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Charlie Stross tells us of how: SF is a profoundly ideological genre—it's about much more than new gadgets or inventions. Canadian science-fiction novelist and futurist Karl Schroeder has told me that "every technology comes with an implied political agenda."Well, yes, we'd run with that. Although we'd go further, a major strand of Sci-Fi is exploring the political agendas, even outcomes, that might come from a specific technological change. Many of which do become dystopias of course - partly that's because "and then everything was lovely" isn't a hugely gripping storyline. But OK, there's a lot of politics in there, at least there's a lot of discussion of politics in there: Science fiction (SF) influences everything in this day and age, from the design of everyday artifacts to how we—including the current crop of 50-something Silicon Valley billionaires—work. And that's a bad thing: it leaves us facing a future we were all warned about, courtesy of dystopian novels mistaken for instruction manuals.Which, well, we doubt we share many political thoughts or ideals with Mr. Stross so let's just say that's possible. But then Sci-Fi really has discussed many of the available dystopias along the way. Possibly the grandaddy of the genre, "We", tells before the event how Stalinism isn't going to work. "Brave New World" can obviously be read as a warning about the then very fashionable in left wing circles eugenics programmes (the Fabians were virtually founded upon the idea). More recently "Fallen Angels" can be read as a warning of actually allowing any greens, anywhere, to hold the controlling reins of politics. There have been novels about how the govt of Earth tried to strangle any freedom among the space colonies by denying water for reaction mass (again, cod-green arguments) so they go corral a moon of Saturn. A whole series that has the UN controlling all new technologies. Our point here is not that Mr. Stross is wrong in identifying some dystopias that result from a possible excess of corporate power. Rather, that the universe explored also includes those with an excess of government control. Which brings us to this: We were warned about the ideology driving these wealthy entrepreneurs by Timnit Gebru, former technical co-lead of the ethical artificial intelligence team at Google and founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), and Émile Torres, a philosopher specializing in existential threats to humanity.Gebru is famous among those who pay attention to these things for insisting that AI cannot be allowed unless it accords to her definitions of what is moral. It must include - work by, produce outcomes that lead to - equity, for example. But as the universe is inequitable by those current standards of how equity is defined - equal outcomes - Gebru's definition insists upon the only AI we're allowed being an AI that doesn't work. For it doesn't describe, start from, the world that exists, it becomes a projection of the desired world. Desired by a certain set of morals and ethical stance, not a building upon what is extant.We'd argue that the dystopias for us to avoid as described in Sci-Fi are not those in which Marc Andreessen gets to cackle at us mere mortals from his private space station. Rather, those in which bureaucrats prevent private space stations from ever existing. But that there is to betray - just as we insist Mr. Stross is doing - our own ideological biases. The real point we want to make here is that yes, Sci-Fi, among other things, explores dystopias. But many dystopias, formed by different stretches and exaggerations of current society and technology. They're by no means all - or even mostly - about an excess of capitalist, corporate or even market power. There are many about that potential excess of state, bureaucratic and just plain foolish power too.SciFi doesn't tell us to worry purely about the current crop of Silicon Valley capitalists. It tells us to worry about all who would direct our society. A little more equity from Mr. Stross and others in the dangers faced here would be welcome. For we're really very certain indeed that the potential dangers do not stem merely from those trying to make a buck or a billion.

Over the last thirty years, the Italians have tried almost everything, nothing has resulted as expected, the country is stagnated, and this is the only dish on the menu that had not been tasted yet. Economic growth was flat since 2000, and after the Great Recession and the pandemic, the per capita GDP is 5% lower than fifteen years ago. Public debt amounts to about 150% of GDP (the second in Europe, only after Greece, which is a much smaller economy).This permanent turmoil is in sharp contrast with the more than forty years of political stability and economic growth since the establishment of the Italian Republic at the end of World War II. In the first edition of my textbook Political Institutions in Europe, the author of the chapter on Italy, Gianfranco Pasquino, summarized that period as one with unstable governments (one-year average duration), lasting coalitions (always around the Christian-democrats), repeated presidents of the Council (up to De Gasperi eight times, Andreotti seven, Fanfani six…), and stagnated policies. After the Cold War and the dissolution of both the Christian-democracy and the Communist Party, there have been sustained attempts to force alternations in government via political polarization. Five electoral reforms replaced the previous proportional representation system with mixed systems including single-member districts by plurality rule and a "majority bonus" to the largest party. The results have been, paraphrasing Pasquino: slightly less unstable governments (lasting on average 18 months, but remember that Germany had only three chancellors in forty years); changing coalitions with many alternations (about eight, plus two national unity cabinets); repeated presidents of the Council (Berlusconi four times, Prodi two…); and extremely stagnated policies, despite government alternations, because they now largely depend on the European Union. Against some expectations, new parties proliferated. The most significant electoral reform has been the most recent one, used for the first time in this election: an unprecedented cut of the number of seats in both chambers of Parliament (by 37 percent), which has reduced the number of parties and attenuated fragmentation.In this context, the emphasis on the fascist precedents of the current largest party, Brothers of Italy, is largely biased. In the early 1990s, in parallel to the dissolution of the Communist party, the Social Movement with fascist roots also experienced a "perestroika." It first formed the National Alliance, which won the popular vote in the South, merged with Berlusconi's party, and after being in government for a while with Giorgia Meloni as a minister, a group split to form the minor Brothers of Italy, which became the only opposition to Mario Draghi's government. Accusing Meloni of fascist origins is as distracting as it would be accusing the former president of the Council Massimo D'Alema, at the time leader of the Party of the Italian Communists, of being the heir of Stalinism. While D'Alema furtherly evolved and became Vice-president of the Socialist International, the Brothers of Italy became a member of the European Conservative Group (which was founded by the British Tories), a more pro-EU alignment than the Identity Group that includes the Italian League, the French Le Pen, and the Alternative for Germany.Meanwhile, the European Union is reinforcing its fiscal and financial resources. Italy is prepared to receive the largest amount of loans and donations from the EU's programs for recovery and investments. The intended amount is a programs' percentage double the size of the Italian population and economy's share in the EU (as similarly happens with Spain, but the latter is a smaller economy). At some moment, Meloni hinted at renegotiating the conditional reforms on the judiciary, the tax code, or the anti-trust and competition rules. The size and interdependence of the Italian economy in Europe may give her some leverage, as the country is too big for the EU to let it fail. On this basis, the new Italian government could threaten the EU. But the EU is right now also menacing by being stern on that kind of attitude with its firmness on Hungary.This unbalanced game of mutual threats reflects the general political situation in Europe: the Union is already sufficiently strong to nullify many sovereign powers of the states, but not yet enough to establish the EU as the prevailing institutional level in all respects. Perhaps things must go still worse to go better. Worse with the useless politicking in the states to go better with a European more effective union.President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella was aware of this risk when he prevented the League's Matteo Salvini from becoming president of the Council after the last election and appointed the European leader Draghi. He could still try something of the sort.

