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Part II
THE EARLY-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY MAP
Chapter IX
THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPEAN DIVISIONS
When it comes to contemporary geopolitics, with its frequent upheavals and
evolutions, the focus is naturally on Afro-Asia, from the Middle East to China.
Europe tends to be left out of the equation, reduced as it often is to a financial
story. But this is a mistake. The European Union’s population of 500 million is
the third largest in the world after China’s and India’s. The EU’s economy of $16
trillion is larger than that of the United States. From its western extremity
Europe faces the heart of North America. It is as close to the Southern Cone of
South America as is the United States. From its eastern extremity, Europe
overlooks Afro-Eurasia. Europe lies at the heart of the Eastern or “Land”
Hemisphere, equidistant between the Russian Far East and South Africa.
1
In
fact, our geographical explanation of world politics should begin with Europe.
The perspective of Mackinder, Spykman, Morgenthau, and some of the other
thinkers we have considered is in large part a European one. Thus, to see how
the world has evolved since their day it helps to start where they did. Though
Marshall Hodgson is obviously right about the primacy of the Near Eastern
Oikoumene, that region will constitute one of the climaxes of our journey, and so
we need not commence with it. Not to worry, Europe will lead us organically to
geographical consideration of Russia, China, the Indian Subcontinent, and the
Greater Middle East. To understand geopolitics in the twenty-first century, we
must start with the twentieth, and that means with Europe.
Europe, as we know from Mackinder, has had its destiny shaped by the influx
of Asian hordes. And indeed, in the twenty-first century, Europe will continue to
be pivotally influenced by its relations with the East, particularly with Russia.
The degree to which Central and Eastern Europe can develop a belt of
prosperous and stable states from the ashes of communism will go a long way to
protect Europe from Russia, and, in the process, convert the dream of a revived
Mitteleuropa
into reality: a dream that liberal intellectuals actually share with
Mackinder.
Yet Europe, precisely because of its quest for a wider and deeper unity, will
also continue to be bedeviled by its own internal divisions, which, despite the
economic form that these rifts now exhibit on the surface—as with German
anger over the Greek debt crisis—are in truth the timeless expressions of
geography: that is to say, the different development patterns of Germany in
northern Europe and Greece in Mediterranean and Balkan Europe. Europe,
largely because of how technology facilitates the movement of peoples, will
certainly see its history increasingly intertwined with Africa to the south and
Asia to the east. But concomitantly, Europe will not be denied its variety within.
In other words, the very fact that Europe at the moment faces no conventional
military threat could leave it prey to the narcissism of small differences. And
that, in turn, could make Spykman’s worries about a unified Europe challenging
the United States premature.
It is the delicious complexity of Europe’s geography, with its multiplicity of
seas, peninsulas, river valleys, and mountain masses that have assisted in the
formation of separate language groups and nation-states, which will continue to
contribute to political and economic disunity in the years to come, despite pan-
European institutions. Europe, the map suggests, has a significant future in the
headlines.
Europe, in the words of the Oxford archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is the “westerly
excrescence” of the continent of Asia, a massive peninsula which came to
dominate world politics in the course of the second millennium
A.D
. Geography
ordained this, as we know from McNeill, and Cunliffe elaborates on McNeill’s
thesis. Europe lay in a “congenial” ecozone between the deserts of Africa and
the ice sheets of the Arctic, with a climate moderated by the Gulf Stream.
Europe was rich in resources, with wood, stone, metals, and furs. Most crucially,
Europe has a deviating and shattered coastline, indented with many good natural
harbors, and cluttered with islands and halfislands. This coastline is 23,000 miles
long—an epic length equal to the circumference of the earth. In fact, Europe has
a higher ratio of coastline to landmass than any other continent or subcontinent.
2
Europe borders on no fewer than four enclosed and semi-enclosed seas that
squeeze the subcontinent, so to speak, into a relatively narrow peninsula: the
Mediterranean, the Black, the Baltic, and the North seas; even as Europe has an
advantageous riverine topography blessed with cross-peninsula routes—the
Rhine, the Elbe, and above all the Danube. The Danube, as the Italian devotee of
Central Europe, Claudio Magris, rhapsodizes, “draws German culture, with its
dream of an Odyssey of the spirit, towards the east, mingling it with other
cultures in countless hybrid metamorphoses.”
3
There are, too, the Moravian Gap,
the Brenner Pass, and the broad plain through France to the Rhône valley that act
as corridors from one part of Europe to another.
This very elaborate interface between land and water, and the fact that Europe
is protected from—and yet accessible to—a vast ocean, has led to maritime
dynamism and mobility among Europe’s peoples, as well as contributing to an
intense range of landscapes inside Europe itself. That, in turn, has led to
strikingly different human communities, and ultimately to the outbreak of power
politics: from warring Athenians, Spartans, Romans, Iberians, Phoenicians, and
Scythians and other barbarian tribes in antiquity, to the conflicts between French,
Germans, and Russians—and between Prussians, Habsburgs, and Ottomans—in
the modern era. Yet despite these divisions, a lowland corridor from the Atlantic
to the Black Sea, for example, has allowed travelers for centuries to cross the
length of Europe in relative comfort, contributing to Europe’s cohesion and
superior sense of itself, as ably demonstrated by Magris’s prose.
4
Moreover, the
fact that distances are short within Europe has been another unifying factor: from
Lisbon to Warsaw, that is, from one end of Europe to the other, it is only 1,500
miles.
Geography, in other words, has helped determine that there is an
idea
called
Europe, the geographical expression of liberal humanism by way of the post–
World War II merging of sovereignty. This pacifying trend, as well as a reaction
to devastating military conflict in all historical ages, is also the product of many
hundreds of years of material and intellectual advancement. And yet there exists,
too, several Europes, at times in conflict with one another. For the economic
divisions we see today in the form of a currency crisis actually have a basis in
history and geography.
In the years immediately before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, as
we have seen in an earlier chapter, intellectuals celebrated the concept of Central
Europe—of
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