Neo-Religionism Of The Post-Ideological Russia – Analysis

The lonely superpower (US) vs. the bear of the permafrost (Russia), with the world’s last cosmopolite (EU) in between. Is the ongoing calamity at the eastern flank of the EU a conflict, recalibration, imperialism in hurry, exaggerated anti-Russian xenophobia or last gasp of confrontational nostalgia?

Just 20 years ago, the distance between Moscow and NATO troops stationed in Central Europe (e.g., Berlin) was more than 1.600 km. Today, it is only 120 km from St. Petersburg. Is this a time to sleep or to worry? ‘Russia no longer represents anything that appeals to anyone other than ethnic Russians, and as a result, the geopolitical troubles it can cause will remain on Europe’s periphery, without touching the continent’s core’ – was the line of argumentation recently used by Richard N. Haass, President of the US Council of Foreign Relations. Is it really so?

Is there any intellectually appealing call originating from Russia? Russia is a legal, not an ideological, successor of the late Soviet Union. Many in Greece, Latin America and elsewhere in the world mingled the two. Does it still today represent a lonely champion of antifascism and (pan-)Slavism? Is the Slavism, identity, secularism and antifascism, while abandoned in Eastern Europe, confused perhaps by the mixed signals from the austerity-tired Atlantic Europe and über-performing Central Europe?

For the EU, Ukraine is (though important) an item of the Neighborhood Policy and for the US it is a geopolitical pivot. However, for Russia, it is all this plus emotional attachment. Without Ukraine, to what extent is Russia Christian and European?

Is the EU a subject or a hostage (like Ukraine) of the mega-geopolitical drama whose main stage is in the Asia-Pacific theater? What is the objective here – the final score (territorial gain) or an altered style of the game (new emotional charge added to the international relations)? What is a road map, an exit, a future perspective – relaxation or escalation? Hegemony, hegemoney, or a global (post-dollar) honeymoon?

Without a socio-political cohesion via integralism, it is rather impossible to reverse the socio-economic decomposition of Russophone and Eastern Europe. Unity for cohesion does not mean a (rigid communist) unanimity. But, the East is still mixing the two. Consequently, all three cohesive forces of Eastern Europe have disappeared: (i) atheistic elites (irrespectively from their ethnic, religious, social and linguistic background); (ii) antifascism; and (iii) Slavism.

While the secularism of Atlantists increases the intellectual appeal of their indigenous ideology – that of neoliberalism, transcontinentally, the newly discovered neo-clericalism of Eastern and Russophone Europe plays, not an emancipating, but a powerful self-restraining role. At home, it only polarizes, fragments and undermines vital social consensus, and for abroad it serves as a powerful self-deterrent. Simply, beyond its narrow ethnic frames or national borders such neo-religionism motivates none to nothing. In the 21st century, dominated by the socially mobilized, secularized and knowledge-based nations across the world, religionism of East (static and rigid like its retrograde MENA sibling) only further alienates, isolates and marginalizes that region. It easily ends up in ethno-chauvinistic overtones that are not only isolating its proprietor, but also antagonizing or radically mobilizing its neighbors. Globally, it means that while East remains entrenched in its ‘newly discovered’ religionism, only one ideology remains unchallenged and uncontested – that of Atlantist neoliberalism.

Logically, East neither controls its own narrative nor (interpretation of) history: Due to a massive penetration of Central Europe, East grossly relativized, trivialized and silenced its own past and present anti-fascism. Additionally, this region does not effectively control its media space. Media there (of too-often dubious orientation and unspecified ownership) is distracting vital public debates: discouraging, disorienting and silencing any sense of national pride, influence over destiny direction and to it related calls for self-(re) assessment. Today, Eastern Europe is not even sure, if its anti-fascism should be a question of choice or a matter of pure survival. Its mental deterritorialisation is corrosive and deep.

In a combination with above, the speed and dimensions of criminal redistribution of national wealth (euphemistically called ‘western style privatisation’ of 1990s) deeply transformed the East, turning many into a re-feudalized society. By the end of Yeltsin dizzy rule, even the biggest critics of the Soviet era were horrified by the post-Soviet destruction. In 2000, Alexander Solzhenitsyn screamed out loudly: “Will we continue looting and destroying Russia until nothing is left? … God forbid these ‘reforms’ should continue.” For that, he was of course, silenced and marginalized, and never quoted.

