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27.06.07
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Getting Used To A Stiff Upper Lip
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By Shaun Walker
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Russians Expect Few Changes as Gordon Brown Takes Over
Today a new era of British-Russian relations will begin. Gordon Brown will become prime minister of the UK, 10 years after Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street, and 14 years after the alleged deal the two men made at the Granita restaurant in London that Brown would temporarily step aside for a Blair premiership. Brown will inherit a relationship with Moscow shrouded in an atmosphere of mutual distrust only heightened by the recent Alexander Litvinenko fallout.
“In recent years there has been very little positive in the relationship with the exception of business,” said Oksana Antonenko, senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Relations between the two leaders have remained reasonably cordial, but with the ascent of Brown, a change of faces will start. Although for about nine months, Brown will have to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2008 Putin will be replaced, probably by either Sergei Ivanov or Dmitry Medvedev. And in 2009, a British general election raises the possibility that a Conservative government led by David Cameron could come to power.
It seems a long time since the first days of New Labour Britain – the heady spring of 1997, when the UK rejoiced that the years of Conservative sleaze were over, and Tony Blair’s permasmile had yet to be tested by the various pitfalls of sticking the course as a U.S. ally. The change comes roughly in the middle of a three-year period in which several of the world’s key leaders – the people who have shaped world politics for the past decade – will be replaced by newcomers. Gone are Gerhard Schroeder, Silvio Berlusconi and Jacques Chirac, and by the end of 2008 they will be joined in the ex-leaders’ club by Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush.
The battle to succeed Blair was over before it started – British politics has seen none of the intrigue and changing fortunes of the delicately balanced and mysteriously judged Ivanov versus Medvedev contest to take over from Vladimir Putin. It’s been clear to everyone for several years that Brown was the successor in waiting. Even though a senior civil servant recently described Brown as a “Stalinist” – worse even than the epithets the British media come up with for Putin – a serious challenger never emerged, nor even a Sergei Sobyanin or Vladimir Yakunin dark horse who might have threatened to snatch the Holy Grail from Brown at the eleventh hour.
Yet despite the common knowledge that Brown would be taking over, little is known about his likely foreign policy choices. The decade he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, immersed in domestic politics, has given few clues as to how he will operate on a global stage and little suggestion that he will relish the role of international statesman in the same way that Blair did.
Aside from a high-profile drive to encourage African debt relief, Brown has kept his international cards close to his chest – if indeed he has any cards. What is known is that he’s somewhat skeptical of the European Union and an admirer of the United States, although he is likely to adopt a more nuanced approach to President Bush. “It's clear that Brown is not going to be another Sarkozy with big plans for the EU - he's known to be a Eurosceptic,” said Antonenko.
This could perhaps pave the way for a more bilateral approach to Russia, building ties outside the framework of the EU and thus skirting the anti-Russian feeling among the newer EU members such as Poland and the Baltic States. “The way Gordon Brown builds the UK’s relations with Russia strongly depends on how he chooses to develop UK-EU relations,” said Maria Ordzhonikidze, secretary general of the EU-Russia Centre in Brussels. “Russia always prefers bilateral relations over the necessity to balance its position against the 27-strong EU.”
Nevertheless, no major breakthroughs are expected in the immediate future. “It's most likely that he'll simply do nothing for a while,” said Antonenko. “He is a cautious man, and it's very unlikely that there will be any major new initiatives on Russia.”
The current tension and mistrust in Russia’s relations with the UK is very different from the early years of Putin's presidency, when relations between the two countries were largely friendly. Whereas it took Russian moral and political support in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to bring the United States and Russia closer together, relations between Blair and Putin were good from the start – the two leaders were both relatively young and dynamic characters in their political environments, and both wanted to bring serious changes to the way their countries were governed.
In the first two years of Putin's presidency, there were nine bilateral meetings between the British and Russian leaders, and warm words were exchanged frequently. Although prior to Sept. 11 and subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq, New Labour was still following its much trumpeted “ethical foreign policy” doctrine. Blair, unlike other Western leaders, did not attempt to lecture Putin about Chechnya, but instead made it clear that Britain wanted to be Russia’s close partner.
“When Putin first came to power, Blair backed him from the start, while some other EU leaders remained wary of him,” said Antonenko. “It was Blair and Berlusconi who first developed the NATO-Russia Council.”
The Litvinenko Factor
“I do not see any link between the investigation into the death of Litvinenko and British-Russian relations,” said First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov in late May. Even at the time – just after British prosecutors had announced that they wanted to try Andrei Lugovoi, a Russian national, for Litvinenko's murder – this seemed somewhat optimistic. Now with Lugovoi's claim that both Litvinenko and Boris Berezovsky had been working for British secret services, and that he himself had been tapped up by MI6 and asked to find dirt on Vladimir Putin, it seems hard to believe that relations between the two countries will do anything but continue to spiral to new lows.
Some analysts suggested that the fervor over the Litvinenko case was driven more by British media than British politicians. “The statements from both sides demonstrate there is much more in Russo-British relations than the private case of Litvinenko’s brutal murder, although it is very high on the media agenda,” said Ordzhonikidze. But statements by British ministers have implicitly suggested Russian official complicity at some level, and there is little doubt at the “man-on-the-street” level in London that the polonium used to kill Litvinenko was dispatched directly from inside the Kremlin walls.
The fact that the Russian authorities will almost certainly refuse to extradite Lugovoi to the United Kingdom will mean that both sides will now have extradition gripes that are likely to affect relations. The Russians have long been aggrieved that Britain is harboring Chechen separatist leader Ahmed Zakayev, and the fugitive businessman Boris Berezovsky, who has not only been given political asylum in Britain, but has also been issued a British passport in the name of Platon Elenin, using the first name of a shady businessman clearly based on Berezovsky in the Russian film Oligarch.
However negative some aspects of the relationship might be, said Ordzhonikidze, Gordon Brown will still have a lot of positives to build on when he takes office. “The Russian diaspora in Britain is estimated to have reached 300,000 people; several major Russian companies have raised vast amounts of cash via IPOs on the London Stock Exchange; British strategic investments (British Petroleum) in the Russian economy still remain the highest international investment in Russia’s modern business history; and Russian investments in the UK, although less publicized, are growing steadily, not only in real estate, but also in industrial sectors,” she said. “And we are not even mentioning the role of Russians in British football.” |
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