In an interview with Le Figaro published on August 16 and based on his new book, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid out what has been missing from Western thinking on the war in Ukraine: a diplomatic Plan B in case the present Ukrainian offensive fails.


If it does fail, as seems increasingly probable, the most likely alternative to a diplomatic solution is an indefinite and bloody war of attrition along roughly the present battle lines.


Quite apart from the threats of disastrous escalation and a NATO-Russia war described by Sarkozy, Westerners who are or claim to be friends of Ukraine should consider the consequences of an unending war on that country. These include a continuation of dreadful human losses and continued destruction of the Ukrainian economy, with no certainty at all over who will pay to rebuild it. They would also entail the indefinite postponement of the process of EU accession, which would have offered Ukraine its best chance of truly joining the West and the inability of Ukrainian refugees to return home, leading to a catastrophic and permanent decline in Ukraine's population.


In addition to all of this: the possibility that a Ukrainian army exhausted and bled white by years of failed offensives will eventually fall victim to a Russian counter-attack, leading to territorial losses far greater than Ukraine has suffered so far.


This being so, one might think that even those who disagree with Sarkozy's specific recommendations would welcome the chance to hold a serious public debate on ways forward. Instead, the response from the great majority of Western (including French) politicians and commentators has followed the wearisomely familiar path of denunciations of the former president as a "Russian influencer" and "friend of Putin" whose remarks were "shameful" and "shocking."


A survey of Western "news" reports (mostly in fact veiled and hostile opinion pieces) is interesting in this regard. Of the ten top stories about the interview resulting from a Google search, only two focused on Sarkozy's remarks themselves. All the others, in their content and headlines (like "'Shameful' Nicolas Sarkozy Under Fire for Defending Putin" in The Guardian), highlighted and quoted at length the angry attacks on Sarkozy.


What Sarkozy actually said is the following:



"Without compromise, nothing will be possible and we run the risk that the situation will degenerate at any moment. This powder keg could have frightful consequences…


The Ukrainians... will want to reconquer what has been unjustly taken from them. But if they can't manage it completely, the choice will be between a frozen conflict... or taking the high road out with referenda [in territories occupied by Russia since 2014] strictly overseen by the international community… any return to the way things were before [ie Ukrainian rule over Crimea] is an illusion. An incontestable referendum... will be needed to solidify the current state of affairs.



On the question of NATO membership for Ukraine, Sarkozy said that:



"Russia has to renounce all military action against its neighbors … Ukraine must pledge to remain neutral … NATO could at the same time affirm its willingness to respect and take into account Russia's historic fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbors."


He also described as unrealistic and hypocritical suggestions that Ukraine can join the European Union in the foreseeable future, comparing this to Turkey's hopeless decades-long efforts: "We are selling fallacious promises that will not be kept to."



On French President Emmanuel Macron's previous efforts to negotiate with Putin, Sarkozy said that these had been correct, but that Macron had failed to follow up with any concrete proposals for compromise, partly "due to pressure from eastern Europeans."


Sarkozy asked Europeans to remember that, like it or not, Russia will always remain part of Europe and a neighbor of the EU, with which it will be necessary to co-exist. Therefore, "European interests aren't aligned with American interests this time."


Despite the near-universal vilification Sarkozy's interview has provoked, much of what he said has in fact been stated on background by some U.S. and European officials, and quoted in the Western media. In February, unnamed Biden administration officials told the New York Times that the U.S. goal should not be for Ukraine to retake Crimea (something that they judged both extremely difficult military and a risk for Russian escalation towards nuclear war) but instead to "credibly threaten" the Russian military hold on the peninsula, so as to "strengthen Kyiv's position in future negotiations."


