From the myth of Europa to the Rimland’s dual identity, from the Mediterranean as “Sea-Heart” to the suppressed tradition of de Gaulle and Dugin, the continent must remember it was born of a crossing. Join us on Telegram, X, and VK. Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su The times we live in The Greeks told of a young woman named Europa, daughter of a king of Tyre, on the coast of present-day Lebanon. One morning, as she was playing by the sea, a white bull emerged from the waves. She climbed onto its back, and the bull carried her across the waters to Crete. From her, the poets said, an entire continent took its name.[1] The myth says more than it seems. The name “Europe” comes from Asia and crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a god. Our continent bears the name of a foreigner, a traveler, a girl from the other shore. Europe was born of an encounter: before it was a territory, it was a crossing. Europeans have forgotten this story. For eighty years, they have been told repeatedly that Europe is a collection of institutions, a common market, a security perimeter administered from across the ocean; that Europe is simply “the West.” Many have come to believe it. The thesis of these pages is different. Europe is a civilization—or, more precisely, many civilizations under one roof. And in the multipolar world that is emerging, this home is neither a province nor a periphery. It stands at the center of the map, and the new order will not be complete without it. Something has come to an end. The unipolar order that emerged after 1991—the one that Francis Fukuyama was quick to call “the end of history,”[2]—is unraveling before everyone’s eyes. History had not ended. It was waiting. New centers of gravity have emerged in Eurasia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Capitals that others have spoken of for centuries now speak for themselves. Even in Washington, the tone has changed: the U.S. National Security Strategy of 2025 speaks openly of interests, burdens, and transactions, and treats old multilateral commitments as costs to be renegotiated.[3] The patron is presenting the bill. For Europe, therefore, the question is no longer whether the multipolar world will arrive. It is already here. The real question is whether Europe will enter it as a subject or as an object: whether it will write history or be the place where others write their own. In The Theory of the Multipolar World, Aleksandr Dugin observes that most of those who speak of multipolarity have no theory of it whatsoever.[4] They imagine a “core” of the world—the United States, Europe, and the Western bloc—surrounded by rising competitors. In that framework, Europe sits at the table of the old, declining center. That place must be rejected. Europe has never truly been the master of the unipolar world; it was its first protectorate. In his handbook on geopolitics, Dugin writes that after 1945, Western Europe was under American control to the same extent that Eastern Europe was under Soviet control. [5] The methods of governance changed, but not the degree of dependence. Many Europeans, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, experienced that division as a tragedy, and some attempted to break it. When General de Gaulle’s France left NATO’s integrated military command in 1966, it did not commit a hostile act against anyone. It committed an act of remembrance: Europe remembered that it had a will of its own. What is Europe If you ask Brussels, the answer will involve competencies, directives, and procedures. If you ask a geographer, you’ll get coordinates: a peninsula bounded by the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Ural Mountains. The first answer is a bureaucracy; the second is a map without a legend. Neither explains why a Sicilian shepherd, a Bavarian carpenter, and a monk from Mount Athos belong, in a profound sense, to the same history. Russian Eurasianists—and Pyotr Savitsky more than anyone else—liked to say that Europe is nothing more than the “western promontory” of Eurasia. [6] Many Western analysts say the same thing with less affection: a small cape attached to Asia. The image is acceptable. But on capes, people have always built lighthouses. At Cape Sounion, the Athenians erected the Temple of Poseidon, white against the sea, so that sailors would know where Greece began. At the tip of Galicia, the Romans named a cape Finis Terrae, the end of the earth. The promontory is the point where a continent looks outward, where the land speaks to the sea and to the world beyond. Europe’s small size on the map has always been the very condition of its significance. Within this promontory, there is not just a single civilization. There are at least four major axes, in constant and fruitful tension. There is the Mediterranean axis: Athens and Rome, law and philosophy, Byzantium and Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanism born of the encounter between Christian theology and the science preserved and developed in the Islamic world. There is the continental axis: the Frankish and Germanic world, the Holy Roman Empire, the medieval university, the long line of thought stretching from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, the old dream of a Mitteleuropa between the Atlantic and the steppe. There is the Eastern axis: the Slavic peoples, Orthodox Christianity, the legacy of Byzantium transmitted through Kiev and Moscow—a Europe that is fully European and yet distinct from Western modernity. And there is the Northern axis: the Norse and Baltic worlds, with their assemblies, their sense of communal law, and their closeness to the rugged beauty of nature. Dugin, following in Heidegger’s footsteps, speaks of the Dasein of peoples—the particular way in which each people exists in the world—and of the Logos of each people, that which gives it life “not merely on the biological level, but on the ethnosociological and metaphysical levels.”