service’), and the convocation of zemskie sobory (‘land assemblies’) drawn from merchants and artisans to build consensus for state modernization policies.

Many of the reforms were based on those prevailing in the Ottoman Porte, in particular those concerned with the military structure, tax collection, and noble obligations. However, the attempt to copy the Ottoman system of land division (private, clerical, state, and ‘sovereign’) – known as the institution of oprichnina (1565-1572), meant to create a personal fiefdom subject to Ivan’s direct rule in order to extirpate treason and reduce boyar power – backfired. The black-cowled, sinister oprichniki, riding on black steeds with a broom and dog’s head to “sniff out and sweep away treason”, were more interested in personal enrichment and settling personal vendettas than in pursuing their task of consolidating Ivan Grozny’s power. They proved powerless to defend Moscow against a devastating raid from the Crimean Khanate in 1571, and were disbanded soon after – but not before inflicting severe damage on the Muscovite heartlands. By now Ivan’s transition from a white rider to dark rider was complete, as he steadily slipped into mental insanity, and Russia was wracked by famines and depopulation, and an unsuccessful war with Livonia. Following his death, Russia would slip into deep stagnation (in which state predation would be displaced by boyar predation) and within two decades, the ‘Time of Troubles’, an era of conspiratorial politics and internal strife (poshlost), depopulation, and foreign (Polish) intervention. Much of the 17^th century was spent in recuperation from the depopulation and weakening of the state during the late 16^th century; although pointedly, it was during this time, relatively free from Malthusian stress and predatory state alike, that Russians enjoyed some of the highest per capita surpluses and consumption in their pre-industrial history[38].

The reign of Ivan IV, ‘the Terrible’, set the template for all of Russia’s consequent ‘defensive modernizations’. Realizing Russia’s backwardness upon coming to power, the white rider, or strongman saviour, begins to rapidly implement a revolution from above involving centralization, social mobilization, and technical and cultural borrowings from abroad, i.e. an embrace of Rationalism. Yet eventually it is noticed that results aren’t progressing as fast as they ought to and need to, and the white rider is replaced by a much stricter dark rider, who rules with an iron fist and possesses an overinflated perception of Russia’s capability to assimilate his changes and reforms. The pursuit of modernization takes on a mystical, quasi-spiritual hue.

Ivan Grozny is special in that in his case, both riders were the same person; it’s just that under the pressures of sabotage and treason from his boyars, he metamorphosed from being a white rider to a dark rider. Under his later rule, efforts at legitimization, coercion, mobilization, etc, were pushed to such extremes that they of themselves critically undermined Russian power. Furthermore, Russia’s rising power and expansionism brought it into conflict with Poland-Lithuania to the west, which sought to check its advances, attempted to block Muscovy’s technological imports from Western Europe[39], and allied itself with the Crimean Khanate to the south (an Ottoman protectorate) – a move that could be seen as a precursor of Britain’s and American’s strategies of ‘containment’. This illustrates a recurring theme of Russian expansionism mentioned in Part I – there are always limits to imperial growth in the form of mounting resistance from bordering Powers, which impinges on the Empire’s economic base. Just as it Russia’s neighbours made it difficult for it to acquire modern gunpowder weapons, so the US during the Cold War would try its best to restrict exports of advanced technologies to the Soviet Empire.

And so it went for more than three hundred years more of Tsarism, during which time Russia suffered from a dependency relation with Europe, both economically (grain exports for luxuries) and culturally (a Francophone, ‘foreign’ elite). Ironically, the single greatest attempt to break out into modernity through mobilization and centralization (despotism?), pursued under Peter the Great, had its greatest impact on the reinforcement of (development-inhibiting) serfdom. The aristocracy soon wriggled out of its state service obligations after Peter’s death, but retained despotic power over their serfs until 1861, using their surpluses to fund lavish lifestyles devoted to the ‘trivial, demeaning aping of Europe’, as characterized by Trubetzkoy (see Part II). A renewed state-led industrialization campaign from the 1880’s would eventually generate the massive reaction – both Western and anti-Western, rational and irrational – known as the Bolshevik Revolution. It is to this event and its consequences that we now turn.

“The Third International is not an International, but the Russian national idea”

Late Tsarist Russia was a highly polarized, divided and turbulent society, as noted in Part IV. Peasants were drifting into rapidly expanding, unsanitary industrial cities riven by inequality. The railways and the spread of literacy – contrary to later Soviet propaganda, already well advanced[40] by that time – gave Russians unprecedented mobility and access to new, radical ideas and a glimpse of the aristocracy’s (and foreigners’) la dolce vita. In its last decade, Tsarist Russia was wracked by constant labor unrest in the factories and political violence, which were harshly suppressed. The workers, aware of and seduced by the consumption habits of Europeans[41] and their elites, demanded a bigger piece of the consumption pie, as did a younger, more ambitious segment of rural society. This conflicted with the state’s need for rapid industrial development, which by now it was taking seriously[42] – high tariff rates on manufactured goods, state involvement, the railways, and a cheap, suppressed labor force contributed to the late Empire’s rapid industrial expansion. But for all that, it should be noted that the Tsar retained the support of the vast majority of people, the extremist elements like the Bolsheviks were regarded as traitorous internationalists, and Russia’s growing power bolstered national self-confidence. At the genesis of modern total war in 1914, the Russian Empire was waxing, not waning; indeed, fearful projections of its future strength were an important factor in Germany’s decision to cross the Rubicon into Belgium.

The war exposed the Empire’s underlying weaknesses, as the initial outburst of patriotic euphoria degenerated into pessimism and anger. The war effort was prosecuted incompetently and an ill-supplied and demoralized Russian Army met defeat after defeat at the hands of the Germans. The privileged elite refused to share the war burden with the workers, alienating them through their ostentatious splendor – manifested above all in the Tsar, whose German wife, English lifestyle, and tolerance of the dissolute Rasputin discredited him in the eyes of the people. These transgressions were made to seem all the more egregious due to the Tsarist regime’s war propaganda, which only served to reinforce Russia’s sense of national consciousness. By 1917, the railway system was breaking down, and along with it food supplies to the cities and the front.

Following the collapse of the three-hundred year old Romanov dynasty in early 1917 and the cessation of political repression under the weak Provisional Government, the socialist-revolutionary movement sensed its historical moment. The radicalization of the urban workers, the discrediting of the old order, and the Bolsheviks’ skilful representation of themselves as the solution to the people’s problems (Land, Bread, Peace), laid the groundwork for the October Revolution of 1917. Utilizing their control of Russia’s main urban centers, instilling iron discipline in their followers, strangling the early Revolutionary freedoms in their cradle, and portraying the White forces as being corrupt and in cahoots with dark foreign forces (i.e., playing on the nationalism which they had rejected in their older, theoretical days), the Bolsheviks won the Civil War and set about building Communism – ‘Soviet power plus electrification of the country’, in Lenin’s memorable phrase. This was in essence another Russian attempt to ‘leap ahead’ of the West, similar to that attempted by Ivan Grozny, Peter the Great and even the late Tsars; yet married to industrialism, far more radical and ‘total’ in its scope and ambitions. Incubated within this apparent, radical Westernization – for Marxism was developed by a German in London, and had its antecedents in the Western dialectical tradition – was a profound resurrection of the mystical and sublime element of Russian history (e.g. the spiritual rehabilitation of Eurasia symbolized by the return of the capital to Moscow from Petrograd).

After the radicalism, insecurity and terrors of the Civil War period, the 1920’s saw a significant liberalization and social modernization – the fruits of the latest Western Rationalism. Abortion was legalized in 1920 and divorce laws were reformed. Austere ‘war communism’ was replaced with the New Economic Policy, which grudgingly granted the right to make private profit. There was more freedom in the arts, typified by the Russian avant-garde movement, which reached its peak in the 1920’s before being forcibly displaced by ‘socialist realism’ from 1932. This was part of a general return to ‘tradition’ spearheaded by Stalin, who pushed the idea of ‘socialism in one country’ in opposition to Trotsky’s internationalist concept of ‘permanent revolution’ and Bukharin and Kamenev’s social-democratic leanings. These old Bolsheviks were to be later condemned as heretics, and extirpated during the Stalinist ‘show trials’ of the mid-to-late 1930’s along with their ideas as Russia drifted back towards a socially-conservative, neo-imperialist state based on mobilization, militarization, and messianic fervor. As the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev put it in his 1937 book The Origin of Russian Communism, “the Third Rome, Russia managed to bring about the Third International, on which were imprinted many of the features of the Third Rome… The Third International is not an International, but the Russian national idea”; the Soviet state represented a transformation of the “ideas of Ivan the Terrible, a new form of the old hypertrophied state of Russian history…Russian Communism is more traditional than people usually think, and is nothing more than a transformation and distortion of the old Russian messianic idea”. That said, the social revolution nonetheless irrevocably changed Russia: as Slavoj Žižek noted, for all their arbitrariness, ‘terror and misery’, nonetheless socialism “opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations which, among other things, enabled us to measure the failure of the really existing Socialism itself”[43]. In other words, Russia’s inevitable failure to fully assimilate this latest Western propagation (see Part II) would in time psychologically contribute to the late Soviet disillusionment and collapse because it opened up a space for its own refutation; just as previous radical ‘revolutions from above’ overseen by strongmen like Ivan Grozny and Peter the Great ended up undermining the Empire.

