The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

For Dugin, triumphant liberalism is embodied by Americanism; the United States, through its origins as an Enlightenment project, and through its superpower status in the twentieth and twenty-first century, is the global driver of liberal practice. As such, with the defeat of Marxism, it has created, and sought to perpetuate, a unipolar world defined by American, or Atlanticist, liberal hegemony. Russia has a long anti-Western, anti-liberal tradition, and for Dugin this planetary liberal hegemony is the enemy. Dugin would like the world to be multipolar, with Atlanticism counterbalanced by Eurasianism, and maybe other “isms.” In geopolitics, the need for a fourth political theory arises from a need to keep liberalism permanently challenged, confined to its native hemisphere, and, in a word, out of Russia.

In the 1920s, Russian Eurasianists as well as some Japanese philosophers try to organize a cultural stronghold able to serve as an orientation mark to “second rate” nations. The result is an autonomous intellectual tradition that leaves behind the dichotomy of particularism and universalism. Also in China, the interest in Asian cultural geography led Chinese intellectuals to an awareness of global space that they had to put in relation with the historical space of China. However, criticism of modernization in Japan and Russia, instead of questioning the idea of modernization as such, tends to deal with the quality of modernization. The article examines the consequences that these movements might have for the contemporary situation.

In the 1920s, Russian Eurasianists as well as some Japanese philosophers try to organize a cultural stronghold able to serve as an orientation mark to “second rate” nations. The result is an autonomous intellectual tradition that leaves behind the dichotomy of particularism and universalism. Also in China, the interest in Asian cultural geography led Chinese intellectuals to an awareness of global space that they had to put in relation with the historical space of China. However, criticism of modernization in Japan and Russia, instead of questioning the idea of modernization as such, tends to deal with the quality of modernization. The article examines the consequences that these movements might have for the contemporary situation.

Metapolitics is not politics by other means. It is neither a "strategy" to impose intellectual hegemony, nor an attempt to discredit other possible attitudes or agendas. It rests solely on the premise that ideas play a fundamental role in collective consciousness and, more generally, in human history. Through their works, Heraclitus, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx all triggered decisive revolutions, whose impact is still being felt today. History is a result of human will and action, but always within the framework of convictions, beliefs and representations which provide meaning and direction. The goal of the French New Right is to contribute to the renewal of these sociohistorical representations.

Even more now, this metapolitical impulse is based on a reflection about the evolution of Western societies in view of the coming 21st century. On the one hand, there is the growing impotence of political parties, unions, governments, classical forms of conquest and the exercise of political power, and, on the other, the rapid obsolescence of all antitheses (first and foremost, Left and Right) that have characterized modernity. Moreover, there is an unprecedented explosion of knowledge, which spreads with little regard for its consequences. In a world where closed entities have given way to interconnected networks with increasingly fuzzy reference points, metapolitical action attempts, beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a transversal mode of thought and, ultimately, to study all areas of knowledge in order to propose a coherent worldview. Such has been the aim for over thirty years.

This manifesto summarizes all of this. The first part (Predicaments) provides a critical analysis of the present; the second part (Foundations) outlines a view concerning man and the world. Both are inspired by a multidisciplinary approach that challenges most of today’s intellectual antitheses. Tribalism and globalism, nationalism and internationalism, liberalism and Marxism, individualism and collectivism, progressivism and conservatism oppose each other with the same complacent logic of the excluded middle. For a century, these artificial oppositions have occluded what is most essential: the sheer size of a crisis that demands a radical renewal of modes of thought, decision and action. It is thus futile to seek this radical renewal in what has already been written. Yet, the French New Right has borrowed ideas from various theoretical sources. It has not hesitated to reappropriate what seems valuable in all currents of thought. This transverse approach has provoked the ire of the guardians of thought, concerned with freezing ideological orthodoxies in order the paralyze any new threatening synthesis.

