Of Alexander Dugin
Source: Heretically
We present, courtesy of the publisher, an extensive excerpt from the book by the Russian philosopher and political scientist Alexander Dugin “Multipolar World Theory”, recently released for the types ofAGA Publishingand can be ordered at the following address:http://www.orionlibri.net/negozio/teoria-del-mondo-multpolare/.Translation of: Donato Mancuso. Curator of the work: Maurizio Murelli.
After the Second World War and the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis powers, a has developedbipolar systemof international relations called «Yalta system». Legally, international law continued to recognize the absolute sovereignty of all nation states but in fact fundamental decisions on central issues relating to world order and world politics were taken in only two places: a Washington e a Mosca. […] THE UNIPOLAR MOMENT
With the collapse of one of the two poles (the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991), the bipolar system has also collapsed. […] While acknowledgingde juresovereignty, the world of Yalta wasin factbuilt on the principle of the balance of two symmetrical and relatively equal hegemons. With the exit of one of the hegemons, the entire system has ceased to exist. […] From this moment, the entire structure of the world order has changed qualitatively and irreversibly. The pole led by the United States and based on liberal ideology, democratic and capitalist, it is a phenomenon that still exists and has continued to spread over the years, on a global scale, its own socioeconomic system based on democracy, on the market and on the ideology of human rights. We are therefore faced with a phenomenon that we can precisely identify asworld, and world order, unipolar. Within the unipolar world there is a single decision-making center regarding major global issues. The West and its core, the Euro-Atlantic community led by the United States, assumes the role of the sole hegemonic power. […] In the 1990s the unipolar world seemed to be a definitively consolidated reality, and some US analysts have elaborated, on this basis, the thesis of «end of the story» (Fukuyama). This thesis consisted of the idea that the world would become completely homogeneous ideologically, politically, economically and socially, and that from now on all the trials that would take place, they would no longer be a historical drama based on the clash of ideas and interests, but rather an economic competition (and relatively peaceful) between market players, similar to how the internal politics of liberal democratic regimes are constructed. As, democracy becomes global. On the planet there is only the West and its periphery, composed of the countries that gradually integrate into it. […] Therefore, according to Fukuyama, the time of national states is over and the world is close to complete and definitive integration. Humanity is transforming into a global civil society, politics gives way to economics, war gives way to trade, liberal ideology becomes the undisputed and universally recognized standard, and all peoples and cultures blend into onecruciblecosmopolitan. […] CIVILIZATION AS AN ACTOR
Huntington objects to these points from a pessimistic position. According to him, the end of the bipolar world does not automatically lead to the creation of a global and homogeneous liberal democratic world order, Therefore, history is not over and it is premature to talk about the end of conflicts and wars. The world has ceased to be bipolar, but it has become neither global nor unipolar. It has a completely new configuration characterized by new collisions and clashes, tensions and conflicts. Who, Huntington gets to the most important point of his argument: he puts forward a hypothesis that is entirely valid and still underestimated todaywho will be the actor, the main character of this future world. He calls such an actorcivilization.
This conceptual step could be considered the beginning of a completely new theory: themultipolar world theory. Huntington highlights a central element: identifies a new actor, civilization, and at the same time it speaks of the multiplicity of these actors, using this word in the plural in the title of his book –The clash«of civilizations". […] Thanks to Huntington, we obtain as a first approximation a picture of a new theory, which postulates a model within which different decision-making centers coexist at a global level in the field of international relations, and each of them corresponds to a civilization.
Now it is important to clearly understand what a civilization is, and what is the meaning of this fundamental concept for the theory of the multipolar world. Civilization is not a concept that appears in any of the theories of international relations, born positivist born post-positivist. It has nothing to do with ideas of the state, political regime, class, net, ecc.Civilization is a collective community united by the same spiritual tradition, historical, cultural, intellectual and symbolic (most often of a religious nature, although not necessarily perceived as a particular religion), whose members are aware of being part of it and of being mutually close, regardless of their national affiliation, classy, political and ideological. […] Civilization as a concept appears in historical science, in sociology and cultural studies, but in the study of international relations it is the first time that this concept has been introduced.
