The One Belt-One Road system makes sense only if it constitutes also a modality for connecting existing projects which are under way in different parts of Eurasia.

a.Russian Railways in the Global Transportation System

An important part of the Northern branch of the New Silk Road (the railway part, the “Road”) will run through the territories of the Russia Federation. Russia’s railways (RZD) share global leadership, along with China and the U.S.A, in terms of their volume of shipments and the extension of their railway lines. Russia has excellent routes, many of which are part of International Transport Corridors (ITCs).The strategic development of Russian Railways is aimed at improving the global competitiveness of Russia’s railways and their integration into the Eurasian transport system. The transportation of goods from Central Asia to Ukraine, Belarus and the European Union forms the back-bone of the existing transit routes passing through Russia. The main types of wares are oil, ferrous metals, chemicals, coal, ore and grain. In the near future, the basis of transit traffic will become the shipment of containerized cargo on key International Transport Corridors, especially the East – West transcontinental route, which is based on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

b.Europe’s TEN-T – “Connecting Europe” Corridors

Nine core network corridors are identified in the CEF Regulation, which includes a list of projects pre-identified for possible EU funding during the period 2014 – 2020, based on their added value for TEN-T development and their maturity status.

To make sure that such corridors are developed effectively and efficiently, each of them is led by a European Coordinator, supported by a consultative forum (the “Corridor Forum”).

The following nine core network corridors have been identified and will function along the lines described:

1. The Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor is a crucial north-south axis for the European economy. Crossing the Baltic Sea from Finland to Sweden and passing through Germany, the Alps and Italy, it links the major urban centres and ports of Scandinavia and Northern Germany to continue to the industrialised high production centres of Southern Germany, Austria and Northern Italy further to the Italian ports and Valletta.

2. The North Sea-Baltic Corridor connects the ports of the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea with the ports of the North Sea.

3. The North Sea-Mediterranean Corridor stretches from Ireland and the North of the UK through the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to the Mediterranean Sea in the South of France.

4. The Baltic-Adriatic Corridor is one of the most important trans-European road and railway axes. It connects the Baltic with the Adriatic Sea, through industrialized areas between Southern Poland (Upper Silesia), Vienna and Bratislava, the Eastern Alpine region and Northern Italy.

5. The Orient/East-Med Corridor connects the maritime interfaces of the North, Baltic, Black and Mediterranean seas, allowing to optimize the use of the ports concerned and the related “Motorways of the Sea”. Including Elbe as inland waterway, it will improve the multimodal connections between Northern Germany, the Czech Republic, the Pannonian region and Southeast Europe. It extends, across the sea, from Greece to Cyprus.

6. The Rhine-Alpine Corridor constitutes one of the busiest freight routes of Europe, connecting the North Sea ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp to the Mediterranean basin in Genoa, via Switzerland and some of the major economic centres in the Rhein-Ruhr, the Rhein-Main-Neckar regions and the agglomeration around Milan in Northern Italy. This multimodal corridor includes the Rhine as inland water-way. Key projects are the base tunnels, partly already completed, in Switzerland and their access routes in Germany and Italy.

7. The Atlantic Corridor links the Western part of the Iberian Peninsula and the ports of Le Havre and Rouen to Paris and further to Mannheim/Strasbourg, with high speed rail lines and parallel conventional ones, including also the Seine as inland waterway.

8. The Rhine-Danube Corridor, with the Main and Danube waterway as its backbone, connects the central regions around Strasbourg and Frankfurt via Southern Germany to Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and finally the Black Sea, with an important branch from Munich to Prague and the Ukrainian border.

9. The Mediterranean Corridor links the Iberian Peninsula with the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. It follows the Mediterranean coastlines of Spain and France, crosses the Alps towards East through Northern Italy, leaving the Adriatic coast in Slovenia and Croatia towards Hungary. Apart from the Po River and some other canals in Northern Italy, it consists of road and rail. Key railway projects along this corridor are the links Lyon-Turin and the section Venice – Ljubljana.

Two key transport policy areas, which are closely related to infrastructure development, have been provided with a TEN-T governance form which is comparable with that of the nine “geographical” corridors: the establishment of the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS) and the promotion of the “Motorways of the Sea”

The multiplication of new exchange opportunities is unavoidable in a moment when Europe and Russia are hit by a long-standingcrisis, also because of their mutual economic war following to the Ukrainian crisis, and China’s economy is relatively slowingdown because of the worldwide recession and of the impossibility, by its internal market, to absorb the bulk of the country’s hugecommercial surplus.

Europe will benefit under several points of view from the increasing ease with which people from all of Eurasia will be able reach it, witnessed already now by the multiple direct railway connections with Madrid, Lyon, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Lodz and also Mortara. Theexperience of the last years has shown that crisis ridden Europe is attracting important Chinese, Russian,  Indian and Arabi (such as the ones in Jaguar, Pirelli,   PSA, Pyraeus Port), and that Russian and Chinese tourists rush are just at the beginning, whilst we have now130 million tourists exiting Chine each year, of which only a small percentage are coming to Europe.

