Europe’s Civilizational Choice

Access to the innermost sanctum

Dimitrios Kisoudis explains why Europe’s real divide is no longer between left and right but between Atlanticists and Eurasianists.

Left and right are geopolitically irrelevant. I may be able to explain why the left or the right has only the option of choosing West or East, but I cannot thereby bring the entire political tendency over to my side. The politically decisive distinction is geopolitical. That is why the Querfront¹ does not run between left and right, but within both left and right. AfD state parliamentarian Hans-Thomas Tillschneider put this fact definitively into words on October 7, 2022.²

Exactly one year later, the situation and the political landscape were thrown into profound disarray. Hamas’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood infused the political confrontation with eschatology by framing the coming conflict in West Asia in relation to the construction of the Third Temple, which the Temple movement seeks to build on the Temple Mount near the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Since then, the recoding of the right as pro-Western and anti-Islamic has gathered momentum.

As is so often the case with Jerusalem, the lines of conflict can be extended across every continent along religious and confessional divisions. The Iran war has added the dimension of fossil energy and reopened the question of the regulation of maritime navigation under international law. A predictive connection between red heifers and the supply of sulfuric acid is beginning to emerge. The eschatological dimension does not mean that rational interests—raw materials, security, or hegemony—are absent from war. But at the highest level, these interests are spiritually embedded, or even subsumed.

Europe is incapable of operating independently on this level. Because it has not been politically consolidated into a civilization, as China, India, or even Turkey have, but instead remains mentally trapped within the Pax Americana and conducts politics in the vacuum of post-history, it is incapable even of defining its material interests. This applies equally to the center, the right, and the left. The transformation may be taking place on the material level, but it can only be perceived on the spiritual level. Here lies the justification for a metapolitics that nevertheless follows rules different from the naive hegemony of slogans and talking points cultivated by the New Right.

Since the moment of its birth, the political center has been bound by rituals that, in the practice of statecraft, stand above even the constitution. The right has achieved success through a populism based on a simple appeal to common sense. Yet it cannot reach its ultimate destination by this means. Spiritually, populism does not merely stand exposed; it stands obediently before the closed barrier leading into the innermost chamber of power. And the left—clans,³ Hamas, postcolonialism—has been recut into a negative template against which a right is being shaped that will be compatible with the coming wars against “Islam.”

Political groupings in Europe are permitted only to play roles, not to act. Some leaders are barely recognizable anymore. And admission into the realm of power must be paid for in the same currency with which Faust once purchased earthly riches.

But shaping Europe into a civilization within a multipolar world is not a task for the moment. It is more like constructing a great building. Like the Capitoline Hill. Or Cologne Cathedral.

(Translated from the German)

1. Translator’s note (TN): Querfront (cross-front) is a political strategy that seeks cooperation across the conventional left–right divide, usually around shared opposition to the existing political order, liberalism, Atlanticism, or other common adversaries. The term originated in Weimar Germany and often carries historical associations with attempts to unite elements of the nationalist right and the anti-liberal left.

2. TN: Tillschneider argues that the decisive political division increasingly runs not between left and right, but between Transatlanticists and Eurasianists. In his account, Transatlanticists favor Germany’s continued anchoring in the US-led Western order, NATO, and strategic distance from Russia, while Eurasianists regard this Western orientation as outdated and contrary to German interests. He has described this divide as cutting through political camps themselves, especially over the war in Ukraine, relations with Russia, and Germany’s place in the international order. Tillschneider himself identifies with the Eurasianist side of this divide. He argues for German strategic sovereignty, good relations with Russia, and an eventual break with NATO dependence; he also presents closer German-Russian economic relations and even a wider Eurasian economic space as serving Germany’s interests. For him, opposition to the Western orientation is therefore not simply sympathy for Russia but part of a broader claim that Germany should cease subordinating its foreign policy to the United States and pursue a more independent geopolitical course.

3. TN: Here, “clans” refers to the German political discourse around Clankriminalität (“clan criminality”): kinship-based networks, often of Arab, Kurdish, or other Middle Eastern background, associated in public debate with organized crime, parallel social structures, and failed integration. In this passage, the term functions as shorthand for one element in a broader negative image of Islam and multiculturalism against which parts of the contemporary right define themselves.