SPEAKER: Charles Clover
CHAIR: Andrew Foxall, Director Russia Studies Centre, The Henry Jackson Society
TIME: 13:00-14:00, 8th May 2017
VENUE: The Henry Jackson Society, 26th Floor, Millbank Tower, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP
Andrew Foxall: Charles Clover has joined us today for today’s event. Charles as I am sure many of you will be aware is a journalist and he works out of Beijing for the Financial Times he is also more importantly and more relevantly to today’s event an author. He is author of Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, the books are for sale outside for £10, if you haven’t already done so I would recommend that you do buy a copy please. If you have already read the book then perhaps buy an additional copy for a friend or a relative. I was just saying to Charles in what now seems like a previous existence, I taught a course at Oxford on Russia geopolitical extradition and that was the full sort of gamut on Russia geopolitical thought, many of the people which I used to teach about and lecture about, Charles covers in this book right through from the 1920s right through to Alexander Dugin who may be more familiar to most of you.
It is an excellent book, as I say please do read it even if you don’t buy it. With any further ado, Charles.
Charles Clover: Thank you very much Andrew. Andrew and I was just talking about Russia nationalism and our sort of common approach to it. What is fascinating is how recent a phenomenon this really is. I mean I have written a book basically about some boheiam coffee house hipsters who happen to be radical nationalists and until about ten years ago were sitting in their basements or living with their parents and publishing pamphlets and tracks and leaflets and blogs and then right 2008/09/10 a lot of them started to get jobs as talk show anchors on TV, they started to write columns for major Russia national newspapers, they started to run university departments so these are people who had been very marginal and had suddenly, largely because what they were preaching about, talking about and writing about suddenly became mainstream or rather than became mainstream, the mainstream moved to them.
Suddenly Russia’s foreign policy as this change in the media culture happened Russia’s foreign policy suddenly started to change. We started to see from our point of view, Russia had a very aggressive foreign policy, a foreign policy of staking out a sphere of influence in former imperial territories, a foreign policy of questioning its existence in the West and establishing its own entity.What really happened over the last decade was that there was two sort of parallel discourses in Russia which I was aware of when I used to be based in Moscow and one of them was kind of the national identity discourse which was the guys with the beards writing books about whether Russia has its place in Europe, Russia is the third Rome and Russia in Eurasia. Then you had Russian foreign policy which was made by very single minded, ex KGB officials who had a very pragmatic view of foreign policy which was keeping good trade relationships with Russia’s major trading partners in the West and maybe pay lip service to the national questions, but really you are more interested in good relationships with the West, with growing the economy and buying some properties in some neighborhoods of this city.
What happened over the past ten years is that these two worlds essentially collided, the making of Russian foreign policy I feel somehow was invaded or coincided with this debate over national identity which was entirely separate. So you started hearing strange buzzwords and slogans out of the mouth of President Vladimir Putin and high ranking ministers would say inaudible which is like national passion which is quite interesting, if you read my book you will understand it a lot more. Words like Eurasia, Atlantist, globalization, these were sort of buzz words which were formerly talked about by the Russia far right and had now become mainstream words which were used in official speeches.
So you had this national identity discourse which was romantic and a foreign policy which was pragmatic and suddenly it seems as though the people who were creating the foreign policy read all of these books and said oh this is a great idea. Now I don’t think that actually happened but it seems to me that on some level the coffee house hipster nationalists at some point managed to wag the dog and they seemed to have somehow created a vision of Russian foreign policy, Russian domestic policy even that was very compelling or for some reason has become implemented in Russia today and it is interesting to try and answer the question why that is. I don’t think that for a moment, Putin necessarily believes this or that he has come convinced by this or that Alexander Dugin being the main protagonist or Putin’s brain as he has been called elsewhere. I think that this philosophy, this ideology is useful to the Kremlin at this stage and for whatever reason the Kremlin finds it convenient to use these slogans and to follow this foreign policy and I think that is quite an interesting development.
I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily an official ideology in the same sense that communism was an official ideology of the Soviet Union were every single speech had to reference Marxism and communism and every major policy sort of had to justify itself. That is not quite the way it is at the moment. You more see kind of an official nationalism with a kind of hidden, slightly on the side kind of nod to radical nationalists and the far right in Russia as a kind of wink to them, a sort of dog whistle politics where you use a slogan like Eurasia and that means something to a certain constituency, to a certain group of people who see their intellectuals who tell their constituents that he is one of us, he is on our side. It is just as deniable you can use the word Eurasia in a speech and then somebody says why did you use the word Eurasia, you can sell well it is Eurasia it is a place, I didn’t mean Eurasia as a super state, the way these people think I did.
