Fifa: Sepp Blatter to quit as president amid corruption scandal

[pampango]

13. Why Putin Leapt to FIFA’s Defense

For Putin, few things are less acceptable than the absence of authority over a territory. Not necessarily his authority—contrary to what many would say these days, Putin is not bent on ruling the world, or even much of Europe—but absence of a clear authority as such. This is why Putin demonizes the memory of the 1990s in Russia. That merry, wild and hard time, when authoritarianism had collapsed, but no alternative system had yet taken root, was dangerous in his eyes, almost like a car without a steering wheel.

This is also why Putin’s Russia has been an adamant supporter of the Assad regime in Syria—not because of the old ties to the Assad family, but because the alternative looks set to be anarchy. This is also the source of much of the anti-American rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin: America, with its sympathy toward democracy and liberal revolutions, is seen as sowing dangerous chaos in the world, whether through incompetence or hostile intent.

Moscow sincerely thinks that Western countries’ judicial systems are in some hidden ways subordinate to the state, the way they are in Russia, and that the Western media carries the governments’ messages. In other words, Moscow’s view of order is very state-centric. And not only state-centric, but big state-centric: a persistent strand in Russian thinking maintains that only big states can be truly sovereign, while smaller ones are inevitably “vassal states,” underlings of some big power.

And this brings us to the role of corruption. In this struggle to impose order on a stubbornly chaotic world, corruption is an invaluable tool. Corruption enables rulers to create hierarchies and structure, to establish allegiances both inside the country as well as beyond its borders.

http://www.newsweek.com/why-putin-leapt-fifas-defense-338534