Culture, Politics and Nationalism an the Age of Globalization by Reneo Lukic Michael Brint

Author:Reneo Lukic, Michael Brint [Reneo Lukic, Michael Brint]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138716414
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00

Eurasianists

If Russian particularity or originality can be conceived in terms of absence – the absence of a largely diffused bourgeois culture, an absence that can also be valorized and perceived as a quality – it can also be boasted of in positive terms. Leaving aside theories of Russia as a Christophoric people (those who carry Christ), let us consider instead another variety of the “Russian idea,” one that has received diverse meanings but that first appeared concurrently with the expansion of the USSR in the early 1920s. The first Eurasianists to express themselves as such did so in the context of the emigration, namely the linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy (Moscow 1890-Vienna 1938), who imagined a coming together of all the peoples of the Russian Empire within a new nation, Eurasia, with the term “Eurasianism” designating nationalism for Eurasia.33 Another was Piotr Savitski, geographer and historian of civilizations, with whom Trubetzkoy collaborated for twenty years. The linguist Roman Jakobson, who, together with Trubetzkoy in the Prague linguistic circle may be considered the founder of phonology and structural linguistics, also worked to give scientific substance to the idea of “the specificity of the geographic Russian world in relation to Europe and Asia.”34

In 1927 Piotr Savitski wrote:

Russia is a world apart. The destiny of this world is constructed independently of that of its Western neighbor (Europe) and also of its southern and Oriental neighbor (Asia). This particular world should be called Eurasia.35

For this author, Russia carried within itself a principle of expansion which had more to do with cultural transformation than conquest. We are close here to Dostoevski’s ideas on the peaceful realization of unified Orthodoxy, in which Constantinople would return to the heart of Russia, a maternal Russia for all the peoples of the Orient. More shall be said of the first Eurasianists further on.

With the collapse of the USSR, and after a long period of official eclipse, theorizing about Eurasianism reappeared, essentially in the thinking of Lev Gumilev (1918-1992), who had met Savitski in a concentration camp. According to Gumilev, there existed a vast continental space comprising the USSR and Mongolia in which a people whose components were related to each other “by psychic resemblance and often mutual sympathy (that is, complementarity)” did and might live and act.36 Using Gumilev as a scientific alibi, Eurasianists multiplied and formed disparate groups. Certain of them are close to the French “new right” of Alain de Benoist, who is fundamentally hostile to liberalism and American cosmopolitanism and for whom the culturalist thane serves as a means of justifying apartheid logic. A frequent reference for Benoist is the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, a German Catholic conservative who developed a theoretical justification of the Nazi regime. The Russian review Elementy (the title is identical to that of Benoist’s French review, Elements) first appeared in 1992 and its columns are wide open to Eurasianist themes. Eurasianism today presents itself as a violently anti-American ideology in which “ours” is opposed to “not ours” (nashy i ne nasky):

We must clearly perceive the unique border that separates ours from not-ours.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.