Agency, Asymmetry, and Discourses on Global Politics
The ways in which the influence of other states, such as Israel and Russia, on Western politics is discussed frequently obscure more than they reveal.
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This post is part of the ‘Research and Reflections’ occasional series, consisting of pieces based on my ongoing academic research, as well as on my musings on and responses to current affairs and personal development.
Content warning: Antisemitism.
When I used to teach on the subject of the global Cold War, one of the things I was keen to impress upon my students was the need to recognise, with due proportionality, local agency. This applied to discussion of developments in the communist states of Eastern Europe, or the staunchly anti-communist dictatorships of the Americas, or the newly independent states of Asia and Africa. Soviet or American intervention, though frequently decisive and hugely consequential once it occurred, was often precipitated and invited by aligned actors, with their own motives. As Odd Arne Westad put it, with regard to the Third World:
In a period of extreme global instability, it is not surprising that highly ideologized regimes such as the United States and the Soviet Union opted for intervention in what seemed to be a zero-sum game, unless there were strong domestic reasons against it. What is more surprising is the key role local elites played in abetting and facilitating these superpower interventions. Marrying their own domestic purposes to a faith in a common, international ideology, many aimed at some form of superpower involvement from the revolutionary stage onwards.1
There is a sort of inverse (though related) phenomenon at play in the way we talk about contemporary geopolitics. This is a world in which the US remains paramount as the preeminent superpower, but with its moral and political authority and its appetite for sustained overseas intervention significantly diminished in the wake of the War on Terror. It is also one in which regional powers feel emboldened to act without deference within what they see as their own patch and even to venture opportunistically beyond it. This can include backing sides in ongoing wars, as a number of Middle Eastern countries have in African civil conflicts. It can also entail seeking to exercise softer or at least more covert forms of power in the West itself.
I want to focus here mainly on the second of these categories, and the way it is talked about in the West. Evidence of this phenomenon, of states beyond the West influencing politics there in ways that can be read as malign, are often decontextualised; the scale of the potency of their influence exaggerated; the extent of the agency of the domestic actors who align with them downplayed. Often this draws on longstanding denigratory tropes dating back to the Cold War and earlier.
Discourse on Israel
One obvious example of this is the discourse around Israel’s influence on British politics, particularly as it relates to approaches towards the Middle East and especially to Israel’s ongoing subjugation of the Palestinian people and their aspirations to full statehood. Such rhetoric often concentrates on the apparent excessive influence of lobbyists for Israel, including British Jews whose loyalty is apparently to Israel over Britain.
It is particularly evident in discussions over Labour’s insipid positioning on Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. I have frequently seen tweets on this subject which attribute this to Keir Starmer doing the bidding of Israeli ‘paymasters’ or ‘puppeteers’. This is inseparable from a perception that Starmer’s predecessor as leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was undermined from within in part because of his support for Palestine, and that this was the real reason for accusations that he failed to deal with antisemitism in the party properly or was even guilty of it himself.
This framing of Labour’s positioning on Israel is itself intrinsically antisemitic, in the way it reproduces narratives of undue Jewish (financial) influence. It is true that there are organisations, including within Labour, who seek closer relationships between Britain and Israel. There are British Jews who feel no clash between an affinity with Britain and with Israel. Yet the power balance operates in the opposite direction: towards Britain rather than Israel; towards gentile politicians over politically active British Jews. Rather, Britain’s, and the Labour leadership’s, support for Israel is fuelled by the political class’s own conceptions as to where British interests lie, as well as endogenously produced ideological affinities.
In other words, they see the national interest as lying in adherence to a set of alliances dating back to the Cold War, as extensions of the unity of the Atlanticist West. Moreover, for supportive British liberals of the stripe who dominate the Labour leadership, Israel embodies a certain redemption of the nation state ideal after the First and Second World War. Nationhood can be manifested in statehood without descending into the ultranationalism of the Nazis, and this is embodied by the people who were its greatest victims. A certain civilisational project beyond Europe can be vicariously enjoyed post-decolonisation, when carried out by a group previously denied the full status of whiteness. In such an interpretation, Benjamin Netanyahu is an unfortunate aberration rather than a logical outcome.
