Geopolitics or Ethnopolitics? Guillaume Faye, the European Far Right, and the 'Russia Problem’

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Mark Bassin, Professor of the History of Ideas, CBEES, Södertörn University.

Presenter: Mark Bassin, Professor of the History of Ideas, CBEES, Södertörn University
Discussant: Ian Klinke, Associate Professor in Human Geography, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

Abstract:

Despite the sympathy for Vladimir Putin's Russia expressed by much of the European Far Right, the question of Europe and Russia has for decades represented a considerable ideological challenge for it. This essay examines the ways in which this challenge is addressed in the work of the French intellectual Guillaume Faye (1949-2019), one of the EFR's most influential theoreticians.

Faye's writings reveal the full scope of the far right’s ambivalence toward Russia, identifying it alternatively as a mortal enemy of the pan-European project, a potential strategic ally that despite its non-European character was vital for Europe's purposes of resisting the American behemoth, or finally as a thoroughly European country and an essential part of a European “bio-culture.” In order to support these various positions, Faye deploys alternative ideological narratives, one based on geopolitics and the other on the precepts of ethnopolitics. This particular ideological juxtaposition has a deep history in the thinking of the EFR, and Faye's polemics reveal how it has become intertwined with the special complexities of the Russia problem.

Bio

Mark Bassin received his PhD in political geography and Russian history from the University of California-Berkeley. He taught for many years in the USA, at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in the UK at University College London and the University of Birmingham. He currently holds appointments as Baltic Sea Professor of the History of Ideas at Södertörn University in Stockholm and Visiting Professor of Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. He is also a Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs.

Mark’s research has focused on problems of space, ideology and geopolitics in Russia and Germany, and his current project examines the idea of Europe in the ideology of the European Far Right. His most recent monograph is The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Cornell UP, 2016).

He has also co-edited the collections The Politics of Eurasianism: Identity, Popular Culture and Russia's Foreign Policy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Eurasia.2: Russian Geopolitics in the Age of New Media (Lexington, 2016); Between Europe and Asia: The Origins, Theories, and Legacies of Russian Eurasianism (Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2015); Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities (Cambridge UP, 2012); and Space, Place and Power in Modern Russia: Essays in the New Spatial History (Univ. of Northern Illinois Press, 2010).