One of the things I wanted to talk about and some of the news which happened over the weekend which made me want to talk about this is that Russia, you raise this interest in Eurasia, this interest in the far left and this interest in the far right and radical nationalism has grown out of interest in the European far right in Russia and an effort to co-opt ideas from the European new right during the 1990s, we translate them, rephrase them, improve them for Russian reality and then actually retransmit them back to the West.
Russia has always had a curious relationship with European ideas. In the 19th century there was a book which focused on how Russia was obsessed with European philosophy at the time, crime and punishment is a book about a guy who kills a women to prove a theory to himself. At the end of the book his friend tells him look its lucky you had a theory were you only had to kill one women, if you had a different theory you might have killed 10’000. That was of course what happened about half a century later, a new theory, a new philosophy wafted in from Europe. Russia took a European philosophy, transformed it and took it very, very seriously, weaponized it, used it in all pretty much all aspects of life everything from the design of a communal apartment building to a debate about how to preserve vegetables. They took Marxism very, very seriously and then they re-exported it to the rest of the world where it became a global totalitarian movement which killed thousands of people.
I would argue that something akin to this happened when what happened with the theories of the new right in Europe, not on this scale of communism I wouldn’t want to get carried away. What happened in the 1990s and there is a chapter in my book about this is the new right in Europe at the end of the Cold War was pretty much a curiosity, it wasn’t a very strong political movement it was a bunch of harmless ex-Nazis and cranky anti-immigration activists. One of the main protagonists he was a nationalist dissident, he came to Europe and learned about and met all of the protagonists of the new right, translated their books into Russian, brought them to Moscow to give lectures, took their theories added a bit of post-modernism, added some better conspiracy theories and took these theories and injected them into the Russian reality in the 1990s. Out of that you had a fairly harmless new right or a fairly defunct political movement, out of that sort of came this weaponized really quite radical theory of nationalism which I think we are seeing a lot of in new right movements in France, in other countries in Europe and the United States. The alt right in the USA is a big example I wish I knew more about this stuff before I published the book.
You can tell the thinkers of the alt right in the US, the new right in Europe they praise Russia they travel to Moscow, they use many of the same terms, the same arguments, they praise many of the leaders of the Russian hard right nationalist movements like Mr Dugin. I notice when the Macron leak documents came out they were first tweeted by a alt right American and I looked at his Twitter feed and it was full of posts of him praising Alexander Dugin. I am not saying that somebody told him, nobody really exactly knows how that happened but there seems to have been multiple areas were the Russian hard right movement has influenced and inspired a hard right movement in Europe and the US and even Turkey, I was there last week giving a lecture about Eurasia, I didn’t fully understand why they were interested in this but it turns out there is a Eurasian movement in Turkey that is very pro-Russian.
When I wrote this book it was about a movement that had happened in Russia and now we are starting to see it kind of creep out of Russia and you start to run into the same terms, the same vocabulary, the same slogans, the same arguments in the alt right movements all over the world. I will actually read you a passage from Steve Bannon who is Donald Trump’s chief strategist which I was absolutely floored by. In 2014 he gave a speech at the Vatican and was quite praising of Eurasianism of the Russian nationalist tradition that I have written about. “With Vladimir Putin if you really look at some of the underpinnings of his beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism. One of the reasons at least is that they believe that Putin is standing up for traditionalism and he is trying to do it for a form of nationalism and I think that people in certain countries want to see the sovereignty for their country, they want to see nationalism for their country.” I would argue that he has fundamentally misunderstood a lot of what Eurasianism is about, it is not about global power it is about empire but the fact that he is propagating it and advertising it in his writings and the fact that he is one of the most powerful officials in the White House is quite interesting. I would never have predicted any of that even a year ago.
I think maybe I should take some questions or I could talk a bit about the origins of Eurasianism but that would be like another lecture. Why don’t we stop there, I think the links between the Russian nationalism and the international alt right movement is something that I think is quite topical today.