As noted in Part V, for all the privations (repressions, economic coercion, etc) forced on the Russian people as the Empire was built up during the 1930-1950’s – and defended at phenomenal cost during the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) – the regime retained a great degree of support throughout. Sometimes the regime went too far in its paranoia and ended up undermining itself, as during 1936-37 when the repressions spiraled out of control and became of themselves the greatest source of ‘sabotage’ in the Soviet economy. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the USSR could have withstood an assault by the Wehrmacht, supported by the industrial potential of most of Europe, if it hadn’t been for Stalin’s foresight and ruthlessness in industrializing the Urals, expanding Soviet borders west, centralizing state operations, and preparing wartime industrial relocation plans.

For if the USSR had lost the Great Patriotic War, this would have resulted in the partial extermination, Siberian exile and helotization of the Slavic and Jewish populations of eastern Europe, as envisaged under Generalplan Ost, Nazi Germany’s genocidal scheme for conquering Lebensraum in the East. This partly explains why Russians today hold such conflicted and contradictory views on Stalin, the despotic Messiah who led and ruled them like the God of the Old Testament – according to a February 2006 opinion poll, 47% of the population are positive, whereas 29% are negative[44]. During the postwar decades, Victory was the greatest single legitimization of the Soviet regime, and even today, it cleanses away the other manifold sins of Stalin’s regime in the minds of many of Russia’s citizens – attesting to its lasting power as Russia’s national myth.

After the poshlost of the 1920’s to the early Stalinist period, in which Russia moved in an upwards arc along the left side of the Belief Matrix, after 1938 – and especially after the spiritual boost of Victory in 1945 – Soviet Russia returned to a state of sobornost at the top-right position of the Belief Matrix, underpinned by sovereignty and autarky, i.e. all the classical elements of the idealized Russian Empire. Prior to Stalin’s death in 1953, the groundwork was being laid for what could have been a new purge directed against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, a euphemism for Soviet Jews, with the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ (1952) to poison Soviet leaders serving as a pretext: hundreds were already arrested by early 1953. This would have been the culmination of a steady process under Stalin in which ‘diasporic’ elements (Rationalism – poshlost) were expunged in favor of Russia’s older imperial identities (mysticism – sobornost). Examples of this process include the purges of the avant-garde artists and the old Bolsheviks; the deportations of minorities; the crushing of ‘national’ movements in direct contravention of Lenin’s liberal attitudes towards nationalities; the gradual rehabilitation of Tsarist-era ranks, symbols and old national heroes like Alexander Nevsky during the war, whose socialist credentials were highly questionable; the wartime reversal of course on Russian nationalism and the Orthodox Church, etc. There is even a story, perhaps apocryphal, that after the end of the Second World War a group of exiled Russian nobles wrote to Stalin, congratulating him on his recreation of a great Empire and offering him their services in return for clemency. He didn’t reply, of course – the Red Tsar did not tolerate heresy, even when recanted.

The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire

The Soviet Empire reached its greatest degree of sobornost during Khrushev’s reign (1956-64). The Stalinist repressions were condemned and political prisoners in the Gulag – many of whom had wept on hearing of Stalin’s death – were released. There was a degree of liberalization and even a work as controversial as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published and avidly debated. Meanwhile, there was strong economic growth, this time including in the consumption sector, as Stalin’s emphasis on the military-industrial complex was relaxed.

However, after the Khrushev thaw (ottepel’) there set in a period of stagnation (zastoi) and renewed authoritarianism, this time of a milder, rational-bureaucratic character. After 1965, the USSR came to be afflicted by a metastasizing alcoholism epidemic, and after a half-century of rapid improvement, Russian mortality rates peaked and began their long slide down. This was most pronounced amongst middle-aged men, though uniquely for industrialized countries, the phenomenon even manifested itself amongst infants from the 1970’s-early 1980’s. This gray authoritarianism was accompanied by a growth in corruption and ‘structural militarization’, in which an ever growing percentage of Soviet industrial output was diverted from the consumption and social sphere into the military sector – by the 1980’s, the military-industrial complex accounted for up to 30% of Soviet GDP[45].

Belief in socialism moved metamorphosed from pure idealism to an ironic skepticism lubricated by vodka. Structural factors strangled economic growth – the demographic transition (declining industrial workforce growth as the effects of the Stalinist fertility transition and the end of large-scale urbanization made themselves felt); limits to growth in the form of flat-lining raw resource extraction (e.g. peak oil in 1987) and the fulfillment of ‘heavy industrialization’; aging machinery (need more investment to maintain the same level of growth); the aforementioned ‘structural militarization’; the growing complexity of the late-industrial economy (the numbers of goods produced explodes and central planning becomes increasingly unviable); and the associated massive expansion of the bureaucracy (e.g. the percentage of the population who were Party members increased from 1% under Stalin to 15% by the 1980’s). There appeared an incipient rejection of Soviet tradition in favor of the West, especially amongst liberal youth, as well as growing disillusionment on the part of the dominant class – the workers. Realizing the dire straits the country was in by the mid-1980’s, the Soviet leadership under Gorbachev embarked on an increasingly radical program of economic (uskoreniye, perestroika), social (anti-alcohol campaign) and political (glasnost, demokratizatsiya) reforms.

Contrary to popular belief, Soviet collapse was not inevitable since the system itself was fundamentally stable, albeit stagnant[46]; the underlying reason was lay not in its failed consumer economy, hypertrophied defense sector or general nastiness, but rather Gorbachev’s abortion of central planning and economic coercion – the system of benefits and punishments for economic performance that was the linchpin of the Soviet economy. (Though, granted, worker unrest and stagnation may have tipped Gorbachev’s hand). In the absence of evolved market mechanisms, this simply led to ruinous insider plunder, asset stripping and managerial misappropriation, all under the label of “liberalization”. Russia’s physical production system remained intact, but retreated to a much lower level of output as barter arrangements replaced central planning and the huge military resource stocks were sold off.

In principle, the Soviet economy could have been reformed if the dictator (Gorbachev) had cracked down hard on the corruption that was debilitating the USSR, undertaken efficiency and organizational improvements that had previously been discarded because of concerns over upsetting entrenched interests and labor unrest, forcefully halted and started to reverse the structural militarization of the Soviet economy (e.g. by transferring capital and R&D assets to the civilian industrial base), etc. However, perhaps the collapse really was inevitable, if the system itself was simply too myopic to imagine its own demise, and / or if a reversion to coercion could not have been made to work by the late 1980’s – a valid point because this might measure may not have won support from a nomenklatura class terrified of a return to Stalinist terror.

Whatever the answer to these questions, this debate is now entirely academic. Costs exceeded benefits; the burden of complexity became too great to bear. The Soviet state, bereft of its most powerful tool (economic coercion) yet still burdened by immense obligations (welfare and warfare), unraveled under the strain. It left behind what could be called, for all practical purposes, a void, for the development of a functioning capitalism and its legal and regulatory norms needs both time and stability – neither of which Russia had. By the early 1990’s, the Empire crumbled and Russia had again reverted to its second equilibrium position – a Hobbesian ‘natural state’ of anarchic stasis[47], or ‘Chaos’.

VII. Reading Russia Right

There are currently three major schools of thought on Russia’s post-Soviet socio-political development, which can be characterized as a) “authoritarian reversion” (a promising transition in the 1990′s that was checked and reversed by dark Kremlin forces – siloviks, chekists, etc), b) ‘convergence’ (a rough but secular convergence to Western liberal democracy) and c) the cynicism of Andrew Wilson’s ‘virtual politics’. Though b) predominated during the 1990′s, under Putin’s tenure a) became the conventional wisdom.

Though each has varying degrees of truth, they all nonetheless have major weaknesses: a) does not account for the fact that the transition period was hardly liberal or democratic, and that the scope of the Kremlin’s authoritarianism is arguably overstated[48], b) the divergence from the West has become too great – both rhetorically and in practice, and c) assumes the elite is entirely post-ideological, concerned with only power and money. The “Sisyphean Loop” model attempts to integrate these divergent worldviews into a coherent whole.

Russia’s loop is a Sisyphean one, because though at times it strives towards the bottom-right of the Belief Matrix – i.e. ‘convergence’ with the ‘rationalist’ West, it never manages to permanently settle there because of the shocks that have always disturbed it from its position there. Being a hostage to its history, it cannot end it. Throughout the stagnation under Brezhnev and Gorbachev’s reforms, society became progressively more pro-Western; however, faith in Soviet-Russian culture remained strong too, held together by decades of socialist propaganda and some real achievements. However, during the early 1990′s, as the magnitude of the Soviet failure to build a fair and prosperous society became painfully clear and the country descended into a black hole of corruption, there was a wholesale rejection of Soviet-Russian culture – society moved left towards poshlost. The period was characterized by insider plunder, rising inequality and grinding poverty, the failed First Chechen War, plummeting indexes on nearly every socio-economic measure that the government still took the trouble to collect, an ossified military reliant on brutal impressments to fill its ranks, and a near-collapsed state that lost effective control of three vital functions – legitimate violence, tax collection and monetary emissions[49].

