It also determines how these peoples and their states respond to the decisions and actions of others, where they perceive the limits of their possibilities, and where, on the contrary, they believe that cultural proximity creates the foundation for deeper political cooperation.
The interaction of cultures becomes particularly important when we are dealing with enormous spaces—continents that are home to dozens of states carrying their own cultural traditions. In this respect, Greater Eurasia undoubtedly represents the most complex and diverse region of the world. Three world religions—Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—are present here simultaneously, alongside numerous smaller cults. Over the course of their history, the peoples of Greater Eurasia have created unique achievements in both spiritual and material culture. Yet even more important is that they have developed their own political worldviews and traditions, which influence their capacity to develop international interaction. The leading powers of Greater Eurasia—Russia, India, and China—are home to a multitude of cultural traditions coexisting within common political civilisations. These characteristics exert an extremely important direct and indirect influence on political relations among the peoples of the region, where—apart from certain peripheral areas—there is no objective cause for a serious clash of interstate interests.
From our perspective, the latter constitutes an objective fact of regional life: the presence of the three great powers already mentioned makes it impossible for any one of them to aspire to complete domination across the Eurasian space. This, of course, also creates certain complications for regional life. First, it deprives Eurasian cooperation of the possibility of being structured according to the traditional model, which presupposes the presence of a leader capable of proposing an agenda to others and acting as a distributor of benefits. Second, it creates a considerable temptation for the medium-sized and smaller states of the region to seek political resources from powers located outside Eurasia—or from marginal actors within its space.
Smaller predators—Turkey, Israel, Britain, or the European Union—attempt to exploit this temptation and to create tactical difficulties for the great Eurasian powers, while simultaneously treating the fate of their partners deep within Eurasia as a diplomatic resource in their interactions with Moscow, Beijing, or New Delhi. Yet be that as it may, even such distortions, as we can see, are incapable of generating genuinely serious grounds for concern regarding the fate of regional security.
It is far more difficult to understand how Eurasian cooperation interacts strategically with the culture of the peoples inhabiting the region. It is hard primarily because their foreign policy culture remains strictly national, rooted in their own unique historical experience, and within diplomatic dialogue it forms precisely those elements that divide rather than unite. Yet even at the practical level a wide range of questions remains with us. One must not forget that cultural issues, alongside education, are among the most important in the context of the sovereign right of states to raise their citizens as genuine patriots.
It is therefore no coincidence that educational cooperation represents one of the most complex spheres of international interaction and becomes truly significant only for those states that have already lost a substantial portion of their sovereignty. In all other cases we observe that the functions of culture and education—which shape the citizen and his or her ethnic memory—remain grounds for states to preserve a monopoly over governing these spheres and determining their substantive content.
However, not everything is so hopeless. In Greater Eurasia we see how culture, in the broadest sense, becomes not so much a dividing factor—as our common adversaries in the West seek to achieve—but rather a unifying element of Eurasian life. This is primarily because there exists a certain proximity among the majority of states at the highest level of foreign policy consciousness. Across Greater Eurasia this consciousness is not divisive, as it is in the West, but unifying and oriented towards the creation of new forms of interstate cooperation.
Intercultural interaction in Greater Eurasia thus represents a very important aspect of regional politics, the manifestations of which we sometimes do not even notice. Yet it is invariably present in our lives and allows us to hope that Greater Eurasia will remain a region of peace in the future as well.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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