The Postmodernism of Aleksandr Dugin's 'Theory of the Multipolar World' vs Christian Universalism
Dugin defines the multipolar world in contrast to what now exists: a unipolar world order controlled by a single Western power center. The entire planet is now dominated in every way by the United States and its allies. This domination extends across the economy, mass media, and even philosophy and history. Dugin believes that the West is effectively erasing all cultural diversity and now presents itself as the only possible civilization. Civilization, as a phenomenon, is now seen as radiating outward from the American core. Societies that are least like the United States are therefore considered to be the least civilized, developed, or in line with historical progress. Although the West rarely characterizes other cultures as "barbaric," it effectively enforces that mentality by refusing to grant legitimacy to any form of government or economy that's not democratic and liberal. The future, in our unipolar world, is seen as entirely aligned with Western development. Everyone who is not the West is just trying to become more like the West.
Dugin opposes this unipolar world. He believes that the West's "end of history" mentality, in which liberal democracy is the final development towards which all societies are moving, represents the termination of all dynamism and development. He describes the West as having become "tired of history", exhausted by historical development, depressed about any other possibilities, and seeking to wrap-up human history by presenting its present worldview as the final possible ideal.
The question for Dugin is how Western hegemony can be overthrown and history restarted. How can the power of the United States and its allies be reduced? How can the Western worldview be returned to its parochial position as just one among many? Dugin's solution is the development of a multipolar world in which each civilization maintains its own sphere of influence and sovereignty. In these geopolitical "large spaces", other civilizations, including the West, will not be able to intrude. Dugin's ideal is that each civilization will be autarchic and able to exist without reliance on other civilizational spheres. In this way, multiple independent "worlds" will exist, diversity will be restored, and history will restart from under the "totalitarian" rule of Western liberalism.
Dugin follows Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations' and expresses his indebtedness to Huntington's worldview. Dugin borrows his list of civilizations and identifies at least six of them which could eventually rival the West as equals: Eurasian (Orthodox), Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Latin American. All six of these possible poles of regional hegemony are in various stages of possible sovereignty. The Islamic world, for example, has no central country capable of uniting the region while Japan is still a vassal protectorate of the United States. Given the right resources and motivations, however, all of them could eventually rise to the level of autarchic multipolar power centers that are then free to follow the logic of their internal value systems and develop their own independent historical courses.
Dugin freely admits that the multipolar world is not now ready to come into existence. He writes that the first step in building a new order is to accept that we are now stuck in a unipolar era that began in 1989 and is now in its 35th year. He cites Wallerstein that there is now only "'the rich North', the 'center', the area of the global periphery ('the poor South,' the 'periphery'), and the intermediate area (the 'semi-periphery,' including the big countries rapidly developing capitalistically: China, India, Brazil, a few countries of the Pacific Ocean region, and also Russia"… "there is only the West and its outskirts, i.e. the countries gradually integrating into it." Unless other civilization can break free of the American "center" and become new centers, then the world is doomed to eternally rotate around the Western unipolar core and melt into the liberal democratic ideal (or wherever else the West decides to drag it).
As a philosopher, Dugin resents the hegemony of Western spiritual discourse. He writes: "Material hegemony goes hand in hand with spiritual, intellectual, cognitive, cultural, informational hegemony". It's not just that the West is the richest place on earth, it also monopolizes values and ideas. The West defines what is "black" and "white" in whatever way it wants to, and no one else is allowed to disagree without being buried under a globalist mass media assault. The West controls the money, but it also controls discourse power and moral legitimacy. The only way to escape Western control is to rebuild separate civilizational elites that can counter the influence of the West. This rebuilding will likely first require regional censorship and then the construction of rival media platforms in the way that China has erected the Great Firewall and blocks its citizens from accessing or dialoguing with the rest of the world. Within these civilizational echo-chambers, the internal logical and value systems of each individual sphere will regain sovereignty. Dugin believes that all inter-civilizational institutions should be dismantled. Effectively, the only dialogue across civilizations will take place between diplomatic classes that are trained to deal with representatives from other civilizations. The world will be both materially and spiritually divided. Globalization will end. Among the only global exchanges Dugin appears to endorse are border wars in the various shatter zones that separate civilizational spheres. War is part of what makes history move, and Dugin is willing to dismantle our Pax Americana in hopes of restarting history.
