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.
20
But
what if, according to Mackinder, Europe’s destiny is still subordinate to Asiatic
history, in the form of a resurgent Russia?
21
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’.
22
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.
23
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.”
24
Of course, Russia is not going to be taking control of Greece anytime soon.
Yet it is interesting to contemplate what would have happened during the Cold
War had the negotiations between Churchill and Stalin gone differently: imagine
how much stronger the Kremlin’s strategic position would have been with
Greece inside the communist bloc, endangering Italy across the Adriatic Sea, to
say nothing of the whole eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Greek
financial crisis, so emblematic of Greece’s
political and economic
underdevelopment, rocked the European Union’s currency system beginning in
2010, and because of the tensions it wrought between northern and southern
European countries was nothing less than the most significant challenge to the
European project since the wars of the Yugoslav secession. As Greece ably
demonstrates, Europe remains a truly ambitious work in progress: one that will
be influenced by trends and convulsions from the south and east in a world
reeling from a crisis of room.
