Once Juan Carlos, being a prince and the successor of the caudillo, went to the United States. The air of freedom played a cruel trick on him — he started to talk about something and blurted out that the Spanish people needed freedom. Old man Franco met him in Madrid and...complimented the heir, saying: «Some things one can and needs to say outside of Spain, and there are things that cannot be said in Spain.» One would think that Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev was in approximately the same position, when he returned from his triumphant trips, particularly his trip to the United States. Nevertheless, it seems he is seeking a way out of «Juan Carlos’s trap»; that is, he is trying to lean on the foreign policy department, striving to turn it into one of the locomotives of modernization, to influence domestic policy through foreign policy. In any case, this is the impression created by his speech to the MID (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) on 12 July, where from the astounded diplomatic corps he demanded support of modernization and «special, modernization alliances», primarily with the European Union and the United States, noting in a positive context his relations with Barack Obama and the warming of contacts with the former representative of the Russian «axis of evil», Poland.
Of course, the head of state understood perfectly well to what audience he was speaking: aging career diplomats and not that stratum that would directly throw aside all, get up from its leather chair, and run out to defend the ideals of democracy and modernization. Medvedev threw them a minimum of two bones, reporting that it is time that someone somewhere imposes the standards of democracy on us here, and that now, after the hard times of the 1990s, diplomats can again be proud of their country. But in everything else, his presentation was reminiscent of an election speech before one’s supporters that sets specific goals.
In the West the head of state plays the role of a washed window to an unwashed Russia. This function is agreeable, but more likely representative. However, after the restart with America, Dmitriy Medvedev was given a chance to work seriously on foreign policy and make it, as he himself expressed it to the audience familiar with the English language, a «driver»; that is, an engine of change. If it is not possible to approach modernization from the inside, if judicial reform and the struggle against corruption are not working out, then one can try to do these things from the outside. The same joint EU program «Partnership for the sake of Modernization» from this political opera. It may not be too well defined at present, there is no accurate «road map», but it does show that Medvedev has an interest in the West.
In addition to the recent speech at the MID, there was another signal that was clearly intentionally leaked in the information space: a ministry document, the existence of which became known in May, with the title «Program for the Effective Use of Foreign Policy Factors on a Systematic Basis for the Long-Term Development of the Russian Federation». This paper is at a minimum evidence of a desire to make foreign policy pragmatic and to make it function without looking at the gigantic seal of the USSR that occupies 142 square meters of the facade of the Stalinist-style MID skyscraper. Nevertheless, it is clear that the old diplomats will continue to play the old fiddle: for example, the document proposes buying up enterprises of the Soviet VPK (military-industrial complex) in the Central Asian countries, when we should be pulling up our own...
Modernization, primarily economic modernization, does not have enough resource support. Hence the attempt to turn to face the world. But just as Skolkovo is unable to create an innovation economy in Russia by itself, the MID, which still uses even in its internal documents pompous, Cold War rhetoric like Stalinist architecture, cannot bring a stormy flow o f investments into Russia. For this it is essential to change the institutional milieu, to conduct real elections, not pack entrepreneurs in detention centers, free Khodorkovskiy...
Therefore, no matter how amicable is Russia’s new, foreign-policy face, Medvedev will not obtain support simply because of his pretty eyes. Action and evidence are needed; that is, real change. And then it won’t matter from where modernization comes to our country — through a window to Europe or through a Russian shop window.