Andrew Foxall: Thank you Charles, so we now how 40 minutes or so for questions, if you do wish to ask a question please just raise your hand and introduce yourself and say if you represent a particular organisation or not. I have lots of questions that I would like to ask so I will start by asking one and give you time to think about any that you wish to ask.
It seems to me that there are various strands of nationalism in Russia at the moment and Eurasianism is one of them. It is inclusive, civilizational and quite intentionally I think quite ill or broad defined to be used for various geopolitical purposes. The other sort of strand is the national ethno-cultural, much more exclusive. Those two things appear to be sort of incompatible – are they?
Charles Clover: Yes and then there is Russia as the third Rome crowd, the sort of Orthodox Church link, that is another entire sphere of nationalism. When you get into nationalism there are tons and tons of little fractions and they are all disagreeing with each other and arguing with each other about all sorts of things. But yes I think broadly speaking I think you have ethno-nationalism which is more associated with the Russian political opposition though maybe less so after the invasion of Ukraine. I am afraid I left Russia in 2013 and since then I have been writing about the Chinese car industry so I am not entirely up on what has been happening there in the last 3 years but ethno-nationalism is defiantly something that is associated more with the political opposition like Alexei Navalny one of the democratic Russian opposition leaders.
The third Rome group is associated with the Orthodox Church they argue for unification of the Orthodox parts of the Russian empire – Ukraine, Belarus, Russia. Then you have Eurasia which is basically the orthodox Slovak along with all the other minority nationalities of the empire of inter Asia, the Kazaks etc. The task of Eurasianism, the original founders of Eurasianism set out to do and I didn’t really get into this but Eurasianism was created in the 1920s by a group of aristocrats who had fled the Baltic revolution, settled in the capitals of Europe, sitting around in cafes, planning for the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union which they believed was going to happen in about 1928, they were about 60 years off but it did happen for exactly the same reasons that they said it would, the economic contradictions and the contradictions of the Soviet nationality are the two things they were absolutely right about. Another thing they were absolutely right about was that they thought that a new regime, the thing that would take the Soviets place in the Kremlin would be a regime that dedicated itself to Eurasia and they kind of seemed to be right, looking at some of the things which Putin has said over the past 5 years.
Their mission was to erase the contradictions of nationalism, so when you are an ethnic nationalist in Russia and you go out on the streets and start shouting about Russia for the Russians everybody else gets very, very nervous, the Kazaks and the Dagestanis, everybody starts to get very nervous and you suddenly see a lot of people thinking about separating. Likewise Russia as the third Rome, the capital of the Orthodox world the Muslims and minority nationalities start to get very nervous so you can’t have a sort of imperial super state with an ideology which profoundly alienates a third of the population. So Eurasia was originally intended as a way to erase these contradictions to have the mobilization power of nationalism without the headache of separatism that has been caused by nationalism.
Now did they actually get it right – probably not. The point of Eurasianism is that you can have Chechnya’s and you can have Russians and you can have and you can have Dagestanis all in the same empire but you can have a single Eurasian orientation to the government and to the regime and to the political system that will theoretically make everyone happy and satisfy everybody’s longing for their own national destiny.
Now it hasn’t really been tried and I don’t think that the word Eurasia as of yet makes anybody’s blood pump with passion in the same way that Russia or another kind of nationalism might do so. When Eurasianism has been tried in public, generally speaking, the ethnic nationalists tend to win. The ethnic nationalists win out in a debate against the Eurasianists because basically the Eurasianists are Russians and the ethnic nationalists are tougher and bigger and they have more people.
It is a profoundly audacious political project to found a completely artificial political unit on the basis of erasing nationalism in the service of nationalism, so we will see if it ends up working. I have a feeling they will try it.
Andrew Foxall: Thank you.
Question 1: I came here I suppose wanting an idiot’s guide about the vengeance caused by this phenomenon and it has been fascinating and clearly I must read the book. Can you give a sense apart from nostalgia and bigotry dressed up in all these forms, what are the defining characteristics of this phenomenon when you meet it in the street and how big a threat does it pose to the West?
Charles Clover: I guess it depends how you define it because if you are talking about Eurasianists, narrowly speaking in Moscow there are a group of intellectuals who mostly write. They inspire within their kind of writings, nationalism broadly speaking they like to say that they represent the Russian far right, they represent an officially sanctioned form of far right nationalism. So that would include skin head gangs, it would also include university professors who like to write about nationalism.
