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William Anthony Hay is a research fellow at FPRI and book review editor of Orbis. The author thanks David Gress and other participants at FPRI’s April 2002 conference on Teaching about Geography and Geopolitics for their remarks on the subject.
Geopolitics provides helpful insights on Europe’s history and its current politics. Topography, climate, and resources all affect relationships among states, and “doing the map” can help clarify the motives of statesmen and governments. In broader terms, geographic factors also shape social and cultural developments, which have political consequences of their own. Geopolitics rightly understood serves as a useful corrective to the view promoted by globalization advocates, who say that technology has surmounted the constraints imposed by geography, whether understood in physical or political terms. The challenge of applying geopolitics, however, lies in finding the correct perspective. Lord Salisbury once attributed his colleagues’ fears of Russian threats to the Turkish straits and their consequences for British control of the Suez Canal to looking at the wrong size maps. His point highlights the way political and technological factors alter geopolitics even where the physical geography itself remains unchanged. The best understanding of geopolitics comes from taking a historical approach, examining developments in the field over time rather than looking at a snapshot that depicts only a single period. Understanding the history of geopolitical conceptions in Europe also helps address the politically contentious question of defining Europe.
Geopolitics developed as a concept in Europe late in the nineteenth century and reflected several nineteenth-century trends, including the shift from a European state system shaped by the balance of power to a more unstable system that included states and colonial territories. Beginning in the 1880s, imperialism was presenting European governments with challenges involving the relationships between power, resources, and space that took different forms for leading states. [1] Naval strategists such as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett explored the relationship between control of the seas and the projection of power on land. Sir Halford Mackinder adopted a different perspective based upon land power when he set out a theory of the relationship between geography and politics in a 1904 lecture, “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Arguing that European civilization derived from the struggle against invaders from Asia, he described the core regions of Eurasia as a pivot area that gave whichever power dominated it control over an outer crescent spanning from Europe to East Asia. At the time, railways and other improved land transport had made this inland area more accessible than ever before, thereby shifting the strategic calculus in favor of land power. [2]
Mackinder’s view contrasted sharply with the historical interpretation of sea power that Mahan had offered a few years earlier, but it influenced the German general-turned-academic Karl Haushofer, who led the Munich Institut für Geopolitik. Geopolitical ideas along these lines suited Germany’s position in the 1920s and ‘30s and justified Adolf Hitler’s ambitions for territorial expansion. The fact that one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of geopolitics is “a pseudoscience developed in National Socialist Germany” cannot be surprising.
That geopolitics became seen in this way illustrates both its elasticity as a concept and the European milieu from which it originated. Even after it became absorbed in the general study of international relations, geopolitics was variously defined and often appeared to be little more than realist thought expressed through maps. Theorists made it easy to misunderstand geopolitics as merely an idiom for expressing calculations “of national interest that give short shrift to morality and economic matters except insofar as they served narrow national ambitions.” [3] Even Mackinder had remarked that his contemporaries in late nineteenth-century Britain thought that “the study of maps by the young promoted strategical [sic], that is military and imperialist ways of thinking.” [4] Clearing away the debris of such thinking, whether American, British, or German, demonstrates that the real basis of geopolitics lies in Oxford’s main definition of it, “the influence of geography on the political character of states, their history, institutions, and especially relations with other states.”
Although geographers often define Europe as a subcontinent of Asia rather than a true continent, the mountains and steppes that divide the European peninsula from Asia presented a formidable barrier to communications prior to the nineteenth century. [5] Wind and current patterns from the Atlantic Ocean, particularly the Gulf Stream, provide a temperate climate with high rainfall despite Europe’s northern location (Britain shares the same latitude as the barren regions of Labrador and Kamchatka). The moist climate of Northern Europe and the Atlantic seaboard promotes agriculture and means that Europe needs neither the artificial irrigation nor the political organizations to sustain it that created the hydraulic despotisms of China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Central America.
While climate varies by region, Europe lacks the extremes seen elsewhere, and areas known as coldest or hottest do not compare with their counterparts in Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Europe has a higher ratio of shoreline (more than 23,000 miles) to landmass than other continents or subcontinents, and the long, indented coast with natural harbors and such major offshore archipelagos as the British Isles encourages water transport and fishing. Africa’s long coastline, by contrast, lacks good harbors, and the consequent limited access to the sea created a very different pattern of development from Europe’s. Neighboring seas provide a natural extension of Europe as much as they set its boundaries.
