From Conservative to Technological Modernization in Russia: Discourse and Policy

The paper raises the question of how to approach recent non-Western modernization programs, taking the Russian «conservative modernization» program and its transformation through the concept of the state-civilization as a case study. Non-Western modernization is based on the idea that technology, on the one hand, and political institutions and values, on the other, are separable, thereby replacing the latter with another civilizational foundation. This work examines the fusion of technological development and non-Western civilizational foundations as the socio-technical imaginary of «technological modernization.» The research question is how this imaginary is constructed and justified, and what it means in practice. The paper consists of three sections: Section 1 offers reflections on the concept of modernization; Section 2 situates the Russian conservative modernization program; and Section 3 examines the concept of Russian state-civilization in the context of «technological modernization.» The analysis of the conservative modernization program relies on a normative-descriptive approach to the concept of modernization proposed in the paper. The normative component includes the imagined vision of a «normalized future» and can also be interpreted as a sociotechnical imaginary, since it fuses the vision of the good life with the technological future. The descriptive component refers to the vision of the current situation and the recipe for reaching the desired future. Examining the conservative modernization agenda reveals its ambiguity, which arises from the merging of liberal, conservative, and technocratic rhetoric. Analyzing the concept of state-civilization through the lens of technological development reveals how the state-civilization framework transforms coproduction, as Sheila Jasanoff defines it, by de-universalizing and detaching Western governance forms from Western technology, and by insisting that they are civilizational choices of a particular civilization, imposed globally as if they were universal. The article concludes with examples of how the socio-technical imaginary of «technological modernization» operates in practice.