Eurasian Ideologies at Odds. Assessing the Opposing Nature of Eurasianism and Turanism

Abstract

Eurasianism and Turanism epitomize two antithetical ideologies driven by the ambition of politically and culturally integrating Eurasia. While Eurasianism has never developed an exclusivist nationalist sentiment based on ethnolinguistic foundations, Turanism falls into the category of pan-nationalist ideologies that tend to exclude the appearance and affirmation of other nations within their spatial scope. The mutually incompatibility of the two ideologies rests on the fact that Eurasianism is based on the principle of inclusiveness of the different Eurasian populations, while Turanism on the principle of Ural-Altaic exclusivism and the rejection of a symbiosis with the Slavic element. This article aims to compare the classic variant of Russian Eurasianism with Turanism from an ideological and cultural perspective, through the evaluation of the respective intellectual fathers’ works. While Eurasianism builds its political-ideological project on Russian-Eurasian history, the imperial idea, the primacy of geography and the rejection of the West as a philosophical model, Turanism grounds its raison d’etre on ethnocentric and pan-nationalist postulates designed for the political and cultural union of the Turanian peoples and the exclusion of others. In this frame, the two ideologies embody geographically overlapping mutually exclusive paradigms and idiosyncratic Weltanschauungs.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. The article has been developed as part of the project ‘Promoting Order at the Edge of Turbulence (POET)’ that is conducted in the Center for International Studies and Development (CISAD) at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow (Poland). The Project is co-financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange under the NAWA Guest Professorship programme’ and the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange within the NAWA Chair programme. The author wishes to acknowledge the financial assistance of the NAWA Grant (PPN/PRO/2020/1/00003/DEC/1) from the Polish Academic Exchange Council and NCN grant (ZARZADZENIE NCN 94/2020) from the Polish National Science Council.

Notes

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Paolo Pizzolo

Dr. Paolo Pizzolo is Assistant Professor and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies and Development (CISAD) of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Research Fellow at the Center for Cooperation with Eurasia, the Mediterranean, and Sub-Saharan Africa (CEMAS) of the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”