What is Eurasianism?

First of all I mean to differentiate between the so-called "Eurasianism" of Aleksandr Dugin and what I mean by Eurasianism. That "Eurasianism" is something else entirely, and in my opinion is quite dubious in its name, for it is merely a matter of geopolitics, and advocates a unity of polities for the sake of international convenience and powerbroking, designed to produce a bipolar axis centered around Moscow and Beijing. As such, few outside of that narrow scope would find much reason at all to care about "Eurasianism", because what it really is is "Russo-Sinicism". It's concern lies mainly in accumulating power for the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China--nothing more. It is only "Eurasian" in that it involves one European power and one Asian.

In contrast, what I mean by Eurasianism is not an alliance of political and geographic entities--mere lines in the sand--but an alliance between races and between civilizations, the marriage and union of two kindred peoples, and the mixed-race offspring which are the fruits of that union. Hundreds of polities have risen and fallen in Europe and in Asia, and in the vast Eurasian Steppe in between. Why should we concern ourselves with only two contemporary ones when we discuss "Eurasia"? Eurasianism then is just as much about the past as it is about the present and the future. It is a continuum stretching back thousands of years, and indeed will mark this planet for thousands more to come. Thus what I mean by Eurasianism is the past, present and future, the attitude, culture, and way of life, of the myriad European and Asian peoples, and the Eurasians, whose heritage is split between the two.

But who is a Eurasian? Strictly speaking a Eurasian is a person of mixed European and Asian heritage, what is commonly referred to these days as Hapa, or by a number of equivalent terms found in various languages, such as ハーフ Haafu, which in the overwhelming majority of cases refer to Eurasians. Because of that it is quite safe to use the terms Eurasian and Hapa or Haafu interchangeably, as I will often do on this blog.

Let us pose another question, who is the Eurasian? Well I say that if Europe is the father, and Asia the mother, then the Eurasian is their son. Certainly he is entitled by his birth to claim with pride the heritage and descent of both civilizations, but he himself has some nature which is not shared by the parents. So, one parent we consider European, and the other we consider Asian, then as for the son, he certainly has inherited the European nature from one parent, and the Asian nature from the other, but in that clash of opposites, is bestowed by what must be God himself a nature which is neither European nor Asian, the Eurasian nature. Certainly the Eurasian is the nucleus of Eurasianism. And just as much as he is the nucleus, he is also the purpose, just as the purpose of any marriage is to produce children.

But even more than the purpose of Eurasianism, the Eurasian, and consequently Eurasianism itself, is the inevitable result of these two races coexisting in the same world. For as long as the two have been separate, there have always been cases of miscegenation between them. And as long as these two races continue to exist, then Eurasians will continue to be born. Contrary to popular opinion, the Eurasian is not a modern phenomenon, the result of the desegregation of a globalized world, but instead Eurasians have come and gone throughout history, and will continue to come and go for many more millennia. This is why when we consider Eurasianism, we must consider the past, present and future, and within that temporal framework, we must consider the interactions between the Europeans and Asians themselves, as well as their interactions with other groups.

So, Eurasianism is in its essence a story, one that was started thousands of years ago and is still being written today. It is the voluminous archives containing the domestication of the horse, the invention of the wheel, pastoral nomadism, legends of gods and heroes, chariots and bronze swords, the thinkers of ancient Greece and China, the conquests of Alexander, Caesar, the Huns, and Genghis Khan, the discovery of gunpowder, the voyages of Columbus and Zheng He, Samurai, knights, castles, grails, kings, emperors, monks, Buddhism, Mithraism, Christianity, Shintoism, Daoism and so on and so forth. There is so much worth discussing, that I don't think even one blog is enough for all of it.

So we have gone over what Eurasianism is, let's touch on what it is not. Most importantly, it is not a political ideology, nor an ideology in any sense of that word. The '-ism' attached to the end of the word is akin to the '-ism' in the word 'medievalism', as in 'the state of being medieval'. Eurasianism is just that: the state of being Eurasian. It does not prescribe a proper form of government, or of thinking or doing, nor does it assert the superiority of one form of government, one religion or one philosophy over another. Rather it includes the numerous political forms and schools of thought that flourished throughout history within the borders of the European and Asian civilizations, and indeed the many strands of thought that were shared by both, ALL of which are worth exploring and NONE of which is entirely useless.

So, to condense things a bit, Eurasianism is about Europe, Asia, Europeans, Asians, and Eurasians, from the most remote time in history to the present day, and evermore into the future, their differences and their similarities, their parting and most recently their union beneath the backdrop of the crisis of modernity.