Despite its relatively small area, Europe has a diverse internal geography divided by topographical features including mountains, rivers, and forests. The combination of proximity and fragmentation defined Europe’s development. A lowland area from the great plains of Eastern and Central Europe to the Atlantic coast establishes a corridor that runs from east to west with the Baltic to the north and Carpathian and Alps to the south. The Pripet Marshes east of the Vistula divide the plain into two natural pathways, one leading along the Baltic coast and the other into Central Europe. Thickly wooded regions of the Ardennes, Hartz, and Teutoberger Wald break up the plain, along with such rivers as the Oder and Rhine. Such physical barriers provided security for stable development, and the open plains of Eastern Europe were among the last areas to be permanently settled. Communication routes that run from north to south through the mountains connect Northern Europe with the Mediterranean. The Moravian Gap, Brenner Pass, and a major line through France to the Rhone valley are the most important corridors. Short journeys in Burgundy or the Alps link rivers that allow travelers to pass from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, Atlantic, or Baltic. In the east, the Dvina-Dnieper portage near Vitebst brings the Baltic and Black Seas together. Topography effectively divides Europe so as to restrict expansion by political entities, but it also creates pathways that invite communication between regions. Rivers and seas have the same dual effect as barriers and highways. Europe’s geographical features thus promoted diverse economies and cultures that retained connections with one another.
Europe is effectively divided into inner and outer Europe. Some of the most wealthy and developed societies of Europe today are at the edges of a European core based on France, the Low Countries, Western Germany, and Northern Italy. Mountains or seas separate Iberia, Scandinavia, and the Balkans from the heart of Europe. The Italian peninsula played a central role in Europe’s development. Its northern regions maintain close ties with neighbors across the Alps, but the Mezzogiorno and Sicily remain on Europe’s periphery. Offshore islands including Sardinia, Corsica, and Crete as well as the British Isles also stand apart from the core regions of the European peninsula. The plains of Eastern Europe that comprise Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine mark the borderlands between Europe and Asia, and permanent settlement in these marchlands only dates from the eighteenth century, when authorities contained nomadic raiders from the steppes. Tensions between these peripheral regions that differ greatly from one another shaped European history and remain a key factor in Europe’s geopolitics today.
Specific events and historical periods define Europe’s geopolitics as much as terrain and climate. Identifying the essential qualities of European geopolitics in terms of what are assumed to be its outcomes presents a misleading view. An effective historical approach cannot read contemporary perspectives into the past in a search for origins. History presents key developments in a context that balances change with continuity, along with cultural and technological factors that shaped perceptions of geography and its political impact. Technology or cultural affinities can make distance, for example, a more or less important factor. The specific effect varies at different times. Two themes, however, recur in European geopolitics, albeit in different forms: first, the political fragmentation of Europe, and second, the historic division between East and West.
Greece served as the foundation of Europe’s culture and provides a template for understanding its subsequent history. The conflicts Herodotus chronicled between Greeks and Persia established a dichotomy of East against West that persisted. Persia, also referred to as the Mede, became “the other” against which Greeks defined themselves. Greeks who adopted Persian ways or accepted Persian suzerainty of material advantage were accused of “Medism.” [6] A compact area divided by mountains and seas, Greece encouraged the development of societies with distinct identities in close proximity and exhibited the same characteristic of geographic diversity within a narrow sphere that characterized Europe as a whole. Political relationships among Greek city-states resembled the international system that emerged between the late Middle Ages and the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Geography and limited resources forced Greeks to look beyond their immediate territories. Trade and colonization extended the Greek world into the Mediterranean, and Magna Graecia took root in Sicily and Southern Italy along with the Aegean and Black Sea littoral. The Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 BCE left a weakened Greece vulnerable to Macedonia and later Rome. Thucydides’ epic narrative of the contest became a defining text in discussing relationships between states, and twentieth-century observers compared the great European wars of their own day to the Peloponnesian wars. [7]
By contrast, Rome became the model for universal empire in Europe. After defeating Carthage in 146 BCE, it faced no serious rivals within the Mediterranean world and limited pressure from beyond it. Persia and the Parthian empires checked expansion into Asia beyond Syria and Anatolia, while Arminius’ defeat of three legions under Quintilius Varus in 9 CE in the Teutoburgerwald deterred further Roman moves into the forests beyond the Rhine. Such peripheral constraints aside, Rome forged the Mediterranean littoral and much of Western Europe into a single political, economic, and cultural entity. Sea communications and roads linked distant provinces, with roads and cities becoming physical features that persisted into the modern era. Frontiers that ran along the Rhine and Danube marked the empire’s boundaries, and the cordon imposed by these lines had a lingering cultural impact on Europe after Rome’s decline and fall. The Mediterranean Sea united provinces in the Middle East and North Africa with Europe. Mackinder argued that the Sahara marked Europe’s southern boundary because the desert severed African regions beyond it from sustained contact with the north. [8]
The collapse of the western Roman Empire in 476, invasions by barbarian tribes, and finally the Arab sweep through the Middle East and North Africa shattered the unified Mediterranean world Rome had created. Europe’s center of gravity shifted gradually north across the Alps and became divided between east and west, a division that grew more profound as the two regions drew apart. The contrast between Greek- and Latin-speaking regions had persisted after Rome conquered the Greek world, with all its cultural implications. The separation of the empire into eastern and western divisions in the late third century, ruled from separate capitals, intensified this. The foundation of Constantinople in 330 shifted power from Rome as the Eastern, later Byzantine, Empire became predominant.
