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

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