This however leads – or should lead – to the obvious question: Future negotiations about what? Unlike Sarkozy, these U.S. officials and their European counterparts have not been willing to state the obvious conclusion: that if Ukraine could achieve such a military success without actually reconquering Crimea, the resulting negotiations would have to be about returning to Ukraine the territories it has lost since last year, while leaving Crimea (and probably the eastern Donbas, also in practice held by Russia since 2014) in Russian hands.


Nor have they addressed the question of how such a peace settlement could be internationally legitimized. Here Sarkozy has suggested a democratic solution that has also been proposed by Thomas Graham and others, but has been rigorously ignored by the governments of Western democracies: to place the decision in the hands of the populations of the areas concerned through internationally supervised referenda.


At present however — and as the Pentagon correctly in advance warned was likely — the Ukrainian army is still very far from being able to retake Crimea, and will very likely never be in that position. The probable failure of the present Ukrainian offensive is now being widely discussed by Western official and unofficial analysts. Once again, however, few have drawn the obvious conclusion that the result will be a prolonged war of attrition, leading either to an eventual ceasefire along present lines or — possibly — to a new Russian victory.


Even fewer have echoed Sarkozy in arguing that the eventual result will have to be a compromise peace, and suggested what the terms of that peace should be.


As to Ukrainian EU membership, EU officials and analysts with whom I talked in Brussels last autumn echoed in private Sarkozy's profound skepticism that this would be possible for a very long time to come. This is partly because the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction would place unprecedented and colossal strain on EU budgets. Six months ago, the World Bank estimated that the cost of this reconstruction would already be around $411 billion — two and a half times Ukraine's GDP for 2022 and more than twelve times the EU's entire present annual spending on aid to its poorer members.


Severe doubts were also expressed to me about Ukraine's ability to achieve the kind of internal reforms that would enable it to even begin to meet the conditions of the EU's Acquis Communautaire. President Macron believes that even if peace can be achieved, it will take Ukraine "several decades" to qualify. In these unfavorable circumstances for Ukraine and the West, to reject Sarkozy's remarks reflexively and without discussion seems the height of irresponsibility, hypocrisy, and moral cowardice, and also does not serve the real interests of Ukraine.


In 1916 and 1917, as the Western front congealed into a horrendously bloody stalemate and Russia sank into revolution and civil war, dissident voices began to be raised in the European combatants calling for a compromise peace. And in all these countries, these voices were also described as "shameful" and silenced by accusations of "treason" and "surrender."


The result was that three great European states were destroyed, the victors (with the exception of the United States) were irrevocably crippled, and the grounds were laid for Fascism, Stalinism, and the even greater calamity of World War II.


One hundred and six years later, very few historians today would describe those advocates of peace as "shameful," or their critics as correct. What are historians one hundred years from now likely to say about present Western witch hunts against those who propose peace in Ukraine?

Alexander Dugin on
Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of
Multipolarity







IR has long been regarded as an
Anglo-American social science. Recently, the discipline has started to look
beyond America and England, to China (Theory Talk
#51, Theory Talk
#45), India (Theory Talk
#63, Theory Talk
#42), Africa (Theory Talk #57, Theory Talk
#10) and elsewhere for non-Western
perspectives on international affairs and IR theory. However, IR theorists have
paid little attention to Russian perspectives on the discipline and practice of
international relations. We offer an exciting peek into Russian geopolitical
theory through an interview with the controversial Russian geopolitical thinker
Alexander Dugin, founder of the International
Eurasian Movement and allegedly an important
influence on Putin's foreign policy. In this Talk, Dugin—among others—discusses his Theory of a Multipolar
World, offers a staunch critique of western and liberal IR, and lays out
Russia's unique contribution to the landscape of IR theory.




Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version




What, according to you, is
the central challenge or principle debate within IR and what would be your
position within this debate or towards that challenge?



The field of IR is extremely interesting and multidimensional.
In general, the discipline is much more promising than many think. I think that
there is a stereometry today in IR, in which we can distinguish a few axes
right away.



The first, most traditional axis is realism – the English school
– liberalism.



If the debates here are exhausted on an academic level, then on
the level of politicians, the media, and journalists, all the arguments and
methods appear new and unprecedented each time. Today, liberalism in IR
dominates mass consciousness, and realist arguments, already partially
forgotten on the level of mass discourse, could seem rather novel. On the other
hand, the nuanced English school, researched thoroughly in academic circles,
might look like a "revelation" to the general public. But for this to happen, a
broad illumination of the symmetry between liberals and realists is needed for
the English school to acquire significance and disclose its full potential.
This is impossible under the radical domination of liberalism in IR. For that
reason, I predict a new wave of realists and neorealists in this sphere, who,
being pretty much forgotten and almost marginalized, can full well make
themselves and their agenda known. This would, it seems to me, produce a
vitalizing effect and diversify the palette of mass and social debates, which
are today becoming monotone and auto-referential.



The second axis is bourgeois versions of IR (realism, the
English school, and liberalism all together) vs. Marxism in IR. In popular and
even academic discourse, this theme is entirely discarded, although the
popularity of Wallerstein (Theory
Talk #13) and other
versions of world-systems theory shows a degree of interest in this critical
version of classical, positivistic IR theories.



The third axis is post-positivism in all its varieties vs.
positivism in all its varieties (including Marxism). IR scholars might have
gotten the impression that postmodern attacks came to an end, having been
successfully repelled by 'critical realism', but in my opinion it is not at all
so. From moderate constructivism and normativism to extreme post-structuralism,
post-positivistic theories carry a colossal deconstructive and correspondingly
scientific potential, which has not yet even begun to be understood. It seemed
to some that postmodernism is a cheerful game. It isn't. It is a new
post-ontology, and it fundamentally affects the entire epistemological
structure of IR. In my opinion, this axis remains very important and
fundamental.



