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.16
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.17
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.18
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.”19 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.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, Ph
iladelphia, 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.
Chapter X
RUSSIA AND THE INDEPENDENT HEARTLAND
Alexander Solzhenitsyn opens his epic novel on World War I, August 1914, with a rhapsody about the Caucasus range, whose “each single indentation … brilliantly white with deep blue hollows … towered so vast above petty human creation, so elemental in a man-made world, that even if all the men who had lived in all the past millennia had opened their arms as wide as they could and carried everything they had ever created … and piled it all up in massive heaps, they could never have raised a mountain ridge as fantastic as the Caucasus.” Solzhenitsyn continues on in this vein, writing about the “snowy expanses,” “bare crags,” “gashes and ribs,” and “vaporous fragments indistinguishable from real clouds.”1
The Caucasus have throughout history held Russians, especially fierce nationalists like Solzhenitsyn, in fear and awe. Here, between the Black and Caspian seas, is a land bridge where Europe gradually vanishes amid a six-hundred-mile chain of mountains as high as eighteen thousand feet—mesmerizing in their spangled beauty, especially after the yawning and flat mileage of the steppe lands to the north. This is Russia’s Wild West, though the mountains lie to the south of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Here, since the seventeenth century, Russian colonizers have tried to subdue congeries of proud peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Ossetes, Daghestanis, Abkhaz, Kartvelians, Kakhetians, Armenians, Azeris, and others. Here, the Russians encountered Islam in both its moderation and implacability. The complex emotional reaction of the Russians to the very fact of the Caucasus, which both tantalize and threaten them, opens a window onto the entire Russian story.
Russia is the world’s preeminent land power, extending 170 degrees of longitude, almost halfway around the globe. Russia’s principal outlet to the sea is in the north, but that is blocked by Arctic ice many months of the year. Land powers are perennially insecure, as Mahan intimated. Without seas to protect them, they are forever dissatisfied and have to keep expanding or be conquered in turn themselves. This is especially true of the Russians, whose flat expanse is almost bereft of natural borders and affords little protection. Russia’s fear of land-bound enemies is a principal theme of Mackinder. The Russians have pushed into Central and Eastern Europe to block nineteenth-century France and twentieth-century Germany. They have pushed toward Afghanistan to block the British in India and to seek a warm water outlet on the Indian Ocean, and have pushed into the Far East to block China. As for the Caucasus, those mountains constitute the barrier that the Russians must dominate in order to be safe from the political and religious eruptions of the Greater Middle East.
Another geographical fact about Russia is its severe cold. The northernmost part of the United States lies at the 49th parallel of north latitude, where Canada begins. But the great mass of Russia lies north of the 50th parallel, so that the Russian population inhabits an even colder climate than do the Canadians, who live mainly along the U.S. border. “Because of latitude, remoteness from open seas, the barrier effects of mountains, and continentality,” writes geographer Saul Cohen, Russia’s climate leaves much of it both too cold and too dry for large-scale, permanent settlement.2 But the Caucasus, along with the parts of the Russian Far East that are close to the North Korean border, are the exceptions to this principle: so that another attraction of the Caucasus is their relatively mild temperatures at the 43rd parallel.3 Truly, the Russian climate and landscape are miserably rugged, and as such hold the keys to the Russians’ character and to their history.
The intense cold seems to have developed in the Russians “a capacity for suffering, a certain communalism, even a willingness to sacrifice the individual for the common good,” writes historian of Russia Philip Longworth, who explains that the short growing season of the high northern latitudes required “interdependence between farmers,” as well as “frenetic, strenuous effort, long hours in the field, and the mobilization of children,” because both sowing and reaping had to be done in haste. Moreover, low surpluses because of the cold encouraged the elites of the emerging Russian state to control wide areas, killing the incentive of farmers to work harder without compulsion, and contributing to a “violent tendency” in daily life.4 Russian communism, as well as a certain disdain for personal freedom until recently, have had their roots in a frigid landscape. The clearing of land, the building of churches and fortifications on the icy plain, and the chanting of Orthodox prayers all bespoke a heartrending communalism.
The northern belt of Russia between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean is frozen treeless tundra, covered in moss and lichen. When it melts in summer slush covers the land, which is infested with giant mosquitoes. South of the tundra lies the taiga, the world’s greatest coniferous forest, stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific. About 40 percent of these regions in Siberia and the Russian Far East are covered in permafrost. Finally, in southern Russia, reaching all the way from the Hungarian plain in the west, through Ukraine, the northern Caucasus, an
d Central Asia to far-off Manchuria, lies the steppe, the world’s vastest grassland, “the great grass road,” in the words of Russia scholar W. Bruce Lincoln.5 As Mackinder writes, the Russians were originally a people huddled in the shielding enclosure of the forest who, for the sake of their own security, had to seek out and conquer—from the High Middle Ages into the early modern era—the incoming Asiatic nomads of the steppe to the south and east. In particular, the protracted and humiliating presence of the Mongols—the Golden Horde near medieval Muscovy and the Blue Horde in Central Asia—which played a role in denying Russia the experience of the Renaissance, gave to the victimized Eastern Orthodox Slavs a commonality, energy, and sense of purpose that was crucial to them being able to eventually break out of the Tatar yoke and roll up large expanses of territory in more recent centuries.6 The Tatar yoke, according to historian G. Patrick March, instilled in the Russians a “greater tolerance for tyranny,” while inuring them to privation and afflicting them with a “paranoid fear of invasion.”7
Insecurity is the quintessential Russian national emotion. “The desire to find both roots and vindication in history grew partly out of the insecurity of the Eastern Plain,” writes Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in his great tome about Russian culture, The Icon and the Axe. “Geography, not history,” he says, has dominated Russian thinking:
Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant; and the ebb and flow of nomadic conquerors often seemed little more than the senseless movement of surface objects on an unchanging and unfriendly sea.8
The Revenge of Geography Page 17
