Pub Date : 2022-01-03DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211065909
A. Etkind
Russian leaders first tried to poison him, then unlawfully imprisoned him, and now are publicly torturing him. His enemies see him as an illegitimate pretender to the Russian throne. His fans are captivated by his ability to survive assassinations and withstand torture. I was among those who nominated Alexey Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize. Though he has not received it, this failure exposes meaningful though underappreciated truths about Russia and about the world. My story will leap back and forward between Navalny’s individual actions, the peculiarities of Putinism, and global issues of neoliberal governance.
{"title":"Alexey Navalny: A hero of the new time","authors":"A. Etkind","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211065909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211065909","url":null,"abstract":"Russian leaders first tried to poison him, then unlawfully imprisoned him, and now are publicly torturing him. His enemies see him as an illegitimate pretender to the Russian throne. His fans are captivated by his ability to survive assassinations and withstand torture. I was among those who nominated Alexey Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize. Though he has not received it, this failure exposes meaningful though underappreciated truths about Russia and about the world. My story will leap back and forward between Navalny’s individual actions, the peculiarities of Putinism, and global issues of neoliberal governance.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-01-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88403443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-30DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211066449
Ostap Kushnir
The article uses Eric Voegelin’s ontology to address domestic processes in contemporary Ukraine. It explains how interpretations of experiences of history and transcendence evoke political order and justice. It also outlines the nature of political symbols deriving from these experiences. The article argues that Ukraine’s social architecture is constructed according to a set of arrangements that are generally regarded as moral and functional under given circumstances. As a result, it provides political elites a platform from which to build a plan of action and gain legitimacy. The article not only shows how Voegelin’s ontology can be used to explain Zelensky’s 2019 presidential election victory but also highlights its interpretative advantages over competing analytical approaches from within the frameworks of institutionalism and behaviorism.
{"title":"The great dichotomy: How experiences of history and transcendence explain Ukraine’s political life","authors":"Ostap Kushnir","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211066449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211066449","url":null,"abstract":"The article uses Eric Voegelin’s ontology to address domestic processes in contemporary Ukraine. It explains how interpretations of experiences of history and transcendence evoke political order and justice. It also outlines the nature of political symbols deriving from these experiences. The article argues that Ukraine’s social architecture is constructed according to a set of arrangements that are generally regarded as moral and functional under given circumstances. As a result, it provides political elites a platform from which to build a plan of action and gain legitimacy. The article not only shows how Voegelin’s ontology can be used to explain Zelensky’s 2019 presidential election victory but also highlights its interpretative advantages over competing analytical approaches from within the frameworks of institutionalism and behaviorism.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77789904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211066448
M. Lipman
The post-Soviet decades have brought about significant changes of the Russian social landscape. A countless number of civic initiatives engaged in charitable operation, legal assistance, education, environment, arts and culture, etc. have emerged across Russia. Self-help communities and effective crowd-funding for all kinds of purposes are evidence of public solidarity inconceivable in the Soviet state. The second half of the 2010s were marked by a rise in investigative reporting based on state-of-the-art data journalism and the rapid progress in social media. Apparently, the impressive rise in civil society has become a matter of growing concern for the Russian government, and in the past year, the Kremlin has stepped up persecutions of political activists and investigative media. This repressive surge is reminiscent of the events some four decades ago when the Soviet government undertook to radically eliminate the dissident movement. The activists of today may be different from the Soviet dissidents, but for now, they are just as defenseless vis-à-vis the state as the dissidents were.
