Toward Eurasia: A New Paradigm for Narrating Europe

The paper aims at purposing a new possible narration of Europe based on a narration of an Eurasian History. The philosophical premise is an apparently contradictory confrontational-imitative identity. Civilizations shape their territory by drawing boundaries and by identifying an enemy with whom they war. Nevertheless, through a never-ending war-and-peace cycle civilizations learn from one another. Then the centuries-old idea which shaped the narration of European History from the beginning to the present days does not work anymore, since its base was a rigidly conceived identity in which the enemy was Islam. This idea worked until some decades ago, until the end of the Great War, when the last heir of Islam, Ottoman Empire, disintegrated. Eurasia is the only geographic territory containing two continents that in the course of time never found a clear boundary. The territorial continuity was the constituting element of the geographic and politic identity of three continents (Africa, Oceania, America), whereas it was not sufficient for shaping an Eurasian continent. Although they have been sharing the same territory, Europe and Asia were and are not only two different areas, but they have been fighting for centuries and they have never had clear boundaries. This only area with two continents was the axis of World History. Drawing on Jasper’s Axial Age, the aim of the paper is to show a possible narration of Eurasia from its origin.