In 2026, Europe has good reason to look at what exactly happened in 1776. Answers about what to do and what can go wrong today will follow from that, not from mistaking Geography as ‘Pivot of History’
By Uwe Alschner (originally published in For The Benefit of the Other)
Ulrike Guérot is a prominent dissident academic in Germany. She is boldly calling for peace with Russia when everyone else seems to be ready to go to war. This has resulted in her getting fired from one of the most prominent Universities in Germany, Bonn. Some describe her as ‘enemy of the state’. Guérot, though hurt, seems unrelenting. She calls out, as a political scientist, the failure of governments in all of Europe for betraying the interests of their people. She doesn’t mince her words over Gaza, calling out Germany’s “disgraceful silence on genocide”. And she has published a book on Halford Mackinder’s “Heartland Theory” in which she — rightly — criticises the absurdity of “Geography [being] elevated to an absolute principle” (p. 13).
Yet, she does essentially the same. Guérot applies geography as a defining term for geopolitics by calling out ‘America’ as imperialist. That is why she might be well advised to pause and read Friedrich Schiller on Universal History, first, before reconsidering her assessment of the causes of, and solutions to, present day geopolitical problems. Equating ‘America‘ with ‘Imperialism’, with which Europe can only deal by establishing a European Republic, is especially shortsighted in the year 2026, which on July 4th will have the 250th anniversary of the declaration of American Independence against British Imperialism. Therefore, the predominant question should be: what happened in those 250 years that it may seem as though America was the predominant and, according to Guérot, archetypical Imperialist Nation? Following Schiller’s method will lead to insightful discoveries.
“[History] accompanies us through all the conditions mankind has experienced, through all the shifting forms of opinion, through his folly and his wisdom, his deterioration and his ennoblement; history must give account of everything man has taken and given. There is none among you to whom history had nothing important to convey; however different the paths toward your future destinies, it somewhere binds them together; but one destiny you all share in the same way with one another, that which you brought with you into this world—to educate yourself as a human being—and history addresses itself to this human being.”
— Friedrich Schiller
Ms. Guérot has gained a huge following among that considerable and growing proportion of the population in Germany who sense that ‘something is not right’. These people look for orientation, and take hope in those whom they consider ‘experts’, such as Guérot. Surely, Ms. Guérot will not want to let down those who trust her?
In calling out the scandalous wars and corruption in spite of personal disadvantages such as job-loss lies Guérots foundation as a “leader” for the people. But that is not enough. A true leader must understand that solutions need to be reasonable and well researched.
So far, Guérot’s are not.
In her book “On Halford J. Mackinder’s Heartland Theory, The Geographical Pivot of History” Ulrike Guérot touches but very briefly, and quite superficially, on Mackinder as a person of historical significance. Equally short are her remarks about British Imperial politics, and the significant role which Mackinder played as an integral part of a very influential group of ‘movers and shakers’ within the British Empire. No mention is made about either the Rhodes Trust, Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Fabian Society, or even the London School of Economics, let a lone of the Coefficient’s, an influential group in which Imperialists from ‘both sides of the political aisle’ met.
Ulrike Guérot has been calling for European unification since she left the infamous ‘European Council on Foreign Relations’ in 2013. A ‘European Republic’ is what Guérot continues to stand for. Then as well as now. European unity, she argues, is necessary to counter, and end, the “transatlantic” imperialist aggression which she sees at work in Ukraine/Russia as well as in Gaza, or the wider Middle East. More precisely, it is the “American” element which Guérot sees at work. Her text spans across 67 pages, on which she refers 61 times to “America”, the “U.S.”, or “Washington”, as opposed to 16 references to “British”, “London”, or even “anglo-”. The ‘British East India Company’, ‘Free Trade’, ‘Rhodes Trust’, or ‘Fabian Society’ are never mentioned at all.
By the way: There is nothing wrong with aspiring to a true Republic. But addressing the problem by lamenting “American” hegemony means going the same route as Mackinder: assuming a “Geographical Pivot of History”. Guérot herself rightly stated with regard to Mackinder, geography does not cause “fateful” (p. 43) history. It is people and, more so, the ideas that people develop and views they hold, which cause history to unfold in one way or another. This article is designed to address people, their organizations and their ideas, and it will show how the United States of America, as they were conceived in 1776, are very likely much more part of any solution, and certainly much less of the problem, than Guérot seems to be aware of.