Notwithstanding the positive shift of interest, in worldwide culture, from a narrow-minded Eurocentrism (the so-called “provincialisation of Europe”), Europe is still attracting people of all the world for a series of conditions unique to it: the European tradition to preserve alsophysically ancient cultural heritage (Athens, Rome, Florence, Venice); the concentration of a centuries old history within a limited space;the diversity among the different parts of this space; the European origin of the inhabitants of many important non European countries, aswell as the influence of European culture on other peoples during the XIX and XX Centuries; the special sophistication of Europeanconsumerism, which renders European culture, goods and locations, very appreciated by big spenders both in the Americas and in Eurasia. As concerns, in particular, China, the Chinese people has always paid a strong attention to European culture because of the similarities between the two worlds, either  evident or hidden.

Today, Europe must overcome its doubts about the positive impact of Eurasian investments in the Continent, which are contributing massively to the overcoming of the present economic crisis, and pave the way to new, more decisive, ones.

Summing up, the benefits for Europe are numerous:

-our economies will be able to recover from the ongoing crisis thanks to the existence in Eurasia of a large population of consumers,which  is hungry of our sophisticated products;

-foreign investments in these sectors will improve, from one side, employment, and, from the other, export;

-there will be a larger “aura” effect, with the connected investments in real estate, with enhanced attention for our cultural institutions (alarge part of students in Europe are Chinese already now), and with a stronger confidence of international financial markets in our economies.

For being able to exploit in the best way this overall shift, Europeans must prepare themselves, their States and their societies. TheEuropean Union must launch an urgent action for the diffusion of Eurasian cultures, for the electronic promotion of Europe worldwide, forthe study of Chinese, Russian and Arabic at all levels. Our publishing house, Alpina srl, its consulting division Bouleusis and thecultural association Diàlexis are working for these objectives since a long time. We have created an Evrazija-Avrasya division for this purpose, and are expecting partners of all over the world to cooperate with us (see http://www.alpinasrl.com)

It should be self-evident that China attributes a large interest to this in depth interconnection with Europe. Advantages for the Chinese havebeen cited as concerns export, a better political image and avoiding that isolation to which the failed TIPP treaty was intended.

The main advantages for both sides would be cultural and political. Paradoxically, whilst China had been very well known in Europe in theXVIII century thanks to Jesuits, courts and Enlightenment, we have witnessed, in the last two hundred years, a growing China-bashingtrend, with China described, starting from Hegel, as backward, despotic, poor, violent, fanatic, narrow-minded. Today, China has anoccasion to show to the whole world its true face: ancient and hyper-modern, one of the oldest civilizations, which, nevertheless, is atthe forefront of progress worldwide.

Not only China, but all Eurasian countries will benefit from the New Silk Road.

Albeit most modern sciences and techniques (mathematics, glass production, automata, paper, paper-money, algebra, printing, gunpowder, firearms…), have ancient Asiatic roots, the development of complicated machines apt to substitute men’s work, such as steam engines, Jacquard looms, dynamos and turbines, motor vehicles, writing and computing machines, electric and nuclear energies, mass media, informatics, are connected in some way to the era  of European hegemony, such as Western exploration, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and, as it has been investigated by many contemporary authors, bear the imprinting of certain characteristics of Western cultures, such as Indo-European language logics and religious messianism. For these reasons, notwithstanding  many efforts made to challenge some of these new developments, such as the ones of  Huxley, McLuhan and Hawking, the mainstream Western thought has not expressed  valuable proposals on how to govern the rise of Intelligent Machines.

Contrary to what is happening in the West, all countries of the BRICS are going, since many decades, in the direction of re-evaluating their traditional cultures, such as Sinic and Indic philosophies, Islam and Eastern Christianity, which are less oriented towards rationalism and messianism. As a consequence, even if  BRICS are now in the forefront of the development of new technologies, we may expect that they will introduce balances to a strict mechanical logic, apt to oppose the risks of the machines overcoming men, expressed still recently by scientists and entrepreneurs such as Hawking and Musk. Let’s think, for instance, of the idea of a “fuzzy” logic, of the Azeri mathematician Lotfi Zadeh, already utilised in the past by Indian and Chinese scientists for predicting rainfalls. Recently, President Putin has spoken about the need to “bridle” Artificial Intelligence and to avoid a world monopoly in this area, and has expressed his preparedness to share with other world powers Russia’ achievements in this field. The fact itself that the final document of the Xiamen Summit had included a series of themes concerning cooperation in the control of several types of abuse of new technologies is evidence of a cultural preparedness, by participating countries, to meet this type of challenge.

Looking at it from with a positive point of view, culture is becoming a social need everywhere, also for balancing the de-personalizing effects of economy and technology. The countries alongside the land and maritime Silk Roads include almost all the most important sources of culture during history (the “Haft Kesvar”-“Seven Climates”-of Persian tradition) . Their histories had borne the risk to be forgotten, inter alia with the reduction of the role of their classical languages, the neglect of care for archaeological sites and museums, the prevalence of market-oriented publishing trends, fanatics’ destruction of ancient treasures, the ignorance of the history of Asian cultures.

