To counterpose the Eurasian wing to the Atlantic core structure makes no sense. It is a confusion of categories. It is explicable perhaps by a tendency to fall back into the categories of the Cold War era, when the Eurasian world was organized separately from and against the Atlantic world, by a Soviet imperial system which itself was structured in concentric circles (Russia-Soviet Union-Warsaw Pact-Comecon) and put itself at the center of an alternative world order system. It is also explicable by the fact that nothing has been finally settled: Russia is not yet inside the core international structures of the Euro-Atlantic world, Russia is not yet definitively Europeanized or Atlanticized in its domestic structures, and many people doubt that it ever will be. Nevertheless, doubt should not be the same thing as dogma. The new Russia is a primarily Western entity, despite ambiguities and uncertainties, and its international home and shelter is already primarily Euro-Atlantic, despite being allowed only into some antechambers of that home. The danger that the two categories in Russian identity, Eurasian and Euro-Atlantic, will again fall out into fundamental practical opposition is something worth pointing out, in a realistic form. An absolute or a priori counterposition of the categories in the present is, however, a confusion of categories.
That tendency to absolute counterposition comes by force of unconscious habit to some, by ideological motivation to others. There are, after all, some ideological bureaucracies in the West that believe that Russia is or ought to be still the enemy, and every time a Russian leader such as Chernomyrdin or Putin speaks of "Eurasianism", they warn that this is the sign of the Beast. Whatever the reason for the absolute counterposition, it serves to reinvent the Cold War conceptualization of the international line-up. In so doing, it no only risks reinventing the Cold War; it also frustrates the effort of the actual Atlantic world to develop its new extension wing and integrate its former enemies.
It is a false Atlanticism. And its counterpart on the other side is a false Eurasianism.
That tendency to absolute counterposition comes by force of unconscious habit to some, by ideological motivation to others. There are, after all, some ideological bureaucracies in the West that believe that Russia is or ought to be still the enemy, and every time a Russian leader such as Chernomyrdin or Putin speaks of "Eurasianism", they warn that this is the sign of the Beast. Whatever the reason for the absolute counterposition, it serves to reinvent the Cold War conceptualization of the international line-up. In so doing, it no only risks reinventing the Cold War; it also frustrates the effort of the actual Atlantic world to develop its new extension wing and integrate its former enemies.
It is a false Atlanticism. And its counterpart on the other side is a false Eurasianism.
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