’Universal History‘ instead of ‘Geographical Pivot of History‘
Ulrike Guérot should do at least two things: She should investigate, and refer to her sources, what ideas caused America to „go abroad in search of monsters to destroy“. And in a like fashion, she should investigate and show the causes of that idea of sovereignty, for which she apparently takes Europe, when in her book on Mackinder she advises her audience how Europe has been depicted as Sovereign (“Queen”) in old maps, and that “Europe can only do peace…, the art of (peace) diplomacy as the greatest of all political arts in Europe. … Europe IS peace” (p. 34 f).
Investigation into these hypotheses will lead to important findings, and it is very remarkable that Guérot, so far, has made no mention of any. Not in her book on Mackinder, nor in any of her public speeches and statements which are most readily suggested by Google searches.
Ulrike Guérot frequently refers to historical precedence, but hardly ever mentions any of such kind with regard to the developments which led to the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence. Why is that? When she refers to the origins of modern Republicanism, the events she quotes from history are not the Declaration from 1776, not the Constitution from 1787, nor the Bill of Rights from 1789, but the Republic of Letters (Republique de lettres, pp. 38, 57) which in itself is, at best, incomplete without the inclusion of American republican networks from Increase and Cotton Mather, or Benjamin Franklin to even Gottfried Leibniz into these scholarly literary exchanges, which did exert enormous political influence.
Ms. Guérot would definitely benefit from Schiller who, in 1789, before the Jacobin Terror in France began, wrote:
“Even that we found ourselves together here at this moment, found ourselves together with this degree of national culture, with this language, these manners, these civil benefits, this degree of freedom of conscience, is the result perhaps of all previous events in the world: The entirety of world history, at least, were necessary to explain this single moment. (…) How many inventions, discoveries, state and church revolutions had to conspire to lend growth and dissemination to these new, still tender sprouts of science and art! How many wars had to be waged, how many alliances concluded, sundered, and become newly concluded to finally bring Europe to the principle of peace, which alone grants nations, as well as their citizens, to direct their attention to themselves, and to join their energies to a reasonable purpose!”
Schiller died young, in 1805, but he lived long enough to witness start of the Napoleonic Wars sweeping across Europe. He even is said to have predicted some “strong man” to come and take over “not just France, but possibly large parts of Europe” after the horrific Terror that decapitated France.1 These events led him to another round of questioning and applying the principle of Universal History. Had he lived longer, he may have come to the same conclusions about the forces of Empire fanning terror and war against true republican progress.
Ms. Guérot seems not to be aware of Schiller‘s principle of going back in history every time an old paradigm breaks apart. Or, at least, not far enough. She lauds Metternich and Talleyrand for examples of “the European Art of Diplomacy” (p. 35), and seems to ignore that American geostrategist and pusher of war in Vietnam and elsewhere, Henry Kissinger, shared in the same role-models and revered the Congress of Vienna just as much as she. One should assume she’d be surprised in finding herself in his camp, enough to go back in history a little further, practise the art of Schillerian Universal History, but that is obviously not the case.
What was the nature of that Congressional Diplomacy a la Viennese which she praises so highly? Ulrike Guérot would find that this diplomacy, first of all, was not conducted and directed so much by Metternich and Talleyrand than by Castlereagh and British Imperial Interests. And that not peace was the object which was pursued at the Congress of Vienna, but stability, meaning the aquiesance of all powers into the ‘legitimacy of the existing order’. For Kissinger, as is evident from the title of his doctoral dissertation on “A World Restored Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 1812-1822” in 1954, peace is a ‘Problem’. He specified that “‘Legitimacy’ as here used should not be confused with justice. It means no more than an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy. It implies the acceptance of the framework of the international order by all major powers …”.
It should be noted that Kissinger’s doctoral mentor at Harvard was none other than William Yandell Elliott, a Rhodes Scholar, who can hardly be considered anything other than an “anglophile”, who called for a “New British Empire” and for the reform of the (strongly anti-imperialist) U.S. constitution. Elliott’s disciple Kissinger, whom he introduced to CIA Director Allen W. Dulles, went on to receive an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in “recognition of his contributions to anglo-american relations”. Hmm? What may this mean in the context of Universal History?
From a speech which the later Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Henry Kissinger, gave in 1982, a lot can be learned which may shed light on the nature of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States of America. U.S.-Interventions of the kind seen during Korean and Vietnam Wars, were “decisively influenced” by Britain, as Kissinger revealed to anyone listening:
“Fortunately, Britain had a decisive influence over America’s rapid awakening to maturity in the years following [the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt]. In the 1940s and 50s our two countries responded together to the geopolitical challenge of the Soviet Union and took the lead in creating the structures of Western cooperation for the postwar era which brought a generation of security and prosperity. In the process a rather ironic reversal of positions took place.”
