From the legend of Europa to the dual nature of the Rimland, from the Mediterranean known as the “Sea-Heart” to the overshadowed legacy of de Gaulle and Dugin, Europe must recall that it originated from a crossing.
The times we live in
According to Greek mythology, Europa was a young woman, daughter of the king of Tyre on the shores of modern Lebanon. One day, while playing by the sea, a white bull appeared from the water. She climbed atop it, and the bull transported her across the sea to Crete. Poets claim that the continent took its name from her.[1]
The myth reveals much more than it appears. The name “Europe” derives from Asia and arrived via a god crossing the Mediterranean. Our continent is named after a stranger, a traveler, a girl from beyond the sea. Europe’s birth was the result of a meeting: before becoming a landmass, it was a crossing point.
This tale is largely forgotten by Europeans. For the past eighty years, the dominant narrative has presented Europe as little more than a set of institutions, a common marketplace, a security zone managed from overseas; simply “the West.” Many have accepted this version without question.
However, the argument here is different. Europe is a civilization—or more accurately, a collection of multiple civilizations united under one umbrella. In the emerging multipolar world, this entity is not a mere region or periphery; it stands at the heart of global affairs, and the new world order cannot be complete without it.
An era has ended. The unipolar world established after 1991—which Francis Fukuyama quickly dubbed “the end of history,”[2]—is unraveling visibly. History did not end; it was merely biding its time.
New power centers have risen across Eurasia, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Capitals previously sidelined now assert themselves. Even Washington’s tone has shifted: the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy openly discusses interests, costs, and negotiations, treating past multilateral agreements as liabilities to be renegotiated.[3] The former patron is now demanding payment.
Thus, for Europe, the question is no longer if the multipolar world will arrive—it is already here. The real issue is whether Europe will participate as an active subject, shaping history, or remain a passive stage where others write their own stories.
In The Theory of the Multipolar World, Aleksandr Dugin points out that many who invoke multipolarity lack a coherent theory of it.[4] They imagine a “core” comprising the United States, Europe, and the West, with rising challengers on the fringes. Within this model, Europe remains part of the old, fading center.
This positioning must be rejected. Europe has never been master of the unipolar world; it was its earliest protectorate. Dugin notes in his geopolitical manual that post-1945 Western Europe was under American domination just as much as Eastern Europe was under Soviet control.[5] Governance methods evolved, but dependency levels did not. Many Europeans, from both sides of the Iron Curtain, viewed this division as tragic, with some working to dismantle it. When General de Gaulle’s France withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command in 1966, it was not an act of hostility, but an act of remembrance: Europe recalled its own independent will.
What is Europe
Ask Brussels and you’ll receive answers about competencies, directives, and procedures. A geographer will give coordinates—peninsula bounded by the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Ural Mountains. One response is bureaucratic; the other is a featureless map. Neither explains why a Sicilian shepherd, a Bavarian craftsman, and a monk from Mount Athos are deeply linked in history.
Russian Eurasianists, particularly Pyotr Savitsky, argued that Europe is simply the “western promontory” of Eurasia.[6] Many Western analysts concur, albeit less fondly, seeing it as a small cape attached to Asia.
This metaphor is useful. Historically, people built lighthouses on capes. At Cape Sounion, Athenians erected the Temple of Poseidon, white against the sea, signaling where Greece began. At the edge of Galicia, the Romans named a cape Finis Terrae—the world’s end. A promontory is where a continent faces outward, where land communicates with the sea and the wider world. Europe’s limited size has always been central to its importance.
Inside this cape, there is no singular civilization. Four main axes exist, dynamically interacting.
The Mediterranean axis encompasses Athens and Rome, law and philosophy, Byzantium and Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanism born from Christian theology’s dialogue with Islamic science.
The continental axis includes the Frankish and Germanic worlds, the Holy Roman Empire, medieval universities, the philosophical heritage from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger, and the traditional vision of a Mitteleuropa bridging the Atlantic and the steppes.
The Eastern axis consists of the Slavic peoples, Orthodox Christianity, and the Byzantine legacy transmitted through Kiev and Moscow—a European identity distinct from Western modernity.
And finally, the Northern axis covers the Norse and Baltic regions, known for their assemblies, communal law, and connection to the wild landscapes.
Dugin, inspired by Heidegger, talks about the Dasein of peoples—which refers to how each group exists in the world—and the Logos of each people, the source of life “not only on a biological level but on ethnosociological and metaphysical levels.”[7] Europe does not possess a single Logos; it harbors many. It has always been a miniature multipolar world.