Some of the key reasons the transition was much harder in Russia than in east-central Europe were its aforementioned geographic disadvantages, cultural proclivities and burdensome Soviet legacy (see Part I). As pointed out in Part VI, after the end of economic coercion, with no market mechanisms or rule of law in place, output collapsed. Russia’s structural disadvantages in manufacturing contributed to its 1990’s deindustrialization, which was much more severe even than the 40%+ peak-to-nadir fall in GDP (1989-1998), for the post-Soviet elites found it much more convenient to sell Russia’s mineral resources abroad, using the proceeds to enrich themselves and import the needed consumer goods from Europe and China. Despite Yeltsin’s authoritarian efforts to implement market fundamentalism with tanks on a recalcitrant Duma in 1993[50], Russia became a rent-seeking oligopoly in economic depression instead of the globalized, laissez-faire economy dreamed of by the neoliberal ideologues in the Kremlin.

No country can remain in a state of collapse indefinitely; towards the end of the 1990′s, the state began to reassert control. The tipping point came in 1998, when the financial crash cemented Russia’s disillusionment with the West and new faces from the security services[51] were brought into Russian politics, determined to clean up and restore its power. This change of course was reinforced by Russians’ angry reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia, which was felt to be unjust and grotesquely insensitive to Russian feelings. This marked the beginning of a long-term decline in Russians’ perceptions of the US – for better or worse, the champion of the “Idea of the West’. The human face of this shift was the accession of Putin the white rider to the Russian Presidency at the dawn of the new millennium – a strongman who restores peace and order to the Russian lands (as presented by his supporters). Russia began to move up along its Belief Matrix, away from the West, as the siloviki consolidated their power and Kremlin rhetoric became less ‘Western’ and more ‘national’ (the critics would add an ‘ist’).

Following a short dip back towards the West during the early 2000′s, when Putin cooperated with the US in the war on terror and introduced some liberal reforms (e.g. the 13% flat tax), the YUKOS Affair and increasing centralization moved Russia further away from the West, into the top-left nether regions where there is no belief in either the indigenous culture or the West. The political culture of the Russian elites transitioned from being ‘diasporic’ to ‘barbaric’, as the terms were defined in Part III. The YUKOS Affair – in Western rhetoric, a heavy-handed and corrupt clampdown on free enterprise and political participation; in Kremlin rhetoric, a necessary defense against an attempted hijacking of the state by the latter-day boyars – was the seminal moment in the break between Russia and the West. In its immediate aftermath, the US launched an information war against Russia and pushed aggressively with ‘color revolutions’ into its Near Abroad; whereas in the 1990’s Western expansionism had been aimed at stabilizing the Eurasian vacuum, now its aim was to reconstruct a cordon sanitaire around Russia to preempt the Empire’s reemergence. Russia retaliated by intensifying its efforts in the economic and intelligence penetration of Ukraine and the Baltics, Caucasus, and Central Asia. Though direct talk of it remains muted, the old strategy of active containment has resurfaced in the last five years.

Facing humiliation from Russophobe rhetoric in the West and feeling increasingly under ideological and territorial siege, the impetus to once again gather up the Russian lands and recreate the Empire has been rapidly resurfacing. On the Belief Matrix, the moral anomie or ‘barbarism’ of the top-left is an unstable state, for almost all people have an overriding need to believe in some higher ideal; once again stimulated by the Russian inferiority complex and perceived Western arrogance, or ‘Russophobia’, from 2006 Russia undoubtedly began to move to the right of the matrix at an accelerating pace, towards sobornost.

Thus we see how all three of the interpretations given at the start of this chapter – a) ‘authoritarian reversion’, b) ‘convergence’, and c) ‘virtual politics’, are to some extent accurate[52]. The concept of ‘convergence’ was popular during the late USSR and early 1990’s, when Russia was at the bottom of the Belief Matrix – its then subscription to Rationalism was taken to mean that Westernization would be inevitable, though some voiced doubts that the psychological collapse (poshlost) brought on by the post-Soviet ‘Time of Troubles’ would undermine the stability of any such transition. The doubters were proven correct, and their concept of an ‘authoritarian reversion’ fueled by popular disillusionment and the ‘traditional’ Russian craving for a strong hand gained ground amongst Russia-watchers, who found their evidence in Putinism’s alleged slide into ‘dark’ authoritarian from the rosy, ‘democratic’ Yeltsin years. This viewpoint manifested itself in lurid book titles like ‘Kremlin Rising’, ‘The New Cold War’, and ‘Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State’ and dominated – and continues to dominate – the Western journalistic and political discourse on Russia. This is regretful, since this viewpoint lacks nuance and tends to favor hyperbole over dispassionate analysis[53].

In an incisive but unfortunately little-known study[54], Andrew Wilson argues that the defining theme of Putin’s Russia isn’t authoritarianism as such, but the preeminence of electoral and media manipulation to conceal a mild, non-ideological, and extremely corrupt authoritarianism beneath a veneer of pluralistic politics. This model of ‘virtual politics’ has a great explanatory potential for the post-Soviet period of poshlost, when Russia was indeed governed by a ‘historyless’ elite; however, arguably, with the creeping return of sobornost and the ideal of the Empire as guiding lights of Russia’s foreign and domestic policies, the era of ‘virtual politics’ is waning and is about to be replaced with something different. This is the topic of Part VIII, which concludes this essay.

VIII. Return to the Future?

Since 2006, there has arguably been a discontinuity in Russia’s national life, akin to what happened in 1998; though as yet little recognized, it will come to dominate its analysis within a few years. Russia has begun to return to the Empire.

First, the state took a much more proactive role in economic and social development. National Priority Projects were launched to improve housing, healthcare and education. Subsidies to agriculture were increased, and in 2008 the grain harvest returned to its Soviet-era highs[55]. A high profile initiative to develop nanotechnology was launched in 2007. It pursued industrial policies designed to attract foreign manufacturing and hi-tech companies, with noticeable effects – for instance, automobile production increased from 1.2mn units in 2000 to 1.8mn units in 2008[56]. As noted before, a degree of ‘autarky’ coupled with state intervention is a vital prerequisite to real economic development in Russia (to a greater extent than is the case in already-developed nations and / or countries with more favorable geographies), with its concomitants in the form of increased national morale and political independence. This is a return to Russia’s traditional mode of development, in which the state harnessed its surpluses – grain during late Tsarism, oil during the late Soviet era – to support the development of strategic industries.  As Russia acquires globally competitive industries – an entirely feasible prospect given its strengths in general education and some specialized sectors like defense, aerospace, and nuclear power – the state may gradually loosen its reins. Though it can hardly hope to ever fully converge with the richest Western nations due to its embedded disadvantages, given that it no longer suffers from the Soviet-era inefficiencies of central planning and excessive militarization, it can reach an asymptote relative to the West substantially higher than its previous 1970’s peak.

Second, there has been a substantial improvement in social morale, as attested to by the demographic statistics and opinion polls. Whereas in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s Russia was losing around 750,000 people a year, today the decline has almost stabilized due to an increase in the average fertility rate (the average number of children a woman is expected to have) from 1.30 in 2006 to 1.49 in 2008 (and still rising in 2009 despite the economic crisis)[57], as well as substantial reductions in the (still abnormally high) middle-aged mortality rate. Furthermore, despite the big reduction in the size of the cohort of women of child-bearing age projected for the 2010’s as a result of the 1990’s fertility collapse, there are strong indicators that this positive trend may continue[58] into the future based on the strong evidence that Russia’s post-Soviet fertility collapse was caused by “transition shock” rather than a “values realignment” to low-fertility middle-European norms. From the other end, the mortality crisis is being attacked by a renewal of the anti-alcohol campaign after a twenty year hiatus. During the 2000-2008 period, state statistics indicate that mortality from alcohol poisonings, suicide and murder have nearly halved, though they all remain very high by international standards.  Perhaps not coincidentally, Levada polls indicate that for the first time since measurements began in the Yeltsin period, from late 2006 more people were confident in tomorrow than were not. All this indicates that a sense of sobornost is being slowly restored.

Third, Russia’s actions in the post-Soviet space, particularly towards Ukraine[59], may imply that it intends, at the least, to restore an econo-political bloc in the region, probably through organizations like EurAsEC and the CSTO. Since more Ukrainians would prefer to join those groups than either the EU or NATO[60] and considering that President Yushenko’s approval ratings hover in the single digits (he is the most pro-Western major political figure in Ukraine) and the nation’s overall disillusionment with the perceived Chaos and poshlost of their democracy (support for which fell from 72% in 1989 to 30% today[61]), this should not be a major hurdle. Russia is likewise reinforcing its influence in Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kirgizstan through a mixture of economic penetration, pipeline politics, and military bases. This foreign policy is stridently independent of the West and contributes not insignificantly to Putin’s consistently high approval ratings, which have been north of 60% ever since he launched the Second Chechen War in 1999. It is not a Western liberal democracy, but Surkov’s description, “sovereign democracy”, appears to be an apt moniker. The main idea being, of course, that Russia is politically sovereign from the West, no longer tied down in the international arena by its economic dependence and internal weaknesses.

[Gallup polls showing attitudes towards Eurasian unity in the post-Soviet space. In all countries except Azerbaijan, the median average wants at least an economic union across Eurasia. This indicates that Russia will not find it unduly hard to rebuild the Empire. Source: Gallup.]

