The ghost of Metternich

: Those who think that there is such a thing as progress in international affairs have been brutally disabused by the Georgian crisis. You can have all the rules you like to discipline international behaviour; but they are not worth the paper they are written on if they run against fierce nationalisms and ethnic passion. Ethnic and nationalist rivalry is as old as sin, and as inextinguishable. As a diplomat in Britain’s Moscow Embassy during the Cold War, I spent time in two of the Caucasian republics, Georgia and Azerbaijan... At the time of my visits, Stalin, a Georgian by birth, was still officially a non-person, airbrushed by his successors from the annals of Soviet history. But in defiance of Moscow his portraits could still be seen in Georgian state farms and Government offices. I asked a Georgian official why this was so. “Because he killed so many Russians,” came the sardonic reply. The feeling was mutual...

Recent events have shown no weakening in these ancient hatreds... The Russia that we are dealing with today, with its fear of encirclement, its suspicion of foreigners and natural appetite for autocracy, is as old as the hills, long pre-dating communism. It is a Russia that will never be reassured by the West’s protestations of pacific intent... Russia and the West need to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century. [David] Miliband and others have condemned the notion of returning to the geopolitics of the Congress of Vienna which, in 1815 after the Napoleonic Wars, divided Europe into spheres of influence between empires and nations. They perhaps forget that what was agreed at Vienna held at bay for almost a century a general European war. Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence...