World Politics After the Arrest of Pavel Durov

The Civilization Phase of History is Now Unavoidable.

“The Lament for Icarus” by Herbert James Draper

The following text was written by the Moscow University (MGU) professor of philosophy, political analyst, and longtime friend of the Simone Weil Center, Boris Mezhuev. It is worth noting, in the present context, that it was together with Prof. Mezhuev that our center planned and carried out, in September 2018, a conference in Moscow on the political and philosophical causes of the rift between East and West (for a detailed description of that conference, see the write up kindly published at the time in The American Conservative).  

Had the U.S. government and its enablers in the U.S. media not acted, back in 2018 (and of course ever since), to prevent a continuation and expansion of such conversations with representatives of Russia's then still mostly pro-Western, pro-American, mildly conservative establishment (of which Mezhuev was only one representative, however prominent), the current complete failure of trust could have been avoided. Very possibly, so could have the current war.  The Russia-gate hysteria -- the domestic American political instrument that has recently been re-started -- put an end to any such prospect.  The result?  Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian men killed; broken economies in Western Europe and beyond; and the still very real threat of uncontrolled military escalation.  And all for what? -- The Editors

Part I

Civilizations have, of course, always existed. China, Europe, Japan, and Russia have developed over the course of many centuries along parallel paths. Their history has never been a unified one. Today, what the civilizational idea points to is not so much this rather obvious circumstance, but rather a much more radical hypothesis: in the near future, we will not be seeing the unification of civilizations within a single, global community. To the contrary, we will be witnessing their ever more rigid demarcation and isolation. Strange as it may seem, this is precisely what is already happening today.

Two events directly related to Russia clearly signal this incipient and possibly entirely conscious determination on the part of key states in the collective West to put an end to what previously had been the only alternative on offer – the process of globalization. These two events are, firstly, the freezing of Russian sovereign assets in the West and, second, the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Despite each of these having their own separate backstories, on a deeper level both were motivated by a single factor –Western elites’ readiness to put an end to the illusions generated by the globalization phase of world history.

The Russians who held their assets in the West and the Russians who used a messenger app not controlled by the Russian authorities (and which was therefore suitable for politically sensitive negotiations) were both motivated by a single desire: ensuring the safety of their financial resources and their free access to information by taking advantage of the factor of extraterritoriality. Everything on the ‘outside’ was considered relatively safe, objective and invulnerable precisely because it was independent of the domestic sovereign power.

It is amusing that, despite Western allegedly ‘globalist’ (as we still refer to them!) elites dealing such a clear blow to the very idea of ​​liberal globalization, Russian Westernizers continue to insist that the civilizational idea is nothing more than an ideological meme invented by Russian authorities for the purpose of legitimizing their own dominance. Meanwhile, all we see is that the world is putting up fences, and the Western world is putting up fences at a much faster pace than its so-called authoritarian adversaries.

What is the basis of this new closing of the Western world? Certainly, the main factor is rivalry with a growing China which had begun to overtake the West precisely in the field of globalization. Hence the felt need to combat this trend by making use of protectionist measures which formerly had been rejected. The Western world did not want to become Sinicized; and, one might add, and in exactly the same spirit, that neither did it want to be Russified or Turkified. This trend will continue to strengthen no matter who moves into the White House in 2025; and no matter who heads the EU or is elected Prime Minister of Great Britain or President of France. This clear awareness by the West of its own borders -- which are the borders of its own identity -- even as it distances itself from Russia, Turkey and, in the near future, from China, signals the onset of the civilizational phase of world history.

Part II

The process of secularization has turned out to be the defining factor in the social development of the West. This process, which began with the liberation first of science, then economics and then politics from the strictures of religious norms and taboos, eventually came to have a bearing on the family structure and everything related to what British sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to as ‘the sphere of intimacy.’  That such a course was inevitable was pointed out already in the 19^th century by various insightful conservatives. In the case of Russia, it was pointed out with particular force and clarity by [the cultural historian] Nikolai Danilevsky, in his work Russia and Europe. This, in turn, brought Russia to a political fork in the road:  Should Russia follow in the footsteps of the West, legalize non-traditional forms of sexual cohabitation and signal that it accepts sexual deviations [literally: perversions] as perfectly admissible, or, to the contrary, should it place a strong emphasis on what in Russia are most often called “traditional values”?

Previous waves of Westernization had taken place under the slogan of modernization. This meant that the pro-Western voices in other civilizations justified their reception of Western modern institutions and the secularization of education and politics on the basis that such steps were necessary in order for their society to successfully compete with the West. But it is very difficult to justify the reformation of the sphere of intimacy in a similar way.  What this means is that the choice to follow or not to follow the West is not something instrumental; it is value-based, and ultimately religious in character. Curiously enough, it was precisely the process of secularization that made the civilizational phase of history with its now characteristic post-secularity inevitable. As for Russia, it was not quite ready for the onset of this new civilizational phase. Right up until the very end, until 2022, it still clung to the idea of ​​its own Europeanness, its civilizational proximity to a Europe that would someday awaken from its deep sleep, throw off the yoke of an intrinsically alien —liberal, Anglo-Saxon, globalist, etc.—West. This desire to participate in the “liberation of Europe,” in the  “abduction of Europe,” acquired the character of a kind of mania in Russia, almost a national idea, even though already back in the 1990s such insightful analysts as Vadim Tsymbursky clearly saw the dead-end character of any such project. It all came to an end as a result of our reaction to the Minsk agreements.  Whereas we had expected our continental partners to assist with the geopolitical neutralization of the Ukraine in its function as a border state, what they did instead was skillfully stall for time, seeing in these agreements nothing more than an agreement aimed at preventing Russia from continuing to exert military pressure. We simply continued to dwell in our illusory notions about the chances of some sort of continental pact between Russia, and France and Germany about which [Russia’s first prime minister] Sergei Witte had dreamed and into which Alexander Dugin had put so much effort in promoting.

Today the fact of the “civilizational” alienation of opposing world blocs stands before us in all its obvious reality. Moreover, as we ourselves must admit, this new reality is so disgusting that the desire quite naturally arises to return to the patterns of sociality that obtained immediately prior to this new ‘civilizational phase’ of world politics, viewing this as the only possible basis for defending freedom and human dignity. Hence all the talk about the struggle between man and Leviathan during discussions of “the Durov affair” -- as if man in the modern world has any opportunity to resist the Leviathan except by means of assistance from its direct competitor -- that is, from another Leviathan.

The task at hand today is by no means finding a neutral space located “outside of the Leviathans” -- we dare say such a space will simply not exist in the near term. The task, instead, is to prevent a deadly fight from occurring between these Leviathans; to prevent them from destroying one another. Here is the problem that the supporters of a conservative Enlightenment must aim at solving, thereby saving humanity from civilizational wars, just as the old rational Enlightenment once saved Europe from the religious wars of the 17th century.