The Revenge of Geography (23 page)

The Soviet thrust into Central Europe in the latter phases of World War II created this entire turn of events, even as it bore out Mackinder’s thesis of Asiatic invasions shaping European destiny. Of course, we shouldn’t carry this determinism too far, since without the actions of one man, Adolf Hitler, World War II would not have occurred and there would have been no Soviet invasion in the first place.

But Hitler did exist, and so we are left with the situation as we have it today: the Europe of Charlemagne rules, but because of the
resurgence of a united Germany, the balance of power within Europe may shift slightly eastward to the confluence of Prussia and
Mitteleuropa
, with German economic power invigorating Poland, the Baltic states, and the upper Danube. The Mediterranean seaboard and the Byzantine-Ottoman Balkans lag behind. The worlds of the Mediterranean and the Balkans meet in mountainous and peninsular Greece, which despite being rescued from communism in the late 1940s remains among the most economically and socially troubled of European Union members. Greece, at the northwestern edge of Hodgson’s Near Eastern Oikoumene, was the beneficiary of geography in antiquity—the place where the heartless systems of Egypt and Persia-Mesopotamia could be softened and humanized, leading to the invention of the West, so to speak. But in today’s Europe dominated from the north Greece finds itself at the wrong, orientalized end of things, far more stable and prosperous than places like Bulgaria and Kosovo, but only because it was spared the ravages of communism. Roughly three-quarters of Greek businesses are family-owned and rely on family labor, so that minimum wage laws do not apply, even as those without family connections cannot be promoted.
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This is a phenomenon that has deep cultural, and therefore historical and geographical roots.

Indeed, geography explains much. As noted in an earlier chapter, when the Warsaw Pact broke up, the formerly captive countries advanced economically and politically almost exactly according to their positions on the map: with Poland and the Baltic states, along with Hungary and the Bohemian end of Czechoslovakia performing the best, and the Balkan countries to the south suffering destitution and unrest. All the vicissitudes of the twentieth century notwithstanding—including the pulverizing effect of Nazism and communism—the legacies of Prussian, Habsburg, and Byzantine and Ottoman rules are still relevant. These empires were first and foremost creatures of geography, influenced as they all were by Mackinderesque migration patterns from the Asiatic east.

Thus, behold again that eleventh-century map of Europe, with the Holy Roman Empire resembling a united Germany at its center. All
around are region states: Burgundy, Bohemia, Pomerania, Estonia; with Aragon, Castille, Navarre, and Portugal to the southwest. Think now of the regional success stories in the twenty-first century, mainly in Carolingian Europe: Baden-Württemberg, the Rhône-Alps, Lombardy, and Catalonia. These, as Tony Judt reminds us, are for the most part northerners, who peer down on the so-called backward, lazy, subsidized Mediterranean south, even as they look in horror at the prospect of Balkan nations like Romania and Bulgaria joining the European Union.
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It is the center versus the periphery, with the losers in the periphery, generally—though not exclusively—in those regions closer geographically to the Middle East and North Africa. But precisely because the Brussels-headquartered European super-state has worked well enough for the northerly subregions like Baden-Württemberg and Catalonia, they have been liberated from their own one-size-fits-all, chain store national governments, and have consequently flourished by occupying historically anchored, economic, political, and cultural niches.

Beyond their dissatisfaction with Europe’s losers on the periphery, among prosperous northern Europeans there is an unease over the dissolution of society itself. National populations and labor forces are demographically stagnant in Europe, and consequently graying. Europe will lose 24 percent of its prime, working-age population by 2050, and its population of those over sixty years old will rise by 47 percent in that timeframe. This will likely lead to increased immigration of young people from the Third World to support Europe’s aging welfare states. While reports of Muslim domination of Europe have been exaggerated, the percentage of Muslims in major European countries will, in fact, more than triple by mid-century, from the current 3 percent to perhaps 10 percent of the population. Whereas in 1913 Europe had more people than China, by 2050 the combined populations of Europe, the United States, and Canada will comprise just 12 percent of the world total, down from 33 percent after World War I.
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Europe is certainly in the process of being demographically diminished by the rest of Asia and Africa, even as European populations themselves are becoming more African and Middle Eastern.

