The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

For the second part of my review of Alexander Dugin’s "The Fourth Political Theory," I will focus on the more esoteric and abstract aspects, and attempt to relate it to real political concerns and issues. Although such ideas may seem irrelevant to a lot of people, they do have significance in the sense that they allow us to trace the trajectory of Dugin’s ideas, as well as their implications on the political sphere. In other words, they can tell us where Dugin is “coming from.”

Dugin: We have to see the struggle for geopolitical power as the old conflict of land power represented by Russia and sea power represented by the USA and its NATO partners. This is not a new phenomenon; it is the continuation of the old geopolitical and geostrategic struggle. The 1990s was the time of the great defeat of the land power represented by the USSR. Michail Gorbatchev refused the continuation of this struggle. This was a kind of treason and resignation in front of the unipolar world. But with President Vladimir Putin in the early years of 2000, came a reactivation of the geopolitical identity of Russia as a land power. This was the beginning of a new kind of competition between sea power and land power.

How did this reactivation start?

Dugin: It started with the second Chechen war (1999-2009). Russia by that time was under pressure by Chechen terrorist attacks and the possible separatism of the northern Caucasus. Putin had to realize all the west, the USA and the European Union took side for the Chechen separatists and Islamic terrorists fighting against the Russian army. This is the same plot we witness today in Syria or yesterday in Libya. The West gave the Chechen guerrilla support, and this was the moment of revelation of the new conflict between land power and sea power. With Putin, land power reaffirmed itself. The second moment of revelation was in August 2008, when the Georgian pro-western Sakashwili regime attacked Zchinwali in South Ossetia. The war between the Russia and Georgia was the second moment of revelation.

Alexander Dugin’s book is a very timely work; by which I mean it is almost exclusively a response to the twentieth century—“the century of ideology” (p. 15) — from the twenty-first. It is a right-wing critique of modernity that has learned its lessons from left-wing post-modernity. It joins a flurry of works in a similar genre of post-war “alternative politics,” spanning from Julius Evola’sFascism Viewed from the Right of 1964 to Guillaume Faye’s Archeofuturism of 2010. Authors can be Christian, neo-pagan, or atheist; they can be reformed fascists, “paleo”-conservatives, or Traditionalists. They all, however, seem to send the same message and understand the same thing about the present state of the Western world: everything that is wrong with the way we act is rooted in something desperately wrong with the way we think. It is, in many ways, set apart from the radical right-wing not only in conclusions but the quality of the authors. While some are certainly pamphleteers in spirit, there is a distinctly intellectual strain running through it all—exemplified by the Nouvelle Droitphenomenon in France. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dugin is Professor of Sociology at Moscow State University (as well as Chair of that department’s Centre for Conservative Studies).

Counter-hegemony is the major aspect of the Theory of Multi-polar World. It originally appeared in the context of the critical theory of International Relations (IR). This concept undergoes certain semantic transformations in the transition from the critical theory of International Relations to the Theory of Multi-polar World (TMW). Those transformations should be considered in more details. In this case, we need to recall the basic principles of the hegemony theory in the framework of the critical theory.

The arrival in Paris of Mr. Ferdinand Ossendowski, who has been called the Robinson Crusoe of the twentieth century, could not go unnoticed; all critics are unanimous in considering Beasts, Men and Gods, his first book translated into French, as a prodigious book, the most exciting travelogue they ever read,. We had the good fortune to talk with Ossendowski, the man who saw the living Buddha, and we had the no less valued opportunity to meet with the three French personalities who seem best designated to compare their doctrines and science to his experiences, and to judge, in the light of Western concepts, the incredible number of observations he reported about his dramatic trip through Asia. I selected the historian of Asia, Rene Grousset, whom we presented to our readers a few weeks ago, Jacques Maritain, the Catholic philosopher, to whom the Thomistic revival in this country is largely due, and Rene Guenon, the Hinduist, whose meditations have earned us this remarkable book,Introduction to Hindu Doctrines, a nice summary, full of substance, both East and West, and who publishes these days on the questions which trouble the European consciousness.

