1. Why has Russia failed to integrate with the outside world

The concept of governance in the earliest days after Russia declared independence was generally summarized as “Euro-Atlanticism, ” which means that Russia was a part of Europe. The country was separated from Western civilization because of the invasion of Tatar-Mongols and the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia is a Eurasian country, which is a geographical fact. But from the perspectives of historical trends, cultural advantages, value-orientation systems and civilizations, ethnic Russians belong to European nationalities. Based on that, Russia should focus on the space over the entire Europe-Atlantic area including the US. People who believed in Euro-Atlanticism thought that the nation's top diplomatic priority is to join the Western civilization as soon as possible rather than re-ally with the former Soviet states. The aim of this policy is to turn Russia into a “partner” or an “ally” of the West, making the country a developed nation, with the symbol of democratization, de-ideologicalization,demilitarization, as well as non-globalization in its foreign policy.

Chinese scholars summarized this foreign policy as “leaning to one side.” The Conception of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, approved by former Russian president Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin on April 30, 1993, was the official document that represented the country's “leaning-to-one-side” diplomatic policy, as well as the first document on Russia's foreign strategy. The document stated that the Western countries were the driving force for the development of the world's civilization in the future, and would play an important role in realizing Russia's revitalization. Integrating with the West was the highest priority of Moscow's foreign policy. As Andrey Vladimirovich Kozyrev, then Russian foreign minister, once said, Russia needed to establish its relations with the Western nations as their partner and ally based on shared democratic values. It is worth noting that, during this period, Moscow mainly viewed the issues of the Commonwealth of the Independent States (CIS) from the perspective of regional stability and the interests of overseas Russians. However, how to maintain its dominance within the CIS while keeping its major-power status was not mentioned. It was mainly because of its “leaning-to-one-side” pro-West policy. By then, Russia believed that the approach to becoming a great power was to join the international organizations led by the West. When it comes to the issues about the CIS, which embodies Russia's core interests, Moscow was even convinced that interventions from the US could help Russia maintain regional stability.

The period lasted until NATO decided on enlargement in 1994. Russia believed that after the end of the Cold War, a new pattern of security in Europe failed to take shape. It thus proposed to build a collective security system based on the framework of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), in order to avoid collapse of the cooperative group. But the proposal was voted down during a meeting of the OSCE in Budapest in December 1994. After a panel of experts was formed to make rules and plans for NATO enlargement on December 1, 1994 in a NATO foreign ministers' meeting,Yeltsin resolutely opposed the expansion plan at the OSCE leaders' summit on December 5. He believed that the decision was a signal of distrust and would put Europe into the danger of cold peace. This was the landmark event of Russia's giving up its “leaning-to-one-side” policy.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia needs to rebuild its ties with the outside world, which is a vital part of the nation's transition and development. In the first few years, both Russia and the external world were at a crucial historical point. What has made Russia fail to join the West eventually in December 1994? As far as I am concerned, five factors have changed the mutual cognition between Russia and the West, which finally led Moscow to give up its pro-West policy.

To begin with, it was the enlargement of NATO that made Russia realize the contradictions between democratic ideology and geopolitical interests. After the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Soviet Union sent armed forces to Lithuania to intervene the latter's struggle for independence. Given the incident and the hardline approach of the Soviet Union in the August Coup in 1991, concerns emerged among Eastern European countries, which were just freed from domination of the Soviet Union. In the light of this, they actively asked for the eastward expansion of NATO. Facing the rapid changes in the Eastern European security pattern, the US, as the leader of NATO, started to reset the positioning of the organization after the end of the Cold War. Until 1993, the administration of Bill Clinton has yet to make up its mind yet. On the one hand, Washington worried that Russia would feel isolated, while on the other, the White House had to consider the possibility of bringing internal conflicts among Eastern European nations into NATO.

The divergences over NATO enlargement in the West have as a matter of fact mirrored the fundamental problem over how to define the international status and the national identity of Russia. Therefore, Russia's domestic policies and changes of its political thoughts were also profoundly affected by NATO expansion. On that score, NATO enlargement is a crucial issue, in which a single move might influence the big picture. It had thus brought huge impacts on Russia's concept of governance. The outcome of NATO enlargement has also led to a long-term debate over whether the West lost Russia due to the former's policy mistakes. Therefore, it was until January 10 to 11, 1994, the Summit Meeting of NATO Heads of State and Government finally endorsed the Brussels Summit Declaration, Partnership for Peace: Invitation Document and Partnership for Peace: Framework Document, which affirmed the commitment to NATO enlargement, in Brussels, the capital city of Belgium.