The fourth axis is the challenge of the sociology of international
relations, which we can call 'Hobson's challenge'. In my opinion, in his
critique of euro-centrism in IR, John M. Hobson laid the foundation for an
entirely new approach to the whole problematic by proposing to consider the
structural significance of the "euro-centric" factor as dominant and clarifying
its racist element. Once we make euro-centrism a variable and move away from
the universalistic racism of the West, on which all systems of IR are built,
including the majority of post-positivistic systems (after all, postmodernity
is an exclusively Western phenomenon!), we get, theoretically for now, an
entirely different discipline—and not just one, it seems. If we take into
account differences among cultures, there can be as many systems of IR as there
are cultures. I consider this axis extremely important.



The fifth axis, outlined in less detail than the previous one,
is the Theory of a Multipolar World vs. everything else. The Theory of a
Multipolar World was developed in Russia,
a country that no one ever took seriously during the entire establishment of IR
as a discipline—hence the fully explainable skepticism toward the Theory of a
Multipolar World.



The sixth axis is IR vs. geopolitics. Geopolitics is usually
regarded as secondary in the context of IR. But gradually, the epistemological
potential of geopolitics is becoming more and more obvious, despite or perhaps
partially because of the criticism against it. We have only to ask ourselves
about the structure of any geopolitical concept to discover the huge potential
contained in its methodology, which takes us to the very complex and
semantically saturated theme of the philosophy and ontology of space.



If we now superimpose these axes onto one another, we get an
extremely complex and highly interesting theoretical field. At the same time,
only one axis, the first one, is considered normative among the public, and
that with the almost total and uni-dimensional dominance of IR liberalism. All
the wealth, 'scientific democracy', and gnoseological pluralism of
the other axes are inaccessible to the broad public, robbing and partly
deceiving it. I call this domination of liberalism among the public the 'third
totalitarianism', but that is a separate issue.





How did you arrive at where
you currently are in your thinking about IR?    




I began with Eurasianism, from which I
came to geopolitics (the Eurasianist Petr Savitskii quoted the
British geopolitician Halford Mackinder) and remained for a long
time in that framework, developing the theme of the dualism of Land and Sea and
applying it to the actual situation That is how the Eurasian school of
geopolitics arose, which became not simply the dominant, but the only school in
contemporary Russia. As a professor at Moscow State University, for six years I
was head of the department of the Sociology of International Relations, which
forced me to become professionally familiar with the classical theories of IR,
the main authors, approaches, and schools. Because I have long been interested
in postmodernism in philosophy (I wrote the book Post-philosophy on the subject), I paid special attention to
post-positivism in IR. That is how I came to IR critical theory,
neo-Gramscianism, and the sociology of IR (John Hobson, Steve Hobden, etc.). I came
to the Theory of a Multipolar World, which I eventually developed myself,
precisely through superimposing geopolitical dualism, Carl Schmitt's theory of the Grossraum, and John Hobson's critique of
Western racism and the euro-centrism of IR.





In your opinion, what would
a student need in order to become a specialist in IR?



In
our interdisciplinary time, I think that what is most important is familiarity
with philosophy and sociology, led by a paradigmatic method: the analysis of
the types of societies, cultures, and structures of thought along the line
Pre-Modernity – Modernity – Post-Modernity. If one learns to trace semantic
shifts in these three epistemological and ontological domains, it will help one
to become familiar with any popular theories of IR today. Barry Buzan's (Theory
Talk #35)
theory of international systems is an example of such a generalizing and very
useful schematization. Today an IR specialist must certainly be familiar with
deconstruction and use it at least in its elementary form. Otherwise, there is
a great danger of overlooking what is most important.



Another very important competence is
history and political science. Political science provides generalizing,
simplifying material, and history puts schemas in their context. I would only
put competence in the domain of economics and political economy in third place,
although today no problem in IR can be considered without reference to the
economic significance of processes and interactions. Finally, I would earnestly
recommend to students of IR to become familiar, as a priority, with geopolitics
and its methods. These methods are much simpler than theories of IR, but their
significance is much deeper. At first, geopolitical simplifications produce an
instantaneous effect: complex and entangled processes of world politics are
rendered transparent and comprehensible in the blink of an eye. But to sort out
how this effect is achieved, a long and serious study of geopolitics is
required, exceeding by far the superficiality that limits critical geopolitics
(Ó Tuathail et. al.): they stand at the beginning of
the decipherment of geopolitics and its full-fledged deconstruction, but they
regard themselves as its champions. They do so prematurely.





What
does it entail to think of global power relations through a spatial lens ('Myslit prostranstvom')?  



