The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

Mitteleuropa
—as a beacon of multiethnic tolerance and historic
liberalism, to which the contiguous Balkans and Third World regions further
afield could and should aspire. But in truth, the political heart of twenty-first-
century Europe lies slightly to the northwest of 
Mitteleuropa:
it starts with the
Benelux states, then meanders south along the Franco-German frontier to the
approaches of the Alps. To wit, there is the European Commission and its civil
service in Brussels, the European Court in The Hague, the treaty town of
Maastricht, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and so on. In fact, all these
places lie athwart a line running southward from the North Sea “that formed the
centerpiece and primary communications route of the ninth-century Carolingian
monarchy,” observes the late eminent scholar of modern Europe Tony Judt.
5
The
fact that the budding European super-state of our own era is concentrated in
Europe’s medieval core, with Charlemagne’s capital city of Aachen (Aix-la-
Chapelle) still at its very center, is no accident. For nowhere on the continent,
more so than along this spinal column of Old World civilization, is Europe’s sea
and land interface quite as rich and profound. In the Low Countries there is the
openness to the great ocean, even as the entrance to the English Channel and a
string of islands in Holland form a useful protective barrier, giving these small
states advantages out of proportion to their size. Immediately in the rear of this
North Sea coast is a wealth of protected rivers and waterways, all promising
trade, movement, and consequent political development. The loess soil of
northwestern Europe is dark and productive, even as the forests provide a natural
defense. Finally, the cold climate between the North Sea and the Alps, much

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more so than the warmer climate south of the Alps, has been sufficiently
challenging to stimulate human resolve from the Late Bronze Age forward, with
Franks, Alamanni, Saxons, and Frisians settling in late antiquity in Gaul, the
Alpine Foreland, and the coastal lowlands. Here, in turn, would be the proving
grounds of Francia and the Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century, of
Burgundy, Lorraine, Brabant, and Friesland, too, and of city-states like Trier and
Liege, all of which collectively displaced Rome, and evolved into polities that
today drive the machinery of the European Union.
Of course, before all of the above came Rome, and before Rome ancient
Greece: both of which, in William McNeill’s choice words, constituting the
antechambers of the “anciently civilized” world that began in Egypt and
Mesopotamia, and spread from there, through Minoan Crete and Anatolia, to the
northern shore of the Mediterranean. Civilization, as we know, took root in warm
and protected river valleys such as the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates, and continued
its migration into the relatively mild climates of the Levant, North Africa, and
the Greek and Italian peninsulas, where living was hospitable with only
rudimentary technology.
But though European civilization had its initial flowering along the
Mediterranean, it continued to develop, in ages of more advanced technology
and mobility, further to the north in colder climes. Here Rome had expanded in
the decades before the start of the common era, providing for the first time
political order and domestic security from the Carpathians in the southeast to the
Atlantic in the northwest: that is, throughout much of Central Europe and the
region by the North Sea and English Channel. Large settlement complexes,
called 
oppida
by Julius Caesar, emerged throughout this sprawling, forested, and
well-watered European black-soil heartland, which provided the rudimentary
foundation for the emergence of medieval and modern cities.
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Just as Roman expansion gave a certain stability to the so-called barbarian
tribes of northern Europe, Rome’s breakup would lead over the centuries to the
formation of peoples and nation-states with which we are now familiar, and
which was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia following the Thirty Years’
War in 1648. As the scholar William Anthony Hay writes, “Pressure from
nomadic tribes on the steppes and European periphery started a chain effect that
pushed other groups living in more or less settled cultures into the vacuum
created by the collapse of Roman power.”
7
That is, Rome’s collapse, coupled
with the onslaught westward from the peoples of the steppe, together aided the
formation of national groups in Central and northwestern Europe.
Antiquity was, above all, defined by the geographic hold of the
Mediterranean, and as that hold “slackened,” with Rome losing its hinterlands in
northern Europe and the Near East, the world of the Middle Ages was born.
8
Mediterranean unity was further shattered by the Arab sweep through North
Africa.
9
Already by the eleventh century the map of Europe has a modern
appearance, with France and Poland roughly in their present shapes, the Holy
Roman Empire in the guise of a united Germany, and Bohemia—with Prague at
its center—presaging the Czech Republic. Thus did history move north.
Mediterranean societies, despite their innovations in politics—Athenian
democracy and the Roman Republic—were, by and large, in the words of the
French historian and geographer Fernand Braudel, defined by “traditionalism

