The fallout from Russia’s aggressive response to Georgian attempts to take back its province of South Ossetia has deep implications for not only the geopolitics of the region but also uni eggheads’ fancy theories about post-Cold War politics.
The biggest casualty of the last week, apart from the territorial ambitions of Georgia, has been the usefulness of NATO and, of course, anything approaching accurate reporting of the complexity of the ethnic and political antecedents to this conflict.
Georgia, by invading its rouge province last week, was seeking to find a resolution to a festering stalemate in the mountainous region that has been bubbling along since 1991. And find a resolution it did. Just not one it wanted.
But the way it has been reported, you would think Russia initiated the attack with its Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, being labelled by some a “modern day Hitler”, invading countries on any spurious pretext.
In reality, Georgia, and parts therein, have been hopping in and out of Russian control with various degrees of autonomy for 200 years - whether it’s been the tsars or the Reds calling the shots from Moscow.
The fact that North Ossetia is in Russia, and South Ossetia has a Russian ethnic majority, should serve as some kind of indicator the situation is not as cut-and-dried as Russia simply having put the boot into a smaller neighbour.
In fact, Russia has had “peacekeeping” forces on the ground since the early 90’s.
Georgia itself has only been independent for brief periods in the last 200 years, when Russia’s rulers were distracted by more pressing issues. It broke away after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, before being reabsorbed by force by the Communists in 1921.
Then when the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became an independent state again, and its leaders decided to take away the autonomy the province of South Ossetia - now within their borders - had enjoyed in Communist times.
This lead to conflict, with Russia stepping in. Its “peacekeeping” forces in the province were a result of the 1992 ceasefire.
With the West sucking up to Georgia of late and vice-versa (Georgia has the third biggest contingent of foreign troops in Iraq) the government in Tblisi may have thought Russia would be wary enough to sit back and watch it reclaim the province. They were wrong.
Instead Russia chose to send a powerful message not only to restless ethnic groups like the Chechens on the fringes of their own country, but also to surrounding countries with large Russian minorities – all 25 million of them.
At the same time it showed the toothlessness of NATO and perhaps the folly of its eastward expansion into countries previously in the sphere of influence of Moscow.
In some ways, the West’s attempt to humiliate Russia by aggressively recruiting so close to its borders may have backfired and shown what a paper tiger they represent.
The Russian bear was not dead, but in hibernation.
But the implications of the conflict in South Ossetia also flow on to various competing political theories of how history will move post-Cold War.
Francis Fukuyama’s thesis is that the fall of the Soviet Union represented the “End of History” and the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy.
As we seem to be seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq, democracy cannot simply by ‘grown’ like a hydroponic plant. It took European countries hundreds of years to devolve power from the few to the many in the fashion we now see in the West – with lots of bloodletting and setbacks along the way.
The fact is, Russia has little history of democracy. Rather it has the opposite – absolute rule by cliques, whether they be aristocratic or Bolshevik.
Instead, perhaps Samuel Huntington’s theory, that cultural and religious identities would dictate the future of world events and fault-lines will spring up between “civilisations”, may be more useful.
But whether this is the case or not, the exponential rise of China - a civilisation masquerading as a country - alongside the oligarchic Russia and the antithesis they present to Western ideas, will be fascinating.
The freedom, democracy and free enterprise we have all been taught to take for granted as a gradual, but inevitable, endpoint of world governance, may be proven wrong.
But then again, perhaps that’s too much to read into a week-long war in a tiny mountainous region called South Ossetia.
