This essay explores the Eurasianist idea that underlays Putin’s theory for war in Ukraine, and suggests that he is not deterrable as Western policy understands the idea.
… the progressive collapse, first of the German state and then of theGerman idea itself took itscourse Germany was not merely wholly defeated in1919; it ceased to exist as a coherent nation, waiting in a state of rancor to be told what it was supposed to be doing.
–Nicholas Fraser, describing the final days of WWI. (Harper’s, April 2002.)
Like Germany in the decade after Versailles, the 1990s for Russia have seen not only the implosion of the Soviet State and its sustaining idea but also the failure of the original democratic impulse that gave birth to Yeltsin’s federation as well as the subsequent dissolution, if not outright collapse, of the democratic-federative idea at its core. With the economic collapse in 1998 and the ascension to power of Vladimir Putin in 1999, Russian political elites were desperately searching for an alternative political philosophy to what they saw as an increasingly corrupt and emasculating situation. In the words of one commentator, many in Russia saw Putin’s official election in 2000 as marking, “… a clear watershed dividing the different historical epochs. In their search for an ideological framework for the future, many in Russia are looking to the past.”1
To end what many saw as a decade of humiliation at the hands of the “West”, a new idea of national self-determination (samo-stoiatel’nost‘) was required – one that would be able to reconstitute an otherwise atrophied pride of belonging, provide an organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy, and provide a rallying point for a broad cross-section of groups living across the territory of the former Soviet Union. What has emerged is the philosophy of a “Eurasian” cultural, spiritual, and political identity that ostensibly transcends any specific national appellation, but which could easily provide a philosophical argument around which a reinvigorated Russian nationalist movement might rally. This neo-Eurasianist movement is led today by Aleksandr Gel’evich Dugin, a man whose political influence is reflected in his role as the chief adviser to the speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament (Duma), and as a frequently cited expert on geopolitics within the Russian military establishment
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