Parody as Norm Contestation: Russian Normative Justifications in Georgia and Ukraine and Their Implications for Global Norms

Introduction

In a talk entitled ​“Is the Age of Intervention Over?” Michael Ignatieff said that ​“it is a world fundamentally irrevocably split over the normative justifications for intervention, so that all we do is serve up parodic versions of each other’s argument.” Alexander Cooley, pointing to Russia’s obsession with drawing parallels between its own actions and those of the West, wrote that ​“the latest script that justifies Crimea’s incorporation is interlaced with a pastiche of norms ranging from the responsibility to protect Russian citizens abroad [to] the absolute sanctity of the principle of local self-determination.” The conflict in Ukraine is not the first time that the idea of parody has come to observers’ minds. ​“Russia wants to serve up to the West a textbook copy of what the West did to Serbia, but of course it’s a ghastly parody,” said a Greek diplomat in the context of the Russian – Georgian conflict in August 2008.

The idea of parody indicates that Western observers read and interpreted Russian normative arguments in correspondence with the preceding Western discourse, mostly as a thinly veiled attempt to cover Russian strategic motives by mocking the norms of civilian protection and secession. Parody also suggests, however, a concern with the potential implications of the controversial recycling of Western normative language. Such an interaction in meaning making conveys the idea of intertextuality in international relations. In the humanities, intertextuality means that the meaning of works emerges not as a response to a directly accessible social reality, but as a response ​“to previous works [ … ] and the codes of other conventions governing them.” Therefore, to understand how meaning is socially assigned, one has to study the ​“various reality-making scripts one inherits or acquires from one’s surrounding cultural/​linguistic condition.”

Assuming that international politics is intertextual in nature, the meaning of discursive interventions would be understood to emerge in correspondence with each other, even if Russian discourse did not abound in explicit references to the previous Western one. There are two factors, however, that prompt an analysis of the particular character of their interaction. The first is that Russian normative discourse explicitly and systematically references the Western one; the second, that it does so in relation to norms that constitute grey areas of international law, where the relevant standards of behavior are profoundly contested. Both international relations and international legal scholarship are aware of the importance of interpretation in applying these relevant standards in a particular context. In the cases of norms such as civilian protection and secession, where the boundary between legality and illegality is particularly fluid and negotiated according to one’s strategic concerns and normative convictions, the dynamics of norm contestation are especially pronounced.

For this reason, as critical constructivism argues, the contestation of norms is not merely an obstacle for compliance, but an analytical entry point to investigate how the scope, content and applicability of norms are negotiated and sedimented through discourses and iterative social interaction. In the course of such interactions, actors actualize ​“structures of meaning-in-use”; background capacities that define and order social facts in a particular way. While some critical constructivist research focuses on recovering the structures of meaning-in-use that are actualized in the process of contestation, this article is focused on the way discursive interventions interact with each other and impact socially held understandings about the content and scope of certain norms. The question thus becomes ​“how meanings are produced and attached to various social subjects/​objects, thus constituting particular interpretive dispositions.” In the context of this article, the question is how to account for the normative impact of Russian allusive imitation of the Western normative discourse in terms of producing interpretive dispositions towards the norms of civilian protection and secession.

The article first reconstructs how the Russian leadership has drawn on the Western discourse that was deployed earlier in the context of Kosovo. In the course of the Russian – Georgian war of August 2008, Russia intervened militarily allegedly to halt genocide and ethnic cleansing against South Ossetians, while claiming to exercise its ​“responsibility to protect.” Shortly afterwards, Russia recognised both South Ossetia and Abkhazia in terms very similar to Kosovo. ​“Saakashvili opted for genocide to achieve his political objectives. It is our understanding that after what has happened in Tskhinval, they have the right to decide their destiny.” In Crimea, Russia assisted in organizing a referendum on the status of the autonomous region, quoting another Western argument in support of recognizing Kosovo’s independence: that it is ​“in keeping with the will of a broad majority of the population.”

Not only had the Russian discourse drawn on the Western one, it has in return triggered a boisterous reaction among Western decision-makers, academics and norm advocates. One identifiable trend of Western commentary is a persistent attempt to reveal Russian hypocrisy in normative disguise. Western arguments show either that Russia’s justifications are contrary to the previous Russian position on secession or the humanitarian use of force, or that there is a discrepancy between what is said and what is done by Russia. Thirdly, commentators argue that Russian normative justifications rely on a heavy distortion of facts, such as the lack of systematic abuse against Russian speakers in Ukraine.

More importantly for the normative impact, however, there is another identifiable trend. In the face of the controversial recycling of Western normative arguments, Western commentators have been drawn into an intense debate on which normative considerations led to a decision to intervene in Kosovo, why this intervention was defensible and what conditions had legitimized Kosovar independence. In other words, the Russian replications triggered not only Western outrage, but also an upsurge of rebuttals on why exactly Kosovo was justified while the subsequent cases were not. How to account for the impact of the Russian reproduction of Western normative discourse? How do Russian and Western discourses read together as texts and how does their interaction produce or alter interpretive dispositions towards civilian protection and secession? Relying on literary theory, the article conceptualizes parody as a heuristic device to shed light on the normative impact of Russian replications, irrespective of how hypocritical they might be, or how much they correspond to the prescriptions of these norms. It thus shows how parodic appropriation of normative language could play a role in the contested evolution of global norms.

The full article is available from Global Society.