Problems stemming from the West during the “unipolar moment” has led many to say that this “moment” is over, that he could not yet be a “destiny” of humanity.That is, a “unipolar moment” should be interpreted very broadly – not only geopolitical, but also ideologically, economically, axiologically, civilization wide. The crisis of identity, about which you ask, has scrapped all previous identities – civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religious, cultural, in favor of a universal planetary Western-style identity  – with its concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights.Instead of a hierarchy of identities, which have traditionally played a large role in sets of collective identities, the “unipolar moment” affirmed a flat one-dimensional identity, with the absolutization of the individual singularity.  One individual = one identity, and any forms of the collective identity (for example, individual as the part of the religious community, nation, ethnic group, race, or even sex) underwent dismantling and overthrow. Hence the hatred of globalists for different kind of “majorities” and protection of minorities, up to the individual.

The Uni-polar Democracy of our moment - this is a democracy, which unambiguously protects the minority before the face of the majority and the individual before face of the group.  This is  the crisis of identity for those of non-Western or non-modern (or even not “postmodern”) societies,since this is where customary models are scrapped and liquidated. The postmodern West with  optimism, on the contrary, asserts individualism and hyper-liberalism in its space and zealously  exports it on the planetary scale.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, adjustments had to be made to the purely economic logic of society’s regulation and reproduction. These adjustments were less the result of conservative resistance than of the internal contradictions of the new social configuration. Sociology itself arose from real society’s resistance to political and institutional changes as well as those who invoked a “natural order” to denounce the formal and artificial character of the new mode of social regulation. For the first sociologists, the rise of individualism hatched a double fear: of “anomie” resulting from the disintegration of social bonds (Émile Durkheim) and of the “crowd” made up of atomized individuals suddenly brought together in an uncontrollable “mass” (Gustave Le Bon or Gabriel Tarde, both of whom reduce the analysis of social facts to “psychology”). The first finds an echo among counter-revolutionary thinkers in particular. The second is mainly perceptible among the bourgeoisie concerned above all with protecting itself from the “dangerous classes.”

While the nation-state supported and instituted the market, antagonism between liberalism and the “public sector” grew in tandem. Liberals never cease fulminating against the welfare state, without realizing that it is precisely the market’s extension that necessitates ever-increasing state intervention. The man whose labor is subject solely to the market’s play is indeed vulnerable, for his labor might find no takers or have no value. Modern individualism, moreover, destroyed the organic relations of proximity, which were above all relations of mutual aid and reciprocal solidarity, thus destroying old forms of social protection. While regulating supply and demand, the market does not regulate social relations, but on the contrary disorganizes them, if only because it does not take into account demands for which one cannot pay. The rise of the welfare state then becomes a necessity, since it is the only power able to correct the most glaring imbalances and attenuate the most obvious distresses.

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.

The status quo of the West’s liberal hegemony has become global. It is a Westernization of all of humanity. This means that its norms, such as the free market, free trade, liberalism, parliamentarian democracy, human rights, and absolute individualism have become universal. This set of norms is interpreted differently in the various regions of the world, but the West regards its specific interpretation as being both self-evident and its universalization as inevitable. This is nothing less than a colonization of the spirit and of the mind. It is a new kind of colonialism, a new kind of power, and a new kind of control that is put into effect through a network. Everyone who is connected to the global network becomes subjected to its code. It is part of the postmodern West, and is rapidly becoming global. The price a nation or a people has to pay to become connected to the West’s globalization network is acceptance of these norms. It is the West’s new hegemony. It is a migration from the open hegemony of the West, as represented by the colonialism and outright imperialism of the past, to an implicit, more subtle version.

To fight this global threat to humanity, it is important to unite all the various forces that would, in earlier times, have been called anti-imperialist. In this age, we should better understand our enemy. The enemy of today is hidden. It acts by exploiting the norms and values of the Western path of development and ignoring the plurality represented by other cultures and civilizations. Today, we invite all who insist on the worth of the specific values of non-Western civilizations, and where there other forms of values exist, to challenge this attempt at a global universalization and hidden hegemony.

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?

