OF TURBULENCE
POLITICS AND SOCIETY
A TIME Professor Adam Daniel Rotfeld, former Polish minister of foreign affairs and long-time director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, talks to Witold Żygulski.
S
omething hard to imagine has happened: There has been war in Europe for almost two months. Why did Vladimir Putin decide on such an unprecedented invasion? It is seemingly simple and yet unimaginable. After the end of the Cold War, the entire international security system, all its institutions, were aimed to build an order whose basic premise was to prevent a sudden and unexpected attack by one state on another member of the international community. Russia has made such an attack. However, it was neither
The Warsaw Voice
sudden nor unexpected. The Russian president had been talking about it for at least 12, maybe even 15 years. In 2014, at a meeting of the Valdai Club to which the Russians invite former politicians, analysts, and experts known to be sympathetic to Russia or at least those who try to understand it, the highlight, as usual at this forum, was Putin’s speech. The title of the debate was “The World Order: New Rules of the Game, or a Game Without Rules?” The Russian president’s main idea boiled down to this: If the new order were not to include Russia as a global power co-determining the fate of the world, then why do we need such an order? Why do we need such a world? This confirmed, in an unusually brutal or indeed simplistic way, an idea that Russia had formulated before, for example in the famous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Putin criticized the current world order as allegedly being built for a group of Western countries that are trying to impose their system of values on the rest of the international community. Meanwhile, Russia has its own original values. At a meeting with then Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski in Warsaw in 2008, Sergei Lavrov developed this idea: It is worth, Lavrov argued, going back to old, proven principles, those that worked at the Congress of Vienna (1815) for example, according to which great powers have the right to privileged zones of interest or their spheres of influence. He repeated this during several inaugural lectures at his alma mater, the Moscow State University of International Relations (MGIMO). This mindset recurred repeatedly in subsequent official Russian statements. Spring 2022
3
