The horrific war of Russia in Ukraine has sharply revived debate over charges of Russia's fascist behavior. Refuting the label of "fascism" for Russia does not mean negating the unacceptable ...suffering of Ukrainians and the responsibility the Russian regime bears for causing it, but instead aids in building up an interpretation of the conflict that is analytically correct and therefore will generate more productive policy. Here, after first defining fascism and where to look for it, Laruelle address various facets of Russia's ideological landscape, its state-society relationship, and finally move to a consideration of the policy implications of the "fascism" label to examine why its maximalism is not only analytically wrong but counterproductive, policy-wise.
Russia's support for illiberal movements in Europe has received wide attention. Yet this promotion of illiberalism should not be seen as merely a cynical political ploy by the Putin regime. For ...Russian elites and for a large part of the population, illiberalism supplies an appealing framework for making sense of the world and structuring a rebellion against the liberal order. Illiberal views existed in Russian society before being coopted by the regime, and there exists a lively school of thought—known as the "Young Conservatives"—arguing that the country's future can be secured only by embracing the illiberal project. In foreign policy, Russia's illiberal credo has been successfully translated into an agenda of "sovereignism" that speaks to diverse audiences and challenges the conventional definition of soft power.
Illiberalism is an emerging concept in social sciences that remains to be tested by different disciplines and approaches. Here, I advance a fine-grained frame that should help to "stabilize" the ...concept by stating that we should 1/ look at illiberalism as an ideology and dissociate it from the literature on regime types, 2/ consider illiberalism to be in permanent situational relation to liberalism. To make that demonstration, I advance a pilot definition of illiberalism as a new ideological universe that, even if doctrinally fluid and context-based, is to some degree coherent.
In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of ...embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe collaborated with Nazi Germany. Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia, soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground. Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.
While the annexation of Crimea boosted Putin's popularity at home, the Donbas insurgency shattered the domestic ideological status quo. The Kremlin's position appeared somehow hesitant, fostering the ...resentment of Russian nationalist circles that were hoping for a second annexation. In this article, I explore the term Novorossiya as a live mythmaking process orchestrated by different Russian nationalist circles to justify the Donbas insurgency. The powerful pull of Novorossiya rests on its dual meaning in announcing the birth of a New Russia geographically and metaphorically. It is both a promised land to be added to Russia and an anticipation of Russia's own transformation. As such, Novorossiya provides for an exceptional convergence of three underlying ideological paradigms - "red" (Soviet), "white" (Orthodox), and "brown" (Fascist). The Novorossiya storyline validates a new kind of geopolitical adventurism and blurs the boundaries, both territorial and imaginary, of the Russian state.
This article employs surveys by Gallup, the Central Asia Barometer, and the Barometer of Eurasian Integration, as well as focus groups that were commissioned as part of this research, to argue (1) ...that Kazakhstani perceptions of the United States compare unfavorably to perceptions of China and especially of Russia; (2) that Russian influence is a minor or nonexistent cause of the United States’ poor image; (3) that US cultural influence has an ambiguous effect on the country’s image in Kazakhstan, due to a “clash of values” between conservative Kazakhstani society and relatively liberal US cultural exports; (4) that the United States’ foreign policy, especially its violation of other states’ sovereignty, has an unambiguously negative effect on its image among Kazakhstanis; and (5) that the resulting relatively negative image of the United States translates into reluctance to build or maintain ties with it. In conclusion, we highlight areas in which the United States–Kazakhstan cooperation is likely to receive a better reception.
This collection provides a broad analysis of Afghanistan and its neighbors in recent decades and investigates the various historical and political contexts into which the region has been placed. It ...examines the legacy of Soviet intervention, patterns of cooperation and conflict among regional states, and recent US strategic initiatives.
Central Peripheries explores post-Soviet Central Asia through the prism of nation-building. Although relative latecomers on the international scene, the Central Asian states see themselves as ...globalized, and yet in spite of – or perhaps precisely because of – this, they hold a very classical vision of the nation-state, rejecting the abolition of boundaries and the theory of the ‘death of the nation’. Their unabashed celebration of very classical nationhoods built on post-modern premises challenges the Western view of nationalism as a dying ideology that ought to have been transcended by post-national cosmopolitanism. Marlene Laruelle looks at how states in the region have been navigating the construction of a nation in a post-imperial context where Russia remains the dominant power and cultural reference. She takes into consideration the ways in which the Soviet past has influenced the construction of national storylines, as well as the diversity of each state’s narratives and use of symbolic politics. Exploring state discourses, academic narratives and different forms of popular nationalist storytelling allows Laruelle to depict the complex construction of the national pantheon in the three decades since independence. The second half of the book focuses on Kazakhstan as the most hybrid national construction and a unique case study of nationhood in Eurasia. Based on the principle that only multidisciplinarity can help us to untangle the puzzle of nationhood, Central Peripheries uses mixed methods, combining political science, intellectual history, sociology and cultural anthropology. It is inspired by two decades of fieldwork in the region and a deep knowledge of the region’s academia and political environment.Praise for Central Peripheries ‘Marlene Laruelle paves the way to the more focused and necessary outlook on Central Asia, a region that is not a periphery but a central space for emerging conceptual debates and complexities. Above all, the book is a product of Laruelle's trademark excellence in balancing empirical depth with vigorous theoretical advancements.’ –Diana T. Kudaibergenova, University of Cambridge ‘Using the concept of hybridity, Laruelle explores the multitude of historical, political and geopolitical factors that predetermine different ways of looking at nations and various configurations of nation-building in post-Soviet Central Asia. Those manifold contexts present a general picture of the transformation that the former southern periphery of the USSR has been going through in the past decades.’ – Sergey Abashin, European University at St Petersburg
Between Europe and Asia Bassin, Mark; Glebov, Sergey; Laruelle, Marlene
07/2015, Volume:
233
eBook
Between Europe and Asiaanalyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former ...Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia.The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.
As in all post‐Soviet states, the Russian intelligentsia has been preoccupied with the construction of a new national identity since the beginning of the 1990s. Although the place of Orthodox ...religion in Russia is well documented, the subject of neo‐paganism and its consequent assertion of an Aryan identity for Russians remains little known. Yet specialists observing the political and intellectual life of contemporary Russia have begun to notice that the development of references to ‘Slavic paganism’ and to Russia's ‘Aryan’ origin can be found in the public speeches of some politicians and intellectual figures. This article will attempt, in its first section, to depict the historical depth of these movements by examining the existence of neo‐pagan and/or Aryan referents in Soviet culture, and focusing on how these discourses developed in different spheres of post‐Soviet Russian society, such as those of religion, historiography, and politics.
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