Alexander Dugin, a youngish, stylish, slim, neat, hip and bearded don at the Moscow U, is a cult figure at his homeland; people throng to his lectures; his plentiful books cover a vast spectre of subjects from pop culture to metaphysics, from philosophy to theology, from international affairs to domestic politics. He is fluent in many languages, a voracious reader, and he made the Russians aware of many less known Western thinkers. He is ready to wade deepest waters of mystical and heterodox thought with mind-boggling courage. He thrives on controversies; adored and hated, but never boring.

He is a scholar and a practitioner of Mysticism, akin to Mirchea Eliade and Guenon; a church-going adherent of traditionalist Orthodoxy; an ardent student of conspiracy theories from Templers and the Holy Grail to Herman Wirth’s Arctogaia; he is a master of tools sharpened by Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord; but first and foremost, he is a dedicated fighter for liberation of mankind from the vise of liberal tyranny in American-dominated New World Order, or even from Maya, the post-modernist post-liberal virtuality - by political means.

Beneath liberalism’s appeals to individualism and social contracts, nationhood remained synonymous with tribe and community. This is not surprising because modern nation-states did not arise out of thin air or at the end of the nose of some 17th-century philosopher. They are are built upon the base of organic societies that have preceded them. 

China, for example, had existed as a nation, civilization, and empire long before the PRC was even established; just as Europe as a civilization and as a historical subject had existed long before the birth of the EU and its member states. So in addressing the issue of Nationalism, it is important to separate the Nation-State from the organic communities upon which it is based. These are H.G. Well’s “natural borders.” They are “the necessary political map of the world which transcends artificial states.”

Almost a century has passed since Guénon began to write his criticism of modernism and modern Western civilization. Since then the epidemic of modernism has spread much more globally and affected much more deeply than then the great non-Western civilizations such as the Islamic, Hindu and Far Eastern. Your question, therefore, can be asked about all civilizations and not only the West. Nevertheless, tradition has been better preserved in those civilizations than in the West where modernism was born and grew before it spread elsewhere. This is especially true of the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of these non-Western traditions with the help of which Guénon hoped a new traditional intellectual elite could be created in the West, something which in fact has taken place to some extent. As to whether Western civilization can avoid decay and destruction by returning to its traditional roots, such an event seems ever more unlikely on a civilizational scale, but return to tradition remains an accessible path for individuals in the West and many have chosen to pursue this path.

Guénon also spoke of the possibility of a “redressement” and who is to say that such an event is no longer possible no matter how unlikely it seems. As the Bible states, “With God all things are possible.” My own understanding is that a golden kernel is now forming while the petals of the “flower of civilization” are falling apart and that this kernel will serve as the seed for the next historical and cosmic cycle.

Protests and demonstrations opposing the ruling AKP in Turkey have rocked Istanbul, Ankara, and other cities over the last week. There are a number of demands, social andeconomic, but also significant among them is the demand to pull out of Syrian intrigues, end the alliance with NATO and USrael, and even for Erdogan to step down. This is either aimed at ushering in new elections before the 2014-2015 election cycle or possibly even something more radical than this. Naturally the latter possibility will depend in large part on both the role of the trade unions and the military. Both institutions having large numbers of sympathizers of nationalism (and related), Kemalism, and communism (and related); these can with some provisos be placed under the category ‘Eurasianist Current in Turkey’ and under this the subheading ‘Ergenekon’.

These protesters have rocked the ruling AKP’s claim to legitimacy in several days of robust demonstrations, bolstered by more recent news that Turkey’s main trade union federation has backed the protests. As of Thursday June 6th 2013 certain facts are becoming more clear.

From the point of view of geopolitics, Turkey belongs to the "coastal zone", and therefore, the geopolitical theorem of Turkish policy on a global scale is solved through the balance and confrontation between the two orientations - Atlanticist and Eurasian. Since the days of Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has a strong national consciousness, perceives its statehood as a colossal, almost absolute value, and tends to play a strong and independent part in the regional context.