Differences between Western and Eastern Christianity deepened the existing cultural and administrative divide. Subsequently those parts of Europe converted to Christianity by the Roman Church became integrated into Western Christianity, while the Orthodox Church in Constantinople spread Greek culture along with its version of the faith among the Slavs in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The fact that Poles and Bohemians, both Slavic peoples converted by Rome, consider themselves part of the West and define their identity in part against Orthodox Russia, gives a measure of the long-term impact of the Catholic-Orthodox split. The sacking of Constantinople by the fourth crusade in 1203–4, described by Orthodox writers as “the great betrayal,” cemented this east-west distinction in Europe. Two European cultural spheres emerged, but Latin Christendom became synonymous with Europe in a way that excluded the East from participating in Europe.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 shattered the old map created by the legions, and what German writers later called the Völkerwanderung, or wandering of peoples, established new frontiers that defined medieval and modern Europe. Pressures 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. Franks, Angles, Saxons, Lombards, and Burgundians each found territorial niches and gave their names to lands they occupied. Other displaced peoples such as the Welsh and Bretons occupied marginal areas that proved more defensible than earlier settlements. Relationships between local rulers and ecclesiastical authorities along the lines of Charlemagne’s bargain with Pope Leo III in 800 conferred legitimacy on new arrangements. The Islamic challenge to Europe from the seventh century forced the Church to rely on support from secular rulers by turning the Mediterranean into a theater of war. Arab armies conquered Iberia and threw the Byzantine Empire on the defensive, and Medieval Christendom in both its Eastern and Western branches defined itself against Islam. Despite the lingering commercial importance of the Mediterranean, Europe’s political, economic, and cultural base shifted north in the centuries after Rome’s final collapse.
Some of the important migrations in the early medieval era were seaborne. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes laid the foundations of England. Celts from Great Britain settled in Brittany, and Scandinavians landed in areas from Ireland and northern France to what would become Russia. The narrow seas around Great Britain and the European peninsula became as much a thoroughfare during this period as they later would later be a barrier to invasion. [9] Viking depredations from the eighth through eleventh centuries caused no less havoc than raids by Huns and Magyars across the European plain, and their ships allowed the Vikings voyages as far as Greenland while also having sufficiently shallow drafts to penetrate far inland along river systems including the Dvina, Dnieper, and Volga.
By the ninth century Norsemen settled permanently in Normandy, Iceland, and the Danelaw along England’s eastern coast, and Rurik the Varangian and his successors organized the first Russian principalities at Kiev and Novgorod. Vikings set a pattern of exploiting seaborne and riverine communications that would be followed in peaceful form by the Hanseatic League and other merchants during the high Middle Ages.
