Morozov, Viatcheslav Russia's Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World (review)

Abstract

SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 390 the sake of regional short-term stability, and 2) to get rid of regimes once they stop serving their own interests. Also, the messy politics of Albania suggests (and this is found in other western Balkan states, as well) that whoever comes to power, s/he will rush to maximize their own personal wealth. In such a climate, concerns about state identity and common benefits are of secondary relevance, if at all. Finally, unstable states often make fertile ground for criminal networks and militant organizations, such as the KLA, which can always re-emerge, ready to fight, perhaps, for a greater Albanian state. School of Social Sciences Branislav Radeljić University of East London Morozov, Viatcheslav. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World. Central and Eastern European Perspectives on International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2015. viii + 209 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £58.00. Russia’s Postcolonial Identity is a new book on the old subject of Russia’s relations with the West. Viatcheslav Morozov finds a novel approach in postcolonial theory to analyse Russia as a subaltern empire dependent on the West’s material and normative hegemony. He argues that Russia, while remaining a formally independent country and even colonizing its own periphery, was integrated into the capitalist world-system on unequal terms (p. 31). Drawing on A. Etkind’s Internal Colonization (Cambridge, 2011), Morozov sees Russia colonizing its periphery on behalf of the global capitalist core. The key question is the origin of Russia’s ambiguous place in the Eurocentric global order. For Morozov, the answer lies in the inherent structural inequality of the capitalist world and Russia’s peripheral role in it (p. 40). The fact that Russia’s main identity discourses are similar to those of other aspiring powers such as China, India or Japan, represented by realist, nationalist and globalist camps, is due to their shared subaltern experiences, that is their internalization of a normative order whose nodal points are defined by the West (p. 65). At the heart of its material dependency lies Russia’s persistent resourceorientated economic development. This dependency, according to Morozov, stretches back to early-modern times when the equivalent of today’s oil was furs. Even Stalinist industrialization followed the old peripheral model of capital accumulation by exchanging grain for technologies. The key to understanding Russia’s confrontational behaviour lies in its mix of subaltern and imperial identities which feeds its insecurity. For example, the anti-Western concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, which insists on each nation’s REVIEWS 391 right to define universal values, is a typical counter-hegemonic project. At the same time, there is a grudging acceptance of European normative superiority, withmodernityandcivilizationunderstoodinRussiainanentirelyEurocentric way. The end result is a constant tension between the urge to catch up and a desire to preserve a unique identity (p. 109). Given this tension, Morozov argues that subaltern imperialism is the best general frame for the analysis of different factors in Russia’s foreign policy (p. 135). All the while the Russian people are caught between Western universalism and domestic authoritarianism (p. 163). As the West remains a key reference for all politically relevant discourses in Russia, either through its negation by the authorities, or imitation by the liberal opposition (p. 155), the people are speechless due to the absence of a genuine native discourse. Morozov’s argument depends on accepting several concepts, most of them of a (neo-)Marxist lineage, in which there is a core-periphery distinction, with the capitalist core dominating the subordinate periphery through its economic and normative hegemony. Hegemony is understood in Gramscian terms as universalization of a particular socio-economic and normative order, used to manufacture consent from the periphery (p. 63). Russia’s difference from the West is due to the uneven development inherent in capitalist modernity, again drawing on a Marxist understanding of capitalist transformation. The strong Marxian bias is not necessarily a deficiency but it certainly needs to be kept in mind when reading the book, as it is not entirely universally accepted. The idea of the dichotomy between the elites and the people as central to the definition of Russia as subaltern...