Eurasianism

Eurasianism is a political and cultural ideology that sees Russia and the lands around it, from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, as a separate civilization called Eurasia. It holds that this region is bound together by geography, history and the shared experience of its Slavic, Turkic, Finno-Ugric and other peoples, and that it should not try to copy Western Europe. Classical Eurasianism began among Russian emigres in the 1920s. A later form, often called neo-Eurasianism, emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and has influenced debates on Russian foreign policy and identity.

Classical Eurasianism was launched in 1921 with the collection Exodus to the East, published in Sofia by Russian emigres including the linguist Nikolai Trubetskoy and the geographer Pyotr Savitsky. Trubetskoy's earlier book Europe and Mankind (1920) had criticized European claims to cultural superiority. The movement developed in Prague, Berlin and Paris and accepted that the revolution had changed Russia permanently, while rejecting Bolshevik ideology. It split at the end of the 1920s when a left wing in Paris moved toward support for the Soviet Union, and it was weakened by Soviet intelligence infiltration. In the Soviet period, the historian Lev Gumilev developed related theories about ethnic groups and the steppe. After 1991, neo-Eurasianist writers revived the term, linking it to geopolitics and opposition to Western liberalism.

Classical Eurasianism was an emigre intellectual movement focused on culture, linguistics, geography and an 'ideocratic' state guided by a ruling idea. Gumilev's work centered on ethnogenesis and the historical ties between Russians and steppe peoples. Neo-Eurasianism, associated with writers active since the 1990s, is more explicitly geopolitical and anti-Western. Some leaders in Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet states have used a pragmatic Eurasianism to support regional economic cooperation among sovereign states.

Critics argue that Eurasianism provides an intellectual justification for Russian dominance over neighbouring countries, and some Ukrainian and Central Asian scholars see it as a form of imperial nostalgia. Liberal critics argue that it rejects democracy and human rights as merely Western values. Some historians argue that it lacks a coherent philosophy and overstates the unity of very different peoples. Russian ethnic nationalists, by contrast, criticize it for giving too much weight to non-Russian peoples. Supporters argue that it offers a realistic account of the region's geography and history and a defense of cultural diversity against Western homogenization.

No state has adopted Eurasianism as an official ideology, but its language appears in Russian debates about national identity and foreign policy. The Eurasian Economic Union, launched in 2015 by Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus and later joined by Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, reflects the economic and cooperative version of the idea.