File 04
Four years spent in Vienna, then twenty years writing about what the West sees poorly.
From 1998 to 2002, Henri de Grossouvre ran Alcatel's major accounts for Central Europe and Russia from Vienna. That is not a line on a CV: it is why his reading of the region does not resemble the one made in western capitals.
Central Europe has this peculiarity: a great deal is said about it from Paris and Berlin, and very little from Vienna or Belgrade. This file rests on a difference in vantage point.
From 1998 to 2002, Henri de Grossouvre ran Alcatel’s major accounts for Central Europe and Russia from Vienna. It was a commercial and industrial post, not a diplomatic one — and that is what makes it interesting. In such a job one learns who actually decides, how contracts and capital move, and where political borders fail to match economic ones.
His education had already pointed that way: his postgraduate dissertation in international relations was on Ukraine.
In 2007, the collective work he edited, For a European Europe, proposed a vanguard made up of six countries: France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary and Austria. The afterword is by János Perényi.
The choice is worth noting. In most “hard core” proposals of the same period, Central Europe appears at best as a second ring. Here it is in the first — because the author’s geography runs through Vienna.
In January 2015, Revue Défense Nationale published a six-page op-ed: Serbia at a crossroads, after years of difficult relations with the European Union, and now a hub between the EU space and Moscow.
The vocabulary is consistent with him — hinge, hub, pivot. Serbia is not a camp there but a tipping point, and a tipping point is observed rather than judged.
In 2014 his first book had appeared in Serbian with Fondacija Dostojanstvo, signed Anri de Grosuvr.
Here the file meets the Security & defence pillar. In 2009, in Revue Défense Nationale, Henri de Grossouvre and Pierre Pascallon hold that Greater Europe exists “from the Atlantic to the Urals”, that it therefore includes European Russia, and that it falls to the OSCE to carry the question of pan-European security, within an international conference still to be convened.
That framing is not neutral for Central Europe. The OSCE is one of the few forums where Central European and Balkan countries sit without being applicants for membership. Choosing that forum over another amounts to recognising them as stakeholders rather than a buffer zone. It is a concrete institutional consequence of a geographical premise.
One last trait is worth noting, because it recurs throughout the corpus: a preference for flows over postures. When the author looks for what actually connects Central Europe to the west and east of the continent, he looks at transport and energy before diplomatic statements.
That is the logic that leads him, in 2017, to name rail infrastructure as the first binding agent of continental cooperation, and then, in 2021, to devote an article to the overlooked growth of rail freight between China and Europe — a corridor that runs precisely through the Central European space. The same year, he co-signs a piece in Revue Défense Nationale on technological cooperation between the European Union and China.
Seen from Vienna, Central Europe is not a periphery. It is where the lines run.
It does not take sides in the internal debates of the countries concerned. Henri de Grossouvre has published analyses of current Serbian politics that commit their author; they do not appear on this site, and this site does not relay them.
What appears here are the underlying positions: Central Europe as an integral part of Greater Europe, Serbia as a point of contact rather than a prize to be won, and the idea that a continental architecture ignoring this space is not one.
Vienna links this file to all the others. It is from Vienna that he looks at Russia when writing Paris, Berlin, Moscow. It is the Central European experience that explains why Hungary and Austria feature in his 2007 vanguard. And the method is the same as elsewhere: start from real flows — contracts, energy, transport — rather than from declarations.
Revue Défense Nationale, Tribune T606
Six pages on Serbia at a crossroads, after years of difficult relations with the European Union. The analysis casts the country as a hinge between the EU space and Moscow — ten years before the question returned to the centre of attention.
Revue Défense Nationale, n° 716
The authors hold that Greater Europe exists “from the Atlantic to the Urals” and therefore includes European Russia. They call for an international conference to settle the continent's disorder, and for pan-European security to be handled within the OSCE.
Xenia
A collective work of the Forum Carolus, edited by Henri de Grossouvre. It examines how a group of countries — France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Hungary, Austria — could form a vanguard and restart European political construction without waiting for unanimity among the twenty-seven. Preface by François Loos, Minister of Industry; afterword by János Perényi.
Revue Politique et Parlementaire, n° 1082 — “Eurasie” dossier
The author reviews the criticisms levelled at the European system from both left and right, and proposes a framework of continental cooperation built on the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis, with rail infrastructure as the binding element.
Éditions L'Âge d'Homme
Henri de Grossouvre's first book, prefaced by General Pierre Marie Gallois, the man who persuaded de Gaulle to give France a nuclear deterrent. Within a Europe of nations, the essay argues for a strategic partnership between a restored Franco-German core and Russia, covering energy, security, space and the mastery of advanced technology. Less than a year after publication, the joint French, German and Russian opposition to the Iraq war put “Paris-Berlin-Moscow” on front pages worldwide.
AgoraVox
On the growth of rail freight between China and Europe and what it shifts, economically and geopolitically. The rail theme runs through his work from the 2017 article on greater continental Europe onwards.
Revue Défense Nationale, n° 838
A collective article published in the file “Have we entered the post-Western era?”. The authors argue that decarbonisation demands greater international cooperation, and that this offers the European Union and China an opening to move past their antagonisms and build a shared project.