As a global phenomenon it fits in to a global trend towards nationalism in all countries and I think there is something quite profound going on today with nationalism everywhere and I think that is one of the things which has helped nationalism in Russia is that it is the narrative in so many other countries. The 20th century was a time were ideology was a big thing, and every country decided to have an ideology. Now nobody talks really about ideology but that fact that Russia has Hindu nationalism is a big thing in India, there are nationalist movements all across the Middle East, the new right nationalism in Europe and the alt right in America. These movements all feed off each other and they seem more relevant to the public simply because they are everywhere, all these other countries have nationalist movements and so it strengthens the credibility of nationalism in all countries.
There is also something fundamental about nationalism that just makes it win political arguments. Nobody really knows why that is, there is something really emotional about it, there is an appeal. It is very new, it is about 200 years old nationalism as a sort of political philosophy. It appeals to the origins of nations and there is just something about that what makes us, there are things about it there are narratives and stories that act on our emotions and nationalism seems to have a monopoly on those things. Britain has gone through something very similar with nationalism recently. There is a movement to separate from the European Union. There is something intrinsic about nationalism which makes it strong, I am personally opposed to it I think it is harmful, but there is something about it which makes it extremely attractive to people.
As far as being a threat, I think yes it is absolutely a threat if you value a) peace I think nationalists tend to have more wars than non-nationalists, if you value integration, if you value national integration, if you value the values of globalization, I do think that that is very much a threat. But what does it look like when you see it in the street? I can’t say. Sometimes it will look like somebody with a shaved head wearing a Lonsdale t-shirt, sometimes it will look like a university professor, sometimes it will look like me, there is no way it really looks. I am sorry if I didn’t totally answer that.
Question 2: If I may I have two questions. I go to Paris to listen to Macrons speech and how do you evaluate inaudible… election and the second question is directed at Andrew and the network of useful idiot work and you give Nigel Farage and Putin inaudible… nationalist but in the case National Front borrowed money from a Russian bank, in general it depends on money from Russia inaudible..
Charles Clover: On Macron I mean again I am based in China so I have a limited understanding of French politics but I think the French designed their electoral system very cleverly. The first round everybody votes their protest vote and then a few weeks later they have a second round were everybody gets to go oh my God what I have done and then they vote for the people who are much better able to govern. Unfortunately in the United States we didn’t do that, we have who we have.
I don’t know that much about the UK side of the Kremlin financing of the far right, that would have been a great chapter to have in my book and I wish I would have had more time but I am afraid I didn’t and I didn’t really spend much time researching that. I believe Nigel Farage has given a few interviews to Russia Today, you probably know much more about this than I do.
Andrew Foxall: Yes perhaps it is a topic for a different event. There is a question here please.
Question 3: Would you rephrase Eurasianism as best as a convenient hold all to steer clear from negative baggage from the past, as a band aid to inaudible the Soviet ideology from the disunion of December 1991. Or at worst trying to grasp at the straw to hold the inaudible together because everything is wrong since the orange revolution, since the Maidan coming knocking at Moscow’s door. Would you see it as a protective agreement, otherwise it will fall apart sooner?
Charles Clover: I think you are absolutely right with the first point that it was a band aid, that it was seen originally when the Soviet Union collapsed the ideological doors were thrown open and you could find people advocating pretty much everything in Moscow in the early 1990s and I think there was definitely a movement by you might call them the dead-enders in the Soviet state, the generals, the KGB officials who saw Eurasia as a way to maintain a sort of Soviet Union to rationalize in sort of theoretical terms the maintenance of an empire using a new ideology. I think that is still how it is sort of seen and I think that is the appeal of it in some circles, why does Putin, why do so many in the Russian elite see Eurasianism as a sort of imperial nationalism as useful. I think they see empire as fundamentally useful, as something as they want. It is also a metaphor for an empire which is a civilization, having a separate civilization allows them a kind of a defense, if they say well we are a separate civilization we are not the west, it neutralizes the moral authority of the West in a sense to say you don’t have democracy, you don’t have human rights, well we are a different civilization we value different things.
So they are two things which are fundamentally useful about Eurasianism broadly speaking, it is a larger political unit, it is a defensive sphere of influence and it is also a tool that defends them against the kind of moral arguments of foreign governments.