Lobbying efforts and considerations of the sympathies of British Jews may reinforce these calculations and interpretations, but they certainly do not determine them. Ironically, there is a parallel here in the way pro-Israel British liberals view its current offensive against Gaza. In this discursive framing, it is the agency of Israeli politicians that is minimised in an asymmetric power relationship, helplessly stumbling into a trap set by murderously cunning Hamas, whose purpose this conflict really serves – see, for example, this recent piece by Jonathan Freedland.
Discourse on Russia
Russia can occupy a similar position in the most febrile corners of liberal imagination that Israel does in their radical leftist counterparts. Unlike Israel, which seeks to maintain and deepen its hegemony in an Israeli-Palestinian space, Russia is revisionist, as evident from its infringement of Ukrainian sovereignty since 2014, and then full-scale invasion in 2022. Its self-perception has shifted towards fulfilling a Eurasianist destiny, countering Western hegemony ideologically, diplomatically, and militarily.2
In the West, especially over the past two years, there has been a tendency to reapply a Cold War framework to interpret the challenge Russia poses. This entails viewing Russia as an existential threat akin to that apparently posed by the Soviet Union, grounded in an essentialist understanding of an unchanging, distinctly ‘other’ Russian national character and culture.3 This ironically mirrors currently dominant Russian narratives about Russia, and overlooks crucial shifts in dominant political structures and orders over the courses of its history. It fails to appreciate the substantial distinction between the universalist ideals underpinning Soviet communism and the particularistic ones of contemporary Russian nationalism.
Moreover, while the dominant institutional architecture of the Cold War-era West – namely NATO, and the EU and its predecessors – has persisted and deepened, no equivalently durable system exists through which Russia and likeminded states can synchronise their interests and objectives. Russia is the third biggest spender on defence globally, but that places it well behind the US.4 Its economy is only the eighth largest in the world. While Russia engages in substantial global propaganda and disinformation efforts and in proxy warfare, there remains significant limitations in its ideological and resource capabilities to shape the world in its image, particularly outside of the post-Soviet space.
Often Western liberal discourse on Russia fails to appreciate this, and in a continuation of a Cold War mentality, conflates ideological and geopolitical fissures. This produces a civilisational reading of the war in Ukraine, as a defence of the West per se, which however makes a mockery of the huge difference between the current suffering and existential danger inflicted by Russia on Ukraine, and a more theoretical danger that it poses to Germany, France, or the UK.
In this way of thinking, the threat to liberal democracy in the West is also reducible to the malign intent of external actors. Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 US presidential election and the narrow vote in the UK to leave the EU that same year are bad precisely because they are what Vladimir Putin would have wanted to happen, possibly even the outcomes of Russian electoral interference. Yet presenting someone like Trump as a Russian asset ignores the reality that the ideological affinity between them is precisely because the US, and other Western countries, have produced their own strains of chauvinist nationalism antipathetic to liberal, pluralist democracy, with vehicles for representation through electoral politics.
Equally, the sudden uptick from 2022 in discussion of the influence of Russian oligarchs in Britain, as with Chelsea’s former owner Roman Abramovich – typified by this episode of Panorama – has tended to treat Russian capitalism as some sort of alien, invasive force. This obscures the shared neoliberal heritage in the ideas and forces that reshaped Russia’s and Britain’s economies in the late twentieth century; the way Britain and other Western states benefited from the economic integration of formerly communist economies into global capitalism; and the manner in which both British governments and organisations like the Premier League actively enabled and courted foreign investment in British assets.
Again, there is a striking inversion of this in the cruder, ostensibly anti-imperialistic takes on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which frame it as provoked by NATO expansion, or Ukraine as a stooge for Western interests, or demand an end to military aid to Ukraine and a push instead for a negotiated settlement with Russia. Whatever the kernels of truth or pacifistic ambitions that motivate such interpretations, they overestimate the reach even of NATO’s power, and diminish Russian agency in invading Ukraine and Ukrainian agency in resisting. They also generally fail to appreciate the differences between the political systems, objectives, and power of the two combatant states, an attack by an imperialist, autocratic regional hegemon on its smaller, (imperfectly) democratic neighbour.
