Anne Applebaum writes about an outfit called the World Policy Forum, which holds an annual “Dialogue of Civilizations” on the Greek island of Rhodes.
The forum… continued, as in the past, to gather people willing to endorse Russian views of the world. There was Vaclav Klaus, the former Czech president, who called Putin’s Syrian adventure a “logical step.” There was John Laughland, political director of a Russian-backed think tank, the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, who argued that the European Union was conceived by the CIA, as part of a U.S. plot to subjugate Europe. Plus dozens of others, from all around the world.
Long-time readers of Harry’s Place may have encountered Laughland, an apologist for the regimes of Vladimir Putin, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and Slobodan Milosevic and others of their ilk.
Once upon a time, we had a vocabulary to describe organizations like the forum or the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation. During the Cold War, we spoke of “front organizations,” such as the World Federation of Trade Unions or even the American communist party, which were allegedly independent but secretly supported with Soviet money. Such groups were run by “agents of influence” — people who knowingly promoted the interests of the Soviet Union in the West — or “useful idiots,” people who did the same thing, unconsciously, usually out of ideological naiveté.
But times have changed, and direct parallels cannot be drawn. Klaus, who is not an idiot, doesn’t hide his financial links to Moscow. The forum does not hide its links to Russia, either. Instead, they both seek openly to legitimize the anti-NATO, anti-European, anti-Western views of the Russian elite…
Even harder to categorize are the actions of some genuinely legitimate politicians. For example, Andrej Babis, the Czech finance minister, and Milos Zeman, the Czech president — once a regular at the forum — frequently echo or repeat Russian slogans, as occasionally does the Slovak prime minister, Robert Fico. In August and early September of 2014, all three argued against Western sanctions on Russia, using similar language. Zeman called them “ineffective,” Babis called them “nonsense” and Fico called them “pointless.” Later, they shifted their rhetoric, and began to point to the refugee crisis and radical Islam as the “real” threats to Europe. “The refugee crisis threatens the Czech republic more than Russia,” said Babis in September. “Islamist terrorism is a greater threat to Europe than Russia,” said Zeman in May.
Like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, all of these men have domestic political reasons for offering verbal support to Putin: They want to ride the anti-European Union, anti-“establishment” wave that has washed across all of Europe, and to capitalize on economic discontent. Since the E.U. began, politicians have long found it useful to blame “Brussels” for problems that they cannot fix. But there may be other motives, too. Zeman’s close adviser ran the office of Lukoil, the Russian oil company. Babis, who is also one of the Czech Republic’s richest men, owns companies that consume a good deal of Russian gas.
But I shouldn’t unfairly single out Central Europeans, for there are many other Europeans who support Russian foreign policy with similarly mixed motives. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi maintains both a political and a financial relationship with Putin. So does Gerhard Schroeder, the former chancellor of Germany. These men aren’t idiots either — but neither are they secret agents, spies or traitors. At the same time, they are working steadily, in their own ways, to undermine Western security and support the spread of Russian authoritarianism in Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East. So what do we call them? We need a new vocabulary for a new era.
Unlike those outside the USSR who supported the Soviet regime, these defenders of Putin are probably motivated as much (or more) by greed as by political conviction or naivete.
