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Russian Foreign Policy Discourse during the Kosovo Crisis

Russian Foreign Policy Discourse during the Kosovo Crisis:

Internal Struggles and the Political imaginaire

Guillaume Colin / Gijom Kolin

PhD candidate Sciences Po Paris / CERI

The aim of this article is to analyse political discourse held in Russia


during the Kosovo crisis. It puts forward the following assumption:
foreign policy discourse was, during the period at hand, the preferred field
of political struggle in Russia.
More precisely, the hypothesis underpinning our reading of Russian
foreign policy discourse held after the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia is
that the Kosovo crisis served as a catalyst for what was actually an
internal political crisis which, at least in the first phase, almost totally
overshadowed the international dimension of the crisis. In this light, the
terms of the debate, which was structured around the interpretation of the
Kosovo events and Russia's position on these events, did not lie either in
the potential breach in the relationship between Russia and western
countries (through NATO) or in their possible confrontation. The core of
the debate lay instead at least in its first phase in a power struggle, in a
challenge to the worldview that the government conveyed, as well as in
the possibility of a swing from government to opposition, from the
prevailing worldview to another one. /3/
We believe the grounding of foreign policy discourse in the internal
sphere can be analysed on two levels which in fact reflect two conceptions
of foreign policy discourse. On the first level, foreign policy discourse is a
practice that belongs both to the field of International Relations and the
field of internal policy. On a second level, foreign policy discourse is also
a matrix for interpreting international events grounded in the political
imaginaire, thus making up a component of political culture,6 Russias in
this case. It can also be shown that these two levels are intricately linked
and that the grounding of foreign policy discourse in the field of politics
presupposes that it is first grounded in the political imaginaire. The use of

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Russian Foreign Policy Discourse during the Kosovo Crisis

myths in foreign policy discourse illustrates this interaction between


grounding in the imaginaire and the political struggle. /5/
The discourses produced by political professionals are therefore
determined by two broad sets of constraints. One set of constraints derives
from the logic of the political field itself, in which professionals are
competing with one another, taking stances vis--vis one another, etc. In
this respect, their utterances acquire a relational status: that is, they make
sense only in relation to other utterances issued from other positions in the
same field. (...) The second set of constraints which operates in the
production of political discourse derives, not from the field itself, but
from the relation between the field and a broader range of social positions,
groups and processes. While the political field has a considerable degree
of autonomy, it is not completely independent of other fields and forces.
Indeed, one of the distinctive characteristics of the political field is that, in
order for professionals to succeed within it, they must appeal to groups or
forces which lie outside the field. This is quite different from, for
instance, the fields of science and art, where an appeal to non-
professionals is not only unnecessary, but would in all likelihood be
counter-productive. In the political field, politicians must constantly
appeal to non-professionals in order to secure the support the credit or
political capital which will enable them to wage a successful battle
against other professionals. (1991: 27-8) /7/

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