Reconciling Land and Sea: Olivier Eichenlaub on the Geography of European Power
Alexander Raynor sits down for an interview with Olivier Eichenlaub, coordinator of the Institut Iliade's Research Division. Eichenlaub argues that Europe's uniquely interlocking coastline of seas and peninsulas predisposed the continent to power—and that recovering this inheritance means transcending Carl Schmitt's old opposition between land and sea.
Alexander Raynor: For English-speaking readers discovering you for the first time: who is Olivier Eichenlaub, how did you come to write on geopolitics, and what is the Institut Iliade, under whose auspices this book appears?
Olivier Eichenlaub: I am Olivier Eichenlaub, a French academic, a geographer by training and a teacher in the humanities. My path led me to teach in various schools of architecture as well as in several private training institutes, where I was able to develop an interdisciplinary approach to questions of territory, space, and society—one that draws as much on the work of the Nouvelle Droite as on the anti-utilitarian movements. In my book Europe puissance (Europe — A World Power), I am interested in particular in the relations between geographical configurations—seas, rivers, continental spaces, borders—and the historical and geopolitical dynamics that structure states and civilizations. In it I explore the place of our continent within the contemporary world system, defending the idea that Europe’s exceptional geography can continue to exert a lasting influence on its political, strategic, and civilizational trajectory.
My work therefore falls in large part within the editorial and intellectual line of the Institut Iliade, a circle for reflection and training devoted to the study of European civilization in its historical, cultural, and anthropological dimensions. This institute organizes colloquia, seminars, and training cycles aimed at deepening knowledge of the European heritage, at interrogating its historical continuities, and at reflecting on the conditions of its transmission in the contemporary world. It places the emphasis on the notions of culture, of civilization, and of long memory, offering a reading of contemporary stakes from within this perspective. Within the Iliade, where I currently coordinate the Research Division [Pôle Études], which publishes each year high-level Cahiers on important themes (Europe—Labor—Liberty), I also directed the collective volume Pour un réveil européen (For a European Awakening), which extends some of these reflections around cultural questions, the European heritage, and the forms of historical continuity.
AR: You open the book by recalling that after 1945 geopolitics became a taboo discipline, “radically forbidden almost everywhere, even under Stalin.” Why was it banished in this way, and can one really refuse to think geopolitically?
OE: In 1945, after the fall of the Third Reich, geopolitics became a taboo discipline. Born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it was first of all a German science, one that would be widely used by the National Socialists to launch their territorial conquests, through concepts such as that of living space (Lebensraum), developed by Friedrich Ratzel around the 1890s, or that of pan-Germanism, associated with Karl Haushofer, who was also the founder of the first international academic journal of geopolitics. Given the political and human disaster that the Second World War had been, there is nothing surprising in the fact that no one wished to hear of it any longer during the decades of reconstruction, which, in Western Europe, were turned toward the new ideology of liberalism. For all that, the Europeans never ceased doing geopolitics; they simply preferred to speak of “foreign policy” or of “international relations,” without reference to the prior body of work. Yet if Stalin did indeed forbid the study of geopolitics on his territory, was he not concretely putting it into practice when he took part in the Yalta Conference to carve up Europe geographically according to political criteria? In reality, it is impossible to think in terms of strategy or sovereignty without at least a minimal reference to geopolitics—rather like Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s Bourgeois gentilhomme, who spoke prose without knowing it. In France, one had to wait until the mid-1970s for the communist geographer Yves Lacoste to rehabilitate the discipline by founding the journal Hérodote—perhaps because, time having passed, he judged that this unjust censorship was over and done with, or perhaps also because he did not know its history well. Be that as it may, he was right to do so.
AR: The book rests on Carl Schmitt’s land/sea dialectic—a geopolitics of the land born in Germany, set against a geopolitics of the sea brought to its perfection by the Anglo-Saxons. Can you present this opposition for us, and explain why the European renaissance requires the reconciliation of these two spheres within the continent itself?
OE: Carl Schmitt developed at length a structuring opposition between Land and Sea, which he regarded as two fundamental principles of the organization of human societies: land powers are characterized by their territorial anchorage, the stability of their borders, and the importance accorded to political sovereignty, strongly rooted in a given territory. Conversely, maritime powers found their power on mobility, commerce, and mastery of the oceanic lines of communication that “open” space to exchange, to the circulation of goods, and to economic expansion. World history would be the result of a permanent tension between these two geopolitical logics, setting, for instance, the British and then the American model against the German or Russian model. This Schmittian approach is of course fundamental, but it does not truly apply at the scale of states, nor at that of an entire continent like Europe, which is simultaneously terrestrial and maritime. From the Atlantic to the Urals, Europe possesses, in fact, a wholly singular geographical configuration. It is an interlocking of lands and seas that interpenetrate one another and weld themselves together, with a highly irregular coastal profile that creates so many peninsulas, straits, and archipelagos. This complexity is found nowhere else in the world, neither in America, nor in China, nor in the Middle East. According to the Swiss essayist David Cosandey, this imbrication would lead to a “fundamental law of geography”: the European continent is an incomparable source of riches which, by its configuration, has generated a relative political stability among peoples, while also bringing about a stimulating competition between territories. This originality, which he sums up in the concept of “articulated thalassography”, would predispose Europe to innovation and excellence; it would lie at the origin of the development of the sciences and the techniques in Europe and of the continental superiority that followed from it beginning in the Middle Ages. A manifest expression, in short, of territory as a factor of power—one that requires going beyond Carl Schmitt’s fundamental dichotomy.
