The Sociology of Geopolitics

Atlantis or Athens: The War Between Land and Sea in Every Soul

Alexander Markovics conjures a war map of spirits where Atlantis and Athens rise again within every soul, calling each to choose between the rooted hero of the land and the drifting trader of the sea in a world torn between sacred geography and globalist dissolution.

To what extent does the land we inhabit shape our society? What impact does geography have on the way we live? And do we, as human beings, truly have a “choice” in geopolitics or are we already participants in a Manichaean struggle between Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, Land and Sea? These questions concerning the role of geopolitics in human society have occupied European philosophy since antiquity. Back then, however, geopolitics was not yet treated as an independent science but was seen as part of a religious worldview: sacred geography. One of the earliest signposts can be found in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato, who over 3,000 years ago developed the idea of an ideal social order closely tied to what we now call geopolitics.

Plato’s Critias: Atlantis versus Athens

In his dialogue Critias, Plato — the philosophical patriarch of Apollonian thought — recounts a war that took place 9,000 years prior. He emphasizes that the Earth had once been peacefully divided among the gods. In that distant age, a primordial Athens defended itself against Atlantis, a mythical island west of the “Pillars of Heracles” (what we now call the Strait of Gibraltar). The character Critias, who lends the dialogue its name, presents the two social systems that faced off in this war.

According to his account, primordial Athens, founded by the gods Athena and Hephaestus, stood under the signs of wisdom and craftsmanship. It was a land power extending far beyond Attica. A conservative, hierarchical order prevailed here, with the gods ensuring that the land produced wise and capable people: men and women alike serving in the military. Farmers were physically separated from warriors and their freely chosen leaders. Thus, primordial Athens can be seen as a conservative society in which the goal of the state was not material wealth but the virtue of its citizens — citizens who honored the Olympian-Apollonian gods and maintained a hierarchical structure.

In stark contrast stood the island of Atlantis. According to Plato, it was created by the god Poseidon, who fathered its people with a mortal woman. Named after its first king, Atlas, Atlantis was characterized by abundance: forests, pastures, and enough resources to sustain even elephants. Every year, the Atlanteans sacrificed ten firstborns to Poseidon, who did not belong to the Olympian pantheon and stood in antagonism to Zeus, the father of the gods. Atlantis, in this depiction, represents trade and materialism — traits considered unvirtuous in the Hellenic-Platonic tradition. As the divine component within the Atlanteans diminished and the human element grew, they became increasingly overwhelmed by their own wealth. This led to their hubris and ultimately to war against Athens. From the fragmentary dialogue Critias, we gather that the downfall of Atlantis was a divine punishment — a judgment, as suggested in the dialogue’s final lines.

Thus, Plato’s depiction of the war between Atlantis and Athens is a clash between two entirely different societal systems and civilizations. On one side, the traditional, land-rooted Athenians who revere gods and tradition; on the other, the Atlanteans, surrounded by sea, driven by materialism and commerce into hubris. This conflict embodies the archetypal struggle between land and sea, a cornerstone of sacred Hellenic geography. Seen through the eternal lens of the Apollonian Logos, the outcome is clear: the enduring, rooted civilization of the land triumphs over the fleeting, liquid civilization of the sea.

Mackinder’s Geopolitics and the Heartland of Eurasia

Such was the sacred geography of Hellenic tradition, which — through Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic empire — became a foundational pillar of European civilization. Yet what would a geopolitical theory look like that clears a path for a maritime civilization to achieve global dominance? In 1904, British geographer and geopolitician Halford Mackinder offered such a theory in his landmark essay “The Geographical Pivot of History,” which marked a turning point for modern geopolitics. He proposed a materialist thesis: that the control of Eurasia’s “Heartland,” equated with Eastern Europe, was essential for ruling the entire World-Island of Eurasia — and thus, the world itself.

Mackinder, rooted in Enlightenment liberalism and British nationalism, posed a stark opposition between civilization and barbarism. For him, European civilization was the result of a secular struggle against Asiatic invasions. He saw Russia’s control over vast Eurasian territories as a threat to Anglo-Saxon sea power. He traced this civilizational rift to the Christianization of the Germanic peoples by the Romans and the Slavs by the Greeks. While the former expanded westward across oceans to found new Europes, the latter expanded eastward into Asia and conquered Turan.

Mackinder raised the contrast between Rome and Greece to a paradigm of his geopolitical thought, lamenting that the Romans failed to Latinize the Greeks — a tragic missed opportunity, in his eyes. This belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority over Slavic peoples, particularly Russia, cemented a geopolitical rivalry for control over Eastern Europe. For Mackinder, this competition evolved into a Manichaean dualism of land versus sea powers. His famous dictum from Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) reads:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;

who rules the World-Island commands the world.

Importantly, Mackinder’s “World-Island” included not only Eurasia but Africa as well. Thus, maritime powers situated at the fringes of this massive landmass needed to entrench themselves along its borders in order to contain and ultimately defeat the Heartland. Mackinder also saw Germany as a potential rival to Britain’s sea power. His nightmare scenario was a coalition between Germany and Russia. For him, land powers were viewed unfavorably: while Germany was a kindred rival, Russia was deliberately cast as alien: Asiatic, Christian, and backward.

In Mackinder’s thought, we find not only the geopolitical ambitions of sea powers but also the logic of imperialism: Anglo-British culture was declared the sole true civilization, destined to spread progress and democracy worldwide. This model tolerated neither multiple power centers nor cultural and social pluralism since it considered itself the only legitimate world order. What human archetype, then, could stand against it?

