The Revenge of Geography (22 page)

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
Mitteleuropa
—as a beacon of multiethnic tolerance and historic liberalism, to which the contiguous Balkans and Third World regions further afield could and should aspire. But in truth, the political heart of twenty-first-century Europe lies slightly to the northwest of
Mitteleuropa:
it starts with the Benelux states, then meanders south along the Franco-German frontier to the approaches of the Alps. To wit, there is the European Commission and its civil service in Brussels, the European Court in The Hague, the treaty town of Maastricht, the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and so on. In fact, all these places lie athwart a line running southward from the North Sea “that formed the centerpiece and primary communications route of the ninth-century Carolingian monarchy,” observes the late eminent scholar of modern Europe Tony Judt.
⁵
The
fact that the budding European super-state of our own era is concentrated in Europe’s medieval core, with Charlemagne’s capital city of Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) still at its very center, is no accident. For nowhere on the continent, more so than along this spinal column of Old World civilization, is Europe’s sea and land interface quite as rich and profound. In the Low Countries there is the openness to the great ocean, even as the entrance to the English Channel and a string of islands in Holland form a useful protective barrier, giving these small states advantages out of proportion to their size. Immediately in the rear of this North Sea coast is a wealth of protected rivers and waterways, all promising trade, movement, and consequent political development. The loess soil of northwestern Europe is dark and productive, even as the forests provide a natural defense. Finally, the cold climate between the North Sea and the Alps, much more so than the warmer climate south of the Alps, has been sufficiently challenging to stimulate human resolve from the Late Bronze Age forward, with Franks, Alamanni, Saxons, and Frisians settling in late antiquity in Gaul, the Alpine Foreland, and the coastal lowlands. Here, in turn, would be the proving grounds of Francia and the Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century, of Burgundy, Lorraine, Brabant, and Friesland, too, and of city-states like Trier and Liege, all of which collectively displaced Rome, and evolved into polities that today drive the machinery of the European Union.

Of course, before all of the above came Rome, and before Rome ancient Greece: both of which, in William McNeill’s choice words, constituting the antechambers of the “anciently civilized” world that began in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and spread from there, through Minoan Crete and Anatolia, to the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Civilization, as we know, took root in warm and protected river valleys such as the Nile and Tigris-Euphrates, and continued its migration into the relatively mild climates of the Levant, North Africa, and the Greek and Italian peninsulas, where living was hospitable with only rudimentary technology.

But though European civilization had its initial flowering along the Mediterranean, it continued to develop, in ages of more advanced
technology and mobility, further to the north in colder climes. Here Rome had expanded in the decades before the start of the common era, providing for the first time political order and domestic security from the Carpathians in the southeast to the Atlantic in the northwest: that is, throughout much of Central Europe and the region by the North Sea and English Channel. Large settlement complexes, called
oppida
by Julius Caesar, emerged throughout this sprawling, forested, and well-watered European black-soil heartland, which provided the rudimentary foundation for the emergence of medieval and modern cities.
⁶

Just as Roman expansion gave a certain stability to the so-called barbarian tribes of northern Europe, Rome’s breakup would lead over the centuries to the formation of peoples and nation-states with which we are now familiar, and which was formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia following the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. As the scholar William Anthony Hay writes, “Pressure 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.”
⁷
That is, Rome’s collapse, coupled with the onslaught westward from the peoples of the steppe, together aided the formation of national groups in Central and northwestern Europe.

Antiquity was, above all, defined by the geographic hold of the Mediterranean, and as that hold “slackened,” with Rome losing its hinterlands in northern Europe and the Near East, the world of the Middle Ages was born.
⁸
Mediterranean unity was further shattered by the Arab sweep through North Africa.
⁹
Already by the eleventh century the map of Europe has a modern appearance, with France and Poland roughly in their present shapes, the Holy Roman Empire in the guise of a united Germany, and Bohemia—with Prague at its center—presaging the Czech Republic. Thus did history move north.

