In the online activity many young people in North America mistake for political engagement, 'white' has become a peculiar sort of insult: a flippant meme masquerading as a serious analytic category. We witness today a constant jockeying for prestige, almost entirely among white men, in which each one strives to publicly display that he is the first and only to have overcome the various pathologies, real and imagined, of white-man-hood. As the sharp critic Fredrik DeBoer has observed, this impoverishment of political debate now leaves us with the obscene and absurd phenomenon of the 'White Off':
A White Off is a peculiar 21st-century phenomenon where white progressives try to prove that the other white progressives they’re arguing with are The Real Whites. It’s a contest in shamelessness: who can be more brazen in reducing race to a pure argumentative cudgel? Who feels less guilt about using the fight against racism as a way to elevate oneself in a social hierarchy? Which white person will be the first to pull out “white” as a pejorative in a way that demonstrates the toothlessness of the concept? Within progressivism today, there is an absolute lack of shame or self-criticism about reducing racial discourse to a matter of straightforward personal branding and social signaling. It turns my stomach.
As for me, I live in Europe, I am not terribly invested in social-media battles of the sort DeBoer seems to enjoy, and so I have only a passing familiarity with the phenomena at issue. How then do I spend my time? Well, when not wondering what the hell is wrong with my fellow Americans, I often find myself thinking about Russia: What is it? What were the historical forces that made it possible for Muscovy to rise to become the principal counterhegemonic force throughout the Pax Americana of the 20th century, and to reappear, some years into the 21st, as a significant player on the world scene?
And in this connection, I have begun to wonder whether this 'white' thing is not perhaps a symptom of a distinctly 'Atlanticist' world view, and whether it might not have somewhat less purchase when one instead looks at the world from a 'Eurasianist' perspective. These are of course the sinister Aleksandr Dugin's terms, and when I invoke them I do not mean to endorse them as true, but rather to make some progress toward understanding why the Russians in particular and the citizens of the former Soviet bloc in general constitute such a peculiar tertium quid in relation to the schemes for carving up of the basic human subkinds that are general currency among American bloggers: they don't see themselves in our Atlantic-centered racial categories, and that exclusion, that irrelevance of our grids, only makes them more estranged and hostile, less NATO-oid. The war in Europe that appears to be taking shape at present is going to be between groups of people Aaron Bady, say, would call 'white', but it's pretty clear that that designation doesn't mean much to at least one of the sides, and that there's a long, deep continental history that's being overlooked when Eurasians, and notably Russians, are thought of in these Atlanticizing terms.
(Aaron is a fantastic scholar of African literature, and I learn a great deal from him. I do believe however that he is guilty of just the sort of Atlantocentrism I am trying to diagnose, and that this leads him to say some remarkable things. Recently I found him bringing up the possibility that there is a 'causative genetic link' between whiteness and colonialist genocide: only to deny it, of course, but also, rhetorically, to suggest it, to get the possibility out there. I do not believe it is just so much whining about 'reverse racism' to suggest that this line of approach isn't helping us to understand how the world works, and certainly is of no use in, say, interpreting what the Soviet tanks were doing in Prague in 1968, or why Stalin ethnically cleansed Volga Germans to Kazakhstan during the war. It's a big world, I guess is all I'm saying, and some hypotheses look even less plausible in some parts of it than others.)
Why, in other words, should that chunk of the world that extends roughly from Berlin to Beijing be analyzed in terms that were developed to make sense of the historical forces that gave rise to Baltimore?
Now there will be a familiar answer from Americans to the question with which we began: Eastern Europeans, they will say, alongside Jews and Southern Europeans, were once racialized as non-white by American immigration authorities, and that time is long past. But I hope it is clear by now that I am not particularly interested in US immigration history, or in any historical experience that is uniquely and distinctively American. I am interested in global history, and in American and Atlantic history only to the extent that they are part of global history; and it is in this context that it seems worthwhile to me to ask whether the terms for defining the racialized order of the Atlantic world are particularly useful for understanding the part of the world shaped by tsars, khans, hordes, and serfs.
Do the Udmurts like Stuff White People Like? Do the Komi hear themselves addressed in some dumb listicle that begins, "Listen Up, White People!"?
A few facts, even if known, are worth reciting. One is that until the Portuguese began looking to the coast of West Africa for a new source of slaves toward the end of the 15th century, the Caucasus, Black Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean were the center of the regional slave trade. The slaves at market in Constantinople were of course multiethnic, but very many of them were Slavs, to the extent even that the very word 'slave' is a deformation of the ethnonym 'Slav'. This word is a vestige of an earlier period in which that particular ethnolinguistic group was associated with forced labor in the same way that Africans would later be in the Southern US, the Caribbean, and Brazil. African slavery in the Americas inherited its name from Eastern Europe. As if this weren't remarkable enough, in my book Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2015), I show that some racialized traits associated in our era with the Afro-Atlantic world were, until the 18th century associated no less essentialistically with Eastern Europeans. Take for example the dreadlock, or, as it was once called, the 'Polish plait' [plica polonica], brought to those parts, so the French and British physicians believed, by waves of demonic 'Tartars' on horseback.
