[[NOTE: I misunderstood just how great Francis Fukuyama’s underestimation of the force that is nationalism. He endorses the neofascist Azov Battalion of the Andrei Biletskiy on (“Author Francis Fukuyama, a Stanford fellow, backs far-right Azov group after school visit,” www.sfgate.com › politics › articleFamed author, Stanford fellow ‘proud to support’ far-right …). He so underestimated nationalism that he could not even see it when it stood next to him. — Gordon M. Hahn, 24 April 2024]]
At the Cold War’s end just over three decades ago the mainstream political philosopher Francis Fukuyama enthralled the American elite with a thesis that the world had arrived at, as his article was titled, The End of History. Writing in 1989, before the Berlin Wall had yet to fall, Cold War had yet to end, or the Soviet Union collapse, Fukuyama did not merely tout “(t)he triumph of the West, of the Western idea” over the East, “an unabashed victory of democracy and capitalism,” and the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” over socialism and fascism. He asserted boldly enough the end of any prospect for the success of communism, socialism, anarchism, nationalism, fascism or any other non-democratic idea or system to triumph in human history: “What we may be seeing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.”[1]
This was a teleology and eschatology of the kind we find in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel, Alexander Kojeve, Karl Marx, and innumerable religious thinkers. It was also an echo of American messianism: the idea that the American revolution had initiated the inevitable march of ‘democracy’ or republicanism – that is, government by representation of the people endowed with political liberty and civil and human rights – across the globe. Indeed, Fukuyama, was declaring the American liberal democratic mission triumphant over its only real remaining ideological competitors—communism and fascism – and would now be completed by establishing democracy across the globe.
Fukuyama later pushed back the end of history; he acknowledged in his 2018 bookIdentity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment that one passion – the demand and pursuit of “dignity” by identity groups, including enthno-nationalist ones, which range from ethnic minorities in the US to Putin’s Russia, drive political conflict. Dignity now was his “master concept,” reflecting another idea that is all-encompassing in nature.[2] As a review put it, Fukuyama’s concept of the pursuit of dignity “explains all the contemporary dissatisfactions with the global liberal order: Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Xi Jinping, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, gay marriage, isis, Brexit, resurgent European nationalisms, anti-immigration political movements, campus identity politics, and the election of Donald Trump. It also explains the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Chinese Communism, the civil-rights movement, the women’s movement, multiculturalism, and the thought of Luther, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Simone de Beauvoir.”[3]
However, by 2022, after the beginning of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, history was ending again. The focus now, according to Fukuyama, should be the threat of authoritarianism to the liberal democratic order. This has become very mainstream thinking, however unoriginal. There is no reason to worry, Fukuyama asserts, since liberal democracy has the upper hand. Authoritarian leaders and their regimes are self-destructive. Undermined by their reliance in decision-making on a single leader or small circle of leaders and by “the absence of discussion and strong debate,” such regimes are prone to end by the resulting “catastrophic consequences,” presumably unlike liberal republican regimes.[4] By a curious ‘coincidence’, the main threat of this authoritarianism emanates – if one is to tell by the examples he cites – are authoritarian regimes that resist Western encroachment on their states’ self-interest and national security. Even more curious has been Fukuyama’s complete failure to notice the rise of authoritarianism in the US in the form of the Democrat Party-state’s revolution from above, but that is another story.[5]
My task here is not to belabor Fukuyama, the point is the teleology and absolutist eschatology of the claim that there will be an ‘end of history’ under capitalist republican dominion and that political theories and practices such as socialism, nationalism, fascism, and authoritarianism shall wither away. This is utopianism of the grandest sort. Perhaps, Fukuyama would retort as the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevskii did to a criticism of his own thinking as utopian end of history under Russian Orthidoxy. Dostoevskii concluded his millennial vision of world unification under Russian Orthodoxy by noting that if it was received as “a ‘utopia’ worthy only of laughter,” then he happily would count himself “among the utopians.”[6]
Reading Fukuyama at the time, I and others – most notably Samuel Huntington in his The Clash of Civilizations – wondered why Fukuyama did not consider nationalism and confessionalism – what we can call ‘communalism’ of ethno-national or religious type, respectively – to be ideologies or at least potential sources for the rise of new illiberal ideologies that might challenge the coming heavenly republican kingdom. The same could be said of authoritarianism. Today we can amend the list of communalisms with various forms of genderism: radical feminism, homosexualism, transgenderism and the like. If liberalism is an ideology, then why is illiberalism or anti-liberalism – i.e., authoritarianism – not an ideology or a source for an illiberal or anti-liberal ideology? Moreover, what of backsliding in democracy in the the world’s perhaps most strong and consolidated democratic regime? The imprisonment of journalists, the quashing of free speech, the politicization of the FBI and CIA undermining the rule of rule and equaity before the law, and biased impunity for violence committed by leftist political organizations are just a few examples of how the Barack Obama and Joseph Biden administrations have failed to meet key criteria for democracy as posed by Fukuyama himself. Modern day American liberalism is really a new version, a racialized and genderized version of leftism – reverse racism and sexism married to genderism and communism, e.g. Black Lives Matter and Antifa – having little to do with individual liberty, equality before the law, and representative government. Clearly, Fukuyama has been accessing only a part of the picture.
