The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
Keith E Rice
It’s difficult to write an article triggered by, but not about, an ongoing crisis that has no obvious outcome in
any predictable timeframe. The Ukrainian army may be gaining ground but the United Nations’ concern
about a growing humanitarian crisis may force them to slow down their assaults - perhaps helped by rockets
fired at them allegedly from across the Russian border. The brutal fact is that West is not going to go to war
over the low-level but brutal civil war in eastern Ukraine. The West is likely to continue to support Kiev
diplomatically and with military supplies and intelligence and there will be reluctant incremental upgrades to
the European Union sanctions on Russia (and retaliatory Russian sanctions on the West); but no American
or European soldiers are going to die for Donetsk or Luhansk, even if there were to be an overt Russian
military incursion.
Russian militiamen causing trouble in the Baltic states could be a very different proposition, though. Treaty
obligations would almost certainly mean any of the Baltic states suffering a secessionist insurgency driven by
Russian irregulars and powered by Russian arms would be able to call on NATO to help defend its territorial
integrity - provided it could be demonstrated convincingly that a ‘foreign power’ (Russia) was threatening that
territorial integrity. And, while no one in their right mind would want it, military skirmishes on the borders of
Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania could easily spiral out of control and into real war.
Part of the challenge, then, is to undermine the Russian ultra-nationalism which is fuelling the insurgency in
eastern Ukraine before it spreads further.
A second part of the challenge, though, is to find ways for Russian nationalism to be expressed safely and
healthily without terrorising Russia’s neighbours.
For these things to happen, the West has to understand Russia and respect its interests. Western media
need to stop treating Vladimir Putin like some neo-Adolf Hitler and Western governments need to support
Putin in reigning in the ultra-nationalists by ameliorating those factors which feed Russian ultra-nationalism.
Putin himself will need to take substantial risks.
A socio-psychological context
When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, the West - and the United States in particular - read this as
Communism having been vanquished by Capitalism. It was a simplistic narrative that suited the ultra-free
market views of George H Bush in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. In
subsequent free market fantasies, it was assumed that Russia, her satellite countries and her former
Warsaw Pact partners would become fertile breeding grounds for capitalist memes - memes, essentially, are
ideas which infect minds, from individuals to whole cultures. The opening of the first MacDonald’s fast food
takeaway in Moscow in 1990 was lauded in the Western media as the first sign of the capitalist infection
taking hold.
However, if we dig a little deeper, using sociopsychological tools, we can see that the West pretty much got it
wrong in the last days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule and has largely been getting it wrong about Russia ever
since.
A key sociopsychological tool for this exploration is Spiral Dynamics, developed by Don Beck & Chris
Cowan (1996) from the work of Clare W Graves (1970, 1971). Graves himself was a correspondent and
sometime collaborator of Abraham Maslow. Graves influenced Maslow (1971) in his final formulations on
the famous Hiearchy of Needs; and Spiral Dynamics incorporates key Maslowian principles, while also
building on and extending the Hierarchy concepts quite considerably.
The basic concept is that vMEMES, motivational systems, emerge in hierarchical order and ebb and flow in
their influence on thoughts and behaviour in synchrony with the life conditions being experienced at the time.
Many developmental psychologists of Graves’ era were coming to similar conclusions about values, needs
and emergence - not least Jane Loevinger and Lawrence Kohlberg - though Graves/Spiral Dynamics
provides the most complete model. See the graphic below. (There are several basic introductions to
vMEMES and Spiral Dynamics available on the web. My own is at
http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/vmemes.html. A comparison map of Spiral Dynamics and similar
models is available at http://www.integratedsociopsychology.net/comparison_map.html.)
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
The Spiral Dynamics model - 'Spiral balloon' graphic © copyright 1996 NVC Inc
In Spiral Dynamics terms, the ultra-free market radical Capitalism that emerged in the West during the time
of Thatcher and Ronald Reagan was driven by the ORANGE vMEME. The focus was on individuals
achieving strategic goals such as wealth creation and having the better things in life. The assumption made
in the West was that, with the collapse of the ordered and repressive Communist police state (BLUE),
ORANGE entrepreneurialism and strategic enterprise would emerge as people enjoyed the freedom to better
themselves.
