After one of her many talks with President Putin at the height of the Crimean crisis, Chancellor Merkel reportedly told President Obama that the Russian president lives “in another world.” Footnote 1 We argue here that Putin’s world is Eurasian and is shared by much of the Russian public and elite. Other states and polities view the world in different terms. China’s tianxia, Europe’s normative power and America’s neo-liberalism offer different cognitive maps, more or less well aligned with the territory of twenty-first-century world politics. Footnote 2 Explicating the geopolitical and civilizational aspects of Eurasianism helps shed light on contemporary Russia’s foreign policies. Footnote 3
Russia’s Eurasianism forms a large umbrella construct that encompasses different types of Russian identities and multiple foreign policy schools of thought. Footnote 4 Iver Neumann, Footnote 5 for example, distinguishes between Westernizers, Eurasianists, and Slavophiles; Andrew Kuchins and Igor Zevelev Footnote 6 between pro-Western liberals, great power balancers, and nationalists; Andrew Buck Footnote 7 between reformers, nationalist-communists, and centrists; Anne Clunan Footnote 8 between national restorationists, neocommunists, slavophiles, statists, and Westernists; Ayşe Zarakol Footnote 9 between pro-Western international institutionalists, moderate liberals and conservatives, and ultra-nationalists; and Ted Hopf Footnote 10 between liberals, conservatives, and centrists. As an umbrella term Eurasianism provides interpretive elasticity that accommodates civilizational, geopolitical, nationalist, religious, anti-globalist, anti-Western and other ideas. None of these are determinative of the foreign policy choices of Putin’s Russia. Taken together all of them help shape practices that fit Eurasia as Russia’s plausible “catchall vision” Footnote 11 and bring into clear focus a broad range of foreign policies.
The dominant Russian conceptualization of geopolitics and civilization as self-contained components of Russia’s Eurasianism does not fit the porousness of Eurasia and its openness to a broader global context. This discrepancy is not specific to Russia. The election of Donald Trump, Britain’s Brexit vote, and a rising tide of rightwing populism throughout Europe reveal similar strains in other geopolitical and civilizational settings. The nationalist and autarkic excesses of the first half of the twentieth century ended in global war. The United States subsequently rebuilt and led a new, liberalizing order after 1945. Its geographic scope broadened during successive decades, as did the socio-economic depth with which it helped remake many polities, especially after the end of the Cold War. Liberalizing processes found many supporters throughout the world. At the same time, opposition and resistance to unwanted intrusions never ceased in many parts of the global South. Eventually, the challenges to the power of ruling coalitions and the distributional struggles among different social segments led to surprising political change even in the core of that liberal order, the United States and Britain. The map with which American, English, and European nationalists seek to navigate the world differs in its fundamentals neither from Russia’s Eurasian map nor those of early-twentieth-century states seeking national and civilizational greatness and finding, eventually, only carnage.
Using old maps in new terrains can court disaster. Half a century of liberalizing policies have left a deep imprint on world politics. Even for semi-authoritarian Russia this creates strains in its foreign policies and offers opportunities to redefine what it means to be Eurasian. Expanding on a theme developed in Peter Katzenstein’s Footnote 12 earlier work on regions and civilizations, we develop this argument in three steps. We first trace Russian and other writings on self-reliant regions and inward-oriented civilizations. Next we explore the constraints and opportunities of some of Russia’s foreign policies conducted in an open world, identifying areas where there is room for learning and adaptation. We conclude with arguments that suggest reconceptualizations of geopolitics and civilizations that would bring Russian thinking in line with the global context and policy environments it faces.