Indeed, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the severity, frequency and tempo of that social re-engineering via criminal redistribution of national wealth had no parallel historic example. Seems as if the region was left to choose between genocide (ex-YU) and its evil twin – social apartheid (elsewhere in the East)? Where were the famous dissidents from East? Why didn’t the academia of Eastern Europe debate about it?

Eastern communities on all their levels are using failed models of leadership. Too many institutions are still mired in a narrative of past victimization, and too many have no any mechanism for producing new leaders to serve true national interests. Currently, percentage of Eastern Europeans obtaining the foreign diplomas – most notably those from the universities in Atlantic-Central Europe – that are later admitted to the higher echelons of its national socio-economic, cultural and politico-military policy-making is higher than even in sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. the LDC situated around Chad or Victoria lakes or Horn of Africa). These figures reveal us that the ‘elites’ in Eastern and Russophone Europe are among the most unauthentic, least indigenous or less patriotically connected with its electorate – probably more than anywhere else in the world. That explains in detail why over the last two decades, the policies and their protagonists there, are so little responsive to a public opinion. Any research, which is not a pre-paid or guided by remote control, is usually quickly denounced. Any independent thinking must be condemned as a ‘radical nationalism’. As if the emancipative democracy should be a lame talk-shop, not a pursuit of happiness’ road-map.

Finally, East is sharply aged and depopulated –the worst of its kind ever– which in return will make any future prospect of a full and decisive generational interval simply impossible. Honduras-ization of Eastern Europe is full and complete. Hence, is it safe to say that if the post-WWII Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was overt and brutal, this one is subtle but subversive and deeply corrosive?

The key (nonintentional) consequence of the Soviet occupation was that the Eastern European states –as a sort of their tacit, firm but low-tempered rebellion – preserved their sense of nationhood. However, they had essential means at disposal to do so: the right to work was highly illuminated in and protected by the national constitutions, so were other socio-economic rights such as the right to culture, language, arts and similar segments of collective nation’s memory. Today’s East, deprived and deceived, silently witnesses the progressive metastasis of its national tissue.

Ergo, euphemisms such as countries in transition or new Europe cannot hide a disconsolate fact that Eastern Europe has been treated for 25 years as defeated belligerent, as spoils of war which the West won in its war against communist Russia.

It concludes that (self-)fragmented, deindustrialized and re-feudalized, rapidly aged rarified and depopulated, (and de-Slavicized) Eastern Europe is probably the least influential region of the world – one of the very few underachievers. Obediently submissive and therefore, rigid in dynamic environment of the promising 21st century, Eastern Europeans are among last remaining passive downloaders and slow-receivers on the otherwise blossoming stage of the world’s creativity, politics and economy. Seems, Europe still despises its own victims…

Terra nullius

When the club of the world’s most powerful economies – that of G–7 – was created in 1970s, it included 4 European and 3 non-European countries. Of the European ones, it was only Atlantic and Central Europe (Britain–France and Germany–Italy). The non-European members of the Club were two further Atlantic economies – that of Canada and the US – both with the overwhelming historic links to Britain. Finally, the 7th member was a ‘Britain of Asia’ – Japan – the islander enjoying the ‘splendid isolation’ from the continent. Political decision to admit Russia into the Club came only at the historic low of Russian economy – when it even shrink below the size of Dutch economy (dizzy days of Gorbachev-Yeltsin contraction, concluded with the suffocating default of Russia in 1998). Ever since then, a recuperating Russia was more scrutinized and under suspension than enjoying its anyway limited membership status in this Club.

Even if the American ideological triumph might be a clear cut, geopolitically it remains undecided. While Russians were absorbing the shock of loss of their historical empire, the ‘lonely hyper-power’ did not quite know what to do with its colossal gain. The fact that there is no (yet) clear leader of the post-Western world, does not mean that the post-Christian and post-industrial West – as a place and as the geo-economic and ideological model – is unquestionably accepted as it used to be in past.