A lot has been written about Vladimir Putin’s war with the future and the past. He wants a future that would take Russia to the centre stage of world affairs, and is unhappy with that country’s loss of (early) Tsarist pride and more recent Soviet collapse. Beyond descriptions, commentaries or analyses on what Putin says and does, there are exciting and insightful aspects of the global social and historical (and philosophical) contexts of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Putin’s war can be situated in a global shift towards the Right; a drift towards ethno-nationalism with distinct echoes of fascism. Perhaps most significantly is Putin’s association with the idea of a Eurasia that includes a toxic identity politics that is part of “birth politics” — which has become code-speak for racial determination, and racism in general. We will get to all of that after a brief report on the most recent developments in Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people.
Putin’s war machine seems to be reaching one of its expressed strategic goals: to capture eastern regions of the Ukraine, which he claimed was populated by Russians, and which does not bode well for that country, the longer the war goes on. As it goes, there is no indication it will end soon and it is, in fact, intensifying.
During a weekend address in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky precisely warned of an intensification of fighting, and asked people to leave the eastern Donetsk region — which Moscow identified early on as one of its prime strategic objectives. The region has seen increased and heavy clashes between advancing Ukraine armed forces and Russians, who already control large parts of the Donetsk region.
In his address, Zelensky, explained: “The more people leave the Donetsk region now, the fewer people the Russian army will have time to kill … We will use all available opportunities to save as many lives as possible and to limit Russian terror as much as possible,” the BBC world service reported.
We can assume that Putin is satisfied with the gains his military have made. What is of greater concern is that he seems to be part of a larger historical shift towards the Right, which forces a break with conventional ideas of the state towards what has been described as the “civilisational state”. The standout examples of the civilisational state are China and India; most of the rest of the states in the world came into being less than 300 years ago.
This break is especially important because it is driven by a distinctly right-wing group of thinkers — one of which, Aleksandr Dugin, has been described as Putin’s brain — who are intent on ridding the world of classical geopolitics and imagine a future polycentric world order of large civilisations, or empires, that will not be part of the post-war liberal international order established by Washington after World War 2.
This imagined future is not underpinned by conventional nation-states, but is driven by a crude ethnopluralism of ethnically pure localised entities. For example, a country like Pakistan becomes less of a republican state than a country of ethnically pure people. This has parallels with the belief that there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that its citizens are in fact Russians, and envisions, further, what has been described as a Eurasian millennium. As early as 2000, Putin declared (as reported in Strana, an online news platform, in November that year) that Russia has always considered itself as a Eurasian country.
To get a sense of the intellectual underpinnings of Putin’s imaginaries we can turn to the thoughts and expressed ideals of Dugin, a Russian thinker, strategist and political analyst sometimes described as a fascist. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Dugin wrote that “no-one in the Soviet leadership was capable of explaining the logic of traditional [Soviet] foreign policy and, as a result, there took place the lightning-fast destruction of the gigantic Eurasian organism … [and so, the Soviet Union] found itself in almost the same situation as post-war Germany [with its] world influence reduced to nothing, its territory sharply diminished, its economy and social sphere reduced to ruins”, recorded Wayne Allensworth in 1998.
In Dugin’s mind, the idea of Russia and the Eurasia project entails “the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state,” he wrote in Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia, which was published in 1997.
For Dugin, the process of “westernising” Russia “denies such values as the people, the nation, history, geopolitical interests, social justice, the religious factor, etc. In it, everything is constructed on the principle of maximal economic effectiveness, on the primacy of the individual, on consumerism, and the ‘free market’”. While this is hardly an appropriate basis for criticising market fundamentalism, Dugin can, on the one hand, be placed in the slipstream of the “New Right” that emerged after Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s market fundamentalism and free market radicals. His position on Russia is sometimes incoherent and inconsistent when it comes to Russia’s “civilisational” Eurasian ambitions.
On the other hand, Dugin’s arguments are consistent with those who oppose liberal internationalism; notably Donald Trump’s anti-globalism, the ethno-nationalism of Hungary’s President Viktor Orban, the crypto-fascism of Italy’s Matteo Salvini, France’s Marie Le Pen and, of course, Putin.
Dugin also subscribes to the “birth culture” that frames electoral politics that is considered to be deeply racist, but carefully avoids using the word race. The foundational texts of birth-culture endorsed by Dugin (and Steve Bannon, who was one of Trump’s closest advisers) is Manifesto: The New Right for the Year 2000 written by Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier of the ethno-nationalist think-tank GRECE that specifically promotes “New Right” thinking. They represent a distinctly right-wing branch of identity politics.