{"title":"Dissent, its Persecutors, and the New Russia","authors":"M. Lipman","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211066448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211066448","url":null,"abstract":"The post-Soviet decades have brought about significant changes of the Russian social landscape. A countless number of civic initiatives engaged in charitable operation, legal assistance, education, environment, arts and culture, etc. have emerged across Russia. Self-help communities and effective crowd-funding for all kinds of purposes are evidence of public solidarity inconceivable in the Soviet state. The second half of the 2010s were marked by a rise in investigative reporting based on state-of-the-art data journalism and the rapid progress in social media. Apparently, the impressive rise in civil society has become a matter of growing concern for the Russian government, and in the past year, the Kremlin has stepped up persecutions of political activists and investigative media. This repressive surge is reminiscent of the events some four decades ago when the Soviet government undertook to radically eliminate the dissident movement. The activists of today may be different from the Soviet dissidents, but for now, they are just as defenseless vis-à-vis the state as the dissidents were.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82268543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211064760
Brad Evans, J. Reid
This essay makes a critical defence of free expression through the spirit of outrageousness. Drawing upon the ideas of Oscar Wilde, along with artists such as Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George and Jake and Dinos Chapman, it looks beyond the current attempts to reduce the question of freedom to quintessential liberal tropes. In doing so, the paper both offers a critique of the moral absolutism that’s taken over certain sectors of the so-called ‘radical left’, while demanding more political appreciation for creatives and those with the abilities to reimagine the human subject. Such a critique not only suggests the need to rethink the meaning for freedom beyond the play of libertarians, but it also calls forth a new political subjectivity who appears timely and yet timeless – the much maligned and theoretically ignored figure of the infidel, who allows us to break free from moral entrapments.
{"title":"Outrageous: Defending the art of free expression","authors":"Brad Evans, J. Reid","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211064760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211064760","url":null,"abstract":"This essay makes a critical defence of free expression through the spirit of outrageousness. Drawing upon the ideas of Oscar Wilde, along with artists such as Frida Kahlo, Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George and Jake and Dinos Chapman, it looks beyond the current attempts to reduce the question of freedom to quintessential liberal tropes. In doing so, the paper both offers a critique of the moral absolutism that’s taken over certain sectors of the so-called ‘radical left’, while demanding more political appreciation for creatives and those with the abilities to reimagine the human subject. Such a critique not only suggests the need to rethink the meaning for freedom beyond the play of libertarians, but it also calls forth a new political subjectivity who appears timely and yet timeless – the much maligned and theoretically ignored figure of the infidel, who allows us to break free from moral entrapments.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78084393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-12-21DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211067405
J. Surman, Ella Rossman
The essay is devoted to the specifics of the contemporary Russian opposition and civil society. We describe the characteristics of contemporary ‘intellectual activism’ and the growing network of small civil and political groups in today’s Russia. We show that Russian civil society remains fragile and fragmented; the public discussion is not focused on strategies of resistance to arbitrariness but on constructing moral categories such as the wide and vague concept of ‘new ethics’. We also show how outsiders appear among contemporary Russian dissidents, who are not supported by most independent leaders and intellectuals – these are young ‘new leftists’ and feminist activist groups. These political activists find themselves under pressure from both the siloviki and the authorities, and in the focus of criticism of opposition leaders, becoming, in fact, dissidents among dissidents in contemporary Russia.
{"title":"New dissidence in contemporary Russia: Students, feminism and new ethics","authors":"J. Surman, Ella Rossman","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211067405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211067405","url":null,"abstract":"The essay is devoted to the specifics of the contemporary Russian opposition and civil society. We describe the characteristics of contemporary ‘intellectual activism’ and the growing network of small civil and political groups in today’s Russia. We show that Russian civil society remains fragile and fragmented; the public discussion is not focused on strategies of resistance to arbitrariness but on constructing moral categories such as the wide and vague concept of ‘new ethics’. We also show how outsiders appear among contemporary Russian dissidents, who are not supported by most independent leaders and intellectuals – these are young ‘new leftists’ and feminist activist groups. These political activists find themselves under pressure from both the siloviki and the authorities, and in the focus of criticism of opposition leaders, becoming, in fact, dissidents among dissidents in contemporary Russia.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-12-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78661343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-07DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211052967
Eve Gianoncelli