Indeed, the map of Europe is about to move southward, and once again to encompass the entire Mediterranean world, as it did not only under Rome, but under the Byzantines and Ottoman Turks, too. For decades, because of autocratic regimes that stifled economic and social development—while also being the facilitators of extremist politics—North Africa was effectively cut off from the northern rim of the Mediterranean. North Africa gave Europe economic migrants, and little more. But as North Africa states evolve into messy democracies the degree of political and economic interactions with nearby Europe will, at least over time, multiply (and some of those Arab migrants may return home as new opportunities in their homeland are created by reformist policies). The Mediterranean will become a connector, rather than the divider it has been during most of the postcolonial era.

Just as Europe moved eastward to encompass the former satellite states of the Soviet Union upon the democratic revolutions of 1989, Europe will now expand to the south to encompass the Arab revolutions. Tunisia and Egypt are not about to join the EU, but they are about to become shadow zones of deepening EU involvement. Thus, the EU itself will become an even more ambitious and unwieldy project than ever before. This is in keeping with Mackinder, who argued that the Sahara Desert denoted Europe’s real southern boundary because it cut off Equatorial Africa from the north.
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Nevertheless, the European Union, albeit beset by divisions, anxieties, and massive growing pains, will remain one of the world’s great postindustrial hubs. Thus, the ongoing power shift within it, eastward from Brussels-Strasbourg to Berlin—from the European Union to Germany—will be pivotal to global politics. For, as I will argue, it is Germany, Russia, and, yes, Greece, with only eleven million people, that most perceptively reveal Europe’s destiny.

The very fact of a united Germany has to mean comparatively less influence for the European Union than in the days of a divided Germany,
given united Germany’s geographical, demographic, and economic preponderance in the heart of Europe. Germany’s population is now 82 million, compared to 62 million in France, and almost 60 million in Italy. Germany’s gross domestic product is $3.65 trillion, compared with France’s $2.85 trillion and Italy’s $2.29 trillion. More key is the fact that whereas France’s economic influence is mainly limited to the countries of Cold War Western Europe, German economic influence encompasses both Western Europe and the former Warsaw Pact states, a tribute to its more central geographical position and trade links with both east and west.
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Besides its geographical position astride both maritime Europe and
Mitteleuropa
, Germans have a built-in cultural attitude toward trade. As Norbert Walter, then the senior economist for Deutsche Bank, told me long ago, “Germans would rather dominate real economic activities than strict financial activities. We keep clients, we find out what they need, developing niches and relationships over the decades.” This ability is aided by a particularly German dynamism; as the political philosopher Peter Koslowski once explained to me, “because so many Germans started from zero after World War II, they are aggressively modernist. Modernism and middle-class culture have been raised to the status of ideologies here.” United Germany is also spatially organized to take advantage of an era of flourishing northern European regions. Because of the tradition of small, independent states arising out of the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century—which still guides Germany’s federal system—there is no one great pressure cooker of a capital, but rather a series of smaller ones that manage to survive even in an era of a reborn Berlin. Hamburg is a media center, Munich a fashion center, Frankfurt the banking center, and so on, with a railway system that radiates impartially in all directions. Because Germany came late to unification in the second half of the nineteenth century, it has preserved its regional flavor that is so advantageous in today’s Europe. Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, in historical terms, is still recent, with trends taking decades to fully emerge, has reconnected Germany to Central
Europe, re-creating, in exceedingly subtle and informal ways, the First and Second reichs of the twelfth and nineteenth centuries: roughly equivalent to the Holy Roman Empire.