Among other things, the Silk Road Initiative should provide finance for publishing, media, academies, universities, schools, archaeology and travel devoted to comparative culture (philology, philosophy, religions, history, literatures, music, arts, cinema, architecture…): the relationships among ancient languages and peoples, didactic methods, comparative cultural history,…

A cultural revival of the Eurasian Continent would contribute to salvage mankind from nihilism and mechanisation, and to the birth of a vibrant cultural industry in a time when simpler jobs are destroyed by technological unemployment.

China is explaining the New Silk Road (or “One-Belty-One Road”, or “Silk Road Initiative”Yi Dai-Yi Lu: hereinafter, “the Initiative”)to the world. Moreover, there is another multiplicity of initiatives, independent of China, which contribute to clarify it in a very differentiated way. Many books have been published in all continents and in many languages. That it normal, because, albeit China is acting as its catalyser, the initiative is not a monopoly of China, but on the contrary is an asset for the entire world.

In any case, a better coordination would be useful, because those multiple independent undertakings encounter difficulties in interfacing one another. According to me, two main aspects should be strongly emphasized: culture and win-win approach.

From the cultural point of view, the Initiative may represent even an answer to the lack of meaning of contemporary societies, too haunted by technical and contingent questions, and loosing hold on reflection and phantasy. As to the win-win approach, the logics of Western languages and cultures is too rigid and materialistic for being apt to explain the deep interrelationships existing among situations and people.

As to culture, the East-West relationship transcends a simplistic dialectic between “modernity” and “tradition”. Contrary to what is commonly believed, East and West have been intertwined since the beginning. The HouHanShu, the Qur’an, the “Trip to the Western Regions”, the Wolfram von Eschenbach, Marco Polo, Akbar, Ricci, Puccini, have shown in practice what these interrelationships mean. Today, Confucius, Tao, Chan, as well as Mahabharata or Bodhidharma, may represent answers to many of the most urgent questions of our technological time. Everything which moved or happens among East and West, such as Alexander, Zhuan Zang, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Sina, al Ghazzali, al-Biruni, Omar Khayyam, Jalal ad-Din .Zheng He, Cinggiz Khan, Kabir, still constitute an unexhausted source of inspiration and fantasy all over the world. As a consequence, the New Silk Road should be conceived first of all as a cultural project, utilising the many works and authors which have focussed on this transnational Eurasian space, such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Schopenhauer, Rerih, Guénon, Fenollosa, Pound and Gumilev.

As to the “win-win” idea, it is not sufficient to list the huge quantity of synergies which may be achieved thanks to a more coordinated approach. Each country and each individual should be made able to understand in which way its assets, its skills, its ambitions, may be better exploited and valued thanks to the opportunities of a broader interchange. This is true especially for Europe, which is experiencing a century-long decadence due to its narrow internal market and to the political limitations imposed by its belonging in the Western block. Only the unlimited Eastern finance and the fast growing Eastern markets may provide a long term sustained development for the sectors in which Europe is still leading, such as culture, tourism, fashion, food and beverages. Unfortunately, the insufficient structures of the European Union is such, that a coordinated approach to these matters does not exist today. In their mutual interests, the EU and China should foster a coordinated approach on both sides, first of all via the Investment Protection Treaty under negotiation; secondly, by organising the utilisation of the New Silk Road for channelling cooperation in new technologies and tourism on both directions, and, finally, for enhancing mutual knowledge between East and West.

In the past millennia, it was clear that Eurasia “functioned” as a sole entity. The Japanese geo-political scholar Shiratori spoke, in this connection, of a the continuous dialectic between the Northern cattle breeding and nomadic “Wu”, “武”(in Japanese, “Bu”) in the North of Eurasia, and the stable, agricultural “Wen”, “文”(in Japanese, “Bu”) along the shores of the seas and of the oceans . Recent paleo-ontological and linguistic studies have confirmed a certain mixture of Northern steppe tribes and Proto-sinic populations, for instance in the necropoles of Elgyin and Linzi.

Old Chinese scholars, albeit considering their country as being the centre of the world (as the name “Zhong Guo” suggests), attributed crucial importance to Europe since the oldest antiquity. Typical is the utilisation of the expression “Da Qin” (“Greater China”) for designating, according to the periods, Rome, Italy, the Roman Empire, the Middle Eastern “Rum”, or even Christianity. In such Old Chinese view, there were only two areas of the world which had a civilization comparable to the one of China: “Da Qin” and India. Much later, this idea was shared by many Europeans, including Marco Polo, Matteo Ricci, and especially the Enlighteners De Quesnais, Leibniz and Voltaire, who aimed at the unification of Europe under a sovereign similar to the Chinese Emperors Kang Xi and Qianlong.

Today, the world is facing unprecedented challenges. The development of informatics, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, etc… is producing new mental, biological and social entities, which had not been addressed either by traditional cultures, such as the Sinic San Jiao, or Vedic and Mediterranean Axial cultures, and not even contemplated by modern humanism, liberalism, socialism, Christian social thought or ecologism. In fact, what could the dignity of big data be? Which is the sense of liberty of a robot? The role of proletariat in a society of intelligent machines? Equality among humans, cyborgs and robots? The defence of all biospecies, except mankind?