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members of the population. Many non-conformist thinkers of the West, from Karl Marx to Noam Chomsky, have written about the mechanism by which these views are imposed on the masses. It often happens in very obvious fashion, as can be seen from the rejection of the death penalty by European elites (a punishment favoured by the majority of people in most countries of the world), the issue of immigration and the fact that several European countries repeatedly held referendums on EU treaty change until they obtained the desired result. It is in this ‘worldly’ source of its dogma that any man-made ideology essentially differs from a religious approach to life. And, if the source is temporal, then the ideological dogmas deriving

from it can also change as society progresses. By comparison, religious truth is revealed to humanity by a higher source and is non-negotiable. That is why traditional churches resist calls by the liberal community to ‘keep up with the times’. From the religious point of view, it is not truth that must conform to society, especially if society has broken away from the Church and is becoming more deeply immersed in sin, and if the people who reject that path are able to approach the absolute ideal by internalis-

ing higher values.

According to the progressive Western view, most of the people on our planet remain hostages to various outmoded religious beliefs and continue to hold that many things are inherently good or bad. And, while many people find the wealth and freedoms of the West attractive, many others are repelled by its permissive attitude towards things that moral systems throughout the world find unacceptable: the blurring of the roles of men and women; in vitro fertilisation and surrogacy; euthanasia; homosexual marriage; and the legalisation of soft drugs, among others.

Furthermore, the concept of the absolute priority of human rights, which forms the foundation of the West’s dominant ideology and evolved through the secularisation of Western Christianity’s theory of ‘natural right’, is alien to most other cultural traditions. The people of those cultures not only refuse to hold up the rights of the individual as the purpose of life, but also see prosperity, social stability, harmony and so on as higher goals for

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societal development. It is no coincidence that the highest form of human rights in China is the ‘right to life’, without which all other rights would be meaningless.7 For these cultures, development that leads to prosperity is the first priority, and the issue of individual rights only comes afterwards.

That is largely why the Chinese model of development is becoming increasingly popular in the relatively poorer countries of Africa, Asia and South America, where the extension of individual rights, and especially the rights of minorities, are far from the top priority. Even Westernised Asian states such as India and Japan treat some norms of Western secular liberalism with great suspicion and, without engaging in a direct ideological confrontation, follow a course that preserves their own values.

In contrast to Western Europe, the former Soviet republics are undergo- ing a religious revival and increased influence from all the major religions: Christianity,Islam,JudaismandBuddhism.And,despitethesignificantdif- ferences between them, they all reject the phenomena mentioned above not because they are ill-suited to people for some pragmatic reason, but because they are sinful; that is, inherently unacceptable and either unsanctioned or expressly prohibited by divine authority.

The majority of people in post-Soviet states are unhappy that the West considers their outlook on life to be backward and reactionary. Their religious leaders support them in this view and are themselves enjoying increasing authority.After all, one can view progress in different ways. If one assumes that the meaning of human existence is to increase political freedoms, in a manner freed from moral constraints that only fetter personal development, and to acquire ever greater material wealth, then Western society is moving forward. But if, to think as a traditional Christian should, the main source of progress in the life of humanity was the coming of Christ, who brought truth, then this life is seen as only fleeting, suffering only serves to prepare one for eternal life and material wealth only hinders this process. The kinds of departure from the truth condemned by the New Testament represent regression: a return to pagan times and customs that Christianity has struggled against for centuries. From this point of view, the West does not lead the whole planet, but is returning to prehistoric times. What is more, not only do large numbers of Russian Orthodox believers in Russia, Ukraine,

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Belarus and Moldova agree with this in principle, so do many people in Central Asia, including numerous Muslims, Jews and Buddhists.

This widespread sentiment has made popular leaders who stand for the integration of the former Soviet republics. They tell people: we are not reac- tionaries or conservatives; we just have a different way of looking at the world and should build our own alliance to include everyone who agrees with us. Based on those values, Putin has succeeded in establishing an independent power centre in Eurasia that already includes Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and that Armenia and Kyrgyzstan might join. Although economic considerations are important, they are also secondary. The policy of the West has stimulated internal conflicts in these countries and only served to further consolidate that centre of power.

