Last Friday week the international relations committee of the Royal Irish Academy held a conference on the currently troubled relationship between Russia and Europe, as well as with the US, writes Garret FitzGerald.
This was a very useful meeting. Some at least of the growing tension between Russia and its two major interlocutors arises from a failure on both sides to understand each other's concerns and motivation. We in the West are naturally - and rightly - disturbed and worried by what we see as the growing intolerance of the Russian administration towards free speech and dissent.
This has imposed a new barrier to understanding on both sides. On the one hand it has affected our capacity to empathise with legitimate Russian concerns in other areas, while, for their part, our expressed concern about this issue has bolstered a widespread Russian belief that this simply reflects a western desire to interfere with and destabilise their domestic politics.
The Russian government's sensitivity in this area was illustrated by the concluding comment of president Vladimir Putin's address to foreign ambassadors last Wednesday, when he remarked that "we will not allow any external interference in [the] process . . . [of freeing] Russia from internal upheaval". To understand the rationale of Russian attitudes to relations with the West we need to understand where the Russians are coming from. Their country passed through a shattering experience in the 1990s.
After several decades when its socialist system had become exploitative and deeply corrupt, it underwent without warning a political and economic collapse that had few global precedents. Over a long and miserable nine years between 1989 and 1998 its output fell by almost 40 per cent, and its people's living standards, never very high, were virtually halved.
In part this reflected the fact that during that decade the takeover of huge amounts of state property by a group of corrupt influential ex-communists intent on looting their country's assets was facilitated by misplaced outside economic advice on privatisation. That advice emanated from some international institutions but also from some right-wing American economists who naively believed that a corrupted socialist society could thereby be transformed almost overnight into a successful liberal economy.
It took 13 years, from 1989 to 2002, for Russia's output to recover to the level it had been in 1989. However, the last five years of rapid economic growth have brought its people relative prosperity, recently enhanced by the rocketing prices for its main exports, oil and gas.
In the course of that decade Russians were not only being impoverished but were also being humiliated
by the fact that overnight their country had ceased to be the dominant state within a huge north Asian land empire - the now collapsed Soviet Union - and had also ceased to be the world's second superpower.
As a consequence its people have recovered their pride in their country but are deeply resentful of the humiliation they suffered in the 1990s, which some of them put down to Machiavellian western plotting to destroy their economy, rather than to the stupidity and naivety of those from outside who for a period sought to influence Russian economic policies.
It is scarcely surprising that most Russians are today strongly supportive of their government, which, as they see it, has given them prosperity and restored their pride in their country. Against that background, and given their history, values such as a free press and tolerance of opposition to government, which we greatly value, simply do not rate equally highly with Russian public opinion.
The Russian people are, moreover, inclined to share their government's suspicion of western motives.
They see themselves surrounded by American power - for the US has military bases to the east of them in the Pacific, to the south of them, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in a number of the countries which were once part of their central Asian empire - and also, of course, to the west of them in Europe.
Russians are also very conscious of the hostility of some of their immediate neighbours in eastern Europe, who, understandably, cannot forget the brutal way the Soviet Union treated them between 1945 and 1989. The Polish government which has just lost power was especially hostile to Russia, and Russians resent and fear the anti-missile bases which the US is planning to build there as well as in the Czech Republic - which they see as directed against them as much as against Iran.
There is particular resentment against the three Baltic states - especially Estonia and Latvia, which in the second half of the last century suffered a major Russian colonisation, as a result of which they both contain large Russian minorities. The peoples and governments of these small states, which suffered so much from Soviet exploitation between 1940 and 1989, are reluctant to concede citizenship to large Russian minorities who are not prepared to learn their languages and to assimilate into their societies.
And Russia complains that before admitting these states to the EU, the union failed to insist on these Russian expatriates being guaranteed minority rights. Sorting out the rights and wrongs of that particular residue of the 20th century will not be easy.
The recent Russian decision to denounce a treaty designed to limit troop strengths in Russia and in Europe has caused concern in the West, but the Russians point out that they were the only state that ratified this treaty and ask if it is reasonable that they should be unable to move troops within their own borders when their western neighbours have chosen to remain free to do so by failing to ratify the treaty.
I mention all these matters simply because, if we are to limit the current dangerous growth of tensions between Russia and the West, we first of all need to understand, even if we cannot share, the Russian point of view on many of these outstanding issues.
I believe these problems will be resolved, although that may take several decades, and that eventually the West and Russia will learn to work together for their mutual benefit, especially because they will have a common interest in helping the two future superpowers, the US and China, to co-exist peacefully.
I recall that almost 60 years ago, when I was a contributor on foreign affairs to a different newspaper, suggested that in the very long run - by which I meant the 21st century - the most likely global fault line would lie between Russia and China and in that event Russia would eventually want to have a friendly rather than hostile Europe to the west of it And I know that there are today some Russians whose thoughts, despite the tensions I have just been exposing, have already started to turn in that direction