The historical dimension of the concept of Eurasia

Abstract

The article states that the Eurasian worldview has deep roots in history, and the very emergence of this movement may be considered as a response to the crisis that hit Russia and the rest of the world during the First World War and the events that unfolded in October 1917. The concept of Eurasia developed within the Russian émigré community during a difficult historical period, the 1920s, resulting in the emergence of a unique school of thought that encompassed a large array of scholarly approaches to the revision of the major conceptions of the Russian historical development. Among its founders were some of the outstanding scholars of that time: Nikolai S. Trubetskoy, Pyotr N. Savitsky, George V. Florovsky, George V. Vernadsky, Lev P. Karsavin, Vladimir N. Ilyin, Nikolai N. Alekseev and others. Special emphasis is put on the fact that the Eurasian region has long been an area of active and productive historic, cultural, socio-economical and political interactions, well-established traditions and a centuries-old historical background. Thereby, the main aim of this publication is to study the issues related to the emergence and historical evolution of Russian Eurasian theory and, as a result, to gain a better understanding of how this concept developed. The present article assumes that modern independent states are capable of taking international cooperation to a whole new level through the study of the historical dimension of the concept of Eurasia; this particularly concerns the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The conclusion is that the Eurasian idea fosters harmonious international relations, since this concept acknowledges fundamental identity and equivalence of peoples in the geographical vastness of Eurasia. A complicated and controversial shift of global centers of power is now taking place as part of global historical evolution. Eurasia is acquiring a new global dimension and moving to the forefront in terms of world politics and economics. Special attention is paid to the fact that the future of the whole world depends largely on the states located in the centre of Eurasia