This is the most important thing. The
entire philosophical theme of Modernity is built on the dominance of time. Kant
already puts time on the side of the subject (and space on the side of the
body, continuing the ideas of Descartes and even Plato), while Husserl and Heidegger
identify the subject with time altogether. Modernity thinks with time, with
becoming. But since the past and future are rejected as ontological entities,
thought of time is transformed into thought of the instant, of that which is
here and now. This is the basis for the ephemeral understanding of being. To
think spatially means to locate Being outside the present, to arrange it in
space, to give space an ontological status. Whatever was impressed in space is
preserved in it. Whatever will ripen in space is already contained in it. This
is the basis for the political geography of Friedrich Ratzel and subsequent geopoliticians. Wagner's Parsifal ends with the words of
Gurnemanz: 'now time has become space'. This is a proclamation of the triumph
of geopolitics. To think spatially means to think in an entirely different way
[topika]. I think that postmodernity has already partly arrived at this
perspective, but has stopped at the threshold, whereas to cross the line it is
necessary to break radically with the entire axiomatic of Modernity, to really
step over Modernity, and not to imitate this passage while remaining in
Modernity and its tempolatry. Russian people are spaces [Russkie lyudi prostranstva],
which is why we have so much of it. The secret of Russian identity is concealed
in space. To think spatially means to think 'Russian-ly', in Russian.





Geopolitics
is argued to be very popular in Russia nowadays. Is geopolitics a new thing,
from the post-Cold War period, or not? And if not, how does current
geopolitical thinking differ from earlier Soviet (or even pre-soviet)
geopolitics?



It is an entirely new form
of political thought. I introduced geopolitics to Russia at the end of the 80s,
and since then it has become extremely popular. I tried to find some traces of
geopolitics in Russian history, but besides Vandam, Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky, and a few
short articles by Savitskii, there was nothing. In the USSR, any allusion to
geopolitics was punished in the harshest way (see the 'affair of the
geopoliticians' of the economic geographer Vladimir Eduardovich Den and his group).
At the start of the 90s, my efforts and the efforts of my followers and
associates in geopolitics (=Eurasianism) filled the worldview vacuum that
formed after the end of Soviet ideology. At first, this was adopted without
reserve by the military (The Military Academy of the General Staff
of the Armed Forces of Russia), especially under Igor Rodionov. Then,
geopolitics began to penetrate into all social strata. Today, this discipline
is taught in the majority of Russian universities. So, there was no Soviet or
pre-Soviet geopolitics. There is only the contemporary Eurasian school, which
took shape at the end of the 80s. Foundations
of Geopolitics was the first programmatic text of this school, although I had
published most of texts in that book earlier, and some of them were circulated
as texts in government circles. Recently, in 2012, I released two new
textbooks: Geopolitics and The Geopolitics of Russia, which
together with The War of Continents
are the results of work in this field, along four axes. 





In
your book International Relations, not
yet published in English, you set out your Theory of a Multipolar World as a
distinct IR theory. What are the basic components of the Theory of a Multipolar
World—and how is it different from classical realism?



In order to be understood
and not get into the details, I can say that the Theory of a Multipolar World
seriously and axiomatically adopts Samuel Huntington's thesis about the
plurality of civilizations. Russia has its own author, who claimed the same
thing more than a hundred years ago: Nikolay Danilevsky, and then the Eurasianists.
However, everything starts from precisely this point: civilization is not one,
but many. Western civilization's pretension to universalism is a form of the
will to domination and an authoritarian discourse. It can be taken into account
but not believed. It is nothing other than a strategy of suppression and
hegemony. The following point follows: we must move from thinking in terms of
one civilization (the racism of euro-centric versions of IR) to a pluralism of
subjects. However, unlike realists, who take as the subject of their theory
nation-states, which are themselves products of the European, bourgeois, modern
understanding of the Political, the Theory of a Multipolar World proposes to
take civilizations as subjects. Not states, but civilizations. I call them
'large politeiai', or civilizations, corresponding to Carl Schmitt's 'large
spaces'. As soon as we take these civilizations—'large politeiai'—as subjects,
we can then apply to them the full system of premises of realism: anarchy in
the international system, sovereignty, the rationality of egoistic behavior,
etc. But within these 'politeiai', by contrast, a principle more resembling
liberalism, with its pacifism and integration, operates, only with the
difference that here we are not talking about a 'planetary' or 'global' world,
but about an intra-civilizational one; not about global integration, but about
regional integration, strictly within the context of civilizational borders.
Post-positivism, in turn, helps here for the deconstruction of the
authoritarian discourse of the West, which masks its private interests by
'universal values', and also for the reconstruction of civilizational identity,
including with the help of technological means: civilizational elites,
civilizational media, civilizational economic algorithms and corporations, etc.
That is the general picture.





Your
theory of multipolarity is directed against the intellectual, political, and
social hegemony of the West. At the same time, while drawing on the tools of
neo-Marxist analysis and critical theory, it does not oppose Western hegemony
'from the left', as those approaches do, but on the basis of traditionalism (Rene
Guenon, Julius
Evola), cultural
anthropology, and Heideggerian phenomenology, or 'from the right'. Do you think
that such an approach can appeal to Anglo-American IR practitioners, or is it
designed to appeal mainly to non-Western theorists and practitioners? In short,
what can IR theorists in the West learn from the theory of multipolarity?



