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The Kosovo war of 1999 brought the checkered legacies of Russian and Western geopolitics back to the forefront of the international relations. The war illustrated the continuities of geopolitical traditions and the dilemmas of the allocation of eastern Europe, to the maritime (Western) or landpower (Russian) orbit. In spite of Western impressions, the tradition of pan-Slavism, linking Russia to the Balkans cultural and political networks has been uneven and is now subject to intensive debate within Russian political circles. Public opinion surveys show some consistent support for the military actions in NATO countries but strong opposition in Russia and other Slavic states. They also question many stereotypes, especially the perception of Russian attitudes in the West. Modern geopolitics is differentiated from classical geopolitics by the insertion of public opinion into the formation of geopolitical codes and foreign-policy, in both the western countries and in Russia. In such an environment, the Balkans will remain central to the strategies of the great powers but public opinion restraints will ameliorate geopolitical confrontations.

The starting point for our geopolitical analysis is the famous comment by Otto von Bismarck, the 19^th century German chancellor at the time of the Congress of Berlin (1878), who dismissed the Balkans as "not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier". Yet, within a generation after the division of the European great powers into two alliance structures (Triple Alliance and Triple Entente), Balkan disputes had pulled the German Empire into World War I, with Russia, France, the United States, and Great Britain. A century later, we have come full circle to the same dilemma that confronted the great powers of late 19^th century Europe - how to resolve or confine local ethno- territorial disputes in the area between Russia and the Wesr without significant damage to the relations of the major powers? At a time when contemporary academic writings on the "borderless" world are filled with hyperbole about the free flow of financial, cultural and commercial goods, the war in Kosovo, continued American and British air attacks on Iraq, Russian attempts to reconquer Chechnya, as well as the Indian-Pakistani skirmish in 1999, serve as useful reminders that traditional geopolitical and territorial interests counter claims of globalization and geo-economic triumphalism.

Debates within NATO countries at the time of the 1999 Balkans war over military strategy (ground invasion, selection of targets for aerial bombing, composition of peace-keeping forces, etc.) were predicated on the larger strategic and political questions of relations between a) the American hegemon and the European states and b) between Russia and the West at the end of the "American Century". Among the many lessons of the Kosovo war is belated recognition of the central role that Russia must play in any stable resolution of remaining territorial conflicts in East-central Europe. The war also highlighted a disagreement within NATO between the U.S. and Britain on the one hand, and other European Union (EU) countries, on the other about the geographic range and military scope of NATO in post Cold War Europe. Any further geographic expansion of NATO to the countries of the former Soviet Union (the Baltic states stand in the front of the entry queue) and the grandiose plans of the "New Strategic Concept" for NATO that was mooted in Washington DC on the 50^th anniversary of the organization in April 1999 must now be re-evaluated in light of the Kosovo war developments.

In this paper, we examine 1) the implications of the 1999 Balkan war for future relations between Russia and the west; 2) contemporary Russian geopolitical perspectives; 3) support for specific NATO military and strategic actions in cross-national public opinion polls; and 4) the relationship between domestic Russian political debates and geostrategic camps. Our approach in tackling these subjects is both historical and critical-geopolitical, revisiting the region that has engaged political geographers from both the east (Russia) and the west (France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States). Though there are some obvious parallels between the reactions of the western and Russian publics and of foreign governments to fighting between Muslims and Slavs in the Balkans, we do not wish to argue that the current Balkan crisis is a replication of those of the 1870s or 1912-13. Indeed, the permanent presence of the U.S. in Europe at the end of the "American Century" transformed the complexion of the Balkans.

Recent work in geopolitical analysis has shifted from advocacy of the interests of a particular state, the modus operandi before the 1970s, to examination of the numerous post Cold War developments that have challenged the stable world of balance of power models and territorial control assumptions. Critical geopolitical works focus on the writings of policy-makers, their advisers and academics who wish to act as Mackinder’s "airy cherub" whispering advice to the prince (see Ó Tuathail, 1996 for an example). But as might be expected after the removal of the bi-polar Cold War division and the extension of the globalized world economy to all territories, the study of geopolitics has been dramatically affected. Newman (1999, 3-4) offers a useful identification of the key themes of contemporary geopolitics that include globalization and the changing function of state sovereignty, the de-territorialization of the state, the critical study of geopolitical texts, narratives and traditions, the geopolitical imagination (especially the "imagined territory" of states), and the "re-territorialization" of the state and the emergence of new ethnic, national and territorial identities. This article contributes to the themes of geopolitical imaginations and "re-territorialization" of the state. We link consideration of the public opinion in democratic states with geopolitical analysis since, at the end of the twentieth-century, popular support for a foreign policy action is the sine qua non of democratic and quasi-democratic regimes.

The history of geopolitics and the history of Eastern Europe are irretrievably linked. Great power rivalry in the Balkans, beginning seriously in the 1870s with shifting alliances resting on strategic and cultural considerations, helped to set the stage for the development of geopolitics in Britain and Germany. After the turn of the twentieth-century, the "Cold Peace" that had existed since the 1870s ended as rivalries in the Balkans intensified because of the Serbs’ goal of uniting the south Slavs under their leadership. First promulgated in 1904, Mackinder’s Heartland model was premised on the assumption that there existed no more unclaimed territory that the great powers could control; therefore, competition would intensify for existing resources, including influence over the small states being created in the Balkans out of the ruins of the declining Ottoman empire. Mackinder’s 1919 geopolitical aphorism: "Who rules eastern Europe, commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland, commands the World-island; Who rules the World-island, commands the World" was developed in light of the events of World War I and the German victory on the eastern front and peace terms imposed on the Bolshevik government. Mackinder was most concerned with a Russian-German landpower alliance that would unite the "Heartland" (impervious to successful attack by the oceanic powers in Mackinder’s view) against the leading seapower, Great Britain.

The nineteenth-century had been a century of both revolution and of nationalism, though great power war was relatively absent. Imperial leaderships in Berlin, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Constantinople, anxious to preserve their multi-national states, feared the territorial consequences of emerging national movements in the Balkans, fuelled especially by Serbian nationalism. Who would replace the Ottoman empire in the power vacuum of the Balkans? Germany feared Russia, the only other land-power capable of defeating Germany; Austria worried about the territorial ambitions of new Russian-sponsored nation-states (Serbia, Bulgaria), and Britain worried about trade and military routes to the Middle East. The Tsar felt duty-bound to protect Orthodox Slavs from the Turks (Davies, 1996, 868-870).

The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had organized the Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors' League) of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia in the 1870s to preserve the status quo and suppress revolution, revisiting the Metternich strategy of a half-century before. But the Balkan crisis of 1876-78 challenged this informal arrangement. The war was sparked by simultaneous revolts in the three Ottoman provinces of Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria. British moral outrage was motivated by reports of 20,000 Bulgarians massacred and by Prime Minister Gladstone’s fiery speeches. His cry, "Let the Turks carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying themselves off", was recently echoed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton, though the contemporary application is to Serbs in Kosovo (Economist, 1999b, 54). The Berlin Congress of 1878, whilst ostensibly settling the Slav-Ottoman disputes, is properly remembered for its setting of the European stage for the subsequent great power alliances and subsequently, of great power politics.

From the late nineteenth-century into this century, European great power alignments revolved around a resurgent Germany that, after its defeat of Austria, Denmark and France, became the central pole of European power relations after 1871. Germany’s location in central Europe meant that "(t)he fault-line of the earthquake zone ran along Germany’s eastern border. …Hence from the start, the major duel over Europe’s future lay between Germany and Russia" (Davies, 1996, 871). In 1930s, Hitler reiterated Bismarck’s program for the Balkans – neutrality, economic exploitation and control. Once the Germans had embarked on this road, the British, French and Soviet counter-offensive was colored by it. Their program involved linking the Balkans together and then tying this region economically to Poland and the Baltic states (Hitchens, 1983, vii). Between the wars, periods of geopolitical transitions were marked by neutrality, departure from the rivalries, and finally, in 1945, a shift from a West-East alliance to a West-Center alliance against the East (Soviet Union and its allies) in a bi-polar division of Europe. Since 1989, there is no oppositional alliance to the Western (NATO) powers and it is hard to see whence one could emanate.

The Legacy of Pan-Slavism: As in the 1870s, the question of the strength of pan-Slavic unity re-emerged in the 1990s. Developed in Russia but focussed on Serbia, Pan-Slavism traces its origins to the early eighteenth-century. The Russian leaders, Peter the Great (1682-1725) and Catherine the Great (1762-1796), invited Serbs escaping from the Ottoman oppression to settle in the southern steppes of Russia and Russian troops supported the Serb rebellions of 1807 and 1810-11 against the Ottoman Empire. As a result of the victory of the Russians over Turkey in 1812, Serbia was granted its first autonomous status. This status was later endorsed by even more autonomy in 1826 as a result of the pressure of Tsar Nicholas I on Turkey in favor of the Orthodox peoples in the treaty discussions at the end of the 1823 Greek insurrection. During the wars of the 1870s between the Ottoman empire with Serbia and Montenegro, numerous Slavic committees were created all over Russia to send thousands of volunteers to the Balkans, while the Serbian army was commanded by a Russian general. The Treaty of San Stefano (1878), at the conclusion of the successful Russian attack on Turkey, secured independence for Serbia, Montenegro and Romania from the Ottoman empire while Bosnia and Bulgaria got more autonomy. While Montenegro was consistently an ally of Russia, Serbia did not formally reach that status till the eve of World War I with the accession of Pietr Karageorgievich to the Serbian throne (Jelavich, 1991).

