Max Planck Institute for

Social Anthropology
Working Papers
Working Paper No. 157
Chris Hann

Towards a
Maximally
Inclusive Concept
of Eurasia

Halle/Saale 2014
ISSN 1615-4568
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, PO Box 110351,
06017 Halle/Saale, Phone: +49 (0)345 2927-0, Fax: +49 (0)345 2927-402,
http://www.eth.mpg.de, e-mail: workingpaper@eth.mpg.de

Towards a Maximally Inclusive Concept of Eurasia 1

Chris Hann 2

Abstract
Based on a plenary lecture given in Astana in May 2014, the paper outlines the concept of Eurasia
which forms the framework for research in the Department Resilience and Transformation in
Eurasia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. It probes the legacies of an
interconnected Eurasia for contemporary political economy and social exclusion both long-term
with regard to the embedded economies of pre-industrial civilisations, and short-term with regard
to those of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism and Keynesian social democracy in the twentieth
century.

Thanks to Markus Kaiser, Tim Keirn, John Schoeberlein and Aigul Zabiova for hospitality and stimulus in Astana; to
Samuel Jub and Alain Supiot, present and past Directors of the Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes, which has
provided the ideal peripheral perspective for developing my views on Eurasia throughout the academic year 201314; to
Kirsten Endres, Catherine Alexander and David OKane, my readers and reviewers at the MPI; to the Scientific Advisory
Board of the Institute, for its persistent querying; to Burkhard Schnepel, for reminding me of the importance of maritime
links; to Johann Arnason, for a flow of ideas that has now continued for several years; to David Wengrow, for
complicating my understanding of Gordon Childe; to Wolfgang Streeck, for his patient tolerance of anthropological
eccentricities; and to Keith Hart, as always.
2
Chris Hann is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, P.O. Box 110357, 06017 Halle/Saale,
Germany, e-mail: hann@eth.mpg.de.

2
Preface
I have used the term Eurasia for a long time and always with the same purpose not to belittle or
deny the particular accomplishments of Europe, but to appreciate them better by placing them in a
wider context alongside those of other macro-regions of the Eurasian landmass. Europe and Asia
are scarcely equivalent units. Eurasia is more appropriately viewed as a single super-continent,
significantly larger than other continents in terms of surface area and still more so in terms of
population. I do not claim originality for this approach, which derives from large bodies of
scholarship critiquing earlier Eurocentric narratives.
Only the path by which this perspective has been reached in the Department which I head at the
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology is distinctive. In the years after our foundation in
1999, our major projects investigated transformations in property, religion, and social support after
socialism. This postsocialist space stretches from the river Saale to the Pacific: from eastern
Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria to the north-east of the Russian Federation, coastal China and
Vietnam. Although these latter states still proclaimed themselves to be socialist, they too had
changed radically as a result of reforms implemented in the 1980s and continuously extended since.
Our ethnographic projects focused on the changes of recent decades, including evolving memories
of the earlier era, which I label Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism (Hann 2006).
The results of these projects (see Hann 2005b, 2010) testify to the value of comparative
ethnographic fieldwork in providing understandings and explanations of contemporary social
transformations to complement those of other social sciences. Anthropologists can dig deeper into
the causes and consequences of social change, besides conveying more insight into the experiential
dimensions which remain inaccessible to other disciplines. We remain committed to these methods,
which have been the hallmark of socio-cultural anthropology for the last century. However, this
indispensable contemporary research agenda need not exhaust our ambitions. In addition to
documenting local and regional variation in postsocialist adaptations across Eurasia, one can also
formulate questions about the significance of these developments in world-historical perspective;
the answers may in turn shed fresh light on contemporary predicaments. One can extend the
definition of socialism to include alongside the one-party regimes the many variants of electoral
socialism (Goody 2003). With this step, it becomes even more obvious that socialism of one sort
or another has had an impact almost everywhere across Eurasia, in Europe as in Asia. How can this
phenomenon best be analysed in the longue dure?
My premise is that the ideas and practices of all these varieties of socialism can be explained in
terms of fundamental relations between society, politics and economy. These relations can be
analysed as evolutionary processes that originate in the later Neolithic, the point at which we can
first identify Eurasia as an innovative, interconnected super-continent. 3 I outlined this approach in
the Report of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology for 20042005, in which I declared
our intention to invest new resources to build up expertise in historical anthropology in order to
3
My use of the word evolution is deliberate but in this paper I cannot go further into controversies over this term in
socio-cultural anthropology. In my view it is important to take account of evolutionist research into issues of (in)equality,
cooperation and solidarity in other branches of anthropology, in primatology and in behavioural economics (cf. the
research programmes of other Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig and in Jena). My premise is simply that universal (hardwired) human proclivities have acquired new dynamics as a result of the historical developments of recent millennia in
Eurasia.

3
explore this Eurasian past (Hann 2005a; cf. Hann 2006). Eurasia was already the keyword in the
title of our major publication series Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia (launched in
2003). I have returned to the problem, defined and elaborated my usage in further articles (e.g.
Hann 2012). Some readers must surely be fed up by now.
Yet I continue to encounter widespread misunderstanding, suspicion and questioning of the very
term Eurasia. The invitation to deliver a plenary lecture at the joint conference of the Association
for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies and the Central Eurasian Studies Society at
Nazarbayev University, Astana, on 22 May 2014 provided me with an opportunity to revisit the
subject and get my message across to a very diverse scholarly audience. This Working Paper is a
revised version of that lecture. The title is unchanged. I begin by noting definitional muddles and
discuss two ways of approaching Eurasia which I find unhelpfully narrow. This is followed by a
summary of how I understand Eurasia in world history, with reference to some key works by
archaeologists, historians and sociologists as well as anthropologists. Having clarified this
framework, in the core section of the paper I analyse current tensions in Eurasia in the context of
global neoliberalism, with particular reference to Europe. The concept of Eurasia which I develop
here is more personal and speculative (critics will no doubt say tendentious). Drawing particularly
on the work of Karl Polanyi (1944) and Wolfgang Streeck (2014), I argue that the only way to
rescue the aspirations of European (Keynesian) social democracy, in other words to reconcile
embedded human economies with democratic polities, is to strive for the political and economic
unity of Eurasia. I view such a Eurasia as the prelude to a unified world society, based on the
values of inclusion.
These issues are highly topical. A few days after I lectured in Astana, citizens of the European
Union were called upon to elect the Strasbourg parliament. In some countries, barely a quarter of
those eligible bothered to vote; a high proportion of those who did so cast their votes for extremist
parties, some with Fascist tendencies, which reject the very idea of further European consolidation.
The other major political story of May 2014 was the on-going crisis in Ukraine, which, in the eyes
of many Western commentators (including a distinguished US historian) was facing a choice
between the freedoms of European civilisation and the totalitarianism of its Eurasian rival. I reject
this opposition. In this paper I have relegated my polemical discussions of these burning current
affairs to the Appendices, together with my assessment of the role of the USA, currently still the
dominant actor in world political economy as well as world anthropology.
In the final substantive section of the paper, prompted by the location of the conference in the
heart of the landmass, I propose complementing familiar east-west binaries by adopting a new
north-south optic. I conclude by explaining why a focus on this super-continent is more than just
another variant of Area Studies. Anthropologists commonly criticise their colleagues in other
disciplines (such as sociology) for their European or Western bias. But I suggest that many
anthropologists, particularly in the English-speaking world, themselves continue to view the world
with transatlantic blinkers.

