The realities of the nuclear age and the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union sustained the alliance for a generation. But the underlying difference in perspective was bound to reappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
After four decades of Cold War, NATO had achieved the vision of the Cold War’s end that its founders had proclaimed. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led rapidly to the unification of Germany, together with the collapse of the Soviet satellite orbit, the belt of states in Eastern Europe with an imposed Soviet control system. In a testament to the vision of the allied leaders who had designed the Atlantic Alliance and to the subtle performance of those who oversaw the denouement, the century’s third contest over Europe ended peacefully. Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development. The nations of Eastern Europe, suppressed for forty years (some longer), began to reemerge into independence and to regain their personalities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the emphasis of diplomacy. The geopolitical nature of the European order was fundamentally transformed when there no longer existed a substantial military threat from within Europe. In the exultant atmosphere that followed, traditional problems of equilibrium were dismissed as “old” diplomacy, to be replaced by the spread of shared ideals. The Atlantic Alliance, it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia—even perhaps including it—was now broached as a serious prospect. The projection of a military alliance into historically contested territory within several hundred miles of Moscow was proposed not primarily on security grounds but as a sensible method of “locking in” democratic gains.
In the face of a direct threat, international order had been conceived of as the confrontation of two adversarial blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity.
THE FUTURE OF EUROPE
What a journey Europe had undertaken to reach this point. It had launched itself on global explorations and spread its practices and values around the world. It had in every century changed its internal structure and invented new ways of thinking about the nature of international order. Now at the culmination of an era, Europe, in order to participate in it, felt obliged to set aside the political mechanisms through which it had conducted its affairs for three and a half centuries. Impelled also by the desire to cushion the emergent unification of Germany, the new European Union established a common currency in 2002 and a formal political structure in 2004. It proclaimed a Europe united, whole, and free, adjusting its differences by peaceful mechanisms.
German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding itself together?
The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system.
The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either. The European Union diminishes its member states’ sovereignty and traditional government functions, such as control of their currency and borders. On the other hand, European politics remains primarily national, and in many countries, objections to EU policy have become the central domestic issue. The result is a hybrid, constitutionally something between a state and a confederation, operating through ministerial meetings and a common bureaucracy—more like the Holy Roman Empire than the Europe of the nineteenth century. But unlike the Holy Roman Empire (for most of its history, at least), the EU struggles to resolve its internal tensions in the quest for the principles and goals by which it is guided. In the process, it pursues monetary union side by side with fiscal dispersion and bureaucracy at odds with democracy. In foreign policy it embraces universal ideals without the means to enforce them, and cosmopolitan identity in contention with national loyalties—with European unity accompanied by east-west and north-south divides and an ecumenical attitude toward autonomy movements (Catalan, Bavarian, Scot) challenging the integrity of states. The European “social model” is dependent upon yet discomforted by market dynamism. EU policies enshrine tolerant inclusiveness, approaching unwillingness to assert distinctive Western values, even as member states practice politics driven by fears of non-European influxes.
The result is a cycle testing the popular legitimacy of the EU itself. European states have surrendered significant portions of what was once deemed their sovereign authority. Because Europe’s leaders are still validated, or rejected, by national democratic processes, they are tempted to conduct policies of national advantage and, in consequence, disputes persist between the various regions of Europe—usually over economic issues. Especially in crises such as that which began in 2009, the European structure is then driven toward increasingly intrusive emergency measures simply to survive. Yet when publics are asked to make sacrifices on behalf of “the European project,” a clear understanding of its obligations may not exist. Leaders then face the choice of disregarding the will of their people or following it in opposition to Brussels.
Europe has returned to the question with which it started, except now it has a global sweep. What international order can be distilled from contending aspirations and contradictory trends? Which countries will be the components of the order, and in what manner will they relate their policies? How much unity does Europe need, and how much diversity can it endure? But the converse issue is in the long run perhaps even more fundamental: Given its history, how much diversity must Europe preserve to achieve a meaningful unity?