Geopolitical and Civilizational Aspects of Eurasianism
Symbolizing an anti-Western and state-centric stance, Footnote 13 the concept of Eurasianism has come to enjoy wide currency in Russia. It has also gathered strong support outside of Russia, though with different connotations. In Kazakhstan, Eurasia is compatible with a stance friendly to both Russia and European states. Insisting that they are European, most of the people of Kiev and along the shores of the Baltic and Black Seas reject Eurasianism outright as a code word for Russian. And in Turkey it can mean either pro- or anti-Westernism. Footnote 14 The plasticity of the term is politically useful. Footnote 15 Inside Russia, for example, in the early 1990s Eurasianism was able to gather support from diverse quarters: former communists, unabashed imperialists, Russian nationalists concerned about the near abroad, and all who opposed taking the states of Western Europe and the United States as models for Russian reforms. Footnote 16
That makes moat-digging and bridge-building a favored Eurasian sport, for example on the location, significance, and political agency of Northern and Southern Central Asia. Footnote 17 In Putin’s words, Russia is located at the very “center of Eurasia,” Footnote 18 reaffirming its great power status. Footnote 19 And since “Russia can only survive and develop within the existing borders if it stays a great power,” Footnote 20 the definition of Eurasianism is vitally important to our understanding of Russia. Eurasia is neither synonymous with Euro-Asia and other terminological and conceptual variants nor is it simply shorthand for the territory once covered by the Soviet Union. Footnote 21 In a large literature some scholars distinguish between normative, ideological, geoeconomic, Footnote 22 and pragmatic, neo- and intercivilizational Eurasianism. Footnote 23 Although the list of different variants of Eurasianism is considerably longer, Footnote 24 it shows a consistent difference between Eurasia’s essentialist, monological and conflictual elements on the one hand and its constructivist, dialogical, and cooperative ones on the other. Footnote 25 Typically, Eurasia is perceived as a self-contained, closed entity autonomously pursuing its foreign policy objectives. Yet clear binaries are the product of abstractions that have never existed in history. In terms of geopolitics and civilization Russia always confronted choices more interesting and complex than acting the part of Europe’s backyard or Asia’s front row. Footnote 26
Geopolitical Eurasianism
Russia’s annexation of the Crimea and its support of secessionist forces in Eastern Ukraine mark a return of geopolitics, a term mired in confusion. Footnote 27 Geopolitics is not a mere shorthand for power politics. Instead geo-political theorizing has focused on factors such as topography, climate, technology, and especially on how the configuration of land and sea power shapes interactions among states and empires. Over the last century and a half geopolitics evolved gradually from a natural to a social science within the discipline of international relations, with classical realism as a half-way house between the two. Footnote 28
Under Soviet rule the conceptual language of geopolitics was deeply tainted by its association with Nazism. Footnote 29 But after 1991, a Russian tradition of materialist geopolitical and regional thinking reasserted itself as an integral part of today’s interest in Eurasianism. Footnote 30 The first cohort of Eurasianists consisted of expatriates who had fled Russia after the October Revolution. Footnote 31 They insisted that Russia needed to unlearn the West. In contrast to Europe, geography was Russia’s destiny. Territorial expansion was the most natural expression of its identity. Geography, geopolitics, political economy, and culture all pointed to a structural unity captured by the conceptual vocabulary of Eurasianism. A pioneer of the discipline of structural geography, Peter Savitsky Footnote 32 developed the concept of topogenesis (or “place development”) through which he sought to prove scientifically the link between territory and culture. The steppe unites Eurasia from East to West. Revealing its continental essence, it sets Russia apart from the maritime mission of Europe and the United States: “Geopolitics is therefore inherent in Eurasianism; geography is a scientific means of restoring political power.” Footnote 33
In line with continental European thinkers such as Ratzel and Kjellén, in the late nineteenth century American Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan and his British contemporary, the geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, developed theories of geopolitics. For Mahan, insular states like Britain, or “continentally insular” states, like the United States, had an ineradicable advantage over even the most powerful land states such as Russia. Mackinder disagreed. Instead of the indefinite primacy of insular states like Britain and the United States, he pointed to the eventual emergence of a globally dominant empire located in the Eurasian “Heartland,” an imprecisely demarcated region occupied by Russia. Although Mackinder’s thinking evolved over time, he continued to fit rapidly-evolving developments in world politics into a global configuration of land and sea. Neither theorist took a determinist view on the role of geography in world politics; both included other factors such as national character (Mahan) and technology (Mackinder). Mahan and Mackinder disagreed on how geography shapes world politics. But they agreed both on the importance of geographic location for giving states particular advantages and disadvantages and on its lack of determinist effects. Footnote 34
Contemporary Russian Eurasianists have been deeply influenced by this tradition, including by writers with suspect Nazi pedigrees, such as Carl Schmitt and Karl Haushofer. They locate Russia geographically not along the European periphery but at the center of the Eurasian landmass. This assigns Russia distinctive roles as both mediator between East and West and a source of authentic and new solutions to the world’s problems. In the 1990s Eurasianism became the platform for a broadly-based, red-brown, Left-Right opposition to Russian liberals, Footnote 35 with Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDPR), and Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), as prime examples.