However, there seem to be few Western leaders with much real understanding of how human motivational
systems develop. Maslow established clearly in the original Hierarchy that, when a lower level is in trouble,
focus goes down the Hierarchy to deal with the problems. Thus, when the BLUE order of the Soviet
totalitarian state was dissembled, it was not so much (higher) ORANGE that dominated in the new freedoms
but (lower) RED. This vMEME is self-centred, lives primarily for the moment and does exactly what pleases it
with little or no conscience or thought of consequences. In so many ways, it is the epitome of what Sigmund
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
Freud (1923) meant by the Id. Russia suffered years of chaos, instability, corruption and gangsterism as a
result of losing so much Soviet BLUE order which then allowed RED to flourish.
The inability of Western leaders to read potential scenarios accurately has led to the catastrophic
mishandlings of Afghanistan and Iraq. The failure to understand the nature of tribalism, driven by the
PURPLE vMEME’s need to find safety in belonging, led to the muddleheaded attempts to implement
Western-style Democracy (a vMEME harmonic of BLUE, ORANGE and GREEN working together) in those
countries with disastrous consequences. People in those countries voted in the interests of the tribe/sect to
which they belonged and as the tribal elders instructed, rather than weigh up the issues and vote on merit in
the national interest as true democrats are supposed to do.
The anthropological psychologist John Berry (1969) calls this the imposed etic. This is when, a local or
regional cultural norm (emic) is treated as a universal norm (etic) when it is not (imposed etic).
Closely connected with the imposed etic is the False Value Consensus, a term Lee Ross et al (1977) came
up with to describe the assumption that everyone else thinks the same as you and holds the same values
you do. Moreover, Ross et al identified the cognitive pattern that, when it becomes inescapable that others
do not think the same as you and do not share your values, you regard those who deviate or even oppose
your viewpoint as defective. There is something wrong with them because they do not think as you do.
Thus, Western leaders denigrate fundamentalist Muslims who have no interest in Afghanistan becoming
democratic and are confused as to why Sunni and Shia slaughter each other in Iraq rather than reach a
‘sensible’ compromise through the ballet box.
Unwittingly, perhaps, they have made similar types of mistakes with Putin and Russia.
Putin: saviour and nationalist
In the year before Putin became Boris Yeltsin’s prime minister, Russia seemed to have reached its nadir of
chaos. The state had defaulted on its debt and salaries for public sector workers and pensions were being
paid months late, if at all. Basic infrastructure was collapsing and the country’s most prized assets belonged
to a handful of well-connected oligarchs who ran much of the country like private fiefdoms. Putin recognised
that all that (RED) indulgence and dissipation needed (BLUE) order - and that was what the restoration of
Russia began with. For Putin, the former KGB officer, putting order back into society - forcibly, if appropriate was something he prized.
International economist Anders Aslund (2008) points out that, in his early years as president and/or prime
minister, Putin implemented reforms that cut down crime and corruption, enabled economic growth, cut the
cost of the state, created conditions to exploit Russia’s massive gas and oil resources and enabled small-tomedium enterprises to grow year on year by an average of 7%. By reintroducing a more-than-moderate
degree of BLUE, Putin facilitated the growth of healthy ORANGE.
Anders did note latterly - and with concern - some reversal of Putin’s early reforms, with growth of the state
apparatus and increased corruption in some circles - often those somehow connected personally to Putin or
his interests. A slew of articles more recently - eg: The Freedom Network’s Bill Gertz (2014) - have made
lurid allegations about Putin’s personal fortune being strongly linked to corrupt practices. If true, then this
would indicate RED regaining traction in the upper echelons of Russia’s government/business relations.
Whatever levels of corruption Russia has endured under Putin in more recent times, the impetus for
economic growth seems only to have slowed rather than reversed, with the country a gas and oil
powerhouse supply (particularly to the Europeans). As the Daily Telegraph’s Stephen Dalziel pointed out
back in 2011, though, Russia’s dependence on gas and oil exports can only be reduced by building up its
base of small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) - just 20% of businesses, compared to 80% in the UK.
According to Dalziel, SMEs in Russia are hampered by too much old Soviet-style (RED/BLUE) bureaucracy
and there is nowhere near enough development in infrastructure to maximise trade.