The USSR had hesitatingly abandoned communism by the end of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Great Reforms or ‘Perestroika’. To the dustbin of history were thrown: communist internationalism, the mono-organization and centralized Party-state machine, and the state-owned and planned command economy. Fukuyama had this aspect right. But according to the teleology of Fukuyama and the American elite’s consolidating ideology, the USSR’s main successor state, the Russian Federation was destined to be a Western-style republican and free market system – as all former Soviet republics, other post-communist states, and non-democracies worldwide were destined – by History’s predetermined course. Russia, a country with little ‘usable past’ of republicanism and free markets must come to the end state of liberal democracy in America’s new world order and do it soon. It had to ‘democratize’ (republicanize) its politics, pluralize its discourses, resolve nationality issues, and privatize its state economy rapidly no matter what the cost. Most difficult to swallow perhaps for Russians was the idea that Russia had to abandon any claim of belonging for the 25 million ethnic Russians cut off from Moscow in the USSR’s 14 former union republics, including Ukraine, and play fifth, sixth, seventh fiddle to the US, the EU, NATO, and their most powerful members. This and Russians’ sense of history, aspiration for wholeness, and obsession with national security and the West helped to ignite a revival of Russian traditionalist and patriotic thought purged during the Bolshevik Soviet whirlwind. NATO expansion was the spark that ignited the reconstitution of Russian traditionalism based on authoritarianism, Orthodoxy, and Russian culture or way of life. In reaction to Western encroachments (NATO and EU expansion), interference (demands for rapid republicanization and threats of isolation if not met), and threats (color revolutions in support of military cooperation towards NATO membership in neighboring or friendly states such as Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia and Montenegro), Russia returned to its national security vigilance norm in relations with the West and its traditionalist, Orthodox-based belief in and aspiration to wholeness or tselostnost’ in all of its forms: monism, universalism, communalism, solidarism, and historicism (see below).
Moreover, just as Moscow was struggling to build and consolidate its weak, even still nascent republican system and a requisite political culture in the Western scheme, the West was beginning a transformation from liberal republicanism centered on the rule of law, equality before the law, free and fair elections, and free market economics to one centered on legal bias in favor of ethnic minorities, gender minorities, and women and state-corporate partnerships to control the market. This marriage of nascent ethno-national fascism and economic fascism when consummated produced the present-day Western ideology of ‘Wokism.’ It mixes and combines cultural Marxist economics, internationalism, and nihilisms targeting the national state, ‘white’ majorities, family, social mores, and even biology (AI, transgenderism). The end of history has not even come to the West, no less Russia, China, and most of the ‘rest’ of the world, even though the world now is split between the West and the ‘rest’ over, supposedly, the ‘universal’ values of democracy and markets.
Fukuyama, perhaps the last Hegelian, would have done well to question his Hegelian teleology, avoid ‘apophatism’ in relation to Marx, and instead refer to the more balanced, modest, and rather superb thought of one of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers. Isaiah Berlin was born on June 6, 1909 in Riga, Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He died at century’s end in 1997—just as liberal political mystics following the path Fukuyama had shown undertook NATO’s post-Cold War expansion, driving the first nail into post-Soviet Russian republicanism’s coffin and ultimately that of the ‘end of history’ as well. When Berlin was still a boy, his family of Jewish lumber merchants moved to St. Petersburg where he witnessed some of the events of the Russian Revolution. The family then moved to London, and Berlin entered, then graduated Oxford, eventually teaching and writing there on the history of ideas. He turned to reading Russian writers, novelists and social thinkers, who, he acknowledged, “did much to shape (his) outlook.” In particular, he respected their “moral” “approach” concerned deeply with the human condition, “what was responsible for injustice, oppression, falsity in human relations, imprisonment whether by stone walls or conformism – unprotesting submission to man-made yokes – moral blindness, egoism, cruelty, humiliation, servility, poverty, helplessness, bitter indignation, despair on the part of so many.”[7]
Berlin’s study of the history of ideas and philosophy led him to reject all total views, any all-encompassing, all-explanatory theory, any and all monism. Political theories, models, ideologies, and the like were alien to him. He believed in combining theory and practical realities. He offered critiques and praise each for Hegelianism, Marxism, historicism, positivism, and romanticism. Among Russians, he admired the non-monists Turgenev and Herzen and respected others. For Berlin, humans have free will and require liberty to flourish as individuals, nations, states, and species, and individual liberty was for him perhaps the highest political ideal. However, he was no libertarian or even a strict free marketer; he was “an enthusiastic New Dealer.”[8]
To Berlin, Fukuyama would have seemed to be a “teleological thinker” on the order of a Hegel or Marx, for whom “all apparent order, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to a failure to discover their purpose.”[9] And for whom the world and History move “from explosion to explosion to fulfill the great cosmic design.”[10]
For America’s global oligarchs and democratizers today “(t)o be wise is to understand the direction in which the world is inexorably moving, to identify oneself with the rising power which ushers in the new world. Marx – and it is part of his attraction to those of a similar emotional cast – identifies himself exultantly, in his way no less passionately than Nietzsche or Bakunin, with the great force which in its very destructiveness is creative, and is greeted with bewilderment and horror only by those whose values are hopelessly subjective, who listen to their consciences, their feelings, or to what their nurses or teachers tell them, without realizing the glories of life in a world which moves from explosion to explosion to fulfill the great cosmic design.”[11] Berlin noticed that historical, teleological monists of this type, like today’s erstwhile Wokists, democracy promoters abroad, and NATO and EU adepts brook no resistance:
“When history takes her revenge – and every enrage` prophet in the nineteenth century (and our own – GH) looks to her to avenge him against thise he hates most – the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverized; justly, because what is just and unjust, good and bad, is determined by the goal towards which all creation is tending. Whatever is on the side of victorious reason is just and wise; whatever is on the other side, on the side of the world that is doomed to destruction by the working of the forces of reason, is rightly called foolish, ignorant, subjective, arbitrary, blind; and if it goes so far as to try and resist the forces that are destined to supplant it, then it – that is to say, the fools and knaves and mediocrities who constitute it – is rightly called retrograde, wicked, obscurantist, perversely hostile to the deepest interests of mankind.” [12]
We can see this very dynamic today in the incessant charges of ‘transophobes’, ‘homophobes’, ‘insurrectionists’, ‘Putin agents’, ‘white supremacists’, and the now more quaint ‘racists’ and ‘sexists’ leveled against anyone who opposes men in women’s bathrooms and sports, breeding heterosexual children to ‘realize’ their -non-binary’ essence and cut off parts of their bodies, the emerging single-party DemParty-state authoritarian regime, the illegal import of ‘refugees’ from Latin America and Wokist reverse racism and cultural Marxsim, or the continuing support of a war that pits one authoritarian regime (Ukraine) against another (Russia) in the name of democracy and freedom.