Mediterranean societies, despite their innovations in politics—Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic—were, by and large, in the words of the French historian and geographer Fernand Braudel, defined by “traditionalism and rigidity.” The poor quality of
Mediterranean soils favored large holdings that were, perforce, under the control of the wealthy. And that, in turn, contributed to an inflexible social order. Meanwhile, in the forest clearings of northern Europe, with their richer soils, grew up a freer civilization, anchored by the informal power relationships of feudalism, that would be better able to take advantage of the invention of movable type and other technologies yet to come.
¹⁰

As deterministic as Braudel’s explanation may appear, it does work to explain the broad undercurrents of the European past. Obviously, human agency in the persons of such men as Jan Hus, Martin Luther, and John Calvin was pivotal to the Protestant Reformation, and hence to the Enlightenment, that would allow for northern Europe’s dynamic emergence as one of the cockpits of history in the modern era. Nevertheless, all that could not have happened without the immense river and ocean access, and the loess earth, rich with coal and iron ore deposits, which formed the background for such individual dynamism and industrialization. Great, eclectic, and glittering empires there certainly were along the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, notably the Norman Roger II’s in twelfth-century Sicily, and lest we forget, the Renaissance flowered first in late medieval Florence, with the art of Michelangelo and the secular realism of Machiavelli. But it was the pull of the colder Atlantic which opened up global shipping routes that ultimately won out against the enclosed Mediterranean. While Portugal and Spain were the early beneficiaries of this Atlantic trade—owing to their protruding peninsular position—their pre-Enlightenment societies, traumatized by the proximity of (and occupation by) North African Muslims, lost ground eventually to the Dutch, French, and English in the oceanic competition. So just as Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire succeeded Rome, in modern times northern Europe has now succeeded southern Europe, with the mineral-rich Carolingian core winning out in the form of the European Union: in no small measure because of geography.

The medieval Mediterranean was itself divided between the Frankish west and the Byzantine east. For it wasn’t only divisions between north and south that both define and plague Europe today, but also
those between west and east and, as we shall see, between the northwest and the center. Consider the migration route of the Danube valley that continues eastward beyond the Great Hungarian Plain, the Balkans, and the Black Sea, all the way through the Pontic and Kazakh steppes to Mongolia and China.
¹¹
This geographical fact, along with the flat, unimpeded access to Russia further north, forms the basis for the waves of invasions of mainly Slavic and Turkic peoples from the east that Mackinder details in his “Geographical Pivot of History” article, and which have, as we know, greatly shaped Europe’s political destiny. So just as there is a Carolingian Europe and a Mediterranean Europe, there is, too, often as a result of these invasions from the east, a Byzantine-Ottoman Europe, a Prussian Europe, and a Habsburg Europe, all of which are geographically distinct, and that live today through somewhat differing economic development patterns: differing patterns that cannot simply be erased by the creation of a single currency.

For example, in the fourth century
A.D
., the Roman Empire itself divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome’s western empire gave way to Charlemagne’s kingdom further north and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire—Byzantium—was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Muslims, when the Ottoman Turks, migrating from the east, captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between these eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially the breakup echoed the divisions of Rome sixteen centuries earlier. The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East. The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, partially reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium, and later between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and
the Turkish sultans in Constantinople.
¹²
Passes and, thus, trade routes existed through these formidable mountains, bringing the cultural repository of
Mitteleuropa
deep into the Byzantine and Ottoman Balkans. But even if the Carpathians were not a hard and fast border, like the Alps, they marked a gradation, a shift in the balance from one Europe to another. Southeastern Europe would be poor not only compared to northwestern Europe, but also in comparison to northeastern Europe, with its Prussian tradition. That is to say: the Balkans were not only poor compared to the Benelux countries, but compared to Poland and Hungary as well.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall brought these divisions into sharp relief. The Warsaw Pact had constituted a full-fledged eastern empire, ruled from Moscow, featuring military occupation and enforced, freeze-frame poverty through the introduction of command economies. During the forty-four years of Kremlin rule, much of Prussian, Habsburg, and Byzantine-Ottoman Europe was locked away in a Soviet prison of nations, collectively known as Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, in Western Europe the European Union was taking shape, first as the Franco-German Coal and Steel Community, then as the Common Market, and finally as the European Union, building out from its Carolingian base of France, Germany, and the Benelux countries to encompass Italy and Great Britain, and later Greece and the Iberian nations. Because of its economic head start during the Cold War years, Carolingian Europe inside NATO has emerged as stronger, for the time being, than Prussian northeastern Europe and Danubian
Mitteleuropa
, which historically were equally prosperous, but for so long were inside the Warsaw Pact.