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From Assertiveness to Aggression. 2014 as a Watershed Year for Russian Foreign and Security Policy
Abstract and Figures
2014 is the year in which Russia's growing assertiveness morphed into aggression. This report uses some existing and builds a few new datasets in order to chronicle what actually happened during this year.
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Bu çalışmada, Avrupa Birliği'nin (AB) demokrasi teşviki gündeminde demokrasinin bir gerekliliği olarak kalkınma unsurunu teşvik edip etmediği hususu AB'nin siyasi/demokratik koşulluluk ilkesini bölgelere ve ülkelere göre seçici bir şekilde uygulayışı ve demokrasi ile istikrar arasında yaşadığı ikilem çerçevesinde incelenmektedir. İktisadi kalkınma ile demokratikleşme arasında bir korelasyon olduğunu savunan, Lipset hipotezi olarak anılan ve modernleşme teorilerinin kaynağını oluşturan yaklaşıma göre; demokratikleşmenin itici gücü aşağıdan yukarıya bir süreç ile devletlerin iç faktörlerine dayanmaktadır. Daha yüksek ekonomik gelişmişlik düzeyinin, daha iyi eğitilmiş bir nüfus ve daha geniş bir orta sınıf ile değerlerin gelenekselden moderne doğru evrilmesi ve siyasete daha fazla katılımın talep edilmesi ile demokratikleşmeye olumlu etkide bulunması bu yaklaşımın doğrusal çıkış noktasını oluşturmaktadır. Bu çalışmada, ilk olarak demokrasi-kalkınma arasındaki ilişki sosyo-ekonomik gelişmişlik düzeyinin demokrasiye geçiş ya da demokrasinin pekişmesi için gerekli bir etmen olarak görülmesi bağlamında teorik olarak ele alınmaktadır. Daha sonra 1990'lı yılların başından itibaren demokrasiyi teşvik edici bir aktör olarak evrilen AB'nin demokrasi teşviki geçmişi ile politikalarının genel hatları çizilmekte ve AB'nin demokrasi anlayışında kalkınma unsurunun yerinin tespit edilmesi amaçlanmaktadır.
"National security starts with strategic anticipation: what are the risks for the Dutch national security? How can the Netherlands prepare for this, and what choices and investments are needed in order to do so?
The HCSS Strategic Monitor analyses global trends in cooperation, confrontation and conflict, and identifies the most important security risks for the Netherlands.
Watch an introductory video to the study below.
The key findings of the report are:
The wheel of fortune spins downwards: the European security situation remains worrisome as Europe faces an array of security threats.
The tensions between the West and Russia continue unabated. Russian military modernization, rhetoric of Russian leaders, as well as assertive and at times aggressive behavior, form a substantial threat to the national security of the Netherlands and its allies.
This observation is not an incident but a trend: the assertivitis virus flourishes among great powers anno 2016. There is a real possibility that an interstate crisis might occur. This kind of crisis is remembered by the previous generation all too well from the Cold War.
The persistent conflicts in the Middle East generate humanitarian and economic consequences of immense proportions. War and instability in this region directly affect Europe and the Netherlands. Refugee flows caused by these conflicts are putting pressure on Europe. The fusion, contamination, and spillover of conflicts in this region, complemented by the mobilizing powers of ISIS, are feeding radicalization and terrorism in European capitals.
The stagnation of the New Peace continues. In particular the number of mayor conflicts – with more than 1000 casualties – has increased significantly. The number of direct war victims has risen from 18,000 in 2005 to 125,000 in 2014 (most recent data available), the most lethal year recorded since 1994. Nevertheless, the number of casualties from war remains under the average of 180,000 a year during the Cold War period.
Conflict projections provide little reason for optimism in the near future: the HCSS models predict the protraction - and in some cases deterioration – of several conflicts, especially in the MENA (Middle East & North Africa) region and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Different security challenges demand different responses. Capacity in the area of collective security and deterrence, as well as instruments in the domain of crisis management and crisis diplomacy, are of essential importance in addressing threats from the East. Instability in the East and South-East of Europe require other means and capabilities, comprising of the containment of conflicts and conflict actors, humanitarian aid, and – at a certain moment – support in the construction stability in these areas.
Nevertheless, the wheel of fortune spins upwards as well: the human condition continues to improve.
People worldwide are better educated, better fed, healthier, freer, and more tolerant. Individual empowerment increases societal resilience, while the ICT revolution enables new forms of open, decentralized cooperation. These positive trends impact our security and prosperity as much as the negative, even if they get less attention in the press or policy debates. Investing in these actual sources of security remains of pivotal importance, especially in this period that is characterized by rapid and (partly) volatile developments.
The wheel of fortune goes up and down, round and round, faster and faster. The risk-space is deepening, broadening, and tilting. A reassessment of the Dutch contribution in the area of peace and security is therefore imperative."
Based on a number of old and new datasets, this report finds evidence of a pathological condition in international relations it calls ‘assertivitis’:an affliction characterized by an almost pathological (from a Western European point of view) inclination to assert one’s power, especially in negative ways. We find one case – China – of developed assertivitis and one – Russia – of inchoate, but recidivist and acute assertivitis. We find another great power – the United States – that has been suffering from chronic assertivitis for an extended period of time but seems to have embarked upon the path of (a modest and uneven) recovery. And we find two Great Powers – India and the European Union – that appear by and large asymptomatic and do not (yet?) seem to be suffering from this affliction. The report ends with a number of policy recommendation of how the international community might deal with this pathology - - also drawn from the literature on school bullying.
Huge amounts of news items are being published from various sources around the world. Our interest in this paper is from the perspective of peace keeping organizations such as United Nations and Red Cross that can benefit from information aggregated from different sources to make important decisions. GDELT project is one such source where data about conflicts is aggregated from various newspaper sources around the globe. This paper makes three contributions to the analysis of peace and conflict data available on GDELT. First, the paper presents two case studies to investigate whether the data extracted from news items in fact captures the global events accurately. The case studies considered were the Sri Lankan civil war, and the 2006 Fijian coup. Second, in these case studies, the study demonstrates how change point analysis can be used to identify important trends which will be valuable for making decisions. Third, based on experience gained through the exploration of these two case studies, it proposes a conceptual model of a multi-level analysis in the form of a dashboard system that would be of interest to different stakeholders.
News about the European Union (EU) looks different in different countries at different points in time. This study investigates explanations for cross-national and over-time variation in news media coverage of EU affairs drawing on large-scale media content analyses of newspapers and television news in the EU-15 (1999), EU-25 (2004) and EU-27 (2009) in relation to European Parliament (EP) elections. The analyses focus in particular on explanatory factors pertaining to media characteristics and the political elites. Results show that national elites play an important role for the coverage of EU matters during EP election campaigns. The more strongly national parties are divided about the EU in combination with overall more negative positions towards the EU, the more visible the news. Also, increases in EU news visibility from one election to the next and the Europeanness of the news are determined by a country's elite positions. The findings are discussed in light of the EU's alleged communication deficit.
Russian military leaders are hoping that restoration of the imperial-era institution of chaplains and the Soviet-era institution of political officers will help them to deal with serious morale and discipline problems in the ranks.
The military reforms introduced, with mixed success, by Anatoly Serdyukov have left the Russian military with enormous problems and are now being dismantled by Serdyukov's successor.
At a time when most Western militaries are contracting and making room for budgetary cuts, the Russian military is going in the opposite direction. Anxious to make its defense capabilities more relevant to the contemporary security environment, the Russian political leadership has pushed for its military to modernize. But many substantial hurdles stand in the way.
This study points to worrying trends in how far two great power contenders, Russia and China, have been willing to go to assert themselves in the international arena. It concludes that increased willingness to resort to brinkmanship has heightened the danger of a ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’-type event that could spiral into uncontrollable escalation.
Based on a several unique new datasets that were specifically assembled for this project, as well as a number of different analytical tools and methods, this study provides quantitative evidence that great power assertiveness has risen significantly over the past few decades. China’s assertiveness has increased most sharply (by about 50% since 1979), but remains at a lower level than Russia’s, which has risen more modestly yet still shows a marked increase since President Putin’s third term in office. Second, both countries’ assertive deeds surpass their rhetoric, which should be a cause for concern: they walk the walk even more than they talk the talk. This applies to both the military, political and economic domains. However, one positive conclusion is that non-confrontational forms of assertiveness continue to outweigh the aggressive actions of both countries. And finally, China increasingly flexes its military muscle. Russia presents a more mixed picture, although here too the Russian baseline remains significantly higher than the Chinese one.
Following the Russia-Georgia War in August 2008, Russia’s conventional Armed Forces were subjected to a far reaching and unpredictable reform. Although the Armed Forces were long overdue reform, previous efforts rapidly failed for a variety of reasons including institutional inertia, in-fighting within the military elite and a lack of consensus on the goals and targets of such reform. The reforms of 2008-12 were therefore unprecedented since the creation of Russia’s Armed Forces in 1992 following the disintegration of the USSR in late 1991; major changes were actually implemented. Yet, the reforms that followed were haphazard, poorly implemented and frequently experienced setbacks, reversals and an overall lack of coordinated policy efforts. These issues are examined in the following paper, exploring the roots of Russian defense planning weaknesses, and the numerous policy zigzags of the reforms to the structure of the Armed Forces, officer downsizing, NCO development and many other issues within a political-military culture that actually mitigates time-phased and fully worked-out planning cycles. Moscow’s blindness to the utility of reliable military statistics will ensure continued ‘blind planning’ and institutional guesswork until obsessive secrecy and state level corruption give way to more scientific approaches to forming, implementing and managing such strategic level change within the country’s defense and security structures.