Of course, not everyone has benefitted to anything like the same degree and Russia suffers from huge social
disparities, with unbelievable wealth shared amongst a tiny few while whole swathes of the population are
around or below the poverty level. (But the UK has similar disparities, though to generally lesser extremes,
with the gap between rich and poor at its greatest since the 1960s.)
Militarily, at the time Putin came to power, the once-mighty Russian army had recently lost a war in the
would-be breakaway republic of Chechnya, a place with fewer inhabitants than Russia had soldiers.
(According to Carlotta Gall & Thomas de Waal in 1997, Russia lost more tanks in the 1994-1995 Battle for
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
Grozny than it did in the 1945 Battle for Berlin!) Three former Warsaw Pact allies had joined NATO, bringing
the Western alliance up to Russia’s borders. This was in contravention of Gorbachev reputedly agreeing to
German reunification within NATO after being promised that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east"
(Johanna Granville, 2000).
And it is this expansion of NATO - see graphic below- which nationalists like Putin perceive to be the
existential threat to Russia’s sense of self, according to commentators like Stephen Wayne Kasica (2014).
Kasica asserts that Putin believes the break-up of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for Russia and that he
wants to turn the clock back and make a new Russian Empire in the territories of the former Soviet Union.
Copyright © 2014 BBC
It’s doubtful Putin actually wants that - even if it were possible (which it isn’t). But there is no doubt Putin is a
Russian nationalist. Among his influences, the National Post’s Joseph Brean (2014) notes, are such
philosophers of Russian destiny as Vladimir Solovyov, Ivan Ilyin and Nikolai Berdyaev. Putin laid out his
beliefs when he told the Douma on his appointment as prime minister in 1999: “Russia has been a great
power for centuries, and remains so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of interest …. We
should not drop our guard in this respect, neither should we allow our opinion to be ignored.”
Putin has wanted to give Russian back its national pride - a RED/BLUE harmonic. For a people deprived of
order and plunged into chaos for so many years, Putin’s rebuilding of Russia also brought in a degree of
safety-in-belonging to meet the PURPLE vMEME’s needs.
Nationalism in itself is primarily driven by a harmonic of the PURPLE and BLUE vMEMES - usually facilitated
by an individual RED/ORANGE self-aggrandiser. Putin has certainly used nationalism in this way to build up
his own popularity.
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
The Russian diaspora has given him the means to do this - all those ethnic Russians who found themselves
located in the breakaway states when the Soviet Union suddenly imploded. They have often been treated as
second-class citizens in their ‘new’ countries - and still are in places like Latvia and - surprise, surprise! –
Ukraine (Damien McGuinness, 2014).
Putin served notice that Russia would pursue its national interests and the interests of Russian nationals militarily, if necessary - when he went to war with Georgia for the ethnic Russian enclave of South Ossetia in
2008.
2nd Tier thinking and the ‘Putin Paradox’
Putin is increasingly pilloried in
the West as a stereotypical
egomaniacal tyrant, totally
ruthless in pursuing his policies
and callous about their human
cost. In some tabloids the tragic
shooting-down of MH17 has been
attributed to him almost as if he
personally - and very deliberately
- pressed the button. See
example left.
There are, of course, a number of
errors in such caricaturing.
Firstly, Putin is a pretty smart
operator. So smart it seems he
might be capable of what Spiral
Dynamics terms ‘2nd Tier
thinking’. Both Graves and
Maslow drew a sharp distinction
between deficiency (Maslow) or
subsistence (Graves) thinking
and ‘being’ levels of thinking.
Both researchers attributed
greater complexity in thinking as
you ascend the Spiral/Hierarchy,
with Graves finding that YELLOW
had four times the problemsolving capability of GREEN.
Putin has demonstrated what
might be 2nd Tier thinking in his
approach to the Middle East and
the so-called ‘Arab Spring’.
