by Tim Marshall
The various tribes of the Iberian Peninsula, for example, prevented from expanding north into France by the presence of the Pyrenees, gradually came together over thousands of years to form Spain and Portugal – and even Spain is not an entirely united country, with Catalonia increasingly vocal about wanting its independence. France has also been formed by natural barriers, framed as it is by the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine and the Atlantic Ocean.
Europe’s major rivers do not meet (unless you count the Sava, which drains into the Danube in Belgrade). This partly explains why there are so many countries in what is a relatively small space. Because they do not connect, most of the rivers act, at some point, as boundaries, and each is a sphere of economic influence in its own right; this gave rise to at least one major urban development on the banks of each river, some of which in turn became capital cities.
Europe’s second-longest river, the Danube (1,780 miles), is a case in point. It rises in Germany’s Black Forest and flows south on its way to the Black Sea. In all, the Danube basin affects eighteen countries and forms natural borders along the way, including those of Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, Serbia and Romania, and Romania and Bulgaria. Over 2,000 years ago it was one of the borders of the Roman Empire, which in turn helped it to become one of the great trading routes of medieval times and gave rise to the present capital cities of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade. It also formed the natural border of two subsequent empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman. As each shrank, the nations emerged again, eventually becoming nation states. However, the geography of the Danube region, especially at its southern end, helps explain why there are so many small nations there in comparison to the bigger countries in and around the North European Plain.
The Danube Basin illustrates the geographical advantages of the terrain in Europe; interconnected rivers on a flat plain provided natural borders and an easily navigable transport network that encouraged a booming trade system.
The countries of northern Europe have been richer than those of the south for several centuries. The north industrialised earlier than the south and so has been more economically successful. As many of the northern countries comprise the heartland of Western Europe, their trade links were easier to maintain, and one wealthy neighbour could trade with another – whereas the Spanish, for example, either had to cross the Pyrenees to trade, or look to the limited markets of Portugal and North Africa.
There are also unprovable theories that the domination of Catholicism in the south has held it back, whereas the Protestant work ethic propelled the northern countries to greater heights. Each time I visit the Bavarian city of Munich I reflect on this theory, and while driving past the gleaming temples of the headquarters of BMW, Allianz and Siemens have cause to doubt it. In Germany 34 per cent of the population is Catholic, and Bavaria itself is predominantly Catholic, yet their religious predilections do not appear to have influenced either their progress or their insistence that Greeks should work harder and pay more taxes.
The contrast between northern and southern Europe is also at least partly attributable to the fact that the south has fewer coastal plains suitable for agriculture, and has suffered more from drought and natural disasters than the north, albeit on a lesser scale than in other parts of the world. As we saw in Chapter One, the North European Plain is a corridor that stretches from France to the Ural Mountains in Russia, bordered to the north by the North and Baltic seas. The land allows for successful farming on a massive scale, and the waterways enable the crops and other goods to be moved easily.
Of all the countries on the plain, France was best situated to take advantage of it. France is the only European country to be both a northern and southern power. It contains the largest expanse of fertile land in Western Europe, and many of its rivers connect with each other; one flows west all the way to the Atlantic (the Seine), another south to the Mediterranean (the Rhône). These factors, together with its relative flatness, lent themselves to unification of regions, and – especially from the time of Napoleon – centralisation of power.
But to the south and west many countries remain in the second tier of European power, partially because of their location. The south of Italy, for example, is still well behind the north in terms of development, and although it has been a unified state (including Venice and Rome) since 1871, the strains of the rift between north and south are greater now than they have been since before the Second World War. The heavy industry, tourism and financial centres of the north have long meant a higher standard of living there, leading to the formation of political parties agitating for cutting state subsidies to the south, or even breaking away from it.
Spain is also struggling, and has always struggled because of its geography. Its narrow coastal plains have poor soil, and access to markets is hindered internally by its short rivers and the Meseta Central, a highland plateau surrounded by mountain ranges, some of which cut through it. Trade with Western Europe is further hampered by the Pyrenees, and any markets to its south on the other side of the Mediterranean are in developing countries with limited income. It was left behind after the Second World War, as under the Franco dictatorship it was politically frozen out of much of modern Europe. Franco died in 1975 and the newly democratic Spain joined the EU in 1986. By the 1990s it had begun to catch up with the rest of Western Europe, but its inherent geographical and financial weaknesses continue to hold it back and have intensified the problems of overspending and loose central fiscal control. It has been among the countries hit worst by the 2008 economic crisis.