4
Introduction: what, where, when is Eurasia?
Inside as well as outside scholarly communities, the names used to denote regions and continents
around the planet have their genealogies and a welter of associations. Sometimes these are morally
loaded. This is certainly the case with Europe. Asia, too, is a name bestowed by Europeans. The
compound Eurasia cannot be freed from these contingent origins. It has not been used in a
consistent way by scholars. I use it non-normatively as the best term available to denote the largest
landmass of the planet, including the large islands of Great Britain and Japan. The initial
geographical definition is supplemented by the southern shores of the Mediterranean because in the
period which concerns me, from roughly 1000 B.C.E. to the present, North Africa was an integral
part of an interconnected set of civilisations. Sub-Saharan populations, like hunters to the north,
were not effectively integrated. Civilisational interconnectedness unfolded across the Indian Ocean
as well as via what has recently been termed the Silk Road. Eurasia included not just the agrarian
empires but also the pastoral nomads of the Near East and Inner Asia. In some historical eras,
the latter were instrumental in bringing very large territories under one polity. However, my use of
Eurasia is not dependent on the fluctuating extent to which territories of Europe were politically
united with territories of Asia (very considerable under Genghis Khan and later under the Russian
Empire and under Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism). Eurasia is simply the name of this landmass
over the last three millennia, irrespective of the temporal and spatial classifications we may wish to
impose within these millennia.
To my way of thinking, this preliminary act of naming should be uncontroversial. Yet I cannot
ignore the fact that some my colleagues use language differently. The excellent journal Slavic
Review is published by a venerable body which changed its name a few years ago to read
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEES). How is Eurasia to be
understood in this formulation? The failure to insert a qualifying Central before Eurasia here
seems symptomatic of the shrinking reference of the term Eurasia in recent years. Since 1999 I
have worked in Germany, where I have noticed that Eurasien is often used more narrowly, to
denote an interstitial zone between (or linking) Europa and Asien. Nowadays I have to face the fact
that, even in the English-speaking world, Eurasia is increasingly invoked as the collective label for
a limited number of post-Soviet states (and there is no consensus on the exact number), with the
possible addition of Mongolia.
In this paper I shall argue against what I believe to be unfortunate, narrow definitions and defend
a broader concept, one that is inclusive not only in terms of territory but also, and above all, in
terms of people.
Let me begin, however, by considering some of the rival definitions of Eurasia available today.
At one end of the spectrum, there is that fascinating current in Russian intellectual thought
associated with Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy, Petr Sawitskii and other extraordinary men of the post1917 diaspora (they were indeed all men). Their notions of Eurasia blend elements of romanticism
and religious mysticism with political conservatism and materialist geographies. According to
Sawitskiis definitions, I finally made it to Eurasia when I began fieldwork in Xinjiang with Ildik
Bellr-Hann in 1986: the Tarim Basin might fall within the historical imperial domain of China
rather than Russia, but it exemplifies the continental principle which underpins this Russian

5
vision of Eurasia. Independent post-Soviet states such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan do not qualify:
these mountainous states are the southern border of a Eurasian entity whose boundaries are set
ultimately by intangible, even spiritual criteria.
This is not the place to discuss the circumstances in which these ideas were revived in the late
Soviet period, a revival sometimes termed by foreign analysts neo-Eurasianism, in which the
Russian etnos is postulated even more firmly as the konstanta of the civilisation of Eurasia
(Humphrey 2002). These are intriguing intellectual, ideological constructions. The best that I can
do, given my background in the West, is to detect affinities between at least some of these
Eurasianist contributions and much older European critiques of the Enlightenment. Like Herder,
but on a much larger scale than the Herderian Volksgeist, Trubetskoy offers an antidote to the
rationalist universalism of Les Lumires. This alternative is holistic, organic, opposing spiritual
profundity to the utilitarian disenchantment of a technologically more advanced West. It may be
politically reactionary, but it can equally be appreciated as a precursor of the Saidian critique of
western Orientalism and postcolonial theories (Laruelle 2008). But at the end of the day, this is not
a definition of Eurasia which I can accept. It opens up extraordinary fertile pathways, but it remains
a closed system of ideas in the Popperian sense, not a body of thought which I can make any use of
as an empirical social anthropologist.
The antithesis of such heady intellectual conceptions of Eurasia is the pragmatic sense in which
the term has acquired a wide measure of acceptance around the world to refer to a limited number
of post-Soviet states. For example, I recently received an unsolicited e-mail informing me of the
founding of the Eurasian Council on Foreign Affairs, modelled on Councils with similar-sounding
names in the European Union and the USA. The declared aim of this Council, funded by the
government of Kazakhstan, is to deepen relations between Central Asia and the EU. In the first
publication of this Council, a paper published in April 2014, Kazakhstan is presented convincingly
as a global energy security partner in turbulent times, the engine for economic growth of a
Eurasian region from which Russia is surprisingly absent.
Yet it cannot be denied that the term Eurasia has also been used (some say abused) of late by
Russia, notably by President Vladimir Putin, who instigated the Eurasian Economic Union in 2011
(though the initial idea was floated by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan two decades
ago). Astana and Minsk share the leadership of this economic union with Moscow. This is
pragmatic in the sense that, unlike the space invoked by the theorists of Russian Eurasianism, it has
precise boundaries. Moreover, like the European Common Market in its early phase, the emphasis
is currently being placed on economic goals: a customs union and the promotion of economic
integration, e.g. in the energy sector. At the same time, it is also pointed out that the members hold
common values and share common civilisational legacies (notably that of socialism).
These pragmatic developments resonate widely, e.g. in academic fields, exemplified not only by
the ASEES but also in journal titles and in the Eurasian Studies programme of the US Social
Science Research Council, which generously extends the territory of Eurasia all the way west to
Habsburg Galicia, and all the way south to include the whole of the Caucasus. However, in my
view this is still not generous enough. I want to retain the usage I was brought up with. I shall argue
that this is not the idiosyncratic foible of an anthropologist but can be readily justified with

