Geopolitics as the World View of Authority in Russia

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the characteristics and motives of thinking about international relations showed by the Russian ruling elite. This thinking is determinated by geopolitics. Russian political class is not the only one in the world establishment, which is based on its perception of the world system on geopolitical interpretations, because a similar trend can be observed in the American and Chinese approaches to these issues. Recognition of Southeast Asia and the adjacent area of the Pacific in recent years by Washington as the most important global policy direction of the United States is a confirmation of such tendency. Nevertheless, geopolitics in Russia becomes a field of knowledge, which is incoporated into the new Russian messianism, being one of the cornerstones of the Russian historical destination and filling Russian historiosophy with new content. Special status of geopolitics in Russia due to the fact that already in the 90s of the 20th century it became an ideology, which filled the ideological vacuum after the bankrupt communist ideology. Thus, in this country there has been a process of ideologisation of geopolitics, which gives it the position of the new universal idea – integrally explaining Russians, and primarily the Russian ruling elite, the surrounding world. Geopolitics and imposed by it determined geographically and by thinking in the traditional categories of zones of influence vision of the international system has become both worldview authority in Russia and an essential element of the Russian strategic culture. In the article will be presenting conditions that make the geopolitics the permanent, archetypical component of thinking about the world and global order from viewpoint of the ruling elite in Russia.