After 1876, the Italian "risorgimento" that united most Italians into a nation-state became an example for Serbs. Prince Michael’s ambition was to make Serbia the Piedmont of the Balkans, thus forming the core of an independent South (Yugo) Slav state. In the nationalist heyday of the late 19^th century, ethnic classification became increasingly important. Of the 11 national groups in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Otto Bauer (an Austrian Marxist) classified them into "historic" nations (Germans, Magyars, Poles, Italians, and Croats) and "nations without history" (Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Slovenes, Ruthenians and Romanians) (Mason, 1997, 10). Karl Marx believed that the Slavs (with the exception of the Poles, a people with history) should be content to remain under the more "progressive" rule of the Germans and the Magyars (Mason, 1997, 88; Hobsbawn, 1991). The myth of a Habsburg identity, "God’s reign upon the earth in the unity of all peoples, the anti-thesis of the nation-state which is, in its very essence demonic and , as such, idolatrous and menacing" (Werfel, 1937, 14) remained in conflict with individual national aspirations and the pan-Slavic imaginary (Bialasiewicz and O’Loughlin, 2000).

Pan-slavism stressed the greater merits of Slavic (especially Russian) culture over that of the West. The first Pan-Slavic Congress, held in Prague in 1848, was confined to Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was effectively anti-Russian. In 1858, the Slavic Welfare Society was established in Moscow, where a Slavic Ethnographic Congress was held in 1867. The cause was also popularized by books written by two prominent Pan-Slavists, General Rotislav Fadeyev (Opinion on the Eastern Question, 1870) and Nicholai Danilevsky (Russia and Europe, 1871) (Stavrianos, 1965). While Fadeyev wanted Russia to lead a new Pan-Slavic federation, including the Slavs under Austrian and Ottoman control, Danilevsky expected a long struggle between Russia and the states of Central Europe. The Pan-Slavic thesis held that the Slavs were younger and more vigorous than decadent West Europeans. Slavs should free themselves from Turkish and Austrian domination and, in extreme versions, unite in a great Slavic confederation with Constantinople as the capital. Austro-Hungarian leaders were fearful that Russia would inherit most of the possessions of the Ottoman empire and especially fearful that Serbia would absorb Bosnia and Herzegovina and become a "Greater Serbia" under Russian patronage, and later would bring other South Slavs (from Austria-Hungary) into it. (Mason, 1997, 55).

Pan-Slavism was never a hegemonic paradigm in Russia and even today, its basic tenets are widely-challenged by the nation-based interest and the Pan-Slavic ideology represents only one camp of contemporary Russian geopolitical opinion. At the end of Tolstoy’s "Anna Karenina", her lover, Count Vronsky, leaves to fight for the Serbs. Fyedor Dostoevsky worried that the Slavs of the Balkans would "rush in ecstasy to Europe" and in the process "have to survive a long period of Europeanism until realizing something in their Slavic importance and in their particular Slavic role in humankind." The long-serving nineteenth-century Russian foreign minister, Prince Alexander Gorchakov, was of the opinion that Slavs under Ottoman rule could be content under control of the Government of Vienna and further, that Russian interests would not be harmed by the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. Other Russian officials, though, were strongly Pan-Slavic including Count Nicholas Ignatiev, who represented Russia in Constantinople between 1864 and 1877. Ignatiev believed firmly in the principle of Slavic unity, which was to take the form of common action against the arch-enemy, Austria-Hungary, with Slavs under Austrian and Ottoman rule serving as allies against Germany. These contrasting views were particularly noticeable regarding the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Stavrianos, 1963). In the age of nationalism, it was increasingly unlikely that the union of South Slavs for autonomy could be prevented; the key question was whether it would be inside or outside the Austrian-Hungarian empire. (7.3 million Yugo-Slavs lived inside the monarchy and 3.3 million outside it) (Mason, 1997, 73)

At the time of the First Balkan War (1876), Gorchakov, facing pan-Slavic emotion in Russia, wrote to Bismarck that the Balkans problem was "neither German nor Russian, but European". Bismarck replied in a marginal note: "Qui parle Europe a tort…(c’est un) notion géographique." At the time of the first Balkans war, Russian pan-slavism and British jingoism were pumped up by tales of ethnically motivated atrocities. As the popular British song proclaimed: "We don’t want to fight, but by iingo, if we do; we’ve go the men, we’ve got the ships, we’ve got the money too…. The Russians shall not have Constantinople". However, in the Ottoman-controlled Balkans, religiously-mixed villages were frequently characterized by tolerance and centuries of living peaceably together in close quarters (Braude and Lewis, 1982; Campbell, 1998). Since the late 19^th century, the mixed ethnic regions of much of the Habsburg monarchy have been converted to mono-lingual national zones through wars, genocides, treaties, and postwar ethnic cleansings, but the uncertainties of the frontiers of the three civilizations (western-NATO/orthodox-Russian/Islamic-Turkish) persist.

The biggest difference between the geopolitical transition from British to American leadership about 1900 and the end of the "American Century" is, of course, the presence in Western Europe of the American hegemon. Europe has evolved from a region of five great powers (Germany, France, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, and Russia) to (partially) an American protectorate in the guise of NATO. With the queue for admission to NATO and the EU ever lengthening in Central and Eastern Europe, only Yugoslavia (Serbia) remains as a non-applicant, whilst Russia is increasingly isolated on a territory now smaller than 100 years ago. Any arguments against extending EU membership to central European states have been undermined by recent economic evidence that indicates that Poland, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Hungary rank ahead of Italy and Greece in an index of "Europeanness" (Economist, 1999a).

A comparison of contemporary Balkan conflicts (the Kosovo war of 1999) with those of the late 19^th century reveals many similarities but some key differences. Among the similarities were calls for pan-Slavic unity and greater Russian involvement in the Balkans to support the Serb position; emotional appeals in the West to stop ethnic slaughter; Serbian nationalism and Albanian irredentism; major naval forces in the Adriatic and the Mediterranean (now mostly American, not British as in the 1870s); and general uncertainty about who is most at fault for ethnic cleansing and mass killing. Further, as in the 1870s, the dimensions of European identity are still not finally demarcated, either in a geographic sense of where Europe ends, or in the political-cultural sense, the power and range of international institutions such as the European Union?

Debates about a new role for NATO in the post Cold War world have temporarily ceased after the enormous power that NATO committed to the Balkans. During the bombing of Yugoslavia in April 1999, NATO met in Washington DC to celebrate its 50^th birthday and to agree a "New Strategic Concept". At this conference, it became clear that NATO successes in the military and political domains have produced two dilemmas, whose resolution will write the history of NATO, and by extension the history of Europe, well into the next century.

The first dilemma lies in the geopolitical arena as the queue for NATO membership grows ever longer with countries as far east as Kazakhstan conducting joint exercises with NATO forces and asserting their interest in joining the alliance. Despite an explicit promise to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 at the time of the disintegration of Communist Europe that NATO would not expand to the east towards Russia’s borders, by 1995, NATO was committed to the admission of three Central European states (Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary) and a promise to consider seriously the future admission of a lengthening list of former Communist countries. Despite significant opposition from across the Russian political spectrum, the list includes former (Baltic) republics of the Soviet Union. If all would-be joiners are admitted, the alliance would take on a strong eastern European character and the "Atlantic" leg of the charter would look increasingly tenuous, predicated largely on the continued involvement of the U.S. on the European continent. (O’Loughlin, 2000).

The "New Strategic Concept" neither delimited the geographic range of NATO’s future military operations nor explicitly limited the number or criteria for new admissions. In the Washington declaration, the NATO ministers declared that "We remain determined to stand firm against those who violate human rights, wage war and conquer territory. We will maintain both the political solidarity and the military forces necessary to protect our nations and to meet the security challenges of the next century." The openness of the Alliance was stressed: "Our Alliance remains open to all European democracies, regardless of geography, willing and able to meet the responsibilities of membership, and whose inclusion would enhance overall security and stability in Europe. NATO is an essential pillar of a wider community of shared values and shared responsibility." In the "Membership Action Plan (MAP)", the NATO leaders declared that: "The door to NATO membership under Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty remains open. The Membership Action Plan (MAP), building on the Intensified, Individual Dialogue on membership questions, is designed to reinforce that firm commitment to further enlargement by putting into place a program of activities to assist aspiring countries in their preparations for possible future membership." (Documents available from the NATO website: www.nato.int/docu). The indeterminacy of NATO’s bounds, either in membership or range of operations, led Russian deputy foreign minister, Yevgeni Gusarov to argue that "NATO wanted to extend its competence to embrace Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space." He also said that the new strategic concept "envisaged NATO resorting to military force without the authorization of the U.N. Security Council". For the "New Strategic Concept", "Russia also wanted the document to guarantee's NATO's co-operation with the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) and to search for ways it could interact with these two organizations." (Eggleston, 1999).

