Speech at the Multipolarity Forum. Moscow. Lomonosov Cluster, February 26, 2024.
The multipolar world is first and foremost a philosophy. It is based on criticism of Western universalism.
The West has racially imperialistically identified itself with humanity. Britain once declared all the seas and oceans its property. Western civilization has declared all of humanity—above all its consciousness—to be its property. This is how the unipolar world came to be.
It has only one value—Western values. There is only one political system—liberal democracy. Only one economic model—neoliberal capitalism. Only one culture—postmodern. Only one idea of gender and family—LGBT. Only one version of development—technical perfection up to posthumanism and the complete displacement of humanity by AI and cyborgs.
The unipolar world, according to its supporters, is “the triumph of world history,” the total victory of the Western New Age, liberalism, which has become the sole and unquestionable ideology of all mankind.
Multipolarity is an alternative philosophy. It is based on a fundamental objection: the West is not yet the whole of humanity, but only a part of it, its region, its province. It is not a civilization in the singular, but one of civilizations. And there are at least seven such civilizations today—hence the most important concept of multipolar theory—heptarchy.
Some civilizations are already united into huge continental States, World-States, Civilization-States or wénmíng guójiā (文明國家). Others have yet to do so. The collective West, NATO countries and US vassals are only one of the poles.
Three others are:
The other three are
- Russia-Eurasia,
- Greater China ( Zhōngguó 中國) or Tiānxià (天下),
- Greater India.
They are all Civilization-States, that is, something more than ordinary countries.
And then there are three other large spaces, integrated to varying degrees
- the Islamic world, tightly knit together by religion, but politically still fragmented,
- black Trans-Saharan Africa,
- the Latin American ecumene.
All seven civilizations have completely different religious profiles, different systems of traditional values, different vectors of development, and different cultural identities.
And Western civilization, contrary to its claims, is only one of them. Arrogant, insolent, aggressive, deceitful, predatory and dangerous. However, its claims to universalism are unsubstantiated, and its dominance is based on double standards.
It is not the West that opposes multipolarity, but the West’s claims to oneness and universality. We know these claims firsthand. They permeate all systems of our culture, science and education. The West has penetrated with its toxic ideology inside our societies, seduced, corrupted the elites, put our society under its information control, tried to lead our youth as far away from faith and tradition as possible.
But the era of the West’s sole hegemony is over. It ended with the position of Russia and personally our President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, when we refused to sacrifice our sovereignty and entered into a deadly battle with the West in Ukraine. We are at war in Ukraine not with the Ukrainians, but with the unipolar world. And our imminent victory will be not only ours, but the victory of all humanity, which will see with its own eyes that the power of the West is not absolute, that it and its policy of neo-colonialism and desubordination can be said a decisive “no” to and the world can insist on its own.
Russia is one of the poles of a multipolar world. This is not a return to the bipolar old model. It is the beginning of a completely new world architecture.
The rapid growth of the Chinese economy and the strengthening of China’s sovereignty, especially under the great leader Xi Jiangping, has turned China into another completely independent pole. And seeing this, the West, represented by the US globalist top brass, immediately declared a trade war on China.
The Islamic world has challenged the West primarily in the religious and cultural sphere. Western values that openly call for the destruction of tradition, family, gender, culture, religion are incompatible with the foundations of Islam. Each of the nearly 2 billion Muslims understands this today. And today the Islamic world has its own war with the globalist West—in Palestine, in the Middle East, where the shameful genocide of the Palestinian people—the slaughter of Palestinian babies, women and the elderly—is in full swing with the total approval of the West.
India is another pole. Today—especially under Narendra Modi—it is an entire civilization that is returning to its Vedic roots, to its ancient tradition, to its fundamentals. It is no longer a cultural and economic colony of the West, but a rising global giant.
Africa and Latin America are consistently and methodically, though not without problems, following the same path.
The Pan-Africanist movement is preparing the way for a unified and comprehensive African integration free from neo-colonial control. It is a new theory and a new practice, incorporating the best aspects of the previous stages of the liberation struggle, but based on a different philosophy, where religion, spirit and traditional values play the most important role.
Latin America also continues its path of anti-colonial struggle. Here, too, peoples are seeking new ways to consolidate and unite, partly overcoming outmoded models that divided everyone into right and left. In many Latin American countries, supporters of traditional values, religion, and the family are uniting with those who advocate for social justice under the banner of a common struggle against the neocolonialism of the collective West and its perverted anti-human culture.
The multipolar world today is neither a utopia nor only a theoretical project. Six civilizations out of seven (from the planetary heptarchy) have united in a new bloc in BRICS. There are representatives of each of them there. We are dealing with the institutionalization of multipolarity. Greater Humanity is uniting, comprehending itself, beginning to harmonize its traditions and its orientations, its systems of traditional values and its interests.
Only the collective West, trying to preserve its hegemony at any cost, categorically refuses to be included in this inevitable multipolar process. It opposes it. It intrigues, provokes conflicts. Intervenes. It tries to strangle all pockets of independence with sanctions and direct pressure. And if it fails, it engages in direct military confrontation—as in Ukraine, in Gaza and if not today, then tomorrow in the Pacific Ocean.
However, the West is not monolithic. There are two Wests. The globalist West of liberal elites and the traditional West—the West of peoples and societies. The traditional West itself suffers from the omnipotence of the perverted globalists and tries, where it can, to revolt. The peoples of the West are not enemies of the multipolar world. They are first and foremost victims. And as our President’s interview with conservative politician and journalist Tucker Carlson shows, Russia and the anti-globalists of the United States have far more in common than they appear.
Therefore, the real Victory of multipolarity will not be the defeat of the collective West, but its salvation, its return to its own—Western—traditional (not perverted)—values, its culture (not a culture of abolition), its classical Greco-Roman, Christian roots. I believe that the nations of the present West, freed from the globalist yoke, will sometime in the future also join the Greater Humanity, becoming a respectable pole of a multipolar world. To stop being a hegemon is not only in the interests of all non-Western civilizations, but also in the interests of the West itself.
I welcome all participants of our Forum. We have gathered here to create the future, to make sense of the present, and to save our glorious past by ensuring the continuity of culture.
So different, so special, so unique, so distinctive, sovereign—humanity is us!
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.