Every historical era has its own distinctive style. For the contemporary Putin era, the most important aspect of its style is pragmatism. This word is always on the President's lips and invariably, is the first to come into journalists' minds when they comment on the head of state's foreign or domestic policy. It is significant that today the word is used exclusively in a positive context: pragmatism is good, pragmatism is the best thing that can be said about a pattern of behaviour, whether in respect to the state or to individual politicians, businesspeople or ordinary citizens.
The Revolution Is Over
Typically, this bandwagon effect is based on contrast to and backlash against the style of the previous era, whose outcome was a general disappointment. As it happens, the Yeltsin era was not pragmatic - nor could it be, since the country then faced revolutionary-scale tasks. The task was to build a semblance of a civilised democratic society on the ruins of a totalitarian state, asserting the values of freedom and human rights against a background of economic changes that were highly painful to the majority of the population. The style of leadership was in keeping with these tasks - sweeping, sharp and at the same time wildly uneven and inconsistent. Alongside the many useful and necessary changes, there was a welter of grand but gratuitous gestures. While the beguiling pledges given were in all likelihood genuine, the resources available, alas, tended to fall short of these ambitions.
The common man has little faith in promises of future mountains of gold. He would rather live in the present, knowing that he has one ruble today, one ruble twenty kopecks tomorrow, and one ruble fifty the day after.
When Putin came into power and suggested living in the present, nearly everyone let out a sigh of relief: The revolution, with all its meteoric rises and disastrous falls, was over. The country seemed to have changed pace: after a decade of chaotic "great leaps" into the unknown, it was now being told to take one step at a time and strictly in the chosen direction, carefully calculating and conserving energy and avoiding looking at the dizzy heights.
That's what has to be pointed out right away and borne in mind further on: the newest form of Russian pragmatism was born of weakness and a stark realisation that the revolution-shaken country had limited strength to go round.
The Greek word pragma translates as "deed" or "action." In a post-default Russia, deeds could only be on a small scale and actions, careful. Nonetheless, against the background of the preceding era, which was largely an era of words, the era of pragmatism looked more dynamic and constructive. It seemed to deliver results, from structuring the political chaos of the past to ending the creeping disintegration of the country and to carrying out certain vital reforms and making firm pledges on others. Salary and pension payments and their steady, if incremental, rises gave people a sense of having a future.
The ideological confrontation that had kept the political system febrile throughout the preceding decade dimmed and became largely irrelevant. After all, ideological rivals in post-Soviet Russia had been appealing to the sovereign power rather than the entire body politic, so there the sovereign power demonstrated its pragmatism - if not cynicism - right away. The government had no qualms about marrying Duma Communists to centrists when necessary and dumping them as unneeded ballast when another greater need arose. A pragmatic government could not care less what colour shirts players on a political playing field are wearing: it is prepared to use any player for its purposes and create new ones should the best current ones prove inadequate.
International affairs are another matter altogether. Yeltsin would bear-hug his friends Bill and Helmut one moment, only to threaten to once more point missiles at them the next, while foreign policy in general was governed by distinctly ideological and frequently contradictory attitudes. On the one hand, Russia was eager to join a select circle of Free World countries, and was willing to occasionally end fairly lucrative relationships with regimes the West disliked. On the other hand, it could invoke "Slavic brotherhood," to the exclusion of its own interests, for example, coming to the rescue of the doomed Slobodan Milosevic. In consequence, by the end of the century Russia was almost a pariah state: the civilised world seemed to have given it up as a hopeless case and stopped reckoning with its interests when making really important decisions.
Thus, the Putin pragmatism in foreign policy also originates in weakness - weakness of the country's international position. It was necessary to abandon grand ambitions and great-power rhetoric, forget the resentment and slowly steer Russia out of the semi-isolation it ended up in by the end of Yeltsin's rule. Here, it was helpful to go by the old British wisdom that Britain does not have friends, it has interests. By making Russia's national interests - geopolitical and economic - the top priority, Putin started speaking to the West in its native political language. In so doing, he was understood and, eventually, accepted, if not as an equal, at least as one of their own.