These three trends – autarky, sobornost and sovereignty – are synergistic. Recreating an empire or something resembling one is (‘sovereignty’), apart from its inherent effect in reinforcing Russia’s geopolitical power, also complementary to the return of economic autarky (creates a larger economic space with opportunities for economies of scale) and sobornost (because the Russian national identity remains inextricably linked up with empire since the 16^th century – as of today, 47% of Russians believe it is ‘natural’ for Russia to have an empire, up from 37% in 1989[62]). Likewise, a self-contained economic system (‘autarky’) increases the Empire’s freedom of action on the international stage and encourages a national (‘sovereignty’), as opposed to internationalist or diasporic, mentality (‘sobornost’). The state of sobornost underpins the fundamental unity and spiritual strength of the Empire. The analysis outlined above indicates that Russia is returning to its future rather than the end of history, a future-and-past characterized by a strong, centralizing state coordinating, if not outright controlling, the direction of development – for it is fundamentally the state guarantees all three factors that underpin the Empire, which also explains the importance of gosudarstvennost and derzhavnost in Russian history.

Following the South Ossetian War of 2008, the already popular belief that the West was a hostile power was reinforced – even the once very pro-Western intelligentsia is beginning to reject the West[63]. It is also interesting to consider that the most “anti-Western” segment of the Russian population are university-educated Muscovite men[64], i.e. the future elites; similar attitudes have filtered through to Russia’s schoolchildren[65]. The 2008-2009 economic crisis probably spells the end of the oligarchs as a class: many have lost their fortunes and become financially beholden to the cash-rich Russian state – as copper magnate Iskander Makhmudov said, “The oligarchs now have mixed fortunes, but we will all end up being soldiers of Putin one day”[66].  The banking system is being consolidated, Russian corporate dependence on Western credit has been severed (because the Western credit system has broken), and Russia’s decision to seek WTO admission in tandem with Kazakhstan and Belarus[67] indicates it places a higher priority on forming a regional economic bloc than on global economic integration.

What next? History is a guide. A fundamental feature of autarkies is that to increase their strategic self-sufficiency, they need to expand their domain – much as the Bolsheviks created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which in turn expanded it to COMECON (the idea being that a group of nations ‘liberated’ from domination by global capital is better off sticking together to preserve their new-found sovereignty). They have to expand territorially in order to acquire access to all the vital building blocks of an industrial economy and to be able to hold its own against other economic bloc. Applying this to the reemerging Russian Empire, it is very likely that within the next decade (East) Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan will again become integrated with Russia, on a spectrum of possibilities ranging from an EU-like structure to a unitary state-empire. Netting in the latter two presents no problem, given that they are already tightly integrated with Russia.

Under normal circumstances, Ukraine presents a much harder to nut to crack; however, it should be borne in mind that Ukraine’s project of Westernization – which happened to encapsulate its bid for real independence from Eurasia – has failed on almost all criteria. Its current GD, taking into account the recent 20-25% collapse during the crisis, 30-40% lower than it was in the late USSR! (Russia’s is around 0-10% lower, but it is not faced with a fiscal or political crisis). Damningly, opinion polls indicate that Putin and Medvedev are by far the most popular politicians in Ukraine. The essence of the Ukrainian Question will not be whether it chooses Russia or the West; it will be whether Ukraine will remain a united state that gets drawn back into Russia’s orbit, or whether there will be a ‘Great Split’ between its Ukrainian-speaking west and its Russophone east, with the latter fully integrating into Russia and the former becoming an independent state.

Reintegration with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan will create a state with 210 million souls and will significantly increase the economic and military-industrial power at Moscow’s disposal by at least 50%. One has to keep in mind that Eurasia’s industrial base was meant to be unified when it was constructed during the Soviet era, and as such the gains accruing from reintegration will be more than just the sum of its parts. One of Russia’s geopolitical priorities is to thwart an independent energy corridor for the proposed Nabucco oil pipeline and to link up with its ally Armenia, so it will no doubt continue pressuring a weakened Georgia to return into its orbit.

Whether Russia will choose to expand in Central Asia is more questionable. On the one hand, they have respectable energy reserves (especially gas), constitute demographic reservoirs amidst graying Slavdom, and are geopolitically important. There are few problems with radical Islam and on the whole they appreciate Russian culture. On the other hand, they will present a development burden and outside powers will oppose any overt Russian reassertion in Central Asia – although it should be noted that both Chinese and US influence is far weaker in the region than Russia’s.

Forking Paths

There are now four distinct ‘paths’ Russia could take in the next few years – ‘sovereign democratization’, ‘totalitarian reversion’, ‘return to the natural state’, and ‘liberalization’. The only (near) certainty is change; for all its apparent move back towards sobornost and the trappings of the Empire, this belies the fact that Russia today is still in an unsteady and undecided state, and as such its future is far from preordained. Let’s look at them in turn.

In ‘sovereign democratization’, Russia will retain its current geopolitical status, ‘indigenize’ or ‘assimilate’ Western liberal democracy, and will successfully develop an advanced economy, which it will gradually open as it acquires globally competitive industries. This viewpoint is argued by Nicolai Petro[68], who claims that Putin consolidated the Russian state during his first eight years, and that the second part of the ‘Putin Plan’ is to develop liberal institutions and an active civil society. State corruption will be greatly reduced – President Medvedev has already openly spoken out against ‘legal nihilism’, and perhaps the recent allied initiative on the part of Surkov, head of the GRU-related clan, and the civiliki clan, to investigate strategic companies linked to Sechin’s FSB-related clan for corruption and mismanagement is the opening shot of a coming purge. In this vision, Russia will be a prosperous, liberal, and patriotic nation by 2020 at the bottom-right of the Belief Matrix, comfortably entwined within the ‘liberty cycle’ much like France or even the US (see Part II), and the centerpiece of a Eurasian economic union. This viewpoint would also be argued by Vlad Sobell, who believes that this “new ‘USSR’ has shed its totalitarian and imperial character and is building genuine democracy à la russe”. This is the ‘optimistic variant’, and is predicated on the survival of globalization and the continuation of Russia’s economic and demographic resurgence.

In contrast, a ‘return to the natural state’ will see the reinforcement of Russia’s current authoritarian and neo-feudal features, and continuing economic nationalism, silovik cronyism, and resource dependency. A powerful Tsar will dole out transitional rent-gathering rights unto his boyars, in return for their political loyalty and tax payments. This ‘Muscovite model’ is socially unjust, Pareto inefficient, and ineffective at either generating economic prosperity or sustaining resource mobilization. This outcome is made more likely if Russia enters a renewed spiral of demographic and economic decline; the people will demand a strong hand at the helm, but one steeped in conservatism and unwilling to undertake any risky reforms. In this form, the Empire is more likely to take the form of a unitary state based on the political integration of Belarus, East Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Russia, as well as the strengthening of its military presence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, rather than a Eurasian economic and security union as in the previous scenario. It will be underpinned by the resumption of large-scale, fifth-generation rearmament, with which the Empire will effective control and project power over the entirety of the post-Soviet space and perhaps even into East-Central Europe. The Empire will be undermined by foreign-backed dissident and national liberation movements, and subjected to a more vigorous encirclement and containment strategy by the United States. The result will be a zastoi on the model of Brezhnev’s USSR. This is the ‘middle variant’ projected by most ‘Western Russophobes’[69], who perceive that Russia is run by a gang of kleptocratic neo-Soviet revanchists and believe the country is doomed to secular decline on account of its disastrous demography and moribund economic system.

The third and most frightening outcome is a ‘totalitarian reversion’. During the 1990’s ‘Time of Troubles’, as in Weimar Germany, Russia became disillusioned in both the West and itself (Part VII), and came to long for the sovereignty, sobornost and autarky embodied in the lost Empire. This imperial nostalgia brought forth a crowd of Eurasianists, nationalists, derzhavniki, etc, who called for Russia to rediscover its faith in itself and to return to its ‘purer’ imperial past-and-future – be it Eurasian (Aleksandr Dugin), Slavophile (Solzhenitsyn), White Nationalist, or hybrids like National Bolshevism, an intellectual descendent of Strasserism (Eduard Limonov). What they all had in common was an opposition to Western finance-capitalism, to domestic stooges of ‘Atlanticism’, and to the ‘diasporic mentality’ (see Part III) – sometimes manifested in virulent anti-Semitism, which is understandable on the basis that Jews are the ‘diasporic people’ par excellence (see Part III). Free-riding on resurgent the Russian nationalism brought forth by instability, Central Asian immigration, and national inferiority complexes, such views have become much more popular since the Soviet collapse (although overall they are still very much on the fringes). However, let’s not forget that all it takes for this to change is an economic collapse, a weakened state, a profound sense of disillusionment with Rationalism, the loss of sobornost, and a well-organized Party with a skilful demagogue willing to gamble.

The fourth alternative is ‘liberalization’, which is by far the most unlikely outcome – Russia is now heading right towards sobornost along the Belief Matrix, not to the bottom and down. That said, it is not difficult to think up potential scenarios in which ‘liberalization’ can occur as a transitional stage to something else. For instance, a popular uprising topples the fragile authoritarianism of the ‘natural state’ into which Russia had degenerated by the 2020’s, resulting in a wave of poshlost and fanatical Westernization (this time based on, say, environmentalism) that again destroys Russians’ faith in themselves, as a result of which they become disillusioned with the Idea of the West and float upwards to the top-left, into ‘moral anomie’. As pointed out previously, this is an unstable state, for only madmen are capable of abandoning all beliefs. They gray dusk of disillusionment darkens… and there emerges a pure blackness, a despotism based on a new-found, mystical sobornost, united in its contemptuous rejection of Rationalism, and probably far more ‘racialist’ than during the Stalinist era[70]. And this time round, it is armed with thousands of nukes.

