There is no such thing as Eurasia
Event Report: Princeton History Professor Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin, Professor of History Professor and Director of Russian & Eurasian Studies at Princeton University, gave an excellent, and in many ways provocative, lecture at George Mason University several weeks ago. Kotkin’s lecture was largely based on an article forthcoming in Kritika, which you can access through this link (PDF). In his lecture, he challenged not only the direction of the field of Eurasian studies, but the term “Eurasia” itself. Instead, he proposed “political exchange” and “imperial legacy” as an alternative framework for analysis.
Does that sound like a lot of academic jargon? Read on and I will try to explain what he is getting at.
The Myth of “Eurasia”
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Soviet studies programs have almost without exception transformed into “Eurasian” studies programs (including Kotkin’s own program at Princeton, as he noted ironically). This shift has occurred for two main reasons. First, there has been a desire to move away from any titles associated with colonialism. A proposed panel at the next Central Eurasian Studies Society Society coming from the Edward Said school of thought is a perfect example of this perspective. Like Kotkin, the panel challenges the term “Eurasia,” but for fundamentally different reasons. A second and related reason is that there has been a tendency in the field of Eurasian studies to focus on identity studies, and thereby define regional groupings by “imagined communities,” or rather, how people group themselves in the world.
“Central Eurasia [as a term] is not something that has any empirical roots. It is more of a fantasy of the academy.” According to Kotkin, any cultural, religious, and linguistic unity stipulated in textbooks is simply not there. The “evidence” for such unity has roots in nineteenth century race theory (for a more detailed discussion of what is meant by this, see pages 13-16 of his full paper).
So if we accept Kotkin’s argument, that Eurasia has no linguistic, cultural, religious, or ethnic cohesion – at least not enough to designate it as a single region – on what basis do we approach the center of the Asian landmass? What else is there?
A Mongol Commonwealth?
Kotkin proposed “A Mongol Commonwealth?” as an alternative (the question mark is important). Stay with me here, even if this moniker may sound a bit odd. He based this new term off “The Byzantine Commonwealth,” a name coined in a book of the same title by Dimitri Obolensky. The main point of the book was that there was a Byzantine civilization – state boundaries aside – that encompassed a massive geographical area, from the Balkans to Greece to Russia. All these areas shared the cultural and political institutions of Byzantine civilization to some degree.
With this model in mind, Kotkin posed (but did not answer) the question: Was there a Mongol commonwealth? The Mongols united much of the Eurasian landmass under a single polity, and fostered the exchange not of ethnic culture, but imperial culture. This distinction is important because it differentiates Kotkin’s proposed framework from the almost primordial conceptions of “Eurasian-ness” prevalent today.
Kotkin spent some time describing the remarkable features of the Mongol Empire. Chingiz Khan set up an “empire of exchange,” one without barriers based on religion, tribe, or language. The Mongols saw talent almost as a form of booty, and sent, for example, technocrats from the Persian part of their empire to China, and vice versa. Policed trade routes allowed unprecedented material exchange across the Eurasian landmass, changing forever the lands that are now Russia, China, the Middle East, and India.
Return to Soviet Studies?
While Kotkin was not certain if a common set of cultural institutions survived the Mongol Empire, he described another empire with political, cultural, and economic institutions that inarguably continue to be tangibly manifest: the Soviet Union.
Kotkin characterized the Soviet Union as the “EU in reverse,” because there the institutions were harmonized before the political union broke up, rather than vice versa. The USSR achieved unparalleled material integration. Someone trained in construction in Albania would be qualified for employment in one sixth of the earth. The Uzbek “folk dance” created by the Soviets is remarkably similar to the Lithuanian folk dance.
The 1975 Soviet film “Irony of Fate” (Ирония судьбы) aptly illustrates the level of integration across the USSR. In “Irony of Fate,” a man gets drunk in a banya with his friends in Moscow, who then mistakenly put him on a plane to Leningrad while he is passed out. Once he arrives, the features there are so similar – the same street name, same apartment models, even his key works – that he doesn’t even realize he is in someone else’s home. The film is humorous precisely because it is not entirely implausible, and Kotkin suggested that it is not out of the realm of possibility that the same situation could have happened if they had put the protagonist on a plane to anywhere else in the Soviet sphere of cultural influence, even North Korea.
Interestingly, Kotkin did not explicitly propose the former Soviet Union as a unit of analysis as he did with the old Mongol Empire. However, he did say:
Empire should be the principal organizing framework for the work that we do in that area between Germany and Japan… There is no other underlying coherence. It is not a region; it is an arena.