Many of the Eurasian geopolitical ideas they expressed in their books and speeches were shaped by and resonated with those advanced by the tireless efforts of geopolitical theorist Aleksandr Dugin, Footnote 36 the most published and publicized of all contemporary Russian Eurasianists. Footnote 37 Dugin is a complex person with a colorful biography that mixes activism with scholarship. Footnote 38 His geopolitical writings draw on the German Conservative Revolution after World War I and offer an idiosyncratic mix of nationalist, neo-fascist, European Far Right, mystic, racist, and post-modern elements. As a public intellectual, Dugin has had an important effect on the thinking of the political class and enjoyed access to Russia’s military and political leadership. Footnote 39 For Dugin the distinction between “Heartland” and “World Island,” between authoritarian land-based and democratic sea-based empires is the central axis around which world politics has been organized in the past and forever will revolve. Eurasia is the continental land mass and essential platform for Russia to play its predetermined, unavoidably anti-Western role, among others as the central supplier of Eurasian energy. Footnote 40 In many of his writings and public speeches Dugin adheres to a determinist version of geopolitical analysis that views Eurasia as self-contained space and assumes that power, purpose, and policy can be “read off the map.” Footnote 41
The foreign policy strategies that Dugin deduces from his set of binary distinctions are of the sphere of influence kind, 1930s- and 1940s-style. Moscow-Berlin, Moscow-Tokyo, and Moscow-Tehran are the axes around which a Russian-centered Eurasia should operate. Russia faces formidable tasks in world politics. Lacking a cordon sanitaire separating it from Europe, Russia must keep a watchful eye on Turkey to its west, China in the east, and coerce or convince India in the south to grant Russia direct access to the Indian Ocean. However far-fetched, abstruse, and dangerous Dugin’s theories may be, they always arrive at a conclusion that makes them eminently plausible to many Russians: Europe and Asia are destined to converge in a Eurasia that is dominated by Russia. Standing for the principle of state sovereignty and engaged in a mission of global significance, Russia promises a multi-polar and anti-global alternative to a world dominated by Atlanticism and the United States. Centered around Russia, Eurasian geopolitics for Dugin, thus is self-contained and determines the contours of Russian foreign policy and world politics.
Civilizational Eurasianism
Russia’s civilizational Eurasianism likewise has a long history. Footnote 42 By the eighteenth century Russia was squarely Western and European in both its self-understanding and experience. Over many centuries it had encountered and fought the Oriental Other in the form of the Mongolian Empire, Turkic Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. Kiren Chaudhry Footnote 43 calls this a “nested orientalism … a hierarchy in which West Europeans Orientalized the Russians, who, in turn, Orientalized the Turks.” Footnote 44 In the words of Filippo Costa Buranelli, Footnote 45 “Central Asia meant disorder, marauding, oppression. Russia meant salvation, civilization, morality.” Russia’s territorial expansion, into Central Asia as well as planned and unplanned migrations across often nebulous borders, made the Asiatic other a problematic part of the Russian, and later Soviet, self. For example, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of her reign, in 1787 Empress Catherine II organized a six-month, lavish tour to visit Crimea, which she had annexed and pacified in 1783. Invited to join her on this trip, Europe’s diplomatic elite marveled at the exoticism of Orientalized Asia—a mixture of Asia, China, ancient Europe, and even paradise. Footnote 46
In Russia, as elsewhere, civilizations are typically viewed as unitary cultural complexes, organized hierarchically around uncontested core values that yield unambiguous criteria for judging good conduct. Invented in Europe in the eighteenth century, the concept of civilization was enshrined in the nineteenth century as one standard of civilization. That standard was grounded in race, ethnic affiliation, religion, and a firm belief in the superiority of European civilization over all others. The distinction between civilized and uncivilized peoples is not specific to the European past. The unitary argument is widely used also by non-Europeans. Everywhere and at all times, it is widely believed, barbarians have knocked on the doors of civilizations. Footnote 47
Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, translated into 39 languages, restates the old, unitary thesis for our times. Footnote 48 For Huntington, civilizations are coherent, consensual, invariant, equipped with a state-like capacity to act, and operating in an international system. In his view, civilizations balance power rather than human practices. Neglecting all the evidence of a restless, pluralist, and at times seething West, Huntington’s analysis sees the West as a civilizationally reactive status quo power that reluctantly engages the upsurge of revisionist non-Western civilizations. Rather than focusing exclusively on actors such as states, polities, or empires that are embedded in civilizational complexes, in Huntington’s analysis civilizations themselves become actors. His clash of civilizations thus looks remarkably like a clash of large states or empires. The voices proclaiming the dawn of Asia’s civilizational primacy may shift from yesterday’s Japan, to today’s China and Russia, and to tomorrow’s India. But these Huntingtonian voices are growing louder. Like “Orientalism,” “Occidentalism” characterizes East and West in the singular.
