Eurasian Thinking Moves On Europe

Sometimes correspondents from overseas give us useful tit-bits on the way the world is going and it seems fair to share them. One of our friends, based in the Baltic, watches the Russians with care. He has drawn our attention to some very interesting developments in Russian ideology.

We have long been preparing for what will amount to a new cultural war between empires – the US, the EU, Russia, China and India – all with their own historical narratives.

This is a resumption of Cold War business and a response to the off-balance sheet 'colour revolutions' that have been used to push the boundaries of Western influence ever further East and into the Islamic World. We can see a 'Green' game in operation in Iran as we write.

In the background are huge half-hidden new strategic funds for dealing with ‘hearts and minds' emerging out of the US strategic budget.

Much of this will be devoted to the Muslim and Arab worlds and will be designed to create a liberal constituency for free markets, international community engagement and eventually for democracy and human rights. But its military purpose is to drain the sea in which militants can swim.

But nothing is quite so simple. Some of this money will also leach into other theatres, including Europe, while Europeans themselves are busy rewriting their own narratives in ways that are, to say the least, highly ambiguous.

On the one hand, the exigencies of European nation-building after 1945 have enforced a highly illiberal approach to Holocaust denial and a narrative of guilt and retribution that secretly enrages much of the European petit-bourgeois who feel that the full story has not been told.

Political fantasies can now earn a prison sentence in much of Europe and the gate has been opened in theory to incarceration for anyone who might ‘explain’ or deny Red Army ‘atrocities’. This upsets many Russians who still see themselves as liberators - as do the Atlanticists.

On the other hand, the electoral rise of the Radical Right is creating threatening new narratives of nationalism that permit the space to rewrite the history of the twentieth century so that both Western liberals and Communists can be presented as alien invaders.

The veil of silence over alternative narratives of European history that do not fit the liberal model of the post-Adenauer generations is being lifted.

The Russians, with their own nationalist post-Soviet tale, are becoming increasingly edgy that they will face a propaganda war on two fronts – liberalism is no longer such a threat but European historical revisionism could fuel militarism and build an independent threat on the back of a liberal state.

On May 19th, President Medvedev, for example, announced a presidential commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests”.

The problem for the Russians is how to preserve (in support of the liberals) a narrative of the evil of Nazism while placing the blame for that evil on those now moralising against 'Red tyranny'. One solution is to build new narratives of the origins of war.

One rewriting of history is very persuasive: “the real reason the war began was because of "Poland's refusal to fulfill German demands ... Germany's demands were very reasonable." This may seem counter-intuitive to the narrative of German war guilt but not quite so.

What we are seeing is a partial Russian engagement with German revisionism against the standard liberal narrative and, from one perspective, it is not unreasonable.

The liberal system (then represented by the League of Nations and now by the UN but arising from the Peace of Westphalia) is based on protecting state boundaries regardless of the will of minority local populations.

Until recently, Soviet and Russian strategists were wholly committed to this principle even if neither side always respected the independence of such nations. However, the performance over South Ossetia and Abkhazia changed everything.

Russia radicals have found a rich seam of national liberation of minority groups to mine against exclusive liberal claims about human rights and self-determination. In essence, the new theory, taken to its logical conclusion, is very dangerous for Europe both in terms of historical narrative and present politics.

First, historically, it asserts that the Treaty of Versailles in 1918 was unjust (the Russians had been knocked out of the war by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) which many Western intellectuals would concur with in terms of reparations - though few whose relatives died on the Front.

It unfairly deprived local Germans in Rhineland, Sudetenland and Danzig of their right to be part of a German state. Suddenly, Hitler’s demands become fair and reasonable, the Poles imperialist and oppressive.

Second, and currently, Europe is riddled with ethnic anomalies where local communities are locked into larger states. This is as messy on the Atlantic seaboard as in the Balkans – Celts, Basques, Corsicans, Sardinians, Sicilians, Flemings and so on.

This door of historical revisionism opens on to another door in a particular strand of European fascist thinking that places blood and soil ahead of liberal state structures and which is more associated with the circles linked to 'democratic socialist' General Vlasov than with his enemy Stalin.

In other words, in the cultural war for the soul of Europe, a conscious Eurasianism based on thinking that owes a great deal to the ferment of forgotten ideas in interwar Europe has emerged.

It was once expressed in a curious little conference of petty nationalists in Prague in 1944 as the walls of national socialism came tumbling down. It challenges the liberal model of the non-ethnic constitutional state just as the EU is being challenged by sections of its own people over the Lisbon Treaty.

Before we get too excited, this view on Poland is not official Russian policy but it is an expression of the ideology of a powerful neo-nationalist faction within the Russian state. We suspect that the ‘real’ power in Russia tends to like this sort of thing precisely because it unnerves the West and keeps it guessing.

While we should not be dismissive of the material, we should also not assume too much. Nevertheless, some radical interwar thinking is back and the Russians and elements in the European Right are becoming bedfellows against the liberal project in the West.

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