De Benoist has argued that identity is cultural and determined at birth and is, therefore, as deterministic as race, but he couches his racial determination in a framework of normative identity and a birth-determined origin that is immutable and now described as “culture”. De Benoist’s thinking draws heavily on that of Maurice Barrès, one of the anti-Semitic instigators in the Dreyfuss Affair of 1894—1906. To people like De Benoist and Dugin, culture and identity are determined at birth and remain eternally intact.
This can help explain the basis for Putin’s claim, in 2008, that there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that its people are Russian. On March 18 2014, marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kyiv is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.” The Russian president has since then repeated this claim. In February 2020 he said Ukrainians and Russians “are one and the same people”, and insinuated that Ukrainian national identity had emerged as a product of foreign interference.
This argument carries a deeply sentimental and spiritual appeal to many Russians derived from the fact that the Kievan Rus’ — a medieval state that came into existence in the ninth century and was centred on present-day Kyiv — is regarded as “a joint ancestral homeland that laid the foundations for both modern Russia and Ukraine”, explained Björn Alexander Düben, a professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Jilin University in China.
Putin’s war on Ukraine is driven by the ideas of distinctly (and self-described) new rightists and characters like Dugin and can be placed in the context of deglobalisation and a rejection of Western liberalism. This is not the traditional leftist opposition to free trade. It is more like the way that free trade is proscribed by protectionist tariff wars between the US and China. Led by the Trump presidency, the promotion of Western democracy has been replaced by an accommodation with autocrats such as North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. And to come back to a point made above, geopolitics is no longer simply about the economy or security, as Christopher Coker explains in The Rise of the Civilizational State, but is largely sociocultural and “civilisational”. In this respect, the “non-Western world”, led by Beijing and Moscow, is pushing back against the Western claim to embody universal values.
China’s Xi Jinping champions a model of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, thereby fusing a Leninist-type of state with neo-Confucian culture. Putin defines Russia as a “civilisational state”, which is neither Western nor Asian, but “Eurasian”. Trump railed against European multicultural dilution of Western civilisation — which he equated with a white supremacist creed. He may no longer be in office, but there is an abundance of evidence that his views and ideas continue to carry weight in the US.
Trump, and now Putin, represent a fairly new doctrine that combines nationalism at home and the defence of civilisation abroad, as part of reconciling the promotion of great-power status with their ideological aversion to liberal universalism. This places states based on civilisational identities on a collision course with democratic institutions. As we have seen in the burgeoning literature, Western liberalism’s decline is making way for civilisational states like Russia to go to war to restore their glory days of empire.
We can go back to the BBC report referred to above and intensification of conflict in the eastern part of Ukraine, which many Russians believe should rightfully be a part of Russia that was accidentally “lost” to Ukraine during upheavals of the 20th century. These are echoed in Putin’s persistent claims that the eastern parts of Ukraine are Novorussiya (New Russia), an administrative name for these regions during the time when Ukraine was a part of the Tsarist empire, and not historically connected to the remainder of Ukraine.
Western liberalism’s decline is making way for civilisational states like Russia to go to war to restore their glory days of empire
The question arises, then, will Russia stop its war if it seizes and occupies the eastern and southeastern parts of Ukraine? This is anybody’s guess. Several indicators point to the creation of a greater Eurasia.
If we return to Dugin, “Putin’s brain”, we find a man bitter about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and deeply nostalgic for the Tsarist era. He has been described as part of a long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past, infused with mysticism and obedient to authority, to explain a failed present. This is consistent with the idea, expressed above, that Putin is at war with the past and with the future.
According to Dugin, in Foundations of Geopolitics, Russia’s future lies in reclaiming the past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present. The thinkers he is associated with include those who thrived in the interwar period — people like Julius Evola, “the mad monk of Italian fascism”, and Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist, among others.
Dugin insists upon reclaiming Russia’s glory days, a time before modernity ruined everything. He wants a spiritual revival among Russian people to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, Eurasia, ruled by ethnic Russians. He blames Russian decline on a Western empire of corrupt individualists, led by the US and Britain, which have denied Russia’s destiny to lead a great empire of Eurasia.
On the surface, then, there have been several disagreements and a steady deterioration of diplomatic ties between Russia and the West over the past two decades. Examples of these include Moscow’s claim that Nato enlargement was a threat to Russian sovereignty and the West’s hasty recognition of Kosovar independence. Russia has also been involved in military conflict in Georgia (2008), and in Ukraine since at least 2013, all of which worsened relations between Moscow and the West — mainly Europe and North America.
But when you drill down to the intellectual origins of Russia’s war in Ukraine, it has less to do with a fear of Nato’s expansion than with the imaginaries of a Eurasia governed from Moscow, and a turn to birth politics, ethno-nationalism and racial determination.
• Lagardien is the author of ‘Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black’. He has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank, in the secretariat of the National Planning Commission and was dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela University.
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