Dugin is known for claiming that "we in Russia have our own truth", and "Russian truth" is not the same thing as "American truth" or "Islamic truth." At the heart of Dugin's worldview is a postmodern relativism that assumes the human race is not really the same species nor children of the same God. In this book, Dugin seems to hint that not even scientific laws are universal, and he explicitly says in one of the appendixes that the central idea of his worldview is "the rejection of universalism." He opposes Western universalism, not primarily because he believes it to be wrong or untrue, but because he does not believe any worldview is universal or true. There is no truth that applies across all civilizations.
Even if Dugin is correct that truth is relative and non-universal, the biggest problem this claim creates for his multipolar world theory is that the vast majority of humanity does not agree with him, and this disagreement includes more than half the civilizations he lists as possible poles of autarchic power. Neither Western civilization nor Islamic civilization nor Latin American civilization would agree with the idea that different parts of humanity have different truths. All three adhere to a universalist Abrahamic worldview. Ironically, even Orthodox Christian Russia does not agree with Dugin. Christianity, which Dugin claims as his own religion, is a deeply universalistic faith that adheres to the belief that all humans are capable of joining a single Christian civilization under one King and God. Dugin's daughter, recently killed by a car bomb, was mourned with a deeply Christian funeral. Dugin's claim that civilizations should not even try to convert others or impose their worldviews on other civilizations cannot be easily reconciled with the words of Jesus: "Go unto all the world and preach the gospel to every person and make disciples from every nation." Ultimately, the laws of science apply to all mankind, and the world was created by a single God who called people across the planet to be his sons and daughters. There is such a thing as universal truth, and the strong intuition of mankind has always been towards projecting their worldview into the realm of universal reality. That intuition is not going to change any time soon, and it renders Dugin's theory difficult to apply in the realm of international relations.
From the beginning of time, every civilization has regarded itself as the bearer of global truth. The Israelites regarded their God as creating the world and its nations, a thousand years later the Han Dynasty was claiming Tian had given the "Son of Heaven" formal leadership over "all under heaven." Dugin's desire to separate the world into civilizations that self-consciously view themselves as parochial bearers of their own private truths is an historical aberration, it's an incarnation of postmodernity divorced from the ways in which humanity has traditionally lived and thought about itself. Unless postmodernity manages to conquer world opinion and displace religion, the prospects for Dugin's multipolar world are not good.
However, having lived in China, I can see the possibility for Dugin's theories to take root in abnormal regions. There is now already an implanted attitude among the Chinese population that there's something inherently different about China in contrast to the rest of the world. There are phrases Chinese people often repeat like "this is what we Chinese believe" which imply that the values being expressed are somehow incomparable or non-universal; that they are "true" only to Chinese people, and that it doesn't matter what foreigners say about them or how they might come across to the rest of the world. The implication is that the rest of the world is living in another truth while China has its own truth. China has already implemented many of the policies Dugin suggests. The Great Firewall that separates Chinese people from the rest of the world has, in many ways, succeeded in creating a parallel world in which facts and values are warped into new forms that collapse under criticism only when exposed for scrutiny to members of other civilizations. While Dugin may celebrate this, most people around the world rightly regard this isolation as creepy, and the most common result of China's internet isolation is downward spiraling into wild conspiracy theory and weirdly distorted government propaganda. But even in China, which is fast becoming a hermit kingdom, the narrative cannot be completely controlled, and much of the population is eager to know the truth from the outside. China's popular discourse and aspirations remain very much influenced and led by Western archetypes, and it's difficult to imagine this changing much in the future. Historically, China has not viewed itself as an isolated civilization harboring its own "truth." Even during its days of failed autarchy under Mao Zedong, it saw itself as incarnating the universalist truth of communism that connected it with the rest of the Marxist world. In my opinion, China is unlikely to remain for long under its current narrow worldview.