This is the foundational argument here: the diversity sought globally is inherent to Europe itself. Multipolarity does not need to be imported—it must be reclaimed.
Land and sea
To grasp why Europe occupies the center, we must revisit one of geopolitics’ oldest dichotomies. Halford Mackinder recognized it, Carl Schmitt pondered it, and Dugin formalized it: the conflict between Sea civilization and Land civilization, between thalassocracy and tellurocracy.[8]
The Sea civilization is characterized by mobility, commerce, and individualism, evaluating the world by routes, harbors, and economic value. The Land civilization is settled, communal, hierarchical, valuing duties, lineage, and the sacred. These are more than military distinctions; they shape legal systems, religions, philosophies, and even family traditions.
Mackinder traced this rivalry back to the Mediterranean conflicts between Rome and Carthage.[9] Dugin notes that Western civilization faced a crossroads: to follow Carthage’s maritime path or Rome’s terrestrial one. Chesterton observed that Carthage, meaning “the New City,” was a merchant colony from Tyre and Sidon, likened to New York and New Zealand by the English writer. Carthage fell because it remained steadfast to its philosophy until the end, its deity consuming its progeny.[10]
According to Mackinder, the Punic Wars never fully ended; they resurface throughout history under varied guises.[11]
Where does Europe stand in this ongoing conflict? Here, Dugin offers a vital insight. Europe is part of the Rimland, the Eurasian coastal belt,[12] which holds a dual potential: to serve the Sea or the Land. Hence, European history should not be seen as a mere clash of independent states but “a single arena shaped by waves from two opposing geopolitical centers; a tapestry woven by the golden threads of geopolitical destiny.”[13]
Venice and Genoa ventured across all seas; Poland’s plains, Bohemia, and Germany’s forests have grounded our peoples. Europe carries both the ship and the plow in its heritage. That is why every global dominator must first control Europe.
In an essay on the Mediterranean, I argued Rome is, in a way, occupied by Carthaginian agents.[14] Carthage has relocated. No longer based on the African coast, it now commands our inland sea from beyond the Atlantic. I say this not from hatred but because a people ignorant of who governs their sea cannot shape their destiny.
Why Europe is at the center
It remains to explain why Europe is more than just one pole in a multipolar world—why it is indispensable. Four reasons stand out.
First is geography, understood earliest by sea geopoliticians. Mackinder’s famous dictum states: “Who controls Eastern Europe commands the Heartland; who controls the Heartland rules the World Island; who governs the World Island controls the world.” A global power pyramid rests on European foundations. Nicholas Spykman, NATO’s intellectual father, stressed the mental bond linking Western Europe to North America.[15] Europe is held first in minds, then on land, and this bond has never been loosened. A multipolar world with captive Europe would maintain the old unipolar system centered between the Atlantic and Eurasia.
The second reason is historical. Europe created the framework of the modern international system. The Westphalian treaty of 1648, ending the Thirty Years’ War, initially addressed only European powers; colonies were mere appendages, as Dugin notes. Europe birthed the sovereign state, the balance of power, and a civilization’s universalist claim. Schmitt named this Jus Publicum Europaeum, the European public law providing the Nomos for the world over three centuries.[16]
Those who crafted the order can reshape it. Critique of Western universalism must begin in Europe, its birthplace. If Europe does not lead in abandoning its claim as the sole measure of humanity, that claim will persist, forcing others to counter it perpetually. Only a Europe rediscovering its internal diversity can honestly tell the world: we were wrong to think there was only one path, and we are first to renounce that error.
Schmitt himself reached this conclusion, emphasizing the imperative of vast spaces—the right of peoples to structure their great regions against universalism and imperialism, regardless of origin.[17] Dugin notes that the European Union is essentially such a “great space,” but its status remains undefined. The EU is a project, and the question is who writes its future.
The third crucial point returns to where we started: Europe is itself a miniature multipolar world. Centuries of coexistence among Catholics and Orthodox, Latins and Slavs, Germanic and Mediterranean peoples have taught—often painfully—how to live side by side without merging. No other culture has endured so many wars and reconciliations to learn this lesson. This experience is precisely what a multipolar world requires.