Regions of the former Carolingian Empire ruled by Charlemagne’s heirs, along with the British Isles and the narrow rump of Christian Spain that withstood the Arab onslaught, formed the core of Latin Europe in the ninth century. That branch of Christendom remained distinct from that of both the Byzantine Empire and other regions of Eastern Europe. The expansion of Latin Europe between the late tenth and early fourteenth centuries cast a long geopolitical shadow. [10] Conversion to Christianity and the establishment of bishoprics that followed integrated pagan Scandinavia and Slavic lands into Christendom, part of a deeper shift toward the Romano-Germanic civilization that developed within the former Carolingian realm. Migration, often at the invitation of local rulers eager to recruit trained knights or develop their lands, changed culture and demographics across the European periphery. In some regions such as Greece or Sicily this imposed a temporary veneer on local populations, but elsewhere it had a deeper effect. German settlements known as the Ostbewegung shifted the center of Germany from the Rhine to Bohemia by the fourteenth century, and the movement that had begun with efforts to convert Slavs to Christianity proceeded to Germanize elites and establish ties with territories further West.
This was more than the aristocratic diaspora seen elsewhere as younger sons excluded by primogeniture sought lands of their own. Agents who offered peasants land on favorable terms and governance under their own customs drew groups of Flemish and German settlers to trek East. Ashkenazi Jews also joined this migration, seeking opportunities and refuge from persecution in the Rhineland associated with the First Crusade in 1096. Although it lacked government sponsorship in the territories where it originated, this transfer of population amounted to the German colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. England’s gradual absorption of Ireland and Wales and Spain’s reconquista of Iberia from the Arabs offer more systematic counterparts to the Ostbewegunh and created a pattern for colonization in the Americas from the sixteenth century.
Geography and other factors imposed countervailing pressures against the integration of Europe under a single political authority. Comparing Europe’s development with Chinese history from the late sixth century underlines the role independent or quasi-independent states played in European geopolitics. The medieval fragmentation of authority between secular rulers and their ecclesiastical counterparts, along with rules governing feudal relationships, inhibited efforts to consolidate the Holy Roman Empire, while other realms such as France and England became effective states. Unlike the empires that developed in China and elsewhere, Europe became a system of independent states in which “the preservation of a balance of power among all the members of the system” prevented any monarch from gaining hegemony. [11] The balance of power as a concept emerged in the eighteenth century, but the conditions that defined it were evident in fifteenth century relations among Italian states and in European politics more generally. The Habsburg Emperor Charles V acknowledged the problems of sustaining a universal monarchy in Europe by dividing his realm between the Spanish and Imperial thrones upon his abdication in 1556. The Protestant Reformation created additional cultural divisions and reinforced Europe’s political fragmentation when it split Latin Christendom.
The Thirty Years War of 1618–48 started as a religious conflict that involved an effort to impose the Holy Roman Empire’s authority on Protestant rulers within Germany. It quickly expanded into a dynastic quarrel between Habsburg Austria and Bourbon France that drew Sweden and Denmark into a devastating conflict that left Germany divided and impoverished. A French-led alliance blocked the Habsburg bid for hegemony in Europe and preserved the autonomy of German princes and city-states, creating a power vacuum in Central Europe, and Germany became a cockpit for struggles involving other European states, including a Russian Empire that became a part of the European system from Peter the Great onward. A similar fragmentation defined Italy through the later nineteenth century, and contrasted with both the nation-states of western and northern Europe and the multinational Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman empires of Eastern Europe. This power vacuum remained until Prussia united Germany in 1870. A similar fragmentation among city-states and principalities defined Italian politics from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, when Piedmont became the central force behind Italian unification.
The Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War confirmed the emergence of a state system in which powers would build coalitions against aspiring hegemons. Diplomatic practices emerged during the Renaissance that reflected the rise of state power and the legal concept of sovereignty. They became refined into the “Concert of Europe” over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and provided the foundations for today’s international system. The state system set Europe apart from other regions, as well as from the Roman and Byzantine Empires of the past. Joining the system as Russia did in the eighteenth century meant becoming part of Europe, and the term Europe itself had replaced the older designation of Christendom in the mid-seventeenth century. [12] Gibbon described Europe as “one great republic … divided into twelve powerful, though unequal kingdoms, three respectable commonwealths, and a variety of smaller, though independent states.” [13] Competition among states for wealth and prestige in peacetime served as a counterpoint to limits imposed by the system in wartime. The partitioning of Poland by Austria, Russia, and Prussia is an important exception to the idea that a balance of power imposes restraints on states, but Edmund Burke and Lord Acton both noted that the partition undermined Europe’s political order, paving the way for the French Revolution and the years of violence it brought. [14]
After 1815, the Congress System developed in the aftermath of the wars to contain Napoleonic France established a more stable European equilibrium that brought a century of peace. Paul Schroeder described the context for diplomacy it produced as a civic association with rules, understandings, and procedures that states used to pursue their own interests within the framework of a shared balance. Major states had a stake in preserving smaller powers within the system both to sustain the balance and neutralize potential conflicts. [15]
Modern Europe thus developed into the “civic association” described by Enlightenment observers such as Gibbon and William Robertson, reflecting both its political fragmentation and its East/West divide. This structure proved fairly stable despite periodic challenges, particularly in the century after 1815. Only radical social and economic changes by the late nineteenth century and expansion of the international system beyond Europe itself created a new pattern for European geopolitics.
