Southgate on Russia at Welf’s NR blog

Welf Herfurth’s New Right Australia New Zealand blog is hosting it’s first offering from Troy Southgate. His subject is the meaning of Putin’s Russia, and its function in the emergence of a new geopolitical dispensation. Obviously, this is a weighty subject, and Troy has only danced lightly across the surface of it. He offers no closing prediction, except to note that in the modern context expediency will restrain geopolitical ambition. That’s true, but one might equally assert that stability is not independent of the second law of thermodoynamics, and things change all the time.

Perhaps the more interesting comment precedes that, though. Troy terms as idealistic Hegel’s view, so faithfully reflected in Francis Fukuyama’s post-communist, 1989 essay “The End of History”, and in the sweaty expectancy of the PNAC that followed eight years later, that history as dialectic inevitably winnows away the extremes. I would hold that this can be true only within a single ideological universe. We are talking about synthesis of extremes in methodology here, not of fundamentally different ideas. But Putin’s Russia also contains elements of anti-liberal nationalism in it ... as well, of course, as some very high-octane power elitism. The struggle for the geopolitical future may be conditioned by the struggle for Russo-centricity (I don’t think it can be called nationalism in any real sense). If the economy slows and Putin’s thusfar remarkably adroit populism wears thin, we may be reminded again how very distant Eurasia is from Europe.

RUSSIA IN 2008: THOUGHTS ON HEGELIAN GEOPOLITICS

by Troy Southgate

Despite the negative image of Russia that is currently being portrayed in the media, it seems pretty feasible that Putin - possibly since his last meeting with Bush in 2007 - was eventually persuaded, albeit covertly, to capitulate to Western demands.

That he’s a loyal friend of Russia’s capitalist ruling class is not even up for debate, even if some people in Right-wing circles do seem to respect him for ousting the Jewish oligarchs several years ago. In reality, however, Russian capitalism is no better than its Jewish-dominated counterpart and Putin’s so-called ‘successor’, Dmitry Medvedev, is little more than a puppet of the same socio-economic regime.

But when you stop to think about the vilification of Russia over the last few months, especially with the well-publicised Litvinenko affair, the systematic construction of what many people are interpreting as a ‘new Cold War’ is, in a sense, rather Hegelian. The reason being, that contradiction, of course, eventually leads to reconciliation and some commentators believe that the thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula is better expressed in the dictum: ‘problem-alternative-solution’.

Perhaps this potential return to a bi-polar world is a shift beyond Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ strategy in which there is merely one superpower (United States) fighting against an imagined or manufactured opponent (Islam)? Let’s think seriously for a moment about the relationship between the West and Russia in both a Hegelian (after Fichte) and a geopolitical context:

* thesis or intellectual proposition (Western capitalism)
* antithesis or negation of the proposition (Soviet communism)
* synthesis or reconciliation (a gradual alliance, through perestroika, between the two)
* presentation of a new antithesis (Cold War 2, Russia as the ‘new’ bogeyman)

... and so it goes on ...

Russia has not exactly presented a new antithesis in an ideological sense as Soviet Communism claimed to do, of course, and it was Hegel’s view that no new antithesis can ever arise due to the eventual disappearance of extreme ideological and philosophical positions, but this rather idealistic perspective does not seem to take into consideration the fact that convenience will often outweigh genuine revolutionary fervour. It remains to be seen where Islam will fit into all this.

Food for thought.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 06:19 AM in World Affairs
Comments (2) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by daveg on March 04, 2008, 10:32 AM | #

Off Topic: Here is a great podcast interview about historical myths about “free market” economics.

It comes from a liberal perspective, but it is very interesting.

Electric Politics

Posted by Nux Gnomica on March 04, 2008, 12:34 PM | #

I don’t see where Hegel comes in. Russia competes with the West, but the nature and strength of the competition vary over time. Hardly a profound observation and hardly exclusive to Hegelians.

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