Valdai traditions: Analysts peer into the future

MOSCOW. (Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA Novosti political commentator) – The Valdai Discussion Club was first convened six years ago, which is not long enough to adequately gauge its effectiveness. But its sixth conference, which is to begin on September 7 in Yakutsk in eastern Siberia, is a sufficient reason for analyzing its history, as well as the traditions and precedents it has set

MOSCOW. (Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA Novosti political commentator) – The Valdai Discussion Club was first convened six years ago, which is not long enough to adequately gauge its effectiveness. But its sixth conference, which is to begin on September 7 in Yakutsk in eastern Siberia, is a sufficient reason for analyzing its history, as well as the traditions and precedents it has set.

Even a cursory look at the club’s six-year history shows that it does not mirror events in relations between Russia and the West, but forecasts them several years ahead. Moreover, it shows that Valdai Club participants, who represent Russia, Europe and the United States, did their best to draw the world’s attention to problems and proposed solutions.

The Valdai Club is a gathering of the world’s leading experts on Russia, who meet every year under the auspices of RIA Novosti and the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. Nearly all the leading Western experts on Russia and the Soviet Union and a few Eastern analysts meet every year in early September in a Russian city to discuss global problems with their Russian colleagues.

After that they meet with top Russian politicians and officials, and then with the Russian president. In the past, they met with President Vladimir Putin. This time they will meet with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The world knows about the Valdai forum exactly because of these meetings, when a number of interesting questions are asked and no less interesting answers provided.

However, this repartee with the president (or the prime minister) is the event that crowns numerous other meetings during which analysts discuss again and again what the West should do with Russia and vice versa.

At the beginning there is a word, and then the word spreads to the political and ruling quarters – because not only analysts but also government advisers come to Russia for the Valdai forum – and this can have unpredictable consequences.

During the second Valdai forum in September 2005, U.S. Presidential Advisor and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution Fiona Hill, a leading expert on the Caucasus and Russia, said it was time to stop appealing to Moscow to launch negotiations with the “Chechen rebels.”

Now is the time for Russia and the West to start cooperating in the North Caucasus, she said.
Few people remember this now, but the Kremlin was literally pushed towards launching talks with “Chechen rebels” in the early 2000s. Since the idea was downright silly, Moscow did not act on it, but put it down as another attempt to encourage it to pursue a suicidal policy and to weaken it.

After 2005, Chechnya disappeared from the theater of propaganda war, which never seems to end. One of the first reasons was that the participants in the first Valdai forum, held in Novgorod, were glued to television sets to watch the Beslan school hostage crisis.

As Fiona Hill said then, it took the Western public nearly a year after the Beslan tragedy to change its attitude toward the Chechen war. Anyway, the inevitability of that became clear at the Valdai conferences.

Unfortunately, Beslan did not put an end to the propaganda war. It only changed the approach.
The most effective Valdai forum was held in 2008 in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, a month after Georgia attacked Tskhinvali and amid the global economic chaos. Many people in Russia thought at the time that the Western countries sided as one with the aggressor – Georgia – and had even prepared for the attack in advance. This is war, they said. But the Valdai forum showed that the situation was controversial and the world had mixed feelings about it.

The issue of the destructive role of the media in Russia-West relations had been addressed in the Valdai club before, but too softly for everyone to hear. Those who met in Rostov-on-Don said out loud that the European media’s coverage of the conflict in Georgia could only incite confrontation.

“The way the European mass media covered the conflict in Georgia was not the first case of encouraging confrontation. The Americans destroyed the free press at the beginning of the war in Iraq. The media participated in selling the lies to the American public with catastrophic results,” said Professor Anatole Lieven of King's College, London.

It also became clear in Rostov that Russian-Western relations needed to be reset after nearly two decades of mutual mistakes. Ways to reset these relations were discussed last year and will be discussed again this year, which is not surprising because it is a complicated matter.

The Valdai forums discuss new ideas, which Russia subsequently hears in the form of propaganda campaigns for several more years. The forum in Rostov considered the issue of the “spheres of security” and “spheres of influence” Russia is trying to establish in former Soviet space. U.S. President Barack Obama later mentioned “spheres of influence” during his speech in Moscow in July 2009, even though it was not the Kremlin but participants at the Valdai conferences who proposed the formula.

The Valdai Discussion Club has developed a specific structure in the six years since its establishment. Russian participants change often, but we can be assured of hearing the “kind” Nikolai Zlobin (director of the Russia and Eurasia Programs at the World Security Institute) and the “angry” Ariel Cohen (a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, U.S.), Jonathan Steele (The Guardian, Britain) and Bobo Lo (head of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House), Thierry de Montbrial (head of the French Institute of International Relations) and other analysts.

The U.S. team is almost always new, and includes people close to the Republican or the Democratic administrations. The British team often has new members, all of them top professionals and respected thinkers. There have been a growing number of non-Western participants from China, India and Iran.

This year the Valdai conference will be held in Yakutsk. In 2006, the forum participants gathered in Khanty-Mansiisk, one of Russia’s oil capitals. This year they will be introduced to the Russian gold and diamond province.

At this year’s session, entitled “Russia and the West – Back to the Future,” club members will discuss the dangers of slipping back into a new Cold War, a subject that has been addressed so often it has become trite. The other issue on the club’s agenda – new challenges for Russia’s cooperation and integration with the West – is quite interesting because it is unclear what   factors would promote integration or hinder it.

It is one thing to put stereotypical reflexes to rest, and quite another to peer into the future to see where it is prodding Russia and the West, which has grown tired of endless discussions.
Asian representatives will feature prominently at this year’s forum, symbolizing these “new factors.” They will certainly discuss the issue of resetting Russia’s relations with the United States and the possible consequences for Europe.

The rest will depend on how well governments listen to their analysts.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.