Greece suffers similarly. Much of the Greek coastline comprises steep cliffs and there are few coastal plains for agriculture. Inland are more steep cliffs, rivers which will not allow transportation, and few wide, fertile valleys. What agricultural land there is of high quality; the problem is that there is too little of it to allow Greece to become a major agricultural exporter, or to develop more than a handful of major urban areas containing highly educated, highly skilled and technologically advanced populations. Its situation is further exacerbated by its location, with Athens positioned at the tip of a peninsula, almost cut off from land trade with Europe. It is reliant on the Aegean Sea for access to maritime trade in the region – but across that sea lies Turkey, a large potential enemy. Greece fought several wars against Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in modern times still spends a vast amount of euros, which it doesn’t have, on defence.
The mainland is protected by mountains, but there are about 1,400 Greek islands (6,000 if you include various rocks sticking out of the Aegean) of which about 200 are inhabited. It takes a decent navy just to patrol this territory, never mind one strong enough to deter any attempt to take them over. The result is a huge cost in military spending that Greece cannot afford. During the Cold War the Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, were content to underwrite some of the military requirements in order to keep the Soviet Union out of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. When the Cold War ended, so did the cheques. But Greece kept spending.
This historical split continues to have an impact to this day in the wake of the financial crash that hit Europe in 2008 and the ideological rift in the eurozone. In 2012, when the European financial bailouts began and demands for Greek austerity measures were made to keep the country afloat and in the eurozone, the geographical divide soon became obvious. The donors and demanders were the northern countries, the recipients and supplicants mostly southern. It didn’t take long for people in Germany to point out that they were working until sixty-five but paying taxes which were going to Greece so that people could retire at fifty-five. They then asked – why? And the answer, ‘in sickness and in health’, was unsatisfactory.
The Germans led the bailout-imposed austerity measures, the Greeks led the backlash. For example, the German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble commented that he was ‘not yet sure that all political parties in Greece are aware of their responsibility for the dif
ficult situation their country is in’. To which the Greek president, Karolos Papoulias, who had fought the Nazis, replied, ‘I cannot accept Mr Schäuble insulting my country . . . Who is Mr Schäuble to insult Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finnish?’ He also made a pointed reference to the Second World War: ‘We were always proud to defend not only our freedom, our country, but Europe’s freedom too.’ The stereotypes of profligate, slack southerners and careful, industrious northerners soon resurfaced, with the Greek media responding with constant and crude reminders of Germany’s past, including superimposing a Hitler moustache on a front-page photograph of Chancellor Merkel.
The Greek taxpayer – of whom there are not enough to sustain the country’s economy – has a very different view, asking: ‘Why should the Germans dictate to us, when the euro benefits them more than anyone else?’ In Greece and elsewhere austerity measures imposed from the north are seen as an assault on sovereignty.
Cracks are appearing in the edifice of the ‘family of Europe’. On the periphery of Western Europe the financial crisis has left Greece looking like a semi-detached member; to the east it has again seen conflict. If the aberration of the past seventy years of peace is to continue through this century, that peace will need love, care and attention.
The post-Second-World-War generations have grown up with peace as the norm, but what is different about the current generation is that Europeans find it difficult to imagine the opposite. Wars now seem to be what happens elsewhere or in the past – at worst they happen on the ‘periphery’ of Europe. The trauma of two world wars, followed by seven decades of peace and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, persuaded many people that Western Europe was a ‘post-conflict’ region.
There are reasons to believe that this may still hold true in the future, but potential sources of conflict bubble under the surface, and the tension between the Europeans and the Russians may result in a confrontation. For example, history and geographical shape-shifting haunts Polish foreign policy even if the country is currently at peace, successful and one of the bigger EU states, with a population of 38 million. It is also physically one of the larger members and its economy has doubled since it emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, but still it looks to the past as it tries to secure its future.
The corridor of the North European Plain is at its narrowest between Poland’s Baltic coast in the north and the beginning of the Carpathian Mountains in the south. This is where, from a Russian military perspective, the best defensive line could be placed or, from an attacker’s viewpoint, the point at which its forces would be squeezed together before breaking out towards Russia.
The Poles have seen it both ways as armies have swept east and west across it, frequently changing borders. If you take The Times Atlas of European History and flick through the pages quickly as if it were a flip-book, you see Poland emerge c.1000, then continually change shape, disappear and reappear before assuming its present form in the late twentieth century.
The location of Germany and Russia, coupled with the Poles’ experience of these two countries, does not make either a natural ally for Warsaw. Like France, Poland wants to keep Germany locked inside the EU and NATO, while not-so-ancient fears of Russia have come to the fore with the crisis in Ukraine. Over the centuries Poland has seen the Russian tide ebb and flow from and to them. After the low tide at the end of the Soviet (Russian) empire, there was only one direction it could subsequently flow.
Relations with Britain, as a counterweight to Germany within the EU, came easily despite the betrayal of 1939: Britain and France had signed a treaty guaranteeing to come to Poland’s aid if Germany invaded. When the attack came the response to the Blitzkrieg was a ‘Sitzkrieg’ – both Allies sat behind the Maginot Line in France as Poland was swallowed up. Despite this, relations with the UK are strong, even if the main ally the newly liberated Poland sought out in 1989 was the USA.
