Commissioned Book Review: Aliaksei Kazharski, Eurasian Integration and the Russian World: Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise
| Author | Tatiana Romashko |
| Published date | 01 May 2021 |
| Date | 01 May 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929919887870 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(2) NP1 –NP2
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
887870PSW0010.1177/1478929919887870Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2019
Commissioned Book Review
Eurasian Integration and the Russian World:
Regionalism as an Identitary Enterprise
by Aliaksei Kazharski. Budapest; New York:
Central European University Press, 2019. 223 pp.,
$70.00/€62.00/£55.00 (cloth),
ISBN 9789633862858
The rise of nationalistic tendencies and anti-
immigrant discourses in many European
countries as well in the United States has
framed an interest in contemporary Russian
ideology and its influence in the global arena.
The fundamental question, which puzzles
social and political scientists, concerns the
success and survival of Putin’s populist
regime that is grounded in moral and eco-
nomic anti-Western sentiments. Aliaksei
Kazharski addresses the phenomenon in new
ways, which help to establish a useful frame-
work of analysis by bridging elements of dis-
course theory and Bourdieu’s sociology of
fields. Kazharski attempts to take Laclau and
Mouffe’s emphasis on the political construc-
tion of identity through their interpretation of
the Saussurean concept of the ‘signifier’ and
the Lacanian notion of ‘nodal points’, which
link political actors to political projects, and
combine that with Bourdieu’s notion of the
‘structured field’ of possible actions in which
actors advance their relation to symbolic capi-
tal. For the author, this forms the ground to
theorise identitary discourses in modern
Russia and enables to make a strong case that
Putin’s project is a form of identity politics.
Considering the Russian phenomena from
this perspective, the book presents a fruitful way
to understand Putin’s political project and the
origins of its cultural leadership. Kazharski aims
to explain the background of the conservative
turn in Russia by shedding light on its ‘identi-
tary’ policies that have been deeply rooted in the
Kremlin’s apparatus since 2006. In doing so,
Kazharski addresses the Kremlin’s discursive
practices of the ‘Russian World’ and the
‘Eurasian Union’ and claims that these discur-
sive formations have been regularly dispersed
throughout the 2000s–2010s mainly as antago-
nisms to the ‘West’ and the ‘European Union’.
The purpose of these discursive formations is to
advance a new paradigm of a multipolar interna-
tional order that includes Russia. By putting for-
ward an analytical framework of cultural and
economic regionalism as an ‘identitary enter-
prise’, the author successfully identifies the
Kremlin’s effort to shape a ‘supranational entity
that is equal in its status to the collective “West”’
(p. 7). Subsequently, it offers an understanding
of how the Russian establishment tends to con-
stitute ‘the people’ as a historical agent by antag-
onism to the ‘external other’ far beyond the
limits of national borders, establishing civilisa-
tional frontiers between the Western and Eastern
power blocs.
Kazharski’s discussion on the ‘Russian
civilisationism’ presents an insightful look
into the basis of the moral and intellectual
leadership of Putin’s populist project. It plays
a double role in the Kremlin’s identitary
enterprise. First, possessing the status of an
official doctrine with ‘a scientific alibi’,
Russian civilisationism in a depoliticised
manner justifies political statements about
ontological antagonism between ‘the Russian
Self and the Western Other’ (p. 59). Second,
the ‘civilizational approach’ functions as a set
of Kremlin-affiliated discursive practices that
articulate ‘Russia’s supranational identity’
through a chain of equivalences, that is, the
Soviet people = the people of the Russian
World = Russian civilisation = civilisation
state = culturally defined unity. It is from this
angle that the author demonstrates how multi-
ple lines of fragmentation in Russian national
identity were bridged by a totalising logic of
the Russian civilisationism within the Russian
World imaginary. Interpreting this body of
discourses ‘as a particular form of cultural
regionalism’, Kazharski sketches Russia’s
political capacity to undermine the ‘Western
neo-liberal hegemony’ and map Russian cul-
tural leadership within ‘a non-Western model
of global order’ (p. 99).
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