Tellurocracy

Tellurocracy is civilisation or political system closely linked to the expansion of land territories and persistent penetration into inland areas. Tellurocratic states have a defined territory in which the state-forming ethnic majority lives and around which they expand. The antonym of tellurocracy is thalassocracy, which refers to marine empires, but this is rare in the pure form of a state. Tellurocratic and thalassocratic traits are usually seen together. The phrase is used in political geography, geopolitics, and geo-economics to describe a country's power based on its control over territory. The Sultanate of Muscat, for example, was thalassocratic previous to their merger, whereas the Imamate of Oman was landlocked and exclusively tellurocratic. Furthermore, most, if not all, landlocked states can be classified as tellurocracies.

Tellurocracies aren't always pure tellurocracies. Unlike thalassocracies, which have historically only had coastlines and no interior territories, most large tellurocracies have coastlines and not simply inland areas. As a result, defining what a tellurocracy is can be challenging. The Mongols, for example, sought to conquer Japan several times. Russian America, which is now Alaska, was also acquired by the Russian Empire. Finally, it came to a point where it couldn't get any further east by land. Similarly, when the US could no longer advance westward, it bought Alaska and incorporated many islands and the Panama Canal, Zone. It's also worth mentioning that continental Australia, which was created as a collection of thalassocratic colonies, now has its island possessions off the coast, such as Christmas Island.

Many antiquity empires are known for being more tellurocratic than their rivals, such as the early Roman Republic in opposition to the rival Carthaginian Empire, which later evolved into the Roman and Byzantine Empires, which were a more thalassocratic, yet still tellurocratic rival to the purely tellurocratic Parthian and Sasanian Empires.

The following civilisational characteristics are traditionally attributed to Alexander Dugin's theory of tellurocracy: a sedentary lifestyle that does not exclude migratory colonisation, conservatism, the permanence of legal norms, and a powerful bureaucratic apparatus and central authority, strong infantry, but a weak fleet. Tellurocracy is traditionally associated with Eurasian governments such as the Qing Empire, Mongol Empire, Mughal Empire, etc. However, others, such as the early United States and the Brazilian Empire, have emerged abroad. All of these attributes are not always present in practice. Furthermore, certain peoples and states evolve in one direction or another over time. For example, Russia was a classic tellurocratic polity before the Russian Empire. However, following Emperor Peter I, the Russian Empire gradually increased its thalassocratic characteristics, leading to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which became one of the world's most powerful naval powers. Outside of its home islands, the British Empire, on the other hand, was for a long time a small, largely thalassocratic state. Still, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it expanded its tellurocratic characteristics by expanding into the Australian Outback and inland Africa, among other places. The term Tellurocracy was coined by Alexander Dugin, a Russian National Bolshevik and Eurasianist publicist, based on the works of Carl Schmitt, a notable German lawyer and geopolitical thinker. Tellurocracy is associated with Eurasianism by Dugin, whereas thalassocracy is associated with Atlanticism.