When we spoke of the ‘New Right’ in the late 1970s, we were referring to two distinct configurations. Firstly, a political one based on an Anglo-American axis, and represented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Secondly, an intellectual one born in France, and embodied by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, which extensively spread in Europe. Although sharing a label, these two formations had pretty much nothing in common. The political New Right claimed social Conservatism and the market economy; the intellectual New Right combined anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism and an opposition to Judeo-Christianity. The expansion of the French New Right led some of his members as well as academics working on it to speak about a European New Right (Bar On, 2007; Milza, 2002). Recent studies have been dedicated to the global dimension of the New Right (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet and Williams, 2018). The emergence of the ‘alt-right’ which played an active part in the campaign and election of Donald Trump and which was influenced by the French New Right also mattered in such a process. The current intellectual and political convergence which allows us to speak of the New Right as a singular phenomenon would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. The forms that it may take today suggest the radicalization of the right, or to put it otherwise, a growing porosity between the right and the far right on a global level. But, this does not mean homogeneity. It is this plurality, and the new connections that have been made possible in particular since the 2010s, that I would like to examine here. To do so, I focus on an object which is omnipresent in conservative and more broadly reactionary discourses: Europe. The arguments of the political New Right as embodied, for example, by Margaret Thatcher had often consisted in claiming a lack of common values and European identity so as to criticize the legitimacy of EU authority (Coman and Leconte, 2019). More globally in reactionary rhetoric, Europe has been made a common target and presented as the cradle of liberalism, abstract human rights and bureaucracy, destructive of traditional social bonds. But, on the side of what was then the intellectual New Right, Europe has also been appropriated. At the crossroads of these two perspectives, since the 2010s, Central Europe governments and intellectuals have contested Europe by promoting another idea of Europeanness. At the core of this redefinition lies the historical opposition between Conservatives and Progressives in the context of what Hunter (1991) has defined
{"title":"The unification of the ‘New Right’? On Europe, identity politics and reactionary ideologies","authors":"Eve Gianoncelli","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211052967","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211052967","url":null,"abstract":"When we spoke of the ‘New Right’ in the late 1970s, we were referring to two distinct configurations. Firstly, a political one based on an Anglo-American axis, and represented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Secondly, an intellectual one born in France, and embodied by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, which extensively spread in Europe. Although sharing a label, these two formations had pretty much nothing in common. The political New Right claimed social Conservatism and the market economy; the intellectual New Right combined anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism and an opposition to Judeo-Christianity. The expansion of the French New Right led some of his members as well as academics working on it to speak about a European New Right (Bar On, 2007; Milza, 2002). Recent studies have been dedicated to the global dimension of the New Right (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet and Williams, 2018). The emergence of the ‘alt-right’ which played an active part in the campaign and election of Donald Trump and which was influenced by the French New Right also mattered in such a process. The current intellectual and political convergence which allows us to speak of the New Right as a singular phenomenon would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. The forms that it may take today suggest the radicalization of the right, or to put it otherwise, a growing porosity between the right and the far right on a global level. But, this does not mean homogeneity. It is this plurality, and the new connections that have been made possible in particular since the 2010s, that I would like to examine here. To do so, I focus on an object which is omnipresent in conservative and more broadly reactionary discourses: Europe. The arguments of the political New Right as embodied, for example, by Margaret Thatcher had often consisted in claiming a lack of common values and European identity so as to criticize the legitimacy of EU authority (Coman and Leconte, 2019). More globally in reactionary rhetoric, Europe has been made a common target and presented as the cradle of liberalism, abstract human rights and bureaucracy, destructive of traditional social bonds. But, on the side of what was then the intellectual New Right, Europe has also been appropriated. At the crossroads of these two perspectives, since the 2010s, Central Europe governments and intellectuals have contested Europe by promoting another idea of Europeanness. At the core of this redefinition lies the historical opposition between Conservatives and Progressives in the context of what Hunter (1991) has defined","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88791529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-06DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211052979
Vibeke Schou Tjalve
“Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Christian democracy” have emerged as darling far Right tropes, seemingly uniting radical conservatives in the US and Europe behind a single, geopolitical imaginary. This article presents a brief political-conceptual story of how “Judeo-Christianity” and “Christian democracy” became a rhetorical meeting ground for radical conservatives across the Atlantic. But it also sheds light on why deep, historical, intellectual, and ethnographic divides beneath, make those grounds highly unstable terrain. Divides not only between European and American traditions of liberalism and conservatism but also between the experiences and practices of state power that inform them. Beneath the slogans of Christian democracy espoused in such disparate contexts as Charlottesville and Budapest, move different legacies, memories, enemies.
