A Utopia of Eurasia: the Uses and Abuses of a Concept – a counter-reply to Chris Hann

Abstract

This piece contains a counter-reply to “Declining Europe: A Reply to Alessandro Testa,” which Chris Hann wrote in response to my article “On Eurasia and Europe.” My counter-reply is woven together with an extensive review of a long paper containing Hann’s more recent article “A concept of Eurasia” and the numerous replies that furnish the latter. This paper should therefore be considered as part of a series consisting of: Hann’s work about the concept of Eurasia until 2016; My aforementioned article; and Hann’s counter-reply and his latest article on the subject.1 While I thank Chris Hann for having engaged with my arguments and provided a reply to my article, I cannot overlook the serious flaws in the line of his argumentation. Moreover, since Hann’s counter-reply ends with a wish to consider his “A concept of Eurasia” as the reference work on the matter, I have undertaken a critical reading of it. What I try to do in this piece is to show why the notion of Eurasia as developed and used for his heuristic purposes by Chris Hann does not stand on its own two feet, as several other scholars also believe (among whom are some of those who were invited to write a reply to “A Concept of Eurasia”). In fact, in spite of Hann’s enthusiasm about his concept of Eurasia, there seems to be a lively company of sceptics found in the disciplines of history and social anthropology.