Greek Geopolitics: The Intermediate Region

Eurasia is divided today between three civilizations: the Chinese civilization, the Western civilization and, in between, the civilization of the Intermediate Region, spanning from the Adriatic Sea to China and from Siberia to North Africa. Up to the 15th century AD there were only two civilizations in Eurasia: China and the Intermediate Region which comprised also present day Western Europe. With the Italian Renaissance, from the Intermediate Region was gradually detached a new civilization which became the present day 500 year long so called Western civilization.

Like China, the Intermediate Region had at its center a single political entity, the Empire, which continuously defended itself from the intrusion of the peripheral Barbarians. The Empire being ecumenical in theory i. e. universal, neither China nor the Intermediary Region could be understood as being expansionist (imperialistic). It is characteristic of this reality that the only two Empires that were confronted with what they called the Barbarians are the Chinese and the Greek (Roman).

Geography of civilizations

Due to historical events spanning thousands of years, the Eurasian continent, of which Europe is but one of its peninsulas, comprises three civilizational areas. In consequence, I have divided the Eurasian continent not in two but in three regions of civilization : a) the West, which includes Western Europe and extends from the Atlantic to the Adriatic; b) the East (or Orient), which includes China and India and extends from the Pacific to the Indus River ; c) the Intermediate Region, a vast and autonomous region of civilization between the two aforementioned regions, which extends from Greece to Pakistan and from North Africa to the north of Siberia. The western border of the Intermediate Region runs between Belgrade and Zagreb.

The lands between the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River form the Intermediate Region and are considered a bridge between Western and Eastern civilizations. This vast area extends from the eastern half of Europe to the western half of Asia. Its significance, from the point of view of civilization, is that there is neither such thing as a uniform Europe nor a uniform Asia. The terms “Europe” and “Asia” denote geographical regions and not civilizations.

Religious Dimensions of Civilization

In terms of population, the dominant religions in the Intermediate Region are Orthodox Christianity and Sunni Islam and, to a lesser extent, Shiite Islam, Alevism and Judaism. In contrast, Catholicism and Protestantism dominate in the West, as do Hinduism and Buddhism in the East.

Greek religion of Dionysos and the Olympian Gods, as well as Shamanism, survived around the Aegean Sea Basin about 1,500 years after the birth of J.C., while Zoroastrianism continue to be present in the realm of Persia. In November 2008, researchers announced the discovery of a 12,000-year-old site in Israel that they regard as one of the earliest known shaman burials.

Outside the Intermediate Region, a certain form of Christianity, in its Roman-Catholic variation, emigrated to the West, while Buddhism from Eastern Afghanistan and the Western Himalayas emigrated to the East with a strong influence of Hellenism in both cases. Hinduism is still today, in the East, the only massively remaining religion strongly influenced by ancient Greek religion.

Alevism, which prevails in Turkey, is a typical synthesis of different religions which dominated in the Intermediate Region since Antiquity. Based on the religion of the Angels (Angelolatreia), coming from Zoroastrian Persia, it includes parts of the religions of Shamanism, Dionysos, Christianity and Islam.The Intermediate Region is thus the melting-pot of all religions on Earth.

Political Dimensions of Civilization

The Intermediate Region had for 2,500 years been dominated by an ecumenical empire, whose center lay by the Turkish Straits and the Aegean Sea. It was the same empire throughout history, and its successive leaders had sought to unify its respective peoples. From the Persian Empire of Darius, it fell into the hands of Alexander the Great, then to the Hellenistic Romans, the Christian Romans and finally to the Bektashi-Alevi Ottomans until 1923-1924. This Central Empire had been subject to attempts by other empires to seize succession. These empires, situated along its periphery, were the Arab, the Islamic, the Persian and the Russian (until 1917).

The dynamic between the Central Empire and the Peripheral Empires constitutes an internal conflict in the Intermediate Region.Each of the main peoples in this area struggle to seize control of its center of influence, that is, Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul, which remained the undisputed focal point for nearly 2000 years. The Arabs in the 8th century and the Russians in the 20th century almost succeeded in doing so, but were not able to take control of the ecumenical empire. Western intervention, since the 18th century, is considered to be an external conflict, which sought not succession, but the destruction of the ecumenical empire, and later its dismemberment (Balkanization) and its subjection to the stranglehold of Westernization.

The Eastern Question

Since the Antiquity the center of the Intermediate Region being the Aegean Sea surrounded by the two lungs of the Empire, present-day Greece and Turkey, its Geopolitics showed constant dynamics by which a continental power (Persia or Russia) tried to arrive on the sea cost. This resulted to constant conflicts between the thalassocracy (the maritime power) that occupied the Aegean Sea and the continental power. The only way to stop the descent of the continental power is to always be assured that the two sides of the Aegean Sea will be united in one entity i. e. the Empire of the Intermediate Region or the future reconstruction of it through a Greek-Turkish Confederation.

We call “Eastern Question” the internal conflict in the Intermediate Region, to which the West intervenes as an external factor. The internal conflict is constituted by the struggle for succession at the top of the empire, in Constantinople, between the different peoples of the Intermediate Region, in order to keep the region under a unique ecumenical empire. The external factor, the West, aims at colonizing the Intermediate Region, by dismantling its unity and importing Western values. The West falsely always presented the Eastern Question as a religious conflict between Christianity and Islam.

