The National Corps also has an international relations section headed by Elena Semenyaka, a young political scientist whose academic specialization is the Conservative Revolution. Semenyaka was previously identified with Alexander Dugin and the Russian Eurasianists, but since Dugin and his Russian followers support the pro-Russian forces in the eastern Ukraine, Semenyaka and her colleagues are now engaged in trying to steer the European right away from Russia towards an “Intermarium Union” that aims to unite Ukraine with other eastern and central European countries, in effect a rightist version of the Visegrád Group. The Intermarium Union takes its name from a plan developed by the interwar Polish prime minister, Marshal Józef Piłsudski.
Interest in Evola in Ukraine is not restricted to the National Corps. It also includes members of Plomin’ (Пломінь, Flame), a “literary club” in Kiev that meets for lectures on philosophers and political thinkers, notably Evola and the thinkers of the Conservative Revolution.
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A Ukrainian correspondent suggests that as well as the National Corps MPs mentioned in my post, I should add 5 of the 7 MPs that Svoboda (Свобода) has. Svoboda is certainly a Right party, and it would be interesting to hear more about their MPs' views on Evola.
It would be probably more accurate to characterize Piłsudski as the Polish interwar leader and just a prime minister (there were many of those during the interwar period and Piłsudski always preferred a role of the leader without an official position). Anyway, his concepts of intermarium were developed long before he shortly held post of a prime minister and even before Poland regained independence in 1918 (drawing from previous ideas of Prince Adam Czartoryski among others).
This blog post brings up an important and related question in my view. One which I am afraid does not get enough traction on this blog and elsewhere. That is whether traditionalism as a philosophy is indeed compatible with the very idea of a nation-state and its nationalism. The idea of the nation is largely the product of post-revolutionary bourgeois political philosophy and the realization of their original economic interests as a class; that is the creation of confined capitalist markets with clear rules of trade. They were motivated by bourgeois materialism and largely still are. They constitute the gears of the modern secular Frankenstein. The liberal nation-state and the hierarchy of transcendence which is in my view essential to any traditionalist point of view seem fundamentally non sequitur, at least in a Guénonian and Evolian sense. This has led Benoist, Dugin and others to form macro-ideas of political action such as pan-europeanism, eurasianism and now intermarium. The tension that is going on in right wing movements in the Ukraine and in many other countries is an attempt to answer the question of which micro or macro political structure is best to concretize their ideas. But what ultimate interest are they serving? It seems to me that the problem from a traditionalist perspective is that this is a question which should remain strictly one of strategy. In other words; the strategic choice of a particularly confined field of combat at any given time. It should not become an end in and of itself. The field of combat of a traditionalist should never be limited. At times however in choosing a necessary strategy of confined political action certain traditionalists confuse the nation for tradition. Worse, they try to give transcendental meaning to a liberal structure which intrinsically has none. Does this not risk strengthening the very Frankenstein some are struggling against?
A reply to Canadian Traditionalist: I see your point but I think you are missing the essential difference between the typical modern nation-state (arbitrary constructions, let's say) and the somehow counter-revolutionary idea of the ethnostate.
You should have in mind that, for Ukraine in particular, nation is the very equivalent of tradition. They do have a problem regarding the identity of western vs. eastern parts of the country. The east is somehow devoid of a specific identity (they are strongly influenced by Russia but there's not a consensus whether they are "part of Russia" or "ethnic Russia abroad"; we're seeing the separatist war in Donbass but that region is only a fragment of Eastern Ukraine). Most of the people there tend not to be staunch defenders of Russia, they are more the so-called non-politicized type. The west is indeed staunchly nationalist and holds the "Ukrainian project" view, which I call a project because it is a historical response of a people who did everything they could – even starving to death at one point in 1932-33 – not to be assimilated into the "Russian Empire project" (Czarism – USSR – Putin).
Therefore Ukrainian traditions and culture are deeply connected to the idea of a state to protect them. Ukraine is little bit like Japan or Israel in that sense; it is a potential ethnostate. Andriy Biletsky has already cited those two countries as role models.
(Personally I see Japan as a strong response to your question of what comes after political struggle; the Japanese are one of the last organically traditionalist people in the world. In the end, the very idea of "traditionalism" as a philosophy of resistance in the modern world is problematic. The ultimate traditionalists were not Evola nor Guénon but our grandfathers who just lived their normal, community-based lives. Of course there is the "deep America" that elected Trump as well a the "deep Ukraine" I'm talking about here, but the term "deep" is in itself a sign of their marginalized status. There's no "deep Japan" and no "Japanese Traditionalism" because mainstream Japan is still traditional. How the West is going to regain that lost innocence instead of just reacting-against-decadence should be the main concern for these next decades...)
There's some deeper debate there whether Western Ukraine (= Ukraine) should stop struggling and separate itself from Eastern Ukraine (= let them be whatever they say they are now) so that Ukrainians could finally manage to have both a coherent identity AND a harmonized homeland. Ukraine as it is today is what corresponds to your Frankenstein analogy. Since the end of the USSR, the proto-liberal democratic country has been swinging between pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian presidents. But it is a complicated issue because no one wants to simply abandon the East; it was much more ukrainianized in the past, before Stalin's ethnical remodeling of the region. Also that would would mean surrendering to Russia, in a sense.
(P.S.: I am an ethnic Ukrainian but I wasn't born in Ukraine and I'm not involved in any of their domestic political movements. Excuse me if I went too far on specific Ukrainian issues. I just think they are somehow neglected in the worldwide debate because of Russia's huge soft power over these topics, making Dugin-influenced traditionalists see Ukrainian nationalism as some sort of "weakened Russia". In fact, the country has a strong potential to be a bulwark against multicultural globalist ideology in the course of this 21st century.)
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