The great divorce: Why Russia must turn away from Europe

The great divorce: Why Russia must turn away from Europe

Western Europe’s hostility should push Russia to rethink its identity, strengthen deterrence and develop its Eurasian roots
In Russia, many people, driven by lingering Europhilia and habits formed during the second half of the 20th century, when Western Europe enjoyed a period of relative peace following its defeat, continue to look for signs of its ‘recovery’ and ways to restore relations.
There are forces within Russia that would advocate overcoming the current hostility and there are decent people in Western Europe, too, even if they are increasingly marginalized. But the causes of this outbreak of desperate Russophobia run deep and cannot easily be remedied and overcoming them may require the complete defeat and dismantling of much of the current European elite. But achieving that goal could come at too high a cost.
I shall attempt to analyze the causes of the almost unprecedented hostility towards Russia among the elites of most European countries and offer recommendations for Russian policy towards Western Europe.
I have written more than once that Peter the Great’s journey towards the rest of Europe, which initially brought many benefits, including helping to create some of the world’s greatest literature and music and modernizing the armed forces, continued for a century and a half longer than was necessary or beneficial.
For many centuries, Europe was the principal source of evil in the world, offering endless wars, including two world wars within a single generation, repeated genocides, colonialism, racism and other calamities.
For Russians who grew up in the shadow of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, and who internalized a love of Europe, it’s not easy to acknowledge this simple truth and act accordingly.
Russian Europhilia was greatly reinforced when Western Europe, having been overwhelmed by the torrent of evil it had unleashed, became relatively peaceful for a time during the second half of the 20th century. In the USSR, Europhilia was fueled by the everyday hardships of Soviet socialism, contrasted with the far greater material prosperity of the western part of the half-continent.
There are many reasons for the current anti-Russian hysteria. The main one is the all-encompassing, multi-layered crisis that has gripped the western part of Europe and this crisis is particularly painful after decades of relative prosperity and, above all, the euphoria of victory that swept the West following the collapse of the USSR.
That euphoria temporarily obscured the mounting signs of crisis in European economies and societies, which had already become apparent by the end of the 1960s, when a mood of protest was beginning to take hold. And then a miracle happened as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc provided hundreds of millions of eager new consumers and millions of cheap workers.
From the 2000s onwards, these problems resurfaced with renewed force. A decade later, most Western European countries had fallen into stagnation as inequality began to worsen once again. Living standards for much of the population began to decline, while competitors started pulling ahead, not only the US and China, but also many countries of the Global South.
Euphoria gave way to a sense of failure and European elites are now trying to drown out that feeling by fueling hostility towards Russia.
At the same time, from the end of the 20th century, the consequences of the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s began to make themselves felt. The flow of resources that Europe had extracted from the rest of the world since the 16th century, and upon which its prosperity and cultural, military, scientific and technological leadership had largely been built, began to dry up.
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