{"title":"Judeo-Christian democracy and the Transatlantic Right: Travels of a contested civilizational imaginary","authors":"Vibeke Schou Tjalve","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211052979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211052979","url":null,"abstract":"“Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Christian democracy” have emerged as darling far Right tropes, seemingly uniting radical conservatives in the US and Europe behind a single, geopolitical imaginary. This article presents a brief political-conceptual story of how “Judeo-Christianity” and “Christian democracy” became a rhetorical meeting ground for radical conservatives across the Atlantic. But it also sheds light on why deep, historical, intellectual, and ethnographic divides beneath, make those grounds highly unstable terrain. Divides not only between European and American traditions of liberalism and conservatism but also between the experiences and practices of state power that inform them. Beneath the slogans of Christian democracy espoused in such disparate contexts as Charlottesville and Budapest, move different legacies, memories, enemies.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74713495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-31DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211052973
A. Alekseev
The article explores how the European populist radical right uses references to rights and freedoms in its political discourse. By relying on the findings of the existing research and applying the discourse-historical approach to electoral speeches by Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, the article abductively develops a functional typology of references to rights and freedoms commonly used in discourses of European PRR parties: it suggests that PRR discourses in Europe feature references to the right to sovereignty, citizens’ rights, social rights, and economic rights. Such references are used as a coherent discursive strategy to construct social actors following the PRR ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. As the PRR identifies itself with the people, defined along nativist and populist lines, rights are always attributed to it. The PRR represents itself as the defender of the people and its rights, while the elites and the aliens are predicated to threaten the people and its rights. References to rights in PRR discourses intrinsically link the individual with the collective, which allows to construct and promote a populist model of ethnic democracy.
{"title":"“Defend your right!” How the populist radical right uses references to rights and freedoms to discursively construct identities","authors":"A. Alekseev","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211052973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211052973","url":null,"abstract":"The article explores how the European populist radical right uses references to rights and freedoms in its political discourse. By relying on the findings of the existing research and applying the discourse-historical approach to electoral speeches by Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, the article abductively develops a functional typology of references to rights and freedoms commonly used in discourses of European PRR parties: it suggests that PRR discourses in Europe feature references to the right to sovereignty, citizens’ rights, social rights, and economic rights. Such references are used as a coherent discursive strategy to construct social actors following the PRR ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. As the PRR identifies itself with the people, defined along nativist and populist lines, rights are always attributed to it. The PRR represents itself as the defender of the people and its rights, while the elites and the aliens are predicated to threaten the people and its rights. References to rights in PRR discourses intrinsically link the individual with the collective, which allows to construct and promote a populist model of ethnic democracy.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79362341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-29DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211052976
Manni Crone
Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the idea of national sovereignty. Opposed to a liberal world order, they prefer a rogue world of nation-states on the loose. This essay seeks to complicate that narrative. It suggests that alongside political parties with a nationalist agenda, an increasing number of voices on the radical Right are now pushing for a re-spiritualized world order in which cultures, civilizations, and empires are to set the scene. This vision of global order echoes Christopher Coker’s recent claim that “we now live in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” But, why does this strand of the far-right prefer civilizations to nation-states? To ponder this question, this essay zooms in on the European New Right and more precisely two of its main luminaries, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. It shows how the New Right stretches back to classical geopolitics to imagine a future polycentric world order in which large civilizations are set free from American hegemony. The empires of the future are no longer underpinned by nation-states but by ethnopluralism—a “blossoming variety” of local, ethnic, agrarian polities.