6
reference to large literatures in several pertinent disciplines. Here I can mention only a few of the
more important contributions.
It is surely no accident that some of the pioneering insights concerning the connectedness of
Eurasia have been provided by scholars who originate and work elsewhere. In archaeology, one of
the first to emphasise the interconnectedness of Eurasia was the Australian Gordon Childe (e.g.
1942). In doing so, Childe transcended the Eurocentric perspective of Marx and Engels, whose
materialist paradigms of progress nonetheless infused everything he wrote. His Eurasianist
credentials can be questioned in the sense that, while emphasising connections, Childe does so
from a premise of European exceptionalism that has affinities with what later came to be termed
Orientalism. He was convinced that essential differences between East and West could be traced
back over millennia (Wengrow 1999). Nonetheless, his work has inspired later prehistorians to
document the exchanges of goods and ideas between East and West without such a teleology, and
even to theorise these movements in terms of embryonic world systems and globalisation
(Wilkinson, Sherratt and Bennet 2011).
In anthropology, Jack Goody has always acknowledged his debt to Childe in the course of
developing his own critique of Eurocentrism and advocating a model based on alternating
leadership between East and West (Goody 2006, 2010). This model only broke down in the
nineteenth century. Arguably, the rise of China in the early twenty-first century is proof that the
model of alternation has lost none of its validity (cf. Frank 1998). Goodys contrasting of plough
agriculture in Eurasia with the technology of the digging stick in sub-Saharan Africa was an
element of my initiation to social anthropology in 1970s Cambridge (Goody 1976). He extended
this inter-continental contrast from production and property to various realms of kinship and
consumption in later publications, before gradually moving on to make East-West comparisons
within the super-continent. I acknowledge once again my debt to Goody, though in this paper I
shall suggest that his relentless focus on East versus West can be fruitfully supplemented with other
perspectives.
Alongside Goody, Eric Wolf is untypical among twentieth-century anthropologists in the
attention he pays to long-term historical factors. In his magnum opus (Wolf 1982) he presented
Europe as no different essentially from tributary states at the other end of the landmass. And yet
the title of this work and its limitation to the recent centuries of North Atlantic domination have
served to reinforce the dominant paradigm of European or Western exceptionalism. Much the same
can be said of the many anthropological studies influenced by the world systems theory of
Immanuel Wallerstein, with its bias towards the Atlantic transformations of the last half
millennium. By contrast, the distinctiveness of both Europe and Eurasia are lost to view in the very
interesting efforts of Friedman and Friedman (2008) to construct a global systemic anthropology.
Historians and sociologists have also contributed significantly to formulating the concept of a
unified Eurasia which underpins my Department at the Max Planck Institute. In the Englishlanguage literature, the doyen of world history in our age is William H. McNeill. He has
consistently dealt with the super-continent as a whole, even in early work devoted to explaining the
rise of the west (McNeill 1963). Marshall Hodgson preferred to designate the same space AfroEurasia (Hodgson 1974). This was understandable for a scholar whose main preoccupation was
Islam, the dominant civilisation of the southern shores of the Mediterranean. The important point is

7
that he, like McNeill, sees no merit in separating Europe and Asia as continents. This appears to
constitute a mainstream position, perhaps even the dominant paradigm, in contemporary
scholarship, whether or not the individual scholar uses the term Eurasia (e.g. Darwin 2007 does so,
while Morris 2010 does not). In this sense, Peer Vries has even complained recently of a certain
Eurasia-centrism in current global history (2009: 16).
It might be expected that the notion of a continental divide between Europe and Asia becomes
more firmly entrenched in the work of scholars who specialise in later periods, following the
Hellenistic and Roman eras. After all, this is the era in which Europe and Asia are invented
and consolidated in discourses. Mutual perceptions and moral evaluations of East and West through
the ages are extremely interesting and important, but they are not my concern here. Recognition of
the contributions of the classical civilisations and those which succeeded them, notably the
Christian world which brought a new measure of unity to the western Eurasian periphery, does not
entail ratification of a continental divide. Like Goody and McNeill, sociologist Johann Arnason
prefers to identify a unity, which he terms the Eurasian macro-region (Arnason forthcoming). His
basic distinction in charting the history of states and empires in the period between the middle of
the first and the middle of the second millennium is not between East and West but between the
inner and outer components of Eurasia. Arnason defines inner Eurasia as the whole area
between the Siberian Arctic and the shifting borders of settled civilisations in the European,
Iranian, Indian and Chinese worlds.
Irrespective of their discipline, most of the scholars I have mentioned have much deeper
knowledge of some regions and civilisations than others. The exact specification of spatial and
temporal boundaries within post-Neolithic Eurasia will depend on these interests and the project at
hand. For example, Johann Arnason himself has worked intensively on Japan and Byzantium.
Whereas the former can still be observed and analysed today, Byzantium obviously cannot
though it is certainly possible to debate whether contemporary eastern Christianity should be
treated as a distinct civilisation, and the nature of its links with other civilisations and with
socialism. In most normal science, research projects proceed with a tacit understanding of a
paradigm, without theorising or questioning that wider framework. It is the same with the projects
in our Department: neither the projects of individual researchers nor the Focus Groups to which
they belong are obliged to address Eurasia in any explicit fashion. Of course, I would be happy if
they were to do so, bringing forward arguments which would require modifications or
transformations of the paradigm which I have outlined here. In the meantime, what I am presenting
in this paper serves the dual purpose of clarifying the sense in which we have been using the term
Eurasia that of the archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and sociologists I have mentioned
and, on this basis, of advancing further propositions which will continue to animate research in the
Department for many years to come. I develop these propositions in the following section.

8
Markets, Welfare, Inclusion: an agenda for historical economic anthropology 4
So far I have argued for the standard definition of Eurasia as the Old World, the landmass between
the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, including North Africa and the large islands of Britain and Japan.
In this section I turn to the condition of this Eurasia today. There is no particular scholarly reason
to begin the discussion in Europe. But this is the region where I have lived nearly all my life, and
where I have carried out much of my field research. In recent decades, Europe has witnessed
significant processes of integration beyond the level of the nation-state. The countries I know best
in Eastern Europe, which formerly belonged to the Warsaw Pact, now belong to NATO as well as
the European Union. The project to create a multinational economic, political and even cultural
entity at the western extremity of Eurasia has much to commend it, especially in the wake of the
destruction wrought upon the world in the twentieth century by precisely these countries. But in
Spring 2014 this effort seems to be floundering. It was arguably flawed from its inception (Salais
2013).
What is this entity Europe, which so many people still habitually place on a par with Asia and the
other continents? It is often argued that the political deficit of EU institutions might have been
avoided if the founding fathers had begun by emphasising cultural commonalities, rather than
implement a common market with little regard to political let alone cultural unity (see Shore 2000).
Much has been done in recent decades to spread awareness of European heritage a common
history that is said to originate in Hellenistic Greece, before transferring to Rome, stalling for
roughly a millennium (the dark ages), and then bounding forward into the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, and the scientific and industrial revolutions which have together contributed to the
uniqueness of this continent. Closer inspection reveals the distortions in such ways of representing
the western Eurasian past. The implicit identification of modern Europe with western Christianity
could not be sustained and was definitively abandoned with the accession of two more large
Orthodox nations (Romania and Bulgaria) to the European Union in 2007. Greece, of course, has
been a member since 1981, although the living legacies of eastern Christianity have remained
problematic for the cultural commissars in the north, who prefer to appropriate Aristotle and
Socrates without the flotsam of the Ottoman Empire. What to do with the self-confident,
economically buoyant successor to that Empire, Atatrks republic in Anatolia, gradually
recovering its Muslim identity and increasingly scornful of the way it is treated by Brussels
Europe? Islam has marked Western Eurasia for centuries through Arabs in the Iberian Peninsula
and Tatars in Russia and Poland, as well as Ottoman Turks in the Balkans (Goody 2004). This
religion is frequently set up nowadays as the other, diametrically opposed to tolerant European
values, yet these variations on Abrahamic monotheism have common origins in the Near East.
In short, all efforts to demarcate Europe, whether in a geographical or a cultural-civilisational
sense, are fraught with difficulty (Hann 2012). European accomplishments must be analysed in the
wider context of Eurasia. Other world religions and civilisations have also contributed. East and
West have been engaging in the exchange of genes, germs, goods and ideas for millennia, usually
by violent as well as peaceful means. Europe (by this time with significant North American
appendages) did not gain a decisive advantage until the onset of the Industrial Revolution and the
4

This section draws on Hann 2013, 2014.