Along with the development of the European state system, the early modern era saw the opening of a new frontier for European expansion. Voyages of discovery charted new trade routes to Asia that avoided the Ottoman Empire while tapping markets in Africa and the Americas. European expansion throughout the Atlantic world added a new dimension to European geopolitics that lasted into the early nineteenth century. At the same time, Muslim invasions pushed the contested frontier between Islam and Europe westward before gradually receding as the Ottoman Empire fell into terminal decline. These episodes show that Europe’s borders involve more than topography.
Colonization in America, particularly the Caribbean and North America, created an Atlantic world that dominated the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European economy. Triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas facilitated development on both sides of the Atlantic. Ships provided the most cost-effective way of transporting bulk cargo, and technological advances in navigation and marine architecture transformed calculations of distance. Mercantilist economic policies created a structure by which primary products from colonies were exchanged for metropolitan manufactures. Furs, tobacco, and tropical produce could then be sold profitably within Europe. One-fifth of France’s trade was with its Caribbean colonies, and commerce shifted toward the Atlantic trade. [16] Colonial towns such as Havana, Philadelphia, and Quebec were closer in real terms for West Europeans than Krakow, Prague, or Lvov. The Atlantic World should be understood primarily as an extension of Western Europe.
European colonists recreated their societies in the New World, and late medieval expansion offered a ready model for conquest. Spain pioneered its empire-building techniques during the reconquesta of Iberia from the Muslims and later in occupying the Canary Islands. The adelanto system by which soldiers licensed by the crown financed their own campaigns in return for lands, repaying investors from the spoils shifted the cost from government to the colonizers themselves. Ecclesiastical structures helped pacify newly occupied territories and integrated them into an hegemonic Spanish culture. [17] Effective implementation of royal authority and the absence of provincial liberties, known as fueros, or other institutions that restrained the crown marked a key difference between colonies and metropolitan Spain. Irish plantations under Elizabeth I and James I set the pattern for English colonies, especially in North America, with separation between colonists and natives. Historians such as David Hackett Fisher have described the transfer of folkways from European regions to North American settlements, and cultural ties persisted despite modifications to suit new environments. Colonial societies remained extensions of their European homelands in many ways, and Europe became a shorthand term that described overseas settlements as well as the peninsula itself. [18] Just as the Ostbewegung expanded the German cultural sphere into Eastern Europe, so the Atlantic World created an overseas Hispanosphere and Anglosphere whose impact on Europe persists today.
Competition between Britain, France, and Spain over trade and territory in the Caribbean and North America shaped eighteenth-century European geopolitics. Struggles between Austria and Prussia found a parallel in Anglo-Spanish trade wars or the Anglo-French struggle for mastery in North America. The network of European alliances, Britain’s dynastic ties with Hanover after 1714, and French relationships with Poland and the German states connected the conflicts. Gains in one theatre could be traded for compensation elsewhere as Britain’s cession of Louisbourg in Acadia after the War of Austrian Succession in 1748 showed. During the Seven Years War, William Pitt the Elder aptly spoke of America’s having been conquered in Germany. [19] Like other regions within Europe, the Atlantic world played a part in European politics.