Much like the Russian revolution and the rise of Eurasianism in the 1920s, the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 acted as a trauma that gave rise to new versions of Eurasianism. Footnote 49 Both traumas elicited a strong anti-Western response. In the 1920s Eurasianist thinkers reacted against Western Socialism, in the 1990s against Western Neo-liberalism. Drawing on Savitsky, Trubetzkoy, Danilevsky, Tsymbursky, and many other writers, Lev Gumilëv has defined civilizational Eurasianism in contemporary Russia. Footnote 50 Gumilëv is a revered and widely-read figure. His complex, at times contradictory, and occasionally abstruse writings have become dogma, immune to criticism. His books are bestsellers and required reading well beyond academia. His idiosyncratic vocabulary—including terms such as ethnos, superethnos, ethnosphere, ethnogenesis, passionarity—is used without any questioning in history, ethnology, and civilizational textbooks. His writings have made ethnic and racial features, group mentalities and invariant forms of biosocial organization legitimate topics in teaching and research that are well known to Russia’s leading politicians. Footnote 51
Gumilëv’s Eurasianism is grounded in non-hierarchical, fraternal relations between Russians and Steppe peoples sharing deep linguistic and cultural affinities. Footnote 52 In contrast to conventional Russian nationalism and older versions of Eurasiansim, the “yoke” imposed by the Mongol conquest is for him no more than a historical myth. Gumilëv’s biologically- and ecologically-rooted, essentialist, anti-semitic, and naturalistic theory of ethnicity placed the origins of ethnic groups in creative moments of eruption and their evolution in long-term, cyclical change. His theory stipulated the existence of inter- and intra-group complementarities in hierarchical orders. Civilizations, like Eurasianism, are superethnic forms of association and the largest communities of fate that humans inhabit. Eurasianism is fundamentally at odds with Europe, the West, and all forms and articulations of liberal cosmopolitanism or universalism. Russia’s primordial nationalism thus is fused with Eurasia’s. It evolves isolated from a more encompassing global context whose existence Gumilëv, like Huntington, denies. In a fusion of nationalism and internationalism after 1990, Eurasia’s multicultural harmony and shared historical destiny thus is a successor to the traditional Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. At stake here is not the often-dubious truth-content of Gumilëv’s elaborate theory, but its acceptance as unchallenged dogma in Russia. Eurasian civilization plays a special role as the only viable global model that integrates different peoples and principles and thus generates a plurality of civilizational views and discourses. Footnote 53 In short, informed by a voluminous intellectual and public civilizational discourse, Russia “is coming to self-identify in increasingly civilizational terms.” Footnote 54
These civilizational terms give rise to a pursuit of milieu goals, a corollary of great power status and spheres of influence. More than half a century ago Arnold Wolfers Footnote 55 drew a distinction between possession and milieu goals, between direct, territorial control and indirect, transnational influence. According to the Eurasianist founding myth, ever since Kievan Rus adopted Christianity in 988, the center of Russia’s world (Russkiy mir), and of its 180 million Russian speakers, is also the core of its religious and secular soft power. Footnote 56 Culture, mass media, common language, the Orthodox Church, and business networks all provide instruments of influence. Footnote 57 As Putin has repeatedly stated, challenging the unity of the Russian world, as in Ukraine, is not ephemeral to Russia’s soft power but nothing less than a frontal assault on the core values and strategic interests of not just the Russian state but of the Russian world. Footnote 58
Geopolitical and civilizational versions of Neo-Eurasianism reinforce one another. Dugin’s geopolitical theory, for example, stipulates the existence of four closed civilizational zones—American, Afro-European, Asian-Pacific, and Eurasian—leaving the issue of where to locate Islam curiously unaddressed and unresolved. Dugin often relies on a “spiritual-racist” terminology to describe civilizational differences. Aryanism and neo-paganism pervade his work. He is intellectually indebted to racial German theorists of the ninetheenth and twentieth centuries and to the slogans of the European New Right. Footnote 59 Conversely, Gumilëv’s civilizational formulation is grounded in a naturalistic and scientific rather than cultural and relativist biopolitics. It incorporates biological and environmental factors, conceptualized not in terms of race but energy circulation and ecology. Gumilëv thus grounds his theory of the formation and evolution of ethnic groups and their superethnic, exclusionary, civilizational complexes in the natural, geographical world.
