Russians' Rights Imperiled: Has Anybody Noticed?

In theory, the degree to which states comply with international norms not only testifies to the robustness of those norms but also indicates how central they are to what is commonly (and euphemistically) referred to as the "international community." Recent scholarship has shifted from establishing that norms, particularly those related to human rights, matter in international relations to specifying the mechanisms by which norms diffuse throughout this community and inside states. ¹ A growing body of literature argues that the international human rights regime, like the "process of global democratization," is "increasing in strength and robustness." ² At the start of the twenty-first century, human rights norms appear to be more widespread in Europe than they were twenty-seven years ago at the dawn of the Helsinki process, and shared more widely than fifty-four years ago during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ³

In this article I argue that even when conditions that scholars have identified as necessary and sufficient for the spread of international norms are present, significant external and internal barriers can slow or otherwise impede their diffusion. These barriers are particularly striking in Russia and in states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moreover, scholars (and policymakers) have paid insufficient attention to these impediments. The purpose here is to explore the contours of these barriers in relation to Russia and suggest areas of further research for the norms debate.

The barriers to norms diffusion in Russia are numerous and reinforcing. For example, a highly permissive international environment has failed to take Russia to task for its noncompliance with a variety of norms, including Russia's indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force in Chechnya. Western policy-makers have on occasion criticized this brutal war, but as long as Russia has met basic institutional criteria (e.g., holding elections), its most flagrant human rights violations have largely beeninconsequential to its international standing. At times, a veneer of democracy barely masks lingering authoritarianism, while it enables Western policymakers to look the other way. International norms diffusing to Russia are further weakened when they compete with increasingly robust local norms, some of which derive from the Soviet era and include residual organizational cultures hostile to, or at least ambivalent about, Western conceptions of human rights and democracy.

Evidence from Russia suggests not only that international norms and practices spread at best in a jagged way through the international system, but that tolerance for noncompliance with democratic and human rights norms at the international governmental level remains high. Russia is certainly not the only violator of human rights, nor is the limited international response to human rights violations in Russia especially unusual. The United States has long maintained close relations with states that have miserable human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia. The international community as a whole did little to stop the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and intervened in Bosnia only after several years of bloody ethnic strife. ⁴ Policymakersoften make what they consider to be trade-offs between values and national interests.

What is different about the Russian case is that the United States has declared that "the consolidation of democratic institutions and values in Russia over the long term is a vital U.S. national security interest." Moreover, the U.S. government along with European powers have sought to integrate Russia into the Euro-Atlantic system by spending millions of dollars over the last decade to help develop and support democratic institutions in the country. ⁵ Some of this money has been used to create transnational networks that spread norms at the microlevel (i.e., among specific groups of activists). In some cases, the impact has been substantial. Yet at the macrolevel, changes within state structures that could alter the internal balance of power do not appear to have occurred. ⁶

The Russian case draws attention to the role that powerful Western liberal states play not only in supporting but...