By Ales’ Chaichits

Let us start with an assumption that the Republic of Belarus has no reasons for not to develop constructive and friendly relations with any country on this planet, let alone with its neighbors. It is in the best interest of Belarusians to establish mutually beneficial cooperation with all countries Belarus borders on: Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It is also in the best interest of Belarusians to foster established cultural, economical, and human ties with Russia and Russian-speaking countries where many people have had sincere warm feelings towards Belarus since Soviet times.

Relations with one country should not be built at the expense of relations with another one. Nevertheless, in the current context of globalizing world where isolation of a country inevitably leads to degradation, there is a question of choosing an outside reference point, of setting the priority for cooperation and international integration. In the case of Belarus its history, geography, and common sense give us a single right answer to this question: in the long run, there is no alternative to getting closer to Western countries and to integration into North Atlantic community.

European country with European culture

Just as Latvians, Germans, French, or Spanish, Belarusians are representatives of European culture and civilization. In order to make certain of that one can compare anthropological, cultural, and linguistic background of a Belarusian with that of a Western European. One can also compare the old architecture of Hrodna or Pinsk with that of European cities, including Vilnius that up until recently had belonged to us as much as to our Northern neighbors, Lithuanians, who are quite sure of their European identity.
Belarus is a European country, Belarusians are a European nation that professes Christianity, often its Western (Catholic, Protestant) branch. Throughout most of their history ancestors of today’s Belarusians, namely Litvins and Lithuanian Rusyns, shared a common (if we can apply this word to that times) cultural, spiritual, and informational space with Western Europe. Reformation, Counterreformation, Age of Discovery, and the era of colonization – till the end of XVIII century Belarus-Lithuania had existed in the context of West European life. Unlike Russia that had been constantly tossing between Westernism and Slavophilism, Belarus had no doubts about its European identity until XIX century.

“Orthodox” civilization is a part of the West

As Samuel Huntington wrote in his famous essay The Clash of Civilization, since the beginning of 1990s the world had been divided not along the lines of struggle between European empires or European ideologies, but between different civilization. Next one and a half decades have shown that Huntington made a mistake: he distinguished Russia with neighboring countries into a separate “Orthodox” civilization. Life has shown that nearly all the countries he had characterized as belonging to “Orthodox” civilization (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Georgia, and to a great extent Ukraine) have become or are aspiring to become a part of West.

As for a country with a much bigger Latin cultural component than, say, Greece or Bulgaria, for Belarus coming back to the West and expansion of cooperation and communication with West European countries is natural and inevitable process. Almost all our neighbors are either already “in the West” (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia) or are quite confidently oriented toward integration into Europe (Ukraine). Belarus and Russia are basically the only exceptions in the regions, and we can say that at least in the case of Belarus this situation is due to artificial political reasons that need to be overcome.

Economic and innovation aspect

Belarusian goods are quite competitive in Western markets, and during the last year the goods turnover between Belarus and Western Europe was steadily increasing, which allowed to alleviate the negative trade balance that we had got thanks to years of the so called Union State with Russia. 
If talking about attracting foreign investments to Belarus, Western investors are more capable of bringing modern managerial and technological know-how than Russians are; that is why economy-wise cooperation with the West is at least as promising as cooperation with Russia. We also need to understand that Baltic countries, Finland, Poland, and many other countries of our region can combine overall orientation toward the West with constructive economic cooperation with Russia. Therefore, we shouldn’t view integration of Belarus into the West as a discriminatory act against Russian business and setting up of an “Iron Curtain” at the border between Belarus and Russia. Cross-border traffic of goods and investments can be diversified according to laws of supply and demand. Belarus does have something to offer both to Russia and Europe.

It is necessary to understand that political, economical, innovation, and cultural potential of modern Russia is insufficient for making this country a global center comparable with the West or even with China. Actually, everything that had been left from Russian economy by seventy years of Communist rule is extraction of mineral resources and a not so attractive status of raw materials and energy supplier of Europe and, in foreseeable future, China. Soviet abstract science, which had been serving interests of the totalitarian empire preparing for the Third World War and artificially supported by the state, failed to adopt to new conditions of peace and free market and collapsed together with the Soviet Union. Today and in the foreseeable future Russia will be more of a recipient of Western technology and know-how rather than a source of them. Cutting-edge science, cutting-edge managerial know-how, cutting-edge technologies – it is all about the West. North Atlantic community is our planet’s vanguard, toward which Belarus should be oriented and whose standards it should be trying to match. Therefore, orientation toward Russia in today’s context would mean that cutting-edge ideas would come to our country via second hands and not directly.

Return of Russia to Europe

In this context the political and civilizational problem of “coming back to Europe” faces Russia as well. The question is whether Russian leadership can become aware of this need and what forms this “coming back” will take: whether it will be Russia in its current borders or only its European pieces in not so distant future. For today’s Russia the problem of integration into the West is the problem of preserving its territorial integrity; simply put, only NATO bases in Russia’s Far East can make sure that this region will still be a part of Russian Federation in fifty years.

Russia in many respects identifies itself as a part of Europe: the favorite idea of modern Russian idea-mongers is building cooperation between Russia and countries of EU-15. If we think not in categories of the XIX century when all the world was basically “European” and it was possible to say that Russia doesn’t belong to the West (which is debatable in itself if we think about what an influence West European migrants had on Russia since Peter the Great up until 1917), today, against the background of cultural differences Russia and Arab world, India, China, Africa, and South-East Asia, Russia appears more and more as a distinctive and yet unquestionably European country.

West is not a cure-all, but there is no choice
 
So, if even Russia is a part of European, Western civilization, what doubts can one have about civilizational and geopolitical affiliation of Belarus? The question is not about the geopolitical vector of Belarus (as we can see, this choice is quite obvious), but in concrete forms of bringing it to life. For instance, it is debatable whether Belarus should join the EU with its bureaucracy and neo-socialism in economy and public sphere. It is not necessary to be a member of European Union to participate in its separate institutions such as the Schengen Agreement: that is the way such countries as Norway, Switzerland, or Iceland are building their relations with the EU. It could be quite worthwhile for Belarus participate in NATO or at least to intensify existing cooperation and to modernize state governance military forces up to NATO standards.

It is also worth to understand that integration into the West and mindless copying of Western institutions is a not a cure-all for all problems. Modern Western society has a lot of vices: political correctness in politics and public thought, consumerism in culture, paternalism and left Keynesianism in economy, demographic crisis and gradual extinction of indigenous people. However, Russia not only doesn’t have answer to these problems, but it also faces other vices that are much less common in the West: corruption and degradation of state institutions, absence of democratic political tradition, post-imperial complexes, and nationalism. So instead of orienting toward modern Russia with its imperfect and unstable socio-economic model and national idea, Belarus needs to orient toward a better role model (that is Western Europe and the United States) and to help Russia follow this way as well.