Multipolarity

Second World, Semiperiphery and State-Civilisation in Multipolar World Theory. Part Two

Second World, Semiperiphery and State-Civilisation in Multipolar World Theory. Part Two

Let us now turn to a different theory: the 'world-system analysis' constructed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Wallerstein, an exponent of the Marxist school of International Relations (especially in its Trotskyist interpretation), on the basis of the doctrine of "the long run" (F. Braudel) and the Latin American theorists of structural economics (R. Prebisch, S. Furtado), developed a model of world zoning according to the level of development of capitalism.

Thoughts during the Plague № 2. End of globalization

The state of emergency, Ernstfall, it is very very serious and one who is in power in such a situation, is not likely to give it up voluntarily to anyone. This is, let's say, the positive side of the epidemic in which we now live. Of course, it’s important to deal with it, it’s important to survive, but you can’t reduce everything to solution of purely technical issues, it is essential to think about the future. And at the exit from this pandemic we will come across a completely new post-global reality.

Eurasianism: The struggle for the multi-polar world

In Moscow, Eurasianist scholar Alexander Dugin influenced the policy of President Vladimir Putin and diverted Russian policy towards Eurasianism. The ultimate purpose of this diversion was aimed at Russian revisionism in order to bolster Russia’s role for the creation of a multi-polar, and multi-stakeholder, world.

According to Dugin, European civilization has degenerated and it must be destroyed. However, to fight the European civilization, Dugin suggests the Eurasianist Federation based on the strategic unity and ethnic plurality with a principle judicial element of the rights of people.

Multipolarity, Unipolarity, Hegemony - Theories and Concepts

Ideological unipolarity entails the universalism of Western values and Human Rights ideology with the concept of human vs. citizen. The concept of human in Human Rights theory is against the nation-state and against the concept of citizen. If you say that the human being has the same rights as the citizen, you destroy citizenship. Migration and the defense of migrants are not purely humanitarian, but ideological. It is the idea to destroy the concept of citizenship, nationality, and the state. That is one of the main goals of the so-called human rights movement. It is purely ideological - as much ideological as Marxism or National Socialism. It is pure propaganda, nothing humanitarian. If you share human rights values, you are globalists on one side, sharing an ideology just like racism in National Socialism or communism and the proletarian position in classical Marxism. Human rights is a liberal ideology. It is not neutral. It is not self-evident. It is purely ideology, just as belongingness to the Aryan race or the capitalist or proletarian classes is. If you are in favor of human rights, you are already totally controlled by ideology.

Multipolarity – The Definition and the Differentiation Between its Meanings

From a purely scientific point of view, there still exists no full and complete theory of a multipolar world (TMW) to date, nor can it be found among the classical theories and paradigms of International Relations (IR). We will try to look for it in the latest post-positivist theories in vain. It is not fully developed in its final aspect, the sphere of geopolitical research. Time and time again this theme is openly comprehended, but still left “behind the scenes” or treated in too biased of a fashion within international relations.

Nevertheless, more and more works on foreign affairs, world politics, geopolitics, and actually, international politics, are dedicated to the theme of multipolarity. A growing number of authors try to understand and describe multipolarity as a model, phenomenon, precedent, or possibility.

The topic of multipolarity was in one way or another touched upon in the works of the IR specialist David Kampf (in the article "The emergence of a multipolar world"), historian Paul Kennedy of Yale University (in his book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" ), geopolitician Dale Walton (in the book "Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the XXI century: Multipolarity and the Revolution in strategic perspective"), American political scientist Dilip Hiro (in the book "After Empire: Birth of a multipolar world" ), and others. The closest in understanding the sense of multipolarity, in our view, was British IR specialists Fabio Petito, who tried to build a serious and substantiated alternative to the unipolar world on the basis of the legal and philosophical concepts of Carl Schmitt. 

The Beginning of a New Geopolitical Era

Not just in the US the mainstream media was broadcasting these fairy tales. In Germany also we “witnessed” a Russian invasion with tanks and lots of war material in Crimea. When I arrived in Simferopol I started searching for the Russian invasion. And I found out it took place but just on our western TV screens. Instead of those depressing “occupation scenes” I saw happy people in “reunification-fever”. Crimeans were looking forward to the referendum day.

Establish a multipolar world order

In my opinion, a multipolar world is the order with 5 or more centers of power in the world and this reality will keep our planet more safe and balanced with shared responsibility between the regions. But it is not just interdependence by the logic of liberalism: some regions might well exist in relative political and economic autarky. Beside that, there might exist a double core in one center (for example Arabs and Turks in a large Muslim zone or Russia and Central Asian states for Eurasia) and shifted and inter-imposed zones, because, historically, centers of power can be moved. Of course at the moment the most significant centers of power are described in terms of nuclear arms, GDP, economic weight/growth and diplomatic influence. First of all we already have more poles than during the Soviet-US opposition. Secondly, everybody understands the role of China as a ‘Bretton Woods-2’, as well as emerging countries under acronyms as BRICS or VISTA, “anchor countries” and so on. And, thirdly, we see the rise of popular and unconventional diplomacy and the desire of many countries (many of them are strong regional actors such as Iran, Indonesia and Brazil) to not follow the U.S. as satellites or minor partners.

Multipolarity as challenge

- The collapse of the Soviet Union has indeed led directly to an American domination of the world affairs. When Bush father proclaimed the new world order in the sands of Iraq, many (in the Western world) even thought that it would be so forever, that the history of ideas had stopped and that the world would from now on forever be under American domination. 

We can see today that those who thought so were wrong, and it only took a decade for History to take back its rights, leading America into wars that will accelerate its decline, while paradoxically, they were supposed to establish its domination. 

During the same decade, Russia was reborn from its ashes and has once again become a strong regional power, a power that has visions of domination of Eurasia, as Vladimir Putin hammered during his first speech as the elected president on May 7, 2012. 

We hear a lot more about the Russia / America confrontation than at the beginning of this century but these countries will probably never be anymore the main key players in the world of tomorrow, unlike America and the USSR in the world of yesterday. 

Civilization as political concept

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.

Alexander Dugin on Global Revolution

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.

 

Fourth Political Theory

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 20th 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 21st 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?

THE EURASIST VISION

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. 

MILESTONES OF EURASISM

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 Eurasian Idea

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).

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