• Jonathan Culbreath
• — January 3, 2023
• Eurasia Review

After World War II, America began to remake the world in its own image. The triumph of liberal democracy over the Axis Powers marked a definitively new stage in world history: it was the triumph of the free world over authoritarianism and totalitarian domination. The next great enemy to be conquered would be the United States’ former ally against Nazism, the Soviet Union, whose defeat at the end of the Cold War would mark yet a further stage in the history of the world’s restructuring at the hands of America. After the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy became truly universal. The ideology and political form of America, as well as the economic system it had inherited and expanded from its British predecessor, was truly global. It was the age of unipolarity.

Economic development all around the world took place only within the parameters of the unipolar world governed by the new hegemon, on terms of trade that were set by U.S.-made institutions of global governance. Even great countries like Russia and China had to play by American rules, and China in particular became the primary location of the labor force for American multinational capitalism. The world market was in every respect a feature of American globalism, a tool of what many have identified as American ‘colonialism’: that is, capitalism on a global scale, where the U.S. itself was the home of global capital.

China, to the best of its ability, took advantage of its inclusion in the world market and used this status to engineer its remarkable rise as the second greatest superpower and largest economy in the world. Contrary to all expectations in the West, China’s marketization and opening to the world did not induce ideological liberalization, but instead it enabled China to become the most formidable challenger to American liberal hegemony. At the same time, while Russia’s economic recovery after the Soviet collapse has not been nearly as impressive as China’s, it nonetheless became a critical source of oil and energy to much of the Western world—an important asset in its toolbox of geopolitical leverage (as recent events have demonstrated all too clearly). Russia’s military and soft power are similarly impressive enough to make it a worthy opponent of American unipolarity.

Yet their differing circumstances and degrees of integration into the world market have also led the intellectual leaders of Russia and China to conceive of the emerging multipolar world in distinct ways, despite their substantial convergence in opposition to Western unipolarity. While both countries have suffered decades of humiliation at the hands of the West, the concrete material conditions that have affected both countries after the fall of the Soviet Union are radically distinct. A Marxist analysis would expect these distinct material conditions to impact the ideologies that would take shape on Russian and Chinese soil. Indeed, this is exactly what has happened. Two thinkers exemplify these distinct ideologies in an especially clear fashion: Aleksandr Dugin and Jiang Shigong. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at the theories of multipolarity formulated by these two thinkers in order to understand the distinct ideological formations of modern Russia and China.

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