It is important that the reader not confuse his argument with a justification of empire; he explicitly emphasized that was not his point. Rather, he argues that scholars have spent so much effort researching the nations constructed by the Soviet Union as units of analysis, that they forget that those nations were constructed very intentionally as Soviet nations. Whether or not the empire itself was good, evil, legitimate, or illegitimate has nothing to do with whether or not is it is an appropriate frame of reference.
Cutting through the Jargon
To some readers this discussion may seem a bit pedantic, and to a certain extent it is. However, regional definitions have very real political implications that make questions such as those posed by Kotkin worthy of consideration.
Between the lines of his talk was a critique of identity studies. The legitimacy of many modern regimes depends on being able to convince the broader public that there is something “natural” about space their state occupies. Likewise, academics attempt to distance themselves from colonialism – a historical theme with a very bad reputation in the modern world – by searching for something intrinsic about their classifications as well. When such homogeneity – be it geographical, linguistic, ethnic, political, or religious – simply does not exist, concepts such as Eurasia become problematic.* Moreover, chasing shadows seems unnecessary when there are so many observable historical continuities that do exist: governance patterns, material exchange, imperial culture, and political institutions.
*Kotkin was not, however, suggesting that there is something wrong with the word Eurasia. Rather, he took issue with the underlying concept for reasons mentioned previously, and proposed empire as an alternative framework.
Miscellany
As with most events, Kotkin made a variety of points tangential to the main argument outlined above, but that were nonetheless quite interesting.
- Eurasia as a term is rather unpopular among polities actually located within that region, which generally have no desire to be classified as such. “Europe,” in contrast, now seems to extend all the way to the Caucasus.
- According to Kotkin, one of the most pervasive themes of the Eurasian landmass is despotism. “It is absolutely extraordinary that in this part of the world despotism lasts so long,” he said. He had no qualms dismissing the democratic credentials of Putin, Nazarbayev, or any other heads of state in the region.
- Along this line of reasoning, he saw little cause for hope of real reform in, for example, Turkmenistan. “Things have changed in Turkmenistan [since the breakup of the Soviet Union]; a small group of people stole all the property… That is the crazy thing about living in America – everyone thinks there are solutions to every problem.” He argued that the only real difference between pre-Soviet and post-Soviet Turkmenistan is that now more conventional thugs have replaced communist ideology, though the Soviet institutions remain.
on May 24th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I suppose the real problem with the term Eurasia is that it was initially a geopolitical term that trampled on the manifold ethnolinguistic, social, cultural etc. differences of the region to which it was applied and explained the importance of the region as lying purely in strategic terms i.e. he identified the region as an historical ‘pivot’ - which is a bit unfortunate when you consider the number of global empires (Roman, British, Ottoman, Spanish, French) which barely impinged on the region - but when did facts ever get in the way of a popular argument?
But perhaps the strongest argument for the dumping of the term ‘Eurasia’ is that it is obsolete. It was popularised, famously, by Halford Mackinder at the time when the ‘Great Game’ was winding down, and therefore came to be regarded as the easiest and most cogent explanation for the events of that period.
However, I doubt the term will be dropped. It is simply too convenient, and reflects a secret desire on the part of academics, ultimately, to keep things simple (a secret desire which, naturally, they have to hide from advisors, faculty boards and funding organisations … ;-) )
on May 24th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Kotkin can be quite hit or miss - in fact, one could argue that he is somewhat overly insulated in academia and overlooks a number of experiences and attitudes held by people living and working in Russia and Eastern Europe.
A while back we blogged about a speech he gave: http://www.robertamsterdam.com/2007/03/princeton_prof_on_dictatorship.htm
It would seem sort of off-base these days to say that Russia isn’t successful at achieving its foreign policy goals, for example.
In regards to Kotkin’s beef with Eurasian studies and the politics of identity, I highly recommend contrasting his views with both Amin Malouf and Michael Ignatieff (who before losing his mind to Canadian politics wrote one of the most thoughtful books on nationalism and identity).
on May 25th, 2007 at 5:15 am
This is a problem vexing everyone involved, I think. There isn’t any sense of regional identity among the people who live there (Kazakhs in particular are very proud of being Kazakh).
This discussion reminds me of the hand wringing that resulted when Condoleeza Rice reordered the U.S. State Department’s bureau structure and made Central Asia (which strikes me as a perfectly acceptable name for the area) part of the South Asian bureau. Does that really make sense, when Turkmenistan has nothing to do with Sri Lanka? Not really. But neither did Uzbekistan have anything to do with Italy when it was in the European bureau (Russia, too, is a tricky beast, incorporating European, steppe, intuit, Caucasian, and even Asiatic regions and cultures).