Central to the debate about NATO’s future profile and Russian-Western relations is the determination of where "Europe" ends in the east and whether Russia is in, out or straddling the European divide. Classically, the limits of Europe ran along the river Don (near the present Ukrainian-Russian border), though the Urals became the commonly-accepted divide in the 18^th century with a imperial boundary post on the road between Yekaterinburg and Tiumen. Not only has the U.S. administration and its pro-NATO supporters strongly argued for the redress of the historic injustice of the Cold War divide in Europe by rapid admission of the central European states, but this "re-discovery" of the European credentials of central European states was bolstered by arguments in favor of NATO membership by politicians of all ideological stripes in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary. This claim on a common European ancestry is not some figment of a post Cold War geopolitical imagination. During the Cold War, Seton-Watson (1985, 14) noted that "Nowhere in the world is there so widespread a belief in the reality, and the importance, of a European cultural community, as in the countries lying between the EEC and the Soviet Union… .To these peoples, the ideas of Europe is that of a community of cultures to which a specific culture or sub-culture of each belongs. None of them can survive without Europe, or Europe without them." Kundera (1983) took the analogy further by advocacy of a "kidnapped West" image, one in which the Soviet Union was holding Central Europe as a geopolitical hostage. Russia is still the "constituting Other" for the east European societies in their drive to certify their European heritage (Neumann, 1993). Though not yet clearly voiced by any Western strategist or central European politician, there is an implicit fear among the East European populations engaged in the NATO expansion debate that expansion might stop before all aspirant states meet the entry criteria.

Recent polling data from the New Democracies Barometer (11 countries in central and eastern Europe) show dramatic differences in the perception of threats from Germany, Russia and the United States. Whilst 62% of Poles saw Russia as a threat in 1998, comparable figures for the Czech republic (48%), Slovakia (45%), Romania (42%), Croatia (18%), Ukraine (14%), Yugoslavia (11%), Bulgaria (6%) and Slovenia (3%) indicate the effects of distance, common religious/linguistic, and historical experience. Though 82% of Yugoslavians regarded the U.S. as a threat, only Ukraine (21%), Slovakia (24%) and Belarus (26%) of the other ten sample countries showed any significant concern. Attitudes towards Germany as a threat varied from 75% fearful in Yugoslavia to 2% in Bulgaria and 3% in Hungary. (Comparable figures for Croatia were 46%, Poland 42%, Czech Republic 37% and Slovakia 23%). Large majorities in all countries surveyed, except Ukraine (58%), Poland (56%) and Bulgaria (54%), favored NATO membership. (see also Haerpfer, Milosinski and Wallace, 1999)

The second dilemma arising from recent NATO actions concerns the implications of the military strategy of long-range bombing from a height (18,000-30,000 feet in the case of the Yugoslavia air defenses) that minimizes NATO, specifically American, casualties. In the case of the 11 week bombing of Yugoslavia in Spring 1999, the fatality numbers tell the tale: Serb soldiers, 6000; NATO, none; Serb civilians, 2000; and uncertain Kosovar estimates, perhaps 10,000-50,000. Over 1.25 million refugees were displaced inside Kosovo and to the neighboring countries. The damage to the civilian infrastructure in Serbia amounted to about $30 billion. An editorial in the Economist (1999d, 15) was moved to question the moral imperative of a war-making that was so one-sided. "Even the elegant trituration of targets in Serbia, the destruction of bridges, the incapacitation of power stations, however necessary in war, when carried out night after night from the safety of the skies, seemed to turn the bombing into a high-tech coconut shy.

Americans suffer from an acute case of double-standards regarding battle casualties. Exhibiting extreme caution about U.S. military deaths because of fear of a public opinion backlash, American leaders are highly reluctant to commit to ground troops, except in "permissive circumstances." The U.S., therefore, foregoes territorial control while at the same time, inflicts heavy aerial damage on civilian structures in order to pressure opponents to capitulate, as in Iraq and Yugoslavia. Further warfare of this style will be very expensive. The Pentagon plans to spend $200 billion on new attack aircraft (Economist, 1999e, 25). Zbigniew Brzezinski has coupled this extreme sensitivity to American casualties with "indifference to the human cost of military action abroad." (quoted in the Economist, 1999d, 24). This juxtaposition of unilateralist moralism and international opprobrium offers a perfect metaphor for the end of the American century. To Henry Luce’s list of "American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products", we can add American moralism.

The moralist track has, temporarily at least, won the debate in the U.S. foreign policy establishment over the strategists. Michael Dobbs (1999), in his book on Madeline Albright, stresses her Wilsonian moralism, adopted as quickly as her American accent upon immigration from Central Europe at age 11. He concludes that the United State's Kosovo policy was largely Albright's doing. Nijman (1998) distinguished between the U.S. "geopolitikers" of European background (Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger), who have argued for NATO expansion on the basis of purely strategic calculations, versus "American moralists" like James Baker, George Schultz and Warren Christopher, who promote the moral imperative of admitting states with proper democratic credentials. Madeline Albright, though from a central European background, has eschewed geopolitical calculation in favor of geographical argument and military uses for human rights purposes (Nijman, 1998). Dobbs chronicles Albright’s emotional congressional testimony on the failure of the U.S. to act in the Rwandan civil war and her determination to right that wrong. The question for NATO and the U.S. remains: what circumstances and locations distinguish between looking the other way and military involvement?

Despite U.S. counter-claims, the Yugoslavian war revealed a NATO deeply divided on the military options. U.S. was most hawkish on the air war and the targeting of Milosovic, Britain was most willing to engage ground troops, while Germany and Italy were most anxious to get Russia involved in peace-making and to get U.N. endorsement of the cease fire plan. In NATO planning, the European members have resisted any plans that might give the impression of NATO as a police force, despite U.S. bows in that direction. But gray areas remain; what about peace-keeping in the Caucasus? Europeans do not want any change in Article 5 of the NATO charter that might be interpreted as anti-terrorist operations, whilst the U.S. and Britain have resisted calls for a pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons by NATO. (Economist, 1999c).

With the partial demilitarization of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army), the withdrawal of Yugoslavia military and civil rule, the compromise by Russia to allow its troops to serve under NATO control and the emasculation of the United Nations in Kosovo, NATO now effectively controls the province, with all of its attendant difficulties. But more broadly, NATO has taken on the stability of the whole of the Balkan region that, since the years of Austro-Hungarian and Turkish imperial competition, has seen many external forces come and leave defeated. NATO definitely now has a new mission (peace-keeping in the Balkans); how this role fits the larger geopolitical aims of the organization remains to be seen. Short-term strategic signs, such as from Bosnia in 1995 where the U.S. tackled perceived European disorder that had been vividly portrayed in the media (Ó Tuathail, 1999), may not conform to long-term geopolitical strategy, though it is evident that NATO is leaving its options open.

Does Kosovo foreshadow a future NATO-Russia confrontation? Whilst Russia was constrained by military, economic, domestic political and strategic limitations in the Kosovo conflict, these limitations can be expected to pale into insignificance if NATO becomes involved in the countries of the former Soviet Union. Russian doubts about NATO intentions are growing as a result of the broken promise to Mikhail Gorbachev, at the time of German reunification in 1990, that NATO would not expand to the east; by the rapid deployment of NATO bombers to Kosovo immediately after the accession of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary; by the military exercises that NATO has conducted with Azerbaijan in the increasingly-contested geopolitical morass of the Caspian Sea basin; by the indeterminate nature of the bounds of NATO action laid out in the "New Strategic Concept" of the Washington 50^th birthday summit of April 1999; and by NATO avoidance of the Security Council of the UN in bombing Yugoslavia to accept foreign troops in Kosovo. Russian geopolitical goals of being an independent power centre in a multi-polar world are hindered by a military spending crisis, reliance on Western loans, and a lack of obvious global allies. Though China and Russia issued a joint statement in 1997 condemning "hegemonism" (code word for U.S. hegemony) in the post Cold War world, an alliance between these two states against the West is unsustainable. Current trends point to a future zone of confrontation between NATO and Russia in the states of the "Near Abroad", especially in Ukraine and the former Baltic and Trans-Caucasian republics of the Soviet Union.