Slavery would continue in Eastern and Southeastern Europe well after the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as well: both the near-slavery of serfdom, as well as actual, legal slavery of a number of distinct ethnic groups, not least the Roma people, who were legally enslaved in parts of the Balkans until the era of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in the US.
Today, the average per capita income in Romania is one-eighth that of Sweden; by comparison, the average income in Mexico is one-fifth that of the United States. Moldova has an average life expectancy and an average income level significantly below that of a number of sub-Saharan African countries. Similar statistics could be adduced for parts of Russia, if we were to take individual autonomous republics and oblast's within the Russian Federation as countries.
There is a blond-haired, blue-eyed warlord in the Caucasus mountains, who declares fealty to Putin in earthly matters and to Allah in transcendental ones. He dances and throws money in the air at the forced marriages of teenage girls, which he has arranged for his subordinate warlords. There is, in his small republic, de facto slavery: not least gender slavery, but also, more generally, total subordination of individual wills to the will of the leader.
The American left, worried about who in their own ranks is the whitest, doesn't have a clue what to say about a place like Chechnya. Find for me, please, a single serious leftist analysis from the past decade of the Chechen wars and of Ramzan Kadyrov's regime, and I will be very grateful.
And yet, it matters: read Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, read Lermontov's Hero of Our Time, and you will already have read enough to understand that holding on to the Caucasian protectorates is existentially vital for Russia. Chechnya makes up well under 1% of the territory of the Russian Federation, yet it is what Putin has staked his entire political career on. It can make or break him, and it is for this reason that he has been compelled to sponsor a form of clan politics that makes his own presidency look like enlightened democracy by comparison. It is in this context that Kadyrov's increasingly bold statements --not least about Dzhokar Tsarnaev, of Boston-bombing fame, and how he was set up by the American secret service as an affront to Chechnya-- need to be understood.
Meanwhile, the US is holding joint military exercises with Georgian forces, with Baltic forces, is sending massive military convoys across Romania, and strongly urging its own preferred outcome in Ukraine. On a nearly daily basis, Russia is sending submarines and airplanes into the territorial waters and airs of Finland, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Poland. Russia has just as many nuclear weapons as it had at the so-called end of the Cold War, and Putin has many military advisors making the best case they can to him that a first-strike nuclear war may be Russia's best option.
Europe, in general, feels like it is gearing up for a war, and in none of this does anyone care in the slightest who is 'white' and who is not. This is not a North-South issue (Islam, incidentally, is only a tangential factor), and it is not an issue that was forged in the experience of Atlantic history (except to the extent that the US grew rich off of trans-Atlantic slavery, and it was only this richness that gave the US the power to seek to assert itself as the sole global hegemon).
Russia is, of course, a place of gross, almost unthinkable anti-Black racism. But this is not a factor that shapes Russian society-- the victims are the small number of African students in places like Moscow (many, ironically, at the school that was once called the 'Patrice Lumumba University for the Friendship of Peoples'). Hypocritically, the RT network, like Pravda of old, loves to report on Ferguson and Baltimore, in a simultaneous display of gross racism and self-righteous indignation at America's inability to overcome racism. But in any case what makes Russia so hostile to the NATO countries that neighbor it is not the presence of Black people in them, and the next time there's fighting in the streets of Warsaw, Berlin, or Bucharest, this will not be because the inhabitants or the invaders are 'white' or not. And yet we can almost hear the American bloggers already, snidely commenting from their safe distance that Putin and his opponents are just so many powerful 'white men' trying to carve up the world according to their arrogant whims, or scoring one against the hypocrisy of the American right by ironizing that 'white kids are killing white kids for no damn reason'.
It is barely an exaggeration to say that the degree to which a given European country is perceived as 'western' is a fairly precise measurement of its historical implication in the enslavement and colonization of Africa, and in the trans-Atlantic economy that grew out of this. Thus, Great Britain and France are western par excellence. Spain and Portugal were trailblazers in this undertaking, but their early decline and their high degree of métissage has created the perception that Iberia is itself Ibero-American. The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark play a proportionally smaller role in the Atlantic realm. The Dutch are most active in the East Indies; relative to its size Denmark is very active in the Caribbean slave trade, while also busy occupying, at various times, other parts of Scandinavia and the Arctic.