How I discovered a hidden planet: The Intermediate Region

My idea of an Intermediate Region was absolutely not subjective or arbitrary. It was built on a strictly objective basis, in my first writings during the 1960s. I had then been impressed by the fact that everybody, without exception, was dividing Eurasia into West and East. Nevertheless, the borders between these two worlds varied considerably from one author to the other.

I therefore decided to draw up in the form of maps, the extension of the various areas which these authors had given before me to what they called West and East. But superposing all these maps which I had drawn on transparent paper, I realized that the border between West and East was always situated somewhere between the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River. That is to say, no writer had ever pretended that Italy was not the West or that India was not the East. But there were writers who placed Greece in the West and others in the East. Same with Pakistan which was sometimes placed in the East and sometimes in the West.

Furthermore, I studied the literature of the peoples comprised in this vast area between the Adriatic and the Indus river and I was able to find out that the writers, be they Greek, Arab, Turk, Iranian or Russian, all presented their culture as a bridge between East and West, being persuaded to be the only ones to form this bridge.

The long-standing disagreement between Greece and Egypt In the 6th and 5th century BC, Egypt was still the center of the Intermediate Region. The Greek scholars were going to Egypt to get the highest education from the Egyptians. But then the formation of the Ecumenical Empire of Persia, followed by the Empire of Alexander the Great and his successors marked the triumph of Greece over Egypt.

About 50 years ago, between 1954 and 1960, a Black African from Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop brought back this antagonism between Greece and Egypt in favor of Black Africans. This was called afrocentrism. He pretended that Egypt and Ethiopia were black and that the civilization of Greece was previously black as well as that of the Hebrews, the original land of whom was Ethiopia and was black. Finally, that the Greek goddess Athena had a black origin. This theory was accepted 30 years later, in 1987, by an English professor, specialist of China, Martin Bernal, who wrote 3 volumes under the title Black Athena.

Furthermore, he wrote that Hebrew, Phoenician and Greek languages were close to one another. The fact is -as I wrote myself- that Spartans and Jews are presented in the Bible (Old Testament, Books of the Maccabees) as being children of the same ancestors.

Aristotle defines the central geopolitical position of Greek civilization in the world

In his book titled Politics (Πολιτικά), the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC – He was the teacher of Alexander the Great) writes the following:

1. The Barbarians are more servile in their nature than the Greeks.

2. The nations inhabiting the colder regions and those of Europe are full of courage but sometimes lack intelligence and skills and consequently remain relatively free but lack political organization and the capacity to govern their neighbours.

The peoples of Asia, on the contrary, are intelligent and skillful but lack courage and thus are are always under the yoke of slavery. But the Greek race partakes of the two characters because it occupies exactly the central geographical position and so it is at the same time courageous and intelligent. Because of these virtues it continuous to enjoy liberty, to have very good political institutions and is capable to govern the whole of Humanity as long as it arrives to the constitutional unity. There is, on one side Europe, on the other Asia and in between, around the Aegean Sea, Greece as the center of the Intermediate Region.

Alexander the Great expanded Hellenism in the Intermediate Region from its heart in the Aegean Sea, keeping the Western Barbarians at large.

Byzantine Princess Anna Komnene and Europe

Anna Komnene (1083-1153) was a famous female historian who wrote an account of her father's reign Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118), in her book Alexiad. She describes the clash of Hellenism with the European Barbarians, i. e. the Roman Catholics of the First Crusade from 1096 to 1099. She says Europe is the West, the domain of the Barbarians. She defines the West as “the totality of the Barbarian nations which lay between the Adriatic Sea and the Pillars of Hercules [today Gibraltar]”. These Barbarians, she says, “left the anarchical lands of Europe to invade suddenly Asia in a tumultuous race”. The conclusion was that the biggest disaster for civilization had been the conversion of these Barbarians to the religion of Roman-Catholicism. Western Europe was lost for civilization, was invaded by the Barbarians and became Roman-Catholic, starting with the Barbarian king Clovis in the 5th century AD (466-511) who was baptized Roman-Catholic in 498.

The Barbarian invasions of Western Europe created primitive States, destroyed Greek (Roman) civilization in these lands and established an “iron wall” of ignorance. The Greeks despised the Barbarians and the Barbarians hated the Greeks, a hatred mixed with admiration, tainted with envy and jealousy. Thus, the Westerners arrived at the conclusion that they and not the Greeks were the real Greeks.

Northern India as the meeting point of Greece with China

India is a peninsula of Asia, exactly like Europe but, instead of West and East, India is divided between North and South. The long corridor of Northern India occupied by the Ganges river, 2,500 kilometers long, from the western Himalayas to the Gulf of Bengal, links Greek with Chinese civilization.

Well before Alexander, the Aryans invaded Northern India, around 1500 years BC and the Greeks settled there, founded city-states and later came in direct contact with the Chinese. The Greek geographers often mention India, relating it to the Greek mythology and to Greek tradition. The Greeks even extended their city-states to the south and founded Bombay (today Mumbai) in the 3rd century BC under the name Heptanesia (“the Seven Islands”). From 800 BC to 500 BC and from Athens to Bengal hundreds of small city-states (janapadas) were formed on the Greek model and suvived up to at least 600 AD, each with its Acropolis-fortress where the philosophers multiplied, like the Buddha from the city-state of Kapilavastu, Nepal (563-483 BC) and Pythagoras, from the city-state of the island of Samos (570-495 BC).

Thus, the Hindu religion resembles the Greek religion of Orpheus, Dionysos and the Olympian Gods. The Hindu philosophers were travelling to Greece and spoke Greek and had probably met Socrates himself. India was called “New Greece”.