The Americans embraced the Poles and vice versa: both had the Russians in mind. In 1999 Poland joined NATO, extending the Alliance’s reach 400 miles closer to Moscow. By then several other former Warsaw Pact countries were also members of the Alliance and in 1999 Moscow watched helplessly as NATO went to war with its ally, Serbia. In the 1990s Russia was in no position to push back, but after the chaos of the Yeltsin years Putin stepped in on the front foot and came out swinging.
The best-known quote attributed to Henry Kissinger originated in the 1970s, when he is reported to have asked: ‘If I want to phone Europe – who do I call?’ The Poles have an updated question: ‘If the Russians threaten, do we call Brussels or Washington?’ They know the answer.
The Balkan countries are also once again free of empire. Their mountainous terrain led to the emergence of so many small states in the region, and is one of the things that has kept them from integrating – despite the best efforts of the experiment of the Union of Southern Slavs, otherwise known as Yugoslavia.
With the wars of the 1990s behind them, most of the former Yugoslav countries are looking westward, but in Serbia the pull of the east, with its Orthodox religion and Slavic peoples, remains strong. Russia, which has yet to forgive the Western nations for the bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the separation of Kosovo, is still attempting to coax Serbia into its orbit via the gravitational pull of language, ethnicity, religion and energy deals.
Bismarck famously said that a major war would be sparked by ‘some damned fool thing in the Balkans’; and so it came to pass. The region is now an economic and diplomatic battleground with the EU, NATO, the Turks and the Russians all vying for influence. Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania have made their choice and are inside NATO – and, apart from Albania, are also in the EU, as is Slovenia.
The tensions extend into the north and Scandinavia. Denmark is already a NATO member and the recent resurgence of Russia has caused a debate in Sweden over whether it is time to abandon the neutrality of two centuries and join the Alliance. In 2013 Russian jets staged a mock bombing run on Sweden in the middle of the night. The Swedish defence system appears to have been asleep, failing to scramble any jets, and it was the Danish air force that took to the skies to shepherd the Russians away. Despite that, the majority of Swedes remain against NATO membership, but the debate is ongoing, informed by Moscow’s statement that it would be forced to ‘respond’ if either Sweden or Finland were to join the Alliance.
The EU and NATO countries need to present a united front to these challenges, but this will be impossible unless the key relationship in the EU remains intact – that between France and Germany.
As we’ve seen, France was best placed to take advantage of Europe’s climate, trade routes and natural borders. It is partially protected, except in one area – the north-east, at the point where the flatland of the North European Plain becomes what is now Germany. Before Germany existed as a single country this was not a problem. France was a considerable distance from Russia, far from the Mongol hordes, and had the Channel between it and England, meaning that an attempt at a full-scale invasion and total occupation could probably be repulsed. In fact France was the pre-eminent power on the Continent: it could even project its power as far as the gates of Moscow.
But then Germany united.
It had been doing so for some time. There had been the ‘idea’ of Germany for centuries: the Eastern Frankish lands which became the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century were sometimes called ‘the Germanies’, comprising as they did up to 500 Germanic mini-kingdoms. After the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 the German Confederation of thirty-nine statelets came together in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna. This in turn led to the North German Confederation, and then the unification of Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War in which victorious German troops occupied Paris. Now France had a neighbour on its border that was geographically larger than itself, with a similar size of population but one with a better growth rate, and that was more industrialised.
The unification was announced at the Palace of Versaill
es near Paris after the German victory. The weak spot in the French defence, the North European Plain, had been breached. It would be again, twice, in the following seventy years, after which France would use diplomacy instead of warfare to try to neutralise the threat from the east.
Germany had always had bigger geographical problems than France. The flatlands of the North European Plain gave it two reasons to be fearful: to the west the Germans saw their long-unified and powerful neighbour France, and to the east the giant Russian Bear. Their ultimate fear was of a simultaneous attack by both powers across the flat land of the corridor. We can never know if it would have happened, but the fear of it had catastrophic consequences.
France feared Germany, Germany feared France, and when France joined both Russia and Britain in the Triple Entente of 1907, Germany feared all three. There was now also the added dimension that the British navy could, at a time of its choosing, blockade German access to the North Sea and the Atlantic. Its solution, twice, was to attack France first.
The dilemma of Germany’s geographical position and belligerence became known as ‘the German Question’. The answer, after the horrors of the Second World War, indeed after centuries of war, was the acceptance of the presence in the European lands of a single overwhelming power, the USA, which set up NATO and allowed for the eventual creation of the European Union. Exhausted by war, and with safety ‘guaranteed’ by the American military, the Europeans embarked on an astonishing experiment. They were asked to trust each other.
What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. It has worked brilliantly and created a huge geographical space now encompassing the biggest economy in the world.