Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin And The Politics Of Order

297 Pages·2020·1.486 MB·English

by  David G. Lewis

Russia’s New Authoritarianism
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For Olivia
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Russia’s New
Authoritarianism
Putin and the Politics of Order
DAVID G. LEWIS
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
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© David G. Lewis, 2020
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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ISBN 978 1 4744 5476 6 (hardback)
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ISBN 978 1 4744 5479 7 (epub)
The right of David G. Lewis to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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CONTENTS
Preface / vii
Acknowledgements / xiv
Note on Transliteration and Translation / xv
ONE / Authoritarianism, Ideology and Order / 1
Understanding Russian Authoritarianism / 1
Order, Smuta and the Russian State / 6
Russia as Weimar / 12
Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Order / 17
TWO / Carl Schmitt and Russian Conservatism / 24
Carl Schmitt in Moscow / 29
Normalising Schmitt / 45
THREE / Sovereignty and the Exception / 49
The Centrality of Sovereignty / 49
Sovereignty in International Affairs / 52
Domestic Sovereignty: Deciding on the Exception / 61
The Dual State / 77
FOUR / Democracy and the People / 81
Putinism and Democracy / 81
The Decline of Parliamentarianism / 86
Constructing a Majority / 88
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vi / Russia’s New Authoritarianism
FIVE / Defi ning the Enemy / 100
Russia and Its Enemies / 102
The End of Consensus / 114
SIX / Dualism, Exceptionality and the Rule of Law / 117
Law in Russia / 119
Conceptualising Dualism / 123
Politicised Justice / 126
Mechanisms of Exception / 130
The Exception Becomes the Norm / 137
SEVEN / The Crimean Exception / 139
Crimea: The Sovereign Decision / 140
Legality as Imperialism / 144
Order and Orientation / 151
EIGHT / Großraum Thinking in Russian Foreign Policy / 161
A World of Great Spaces / 161
Russia’s Spatial Crisis / 165
The New Schmittians / 190
NINE / Apocalypse Delayed: Katechontic Thinking
in Late Putinist Russia / 193
Russian Messianism / 197
Russia as Contemporary Katechon / 200
Katechontic Thinking and the Syrian Intervention / 206
CONCLUSION / 215
Bibliography / 223
Index / 268
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PREFACE
Post-Soviet Russia is the most signifi cant case study of the struggle between
democracy and authoritarianism in the post-Cold War world. The regime
headed by Vladimir Putin after 2000 has often been studied as an isolated
case – explained by Russia’s troubled political history, its limited experience
of democracy, the kleptocracy of its business elites, or the legacy of seventy
years of Soviet rule. Yet twenty-fi rst-century Russia also developed a new
version of authoritarian politics with much wider international resonance.
In many countries around the world – from Budapest to Beijing – many
familiar elements of ‘Putinist’ politics could be identifi ed in the fi rst two
decades of the twenty-fi rst century. Understanding the nature of ‘Putinism’
became critical for understanding wider trends in global politics, and the
rise of a new wave of authoritarian and illiberal regimes.
The rise of illiberal politics simultaneously in many parts of the world
in the 2010s suggests that Russia’s political development under Putin
should be understood as part of a broader global backlash against liberal
ideas and liberal order. This reaction took multiple forms, ranging from
radical Islamist movements in the Middle East to left-wing populist move-
ments in Europe. But the most signifi cant trend has been towards forms
of radical conservatism, which have produced right-wing populist move-
ments in parts of the West, and authoritarian regimes in many countries in
Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. Disparate in form, in leadership and in
vision, these political trends nevertheless had much in common in their
worldviews and ideological frames. They shared, above all, a profound
rejection of a form of liberal internationalism that had come to dominate
global discourse and global institutions in the post-Cold War world.
These political movements were not only ranged against modern lib-
eralism and its proxies, but they also began to coalesce around emergent
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viii / Russia’s New Authoritarianism
alternative visions of both domestic and international order. They rejected
the claim that the international system was a benign form of liberal inter-
national order, a rules-based system that ultimately benefi ted all. Illiberal
movements and authoritarian political leaders rejected universal values,
such as human rights, and instead advocated essentialised national or reli-
gious cultures and principles. Against a cosmopolitan vision that argued for
diminished state sovereignty and porous borders, they instead promoted
hard boundaries and frontiers, carving out national and civilisational
spaces. At the centre of political life, once again, was the state, as a reasser-
tion of centralised political power against global institutions, international