According to Hobson's
entirely correct analysis, the West is based on a fundamental sort of racism.
There is no difference between Lewis Morgan's evolutionistic racism
(with his model of savagery, barbarism, civilization) and Hitler's biological
racism. Today the same racism is asserted without a link to race, but on the
basis of the technological modes and degrees of modernization and progress of
societies (as always, the criterion "like in the West" is the general measure).
Western man is a complete racist down to his bones, generalizing his
ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions. Something tells me that he is
impossible to change. Even radical critiques of Western hegemony are themselves
deeply infected by the racist virus of universalism, as Edward Said showed with the
example of 'orientalism', proving that the anticolonial struggle is a form of
that very colonialism and euro-centrism. So the Theory of a Multipolar World
will hardly find adherents in the Western world, unless perhaps among those
scholars who are seriously able to carry out a deconstruction of Western
identity, and such deconstruction assumes the rejection of both Right
(nationalistic) and Left (universalistic and progressivist) clichés. The racism
of the West always acquires diverse forms. Today its main form is liberalism,
and anti-liberal theories (most on the Left) are plagued by the same
universalism, while Right anti-liberalisms have been discredited. That is why I
appeal not to the first political theory (liberalism), nor the second
(communism, socialism), nor to the third (fascism, Nazism), but to something I
call the Fourth Political Theory (or 4PT), based on a
radical deconstruction of the subject of Modernity and the application of
Martin Heidegger's existential analytic method.



Traditionalists are brought
in for the profound critique of Western Modernity, for establishing the
plurality of civilizations, and for rehabilitating non-Western (pre-modern)
cultures. In Russia and Asian countries, the Theory of a Multipolar World is
grasped easily and naturally; in the West, it encounters a fully understandable
and fully expected hostility, an unwillingness to study it carefully, and
coarse slander. But there are always exceptions.





What
is the Fourth Political Theory (4PT) and how is it related to the Theory of a
Multipolar World and to your criticism of the prevailing theoretical approaches
in the field of IR?



I spoke a little about this in the
response to the previous question. The Fourth Political Theory is important for
getting away from the strict dominance of modernity in the sphere of the
Political, for the relativization of the West and its re-regionalization. The
West measures the entire history of Modernity in terms of the struggle of three
political ideologies for supremacy (liberalism, socialism, and nationalism).
But since the West does not even for a moment call into question the fact that
it thinks for all humanity, it evaluates other cultures and civilizations in
the same way, without considering that in the best case the parallels to these
three ideologies are pure simulacra, while most often there simply are no
parallels. If liberalism won the competition of the three ideologies in the
West at the end of the 20th century, that does not yet mean that
this ideology is really universal on a world scale. It isn't at all. This
episode of the Western political history of modernity may be the fate of the
West, but not the fate of the world. So other principles of the political are
needed, beyond liberalism, which claims global domination (=the third
totalitarianism), and its failed alternatives (communism and fascism), which
are historically just as Western and modern as liberalism. This explains the
necessity of introducing a Fourth Political Theory as a political frame for the
correct basis of a Theory of a Multipolar World. The Fourth Political Theory is
the direct and necessary correlate of the Theory of a Multipolar World in the
domain of political theory.





Is
IR an American social science? Is Russian IR as an academic field a
reproduction of IR as an American academic field? If not, how is IR in Russia
specifically Russian?



IR is a Western scientific discipline,
and as such it has a prescriptive, normative vector. It not only studies the
West's dominance, it also produces, secures, defends, and propagandizes it. IR
is undoubtedly an imperious authoritarian discourse of Western civilization, in
relation to itself and all other areas of the planet. Today the US is the core
of the West, so naturally in the 20th century IR became more and
more American as the US moved toward that status (it began as an English
science). It is the same with geopolitics, which migrated from London to
Washington and New York together with the function of a global naval Empire. As
with all other sciences, IR is a form of imperious violence, embodying the will
to power in the will to knowledge (as Michel Foucault explained). IR in Russia remains purely
Western, with one detail: in the USSR, IR as such was not studied. Marxism in
IR did not correspond to Soviet reality, where after Stalin a practical form of
realism (not grounded theoretically and never acknowledged) played a big
role—only external observers, like the classical realist E.H. Carr, understood
the realist essence of Stalinism in IR. So IR was altogether blocked. The first
textbooks started to appear only in the 90s and in the fashion of the day they
were all liberal. That is how it has remained until now. The peculiarity of IR
in Russia today lies in the fact that there is no longer anything Russian
there; liberalism dominates entirely, a correct account of realism is lacking,
and post-positivism is almost entirely disregarded. The result is a truncated,
aggressively liberal and extremely antiquated version of IR as a discipline. I
try to fight that. I recently released an IR textbook with balanced (I hope)
proportions, but it is too early to judge the result.





Stephen
Walt argued in a September
article in Foreign Policy that Russia 'is nowhere near as threatening as the old Soviet
Union', in part because Russia 'no longer boasts an ideology that can rally
supporters worldwide'. Do you agree with Walt's assessment?



There is something to that. Today, Russia
thinks of itself as a nation-state. Putin is a realist; nothing more. Walt is
right about that. But the Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political
Theory, as well as Eurasianism, are outlines of a much broader and large-scale
ideology, directed against Western hegemony and challenging liberalism,
globalization, and American strategic dominance. Of course, Russia as a
nation-state is no competition for the West. But as the bridgehead of the
Theory of a Multipolar World and the Fourth Political Theory, it changes its
significance. Russian policies in the post-Soviet space and Russia's courage in
forming non-Western alliances are indicators. For now, Putin is testing this
conceptual potential very gingerly. But the toughening of relations with the
West and most likely the internal crises of globalization will at some point
force a more careful and serious turn toward the creation of global alternative
alliances. Nevertheless, we already observe such unions: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS, the Eurasian Union—and they require a new
ideology. Not one like Marxism, any universalism is excluded, but also not
simple realist maneuvers of regional hegemons. Liberalism is a global
challenge. The response to it should also be global. Does Putin understand
this? Honestly, I don't know. Sometimes it seems he does, and sometimes it
seems he doesn't.