AR: You write that England—”however amicably one may speak of it”—remains the foremost enemy of European continental unity. That is a striking assertion for an English-speaking public. Are you targeting the English themselves, or the thalassocratic model of which they were the pioneers—the one Alain de Benoist links to globalization itself?
OE: When one speaks of a state in geopolitics, it is not unusual to name it by its capital: Washington is at this very moment confronting Tehran under the perplexed gaze of London, Paris, or Berlin. Behind these names of cities, one should imagine no other unity than that of the political power in place; not all Americans support the war, not all Iranians wish for the survival of the regime of the Mullahs—far from it. It is in the same state of mind that I speak of England, thereby committing, in fact, a classic error of the French literature, which often confuses it, for historical reasons, with the United Kingdom. As Alain de Benoist does as well, it is therefore clear that I am designating here the thalassocratic model devised by the British elites, and to a lesser degree the industrial model of which they are likewise the originators. I also stress in passing that the island of Britain has not always been turned toward the Atlantic, and that the Channel has at times been scarcely wider than a large river fairly easy to cross. We thus share a common history—that of King Arthur or that of Joan of Arc—who belong fully within a terrestrial geopolitics. That said, from the 17th century onward, England turned toward other, far vaster horizons, with an intensity that neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese had been able to imagine in building their world empires. What could be more natural, in the end, for a state that remains above all an island? But like many islands, England has developed ever since a certain mistrust of the continent, which it has sometimes tended to regard as a competitor. Even if it was from London that General de Gaulle called for Resistance during the Second World War, he had perfectly grasped this ambiguity. One will go on finding it thereafter throughout the history of the European Union, within which British decision-makers have often been particularly counterproductive, multiplying their “Trafalgar broadsides”...1 right up to Brexit. My esteem and my friendship for the British incline me to think that they will once again know how to move beyond this stage—not for a new Agincourt, but so that all the European peoples may together give themselves the means to build the power that Europe lacks.
AR: The book presents Russia as “Europe’s ideal energy partner” and argues that Europe cannot be conceived without Russia, against Huntington’s civilizational map. The book appeared in 2022, on the eve of the war in Ukraine—a war that severed the energy ties, hardened the division of the continent, and pushed the European Union further into the Atlanticist camp you criticize. Has the Russo-Ukrainian war refuted this chapter, or confirmed its warning? And beyond the present conflict: can the Euro-Russian relationship be repaired, and what would the first steps be?
OE: Is Russia part of Europe? Geographically, the majority of its territory lies in Asia, where it encompasses groups of populations that are varied from an ethnic point of view, with a more or less autonomous history of their own. Demographically, on the other hand, the great majority of Russians live in the western part of the territory, west of the Urals. From Saint Petersburg to Moscow, this western Russia has contributed greatly to European history: the contributions of Pushkin, of Peter I, of Ivan the Terrible, or of Leo Tolstoy, to cite only these, constitute a whole component of a common culture. Like Emperor Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II was a cousin of King George V. Politically, the Rus of Kiev also exerted considerable influence over the great plains of eastern Europe, controlling the vast eastern territories of Mitteleuropa, in particular Poland. But this vision is not that of the American political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose work implicitly influences part of the United States’ interventionism through a “clash of civilizations” that also runs through part of Europe. Here we find an American dread that goes back more than a century, to when Alfred Mahan declared that an alliance between Germany and Russia had to be avoided at all costs, so that Europe would not manage to rival the United States. This will to “divide and rule” would later be theorized by Halford Mackinder in his “pivot theory,” which Nicholas Spykman would envisage more concretely through the notion of “containment.” It is through this historical thickness that one must analyze the war that the United States is waging today against Russia by proxy armies—as Emmanuel Todd does very well,2 and as is shown also by the (more than probable) American sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline linking Germany and Russia under the Baltic Sea. By cutting off any possibility of continental collaboration with a historic and strategically vital energy ally, the Americans won, from an ideological point of view, the few decades that the Europeans lost, from a realist point of view, for the construction of a Europe as Power.
AR: Your third chapter argues that the European Union has built a “Europe-as-market” structurally incapable of thinking in civilizational terms—and you designate Kundera and the Visegrád countries as the guardians of a cultural idea of Europe. Why is it Eastern Europe, the region that suffered most in the 20th century, that remembers what Europe is?