A conflict of values

By looking at Eurasia’s integration not only in terms of that region’s relations with the West, but in the broader context of worldwide trends, one can draw more general conclusions. New centres of power are forming not only here, but also in states as diverse as China, India and Brazil. Religious revivals are occurring not only in former Soviet republics, but in the Middle East and among both Christians and Muslims in Africa. And everywhere, despite all their differences, this integrative process is most often based on values differing from those preached by modern Western society. China speaks of collective Confucianism; the role of Hinduism is on the rise in

India; Christians in Africa firmly reject questionable moral innovations sanctioned by mother churches in Europe; and the Muslim world generally views modern Western society as the centre of sin and depravity. Even moderate Muslim leaders do not accept Western civilisation in its entirety, but try to create something of their own using its achievements. Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister and current opposition leader, and well-known theorist of Islamic civil society, has written that

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intrinsically incompatible … Religion has been a source of great strength to Asian society and will continue to be a bulwark against moral and social decay.8

The West is losing its moral leadership and its military dominance, although still in force, has weakened significantly. The appeal of its material prowess is diminishing as other effective economic models emerge, particu- larly that of China. Events have repeatedly shown the error of the idea that Westernisation is both a universal goal and an inevitable outcome once the authoritarian regimes resisting it are removed. The most recent examples are the anti-authoritarian revolutions in the Arab world, which brought to power forces even more anti-Western than the governments they overthrew. It turns out that Europe is surrounded not by hostile rulers hindering Westernisation, but by entire populations who consider Western society alien and undesirable. And it is their leaders who, as Alexander Pushkin once said of the Russian government, are often ‘the only Europeans’ in their country.9

In a sense, the current situation bears comparison with the world of the Hellenistic period. On the one hand, Western civilisation today, like Greek civilisation of that time, has spread to almost every country of the world: almost everywhere, the language of politics, economics and culture has become Westernised. Even in the countries most hostile to the West, such as Iran and China, Western political reforms include parliaments, constitutions, political parties and so on. On the other hand, similar to Alexander the Great’s rule over his unified state, the political dominance the West has enjoyed since the collapse of the Soviet Union has not only been rather short in duration, but is also giving way before our eyes to a multipolar world. Now, new centres of power that borrowed the achievements of Western civilisation have gained enough strength to challenge the West’s previously unquestioned hegemony.

It is still unclear which centres of power will turn out to be successful, and which will be absorbed by the as yet more powerful West. In his remarkable book, Can Asians Think?, the European-educated Singaporean intellectual

Kishore Mahbubani wrote that ‘only time will tell whether Asian societies

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can enter the modern universe as Asian societies rather than Western replicas’.10 All new potential centres of power, including those in Eurasia, face this question. The answer depends largely on whether they can offer a value systemanddevelopmentmodeldifferingfrom,butequallyasattractiveand effective, as that of the West. Of course, the stereotypical Westerner would say that is impossible because humanity has only one course of development and the West has progressed farther along that path than anywhere else. But this essay has attempted to show that other paths do exist and that they are based not only on different political and economic principles but, most importantly, on different underlying values.

In any case, the ideology of secular liberalism that dominates in the West will meet with increasing resistance and aversion. Although that ideology represents the most powerful part of the planet, it includes only a minority of the world’s major civilisations and a small share of the global population. The very fact that the West is currently the most powerful centre will inspire less influential centres to unite as a counterweight. This process can be seen in the fairly successful activities undertaken by the BRICS (Brazil, Russia,

India, China and South Africa), a group consisting of very different states that generally claims to represent the interests of the non-Western world.

ItisnowclearthatFukuyama’smodelofavictoriousWestdoesnotreflect the future picture of global politics. However, it would also be a mistake to fully accept the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ put forward by Samuel

Huntington. According to that model, alliances would form between such disparate partners as Orthodox Georgia, Russia and Romania, Confucian China and Vietnam, and also Muslim Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Syria.

Therealityisfarmorecomplex:thepoliciesofthosecountriesareinfluenced not only by cultural factors, but also geopolitical, economic and historical considerations.

And yet, despite these factors, value systems will play the critical role in the world of the future. What is more, in the clash of cultures one can expect to observe in coming years, it will matter less whether a person lives in this or that state or civilisation, and more whether he or she advocates absolute values or relativistic mores. The Western world includes a great many advocates of absolute values, but their voices are still drowned out

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by the supporters of liberal secularism. One example is the fairly powerful Catholic Church, which actively opposes not only moral innovations but, in the person of Pope Francis, also the economic and social self-centerdness of the Western model of consumer society. In this sense, it would be far easier for the Russian Orthodox Church to find a common language with Roman

Catholics than with Russia’s own liberals.

Interestingly, ultraconservatives in the US have recently written favour- ably about President Putin’s attempts to combat some of the extremes of

Western ideology. Pat Buchanan recently commented on this when he wrote that ‘as the decisive struggle in the second half of the 20th century

in December 2013, President Putin referred to Russian émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, arguing that ‘the point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state’.12 The conservative-versus-liberal paradigm is a creation of the West that tacitly implies that its own society has achieved the greatest progress. That is why the forces that will align against this ‘militant secular- ism’ are likely to include not only US conservatives but also other groups holding similar attitudes on some, although not all, fundamental values and approaches to the world.

To be sure, we should not underestimate the fact that most of those promoting alternatives to the Western model are authoritarian leaders and systems that have not adopted the main achievements of Western civilisation: a high degree of political freedom provided by the separation of powers, the rule of law and so on. This largely deprives such models of their appeal. Although it is debatable whether political freedoms represent the

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