Modern Turkey was born in a bloody battle on the Bosphorus against the British. Kemal Ataturk builds «young Turkey» on the basis of hard confrontation with the Anglo-Saxon project. In other words, the Eurasian choice lies in the foundation of the modern Turkish state, where anti-English momentum begins its modern history. The geopolitical line of Ataturk is clear: Turkey does not intend to be atlanticist colony: it's a free and fundamental choice of father-founder of the Turkish state. And this choice is Eurasian geopolitically.

During the so-called Cold War, we lived in a bipolar world. At least, this is what most people think. But how bipolar was it really? There were two superpowers (USA and Soviet Union), with their respective geopolitical areas of influence (West and East), trying to control the world resources and the world population, and competing with each other.

There are different tendencies in the new generation of revolutionary, non-conformist movements in Europe (on the Right as well as the Left), and some of them have been successful in attaining high political positions in their respective countries. The crisis of the West will grow broader and deeper every day, so we should expect an increase in the power and influence of our own Eurasianist resistance movement against the present global order, which is a dictatorship by the worst elements of the Western societies.

Those from either the Right or the Left who refuse American hegemony, ultra-liberalism, strategic Atlanticism, the domination of oligarchic and cosmopolitan financial elites, individualistic anthropology and the ideology of human rights, as well as typically Western racism in all spheres – economic, cultural, ethical, moral, biological and so on – and who are ready to cooperate with Eurasian forces in defending multipolarity, socio-economic pluralism, and a dialogue among civilizations, we consider to be allies and friends.

Alexander Dugin was in Paris on the 25th of may 2013 for a joint conference with Alain de Besnoist, of GRECE, Krisis and Nouvelle Ecole fame and Laurent James, a controversial writer and artist who deals with esotericism and metaphysical Revolution.

The conference was held in the historical center of Paris, place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the “Salle Lumière” wich translates as the “Room of Light” – there are no coincidences. It took place four days after the ritual suicide of Dominique Venner in the cathedrale of Notre Dame on the 21st of may, thus asserting itself as the first metaphysical and geopolitical conference of a new aeon. The day after, on the 26th, the massive anti-gay marriage demonstrations escalated into violence all night long, protesting the postmodern liberal “coup” of the despised pseudo-socialist government who had just passed the law in a quasi totalitarian fashion, ignoring the millions of people on the street and the growing anger of the population against the state of the country. Some said this was an anti-May 68, or a conservative revolution taking the streets ; whatever will come out of it nobody knows, but it could be the starting point of mass disillusion with the system and its globalist-deconstructivist agenda.

What is perhaps initially most appealing about this publication – aside from the promise of an offer of a fresh, viable alternative to the present stagnant political void, this “end of history” in which we find ourselves – is the comprehensive critique of the prevailing liberal ideology from a perspective which neither wholly aligns itself with the traditional positions in opposition to liberalism, nor stations itself against these.

The principal aim of Professor Dugin's work is not simply to deconstruct the previous failed political theories, which he lists as fascism, communism, and liberalism, but to fashion a new fourth theory, utilising what may be learnt from some of the previous models after their deconstruction rather than dismissing them outright on the basis of particulars worthy of rejection. That is not to say that the Fourth Political Theory is simply a synthesis of ideas that in their singular form have seen their day. Dugin is conscious of the necessity to bring something new to the table, with one of the principal of these novel ideas being the rejection of the subjects of the old ideologies, such as class, race, or the individual, in favour of the existential Heideggerian concept of Dasein (roughly Being or being-in-the-world. Literally da – there; sein– being) as the primary actor.

On October 28, 1940, Italy attacked Greece. We know now that Italian invasion was due not to Mussolini’s initiative but to Ciano’s one. For the latter was in contact with the British; and the British wished Greece to be involved into the Second WW in order to establish air bases on Greek territory and bombard the oil fields in Ploieşti, Romania.

Iōannēs Metaxas was by then Greece’s Prime Minister. He was a brilliant Engineers officer and a noted pro-German as well. On August 4, 1936, he managed to have an authoritarian system imposed on Greece – under his own leadership. Still Metaxas was dependent on King George II of the Hellenes. The Sovereign had expressed during the First WW the same pro-German sentiments as Metaxas. But his mind was changed in the 1930s: he had fully understood that Greece was run (and she keeps being run) by a supra-masonic government closely associated to Great Britain’s “deep state”.

