A failure to read Russia correctly

Abstract

Chapter 4 surveys Germany’s Russia policy from 1990 to 2014 and shows how successive governments stuck to the idea that Russia was a partner in Europe and were prepared to disregard its backtracking on democracy and its violation of human rights and tolerate the development of a form of capitalism incompatible with rule of law. A key measure of Russia’s progress was the growth of trade with Germany. Berlin continued to believe that economic development would promote good governance and rule of law as though Russia could fall back on an earlier legal culture as Germany had done after 1945. The election of a German-speaking president in 2000 seduced Berlin into believing that relations could not be better. It closed its eyes to the Kremlin’s closure of privately owned media, its progressive stifling of political opposition and civil society and its subversion of the country’s legal system to consolidate power and facilitate self-enrichment. At the same time, German policymakers failed to heed the warning signs as high commodity prices injected adrenalin into the Russian system, stimulating it to begin challenging western policy and propose renegotiating the principles of European security agreed at the end of the Cold War. Berlin also failed to see that the EU posed a challenge to Russia in the ‘shared neighbourhood’, setting the scene for the dramatic breakdown of relations over Ukraine in early 2014.