Bruno Maçães is the former Europe minister for Portugal and the author of the forthcoming book The new Eurasian supercontinent. You can follow him on Twitter at @MacaesBruno.

A review of The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. By: Bruno Macaes. Publisher: Allen Lane, London, 2018.

The notion of civilisational entities and grand, sweeping analytical concepts such as “Europe”, “the East”, “Africa”, etc., has been under sustained attack by social scientists for over two and a half decades. Indeed, within the humanities it is seemingly a sine qua non for any commentator on the “non-European” to provide a pre-emptive preface outlining why what they have written is not Orientalism (broadly, the study of the non-West, as essentialist and as a means to domination).

We live in one of those rare moments in history when the political and economic axis of the world is shifting. Four or five centuries ago, it shifted West. Europe, for so much of its history a quiet backwater, came to rule practically the whole globe. Now this axis is shifting East. We know what this means for Asia. We have seen the new majestic skylines and the bullet trains and stations quickly replacing the old camel routes and caravanserai.

My neighbour in Baku fought in Karabakh a little over 20 years ago. He described all the horrors of a mostly close-quarter war in the beautiful but treacherous hills before telling me a story he must have thought summarised those horrors. After capturing three Armenian soldiers in the hills – a father and two sons – and being told by his commander that he could do what he wanted with them, he offered to let one of them go, provided they could all agree on which one. The two brothers picked their father, but the father could not bring himself to pick one of his sons.

“What do you think I did?” My neighbour, Rustam, asked rhetorically. I figured that Rustam wanted to impress on me how even in the worst times humanity is able to survive, so I answered he must have decided to free all three of them.

Rustam looked at me for a moment and laughed. “My friend, after your travels you need to see a doctor. Armenians killed my brothers and my friends and I would let them go?”

“You freed the two sons?”

“No, I killed all three of them. I gave them a chance to pick one. They did not take it.”

Get this issue delivered straight to your doorstep. Click here to subscribe online today.  How much control does today’s Europe have over its own future? This is the main question we pose in the March-April 2016 issue of New Eastern Europe. In light of the refugee crisis, risk of a British exit from the Europe […]