RAS 12 - JRL 6535

RUSSIAN NATIONALISM

3. EURASIANISM: DUGIN'S NEW PROGRAM

SOURCE. Programma i ustav politicheskoi partii "Evraziia" [Program and Statutes of the Political Party "Eurasia"] (Moscow: "Arktogeia-Tsentr," 2002).

In March 2002, "New Right" philosopher Alexander Dugin launched his new political party "Eurasia" on the basis of the public movement of the same name. The apparent initial success of the initiative has alarmed some observers. (1) But what does the new party stand for? Its program, written by Dugin and published in May, helps us answer this question. It is also of interest to see where the program diverges from Dugin's earlier views, and in particular from the outlook of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party, in which Dugin occupied a prominent position from 1993 to 1998. (2)

The 82-page program, composed in a clear and concise style highlighting key concepts, consists of seven sections:

1. Eurasianism as worldview and political philosophy

2. Eurasianism and domestic policy

3. Foreign policy

4. The economy: Eurasian paternalism

5. Eurasian security

6. Science and culture

7. Aims of the party

The whole text is pervaded by Dugin's geopolitics. He posits that different world regions are home to sharply distinct, autonomous [samobytnyi] and incommensurable civilizations. However, the basic opposition is that between land and sea, between continental (Eurasian) and oceanic (Atlanticist) civilization. (3) Russia's destiny, determined by its geography, is to act as the integrative core of a continental bloc, which Dugin envisages as comprising three main elements: the European Union, the Eurasian Union (roughly corresponding to the former USSR), and an East Asian / Pacific grouping.

The immediate strategic goal is to counter the destructive standardizing impact of "globalism" -- the attempt to impose Atlanticist civilization on the whole world. For that purpose the US-centered unipolar world must be replaced by a balanced multipolar world. This requires the restoration and maintenance of military parity between Russia and the US, with primary reliance on nuclear deterrence. (4)

However, Dugin tones down the confrontational anti-American language he used in the past. He avoids the word "enemy" [vrag]. He no longer mentions the ultimate goal of eliminating the US as a world power, arguing instead that only by establishing a multipolar geopolitical structure can the necessary conditions be created for a genuine partnership between Russia and the US.

In devising a state structure for Russia and the projected Eurasian Union, Dugin strives to combine two principles, the imperial and the ethnic, while rejecting the liberal principle of individual citizenship. In everything affecting the state's geopolitical interests there must be strictly centralized government by a "geopolitical elite" recruited without regard to ethnic affiliation. All other issues are left in the hands of autonomous ethnic communities, which may take the form of democratic republics or be ruled by dynastic monarchs or "charismatic theocrats." (As a Traditionalist Dugin clearly prefers the latter.) No ethnic group is explicitly assigned a leading role, although repeated use is made of the phrase "the great Russian people" -- which must be saved from demographic extinction by restoring traditional family values.

The program outlines a mixed economy. Strategically vital sectors are to be state-owned, with private ownership prevailing in small and medium-sized enterprise. However, the rights of property (or "patrimony") are conditional on its proper productive use. Thus farmland can be inherited but must not be used for non-agricultural purposes.

Dugin has distanced himself from the leftist phraseology of the NBP, which claims to stand for a "social" as well as a "national" revolution. In fact, the word "revolution" is conspicuously absent from the program. Dugin pledges his party to work with existing state structures and pursue its goals by a process of gradual evolution.

A certain unresolved tension is detectable between Dugin the technocrat, with his schemes for creating "poles" and "corridors" of industrial development, and Dugin the traditionalist, who wants to return people from the cosmopolitan megapolis to the "real country" of the authentically Russian village. (True, he has a vague idea that high technology can be combined with rural living by means of the Internet.) Similarly, he favors generous state support for science, but also demands a spiritual and moral transformation of science to rid it of Enlightenment rationalism.

In the cultural field, Dugin advocates a "style" that will attract youth by combining the archaic with the avant-garde. In this respect he remains loyal to the approach of the NBP.

Dugin proposes an alliance of the traditional Eurasian religions -- Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism -- against the threat of alien sects and godlessness. One notes the disappearance of the anti-Semitic motif, which has in any case always been relatively weak in Dugin (by the standards of the Russian nationalist camp).

In his new program Dugin tries to make his basic ideas accessible to a broader public. At the same time he tries, without giving up on fundamentals, to formulate compromises -- with modernity, with the United States, and most important of all with Mr. Putin.

The final paragraph of the program reads as follows:

"We have come seriously and for a long time. (5) Nobody and nothing will stop us, because the rhythms of Russia (Eurasia) sovereignly and imperiously beat in our hearts. Eurasianism embodies a new triumphal stage in the development of the national idea, of national history. We are confident of our victory, because for us 'Eurasia is above all'. (6)"

NOTES

(1) See RAS No. 9 item 3 and No. 10 item 8.

(2) For an account of the earlier Dugin, and also Limonov and the NBP, see Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), Chapter 7.

(3) This idea of incommensurable regional civilizations goes back to the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky. The basic opposition between oceanic and continental powers was first proclaimed by the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder in 1904.

(4) In some places Dugin speaks of parity between Russia and the US, in other places of parity between Russia and NATO.

(5) "Seriously and for a long time" is a famous phrase uttered by Lenin about the New Economic Policy.

(6) The program's sole hint of a connection with the Nazis, whose slogan was "Deutschland über alles" [Germany above all].