Whither Europe?

“Geopolitical apperception is the ability to perceive the totality of geopolitical factors consciously, with an explicit understanding of both our subjective position and the regularities the structure of what we perceive…[It] does not signify only citizenship and a particular sphere of professional knowledge…He who occupies himself with it first clarifies his own position and its relation to the geopolitical map of the world. This position is neither geographical nor political (having to do with one’s citizenship), but sociocultural, civilizational, and axiological. It touches the geopolitician’s own identity. In certain cases, it can be changed, but this change is as serious as a change of one’s religious confession or a radical modification of one’s political opinions.” - Alexander Dugin [1]

Europe is in a state of profound crisis. This is a reality which a rapidly growing number of ordinary people and analysts are not only beginning to logically deduce, but also feel in the depths of their minds and souls. The peoples of the European continent, the unconscious heirs of Europe’s traditions, traumas, and struggles, are stirring from the virtual, dreamy slumber of the “End of History” which is quickly showing itself to be a nightmare. Once again, and without any stench of cliche, a specter is haunting Europe. However, rather than a wave of bourgeois revolutions threatening to topple the decaying remnants of the traditional order or a march of red flags proclaiming the dealing of justice to the masses expropriated by the crusade of “freedom from,” the new specter is profoundly more ominous in an eschatological sense. What is at stake is not a successive transformation of Europe’s socio-economic, political, or spiritual landscape in the interest of this or that class, but the end of Europe itself.

This time, moreover, the darkness engulfing Europe is not the shadow of its own injustices, but the despair of an assisted suicide, a shove into the abyss courtesy of Europe’s treacherous offspring, the American superpower which has taken the dark sides of European Modernity - liberalism, capitalism, and heretical eschatology - to the logical climax. In Europe today, as Alexander Dugin has pointed out, this threat is posed by the ideology of liberalism, the geopolitical subjugation of Atlanticism, and the catastrophes spawned by late capitalism. Yet all three of these crucial indices find their expression in the most crucial of agonies - the collapse, decay, and cannibalism of an uprooted identity.

Europe’s various peoples cannot reverse the steepening, multi-dimensional crisis, or much less unite together to wither it as long as Europe and its peoples remain stuck within the liberal trap of a diluted and self-destructing identity. How can labor fight capital if it does not realize that it is labor? How can a nation fight against neocolonialism if it does not recognize itself? How can the peoples of Europe ever save their continent if they cannot even determine their own “gender” or “sexuality?” The classic divide and conquer strategy enshrined in liberal dogma and implemented by the American leviathan by both force and ideological indoctrination has been so effective that even the notion of a European identity, now being associated with the exploitative structures of the American-manipulated European Union, has not only been obscured, but has even come to leave a bad taste in the mouth of the peoples who have had to taste the spoiled rations of “European integration” à l’américaine.

A corrosion or lack of identity in itself is a tragedy as it reduces a subject into an object, but the wider implication is much grimmer. Now that the peoples of Europe need to be actors and not objects more than ever, and now that Europe is faced with perhaps the last chance to regenerate itself as a positive pole in a burgeoning multipolar world, the peoples of the continent cannot even recognize themselves in the mirror. The Greek bus-driver sees in himself an unjustly tortured victim and prisoner of EU capitalism. The German baker sighs in disillusionment and reminds himself that his historical guilt doesn’t allow him to think that something’s wrong. The Polish apple farmer, warned of impending “Russian aggression” and restricted to the trenches of the cordon sanitaire, doesn’t understand why he has to give away the fruits of his labor for free to American soldiers. The French worker looks at himself and wonders who is really French: himself or the North African next door. The Serbian youth cannot bring himself to believe that Serbia might soon fly the flag under which his infancy was traumatized with the sounds of bombs and the sights of “collateral damage.” The unemployed Italian scratches his head and tries to remember how unified Italy came to be and why the First Rome is now relegated to the role of producing Europe’s most comical (Italy’s most embarrassing) scandals all too common of liberal democracy. All of the above are confused by the possible inclusion of such a country as Turkey in a union bearing the name “European” and castigated as “fascists” by the mainstream media for even the slightest questioning of accepting endless waves of disgruntled migrants. And so on. Stuck in the cycle of liberalism and capital’s atomization and alienation, not only is the reflection in the mirror becoming invisible, but the bigger picture escapes view altogether.

From the point of view of geopolitical reductionism, Europe has come to represent Rimland, the contested space between the forces of land and sea, the forces of continental integration and civilizational consciousness vs. the forces of trans-atlantic subjugation and neo-colonialism. On today’s map, this manifests itself in the struggle between the American Empire, with its European liberal puppets, and the continental spirits of Europe backed by an awakened, emerging Russia-led Eurasian alternative. For the last half a century, Europe has restricted itself to being a puppet of the former.

