Hazony's Heresy.

• Author: Kimmage, Michael C.
• Position: The Virtue of Nationalism - Book review

Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism, (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 273 pp., $26.99.

It was the best of times in Europe, in the 1990s, and it was the worst of times in Russia. The Soviet Union had ignominiously collapsed in 1991. Its outer satellites, the former Warsaw Pact nations, rushed as quickly to the West as they could. The Baltic countries, each an erstwhile Soviet Socialist Republic, went with them, leaving the newly created Russian Federation an experiment in difficulty. Its economy began at a low point and foundered. Economic weakness ensured geopolitical weakness. Throughout the Cold War, Moscow's reach had threatened Western Europe. In the 1990s, Moscow's reach was a thing of the past.

Russia of the 1990s was an exemplary failure. Moscow was diplomatically isolated, its poverty symbolic. It was the poverty of a country without an idea. In its economic and political affairs, Russia's only real program was to catch up with Europe, the decade's signature success. Europe had put to rest the demons that had unleashed two world wars. It had triumphed over the Cold War divisions, cheerfully dismantling the Berlin Wall after 1989. The removal of walls was equivalent to the removal of borders within the European Union (EU). Europe's triumph was its openness: openness to itself, to the outside world, to commerce, to innovation. The reward for openness was stability and prosperity.

Two decades later, the tables have not exactly turned, but the changes are so profound as to seem historically inexplicable. Europe is still much richer than Russia: its legal systems are superior and quality of life is demonstrably better. Wealthy Russians go to live in Europe and send their children to study there, not the other way around. Yet political success and failure, social stability and crisis, have acquired unanticipated configurations. The European Union keeps nearing the edge of disaster, a dissolution similar to that of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Euro is a source of acute uncertainty, a lever of instability. And in the summer of 2016 the British did what the East Germans, the Poles and the Czechs had once done: they voted with their feet, as Vladimir Lenin might have said. They chose to leave the European Union. The governments of Hungary and Poland regularly broadcast their antipathy toward Brussels. Existential tremors--is this finally it for the European project?--are felt at every major European election.

Russia, by contrast, has discovered a kind of certainty under Vladimir Putin. Aided by petrodollar windfalls, Putin presided over substantial economic growth between 2000 and 2008. He transformed a chaotic political order of boisterous oligarchs and a weak state into a "power vertical" with the Kremlin on top. This has been devastating for hopes of Russian democracy. It has also yielded teal executive power. Putin's Kremlin has used state media to project a national idea--one-part appreciation of impetial Russia, one-part nostalgia for the Soviet Union and one-part present-day assertiveness on the international stage. In addition, Putin directed serious financial resources to the modernization of the Russian military. On the basis of this modernization, he has waged wars in Georgia and Ukraine and intervened to lasting effect in the Syrian civil war. (The European Union has suffered the consequences of this war without finding a way to exert any real leverage on it.) Putin's military initiatives have added to his already considerable domestic popularity.

How could it be? How could Putin be riding high and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel be rushing from one open wound to another? Where did...