Italy and Germany come late to Africa. Italy, with the historical memory of trans-Mediterranean Roman unity, is a special case. Germany's lateness seems to have something to do with its liminal place within Europe, a boundary status that would for a while be reflected in the official division between the BRD and the DDR. This was a carving-up by other empires, but when Germany has itself been in phases of imperial expansion, its most natural motion was not to move across seas, but rather to spread out on the continent, in particular, as the Nazis expressed it, Raum im Osten zu schaffen, 'to create some space in the East (for more Germans to inhabit)'. Austria's imperial motion was, similarly to create a condominium with Hungary; Poland's motion, to fuse with Lithuania and to move eastward into the Baltics. The more powerful Central European nations, then, had imperial ambitions, but not based on the colonial model familiar from the countries bordering the Atlantic and the North Sea (again, here, Germany straddles a boundary: it does touch the North Sea, but also penetrates deep into Mitteleuropa).
The countries that could not claim to be 'Central European' but had to acknowledge their 'Oriental' essence, in turn, are the ones that had no East of their own to expand into, but were generally themselves absorbed into Empires centered to the East: thus the Ottoman vassal states of Wallachia and Moldavia, the despotate of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece: in these parts, still today, when one plans a trip to Paris or London, one speaks of going 'to Europe'. It would make no contextual sense to reply, 'But you're in Europe!' Everyone knows the difference. And yet the American left tends to speak of Europe as if it were some great homogenous Whiteopia, as if to be a Romanian Gagauz farmer were the same thing as to be a Stockholm yuppie dressed up in the finest tennis whites. But again, in terms of standard of living, the Romanian is at least as different from the Swede as a Mexican farm laborer is from a WASP. In spite of what Chris Rock once observed in a very Americanocentric but otherwise sharp routine, a Romanian is not really a 'cracker'. (The question came up in connection with a delightful take-down of Farrakhan: Black people don't hate Jewish people, he explained. Black people hate white people. So you're Romanian, are you? No, you're a cracker!)
What about Russia? Its centers of political power have been, in various centuries, located in Kiev, in Novgorod, in Moscow, but from the 13th-century Mongol invasions through to the Petrine Enlightenment, Russia's principal orientation had been to the East: that was where the enemies came from, and that was the space that stood to be conquered. And when Russia 'created space for itself in the East', there was no political structure in North Asia strong enough to prevent the expansion from reaching all the way to the Pacific. The Khanate of Sibir fell by 1598; the Russians made it to Kamchatka a few decades later. As Russia expanded, much of the Tatar nobility was transformed into Russian nobility. Thus the 'House of Siberia', which counts the Crimean War veteran Prince Alexander Sibirsky as a descendant, is traced back to Kuchum, the last Khan of Sibir. Stalin would remark that 'if you scratch a Russian, you'll find a Tatar'. He meant this as if to say, 'Don't fuck with us', but there is a great deal of historical truth to it: modern Russia emerges out of an absorption by Muscovy of the khanates left over from the westward expansion of the Mongol horde. (And it is not just the Russians either, but other Slavic groups as well: thus the South Slavic Bulgarians, firmly implanted in the Balkans, are really a fairly recently Slavicized splinter group of the Turkic Volga Bulgars.)
The Russian empire goes through periodic phases of expansion and contraction, and its maximum phase of its westward motion, into 'Central Europe', usually maps fairly well onto the maximum historical reach of Mongol expansion: thus, Serbia, Hungary, eastern Poland. Much further west than this, much closer to the 'Atlantic realm', and the overreach quickly becomes apparent. Similarly, Russia has had longstanding imperial interest in South Asia with Central Asia serving as a sort of buffer in the same way that Central Europe serves as a buffer between Russia and Atlantic Europe. In the period of the so-called 'Great Game', which was really the first irruption of the Cold War (with Great Britain still standing in as a sort of proto-United States), Russia pushed southward as much as it could, while Britain, the maritime power that was able to take the part of South Asia that was squarely within the Indian Ocean region, pushed northward as far as it could. Both empires were pushing into territories they were not historically constituted to control: Russia into the world of the global maritime empire, Britain into the world of the Eurasian megacontinental empire.
Where precisely the boundaries of the Russian empire are is a matter that will never be definitively settled. But Russia will remain an empire, and an empire of a different sort than the American Empire. Russia is not part of the Atlantic order, and never will be. What Russia does, with its massive military arsenal and its historically rooted resistance to absorption into the US- and NATO-dominated order, is far more important than anything the American left is currently focusing on. It's far more important than anything ISIS does, than anything alienated European-born jihadists do. No sense can be made of it if one's categories of analysis are 'white' and 'non-white', which again are mostly just memes disguised as categories of analysis. My own view, for which I've argued before, is that the best the left could do is to engage truly progressive, internationalist, anti-Putin forces within Russia, which do exist, even though most in the western left have no idea of them. Even this probably wouldn't help much. Putin is too powerful. And neither he, nor Kadyrov, nor anyone else in the former Soviet bloc, for that matter, could care less about who won the latest White Off on Twitter.
Less identitarian caterwauling, frivolous posturing, and community theater, please. More deep history, real analysis, and global scope.