On 23rd February 2024, Mitra Kunj, the alumni association of Soviet/Russian/CIS graduates, had organized a hybrid discussion on Emerging Multipolarity in the South Asian Contextwith the Russian political philosopher Alexander Gelyevitch Dugin at the Russian Cultural Center in Kamal Pokhari. The chief guest was former prime minister Jhala Nath Khanal and the discussions were moderated by Kathmandu School of Law Prof. Yubaraj Sangraula. Dialogue panelists were general secretary of the Maoist Communist Party Dev Gurung, former Nepali Kangress minister of culture and ambassador to India Deep Kumar Upadhyay, former chief secretary and ambassador to China Lilamani Poudel, as well as former ambassador to Russia Milan Tuladhar and yours truly.

Dugin is a product of lived Russian history. Though born into a family of a Soviet military intelligence officer, he came of age during the period that Gorbachev has termed Brezhnevite stagnation when the Soviet communist system was failing economically, culturally and politically. The youth were looking for alternatives across the spectrum from the occult to the irridentist and much in between. Dugin seems to have dabbled in many of these anti-Soviet trends even while formally studying philosophy and self-teaching himself English, French, German, Spanish and Italian.

His first book Foundations of Geopolitics came out in 1997 when Russia was at its post-Soviet nadir, with Boris Yeltsin having to beg Clinton for help to defeat his communist opponents in election. Written three years before the advent of Putin and during the full domination of a US unipolar moment and its NATO expansion despite what was promised to Gorbachev, it argued for Russia to see and develop itself as land-based Eurasian nation instead of a fully US-dominated maritime Euro-Atlanticist appendage. It naturally alarmed the US which saw tendencies of revanchism and even the occult and fascistic in the writing that was challenging its dominance.

His next major book The Fourth Political Theory appeared in 2009 almost a decade into Putin’s rule that had significantly reversed the Yeltsin decline.Here Dugin examines three political ideologies that Russia suffered under – communism under Lenin and Stalin, German fascism that resulted in 22 million Russians killed during WW-II, and liberalism of the 1990s that gave primacy to US-led market expansion and colonization of Russian resources. Dugin draws from Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein or “being” and eclectically filters the gist of the three ideologies after “neutralizing and decontaminating” their negative aspects to come up with his new, fourth political ideology. Although expectedly dismissed as schizoid by much of mainstream West, this work has found resonance among both left and right groups in the West, including Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon, Erdogan of Turkiye and Brazilian far-right group New Resistance.

In 2012, he brought out his next major work Theory of a Multipolar Worldwhich critiques the hegemony of unipolar Western liberalism, its neoliberal capitalism and its culture of postmodernism, especially the wokeism it has degenerated into. In it he argues for an alternative to Western hegemonic universalism, a world where different civilizations and their values have respected space. Between 2018 and 2021 appeared Ethnos and Society where he tries to reverse Western sociology’s privileging modern (Western) society over other social forms; Political Platonism where he deconstructs current mainly American concept of democracy; and The Great Awakeningwhere he targets and demolishes liberalism’s counter-attack against multipolarity in its service of hegemonic Western capitalism.

One striking feature of these works is how Dugin locates the wider global experience with Westen liberalism (like “democracy”a much-misused word that actually extends its capitalist hegemony) in Russia’s lived historical experience. Somewhat similar to the great political economist Karl Polanyi, he too sees fascism as an outgrowth of liberal capitalism, a distorted reaction of society when public interests that the state should have represented is wholly subsumed under profiteering market interests.

This exploratory path becomes a two-way street with the wider world impacting his thinking and changing his worldview. For instance, if earlier he saw China as an eastern hegemon similar to US in the west that should be internally de-hegemonized, later he became a supporter of China’s civilizational ethos and gives lectures at China’s Fudan University. Indeed, political philosophers down the ages, including Gandhi, have not been prophets with ready-made revealed wisdom they have carried from on high: rather they have learned and refined their thinkingalong their long, pugnacious way.