So, the most important point in the actual situation in the international field is the fundamental changes in the architecture of the global politics. There are kinds of international orders that follow one another and to begin to discuss where we are we should make a little survey concerning the international orders that existed in the past in order to understand better what is going on in the present. So, we could make appeal to two concepts, two theories. First of all, we could take Carl Schmitt’s ideas of Nomos (Greek word) of the Earth. According to Schmitt’s German political theories there was a first Nomos of the Earth corresponding to the traditional empires of the pre-modern past. So, it was a kind of pre-modern world order where the actors, the hierarchies, the hegemonies, the balance of powers were completely different structurally from the modernity. It could be defined as the pre-modern international order. To this concept totally corresponds the idea of ancient or classical international system proposed by the English researchers of international relations Barry Buzan and Richard Little. So, these two concepts in sum correspond each other. The pre-modern first Nomos of the Earth (Carl Schmitt) and the classical/ancient international system (Barry Buzan).

America is being overwhelmed with social meltdown, uncontrolled poverty and unemployment.  This has been combined with the constant media bombardment of an entertainment complex meant to cause intellectual and emotional retardation, combined with a security culture on overdrive.  The USA is being eaten out from the inside by a cancer of its own creation.  American Revolutionaries on ‘both sides’ of the so-called political spectrum were right, have been right all along, and are right today.  This is a twofold phenomenon, a meltdown occurring on both the cultural and economic front.

These two are connected and inseparable, creating a ‘chicken or egg’ paradox when one tries to untangle them. Today’s revolutionary Political Soldiers need to have a basic grasp of the present situation beyond being a percipient witness to their daily lives.  From this, a more coherent analysis of what is now and ‘What is to be Done?’ will be possible.  That will lead the best of them to the conclusion that the groundbreaking thesis of Alexander Dugin provides them with the most coherent set of usable tools for the coming American revolution.

- Jobbik is a national conservative party which does not refrain from using radical means. So when they label us as radicals, they are wrong.  Radicalism is not a principle, it is a method. The reason why we are radicals is because the situation is radical as well. At the moment, we Hungarians are sick passengers on a sinking European ship that has lost its values. This is unbearable. First we must get off the ship, then cure our diseases. Hungary was not admitted to the EU so that we could develop. The goal was to colonize us, to exploit our cheap labour and acquire our markets. Western companies and banks now try to maintain their systems by using the profit they pump out of our country in the East. And this is just the economic side of the problem. The EU did not bring any good in terms of the spiritual, mental side, either. After the anti-value approach of Communism, we are now living in the valuelessness of capitalism. I personally follow traditionalist principles, in other words, I believe that Europe should get back to its own roots and rearrange its relationship with other traditional cultures that only exist in the East now.

Michael O’Meara is the author of the definitive English-language overview of the French Nouvelle Droite’s ideas, New Culture, New Right. Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe. An acute and perceptive writer himself, O’Meara is also the author, as Michael Torigian, of Every Factory a Fortress. The French Labor Movement in the Age of Ford and Hitler. For all those who gravitate towards the ideas of the Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) and are serious about seeing them come to fruition in the real world, they could do worse than read the latter book and its account of what a militant labor movement can accomplish (That’s right, the working class also plays a role in a revolutionary struggle. Metapolitics alone and publishing articles on “Implicit Whiteness in the Second Season of Veronica Mars” are not going to cut it, no matter how many footnotes they have.)

Myths about Hyperborea, the land of forefathers in the Far North, about the country that lies "beyond the north wind", are very deeply embedded in the collective unconscious and mythology of almost all Indo-European nations (and, of course, not only of their). By itself, this fact has great importance. But, more important than the fact of their widespraeding is the question what is their meaning. If Hyperborean myths really have such an important role in the unconscious of the Indo-European peoples, they have this by their own significance, due to its interior facilties. Because, for us, a myth in not "false story", a superstition or a misunderstanding. Myth is timeless reality, which is, perhaps, "not never enact anywhere," but is constantly repeated in history and, indeed, in a reality that determined and defined it.