Russian Foreign Policy and Public Diplomacy: Meeting 21st Century Challenges

Greg Simons

doi:10.22363/2313-0660-2020-20-3-491-503

Abstract

Foreign policy is about setting the policy aims and goals of a given country in the competitive environment of international affairs. When analyzing it, one should pay attention to many factors, namely, economic and energy potential, military-technical means, the presence of trade and economic partners, political weight and state image in the international arena, state membership in various international organizations. You can also highlight a number of tools that also play a large role in the foreign policy of states. As a specific instrument of foreign policy, public diplomacy concerns the regulation and management of international relations with various global publics in order to realise those foreign policy aims and goals. Specifically, public diplomacy intends to create a positive reputation and brand of the country, simultaneously increasing the countrys soft power potential, which is based on external and internal sources. This article intends to track and analyse the challenges and the role played by Russian public diplomacy in terms of meeting the challenges of the countrys foreign policy agenda in the 21st century. These challenges have been in a state of transformation as the nature of the environment of international relations changed. As a result, Russian public diplomacy has needed to evolve along with the changes at the global level and consequently the shifting demands enshrined in the foreign policy concepts. There are several identified distinct political policy periods noted: attempts to integrate into the Western-led global order; cooling relations with the United States dominated global order; and preparing for multi-polar and a post-Western global order.

Highlights

An increasing amount of attention is paid to Russian foreign policy and public diplomacy in the 21st century
One of the tracks is to treat Russian foreign policy and/or public diplomacy as a mechanism of neo-imperial ambition [Lucas 2008; Ismayilov 2011]; another path is to treat these aspects as subversive persuasion and/or an element of “hybrid war” [van Herpen 2016; Fox, Rossow 2017]; and another path is that of pursuing national interests and goals from a lens of foreign policy realism1
A specific research question is posed — how has Russian public diplomacy evolved to meet the new challenges of the 21st century?

Summary

Introduction

An increasing amount of attention is paid to Russian foreign policy and public diplomacy in the 21st century. In the end of 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc fundamentally altered the global geopolitical balance and saw a sudden shift from a bipolar world order (United States and the Soviet Union) to a unipolar order as the United States was the sole remaining superpower This had a very sudden and profound impact on international relations and politics (including the foreign policy) in the newly emergent Russian Federation. Russia’s pivot away from the declining Western dominated political and economic global order to a non-Western grouping of rising powers This is perfectly in keeping with the third form of the national pragmatic model of Russian foreign policy. Russia is presented as being open and predictable and playing an ageold role of a counterbalance in international

12 The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian

Conclusion