Maybe this is just one of those natural limitations and frustrations of trying to divide and label the world?
on May 25th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I read Kotkin’s article in the pub last night (erk! spot the nerd!). It was an enjoyable essay about academic self-identification, I thought, rather than a research-based article positing some new or exciting point of view. At the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) I hardly came across the term ‘Eurasia’ whilst studying Ottoman or Mongolian history yet as soon as I moved into the field of post-Soviet studies I hardly move for tripping over the concept - and therefore I think that the current debate about the use of the term is very much about filling the vaccuum filled by the term ‘Soviet Studies’.
Maybe this is just one of those natural limitations and frustrations of trying to divide and label the world?
Good point. By way of example, at SOAS, neither the survey class on Central Asian history nor the class on Islam in South Asia covered Afghanistan (and the teachers of both recommended that students wishing to study Afghanistan take the other class!)
on May 25th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
I’ve noticed Afghanistan is kind of stuck in this weird limbo - perhaps because of the jumbled mess of ethnicities and cultures that call it home. But since “Eurasia” really seems to be the last refuge of Soviet Studies, why not just call the field “Post-Soviet Studies?”
That would make logical sense (just as I thought the State Department should have created a separate Post-Soviet Bureau). But it might be too much like a “Post-British Studies” field, or something. Maybe connecting the region to its Mongolian roots would be more useful, even if it has a lot more in common with the rest of the FSU states.
on May 25th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
The problem also lies not only with the geographical expanse covered by the term ‘Eurasia’ but also the timeframe. Post-Soviet studies is fine for, well, the study of the FSU, but what about BEFORE the USSR? questions questions questions. Truth be told, ‘Eurasian Studies’ covers a multitude of sins: history, politics, ethnography, anthropology, geography, development studies, economics, linguistics/languages, archaeology, Caucasus, Central Asia, Baltic states, Russia, Siberia, Tibet, Turkey, Ottoman Empire etc etc. Geographically speaking, I’d be more comforable talking about, say, Eastern Europe, Russia, Caucasus, Central Asia and Inner Asia. I think the universities which have shunned the term ‘Eurasian Studies’ have it about right.
on May 25th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Interesting comments, everyone.
The point of the post wasn’t really to suggest that we should abandon “Eurasia” because there is some other “true” term that we should be using. Rather, I thought Kotkin’s lecture and paper were interesting because they raise some interesting questions about why we use the terms that we do.
For instance, to Nick’s point, I think it is fine, even useful, to use different terms depending on circumstances. For instance, I doubt a Mongol Commonwealth is really all that useful today, but if we are talking about 1400, it might make a lot of sense. The important part is not finding the perfect term, but understanding the assumptions underpinning the different terms. This is not to say that all definitions are equal; I think Kotkin makes a fair point in criticizing contrived ethno-linguistic patterns as bases for regional groupings.
And to Josh’s point re: “post-Soviet Bureau,” I think Kotkin is arguing exactly that, at least to some extent.
Afghanistan is definitely stuck in limbo if we are talking about Central Asia, the Middle East, or post-Soviet Studies, but what if we talk about a “Persian Commonwealth,” to use Kotkin’s phrasing. Then Afghanistan’s status is not nebulous at all, but other areas like India or Xinjiang are instead.
Of course the rubber hits the road when government and academic departments have to decide how to organize themselves, and which positions to fund; then you can’t be as definitionally agnostic as I am advocating.
The consequence? Afghanistan flounders between Central Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia.
on May 27th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I have a question:
If Eurasia (as the name of the blog suggests) includes Russia, why is there no blog for this country here?
The way this blog is organized (CA and Caucauses) suggest a strange way of separating the countries which belong to “Eurasia”.
Anyone care to explain or you guys don’t get funding to cover Russia? ;)
If so what is this targeted funding all about? Any hidden agenda?
Just curious :)
on May 27th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Tajik Boy, thanks for your question.
Now that we’ve ceased to cover the Caucasus, never focussed on Russia for a lack of interest and expertise and concentrate only on Central Asia, our name might really not be too suitable. But as the discussion above shows, there is so much confusion over terminology that we can definitely stick to it for some more years to come :)
The targeted funding we are receiving from Hivos aims to help blogging take off in the region - as a tool for uncensored self-expression. So that’s the hidden agenda if you want. It’s all in our “About the Partnership” section.
on May 28th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Thanks Ben,
The term Eurasia, by the way, was coined by Russkis to underlined their influence over what they percieved to be their territories of influence.
Now that Soviet Union is gone, such influence is felt less and less over the years (especially in Caucausus and CA).
Perhaps it is a high time to change the term or stop using it altogether (to me this blog is all about CA).
I can’t believe there was a lack of in terest on Russia here. This country still figures prominently (and not always in good light) in the life of many FSU countries (Georgia, Estonia, Tajikistan?)