Liberalism's loyal opposition : contemporary attitudes to Russia in the wake of the cold war
Date
2015
Authors
Horsfield, Dorothy
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The thesis explores the continuities that underpin public debate about Russia in the post-Soviet era. It approaches the question using the conceptual framework of new Cold War warriors and re-invented fellow travellers for two reasons. The first is that debates that seek to re-conjure spectres of Marxism or socialism in contemporary Russia are not a notable feature of the work of today's academic scholarship. Instead most of the analysis is centred on evaluating either civilizational or sociological perspectives on the country. Much of it is focused too on the governance of Vladimir Putin, an approach which includes a singular amount of psychologising about his alleged personal failings, both as a leader and as a foreign policy strategist. The second reason is that, though radically opposed, these two concepts anchor the dissertation in the spectrum of liberal thought from classical Liberalism, to economic Liberalism, to neo-liberal utopianism and, more recently, liberal pluralism. The implication is that, in one way or another, for most commentators, both within Russia and internationally, Western liberal norms provide a benchmark with which to appraise Russia's response to the demands of modernity and modernisation, the vagaries of global capitalism and the institutionalisation of democratic freedoms. Within these contentious arenas, the dissertation falls broadly into two camps. On one side are those who are still welded to either a Cold War skepticism or an ideological rigidity that invites a ready condemnation of the new Russia; and those who are more hopeful that the country's future can be more humane than its past. The approach is not aimed at adjudicating about which side will carry the day. Rather it constitutes an inevitably selective, innovative and ambitious commentary about commentaries. Its intention is to foster in both writer and reader a more reflective understanding of the assumptions and presumptions, as well as the areas of uncertainty, in interpretations of today's governance. Admittedly, given the breadth of historical and ongoing research, as well as the myriad ways real existing social worlds defy easy categorisation, the result is more likely to veer towards an impressionistic effect. Admittedly too, it is also an effect which veers towards an antipathy about many of the claims of the new Cold War warriors.
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