Vladimir
Putin recently characterized the contemporary world order as follows: 'We have entered a period of differing interpretations and
deliberate silences in world politics. International law has been forced to
retreat over and over by the onslaught of legal nihilism. Objectivity and
justice have been sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. Arbitrary
interpretations and biased assessments have replaced legal norms. At the same
time, total control of the global mass media has made it possible when desired
to portray white as black and black as white'. Do you agree with this
assessment? If so, what is required as a response to this international
situation?



These are true, but rather
naïve words. Putin is just indignant that the West establishes rules in its own
interests, changes them when necessary, and interprets allegedly 'universal
norms' in its own favor. But the issue is that this is the structure of the
will to power and the very organization of logo-phallo-phono-centric discourse.
Objectivity and justice are not possible so long as speech is a monologue. The
West does not know and does not recognize the other. But this means that
everything will continue until this other wins back the right to recognition.
And that is a long road. The point of the Theory of a Multipolar World is that
there are no rules established by some one player. Rules must be established by
centers of real power. The state today is too small for that; hence the
conclusion that civilizations should be these centers. Let there be an Atlantic
objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice
will counter them. And the Chinese world or Pax Sinica [world/peace: same word
in Russian] will look different than the Islamic one. Black and white are not
objective evaluations. They depend on the structure of the world order: what is
black and what is white is determined by one who has enough power to determine
it.





How
does your approach help us understand Russia's actions on the world stage
better than other IR approaches do? What are IR analyses of Russia missing that
do not operate with the conceptual apparatus of multipolarity?



Interesting question. Russia's behavior
internationally is determined today by the following factors:



First,
historical inertia, accumulating the power of precedents (the Theory of a
Multipolar World thinks that the past exists as a structure; consequently, this
factor is taken into account from many sides and in detail, while the
'tempocentrism' (Steve Hobden, John Hobson) of classical IR theories drops this
from sight. We have to pay attention to this especially taking into
consideration the fact that Russia is in many ways still a traditional society
and belongs to the 'imperial system' of IR.) There are, besides, Soviet inertia
and stable motives ('Stalinism in IR');



Second,
the projective logic of opposition to the West, stemming from the most practical,
pragmatic, and realist motivations (in the spirit of Caesarism, analyzed by
neo-Gramscians) will necessarily lead Russia (even despite the will of its
leaders) to a systemic confrontation with American hegemony and globalization,
and then the Theory of a Multipolar World will really be needed (classical IR
models, paying no attention to the Theory of a Multipolar World, drop from
sight the possible future; i.e., they rob themselves of predictive potential
because of purely ideological prejudices and self-imposed fears).



But if an opponent underestimates you,
you have more chances to land an unexpected blow. So I am not too disturbed by
the underestimation of the Theory of a Multipolar World among IR theorists.





In
the western world, the divide between academia and policy is often either
lamented ('ivory tower') or, in light of the ideal of academic independence,
deemed absent. This concerns a broader debate regarding the relations between
power, knowledge and geopolitics. How are academic-policy relations in Russia
with regards to IR and is this the ideal picture according to you?



I think that in our case both positions
have been taken to their extreme. On one hand, today's authorities in Russia do
not pay the slightest attention to scholars, dispatching them to an airless and
sterile space. On the other hand, Soviet habits became the basis for servility
and conformism, preserved in a situation when the authorities for the first
time demand nothing from intellectuals, except for one thing: that they not
meddle in socio-political processes. So the situation with science is both
comical and sorrowful. Conformist scholars follow the authorities, but the
authorities don't need this, since they do not so much go anywhere in
particular as react to facts that carry themselves out.





If
your IR theory isn't based on politically and philosophically liberal
principles, and if it criticizes those principles not from the left but from
the right, using the language of large spaces or Grossraum, is it a fascist theory of international relations? Are scholars who characterize your thought as 'neo-fascism',
like Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovstov, partially correct? If not, why is that characterization
misleading?



Accusations of fascism are simply a
figure of speech in the coarse political propaganda peculiar to contemporary
liberalism as the third totalitarianism. Karl Popper laid the basis for this in
his book The
Open Society and its Enemies, where he reduced the critique of
liberalism from the right to fascism, Hitler, and Auschwitz, and the criticism
of liberalism from the left to Stalin and the GULAG. The reality is somewhat
more complex, but George
Soros,
who finances Umland and Shekhovstov and is an ardent follower of Popper, is
content with reduced versions of politics. If I were a fascist, I would say so.
But I am a representative of Eurasianism and the author of the Fourth Political
Theory. At the same time, I am a consistent and radical anti-racist and
opponent of the nation-state project (i.e. an anti-nationalist). Eurasianism has
no relation to fascism. And the Fourth Political Theory emphasizes that while
it is anti-liberal, it is simultaneously anti-communist and anti-fascist. I
think it isn't possible to be clearer, but the propaganda army of the 'third
totalitarianism' disagrees and no arguments will convince it. 1984 should be
sought today not where many think: not in the USSR, not in the Third Reich, but
in the Soros Fund and the 'Brave New World'. Incidentally, Huxley proved to be
more correct than Orwell. I cannot forbid others from calling me a fascist,
although I am not one, though ultimately this reflects badly not so much on me
as on the accusers themselves: fighting an imaginary threat, the accuser misses
a real one. The more stupid, mendacious, and straightforward a liberal is, the
simpler it is to fight with him.





