The Illegible Other: Comparative Reactivity to the Past and Present in Russia and Germany

Russia is the furthest it has been since its independence from being an accepted member of the global order or a major player in bilateral or multilateral relations with the West. The process that began with its failure to democratize has followed an accelerated trajectory toward autocracy in the 21st century under Vladimir Putin’s leadership. Russia’s severance from the West has led many countries to reflect on their policy towards Putin’s government and scramble to backfill the ruptured economic ties that persisted after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea made it clear that Russia was a fully unreliable political partner. Germany, having lost such a well-established partner, may be left with the most pressing questions. Any number of iterations of “How could they have gotten Russia so wrong?” now resonates with those that feel they’ve known for years that Russia would act the way it has in recent years. This paper addresses this question from the perspective of their comparative experiences with democratization. To understand the growth and mistakes that underpin Germany’s relationship with Russia, this paper looks at their differing experiences with democratization emphasizing their reactivity to their past and transferring this frame to their bilateral relations in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Germany was successful in utilizing its past experience to build and strong democracy. Their past was a legible, stable platform on which to develop. On the other hand, Russia failed to learn meaningful lessons from its own muddled, illegible past. When the two entered into relations as their current selves after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their experiences were reversed. Germany made poor use of its own experience, bringing Ostpolitik to the present, while Russia, in contrast, made nimble and pragmatic use of Germany’s desire for closeness, leveraging economic gain while keeping political interference at bay. In the long term, Russia will likely suffer from its choice to sever ties with Germany and the Western world, but in the short term, it may be buoyed by its illiberal axis with China. In the short term, Germany has been embarrassed and damaged by its deep ties with Russia that it has rapidly lost, and so we look to the past for some explanation of how this came to pass.