Вопрос Зазеркалье.

Отношения России и Сирии не подходят для раздела "Общество и политика"?

Тогда где вопросы для обсуждения?

А обязательно что-то обсуждать? Просто предоставить для ознакомления уже не катит? Не прошло и полчаса.

А что будет, если я здесь запощу статью из сегодняшней Financial Times на английском языке? Никто не обидится? Для тех, кто читает по-английски, она будет интересной. Там как раз по этой теме...

30 May 2012

Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer

Here we are again. Syria’s government has killed dozens more of its own citizens, and what does its old ally, Russia, do? It obstructs a substantive UN Security Council response. This has long since become a predictable story, but it raises a fundamental question: what is Russia’s place in today’s world?

Russian membership in western organisations is not exactly yielding positive results. The G7+1 cannot become a G8 until Russia begins to act like a mature free-market democracy. It’s hard to work up much optimism on that score with President Vladimir Putin claiming that recent protests in his country are choreographed by western spies and that he couldn’t make it to the latest G8 summit at Camp David because he was busy putting together his new cabinet – always a complicated chore in an authoritarian country. Mr Putin’s absence made little difference as discussion turned to Afghanistan and the eurozone, where Russia can’t help, and to Iran and Syria, where Russia is part of the problem.

So if its government isn’t interested in western clubs, can we classify Russia as a dynamic emerging market? Not a chance. In China, a Communist party has engineered a complex, high-powered economic engine that has lifted the country from abject poverty to become the world’s second-largest economy. India has produced some of the world’s more innovative private sector companies. Brazil is now an increasingly self-confident democracy with a well-diversified economy and a growing international profile.

Russia, by contrast, has become an authoritarian state built on Mr Putin’s reputation as a tough guy and the export of oil, gas, other natural resources and little else. Corruption is endemic. Graft is a particular problem in most developing countries: Transparency International’s global corruption index ranks Turkey at 61st, Brazil at 73rd and China at 75th. Russia ranks far worse at 143rd.

In addition, much of Russia’s commercial elite still views the country as a wealth generator but not a long-term investment bet. Capital flight, a chronic problem, has reportedly accelerated since Mr Putin’s re-election in March. The country’s population is falling – because healthcare is poor, socially driven diseases such as alcoholism rampant and because well-educated Russians are leaving in search of better opportunities elsewhere. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia inherited 148m citizens. Today there are fewer than 142m. UN studies have warned that the population could fall by 30 per cent over the next four decades, with obvious implications for growth.

Are things improving? During Russia’s most recent Potemkin election campaign, Mr Putin spent more time bragging about the stability he established during his last stint as president than about any grand plans for the country’s future. Russia is also about to become less transparent as Mr Putin has formed a cabinet with reformers who may not have real power and brought administrative heavyweights on to his presidential staff. The risk is that policy will be made not in Russia’s ministries but behind closed doors inside the Kremlin.

Mitt Romney, the Republican party’s likely presidential nominee, recently referred to Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe”. That’s absurd, not because Russia isn’t increasingly antagonistic to US interests, but because it is becoming increasingly less relevant – as a political power or as an attractive emerging market. Russia’s fellow Bric nations may have no interest in dismissing Moscow from their club but the rest of us can (and should) stop speaking of Russia as if it belongs in this company.

There are those in Russia who argue that their country can become a modern European state rather than the “Eurasian nation” of Mr Putin’s dreams. These include some of the reformers around prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, much of Russia’s urban middle class, internet and social media-savvy young people, a new generation of entrepreneurs fed up with byzantine restrictions and regulations, intellectuals and much of the media. Members of all these groups want a democratic Russia with an innovative, modern economy driven by private sector ingenuity, and they have recently taken to the streets to make themselves heard.

For the moment, the Kremlin has managed to ignore these voices, acting like neither a Bric nor a G8 member in good standing. Washington should not make the same mistake. If US and European leaders genuinely want to build new ties with Moscow, these are the people they should be talking to.

По существу вопроса - про Сирию - одна строчка. Всё остальное - не по теме.

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