September 14th, 2009, the Russian town of Yaroslavl played venue to the international conference “Modern State and Global Security”. Against the backdrop of innumerable events devoted to similar subjects, this particular forum distinguished itself by at least two distinctive traits. First, it was held under the aegis of Russia’s supreme authority: the opening ceremony of the conference was attended by Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev. Furthermore, the forum guest list featured Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and former Italian premier Romano Prodi. Second, this conference surprised everyone by a constellation of learned names – it involved not merely well-known but truly iconic Western scholars – Immanuel Wallerstein, Thierry de Montbrial, Ian Shapiro, John Naisbitt, Farid Zakaria and many others.
        On the Russian side the forum was organized by the Public Planning Institute, the Institute of Contemporary Development and Yaroslavl Demidov State University. According to the Organization Committee officials, the conference was conceived not only as an academic forum, but also as a sort of public dialogue on international issues. They presumed that the participants would be able to build up a pool of ideas which could prove applicable for preparing policy recommendations or for coming up with solutions to at least some of burning international problems.
        Over the past five or six years, the Russian general public has grown accustomed to various intellectual clubs. I am above all referring to yearly Valdai sittings which bring together every autumn Russian leadership and prominent foreign academics. Judging from its magnitude and ambition, this year’s Yaroslavl forum may smack to a certain degree of Valdai get-togethers. And yet, the former acquired its own unique characteristics. It is important to note at the outset that the Valdai discussions were originally designed and have turned out to be the tool of setting forth Russian foreign and domestic policy priorities. The Valdai major protagonists were Russia’s leaders whose job was to make their stand clearer to their overseas counterparts, all the while obtaining first-hand appreciation of what represents main concerns within Western academic quarters.
        By contrast, the Yaroslavl conference appears to be first and foremost a dialogue mechanism. Its raison d’e^tre was in large part to bring into the Russian intellectual domain a number of sophisticated, fascinating and at times truly original and even surprising ideas devised by American or Western European schools of thought.
        Let’s put it straight (readers will see it for themselves, anyway): the pool of ideas promoted in Yaroslavl by Western scholars included first of all those which are in tune with the Russian audience’s expectations, which seem particularly important in terms of current realities of Russian life, which looked potentially revealing for the key issues of Russia’s domestic and foreign environment.
        I am under the impression that the Western scholars were as aware of all these considerations as we are. They found it fairly useful to accept this formula and acted thereupon not only in view of testing out politically relevant intellectual concepts pertaining to Russia, but for a delicate but firm enunciation of their own perspectives – academic, analytical, value-based and moral. I have a feeling that it only benefitted the conference. In effect, we thus found the key to a frank but rather appropriate debate of the critical questions of politics, on which opinions of Russian and foreign intellectuals do not completely coincide or even diverge. We shouldn’t overstate the extent of commonality with regard to such concepts as multipolarity, democracy, the role of coercion in political development, individual liberties or instinct-driven urge of a non-Western human being to lack of freedom in the disguise of ‘paternalistic state custody’ towards its citizens. Pluralism and dissident sentiment was abundant at the Yaroslavl conference.
        But at the same time, for Russians it was highly important to make sure that Western intellectual environment is not monolithic. It is equally welcoming to both orthodox liberals and academic revolutionaries who seek to develop radically new approaches based on realistic assessment of Western and non-Western experience. In this sense I daresay that our readers will find quite stimulating and thought-provoking the ideas concerning the ‘vertical democracy’ in China, an imminent upheaval as a result of the current economic crisis, and most certainly, illiberal democracies, particularly given that contemporary Russia, the way I see it, occurs in this pattern, too.
        Western scholars who visited the Yaroslavl conference are not marginal non-conformists. They represent the mainstream of political science. Yet, they are intellectually independent. Being authorities on their respective matters, they can afford to write and speak “out of line with the dominant context”. We all know that censorship in the proper sense of the term does not exist in Western sciences. But there is such a thing as self-censorship – a phenomenon which is increasingly familiar to Russians. The majority of Western scholars pursuing academic careers weigh their every step in relation to the authoritative opinion in the area of their expertise. There is a plethora of self-restrictions for a political analyst working in the USA or the European Union. An American scholar is not encouraged to question the universal value of the American democratic model, the omnipotence of democracy per se, which is capable of solving virtually all complicated situations. An EU scholar is not advised, for instance, to emphasize the political dimension of the interracial differences in Europe – to name only a few.
        The Yaroslavl conference guests are basically free of the need to exercise this kind of cautiousness. They can afford to be independent – this is why they do not represent the arithmetic majority of the Western intellectual establishment, all the while accounting for its best part. Hence, it is all the more interesting to listen, inter alia, to their implied criticisms of Russia’s democratic experience. And it is also quite instrumental to figure out what they consider “acceptable, possible or outrageous”. The Western scholars are quite sober in their appraisal of global megatrends, in identifying contradictions of global development. They surpass the vision of the West through rosy glasses and are keen to be truthful even though it is not always to the liking of Western governments.
        Last but not least. The articles published below enable us, at any rate in part, to compare the level of professional thinking of Western political scientists with that of their Russian colleagues. It goes without saying that these are not full-fledged articles, and it may be fairly difficult to form an impression basing oneself on them alone. Nonetheless, they present an interesting source of knowledge about the contemporary state of Western political science.

Alexey Bogaturov