Federico Bordonaro

Bruce Pannier writes on Gazprom for RFERL — the analysis contains bits of my interview for the Radio:

It’s been a tough year for Gazprom, Russia’s state-controlled gas giant.

Just a year ago, Russia’s state-owned gas giant Gazprom was the third-most valuable company in the world, worth some $350 billion. Now, it has shrunk by two-thirds to about $120 billion, declining to the world’s 40th-largest company, according to “The Moscow Times” on May 27.

And the company appears set to fall another notch or two, thanks to a ruling by Russian antimonopoly authorities on June 2 that Gazprom must share its export pipelines with independent gas producers.

An interview for RFERL on the evolution of European-Central Asian diplomatic and commercial ties.

Just a few years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine an official from Turkmenistan visiting Brussels to discuss exporting natural gas directly to the EU.

But when Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov meets with European Union officials in Brussels, discussing his country’s participation in projects to bring natural gas to Europe will be high on his agenda.

Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have traditionally been the most resistant of the Central Asian states to Western influence, but both are increasingly showing an interest in breaking that mold.

RFERL’s “Power Vertical” delivered an interesting comment on Stratfor’s geopolitical analysis of the global recession.

The report begins with statistics showing how the global recession is affecting various countries and then moves on to an interesting, geography-based explanation of why the recession is, so far, more than four times worse in Russia (change in GDP of negative 9.5 percent over the last 12 months) than it is in the United States (a decline of 2.6 percent).

Stratfor’s analysis of the United States – how its geography, including the world’s largest mass of arable land and a generous inland waterway system that promotes open and cheap domestic trade, produced a resilient and flexible political and economic system – is intriguing reading.

Geography may not be “destiny”, but it certainly has an influential say about it…

As Peter Zeihan wrote in the Stratfor’s report:

The most important aspect of the United States is not simply its sheer size, but the size of its usable land. Russia and China may both be similar-sized in absolute terms, but the vast majority of Russian and Chinese land is useless for agriculture, habitation or development. In contrast, courtesy of the Midwest, the United States boasts the world’s largest contiguous mass of arable land — and that mass does not include the hardly inconsequential chunks of usable territory on both the West and East coasts.

Second is the American maritime transport system. The Mississippi River, linked as it is to the Red, Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee rivers, comprises the largest interconnected network of navigable rivers in the world. In the San Francisco Bay, Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound/New York Bay, the United States has three of the world’s largest and best natural harbors. The series of barrier islands a few miles off the shores of Texas and the East Coast form a water-based highway — an Intracoastal Waterway — that shields American coastal shipping from all but the worst that the elements can throw at ships and ports.

This reminds me about Spykman’s lesson: Size per se is not strength, but potential strength. Size, topography, and location, if taken together and analysed in their mutual relations, allow an observer to “get the really big things right enough”, as Colin S. Gray said about Mackinder’s geopolitical works.

“The number of people who consider French membership of the EU a good thing has fallen from a peak of 74 per cent in 1987 to 47 per cent last year”, Ben Hall reports in today’s Financial Times. “The reluctance of the parties to debate during the campaign reflects how French enthusiasm for Europe has soured into cynicism and indifference in the past decade”.
Such a process, however, is unfolding since some years. In 2005, after French voters rejected the proposed E.U. Constitution, this author wrote that political Europe was experiencing a paradox, in which “sovereignism” was gaining influence - particularly in France:

The historical context in which pro-sovereignty movements are gaining strength is a fairly paradoxical one. For instance, it is incorrect to say that “Europe does not exist” due to the result of the recent referenda, an argument that many in this movement are making. On the contrary, the European main states such as France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the “core” of the integration process — obtained, at least formally, the strategic goals they had set in the early nineties. The E.U. now has a common currency, functioning political institutions like the European Council, the European Commission, and the European Parliament, in addition to security and defense assets such as the Political Committee for Security, the European Headquarters, a secretary general for foreign policy, and even a Rapid Reaction Force.