These darker possibilities, though currently remote, should not be dismissed. Russia’s oil production very likely peaked in 2008, along with global production[71], and there is credible evidence that this peak will be final[72]. Considering its vital role in lubricating the wheels of global commerce, the future viability of globalization is under serious question. This is just one facet of approaching ‘limits to growth’[73], for in more general terms, resource depletion and pollution threaten the very survival of industrial civilization during this century. Hoarding what remains for its own use may become a priority for rational Russian leaders, and exports only allowed on the most favorable terms, in exchange for Western technologies or German machine tools, but not US Treasuries, Chinese trinkets or oligarch mansions in London.

One consequence is that there will be a massive increase in imperial competition for resources. The industrial core (the US, Europe and China) may strike up strategic alliances to control and influence resource-rich nations, either overtly (latter-day gunboat diplomacy) or covertly (influence operations, information wars, etc). In this world, much like in the 1930’s, the strong will beat the weak. As a resource-rich nation largely spared from the ravages of projected climate change, Russia may come to view itself, with some degree of justification, as a fortress besieged by global industrialism – much as the 1928 war scare contributed to tipping the USSR towards Stalinism. In such a world, Russia’s geopolitical priorities would logically be – and all this is already happening – to a) increase its military strength, including the nuclear deterrent, b) neutralize and co-opt Europe and c) extend influence over the energy-rich Arctic, Central Asia and the Middle East. To pursue these goals effectively, Russia needs to be an Empire.

Finally, any true Eurasian Empire is almost destined to be in conflict with Atlanticism (and not just because this is an explicit aim of folks like Dugin[74]), even leaving aside the prospect of ruthless competition for resources. The economic strength of the Atlantic powers is magnified because of globalization’s opportunities for increasing the power of the whole through ‘scope enlargement’ and international specialization, strength that can – and was – used to strangle any potential Eurasian hegemon. That is the story of the Cold War, in which the USSR increasingly fell behind the West; for with its access to Japanese electronics, Saudi oil, and German machine tools, the US could more than match Soviet military efforts, while at the same time providing its citizens with a much higher standard of life. As such, an autarkic Eurasian Empire would find it to be in its best interests to oppose the Atlantic powers by trying to foment chaos within the global system, so as to shut it down and hence level the playing field to continent against continent, instead of Eurasia against the World System.

IX. The Loop

Due to its geographical and climatic features, and the cultural traditions derived from them, Russia’s economic life is traditionally based on state-driven coercion. This is incompatible with ‘rational’, Western norms, hence Russia always found it particularly difficult to Westernize. When it does try to Westernize, it becomes culturally dependent on the West, but remains backwards nonetheless – if anything, at times even more so. This breeds an inferiority complex and a sense of resentment towards the West, which the latter does little to dispel: Russians increasingly reject the West, and pine for an (imagined?) past of autarky, sovereignty and sobornost. Political leaders are ultimately powerless to resist: either they go with the flow, or they are displaced or overthrown.

The rock is pushed up the mountain with messianic fervor, but eventually the past-and-future turn out to be not as great as Russians imagined them and a long stagnation sets in. The mountain looms ever larger, Sisyphus gets tired, and Prometheus’ acolytes try to block his path; the road ahead begins to look hopeless. This again arouses an intense interest in the West: after some time, due to accumulating backwardness, the regime is no longer able to resist its tantalizing siren calls, and succumbs – often with disastrous consequences, because economic coercion also grinds to a halt, resulting in output and social welfare collapse. The loop comes full cycle, and after a period of recuperation and apathy, Sisyphus starts rolling the rock up the mountain once more with renewed fervor.

The struggle is ultimately (historically) always futile; yet it is too Romantic a struggle to abandon – indeed, Russia does not want to abandon its endless, sordid and tiring, but ultimately uplifting and self-defining struggle towards the boundless plains of universal utopia.

[2] Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (K. Polanyi, 1957), Ch.5: “Aristotle discovers the Economy”.

[3] V. Kluchevsky, 1956, pp.313-4: “There is one thing of which the Great Russian is sure − that a sunny summer day is valuable, that nature would allow little time convenient for agricultural work and that a short Great Russian summer can be shortened even more by a sudden untimely turn of bad weather. This would force the Great Russian peasant to hurry up and toil in order to achieve as much as possible over a short while and take the crop in good time… In this way the Great Russian would learn to take an extraordinary but short effort, would learn to do rush, hasty work and then take a rest during forced idleness in autumn and winter. No other nation in Europe is capable of such short extraordinary effort; but, on the other hand, such lack of habit to regular, moderate, constant work is unlikely to be found anywhere in Europe.”

[4] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (A. Smith, 1776). “…all that part of Asia which lies any considerable way north of the Euxine and Caspian seas, the ancient Scythia, the modern Tartary and Siberia, seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilised state… The Sea of Tartary is the frozen ocean which admits of no navigation, and though some of the greatest rivers in the world run through that country, they are at too great a distance from one another to carry commerce and communication through the greater part of it.”

[5] Russia in the 21^st Century: The Prodigal Superpower (S. Rosefielde, 2005).

[6] As long as the energy and mineral resources underpinning it last, anyway.

[7] Kicking Away the Ladder (H. Chang, 2002).

[8] This refers to Russia’s well-known post-Soviet demographic crisis, during which average fertility rates and life expectancies plummeted, causing the population to fall from 149mn in 1992 to 142mn by 2008, despite the net influx of 5mn immigrants from the ‘Near Abroad’.

[9] The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (D. Landes, 1999), Ch.2: “Answers to Geography: Europe and China”.

[10] Introduction to social macrodynamics: secular cycles and millennial trends (A. Korotayev, 2006) is a comprehensive analysis and modeling of the exponential secular, cyclical Malthusian, and stochastic processes governing political-demographic and economic development in history.

[11] Even tiny differences in growth rates can lead to huge differences in the long-term.

[12] http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm

[13] A Greek word Fukuyama interprets as “desire for spiritual recognition”.

[14] Interestingly, Fukuyama anticipates – and does not like – the relativist argument. From his “The End of History and the Last Man”: “Relativism – the doctrine that maintains all values are merely relative and which attacks all “privileged perspectives” – must ultimately end up undermining democratic and tolerant values as well. Relativism is not a weapon that can be fired selectively at the enemies one chooses. It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the “absolutisms”, dogmas and certainties of the Western tradition, but that traditions emphasis on tolerance, diversity and freedom of thought as well”.

[15] The Marquis de Custine and his Russia in 1839 (G. Kennan, 1971) quotes the19^th century French travel writer: “I don’t reproach the Russians for being what they are; what I blame them for is their desire to appear to be what we [Europeans] are… They are much less interested in being civilized then in making us believe them so… They would be quite content to be in effect more awful and barbaric than they actually are, if only others could thereby be made to believe them better and more civilized.”

[16] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, pp.28 (S. Matthew, 1995).

[17] Nabokov’s Otherworld (V. Alexandrov, 1991).

[18] Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (S. Boym, 1994).

[19] Ibid.

[20] Strong Opinions (V. Nabokov, 1973). See http://www.theparisreview.org/media/4310_NABOKOV.pdf for the original interview.

[21] “Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue” – La Rochefoucauld. On the one hand, admirable; on the other hand, it is the implicit deception that is intolerable.

[22] Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler (P. Viereck, 1941).

[23] Categorizing the Russia Debate (A. Karlin, 2009) at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/07/09/categorizing-the-russia-debate/.

[24] Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler (P. Viereck, 1941).

[25] Ibid.

[26] Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left (W. Newell, 2001) at http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Newell.htm.

[27] See Поведение / “Behavior” (K. Krylov, 1996) for a good discussion of the “diaspora” and “barbarian” mentalities at http://warrax.net/behavior/00.html.

[28] Max Weber’s definitions of authority can be assigned places on the Belief Matrix – “charismatic” is the top-right, “legal-rational” is the bottom-right, and “traditional” is in between. The last is typical of premodern, Malthusian, traditional societies based on feudal / clan relations.

[29] Lev Gumilev’s semi-mystical concept of the ‘vital energy’ of a civilization, i.e. its willingness to self-sacrifice, to conquer, to succeed, etc.

[30] In a 2007 interview with the Guardian, Francis Fukuyama stated: “The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization…I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military”.

[31] Europe and Mankind (N. Trubetzkoy, 1920).

[32] See Twitter Terror in Moldova (A. Karlin, 2009) for a case study at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/04/11/twitter-terror-moldova/.

[33] The Coming Era of Russia’s Dark Rider (P. Zeihan, 2007) writing in Stratfor (http://www.stratfor.com/coming_era_russias_dark_rider).

[34] Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (J. Scott, 1941).

[35] Moscow War Diary (A. Werth, 1942).

[36] Having investigated the report of Maljuta Skuratov and commemoration lists (sinodiki), R. Skrynnikov considers, that the number of victims was 2,000-3,000 (Skrynnikov R. G., “Ivan Grosny”, M., AST, 2001).

[37] Furthermore, one must also note that the correspondence between Kurbsky and Ivan Grozny is suspected to be a forgery – see “THE KURBSKII-GROZNYI APOCRYPHA: the 17th-Century Genesis of the “Correspondence” Attributed to Prince A. M. Kurbskii and Tsar Ivan IV” (E. Keenan, 1970) http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/KEEKUR.html.

[38] Secular Cycles (P. Turchin & S. Nefedov, 2009), Ch. 9: “Russia: the Romanov Cycle (1620–1922)”.

[39] In 1547, Hans Schlitte, the agent of Tsar Ivan IV, employed handicraftsmen in Germany for work in Russia. However all these handicraftsmen were arrested in Lübeck at the request of Livonia.