Just as the Kosovo war seemed to recreate the nineteenth century great power competition in the Balkans, recent events in the Caucasus region seem to be repeating the "great game" in Central Asia when an expanding Tsarist empire came into conflict with British imperial plans. The Crimean War (1853-56) temporarily slowed Russian territorial growth but the great power competition shifted further east to the borders of Afghanistan and Iran. Since the end of the Soviet Union, national and strategic cleavages along the southern margins of Russia have deepened. At the center of the military, economic and political networks is the Caucasus, that incorporates the unsettled dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disposition of Nagorno-Karabakh, now controlled by Armenia. Azerbaijan and Georgia have opted out of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) collective security pact and are members of the GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova) group. These states have held joint military exercises in the Caspian Sea region with NATO forces, under the aegis of the Partnership for Peace program. Azerbaijan has tried repeatedly to link itself closer to NATO, assisted greatly by close relations with Turkey, and its representatives attended the NATO 50^th anniversary celebrations. Azerbaijan has offered an air base to NATO and in a classic geopolitical countermove, Armenia and Russia have become militarily ever closer, especially in Russian provision of new jet fighters and improved air defense systems. Georgia has asked Russian peacekeepers to leave Abkhazia (northwest Georgia) and accused Russia of trying to settle internal Georgian political disputes by assassination and provocation, while Russia has responded by removing border controls between Abkhazia and Russia. Russia tried to isolate Chechnya by cutting the link with Georgia across the Caucasus mountains in the 1999-2000 Chechen war.

Why would the U.S. and the west become involved in a region particularly sensitive to Russian interests at a time when, ostensibly, NATO is trying to mend relations with Russia? The geopolitical machinations in the Caucasus region have become heated because of the immediate crisis in oil delivery from the Caspian Sea holding of Azerbaijan and by the ethnic conflict that has spilled out of Chechnya into Dagestan and other bordering territories. For decades, the oil flowed through pipelines crossing the northern Caucasus, via Chechnya to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk supplemented by a new (since April 1999) southern route to the Georgia Black Sea port of Suspa. The plan to ship the oil direct from Baku to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey, thus bypassing the unstable Caucasus region and the Bosporus bottleneck, is seriously delayed. Though heavily favored by the Western governments, current oil prices and reserves make it uneconomical for oil companies drilling in the Caspian Sea. The three biggest Azeri oilfields are run by a Western consortium of 12 companies that include Amoco and British Petroleum. (Beddoes, 1998). In April 1999, contracts worth $2 billion between SOCAR (Azerbaijan’s state oil company) and Exxon and Mobil for further Caspian sea oil exploitation were signed at the time of the NATO party, illustrating well the coincidence of economic and geopolitical goals. In a specific message to Russia and Armenia, GUUAM troops conducted military exercises in 1999 to "defend" the Baku-Suspa pipeline. In June 1999, Russia announced that the Baku-Novorossiysk would be shut down indefinitely due to thefts of the oil running through Chechnya and suggested an alternative route further north, through Dagestan, that has been rejected by Azerbaijan. The Caucasus meets the narrow definition of Saul Cohen’s (1982) "shatterbelt" thesis (a region with significant global resources, complicated ethnic divisions and territorial claims, alliances of local and outside great powers, and great power competition). Future local and regional conflicts can easily be transformed into further NATO-Russia confrontation, with growing prospects of a new Cold Peace.

War-making has changed fundamentally in the past two decades because of the instantaneous transmission of news, rapid growth of cable television, the lingering effects of the Vietnam war, and the resulting attempt by governments, especially in traditional democracies, to avoid military casualties (Cumings, 1994; Ó Tuathail, 1999). In the contemporary United States, foreign policy decisions are closely monitored by public opinion polls; indeed, numerous polls and focus groups are conducted by political leaders to probe public reaction to a variety of possible scenarios and military developments, before a decision is taken. The Clinton administration has taken opinion polling to a new height by conducting polls to estimate public reaction to different possible foreign policy actions. The spectacle in Mogadishu in 1993 of an American soldier’s body being dragged through the streets remains a defining image of peacekeeping in the post Cold War world in the eyes of many Americans. Based on extensive polling about foreign military actions and about the Kosovo war, University of Maryland pollsters concluded "Americans are very resistant to the U.S. acting on its own and looking like the world’s policeman. Since the Vietnam experience, this is anathema to most Americans. But provided that the alliance holds together, the U.S. public is likely to support a dynamic NATO effort in Kosovo. Fatalities would definitely raise the political stakes, but ultimately, Americans do see it as part of America’s role to participate in multilateral efforts to stop genocide."(PIPA, 1999). The perception of legitimacy (of military action) in the last years of the twentieth-century is molded largely by that supreme arbiter in modern democracies, public opinion, rather that the norms of international law or the expectations of strategic balance of power strategies (Economist, 1999c) . Though foreign affairs do not generally have a high profile in American public discourse, political leaders strongly feel the need to mobilize public opinion or, at least, generate a cautious "wait-and-see" feeling. In respect of the Yugoslavian aerial bombardment, 55-60% of Americans supported the aerial war throughout its 11 week course while at the same time, only about one-third favored a ground invasion of Kosovo for humanitarian aims, due to fears about high U.S. casualties. Support for military actions decreases in proportion to the expected number of U.S. casualties (PIPA, 1999). A symbiotic relationship between public attitudes and government foreign policies has developed over the past quarter-century.

Starting in Spring 1998, officials of the Clinton administration led by Secretary of State Madeline Albright repeatedly made the case for NATO intervention in Kosovo on humanitarian purposes. Stories of ethnic cleansing and massacres had swung the majority of Americans to the side of intervention by the beginning of 1999. About two-thirds of the U.S. public thought that the U.S. had a "moral obligation" to launch attacks on the Yugoslav forces and in general, humanitarian concerns and beliefs generated more support for U.S. involvement than Clinton administration arguments about U.S. national interests. An April 7^th 1999 Gallup poll showed that two-thirds believed that the U.S. should be engaged in the war because of a "moral obligation to help the refugees" while just 13% thought NATO’s credibility was important and only 8% cited strategic reasons. When asked directly to compare the principles of "national sovereignty" and "genocide prevention", more than twice as many Americans (62%) agreed that fears of genocide justified military intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign state over those (28%) upholding the principle of national sovereignty. The support of the humanitarian principle is strong even in the face of charges of "American unilateralism". When asked about NATO’s avoidance of the United Nations, 48% of the U.S. public were concerned that NATO actions did not have UN backing but that it should continue anyway; 30% believed that NATO action should wait for UN support (like the situation in Kuwait in 1991); and 19% were unconcerned that NATO was operating without a supportive UN resolution (PIPA, 1999). What these and other national polls consistently show is that about two-thirds of Americans will support military action for humanitarian purposes, though support drops in proportion to increasing rates of expected U.S. casualties, and it is also reduced by lack of support from traditional allies. As long as U.S. leaders can demonstrate moralistic goals for overseas action and support from other countries (preferably including the United Nations, though it is not imperative), the U.S. public will support the military option. Kosovo, the first time that Western powers have launched military attacks for ostensibly humanitarian purposes without UN endorsement and established a protectorate within a sovereign state with ground forces, may be the first of post-Cold War Western interventions that increase the number of pseudo-states in the world system. Pseudo-states are concentrated on the territory of the former Soviet Union, with Russian troops intimately involved in their establishment (Trans-Dniester Republic of Moldova, Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh) or in attempts to eliminate them (Chechnya). (Kolossov and O’Loughlin, 1999; O’Loughlin, Kolossov and Tchepalyga, 1998).

Though the U.S. was the undisputed leader of the NATO alliance in the Yugoslavia conflict of 1999, the war demonstrated a growing fracture in NATO that pitted the U.S. and British leaderships on the military activist side against the more cautious leaders of Germany, Italy and some smaller states that worry more about future relations with Russia. Public opinion surveys conducted by international polling firms, Angus Reid and Louis Harris, available from www.angusreid.com and www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll, at the height of the bombing of Yugoslavia allow a comparison of support for different NATO actions across a large sample of countries, in and outside of Europe. In general, the polls show a close fit between the practices of individual NATO members in the alliance councils and public opinion in the respective countries. Overall, just over half of respondents surveyed in all sample countries supported NATO actions in bombing Yugoslavia, with support in NATO countries reaching 62% (Figure 1). Predictably, citizens of the U.S. and the UK were more supportive of NATO bombing actions in mid-April (about two-thirds support), though these ratios are matched by values for Denmark, Norway and Canada where the moral imperative of saving Kosovars held sway over considerations of national sovereignty in the popular media. Most other NATO countries, whether new (joining in 1999) or traditional partners, show more support than opposition, though Italy (47%), Czech Republic (37%) and Spain (36%) had majorities opposed. Greek public opposition (92%) is as strong and unanimous as the Russian and Ukrainian cases, a trend interpreted by many commentators as a kind of Orthodox solidarity but was almost certainly motivated by traditional Balkan rivalries and historical geopolitical alliances. The figure for Ukraine is most significant since the country is polarized between a pro-Western (Ukrainian) and pro-Russian eastern part of the country (Kubicek, 1999). Opposition to NATO actions spanned this internal cultural cleavage and pushed a rapprochement with Russia on the part of the previously Western-leaning Kuchma government.

