Neo-Eurasianism and the Russian elite: the irrelevance of Aleksandr Dugin’s geopolitics

ABSTRACT

The consistency and effectiveness of Russia’s assertive foreign policy has earned Putin, both domestically and internationally, the image of a powerful and ambitious leader with a strategic plan to re-establish the Russian empire and defend Russia’s core national interests. Speculation among scholars and practitioners regarding the existence of such a “strategic plan” makes Aleksandr Dugin’s conspiratorial neo-Eurasianism project an especially appealing subject of research. This paper explores key ideas of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism, as described in his Foundations of Geopolitics, and tests them empirically with data from the Survey of Russian Elites: 1993–2016 using a Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling approach. Its main finding is that the theory has limited utility for understanding elites’ foreign policy perceptions and therefore its influence should not be overstated. Moreover, there is no evidence that Dugin’s theory is more salient in the post-Crimean period than in the pre-Crimean period.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurasianism
• Dugin
• Russian elites
• Bayesian Structural Equation Modelling

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was prepared for presentation at the conference “Sources of Conflict between Russia and the West,” Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, April 20-21, 2018.

The author is grateful to William Zimmerman (University of Michigan), Sharon and David Rivera (Hamilton College), Kimberly Marten (Barnard College), Vladimir Gel’man (University of Helsinki), Dina Smeltz (Chicago Council on Global Affairs), and other participants in the conference “Sources of Conflict between Russia and the West” (April 20-21, 2018) for their valuable comments and suggestions on the previous version of this paper.

Supplementary material

The supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Dugin asserts that Germany and Russia, as continental powers, tend to be natural allies in terms of their geopolitical interests; Russia’s natural rivals are the maritime powers, the UK and the US (214). He also claims that once it becomes geopolitically independent from the US, a unified and politically neutral Europe could become Moscow’s ally in building “the body of new Europe” (367–368).

2. The Bayesian approach adds flexibility to estimation procedures: it helps to integrate prior knowledge about parameters of interest, combine imputation procedures for missing values with the overall estimation process, and relax traditional identification requirements along with normality assumptions, thus enabling the researcher to explicitly specify appropriate probability distributions. Given that the data sample is quite small and has many missing values, Bayesian estimation is the most appropriate for my estimation strategy.

3. In the Bayesian framework, inference involves communicating features of the posterior distribution of parameters. All estimates provided below are based on stationary posterior distribution of the Markov chain obtained from 20,000 iterations.