The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Present-day Europe has its own strategic interests that differ substantially with American interests or with the approach of the Global West project. Europe has its particular positive attitude towards its southern and eastern neighbours. In some cases economic profit, the energy supply issues and common defence initiative don’t coincide at all with American ones.

These general considerations lead us, European intellectuals deeply concerned by the fate of our cultural and historical Motherland, Europe, to the conclusion that we badly need an alternative future world vision where the place, the role and the mission of Europe and European civilisation would be different, greater, better and safer than it is within the frame of the Global Empire project with too evident imperialistic features.

The only feasible alternative in present circumstances is to found in the context of a multi-polar world. Multi-polarity can grant to any country and civilisation on the planet the right and the freedom to develop its own potential, to organise its own internal reality in accordance with the specific identity of its culture and people, to propose a reliable basis of just and balanced international relations amongst the world’s nations. Multi-polarity should be based on the principle of equity among the different kinds of political, social and economic organisations of these nations and states. Technological progress and a growing openness of countries should promote dialogue amongst, and the prosperity of, all peoples and nations. But at the same time it shouldn’t endanger their respective identities. Differences between civilisations do not have to necessarily culminate in an inevitable clash between them – in contrast to the simplistic logic of some American writers. Dialogue, or rather ‘polylogue’, is a realistic and feasible possibility that we should all exploit in this regard.

In today's world, the impression is growing that politics has ended – at least the politics that we used to know.  Liberalism stubbornly fought it out with its political enemies, which had offered alternative recipes – with conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and communism – and, finally, at the end of the 20^th century, it beat them all.  It would have been logical to surmise that politics would become liberal, while all of liberalism's opponents, having turned up on the periphery, would begin to rethink strategies and to form a new front: the periphery against the centre (Alain de Benoist).  But at the beginning of the 21^st century everything followed a different script.

Liberalism, having always insisted upon the minimization of the political, decided after its victory to countermand politics altogether, possibly in order not to allow formation of political alternatives and to make its rule eternal, or from the completion of the political discussions of the day due to the lack of enemies, who are necessary, according to Carl Schmitt, for the proper constitution of a political position.  In any case, liberalism drove the matter to the wrapping up of politics.  At the same time it itself changed, having moved on from the level of ideas, political programs and declarations and entered into the very make-up of social reality, which became liberal, not in a political but in a natural, every-day manner.  As a consequence of such a turn of history, all the political ideologies that feuded passionately with one another over the last century lost their currency.  Conservatism, fascism and communism, together with their secondary variations, lost; but liberalism, having won, quickly mutated into a way of life: consumerism, individualism, and a post-modern style of fragmented and sub-political being.  Politics became bio-politics, redeployed on an individual and sub-individual level.  It turns out that not only the defeated political ideologies but politics as such left the scene – including the liberal variant.  For that reason, the formulation of alternatives is proliferating.  Those who do not agree with liberalism found themselves in a difficult situation: the victorious enemy dissolved and disappeared; they're fighting with the air.  How, then, is one to engage in politics, when politics is no longer?

Russian Eurasian geopolitics met the European continentalism in 1992 - during a joint visit to Moscow of Carlo Terracciano and Jean Thiriart. Jean Thiriart  was the author of the concept "Euro-Soviet empire from Vladivostok to Dublin" and Carlo Terracciano at that time has written his programmatic work "In the foam of history" (“Nel fiume della Storia”). Since European continentalism and Russian eurasianism became almost the same geopolitical line. Something similar was described in the project Haushofer continental concept of geopolitical block “Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo”. The same idea was revived on the theoretical level in the early 90s in Russia. The close Russian – European geopolitical dialogue started then in Moscow and is continuing and growing up to present day. At the same time, other European geopolitics, in particular, Alain de Benoist, Claudio Mutti visited Moscow, entering the same direction of geopolitical considerations. In France, a very similar views were held by an excellent traditionalist writer Jean Parvulesco.

