Can we evaluate globalisation in eschatological terms?

Theses of A. Dugin’s address at the round table on globalisation of the 6th World Russian People Council, December 2001.

1. What is the globalisation process?

It is the universalisation of a definite code, the uniform unification of the political, social, economic, confessional and cultural poles.

2. What kind of code is this?

It is the result of the development of the western civilization, and its most consequent embodiment in the US.

3. Globalisation is unipolar

As a consequence, globalisation is the contribution of a normative code, elaborated by the western civilization and embodied in the US political-economic system.

4. What do we mean when we talk about the decisional centre and the transnational nature of globalisation?

We mean that, once the process of planetary unification has reached some definite moment, the territorial localisation of the directional centre – the localisation of the World Government – will have no more a decisive significance.

But this does not contradict at all

1) the American-centred nature of globalisation in the present stage
2) the content and value of globalisation, i.e. the universalization not of any arbitrary code, but just of the North-American or post-American code

5. Globalisation is the product of the secular western matrix

Let us observe more attentively the globalisation code. It is a secular code, yet it is formatted on the basis of the western-Christian matrix.

Both lines are neither casual nor arbitrary: they are imperative. The western confessions sometimes criticise globalisation for its accent on secularity. The western Church progressists, on the contrary, greet it as the further development of some modernisation processes of the western-Christian ethic, becoming autonomous.

6. Syncretic elements

In the process of cultural formation there is also an assimilation of different cultural-religious complexes. It is the disperse (isolated) fragments of the cultures of the ethnic minorities, brought out from their own context. In it consists the general relation of the US to ethnos and folklore (Negroes, Indians, Latinos, Mid-Easterners, Russians, Jews and other diasporas).

The attempt to a systematisation of such elements is represented by the New Age movement. It is the systematisation of the fragmentary and the marginal within the field of the «parallel religiosity».

The New Age is the expressive element of globalisation.

7. What is deleted by globalisation?

State
Sovereignty
National system of the economy
National administration
Confessional autonomy, linked to a greater or lesser extent to political, social cultural or economic identity
Ethnic enclaves
Sovereign army
Autarchy of ethic kind
National and regional currencies
Juridical differentiation
Regional and national variants of economy
Dialog among cultures

8. What remains untouched by globalisation?

The sphere of individual choice (since from now on it does not acquire an interpersonal-social, collective dimension)
Freedom of movement
Freedom of private enterprising activities

9. Spiritual aspects of globalisation from the point of view of the Orthodox religious doctrine

What might threaten Orthodoxy?

1) The normative, imperative nature of globalisation, the aim at affirming the globalist code as an all-obliging social, political, civilizational and cultural pattern.

2) The secular nature of globalism, severely rejecting religion in its social-collective, counciliary character, losing the Orthodox image of the Church.

3) The genetic link to the western-Christian culture, which was never really close to Orthodoxy.

4) The accent on «parallel religiosity», bordering with sacrilege.

5) The rejection of the social normative meaning of ethics.

Besides: for those Orthodoxes who connect Orthodoxy to the destiny of the Russian State and the Russian people, the imperative suppression of this State and this people may cause problems.

10. Final diagnosis

How to answer to the question contained in the header of the address?

It is not so easy.

If we understand as Orthodoxy what was earlier understood – Church, doctrine, legend, tradition, counciliarity [sobornost’], and in an even wider sense: «Orthodox civilization» – everything that falls under the definition of globalisation may be unequivocally identified with apostasy and the antichrist.

From the intellectual full point of view of Orthodox traditionalism, the conclusion is obvious. Yes, this is an univocally eschatological phenomenon.

But.

Leaving aside the legend, and standing from the liberal point of view of any priest, stating (as the Protestants do) that salvation and faith are absolutely personal, absolutely individual matters – then such identification does not occur, since just in its relation to the individual principle globalisation is a liberation and emancipation movement.

In that moment when Orthodoxy will univocally acknowledge that globalisation is not an eschatological phenomenon, it will definitely cease to be Orthodoxy and become something else.

Trans. M. Conserva