One of Berlin’s central points was that any preconceived all-encompassing theory, model, unified system, or explanation of the past, present and future is fraught with the danger of authoritarian or totalitarian repression of liberty justified by political priests as a necessary sacrifice for their attainment of their grand, universal vision and goal. No over-arching, all-encompassing historical, philosophical, religious, or political vision, in Berlin’s understanding of the human predicament, can save humankind from the moral responsibility of building our world in such a way as to avoid conflict, violence, repression, and poverty. And whatever solution that may be found, it will only mitigate not eliminate human problems, frailty, evil, and egoism. Rather than any historical destiny, each human generation has to confront anew its situation, challenges, and weaknesses and must fashion concrete solutions to address them as best they might.
Thus, in an excellent introduction to a revised edition of Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, the set of Berlin’s magnificent essays on 19th century Russian history and literature, Aileen Kelly notes that Berlin revealed the nature of a passion for a certain genre` of historical determinism and wholeness among many Russian thinkers. Berlin himself was offering a vigorous and profound rejection of both materialist and “historiosophical” or “metaphysico-theological theories of history.”[13] Berlin found the phenomenon of teleological, single-factor thinking oddly fascinating and certainly did not see it as a malady confined to Russian thinkers alone.[14] He discovered, in Kelly’s words, “monist visions” in Western political thought and extending to Hegelian and Marxist analyses which propose “a fundamental unity, deriving from a single universal purpose, underlies all phenomena.”[15] These phenomena can be discovered and used to determine how humankind, whether as a group, groups, or individuals, should live. An aspiration to, and/or a belief in wholeness, the craving “to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present, and future, actual, possible, and unfulfilled is symmetrically ordered,” according to Berlin, “(i)s one of the deepest of human desires.”[16] This passion for monist explanations, a “transcendent whole,”[17] is driven in part by a desire to throw off the burden of individual responsibility in an unfathomable, chaotic world. This escape from responsibility, indeed freedom is accomplished, in Berlin’s terms, by handing it over to a “vast amoral, impersonal, monolithic whole – nature, or history, or class, or race, or the ‘harsh realities of our time’, or the irresistible evolution of the social structure – that absorb and integrate us into its limitless, indifferent, neutral texture, which it is senseless to evaluate or criticize, and against which we fight to our certain doom.”[18]
Berlin occasionally listed the kinds of supreme causes around which various monist myths had been constructed, and which he thought ought to be avoided. Typical is the following list of “concepts” that had “played their parts in teleological-historical systems as protagonists upon the stage of history”: “Race, colour, Church, nation, class, climate; irrigation, technology, geopolitical situation; civilization, social structure, the Human Spirit, the Collective Unconscious.”[19] Oddly enough political system, regime type, democracy, republicanism, or the like are missing consistently from Berlin’s lists.[20]
In his ‘end of history, these factors were very much included in Fukuyama’s monist teleology, and it has been Fukuyama’s ideas unfortunately that have prevailed since the Cold War’s end. They massaged Americans, the American elite, and theur democratic messianism, an important element in US political culture since the founding. Early Americans hailed Napoleon’s effort to bring freedom, brotherhood, and equality to the world. They saw him, as an apostle not the messiah of universal liberty. America was the messiah, and Providence dictated that it would spread the gospel of liberty across the seas. America had a duty to ‘make the world safe for democracy’, then to make the world democratic (republican). The prophet and its European apostles of the world republican order spawned armies of democratizers, democracy-promoters, democracy consultants, and economic consultants. They fueled an American hubris that was already bursting with national pride and egoism by the time of America’s ‘victory in the Cold War’ and its acquisition of a new status as ‘the world’s lone superpower,’ the indispensable country, the global hegemon. The American apostles and armies of democracy spread the good news that that there was a sure solution to the world’s plagues and pestilences of repression, war, violence, racism, and poverty. All these problems would wither away, if states democratized, marketized, and generally liberalized here and now, and –with a little nudge from Washington – they surely would. The outcome was foretold by Fukuyama. All regimes designated as authoritarian were on the wrong side of history, and to be on the right side of history means that countries with such regimes could be destabilized, infected with Western ideas and pr-Western groups funded by U.S. government bodies and organizations tied to them, and then subjected to coups and revolutionary plots. Mechanisms such as prospective EU and NATO membership, IMF and World Bank loan programs, and government-funded grants could be used to split societies and states.
The curious urgency that emerged, of course, had nothing to do with some mandated teleological tempo or some grave need to avert an imminent apocalypse (excluding the green movement’s claims about global warming, cooling, climate change). It had much to do with human ambitions. Careers are not built on deliverables with a posthumous timeframe. The ambitious, messianic American elite is populated by no less ambitious apparatchiks, to whom the message of the End of History appealed quite nicely because through it they might become iconoclastic pioneers and heroes in the great eschatological adventure of building the liberal democratic utopia to be constructed on the model of their homeland.
For these democracy-promoting missionaries’s ‘target states’, they only needed to follow the American playbook in order to traverse successfully the road to salvation in the new order. But just at the height of its greatness, America was well into an era of decay and decadence that began during the victorious Cold War. The purity and beauty of her message belied the impurity and ugliness of many of these American elitists, who brought to the capitols of the world the increasingly greedy, hedonistic, and corrupt way of life of a too well-fed, too well-appointed, too self-centered, too self-impressed nation and a good many of its people. American artistic culture and entertainment was already perverse by Cold War’s end. The political system and culture were being ‘solved’ by American elites, who could now remain in power for decades on end as they began to resemble the Soviet gerontocracy. The media would help Bill Clinton get past his direct lie to the face of the American people” ‘I never had sex with that woman. Never’ and helped his wife pedal the idea that the notion that he had was a ‘right-wing conspiracy’. That by now is routine Democrat Party-state practice, perfected as has its media control over the ensuing three decades as Americans portrayed themselves and imagined their system as something quite different. Corruption was attaining an inordinate level, driven by the lobbying industry and the lust for power and influence among American elites—the lust intensified by the realization that one was not just a ‘player’ in the nation’s capitol, but in the world’s capitol, the center of the universe about to be unified under the Heavenly Kingdom of American Democracy. One – the most mediocre, sniveling bureaucrat – could imagine himself a god, determining the fates of people, nations, states, and entire continents.