Does
technological change in warfare and in civil government challenge the
geopolitical premises of classical divisions between spaces (Mackinder's view
or Spykman's) heartland-rimland-offshore continents)? And, more broadly
perhaps, does history have a linear or a cyclical pattern, according to you?



Technological development does not at all
abolish the principles of classical geopolitics, simply because Land and Sea
are not substances, but concepts. Land is a centripetal model of order, with a
clearly expressed and constant axis. Sea is a field, without a hard center, of
processuality, atomism, and the possibility of numerous bifurcations. In a
certain sense, air (and hence also aviation) is aeronautics. And even the word
astronaut contains in itself the root 'nautos', from the Greek word for ship.
Water, air, outer space—these are all versions of increasingly diffused Sea.
Land in this situation remains unchanged. Sea strategy is diversified; land
strategy remains on the whole constant. It is possible that this is the reason
for the victory of Land over Sea in the last decade; after all, capitalism and
technical progress are typical attributes of Sea. But taking into consideration
the fundamental character of the balance between Leviathan and Behemoth, the
proportions can switch at any moment; the soaring Titan can be thrown down into
the abyss, like Atlantis, while the reason for the victory of thalassocracy becomes the source of its
downfall. Land remains unchanged as the geographic axis of history. There is
Land and Sea even on the internet and in the virtual world: they are axes and
algorithms of thematization, association and separation, groupings of resources
and protocols. The Chinese internet is terrestrial; the Western one, nautical.





You
have translated a great number of foreign philosophical and geopolitical works
into Russian. How important is knowledge transaction for the formation of your ideas?



I recently completed the
first release of my book Noomachy,
which is entirely devoted precisely to the Logoi of various civilizations, and
hence to the circulation of ideas. I am convinced that each civilization has
its own particular Logos. To grasp it and to find parallels, analogies, and
dissonances in one's own Logos is utterly fascinating and interesting. That is
why I am sincerely interested in the most varied cultures, from North American
to Australian, Arabic to Latin American, Polynesian to Scandinavian. All the
Logoi are different and it is not possible to establish a hierarchy among them.
So it remains for us only to become familiar with them. Henry Corbin, the French
philosopher and Protestant who studied Iranian Shiism his entire life, said of
himself 'We are Shiites'. He wasn't a Shiite in the religious sense, but
without feeling himself a Shiite, he would not be able to penetrate into the
depths of the Iranian Logos. That is how I felt, working on Noomachy or translating philosophical
texts or poetry from other languages: in particular, while learning Pierce and
James, Emerson and Thoreau, Poe and Pound I experienced myself as 'we are
Americans'. And in the volume devoted to China and Japan, as 'we are
Buddhists'. That is the greatest wealth of the Logos of various cultures: both
those like ours and those entirely unlike ours. And these Logoi are at war;
hence, Noomachy, the war of the
intellect. It is not linear and not primitive. It is a great war. It creates
that which we call the 'human', the entire depth and complexity of which we
most often underestimate.





Final
question. You call yourself the 'last philosopher of empire'. What is
Eurasanism and how does it relate to the global pivot of power distributions?



Eurasianism is a developed worldview, to
which I dedicated a few books and a countless number of articles and
interviews. In principle, it lies at the basis of the Theory of a Multipolar
World and the Fourth Political Theory, combined with geopolitics, and it
resonates with Traditionalism. Eurasianism's main thought is plural
anthropology, the rejection of universalism. The meaning of Empire for me is
that there exists not one Empire, but at minimum two, and even more. In the
same way, civilization is never singular; there is always some other
civilization that determines its borders. Schmitt called this the Pluriverse
and considered it the main characteristic of the Political. The Eurasian Empire
is the political and strategic unification of Turan, a geographic axis of history
in opposition to the civilization of the Sea or the Atlanticist Empire. Today,
the USA is this Atlanticist Empire. Kenneth Waltz, in the context of neorealism
in IR, conceptualized the balance of two poles. The analysis is very accurate,
although he erred about the stability of a bipolar world and the duration of
the USSR. But on the whole he is right: there is a global balance of Empires in
the world, not nation-States, the majority of which cannot claim sovereignty,
which remains nominal (Stephen Krasner's (Theory
Talk #21) 'global hypocrisy'). For
precisely that reason, I am a philosopher of Empire, as is almost every
American intellectual, whether he knows it or not. The difference is only that
he thinks of himself as a philosopher of the only Empire, while I think of
myself as the philosopher of one of the Empires, the Eurasian one. I am more
humble and more democratic. That is the whole difference.





Alexander Dugin is a Russian philosopher,
the author of over thirty books on topics including the sociology of the
imagination, structural sociology, ethnosociology, geopolitical theory,
international relations theory, and political theory, including four books on
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. His most recent books, only available
in Russian at the moment, are Ukraine: My
War and the multi-volume Noomachia:
Wars of the Intellect. Books translated into English include The Fourth Political Theory,
Putin vs. Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed
From the Right, and Martin Heidegger: The Philosophy of
Another Beginning.






Related links





Who is Alexander Dugin? Interview with Theory Talks editor Michael Millerman (YouTube)
TheFourth Political Theory website (English): 
Evrazia.tv
(Russian) 
Evrazia.tv
(English) 
Geopolitics.ru
(English version)
InternationalEurasian Movement (English version)
Centerfor Conservative Studies (Russian)

Print version of this Talk (pdf) Russian version