Huntington's logic, who advanced the hypothesis of civilization in international relations, it's clear enough. […] He concludes that modernization and democratization, as well as the norms of liberalism and the free market, they have only taken root in Western societies, while all other countries accepted these rules of the game under the pressure of necessity, without however grafting them deeply into their cultures, pragmatically selecting and borrowing only particular aspects of Western civilization in the application and technological field. As, Huntington speaks of "modernization without Westernization" widespread in non-Western countries, phenomenon that occurs when representatives of non-Western societies borrow some Western technologies, trying to adapt them to the local conditions of their societies and very often using them against the very West that provided them. The democratization and modernization of non-Western societies therefore, in light of this analysis, become ambiguous and relative and, consequentially, they do not guarantee the results that would be expected if the substrate of these processes were not taken into account. The more the West extends its borders, incorporating non-Western societies into itself, the more this ambiguity is exacerbated, the wider the gap between Western and non-Western regions becomes, who receive new technologies and strengthen their potential while preserving links with the structures of traditional society. This circumstance leads to recognizing the concept of "civilization" as a scientific concept of international relations.
Civilizations in the structure of international relations of the 21st century are vast spatial areas that, under the influence of modernization and with the support of Western technology, consolidate their strength and intellectual potential, ma, instead of fully accepting the Western value system, they maintain organic and robust links with their traditional cultures, their religions and social structures. It should be noted that such traditional elements are sometimes in sharp contrast to Western ones. We have seen how the collapse of the socialist camp characterized these processes and brought out this state of affairs. Instead of a symmetrical opposition between East and West, a field of tensions appears in which different civilizations confront each other. These civilizations, today very often divided by national borders, during the processes of globalization and integration they will become increasingly aware of their community ties and will act in the system of international relations, guided by their values ​​and by common interests arising from these values. As a result of the development of these processes and in the case of effective «modernization without Westernization», we get a fundamentally new picture of the balance of power on a global scale. This is precisely the image of themultipolar world. […] A NEW PARADIGM OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
The multipolar order tends to reproduce, on another scale, the Westphalian system with the characteristics that distinguish it – sovereignty, balance of power, anarchy in the international environment, possibility of war and peaceful cooperation - with the fundamental difference that the actors from now on will no longer be national states, conforming to the model of the European capitalist state of the modern era, but civilizations having a totally independent internal structure, corresponding to the historical traditions and cultural codes of each.
Such a world will be polycentric, in the true sense of the word. Furthermore, the equality of civilizations within the international legal system does not at all presuppose the equality of their internal political structure. In such a system, civilizations are free to organize their societies according to their preferences, based on their own value systems and historical experiences. For some of them, religion will play a central role, for others the principles of secularism could prevail. In some there will be democracy, in others there will be completely different political forms of government, or associated with the historical experience and cultural characteristics of a society, or chosen as most appropriate by the companies themselves. In contrast to the Westphalian system, in such a world order there will not be a planetary model of universalistic hegemony nor a binding standard for the whole world. As, in every society, generalizing value systems specific to a specific civilization can be promoted, including notions of subject, object, tempo, space, politics, man, knowledge, purpose and meaning of the story, rights and duties, social norms, ecc. Every civilization adheres to its own philosophical precepts, and non-Western civilizations, naturally, they will rely on their indigenous philosophical systems, bringing them back to life, perfecting them, transforming them or even renewing them, but all this in conditions of total freedom and in terms suited to each specific society. […] From this it is possible to draw an important conclusion: the multipolar world will be an extremely open historical space, in which the active participation of societies in the creation of a new world, of a new map of reality will not be limited by any external frame, no hegemony, no reductionism or universalism, no pre-established rule imposed by an external actor. Such a multipolar reality will be much more composite, complex and multidimensional than any postmodern intuition.
The multipolar world is a man-made space of virtually unlimited historical freedom, freedom for peoples and communities to independently build their own destiny