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The year 1968 marked the apogee of High Modernity as expressed in the Old Left programs of either social-democratic reform or communist revolution. The New Left critics, in both east and west, demanded more of the same: a more "humane" socialism or less bureaucratic capitalism. Their demands, however, exceeded the limits of redistribution under each political system. Both western and eastern European power elites eventually found escape from state confines in globalization and neoliberalism. The exhaustion of modernity projects caused lasting fragmentation in the fields of ideology, culture, and politics previously structured by powerful national states and large political movements. This condition can be called "post-modern" in the simplest sense of following the breakdown of modernity without any new quality. The ex-Soviet countries serve as richly-nuanced examples of historical transformation from 1968 to 1989 and into the present morass.

Geocultural features and transformations of states and large regions determine the specifics of their geopolitical trajectories. Any large geoculture can be conceived as a planetary one, with its own planetary cartographies and imaginative patterns. Northern Eurasia can be considered as a field of intersection and interaction of various planetary geocultures that shape the prospects for terrestrial development. The planetary influence of a large local civilization is associated with the presence of an original planetary geocultural cartography of the imagination, with the possibility of successfully translating these large-scale geocultural images outside, into the zones of influence of other large terrestrial civilizations. Co-spatiality in its civilizational and geocultural dimension means the presence of multiple purposeful planetary thinking that unfolds large-scale spatial communication patterns. Any co-spatial civilization or geoculture is totally borderline – its borderline is due to the constant process of geocultural selfadaptation in interaction with other geocultures and civilizations. Meta-geoculture explores the genesis, formation and various transformations of planetary imaginative cartographies focused on achieving their respective geocultural, geopolitical and geo-ideological goals. Meta-geocultural studies of Northern Eurasia should be aimed at identifying, first of all, the planetary geocultural cartographies of the imagination. Northern Eurasia can be considered as a space of interaction between the Western Euro-African cartography of the imagination, based on the Euro-Indian (or Indo-European) meta-geographic axis, and the East Asian cartography of the imagination, which is closely correlated with the Russian-Chinese meta-geographic axis.

Recent works on 'uneven and combined development' (UCD) have focused on its contributions to the study of political economy and geopolitics, but they have yet to systematically address the cultural dimension of social change — the socially shared ideas by which people understand and act upon the world. The present article addresses this lacuna by applying the premises of UCD to the nineteenth-century emergence of Occidentalism: the idea of 'the West' as the dominant site of culture, civilisation and modernity. Against the problems of methodological internalism and Eurocentrism, I argue that the categories of unevenness and combined development provide critical entry points for an examination of the international construction of 'Western' identities and discourses during the late-nineteenth century imperial era. Specifically, I advance a theory of geocultural feedback which locates the constituting terms of those identities and discourses in a specific conjuncture of global unevenness: how the experience of 'relative backwardness' in late-industrialising societies translated into self-consciously 'Westernising' projects of catch-up development which destabilised prevailing conceptions of white European supremacy. In both the British and American empires, this historical dynamic produced a distinct pattern of cultural transformation: a reactive discourse of civilisational closure centred on the defence of 'the West.'.