Discourse on Hungary
There is a notable contrast here with the way Hungary’s influence in the West is generally more sanguinely discussed.
recently wrote insightfully about the reasons for the American right’s enthusiasm for Hungary. He examined the way the Hungarian government has used patronage domestically to control public institutions, in order to minimise dissent, reward loyalists, and persecute minorities; and externally, to attract the endorsement of American right-wing intellectuals and think tanks. Moynihan argued that Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán offered Trump and his supporters a model for taking over and dismantling democracy from within, albeit one that would be only partly viable in the US, given differences in the two countries’ political systems.The gears of this relationship are lubricated by resource flows emanating from the Hungarian state, but American right-wingers extol Hungary not because they are doing Orbán’s bidding, but because they see something to be admired and replicated in their own national context. I think this is easier to discern because the distorting essentialist tropes available for discussing Jews and Israel, or Russia, simply are not available in this instance. Central and Eastern European states have historically been depicted as weak, backward, turbulent, quarrelsome, and ultimately compliant in the face of larger regional powers.5 It is counterintuitive to see Hungary in the role of omnipotent orchestrator; evidence of an outsize influence on domestic politics in bigger, richer Western states invites pause for thought, and more considered analysis.
Taking the cases of Israel, Russia, and Hungary together is helpful for characterising more accurately the relationship between global ideological trends and geopolitics. In what were once nascent or even maturing democracies, currently or formerly ostensible allies or partners of the West, authoritarian leaders have ensconced themselves in power. They have done so on the back of a swelling of a reactionary desire to reaffirm hierarchies of ethnicity and gender, to reassert the power of the state and leader to act without constraint in (a particular idea of) the national interest. This results in a more nakedly self-interested foreign policy, sometimes defying naïve expectations that they will act in accordance with previous alignments.
Western states have played a vast role in creating this climate, through centuries of colonialism, Cold War-era developmentalism, and Washington consensus neoliberalism in the Global South and later the post-communist world. Nonetheless, there are nationally specific ideological currents at play, which politicians and their constituencies in non-Western states have their own interests in adhering to. Western governments and media, frequently of a broadly liberal orientation, have played their part in laundering these figures, out of ideological commitments and perceived shared interests. So too, equally misguidedly or cynically, but with much less consequence, have fringe elements of the Western left. There are imbalances in and limitations to influence throughout these relationships; none are of puppeteer and puppet.
Reassessing where the threat lies
Speaking generally, liberals and even leftists often struggle to put their finger on all this, not least because they start from an acceptance (shared with the right) of the nation state as the normative mode for organising politics around. They also share a tendency to view international relations in dualistic terms, as all-encompassing struggles between sides representing civilisation and barbarism, or democracy and dictatorship, or imperialism and anti-imperialism.
This often culminates in treating the complex identities and affiliation of particular diasporic groups or individual members of them as a challenge to the broader national polity they inhabit, serving interests antithetical to it, rather than a presence that raises questions as to whether there is such a thing as a monolithic national interest. Even efforts at inclusion rooted in this mindset that treat diaspora as equally monolithic, to be represented by particular institutions adhering to particular versions of a communal ideology that they themselves lionise; for example, an expectation that diasporic Jews should be pro or anti-Zionist.
It also results in Western liberals and leftists alike frequently critiquing unpalatable developments in terms of domestic politicians serving as dupes on behalf of foreign interests, rather than the ideologically motivated conduct of actors with their own agency. It either distorts or reads too deterministically the workings of transnational networks of money and power. And crucially, it distracts from recognising the place of their own countries’ domestic politics in the ideological-geopolitical configuration I identified above. A conception of the national interest, which they may share elements of, is a principal driver of the version of chauvinistic nationalism that threatens their own democracy, spearheaded by legitimised politicians and parties, and the norms of international relations that once seemed hegemonic.
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Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Makings of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 397.
See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2023), Ch. 4.
‘International Comparisons of Defence Expenditure and Military Personnel’, The Military Balance, Vol. 124, No. 1 (2024), pp. 542–547.
On longstanding tropes in the representation of Russia, see:
Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the 16th Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and a Bibliography (Oxford: Meeuws, 1985).
Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: “The East” in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Ch. 2.
On tropes in the representation of Central and Eastern Europe, see for example Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘On Small Nations and Bullied Children: Mr Punch Draws Eastern Europe’, Slavonic and Eastern European Review, Vol. 84, No. 2 (2006), pp. 280–305.