When it maintained a global system, Europe represented the dominant concept of world order. Its statesmen designed international structures and prescribed them to the rest of the world. Today the nature of the emergent world order is itself in dispute, and regions beyond Europe will play a major role in defining its attributes. Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down? In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit? So far the process of integration has been dealt with as an essentially bureaucratic problem of increasing the competence of various European administrative bodies, in other words an elaboration of the familiar. Where will the impetus for charting the inward commitment to these goals emerge? European history has shown that unification has never been achieved by primarily administrative procedures. It has required a unifier—Prussia in Germany, Piedmont in Italy—without whose leadership (and willingness to create faits accomplis) unification would have remained stillborn. What country or institution will play that role? Or will some new institution or inner group have to be devised for charting the road?
And if Europe should achieve unity, by whatever road, how will it define its global role? It has three choices: to foster Atlantic partnership; to adopt an ever-more-neutral position; or to move toward a tacit compact with an extra-European power or grouping of them. Does it envisage shifting coalitions, or does it see itself as a member of a North Atlan
tic bloc that generally adopts compatible positions? To which of its pasts will Europe relate itself: to its recent past of Atlantic cohesion or to its longer-term history of maneuvering for maximum advantage on the basis of national interest? In short, will there still be an Atlantic community, and if so, as I fervently hope, how will it define itself?
It is a question both sides of the Atlantic must ask themselves. The Atlantic community cannot remain relevant by simply projecting the familiar forward. Cooperating to shape strategic affairs globally, the European members of the Atlantic Alliance in many cases have described their policies as those of neutral administrators of rules and distributors of aid. But they have often been uncertain about what to do when this model was rejected or its implementation went awry. A more specific meaning needs to be given to the often-invoked “Atlantic partnership” by a new generation shaped by a set of experiences other than the Soviet challenge of the Cold War.
The political evolution of Europe is essentially for Europeans to decide. But its Atlantic partners have an important stake in it. Will the emerging Europe become an active participant in the construction of a new international order, or will it consume itself on its own internal issues? The pure balance-of-power strategy of the traditional European great powers is precluded by contemporary geopolitical and strategic realities. But nor will the nascent organization of “rules and norms” by a Pan-European elite prove a sufficient vehicle for global strategy unless accompanied by some accounting for geopolitical realities.
The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.
Europe, which had a near monopoly in the design of global order less than a century ago, is in danger of cutting itself off from the contemporary quest for world order by identifying its internal construction with its ultimate geopolitical purpose. For many, the outcome represents the culmination of the dreams of generations—a continent united in peace and forswearing power contests. Yet while the values espoused in Europe’s soft-power approach have often been inspiring, few of the other regions have shown such overriding dedication to this single style of policy, raising the prospects of imbalance. Europe turns inward just as the quest for a world order it significantly designed faces a fraught juncture whose outcome could engulf any region that fails to help shape it. Europe thus finds itself suspended between a past it seeks to overcome and a future it has not yet defined.
CHAPTER 3
Islamism and the Middle East: A World in Disorder
THE MIDDLE EAST has been the chrysalis of three of the world’s great religions. From its stern landscape have issued conquerors and prophets holding aloft banners of universal aspirations. Across its seemingly limitless horizons, empires have been established and fallen; absolute rulers have proclaimed themselves the embodiment of all power, only to disappear as if they had been mirages. Here every form of domestic and international order has existed, and been rejected, at one time or another.
The world has become accustomed to calls from the Middle East urging the overthrow of regional and world order in the service of a universal vision. A profusion of prophetic absolutisms has been the hallmark of a region suspended between a dream of its former glory and its contemporary inability to unify around common principles of domestic or international legitimacy. Nowhere is the challenge of international order more complex—in terms of both organizing regional order and ensuring the compatibility of that order with peace and stability in the rest of the world.
In our own time, the Middle East seems destined to experiment with all of its historical experiences simultaneously—empire, holy war, foreign domination, a sectarian war of all against all—before it arrives (if it ever does) at a settled concept of international order. Until it does so, the region will remain pulled alternately toward joining the world community and struggling against it.
THE ISLAMIC WORLD ORDER
The early organization of the Middle East and North Africa developed from a succession of empires. Each considered itself the center of civilized life; each arose around unifying geographic features and then expanded into the unincorporated zones between them. In the third millennium B.C., Egypt expanded its influence along the Nile and into present-day Sudan. Beginning in the same period, the empires of Mesopotamia, Sumer, and Babylon consolidated their rule among peoples along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. In the sixth century B.C., the Persian Empire rose on the Iranian plateau and developed a system of rule that has been described as “the first deliberate attempt in history to unite heterogeneous African, Asian and European communities into a single, organized international society,” with a ruler styling himself the Shahanshah, or “King of Kings.”