The Yugoslavian war of 1999 will be remembered in the United States for the armchair strategists and military pundits that proliferated on the cable television channels. Their advice to the Pentagon and the White House ranged from a full-scale land invasion of Yugoslavia, followed by forced removal from office and a war crimes trial for President Milosevic on the one hand, to a halt in the aerial bombing on the other. Like the Gulf War of 1991, critical voices that questioned the whole NATO enterprise were relatively missing from the mainstream media. The public in the NATO countries was thus engaged in the conduct of the war on NATO’s terms. The interest was further motivated by careful manipulation and spinning of military news and a torrent of satellite television reports from points in Yugoslavia and bordering states. In the confusion about a clear strategic goal (the ostensible goal of protecting Kosovars took on a different dimension when the refugee flight reached full force), numerous options came into the public fray. The responses by the public to five options for NATO at the height of the campaign in mid-April are presented in Figure 2. The results are consistent since the publics that were more supportive of the NATO policies were also the most warlike. Majority support for more or continued military action was found in Croatia, Denmark, Britain, the U.S. and Canada. Of these states, about one-third of the public surveyed supported a ground invasion.

A balance between continued military pressure and a stronger diplomatic effort to resolve the crisis can be seen by the responses from Norway, France, Germany, and Poland (Figure 2). Respondents in Hungary, Finland, Italy and the Czech Republic preferred a stronger diplomatic initiative than the military option, while respondents in Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia opted strongly for either an end to the NATO action or a diplomatic solution to the crisis. In the end, a combination of military and diplomatic activities followed by NATO and abandonment of Milosovic by Russia resulted in the cease fire agreements negotiated in Bonn and strongly promoted under German auspices. Differences in opinion in the NATO leadership about the conduct of the war was mirrored by the comparative public responses and the possible outcome of this unilateralist NATO action is a questioning of U.S. leadership that was significantly more inclined to use the military option than most of the European NATO states (with the exception of Britain) wished to pursue. In further discussions in the European Union about expansion and relations with the countries of Eastern Europe, a key item will concern the nature of the cross-Atlantic political link and the continued U.S. dominance of NATO.

The possible substitution of NATO by an alternative military forces of the European Union motivated a specific question by the opinion pollsters; the answers are shown in Figure 3. Though the correlation between the answers on this question and previous responses in Figures 2 and 3 are not as strong as those between the answers to the questions on NATO’s conduct of the war, there is some consistency. Among the NATO countries, France and Italy show majority support for a European alternative to NATO. The question asked specifically about a "new defense and peacekeeping force" to replace NATO and overall, 38% of Europeans sampled supported this idea. However, opposition to such a replacement for NATO is solid in two important original members of NATO, Germany and Great Britain, while the U.S. percentage sits close to the NATO average. The relatively high score for the U.S. is a function of the traditional isolationist streak of Americans and this position, with about one-third public support, argues that Europeans (and other U.S. allies) should pay more for their own defense and commit more military resources (O’Loughlin,2000). Fearful of the actions of a unilateralist NATO, respondents in Russia and Ukraine, as well as Slovakia, want its replacement by an EU force, while the reaction in Croatia (42% support, 42% opposition and 36% unsure) reflects the uncertainties of a Europe without NATO as a substantial part of the Balkans currently resides under its protectorate status. Opposition to a new EU military force is also strong in the small NATO states of Denmark and Norway (less than 20% support) and, in a separate survey, respondents in the EU neutral states also opposed the idea (Ireland 27% support and Austria 35% support). (Smyth, 1999).

Though the United States administration argued strongly during the course of the Yugoslavian war that NATO was united and determined to meet its goals, suspicions about the U.S. role in Europe and its long term aims abound. When asked to contrast Russia and the United States in terms of which state is the greatest threat to world peace, citizens of NATO countries pointed to Russia, 53% to 23%. But in the six non-NATO countries in the Angus Reid sample, a slightly bigger majority pointed to the US, 52% to 19%. (The figures blaming the U.S. as the biggest threat reached 66% in Russia and 57% in Ukraine). Further evidence of the east-west gap in perceptions is provided by the answers to the question asking for an overall positive or negative rating of NATO as a contributor to peace. While the respondents in the NATO countries rated the organization positively by a two-thirds majority, 50% of Russians and 41% of Ukrainians rated it negatively. Further, 75% of respondents in NATO countries believe that the organization should ignore Russia’s protests regarding NATO expansion but response to this question is evenly split in non-NATO states.

While the attention of Kosovo war pundits focussed on political developments in Moscow, analysis of the impacts of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on other former Communist societies in transition has been relatively scarce. Ukraine is most often viewed as the most significant of the post-Soviet independent states for the future direction of NATO-Russian relations (Brzezinski, 1998). Ukraine straddles the new geopolitical divide that is emerging in Europe as criteria for admission to the Western institutions are defined and implemented. Since independence in 1991, successive governments in Kyiv have tried to paint Ukraine in European colors, despite a strong regional divide in the country based largely on ethnicity (Ukrainian and Russian) and ideology (Communist and reform) (O’Loughlin and Bell, 1999). The Ukrainian government joined Russia in strongly condemning the bombings in Yugoslavia, despite the fact that NATO was a hugely popular institution in the country. By April 1999, 39 % of Ukrainians (and 70% of Russians) in the Angus Reid poll saw NATO as a military threat and dismissive comments by U.S. commentators about Ukrainians as peace-keepers in a U.N. force have only fuelled suspicions about NATO’s goals, seen as more geopolitically self-serving than the ostensible goal of protecting Kosovars. President Leonid Kuchma has been carefully pursuing his "multi-vectored foreign policy" that presents two different faces of Ukraine to the West and to Russia. This strategy was successful in the 1999 Presidential election campaign, despite accusations by opponents that skewered Kuchma for contradictory "pro-Russian" or "pro-NATO" policies. NATO has leased a military training ground in Western Ukraine, Ukraine has participated in NATO's Partnership for Peace program and also attended the 50th anniversary celebrations in Washington DC. Reflecting the geopolitical split in the country as a whole, polls showed that 50 percent of the Ukrainian population opposed sending troops to Kosovo, with 25 percent in favor.

Public opinion can be fickle and can be manipulated by political leaders assisted by both state-controlled and private media. Nevertheless, extensive polling at the time of the Yugoslavian war demonstrated conclusively the "psychological iron curtain" that is developing in Europe between NATO members (both original and new) and the states to the east, especially Russia and increasingly Ukraine. The Yugoslavian war clarified this geopolitical divide and compared to the NATO-Russia/Ukraine public opinion gap, the differences within the NATO community (except for Greece) are relatively small. Unlike the United States, where elite and public opinion has been consistent over decades about the level and nature of U.S. involvement in world affairs, the citizens of European countries are newly confronted with the unanticipated consequences of dramatic geopolitical shifts on their continent. Parallel to the construction of a European "community" is the parallel determination of future members of the community and the nature of economic and political relations with the states to the east. It is not just public and elite opinion in the west that will determine this outcome but significantly, it will depend on the struggle over the nature of the political transitions in former Communist states as "westerners" and "eurasianists" compete for the geopolitical futures of Russia and Ukraine.

As other former Communist countries queue for membership in European institutions, Russian foreign policy debates are revisiting the major geopolitical paradigms that have existed in one form or another since the revolution of 1917. The gepolitical ovision of Russia as a Eurasian country (a world onto itself, neither east nor west) is growing beyond its traditional adherents (Clover, 1999) as the grand question of whether Russia is part of the European-Western world or the center of a separate Eurasian sphere has split the political elite. The "westerners" want to be part of the Atlantic-European community but their opponents (supporters of Russian great power status) see westernism as the root of Russia’s problems. The perspectives of the centrists and Communists are less dogmatic but veer towards the western and the Eurasian ideologies, respectively. A shared belief that NATO enlargement institutionalizes a new European iron curtain is bridging ideological perspectives. Nearly 100% opposition to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in Spring 1999 was accompanied by sympathy for the Serbian people and a condemnation of the actions of the Milosevic regime. Traditional links between the Orthodox peoples of Serbia and Russia were exaggerated by the pan-Slavists during the Kosovo war. During the scramble for the territories of the Ottoman empire in the Balkans from 1867 to 1913, Russian support for Serbia was inconsistent and haphazard, though Tsar Nicholas I in 1826 obtained autonomy for Serbia from the Ottoman Empire and many Russian volunteers fought in 19^th century Balkan wars

Contemporary Russian public opinion to the Kosovo crisis was greatly colored by, and in turn, influenced domestic political alignments. During the Kosovo war of 1999, the "westernizers", who controlled the Russian policy circles and are associated with reliance on Western financial loans (Viktor Chernomyrdin, Anatoly Chubais, and most of the Yeltsin forces) acted to defuse the crisis, and in the end, pressured Serbia to accept a cease-fire that resembled the Rambouillet agreement, rejected by Slobodan Milosovic in March 1999. By firing Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov in the middle of the Kosovo war, President Yelstsin signified the marginalization of the "anti-Western forces" in Russia; in this regard, by reaching accomodation with the West to settle ethnic conflicts in the Balkans, the Yeltsin behaved as the inheritors of the tradition of Foreign Minister Gorchakov.