The second point. When we speak or write Russian, French, Serbian, Polish, German, Arab, Turkish, Iranian and so on we are linked to the regional perspective. Our native languages impose on us the concrete national borders, historical experiences and idiosyncrasies. So we count on understanding and presume that listeners know the contexts. So the social context dictates the form of expression and affects thus the various semantic levels. Using English we are free from all these, so we try to be understood by anyone including by those whose historical experience is different from ours. So we choose the words and terms carefully, explaining the details and doing so we rethink what we are to say.

1.The human world is not one (Modern-Western) civilization as universal one and example of the development to all other, but rich variety  of civilizations, cultures, religions, ethnics and societies. Each one of them has absolute right of stay what it is or change at its own will in any direction. No society can judge another society because there is no common measure. Any judgment of the sort will be necessarily ethnocentric. The is only one universal think - total absence of any universality (concerning human society).

2. So we need to construct multipolar world where the Western (and North American) society will be one possibility among many other (and not common destiny).

3. The Russia is not a country like Germany or Italy, o Greece. It is something more. It is civilization on its own. It is cultural, geopolitical, historical and social pole of the human world charged with the mission. The Russia in not part of the West nor East. It is completely aside. To understand Russia we should compare it with Europe as whole or with Islamic civilization, or with chinese civilization.

From the depths of being, the contemporary Russian Worker sullenly glazes at this bustle. Awkward and concrete, tenacious as a machine, and sluggish like a thinker. He does not believe and will never believe the social demagoguery of the “pinks.” Them again? No, enough. For the “capitalists,” the reckoning will also be short. Only the dense, passionately melancholic power of arising nationalism can touch these solid and temperate people. But when there is talk of a “ruling dynasty,” “restoration of privileges to nobility,” gonfalons, cossacks, or “national entrepreneurship,” the patriots face gloomy indifference: “Maskers.” Each morning, with sunrise (nobody except these people has thought of the sun for a long time now) they crawl out of apartment cages from fat and stupid wives and snotty toddlers, move in a measured pace into the concrete womb of Production. So that - toiling without inspiration - persistently, rhythmically, uninterruptedly wage a cosmic battle with matter, so inflexible, raw, rough, so poisonous. Gloomy workers know - evil demon of substance has taken hostage delicate and frail Life, the Sun Maiden. It is the form stolen by a harsh usurper of matter. It can be saved only by heroic deed, a stubborn, terrifying, relentless war against the ground ice of reality.

There are no universal patterns of development. The plurality of landscapes on Earth produces a plurality of cultures, each one having its own cycles, internal criteria and logics. Geographical space has a huge (sometimes decisive) influence on peoples’ culture and national history. Every people, as long as it develops within some given geographical environment, elaborates its own national, ethical, juridical, linguistic, ritual, economic and political forms. The “place” where any people or state “development” happens predetermines to a great extent the path and sense of this “development” – up to the point when the two elements became one. It is impossible to separate history from spatial conditions, and the analysis of civilizations must proceed not only along the temporal axis (“before”, “after”, “development” or “non-development”, and so on) as also along the spatial axis (“east”, “west”, “steppe”, “mountains” and so on). 
No single state or region has the right to pretend to be the standard for all the rest. Every people has its own pattern of development, its own “times”, its own “rationality”, and deserves to be understood and evaluated according to its own internal criteria. 
The climate of Europe, the small extension of its spaces, the influence of its landscapes generated the peculiarity of the European civilization, where the influences of the wood (northern Europe) and of the coast (Mediterraneum) prevail. Different landscapes generated different kinds of civilizations: the boundless steppes generated the nomad empires (from the Scythians to the Turks), the loess lands the Chinese one, the mountain islands the Japanese one, the union of steppe and woods the Russian-Eurasian one. The mark of landscape lives in the whole history of each one of these civilizations, and cannot be either separated form them or suppressed.