Question 4: I was quite interested in your distinction between the sort of coffee house intellectuals and the sort of skin head, biker gang thugs. Often in Western Europe at least nationalism tends to suffer when those inevitably divide. Now that might be a case of that is not that easy to divide and create divisions between those two groups in Russia but certainly the baggage which goes with 20th century history on beating up people in the street, that can be portrayed in Western Europe. How does that play out in Russia when journalists disappear overnight how does that sort of divide between the two sides of nationalism?
Charles Clover: There is a kind of collective group identity for a set of intellectuals in Russia, no matter what your politics are they do go to the same clubs and drink together so if something happens to somebody, if somebody disappears or somebody gets attacked that is something that is not just upsetting to the left wing or the liberal intellectuals it is something that the right wing intellectuals feel as a possible threat to them.
That said these guys take their ideas incredibly seriously and far more seriously than I think our own intellectual culture does. Little tiny disagreements over little tiny things can lead to splits and disagreements and people don’t talk to each other for weeks. The contradictions between the various types of nationalism I think that is one of the things which is really worth focusing on because you have the skinhead gangs and you have the kind of intellectuals who see the skinhead gangs as expressing something very authentic and skinhead gangs don’t really think very much about what they are doing. The intellectuals want to create a movement where they want to fit the skinhead gangs into their narrative.
One of the interesting dynamics of the Eurasian movement in Russia was that it was actually used as a movement by the Kremlin to kind of recruit the nationalist skinheads to a more pro Kremlin type of nationalism and it failed spectacularly. This was in 2005, the first Russian march in Moscow was put on by the Eurasianist movement, Mr Dugins Eurasianist movement, as a way to co-opt Russian ethno-nationalists into a less ethnic type of nationalism and more Kremlin friendly, more anti-Western type of nationalism. It failed because they invited too many skinheads and the skinheads just took over the whole march and since then the march has always been basically skinheads and Hitler salutes and things which is the Kremlin’s worst nightmare.
That does kind of show you the interplay between the gangs, you know the street nationalism and the coffee house (for lack of a better word) nationalism. There is an interplay and there is an interesting kind of dynamic there but sometimes it is the tail wagging the dog and sometimes it is the other way round.
Andrew Foxall: Before I go back to the audience I am going to ask another question again if I may. Eurasianism in itself I think it purposely both in its origin and its intention isn’t specific to Russia. So my question is to an extent, how has Eurasianism been felt or adopted in the broader Eurasia so I suppose one thinks about practical policy terms then the most obvious manifestation of Eurasianism since 2011/12 would be the Eurasia Union which put itself out in 2011/2012, the emergence of something like the European Union structure. Now that I think it would be fair to say that countries haven’t been, well there isn’t a particularly long queue to join that union, so how has the broader Eurasia geopolitical project been received in Eurasia itself?
Charles Clover: Some countries I think Kazakhstan, Belarus the sort of old loyalists who have very few other alternatives but I think ye it is met with a great deal of skepticism by the other potential members of the Eurasian Union. I think everybody is looking at what is going to happen to Ukraine to see what is the price of resisting this if Russia does actually manage to kind of put Ukraine into a sphere of influence and other countries might use that as a lesson.
In other practical terms, Eurasianism is inevitably, the whole politics of the post sanctions era in Russia is going to lead towards Eurasianism to avoid a huge disappointment with the West in search of alternatives. I can see that from China very easily you see Russian business men in banks, government officials are very keen to develop any contacts they can with China, especially military contacts and I think the military technological areas were Russia can be especially useful to China and China sees a very good sort of way to co-operate with Russia, but I don’t think that is going to go towards and alliance of some sort but there are some very influential Chinese political analysts, the heads of think tanks and stuff, who have actually supported this view but I think the Chinese state is opposed to it.
There have been other attempts for a kind of Eurasian integration as a way to create a counter balance to other things. The Chinese Silk Road is another geopolitical project in creating trade and investment links and soft power relations between China and countries of Eurasia and Africa. It is a project that is very much in the air. The idea of creating a counter-weight to the United States is something which has been talked about and it has been tried and it may actually wind up succeeding, it may be Eurasia, it may be the Silk Road, it may be called something completely different and you haven’t heard it yet. That is something that China, Russia and a number of other countries in the region of Eurasia are talking about.
Question 5: Do you think any other Orthodox Churches across the world will rise up to those in Russia and say that the behavior is not acceptable or will they accept it?