civil society and multinational corporations. Within society, they advocated
fi xed defi nitions of gender and sexual identity against notions of equality,
LGBT rights and ‘gender fl uidity’. Instead of liquidity and movement, in
personal life as in the international order, they advocated fi xity, hierarchy
and order.
Russia played a central role in this emerging trend of anti-liberal politics.
In Russia, perhaps more than anywhere else, the post-Cold War liberal order
appeared to represent an existential threat both to political order within the
state and to Russia’s place in the international system. After 1991 Russia
adopted all the institutions of liberal democracy, and permitted unprec-
edented international infl uence within its domestic politics, from monitor-
ing elections to shaping economic reforms. The result under President Boris
Yeltsin was a regime beset by economic decline and internal factionalism,
which had capitulated in the face of the Chechen insurgency, and which
had been unceremoniously demoted from the role of superpower to a weak,
troubled, regional player in a US-led global order. A reaction to Russia’s
crisis of the 1990s was inevitable, and it was never likely to be in the direc-
tion of greater liberalisation, as advocated by many Western critics. Russia
instead became a political laboratory for the construction of new forms of
authoritarian political order, which sought to consolidate decision-making
power in the hands of a political leader, while remaining engaged with a
global, neo-liberal economic system.
Political scientists struggled to conceptualise this new type of authoritari-
anism. The dominance of theories of democratisation skewed political sci-
ence towards a misleading frame of analysis that focused primarily on the
movement of countries on a path between dictatorship and democracy. In
Chapter 1 I argue that an alternative binary – that between chaos and order –
has been more infl uential in Russian thinking about politics, and is more
helpful in understanding the politics of Russia over the past two decades.
Other values – democracy, justice, equality – were always secondary to a par-
ticular understanding of political and social order. The form of political order
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Preface / ix
pursued by the Russian political elite was shaped by many infl uences, and
was often contested within the system by different ideological and political
forces. But while ‘Putinism’ never cohered into a clear belief system, there was
suffi cient agreement across parts of the elite to talk about shared elements
of a worldview, a collective agreement on the meanings of concepts, a para-
digm that imposed meaning on the world and structured Russia’s potential
responses.
To understand the emergence of this anti-liberal political order in Russia,
I turn to the most infl uential anti-liberal thinker of the twentieth century,
Carl Schmitt, the German jurist and political theorist who for a short time
in the 1930s was described as the ‘crown jurist of the Third Reich’. Writing
in 2000, Gopal Balakrishnan could still comment that Carl Schmitt’s writ-
ings ‘form what is arguably the most disconcerting, original and yet still
unfamiliar body of twentieth-century political thought’ (Balakrishnan
2000: 2). No longer. His work remains frequently ‘disconcerting’ – not only
because of his disastrous association with the Nazis, and his virulent anti-
Semitism, but also because of the implications of his arguments for con-
temporary politics. His work is often still strikingly original, but it is no
longer unfamiliar – in the past two decades his work has prompted a vast
array of commentary and interpretation. Schmitt ’s status as the ‘twentieth
century’s foremost critic of liberalism’ (McCormick 1998: 830) proved irre-
sistible both for intellectuals in the European New Right and many on the
post-Marxist left (Müller 2003).
By the late 1990s William Scheuerman could write that the ‘ghost of
Carl Schmitt haunts political and legal debates not only in Europe, but also
in the contemporary United States’ (Scheuerman 1999: 1). Two decades
later, the spectre of Schmitt haunts liberal politics across the Western
world, inspiring illiberal opponents in a powerful transnational ‘alt-right’
movement in America and Europe and informing the rise of a wave of
authoritarian regimes around the world (Lewis 2016b). ‘[Schmitt’s] politi-
cal views are thoroughly discredited’, writes his most recent biographer,
Reinhard Mehring (2014: xvi), but in authoritarian states, such as Russia,
his renaissance has been welcomed as ‘evidence of a crisis in contemporary
liberal theory’ (Mikhailovsky 2008a) and as an inspiration for new forms
of authoritarian politics and law (Bowring 2013; Lewis 2017b). Schmitt’s
infl uence has spread rapidly in China too, both as a critique of liberal
thinking and – paradoxically – as an inspiration ‘for those who aim to
move from an authoritarian state to a democratic state’ (Zheng 2012: 52).1
In Chapter 2 I trace the remarkable impact of Schmitt on conservative
political thinking in post-Soviet Russia. After a short dalliance with liberal
ideas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, political debate in Russia took place
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