Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Who is Russia's Enemy? | Pew Research Center Data
You will have seen that we are much intrigued by the Pew Research Centers. They do surveys on global attitudes, and increasingly we are trying to make some of our questions cohere with their efforts, so that we have a more telling international comparison. (This isn't always easy, since replicating their question may go at the expense of continuity of our old questions.)
Unfortunately they do not cover Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. But studying their long report closely (which is fascinating), we nevertheless stumbled on a reference to the Caucasus.
Do Russians think they have an enemy in the world?
There are a lot of people that say yes, but also a lot of people say they don't know, or refuse to answer. So less than a third of Russians are certain that they are not beleagured by enemies of Russia that are lurking out there.
And who are the enemies? Those that said that there are enemies of Russia were asked to specify.
Note: this does not mean that 43% above Russians consider Georgia an enemy, it's 43% of the 57% that said Russia has enemies, so closer to 25% total. Still, this is a stunning number. You might think, for example, that China was more on the mind of Russians. But tiny Georgia is right up there with the United States.
In other parts of the survey 49% of Americans say they have a favorable view of Russia, and 57% of Russians say they have a favorable view of the United States.
The Global Attitudes Project has much more interesting information, which you can read here. Our previous posts on Russian attidues in 2008 here, and 2009 here. We wrote a short piece on Georgian attitudes here.
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