Eurasia

• 1. Introduction

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  Eurasia is the largest continental area on Earth, a single unbroken landmass stretching from Iceland in the far west to the Russian Far East, and from the Arctic in the north to Maritime Southeast Asia in the south. It covers around 55 million square kilometres, roughly 36.2% of the entire surface of the land. More than 5 billion people live on it, close to 70% of all humanity. So before we ask what Eurasia is, the more interesting question is: why do most people not think of it as one thing at all? The answer reaches back to ancient Greece, winds through 18th-century cartography, and arrives at a geopolitical argument that is still actively contested today.

• 2. A Line Drawn in Antiquity

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  The ancient Greeks gave us both halves of the name. Europe was drawn from Europa, a mythological Phoenician princess. Asia came from a woman named Asia in Greek mythology. The Greeks originally placed Africa inside Asia, treating it as a single eastern land, while Europe stood apart as a separate category. That founding confusion never fully resolved itself. Where to draw the line between Europe and Asia remains disputed to this day. One boundary runs along the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, the Kuma-Manych Depression, the Caspian Sea, the Ural River, and the Ural Mountains. That definition was set down by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg in the 18th century and is probably the most widely accepted version. Even so, Halford Mackinder, one of the most influential geographers of the modern era, dismissed the Ural Mountains as a meaningful continental divide. The question of Mount Elbrus adds another wrinkle: if the Caucasus Mountains rather than the Kuma-Manych Depression form the boundary, then Elbrus, not Mont Blanc, is Europe's highest peak.

• 3. Deep Time, Deep Land

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  Eurasia's physical unity is not just a cartographic convenience; it is geological fact. The landmass formed between 375 and 325 million years ago when Siberia, Kazakhstania, and Baltica merged together. Baltica at that time was itself joined to Laurentia, the ancient core of North America, forming the supercontinent called Euramerica. In plate tectonics, the Eurasian Plate covers Europe and most of Asia, but specifically excludes the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula, and the part of the Russian Far East east of the Chersky Range. All 100 of the highest mountains on Earth stand within Eurasia, concentrated in the Himalaya, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Hengduan, and Tian Shan ranges. Every peak above 7,000 metres is found in these ranges and the Transhimalaya. Running across the south of the continent, the Alpide belt extends 15,000 kilometres from Java in Maritime Southeast Asia all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, threading through the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and the Alps in a single connected arc.

• 4. Rivers, Islands, Climates

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  The Yangtze, known in Chinese as Chang Jiang, runs 6,300 kilometres through China, making it the longest river on the landmass. Below it in length come the Yellow River at 5,464 kilometres, the Mekong at 4,909 kilometres, and then the Lena, the Irtysh, the Brahmaputra, the Ob, the Volga, the Yenisey, and the Indus, all of which clear 3,000 kilometres. Off the coasts, Borneo and Sumatra are the largest Eurasian islands by area, followed by Honshu, Great Britain, and Sulawesi. The five most populated islands on Earth are all Eurasian: Java, Honshu, Great Britain, Luzon, and Sumatra. Because Eurasia spans such an enormous range of latitudes, it carries every climate type in the Köppen classification system, from the harshest polar cold to equatorial heat, from desert aridity to monsoon saturation. This variety of peninsulas, from the Arabian to the Korean to the Italian to the Kamchatka, extends the landmass into every surrounding ocean.

• 5. The Axial Belt and World History

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  Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China were among the ancient civilisations that took root on Eurasian soil. During the Axial Age, the mid-first millennium BCE, a continuous band of civilisations stretched across the Eurasian subtropical zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That belt, the source notes, formed the mainstream of world history for two millennia afterward. New connections across the landmass arrived with the Age of Discovery. Iberian navigators opened new maritime routes in the 1490s. The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 then created direct passage through the Indo-Mediterranean and helped trigger the wave of Western European imperialism that dominated Africa and Asia into the mid-20th century. The Soviet Union's communist project afterward dominated much of the continent until the Cold War ended in 1991, the latest in a long series of powers that have tried to command the Eurasian centre.

• 6. The Geopolitics of a Name

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  Zbigniew Brzezinski put the geopolitical stakes plainly when he wrote that how America manages Eurasia is critical, because a power controlling it would command two of the world's three most productive regions, would almost automatically subordinate Africa, and would account for roughly three-fourths of the world's known energy resources and about 75 per cent of its people. Halford Mackinder's earlier ideas about the Eurasian heartland shaped much of that thinking. The term itself gained a fictional second life in 1984, George Orwell's novel, where Eurasia appears as one of three permanent super-states built on surveillance and propaganda. The Russian concept of "Eurasianism" traces different roots: 19th-century philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky defined Eurasia as a distinct entity bounded by the Himalayas, the Caucasus, the Alps, the Arctic, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. That framing influenced later Russian geopolitics. In 2010, Vladimir Putin called for a common economic space stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok, though that project stalled after Russian-EU relations broke down following the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014.

• 7. Integration and Alliance

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  Several overlapping organisations now try to knit pieces of Eurasia together. The Commonwealth of Independent States, formed after the Soviet Union dissolved, links 10 post-Soviet republics with a combined population estimated at around 239,796,010. Six of its members also joined the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance founded in 1992. The Eurasian Economic Union, established in 2015 and modelled on the European Union, includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, with observer members Moldova, Uzbekistan, and Cuba; it is headquartered in Moscow and Minsk. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, announced on the 15th of June 2001 in Shanghai, now covers three-fifths of the Eurasian continent and nearly half of the human population, making it the largest regional organisation in the world by geographical coverage. The Asia-Europe Meeting has gathered most Asian and European countries every two years since 1996. Kazakhstan's president Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2007 proposed a "Eurasia Canal" linking the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea via the Kuma-Manych Depression, which would give landlocked Caspian nations a more direct route to open water than the existing Volga-Don Canal offers.

• 8. A Continent Still Becoming

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  On the 14th of June 2024, Vladimir Putin put forward an initiative for a Eurasian security architecture in a speech at the Russian Foreign Ministry. Sergey Lavrov elaborated on it in Perm on the 29th of May 2025, describing the Greater Eurasian Partnership as the material basis for that security framework and noting that while Africa has the African Union and Latin America has CELAC, no equivalent pan-continental association yet exists for Eurasia. The word itself has taken on distinct local meaning in Kazakhstan, where institutions from the L. N. Gumilev Eurasian National University to the Eurasian Development Bank carry it in their names, partly through the influence of Olzhas Suleimenov, who popularised the ideas of Lev Gumilev in that country. Humans first arrived on this landmass from Africa around 125,000 years ago; the political question of what to call it, and who belongs to it, is evidently still being answered.