Thus, the advancing kingdom was careful not to leave everything to History’s inevitable teleology and eschatology of an inevitable republican utopia at the end of time. It chose to be proactive and mitigate the risks of ‘spontaneity’ as Lenin had chosen to do in regard to Russia. Lenin deplored the Mensheviks’ tendency towards spontaneity or the natural, historically determined evolution from capitalism to socialism, using the proletariat’s majority in capitalist states in order to transform their systems gradually from the inside using the liberalism and pluralism of republican representation and freedoms to hang capitalism. The idea of organizing revolution in Russia was itself already a rejection of spontaneity. For Lenin, there were probably no doubts about the outcome, but the tempo had clearly dubious benefits for his lust for power and revenge of the execution of his brother by the Russian Imperial autocracy. An overwhelmingly agricultural state like Russia with 80 percent of the population consisting of rural peasants could not be relied upon – at least in Lenin’s lifetime, so it seemed – to yield a proletarian revolution by and of itself. For a socialist revolution in Russia to rise up, the weak proletariat needed the energetic, concentrated leadership of a professional revolutionary party, alliances with ethno-national minorities and the peasantry, revolutionary terrorism, and financial and economic backing from the Russian Empire’s enemy in World War I, capitalist Germany.
Now, a century later, Americans too would not simply rely on History taking its natural, predetermined course to the republican, free market end. Spreading the Word through preaching the American playbook of democratization was not sufficient to bolster Historical spontaneity’s perhaps limited dynamism. There were doubts among many, despite Fukuyama’s prophecy. Proactive, even aggressive American leadership from Washington and Brussels was required, and woe to the government that sought to avoid fulfilling American playbook’s requirements because it feared the risk of the collapse their government, economy, or the state and society themselves. Washington realized that governments might need mre than nudging. If economic threats and political coercion did not suffice, such governments needed to be overthrown in color revolutions, even military interventions. The list of such cases is long: Iraq, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Ukraine again. But most important was Moscow for it had turned against the West’s force-feeding of NATO expansion and the coups undertaken so the feeding went easier among Russia’s allies and neighbors. Moscow itself should not be tempted to rely on extensive methods of post-Soviet development such as rebuilding its empire or simply retaining historically tied former Soviet republics as close allies rather than democratizing and building free markets the Western way. Russian officials might need to be bought and convinced to betray the national interest so that they privatized as rapidly as possible. Elections might need to be rigged – this was authoritarian, barbarian Russia after all! – to ensure communists or fascists did not return and undermine democracy. NATO might need to be expanded in order to maximize American power and hegemony without limits so that governments did not follow the Russian example and begin to act on second thoughts about following the American, IMF, World Bank pressure and demands stipulating the urgency of rapidly democratizing and marketizing their systems even if such policies risked political instability, state failure, military coups, and the like.
American messianism and teleology had a dark side. As with the all-encompassing, universalism of the international communist eschatology that the US and its victory in the Cold war had demystified and defeated, America’s belief in its values’ universalism and her messianic teleology and eschatology came with a confining monism that could easily devolve into republican liberalism’s opposites—authoritarianism, repression, even terrorism. Notwithstanding Berlin’s allegiance to the New Deal practice of the managerial society, he was well aware of the danger of “the unnumbered American disciples” of a centuries’ long line of “benevolent sages” and contemporary “benevolent humanitarian prophets” such as Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Bernard Shaw.[21] If Berlin were alive today he surely would be consternated by American Wokism at home; the American zeal for democratism, color revolutionism, and universalistic democracy-promotion abroad; and the mammoth gap between these respective domestic and foreign agendas. In a letter, he once wrote: “Equality is a noble ideal … but when the desire for social justice takes resentful … forms, it leads to repression.”[22] Given his value pluralism and practical fatalism, Berlin, if he were with us today, would not be surprised that nations, cultures, or civilizations are frequently incompatible with each other and clash. This was mankind’s eternal, common predicament, and fault could be found in all entities. Berlin, therefore, might very well also have found fault with the Russian response to American democratic teleological historicism.
PART 2: FUKUYAMA, BERLIN, AND RUSSIA
Russia (and China) has foiled Fukuyama’s end of history. The last man may not be Soviet, but he certainly will not be American either. Rather than follow the crowd of post-communist states following the American playbook domestically and joining the West’s alliances for the attainment of perpetual republican peace and prosperity, Russia has balked for a variety of reasons. Among them are Russia’s own inclination to monisms – tselostnost’ or wholeness, as I demonstrated in Russian Tselostnost’[23] – and the rejection of the idea of the universality of Western values, whatever they might be at any particular moment. The latter factor – rejection of the West – has numerous causes: a long history of Western interference and invasion in Russia, Russian cultural differences with the West, NATO expansion, the noted color revolutions targeting Russia and its allies, among others.