Rather than join the Western rush
to support the supposedly
Copyright © 2014 News Group Newspapers
‘democratic’ revolutions, Putin
hung back, observing. If anything
- and certainly in Syria - he tended to support the status quo. As the horrifyingly-fundamentalist Islamic State
is being carved out of the remains of Iraq and Syria, Egypt is back in the hands of a repressive military
regime and Libya teeters on the verge of a second civil war…and the West dithers as to what to do about
any of it, Putin’s restraint looks far more the better strategy. A 2nd Tier thinker, weighing up all the competing
forces acting upon the players in the various ‘revolutions’, might have discerned that ‘Democracy’ was an
ideal to be grasped for but not really grounded in peoples whose thinking was tribal (PURPLE) and who were
used to autocratic rule (RED) as the way power works.
Last Summer Putin demonstrated particularly-sophisticated thinking in the way he rescued Barrack Obama
from his infamous ‘red line’ debacle on the use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces. While
Obama’s government dithered painfully on whether to launch what would probably have been an ineffective
missile strike, Putin saved Obama’s face by using his leverage with Bashar al-Assad to push his government
into handing over their chemical stock to the United Nations.
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
The virtually-bloodless takeover of Crimea was so masterful it could be argued as another example of 2nd
Tier thinking. The BBC’s veteran World Affairs editor John Simpson was so impressed he described it as
“the smoothest invasion of modern times. It was over before the outside world realised it had even started.”
The paradox then comes: if Putin is a 2nd Tier thinker - and that is ‘if’ - and can demonstrate such complex
thinking in international matters, how can he have allowed corruption and restricting bureaucracy to have so
re-infected Russian government and business?
Many with a limited understanding of Spiral Dynamics struggle with this paradox as 2nd Tier thinking is so
often assumed to be beneficent. However, the little evidence of 2nd Tier thinking available does not support
this assumption unequivocally. Also, as co-developer Don Beck has pointed out numerous times, the model
is about systems within people, not types of people - and those systems work in relation to the life conditions
being experienced.
Beck & Cowan (1996) use the concept of vMEME stack to illustrate how different vMEMES will ebb and flow
in relation to changing life conditions.
The illustration left shows
how vMEME dominance can
change in an individual even
by the hour, as the life
conditions change. Like an
audio graphic equaliser, the
strength of each vMEME
rises and falls according to
the input being received.
(The ‘graphic equaliser’
analogy was given to me by
Steve Gorton of Enabling
Development for my 2006
book, ‘Knowing Me,
Knowing You’.)
Thus, it is perfectly possible
that early in his leadership
Putin approached Russia’s
domestic problems from a
2nd Tier meta-perspective,
seeing the need to restrain RED indulgence and strengthen healthy BLUE disciplines to facilitate the
emergence of ORANGE. Later, as life conditions offered him the opportunity for personal aggrandisement,
that will have appealed to his RED and perhaps, with the Russian economy reasonably stable, allowed him
to focus on his personal opportunities - even to the partial detriment of his country.
This will be particularly so if Putin is high in the temperamental dimension of Psychoticism, as per Hans
Eysenck’s Psychoticism-Extraversion-Neuroticism model (Eysenck, 1967; Eysenck & Eysenck, 1976). While
the relationship between temperament and motivation is relatively unexplored, there is some evidence - eg:
N N Trauel, 1961; Rice, 2006 - that temperament can influence the lower vMEMES.
Profiles of Putin - such as those by Kassica and Oliver Bullough (2014) - certainly indicate, with Putin’s
ruthless, sheer physicality, demonstrations of ‘machoness’ and an ‘eye for the ladies’ that he could be high in
Psychoticism. If so, then, as Psychoticism seems to facilitate the RED vMEME particularly, then Putin will
always experience a natural self-orientation even if, when he’s thinking in 2nd Tier, he knows another
approach is needed.
Nationalism and the ‘dictator’ meme
In the wake of Crimea, Gallup’s Julie Ray & Neli Esipova reported Putin had polled 83% approval, a
massive gain from 54% the previous year - see upper graphic below. Clearly the Crimean takeover made
Russians feel good about their president!
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
Also interesting is the way
approval slowly but surely
dropped from 83% in 2008 to
its low point in 2013. Was
this drop a reflection of
growing public awareness of
corruption, the slowing of
economic growth, restricted
opportunities for personal
advancement and
widespread poverty? If so, it
indicates Russians squarely
put the blame on their
president.
From the same set of
surveys, Ray & Esipova - see
graphic lower left - found
that Russians reported
greater confidence in their
institutions after Crimea.