Werner Sombart: Traders and Heroes

A German answer to Anglo-Saxon imperial ambition can be found in the 1915 work Traders and Heroes: Patriotic Reflections by German sociologist Werner Sombart (1863–1941). Writing in the context of World War One, Sombart identified Britain — driven by economic and hegemonic interests — as the principal enemy. What began as a critique of the British mercantile spirit developed into a radical cultural critique centered around the figure of the trader, whom Sombart saw as the archetype of the sea power.

Motivated by profit and worshiping wealth as the highest value, the trader was, in Sombart’s view, an utterly unheroic figure who embodied the capitalist spirit and stood in opposition to tradition. Rational and individualistic, the trader knew neither homeland nor sacrifice for the community; instead, he sought to subject the entire world to the logic of money. Against him, Sombart posited the hero: a figure rooted in tradition, ready to fight for his homeland and even to lay down his life for his people.

While Sombart generally characterized the British as a trader nation and the Germans as a nation of heroes, he acknowledged that both archetypes existed within each society. This inner struggle for the human soul demanded, in his view, an education toward heroism. Modern society, he noted, inherently favored the trader type. World War One, then, was not merely a war of empires but a clash of human types. The trader corresponded to sea power, the hero to land power. Thus, the hero represented the societal response to the encroachment of sea-based imperialism. But what would a global order look like that could counteract these imperial designs?

Carl Schmitt — For a New Nomos of the Earth

German conservative revolutionary and legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) proposed such a vision. In 1939, he articulated the concept of a multipolar order — though he did not use that term — in his essay “The Great Space Order of International Law with a Ban on Intervention by Foreign Powers.” In this vision, the globe would not be dominated by a single sea power but consist of multiple empires. Referring to the Holy Roman Empire, Schmitt envisioned “great spaces” led by a Reichsvolk (imperial people or peoples), unified by a shared political idea.

Schmitt referred to the U.S. Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which declared the Americas an exclusive sphere of influence and forbade external intervention. He argued that the German Reich, the Soviet Union, and Japan should each establish similar great spaces — thus rejecting the universalist domination of the maritime empire.

In Land and Sea: A Global Historical Meditation (1942), Schmitt, in a narrative written for his daughter Anima, portrayed history as a perpetual battle between Leviathan and Behemoth, between seafarers and land dwellers. Though two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, Schmitt argued that man is fundamentally a land creature. Land appropriation has always marked the founding act of culture. Only with the rise of the British Empire — and its strategy of oceanic conquest aimed at controlling trade routes — did true sea power emerge, basing its foreign policy on the principle of piracy.

Schmitt developed these ideas further in The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (1950). In this sweeping critique of Western universalism through the lens of European international law, he showed how the boundless expansion of European culture — driven by maritime power — did not strengthen Europe but rather led to its spiritual emptiness and decline, replaced by a mechanical, internationalist culture. Europe’s domination by foreign powers — America in the West and the Soviet Union in the East — prompted him to advocate a new Nomos of the Earth (from the Greek for “allocation of pastureland”).

As former colonies reclaimed their homelands during decolonization, Schmitt argued that Europeans should likewise reclaim Europe from the occupying forces of the United States and the Soviet Union. This new division of the Earth implied, above all, a spiritual decolonization: a break from the maritime mindset that had led Europe into its self-made abyss. Only by overcoming its universalist hubris and renouncing the urge to rule the entire world could Europe rediscover its own identity as a land power and reemerge as a sovereign civilization among many. In this, Schmitt laid the groundwork for the uprising of the land against the sea. But how can this be transformed into a comprehensive worldview?

Alexander Dugin: Multipolarity as the Land’s Revolt against the Sea

With his Fourth Political Theory (2008), Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin (b. 1962) offered a systematic framework for the revolt of land power against sea power. By adopting Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein (being-there) as the subject, Dugin argued that existence rooted in a specific place (a people) constitutes the revolutionary agent in a globalized world. He asserted that there is not one civilization but many, not one mode of being but a plurality.

Against the fluid system of globalization — which seeks to commodify all values — only traditions rooted in place can offer resistance. In the spirit of Sombart, Dugin critiques all of modernity (liberalism, communism, and nationalism) as materialistic and calls for its transcendence. By doing so, he breaks with Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the “end of history,” which elevates the trader figure as the final human type. Instead, Dugin aims to reestablish a connection with eternity.

Dugin’s envisioned world order is not unipolar, governed by the liberal West, nor bipolar as during the Cold War. Rather, it is multipolar — composed of at least three centers of power. On his civilizational map, he names not only the West, Eurasia, China, India, the Muslim world, Latin America, and Africa, but also a sovereign Europe as a potential future power. Each great space, following Schmitt’s model, is a “zone with a ban on intervention by alien powers.” Each must be capable of defending its sovereignty and forming a political idea rooted in its own tradition. The message is clear: liberalism — with its attendant phenomena of mass immigration, radical individualism, and sexual deviation — is not destiny but a conscious choice.

Dugin thus departs from Mackinder’s Heartland theory, proposing instead the idea of a “distributed Heartland.” No longer is the conquest of Eastern Europe or Eurasia the goal, but rather, each civilization becomes its own Heartland — its own core of land power — worthy of defense and preservation. This vision yields an ethnopluralist polyphony of civilizations, a world of diverse peoples and traditions opposed to the liquefying universalism of the globalist West.

Returning to Plato, Dugin underscores that land and sea — as Schmitt defined them — exist not only at the level of states but also within each individual society. It is up to each person to decide whether to support the land power and thereby uphold tradition (as the hero, in Sombart’s terms) or the sea power and thus embrace modernity (as the trader). In this spiritual war — Noomachia, the title of Dugin’s major philosophical work — philosophy has consequences. It shapes the society we inhabit. For us Germans and Europeans, the time has come to make a conscious choice in this war of spirits between land and sea — and to combat liquefied globalism at every level.

(Translated from the German)