As summarized in Table 1, geopolitical and civilizational versions of Eurasianism offer a differentiated conceptual vocabulary widely shared in Russia for describing the contours of the Russian world.
Table 1 Aspects of Eurasianism
Russia’s Foreign Security and Economic Policies: Eurasianism as Rationale and Limit
The plasticity of Eurasia’s geopolitical and civilizational meanings offers Russia welcome latitude in fashioning and justifying its security and economic policies. That flexibility notwithstanding, the worldview of Eurasia as a relatively compact and self-contained geopolitical and civilizational space does not align with some important facts. Although Russia has achieved a degree of success in pursuing its objectives, its self-contained and inward-looking Eurasian worldview fails to recognize adequately the porousness of regional and national systems in a globalized world. Putin’s moves in Eurasia and elsewhere are therefore often constrained, at times seriously, on both security and economic questions. Yet Russian policies and practices are not cast in stone; they could be changed through learning, specifically learning from a more distant Eurasian past.
Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian security policy has been highly innovative in the development of “new,” “hybrid,” “compound,” or “frozen” wars that are deployed less as an instrument of gaining battlefield victories in territorial disputes and more as a means of ensuring Russia’s continued political leverage in situations it regards as being of vital interest. These wars operate below the threshold of NATO mobilization. Putin’s reforms during his first presidency (2000–2008) gave the Russian state capacities and resources to use new and old forms of war in combination, for example in Georgia in 2008 and in Crimea and eastern Ukraine since 2014. While not resulting in definitive victories for Russia, these conflicts reveal weakness in U.S. and European military responses and allow Russia to reinforce its claims of multipolarity. Footnote 60
The war with and inside Ukraine reflects both “fierce symbolic power struggles” with NATO Footnote 61 and “frozen conflicts” in other breakaway ethnic regions in Eurasia, Footnote 62 including in Moldova’s Transnistria region, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia in Georgia, and Nagorno Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Crimea’s annexation had high symbolic overtones that supported geopolitical Eurasianism; and Russia deployed in eastern Ukraine all the instruments of its coercive diplomacy—supporting separatist ethnic movements, covert military action, bribes, information warfare, humanitarian aid, and energy trade—that it had developed in prior Eurasian conflicts. Footnote 63 In these conflicts, Russia is taking a long-term perspective on destabilization. It is based on the premise that, marshalling its formidable resources, Russia will be patient in the pursuit of an objective that is of vital importance to Russia but not to the EU or the United States. Footnote 64
Russia’s Eurasian sphere of influence, however, is not self-contained, and its interventions are not costless. Crimea’s occupation and annexation openly violated agreements constitutive of the European peace and security order. Russia broke at least four legal obligations to recognize Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state within its existing borders, as codified in: the Commonwealth of Independent States (1991); the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (1992); the 1994 Budapest Memorandum; and the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation of 1997. This egregious breach of international law engendered a strong reaction not only from the United States but, to Putin’s evident surprise, also from the EU and, in particular, from Germany. Furthermore, the unilateral, military nature of his action also violated a widely-accepted European and UN norm of peaceful multilateralism. It robbed Russia’s policy of support even though it was bloodless and evidently supported by a majority of the Crimean population. Footnote 65 In spite of political upheaval in Europe, the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, Italy, and Spain—along with the outgoing Obama administration—have continued to reaffirm their commitment to sanctions even as late as November 2016. Great power status and spheres of influence politics no longer work as they did before World War II. International law and the ingrained practice of multilateralism penetrate spheres of influence. Disregarding this fact brings with it serious political costs, and may demand changes to Russia’s worldview and resulting policies.
Russia is likewise encountering limitations to its policies in the energy sphere. Although Russia does use its energy sector to advance its Eurasianist goals, it finds itself hampered by incomplete control over key actors and international markets. Contrary to the statist vision of realists, oil markets do not pit state against state but are complex transnational networks in which states and corporations, often with mixed ownership, interact. Footnote 66 Gazprom is a case in point. It is part of a transnational energy system linking states and non-state actors. Footnote 67 Both in its current form and its predecessor institutions, Gazprom has long-established international relationships, for example with Germany and its energy corporations, manifested in long-term sales contracts.