Again there is a high in
confidence in
2008 for
national
government
and the
electoral
process,
followed by a
decline in
confidence in
the following
years. Only
the military
bucks this
confidence
trend.
However, all
three
institutions
receive a
significant
boost in 2014.
What is that
much more
interesting about the second set of results is that it allows us to see that, all institutions received a boost in
2008 - the year of the war with Georgia. Perhaps Putin is smart enough - 2nd Tier thinking? - to realise that
infecting the wider population with the meme of nationalism by championing ethnic Russians outside the
motherland, even to the point of (successful) military intervention and being prepared to defy Western
critics, deflects from domestic controversies and boosts confidence in him and his government.
Poll graphics copyright © 2014 Gallup Inc
If so, he won’t be the first politician to benefit from a successful patriotic war. Margaret Thatcher went from
being the UK’s most unpopular 20th Century prime minister to a landslide electoral victory on the back of the
Falklands War in 1982.
The problem for Putin may be that Crimea has enabled the ‘beast’ of Russian nationalism to escape from the
leash. The day after the Crimean referendum The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland, Conal Urquhart & Alan
Yuhas reported Russian nationalists streaming across the border into Donetsk and other eastern cities to stir
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
up their sizeable ethnic Russian populations. We now know that Igor Strelkov, former Russian intelligence
officer and now overall-commander of the pro-Russian forces in the Ukraine, was one of them.
What has happened in the Ukraine since March does not resemble 2nd Tier thinking at all. Rather, it is a
bloody mess, born of RED-driven demagogues exploiting PURPLE/BLUE nationalism. It lacks Putin’s sure
touch in international affairs…which, in turn, suggests either that 2nd Tier thinking has eluded Putin in this
context or that he is not in absolute control of Russia…which, in turn, suggests he is not the egomaniacal
tyrant the Western media have been portraying him as.
A second problem with the way Putin and Russia are reported in the West is that lazy Western journalism
has been content to portray Putin as a dictator for years - this stereotype being expedient every time Russia
is at odds with the West. Accordingly, Russian internal politics is chronically under-reported in the West. The
lack of sophisticated thinking amongst Western leaders means that they all too often seem infected
memetically with the media stereotype, rather than working to decipher the information that hopefully is being
collected by their intelligence agencies about what is really happening in Russian internal politics.
Like most rulers in fact, Putin has advisers who jockey with each other and compete for influence. And since
Russia is a faux-democracy at least, many of those competing advisers have genuine independent influence
in the Douma and even their own electoral bases. Others occupy senior positions in the civil service and the
military. Yet others are philosophers and political ideologues who publish their views in all kinds of social and
formal media with little or no restraint but are often able to tap into and amplify popular feeling.
On the ‘doves’ side, Putin has Dmitry Medvedev. Their closeness was demonstrated 2008-2012 when, to
comply with the constitution inhibiting a third successive term, Medvedev subbed as president while ‘prime
minister’ Putin continued to pull the strings behind the façade. According to blogger Pietro A Shakarian,
Medvedev opposed Russian intervention in the Crimea and has been instrumental in counselling Putin
against military intervention in eastern Ukraine.
On the ‘hawks’ side, there are ultra-nationalist writers like Aleksandr Dugin and Aleksandr Prokhanov and
politicians like Dmitry Rogozin. Some of these have taunted Putin publicly for cowardice, for not intervening
militarily in eastern Ukraine, reports the Associated Press’ Vladimir Isachenkov. In late June Putin’s
economic adviser, Sergei Glazyev, topped a series of bellicose statements with the proposal to send
Russian military jets to protect the rebels in eastern Ukraine from government air raids. The Kremlin
disavowed his words, saying Glazyev was expressing his private opinion.
Just how much Putin supports the Ukrainian rebels philosophically we might never learn but, once the
caricature of the absolute tyrant is done away, it is clear that Putin is under pressure from multiple sides and
that he does not have total control. Thus, it is more than likely sympathisers and ex-colleagues in the
Russian military, are enabling Strelkov to access old but still formidable technology like the T-64 tanks and
BUK SA-11 missiles - one of which is widely presumed to have brought down MH17.
How much Putin is aware of this and how much he is for or against it is a moot point; but the current nonreporting of government aircraft brought down by rebel missiles indicates the supply may have been cut off.