9
colonial expansion of the nineteenth century. The great transformation analysed by Karl Polanyi
(1944) primarily with regard to British economic history, must be located within this larger great
divergence (Pomeranz 2001) of East and West. John Darwin (2007) calls this the Eurasian
revolution.
The basic unity of Eurasia since the urban revolutions of the late Bronze Age (following earlier
multi-sited agricultural revolutions) was occluded in the era of North Atlantic global domination. It
escaped the vision of Polanyi, a Central European whose successive migrations took him ever
further westwards. During the last decade of his life in North America, Polanyi found renewed
inspiration in Aristotles writings on the economy; but he did not probe into similar bodies of
thought in other civilisational traditions, equally concerned to keep money and markets in their
place, rather than imagine them to be the basis of all human flourishing. In an era when China and
other Asian states are growing dynamically, restoring the pattern of alternating leadership after two
centuries of Western domination, it is instructive to look more carefully (e.g. in Confucian thought)
at their own critical commentaries on the economy. Although the Prophet was a merchant and his
faith was more sympathetic to trade than any other religious tradition, like all the agrarian
civilisations of Eurasia, Islam too kept the inequalities of the market in check. In Polanyis terms,
market exchange was never the dominant form of integration. The economy was embedded in
society through other forms: reciprocity, redistribution and householding. At the same time, we
cannot overlook the fact that these civilisations institutionalised other forms of oppressive
inequality, including slavery and many variations of feudalism.
This is the world-historical context in which to analyse the commonalities of Eurasia. The
contours of more recent developments are well known. Europeans made up roughly one quarter of
the worlds population in 1900, but they controlled directly and indirectly more than three
quarters of its territories. By 2100 it is projected that Europeans will comprise no more than 6% of
world population, while that of Asia will be 43% down from 60% today. 5 In other words, Eurasia
in my inclusive sense will comprise less than half of humanity, and its western extremity will have
fallen in two centuries from global hegemon to minor player. The ageing, fragmented peoples of
Europe cannot conceal their sharp decline.
However, before we write Europe off completely, let us not forget that it remains a pole of
attraction to many in Ukraine today, for example, as in numerous small Balkan states whose
aspirations to join Europe have been delayed and denied in recent decades. Let us assume that this
wish to join the EU (not the same thing as Europe, of course) is not driven solely by the obvious
material benefits and advance two strong claims. First, more transparent bureaucratic mechanisms
have been by and large better reconciled with more democratic forms of governance in Europe than
anywhere else in the world. Second, since the industrialisation of the nineteenth century this macroregion has created unprecedented welfare states, constituting a significant rupture with the
traditions of hierarchical privilege which were the legacy of the agrarian empires of the past. Surely
these two achievements, democracy and welfare, should not be lightly cast aside.
However, it is obvious that the so-called European Social Model (ESM) is under enormous
pressure. Demographically, the native population has long been incapable of reproducing itself.
5

I thank Keith Hart for all these figures, which originate in UN estimates and projections; see
http://thememorybank.co.uk/2014/05/06/europe-is-the-main-and-permanent-loser-in-this-world-crisis/ (accessed 30th
May, 2014).

10
British sociologist Anthony Giddens (2013), best known for his espousal of third way strategies
during the era of Tony Blair, thinks that a significant retrenchment of the welfare state is
unavoidable, because many sections of the native populations of the continent have fallen into
welfare dependency. They must be given new incentives by the social investment state of the
future, which will require higher contributions to be paid by those who benefit concretely from
social allocations. However, it is also possible to view the socialist and social-democratic
constructions of welfare in terms of evolutionary processes which began in Eurasia more than 3000
years ago, and to evaluate the present dialectic quite differently from Giddens. I would counter that
the ESM should not be abandoned but re-named Eurasian Social Model, because the values on
which it is based are the evolved moeurs of society throughout the landmass. Further, I propose that
these values are exemplified in the ideals of socialism, and that memories of socialist experiences
will play a crucial role in determining the future of embedded moral economies, in Eurasia and in
the world. These propositions can be reformulated as hypotheses and tested in historical and
ethnographic research.
Let me develop the argument more carefully. Anthony Giddens does not suggest that welfare
states should be entirely dismantled. Some state measures to provide support for those who need it
and to enhance security for all are a feature of all developed societies, he argues, including the
United States (Giddens 2013: 88). Similarly, David Garland (forthcoming) develops a Foucauldian
argument to the effect that welfare measures are a universal technology of governmentality in all
industrial nations; anyone who pretends otherwise is arguing ideologically. Both he and Giddens
argue primarily with reference to the transatlantic world. Some may feel that these sociologists
flatten some rather significant differences between the welfare states of North America and those of
Europe, not to mention significant differences within Europe (Esping-Anderson 1989). They do not
address socialist and postsocialist worlds, not even those of eastern Europe. They assume that
industrialisation and development entail welfare states, but they do not consider how different
forms of industrialisation (and deindustrialisation) shape the forms of welfare provision.
Anthropologists can make good this deficiency by documenting these differences on the
ground. This is exactly what we have been doing in East Asia with our on-going research into
Kinship and Social Support in China and Vietnam. But it is desirable to place these ethnographic
analyses in a wider conceptual framework. The framework I suggest is historical. It starts out from
agrarian foundations and the long-term ethics of non-market, hierarchical inclusion, as noted
above. The impact of industrialisation is radical. Karl Polanyi focused on the market, both in terms
of its ideology and in terms of the application of the market principle to organise the production,
circulation and consumption of goods and services. He argued that, although the idea of the selfregulating market was ultimately an illusion (Garland would say ideology), it was nonetheless
capable of wreaking tremendous damage to the fabric of society. In response, society would seek to
protect itself; the emergence of Keynesian social democracy, as reflected in the welfare state of
William Beveridge, can be viewed as the successful realisation of what Polanyi termed the double
movement, allowing him to devote himself to other concerns in the last years of his life (Dale
forthcoming).
But the dialectic was not resolved. Since the 1970s, and especially with the financial crisis which
began in 2008, which has led almost all governments into more or less involuntary austerity