The former factor – the Russian aspiration to or belief in tselostnost’ – is a predominant inclination in Russian culture, thought, history, and politics. We might say, using Berlin’s comparative analogy, that Russians are hedgehogs, tending to focus on one big thing, more so than many other peoples, who tend to be foxes, knowing many things.[24] In Russian Tselostnost’ I detailed four types of tselostnost’ important in Russian culture and discourse. First, ‘monist tselostnost`’ or simly ‘monism’ is the belief in, or aspiration to wholeness or unity between God and humankind, Heaven and the universe, the Divine and earthly, spirit and matter. Its most powerful origination lies in Russian Orthodox Christianity’s eschatology, theurgy, and teleology. The most obvious example is religious philosopher and mystic Vladimir Solovev’s idea of ‘vseedinstvo’ or ‘all-unity.’ The communist era iteration envisaged unity between man and machine. Second, is universalist wholeness or simply universalism — the idea of the unity of all humankind – also derives from Orthodox messianism, missionarianism, and the aspiration to a worldwide Christian community united under God’s divine grace or blagodat’. Communist internationalism and belief in a worldwide communist revolution and proletarian utopia evolved from the Orthodox sensibility of universdal Christian love. Semi-universalisms such as pan-Orthodoxy, pan-Slavism, and Eurasianism evolved from the Russian passion for universal integrity rooted in Orthdodoxy. Solidarist tselostnost’ or solidarism is the idea of the solidarity or wholeness of the Russian nation, society, culture, and state either separately or together. Russian communalist tselostnost’ or communalism can be thought of as solidarism or unity at the sub-national or social level. It is the Russian preference for the group or community and its interests over the individual and his or her interests. It has been expressed historically in the village mir and obshchina in which the land or produce from it was communal property. An Orthodox form of communalism can be found in the belief in ‘conciliarity’ or sobornost’—the spiritual interconnection and mutual love believed to be enjoyed by those of Orthodox living with Christ and God’s blagodat’. Communist era versions of these are the ideas of collectivism and institutions such as the kolkhoz (collective farm), partiinost’ (‘partiness’ or party loyalty and unity), and the kommunalka (communal apartment). Whereas Berlin focused on a more general concept of ‘monism’ in philosophy and particularly political philosophy and ideologies, I explored types of monism or tselostnost’ – a label I use to express the same idea as Berlin’s monism as reflected in Russian culture and discourse – in detail through close reading mostly of Russian texts but also political, social, and economic behaviors.[25] More recently, under the influence of the revived Russian historicism and tselostnost’ of the pre-Soviet Russian religious and philosophical renaissance, there has been a return to historical tselostnost’ as a Russian cultural value and topic of voluminous discourse, with Putin himself calling for respect for all of Russian history as a common treasure of Russian civilization and bulwark of solidarism against disunity, dissent, and revolution being encouraged in Russia by the West.[26]
Russian tselostnost’ may very well be a significant maximalization of the tendency towards monism extant in other cultures, but it is not so radical a departure that Russian becomes some sort of perverse civilizational outlier, as many nowadays like to claim. Nevertheless, perhaps as nowhere or no other time in world history, 19th century Russian history was gravely plagued by a harsh reality, and so Western monist visions mixed with powerful native ones to produce peculiarly monist, absolutist, maximalist, and utopian revolutionary visions. These trends in their non-materialist, non-communist forms have seen a rebirth in Russia since the Soviet collapse. This great return has interacted with the wounds of that collapse and of post-Cold War slights such as NATO expansion and demands that ‘backward Russia’ catch up to the West as soon as possible no matter how fast and far the West itself was moving away from its own traditions of classical liberalism and republicanism towards a new totalitarian universalism of transhumanism and simultaneously peculiar, selective particularisms such as utilitarian identitarianism of various sorts (color-ness, feminism, homosexualism, transgenderism. Western demands that Russia Westernize, indeed Americanize, bumped up against the ‘great return’ of Russia’s pre-communist culture and traditions based on such values as solidarism, communalism, monism, and even several semi-universalisms. The perceived NATO military threat, the interventions and interference in Russia’s and its allies’ and neighbors’ politics, particularly through color revolutions, and the overweaning influence of the West in Russia led to a passionate desire to rely instead on its own traditions. On this background, traditional Russian solidarist tselostnost’ or solidarism, the desire to preserve the national political and cultural wholeness, reactivated easily, quickly, and powerfully. Russians began to pursue ways to protect their traditions of solidarity and communality ideologically and geopolitically. Russian discourse has begun to settle on several: Orthodoxy religiosity and monism over Western secularism and rationalist materialism, national solidarism over pluralism, communalism over individualism, and the semi-universalisms of pan-Orthodoxy, pan-Slavism, and most of all a revived ‘pan-nationalist’ or ‘civilizationalist’ neo-Eurasianism over republicanism, communism, indentitarianism, and fascism.
Russia’s return to Orthodoxy religiosity and monism should not be overstated, but there is no doubt that Orthodoxy has replaced the secular religion of communism as the most prominent belief in post-Soviet Russia today. Many Russians still believe in the eschatology and teleology of Orthodoxy and that God acts in the world. There are other contenders for the Russian bent for the transcendent and mystical – New Agism, Buddhism, Krishnaism, even the more technological transhumanism; but they all reject Western secularism and rationalist materialism.
Authoritarian national solidarism has triumphed over democratic-republican pluralism yet again in Russian history. As in earlier times, Russians’ preference for tselostnost’ was nurtured and intensified by outside forces after the brief flirtation with Western pluralism in the perestroika and early post-perestroika years. NATO and less so EU expansion, Western support for Bosnia-Herzogovinian, Slovenian, and Croation independence from Yugoslavia, the NATO war against Serbia in Kosovo, and Western interference in Russia, allied and neighboring states through massive democracy-promotion and color revolutions led to a rejection of the West and its ‘universal’ values, which seemed to coincide curiously with Western power maximizing through the expansion of military, political and economic power in newly ‘democratized’ states. On this background, opposition forces again began to appear or could be framed as constituting a dangerous fifth column doing the West’s bidding for color revolution.
An accompanying element has been the revival of old communalisms along with the survival of collectivism in communist quarters over individualism. With anti-Westernism, anti-oligarchic, and anti-free market sentiment emerging during the depression of the 1990s and subsequent alienation from the West described above, pluralist beliefs in economic competition yielded to the old state-led economy relying on large state corporations and a large bureaucratic state in order to integrate the business, educational, cultural, scientific sectors. Russia’s communists still believe in the old collectivism. Even the ancient idea of Orthodox sobornost’ has seen a minor revival.