[40] The End of Imperial Russia, 1855-1917 (P. Waldron, 1997), pp. 97. By 1913, adult literacy was at 38%, up from 21% in 1897; the last generation of children to have had access to the empire’s schools, according to the 1920 Soviet census, had a literacy rate of 71% for boys and 52% for girls.

[41] The international demonstration effect, e.g. see Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (Nurske, 1957).

[42] By 1913, Russia had the highest average tariff rates on manufactured goods in Europe at 84% (Bairoch 1993) and enjoyed the fastest industrial growth rate on the continent. In contrast to development in the 1880’s-1890’s, which was spearheaded by a huge state-led program of railway building, after 1905 there appeared big industrial banks clustered around St.-Petersburg geared towards funding domestic manufacturers on the German model of development (Gerschenkron, 1962).

[43] When the Party Commits Suicide (S. Žižek, 1999), at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-when-the-party-commits-suicide.html.

[44] Translation: The Case of the “Stalinist” Textbook (A. Karlin, 2009) at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/05/28/translation-stalinist-textbook/.

[45] Russia in the 21^st Century: The Prodigal Superpower (S. Rosefielde, 2005), see summary at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/07/06/notes-prodigal-superpower/.

[46] Are Command Economies Unstable? Why Did the Soviet Economy Collapse? (M. Harrison, 2001) at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/workingpapers/publications/twerp604.pdf.

[47] What Russia Teacher Us Now (S. Holmes, 1997) at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=what_russia_teaches_us_now is a typical late-1990’s article from a time when the theme of Russia’s collapse was predominant in the Western media, in stark contrast to today’s talk of a ‘resurgent Russia’.

[48] Russia Through the Looking-Glass (N. Petro, 2006) at http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/russia_3259.jsp.

[49] The State in the New Russia (1992-2004): From Collapse to Gradual Revival? (V. Popov, 2004) at http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/pm_0342.pdf.

[50] Attempting to portray Putin as a revanchist neo-Soviet authoritarian, the Western media tends to gloss over the manifold authoritarian tendencies of the preceding Yeltsin administration, which redeemed itself by being pro-Western. Alternative newspapers have excellent sources on this, e.g. the eXile: see How do you Spell Hypocrisy? O-S-C-E (M. Ames, 2003) at http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7149&IBLOCK_ID=35, The Myth of the Democratic Model (S. Guillory, 2008) at http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=16511&IBLOCK_ID=35.

[51] In 2004 the Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya calculated that 25% of the Russian elite had a security or intelligence background (i.e. siloviki), which rises to 58% amongst Putin’s ‘inner circle’.

[52] “The truth is like a quantum superposition state: it is not one version or the other, but a strange combination of all them”. – Gideon Lichfield, former Economist journalist. I feel this is especially apt when it comes to Russia-watching. Taken from Press Review: The Economist’s Three Stooges (K. Pankratov, 2007) at http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=8518&IBLOCK_ID=35.

[53] For examples, see my list of Top 50 Russophobe Myths at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/07/04/top-50-russophobe-myths/. Though *some* of my refutations are in some ways as biased as the original claims, they will provide plenty of food for thought for anyone steeped in exclusively American or West European media coverage of Russia.

[54] Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the post-Soviet World (A. Wilson, 2005); see Mark Ames’ eXile review at http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7982&IBLOCK_ID=35.

[55] The country’s grain market: realising its potential (D. Medvedev, 2009) at http://rbth.ru/articles/2009/06/16/160609_grain.html.

[56] International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers http://www.oica.net/.

[57] Rosstat.

[58] Through the Looking Glass at Russia’s Demography (A. Karlin, 2009) at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/06/13/thru-looking-glass/.

[59] In the past two years there have been a number of hints from Russia indicating that it does not view Ukraine as a fully sovereign state. E.g. see Putin to the West: Hands off Ukraine (J. Marson, 2009) at http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1900838,00.html.

[60] Would the Real Ukraine Please Stand Up? (G. Stack, 2009) at http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?pageid=Politics&articleid=a1245680109.

[61] End of Communism Cheered but Now with More Reservations (Pew Research Center) at http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=267.

[62] Ibid.

[63] Disheartened With the West (A. Pankin, 2009) at http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/1016/42/380391.htm.

[64] Russians don’t much like the West (S. Richards, 2009) at http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/email/russians-don-t-much-like-the-west, Russia’s New Cyberwarriors (N. Petro, 2007) at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_nicolai__070623_russia_s_new_cyberwa.htm.

[65] Well-off Muscovite Teenagers More Inclined to View US as Enemy (P. Goble, 2009) at http://social.moldova.org/news/welloff-muscovite-teenagers-more-inclined-to-view-us-as-enemy-201672-eng.html.

[66] Russian Oligarch Special Series (Stratfor, 2009), “Russian Oligarchs Part 3: The Party’s Over” at http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090522_russian_oligarchs_part_3_partys_over.

[67] Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan to seek joining WTO as parts of Customs Union http://en.rian.ru/business/20090706/155444034.html.

[68] The Great Transformation: How the Putin Plan Altered Russian Society (N. Petro, 2009) at http://russiaotherpointsofview.typepad.com/files/nick_petro_putin_plan_may_09.pdf.

[69] See Categorizing the Russia Debate (A. Karlin, 2009) at http://www.sublimeoblivion.com/2009/07/09/categorizing-the-russia-debate/ for definitions.

[70] The popularity of the idea of ‘Russia for Russians’ has increased from 26% in 1989 to 54% in 2009 (http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=267). This is reflected in the proliferation of fascist movements.

[71] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5969

[72] Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak (K. Deffeyes, 2006) and The Last Oil Shock (D. Strahan, 2007) are good introductions to the theory of peak oil. See a short, compact mathematical demonstration and quasi-proof at http://watd.wuthering-heights.co.uk/subpages/hubbertmaths/hubbertmaths.html.

[73] Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (D. Meadows et al, 2004).

[74] Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics (J. Dunlop) at http://www.princeton.edu/lisd/publications/wp_russiaseries_dunlop.pdf.

The Big Questions

1. Demographic problems: aging, low fertility and Eurabia?
2. The unsustainability of the modern welfare state?
3. Cultural decline & reaction against liberal rationalism?
4. The return of Great Power politics? (e.g. Mearsheimer 1990), & the decline of the EU and growing centrality of Franco-German relations, – or will the EU survive, and if so in what form?
5. National trends: a secure, “flourishing” France; a troubled but powerful Germany; Poland beset on two fronts; marginalized Britain, Spain & Italy, all in decline; Sweden as preeminent Baltic power; on the outskirts, both Russia and Turkey increase their power – realistic?
6. The retreat into authoritarianism and militarism? Europe as a Black Continent?

European Trends

Without much exaggeration, demography is Europe’s central issue for the foreseeable future. Just to keep the labor force constant, the EU needs 1.6mn immigrants annually (current population: 500mn); to maintain a 3:1 ratio of labor force to retirees, it will need 3.1mn immigrants yearly to offset the aging of the population. These kinds of numbers are probably unrealistic due to (justified?) European xenophobia, especially in the east and center.

The root explanation is Europe’s post-1970 fertility collapse, especially pronounced in Germania, the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, etc), and the Visegrad region (East-Central Europe). It is most severe in Germany and Austria (both TFR = 1.3), where the total fertility rate (TFR) fell below the replacement-level rate of 2.1 children per woman in the early 1970′s; since the Germans have not been reproducing themselves for a full generation now (and have no desire to start doing so, as even the desired TFR is at a low 1.8), they will inevitably fall into a death spiral.

The situation is similar in the Mediterranean nations and Visegrad (TFR around 1.3), with the exception that their fertility falls came a decade and two decades after Germany’s, respectively. However, much like Russia, Visegrad still has chances of effecting a demographic recovery, assuming their fertility collapse was primarily a result of “transition shock” instead of “social modernization”. Much better off are France (TFR = 2.0), the UK (TFR = 1.9), and the Nordic countries like Sweden (TFR = 1.7), whose fertility rates are all within a manageable distance of the replacement level rate.

However, conservatives who fear the coming of a Muslim Europe – “Eurabia” – are going to be happy. That theory rests on the assumptions that a) the size of the Muslim minority in Europe is severely underreported, b) the Muslim minority retains its extreme religiosity, c) “reversion” to Islam will increase, and that d) the high fertility rates of first-generation Muslims and e) high levels of Muslim immigration will continue indefinitely in the face of rising European xenophobia. All of these assumptions are very much open to question. The far likelier possibility is that the trans-European Muslim community will be scapegoated by a declining continent rediscovering its old geopolitical faultlines.

Napoleonic France introduced pensions for civil servants, Bismarck’s Germany invented the social security system, and Sweden developed the modern welfare state in the 1930’s – a system that reached its apogee on the European continent on the back of the post-war economic miracle and demographic expansion. Both have come to an end, and so too may the modern welfare state as we know it.

Due to their fertility crises, Europeans will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their generous welfare states. Sweden will likely soldier on with its “social-democratic welfare state”, given that it lies at the heart of its identity (social mobility, egalitarianism, progressivism); a (relatively) youthful France will also find it manageable to retain the extensive perks, privileges, and niceties of its dirigiste system. Though demographically healthy, Britain has an array of other critical problems that will force it to strip down the bloat and return to its traditionally minimal “liberal welfare state”. In low-fertility Europe, raising the retirement age and cutting down the “corporatist welfare state” to the spartan standards of the earlier 20th century is now the only realistic solution, the alternatives being one or two more decades of decay followed by fiscal and social collapse. The rightist wave sweeping the European elections of 2009 may be a subconscious realization that it’s time for taking responsibility.