[7] Europe does not have just one Logos: it has many. It has always been, in and of itself, a multipolar world in miniature. This is the first thesis of this essay. The plurality that the entire planet now calls for, Europe already carries within itself. It does not need to import multipolarity. It must remember it. Land and sea To understand why Europe stands at the center, we must go back to the oldest opposition in geopolitics. Halford Mackinder saw it, Carl Schmitt reflected on it, and Dugin systematized it: the opposition between the civilization of the Sea and the civilization of the Land, between thalassocracy and tellurocracy.[8] The Sea civilization is mobile, mercantile, and individualistic, and measures the world in terms of routes, ports, and prices. The Land civilization is rooted, communal, and hierarchical, and measures it in terms of duties, generations, and the sacred. These are not merely military categories. They shape law, religion, philosophy, and even the way a family sits down to dinner on Sundays. Mackinder traced the origin of this opposition to the Mediterranean, to the wars between Rome and Carthage.[9] Dugin recalls that at that moment, Western civilization found itself at a crossroads: to found a civilization along the maritime path—that of Carthage—or along the terrestrial path—that of Rome. Chesterton noted that Carthage literally meant “the New City.” It was a colony founded by merchants from Tyre and Sidon, and the English writer compared it—not innocently—to New York and New Zealand. Carthage fell, he wrote, because it remained faithful to its own philosophy until the very end, and its god ultimately devoured its children. [10] In Mackinder’s interpretation, the Punic Wars never truly end: they recur in every era under new names. [11] Where does Europe stand in this perpetual war? Here Dugin offers a key insight that I consider decisive. Europe belongs to what geopoliticians call the Rimland, the great coastal belt of Eurasia,[12] and the Rimland has a dual identity: it can serve the Sea or serve the Land. For this reason, Dugin writes, European history is not the free play of sovereign states colliding like atoms, but “a single field made up of waves generated by two opposing geopolitical centers; a field crisscrossed by the golden threads of geopolitical destiny.” [13] Venice and Genoa have sailed all the seas; the plains of Poland and Bohemia and the forests of Germany have rooted our peoples in the soil. Europe has the ship and the plow in its blood. Precisely for this reason, anyone who has sought to dominate the world has first had to take control of Europe. In an essay on the Mediterranean, I wrote that Rome is, in a certain sense, occupied by Carthage’s emissaries.[14] Carthage has moved. It no longer sits on the African shore: it sits across the Atlantic and governs our inland sea from the outside. I do not say this out of hatred for anyone. I say it because a people that does not know who governs its sea cannot govern its own future. Why Europe is at the center It remains to be shown why Europe is not merely one pole among others—one that the multipolar world could easily do without—but an indispensable protagonist. There are four reasons. The first is geographical, and the geopoliticians of the Sea understood it before anyone else. Mackinder’s famous formula states: “Whoever rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland; whoever controls theHeartland controls the World Island; whoever controls the World Island controls the world.” The entire pyramid of world power rests on a European foundation. Nicholas Spykman, the strategist who laid the intellectual groundwork for NATO, insisted—as Dugin notes—on the importance of the intellectual factor in binding Western Europe to North America. [15] They understood that Europe is held first in the minds and only later on the ground, and for this reason they have never let it go. A multipolar world in which Europe remained captive would preserve the old unipolar order embedded at its heart, right at the pivot between the Atlantic and Eurasia. The second reason is historical. Europe gave the world the grammar of the modern international order. The Westphalian system, born in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, originally concerned only the European powers; the colonies, as Dugin notes, were treated as mere appendages. From Europe came the sovereign state, the balance of power, and even a civilization’s claim to universality. Schmitt called it Jus Publicum Europaeum, the European public law that for three centuries gave the entire world its Nomos, its fundamental order.[16] Those who wrote the framework can rewrite it. Criticism of Western universalism cannot stop at Europe’s borders, because it is in Europe that this universalism was born. If Europe does not be the first to overcome the idea that its own values are the measure of all humanity, the old claim will survive in its place of origin, and every other civilization will have to continue defending itself against it. Only a Europe that has rediscovered its own plurality can say to the world, with authority: we were wrong to believe that there was only one path, and we are the first to abandon that error. Schmitt himself drew this conclusion and pointed out to the peoples of Europe and Eurasia what he called the imperative of vast spaces: the right of peoples to organize their own vast spaces against universalism and imperialism, no matter where they come from. [17] Dugin observes that even the European Union is, at its core, a “great space” whose status remains uncertain. The Union is a draft. The question is who is holding the pen. The third reason is the one from which we began: Europe is already a multipolar world in miniature. For centuries, Catholics and Orthodox Christians, Latins and Slavs, Germanic peoples and Mediterraneans have learned—often through pain—to live side by side without becoming one another. Europe knows from within the cost and the benefits of coexistence with difference. No other civilization has had to learn this lesson so many times, thr…