ISMAIL LAGARDIEN | Historical anxieties shape Western fears of Russian aggression

Former Italian football player Mario Balotelli once revealed a T-shirt under his team jersey with the slogan “Why Always Me?” Balotelli did attract a lot of attention early in his career, most of it for his silly pranks off the field of play.

Several weeks ago I wrote down Balotelli’s question, replacing “me” with “Russia”. Why always Russia? There are many ways to answer that question. It really depends on how you want to arrange facts: on recency or ideological biases or on what you consider important.

In some ways it is difficult to make sense of North Atlantic Russophobia, especially since they share such deep social, cultural and historical ties (a transatlantic lineage) that run from North America to Yekaterinburg, near where the European continent ends.

North Atlantic community concerns may have much to do with paranoia that began with an 18^th century political forgery, the apocryphal “Will of Peter the Great”, which supposedly threatened to subjugate Europe. With the caveat that Ukraine has not yet been made part of the North Atlantic community, it seems Russia has done more for Western Europe over the past 200 years than the other way around.

Beside the Soviet capture of Berlin in 1945, the Russians have never actually invaded Western Europe. Tsar Alexander I joined Europeans in Paris to force Napoleon’s abdication, but there was no Russian invasion or territorial expansion. Yet the Europeans always imagine Russia as an invading force. I think the British media gave the world the term “jingoism” precisely through scare-mongering of Russian “barbarians” during the 1800s.

None of this is to deny Russia’s expansionism in central Asia, and especially Afghanistan, during the late 1800s and in the 1980s. As it goes, many people in Africa and Asia remain wary of Moscow, as they are of the US, Britain and France. Moscow, like London, Washington and Paris, has funded subversive activities worldwide for decades.

The point is that Russia has never invaded Western Europe. The closest it has come to encroaching on the border of an Atlantic Community country was when the Soviet Union placed missiles on Cuba in response to US missile bases (equipped with thermonuclear warheads) being placed in Turkey.

Sweden invaded Russia in 1708, and in 1854, Britain and France led a coalition that invaded the Crimean Peninsula. Napoleon Bonaparte, as European as they have come, invaded Russia in 1812. During World War 2, Germany, Finland and Hungary also invaded Russia.

My personal biases make it difficult to say anything positive about politics and society of the Tsarist era. The poverty, inequality and abuse were abhorrent. Yet, we may consider the “positive” roles successive Moscow regimes played in protecting conservative monarchies based on “Christian principles”. These were positive if you believe “Christian principles” are necessarily a good thing.

In 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat, Tsar Alexander I collaborated with Austria’s Emperor Francis and King Frederick William III of Prussia to protect Christian principles. The Tsarists were called on again to stabilise European monarchies from uprisings in Spain (1823) and Hungary (1845).

I feel obliged to reference Russian literary contributions. A few years ago, in Bad Ems on the banks of the Lahn River, Germany, someone sat me down and explained the long, inspirational relationship Fyodor Dostoevsky had with the town. Other great Russian writers and thinkers, from Leo Tolstoy to Ivan Turgenev, found a home and inspiration in Western Europe.

By one (French) account, Russian literature represented a morally pure alternative to French naturalism. I’m not quite sure what that means, but it was what the French diplomat and writer Eugene-Melchior De Vogue wrote (about the Russian novel) in 1886.

Until the Europeans completely make Ukraine part of the North Atlantic community, and if history is a yardstick, there really is little to support the idea that Russia intends to invade or “subjugate” Western Europe. I’m still not sure this answers the question “Why Always Russia?” though.

If, however, you believe in ideas about “evil empires” or “ancient hatreds”, and as a corollary you believe hateful people can never be good, and that good people can never be bad, you may have an easy answer to the question.

You might, of course, simply not like Russia, nor Mario Balotelli for that matter.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank and the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.