Mark Bassin
Visiting Professor of Eurasian Studies and Director of Research, Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University.
Institution: Center for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm
PhD in political geography and Russian history from the University of California-Berkeley, 1983. Mark has had permanent appointments at UCLA, UW-Madison, University College London and the University of Birmingham (UK), and guest professorships at the Universities of Chicago, Pau (France), and Copenhagen. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, among others from the Fulbright Program, NEH, NCEEER, Woodrow Wilson Institute, Remarque Institute NYU, the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, DAAD, Institut für europäische Geschichte in Mainz, American Academy Berlin, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in Uppsala, and the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies in Stockholm. Mark’s research has focused on the history of geopolitics and discourses of problems of space, identity, and politics in Russia and Germany. His most recent monograph is The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2016)
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms”
My interests in this research network relate to the study of “civilizationism.” I understand this as an identity discourse structurally similar to nationalism, in which the identity in question derives from membership in a civilization— a notional multi-national and poly-ethnic community that is historically and geographically situated. Like nationalism, civilizationism assumes the inherent virtue of one’s native civilization and its superiority or at least its pre-eminence over others. The essential tension driving civilizationist discourses comes from the juxtaposition between members and non-members—a juxtaposition that is understood in many if not all cases to be hostile and irreconcilable.
The political value of civilizationism today derives from this tension, more specifically the ways that the inherent juxtaposition between members and non-members can be framed as a an existential, indeed fatal challenge, thereby creating a defensive group-psychological dynamism that is powerful and can be readily mobilised for political purposes. However, while civilizationism is structurally similar to nationalism, it is not the same thing. Very much to the contrary, the two are distinct and therefore can be and are deployed simultaneously, indeed often in calculated coordination. Although Huntington called attention to important features of civilizationism already in the early 1990s (without using the term), it has been over the past 15 years or so that its real influence has begun to be felt, in Europe and across the globe.
I have studied these questions in two different historical-geographical contexts. The first is focused on Russia, specifically on the doctrines of Evraziistvo or Eurasianism, which were first fomulated in the interwar period and then revived very powerfully after the Cold War. Eurasianism is a civilizationist discourse, which envisions what it calls “Russia-Eurasia” as a multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-confessional, and multi-cultural entity, that coalesced naturally through centuries of co-habitation on the expanses of Eurasia. The remarkable political and mobilizational efficacy of Eurasianism as a civilizationist discourse became very clear after 1991, as differing versions of it were embraced in diverse post-Soviet countries for an assortment of different political projects.
More recently, I have studied civilizationism in the European context. This is part of a project on “Europeanism” as a key ideological project of the neo-fascist European Far Right, beginning in 1945 and continuing to the present day. After the German defeat, formerly fascist ideologues in Western Europe sought to revive a far-right movement by rejecting the hyper-nationalism of the war years in favor of the geopolitical and civilizational project of reviving and reconsolidating European civilization as a “Third Force” to rival the two victorious superpowers. This project was sustained over many decades, and—in an up-dated “Identitarean” version—continued to inspire the Far Right after 1991. Most recently, authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian movements across Europe have mobilized civilizationist arguments against the “invasion” of European-Christian civilization by foreign, non-Christian, and non-white intruders from Asia and Africa.