11
campaigns, welfare provision in most Western European states has come under grave pressure. The
political economy of these decades has been brilliantly analysed by my colleague in the Max
Planck Society, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck (Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of
Societies at Cologne). Like Garland, Streeck (2014) rests his case on the functionalist argument
that market capitalism has an intimate need of welfare institutions. In their absence, these marketdriven systems would destroy everything! Welfare provisions in the broadest sense, just like higher
real wages, obviously impact on the profitability of enterprises. However, this hardly explains why
capitalists have invested less in the age of neoliberalism, in which they have been the principal
beneficiaries of dramatically increased social inequalities. In this same period, the legitimacy of
parliamentary government in Europe has been undermined by the emergence of new institutions at
the European level, notably the single currency. The dialectic between competitive markets as the
dominant form of integration and embedded economies of the kind of the kind advocated with
passion by Karl Polanyi is now being played out in the context of a massive legitimation crisis.
Social inclusion via welfare is viewed as functionally indispensable for the reproduction of
capitalist democracy by an array of post-Polanyian sociologists: the third way approach of
Giddens, the Foucauldian governmentality approach of Garland, and the Frankfurt-inspired critique
of Streeck. Wolfgang Streecks analysis is the most powerful and convincing of these accounts. But
instead of re-introducing statist controls over currencies within a system of the Bretton Woods
type, as Streeck proposes, I argue that it is time to be more ambitious. Global economic power has
already shifted away from Europe, and will continue to move eastwards in the decades to come.
China remains formally socialist; in recent years it has taken significant steps to extend pension
rights and enhance basic social security for its citizens. Yet in practice, notably in industrial
production, it has for several decades approximated a rather harsh variant of what Polanyi termed
market society. Similar patterns can be observed throughout Eurasia, as elsewhere around the
globe. Large sectors of social policy in the former Soviet bloc countries have been converted to the
logic of the market. Although the old welfare provisions have not been entirely abandoned, the
demise of the Soviet system opened space for elites (often including large sections of the old
nomenklatura) to plunder their way to new forms of market-dominated hierarchy. Indicators of
social inequality typically exceed those of the advanced capitalist states of the West, including the
United States.
The implications of these developments for the rest of the world, including Europe, are alarming.
China cannot be expected indefinitely to maintain low domestic consumption and welfare provision
in order to purchase US debt and sustain the illusion of Western superiority. The issue is whether
the new accommodation necessitated by the rise of China takes place with reference to the
standards of welfare inclusion which Western Europe was able to implement following the Great
Divergence (and to which Maoist China aspired in a very different way) or whether those standards
are abandoned in a world in which market power is the sole arbitrator and state regulation is
minimised. To give concrete examples: will the environmental and labour market standards of
France and Germany be extended across the landmass from west to east, or will the standards and
practices of China and India spread from east to west, in tandem with the inexorable rise of those
economies?

12
The ultimate challenge is the same as that analysed by Polanyi but globalisation and
financialisation have made the problems more acute: how to embed the economy into appropriate
forms of polity and society and thereby tame the power of the market? Epochal political
compromises are called for. The solution could be to adopt new federal forms of government, not at
the level of Europe where they patently do not work, but at the level of Eurasia, accompanied and
symbolised by a new single currency. This might bear the name Avra, an abbreviation of Avrasya,
the Turkish term for Eurasia (Hann 2014). This politically and economically unified entity should
not be imagined as a fortress, analogous to current efforts to consolidate the physical frontier
defences of Europe. Rather, a unified Eurasia would be the big bang necessary to solve the
collective action problem which threatens the planet, which now requires a decisive rupture with
the theory and practice of the hedge-fund. Only Eurasia can accomplish this, by virtue of its size.
But immediately following this revolution, we could imagine preferential partnerships with Africa
and South America. It might take a little longer before North America applies to affiliate. When it
finally does so, the first world government would take shape promptly.
It might be objected that this is utterly fanciful: if structural imbalances such as those which make
Germany and Holland so different from Greece and Spain are sufficiently powerful to undermine
the geographically very restricted realm of what Wolfgang Streeck calls Euroland, how could a
single currency possibly work for the vastly greater entity of Eurasia? If German solidarity does not
stretch south to Greece, how could it possibly stretch east to a super-federation including Vietnam?
This solidarity will certainly be expensive. Asia is growing dynamically, but most Asian states will
for many years to come have relatively low rates of productivity and infrastructural development.
Only massive transfers from west to east as well as from north to south, a redistribution of wealth
unparalleled in human history, can address these imbalances.
But if the principles behind this redistribution are spelled out transparently by politicians from the
beginning, why should the inhabitants of the countries which profited from the Great Divergence of
the Eurasian revolution be unwilling to vote for them? As Claus Offe (2013) argues for the present
crisis in Euroland, voters will first have to be convinced that this is in their own best interests, in
order to ensure the long-term flourishing of all citizens. No one should pretend that it would be
possible to create a Eurasian parliament as a replica of democratic national parliaments. The
Strasbourg model should be abandoned for good. Instead, national parliaments would send their
representatives to a new central Council. If the word federation is too tarnished, some alternative
will have to be found. The premise will have to be a Constitution which strengthens democracy and
prescribes rotation of the highest responsibilities at the central bodies. This would include the
unambiguous powers to regulate economic and above all financial institutions, which have
assumed such unholy significance in recent decades (Hart 2012). The overwhelming power of the
markets would disappear, to be replaced by entirely new institutions under public control.
All this can be dismissed as pipe-dreaming, the very notion of embedded economy as a chimera.
But whether or not academics adopt the Eurasian optic, a transformation of global political
economy is taking place before our eyes. The Chinese state and Chinese enterprises are quite
consciously investing in Europe and spreading the principles to which they have adapted so
successfully in their own new ways. To formulate the choice in stark evolutionary terms: the
alternative to the Eurasian solidarity which I am proposing is the Hayekisierung (Streeck) of the

13
world. It would be rash in this case to pin too many hopes on impersonal evolutionary mechanisms.
Voters should therefore be offered a choice between the free markets of F.A. Hayek (1944) and the
embedded economy of Karl Polanyi (1944): between the utopia of self-regulating markets and a
redistributive polity which encourages exchange (not least by minimising monetary transaction
costs) but subordinates it to a cohesive social order.
This new system would no longer be capitalist, according to the definitions we have come to take
for granted, which presuppose the dominance of markets. But nor could it be one of classical
central planning. One major lesson of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist (hereafter MLM) socialism is that,
within any system of planning, there must be ample space for material incentives and market
exchange. Some form of stock market will still be needed. When this is properly recognised, the
Polanyian model I am advocating, in which the economy is embedded in the polity and the society
and market exchange is one form of integration alongside others, is not just ethically more
attractive: it is also in everyones long-term interests economically.
In the meantime, irrespective of whether or not such a vision is currently realistic, the challenge
for scholars is to set these on-going debates about economy and society in a context which is
broader than that of NATO and the G8. The super-continent of Eurasia has rich experience in
dealing with the menace of markets on the one hand and of oppressive political hierarchies on the
other. The uneven impacts of capitalism in recent centuries are the culmination of these processes.
In western Europe, the double movement led to impressive forms of welfare provision, starting
under Chancellor Bismarck, before everything went horribly wrong with warfare and Fascism in
the first decades of the twentieth century. In the east, non-electoral forms of socialism eventually
emerged as the dominant reaction to economic backwardness. This new variant of socially
inclusive, collectivist ways of thinking about society and economy brought massive dislocation and
violence in its train. In this context, the remarkable fact is that the ethical ideals of MLM socialism
have remained attractive to hundreds of millions, even to many who liberal outsiders would
classify as victims. So the question is whether these dual legacies, the long-term agrarian legacy
and the short-term legacies of MLM socialism, can provide a basis for inclusive polities and
embedded economies today. A simple proposition can be formulated at this point: given that our
crowded planet faces urgent problems of reconciling markets, polities and societies, and that it is
no longer possible to resolve the tensions by colonising new continents, it is instructive to pay close
attention to the patterns and solutions which have evolved over millennia in the largest and most
populous continent, namely Eurasia.
Of course, this is to remain at a very general level (albeit a level unfamiliar to most Western
social scientists). In practice, as indicated above, our projects are more likely to engage with
regional patterns which have evolved in the course of Eurasian interconnectedness in particular
periods. I believe that civilisation can be a useful term for exploring these patterned processes, but
there is no space to elaborate that concept here. Johann Arnason has done so on many occasions
(e.g. Arnason 2003). 6 There have been various objections to use of the term civilisation. Here, too,
we are always open to critical argument (as distinct from a knee-jerk reaction on the part of

We are currently editing the papers of a conference we organised together in Halle in 2012, devoted to bringing together
Anthropology and Civilisational Analysis in Eurasia.