Dear Aleksandr,

As a thinker and and author on philosophy, science and religion, theo-politics, geo-politics and financial geo-economics, and having great respect for the breadth an depth your work and vision, I am writing to you now – and through you, to the International Eurasian Movement as a whole – with a feeling of great urgency.

My aim is not only to let you know about The National People’s Party in the U.K., but above all to bring your attention through it to what I see as a central and urgent question -  one which I believe is absolutely vital for all Eurasianists to recognise if your vision is to be realised.

The question concerns the changed nature of money and currency and in particular the right of both nations and federations of nations to create and issue their own currency - without borrowing from commercial and international banks.  This is the sovereign economic right that Abraham Lincoln fought form by issuing  Greenbacks as a sovereign currency – a major cause of the war against the colonists launched by King George and funded by international bankers.

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 current world is unipolar with the global West in its centre and with the United States as its core. 

This kind of the unipolarity has geopolitical and ideological sides. Geopolitically is the strategic dominance of the earth by North-American hyperpower and the effort of Washington to organize the balance of forces on the planet in such a manner to be able to rule the whole world in accordance with its own national (imperialistic) interests. It is bad because it deprives other states and nations of their real sovereignty.

When there is only one instance to decide who is right and who is wrong and who should be punished we have a kind of the global dictatorship. I am convinced that is not acceptable. So we should fight against it. If someone deprives us from our freedom we have to react. And we will. The American Empire should be destroyed. And at one point it will be.

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.

New World Order as a concept was popular in a concrete historical momentum – precisely that when the Cold War ended (late 80’s, Gorbatchev era) and the global cooperation between the USA and Soviet Union was considered near and very probable. The basis of NWO was presumably realization of the convergence theory predicting the synthesis of Soviet socialist and Western capitalist political forms and near cooperation of the Soviet Union and USA in the case of regional issues – for example first Gulf War in the beginning of 1991. Hence, as the Soviet Union split soon after, this project of NWO was naturally set aside and forgotten.

After 1991 the other World Order was considered as something being created under our eyes – Unipolar World with open global hegemony of USA. It is described well in Fukuyama’s political utopia “End of history”. This World Order ignored any other poles of power except the USA and its allies (first of all Europe and Japan) and was thought as universalization of free market economy, political democracy and human rights ideology as global pattern accepted by all countries in the world. 

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.

The potassium cyanide of civilization. The degeneracy and the vice flourishes where the organic connections, spiritual meanings and anagogic spirals of hierarchies that ascend unimpeded to heaven, are lost. The perception of unholy reality. The insufferable loss of the "Third Rome". The horror before the encounter with the universal Antichrist element, with Petersburg. Raskolnikov guesses absolutely correctly that the symbolic pole of evil is a perverted womanhood (Kali). That is that damned by religion loan capital, which equalizes the living with the lifeless and creates monsters. That is the decaying, degradation of the world. All this is the crone-usurer, the Baba-Yaga of the modern world, the Winter-Woman, Death, murderer. Out of her dirty place she spins Petersburg's web, sending through its black streets Luzhins, Svidrigaylovs, dvorniks and Marmeladovs, the "black brothers", secret agents of the capitalist sin. 

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.

Against the establishing of the atlantist world order and globalisation stand the supporters of the multi-polar world – the eurasists. The eurasists defend on principle the necessity to preserve the existence of every people on earth, the blossoming variety of cultures and religious traditions, the unquestionable right of the peoples to independently choose their path of historical development. The eurasists greet the generality of cultures and systems of values, the open dialogue among peoples and civilizations, the organic combination between the devotion to traditions and the creative impulse. 
Eurasists are not only the representatives of the peoples living in the Eurasian continent. Being eurasist is a conscious choice, which means combining the aspiration to preserve the traditional forms of life with the aspiration to free creative (social and personal) development. 
In this way, eurasists are all free creative personalities who acknowledge the values of tradition; among them are also the representatives of those region which objectively form the bases of atlantism. 
Eurasists and atlantists are opposed to each other in everything. They defend two different, alternative, mutually excluding images of the world and its future. It is the opposition between eurasists and atlantists which defines the historical outline of the XXI century. 

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. 