Besides the Berlin Wall’s collapse, another factor that has buttressed German geopolitical strength has been the historic German-Polish reconciliation that occurred during the mid-1990s. As former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes, “Through Poland, German influence could radiate northward—into the Baltic states—and eastward—into Ukraine and Belarus.” In other words, German power is enhanced by both a larger Europe, and also by a Europe in which
Mitteleuropa
reemerges as a separate entity.
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A critical factor in this evolution will be the degree to which European, and particularly German, quasi-pacifism holds up in the future. As the Britain-based strategist Colin Gray writes, “Snake-bitten … on the Somme, at Verdun, and by the Götterdämmerung of 1945, the powers of West-Central Europe have been convincingly debellicized.”
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Though it hasn’t only been the legacy of war and destruction that makes Europeans averse to military solutions (aside from peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions), it has also been the fact that Europe during the Cold War decades had its security provided for by the American superpower, and today faces no palpable conventional threat. “The threat to Europe comes not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,” says the German American academic and journalist Josef Joffe.
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But what if, according to Mackinder, Europe’s destiny is still subordinate to Asiatic history, in the form of a resurgent Russia?
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Then there might be a threat. For what drove the Soviet Union to carve out an empire in Eastern Europe at the end of World War II still holds today: a legacy of depredations against Russia by Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Frenchmen, and Germans, leading to the need for a cordon sanitaire of compliant regimes in the space between historic Russia and Central Europe. To be sure, the Russians will not deploy land forces to reoccupy Eastern Europe for the sake of a new cordon sanitaire, but through a combination of political and economic pressure, partly owing to Europe’s need for natural gas from Russia, Russians could exert undue influence
on their former satellites in years to come: Russia supplies some 25 percent of Europe’s gas, 40 percent of Germany’s, and nearly 100 percent of Finland’s and the Baltic states’.
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Moreover, we may all wake up from Europe’s epic economic and currency crisis to a world with greater Russian influence within the continent. Russia’s investment activities as well as its critical role as an energy supplier will loom larger in a weakened and newly divided Europe.

So, will a debellicized Germany partly succumb to Russian influence, leading to a somewhat Finlandized Eastern Europe and an even more hollow North Atlantic Treaty Alliance? Or will Germany subtly stand up to Russia through various political and economic means, even as its society remains immersed in a post-heroic quasi-pacifism? The former scenario threatens to prove the fears of Mackinder and other geographers right: that, in a geographical sense, there is no Central Europe or
Mitteleuropa
, only a maritime Europe and a continental one, with a crush zone in between. The latter scenario, on the other hand, would present a richly complex European destiny: one in which Central Europe would fully reappear and flower for the first time since before World War I; and a tier of states between Germany and Russia would equally flourish, as Mackinder hoped for, leaving Europe in peace, even as its aversion to military deployments is geopolitically inconvenient to the United States. In this scenario, Russia would accommodate itself to countries as far east as Ukraine and Georgia joining Europe. Thus, the
idea
of Europe, as a geographical expression of historic liberalism, would finally be realized. Europe went through centuries of political rearrangements in the Middle Ages following the collapse of Rome. And in search of that
idea
, Europe will continue to rearrange itself following the Long European War of 1914–1989.

Indeed, Europe has been in geographical terms many things throughout its history. Following the Age of Exploration, Europe moved laterally westward as commerce shifted across the Atlantic, making cities such as Quebec, Philadelphia, and Havana closer economically
to Western Europe than were cities like Kraków and Lvov in Eastern Europe; even as Ottoman military advances as far northwest as Vienna in the late seventeenth century cut off the Balkans from much of the rest of the European subcontinent. Of course, nowadays, Europe is shifting to the east as it admits former communist nations into the European Union, and to the south as it grapples with the political and economic stabilization of the southern shore of the Mediterranean in North Africa.

And in all these rearrangements, Greece, of all places, will provide an insightful register of the health of the European project. Greece is the only part of the Balkans accessible on several seaboards to the Mediterranean, and thus is the unifier of two European worlds. Greece is geographically equidistant between Brussels and Moscow, and is as close to Russia culturally as it is to Europe, by virtue of its Eastern Orthodox Christianity, in turn a legacy of Byzantium. Greece throughout modern history has been burdened by political underdevelopment. Whereas the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions in Europe were often of middle-class origins with political liberties as their goal, the Greek independence movement was a mainly ethnic movement with a religious basis. The Greek people overwhelmingly sided with Russia in favor of the Serbs and against Europe during the 1999 Kosovo War, even if the Greek government’s position was more equivocal. Greece is the most economically troubled European nation that was not part of the communist zone during the Cold War. Greece, going back to antiquity, is where Europe—and by inference the West—both ends and begins. The war that Herodotus chronicled between Greece and Persia established a “dichotomy” of West against East that persisted for millennia.
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Greece barely remained in the Western camp at the beginning of the Cold War, owing to its own civil war between rightists and communists, and the fateful negotiations between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin that ultimately made Greece part of NATO. Greece, as Mackinder writes, lies just outside the Eurasian Heartland and is thus accessible to sea power. But possession of Greece in some form by a Heartland power (namely Russia) “would probably carry with it the control of the World-Island.”
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