Putin's brand of pragmatism has been an extraordinarily effective instrument for steering the country out of the crisis. This has also been the case on a purely human level. The kind of people who have internalised the spirit of pragmatism, learned to set clear goals, to pursue success deliberately and to seek and find advantage are the ones who are truly succeeding these days.
The Survival Cul-De-Sac
But does that mean that pragmatism is a skeleton key to all problems present and future, the one road that will ultimately lead Russia to a state of well-being?
I wouldn't get too euphoric about that.
One troubling thing is that the adoption of contemporary Russian pragmatism was clearly forced by extraordinary circumstances and is therefore of a defensive and recuperative nature. The action - the Greek pragma - is not entirely free, it is performed in response to a threat of some kind and all subsequent activity thus follows the pattern of such hasty responses. While the agent perceives that he sets the goal for himself, in actual fact the goal is imposed on him as a problem of ultimate urgency, the solution to which is a matter of life and death.
A political power, when pragmatic in this way, paradoxically resembles a fellow who survives rather than lives. In our country, no less than half the population live in this manner, toiling hard for their survival. The issue here is not so much that life can have different meanings, but that survival is solely about staying alive. More importantly, survival is far from being the private life that the classics of liberalism lovingly referred to; it is simply a limited life that remains oblivious to the wider world. A life like this tends to develop petty values of its own that are in stark contrast to the wider ones. A pay rise can bring happiness, while a hike in utility charges is considered a catastrophe. A survivor never looks beyond tomorrow and only goes about his petty affairs, which alone he can barely handle.
The pragmatism of the weak is like a strategy adopted for a short race. It's beyond dispute that a good strategy is better than pseudo-ideological demagoguery or a flagrant dependency culture, but this strategy alone does not have the potential to extend beyond the limited confines of the racetrack.
Back from the human to the political level: It's not surprising that in a calculated space, things can get dull even for pragmatists. Such is the case with Putin challenging the Cabinet to be more ambitious. This is understandable. It's almost unbearable to learn that at this rate it is going to take a former superpower almost thirty years to catch up with tiny Portugal. Despite oneself, one starts thinking of a "great leap"...
The Overwhelming Battle
Admittedly, Russia today is a weak country. God willing, within forty or fifty years of pragmatic development, it will grow stronger and the present earthbound, cautious pragmatism will be transformed qualitatively. Indeed, an example of such growth happens to be before our eyes at all times - the United States, the most powerful civilisation in the world, has been built by pragmatists. For that matter, it happens to be the place where the idea itself originated - in the 1870s, as a name of a philosophical trend, which, come to that, is America's only major contribution to world philosophy.
The trend was, in its own way, revolutionary: The pragmatist philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey decided that rather than reflecting on the origins of being, philosophy must be a general method of solving specific problems that confront man. To them, the criteria of truth were usefulness and success, while thinking was seen as a means of adapting the agent to the environment. Even the idea of God, pragmatists claimed, was true solely because it was useful. Philosophical pragmatism was very American, essentially a summation of their civilisation-building experience.
So here it is right in front of us - the land of victorious pragmatism, the apotheosis of it, if I may say so, the world's richest and mightiest power, a worthy example for all pragmatists.
Perhaps, we are now seeing America truly at the peak of its power. But if historical experience is anything to go by, no one has yet been able to hold on to this peak for long. And despite oneself, one starts pondering just what kind of external power or internal inadequacy could if not bring the colossus down, then at least force it to change qualitatively, breaking age-old traditions and compelling it to seek new moral pillars.