The first pattern represents the inertial cliché of the Soviet (mainly later Soviet) period. It has somehow taken roots in the psychology of some Russian managing systems, often unconsciously, pushing them into adopting such or such decision on the basis of the precedents. This pattern is supported with the “relevant” argument: «It worked earlier, it will work also now». It concerns not only those political leaders who consciously exploit the nostalgic complex of the Russian citizens. The Soviet reference pattern is much wider and deeper than the structures of the KPFR [Communist Party of the Russian Federation], which now stands at the rim of  executive power, far from the decisional centres. Everywhere politicians and officials, formally not identifying themselves in any way with communism, are guided by it. It is an effect of education, life experience, formation. In order to understand the substance of the undergoing processes in Russian politics, it is necessary to admit this “unconscious sovietism”. The second pattern is the liberal-democrat, pro-American one. It started taking shape with the beginning of “perestroyka” and became some kind of dominant ideology in the first half of the 1990s. As a rule, the so-called liberal-reformers and the political forces close to them identify themselves with it. This pattern is based on choosing as system of reading of the American socio-political device, copying it on the Russian ground and following US national interests in international issues. Such pattern has the advantage to allow to lean on the quite real “foreign present”, as against the virtual “domestic past” around which the first pattern gravitates. The argument here too is rather simple: «It works for them, it will work for us too». Here it is important to stress that we are not simply talking about “foreign experience”, but about the orientation towards the US, as to the flagship of the successful Western capitalist world.

Almost all religions and traditions claim – globalization, “new world order” , “unipolar world”, “world cabinet” – are symbols of Lucifer , strategic constructions of “God enemies” – Archangel Michael`s direct enemies. Christians identify this “new world order” as “antichrist”, muslims as “dadjallah”, judes – “great melting” (“erev rav”), hinduists – as forces of Kali Juga, Buddhists – Mara, demon of illusion.v On the other side of all differences between doctrines, rituals and dogmata exists special tradition – tradition of Archangel Michael, “michaelic” veiled light. It is affiliation of human to “hierohistory”, right (and obligation) to be a soldier of one of the two opposing armies.

Eurasian idea in its highest sense – projection of michaelic, vertical outtime pillar of light on history in its final stage of redemption.

Archangel Michael is often pictured with a sword in one hand and with scales in another. Scales mean justice. German philosopher M. Haidegger in his “Holzwege” analyzed very important for us poem of Rhien Maria Rilke. It was about “handing over the scales from merchant to Archangel”.

 In contrast to the absolutization of the liberal pattern laying at the economic base of the «new world order», the Eurasist Project supposes the reference to a wide spectrum of the socially oriented patterns of a social system, which can be sometimes globally called as «socialism» or «socially oriented community». The social environment is the natural habitat of the man, and in his basic features man is defined just as in relation to a definite community. As against dogmatical Marxism, this community can be understood in very different ways —as a cultural type, as community collective unconscious, as ethnic identity, as religious faith, as a social-historical formation, as a class-professional belonging etc. All these social features can be taken into account in a common summary pattern, which, conditionally, it is possible to call as the «eurasist socialism», free from the dogmatists, creative, open, incorporating both traditional forms of social identification and new social forms growing in modern conditions. The social feature of Eurasism does not exclude at all the value of the  individual, and the more so it does not reject some definite elements of market management. It is a common spirit, a priority attitude toward the social system, where in the economic, social, scientific and political areas the models based on the principle of the general social subject are encouraged, and the major basic instance is the organic collective of an old or new kind. 

The Eurasian Idea represents a fundamental revision of the political, ideological, ethnic, and religious history of mankind, and it offers a new system of classification and categories that will overcome standard cliches. The Eurasian theory went through two stages - a formational period of classical Eurasianism at the beginning of the XX century by Russian emigrant intellectuals (Trubeckoy, Savickiy, Alekseev, Suvchinckiy, Iljin, Bromberg, Hara-Davan etc.) followed by the historical works of Leonid Gumilev and, finally, the constitution of neo-Eurasianism (second half of 1980's to the present).