The semi-universalisms of pan-Orthodoxy, pan-Slavism, and most of all the ‘pan-nationalism’ or civilizationalism of neo-Eurasianism have gained some favor in today’s Russia. They replace nationalism as a driving ‘monism’ of the kind Berlin wished to hold at arm’s length. Fukuyama’s end of history completely missed the rise of late Soviet and post-Cold War, post-Soviet nationalism (and civilizationalism). Indeed, he and many others missed the importance of nationalism and other communitarianisms (ethno-national, confessional, gender, and other identity-based ‘isms’) as strong competitors to Western liberal republicanism.Berlin might have expected it and certainly would have worried when it arose, as suggested by his inclusion of the ‘nation’ in the above-mentioned list of monisms he thought can lead to illiberal absolutism. In his 1978 article “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power”, he referred to nationalism as “ideologically important and dangerous,” though he did not think it a uniformly malignant phenomenon.[27] Berlin noted that in an earlier era the power of nationalism had been neglected by liberal political thinkers and policymakers to grave detriment. In that case of social psychological stumbling, the social stresses caused by the industrializing and modernizing German state of Frederick the Great produced a powerful socialist and communist movement to challenge the emerging German pluralism and republicanism. But ultimately, it was nationalism that emerged victorious. The alienation felt by German writers because of their diminution in the new order spread rapidly to the general population after the wound of defeat in World War I and the ‘stab in the back’ of Versailles, competing with Marx’s alienation of the proletariat and liberals’ ‘humanity yearning to be free.’ The result is all too well-known. These writers and the cultural angst and romanticist national image they produced constituted, in Berlin’s view, the sufficient cause that operationalized the necessary cause for the rise of nationalism or “national self-assertion”: the pre-existence of a class or group of people in the culture ready to interpret the wound in terms that mobilize nationalism; “a group or class of persons who are in search of a focus for loyalty and self-identification, or perhaps a base for power, no longer supplied by earlier forces for cohesion – tribal, or religious, or feudal, or dynastic, or military.” With “wound of conquest, or even cultural disparagement from without, … the rise of nationalism may be prepared.”[28] On the background of an already disoriented and alienated German elite and a population already seeking a new focus, the rout of Germany nationalism’s first wave under Kaiser Wilhelm in World War I and the wounds of Versailles and economic depression sparked a more virulent assertion of the German national will under National Socialism. The post-war settlement was forced to address a myriad of new nationalisms seeking an independent state through which they might develop and assert their newfound identities.
Berlin the potential for danger in four characteristics of nationalism present in all of its various shades: “the belief in the overriding need to belong to a nation; in the organic relationships of all the elements that constitute a nation; in the value of our own simply because it is ours; and finally, faced by rival contenders for authority or loyalty, in the superiority of its claims.” He saw that “(t)hese ingredients, in varying degrees and proportions, are to be found in all the rapidly growing nationalist ideologies which at present (writing circa 1977-78) proliferate on the earth.” He amended this to note that nationalism’s power is heightened when it is coupled with an industrializing and/or modernizing statism—the State being another focus of monism potentially dangerous to humankind.[29] A better appreciation of this risk of rising nationalism in the post-Cold War era as well as the peculiar mix of challenges facing a ‘transitioning’ Russia, for example, might have stayed the hands of NATO before expansion and those of the IMF and World Bank before punishing Russia for reforming ‘too slowly’.
Berlin likely would have had trepidations about any nationalist or neo-nationalist Russian ideology. Much in Russia’s recently emerging ideology reflects Berlin’s four characteristics of state-oriented, non-ethnic nationalism, but its particulars are a direct result of post-Cold war wounds inflicted by the West. After two decades of post-Soviet Russia lacking an ideology – an official state ideology is forbidden by the Russian constitution – a Russian ideology has begun to coalesce in response to the liberal West’s encroachments upon Russia’s sphere of influence: NATO and EU expansion and color revolutionism targeting Russia’s neighbors (most importantly, in Ukraine and the Maidan revolt), allies, and Russia itself. Such “wounds” are a necessary, though not sufficient cause of the rise of nationalism, in Berlin’s reading.[30] However, they very well could be sufficient for the rise of a nationalist or quasi-nationalist ideology, if there is a prior, robust history of slights and wounds driven by one and the same source as those that produced previous ones. The “new Russian ideology,” as I have tried to understand it, consists of solidarism, religiosity (primarily Orthodoxy), social traditionalism, and neo-Eurasianism.[31]
In a recent effort, The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021), I showed that Russian history has been punctuated if not largely populated by a series of existential crises and ‘wounds’, most connected to or directly inflicted by the West on Russia: military invasions, military interventions, political and cultural interference, and the fomenting of dissent, opposition, and division. These great crises – the Time of Troubles or Smuta, Napoleon’s invasion and the Patriotic War, Hitler’s invasion and the Great Patriotic War, and numerous lesser but notable events – developed in Russia a powerful security vigilance norm. Thus, security vigilance shapes both Russia’s strategic culture that focuses on potential military threats from abroad, mostly from the West, as well as its political culture, which most often promotes the norm of national solidarism emphasizing ontological security through identity and cultural unity and political stability through political solidarity. I noted with regard to Russia, as did Berlin did regarding humankind, there have been intermittent pluralist breakthroughs. While Russia’s security vigilance usually has been the dominant strand in Russian culture, there have been brief periods in which vigilance relaxes, pluralism in the political and broader sense replaces monist tendencies, and Russia becomes more open to and accepting of the West and its values.[32] The soon to be forgotten perestroika era and post-perestroika ‘wild ‘90s’ constitute one of several such pluralist breakthroughs in Russian history confounded in significant part by Western ‘overreaching.’ Tselostnost’, in particular solidarism, has been valued mostly within the traditionalist wing of the Russian political spectrum, no matter which regime – Tsarist Imperial, Soviet, or post-Soviet – one is discussing.