{"title":"Towards great ethno-civilizations and spiritual empires? How the European New Right imagines a post-liberal world order","authors":"Manni Crone","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211052976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211052976","url":null,"abstract":"Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the idea of national sovereignty. Opposed to a liberal world order, they prefer a rogue world of nation-states on the loose. This essay seeks to complicate that narrative. It suggests that alongside political parties with a nationalist agenda, an increasing number of voices on the radical Right are now pushing for a re-spiritualized world order in which cultures, civilizations, and empires are to set the scene. This vision of global order echoes Christopher Coker’s recent claim that “we now live in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” But, why does this strand of the far-right prefer civilizations to nation-states? To ponder this question, this essay zooms in on the European New Right and more precisely two of its main luminaries, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. It shows how the New Right stretches back to classical geopolitics to imagine a future polycentric world order in which large civilizations are set free from American hegemony. The empires of the future are no longer underpinned by nation-states but by ethnopluralism—a “blossoming variety” of local, ethnic, agrarian polities.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87533566","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1177/2336825X211052974
V. Morozov
In the current Russian political landscape, there are no political forces that would fully qualify as part of the New Right. The political regime that took shape during Vladimir Putin’s presidency cannot be described as populist without major reservations (for a range of positions, see Casula, 2013; Matveev, 2017; Oliker, 2017; Laruelle, 2020). After the ideological transformation that it underwent starting in 2011–12, it can be described as conservative and traditionalist, but it still hesitates to fully embrace xenophobic nationalism, so characteristic of the politics of the New Right. What it shares with the New Right is its claim to directly represent the common people, bearers of the genuine national spirit, allegedly incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy and individual rights (Yudin, 2021). My interest in Putinism in the context of the debate on the New Right is driven by more than those similarities. I believe that Russia, as a subaltern empire (Morozov, 2015), offers a unique opportunity to discuss some of the basic structural preconditions for the emergence of the New Right in the former SecondWorld. A country that still strongly identifies with Europe but has always stood apart, Russia has an intellectual class that has for centuries tried to make sense of the double divide: one external, between Russia and Europe, and one domestic, between the elites and the masses. This article focuses on one particularly important manifestation of this interstitial identity – the fixation of the national debate on the figure of the peasant and, more broadly, uncivilised native, who serves as the embodiment of Russia’s uniqueness both for the advocates of Europeanisation and for the proponents of a Sonderweg. I interpret this phenomenon as an outcome of uneven and combined development of global capitalism (see Rosenberg, 2006, 2016 for a contemporary take on the concept). Combination manifested itself in Russia’s internal colonisation, which created a deep cultural divide between the educated class and the common people (Etkind, 2011; see also Hosking, 1997). This divide that is experienced as such until this day, by a society that is much more homogenous than it was as recently as one hundred years ago.
{"title":"Class, culture and political representation of the native in Russia and East Central Europe: Paving the way for the New Right?","authors":"V. Morozov","doi":"10.1177/2336825X211052974","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/2336825X211052974","url":null,"abstract":"In the current Russian political landscape, there are no political forces that would fully qualify as part of the New Right. The political regime that took shape during Vladimir Putin’s presidency cannot be described as populist without major reservations (for a range of positions, see Casula, 2013; Matveev, 2017; Oliker, 2017; Laruelle, 2020). After the ideological transformation that it underwent starting in 2011–12, it can be described as conservative and traditionalist, but it still hesitates to fully embrace xenophobic nationalism, so characteristic of the politics of the New Right. What it shares with the New Right is its claim to directly represent the common people, bearers of the genuine national spirit, allegedly incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy and individual rights (Yudin, 2021). My interest in Putinism in the context of the debate on the New Right is driven by more than those similarities. I believe that Russia, as a subaltern empire (Morozov, 2015), offers a unique opportunity to discuss some of the basic structural preconditions for the emergence of the New Right in the former SecondWorld. A country that still strongly identifies with Europe but has always stood apart, Russia has an intellectual class that has for centuries tried to make sense of the double divide: one external, between Russia and Europe, and one domestic, between the elites and the masses. This article focuses on one particularly important manifestation of this interstitial identity – the fixation of the national debate on the figure of the peasant and, more broadly, uncivilised native, who serves as the embodiment of Russia’s uniqueness both for the advocates of Europeanisation and for the proponents of a Sonderweg. I interpret this phenomenon as an outcome of uneven and combined development of global capitalism (see Rosenberg, 2006, 2016 for a contemporary take on the concept). Combination manifested itself in Russia’s internal colonisation, which created a deep cultural divide between the educated class and the common people (Etkind, 2011; see also Hosking, 1997). This divide that is experienced as such until this day, by a society that is much more homogenous than it was as recently as one hundred years ago.","PeriodicalId":42556,"journal":{"name":"New Perspectives","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75275027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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