To maintain its empire, the US wants and needs either a colonized Europe or a destabilized, no-man’s-land Europe. The first option has three varying scenarios: (1) the prolonging of the status quo in which Europe is semi-colonized by the unipolar American hyper power through the medium of the present EU and US-led NATO, (2) the outright, repressive occupation of Europe by American armed forces, or (3) the incitement of a new “third way” project with form and consequences similar to that of 20th century fascism [2]. The first variant is today revealing itself to be increasingly untenable. The “unity” of the EU is crumbling under its own artificial weight and continental forces are slowly but steadily emerging to challenge the EU’s attack-dog manipulation against Russia and the distinctly anti-European facets of American trans-Atlanticism. The second variant is in the process of being tested, as more and more American soldiers are being deployed under the pretext of “deterring Putin.” The third variant, a prototype of which was run in US support for the Ukrainian neo-Nazis installed in Kiev in 2013, is still open for consideration, although the full realization of such as the main endgame plan in itself is unlikely given Russia’s growing involvement in shielding European politics from provocative American campaigns and, anyway, the new “totalitarianism” plaguing Western societies is that of “post-liberalism” which has vastly surpassed former repressive mechanisms of hard and soft power.

The second option includes other possible scenarios. The first is being steadily prepared through the weaponization of mass migration and the “refugee crisis.” The end goal in this scenario could be either an outright Islamization of Europe which the US could play along with in the same way it does with Wahhabism in the Middle East, destabilization wreaked by ethnic war and a “clash of civilizations” on European soil, or the “preventative” deployment of US armies which would play the role of tribal war provocations or advertise hypocritical “unity in the war against Islamic terror.” The Islamization of Europe would mean the end of European Europe no matter what the variant and therein guarantees the solution of the “European problem” for American empire-maintenance. The destruction of the anthropological basis of Europe, and Europeans themselves, would be just another small price to pay (which, like always, the Americans won’t) in the crusade to drag destabilization and terror up to Russia’s border.  

Another resort could be instigating European civil war and the ensuing Balkanization of new strategic nodes of the continent. Whether this scenario could ever materialize itself, of course, depends on the will of European themselves and the heeding of their historical memory - one of the very targets of the liberalism in power.

It is important to recall that a collapsing empire falls in part because it draws up policy on the fly and can no longer formulate and pursue coherent plans. This is a distinct feature among the current American elites and explains the variety of different scenarios already visible in US policy towards Europe, the seemingly mixed juggling of multiple tactics at once, and the relatively quick breakdown of the US’ initiatives in Ukraine and Syria. Nevertheless, a cornered, dying beast is one which lashes out and tries to take as many victims as it can down with it. The American threat can only be underestimated at one’s own peril. After all, we are dealing with a hyper-power unparalleled in history motivated by the most rapacious ideological, economic, and  religious perversions of Modernity which dehumanizes anyone that stands in the way of its interests. Those who claim that the threat of Islamization, for example, should serve as a point of unity for a “North (America + Europe) vs. South” axis as opposed to an “East vs. West” (Eurasia vs. Atlantis) arrangement see the dagger but not the wielder and are playing into the hands of the American scheme.

The harsh occupation, horrific destabilization, or tragic disappearance of one of the world’s civilizational poles is a looming catastrophe. Whether this is ushered by dint of American bayonets, Islamic proxy beheadings, or by fratricidal civil war is open to question, conditioned by different factors and the course of events, and to a certain extent irrelevant. The threat itself, regardless of incarnation, is a wake-up call not only for Europeans, but for the rest of the world. If Rimland falls, Eurasia, the Heartland, is in danger, and if Heartland falls, there will be nothing left to stop the onset of, no matter by what name it is called, the end times - the end of history. As Alexander Dugin wrote in 1999, “Few are conscious of what happened at the turn of the ’90’s and what side opened the ‘paradigm of the End’ in front of humanity…” [3] This is the common denominator which both the anti-liberal and anti-capitalist “left” and “right” can only ignore or obscure at their own peril.

As Tradition teaches, darkness is not only a negative or ominous phenomenon. It is also the flip-side of the possibility of finding Being out of Oblivion and in some interpretations it is the first bridge which has to be crossed to reach the light at the end of the tunnel.  Peering into the abyss leaves one to reconsider the path. Today, the darkness is not descending upon merely this or that European nation, but upon Europe as a whole. Accordingly, it is Europe as a whole that must seek rectification, the light, regeneration, and, in practical as well as metaphysical terms, civilizational unity. The European nations struggling for sovereignty and the movements crusading for one form or another of “national liberation” must realize that they are part of a common struggle and that no matter what connotations “European unity” might have thanks to the corrupt, colonial nature of the present European Union, the enemy is not Europe, but the overseas power and ideology which have twisted “European integration” to resemble the “integration” of prison inmates rather than the solidarity of free, conscious men.

It is high time to reclaim the very terms “Europe” and “European civilization” from the liberals and empower the anti-Atlanticist struggle with a new scope of geopolitical apperception, one which takes Europe as a whole as its subject. This does not overlook the important contradictions within Europe, but rather spurs their resolution and, so to say, separates the wheat from the chaff. It will reveal who are the real heirs of the continent, and who are the traitorous beneficiaries and artificial projects positioned to divide it. To a large extent, this is a fateful test for the peoples of Europe, and the arrangement and make-up of Europe will undoubtedly change with it. “Tradition” and “geopolitics” are two of the watchwords guiding this struggle.

Those who, immersing themselves in geopolitical apperception, have followed the pulse of the heart of one of the world’s civilizations will understand the meaning imbuing these words.

[1] Dugin, Alexander. Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia. Arktos (2016).

[2] For a detailed discussion of the geopolitical fallaciousness of the so-called “Third Way” project, see A. Dugin’s “Paradigm of the End”

[3] Ibid.