The West and the False Value Consensus
Western leaders have to realise that Putin is not an absolute dictator but has to balance all kinds of
pressures on him. Just as they do…but, through history and values, some of those pressures are very
different.
In the 11 years from 1999 to 2009, NATO has expanded East to incorporate a number of the former Soviet
Union’s former Warsaw Pact partners, eventually even the Baltic states, once an integral part of the Soviet
Union. Whether Gorbachev was misled over Germany or not, this expansion provides an in-your-face
challenge to the nationalist Putin who declared: “Russia has been a great power for centuries, and remains
so. It has always had and still has legitimate zones of interest ….”
Do any Western leaders have the sophisticated thinking to ponder how NATO expansion plays out to Putin’s
electorate - and particularly the nationalists…?
Keeping the Ukraine out of NATO’s and the European Union’s hands, then, is vital if Putin’s talk of Russia’s
‘zones of interest’ is to have any credibility left in Europe - and with his own nationalists back home. The
insensitivity of Western leaders to the Russian’s leader’s needs is epitomised by the June partnership deals
the EU signed with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova - all once integral parts of the Soviet Union. Whatever he
thinks of the mess Strelkov and the rebels are making, Putin simply cannot afford to let Ukraine go easily.
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
It is part of the Assimilation-Contrast Effect, developed by Don Beck (2003) from the work of Muzafer
Sherif (Muzafer Sherif & Carl Hovland, 1961; Muzafer Sherif & Carolyn Wood Sherif, 1968) that, when
differences occur, the RED vMEME pushes the other party away by exaggerating the differences
(contrasting) while ORANGE and GREEN draw the other party closer by minimising the differences
(assimilating). See graphic below.
Copyright © 2003 Don Edward Beck
Thus, when Russia appeared to embrace Capitalism in the mid-late 1990s and joined the G8 in 1998, Russia
was now perceived by ORANGE and GREEN dominated Western leaders to be ‘one of us’ - the False
Consensus Effect. When PURPLE/BLUE Russian nationalists, led by RED-driven demagogues, broke the
BLUE rules of international law seized Crimea and then agitated violently for secession in eastern Ukraine,,
Western leaders came down the Spiral/Hierarchy in true Maslowian fashion to exaggerate their differences
with ‘dictator Putin’ and portray him and Russia as defective.
In fact, it seems Putin never truly embraced the ORANGE/GREEN liberal democracy values that have
increasingly dominated the mindsets of many Western leaders over the past 40 years. As The Independent
on Sunday’s Fareed Zakaria (p36) writes: “The crucial elements of Putinism are nationalism, religion, social
conservatism, state capitalism and government domination of the media. They are all different from and
hostile to Western values of individual rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism and internationalism.”
While ignoring the effects of and levels of corruption, Zakaria is describing the Russia Putin and his
governments have developed post 2008. There may be a question here of whether the boost in popularity
the government gained from the Georgian war gave Putin and his chief ministers the confidence to
decelerate the trend towards Western-style Capitalism and reintroduce certain aspects of the Soviet
system…but that is beyond the immediate scope of this article.
Zakaria almost certainly exaggerates the hostility between Putin’s socio-economic approach and that of the
Western liberal democracies…but it does show the ORANGE/GREEN’s assimilating effect of what has been
really more a BLUE/ORANGE approach. Viktor Orban, prime minister of EU member Hungary and an
admirer of Putin, now terms this approach ‘illiberal democracy’. Orban’s naming of the approach gives it a
sheen of philosophical credibility which requires it to be investigated and classified by the social
sciences…and that is likely to lead to more of a contrasting effect with the liberal democracies.
Managing the differences
Western leaders need to gain the understanding offered by tools like Spiral Dynamics so that they can
understand and manage difference.
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
They need to understand not only that not every government supports their values but that the other culture’s
values may, in fact, be appropriate for them. Then they should be able to accept that Democracy-foreveryone is an imposed etic and the emic of tribal government is appropriate for countries like Iraq and
Afghanistan where PURPLE and RED are the dominating cultural vMEMES.
If George W Bush and Tony Blair had employed such understanding in 2001 and 2003, Iraq and
Afghanistan may well not have turned into the life-consuming catastrophes they have become.
