Eurasianism: The struggle for the multi-polar world

Shahzada Rahim

Three decades ago, American pragmatic commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote The end of History and the Last man, proclaiming the end of ideological war and celebrating the victory of the liberal order.

The proclaimed words were no different from General George Marshall’s famous speech at Harvard University, in which he said:

the world situation is very serious…with foresight, and a willingness on the part of our people to face up to the vast responsibility, which history has clearly placed upon our country. The difficulties can and will be overcome”.

Both proclamations have something in common, the role of American leadership in maintaining world affairs.

Whereas George Marshall explained the responsibility of American leadership in the context of the cold war, Fukuyama attempted to presume the unilateral role of American leadership in the post-cold war, especially in the absence any major adversary on the global scale.

But within a decade, after Fukuyama’s open proclamation of America’s liberal ascendance, American leadership began suffering from the disorder of doublethink that originates from the contradiction between theory and practice in the promotion of liberal values.

Indeed, the proclamation led by the United States and Europe was frenzied with the selective vision of creating a liberal world order.

Consequently, the west tried to execute this vision through Think Tanks, NGO’s, Supply-side Economic reforms, and humanitarian intervention that finally ended up in the apocalypse and exposed the failure of unipolar American leadership.

In the wake of the so-called humanitarian interventions, and failure of supply-side economic reforms in the form of 2008 financial collapse, the leaders of Russia, China, India, Turkey and other major powers began perceiving the west’s promotion of liberal values as a cynical ploy to subvert their rule and their ambitions.

This dissent vertical thinking was similar to the German school of thought about French revolutionary cries of liberty, fraternity and equality as a camouflage for the conquest back in the 19th century.

The failure of post-cold war socio-economic order stagnated the global economy and widened the gap between rich and poor, which fomented Identity crisis.

The birth of a new identity crisis was harried with moral guilt and hatred for the liberal centric world order that ignited the strong wave of popular nationalism across the globe.

In Moscow, Eurasianist scholar Alexander Dugin influenced the policy of President Vladimir Putin and diverted Russian policy towards Eurasianism. The ultimate purpose of this diversion was aimed at Russian revisionism in order to bolster Russia’s role for the creation of a multi-polar, and multi-stakeholder, world.

According to Dugin, European civilization has degenerated and it must be destroyed. However, to fight the European civilization, Dugin suggests the Eurasianist Federation based on the strategic unity and ethnic plurality with a principle judicial element of the rights of people.

For Dugin and other Eurasianists, the federation will be accompanied by the cob-web of connectivity ranges from ethnocultural to territorial level. What Dugin says:

The crisis of identity has scrapped all the previous identities—Civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religion, and culture in favor of the universal planetary western style identity, with the concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and the ideology of human rights”.

For Alan de Benoist;:

the existing west is an alien to European culture that is, in fact, the enemy of the Europe—Atlanticism, liberalism, and individualism are all forms of absolute evil for the indo-European identity, since they are totally incompatible with it”.

Today, there are three different policies that revolve around the Russian geopolitical thinking: the soviet, the pro-western, and the Eurasianist.

For Dugin, in order to revive the multi-polarity, Russia must uphold and pursue the Eurasianist policy with a vast responsibility of safeguarding the collective identities across the Eurasian continent. In this regard, Eurasianist policy is the only practical way of curing the ills created by the dystopian liberal world order.

Hence, it is this interconnection between the concept of multi-polarity and Eurasianism, which Dugin calls his “Fourth political theory” that envisions the new project for the Eurasian century.

Likewise, through his Fourth political theory, Dugin attacks Western civilization with the broader vision of creating a multi-polar world by resurrecting liberal Europe.

In contrast, Dugin perceived the concept of multi-polarity through the Oswald Spengler’s, “Decline of the west” together with the dissent philosophy of Fredrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

Therefore, by using their nihilist approach, Dugin wants to overcome liberal centric Europe and its modernity, whose destruction he deems as necessary to create the multi-polar world.

Thence, the central theme of the Eurasianism transcends from the context of values of the traditional society and advocates the technical and social modernization without abandoning the cultural roots.