Let's assume that the external power is already there and left its calling card on September 11 last year. If anything, the challenge was issued and accepted. Speaking of naked power alone, whether military or economic, it's premature for now to worry about the fate of a West led by the United States. The Taliban has been routed, Saddam Hussein is next in line and in general, a succession of more or less successful military operations against the ubiquitous and elusive "international terrorism" seems to lie ahead.
What matters, however, is that this time, the United States is up against a power of an altogether different nature, one that is gauged not in terms of soldiers, tanks or warhead numbers, but in units of another kind. Furthermore, it seems the Americans are still not quite sure what exactly they have to confront. And significantly, it is their innate pragmatism that hinders them from understanding this. It is apparent that this will also hinder the fight against the new enemy.
Indeed, the current situation in the Islamic world, within which international terrorism was born and bred, is itself the result of a pragmatic calculation - and at the same time, a miscalculation - in American policy. It now transpires that with all its pragmatism, America too was the champion of a short race. By backing Saddam in a war against Iran and Islamic fundamentalists in a war against the USSR in Afghanistan, and by banking on Saudi Arabia as its chief ally in the region, the Americans, to their own advantage, brilliantly handled short-term local issues. But the Americans couldn't predict or calculate the far-from-pragmatic phenomenon of the overall religious and spiritual expansion in the Islamic world, stretching from Morocco to the Philippines. Its repercussions included, among other things, the rise of Islamic extremism. Local victories have also backfired on them and while not defeats (though what was September 11 if not a defeat?), then at the very least they will pose a serious problem for decades to come.
In the war unfolding right in front of our eyes, two fundamentally different adversaries are clashing. Again, it's not a matter of ill-matched military powers, but of the character of motivation. Militant Islam is an aggressive ideology, whose adherents hold its proclaimed values sacred and are determined to assert them throughout the world. They are willing to kill and die for Allah, whatever it takes. And opposite this numerous Islamic army, which is at the height of its religious enthusiasm, stands a pragmatic Western world, which possesses the most advanced military technology, but without any enthusiasm. There is no longer anything in the world that a modern Western man would give his life for. The ultimate pragmatist, he is loath to fight, but prepared to endlessly negotiate, compromise and look for options. If anything, Europe stands firm on this position and is trying hard to soothe the more belligerent America. Incidentally, America's relative belligerence - against the background of Europe - can probably be explained by the idiosyncratic, yet fairly strong religiosity of millions of Americans.
But even in America, anti-terrorist rhetoric has mostly focused on national security, which again is a purely pragmatic task.
In short, a truly classic picture is emerging: a global idea commanding millions of people clashes with a powerful, but totally inanimate war machine. The outcome of this showdown is unpredictable, but in any case, it's hard to believe that the machine will prevail over the idea.
The bottom line is that for now, there's little the pragmatic West can do to counter the emergent Islam. Symmetry would seem to point to Christianity as a counterbalance, but alas, decrepit modern Christianity has not been a match for anyone for a long time now. What's more, pragmatism is also pluralism, that is, acknowledging that every religion and every culture has a right to exist. A pragmatic mind just cannot accommodate a religious war of attrition.
What else can the Islamic onslaught be countered with? The classical liberal values - freedom, human rights, individualism? But again, following these values - which happen to be fundamental to pragmatism too - implies acknowledging other people's rights to profess any ideas, worship any gods and follow any ethnic and religious traditions, however brutal. This means a vicious circle of sorts: pragmatism is the West's strength, but also its weakness. Local anti-terrorist operations will carry on as usual, but it won't be possible to talk seriously of a victory over this evil until something stronger than the traditional Western pragmatism emerges in terms of ideas and values. And if Western civilisation is to accomplish this, it will have to change qualitatively.
In writing these remarks, it was not my intention to censure pragmatism. Pragmatism is indeed a very effective instrument, which the West has put to good use when building a powerful civilisation and which has now been helpful to Russia in getting out of a protracted crisis. But an instrument is but a means to an end, which has a limited value in a world that seems to have lost the taste for great goals.