Sub-state cooperation and trust (and its breakdown) has been influential for Russia’s relations with transit states. Ninety percent of Russia’s gas was shipped through the Druzhba (“Friendship”) Pipeline, which crossed Ukraine and provided badly needed transit fees. “All of this delivered unto Europe and Eurasia a kind of pipeline brotherhood … Although governments played important, recurrent roles, it was the firms that drove change.” Footnote 68 There were only a handful of firms in this market and over time the essential story linking them, first to the Soviet gas ministry and subsequently to Gazprom, was a story of the development of trust. Footnote 69 In 2014 Russian policy was based in large part on the assumption that these corporate relations—combined with heavy dependence on Russian gas supplies—would make it impossible for EU governments to follow the United States' lead and challenge Russia’s Ukraine policy through financial sanctions. That assumption proved to be wrong.
Russia’s ability to leverage its energy trade for political purposes has also been hampered by global energy price movements outside of its control. Footnote 70 Price weakness has been driven by a range of international factors, including a glut in liquefied natural gas markets, actual or expected demand reductions in Europe and China, the scale and resilience of unconventional oil and gas production in the United States, improved interconnections in pipeline networks following the Ukrainian gas crises of 2006 and 2009, failures by OPEC to significantly reduce oil production, and the expectation of added Iranian oil supplies following its nuclear deal with the United States. While prices will surely rise (and fall) in response to changing market conditions, Russia and other producers will suffer if the price recovery is slow or stops well short of the $90–100 per barrel range. Footnote 71 In October 2016, Russia was forced to amend its national budget to reflect a deficit of 3.7 percent of GDP. In order to cover this deficit, Russia has sold stakes in oil producers Bashneft and Rosneft and has been depleting its reserve fund, which had shrunk from $91.7 billion in September 2014 to $15 billion by the end of 2016. Footnote 72 The combination of fiscal fragility and a reduction of Europe’s dependence on Russian gas represent a potential weakening of Russia’s ability to shape its regional milieu through its energy corporations or to enforce its sphere of influence more directly.
A Eurasian map depicts itself as a self-contained geo-economic bloc and a homogenous, inward-directed civilizational space. This view resembles that of public intellectuals and scholars who analyze the dynamics of what they consider to be the economics of regional blocs Footnote 73 and the politics of putatively homogenous and unified civilizations. Footnote 74 Contradicting these views, Eurasia is marked instead by porousness to its extra-regional context and openness to global civilizational currents. Both porousness and openness limit Russia’s ability to achieve its objective of great power status. International survey data, for example, indicate the limits that Russia encounters in its pursuit of milieu goals. Footnote 75 In one survey that relies on 50 different indicators, as assessed by a panel of experts, Russia ranked twenty-ninth out of 30 countries in 2014. Footnote 76 And in the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, conducted in 27 countries between 2007 and 2012, the number of people who viewed Russia favorably increased in only 3 countries while it decreased in 17. Footnote 77 As Russia is discovering, regions are no longer self-contained blocs as they were in the heyday of great power spheres of influence politics; and civilizations are no longer clearly-demarcated transnational milieus. Both are instead sites of engagement and arenas of exchange that Russia can disregard only by paying considerable political costs. Expanding its influence in a fractured and volatile Middle East will make Russia the focus of new hatred and animosity.
Recent failures of Russia’s international security and economic policies have imposed real costs and may provide the impetus for a process of complex learning and adaptation of the Eurasian worldview. As Peter Haas notes, decisionmakers—and other policy experts—frequently fail to recognize limitations to their understanding of complex issues. Crises and uncertainty may be necessary to open policy-makers to new ideas about cause and effect as well as new conceptualizations of state interests. Footnote 78 Learning occurs when states deliberately adjust their goals or behaviors based on new information or experiences. Simple learning occurs when states adjust their strategies while preserving their worldview, whereas complex learning reshapes a worldview fundamentally. Footnote 79 Rather than changing ends and means, learning might also involve a reappraisal of the appropriate setting for the use of policy tools. Footnote 80 Learning is also more likely in response to failures Footnote 81 and policy shifts resulting from learning may require “shifts in the locus of authority over policy.” Footnote 82 The resulting new ideas are not necessarily “better” or “more appropriate”; but they can provide new filters that modify actors’ existing worldviews. Footnote 83 Those modifications, in turn, can produce policy responses ranging from incremental innovation to transformational invention. Footnote 84 The lessons of Russia’s Ukraine policy and its energy diplomacy are that spheres of influence and milieu goals are challenged by a world order that is more open and interdependent than is recognized in the current iteration of the Eurasian worldview.