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and rigidity.” The poor quality of Mediterranean soils favored large holdings that
were, perforce, under the control of the wealthy. And that, in turn, contributed to
an inflexible social order. Meanwhile, in the forest clearings of northern Europe,
with their richer soils, grew up a freer civilization, anchored by the informal
power relationships of feudalism, that would be better able to take advantage of
the invention of movable type and other technologies yet to come.
10
As deterministic as Braudel’s explanation may appear, it does work to explain
the broad undercurrents of the European past. Obviously, human agency in the
persons of such men as Jan Hus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin was pivotal to
the Protestant Reformation, and hence to the Enlightenment, that would allow
for northern Europe’s dynamic emergence as one of the cockpits of history in the
modern era. Nevertheless, all that could not have happened without the immense
river and ocean access, and the loess earth, rich with coal and iron ore deposits,
which formed the background for such individual dynamism and
industrialization. Great, eclectic, and glittering empires there certainly were
along the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, notably the Norman Roger II’s in
twelfth-century Sicily, and lest we forget, the Renaissance flowered first in late
medieval Florence, with the art of Michelangelo and the secular realism of
Machiavelli. But it was the pull of the colder Atlantic which opened up global
shipping routes that ultimately won out against the enclosed Mediterranean.
While Portugal and Spain were the early beneficiaries of this Atlantic trade—
owing to their protruding peninsular position—their pre-Enlightenment societies,
traumatized by the proximity of (and occupation by) North African Muslims,
lost ground eventually to the Dutch, French, and English in the oceanic
competition. So just as Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire succeeded Rome, in
modern times northern Europe has now succeeded southern Europe, with the
mineral-rich Carolingian core winning out in the form of the European Union: in
no small measure because of geography.
The medieval Mediterranean was itself divided between the Frankish west and
the Byzantine east. For it wasn’t only divisions between north and south that
both define and plague Europe today, but also those between west and east and,
as we shall see, between the northwest and the center. Consider the migration
route of the Danube valley that continues eastward beyond the Great Hungarian
Plain, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, all the way through the Pontic and Kazakh
steppes to Mongolia and China.
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This geographical fact, along with the flat,
unimpeded access to Russia further north, forms the basis for the waves of
invasions of mainly Slavic and Turkic peoples from the east that Mackinder
details in his “Geographical Pivot of History” article, and which have, as we

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know, greatly shaped Europe’s political destiny. So just as there is a Carolingian
Europe and a Mediterranean Europe, there is, too, often as a result of these
invasions from the east, a Byzantine-Ottoman Europe, a Prussian Europe, and a
Habsburg Europe, all of which are geographically distinct, and that live today
through somewhat differing economic development patterns: differing patterns
that cannot simply be erased by the creation of a single currency.
For example, in the fourth century 
A.D
., the Roman Empire itself divided into
western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire,
while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome’s western
empire gave way to Charlemagne’s kingdom further north and to the Vatican:
Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire—Byzantium—was
populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Muslims,
when the Ottoman Turks, migrating from the east, captured Constantinople in
1453. The border between these eastern and western empires ran through the
middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia.
When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially the breakup
echoed the divisions of Rome sixteen centuries earlier. The Slovenes and Croats
were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary
to Rome in the West; the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-
Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East. The Carpathians, which run northeast of
the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, partially reinforced
this boundary between Rome and Byzantium, and later between the Habsburg
emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople.
12
Passes and,
thus, trade routes existed through these formidable mountains, bringing the
cultural repository of