The Bosnian War, which broke out in March 1992, indicated the different interest demands between Russia and the West over geopolitical security on the European continent. The war was not only an ethnic conflict that emerged after the end of the bipolar structure, but also the largest ethnic war since the end of the Cold War on the European continent. The game among the US, Europe and Russia during the Bosnian War reflected the different resolutions between Russia and the West over security issues in Europe. In the meantime, it made both Russia and the West realize their different interests in the post-Cold War era.

The regime crisis in Russia also matters. The implementation of the “shock therapy, ” a set of radical economic reforms, proved to be ineffective. The country's political development was also severely influenced by the crisis. All that Yeltsin could choose was to keep the regime stable in the first place. However, Russia's then vice president Alexander Vladimirovich Rutskoy and chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet Ruslan Khasbulatov had doubts about the Yeltsin-raised “leaning-to-one-side” policy and the “shock therapy.”Their suspicions led to a series of divergences in Russia's development mode, political path, as well as diplomacy. These differences were displayed during the process of the publication of the new constitution, and eventually triggered fierce conflicts between legislative bodies and administrative machinery over the distribution of power. It ended with the October Revolution. The huge pressure that was piled up by the opposition parties left Yeltsin with no choice but to rethink his domestic and foreign policies.

The forth factor is the 1993 State Duma election. By the end of 1993, the“Zhirinovsky Phenomenon” emerged in Duma elections. Western countries started to worry about the possible emergence of Russia's Weimar syndrome. In December 1993, the Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky-led Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which was by then not taken seriously, surprisingly won 70 seats in Duma elections. In contrast, the Choice of Russia, led by Yegor Timurovich Gaidar, who was under high expectations from Yeltsin, only gained 96 seats. The radical political forces who supported then president and the ruling party suffered a crushing defeat. And the influence of the LDPR and the left-wing opposition party, the Communist Party, increased evidently. The new parliament started to run on January 11, 1994, and the reshuffle of the government was completed on January 20. The radical democratic forces then became the minority in both the parliament and the government.

The unexpected victory of Zhirinovsky made the West begin to compare Russia, a country with a sluggish economy but rising nationalism, with “Weimar Germany.” The emergence of “Zhirinovsky Phenomenon” showed that if Russia was going to develop into an empire again, it could still bring serious threat to this region despite its weak national strength. Such hypothesis was called the issue of “Weimar Russia.” It means there was a chance that Russia would revitalize its honor of empire by changing its policy toward ultra-nationalism even when it suffered from economic and political troubles and anger of shame, especially by restructuring and exercising sovereignty over components of the old empire.

The last factor is the first Chechen War. The outbreak of the war in Chechnya in December 1994 made the West start to be on guard against the revival of Russia's imperial mind-set. The issue of Chechnya was a provocative factor that caused conflicts of interest between Yeltsin and democrats. The puzzle put an end to cooperation between the two sides. More importantly, the war magnified xenophobia in Russian society. Strong xenophobia was created due to the worsening economic crisis, people's dissatisfaction with and disappointment toward the ruling party, military conflicts among different ethnic groups, and large-scale waves of immigrants into Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. According to a survey in February 1994, 75 percent of Russians had such an emotion. Half of the interviewees thought that Russian people were treated unfairly – “others took what they could from us and then claimed it was all Russia's fault.” Moreover, 15 to 20 percent of those respondents showed an anti-West mentality. They believed that the foreigners, who planned the reform that was only beneficial for Western countries, robbed their wealth. In addition, people being xenophobic believed it was those different races that caused Russia's misery. Those non-Russians held too much power and abused it. No matter how the first Chechen War ended, it intensified xenophobia in Russia. It can be argued that the issue of Chechnya has special meaning in the relationship between Russia and the outside world. For instance, when the second Chechen War broke out in 1999, the West used it as an excuse to put pressure on Moscow. One of the reasons was to isolate the financial oligarchy that was formed during the latter period of Yeltsin's presidency. At that time, Western countries generally thought that if Russia was not to change its regime, its political authorities would become more corrupt and the nation would once again be led by an autocratic regime.

The five factors stated above triggered changes in Russia's domestic situation, which in turn forced Yeltsin to slow down his pace of reform and to assuage people's discontent, in order to fight against the opposition forces. In the field of diplomacy, Yeltsin began to focus on the interests of Russia and the major-power mentality among his people. In the first Russian version of the State of the Union address in February 1994, Yeltsin emphasized that the strategic mission of the nation was the reconstruction of a united national authority and the establishment of a national identity. He placed the idea of attaching great importance to national interests that could easily gain favor from the opposition parties in the first place, and emphasized building up a strong Russia. Against the backdrop of continuous economic crises and the rise of opposition forces, Yeltsin tried to consolidate the regime by highlighting national sentiment. The speech, which set a tone for the country's outlook, laid a foundation for the establishment of Russia's new international status. Head of the Party of Russian Unity and Accord by then, Sergei Shakhrai, claimed that Yeltsin has for the first time in history planted a seed of the concept over establishing Russia's national status.