Although it remains an extension of the European cultural and geopolitical sphere today, the role of the Atlantic world changed between 1776 and 1825. Independence movements severed direct political ties first between Britain and the United States, and then a generation later between Spain and all its colonies but Cuba and Puerto Rico. Under British rule Quebec followed a different pattern of development from metropolitan France that sustained the dominant role of the Roman Catholic Church until the 1960s. Caribbean territories became less economically important for the British Empire and Europe as a whole by the mid-nineteenth century than before. Control over the Atlantic world shifted even earlier as Britain gained a degree of maritime supremacy after Trafalgar in 1805 comparable to Napoleon’s hegemony in continental Europe. Britain excluded France and French-occupied Europe from overseas trade and finally secured the open access to Spanish and Portuguese territories that it had sought throughout the eighteenth century. Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees excluding British or British-shipped goods from Europe started an economic war that devastated regions dependent on Atlantic trade. Grass grew in the streets of Bordeaux as its economy collapsed, and French commerce shifted from the Atlantic ports eastward toward the Rhine and Central Europe to set a pattern for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [20] Peace in 1815 restored overseas trade, but the wartime economic shift that diminished the Atlantic world’s role persisted, and Spain, once a key European power, became marginal.
During the era in which the development of the Atlantic World extended Europe westwards, the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans contracted European boundaries in the East. Examining the Ottoman impact on the Balkans as a counterpart to the Atlantic world highlights the changing patterns of geopolitics in Europe. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 narrowly preceded the first Atlantic voyages and opened Eastern Europe to the Ottoman Turks. A Spanish-led fleet at Lepanto checked Ottoman expansion at sea in 1571, but victory over the Hungarians at Mohacs in 1526 had brought the Turks into Central Europe. The siege of Vienna in 1683 marked the high tide of Ottoman power in Europe, but the Ottomans nonetheless shattered the existing structure of the regions they conquered and severed them from leading currents in European history. Their control over the Crimea and Northern Black Sea littoral into the early nineteenth century impeded development in the Ukraine and blocked its access to the Mediterranean. The frontier with Islam marked an especially potent division between East and West that oriented Turkish-held regions toward the Middle East. Gibbon’s description of the Balkan coast in the 1780s as “a country within sight of Italy which is less well known than the interior of America” reveals much about the mental frontiers of Europe. [21] Regardless of where they fell on the map, lands under Turkish rule were seen as Asian rather than part of a European world. The Turks held much of the Balkans through the nineteenth century, and the Ottoman Empire’s gradual dissolution created the “Eastern Question” that vexed European diplomacy until 1919.
Just as religion and culture shaped European geopolitics at various stages, so technology brought changes of its own with the industrial revolution. Communications technology improved in the eighteenth century with the development of canals and roads. Projects such as the Canal du Languedoc in France, the canalization of the Guadalquivir River in Spain, and the Neva-Volga complex in Russia expanded access to cheap water transport for bulk goods. [22] The Bridgewater canal in England linked coal fields with iron ore deposits, thus aiding the growth of the steel industry. Roads could not match the low cost of canals for goods, but Thomas Telford and J. L. McAdam improved them in the early nineteenth century to enhance the speed and safety of travel throughout Britain. Developments in mining and manufacturing, spurred by improved transportation, fed the pattern of challenge and response that created the industrial revolution. Industrialization gave specific regions greater strategic importance as sources of wealth and goods, thus changing the balance of power. Exploitation of coal and iron resources in the Ruhr, for example, aided Prussia’s rise to predominance in Germany. During the twentieth century France sought control of the Ruhr and Saar for economic and military security, while Germany planned to annex the Longwy-Briey iron ore fields of Northern France after World War I. Beyond such resources, manufacturing had made new technologies available that altered the strategic calculus in Europe.
Railroads applied the industrial revolution to communications, creating a mutually reinforcing pattern of supply and demand. Constructing rail networks created a demand for steel, coal, and heavy engineering products, while expanding industrial output required additional transport capacity. Railroads transformed the physical landscape of Europe and promoted suburbanization as they spread from Britain to the Continent in the 1830s–40s. Most important, they revolutionized transportation by making it cost effective to ship bulk goods over land and creating a viable alternative to water transport that could be expanded more easily than canals or rivers. What Daniel Hedrick aptly described as one of the most important tools of empire also revolutionized geopolitics in Europe. Competition between Russia and Austria to control railroads in the Balkans between 1890 and 1914 and concurrent Austrian efforts to block Serbia from direct rail access to the Mediterranean show these dynamics at work. [23] Rail transport also enabled long-range power projection within Eurasia and opened Western European markets to Russian and Siberian goods. [24] Railroads were the technological precondition for the kind of geopolitical thinking based upon the primacy of land power that Mackinder and Haushofer embraced after 1900.
