The Theory of a Multipolar World

Alexander Dugin

• Publisher: Arktos Media Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781914208188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Alexander Dugin's The Theory of a Multipolar World is a cheerful and optimistic view of a future in which humanity will reach its highest development. However, it will not be the uniform humanity pictured by the globalizing and leveling schemers and manipulators. Instead, old artificial borders will be dissolved and new natural divisions installed. Mankind will blossom in its manifold manifestations, namely the distinct civilizations and the ethnoses that breathe their souls into them. Drawing from a variety of philosophies from both the Right and Left, Dugin maps out the immediate goals and ultimate vision of this theory, and what is required to implement it.

Multipolarity is the tapestry that creates a myriad of colorful potentialities rather than a single dead-end passage, whither an anonymous human mass is herded to languish till the end of days. According to Dugin, the Westphalian system of the sovereignty of nation-states has long since become obsolete and ceased to function. In its place will be erected a continental system of "large spaces" (in the Schmittian sense), where individuals are integrated in the social whole based on the insoluble bond of kinship and common tradition. It will be a time of high adventure, boundless curiosity and the rediscovery of what it truly means to be different and therefore able to think of unique solutions in lieu of standardized ones.

1. Introduction

Multipolarity: Definition of the
Concept and Delineation of Meanings

The First Efforts toward an Elaboration of a TMW

From a purely scientific point of a view, a full-fledged and complete Theory of a Multipolar World (TMW) does not exist today. We will not find it among the classic theories and paradigms of International Relations (IR).¹ We will also search the newest postpositivist theories in vain. It is not fully elaborated even in the most flexible and synthetic domain — in the sphere of geopolitical studies, where much is often comprehended that in IR remains outside the frame or is interpreted too unfairly.

Nevertheless, more and more works devoted to foreign policy, global politics, geopolitics, and international relations proper are dedicated to the topic of multipolarity. A growing number of authors try to comprehend and describe multipolarity as a model, phenomenon, precedent, or possibility.

The themes of multipolarity, in one way or another, were touched on in the works of David Kampf (in his essay “Emergence of a Multipolar World”),² the Yale historian Paul Kennedy (in the book The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires),³ the geopolitician Dale Walton (in the book Geopolitics and the Great Powers in the 21st Century: Multipolarity and the Revolution in Strategic Perspective),⁴ the American political scientist Dilip Hiro (in the book After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World)⁵ and others. In our opinion, the British IR specialist Fabio Petito came closest to understanding the essence of multipolarity. Petito tried to build a serious and well-grounded alternative to the unipolar world on the basis of the legal and philosophical concepts of Carl Schmitt.⁶

Political actors and influential journalists time and again mention the “multipolar world order” in their speeches and writings. Thus, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was the first to call the US “the indispensable nation,” announced on February 2, 2000 that the US does not want to “establish and enforce” a unipolar world and that economic integration has already created a “certain world, which can even be called multipolar.” On January 26, 2007, a New York Times editorial spoke directly of the “emergence of a multipolar world,” together with China, which “takes a parallel place at the table along with other centers of power, like Brussels or Tokyo.”⁷ A 2008 US National Intelligence Council report on “Global Tendencies 2025” declares that the rise of a “global multipolar system” should be expected over the next two decades.

In 2009, many considered US President Barack Obama a harbinger of the “era of multipolarity,” thinking that he would give priority in American foreign policy to growing centers of power, like Brazil, China, India, and Russia. On July 22, 2009, Vice-President Joe Biden announced during a visit to Ukraine that the US “will try to build a multipolar world.”

And yet, in all these books, articles, and pronouncements, there is no precise definition of what a multipolar world (MW) is, nor, all the more so, any sort of systematic and consistent theory of its construction (TMW). Most often, appeal to “multipolarity” implies only an indication that at present, in the process of globalization, in the undisputed center and core of the modern world (the US, Europe, and, more broadly, the ‘Global West’) certain competitors appear on the horizon, rapidly developing, or simply powerful regional states and blocs of states, belonging to the ‘Second’ World. Comparison of the potentials of the US and Europe, on one hand, and the growing new centers of power (China, India, Russia, the countries of Latin America, etc.), on the other, convinces more and more of the relativity of the traditional superiority of the West and raises new questions about the logic of the long-term processes determining the global architecture of powers on a planetary scale, in politics, economics, energy, demography, culture, etc.

All of these commentaries and observations are exceedingly important for the construction of the Theory of a Multipolar World, but do not at all compensate for its absence. They should be taken into account in the construction of such a theory; however, it should be noted that they are fragments and sketches and fail to rise to the level of even primary theoretical, conceptual generalizations.

Nevertheless, appeal to a multipolar world order can be heard more and more often at official summits, international conferences, and congresses. References to multipolarity are present in a number of important international agreements and in the texts of the conceptions of the national security and defense strategies of many influential, powerful countries (China, Russia, Iran, and in part the European Union). Thus, today as never before, it is necessary to take a step toward beginning the full-fledged elaboration of a theory of a multipolar world in accordance with the basic demands of an academic, scientific approach.