14
anthropologists unwilling to engage with the relevant literature in historical sociology, not to
mention the contributions of anthropologists themselves in earlier generations).
What does this mean in practice? The best example I can offer right now is a project which I will
launch later this year at the Max Planck Institute: Realising Eurasia: civilisation and moral
economy in the 21st century. Funded by the European Research Council, REALEURASIA will
involve fieldwork in at least five countries of Eurasia, representing five world religions as defined
by Max Weber. The aim is to see whether the Weberian notion of economic ethic
(Wirtschaftsethik) can be operationalised today. Do religious beliefs and/or civilisational heritage
make a difference to the way that households and small businesses organise themselves and take
economic decisions. If not, what other elements of moral economy shape behaviour? In some of
our field sites, legacies of socialism can be expected to play a significant role. Although MLM
socialism as a belief system differs greatly in the manner of its imposition and the nature of its
ideology, it is nonetheless instructive to place this phenomenon in the long-term history of Eurasian
religions and civilisations.
This new ERC project by no means exhausts the possibilities. Civilisation need not be defined
restrictively with reference to the major world religions. There are excellent precedents in
anthropology, for example in the writings of Marcel Mauss and mile Durkheim (see Schlanger
2006), for extending the concept to denote families of societies in the most general sense. In
some respects, this work anticipates contemporary analysis of globalisation and transnational
flows. Our premise concerning the long-run unity of Eurasia is based on developments which
attach particular weight to the emergence of literate high cultures, but the concept of civilisation
can equally be applied to families of non-literate societies of the kind which have dominated in
sparsely populated regions of Siberia and other niche locations further south until very recent
times. Chinese scholars speak nowadays of grasslands civilisations when referring to the
nomadic peoples of inner Eurasia, with whom successive dynasties have lived in tight symbiosis
over millennia (Barfield 1989). These pastoral peoples have had substantial impact throughout
Eurasia, extending deep into Europe. In my final section, I want to consider new twists to
civilisational encounters in these parts of the world, based on the current situation of Kazakhstan, at
the heart of the super-continent.
A New North-South Optic
The premise of my Department is thus a shift from a transatlantic optic, formed by European
expansion since the 16th century, reflected within living memory in the antinomies of the Cold
War, and still deeply determinant of global knowledge production in socio-cultural anthropology,
to a Eurasian optic which views world history over a much longer period. Within this Eurasian
optic, many more specific vantage points are available. For example, numerous initiatives are
currently under way to link inner Eurasia to neighbouring regions in all directions. As we could
observe at the May 2014 economic summit in Shanghai, Kazakhstans links with China are in some
respects as tight as the alliance with Moscow. The Beijing leadership has been assiduously
promoting relationships which, of course, are designed to serve Chinas economic needs, above all
in terms of energy supply. It is conceivable that Astana and Moscow will become increasingly

15
willing to accept Renminbi as the currency for the energy they supply, and that this will be decisive
in the rise of the Chinese currency to rival the Dollar and the Euro as a global reserve currency.
This could be a spur to the realisation of the Avra as outlined above. It follows from the logic of my
inclusive approach to Eurasia that Brussels (and also Frankfurt, the location of the European
Central Bank) should be included in all such negotiations.
The present scheme for a Eurasian Economic Union comprising Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia
will not change a great deal. A single currency has been ruled out for the time being, and even the
possibility of a new Eurasian financial centre has been pushed back to 2025. The caution is
understandable, especially as the size of these economies and their trade remain modest in
comparison with the economies of the west. In any case, the target should not be a new isolated
bloc, but preferential partnerships and eventually a full union with Europe as well as China and the
rest of the landmass, symbolised by the Avra. The condition of this monetary union, the crucial
condition not met in the case of the Euro, is that it be implemented by a democratically legitimated
political unity. We could imagine that the initiative is taken in Kazakhstan, and that the key
institutions for governing the new Eurasian federation and its Central Bank should be housed in
one or two of the remarkable new buildings of Astana. Due to its unique location at the heart of the
landmass and its excellent political links in all directions, Kazakhstan is in an unprecedented
position to break the political stalemate.
Wolfgang Streeck and other European sociologists have been preoccupied with the north-south
divide within Europe. This is understandable in that part of the world today, but it is insufficient.
Until 25 years ago Europe was divided by the Cold War and the dominant polarities were East
versus West. When we extend both temporal and spatial frames to cover the super-continent over
the last few millennia, for scholars as diverse as Goody, Said, Pomeranz, Morris and Frank, the
dominant perspective for theorising has also been that of East-West. Yet the unifying core of
Eurasian civilisations lay in the central zones. Many breakthroughs in the means of
communication and in religion, as well as the means of production and technology occurred in
the zone we might loosely label centre-south. But as I have noted already, what we might call
centre-north hoe to the large Mongolian, Turkic and Slavic speaking populations of northern
Eurasia has also made vital contributions to the connectedness and development of Eurasia. The
thirteenth century Mongol Empire of Genghis Khan was the most extensive territorially, but it was
preceded by Turkic empires which interacted in comparable ways with the established agrarian
civilisations they encountered. The later colonisation of Siberia and Central Eurasia by Russia
needs to be assessed against this earlier background of sedentary-nomadic interaction between
inner and outer Eurasia.
Today, the energy needs of the macro-regions of east and west, China and Europe, give the
countries of the centre-north leverage and unprecedented opportunities to propose new creative
solutions to global problems. It must be conceded at once that hydrocarbon wealth does not
correlate with human flourishing, at any rate according to the criteria of democracy and welfare
which I have been advocating in this paper. Some analysts of contemporary Russia view the
resource curse as the most fundamental barrier to more liberal forms of society (Etkind 2011,
2014). The oil states of the Near East offer no encouraging precedents in this regard. In fact, the
record is not uniformly bleak. It is sometimes forgotten that Muammar Gaddafis Libya made

