I have spent decades campaigning for a watershed approach to geography.

Ultimately, these would be within saltwater basins, not just freshwater ones.

The art authority for this comes from the 20th century artwork said by

art historians to be the most influential:  the Urinal, by Marcel Duchamp.

I guess influential means... influential.

Can it influence policy?

Can it influence Europe?

Shall we use military history?

The coincidence of watershed limits and decisive battles frequently occurs

(Verdun, Stalingrad, Waterloo, Gettysburg, DienBienPhu, Nomonhon, the perimeter

of NY Bight Basin and Oriskany, Monmouth, Princeton, Bennington, Saratoga,

Koeniggratz, Smolensk, even the division today of Ukraine along the line

(also of Karkhov and Kursk) separating the Sea of Azov from the Gulf of Odessa)

that I believe that Europe, or Civil War USA (notice the final line of battle,

leading to Appomatox), or East Asia, where wars have been frequent and big enough,

could organize by watershed, particularly to salt seas, and 

correlate this substantially with the lines of decisive battle.

Even TeutobergerWald, which lies on the line separating two major

flows to the North Sea.

So that any watershed approach to territory need not be sanitized science,

or some technocracy.  It coincides enough with the history of human struggle

to be accepted as part of the evolution of humanity.  

The British who voted against the EU did not want to have Brussels' bureucrats

be guiding the evolution of humanity.

In Berlin now, the Neptun Brunnen, soon or just moved to the Schloss, represents

four rivers of a one-time Prussian Reich, as of 1890.   Rhine, Elbe, Oder, Weichsel.

There is no Danube in this.

The Danube is assumed to belong to Bavaria-born Sissi and her friends in Austria.  Exactly.

Altogether, it is not hard to advocate an organization of Europe by its watersheds

scientifically

administratively

historically

culturally

As the Deutsche Historisches Museum front-lobby display shows, there is no fixedness of

the borders of "Germany."  So, why have a European Union made up of names of extremely-

elastic territory.  Rumania today is not the Romania of a hundred years ago.  And so on.

Hence my desire to see Europe organize around its soil and water, in its rivers to the sea.

This seems to have also been Napoleon's ambition.  his Grande Armee, invading russia, was a pan-Europen force (like NATO today, rattling sabers with Russia), was an army of a peninsula, called "L'Armee des Cotes de l'Ocean.'  Fortress Europe certainly has a coast, on all but one side.  Napoleon also labeled

several of his armies according to rivers, e.g., Army of the Rhine.  If there is an administration of

the Rhine, then Alsace-Lorraine are subordinated to that, and we depart from the Vauban/Colbert notion of a "nation carre", or fortress France. We have instead, as Napoleon sought, a revolutionary message throughout all the river basins and coastal regions of Europe.

Here are some of the basins which basin mapping has given an identity.

FIRST, SEE EUROPE AS A PENINSULA, LIKE A SHIP.

ITS BOW IS IN BRITTANY.  IT'S ALSO CALLED COTE D'ARMOIRE.

ARMOR THIS BOW, GIVE IT A SPECIAL IDENTITY, HONOR BOTH SIDES,

AND YOU HAVE A BRITTANY THAT SPLITS EUROPE INTO TWO PARTS:

TO THE SOUTH, extending int the Mediterranean, Black, Caspian Seas

TO THE NORTH, flowing into the Irish, North, Baltic and Barents Seas

France can defer to Brittany and take this lead, of serving as

the bow that splits Europe into two very-different administrative (and tax)

regions.

Many eco-tax districts can be formed.  Each is a soil-water unit.

Here are some, set under terms of the Regional Seas Program of the

United Nations Environment Program, and mandated further by the

Italy/Palau/Monaco ocean initiative.

TO THE SOUTH

Iberian Current

  Loire Basin (one of the few river basins in Europe with nearly no dams)

  Aquitaine

  Basque Region

  Galicia

  Andalusia

 

Mediterranean Basin

  Rhone (Burgundy)

  Catalonia

  Andalusia east

  Corsica

  Sardinia

  Sicily  (in ancient tradition, partitioned by its water-flows down slopes)

  Tyrrhenian Sea regions of Italy

  

  Adriatic Sea regions of Italy, plus

    Gorizia (Isonzo( basin (much fought for in WW I)

    South Tirol (Adige)

    Dalmatia (a distinct region for Napoleon)

    Montenegro

    Albania  (three-way split at apex, Kosovo)

     (give new significance in the Balkans to Kosovo)

  Cyprus, in two (or even three) parts

   acknowleding the Greek and Turkish slopes

  Macedonia (Vardar, to Gulf of Salonika)

  Levant slope of Syria/Lebanon

  Orontes River basin

Black Sea

  Bavaria (Donauland)  the 'adhesion' to Prussia only since 1871

  Moravia 

  Dniestr (or Moldova plus Transdnistria), flowing into a sub-sealevel bay)

  Gulf of Odessa (west Ukraine0

  Sea of Azov (east Ukraine)

  western Georgia

  at issue:  Upper Don; do we follow initiatives of Pasha Sultan 1597 and Peter the Great

   (1698) for a diversion to the Volga, and further esst, to supply the Aral Sea?

Caspian Sea

  river basin programs, with massive Caucasus snowmelt and runoff, for

  now-separatist North Ossetia and Chechnya (e.g., Argun River)

  manage Volga and Ural Rivers for, maybe with diversions, to increase Caspian salinity

  administration can be headquartered in Moscow, but would be scientific, not nationalist

TO THE NORTH