843 words
French original here; Slovak translation here
Like “Eurosiberia,” the idea of “Septentrion” is a recurring theme in the geopolitics of the European New Right. “Septentrion” is derived from the Latin “septentriones,” meaning “seven plowing oxen,” referring to the stars of constellation Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, a constellation that is generally associated with the North and the North Polar region. By synecdoche, “septentrion” has come to refer to the North in general. In ENR discourse, “Septentrion” (capitalized) refers to a geopolitical union of the white peoples of Europe, Northern Asia, and the northern parts of North America. The following passages that I have translated from French give a good sense of the discussion. I wish to thank a French comrade for collecting these quotes, and for the title as well.
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If global warming continues and intensifies, in a few hundred years, the polar ice-cap will eventually disappear, making the Arctic Ocean a maritime domain of the very highest importance. Extending on the littorals of the three continents that border it, the Holy Arctic European Empire—ideally including Eurosiberia and the septentrional territories of North America (Alaska, the Yukon, the North-West Territory, Nunavut, Quebec, Labrador, Newfoundland), Greenland, and Iceland—would be a major player among world powers. Ultimately, it is the tangible transposition in space of the polar symbol. As the Emperor is the axis of the Empire, our Empire will again become the pole of the world, the axis of a spiritual and ethnic renaissance of all peoples, far removed from any universalism or globalism. (Rodolphe Badinand, Europe Maxima, 2000)
“Eurosiberia” is . . . a strand of “post-apocalyptic” thinking, a stage in the construction of a circumpolar European empire after the chaos generated by global warming. . . . In a world of global warming, Europe will no longer be “peninsular,” i.e., a tiny appendix of Eurasia. . . . According to the global warming scenario, Southern Europe might become “subcontinental” compared to the Nordic bloc, which would include Germany, Austria, Poland—constituent parts of today’s Europe that already have nothing “peninsular” about them. (Daniel Cologne, Europe Maxima)
If Canada and at least certain parts of the United States choose to join the [European] Imperium, then we will surround the Arctic Ocean completely and it will become a “mare nostrum” in the same way that the Mediterranean was the “mare nostrum” of the Romans. (Alisdair Clarke)
We are “patriots of the North of Europe,” defenders of the intrinsic specificity of the North of Europe, and not only of Russia. . . . I am for the unity of the European peoples but on the basis of restoration of the common spiritual and Nordic Tradition. (Alexander Dugin)
Are we not equally blind, we who think of the problems of Europe but never think of the indispensable Russo-American-European unity that someday will constitute the triple Nordic and Western front against the ineluctable Asiatic tide? (Jean Mabire, 1964)
[We need] to pose the problem of global solidarity—fundamentally ethnic—of the North against the threat of the South. . . . The concept of the West disappears, yielding its place to that of the North, or Septentrion. (Guillaume Faye, L’Archéofuturisme, 1998)
Wouldn’t North America, from a visionary historical perspective, have to return to the bosom of the motherland, Great Europe? It would be the return of the prodigal son, the acceptance of Americans of European descent of the historical error of secession. (Guillaume Faye, Pourquoi nous combattons, 2001)
I suggest . . . another idea, that comes after my concept of “Eurosiberia”: Septentrion, i.e., the gathering of all people of European origin on the planet, in a perspective that is ethnopolitical and no longer geopolitical. . . . It would accomplish, in a manner still unimaginable (but that History will imagine for us), the regrouping of all white-European peoples centered in the Northern hemisphere, of North America, Europe, and the Russian Federation. . . . This prediction of the possible—and perhaps desirable—future existence of Septentrion undoubtedly supposes the disappearance of the United States as we know it, probably following a territorial partition and abandonment of a certain number of states. . . . The idea of Septentrion is by no means incompatible with that of Eurosiberia, since its center could only be on our Continent, the motherland, the physical, spiritual, and geopolitical center of what we have come to call the white race; and Septentrion presupposes the historical end of the USA in its current form, and perhaps the return of some Americans of European descent to the orbit of a new ethnocentric and Eurocentric Empire. Septentrion will be the end of the American Dream, the return of the prodigal son to the European parental bosom. (Guillaume Faye, Le coup d’Etat mondial, 2004)