16
concerted efforts to use hydrocarbon wealth for the benefit of all Libyan citizens, based on a
curious political blend of Islamic socialism (Davis 1987). But these experiments did not prove very
successful in the long run.
But why should it be the same concerning the natural resources of Northern Eurasia? Alexander
Etkind outlines ingenious parallels between the expropriation of fur in Siberia in the early centuries
of Russian colonisation and the extraction of oil in recent times. He is surely right to argue that the
benefits have accrued to others, not to the indigenous inhabitants of these regions, and that these
forms of economy have been increasingly conducive to everyday corruption at every level of
society. Do these processes of internal colonisation differ at all in their long-run consequences from
similar forms of resource extraction in overseas empires? To what extent do these pre-socialist
legacies combine with the legacies of MLM central planning to subvert transparent institutions and
the rule of law in countries such as Kazakhstan nowadays? Here, too, I see rich agendas for
combining historical and ethnographic research in our Department.
The socialist century witnessed a more thorough institutional integration of Eurasia than anything
accomplished previously. The agrarian empires analysed by McNeill formed a narrow belt from
Rome to Beijing. The Turkic and Mongol Empires were larger, but ephemeral. Later Russian and
Chinese Empires were also extensive but they too left much scope for local variation, even in basic
political, legal and economic institutions. By contrast, socialists imposed their institutions in
remarkably uniform ways across the greater part of the landmass. The ensuing material similarities
have been superficially attenuated with the demise of the Soviet Union, but linkages have in
numerous respects been continuously consolidated and extended territorially in the postsocialist
era. I am thinking of pipelines from Azerbaijan to Turkey and from Russia to Germany, but also of
new motorways from Central Eurasia to the Pacific Ocean; and perhaps before many years have
passed, of high speed rail connecting Astana to both the Pacific and the Atlantic.
If these material investments are eminently realistic, it is harder at present to be very optimistic
about the social and political dimensions. The current regimes of inner Eurasia remain closely
modelled on their MLM predecessors. They have proven by and large intolerant of opposition and
democracy. Even resource-rich states such as Kazakhstan have a poor record in terms of providing
existential security for their populations and even food security has declined in some places. But
there is no reason to suppose that it will remain this way. Compared to the tribal societies of the
Near East and North Africa, it can be hypothesised that citizens in hydrocarbon societies exposed
to the ideals of socialism will make claims and assert rights deriving from what was normatively
internalised in that epoch. Repressive regimes and their secret services constrain protest, but
opportunities may emerge in the power vacuum which follows the death of the all-powerful leader.
That is the point at which citizens will unite to insist that the profits of resource wealth should
support inclusive societies rather than, as is currently the case, so-called prestige projects and
cronyism among the new elites. The aspirations are clearly there, evident today not only among
many small indigenous peoples of Siberia but also among the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, who struggle
for some real autonomy and a fair share of the wealth that is extracted from their homeland (Hann
2011). If imaginative statesmen fail to initiate new modes of governance to ensure embedded
economies and inclusive societies, the citizens of inner Eurasia (centre north) will rebel. They can
expect solidarity and support from all corners of outer Eurasia.

17

Conclusions
Whats in a name? For me, the term Eurasia remains attractive as the key to a more balanced
appreciation of the role of Europe and the various macro-regions of Asia in world history. I am
reassured by the fact that so many distinguished scholars in different disciplines recognise the same
basic unity, and that quite a few of these scholars readily employ the name in the same way I do. I
cannot ignore other usages, including ideological programmes with which I have no sympathy, but
I see no need to capitulate to them by searching for a new name for my Department. In Germany,
the term Republikaner has been appropriated by an extremist political party. This hardly constitutes
grounds for scholars to abandon the term republican. Similarly, the term Eurasia can be defended
against ideological distortions, irrespective of whether these come from Astana, Moscow, or New
York.
In this paper I have proceeded beyond a minimalist conception of Eurasian connectedness over
the last three millennia to make the case for an inclusive conception of Eurasia in a double sense
not only the maximal territorial extent, but also the maximal social extent, ultimately uniting all
citizens in a new Eurasian polity. If this remains utterly utopian, those fortunate enough to be able
to make their living as scholars are nonetheless free to uphold such a notion, to explore its
historical roots and their consequences in the present. We are free to theorise and investigate
empirically a Eurasian mental space which indeed is exactly how Europe is legally conceived in
the charters and treaties of the European Union. 7
It goes without saying that my deeper goal in returning again and again to Eurasia is to join other
scholars in numerous disciplines in destabilising some of the basic assumptions and geographical
imaginaries of Western history and social science. Europeans have lived through momentous
transformations in recent decades, including the end of Keynesian consensus and then of the Cold
War, with its dominant East-West optic. Their compass has been reset to emphasise a North-South
cleavage, referring in the first instance to the Mediterranean casualties of the crisis of Euroland.
On a larger scale, reference is increasingly made to the Global South. I have argued in this paper
for other vantage points and in particular that northern Eurasia may have unique resource-based
potential to intervene decisively for the sake of improving human futures in all other points of the
compass.
In the economically globalised world of the twenty-first century, it may seem that to privilege
Eurasia makes no more sense than the present bias towards Europe and/or the North Atlantic, since
it no longer makes sense to delimit any geographical entity, not even one of this scale. Since
Eurasia was never politically unified in the past, what is the point in speculating about such a unity
today? Is this not another form of Area Studies? How can Eurasia provide the key to a truly global
vision of world society and of anthropology?
My starting point is that good anthropological research should link ethnography at the micro level
to historically informed analysis of large-area integration. The modern world system is not just the
product of the rise of the West. Just as Esping-Anderson (1989) explains different welfare systems
7

For the jurists, Europe is not a geographically defined territory but an espace de libert, de scurit et de justice
(Supiot 2008: 151). For recent sociological exploration of how this mental space impacts on individual and collective
identities, see Schtze and Schrder-Wildhagen (2012).

18
in the North Atlantic region in terms of recent political and social history, it can be instructive to
approach the embeddedness of the economy with reference to the evolution of social institutions
over a much longer time frame. Political unity is not the issue here. It was not necessary for largescale integration in the past (via religion and trade as well as the means of violence and of
communication in general) but it is a prerequisite to counter the power of the markets and their
attendant inequalities today.
Eurasia, as we use the term in the name of my Department, is neither a folk name nor an analytic
category. We seldom operationalise the term in our projects. However, the concept which I have
developed in this paper is more than just another variant of Area Studies. Let me be clear: it is not
that we are opposed to Area Studies. Much of my own work has been devoted to a relatively small
area of postsocialist East-Central Europe, in the course of which like other anthropologists I
draw heavily on the studies of regional specialists in other disciplines. As I have noted, much of
our research at the Max Planck Institute proceeds on the basis of comparisons within more or less
narrowly defined areas, as is the case with many anthropological projects elsewhere in the world.
To mention just one example, in the course of work on religion after socialism, we had a highly
productive regional cluster in inner Eurasia, though we followed convention and referred to this as
the Central Asian cluster (see Hann 2010).
Eurasia, too, is a part of the whole, but it is different from a conventional area because it is the
sole super-continent and has a unique priority in world history. My normative proposition is that it
has become urgent to recognise common heritage and civilisational pluralism in Eurasia precisely
because of accelerating globalisation and the ever more urgent need to consider the planet as a
whole. The civilisations of this landmass can dig deep into their connected pasts in order to
negotiate new forms of partnership, moral economy, and governance, above all ways of taming the
markets to serve the needs of people and their environments. It is not too far-fetched to hold that
the future not only of the European welfare state or Eurasian Social Model but of human society in
its most elemental sense is currently at stake. It is threatened by the neoliberal race to the bottom,
a race which the resurgent powers of East and South Eurasia are well placed to win. Both the Euro
and the larger project of the European Union have so far failed. Brussels has not even been able to
facilitate the integration of the postsocialist states of Eastern Europe, whose inhabitants had looked
admiringly for so long to the west. Nowadays many of them cast their democratic votes for extreme
nationalists, while their elites tend to see unconditional support for the policies of Washington as
their raison dtat. The denouement of MLM socialism has intensified the need for Europeans all
Europeans not merely to reconstruct democratic institutions within their peninsula, but to strive
for a historically grounded accord with all the civilisations of the landmass, as the essential prelude
to the realisation of new institutions to secure global human flourishing.