Charles Clover: The official Russian Orthodox Church is very, very supportive of kind of great power, nationalism and this whole Eurasia idea. The patriarchs can say one thing but the various priests and the archbishops have their own opinions and it is really hard to get a really straight view from them on what the line is. There are people who are very, very liberal and quite powerful within the Russian Orthodox Church.
I agree, this whole ideology to some extent does rest on a view of Orthodoxy as somehow monolithic and somehow projecting a certain type of identity that has come to all Orthodox people in the rest of the Orthodox world so if they said hey now we don’t agree with this, that would be definitely, I don’t know how widely reported that would be in Russia but it would definitely be a shock to the system as you say.
I don’t know enough about the other Orthodox churches to say definitively who would take what position on this. Certainly the Georgian and Ukraine Orthodox Churches have profound disagreements with the Russian Orthodox Church. I think the Russian Orthodox Church is the official patriarch is very traditional and very Orthodox and pro Kremlin. The lower down the food chain I found many, many liberal voices in the Russian Church as well. I think it’s so diffuse that any effort to found a political movement on Orthodoxy would suffer because of the Church, any effort to say well we are going to have a new Soviet Union with the Orthodox Church as a partner, the Orthodox Church lost 300,000 people so there would be a huge problem, there would be a lot of contradictions I think in trying to get the Orthodox Church as a unit to play along with this. The official hierarchy would have no problem with it, but no I think you are right, the Orthodox world is not a monolith nor is the Orthodox Church in Russia.
Question 6: I have just learned that there are Liberals in the Orthodox Church in Russia, I didn’t know that before. Two very brief questions, one is do you have any demographics in regards to Eurasia, my initial sense is that it is unfortunately a younger generation, those who weren’t born in Soviet times, do have a nostalgia for the Soviet Union and therefore are at least as nationalistic worryingly so, as their grandparents maybe. That is important for the future and my other question is towards well so what, is this something we can passively analyze or what do you think the operational conclusion should be?
Charles Clover: I mean definitely the younger generation does seem to be nostalgic, anybody who didn’t live through the Soviet time seems more likely to be nostalgic for a time when they didn’t have to stand in line for bread for 3 hours but they are nostalgic for a time when they were taken seriously when they travelled abroad, their passport meant something.
As far as operational conclusions the problem is if you fight against nationalism you fulfill the prophecy of nationalism and I can’t say that there is really any effective way to do that what I can think of. One can passively refute all the conspiracy theories that come out about the US creating ISIS and stuff. That is something that we should be doing and that is something that is being done, I think refuting conspiracy theories is what we are up to at the moment. I guess my operational conclusion for the time being would be just to ignore it and hope it goes away.
Andrew Foxall: Finally, we now have two questions on the back row, perhaps we could take them together please.
Question 7: What do you think the end point would be and inaudible… Russian nationalism inaudible… domestic problems inaudible… in the long term
Question 8: To what extent do you think inaudible… sort of tidying up ideology …inaudible..
Andrew Foxall: OK so two questions which are as you suggested basically one which is what is the end point of Eurasianism that if one follows through logically that the thinking and evolution of Eurasianism where does that lead us?
Charles Clover: I think the original version of Eurasianism that was pioneered in the 1920s saw the end point of Eurasia as the creation of a separate civilisation bounded in Asia on one side by China and bounded on the other side by the boundaries of Catholic Europe in the 16th Century or something so it includes maybe the Caucuses, Central Asia, the Siberia territory of the Russian Federation and Ukraine and Belarus. That territory has a separate civilisation super state with its own ideology and its own autocratic government that is the end state of what the original Eurasianists wanted.
The new age Eurasianists who are associated with Dugin and the ones who have sort of taken this theory and added a whole bunch of European new right ideas to it along with a lot of geopolitical theory would see the end state as a reformed Russian Eurasian empire as a singular political unit along with a series of alliances with other similarly oriented countries such as China or Japan or India or Iran. The construction of an anti-Western alliance in the territory of Eurasia that is designed to eject the Western or Atlantic or American or Anglo Saxon influence from the Eurasian landmass and asked as a counter weight to that.
The current version of Eurasia adds that geopolitical alliance component to that. So that is the pie in the sky, utopian or dystopian end point that these people look towards.
Andrew Foxall: Thank you Charles it is just after 2pm so I am aware that most of you have jobs which you will need to get to so I will call the meeting to a close there. Thank you Charles, it really was most interesting.