The wealth, social solidarity, and geography of European nations means that overpopulation, pollution and climate change will not have quite the same critical impact as in other regions like the Middle East or China – though an inundating Holland, desertifying Spain and burning Greece may beg to differ. (This applies to the period until 2030; after that, all bets are off everywhere).

European Regions

Germany has a robust industrial ecosystem manned by a well-educated population, powered by a triad of coal, natural gas and renewable sources of energy, and underpinned by advanced technologies and a potent machine-building sector. It constitutes Europe’s economic and commercial powerhouse. However, it is artificially reliant on exports to provide the savings needed for its rapidly aging population – short of a mortality crisis, an irreversible problem compounded by the most intractable demographic crisis of any major European nation. This reliance is dangerous, given the imminent waning of globalization. Facing a subpar energy future, the loss of global export markets, and the rediscovery of a conservative nationalism bizarrely married to environmentalism, Berlin will again turn its baleful gaze to East-Central Europe.

In addition to the manifold soft power tools at its disposal, Germany is already beginning to unshackle itself from its post-WW2 military constraints. Though the Bundeswehr is of Cold War vintage with minimal power projection capabilities, Germany has the technologies and industrial potential to once again become a leading European land power. Its status as a “virtual nuclear weapons state” means it has the capability to develop and field a small arsenal of deliverable nuclear weapons within months of commencing a crash program. Thus, Germany has both the dormant potential and the incentives to return to the Reich, expanding into Visegrad to acquire captive markets and to guarantee Russian hydrocarbons supplies – and reigniting its old, paranoia-fueled duel with France for European hegemony.

Unlike in the first half of the 20th century, it is France that will be the more potent competitor this time around. Its fertility rates are the healthiest on the European continent – though its population of 62mn is smaller than Germany’s 82mn, it already has a higher number of annual births. Though they have a restive 10% Muslim minority in the deprived banlieues, French Muslims are culturally more integrated than their co-religionists in Germany or Britain. The French economy is versatile, productive, and robust, suffering little during the 2008 economic crash – though scolded for dirigisme and S&M business regulations that stymie employment, its dirigisme is arguably superior to Germany’s export dependency, the Mediterranean’s fiscal holes, and Britain’s bubble economy.

On the strategic level, France is a powerful independent actor. With 80% of its electricity generation coming from nuclear power, its industrial and residential infrastructure is invulnerable to gas disruptions – be it Russian “energy blackmail” or Ukrainian intransigence. The country is underpopulated relative to the rest of Western Europe. France possesses Europe’s sole fully-autonomous military-industrial complex, producing the whole panoply of weapon classes from helicopter carriers to fighter jets; it has substantial power projection capabilities; and its extensive nuclear infrastructure supports the world’s third largest strategic nuclear stockpile, the bulk of its 300 warheads mounted on MIRVed SLBM’s held on four ballistic missile submarines.

All these factors put it in good stead for a symbiosis with its former North African colonies. Algeria is a major oil and gas producer, while Morocco has 2/3 of the world’s rock phosphate reserves – “a critical component in global fertilizer supply”. Facing a demographic “youth bulge” and shrinking agricultural yields under the stress of global warming and an advancing Saharan desert, the Maghreb nations may feel compelled to offer energy & phosphate supply guarantees to France in exchange for its commitment to a high immigration quota and protection of Muslim rights. Further afield, it has a strong military and neo-colonial presence in energy-rich West Africa. Occupying an enviable geostrategic location from a position of immense strength – demographic, economic, and strategic – there can be little doubt that France will be the predominant European power of the next decades.

On the surface, Britain appears to be a strong contender for European preeminence in the coming decades. It has respectable demographic indicators and, at least so far, a relatively low level of sovereign debt. The island nation occupies the most strategically secure location on the European continent – it has never been successfully invaded since 1066, largely thanks to its efforts to maintain a continental balance of power, spoiling attacks on potential European hegemons, and as a last resort, the English Channel. The island nation hosts significant power projection capabilities and a robust SSBN-based nuclear deterrent (much like France); furthermore, it also maintains a “special relationship” with a United States that shares its fundamental goal of stymieing the rise of a European hegemon. At the same time, London is not averse to profiting from European markets and the pursuit of its neo-colonial interests further abroad, as befits the descendant of an empire on which the sun never set. As the sun sets on Pax Americana, could its British satrapy continue its legacy on the old continent?

The answer is almost certainly not. Despite its ostensible strength and vigor, the United Kingdom faces a set of imminent, interlinked challenges – economic, fiscal, energy, and nationalities – that could not only preclude its rise to preeminence, but put at peril its very existence as a federated state.

Britain has seen accelerating deindustrialization since the neoliberal revolution of 1980′s Thatcherism, culminating in the false boom of the 2000′s driven by construction and finance. At the same time, government spending increased as Britain moved to implement a social-democratic welfare state – partly because of the need to satiate the emerging victims of market fundamentalism, and partly because of a general expansion of state power relative to the citizenry (surveillance, databases, etc). However, it should be noted that unlike in Scandinavia, this development did not lead to higher socio-economic mobility, which remains the lowest in Europe.

Even before the current crisis, government spending (purchases and transfers) was approaching 50% of GDP, with the figure rising to 56% in Scotland, 72% in Wales and 78% in Northern Ireland. With the discrediting of the neoliberal model, soaring budget deficits (12%+ of GDP), plummeting foreign investor confidence, and widespread indebtedness stymying a consumer-led recovery, Britain finds itself locked into a predicament, between the Scylla of inflationary fire and the Charybdis of a painful fiscal retrenchment and deflationary “debt trap”. Though on current trends the former seems to be the more prevalent, the likely triumph of the Conservatives in the 2010 elections may herald a sea change in favor of the fiscal restraint championed by their middle-England electoral base.

This fiscal predicament is compounded by its energy woes, in which the absence of a long-term energy policy, mindless liberalization, and above all the rapid depletion of the North Sea gas and oil fields, may see it enter a period of Third World-style blackouts by the mid-2010′s. Britain’s growing need for gas imports will necessitate costly investments in LNG terminals, put its current account further into the red, and even develop a German-style dependence on Russia. This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – forced into buying expensive energy supplies and suffering from power disruptions, the British economy will go into stagnation or outright decline. This cannot be squared with the level of requisitions needed to support the metastasizing British welfare state, and it will have to give.

Finally, Britain’s latent separatist pressures will come to the forefront – no one wants to remain on a sinking ship. Scotland is a viable nation with a substantial industrial base and still significant North Sea hydrocarbons deposits – given independence, it will resurrect its Auld Alliance with France. Similarly, there will be less enthusiasm for maintaining Northern Ireland on the English dole; once ditched, it will inevitably drift to the hearty embrace of the Republic of Eire. Only Wales is likely to remain within the new Republic of England & Wales (the Queen will have moved to Scotland). Though England will retain the vast bulk of the UK’s population, economic, and military assets, their general degradation during this time period will have relegated it to the status of a secondary European Great Power like Italy or Spain. However, its longer-term prospects are slightly brighter due to its relatively healthy (current) demography and preparedness for global warming.

Not even that can be said about the Mediterranean nations, however, which suffer from all the challenges facing Germany, France and the UK – collapsed fertility rates (TFR = 1.3), social immobility, sclerotic economies, unsustainable welfare states, debt traps, and imminent fiscal collapse thanks to the ECB depriving them of the ability to engineer a currency depreciation (their traditional solution to fiscal crises).

Italy is sinking back into political cronyism, the level of corruption is astounding for a First World nation, and its artisanal manufacturing is being destroyed by Chinese competition. There remain huge gaps between the advanced Nord and the Mafia-riddled, poverty-stricken Mezzogiorno – thus, opportunities for domestic tensions abound. As for Spain, it is facing an excruciating bust as the foreign credit flows pumping up its construction-fueled economy subside; furthermore, it faces an uncertain energy future (despite its impressive expansion into renewables, the scale is still far too small), exponentially-rising damage from global warming, and separatist tensions from the Basque region.

The performance of their education systems (both basic and tertiary), spending on R&D, and levels of corruption, are all far behind their north European neighbors. Too preoccupied with their manifold domestic challenges and isolated by the Alps and the Pyrenees from the North European Plain, these two nations have neither the incentive nor the capability to play a major role in future European power politics. They are likely to succumb to an accelerating, self-reinforcing decay, eventually culminating in the emigration of millions of young Spaniards and southern Italians to France and the US (being whites, xenophobia will not play a big role).

Finally, there are two European nations that are currently marginal, but may assume a much more prominent role in future decades – Poland and Sweden. Let us start with the former. Poland has a balanced, protected, and fast-growing economy that was little affected by the 2008 crisis (relatively speaking); a strong sense of national unity; and although it suffered from a sharp fall in fertility from the early 1990′s along with the rest of the socialist bloc, it may have a chance of recovery for the same reasons as Russia, i.e. because there is evidence to suggest its demographic decline was a result of the “transition shock”, i.e. not permanent. However, the likelihood of that occuring is smaller because a) its desired fertility (around 2.1) correlates with those of the low-fertility Med nations, whereas Russia’s is higher (around 2.5), and b) its transition shock was much less pronounced than Russia’s, but unlike Russia from 2006 it has yet to see any firm signs of demographic recovery. And although it does not have Russia’s mortality crisis, the main impact of that will be to put more pressure on the Polish pensions system, on which it already spends more than 10% of GDP (i.e. a figure similar to the rest of “old Europe”).

