LONDON: When the 27 EU government heads sit down on September 1 around the conference table in the glass-fronted Justus Lipsius building on Brussels’ Rue de la Loi, the significance will not be lost on any of those present. The last time they sat in emergency session was in 2001, immediately after Al Qaeda’s attack on New York’s Twin Towers.

This time, they will be meeting to consider Russia’s military actions in response to Georgia’s attempt to retake South Ossetia. Those present are likely to agree with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who declared last week that a new era in international relations was upon us: the post-post Cold War, as former US secretary of state Colin Powell originally framed it. Russia’s intention to absorb both South Ossetia and Abkhazia into the Russian Federation is being treated as a move of that magnitude.

History, to reverse Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement on its ending, has decisively begun again. The ‘new world order’ envisaged in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall – an order in which liberal democracies would proliferate across the world as the United States exercised a benign global hegemony – has proved to be a mirage. First 9/11 and then the debacle of Iraq gave the lie to that happy illusion nurtured in the think-tanks of Washington.

Now, in the space of a few weeks, Putin’s tanks have buried it once and for all. In the face of protests, exhortations and furious remonstrations, Moscow acted as it saw fit in what it considers the Russian backyard, and damned the consequences, assuming there would be none of any note. This is no unipolar world, designed to western specifications.

In Syria, Libya, even Turkey (a US and European friend) politicians and analysts have noted the consequences of the Georgian crisis – not for what Russia has done but for what the US, EU and Nato has been unable to do: exercise their power to protect an ally.

In Washington, London and Moscow, the trading of accusations has accelerated, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin charging – in language that would not seem out of place coming from the lips of dour Soviet Cold War-era Minister for Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko – that the US had armed Georgia for war and suggesting US military advisers may have been present during fighting.

If there is agreement that one era of diplomacy has passed, there is less agreement over the nature of the new period that the war in Georgia has ushered in and how to negotiate its new uncertainties.

For Ivan Krastev of the Centre for Liberal Strategies – and Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s foreign policy adviser Robert Kagan – the Georgian crisis echoes the power plays of a century ago. ‘Europe,’ he wrote soon after the fighting, ‘has entered a new 19th century, vaporising the end-of-history sentiment that shaped European politics in the 1990s and replacing it with an older, geopolitical calculus in a modern form.’

On the surface, at least, the return to gun-boat diplomacy appears confirmed by the spectacle of the war ships of five nations cluttering the Black Sea, and US and Russian troops competing over two of Georgia’s ports. But if a new Cold War is coming it is clear it will not be much like the old – or even the brief outbreak of conflict in Georgia. With a high oil price, $600 billion in its reserves, European dependency on Russian energy, and wider dependency on Russian cooperation in issues from Iran and the wider issues of the Middle East, Russia is already well-armed with the weapons needed to fight this war.

Georgia a ‘turning point’

Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution, who has met Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on several occasions, as well as President George Bush, believes that Georgia is a ‘turning point’ but is more cautious about apportioning the blame entirely on Putin and his vision of Russia.

‘The Georgia crisis is not unique in itself. It has simply been the event that wakes people up to what has been already happening. I really think that many leaders in the West failed to acknowledge what was happening. I liken it to a financial bubble, and the implicit assumption was that Russia was weak.

‘We considered multiple models for Russia... except for the outcome where Russia became strong and “bad” as defined in our terms – which means “like us”. No one considered this outcome because no one imagined oil at over $100 a barrel.’

Gaddy also rejects the idea that Russia is trying to re-establish an empire or bring back a Cold War similar in scope to the last. Instead, he sees the current crisis as the inevitable reaction to the experience of Putin and those closest to him over the question of Russia’s ‘security’ during the 1990s when Russia veered towards becoming a failed state.

That concern, existential in Russian society, Gaddy believes was too easily discounted by the West as a rhetorical device of domestic politics: ‘Russia in the 1990s was close to being a non-entity. Survival as a grand power was an issue.’Into this was interposed the issue of Nato expansion to Russia’s very borders, sold first by then president Bill Clinton and later by George Bush, as a mechanism for ‘democratisation’ that would guarantee security. ‘That push was counter-productive and largely responsible for what is happening today. If we push harder,’ as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggests, Gaddy contends, ‘it will confirm Russia’s worst fear over what Nato is about. That is what I am afraid of – by pushing ever harder we end up in a dangerous place.’

The feeling that the world stands in the midst of a definitive reorganisation is shared in Russia too.

‘We are on the verge of a new Cold War,’ argues Sergei Karaganov, a former adviser to Russian president Boris Yeltsin and now deputy director of the European Studies Institute in Moscow. ‘It seems like a Cold War. I can only hope it will not be so deep.’

For Karaganov, the conflict between Russia and the West has been an inevitable consequence of a scenario that many American writers have recently turned their attention to – the relative decline in US power and the unipolar world that dominated throughout the 1990s – and the emergence of a multipolar world that US and British foreign policy has been slow to react to and acknowledge.

‘It is not just that the West and the EU has been losing influence because of mistakes made in places like Iraq,’ says Karaganov. ‘Russia has contributed to what is happening, too, by being too cocky in trying to restore its position in the world too quickly. Not so long ago we were almost a failed state. Now we are one of the world’s three big powers again.’

There will be much noise generated by tomorrow’s meeting in Brussels, the likely outcome is an agreement on a series of ‘stings and pin pricks’ – not enough to reverse what has happened in Georgia, but enough, it is hoped, to discourage Russia in the future.

Among them, it is expected, will be a review of joint Russian-EU partnership agreements; a declaration of support for Georgia’s territorial integrity (if not necessarily its President Mikheil Saakashvili, who launched the attack that led to Russia’s intervention); and consideration of new visa restrictions for Russians wanting to come into the Schengen Area.

What none will be able to ignore, in a grouping that gets almost a quarter of its energy from Russia, is that the EU – like the US – has few weapons in its armoury to punish Russia, except by attempting to shame it at a time when Moscow appears determined not to be embarrassed, its president, Dmitry Medvedev, declaring the country is not afraid of a ‘new Cold War’.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service