The Return of Great Spaces

The end of the globalist world order

Pierre-Antoine Plaquevent on pan-regions, spheres of influence, and the post-globalist world.

One century ago, the continentalist school of geopolitics proposed a world-system organized into pan-regions (Haushofer): an international order divided into large, autonomous continental spaces (Carl Schmitt), each polarized around a core power.

This third way—between the nation-state nationalism rendered obsolete after the First World War and the globalism of the League of Nations—is once again presenting itself today as an updated alternative to a declining globalism. Regional imperialisms that restrain one another, rather than a hypocritical, monopolar planetary imperialism.

Logically, if the United States were truly to accept a division of the world into autonomous great spaces, it would have to leave eastern Ukraine to Russia and Taiwan to China, in exchange for the abandonment of Sino-Russian influence in Latin America. Above all, it would have to restrain Israel in its posture towards Iran.

China, Russia, and Iran are the strategic powers that dominate the Eurasian heartland. A stabilized world order is possible only if the United States recognizes the respective spheres of influence of the Eurasian powers. This is the logical corollary of the updated Monroe Doctrine to which the Trump administration refers.

Yet the history of the previous century shows that a thalassocracy of inherently globalist character does not accept a U.S. retreat to the Western Hemisphere alone. The near future will tell us whether what is currently unfolding in Latin America marks a genuine U.S. acceptance of a new post-globalist division of the world or the prologue to a broader conflagration.

The realistic scenario would thus be a division of the world into longitudinal corridors of influence among the powers of the “Global North” (Surkov), coupled with the construction of a multipolar world order of great powers that would definitively replace the faltering project of global governance.

The pessimistic scenario, by contrast, would be that the move against Venezuela foreshadows an attack on Iran, after having seized control of the principal ally of political Eurasia in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere.

(Translated from the French)