Alexander Dugin & Neo-Eurasianism (Book Review)



'Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism' (2014) is a compilation of writings summarizing Alexander Dugin's Russia-centric geopolitical philosophy. Dugin is among Vladimir Putin's advisors, and his thinking has begun to exert influence among central Asian societies. Eurasianism began around 1900 as a pro-slavic philosophy that sought to differentiate between European and Russian civilizations. Instead of accepting the idea that Russia is part of the West, the Eurasianist movement sought a unique Russian identity. Neo-Eurasianism, with Dugin as its founder, emerged around the year 2000 as a more universally relevant geopolitical project advocating multipolarity, anti-Americanism, and anti-liberalism. Dugin seeks a vast coalition of anti-liberal forces to help him bring down the American led world order: fundamentalist Islam, communist China, youthful radicals, and more. It doesn't matter to Dugin whether the aims of coalition members are fundamentally at odds, because so long as American hegemony remains intact none of humanity's alternative futures is possible. America is blocking the path forward. According to Dugin, diversity is being erased by a global oligarchy of western elite "scum" who only care about money while actively opposing all traditionalism, community, and spirituality. In Dugin's view, America is literally the greatest possible evil, and the average American is ignorant and oppressed by their all-consuming, literally demonic, elites. 

Multipolarity is at the heart of Dugin's philosophy. His multipolarity is not just political decentralization, however, but a diversity of human worldviews that dismisses the very idea of a universal human destiny. For Dugin, civilizations are barely able to communicate with one another because their values and ways of existing in the world are unique to themselves and their internal cultural logic. Dugin foresees the emergence of four distinct poles of power and interaction in the near future: the American hemisphere led by the USA, Euro-Africa led by the EU, the world heartland led by Russia, and Asia-Pacific led by Japan. These four separate blocs will form different self-sustaining worlds that will have little to do with one another and operate on separate historical trajectories. Each civilization and bloc will decide for itself how to develop and how to interact with the other blocs. Dugin is adamant throughout the book that no civilization is truly universal, and that the greatest evil is one civilization enforcing its worldview on another civilization. This is why the West, and especially America, is so evil. The West is the only civilization in history that has more or less succeeded into subjugating the entire world under its worldview. What's worse, however, is that the West has universalized a worldview that is secular, atheistic, individualistic, and materialistic. This worldview is represented in its purest form by the United States. The USA never had to develop into modernity, it alone among the world's societies was born in modernity and has never known a period before modern development. The US was always progressive, individualistic, and obsessed with human rights and technological power. For Dugin, this is pure evil. America has no spiritual roots, it has no "form" in the Aristotelian sense, it is just material movement without meaning. The American, then, is not a rooted person with an identity, but a lost atomized and sub-human material object in motion. America is the "anti-Christ" because it substitutes its own "asphalt" existence of comfort and wealth for the genuine spiritual existence that is humanity's optimal natural state. America wants to spread its anti-Christ worldview around the entire world, and it's actually succeeding.

Dugin identifies a revolutionary elite who are opposing American led liberal hegemony. This elite should unify with all others who oppose America, no matter what the others are like. He specifically states that it's immoral to condemn any person, state, or organization that opposes America no matter how immoral or unjust that entity might be. A member of the Eurasianist revolutionary elite should never condemn any leader or country that commits genocide or advocates mass violence so long as that leader or country is fighting against American interests. Dugin repeatedly emphasizes this point because it's important for his geopolitical project. America and Europe are too powerful for any single civilization to fight by itself, as the fallen Soviet Union demonstrated. Absolutely everyone, no matter who they are, is needed in the fight against American hegemony. 

Dugin frames the ongoing conflict as "Atlanticism" verses "Eurasianism", cosmopolitan sea power against traditionalist land power. While the book does not make this explicit, it's clear that Dugin's worldview is mystical in nature. American liberal hegemony is a demonic force driven by evil beings determined to undermine humanity's proper spiritual development. Humanity cannot move forward or solve any of its problems until the demonically led American hegemony gives way to a multipolarity and traditionalism that once again is allowed to define humanity's identity, form, and purpose. Dugin's philosophy is heavily influenced by Heidegger, and he references several of Heidegger's more obscure concepts and prophesies. Dugin argues that unless America is stopped it will reduce all of us to post-human automata who are cloned, drugged, biologically engineered, and increasingly displaced by various artificial technologies. Already, humanity is being reduced to digital zombies via endless shallow entertainment and internet brainwashing.

I've been following Dugin-esque ideas for many years now, but this was the first time I sat down and read through an entire book of his writings. I've always been attracted to his spiritual imagery and radical religious tendencies, which I appreciate as stimulating for Christian thought. I agree with much of Dugin's critique of postmodern American liberalism's devolution into transsexualism, transhumanism, and digital dystopianism. I found much of Dugin's psychological analysis of a theoretical American's search for identity as paralleling my own search for roots and essence in a fast moving un-rooted twenty-first century USA.

Despite the book's many insights, however, I also found much of it disturbing. Firstly, it's difficult for me as a Christian to accept Dugin's view that there is no truly universal worldview. Dugin repeatedly states that converting other civilizations to one's worldview is evil, meaningless, and maybe even impossible. He implies that people from different civilizations possess cultural languages that cannot be mutually understood, and therefore it's impossible for one civilization to pass moral judgement on another civilization. How can Christians accept this? When Jesus told his disciples to "go unto all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" the implication was that every human is both able and obliged to modify their worldview based on a message that originated in a completely different civilization. In Jesus's time, different civilizations were far more different than they are in today's globalized world. If inter-civilizational communication was possible in Jesus' time then it's definitely possible in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, there's something strange about believing that different civilizations are somehow incapable of sharing values and truth when all of humanity was created by the same God and is descended from the same parents. Dugin claims to be a practicing Orthodox Christian, and I'd like to hear more about how he reconciles his belief in the non-universality of Christianity with the theology of his own church. Dugin states many times that the conflicts between competing worldviews should be sorted out only after American liberal hegemony has been overthrown, and it's possible that his insistence on the non-universality of any worldview is just a coalition building tactic that can be discarded after the multipolar mission has been accomplished. 

My second problem with Dugin's philosophy is what I perceive as a logical contradiction. Dugin repeatedly claims that the imperialist liberal universalism of the West arose out of the natural historical development of Western Civilization, but he then always claims that the result of this development is intrinsically evil. If Dugin is right in saying that civilizations cannot be criticized from the perspective of other civilizations, and that in a multipolar world every civilization will have the right to pursue its own internal concepts of development, then why is it wrong for America to pursue its own worldview of universalist liberalism? Why is universalizing your worldview the one thing a civilization is not allowed to do, especially when Dugin admits that Western universalism is a natural development of that civilization? Is Dugin not universalizing his own preference for multipolarity over unipolarity? 

Lastly, and building on the previous two paragraphs, how can Dugin claim to be defending traditionalism when his worldview contradicts the universalist aims of Christianity, Islam, and almost all other traditional worldviews? The Nicene Creed, which is accepted by both Western and Eastern Christianity, specifically states that there is only one "universal" church. The traditional worldview of China was expressed as "Tianxia", which means "all under heaven." The Chinese emperor was believed to be the emperor of the entire world, and many traditional Chinese went to extreme lengths both politically and intellectually to prove that Chinese civilization was universal. Similar attitudes existed in almost all pre-modern societies. If Dugin isn't defending actual historical traditional worldviews, then what exactly is he defending? Is he just imagining a false past that conforms with his contemporary geopolitical aims?