Ever heard of Atlantropa? Probably not. It was a nutty scheme hatched by a nutty guy, and it never had even the remotest chance of ever coming to pass. In the 1920s, Europe was suffering from a myriad of post–World War I problems. There was a refugee crisis, the result of the shifting borders and population transfers that occurred at the war’s end. There was an energy crisis, and a serious shortage of natural resources. And, of course, there was the economic depression. Several years before a madly gesticulating Austrian with a wacky mustache would rise to power with his own solution to the continent’s ills, a plucky architect from Bavaria named Herman Sörgel proposed a different one: Drain the Mediterranean! Dam the Med and partially drain it, in order to form a contiguous body of land between Europe and Africa. A new continent that would be called Atlantropa. To Sörgel, this would cure Europe of all that ailed her. The dammed Mediterranean would create hydroelectric power plants to relight Europe’s recently dimmed lamps, and the elimination of pesky ocean crossings would allow millions of European refugees to stream into Africa, where they would take their rightful place as lord and master. Better still, this newly conquered African land would be ripe with fertile soil, minerals, and a plethora of natural resources for the taking.
Oh, Herman Sörgel, you pie-in-the-sky dreamer! You were the Elon Musk of your day (but slightly more grounded). The idea never took off, not just because of the fact that it was batshit insane, but also because, at that time, the left’s intellectual elite — the League of Nations crowd, the “forward-thinkers” — understood that you don’t cure one nation or one continent’s refugee problem by sending all of the huddled, wretched refuse to another people’s nation or continent. Back then, the left understood that this would pose serious problems for the host nation or continent. And the left was right. Atlantropa would have been a nightmare for native Africans, and eventually, there would have been a Rhodesia- or South Africa-style reckoning.
In the 1920s, if anyone had suggested that the specter of millions of European refugees streaming into Africa did not constitute an invasion, that person would have been dismissed as a lunatic, because of course it would have been an invasion. Those in favor of Atlantropa, and those against it, all got that point. The European refugees would not have been content to live like Africans, or to live under African rule. Europe’s refugee crisis would have become Africa’s domination crisis. So to the liberal elites, the best solution was to tell the refugees to stay put.
David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.
April 20, 2021
QotD: The Atlantropa project
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