The collision of geopolitically invoked nationalism with the demography and political geography of earlier centuries shaped Europe’s twentieth-century wars. Nationalism and the desire of peoples to attain self-government within an independent state played an important role in European politics from the late nineteenth century. The unification of Germany and Italy set forth a model that others pursued, and the dissolution of the multinational Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires prompted the creation of new states in the 1920s. Unfortunately, nationalities did not live conveniently in divided communities, but mixed together in a way that created incompatible claims. Almost every nation found some of its people outside political boundaries that included substantial minorities from other nationalities. Jews and Gypsies remained minorities lacking a homeland or government to protect them, while Germans and Hungarians lost the privileged standing they had enjoyed under the old regime. The composite states of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia faced strains of their own, with the former a Serb-dominated federation. Noel Buxton had foreseen the problem in 1917 when he warned that forming new states from the ruins of Austria-Hungary would “create several Ulsters strongly supported from the outside and each without a guarantee against persecution.” [25] Small, ethnically divided states revived the old conflicts about self-determination while sparking new international tensions that could not be contained.
What became known in the 1990s as “ethnic cleansing” rationalized borders between 1919 and 1948. In the aftermath of the Greco-Turkish war of 1920–22, Kemal Ataturk’s regime expelled Anatolian Greek communities and destroyed the remains of Magna Graeca that had survived the Ottomans. The Turkish population of Northern Greece faced the same fate in a gruesome population exchange. Josef Stalin used terror famines to break national resistance to Soviet rule in the 1920s, and after 1938 he deported as security risks Chechens, Tatars, and ethnic Germans, along with Poles, Latvians, and other Baltic nationalities. The Nazi holocaust destroyed Ashkenazi Jewish communities that dated from the middle ages, and the war drove Poles eastward from territories Germany annexed into Adolf Hitler’s Reich. Germany’s defeat brought about the reversal of the medieval Ostbewegung as ethnic German communities were brutally exterminated or driven westward by the Soviet armies. Germany’s borders also changed. Konigsberg became Kaliningrad in honor of Communist leader Mikhail Kalinin, and the historic nation of Prussia disappeared as Poland and the Soviet Union divided its depopulated territory. The Benes Decrees of 1945 expelled Germans as a belated reprisal for Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, along with Czechoslovakia’s Hungarian minority, which the government also deemed a security threat. Diplomacy ratified the demographic changes as Poland moved into what had been German territory and ceded lands along its eastern border to the Soviet Union to become a more ethnically cohesive state than it had ever been before.
The Cold War split Europe into East and West by what Winston Churchill called “an Iron Curtain descending from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.” This division placed much of Central Europe in a new “East” defined by Communist rule from Moscow. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization formed in 1949 as a military alliance to defend the Euro-Atlantic sphere became the counterpart to the Soviet bloc. Neutral Western states such as Ireland and Sweden, along with Yugoslavia, whose Communist government resisted Soviet control, remained outside the Cold War alliance system that split Europe, but they were exceptions illustrating the rule that defined geopolitics until 1989 when the Soviet bloc collapsed.
Cold War geopolitics made Western Europe synonymous with “Europe” as the United States’ partner in the Western alliance, and that usage implicitly excluded countries behind the iron curtain from a European identity. American leaders supported European integration in order to have a more effective partner against the Soviet Union, but specifically European imperatives largely drove the idea. [26] Cooperative efforts to advance postwar recovery and promote economic integration led to the formation of a European Economic Community with the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Jean Monnet sought to achieve Europe’s political and military union along with economic integration by gradually transferring functions from national to supranational control. European institutions provided a means of transcending geopolitical factors that their advocates saw as the cause of two world wars. Monnet’s Europe thus represented an idea more than an actual place. [27]
The Maastricht Treaty in 1991 that transformed the European Community into an explicitly political European Union with a common currency and ambitions for common foreign and security policies reflected Monnet’s concept of pooling sovereignty, but it also sought to resolve specific concerns about the role of a united Germany in post–Cold War Europe. National interests, from access to neighboring markets and resources to Germany’s desire for political rehabilitation, had driven earlier projects for European unity. Only with the introduction of the euro and the stability pact that accompanied it did European policy conflict with national policies, and serious tensions have emerged since 2000. Charles de Gaulle spoke of l’Europe de Patries, which he privately saw as a means to bolster French influence, and, despite Monnet’s ambitions, Europe developed as a community of national states that reserved power to act in their own self interests. Territories of the Carolingian Empire provide the geographical core for the European idea, and there is a conscious identification with its legacy. Connections within this region make integration more appealing than in areas with very different traditions, but the EU is also an artifact of the Cold War and Franco-German tensions in the 1920s and ’30s that have long since been resolved. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself, as well as the accession of Ireland and other peripheral states to the EU, established a different geopolitical dynamic from the recent past. Europe can no longer be seen as coterminous with the EU, and although applauded by many observers, the transition from nation-states to member-states is far from a reality. The definition of Europe thus remains a contested issue in the twenty-first century.
