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CIAO DATE: 01/06
Russian Foreign Policy Discourse during the Kosovo Crisis: Internal Struggles and the Political Imaginaire
Guillaume Colin
December 2004
Abstract
The Kosovo crisis gave rise to a domestic political crisis in Russia. The NATO bombings called into question the efficiency of Russian foreign policy, which was against them, challenging the worldview that the government conveyed, thereby reinforcing the communist anti-establishment vision. The present article, by analysing the press conferences given by both the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Communist Party, argues that each of the two narratives aimed to construct and impose (or defend) its own worldview and dividing principles of the world. In both narratives, this struggle was backed up using very strong political identity myths — namely Russia's relation to the West and the memory of the Second World War — that are referred to in opposite ways. The Kosovo example allows us to highlight the stakes and themes that work their way into Russian foreign policy discourse and contribute to exploiting foreign policy issues in Russian domestic political debate, and also cast light on the distorting effects caused by this instrumentalization.
On a more theoretical ground, this article argues for the need to dissociate foreign policy discourse analysis from foreign policy analysis itself insofar as foreign policy discourse does not relate solely to foreign policy. In particular, it is suggested that to fully understand foreign policy discourse, its two-level grounding in domestic political struggle as well as in political imaginaire must be taken into account, these two being articulated around 'the symbolic struggle for the conservation or transformation of the (social) world through the conservation or transformation of the vision of the (social) world and of the principles of division of this world' (Bourdieu, 1991: 181). Consequently the insight into foreign policy discourse that is proposed in this article uses theoretical tools that do not belong exclusively to the IR theoretical arsenal - namely, Bourdieu's notion of political field and Barthes' of myth - and that are rarely referred to in IR works, even if our conception of discourse is indebted to work by the 'Danish school' of IR on foreign policy discourse analysis.