Russia today is being shaped and challenged by its cultural tendency to remembrance traditional Russian values, norms, and ideas when it perceives external threats, in particular from the West. In such embrace reconstitutes what it regards at the time as old tradition. Today, this includes ‘monisms’ or the wholeness of communitarian types other than nationalism. Any form of ultra-nationalism of the ethnonational kind as a monist ideology driving Russian politics is a distant proposition rather than an emerging reality, though present NATO-Russia Ukrainian war has the potential to do precisely this over the long-term. But Russians have never been really drawn to ethno-nationalism. Only small ultra-nationalist movements emerged in periods of Russian history that should have been fertile for its development: the Russian Imperial revolutionary era from the 1860s through 1917 (the Black Hundred movement is a case in point) and the during the rise of nationalism in the period of the Soviet collapse, which affected the Soviet Union’s non-Russian nationalities more than the Russians (Russian examples include Pamyat, and Vladimir Zhirinovskii’s Liberal Democratic Partyof Russia). Traditionally, Russian nationalism has been focused on the state and the entire society, not on the Great Russian ethnicity. Russian universalism and its semi-universalisms serve as an antidote to the rise of a powerful ethnic-centered ultra-nationalism. Ethno-nationalism also bumps up against the cherished norm of solidarism, as 80 percent of Russia’s population is comprised of ethnic (and religious) minority groups. Many of them, such as the Volga Tatars and more recently the Kadyrovs’ Chechens, are well assimilated into the Russian sociopolitical whole.
A quasi-national form, semi-universalist communitarianism – a new civilizationalism – has arisen to reinforce state nationalism or ultra-patriotism in post-Soviet Russia: neo-Eurasianism. It is a communitarianism similar to nationalism, but its base and constituency is far broader. It is semi-universal, as it is both multinational, multi-confessional, and even multi-civilizational, combining together several nations, religions, and even civilizations into a counter-vision to secular, anti-traditional Western Wokism. It involves ideas about Russia, Orthodoxy, Eurasia, non-Russian civilizations and religions and their place in the geopolitics and geoeconomics of civilizational competition within the international system.
Part and parcel of Russian neo-Eurasianism is religiosity or confessionalism, in the case of Russian and Eurasian civilization, civilizational democracy within the international system, and communalist and solidarist societies’ organic nature being preferable to rationally-determined artificial identity constructions. Confessionalism takes the form of Russian Orthodoxy and several connected ideas which taken together along with the religion itself can be said to constitute Orthodoxism. More broadly, this is a confessional semi-universalism, envisioning Eurasia as a geo-cultural space consisting of traditionalist cultures, religions, and civilizations: Slavic Orthodox, Asian Confucian, Buddhist, Hindi, and Islamic. With the war in Ukraine, there is a strong possibility of the radicalization of Russian nationalism and/or neo-Eurasian civilizationalism. All these civilizations are regarded to be equal among themselves and with the Western world, though the Eurasian civilizations are superior for being rooted in traditionalist religious and family values that can form organic communities as opposed to the artificial and constructed societies of the West with their ‘anthills’ of atomized, de-cultured, and Godless individuals.
Berlin’s value pluralism allowed for a respect for strong national feeling of patriotism, even as he condemned any nationalism that claimed the innate superiority of one group, nation, or civilization over another. In our world split apart, we actually have two mutually antagonistic civilization projects, with the Sino-Russian quasi-Eurasian project rising to challenge the Western universal order. The trend in Russia, if not so much in China, is for neo-Eurasianism and its ideological pillars rising to the status of universal values superior to Western homosexualism, transgenderism, and transhumanism. Berlin praised Herder’s critique on Enlightenment universalism and his emphasis on the importance for individuals to have a sense of ‘belonging’ to a larger community within and through which he can express his individuality. His uncovering of the social function of ‘belonging’, for Berlin, was Herder’s “most original achievement” and lifted him “above his generation” as a social psychologist. Both men insisted that, as Berlin notes: “(N)o one milieu or group or way of life is necessarily superior to any other; but it is what it is, and assimilation to a single universal pattern, of laws or language or social structure, as advocated by the French lumie`res, would destroy what is most living and valuable in life and art. … Every group has a a right to be happy in its own way. It is terrible arrogance to affirm, that to be happy, everyone should become European.”[33] The “emptiness of cosmopolitanism,” Berlin notes, is clear, and “(t)hose who have grasped the notion that men are made miserable not only by poverty, disease, stupidity, or the effects of ignorance, but also because they are are misfits or outsiders or not spoken to, that liberty and equality are nothing without fraternity…are in possession of one of Herder’s idees maitresses.”[34] Here Berlin’s laudatory interpretation of Herder sounds much like Russian neo-Eurasianism’s idea – now promoted by President Vladmir Putin and Foreigng Minister Sergei Lavrov, among many others – of a democratic international order that respects all civilizations rather than one that promotes today’s Western model of ‘liberal democracy.’ Berlin worried more, perhaps, about the dangers of universalist monisms such as communist internationalism and today’s ‘liberal’ globalism, especially as they combine with American nationalism to produce the present global schism. Therefore, he might find neo-Eurasianism’s civilizational pluralism attractive, though he would have remained wary of it devolving into a grand version of exclusivist nationalism – another massive monist project no more tolerant of civilizational ‘others’ than Western liberalism has become.
Conclusion
Fukuyama’s end of history is based on the assumptions of the Enlightenment. In Berlin’s words: “The ideal of a single, scientifically organized world system governed by reason was the heart of the programme of Enlightenment.”[35] But Berlin described a familiar dynamic for the failure of the Enlightenment’s successors to see the rise of nationalism: “Among the assumptions of rational thinkers of the liberal type in the nineteenth and for some decades in the twentieth century were these: that liberal democracy was the most satisfactory – or, at least, the least unsatisfactory – form of human organization; that the nation State was, or at least had historically come to be, the normal unit of independent, self-governing society; and, finally, that once the multinational empires…had been dissolved into their constituent parts, the yearning for union of men with a common language, common habits, memories, outlooks would at last be satisfied and a society of liberated, self-determined nation States…would live at peace and in harmony with each other, no longer impeded by the irrational survivals of the past.”[36] He notes also that neither socialism or liberalism “anticipated the growth of national sentiment and, more than this of aggressive nationalism” as it persisted in Europe and extended to the Third World.[37] Once again the power of nationalism, communitarianism or simply communalism has been underestimated, and the cost of this mistake is only just beginning to be revealed.
