Meta-narrative and its Impact on Western Intellectual Frameworks of Russian Historical Development

Dr Paul SandersNEOMA Business School, Reims, FranceNovember 2013

The starting pointLennart Dahlgren, IKEA, on Russia market entry, 2000

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2‘Surprise was that there were

no surprises'

Source: Eurostat

Rate of return on EU FDI outward stock

0

5

10

15

20

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BRA RU IN CH ExtraEU

Av. 2003-20062006

Accounting for the East-West divide: common approaches

• Option 1: Extrospection• Post-Sovietism & structural disequilibria• "Putinism"• Geopolitics (energy, democratisation, spatial planning and 'liminality')

• Value gap• Option 2: Introspection• Stereotyping (‘Russophobia’, ‘Anti-Westernism’)

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Do narratives have an impact?

21/10/2022Psychanalyse et géopolitique : l’âme russe

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Russia narratives

Meta-Narrative• …also Grand Narrative, Meistererzählung, Grand récit

• "Historiographical or cultural output advocating a coherent and unequivocal perspective which goes on to become the dominating public orthodoxy or 'politically correct' version of history" (Sanders, 2011)

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Typology - ExamplesWhite, Metahistory Tragedy (Tocqueville)

Comedy (Ranke)

Romance (Michelet)

Satire (Burckhardt)

Jarausch, Die Meistererzählung Failure

Success

Survival

Sublimation

Victimization21/10/2022

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Impact: cognitive and evolutionary economics

Practical impact of ideas and ideology on German politicians' decision makingHeinemann and Janeba, The Globalization of tax policy: what German politicians believe, 2007

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Narratives of transition• At least 3 major economic narratives for post-Soviet Russia:

1. "Shock therapy" & "Normal country": Harvard 'boys' (Shleifer, Aslund, Treismann et al.)

2. Gradualism, criticism of global institutions and global governance (s. Stiglitz, Globalisation and its discontents)

• Both are a-historical: time horizon = 1991

3. Neo-instititutional (historical) alternative: Hedlund, Rosefielde et al.

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Sven Hedlund, Russian path dependency (2005)

Path dependency• Institutional ‘lock-in’• Multiple failures to 'break out' in order to 'catch up' (Gerschenkron, North),

• Suboptimal economic performance

Maintains:• Hypertrophic state• Unfettered despotism• Lack of property rights• Trompe l'œil tactics etc.

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Hedlund - Pipes - De Custine

• Influence of particular historical templates:• Richard Pipes: patrimonialism (Russian under the Old Regime, 1974 et al.)

• Gerschenkron: "catch-up" economics• De Custine, Russia in 1839

Deprivation hypothesis• Orthodoxy and Byzantine Caesaropapism• Mongol influence• Culling of proto-democratic alternatives (Novgorod, Pskov, Poland-Lithuania)

• Peter I: Apogee of patrimonial system• Reform era (until 1917): failure to 'break out'• Soviet Union: return to Muscovite matrix ('Second serfdom')• Perestroïka & 1990s: new failure to 'break out'• Putin: (probable) new return to Muscovite matrix 21/10/2022

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Criticism• The positivism of institutional ('path dependency') economists singles out one particular narrative of Russian political and economic development and considers this historical interpretation objective

• Clashes with post-positivist call for multiple competing narratives

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Criticism 2: Russian path dependency & historical determinism

• Path dependency and contingency are mutually self-exclusive

• 1917, Civil War, Soviet power; Perestroïka: contingency or continuity?

• Carsten Goerhke identifies four critical junctures where the outcome depended on agency (and was therefore contingent): Vladimir I, Alexander II, Lenin, Gorbachev

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Example: Minimizing the impact of WW IPath dependency: Soviet Union = full return to Muscovite patrimonial

matrix• If this argument is to prevail, then the impact of WW I, 1917 and

the Civil War on the Bolshevik project requires minimisation• Path dependency must trump contingency

• Again, this is not unanimous• Eclipse of WW I by the 'greater catastrophe' of WW II no longer consensual• Kennan: "seminal catastrophe"• Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes, Second Thirty Years' war• Bartov: Industrial killing, barbarisation and the road from Verdun

to Auschwitz • 1913 revival (Dowler, Ingold) – a missed (and misinterpreted!)

opportunity?

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Economics as a truth regime

• Path dependency….• discounts agency• Extrapolation of Western experience with Communist Russia (1917-1991)?

• Retrospective, a-historical, deterministic, static

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Path dependency focus shuts out geopolitics and economic geography

• Liberal market, illiberal geography (Lynch, Gaddy)

• Argument: if Russia grows at all, then organically, from pockets of prosperity, but first it needs to downsize.

• Indispensable state, dispensable liberal order

• >>> Head-on clash with the dominating Western meta-narrative of freedom, liberty and democratisation

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