Public sensitivities to NATO actions in Eastern Europe were clearly visible in the strong and consistent reaction across the ideological spectrum, a rare occurrence in contemporary Russia. Ranging from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s comparison of NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia to Hitler’s Balkan campaign to the milder denunciation of the Westernizers in Moscow, close to 100% of Russians opposed NATO’s military campaign, and 70 percent saw NATO as a military threat to Russia. In the view of many Russians, NATO is engaged in setting up a series of military protectorates (Bosnia, Albania, Macedonia and Kosovo), thus edging into Russia’s historic zone of influence (Wallender, 1999; Stepanova, 1999). With the growing turmoil in the Caucasus coupled with the increasing interests of external powers for geopolitical and economic reasons, Russians worry about NATO intentions in the "Near Abroad". Russian geopolitical dilemmas have evoloped from the clash of a long tradition of geopolitical isolationism with the contemporary era of geopolitical transition.

The Soviet heritage and contemporary geopolitics: With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, attention turned to the nature of the identities that would succeed the Soviet one in the successor states. During the Soviet period, a Leninist nationalities policy encouraged multiple identities, usually Soviet and that of a titular group, in the republics and the autonomous regions; the policy was most successful for Russians, by far the largest titular group (Chinn and Kaiser, 1996). Thus, in 1989, a public opinion poll show that Russians identified with the Soviet Union more than the residents of the other federal republics (Lynn and Bogorov, 1999, 109). As in other republics with similar mixed, overlapping and often conflicting identities, the content of what it meant to be "Russian" came into discussion after 1989 (Eckert and Kolossov, 1999; Kliamkin and Lapkin, 1995; Tishkov, 1997). While now widely accepted among academic observers that individuals can have multiple allegiances and identify with multiple national and territorial identities, it is also clear that changes in identities shift in response to contemporary political and cultural developments (Herb and Kaplan, 1999). After three years of independence in 1994, 63% of respondents in the VCIOM survey of respondents in Russia said that they constantly felt Russian (an additional 17% added "sometimes"), while 35% constantly and 23% "sometimes" still perceived themselves as Soviet people. Moreover in Russia, there is no consensus about the ideology or a set of foundational ideas that could be used as the basis of national unity and social integration. Unlike the United States, for example, where the founding statement of the republic is reified in the Constitution, promoted throughout the educational careers of all American pupils, Russia has no unambiguous and unchallenged document that unites all citizens. Under the conditions of the deep, all-encompassing crisis embracing the country since the early 1990s, consistently about 50% of the Russian population suffer from fear of loss of national resources and national identity. For instance, 60% of respondents to a 1997 VCIOM survey were persuaded than Russia was under threat through the sale of national resources to foreign countries and 46% of Russians believed that their political leadership was betraying the "national interests", though it is not evident that the respondents are consistent in their definitions of the national interests.

The population of post-Soviet Russia fully inherited important elements of the Soviet mentality - opposition to the outside world, fear of a "hostile environment", strong mechanisms of group solidarity and appeals to symbols of "great-powerness" - as compensation for the many different humiliations and psychological damages suffered in the post-Soviet times. Vladimir Putin (1999) identified four elements of the Russian idea, viz., patriotism ("a source of the courage, staunchness and strength of our people"), social solidarity ("striving for corporative forms of activity that have always prevailed over individualism"), a strong state ("not an anomaly that should be got ride of….Russians see it as a guarantor of order and the initiator and main driving force for change"), and great power beliefs ("preconditioned by the inseparable characteristics of its geopolitical, economic and cultural existence…determining the mentality of Russians and the policy of the government throughout the history of Russia"). The loss of great power status is deeply felt across the wide spectrum of the Russian society. In 1996, according to a VCIOM survey, more than two-thirds of the Russian population still regretted the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Unlike most post-socialist central-European countries (exceptions are Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria), pessimistic predictions of the countries' present course and future direction, compared with the recent past, dominate in Russia as well as in Ukraine and in other former Soviet republics, except the Baltic states. More than 80% of Russians worry about the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers in the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union, principally in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Estonia.

The perception of a hostile global environment, persisting across centuries, was cultivated by successive Soviet governments and has become deeply rooted in the Russian and the Soviet mass consciousness, as reflected in the VCIOM surveys. Many Russians see their country as a besieged fortress encircled by enemies and consequently, they site themselves in opposition to the "other" world. In 1994, 42% of VCIOM respondents fully or partly agreed with the statement that "Russia always provokes negative feelings in other states, and nobody wants us". Of course, such a feeling was encouraged in the early post-Soviet years by an expulsion of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians from the Transcaucasian republics, Central Asia and Kazakhstan and by overt anti-Russian nationalism in the independent Baltic states, marked by stringent language requirements for citizenship. In 1996, 8% of VCIOM respondents declared that they believed that the military threat to Russia was real and 29% believed in the possibility of external military aggression against Russia. In April 1997, one-quarter of the respondents answered that the military threat to Russia has grown since the beginning of political and economic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.

For centuries, the Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union as its direct successor built enduring geopolitical "envelopes" around the country in the attempt to move perceived enemies away from "the besieged fortress"; this classic attempt to make buffers against external threat was directed towards east and west. As a result of these continual efforts, three such envelopes existed around Russia by the end of the Soviet Union in 1991: the belt of Union republics on Russia’s borders, the strip of Soviet allies in East-Central Europe and in other regions, and, finally, a discontinuous zone of the so-called "countries of socialist orientation", a set that grew significantly in the 1970s (O’Loughlin, 1989). In only a few years, 1989-1991, all three zones disintegrated (Kolossov and Treivish, 1993). Moreover, the recent enlargement of NATO to central Europe right up to the borders of Russia and incorporating former Soviet allies, has made the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad a direct neighbor of a NATO member, Poland. The perspective of a further eastward expansion of NATO to the territory of the former Soviet Union, for example to the former Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, is highly negative and emotive for a large part of Russian public opinion.

Inconsistent with expectations from a general sense of encirclement, Russian perceptions of the "other" are typically not aggressive. In 1997, only 17% of Russians explain their frustration with the present-day situation by loss of "external" self-identification towards the outside world. Negative attitudes of Russians are generally not focused against specific national groups, with some important exceptions. According to the results of the 1997 VCIOM sociological study, 47% of Russian respondents did not trust or were angry towards Chechens (in autumn 1999, after a series of apartment bomb blasts in Moscow and Rostov for which Chechens were blamed by Russian authorities, this percentage has undoubtedly increased dramatically) and 41% were hostile towards Gypsies. The comparable hostility figures are about 10% towards Jews, 12% towards Estonians, and 28% towards Azeris. However, ethnic or political mobilization according to a single "oppositional" model that puts Russian identity as a frame of reference against other national groups of the former Soviet Union, is simply not feasible among contemporary Russians. For Russians, a combination of a general lack of self-confidence, an uncertain identity and a general distrust of foreigners is not matched by strong negative feelings towards specific nationalities or countries.

The new Russian isolationism: The state of cultural and social disorientation and the lack of identity markers in contemporary Russia has given rise to isolationism, to the desire of individuals to hide themselves from unpleasant realities and to become less aware of their own short-comings. The results of the ISSP (International Social Survey Procedure) program "National Identity 1995" conducted in 1995-1996 in 22 European countries, as well as the U.S., Canada and New Zealand using consistent methods and questions show that Russian citizens are not proud of their country nor do not share a feeling of national exclusiveness (Gudkov, 1999). The ratio of those who believe that their country is "better than most other countries" was 42%, ranking Russia in 13th place of 22 countries (in Japan, positive answers to this question were given by 84% of respondents, in the U.S. by 81%, and in Canada by 77%). In the Russian sample, a remarkably small ratio (44%) would not like to be citizens of any other country.

Russia has ceased to be a great power in the eyes of most of its citizens. Traditional markers of identity in a great power are belief in the armed forces of the country, feelings of dominance over other nationalities, and pride in a glorious and heroic past. This combination helps to nourish "imperial" feelings of self-satisfaction and partly compensates for the frustrations of individuals with daily life struggles, but in the case of contemporary Russia, such a combination no longer cements national unity and the common identity of Russians. In the 1995 ISSP polls, only 14% of Russians were proud of their armed forces, compared to 49% of the U.S. and 48% of the British samples. A high level of science and technology education cannot substitute for these markers of self-identification for Russians. Only the domains of national cultural heritage, literature and the arts are highly-rated by the Russian respondents and these characteristics could still be used as building-blocks of modified ethnic and nation-building in the post-Soviet years. The high proportion of citizens that "highly appreciate" their national cultural heritage, perceiving a particular collective solidarity, puts Russia together in the company of some small European countries like Ireland, Norway and Austria, but not with the traditional "great powers". Characteristically, contemporary Russian identity is oriented to the past, with 45% of respondents in Russia "proud of the history of their country", a slightly lower ratio than the U.S. sample (50%), but, unlike the U.S., this ratio does not correspond to a more general conviction of their country's dominance in most fields (Gudkov, 1999).