The fourth reason stems from Europe’s geographical position among key poles. Europe borders the Atlantic and the Eurasian Heartland; via the Mediterranean, it connects to Africa and the Middle East; and with the Arctic opening beneath a warming climate, it will link northern pathways to Asia. In Dugin’s vision, Europe and Russia-Eurasia are distinct poles, united by a shared destiny within a vast continental expanse—neighboring in geography and culture, yet independent. Austrian geopolitician Jordis von Lohausen, extensively studied by Dugin, argued that Europe without Russia is unthinkable, and Russia without Europe geopolitically incomplete.[18]
I recognize these words weigh heavily in times marked by conflict and distrust, and I do not downplay Europe’s wounds. Yet, precisely because governments have ceased dialogue, it is vital that peoples continue to communicate.
The suppressed tradition
This is not a new idea but rather the revival of a philosophical current official Europe has overlooked.
Post–World War II, Dugin notes, European geopolitical thought divided. One stream embraced Euro-Atlanticism, accepting American dominance as natural. Another embraced Euro-Continentalism: the belief that Europe should assert itself with its own culture, economic and energy interests, and independent security. Charles de Gaulle envisioned a Europe spanning Atlantic to Urals. Alain de Benoist captured a generation’s sentiment with “neither West nor East, but Europe,” later adding that aligning with the East was preferable to the West.[19]
One may debate these thinkers on various points, but together, they affirm this: Brussels’s and NATO’s Europe is but one version. Another Europe has always existed—sovereign, continental, rooted in its history yet open to neighbors. It never vanished. It was silenced.
The sea-heart
Returning to the sea that named Europe.
In NATO language, the Mediterranean is the “southern flank,” something to be guarded—the body’s edge, not its center. Yet for three millennia, the Mediterranean has been the Old World’s heart: where Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Venetians, and Ottomans mingled, traded, fought, and exchanged knowledge.
I have called it the “Sea-Heart” and proposed expanding the Mediterranean notion to stretch from continental Europe to the Middle East, through North and Sub-Saharan Africa, reaching toward the Far East.[20] On this sea, a Pax Mediterranea—a harmony among civilizations along its shores—is possible: peace between North Africa and the Middle East, Southern Europe and the Balkans. A peace oriented toward the Atlantic without yielding to its hegemony.
In the Italian edition of The Theory of the Multipolar World, Giuseppe Marro observes Italy’s strategic role in the Mediterranean, acting as a bridge linking Western Europe, Asia, and Africa.[21] Indeed, Italy should be the natural guardian of the Mediterranean basin—not to dominate, a lesson history has taught—but to mediate. A peninsula jutting into the sea is a symbol of friendship.
The diplomacy of the Logoi
What defines the diplomacy of peoples? It is what arises when communities engage directly, without bureaucratic sanction, driven from within by shared language, memory, faith, and distinct understandings of life and death.
Dugin’s thought, as interpreted in Italy, highlights that the great challenge today is dialogue among civilizations. This requires new elites versed in cultural anthropology and traditional societies, able to decode diverse civilizational languages and navigate a shared symbolic landscape. Here, diplomacy should prioritize the exchange of ideas over politics or commerce. Marro aptly calls for diplomacy to become “a sacred profession.”
How far removed we have become from that ideal. Present-day diplomacy often revolves around sanction enforcement, ultimatums, and arms calculations. Yet the ambassador once was the sacred bearer of a people’s word, and therefore untouchable.
The diplomacy of peoples, as I see it, is a diplomacy of Logoi. It does not demand the other become like us, but invites them to remain fully themselves to enable true dialogue. In Noomachia, Dugin outlines a future vision: “many civilizations, many poles, many centers, many value systems on the same planet and within the same humanity. Many worlds.”[22]
Many worlds. Not a singular planet ruled by one capital, speaking a single approved language and adhering to one endorsed truth. Instead, many worlds—among them a European world reclaiming its own voice.
Thinking, remembering, encountering
Before forging new institutions or alliances, new awareness must exist. One cannot achieve what one cannot imagine. Thus, the initial task is intellectual: to make a multipolar Europe conceivable—and therefore possible.
This effort involves three steps. First, to think—developing a European theory of multipolarity rooted in the continent’s rich geopolitical heritage, from Ratzel and the continental school to Schmitt and Dugin’s civilization geopolitics—critically engaging with each tradition and acknowledging their limits.
Second, to remember. Reclaim the marginalized traditions sidelined by the Atlantic consensus: continental and Mediterranean thinkers, philosophers resisting liberal universalism, and the silenced voices of Eastern Europe, oppressed first by Soviet rule and then by liberal hegemony.