19
Appendix I: the exceptionalism of the USA
It may be objected that an inclusive focus on Eurasia must necessarily exclude other parts of the
world. The principal other of a Eurasia defined inclusively through the ethics of welfare seems
increasingly obvious. The United States came into existence with lofty aspirations to realise new
forms of freedom and democracy, providing opportunities and proclaiming human rights which had
been denied in the Old World. In the twentieth century, after pioneering new forms of economic
embeddedness in the era of the New Deal, the USA played a decisive role in saving that Old World
from Fascism. But in the early twenty-first century, even a Democratic President with impeccable
liberal credentials is powerless to counter the logic of what Polanyi called market society, a
society which destroys the bases of its cohesion by elevating the myth of self-regulating markets to
ideological doctrine. The US path has become the most Hayekian. The results are abundantly
evident in diverse domains, from environmental indicators to medical insurance, from Gini
coefficients of social inequality to gun control.
It is possible to hold, with Giddens (2013) and Garland (forthcoming), that the United States also
has a welfare state. As a critique of those who call for the complete withdrawal of government from
the tasks of managing the economy and the population, this sociological point is entirely valid. The
ideology of the Tea Party is exactly that, ideology, because it contradicts the reality of the welfare
state as normal social fact (Garland). However, this ideology has had an impact, comparable to
that of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century. It is important to trace these practical outcomes and
the historical differences between states. One hypothesis could be that the value foundations of the
hegemonic power of the 20th century are different from those which predominate in Eurasia. It
would be too crude to reduce the differences to a dichotomy such as individualist versus
collectivist, or liberal versus communitarian. Let us simply recall at this point that Polanyi and
Hayek share common roots in Central Europe. Austrian economists paved the way for Chicago
schools in that discipline, but other Europeans have taught us the necessity of embedding markets.
The latter can be placed within a broad Eurasian tradition. Keynesian social democracy can be
viewed as its crowning achievement. I argue that to preserve this strand in European/Eurasian
thought and to defend its institutions, it is necessary to take seriously the ideology of the Tea
Party in Washington, the pernicious consequences of which spread far beyond the USA. (Closer
inspection shows that this ideology shares little with the values of classical liberalism.)
I am thus arguing that, in order to preserve the European achievements of recent centuries, it is
essential to think Eurasian. Yet what is happening in reality? The principal political breakthrough
at the G8 summit in June 2013 was to accelerate the implementation of an extended free trade zone
uniting the European Union with the United States. Consumers in Germany are already protesting
at what they fear (on good grounds) will lead to a massive decline in standards of health and safety.
Why is it not possible for Europeans to look eastwards for guidance, to Confucius and Aristotle
rather than to Smith and Hayek?

20
Appendix II: Europe and Ukraine in MayJune 2014
Living in Europe during the parliamentary election campaign of Spring 2014, it is hard not to feel
despondent. The promise was that, for the first time, voters should be able to determine at least
indirectly the next President of the European Commission. The German Social Democrat Martin
Schulz made various commitments to reform the financial sector and his electoral bloc did better
than expected. Yet it still finished behind the conservative bloc headed by the veteran Luxemburg
fixer Jean-Claude Juncker, who as President of the Eurogroup was the key figure in managing the
financial crisis to safeguard the interests of banks rather than peoples. I find myself in agreement
with British Prime Minister David Cameron (albeit for quite different reasons). That the top job in
Europe should go to the former Prime Minister (voted out of office by his own electorate in 2013)
of that hyper-financialised sovereign state which epitomises the initial design faults of the EU
speaks volumes about the current state of democracy in Europe. Junckers alliance received less
than 30% of the votes in elections in which the overall turnout was 43%: can this be the basis of a
mandate?
The sorry state of the European Union is shockingly evident in the handling of the current crisis
in Ukraine, which has been largely caused by the flawed politics of European integration. Brussels
has sought over many years to detach Ukraine from Russia in every way possible. Yet the Maidan
protest in Kiev was not simply a joyous multicultural celebration of human rights and European
values, as many commentators in the West have presented it. I see a Euro-American mystification
under way, which minimises or overlooks altogether the presence of well-organised neo-Fascist
groupings in the protests which led to the toppling of President Yanukovych. For example, in
contributions to the New York Review of Books and in a recent issue of the Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung (also available in English in Eurozine), Timothy Snyder, who has done more than anyone
in recent years to draw attention to the tragic history of Ukraine in the twentieth century, attributes
the blame to a sinister alliance between the Kremlin and the populist right in Western Europe. He
terms this alliance Eurasia and portrays it as more dangerous politically than the populist right
within Ukraine itself. According to Snyder (2014):
()Eurasia means the collaboration of the Kremlin and the European far Right as Russia
tries to prevent the Ukrainian elections from happening at all, and as European nationalists
try to win European elections. A vote for Strache or Le Pen or even Farage is now a vote for
Putin, and a defeat for Europe is a victory for Eurasia. The return to the nation-state is
impossible, so integration will continue in one form or another: all that can be decided is the
form. Politicians and intellectuals used to say that there was no alternative to the European
project, but now there is: Eurasia.
I find it sad that a distinguished historian can celebrate Europe so naively, and then oppose it to
Eurasia. This is the heart of the problem: Snyder has not escaped from a Manichean Cold War
perspective which pits Moscow against the Free West. He does not appreciate that the European
Union is ravaged by crisis, or that the Euro is a neoliberal imposition which has so far benefited
tiny elites rather than the mass of the citizens, thereby undermining the very principles of liberal
democracy which he claims to uphold.

21
Appendix III: implications for anthropology
Some readers might wonder at the end what this paper has to do with socio-cultural anthropology,
the discipline which I am paid to practice, which has traditionally specialised in the other, the
uncivilised, the binary opposite of the civilisations of Eurasia. This is indeed how anthropology
consolidated itself in the era of North-Atlantic domination, when European overseas empires
dominated the world. The alternative vision of the discipline is one in which anthropologists pay
equal attention to other epochs and other forms of imperialism, and, together with archaeologists,
sociologists and global historians, seeks to develop a truly comparative science of humanity.
Recognition of Eurasia and its adequate, balanced incorporation in research and teaching are
essential if this vision is to be implemented. It is not enough to bring particular societies of the
Eurasian landmass into the anthropological syllabus piecemeal and to fund research projects on
contemporary neoliberal transformations. It is essential to recognise the larger spatio-temporal
frameworks, and also the power relations that continue to mark our own discipline. I have in mind
not just the dominance of English-language journals but the fact that European researchers who
conduct research elsewhere in Eurasia are more likely to wish to present their results at a meeting
of the American Anthropological Association than at any forum in Eurasia (including meetings of
related scholarly bodies in the country where the research was carried out). The European
Association of Social Anthropologists has become in practice a transatlantic association.
Analogously, therefore, to the change I proposed above concerning the European Social Model, I
would propose transforming this name into the Eurasian Association of Social Anthropologists and
developing substantive links with other scholars of the super-continent. 8

For more on the implications of my understanding of Eurasia for transnational collegiality and collaboration, see my
Introduction to the Departmental Report Resilience and Transformation in Eurasia, 19992014:
http://www.eth.mpg.de/cms/de/publications/reports/d2_report_resilience_transformation_2014.html

22
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