OE: Certain geopoliticians distinguish what they call living borders from other borders they regard as dead. The former are lines of strategic and military tension. The latter, which generally succeed the former once the conflicts have passed, are above all memorial and cultural limits, which endure over the long term. The Iron Curtain is a characteristic illustration of this. In the East, the peoples certainly knew the dictatorship of communism, but they were spared the liberal and consumerist ideology that imposed itself in the West. After the fall of the Wall, this is surely what explains the positions of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe on questions as sensitive as the economy or extra-European immigration. Thus, behind Viktor Orbán’s Hungary at first, the Visegrád Group affirms its aspiration to a Europe more protective of peoples and nations, preferring to put forward a “patriotic economy” founded on the values of the family and on the ways of life inherited from Christendom rather than on mass consumption and individual libertarianism. It remains to be seen how long this specific mentality will be able to resist integration within the European Union and the pressure that the war in Ukraine exerts on political realism. In the meantime, Visegrád nonetheless appears as a counter-model with which one ought, at the very least, to enter into dialogue, so as to reconstruct a model capable of restoring a specific existence and power to Europe in an increasingly multipolar world.
AR: One of the most concrete sections of the book concerns infrastructure: the Rhine-Rhône canal, the high-speed rail links from Paris to the Black Sea, the lessons of the Roman roads and of the Trans-Siberian. Why is an infrastructure of this kind a civilizational question, and not merely an economic one?
OE: The history of the great empires shows that power does not rest solely on military force. To endure, an empire must organize the space it controls and connect to one another territories that are often vast and diverse. Infrastructure thus plays an essential role in the construction and the durability of civilizational wholes. From Antiquity onward, the great powers understood the strategic importance of communication networks. Roads, bridges, ports, canals, and postal relays made it possible to move armies rapidly, to transmit orders, and to ensure control of the peripheries. The economic function of these facilities is, moreover, obvious and essential. They facilitate commercial exchange, foster the circulation of merchandise, and allow the exploitation of resources. However, to limit infrastructure to its economic dimension alone would be a mistake. It possesses as well a cultural, political, and civilizational reach. The lines of communication do not transport only material goods; they also foster the circulation of ideas, of beliefs, of languages, and of forms of knowledge. The Roman roads helped to spread Roman law, Latin, and, later, Christianity across a large part of Europe. Infrastructure thus takes part in the formation of a common space. It brings different populations closer together and contributes to the emergence of a shared identity. In this sense, these are instruments of integration as much as tools of development. By structuring the flows of transport, energy, information, or commerce, large-scale infrastructure shapes spaces of influence and reinforces the position of the powers that control it. More than mere technical facilities, they are the arteries through which riches, men, ideas, and values circulate, contributing to the political cohesion of the great wholes, to the diffusion of cultural models, and to the affirmation of a vision of the world. Territorial planning is a major lever of power.
AR: You conclude with the Greek pairing of Hestia and Hermes—the hearth and the journey—and with this formula: “For a Swiss Europe, then... but with the sea.” Can you unfold this image for readers who have not yet opened the book, and tell us what you hope a reader formed within the maritime civilization will take away from your work?
OE: In Greek mythology, Hestia and Hermes are two complementary figures, who express the equilibrium between attachment to a place and exploration of the world. Hestia, goddess of the hearth, embodies stability, peace, and rootedness in the home and the community. Her sacred fire symbolizes that which remains and gathers. Conversely, Hermes is the god of movement, of journeys, and of exchanges. He watches over the roads, the borders, and the circulation of ideas. Where Hestia offers a fixed center, Hermes opens toward the outside and the unknown. Together, they express the equilibrium between attachment to a place and exploration of the world. What we remember of Europe’s greatness belongs most often to the world of Hermes: the discovery and conquest of the world, political universalism, scientific and technical progress, communication, and the exploration of space. But the world of Hermes is also a world in which one easily loses oneself. This is why it is necessary, too, to gather once more around the hearth, as Ulysses always sought to do in his Odyssey. After a long voyage during which she left behind a part of her soul, Europe must now rebuild herself as a community. To illustrate this idea, I could have taken the image of the Shire of the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. Out of provocation, I preferred to use that of Switzerland, foregrounding its skepticism toward the great technocratic systems, its direct relationship to democracy and to armed defense, and so on. But neither the Shire nor Switzerland has access to the sea. The European potential is therefore a thousand times greater than theirs—and we know how the Romans, or the merchants of the Hanse, knew how to make use of the Mediterranean and the Baltic. As for the question of what is to be done today with the world’s seas without losing oneself in them, let us leave it to the British, who are our European specialists on the matter, to answer it within the framework of a common construction.
Order Olivier Eichenlaub’s Europe — A World Power, brought to you in English by Arktos:
TN: a French idiom for a sudden, treacherous reversal or sabotaging blow, named for Nelson’s 1805 victory; an idiomatic alternative would be “a stab in the back.”
La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), Paris: Gallimard, 2024. Not yet translated.