This idea, that nations and civilizations exist as individual organisms, was particularly widespread in the aftermath of the First World War. With the horrific events of the previous decade, the shine had worn off European civilization, which no longer appeared to represent something universal and aspirational. Its moral authority had been questioned as never before by the carnage of the conflict, as had the values that Europe had championed since the Enlightenment: individual rights, freedom, democracy and the perfectibility of man. A number of interwar thinkers, such as Oswald Spengler, argued that non-Western civilizations have fundamentally equivalent (if incommensurate) moral and epistemological systems, and they fundamentally questioned the authority and singularity of the Enlightenment.
The destruction of the war, the millennial cataclysm of the Bolshevik revolution, the unprecedented population movements after the war, and the collapse of three major empires which had ruled for centuries – all this combined to create a mood where the most deeply embedded truths were suddenly open to question. It was in this environment that Trubetskoy began to pursue a sideline in political pamphleteering, which was tangentially related to his and Jakobson’s academic work. In his political writings, he could not resist extending the metaphor of language as a self-regulating ‘system’ to culture generally, contending that cultures represent autonomous sealed universes of unconscious structure.
Trubetskoy, along with a number of other, better known interwar writers, questioned the idea – a dogma of Enlightenment thought – that humanity ‘advances’ at all; that such a thing as ‘progress’ exists. If the most advanced nations of the world could wage such a brutal war and extinguish so much life in so short a time, then what right did they have to cloak themselves in ‘progress’ and to teach other civilizations about its virtues?
The weakening consensus around the universal values preached by the Enlightenment was matched by the strengthening of elemental nationalism. Instead of the pinnacle of human reason, nationalism sold itself as the most primordial human instinct: the urge to reach back in time to secure identities that had lost their moorings because of the turmoil. Political parties across Europe immediately understood the power of this simple formula to mobilize profoundly alienated and demoralized populations.
This rise of nationalism was helped by the post-war deconstruction of the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg empires. The new states that emerged in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, such as Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, were unlike the nation states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These new nation states were nations first, and states second. The right to citizenship was guaranteed only to members of the titular nationality, and it was felt that minorities needed protection under a treaty in order to enjoy full rights, until they could be assimilated.9 Rights for the first time became equated with a nation rather than a state, and it was not long before Hitler declared that ‘right is what is good for the German people’ and rendered Germany’s Jews stateless and rightless by stripping them of their nationality.10
It is noteworthy that the first to feel the bitter taste of this new xenophobia and bombast were Europe’s refugees, and especially the Russian exiles. In the new postwar political climate, the stateless were the continent’s most vulnerable: they had no recourse to embassies, no representation and no rights, and states found they could deal with this increasing mass of uprooted people through arbitrary police power. The stateless lived in constant fear of deportation; the only factor preventing this was that no other country would take them in. With their political rights attached to citizenship and nationality, the stateless Russians were, in a sense, the first subjects of the totalitarian regimes that were to come, even before these regimes took shape.
It was in this climate that Trubetskoy wrote his first political pamphlet – a blistering attack on Europe’s claim to universalism and progress, called Europe and Mankind. It would eventually lead Trubetskoy to found the Eurasianist movement the following year with three other collaborators. For Trubetskoy, the Bolshevik revolution and the rapid disintegration of Russia provided proof that Russian efforts since the time of Peter the Great to Europeanize had weakened the country, and that Europe (‘Romano Germanic civilization’) did not deserve the prestige it arrogated to itself. As he wrote in the introduction to the pamphlet:
The Great War and especially the subsequent ‘peace’ (which even now must be written in quotation marks) shook our faith in ‘civilized mankind’ and opened the eyes of many people. We were witness to the sudden collapse of what we used to call ‘Russian culture’. Many of us were struck by the speed and ease with which this occurred, and many began to ponder the reasons for these events.
Trubetskoy’s bitterness at Europe has to be understood in the context of his own personal situation as a stateless refugee; but he was also ploughing a well-worn furrow among Russian writers, who were only too happy to speak European languages, drink European wine and vacation in Europe, but who endlessly decried their country’s slavish imitation of the West and proclaimed their desire to be free of it. The Russian writer to whom Trubetskoy most clearly owed a debt was Nikolay Danilevsky, whose Russia and Europe, printed in 1869, clearly inspired Trubetskoy’s title and many of his ideas.
An avowed Russian imperialist, Danilevsky was a little-known fisheries expert and obscure pamphleteer, whose most famous work was a venomous assault on the prestige of European culture. His pen dripping with derision, he lambasted Russia’s intelligentsia for its docility and anxiousness to reproduce the latest intellectual fashions of Paris and London salons in their own country. He argued that Russians were hesitant to assert themselves politically because they had internalized the view – promoted by Europe – that forceful and confrontational policy towards the West was immoral, narrowly nationalistic and non-humanitarian. This constituted implicit acceptance of Europe’s claims that its civilization was the culmination of human history.
To be fair to Trubetskoy, Europe and Mankind was not sheer plagiarism of Danilevsky’s ideas; but the young prince, without once attributing or even mentioning Danilevsky, was clearly profoundly influenced by the Pan-Slavist, right down to his choice of terminology: to describe civilization, Trubetskoy adapted the key term ‘Romano German’ from Danilevsky, who had called it ‘Germano Roman’.
Like Danilevsky, Trubetskoy went on to chastise the Russian intelligentsia for their unquestioning belief that foreign ideas and cultural norms could be superior to native ones: ‘The Romano Germans have always been so naively convinced that they alone are human beings that they have called themselves “humanity”, their culture “universal human culture” and their chauvinism “cosmopolitanism”.’ The ladder of progress was an illusion, and the reality, argued Trubetskoy, was that no foreign culture can ever be assimilated properly: ‘Efforts to achieve complete Europeanization promise all non Romano Germanic nations a miserable and tragic future.’
Europe and Mankind was noteworthy for its clear and erudite style. This distinguished it from the political propaganda of the time that was being churned out by all major exile groups. Danilevsky’s views, reproduced by Trubetskoy, may not have found their mark in the age of John Stuart Mill and Turgenev, when the prestige of European culture was at an all-time high. But by 1920, dismayed Russian exiles were more willing to countenance the increasingly popular view that the West was in decline. The pamphlet was also noticed for the exalted Trubetskoy name, which still held tremendous cachet among Russians. Though the pamphlet did not sell particularly well, it was reviewed in a number of prominent journals. One reviewer was a man named Petr Savitsky, who happened to arrive in Sofia at the same time as Trubetskoy. Savitsky wrote for the widely distributed liberal publication Russkaya Mysl. In his review of Europe and Mankind, he extrapolated from some of Trubetskoy’s thoughts and added a few of his own (‘the cultural emancipation of Russia-Eurasia from Eurocentric egotism’).