Lorenzo Maria Pacini
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.
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, through so many wars and so many reconciliations. It is precisely the experience that a multipolar world needs.
The fourth reason is its position between the poles. Europe borders the Atlantic and the Eurasian Heartland; through the Mediterranean, it borders Africa and the Middle East; and through the Arctic-which opens up beneath a warmer sky-it will connect to the northern routes toward Asia. In the vision developed by Dugin, Europe and Russia-Eurasia remain two distinct poles, two entities bound by a common destiny within the vast continental space-contiguous in geography and culture, yet independent. The Austrian geopolitician Jordis von Lohausen, whom Dugin studied extensively, went even further: he considered a future for Europe without Russia unthinkable, and a Russia without Europe geopolitically incomplete. 18
I know how heavily these words weigh in years of war and mistrust, and I do not claim that the wounds of our continent are minor. But precisely because governments have stopped listening to one another, the peoples must not stop talking to one another.
The suppressed tradition
None of this is an invention. It is a matter of recovering a line of thought that official Europe has preferred to forget.
After World War II, Dugin recalls, European geopolitical thought split into different currents. On the one hand, there was pure Euro-Atlanticism, which accepted American primacy as the natural order of things. On the other, there was what he calls Euro-Continentalism: the conviction that Europe should stand on its own, with its own culture, its own economic and energy interests, and its own security system. Charles de Gaulle spoke of a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. Alain de Benoist distilled the sentiment of an entire generation into the phrase "neither West nor East, but Europe," later adding that it was preferable to align with the East rather than the West. 19
One may agree or disagree with each of these authors on many points; a living tradition is built on debate. Taken together, however, they clearly convey one thing. The Europe of Brussels and NATO is not the only Europe that has ever been imagined. There has always been another-a continental, sovereign Europe, rooted in its own history and open to its neighbors. It has never disappeared. It has been silenced.
The sea-heart
Let us return to the sea that gave Europe its name.
In NATO documents, the Mediterranean is the "southern flank". A flank is something you guard-the edge of the body, not its heart. For three thousand years, however, the Mediterranean has been the heart of the Old World, the space where Egyptians and Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, Arabs, Normans, Venetians, and Ottomans met, traded, fought, and learned from one another.
I have called it the "Sea-Heart," and I have proposed the idea of an expanded Mediterranean that stretches from continental Europe to the Middle East, to North and Sub-Saharan Africa, and beyond, toward the Far East. 20 On this sea, I believe a Pax Mediterranea is possible: a harmony among the civilizations that have always inhabited its shores, a peace between North Africa and the Middle Eastern Crescent, between Southern Europe and the peoples of the Balkans. A peace open to the Atlantic Ocean that does not allow itself to be governed by its power.
In the Italian edition of The Theory of the Multipolar World, Giuseppe Marro writes that Italy, due to its natural projection into the Mediterranean, serves as a bridge between Western Europe, Asia, and Africa. 21 That is indeed the case. Italy is-or should be-the natural holder of a strategic role in the Mediterranean basin. Not to dominate-a lesson our history has already taught us-but to mediate. A peninsula jutting out into the sea is a hand extended in friendship.
The diplomacy of the Logoi
What is the diplomacy of peoples ? It is what happens when peoples meet without waiting for permission from their bureaucracies. A diplomacy that comes from below, but also from deep within: from language, from memory, from faith, from the way a people understands life and death.
In Dugin's thought, as his Italian interpreters have emphasized, dialogue among civilizations is the great challenge of our time. To address it, a new kind of elite is needed-men and women trained in cultural anthropology and the study of archaic and traditional societies, capable of understanding the codes of civilizations different from their own and of navigating a shared map of meanings. In this vision, diplomacy should focus on the circulation of ideas even more than on politics or trade. Marro sums up the idea with a fitting phrase: diplomacy should become "a sacred profession."
How far we have strayed from that. Today, diplomacy is all too often about managing sanctions, drafting ultimatums, and the arithmetic of armaments. Yet the ambassador was once the one who carried the word of one people to another, and his person was inviolable because the word was sacred.
The diplomacy of peoples, as I understand it, is a diplomacy of the Logoi. It does not ask the other to become like us; it asks the other to be fully itself, so that a genuine dialogue may take place. In Noomachia, Dugin describes the future he envisions with words that could serve as a program: "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 single world governed by a single capital, speaking a single authorized language and believing in a single authorized truth, but many worlds-and among them, a European world that has rediscovered its own voice.
Thinking, remembering, encountering
Before building new institutions and signing new alliances, a new consciousness must exist. What a people cannot imagine, it cannot even achieve. The first task is therefore an intellectual one: to make a multipolar Europe conceivable-and thus possible.
This task has three dimensions. The first is to think-that is, to construct a European theory of multipolarity that draws on the full depth of the continent's geopolitical thought, from Ratzel and the continental school to Schmitt and Dugin's geopolitics of civilizations, while remaining critical, open to every tradition, and aware of the limitations of each school.
The second is to remember. We must recover the traditions that the Atlantic consensus has pushed to the margins: the continental and Mediterranean thinkers, the philosophers who resisted liberal universalism, and the voices of Eastern Europe silenced twice-first by Soviet rule and then by the liberal hegemony that succeeded it.
The third is to come together. We need spaces where institutions, scholars, artists, and representatives of different civilizations can speak to one another as equals: Europeans with Russians and Chinese, with Africans and Latin Americans, with the peoples of the Islamic world, with India, and with the Global South. Not the polite multicultural "dialogue" in which everyone agrees in advance to say nothing, but a genuine encounter between different Logoi, from which each emerges transformed.
In this work, the Mediterranean occupies a special place. Our inland sea must once again be seen as a crossroads of civilizations and not as an area of external management, and the Pax Mediterranea is a concrete horizon for action: the regional laboratory of the multipolar world.
Such a project takes the form neither of a political party nor of a lobby. It takes the form of a myth, that of a crossing: the journey of Europa across the sea repeated in our time, with Europe setting out to meet the other shore and the other shore coming to meet her.
It is a task measured in decades, not years, and one that will be accomplished for a generation that will not live to see it. This is no reason to be discouraged. Europe's cathedrals were built by men who knew they would never see them completed. They built them anyway, because they knew what they were building for.
The crossing
When the white bull carried her across the sea, Europa did not know where she was going. She did not know that her name would one day be given to a continent-to its empires and cathedrals, its crimes and saints, its philosophers and poets.
Today, Europe stands once again at the water's edge. Behind her lies the old world she built and then lost-the one in which a single civilization believed it could speak on behalf of all humanity. That world is over, and there is no reason to mourn it. Before her lies a sea full of other shores, other peoples, other ways of being human.
Europe can remain on the shore, gazing out at the Atlantic, waiting for instructions. Or it can set out on the crossing once more. Not as a conqueror this time, nor as a missionary of a universal model, but as what it was in the beginning: a traveler, a guest in both senses that our language gives to the word, a civilization born of an encounter.
If it makes this crossing, the multipolar world will have its missing center: the civilization that knows better than any other what it means to live with difference, because it has been doing so-with blood and genius-for three thousand years.
Europe is not the world's past. It is one of its futures, and it is up to the peoples to decide 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