Land: Territory
The geographical space of a people’s existence and survival — and its incarnation in a ‘place’.
The notion of people, like that of blood or identity, is incomprehensible without a notion of ‘land’ (terre). A territorial appropriation is an ethological imperative of the living. The only people — the Jewish people — having existed for a certain period in diaspora without a land, being as such a blood and spirit without a soil — always sought to recover their territorial roots: the state of Israel has since become the concretisation of its Promised Land. Similarly, the Chinese diaspora always refers to its original homeland, to which it feels bound.
Even Muslim peoples, Arabs and Turks haunted by their nomadic past, have ‘the land of Islam’, which they are always trying to expand. Sedentism[1] and nomadism are linked. Purely nomadic peoples, like Gypsies, have never been historically creative. Land is the place one leaves to conquer, the place one inhabits and loves — and where one is to be buried.
The conquest of space, as formulated by Wernher von Braun and Jules Verne, its principal theoreticians, has never been understood as a nomadism or an abandonment of Mother Earth, but rather as an extension. The astronomer Hubert Reeves could write, ‘When humanity begins conquering the planet Mars, it will inevitably be divided into territories’.
A people cannot exist without a land. It’s often said that the Twenty-first century will be a century without frontiers — a century of networks, flux, an age in which zones replace clearly bounded lands. This nomadic vision, however, corresponds in no way to what is coming. Globalisation provokes not a weakening of the territorial idea, but rather, as an indirect consequence, its reinforcement. Notions of homelands and territory will never be obsolete, for they are inscribed in the genetic memory. The seas, like airspace, are extensions of national territory.
Man is a territorial animal — one who defends his land or conquers another. Today, European lands are threatened by Islam, which is trying to turn Europe into a ‘land of Islam’ (Dar al Islam), and by Americans, who are trying to turn the Continent into one of their geostrategically dominated spaces. The defence of European lands, and beyond that, the Eurosiberian space, is inseparable from their defence as a people.
(see enrootment; Eurosiberia; fatherland; geopolitics; people)
- ↑ Sedentism is a term used in anthropology to refer to the process by which a nomadic people decide to stop circulating and set up permanent settlements.
