Awakening of spirits: Eurasianism and geopolitics in the foreign policy of Russia

Students of international politics tend to convert their personal or collective experience and/or historical information into geographical images of the world, and to attach to them some kind of political significance. This tendency, the conversion of historical information into geographical images, in this dissertation is referred as geomentality. Coming from this, the dissertation argues that since the emergence of the new Russian state in the 1990s, Eurasianism and geopolitika have become theoretical or doctrinal manifestations of the geomentality of Russia's foreign and security policy establishment. This manifested itself in two important foreign policy challenges in the 1990s, the start of NATO enlargement, and the NATO-Yugoslavia war of 1999.; The dissertation emphasises that the tendencies of envisioning the political world in terms of Eurasianist and geopolitical models is most natural for Russian foreign and security policy makers. Political thinking about the importance of geographical space has strong intellectual and academic roots in Russia, and exploration and expansion-oriented geomentalities have been centrepieces of Russian state-making for generations.; The dissertation analyses the doctrines of Eurasianism and geopolitika . The accent is placed on the birth of Eurasianism in the 1920s, and its re-emergence in Russian political thinking in the 1990s. The dissertation explains how Eurasianism informs Russia's political identity and its foreign and security policies.; The first government of post-Soviet Russia was dominated by the Liberals, politicians who advocated Russia's pro-Western orientation. However, Russia's pro-Western foreign policies slowly collapsed under Eurasianist pressure. The first foreign policy issue that helped Eurasians to gather popular support was the question of the Russian diaspora in the former Soviet states. The decision on NATO enlargement helped Eurasianist ideas to emerge as the dominant doctrine in Russia's foreign and security policy. The NATO enlargement issue united Russia's political class in their opposition to this policy. However, Russian public opinion did not share the same sentiment until the Kosovo war. The 1999 NATO-Yugoslavia war convinced the majority of Russians that Eurasians had always been right in their criticism of the West NATO, and the Russian Liberals.