Constructing a Resurgent Russia

Abstract

Russia's Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity. By Andrei P. Tsygankov Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 217 pp., $65.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-2649-6), $24.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-2650-X). Andrei Tsygankov, a political scientist at San Francisco State University, sets out two modest goals in Russia's Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity : “to assist fellow academics in their teaching needs and to suggest a plausible interpretation of Russia's foreign policy” (p. xxiv). He succeeds admirably in both. Tsygankov argues that one constant in Russian foreign policy since the time of Peter the Great has been the construction of a national identity in relation to Europe and the West. As a result, he suggests that a constructivist approach, with its focus on cultural contexts and meanings, provides a more comprehensive basis for explaining Russian foreign policy than either the realist or the liberal schools of international relations. Realism's tendency to take national interests as given, and its focus on power and capabilities, limit its ability to explain such major changes as Mikhail Gorbachev's “new thinking” in foreign policy. For its part, liberalism relies on a linear, progressive view of international relations that is premised on the ascendancy of Western political values—a perspective that cannot account for recent conservative shifts in foreign policymaking. Constructivism takes into account both international influences and local conditions that impact foreign policy formation. For Russia, the most important international influence has been the role of Europe …