RUSSIA AS EUROPE'S OTHER Iver B. Neumann European ...

which may also crop up occasionally in, say, contemporary French constructions
of the British (or, to take a similarly example from a later period, British
twentieth century constructions of Germans). The crucial difference is that, in
the case of Russia, this is a regularly invoked feature of discourse throughout
the nineteenth century, and, as we have already seen, beyond.
Going hand in hand with the construction of the barbarian at the gate, however,
was an auxiliary attempt to disrupt the idea that Russia has a place inside the
European balance of power by changing that construction itself. The crucial
name here is L’abbé Dominique-Géorges-Frédéric de Pradt, who in a series of
books exhorted Europeans to close ranks and gates against the Russsians:
Russia is built up despotically and asiatically [...] Europe must draw
closer together and as she shuts herself up, Europe should cooperate in
outlawing all participation in her affairs by any power which does not
have a direct interest in them and which has the force to weigh down the
balance to suit her own interests’ (quoted in McNally 1958: 182; also
Cadot 1967: 174-175; Groh 1961: 128-131).
In a number of works published in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, de
Pradt, who was an Archbishop and Napoleon’s former confessor, went on to
develop the thesis that ’l’Angleterre règne sur la mer, la Russie sur la terre: tel
est la partage actuel du monde’. Russia must be kept from Europe, and the way
to do it was to expand the idea of the balance of power to include America!
Here is the genesis of the idea that Europe is situated between America and
Russia, and that European power politics must be conducted on the basis of this
fact. Crucially, by changing the balance of power from a intra-European to a
European-focussed phenomenon, this idea annulled the idea that inclusion into
the balance of power in and of itself should confer Europeanness on a particular
power. Since it came at the exact time when there could no longer be any doubt
about Russia’s pivotal role in the European balance of power, this was indeed
a crucial move. Since, after the nineteenth century, the relevance of inclusion
into the balance of power for inclusion into Europe clearly faded, it was also a
move which was to prove productive in the long run.
The idea of the barbarian at the gate, then, lent a particular flavour to European
strategic discourse on Russia. Russia was depicted as an ambiguous presence on
the border, which could be associated with Europe, but also with China. It is,
then, not surprising to find as the central metaphor in the perhaps most widely
read book of the period the idea that Russia was cordoned off from Western
Europe by a ’Chinese Wall’ (Cadot 1967: 540, 173). What should be particularly
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