Several definitions of Europe emerge from an historical overview of its geopolitics. The first draws on long-standing geopolitical factors that include the East/West divide, the persistence of Gaullist Europe of nation-states, and the different economics cycles under which European regions operate. The second is an “idea” of Europe promoted by Monnet that gained institutional form with the EU. Along with other transnational institutions and concepts such as globalization, this idea of Europe reflects an effort to transcend geopolitics and its historical foundations. Its advocates increasingly define Europe through criticism of American society and popular culture. The demographic Europe undergoing great change with aging populations and mass immigration from the third world provides a third definition of Europe that should also be taken into account. Connections with European-derived societies overseas are closely related to the cultural and demographic understanding of Europe, and those ties still carry significant political, economic, and emotional weight. Each of these definitions of Europe has important consequences for both understanding present circumstances and developing effective policies that cannot be dismissed offhandedly. Appreciating their relative weight requires more than a glance at the map, and also sufficient knowledge to recognize distortions that follow from misreading maps. The United States has been and remains a European power, and Americans, mindful of that role, should understand the importance of geopolitics and history in shaping it.
[1] Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue Like Necessity: Realist Thought in International Relations Since Machiavelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 164–6.
[2] Sir Halford Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal, vol. 23, no. 4 (April 1904), pp. 421–44.
[3] Harvey Sicherman, “The Revival of Geopolitics,” Intercollegiate Review (Spring 2002), p. 17.
[4] E. W. Gilbert, “The Right Honourable Sir Halford J. Mackinder, P.C.” Geographical Journal vol. 23, no. 4 (July–Dec. 1947), pp. 94–9.
[5] Norman Davies’s Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 47–66, provides an extended discussion from which points in the following paragraphs are drawn.
[6] Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 52.
[7] Irving Babbit’s Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1979), p. 172, provides a particularly learned example of the analogy.
[8] Mackinder, “Geographical Pivot of History,” pp. 428–29.
[9] N. A. M. Rogers, Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660–1649 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), presents an innovative analysis of the political impact of maritime and riverine communications on the British Isles.
[10] Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
[11] William Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V with a View on the Progress of Society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 7th ed. (London, A. Strahan, 1792), vol. I, pp. 134–5.
[12] Davies, p. 568.
[13] Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1994), vol. IV, pp. 121, 123–4.
[14] John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, “Expectation of the French Revolution,” in J. Rufus Fears, ed., Essays in the Study and Writing of History: Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol. II (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), p. 61.
[15] Paul W. Schroeder, “The Nineteenth Century System: Balance of Power or Political Equilibrium?” Review of International Studies, vol. 15 (1989), pp. 135–53.
[16] Derek McKay and H. M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (London: Longmans, 1983), p. 179.
[17] Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), pp. 57–8.
[18] David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jonathan Clark notes that aspects of eighteenth-century British political discourse persisted in the United States despite being supplanted in Britain itself and shaped American institutions that were “rationalized into the modernity of the 1780s.” See J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1194), pp. 382–91.
[19] McKay and Scott, p. 198.
[20] Francois Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” in Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 295–318.
[21] Gibbon, IV, p. 387n.
[22] Davies, p. 602.
[23] Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 180–91. For an overview of the railroad’s impact on Balkan diplomacy see Arthur J. May “The Novibazar Railway Project.” Journal of Modern History 10:4 (1939), pp. 496–527 and “Trans-Balkan Railway Schemes” Journal of Modern History 24:4(1952), pp. 352–67, and Solomon Wank, “Aehrenthal and the Sanjak Railway Project: A Reappraisal.” Slavonic and East European Review vol. 42 (1964), pp. 354–96.
[24] W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of A Continent: Siberia and the Russians (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 281–2.
[25] Noel Buxton, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), July 24, 1917, 5th ser., vol. 96 (1917), cols. 1175, 1177–8.
[26] Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
[27] Tony Judt, A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), pp. 3–4.
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