By Françoise Thom

What strikes a historian when looking at the relationship between Russia and Europe is the unchanging illusions Russia produces in the imagination of Westerners, and Russia’s ability to dictate the conceptual frameworks within which it wants to be interpreted –and misunderstood– abroad.

This explains another mystery in the relationship between Russians and Europeans: the astonishing imperviousness of the Western partners to experience.
The successive setbacks suffered by businessmen in Russia, the snubs regularly inflicted on European statesmen, the murders, the insults to diplomats, the abusive nationalizations, the broken commitments, the violations of international law, all are instantly forgotten.
No sooner had Russia launched a war of conquest allowing it to occupy 20 percent of the territory of a neighboring state, than the United States spoke of a “reset”; that is to say, of wiping off the slate (and thus erasing a valuable experience from which the lessons should have been drawn), while France is eagerly offering Russia the means for its next war of aggression against neighboring states by selling it Mistral helicopter carriers.

Rarely has the actual misunderstanding of Russia been as great as it is now, and as fraught with disastrous consequences for Europe.

Read the whole article in Eesti Elu (in English) here and in French in Géopolitique de L’Europe here.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 3:01 PM and is filed under Estonia, Finland, Geopolitics, Latvia, Lithuania, NATO, Russia, Security, Sweden, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.