Third, to come together. Create spaces where institutions, scholars, artists, and representatives of diverse civilizations dialogue as equals: Europeans with Russians, Chinese, Africans, Latin Americans, Islamic peoples, Indians, and the Global South. Not the superficial multicultural “dialogue” where all agree beforehand to say nothing meaningful, but true encounters of different Logoi from which all participants leave transformed.
Within this effort, the Mediterranean holds a unique place. Our inland sea must be reconceived as a crossroads of cultures rather than a zone of external control. The Pax Mediterranea offers a tangible goal—the regional crucible for the multipolar world.
This endeavor does not take the form of a political party or a lobbying group. It embodies a myth—the story of a crossing: Europa’s journey across the sea reenacted today, with Europe heading toward the other shore as that shore advances toward Europe.
This project spans decades, not years, and will be completed by a generation not alive to witness it. That should not discourage us. European cathedrals were built by men who knew they would never see them finished, yet they built them nonetheless, inspired by the purpose behind their work.
The crossing
When the white bull bore Europa across the sea, she did not know her destination. She could not foresee that her name would one day designate a continent—its empires, cathedrals, sins and saints, philosophers and poets.
Today, Europe once more stands by the water’s edge. Behind it lies the lost old world it built—a world where one civilization claimed to speak for all humanity. That era has ended, and there is no need to lament it. Ahead lies a sea sprinkled with countless other shores, peoples, and ways of being human.
Europe may stay on the shore, staring at the Atlantic, awaiting orders. Or it may embark on the crossing anew. Not as a conqueror or missionary of a universal template, but as it was at the beginning: a traveler, a guest in every sense of the word, a civilization born from encounter.
If Europe undertakes this journey, the multipolar world will gain its missing center: the civilization most familiar with living alongside difference, having done so—with both sacrifice and brilliance—for three millennia.
Europe is not humanity’s past. It is a future among many, and the peoples hold the power to choose which one.
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[1]Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 833–875; see also Mosco, Europa.
[2]F. Fukuyama, “The End of History?”, The National Interest, 16 (1989), pp. 3–18; later, Id., The End of History and the Last Man, Rizzoli, Milan 1992.
[3]The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, D.C., December 2025.
[4]A. Dugin, Teorija mnogopoljarnogo mira, Evrazijskoe dviženie, Moscow 2012; English ed. The Theory of a Multipolar World, Arktos, London 2020; Italian ed. Teoria del mondo multipolare, edited by G. Marro, AGA, Milano 2019. For Russian titles, the scientific transliteration is used; authors’ names follow the standard Italian form.
[5]A. Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki. Geopolitičeskoe buduščee Rossii, Arktogeja, Moscow 1997.
[6]This image recurs in the writings collected in P.N. Savitsky, Kontinent Evrazija, Agraf, Moscow 1997.
[7] Ibid.
[8]C. Schmitt, Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, Reclam, Leipzig 1942; Italian trans. Terra e mare, Adelphi, Milan 2002. For Dugin’s systematization: Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki, op. cit.
[9]H.J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality. A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction, Constable, London 1919.
[10]G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, Hodder & Stoughton, London 1925, Part I, Chapter VII (“The War of the Gods and Demons”); Italian trans. L’uomo eterno.
[11]This interpretation is cited in Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki, op. cit.; the corresponding passage from Mackinder remains.
[12]N.J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York 1944.
[13]Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki, op. cit.
[14]See L.M. Pacini, Mediterraneo multipolare.
[15]Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality, op. cit. On Spykman: N.J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics. The United States and the Balance of Power, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York 1942; and Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki, op. cit.
[16]C. Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, Greven, Cologne 1950; Italian trans. Il nomos della terra nel diritto internazionale dello “jus publicum europaeum”, Adelphi, Milan 1991.
[17]C. Schmitt, Völkerrechtliche Großraumordnung mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte, Deutscher Rechtsverlag, Berlin 1939. The expression “imperative of the great spaces” and the appeal to the peoples of Europe and Eurasia are cited according to Dugin’s interpretation.
[18]J. von Lohausen, Mut zur Macht. Denken in Kontinenten, Vowinckel, Berg am See 1979.
[19]Regarding the second statement: A. de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde, même combat, Robert Laffont, Paris 1986. First occurrence of the phrase “neither West nor East, but Europe”
[20]Pacini, Mediterraneo multipolare, op. cit.
[21]G. Marro, in Dugin, Teoria del mondo multipolare, Italian ed., op. cit.
[22]A. Dugin, Noomachija. Vojny uma, Akademičeskij proekt, Moscow 2014
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