If today’s Western leaders had such understandings, the EU would never have entered into the partnership
agreements with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. A second referendum would be held in Crimea under UN
supervision to almost certainly confirm the March referendum and thus legitimise the Russian annexation. As
for Ukraine, it would become a neutral state in the way that Switzerland is assertively neutral and the rights
of ethnic Russians in the Ukraine would be constitutionally protected.
Putin the nationalist has to restrain the ultra-nationalists. To do that, his more moderate approach has to be
seen domestically as working and it has to both enhance his personal reputation and increase his power
base. On a Maslowian basis, if Putin is capable of thinking 2nd Tier but life conditions are activating his RED
and we want him to think 2nd Tier, then we have to help him resolve issues of power so that his mental
energies can focus at 2nd Tier. That will facilitate him in isolating the ultras.
To a degree Western displeasure at Russia’s nationalist aspirations and European Union sanctions have
been helpful in that the flight of capital has been enormous and a number of Putin’s connections in the elite
have been their assets in the West frozen. This is irritating for the elite in the short term and seriously
threatening to their wealth in the longer term, with the result that they are likely to put the pressure on Putin
to ‘normalise’ relations with the West sooner rather than later. However, as the effects of sanctions, etc, are
felt more in the general population, the results are likely to be counter-productive as the PURPLE/BLUE
vMEME harmonic of nationalism is likely to rally them to the cause and people conform to the old meme of
being victims of Western aggression.
More helpful to Putin in reigning in the ultra-nationalists would be Western collaboration in addressing the
issue of the Russian diaspora. Without this being addressed, Russian nationalism will always have a cause.
Such was the anti-Russian feeling in those countries that broke away from the crumbling Soviet Union in
1991 that the ethnic Russians - termed ‘occupiers’ by some – were not automatically granted citizenship of
the newly-independent countries even though they were born there. Many who worked in the public sector
lost their jobs and were discriminated against in other ways. In Latvia, for example, even now ethnic
Russians cannot vote or work in the public sector unless they pass a citizenship test. This requires them to
be fluent in the Latvian language and demonstrate knowledge of Latvian culture. Many of the older ethnic
Russians do not speak Latvian and so could not pass the citizenship test. Others, according to the BBC’s
Damien McGuiness, refuse to take the test on principle because it clearly discriminates against their
heritage.
Yet the Baltic states – Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania - are all members of NATO! They are also members of
that ultimate advocate of ‘human rights’, the European Union! Where was the West’s GREEN, one might
ask, when countries were signed up which openly discriminated against ethnic Russians born on their
territory to ethnic Russian parents who simply happened to live in the country when it seceded from the
remnants of the Soviet Union?
NATO and the EU collaborating with the Russian government to ensure ethnic Russians in the breakaway
countries are guaranteed equal rights constitutionally would undermine the ultra-nationalists by showing
diplomacy and cooperation work better in the ethnic Russians’ interests than secessionist violence.
NATO and the EU need to recognise and respect Russia’s traditional interests in eastern Europe and
encourage countries like Ukraine and Moldova to adopt a Swiss-style neutrality. That needn’t preclude
certain trading agreements but it would prevent them being seen to be in one camp or the other. Remove the
threat of encroachment and the ultra-nationalists lose another cause.
A key principle in both Maslow and Graves/Spiral Dynamics is that needs which are ‘felt’ need addressing.
Russians need to feel good about their country and about its place in the world; and they need to feel good
about their president and their government. The more the West can help Russia address those needs while
respecting the differences in culture and tradition, the more Putin and Russia are likely to be cooperative
partners.
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The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?
It also should be said that Western cooperation with Russia needs to be from a position of strength, not
weakness. The kind of dithering Obama indulges in or the kind of bombastic name-calling David Cameron
has gone in for only serve to convince the ultra-nationalists that the West’s threats are empty and their
sanctions can be ridden out – thus weakening Putin’s position as a moderate nationalist.
Putin has shown himself capable of complex thinking and of being a worthy partner to the West providing
Western leaders can get beyond the imposed etics of Capitalism and Democracy and accept that Russia has
some different values.
Western leaders desperately need to up the complexity of their thinking so that they can see what Putin
needs and then give him a modicum of support.
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