In general during post-Soviet times in Russia, most expectations and most disillusions concern domestic policy and extend only to the day-to-day economic difficulties and not to foreign policy (Byzov, Petrukov and Ryabov, 1998; Gorshkov, 1997). However, the crisis of post-Soviet identity has generated many geopolitical discussions and projections among political parties and especially among Russian intellectuals. An identity crisis is an important stage of the search for regional and global roles in all the post-Soviet societies, but in Russia, the identity crisis has produced a louder and more bitter debate than in other post-Soviet countries. Because of the size of Russia and the leading role played by Russians in the Soviet state, the loss of the Soviet identity cannot be easily or simply compensated by Russian ethnic-building and more expressive nationalism or by a rediscovery of new markers of identity, as is the case of most other former Soviet republics (Eckert and Kolossov, 1999). Not surprisingly in Russia today, ideologists of different parties, academic scholars and journalists try to evaluate the new position of Russia in the world, both now and in the future. Further, wide speculation exists in Russia about potential external threats to national security, actual and potential allies, and Russia’s possible relations with world powers and neighboring states in order to generate new geopolitical codes in the emerging world geopolitical order. Importantly, by the mid-1990s, the term "geopolitics" had become almost monopolized by the opposition to market and liberal reforms on both the left and nationalist flanks. Thus, the Duma Committee on Geopolitics 1995-1999 was chaired by a deputy from Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia and the term "geopolitics" appears frequently in Communist party leader, Zyuganov’s 1995 book. Four main streams of geopolitical thought can be distinguished in the numerous geopolitical (or popular pseudo-geopolitical) publications that have appeared in post-Soviet Russia.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Atlantist (Westernizer) geopolitical orientation quickly became the hegemonic geopolitical discourse. After the economic distress of the past decade, the westernizers are widely accused by relatively liberal (meaning pro-marketization and democratization in the Russian context) critics and media of ignoring national interests. Further, they are attacked for blindly following the politics of the U.S. and other Western countries and for his readiness to "surrender" to the West in the neighboring regions of the Baltic states, Transcaucasia, and in Central Europe. This Atlantist orientation or doctrine was based on expectations and dreams of Russian development dominant at the end of the Soviet period, 1987-1993, among liberal intelligentsia and the majority of voters, who sincerely believed that Russia would be immediately admitted to the club of Western powers enjoying full membership rights and status. The disappointments of political and economic change in Russia since 1991 have significantly reduced the attractions of the Atlantist model and the Kosovo war of 1999 further undermined its appeal dramatically.

Second, a new Russian isolationism has manifested itself in a varied and incoherent set of geopolitical concepts. The most interesting among these is the concept of "island Russia", developed by Vadim Zymburski. In his view, a weakened Russia should temporarily keep its distance from world affairs and focus its efforts on self-development on the "island" encircled by "straits" - geopolitically unstable and disputed territories (Zymburski, 1993, 1997). However, the sense of belonging to a great power by most Russians overrides such isolationism and motivates an engagement with world politics, with closest attention given to the "Near Abroad".

A third geopolitical perspective, the Russian "national" geostrategy, can be considered as a variety of the Atlantist or of isolationist concepts, or as a separate concept. It has united Russian intellectuals and politicians who share the values of the market economy and democracy but do not rely on promises of Western assistance to post-communist reforms; at the same time, this rather-diverse group is skeptical about any possible future union of Russia with Turkic Muslim republics in a modified Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and they are concerned about "pumping" economic resources out of Russia. This geopolitical concept demands the withdrawal of Russia not only from Central Asia but as well from Transcaucasia (Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia) as well as the Muslim parts of the North Caucasus especially Chechnya and Dagestan. What remains would be the region dominated by Russians and other Slavs and in the view of the proponents of the "national" strategy, this match of national distribution and territory would enable the creation of a truly Russian nation-state. This geostrategy is based on a union with the former Slavic republics of the Soviet Union and argues for the necessity of promoting the integration of Russia and Belarus to include Ukraine and Northern Kazakhstan (a predominantly Russian populated area) in this process. This "national geopolitical" strategy also often incorporates some points of the abandoned 19th-century concepts of panslavism and pan-orthodoxism. Therefore, its supporters worry about the NATO expansion to the borders of Russia and view the events in Kosovo in Spring 1999 as negatively as the neo-Eurasianists.

The fourth geopolitical camp, the "neo-Eurasian" school, has generated most concern in the Western media (Clover, 1999). It was recently revived around the newspaper of the radical leftist opposition, Den (Day), later evolving into a related publication Zavtra (Tomorrow). One of its best-known representatives, Alexander Dugin, is the author of a voluminous manifesto entitled "The Basis of Geopolitics" (1997) and the founder of a special geopolitical periodical "Elementy" ("Elements"). Neo-Eurasianists claim to be heirs of a long tradition in the Russian philosophical and political thought (Hauner, 1990, 1997). The concept of Eurasianism was worked out in the 1920s and the 1930s by Russian intellectuals and emigrés in Prague, and later in Paris. These emigrés, G.N.Vernadsky, P.N.Savitsky and N.G.Trubetskoi, considered Russia as a separate and unique geographical and cultural entity whose roots were simultaneously in the Turkic (nomadic) civilization of the steppes and in the Slavic civilization of the forested zone. As almost always happens with epigraphs, contemporary neo-Eurasianists have simplified and primitivized the ideas and concepts of the founding-fathers. In particular, the originators of the concept emphasized in their books the importance of the age of the Mongol domination in the Russian mentality. It delimited the Russian cultural area by separating it from the Christian West and orienting the country towards the Finno-Ugrian, Siberian and "Turanian" worlds. (The Turanian zone is situated between the Caspian and the Aral seas).

Contemporary neo-Eurasianists strongly criticize economic and cultural globalization and view with alarm the importation of liberal democratic procedures and principles in Russia. In their view, the West is bent on destroying world cultural diversity and establishing a uni-polar world geopolitical order that perpetuates the Atlantists' (i.e. American) dream. Proponents of neo-Eurasianism promote the perspective that the historical role of Russia is to become the leader of the global opposition to this U.S.-led geopolitical order and stress the slogans of "equality in diversity" and "the mutual respect" among peoples and countries. They contrast Slavic and Russian spiritualism of a cooperative spirit (supposedly innately present in Russians) to Western pragmatism and practices that are based solely on incessant promotion of a senseless course for individualism, material values and consumerism.

Neo-Eurasianists combine the ideas of Vernadsky and other members of his circle with some points from early European geopolitical writings, including environmental determinism. They uncritically and unilaterally adopted Halford J. Mackinders's theory of the world Heartland (Pivot Area) as "rediscovered" by them and they laud this theory as unsurpassed geopolitical wisdom. This Heartland theory seemed very suitable for the purposes of Eurasianists because it endowed the territory of Russia with a particularly important geopolitical role and is considered the key to global stability while acting as the geographical center of world politics. (See Bassin, 1991; Dijkink, 1996, Kerr, 1995; and Clover 1999 also on this point). In general, in the mind of neo-Eurasianists, the development of geopolitics was halted before World War II at the time of the publication of the works of Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Kjellen and Alfred Thayer Mahan. Neo-Eurasasianists have also borrowed some ideas of ideologists of the so-called "New European Right", in particular, those of A. de Benoist (Goguelin, 1999).

The neo-Eurasianists remain a small group of intellectuals and have little chance to promote themselves into an influential social movement since it is almost impossible to mobilize Russians on the basis of huge utopian visions, as was the case in the late 1920s and early 1930s and, to a lesser extent, during the three decades after World War II. Russians are no longer ready to sacrifice their private material interests and family well-being in the name of national glory. Ambitious objectives and traditional Russian idealistic messianism, described by the prominent Russian philosopher, Nikolai Berdiaev (1938) are artifacts of history. In May 1998, about two-thirds of VCIOM respondents to a national survey declared that their family affairs were closer to them than the health of the country. Individual, pragmatic, "petty-bourgeois" values now dominate among Russians. Even the issue of Russians in the Near Abroad is mentioned as an essential element for Russians by no more than 3% of the national sample, while more than 80% do not consider it worthwhile, and are not ready, to intervene in the internal affairs of the countries of the former Soviet Union.

However, the influence of the neo-Eurasianist circle is much larger than their "direct" political strength. Their arguments are widely used by Gennady Zyuganov (1995), leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which composed the largest fraction in the Federal Duma after 1995. Sergei Baburin, a professor of law from Omsk, the vice-speaker of the 1995-99 Duma and head of the Russian National Alliance (Sobor), agrees geopolitically with Zyuganov, his former political ally in the Union of Popular Patriotic Forces (Baburin, 1997). They argue that the existence of the Soviet Union occupying most of the world’s Heartland contributed to global geopolitical equilibrium in the Cold War years and they castigate NATO for attempting to subordinate Russia and to transform it into an appendix of major western countries in a subordinate role as a supplier of raw materials. Naturally, the Communist party and other left organizations were in the vanguard of the severest critics in Russia of NATO policies in the Balkans. The NATO action offered it the best possible argument justifying its position, a point repeatedly emphasized by George Kennan in his critique of NATO expansion (O’Loughlin, 2000).

