Has Russia Gone Absolutely Nuts?: Cooperation in an Era of Global Paranoia

By Kerry Cosby

As a child of the '70s and '80s, I was raised on courtroom dramas. This is why, when I read articles about Russia’s insane foreign policy or the country’s paranoiac laws regarding foreign influence, I cannot help but imagine two TV lawyers battling over the claim that Russia needs to be institutionalized.

So what is the verdict? Does Russia require four padded walls and a straight jacket?

If the news media were the court in our version of Law and Order, the lead prosecutor would have already made a clever remark summing up the episode, the electronic metal bar would have fallen, and the screen would have faded to black.

But in reality, the situation is more complex and has more significant repercussions for global cooperation.

The Case Against Russia

The courtroom drama episode begins with our slick, well dressed prosecutor standing before the jury and calling their attention to the law being discussed in the Russian Duma. The law states that the political situation should be taken into consideration when determining what foreign schools will be a part of the Russian government’s study abroad program. He cues up a video of Russian PM from the nationalist Liberal Democratic faction, Valery Selevnyov who says, "For our money, we will get highly skilled agents of foreign espionage services."

The prosecutor follows up with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s September 27^th statement to the UN General Assembly. The video rolls of him asking, “Shouldn’t the General Assembly adopt a declaration on the inadmissibility of interference into domestic affairs of sovereign states and non-recognition of coup d’états as a method of the change of power?” (Certainly, the irony of Lavrov’s question would not be lost on the jury, given Russia’s role in South Ossetia in 2008 and Crimea and Eastern Ukraine today.)

But the video is not enough for us to conclude that these are mutterings of a government lost in its own fantasy of persecution?

So the prosecutor brings into evidence recent laws requiring some Russian non-governmental organizations receiving money from abroad to register as “foreign agents,” and the closing of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Just to bring the case home, he might even throw in Russia’s claims that the Hong Kong protests are being organized by Great Britain and the USA.

This might be enough to convince our jury that Putin and his crew are an insane authoritarian government, clinging to power and thus seeing shadows around every corner.

But, our prosecutor points out that insanity, by itself, is not a sufficient reason to lock someone up. If it were, most Hollywood celebrities would be in mental wards. The danger, he says, is that the paranoia has somehow infected the country’s people, 45 percent of whom believe an omnipotent shadowy group controls humanity.  He also points out that many of the Russian media’s conspiracy theories about Malaysian flight MH17—shot down over eastern Ukraine—spread like wildfire through Russian social media.

The prosecutor stands beside the jury with one hand on the jury box and one pointing at the Russian bear seated at the defendant’s table, and tells them that this is an insanity that needs to be contained before it infects everyone.

They’re All Already Insane

The defense, an uncompromising, short-haired blonde steps up to the jury and declares that we may want to hold back our desire to paint Russia with the madman brush.

This concern about outside interference can be seen in more than just Russia. Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan have also created “foreign agent laws” and shut down representatives of international non-governmental organizations.  In September 2014, the head of Azerbaijan’s President’s Cabinet gave an interview in which he accused the head of the Baku office of the National Endowment for Democracy of “forming a radical group of protesters."

China itself has voiced concern about foreign interference in domestic affairs. Recently, on the subject of the Hong Kong protests China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Hua Chunying stated, “I’d like to reiterate that Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, which is a special administrative region of China. Hong Kong affairs fully fall within China’s domestic affairs. We hope that relevant countries can be prudent in their words and deeds, refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Hong Kong in any way, stay away from supporting the illegal acts such as “Occupy Central”, and do not send out wrong signals.”

Turkey has claimed that external forces have interfered with its election—not foreign governments, but independent groups abroad. Since March 2014, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (previously Prime Minister) has been in a bitter battle with the Internet, recently expressing the feeling that he was “increasingly against the Internet every day." In March, leaks and allegations of corruption began appearing on YouTube and Twitter, for which Erdogan blamed US-resident and founder of the Gulen Movement, Fethullah Gulen. Most recently this battle took the form of a new law passed by the Turkish Parliament that expands the powers of the High Council for Telecommunications (TIB) to block websites or gather Internet user information.

If Everyone’s Crazy, Then No One Is

Our Defense attorney feels confident about her argument now. She stands directly in front of the prosecutor in a demonstration of her and the case’s strength, and announces that it would be easy to say these are simply the reactions of authoritarian leaders to challenges to their rule. But that would be looking too narrowly at the issue. A better assertion would be that this is the reaction of nation-states to the ever increasing interconnections of a globalized world, particularly one that has recently entered a multi-polar era.

As evidence, she points to the fact that the process has occurred even in democratic countries. In 2012, amid allegations that voter identification laws put barriers in front of poor and minority voters, Texas Attorney General threatened to arrest OSCE election monitors dispatched for the 2012 general elections. Abbot wrote in an open letter, “If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented to protect the integrity of elections. However, groups and individuals from outside the United States are not allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas.” Abbot’s stance was supported by conservative groups and news outlets.

But U.S. conservatives do not have a monopoly on the fear of foreign groups and countries.  In September, the New York Times published an article on the influence foreign states exert on the U.S. through funding to U.S. think tanks.

Moreover, as a parallel to Russian citizens’ belief in a shadow group controlling humanity, according to a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, 28 percent of American “voters believe that a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order.”

Cooperation Among Paranoiacs

The defense would probably have won the case, but the television audience might have hoped to see Russia hauled away by men in white coats. Such a verdict would certainly provide more hope for global cooperation.

Given that the most significant issues we face are global ones (climate change, global terror networks, ebola), the paranoiacs will need to work together to solve them. For this to happen, even if each of the countries are wary of each other, they will need to seek to restore trust in international organizations, and transnational civil society—although both may need to be re-envisioned for the post-American era.

International structures, such as the United Nations, IMF and World Bank, will need to address concerns about their democratic deficit. The UN would need to examine the possibility of including principles of deliberative and/or electoral democracy, through structures such as a Parliamentary Assembly (directly elected by the citizenry of member nations) or by bringing transnational civil society among the representatives of nation-states themselves in the decision-making bodies.  They will need to create forms in which open participation in debate becomes possible.  And at some point, the UN will have to tackle the problem for democratic governance that the Security Council poses.

Transnational civil society will need to deal with the fact that it is perceived as a pawn of the “West,” living off funding from U.S. and European aid organizations.  Such an act would require that boards and decision-makers be from a wide range of national backgrounds. The civil society organizations will need to find more varied funding sources, and perhaps consider alternatives to the professionalized management structures that have become so widespread since the 1980s.

Nations themselves cannot be separated from this process.  For such distrust of international institutions and civil society to be overcome, nation-states should prepare their citizenry to participate in international debate and help them to better understand international systems of governance. They will need to integrate ideas of deliberative democracy into their education systems and reinforce the idea of deliberation in their own politics.