In other words: It has been Britain which, after FDR was out of the way, ‘decisively’ shaped the course of American ‘maturity’ to assume the Cold Warrior’s role.
Kissinger continued:
“Where Americans have tended to believe that wars were caused by the moral failure of leaders, the British view is that aggression has thrived on opportunity as much as on moral propensity, and must be restrained by some kind of balance of power. Where Americans treated diplomacy as episodic–a series of isolated problems to be solved on their merits–the British have always understood it as an organic historical process requiring constant manipulation to keep it moving in the right direction.”
Balance of Power, of course, is another word for “stability”. As we had learned earlier from Kissinger, stability must be seen as the superior goal to peace, which at least in certain situations was ‘problematic’, for which reason it was going to have to be on the altar of ‘constant manipulation’ which, according to Kissinger, is required to keep ‘moving in the right direction’.
Should anyone wonder what Kissinger would have been considering as ‘the right direction’, his mentor “Bill“ (Elliott as Allen Dulles referred to him fondly) should come to mind. Elliott in the early 1920s had been trained at Oxford to work towards the direction set out by Cecil Rhodes for all Rhodes Scholars: Unity of all English speaking countries, including the United States of America, under the retention of the British Empire.2
Contrary to what, according to her Mackinder book, Ms. Guérot believes to be a constant American objective of unilateralism and hegemony, it is even Kissinger, who in his 1982 speech at Chatham House put it on the record:
“Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Crimean Conference in 1945, told the Congress of his hope that the postwar era would »spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries–and have always failed.« (…) If there were doubts about the peace-loving virtue of our wartime allies, they seemed to many American leaders to apply as much to Britain as to the USSR: Roosevelt toyed with the idea of nonalignment between a balance-of-power-oriented, colonialist Britain and an ideologically obstreperous Soviet Union. Even Truman took care not to meet with Churchill in advance of the Potsdam conference; he did not want to appear to be ‘lining up’ with Britain against the USSR. (…) American attitudes until quite literally the recent decade have embodied a faith that historical experience can be transcended, that problems can be solved permanently, that harmony can be the natural state of mankind.”
What Kissinger describes here is strikingliy consistent with the spirit of the young American Republic that resulted from the struggle of 13 British Colonies for political as well as economic independence. An independence which the British Kingdom was not willing to allow, and which to reverse it resorted to securing cannon fodder from several European countries, such as the Hessians. Incidentally, Friedrich Schiller took issue with such practise, which resulted in including unambiguous literary prose into his ‘Cabals and Love’. Whilst this may have been a moral imperative, Schiller, indeed was very sympathetic to ‘the American Cause’, so much so that he did even plan to emigrate to the United States at some point.3
The year 2026 will see the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it should give everybody plenty of good reasons to study what the quest for independence was really all about. A point to start could be to compare Kissinger’s admission from above with what John Quincy Adams, 6th U.S. President, said on the occaison of the 45th anniversary in 1826:
“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity. She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful cars, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own. She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when the conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence, has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”
Is it not striking, how much this quote from a much longer speech matches the essence of what Kissinger said was the American attitude before Britain exerted its decisive influence following Roosevelt’s death?
Ms. Guérot observes in her book on Mackinder that Europe in the 21st century must come to terms with the fact that the USA no longer are the country they might have been in the 20th century (p. 51). Will she then be ready to come to terms with the undeniable fact, documented by none other than Henry Kissinger KCMG himself, that the U.S. did undergo an even greater change before that? Would it not be warranted to investigate how that change did occur, and whether — possibly — Britain played a “decisive” role in that change, as well? At least that is the opinion of Scholars Nancy and Edward Spannaus, who in the year of Kissinger’s speech at Chatham House wrote a paper for the Executive Intelligence Review on how “the Monroe Doctrine Was Aimed At Britain.”
This may be worthwhile for Americans, one might object, but for Europe it is not so much of relevance as the need to press on with their own process of unification. That is, more or less, what Ulrike Guérot keeps urging, again and again.
Well, this is where Schiller would be a good teacher, once more. Go back in history, assess emerging evidence. Given the surprising discoveries from reading Kissinger and John Quincy Adams, and with the well documented Rhodes-plan for British dominance in mind, might it not be possible that even the European movement might have been something designed to serve Britain more than Europe?