Those lessons resonate with important aspects of Eurasia’s past that attest to the importance of porousness and openness and that could help shape some of Russia’s future policies. Eurasia emerged from exchanges made possible by the carnage and cosmopolitanism of the vast Mongol empire. Footnote 85 In victory, the Mongols consolidated the Turkic-speaking tribes, dealt a harsh blow to Arab dominance of the Muslim world while spreading Mughal rule to Northern India, penetrating much of China, creating the institution of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhism, and helping spread Islam in many important oasis towns dotting old and new trade and pilgrimage routes across Eurasia. The empire was not divided by religious, linguistic, or tribal barriers. Dispersed centers of rule brought an unknown cosmopolitanism to all walks of life. Stephen Kotkin Footnote 86 has identified Mongolia as “a model of empire as exchange,” created by and reflected in human practices that have come to shape Eurasian geopolitics and civilizations. This simple fact makes unnecessary and misguided the search for authentic historical Eurasian or Russian origins. Instead it is an invitation to connect Putin’s world to the Atlantic, Sinic, Islamic, and other worlds that constitute contemporary world politics. Geopolitical and civilizational Eurasianism shares with these other worlds two attributes. Its distinctiveness grounds Russia’s claim to be a great power; and its openness and porousness makes that claim conditional on the recognition by other actors, thus imposing serious constraints on Russian policies based on a different Eurasian worldview. Footnote 87
Eurasianism in an Open World
Geopolitical and civilizational versions of Eurasianism entail Russia’s insistence on a Eurasian geo-political sphere of influence and the legitimacy of Russia’s strong impact on Eurasia’s civilizational milieu. For Russian foreign policy, contemporary world politics are marked by persistent competition between diverse states, regions, and civilizations, rather than by convergence on a pattern defined by the West. Competition demands collective leadership that represents the world’s diversity rather than U.S. hegemony. Occupying a pivotal geo-political place in Eurasia and as a civilizational state enjoying great power status, Russia thus contributes to the world’s collective leadership.
At the same time, we have shown, important aspects of Russia’s foreign security (Crimea and Ukraine) and economic (energy) policies encounter serious constraints in an increasingly global world that envelops Russia and Eurasia in a larger context. The insularity of Russia’s Eurasianism imposes significant costs and may require future redefinition in the meaning of Eurasianism that would take account of the influences that emanate from its global context.
Russia’s Eurasian geopolitical worldview is not unique. It is, or should be, quite familiar to American observers. Indirectly, geopolitical Eurasianism has shaped American foreign policy since the late nineteenth century. Drawing on both Mahan’s and Mackinder’s theories, a Yale professor of Dutch origin, Nicholas Spykman, introduced the concept of the “Rimland” that stretched along the rim of the Eurasian landmass, from Western Europe, across the Middle East to India, China, and Japan. Neither purely land nor purely maritime powers, Rimland states were the amphibious center of the world. George Kennan, as one of the main architects of American foreign policy during the early stages of the Cold War, was greatly influenced by Spykman’s theory; and so were John Foster Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Footnote 88
Geopolitical theories—along with the shortcomings of oversimplication—have, as in Russia, also found new support in the current world order. The fall of the Berlin wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the attacks of 9/11 have prompted some Americans to revive geopolitical theory. Footnote 89 Robert Kaplan, for example, is a noted public intellectual whose work is widely and favorably reviewed. In an article that previewed an ambitious book, he argues that “of all the unsavory truths … the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography … Such determinism is easy to hate but hard to dismiss.” Footnote 90 More recently, Kaplan Footnote 91 has repeated this geopolitical argument opening a new book with a similar argument: “Europe is landscape; East Asia is seascape … the sea acts as a barrier to aggression, at least to the degree that dry land does not.” Footnote 92 Kaplan’s geopolitics is one manifestation of a cast of mind that seeks to understand a complex world with misleading simplifications. Different strands of American conservatism, for example, are also prone to essentialist arguments about America as the incarnation of universal values, of the most perfect democracy, or of God’s chosen country.