Multipolarity Is Not Congruent with the National, Westphalian Model of Organizing the World

Before we proceed with the construction of a Theory of a Multipolar World (TMW) in earnest, we should strictly delineate the studied conceptual zone. For this, we shall consider the basic concepts and determine the forms of global order that are definitely not multipolar and, accordingly, in regards to which multipolarity is an alternative.

We begin with the Westphalian system, which recognizes the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state and builds on this basis the entire legal field of International Relations. This system, formed after 1648 (the end of the Thirty Years’ War in Europe), went through a few stages of its establishment and to one extent or another corresponded to objective reality until the end of the Second World War.

This system was born of the rejection of the pretensions of medieval empires to universalism and a “divine mission,” corresponded to bourgeois reforms in European societies, and was based on the position that the highest sovereignty is possessed only by the nation-state, while there is no authority outside it with legal right to interfere in the internal politics of this state, whatever its goals and missions (religious, political, or otherwise). From the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 20th century, this principle determined European politics and was transferred with certain modifications to the countries of the rest of the world.

The Westphalian system originally concerned only European states, while their colonies were regarded merely as their extensions, lacking sufficient political and economic potential to claim independent sovereignty. From the start of the 20th century and during the course of decolonialization, that same Westphalian principle was spread throughout former colonies.

The Westphalian model supposes full legal equality among sovereign states. In this model, the world has as many poles of foreign policy decision-making as there are sovereign states. This rule implicitly acts even now by inertia, and all international law is based on it. But in practice, of course, there is inequality and hierarchical subordination among sovereign states. In the First and Second World Wars the distribution of powers among the largest global powers spilled over into the confrontation of separate blocs, where decisions were made in the country that was most powerful among its allies. As a result of the Second World War, in consequence of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis countries, a bipolar world system of international relations formed in the global system, called the Yalta system. De jure international law continued to recognize the absolute sovereignty of any nation-state. De facto, however, the major decisions concerning the central questions of the world order and global politics were made in only two centers, Washington and Moscow.

A multipolar world differs from the classical Westphalian system in that it does recognize in separate nation-states, legally and formally sovereign, the status of full-fledged poles. As a result, the number of poles in a multipolar world should be significantly less than the number of recognized (and unrecognized) nation-states. Today, the great majority of these states cannot by themselves ensure their own security or prosperity in the face of a theoretically possible conflict with the hegemon (the role of which, in our world, is played by the US). Consequently, they are politically and economically dependent on external sources. Being dependent, they cannot be centers of real independent and sovereign will in global questions of world order.

Multipolarity is not a system of international relations that insists on the legal equality of nation-states, considered as matter-of-fact. That is only a facade of an entirely different picture of the world, based on the real, not the nominal, balance of powers and strategic potentials. Multipolarity operates with the state of affairs that exists not only de jure, but de facto, and it starts from the principal inequality of nation-states in the contemporary and empirically fixed world. Moreover, the structure of this inequality is such that secondary and tertiary powers are not able to defend their sovereignty, even in bloc configuration, against a possible external challenge from a hegemonic power. Hence, this sovereignty is today a legal fiction.

Multipolarity Is Not Bipolarity

After the Second World War, a bipolar system formed in the world, also called the Yalta system. Formally, it continued to insist on the principle of the absolute sovereignty of all states, and the UN was organized on this principle, continuing the business of the League of Nations. However, in practice there emerged two centers of global decision-making: the US and the USSR. The US and the USSR represented two alternative political and economic systems: global capitalism and global socialism. Thus, strategic bipolarity rested on ideological dualism: liberalism versus Marxism.

The bipolar world was based on the economic and military-strategic parity of the US and USSR, on the symmetrical comparability of the potential of each of the opposed camps. At the same time, no other country in either camp was even remotely comparable in power to Moscow or Washington. Consequently, there were two hegemons on a global scale, which were surrounded by constellations of allied countries (strategically half-vassals). In this model, the national sovereignty of countries, formally recognized, gradually lost its significance. In the first place, every country depended on the global policies of the hegemon to whose sphere of influence it related. So, they were not independent; and regional conflicts (as a rule, in the Third World), quickly grew into the confrontation of the two superpowers, which tried to redistribute the balance of planetary influence to “disputed territories.” This explains the conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, etc.

In the bipolar world, there was also a third power — the Non-Aligned Movement. It included a few countries of the Third World that refused to make an unambiguous choice in favour of either capitalism or socialism and preferred to manouevre between the global antagonistic interests of the US and USSR. Some were able to do this to a certain extent, but the very possibility of non-alignment presupposed the presence of precisely two poles, which to one extent or another counterbalanced each other. At the same time, most “non-aligned countries” were in no way able to form a “third pole” since they were isolated, lacking consolidation and a shared socio-economic platform, and inferior in the main respects to the superpowers. The entire world was...

Table of contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Hegemony and its Deconstruction
• 3. Civilization as Actor: Large Space and Politeia
• 4. Theory of a Multipolar World and Other Paradigms of IR
• 5. The Main Themes and Topics of IR in the Context of the TMW
• Appendix
• Other Books Published by Arktos
• Notes