After all, the ideas with which “the Empire” was tried to be upheld include concepts of Federalims, both Imperial as well as global. European Federalism was one element within this variety. Ms. Guérot will be finding, that Sir Halford Mackinder played a part in the development and application of such ideas, as did friends of his, such as Leo Amery and Lord Milner, who in turn, were closely affiliated with the Rhodes Trust.
It is a fact that “Europe as a peace project” was quite a tempting idea in the wake of two devastating world wars. But at the same time, it might be a good reason to pause and reconsider the implications of the fact that two of the most prominent ‘fathers of the idea of Pan-Europe’ were, in fact, not just aristocrats, but oligarchical royalists, Otto von Habsburg and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (a friend of Imperial Federalist Leo Amery). Whether or not these figureheads could possibly be authentic European democrats, or pursuing their own or some other power’s hidden agendas is relevant, given the dynamics they created for accelerated and deeper integration of Europe. Was it just a coincidence, or may it have been by intentional design having a dynamic European integration that was more concerned with “creating Europe” than with creating something of true republican value for the peoples of Europe. For, clearly, the EU has a lot of in-built flaws that run counter to any legitimate interests of its citizens. Who can hold the European commission to account? Who can hold the council of ministers to account, let alone the Eurogroup?
Therefore, it should be obvious, that more dynamics towards a European Republic is a sensitive issue at a time when national sovereignty of EU member states has been diluted and reduced to a staggering degree. This has only been possible because of lack of leadership among those nation’s political class. What, then, should be the top priority for Europeans now? Accelerate the drive for a European Republic, or take back sovereignty first, get your political class sorted out for true leadership before pressing ahead into the fog in search for the Republic of Europe? Let’s not forget that all major flaws within the EU are primarily due to acceleration and a perceived need to get integration first, and sort out flaws later. This was only possible because Europe was sold as a “peace project”. Today, everyone should be wiser, especially since it is precisely the EU which keeps beating the war-with-Russia-drums.
In any case will a successful drive for a European Republic depend on a thorough and proper investigation of the history of republics past, of the general idea of statecraft, and of Universal History in the Schillerian sense. To embark on a project of creation a sovereign republic from amongst the peoples of Europe will have to establish the true essence of sovereignty.
It is very obvious, that the United States of America was founded on the idea of national sovereignty flowing from individual sovereignty of each citizen.4 Therefore it is important to understand the fundamental differences between the United States and Great Britain with regards to sovereignty and independence of other nations, particularly, but not exclusively, in the Americas. As John Quincy Adams put it in his reasons to refuse signing a joint Anglo-American declaration on South America, which then led to the Monroe Doctrine in its pure, anti-imperialist essence:
“The emancipation of the South American continent opens to the whole race of man prospects of futurity in which this Union will be called in the discharge of its duties to itself and to unnumbered ages of posterity to take a conspicuous and leading role … . That the fabric of our social connections with our southern neighbors may rise in the lapse of years with a grandeur and harmony of proportions corresponding with the magnificance of the means placed by Providence in our power and that of our descendants; its foundations must be laid in principles of politics and of morals, new and distasteful to the thrones and dominations of the elder world ….”
John Quincy Adams, who at the time was serving president Monroe, but was elected president himself shortly afterwards, continues to hone the point:
“So long as Great Britain withholds the recognition of that [independence], we may, as we certainly do, concur with her in the aversion to the transfer to any other power of any of the Colonies in this Hemisphere, heretofore or yet, belonging to Spain; but the principles of that aversion, so far as they are common to both parties, resting only upon a casual coincidence of interests, in a national point of view selfish on both sides, would be liable to dissolution by every change of phase in the aspect of European politics …. Britain and America … would not be bound by ‘any permanent community of principle.’
As the Spannaus-paper very precisely finds:
“Adams’s concept of a community of principle was well-known among the proponents of the American System at the time, including the Marquis de Lafayette. It meant relations between states were to be based on mutual respect for national sovereignty, that sovereignty itself being defined not by mere brute exercise of power, but by the commitment to the betterment of its population morally and materially. Such a commitment to the principle of sovereignty demanded peaceful relations among states and stood in total contrast to the maneuverings for looting arrangements that characterized the relations among the European powers.”