At the same time, this complex political, economic and military framework does not work in the way some Europeanists dreamt it would, and the E.U. simply has not become what French visionary personalities such as former French President François Mitterrand wanted. In particular, today’s European Union is neither the source of a distinctly European vision of world politics, nor the political tool necessary to project French power in the age of globalization. If the international system is shifting from unipolarity to a proto-multipolar structure, it is because of China’s rise as a great power, and not because of the European Union. The E.U.’s dramatic division in front of the Iraqi crisis of 2002-2003 was the crucial proof of its weakness as a real global player.

The European paradox is exactly this: the E.U.’s official goals have been reached, but the outcome is quite different from what its main supporters expected 15 years ago.

Moreover, French citizens perceived that an enlarged Europe was not a multiplier of power and prosperity, but a huge market that exacerbated competition, wiping out the welfare state, i.e., the core of the so-called “European social model”.

Since then, the E.U. and the most pro-European parties in France have been unable to reverse the process. Enthusiasm for European integration has remained weak. However, no real alternative to the current path of integrationist policies has been effectively proposed. If the supranational model is in a crisis, so is the “Europe of nation states” advocated by the sovereignists. As a consequence, European elections are perceived as a not-so-crucial event by French (and European) citizens.

E’ uscito il mio saggio su La Russia e l’Estero Vicino: da Eltsin a Putin, per la rivista “Ricerche Storiche”, edita da Polistampa.
Uno stralcio dal paragrafo introduttivo:

L’idea dell’esistenza di un “estero vicino russo” nasce in concomitanza con la fine dell’Unione Sovietica. È direttamente connessa al problema di quali rapporti politico-diplomatici, strategico-militari ed economici instaurare fra la Federazione Russa e gli altri stati ex sovietici.
L’espressione ближнее зарубежье (Blizhneye Zarubezh’e) è composta dall’aggettivo blizhneye (vicino) e dal sostantivo zarubezh’e che significa letteralmente “oltre confine”. In altri termini, designa “i paesi oltre confine ma prossimi”, in contrapposizione all’estero “lontano”. In un articolo del 15 gennaio del 1992 sul quotidiano Izvestiya si menzionava non a caso un “estero a portata di mano” .
L’allora ministro degli esteri russo, Andrei Kozyrev, nell’agosto del 1992 si espresse in modo critico verso ogni tentazione di Mosca di “minacciare” i paesi ex sovietici nel “cosiddetto estero vicino” , in particolare in Ucraina, al fine di mantenerli strettamente legati alla Federazione Russa.
Da parte sua, un osservatore statunitense della nascita del concetto di “Estero Vicino”, Paul Goble del Carnegie Endowment, affermò nel gennaio del 1992 che l’espressione rivestiva “un significato politico ben più che geografico o demografico” e indicava soprattutto “la difficoltà” dei politici russi a considerare i paesi ex sovietici come nazioni “realmente indipendenti”. Ancor più importante, secondo Goble e altri analisti americani, era il fatto che le repubbliche ex sovietiche appena nate fossero l’oggetto della “pretesa russa” di alcuni speciali diritti in campo politico ed economico. In altri termini, il concetto di Estero Vicino designava la volontà di Mosca di delimitare una vera e propria “sfera d’influenza” russa post-sovietica.
Al contempo, cominciava però ad affacciarsi anche un secondo significato di Estero Vicino, più geografico e demografico, ma anch’esso strettamente legato a quello politico: l’espressione avrebbe indicato le repubbliche ex sovietiche dove vivevano ancora circa 25 milioni di russi , che Mosca avrebbe dovuto “difendere” dalla pressione dei nuovi nazionalismi.
Emergevano quindi, già nel 1992, tutti gli elementi che avrebbero reso il concetto di Estero Vicino un perno della nuova politica estera russa: quelli politici, connessi sia alla questione dello status di grande potenza russa, sia al problema della sicurezza strategica del nuovo stato; quelli economici, con la definizione di nuovi rapporti commerciali ed energetici; e quelli legati all’identità russa e al rapporto fra Mosca e le comunità russe oltre confine.