But Berlin warned of the dangers of Europe’s “Eurocentrism,” regarding it as one of the causes of the West’s failure to anticipate the rise of nationalism at the beginning of the last century. Now the same has occurred at the beginning of the present century in relation, first of all, to Russia, a European, yet not quite entirely European country. The false assumption that rational choice dictated a Russian transition to ‘democracy’ no matter how much the West pressed on Russian sensitivities – security from the West, national pride, and honor – led to the all too predictable outcome. The West’s threatening of Russia’s national military, political, and ontological (cultural-identity) security has brought the rise of a Europe-autonomous, anti-Western traditionalist Russia determined to treat its wounds in Ukraine. She is joined by a risen China, which even more insistently rejects republicanism but uses the market to feed its neo-communist state oligarchic-militarist regime and rally Russia and the rest of the Rest – non-Western lesser powers and smaller states – against the aging Western hegemon. Kant’s and Fukuyama’s democratic peace is being confounded again by Berlin’s “crooked timber of humanity,” West and East. Perhaps the best evidence of Fukuyama’s miscomprehension can be found in Fukuyama himself. In October 2022, Stanford University and Fukuyama himself, along with another Stanford and Hoover Institution ‘champion of democracy’, former democracy-promoting US ambassador to Moscow, hosted leaders of the neo-fascist, white supremacist Ukrainian organization ‘Azov’ [https://forward.com/opinion/552958/why-did-stanford-host-azov-neo-nazis/; https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/fukuyama-senior-fellow-stanford-far-right-group-18193614.php; and https://twitter.com/mossrobeson__/status/1576765779789328385; on Azov and is predecessor organization the Social-National Assembly see Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the ‘New Cold War (McFarland, 2018)]. These democracy-promoters have transformed into American nationalists allied with the most despicable ultra-nationalist/neo-fascist organizations on the international, not just Ukrainian stage today. The irony is striking and shocking.
Berlin was right about the power of nationalism. Just like the American republic, Ukraine, Russia, and others are mired in the throes of nationalism, often in extremist forms, so to have America’s democracy-promoters been drawn into the nationalist milieu. In the end, what we confront today is not the end of history – putting aside the possible nuclear termination – but instead just another cycle of banal authoritarianism, nationalism, militarism, and general amoralism emanating from the West and the Rest.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” The National Interest, Summer 1989, pp. 3-18, at pp. 3-4.
[2] Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018).
[3] Louis Menand, “Francis Fukuyama postpones the End of History,” The New Yorker, 3 September 2018 Issue, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/francis-fukuyama-postpones-the-end-of-history.
[4] Francis Fukuyama, “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History,” The Atlantic, 17 October 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/francis-fukuyama-still-end-history/671761/.
[5] On the Russian and US revolutions from above, see, for example, Gordon M. Hahn, “Working Paper: Comparing the Russian and American Revolutions from Above, Part 3,” Russia and Eurasian Studies, 6 January 2022, https://gordonhahn.com/2022/01/06/working-paper-comparing-the-russian-and-american-revolutions-from-above-part-3-conclusion/.
[6] F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, 1873-1881 (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), pp. 254-5.
[7] See Berlin’s semi-autobiographical “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage, 2013), pp. 1-16, at p. 2.
[8] Roger Hausheer, “Introduction,” in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, pp. xxxiii-xlvi, at p. xlv.
[9] Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” in Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (London: Vintage Books, 2013), pp. 119-90, at p. 132.
[10] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” pp. 138-9.
[11] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 138.
[12] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 139.
[13] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 187.
[14] I explored the phenomenon of Russian thinking centered on ‘wholeness’ or ‘tselostnost`’ in a signifcantly comprehensive and not as an idea confined to Russian culture but one that to a considerable degree is more pronounced in Russia. See Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022).
[15] Aileen Kelly, “Introduction: A Complex Vision,” in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, revised edition (New York: Penguin, 2013), pp. xxiii-xxxv at p. xxv.
[16] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 180.
[17] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 154.
[18] Berlin, “Historical Inevitablity,” p. 189, see also pp. 152-4.
[19] Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” p. 139.
[20] See Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” pp. 139 and 151-2.
[21] Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” p. 137.
[22] Dalya Abrege, “Isaiah Berlin’s Letters reveal his despair at the growth of ‘barbarism’,” The Guardian, 15 June 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/16/isaiah-berlin-letters-modern-youth.
[23] Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics.
[24] Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” in Berlin, Russian Thinkers, pp. 24-92, at p. 24.
[25] Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022).
[26] Gordon M. Hahn, “Working Paper: Russian Historical Tselostnost’, Parts 1-3, Conclusion,” Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2023, https://gordonhahn.com/2023/04/13/working-paper-russian-historical-tselostnost-parts-1-3-conclusion/.
[27] Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind,” pp. 581-604, at p. 590. For a recent attempt to coopt the value plural Berlin’s opposition to the monism of nationalism to serve the Democrat Party-state’s war on then-President Donald Trump, see https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/11/07/we-are-all-isaiah-berliners-now/.
[28] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” pp. 595 and 598.
[29] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” p. 594.
[30] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” p. 595.
[31] On the new Russian ideology just as it was emerging prior to the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war began, see Gordon M. Hahn, “The New Russian Ideology,” Russian Eurasian Studies, 12 August 2021, https://gordonhahn.com/2021/08/12/the-new-russian-ideology/ and Gordon M. Hahn, “Shoigu, Succession Politics, Ideology-Building, and Cultural Discourse in Russia, Parts 1 and 2 (Complete),” Russian Eurasian Studies, 26 November 2021, https://gordonhahn.com/2021/11/26/shoigu-succession-politics-ideology-building-and-cultural-discourse-in-russia-parts-1-and-2-complete/.
[32] Gordon M. Hahn, The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (Jefferson: McFarland, 2018).
[33] Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind, pp. 359-435, at p. 415.
[34] Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment,” pp. 416-17.
[35] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” p. 603.
[36] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” p. 600.
[37] Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” pp. 601-3.
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About the Author –
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu
Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.
Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.