Therefore John Quincy Adams concludes with regard to Anglo-American relations:
“It affords a very suitable and convenient opportunity for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles explicitly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.“
It should have become obvious by now that Americanism emerged as a decidely anti-colonial, anti-imperialist fashion of statecraft. Just how great the danger might be for all those who today oppose imperialism and war, to fall into a trap, laid out to the world by oligarchical globalists, which is designed to equate ‘America’ — the one great defeat which ‘Empire’ had to suffer in modern times — quite geographically, but completely a-historically, with imperialism is underscored by another quote from that 1982 speech of Kissinger’s:
“It was therefore a rude awakening when in the 1960s and 70s the United States became conscious of the limits of even its resources.”
Limits to growth! Prior to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy, America was not educated in, nor did it subscribe to British Malthusian fatalism of purported carrying capacities of the world, from which ideology the oligarchical Club of Rome, once the Kennedy brothers and their optimism were gunned down, implanted their “Limits to Growth” ideology.
For this to work out successfully, British controlled psychological operations against the American nation and the youth of the world were designed and carried out by the Tavistock-Institute, including a subversion of the counter culture movement (MK-ULTRA). One of the counter culture’s main protagonists until this day is Stewart Brand, who was part of, or close to the Merry Pranksters Hippy caravan, and who came up with the Whole Earth Movement, for which he was able to obtain the first NASA satellite shots of planet earth, despite apparent aversion that was supposed to be existing between the Hippies and the establishment.
Brand was recruited into the counter culture movement by British anthropologist and CIA operative in the MK-Ultra program Gregory Bateson, who together with his wife Margaret Mead was involved in the front organization for MK-Ultra experiments, the Macy-Foundation. Mead was closely involved in the setting up of the World Federation for Mental Health under the guidance of Hitler-Financier and handler of Nazi-Minister Hjalmar Schacht, Sir Montagu Norman.
“The philosophical mind cannot dwell on the material of world history long, until a new impulse striving for harmony becomes active in him, one which irresistibly stimulates him to assimilate everything around him into his rational nature, and to raise every phenomenon he sees to its highest recognizable effect, to thought. The more often, and the more successfully he thus repeats this attempt to connect the past to the present, the more he is inspired to connect that, as means and intent, which he sees to be interlocked as cause and effect. (…) He thus takes this harmony from out of himself, and plants it outside of himself into the order of things, i.e., he brings a reasonable purpose into the course of the world, and a teleological principle into world history. With this principle he wanders once more through world history, and holds it up, testing it against each phenomenon which this grand theater presents him. He sees it confirmed by a thousand concurring facts, and disproved by just as many others; but as long as important links are missing in the course of changes in the world, as long as destiny withholds the final explanations about so many events, he declares this question to be undecided, and that opinion will triumph, which is able to offer the greater satisfaction to the mind, and to the heart, the greater bliss.”
— Friedrich Schiller, ‘What Is, and to What End Do We Study, Universal History?’
Footnotes
1 Max Batt, “Schiller’s Attitude Towards the French Revolution”, in: The Journal of Germanic Philology, 1897, Vol. 1, No. 4 (1897), pp. 482-493
2 In an earlier version of his last will in 1877, Rhodes had been more explicit: “The extension of British rule throughout the world, . .. the colonization by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the sea-board of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, . . . colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament, which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire, and finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.” Note that for Rhodes, too, war was hoped to be made impossible after the foundation of “so great a Power”. Until then, war, for Rhodes would have to be necessary sometimes. For those who might be inclined to think that those earlier plans by Rhodes had been given up on, here are the words of Basil Williams, who in 1921 published his Rhodes Biography for which he had been given full access to Rhodes papers: “This will, [of 1899], contained the final and most explicit directions for a scheme to carry out the purpose already outlined in more ambitious language twenty-two years earlier.” (p. 51f.)
3 He said, in a letter to Henriette von Wolzogen from January 8th, 1783: “If North America should become free, it is decided that I will go there.”, Schiller NA Vol. 23, p. 60.
4 This is true in spite of the fact that only white males at the time were considered citizens, which was due to the fact that severe ideological differences existed between representatives from the industrial north of the 13 colonies, and those from the agrarian south, which existed on a slave based economy (with much closer ties to the British Empire, as would become evident during the American War of Secession, triggered by the southern states when Abraham Lincoln was elected and proceeded to issue the Emancipation Act. For more detail see H. Graham Lowry, “How the Nation Was Won”, Anton Chaitkin, “Who We Are”, Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, and Matthew Ehret, “Clash of the Two Americas”.