The destruction of society EUROZINE REVIEW
‘In Russia, the
authoritarian state is pressing ahead with the destruction of society,’ write
the editors of Osteuropa (Germany). ‘Almost
150 clubs, associations, centres, movements and institutes across the
country have been hit by the slander campaign intended to silence institutions
that have fallen out of favour. They are defamed by the Ministry of Justice as
“foreign agents” – in other words spies – and, through fines and threats of
imprisonment, are pressured into acknowledging this stigmatization by placing
themselves on a register of agents. Now, with the inclusion of the Levada
Centre and Memorial International, the repressive state has sent out a
new signal: international renown no longer serves to protect. The aim is to
spread fear.’
Spiral of
repression: As Jens Siegert explains,
the economic crisis of the 1990s forced Russian NGOs to seek funding abroad;
when the Russian economy began to improve, few Russian foundations were
prepared to support NGOs seen as critical of the Kremlin. After NGOs resisted
the 2012 law obliging them to declare themselves as foreign agents, the
Ministry of Justice began to blacklist them itself. One such group is the Women
of the Don Union, which campaigns for human rights and the rights of women in
the northern Caucasus, and whose operations have been paralysed since the
authorities began a criminal investigation into its director Valentina
Cerevatenko in June 2016.
Poland: In an interview on the ‘illiberal spirit’
in Polish politics, Basil
Kerski talks about the future of the European Solidarity Centre in
Gdansk, of which he is the director. The ESC, Kerski explains, receives a mix
of state, regional and city support. Since Poland’s larger cities and the
majority of its regions are still governed by the liberal Civic Platform or
independent mayors, they enjoy some protection from government interference.
Visitor popularity also secures the autonomy of the museum’s curators and shows
that ‘one can narrate the recent history of Poland in a multi-perspectival way
and thus create broad identification.’ At the same time, the political
engagement of the ESC irritates many politicians and makes ‘a conflict over the
future of our museum’ inevitable. ‘Despite its success, and above all its broad
acceptance by the citizens, our future is open.’
More: Jevhen Fedchenko, founder and
editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian portal StopFake.org,
describes the site’s evolution from Ukrainian ‘self-defence’ outfit into
watchdog organization on Russian disinformation activities worldwide; and Eva Kovacs reconstructs
the ‘parallel’ biographies of two women, a Jew and a Roma, subjected to
involuntary sterilization – one at the hands of Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, the
other by the Hungarian authorities in 1970 – and discusses how these acts of
sexual violence prompted processes of ethnic and gender identity-formation.
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In Merkur (Germany),
Swiss cultural historian and Slavist Felix Philipp Ingold examines the ideology
of neo-Eurasianism and its influence on Russian geopolitics. A ‘state ideology’
supported by research institutes, media organs and propaganda centres,
neo-Eurasianism advocates military rearmament and nuclear deterrence, support
for sympathetic regimes such as Syria and Iran, the formation of alliances
against global capitalism, and ideological warfare on ‘totalitarian
liberalism’. Russian foreign policy, neo-Eurasian to the core, aims to ‘restore
the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union’ and to counter NATO ‘militarism’
with a ‘continental alliance of nations stretching from eastern Europe through
Central Asia to the Pacific’ – a concept ‘modelled on the multinational Soviet
bloc, but which far exceeds its range’.
Eurasianism emerged in
the late Tsarist and early Soviet periods, where it was called ‘Pan-Mongolism’,
‘Scythianism’, and ‘exodus to the East’. Alongside western thinkers Oswald
Spengler, Carl Schmitt and C.G. Jung, its preeminent ideologues
included the philosophers Konstantin Leontyev and Vladimir Solovyov, the
linguist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, the poets Valeri Bryusow and Alexander Blok, and
composers Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky. From the 1960s, the tradition
was continued by cultural historian and ethnologist Lev Gumilyow and, since the
late 1990s, by Aleksandr
Dugin. The latter’s monumental work The Foundations of Geopolitics has,
writes Ingold, ‘has become a textbook for all decision makers in the most
important spheres of Russian political life’. In it, Dugin predicts an ‘an
incessant duel of the civilizations’, from which Russia will emerge as the new
world power.
Dugin’s philosophical
lodestar is Martin Heidegger, whom he sees as offering a philosophy perfectly
matched to the ‘Russian mentality’. Heideggerian Dasein is,
Dugin argues, congruent with a specifically Russian ‘being in the world’. Yet
his esoteric rhetoric should not, warns Ingold, ‘distract from the relentless
rigour of his thought, which goes beyond everything imagined by Bolshevism’.
The geopolitics of the neo-Eurasians is ‘a new militant patriotism that places
absolute value on the homeland and lends it global dimensions’. Like the
Russian president himself, neo-Eurasianists are far removed from the idea of
Russia’s geopolitical role as mediator between East and West, as propounded by
philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev in the 1830s.
Vikerkaar (Estonia) focuses on the tension between
liberal universalism in international relations and the particularist reaction
to it. Rein
Müllerson, Professor of Law at the University of Tallinn and former advisor
to Mikhail Gorbachev, argues that the universalist moment of the 1990s is over
and that a new concert of nations is necessary:
‘Since the Cold War,
high – some would say naive – expectations of a world in which law, impartially
interpreted and applied, would have primacy over politics have not
materialized. Differing visions of desirable and possible world orders are
accompanied by propaganda warfare where even international law is used as a
tool of hegemonic dominance or, conversely, as an instrument to counter such
dominance. … The only realistically possible international system is a
multi-polar one. International law, as a normative system based on the balance
of interests and compromises and not necessarily on shared ideology (though
this may underpin domestic legal systems or EU law), can function relatively
well only in a multi-polar, balance of power, concert of powers system which is
consciously and conscientiously built and accepted as legitimate.’
Rejoinder: Talk about spheres of influence is the
last thing small nations like to hear, however. In a rejoinder to Müllerson,
Juri Saar makes the case for fundamental western values such as truth,
personality and contract, and argues for their relevance in international
affairs. These pillars, Saar claims, have been undermined by postmodernist
thought and, more recently, by Russian information war. Inspired by the
philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, Saar advocates a new realism, one that returns
to universalist Enlightenment values… read more:
