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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Eurasian Mirage

A Critical Review of Ray Harris's The Geopolitics of Eurasia

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Ray Harris's latest contribution, The Geopolitics of Eurasia: Thoughts on the recent Dillard/Visser exchange, is in part a historical corrective. Harris is dissatisfied with the conceptual opposition between “the West” and “the East” that he sees lurking behind the recent debate between Joseph Dillard and myself. His basic point is straightforward: Europe and Asia have never been hermetically separated civilizations. People, languages, goods, armies, technologies and religions have been moving across the Eurasian landmass for thousands of years. The very idea that Europe constitutes one geopolitical world and Asia another is therefore historically artificial.

There is considerable truth in this. Harris opens with the apparently innocent example of pasta all'Amatriciana in Rome and uses it to remind us that even supposedly traditional European culture is often the product of long-distance cultural exchange. He then moves backwards through Roman contacts with China and India, Indo-European migrations, the Vikings, the Huns, Islam, the Mongols, the Ottomans and finally the Russian Empire. His argument is essentially that Eurasia has always been a zone of interaction rather than a collection of sealed civilizational compartments.

This is a useful antidote to crude civilizational geography. But it does not quite accomplish what Harris wants it to accomplish.

The fact that Eurasia has always been interconnected does not tell us what political configuration Europe should have today. Historical connectedness is not the same thing as political compatibility, and geographical continuity is not the same thing as geopolitical integration.

That distinction is important because Harris is responding to Dillard's much more contemporary argument that Europe's future “lies in Eurasia.” Dillard's argument was not simply that Europeans had forgotten that Eurasia exists. He was making a claim about present and future strategic alignment: energy, trade, geography, Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf. Harris's historical survey therefore risks answering a somewhat different question.

Eurasia has always been connected—and has always been divided

Harris is surely right that the Eurasian landmass has witnessed enormous population movements and cultural exchanges. Ancient DNA research has dramatically reinforced this picture. The Yamnaya-related populations of the Eurasian steppe spread westward into Europe during the Bronze Age, producing enormous demographic and genetic transformations. Recent research places the relevant steppe developments several millennia before the historical period Harris discusses.

But there is a curious irony here. If Eurasian interconnectedness is taken as the fundamental historical lesson, then Harris's own narrative becomes evidence for the opposite conclusion as well.

The Eurasian continent was connected precisely because populations repeatedly migrated, invaded, traded, conquered, assimilated and separated. Connectivity did not abolish political difference. It frequently produced it.

The Roman Empire traded with distant civilizations, but Rome was not therefore politically integrated with China. The Vikings travelled enormous distances, but Viking mobility did not create a European political community. The Mongol Empire connected huge areas of Eurasia under one imperial structure, but that structure eventually fragmented. The Silk Road was an extraordinary network of exchange, but it was also dependent upon changing political conditions.

In other words, connection is not integration.

This distinction is strangely absent from Harris's argument. Eurasia can be simultaneously one interconnected historical space and a collection of competing political systems. Indeed, that has arguably been its defining characteristic.

The “West” really is more complicated than the West

Harris's strongest point is his attack on the idea of a timeless, homogeneous “West.” His examples demonstrate how porous European civilization has always been.

Russia provides an especially interesting case. Harris points to the Varangians and the formation of the Rus polity, emphasizing Scandinavian involvement in early Russian history. He is right that the origins of Rus cannot be understood through a simple picture of an isolated Slavic civilization. The history of eastern Europe was deeply entangled with Scandinavia, Byzantium, the steppe and the wider European world.

But Harris occasionally turns historical entanglement into an argument about civilizational identity.

His claim that Russia is therefore “firmly part of the larger European family” is perfectly reasonable if “European” means historically connected with Europe. It becomes much more questionable if “European” is being used as a political or institutional category.

Russia can be culturally European in important respects while simultaneously developing political institutions, strategic traditions and imperial relationships that differ profoundly from those of western European states. Geography cannot settle that question.

The same problem occurs when Harris invokes the migration history of Britain. Britain itself is presented as the product of successive arrivals from the east: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans. Again, this is broadly useful as historical perspective. But if this proves anything, it is that European identity has always been constructed through interaction. It does not prove that contemporary political distinctions between European states are meaningless.

Indeed, the more interesting conclusion would be that Europe has always been a moving target.

The “66 percent” problem

Some of Harris's historical compression is considerably more problematic.

He states that the expansion of Islam “is considered to have taken around 66% of Christian lands” and that Europe was challenged by Islamic expansion for approximately a thousand years.

The first formulation is presented without definition or source. Sixty-six percent of which Christian lands? At what date? Measured by territory, population, political control, or ecclesiastical jurisdiction? Such a statistic is meaningless without specifying the denominator and historical baseline.

The broader historical point—that Islamic empires conquered enormous territories that had previously been ruled by Christian states—is obviously true. But turning that complicated history into a single percentage gives an appearance of quantitative precision without supplying the underlying historical argument.

This is one of the recurring weaknesses of the essay. Harris often has a legitimate historical intuition and then expresses it in a form considerably more categorical than the evidence warrants.

The Mongols, Ottomans and the problem of historical selection

The same tendency appears in the treatment of the Mongols and Ottomans. Harris presents successive “invasions from the east” as a kind of recurring Eurasian pattern.

But this produces a rather strange geographical picture. The Mongols were not simply “Asia invading Europe.” Their empire itself became a Eurasian political system spanning China, Central Asia, Persia, Russia and eastern Europe. Likewise, the Ottoman Empire cannot be reduced to an Asian force pushing into Europe. It was simultaneously European, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Islamic, with Constantinople/Istanbul as its imperial centre.

The more carefully one follows Harris's own examples, the harder it becomes to maintain a simple East-to-West narrative.

That is precisely why the concept of Eurasia can be useful. But it also means that Eurasia cannot be treated as a unified geopolitical subject. There is no single Eurasian interest waiting to be discovered beneath the artificial categories of West and East.

There are Russian interests, Chinese interests, Indian interests, Turkish interests, Iranian interests, European interests and the interests of dozens of smaller states whose strategic calculations do not necessarily coincide with those of their larger neighbours.

The real disagreement with Dillard

This is where Harris's response to Dillard becomes most interesting.

Dillard argues that Europe is geographically situated within Eurasia and therefore has powerful incentives to develop relations with Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf. My earlier critique of Dillard pointed out that geography does not automatically determine political alignment. Europe and Russia have shared a continent throughout the Cold War and yet remained on opposing sides of a major security divide. Conversely, the Atlantic Ocean did not prevent the United States from becoming deeply integrated into European security.

Harris essentially agrees with the first part of this criticism: Europe and Eurasia have always been connected.

But he then shifts the argument. For Harris, the crucial contemporary distinction is not West versus East but liberal democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus repression, and freedom versus political constraint. He therefore argues that the relevant political divide runs between Europe on one side and Russia, China, Iran and North Korea on the other.

There is a solid empirical basis for pointing to differences in political institutions and civil liberties. Freedom House's 2026 reporting, for example, describes Russia as “Not Free,” with political power concentrated around Vladimir Putin and extensive restrictions on opposition, media and civil liberties. Iran and North Korea receive similarly restrictive assessments.

But Harris's formulation is still too binary.

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are not interchangeable political systems. Nor is “Europe” politically homogeneous. There are substantial differences among European democracies in constitutional arrangements, civil liberties, executive power, media systems, migration policies and foreign-policy preferences. The political spectrum cannot simply be compressed into “liberal democracy versus autocracy.”

Harris is therefore right to insist that political institutions matter. But he risks creating another grand binary immediately after criticizing the old one.

From geography to ideology

There is a deeper conceptual problem here.

Harris wants to move the argument away from civilizational geography and toward political institutions. But these are not competing explanations in the way he implies.

Geography matters. Political institutions matter. Economic interdependence matters. Military power matters. Historical memory matters. Domestic politics matters. Demography matters. Technology matters. And so does the perception of threat.

A country does not choose its geopolitical relationships on the basis of a single variable.

This is especially obvious in the case of Russia. Harris concludes that “under Putin, Russia chose to turn its back on the rest of Europe.” That formulation attributes a great deal of causal agency to one side of a complicated historical relationship.

There are certainly documented reasons for describing the Putin government as increasingly authoritarian, and Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 profoundly altered its relationship with European states. Freedom House documents intensified repression inside Russia after the invasion.

But explaining the deterioration of Russia-Europe relations requires more than saying that Russia “chose” to turn away. The history involves NATO and EU enlargement, Russian imperial and post-Soviet ambitions, Ukrainian sovereignty, competing security perceptions, energy dependence, domestic Russian politics, Western policy, and the consequences of the war itself. Different analysts assign different causal weights to these factors.

Harris does not seriously engage with that complexity. His sentence is rhetorically neat precisely because it compresses a difficult causal problem into a single decision.

Harris corrects Dillard on Russian energy—but too aggressively

One of Harris's most useful interventions concerns Dillard's claim that Europe's industrial base was built on cheap Russian energy.

Harris objects that European industrialization was built on steam rather than Russian oil and points out that the Russian petroleum industry itself developed with substantial European capital and technological involvement.

That correction is valuable. Dillard's formulation is historically much too sweeping. European industrialization obviously predates the era of large-scale dependence on Soviet and Russian hydrocarbons.

But Harris again risks correcting an overstatement with another overstatement.

Russian energy really did become enormously important to the European economy in the post-Cold War period, particularly through natural gas. The International Energy Agency reports that Russian gas rose to more than 45 percent of EU gas supply by 2019, while Russia supplied roughly 40 percent of EU total gas consumption in 2021.

So the historically accurate formulation is neither “Europe's industrial base was built on Russian energy” nor “Russian energy was basically irrelevant to European industry.”

It is that European industrialization has much deeper roots, while later European economic development became substantially dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.

That distinction matters.

The energy relationship really did change

There is also an unintended irony in Harris's essay: its historical argument is strongest precisely where it contradicts the temptation to turn history into destiny.

Europe and Russia developed extraordinarily important economic relationships. Those relationships could change because political conditions changed.

And they have changed dramatically.

According to the IEA, Russian pipeline gas deliveries to the EU fell by around 90 percent between 2021 and 2025. The Russian share of EU gas demand fell from almost 40 percent in 2021 to around 10 percent in 2025.

That is a remarkable empirical demonstration that geographical proximity does not dictate political-economic dependence.

The pipes existed. The resources existed. The continent remained where it was.

The relationship changed.

This is precisely the point that both Dillard's geographical determinism and Harris's historical Eurasianism tend to obscure: institutions and political choices can reorganize relationships that geography makes possible but does not determine.

Britain and Russia: history is not destiny

Harris's British-Russian example illustrates this beautifully.

He points out that Britain and Russia established formal relations in the sixteenth century and subsequently developed extensive commercial connections. He also reminds us of dynastic relationships between the Russian and British royal families.

All true, and fascinating.

But Britain and Russia have also repeatedly been rivals. The Crimean War is the obvious example. The nineteenth-century “Great Game” produced strategic competition across Central Asia. After 1917, ideological hostility became profound. During the Second World War they became allies against Nazi Germany. During the Cold War they became adversaries again.

So what does their long history prove?

Not that Britain and Russia belong together.

Rather, it demonstrates the extraordinary flexibility of international relationships.

The same geographical relationship can support alliance, trade, rivalry, war or strategic containment depending upon circumstances.

That is actually a stronger argument against geopolitical determinism than Harris seems to realize.

The Napoleon example is too neat

Harris similarly invokes Napoleon's invasion of Russia and argues that Napoleon attacked Russia because Russia was helping Britain escape the French blockade.

There is certainly an important connection here: the Continental System and Russia's changing relationship with Napoleon were central to the deterioration of Franco-Russian relations.

But reducing the 1812 invasion to Russian assistance to Britain is historically insufficient. The breakdown of the Franco-Russian alliance involved economic interests, the Continental System, Russian concerns about French expansion, the Duchy of Warsaw, territorial disputes and Napoleon's broader European imperial strategy.

Again, Harris's instinct is good: Russian history cannot simply be told as a story of innocent Russia being repeatedly attacked by “the West.”

But the corrective becomes problematic when a complicated geopolitical process is reduced to a single causal explanation.

The essay's strongest insight is also its missing conclusion

Harris's most interesting idea is that Eurasia should be understood as a connected historical system rather than as two civilizations facing one another.

I agree that this is an important corrective to simplistic geopolitical narratives.

But if that is the lesson, then the conclusion should be considerably more modest than Harris's.

A genuinely Eurasian perspective would not say that Europe belongs either to the West or to Eurasia. It would say that Europe belongs geographically to Eurasia and remains deeply connected to the Atlantic world.

It could trade with China while competing with China.

It could eventually trade more extensively with Russia while maintaining security concerns about Russia.

It could cooperate economically with Gulf states while disagreeing with their governments on political questions.

It could maintain NATO relationships while developing greater European strategic autonomy.

It could be simultaneously Atlantic, European, Mediterranean and Eurasian.

That is much messier than the old civilizational maps—and probably much closer to reality.

From “West versus East” to multiple interdependencies

This is where I think Harris's essay can be pushed further than Harris himself pushes it.

The most useful alternative to the West/East dichotomy is not another master category such as “liberal democracy versus autocracy.” It is a picture of overlapping networks.

Europe belongs simultaneously to several systems: the European Union, NATO, the Atlantic economy, the global financial system, the Mediterranean, the Eurasian landmass, the Arctic, global energy markets and worldwide technological supply chains.

China is simultaneously an Asian power, a Eurasian trading power, a Pacific power and a global industrial power.

Russia is simultaneously European, Eurasian, Arctic and Pacific.

Turkey is simultaneously European, Black Sea, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean and Eurasian.

Iran is simultaneously Middle Eastern, Persian Gulf, Central Asian-facing and connected to the wider Eurasian system.

None of these identities cancels the others.

That is the geopolitical reality that both Harris and Dillard would do well to take more seriously.

The paradox of Harris's essay

There is therefore a delightful paradox at the heart of The Geopolitics of Eurasia.

Harris sets out to demonstrate that geopolitical categories are historically contingent. And he succeeds.

But he then turns around and proposes another very broad organizing distinction: liberal democracy versus autocracy.

The first half of the essay teaches us that civilizations intermingle, identities mutate and alliances change. The second half is tempted to divide the contemporary world into opposing political camps.

The historical evidence actually points toward a more pluralistic conclusion.

The world is not neatly divided into West and East. Nor is it neatly divided into democracies and autocracies. It consists of states with overlapping identities, competing interests, mixed political institutions and constantly changing relationships.

This does not make political values irrelevant. On the contrary, institutional differences can have enormous consequences for citizens, political opposition, media freedom and individual rights. Contemporary Russia's authoritarian political system, for example, is extensively documented.

But political differences do not erase geography, economics and history, any more than Eurasian interconnectedness erases political differences.

Conclusion: Eurasia without Eurasianism

Harris has performed a useful service by reminding us that Eurasia is not a conceptual invention of the twenty-first century. Europe has never existed outside Eurasia. The movement of peoples, technologies, commodities, religions and political institutions across the continent is not an exception to European history. It is European history.

Where Harris goes too far is in allowing this historical observation to become a geopolitical argument.

The fact that Europe has always been connected to Eurasia does not establish that Europe's future must be oriented toward Russia and China. Nor does Russia's European history establish a contemporary political identity. Nor does European dependence on Russian gas during the previous decades establish permanent economic interdependence. And the fact that contemporary Russia is authoritarian does not by itself explain the entire history of Russia's deteriorating relationship with Europe.

The real lesson of Harris's historical survey is actually more interesting.

Geography creates possibilities. History creates inheritances. Economics creates dependencies. Political institutions create constraints. But none of these, by itself, dictates the future.

That conclusion also provides a useful correction to Dillard. Europe does not have to “choose” between the Atlantic and Eurasia. It already inhabits both worlds. The more realistic picture is one of overlapping and sometimes conflicting relationships.

Eurasia is real.

But “Eurasianism” does not automatically follow from it.

And perhaps that is the most important distinction Harris's own historical tour makes visible.