Geopolitical theory is surely correct in pointing to the importance of geography for world politics. Footnote 93 But geography is not destiny. Peter Zeihan, Footnote 94 for example, starts his analysis with geography, specifically the combination of easy water transport within and difficult transport beyond a country and then adds the importance of technology, specifically deepwater navigation and industrialization, to analyze the accidental nature of power. Similarly, Kees Van Der Pijl Footnote 95 has developed an ambitiously comprehensive historical-materialist framework for a nuanced analysis of the historical processes and practices of land- and sea-based empires in world history that sidesteps the temptation to assume that geography is self-contained or lends itself to determinist explanations. As Leslie Hepple Footnote 96 reminds us, we should avoid the “‘naturalistic fallacy’: an excessively direct linking of ‘permanent geographical factors’ with policy … with little discussion of the social and political assumptions and models that are always involved in social constructions such as geopolitics.” The material context of land and sea power is relevant for our understanding of world politics; its significance in any specific case, however, is a different matter: Footnote 97 “The issue is not whether geography can play some role, but why it should be the primary explanatory approach, as a reference to geopolitics suggests.” Footnote 98 One of geopolitical theory’s most distinguished proponents, Harvey Starr, argues that we should not see the geographical context of politics as enduring, immutable, and deterministic. Indeed, the closure of Eurasia to the broader international and global context is a chimera, as Dugin himself appears to acknowledge at times. Footnote 99 Instead, that context is marked by dynamism and many political possibilities. Human interventions alter the meaning of space, of location, and of distance and thus of time-space, cost-space, and social-space. Footnote 100
Much like Russia’s geopolitical Eurasianism, its civilizational variant, with its self-contained nature and deterministic qualities, finds adherents abroad. Civilizational Eurasianism resonates also in France. Like Russian, French is an international language. Like Russia, France used to have a sphere of influence in Africa long after the end of imperialism. Like Russia, France practices an ambitious public diplomacy in defense of French language, values, and interests. And like Russia, France provides fertile soil for civilizational thinking. Important aspects of Eurasianism’s geopolitical and civilizational lineage are therefore not specifically Russian. And just as America and France hold fast to their worldviews, so does Russia—revealed, for example, in its energy diplomacy and doctrine of sovereign democracy.
But Eurasian, French, and other civilizations are not self-contained. Rather, they are placed in a broader context, a universal system of knowledge and practices that may undermine or reinforce civilizational unity. Islam, for example, does not cohere around values of religious fundamentalism. Instead, just like Russia, China, and America, Islam experiences conflicts over contested truths reflecting its internal pluralism and external context. Islam is instructive because it illustrates a territorially loosely integrated and decentralized civilizational complex rather than a civilizational state, like China or Russia, struggling to contain its diversity. The founder of modern Islamic studies in the United States, Marshall Hodgson, has argued persuasively that Islam belongs to neither East nor West. Footnote 101 As a truly global civilization, Islam is a bridge between both.
In this paper we have highlighted both the relevance and limitations of the self-contained Eurasian worldview that informs the pursuit of great power status and a favorable international milieu by contemporary Russia. In fact, Russian language does not differentiate between geopolitical and civilizational Eurasianism. Both are expressed as evraziiskii. This terminological vacuum makes Eurasia a plastic concept that resonates deeply inside Russia. Footnote 102 Without making talk “cheap,” political actors can adapt Eurasian discourse readily to shifting contexts.
Outside Russia, processes of exchange and interaction have made civilizational and geopolitical interactions similarly plastic. In contemporary world politics porous borders cannot easily be sealed against outside influence. The relative closure and openness of geopolitical and civilizational spaces is thus a matter of degree. Always an object of political struggle, it varies across time and space. The participants in that struggle are convinced that at the end of their steep climb they will find, at the top of the mountain, a plateau that is secure, be it open or closed. But all political struggle is Sysiphian labor; it is unending. And so is the search for the proper and feasible balance between openness and closure. Analyses that convert political struggles over social processes into fixed categories—such as maritime and land power or East and West—aim to discover laws that the contingencies of politics and history have a habit of upending.
Russia’s Eurasian worldview rests on deep historical foundations. Yet memories of a grand past are not a recipe for meeting tomorrow’s challenges. Like Britain, France, Turkey, and other centers of once-vast empires, in the twenty-first century Russia will have to come to terms with the fact that its self-assessment as a great power, deeply encrusted in habits of thought, emotions, and practices at home, conflicts sharply with the assessment of politically-relevant others abroad. These others recognize Russia as an important rather than a great power, despite its vast land mass, rich energy resources, and formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons. Geopolitically and civilizationally, Russia and Eurasia, like other polities, regions, and civilizations, are part of an encompassing global context. Realigning map to territory so as to navigate successfully a turbulent regional and civilizational world in the twenty-first century is a prerequisite—not only for Russia but also for all other great and would-be great powers and polities.