In his Kathmandu zoom presentation on multipolarity – which incidentally was hacked but Mitra Kunj IT experts were able to restore the system back quickly and continue the discussions – Dugin highlighted a few key points:

Ø The six poles of emerging multipolarity – Chinese, Indian, Russian, Islamic, Latin American and African which are now represented in BRICS – are essentially civilizations different from the West. The challenge for them is to redefine scientific modernity and individual liberty from within their own basic civilizational values in a manner different from Western hegemonistic thinking. China has been most successful in redefining themselves and their polity via Confucian values even though initially they did so via Western Marxism.

Ø All BRICS countries are multiethnicand multireligious, and this requires serious interfaith dialogues as equals, even while being loyal to their origins and traditions and not succumbing to Western secularism. This is possible because there are certain undercurrents in each that find humane resonance in others. For instance, with Islam, its rich tradition of Sufi mysticism finds strong resonance with Hinduism and Buddhism.

Ø Even though political colonization ended in the middle of the last century, neo-colonialism (with forced military interventions) as well as mental colonization and subservience to Western values and global institutions spawned by them is still very strong. This is especially true in the social sciences and the humanities in all BRICS countries including Russia; and they all have to find a way of decolonizing their thinking.

Ø Although we are at the end of that Western colonization, the path forward for the Global Rest starting with BRICS countries cannot be a simple return to our pre-colonial past. It has to be a new and syncretic governance system without recourse to the internally hegemonizing Westphalian model.

Ø For instance, Hindu logic (Nyaya darshan) is far richer and more complete than Western Aristotelian. {He did not explicitly get into it but implied – as Julian Baggini has written – how Nyaya Darshan unlike Aristotelian three-member syllogism presents a five-membered one that merges deduction with induction and thus avoids Western “only true or false” binary polarization.} How to bring forth the best of such civilizational values is what the challenge will be for South Asia.

In response from panelists, Jhala Nath Khanal spoke of the need to find an alternative to the West-dominated Bretton Woods system while Dev Gurung asked how US could discard UN resolutions and support Israeli genocide while they label anyone they disagreed with as “terrorists”. {This has become more ironic with Syrian terrorist al-Jolani with a ten-million-dollar CIA bounty on him has now become a “freedom fighter!} Deep Kumar Upadhyay who has returned back to active politics to cleanse Loktantra thought this discussion itself was a major departure in the Nepali context. Leela Mani Poudel thought expanding military power and arms trade seemed to be the only visible US objective.

My own observations, to which Dugin had some quick responses, were on how Russian Orthodox Christianity which broke with Rome in 1054and does not carry the burden of Crusades against Islam between 1095 and 1291, has more in common spiritually with Eastern religions than Roman Catholicism or its Western Protestant offshoots. It seems to have allowed Russia to better accommodate its own Muslim minorities and neighbours. South Asia’s challenge is to begin Hindu-Islamic syncretism where Sufi Prince Dara Shukoh and his Majma-ul-Bahrain left off in 1655 after being militarily vanquished by his Sunni fundamentalist younger brother Aurangzeb.

Similarly, US’s 2014 Maidan regime change in Ukraine and the following sanctions have accelerated Russia’s self-production and industrialization, leading to its rejuvenation while the West’s reliance on finance capital (and the export of its industrial capitalto “under-polluted” Third World – former US treasury secretary Larry Summers’ notorious expression) is resulting in the debt and economic crisis we are seeing from Germany, France and UK to the UScurrently. It is a reminder of Italian socio-economist Giovanni Arrhigi’s argument that reliance on finance capital as against manufacturing capital inevitably leads to a terminal crisis and the ultimate reorganization of world capitalism.

To recall Deep Kumar Upadhyay, discussions such as these are a major departure from the pro-West, anti-Russian Nepali political context of Loktantra which has yet to even respond positively to Russia’s proposal to help with thirteen infrastructure projects in May 2023. South Asia, like Nepal, is far behind other BRICS countries in rethinking multipolarity for the 21st Century.