As such, it is hard to give credence to credence to George Friedman’s (Stratfor) prediction that Poland will become a Great Power any time soon. That said, as the strongest barrier between Germany and Russia – and hence a bulwark against the emergence of a European hegemon – much of the rest of the continent, especially France, England, and Sweden, as well as the US, will find it in their interests to extend technical and military aid. And should the resurgent Russia Empire collapse and wither back into its Muscovite heartlands, the recreation of a modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, encompassing much of Visegrad and western Ukraine, beckons.

With its cold climate and poor internal communication lines, the Scandinavian Peninsula’s population was always concentrated along the southern coasts. This is where Sweden first emerged as a maritime Power based on riverine trade within the Hanseatic / Baltic region – and that is where its modern interests lie. It naturally dominates energy-rich Norway and its maritime traditions enable a flexible military posture in Europe, while Finland serves as an excellent buffer against Russian expansionism. Sweden exerts financial domination over the Baltic nations, maintains friendly relations with NATO, and hosts an advanced military-industrial complex. As such, Swedish power is incommensurate with its small population, though overall it remains, and will remain, a minor player. Global warming will open up more of its lands to sustainable settlement, which coupled with its respectable demography and immigration from climatically-stricken zones from Europe and farther abroad will ensure the continued growth of its relative power. Finding a natural ally in Poland to contain German ambitions and Russian revanchism, the two could prove to be a potent combination.

Above is a rough table summarizing my view of the current relative strengths (mostly 1-5) and future prospects (+ and -) of the current European Powers in population / demographic structure; economic-technological strength; energy reserves, sustainability and/or security of supply; climate effects; and overall hard power. For obvious reasons these are very rough estimates and subject to a wide degree of error.

Europe’s Geopolitics

Having outlined the general trends and regional idiosyncrasies of the European continent, I am now going to try to bring it all together and paint a picture of how European geopolitics and metapolitics are going to develop in the decades ahead.

First, a word about the European Union. It is the quintessential “end of history” project – as Fukuyama himself noted, its “attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military”. This utopian pursuit is, however, dependent on social stability, which is what underpins Europe’s historically recent embrace of liberal democracy and rules-based mechanism for resolving disputes.

But considering the interlinked and growing economic, energetic, demographic, and climatic challenges to this social stability covered above – and bearing in mind that for all its pomp and splendor, the EU remains weak and peripheral relative to the twenty-seven European nation-states that will collectively decide its destiny – the EU’s disintegration, “withering away”, or “expansion into irrelevancy”, is almost inevitable. Powerful Eurosceptic elements in Britain, Poland and the small European states do not want to give away their national sovereignty and are suspicious of European federalism, which they perceive to be nothing more than a new, covert hegemonic project. Nor is it likely that it will be replaced by a “Europe of two speeds” based on accelerated Franco-German integration; the interests of these nation-states are simply too divergent for that to happen.

As for NATO, if it can be undermines by an issue as small as Afghanistan now – it has no chance of surviving the coming earthquakes in any meaningful form. Britain, France, and Poland will likely remain closely allied with the US, but beyond that the dominant paradigm will be a return to 19th century-like Great Power politics. Facing a subpar energy future, the loss of export markets in a more protectionist world, a rapid demographic decline, and an unprecedented fiscal crisis, Berlin will again look east, as it usually does in times of national stress. It is in its strategic interests to draw closer to Moscow, given the mutual desirability of setting up a bilateral relationship based on trading Russian commodities (natural gas) for German machine tools and technology, as occurred so often in the past. (For instance, in the Treaty of Rappallo (1922), the two international pariahs signed a peace agreement, forgave each other’s debts and signed a free trade accord. Russia also helped Germany circumvent the Treaty of Versailles by allowing Germany to use its territory to continue military-related R&D and weapons testing, far from the prying eyes of Western observers). Furthermore, Russia could make use of a neutral-to-friendly Germany as a shield to consolidate its power over the post-Soviet space.

Once again, Poland will stand in the way of this Russo-German relationship. Russia is interested in pushing American influence out of East-Central Europe, converting the region into a neutral buffer for its empire. Germany will be interested in 1) furthering its economic penetration of the region, given the losses of many of its other export markets, and 2) in preventively blocking Russia’s further expansion into Europe proper, which in the end would seriously endanger German national security. In addition, there’s also its traditional craving for Lebensraum.

The region of Visegrad will therefore become a vortex of geopolitical competition between Germania, Eurasia, Scandinavia, and the Atlanticists. Poland will be supported directly by France, which has a direct interest in guaranteeing Polish sovereignty in order to prevent the rise of a German-dominated Europe (or of a contiguous Russo-German bloc, which would amount to the same thing). Despite its likely retreat from active Eurasian power politics in the face of mounting domestic crises, the US too will likely contribute to Polish security, since preventing the rise of a Eurasian hegemon will still figure amongst Washington’s priorities. Interestingly, a weakened Britain (or England) will probably try to maintain neutrality and good relations with all sides: its desire to support France and Poland in order to preempt the rise of a united European hegemon will be partially counterbalanced by its growing energy dependence on Russia.

However, the alliance between Germany and Russia will be far from rock-solid, considering that it is based exclusively on shared interests. Germany does not want a Russia that is too strong, and as such will try to maintain a modicum of good relations with the Atlantic powers as a hedge, as well as making geopolitical inroads and alliances beyond Europe proper. Boxed in by seas to the north, a powerful France to the west, the Alps to the south, and an Atlanticist-supported Poland to the east, Germany will push its influence into the Balkans in conjunction with Turkey, a country with which it will resurrect its traditional alliance, and more importantly, a country that will be able to keep Russia’s attention diverted to its unstable south (the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Balkans – areas where Turkey already has substantial cultural and economic influence). Furthermore, Turkey would provide Germany with an additional supply of gas independent of Russian control sourced from Azerbaijan, Central Asia (if they remain outside Russia’s overt control) and possibly even Iran (if it reconciles with the West), and assuming that the necessary pipelines get built. In exchange, Germany will transfer the technologies Turkey needs to build a self-sufficient military-industrial complex that will complement its already formidable military power.

France will seek a close alliance with the Visegrad nations and Sweden to keep Germany and Russia occupied, while focusing most of its energies on securing its regional dominance. Flooded with younger immigrants from Spain and Italy – and perhaps the Maghreb, should it agree on the energy-for-immigration deal mooted above – its population will grow even more rapidly than projected, perhaps reaching 80-90mn souls by the 2030′s. This will result in the division of its electorate into three major groupings – the French conservatives and nationalists; the internationalist moderates; and the hard left, which will include the Islamist groups.

These internal divisions will be the cracks through which its weaker neighbors, especially Germany, will try to undermine it; however, ironically, those same divisions may lead to the long-term survival of multiculturalism and liberal democracy on French soil, even as Germany returns to the Reich, Italy reverts to its regionalistic capo governing traditions, Turkey revives its Ottoman imperial legacy, and Russia reacquires its Eurasian empire. Along with the British isles and various enclaves (Sweden, Switzerland, Czechia, Ireland, Poland?, etc), France will remain a light in a continent rapidly turning black with fascism, militarism, collapse – and perhaps war. War? Yes, I’m serious. Once effective ABM shields are developed and proliferate – and that’s not especially far off – the deterrence power of nuclear weapons will fall dramatically.

As mentioned above, both of the major Mediterranean powers will be too absorbed by domestic affairs to give serious heed to geopolitical jockeying. Though they might try to revive their colonial-era relations with North Africa – Spain in Morocco, Italy in Libya – they do no have the carrots to enjoy sustained success, and will be outmanoeuvred by France. Though Poland holds some promise, it is locked into a geopolitical vice and will remain too weak to play a truly independent role in Europe. And though Sweden is a formidable and growing Baltic power, its population and industrial base is simply too small to play a true Great Power role.

[A possible future European alliance / categorization system. Black - the expansionist Germans, Turks and Russians. Dark gray - France and its allies, Poland and Sweden. Gray - the relatively weak "balancing powers": Britain will lean more towards France, Italy more towards Germany, but none want to see a European hegemon. Light gray - too weak to really matter].

Conclusions

As a result of the epochal shifts in the global balance of power brought on by peak oil and the waning of Pax Americana, within the next decade the geopolitical structure of Europe will experience a profound transformation. The post-historical EU project will die when history returns to Europe. As Britain weakens and splinters into its constituent parts, and as the Mediterranean powers retreat under the weight of their manifold demographic, fiscal, and economic problems, the old struggle between France, Germany and Russia for European hegemony will resume.

This will entail a complex balance of power system. A powerful France will seek to encircle an ailing but still formidable Germany by allying itself with Visegrad and Sweden, while maximizing its own power by asserting itself in its Mediterranean backyard. Germany will make a wary alliance with Russia, and try to break free of its encirclement by threatening Poland, undermining France, and hedging with a Turkish alliance. Meanwhile, Russia and Turkey may come into intense geopolitical competition over the fate of the Balkans, Caucasus and Central Asia; however, should Turkey focus its expansion into the Middle East, their relations will likely be quiescent. (But this issue is for the Eurasia SSR). As the world energy and climate crisis worsens with every passing decade, Europe will return to its future – the Black Continent.