The United States needs support from other states to carry out global governance, particularly from rising powers such as China and Russia. Securing cooperation from China and Russia poses special problems, however, because neither state is part of the liberal Western community, ruling out appeals to common values and norms. Nevertheless, an alternative approach that is rooted in appreciation of China's and Russia's heightened status concerns may be viable. Since the end of the Cold War, Chinese and Russian foreign policy has been shaped by the goal of restoring both countries' great power status, which received major blows after China's Tiananmen Square repression and the Soviet Union's breakup and loss of empire. This desire for status can be explained by social identity theory, which argues that social groups strive for a distinctive, positive identity. Social identity theory provides a typology of strategies that states may use to enhance their relative status and suggests appropriate responses to sta...

Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy

Although the development of a new private sector is generally considered crucial to economic transition, there has been little empirical research on the determinants of start‐up firm growth. This article analyzes panel data on 297 new small enterprises in Romania with detailed annual information from the start‐up date through 2001. Controlling for heterogeneity with a rich set of firm characteristics and firm fixed effects, our panel regressions imply that access to external credit substantially increases both employment and sales growth. Entrepreneurial characteristics such as gender and education have weaker estimated effects. Neither technical assistance nor a wide variety of measures of the business environment (contract enforcement, property rights, and corruption) have any clear association with firm growth.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/20613/1/dp1343.pdf

What makes small firms grow?: finance, human capital, technical assistance, and the business environment in Romania

1. Introduction Part I. Theory: 2. Honor in international relations 3. The Russian state and its honor 4. Russia's relations with the West Part II. Honor and Cooperation: 5. The Holy Alliance, 1815-53 6. The Triple Entente, 1907-17 7. The collective security, 1933-9 8. The war with terrorism, 2001-5 Part III. Honor and Defensiveness: 9. The Recueillement, 1856-71 10. The peaceful coexistence, 1921-39 11. Containing NATO expansion, 1995-2000 Part IV. Honor and Assertiveness: 12. The Crimean War, 1853-6 13. The early Cold War, 1946-9 14. The Russia-Georgia War, August 2008 15. Conclusion Bibliography.

Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin: Honor in International Relations

CSR and the legitimacy of business in transition economies: the case of Russia

Since 2003, Russian foreign behavior has become much more assertive and volatile toward the West, often rejecting U.S. diplomatic initiatives and overreacting to perceived slights. This essay explains Russia's new assertiveness using social psychological hypotheses on the relationship between power, status, and emotions. Denial of respect to a state is humiliating. When a state loses status, the emotions experienced depend on the perceived cause of this loss. When a state perceives that others are responsible for its loss, it shows anger . The belief that others have unjustly used their power to deny the state its appropriate position arouses vengefulness. If a state believes that its loss of status is due to its own failure to live up to expectations, the elites will express shame . Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has displayed anger at the U.S. unwillingness to grant it the status to which it believes it is entitled, especially during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, and most recently Russia's takeover of Crimea and the 2014 Ukrainian Crisis. We can also see elements of vengefulness in Russia's reaction to recognition of Kosovo, U.S. missile defense plans, the Magnitsky act, and the Snowden affair.

Russia says no: Power, status, and emotions in foreign policy

(2001). The Realism of Russia's Foreign Policy. Europe-Asia Studies: Vol. 53, No. 1, pp. 7-31.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/826237.pdf

The Realism of Russia's Foreign Policy

ONE OF THE STRIKING ASPECTS of Russia’s economic course in the 1990s is the dearth of capital investment, both foreign and domestic. Investment is an essential requirement if Russia is to experience a sustained economic recovery from the shocks of Soviet disintegration and the often incoherent economic policies pursued in the early post-Soviet years. By any standard—for example the levels of foreign direct investment going into the East Central European countries or the capital requirements of reversing the general obsolescence of Russia’s transport, communications and even mining infrastructures—the Russian economy is starving for direct capital investment. Why has this been the case? A widespread view has it that uncertainties about political stability and legal and administrative reliability have scared off investors from a risky Russian market and caused them to look elsewhere. While we are far from wishing to contest this interpretation, it may not go far enough in explaining the hesitancy of investors to commit to substantial, long-term projects in the Russian Federation. Even were Russia to establish effective and impartial public institutions, there would remain for many investors signie cant hurdles in the form of the unusually high costs of production in Russia, especially for large-scale infrastructure projects and the development of distant Siberian regions. This article advances the thesis that there are specie cally Russian aspects of economic geography, in the form of severity of climate, distance (including the dislocation of population as compared to natural resources) and the preponderance of costly land transport over cheap sea transport, that tend to make the costs of production in Russia a multiple of what they are almost everywhere else in the world. Under these circumstances, the Russian state must play a central role in economic development if Russia is to develop as a civilisation, as distinct from certain raw materials enclaves. The article examines the infrastructure crisis facing the Russian economy after a decade of cumulative capital depreciation, the scale of investment requirements over the next decade, and the ways in which geographical factors impinge upon the costs of production and the decision to invest. In the conclusion, an essentially Keynesian approach will be applied to the problem of Russian economic development in an increasingly liberal international political economy.

Allen C. Lynch

Papers

The Realism of Russia's Foreign Policy

Roots of Russia's Economic Dilemmas: Liberal Economics and Illiberal Geography