Russia and NATO: Since the last days of the Soviet Union, Russian public opinion towards Western countries has completely reversed. In 1990, 50% of respondents believed that there existed a military threat to Russia. Of the respondents feeling threatened, 33% declared that the source of the threat was the U.S., 24% nominated Germany, 8% picked Japan, and 8% choose NATO as a whole. In late 1996, according to the VCIOM surveys, only 2% of respondents believed that the U.S. and Germany were enemies of Russia, with the perception of enemy shifting to neighboring countries. The former Soviet republics of Estonia (22% of respondents) and Ukraine (10% of respondents) were nominated most frequently as threats to Russia. Interestingly, many of the respondents picking these states were people with higher education living in Moscow, Petersburg and Southern Russia. Most VCIOM respondents, however, are persuaded that the most important threats to Russian national security originate within Russia itself. Paradoxically, despite the war in Kosovo and recent difficulties in relations between Russia and the NATO countries, numerous recent polls compel the conclusion that no consistent anti-Western orientation exists in most segments of contemporary Russian society.

Before the 1999 NATO bombing, Kosovo remained a secondary issue for a Russian public preoccupied as usual with domestic economic affairs. In early 1999, only 4% of VCIOM respondents mentioned the conflict in Kosovo as an important event that occurred in 1998, while 44% nominated the Russian financial landslide of August 17, 1998 and 29% listed the acceleration of inflation after the financial collapse. For most respondents, the major 1998 foreign event was the bombing of U.S. and British bombing of Iraq. At the same time, 47% of respondents considered the conflict in Kosovo as a Yugoslavian internal affair and opposed any foreign involvement in it. In spring 1999, before the start of bombing, the overwhelming majority of respondents (57% to 65%) were against any Russian military involvement in Kosovo. Only 18% were in favor of it. Even after the start of hostilities in Kosovo in March 1999, 63% of Russian citizens were strongly against or more against than in favor of Russian military assistance to Yugoslavia.

Returning to the historical theme of pan-Slavism that frequently turns up in contemporary Russian geopolitical debates, the VCIOM polls do not show much support for the so-called pan-Slavic solidarity of the Russian and Serbian peoples on a "civilizational" basis. Despite frequent mention in Western as well as in Russian media, only a small minority of Russians sympathized with Serbs (14-16%) at the time of the Kosovo conflict. Though fewer sympathize with Kosovars (5-7%), most VCIOM respondents (40%) blamed both of them for the Kosovo conflict or have no particular sympathies (39%). At the same time, however, both Ukrainians and Russians fear that next time NATO can intervene in their domestic conflict and contribute to further conflict and to the possible disintegration of their countries. Even the leaders of UNA-UNSO, the Ukrainian ultra-nationalist (and strongly anti-Russian) organization whose members are concentrated mostly in the west of the country and in Kiev, believe that NATO could support anti-Ukrainian movements of Ruthenians in Transcarpathia (far west Ukraine) and of Tatars in Crimea (Nezavissimaya Gazeta, 19 June 1999).

The official Russian foreign policy strategy in the long term, explained many times by Presidents Yeltsin and Putin and foreign ministers Igor Ivanov and Yevgeny Primakov, can be briefly stated as the creation of Russia as an "independent power center in the multipolar world". Therefore, the Kosovo conflict was a challenge to traditional Russian interests in the Balkans, as well as indicating that NATO did not intend to maintain its long-standing geographical limits in central Europe. It was not coincidental that, at the time of the Kosovo war, Russia staged naval exercises in the Baltic sea, re-armed Armenia with sophisticated weapons, halted the flow of oil from Azerbaijan through Chechnya, stepped up discussions with China about "hegemonism in world affairs", and pressured Ukraine to allow free passage of Russian aircraft to the Balkans. Official Russia, controlled by the "westernizers", does not view NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia as meriting a highly negative response and jeopardizing relations with the West. However, any further NATO encroachment on Soviet territory is likely to be met with a more robust response, motivated by both public opinion and geopolitical theories.

The east-west gradient has existed in Europe for centuries and can be measured by a number of quantitative geographical, economic and cultural variables, characterizing geomorphology and climate, the network of rivers and the density of population, land-use and natural resources, cultural preferences and economic development. For centuries, this gradient has served to justify geopolitical ambitions, to divide neighboring countries into "friends" and "enemies", "ours" and "not-ours". The divide has been a powerful leverage in ethnic and nation-building and has served as an important factor in the creation or the transformation of identities, in particular, at the supra-national level (Kolossov and O’Loughlin, 1998). Geopolitical exercises with linguistic and cultural borders and attempts to delimit "european" and "barbarian" countries and regimes are as old as the beginning of modern European politics. Count Louis-Philippe de Segur, designated as French ambassador to Petersburg wrote in 1784 that he had completely abandoned Europe having crossed the boundary between Prussia and Poland. It is not the struggle between "the West" and "the East" which determined the post-war and the current geopolitical situation but the struggle between modernization and traditionalism at all territorial levels, including the sub-national level. Most research and commentary that focuses on multi-national lines in Eastern Europe (the West versus the rest) are perpetuating the tendency to reify the border that separates Central and Eastern Europe (CIS countries, or even "Europe" as a whole from "Eurasia" , that is Russia). It continues to be unwise to ideologize the current economic and political situation in Europe in terms of a primitive, quasi-biological primordialism and "geological" determinism, methodologies that can result in a new border. Any European border is a social construct which can move with time and depends on the will and the activity of interested peoples (Miller, 1997).

Plans for a common European military force are uncertainly poised on future coordination with NATO while the U.S. remains the dominant military power on the European continent. The answer to former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s question "do we all want to become Americans?" – is still not readily observable. Unless the EU departs radically from its careful and slow enlargement and deepening, the status quo for Europe will continue to keep "the Americans in, the Balkans quiet, and the Russians out" (Tom Friedman, New York Times, June 20, 1999, page A25). The present "Europe", a creation of the Cold War under American dominance, is expanding to surround Russia, in the perception of many Russians. That this geographic and political encirclement will produce a strong Russian reaction in the form of a search for alliances abroad, revival of the military at home, pressure on neighboring states, electoral successes for anti-Western "patriotic" candidates, and a revival of a cold peace, seems probable.

As the title of our paper indicates, in the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, Germany could not pursue military objectives in the Balkans without risking the lives of Pomeranian and other grenadiers. In the last year of the twentieth-century, Russia in Chechnya and NATO in Yugoslavia were able to pursue political-military objectives through air attacks, thus minimizing danger to their troops and preempting a possible confrontation between democratically-elected regimes and popular support for military action. The technology of war has widened the range of options of strong states, who now are no longer forced to choose between casualties, credibility and consent. The substitution of civilian for milatary casualties and destruction of facilities and infrastructure does not seem to matter much in the new calculus of war, public opinion and geopolitical strategy.

Public opinion polls in Russia highlight a disparity between perception (Russia as a country strongly antagonistic to the west and supportive of the Serbian regime and other opponents of NATO) and the reality (Russians are generally not anti-Western and are overwhelmingly concerned with day-to-day struggles for a decent quality of life). Their major foreign policy concerns extend only to the countries of the Near Abroad on the borders of Russia and to separatist movements in the Caucasus. Russian foreign policy actions are motivated strongly by a distance-decay effect and events in the (former) NATO theater of operations are not yet significant enough to merit a strong and consistent political and military response. Russian domestic politics hinders the formation of consistent geopolitical codes and until the election season of 1999-2000 yields a clear resolution on the future directions of Russian political and economic life at the top, the still-unanswered issues about the scope of European identity and the extent of Russian insecurity, persisting for over a century, will continue. Just as we began this paper with a quote from Bismarck, we conclude with another, his deathbed prediction: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." While the Balkans constituted a shatterbelt in 1914, recent Western actions that have effectively brought the region into the NATO orbit suggest that Bismarck will not be correct about twenty-first century conflict. The frontier of geopolitical uncertainty has moved further east to the borders of Russia, especially in the Caucasus. The Chechen wars, 1994-1996 and 1999-00, are probably the first of many militarized disputes that will determine the geographic extent of Russian power and Western geopolitical reach.

Acknowledgements: This paper was presented at the conference on "Challenging the American Century", Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom, 1-4 July, 1999. The research was supported by a grant to Professor O’Loughlin by the Geography and Regional Science Program, National Science Foundation and a Fulbright fellowship to Professor Kolossov.

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Figure 1: Public opinion in 21 countries about the NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia, April 1999. The questions asked: "Do you support or oppose NATO’s actions in Yugoslavia?" The sources are the Angus Reid and Louis Harris polls.

Figure 2: Public opinion in 17 countries about the possible options for a resolution to the Kosovo conflict, April 1999. The question asked: "What should NATO do in Yugoslavia?" and offered five possible answers. The source is the Angus Reid poll.

Figure 3: Public opinion in 16 countries about a possible permanent European Union military force, April 1999. The question asked was: "Should the European Union develop a new military force to replace NATO?" The source is the Angus Reid poll.