By the end of the sixth century A.D., two great empires dominated much of the Middle East: the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire with its capital in Constantinople and professing the Christian religion (Greek Orthodox), and the Sassanid Persian Empire with its capital in Ctesiphon, near modern-day Baghdad, which practiced Zoroastrianism. Conflicts between them had occurred sporadically for centuries. In 602, not long after a plague had wracked both, a Persian invasion of Byzantine territories led to a twenty-five-year-long war in which the two empires tested what remained of their strength. After an eventual Byzantine victory, exhaustion produced the peace that statesmanship had failed to achieve. It also opened the way for the ultimate victory of Islam. For in western Arabia, in a forbidding desert outside the control of any empire, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers were gathering strength, impelled by a new vision of world order.
Few events in world history equal the drama of the early spread of Islam. The Muslim tradition relates that Muhammad, born in Mecca in the year 570, received at the age of forty a revelation that continued for approximately twenty-three years and, when written down, became known as the Quran. As the Byzantine and Persian empires disabled each other, Muhammad and his community of believers organized a polity, unified the Arabian Peninsula, and set out to replace the prevailing faiths of the region—primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism—with the religion of his received vision.
An unprecedented wave of expansion turned the rise of Islam into one of the most consequential events in history. In the century following the death of Muhammad in 632, Arab armies brought the new religion as far as the Atlantic coast of Africa, to most of Spain, into central France, and as far east as northern India. Stretches of Central Asia and Russia, parts of China, and most of the East Indies followed over the subsequent centuries, where Islam, carried alternately by merchants and conquerors, established itself as the dominant religious presence.
That a small group of Arab confederates could inspire a movement that would lay low the great empires that had dominated the region for centuries would have seemed inconceivable a few decades earlier. How was it possible for so much imperial thrust and such omnidirectional, all-engulfing fervor to be assembled so unnoticed? The records of neighboring societies had not, until then, regarded the Arabian Peninsula as an imperial force. For centuries, the Arabs had lived a tribal, pastoral, seminomadic existence in the desert and its fertile fringes. Until this point, though they had made a handful of evanescent challenges to Roman rule, they had founded no great states or empires. Their historical memory was encapsulated in an oral tradition of epic poetry. They figured into the consciousness of the Greeks, Romans, and Persians mainly as occasional raiders of trade routes and settled populations. To the extent they had been brought into these cultures’ visions of world order, it was through ad hoc arrangements to purchase the loyalty of a tribe and charge it with enforcing security along the imperial frontiers.
In a century of remarkable exertions, this world was overturned. Expansionist and in some r
espects radically egalitarian, Islam was unlike any other society in history. Its requirement of frequent daily prayers made faith a way of life; its emphasis on the identity of religious and political power transformed the expansion of Islam from an imperial enterprise into a sacred obligation. Each of the peoples the advancing Muslims encountered was offered the same choice: conversion, adoption of protectorate status, or conquest. As an Arab Muslim envoy, sent to negotiate with the besieged Persian Empire, declared on the eve of a climactic seventh-century battle, “If you embrace Islam, we will leave you alone, if you agree to pay the poll tax, we will protect you if you need our protection. Otherwise it is war.” Arab cavalry, combining religious conviction, military skill, and a disdain for the luxuries they encountered in conquered lands, backed up the threat. Observing the dynamism and achievements of the Islamic enterprise and threatened with extinction, societies chose to adopt the new religion and its vision.
Islam’s rapid advance across three continents provided proof to the faithful of its divine mission. Impelled by the conviction that its spread would unite and bring peace to all humanity, Islam was at once a religion, a multiethnic superstate, and a new world order.
THE AREAS ISLAM had conquered or where it held sway over tribute-paying non-Muslims were conceived as a single political unit: dar al-Islam, the “House of Islam,” or the realm of peace. It would be governed by the caliphate, an institution defined by rightful succession to the earthly political authority that the Prophet had exercised. The lands beyond were dar al-harb, the realm of war; Islam’s mission was to incorporate these regions into its own world order and thereby bring universal peace:
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