This article proffers a dichotomy without recognizing its asymmetry.

Von Hoffmeister’s article is a bit of a dud for me. Do not take this as calling it a bad article; I have an objection to its statements, but my central problem with it is that it did not prod me to thought or to ideas I hadn’t grappled with in the past.

Hoffmeister contrasts ‘Atlanticism’ – rationalist, homogenizing imperialism- with ‘Eurasianism’- multipolar power-states and multi-ethnic empires (al a Rome). Some references are made to interesting points here- the relative diversity of culture within the Roman and Persian empires, remarkable in light of their stability, when many countries stagger quite badly under the influence of diversity. Alanticism posits integration and unification of culture; Eurasianism posits multipolarity of culture and nation. The contrast has value.

(I’m actually familiar with the concept of ‘Atlanticism’ as the ideal of American-European-Anglosphere integration popular since the late 1900s and partly responsible for WW1 and the post-WW2 mess. The two ideas are obviously related, if not precisely congruent.)

The conclusion of the article, however, falls flat in my eyes. First, it posits Xi’s China as an example of Eurasianism. To the extent that it is…. Well, we’ll get to that. The difficulty with the assertion generally is that while China is perfectly willing to regard everybody outside itself as different, China internally is a homogenizing imperial force, al a the liberal order (and heavily derived from it. We invented Communism and fascism, after all).

As per The China Show and its hosts, who are both internally credible and recommended by sources themselves credible, China’s government actually engages in an effort of ethnic homogenization towards Han Chinese (with some disregard for whether the person is actually Han). Further, China’s interest in homogenization of culture, religion, and thought flows from its totalitarian nature; the design is evident in all the credible information we have on its internal function. Its propaganda is intensely nationalistic, for instance- in pursuit of a homogenous nation-mind.

The Chinese one-party system does not accept true variance internally. This becomes incongruous with the article’s idea of ‘Eurasianism’ when we realize that China as it currently exists under the CCP includes not only China-proper but a catalogue of other territories conquered by the Chinese empire, many of them relatively recently. China may be externally ‘Eurasian’ in this article’s framework- but it fails to consider that it is intensely ‘Atlanticist’ internally (nevermind the geographic atrocity that I’m perpetrating)).

Second, the article speaks of Eurasianism and Atlanticism as two equal and opposites. Here’s where everything falls down on itself, in my eyes.This ‘Eurasianism,’ as I see it historically, is merely the standard of sinful man. Multipolarity is the status quo; Atlanticist belief in the possibility of true and complete hegemony, of a rationalist unification of all, is a historical aberration, a temporary delusion now in the process of collapsing. Rome had Parthia. We now have China and India and Russia.

The hegemonic domination of the West over the world was a strange thing in history, the result of an unprecedented large-scale application of God’s wisdom to society following the Protestant Reformation. The development of liberal ideology and its proliferation as an infiltrator-replacement of Christianity combined with the remains of this burst of power to produce the possibility of seeing Europe as ‘one’ in a sense, capable of a unipolar world and capable of flattening that world into itself. The USSR was only a small problem for this; it was, essentially, a liberal state (in the broadest sense of the term); its collapse allowed the delusion to prosper. The past two decades have been the shattering of that post-1990s hallucination of unpolarity, a return to normality. ‘Eurasianism’ is not a strange thing; it is simply power politics, realpolitik, and the reassertion of the world everybody actually lives in.

In that light, Xi’s inconsistency with the posited Eurasianism makes sense. He lives in a multipolar reality and navigates it with competency (better than America, sometimes, whatever you think of his morals). This is his foreign policy, with its imperial elements. Internally, he has adopted another tactic, one more modern, the homogenization of his domain.

Putin’s Russia, meanwhile, seems to have adopted a different, less homogenizing course, focusing not on forcibly integrating an imperial fringe and extending that empire (China) but on forming and reinforcing a core already materially Russian (culturally), hence it desires to integrate eastern Ukraine but not Kazakhstan or Mongolia or western Ukraine.

So the reason this article falls flat for me is that it posits as a great dichotomy something I already understand; worse, it posits ‘Eurasianism’ as something special when it is in fact the natural state of international relations. The sum of it is that the article was to me banal and actually a retreat from a full understanding of its concepts, without actually being wrong enough to passionately argue with (al a Ebert’s article).

(There is a better path than either of these, which is to maintain cultural diversity as a matter of course, with minimal government protectionism and less need therefor- under the banner of Christ’s sanctifying word and by the power of His blood redeeming men. In other words, the nations could work under a shared prioritization of God, rather than realpolitik’s prioritization of self interest.)

God bless.