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
Ruska spoljna politika tokom Kosovske krize
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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/