In 2050, the average American will be mostly of African, Asian, and Latin-American descent. . . . The last Euro-Americans, besieged in their bastions in the North, will be obliged to ask to join Canada and to form a new nation including Alaska. The new state will form part of Greater Europe: 450 million true Europeans, gathered in a European Nation connected economically, politically, and above all racially to millions more dispersed in Europe overseas, which will ensure a PAX EUROPA for the centuries to come. (Norman Lowell, Credo)
3 comments
“Septentrion” is also the title of a novel by Jean Raspail, on whom it would be good to see an article in English. There is an interesting mention of Raspail in Virgil Nemoianu’s article, “Politics and the Intellectual World: Changes in Europe” (Modern Age, winter-spring 2004), from which the following excerpt is taken. Discussing French authors, Nemoianu writes:
“I will mention first the major novelist, Jean Raspail (by now an elderly figure), little known in the United States, but a constant best-seller in France, and revered, of all people, by the Canadian ecologists for his outspokenness in defense of tiny ethnic groups and cultures being erased by the steam-roller of global modernization. Raspail is a staunch old-line Roman Catholic and a conservative monarchist; he has also written with great empathy about the extinction of Tierra del Fuego tribes, and about Caribbean, Siberian, and Amerindian torments. In English he gained success by the fantastic/anticipatory book Camp of the Saints which imagined a Europe overrun by massive waves of third-world immigrants: it seemed a pretty incredible scenario in 1973, perhaps slightly less so now, thirty years later.
“The bulk of Raspail’s work has remained untranslated and unknown in America. Of this I will refer to just two major and significant novels. One of them is the dystopian novel Septentrion that describes the institution of a Communistlike dictatorship and the flight of a number of dissidents by armed train toward a more and more inhospitable and mythical ‘North.’ This tragic work was inspired to some extent by the historical events surrounding the desperate and heartrending last weeks of Admiral Kolchak’s heroic rebellion against Red power in Siberia in the early 1920s. It also suggests the numbing conformity of modern globalism and of its attempt to destroy every individual autonomy.
“The other major work by Jean Raspail is L’Anneau du pecheur (‘The Ring of the Fisherman’; Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), the action of which is placed on two levels. One is historical and shows the brutality through which secular powers effected the unification of the split Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages. According to the fictional narrative the legally most correct claim would have been that of the Avignon Pope, Cardinal Pedro de Luna, whose papal name was Benedict. He and his tiny band of faithful followers went underground (according to Raspail’s fiction) and continued the legitimate line of true magisterial faith to our days. Meanwhile, on another, contemporary level, attempts are made by the Vatican to rediscover the anonymous beggar, the papal descendant of Benedict, and bring him back into the fold. The whole novel contains a thinly disguised warning or prophecy as to the future of Catholicism, indeed of all Christianity in the twenty-first century. Raspail’s most celebrated and feted work was devoted to Antoine Tounens, a nineteenth-century eccentric whose dream was to establish an independent feudal monarchy in Patagonia. This quixotic and ultimately despairing mode of thinking pervades all of Raspail’s novels.”
Greg,
I was happily surprised to discover your treatment of these Septentrion ideas.
In the late Nineties they began to influence my own understanding of the “Borean” kinship linking North American, European, and Russian whites. Cf. “Boreas Rising: White Nationalism and the Geopolitics of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow Axis” — TOQ, Winter 2004.
Faye: “Septentrion will be the end of the American Dream, the return of the prodigal son to the European parental bosom.”
This could be one of the best things to happen to European Americans / white Americans (and I write this as a European American).
Out of curiosity, what do you think will happen to whites in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa?
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