History is not . . . a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable.
Henry Kissinger, 19791
This book has covered more than 500 years of European history. It has discussed dozens of wars, interventions, reform movements and their associated debates. We have been introduced to very different polities, personalities and cultures, starting with the Holy Roman Empire, progressing through absolutism, parliamentary government, the Third Reich, and ending with the European Union. Despite all the differences of time and place, however, we have seen that there are recurring geopolitical themes in the history of the European states. It is to these patterns, and the question of where – if anywhere – they might point in the future, that we now turn.
The fundamental issue has always been whether Europe would be united – or dominated – by a single force: the Universal Monarchy attributed to Charles V, Philip II (for whom the world was ‘not enough’) and Louis XIV; the caliphate of Suleiman the Magnificent and his successors; the continental bloc which Napoleon so nearly achieved; the Mitteleuropa of Imperial Germany; Hitler’s ‘Thousand Year’ Reich; the socialist Utopia espoused by the Soviet Union; and the democratic geopolitics of NATO and the European Union today. In each case the central area of contention was Germany: because of its strategic position at the heart of Europe, because of its immense economic and military potential and – in the Early Modern period – because of the political legitimacy which its imperial title conferred. In the late nineteenth century, this latent power was realized under Bismarck’s leadership and dominated European politics until the fall of Hitler. During the subsequent Cold War, the struggle for control of Germany was at the heart of the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the west. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, German power surged again with reunification – albeit more slowly than many had expected – and now dominates the European Union. Again and again, from the Treaty of Westphalia, through the Vienna Settlement, to the establishment of the Western European Union, and the new surge in European integration after the fall of the Wall, the link between the internal order in Germany and the peace of Europe has been made explicit. Some of the most important international institutions – the League of Nations, the United Nations, the project of European integration, the Non-Proliferation Treaty and (in part) NATO – were originally designed to contain Germany or to mobilize her energies in the common cause.
Germany has also been the cockpit of the European ideological struggle. The south-eastern flank of the Holy Roman Empire was the most important front against Islam: the Turks penetrated twice as far as Vienna. It was also the fulcrum of the battle between Catholic and Protestant, which culminated in the Thirty Years War and continued to roil relations within and between states for a long time after. It was in Germany where the confrontation between conservative autocrats and liberal constitutionalists was sharpest in the nineteenth century. Germany was the birthplace of Marxism and home to the most powerful socialist party before the First World War. It was Germany which produced Nazism. Finally, the clash between communist dictatorship and democracy was nowhere stronger than in Germany, and particularly in Berlin, which took on a crucial symbolic importance as a divided former capital, in a divided Germany, in a divided Europe, in a divided world. The Cold War started and ended there. Today, the question of whether Europe will go forward into a closer union or will remain a confederation of nation states will primarily be decided in and by Germany.
The European balance of power – and especially the future of Germany – was also crucial to the most important extra-European power, the United States. North America was settled as part of the contest between Britain, France and Spain; this struggle both drove the colonists to seek independence and made it possible. Despite periodic attempts at isolation, the security of the new republic was always primarily dependent on the policies of the European states. They were rivals for influence in the western hemisphere and posed a mortal threat when they sought to establish themselves on the flanks of the United States. Washington slowly learned to live with the British presence in Canada, but it strenuously resisted any European penetration of Latin America: by Britain over slavery in Cuba, Napoleon III’s attempt to establish a satellite empire in Mexico, Imperial Germany’s links with Mexico and finally the Soviet gambit in Cuba. More generally, American strategists were fearful that were any one power to become predominant in Europe, this would soon be followed by an attempt to impose its authority and ideology on them. They therefore followed the Napoleonic Wars, the early-nineteenth-century clash between liberalism and autocracy, and the ambitions of both Imperial Germany and the Third Reich with profound concern. After the Second World War, Washington was determined not to allow the central European landmass to fall into the hands of a rival power, for the same reason. The United States thus originated as part of the European state system and has become increasingly central to it ever since.
It would be tempting to end with a list of prognostications and recommendations. Instead, I will conclude with a series of questions.
This book goes to press during a period of exceptional European uncertainty. Nobody knows whether the Franco-German-led Eurozone will survive the onslaught of the markets or whether it will be pulverized by the outside world as surely as the Continental System, Mitteleuropa and ‘Fortress Europe’ were crushed in their time. Will Europe find a common position on the challenges and opportunities of the Arab Spring, Russian ambitions in the east and the growth of Chinese power, or will it fragment into its component parts? Will Europeans persist in regarding the EU as a modern-day Holy Roman Empire, which enables them to coexist more easily than ever before but is incapable of effective collective action, or will they conclude that all these problems can only be mastered by establishing a new constitutional settlement on the lines pioneered by the Anglo-Americans in the eighteenth century: a mighty union based on a common debt, strong central institutions responsible to a directly elected parliament and a common defence against common enemies?
Only two states have the power to unlock this door to deeper integration: Britain, because she possesses the most credible fighting force on the continent at the moment; and Germany, because her economic strength is vital to the functioning of the Single Market and the Euro. Will they turn the key together? Will Britain serve as the Prussia of the European project, driving forward security integration and providing it with the military credibility it so desperately needs? Will it embrace the European destiny which Englishmen have pursued since Henry VIII, Marlborough and Castlereagh if not earlier? Will it at least support the continent in its quest for union, even if it supports the project only as a buttress from outside. Or will Britain turn her back on Europe and destroy all hopes for a mighty union for the defence of western values at home and their projection abroad? Will Germany, for her part, return to the traditions of ‘Rapallo’, permanently blocking NATO expansion, and pursue a policy of narrow fiscal advantage, by seceding from the common currency? Or will Berlin accept that the alternative to a democratically controlled European currency is a German economic hegemony which will in the long run destroy the European Union, thereby greatly increasing the economic and strategic insecurity of the Federal Republic? Will Germany therefore concede the logic that she is ‘too small for the world and too large for Europe’, by seeking through democratic union the critical weight which had eluded her leaders from Bismarck to Hitler?
This book began with the call to rally ‘Christendom’ in the mid fifteenth century as it struggled to meet the Ottoman challenge. It argues that Europeans have only ever experienced that unity in the face of an external or internal threat, for example against Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. It follows that only a major external threat will unite Europeans today. Will this take the form of a confrontation with Mr Putin’s Russia, perhaps over the Baltic states, Belarus or Ukraine? Will it be a showdown with the Islamist caliphate in the Middle East or on the ‘home front’ of western societies? Or will it be a clash with China as it expands into areas of vital interest to Europe and becomes an ever more severe ideological challenge? Will the Union meet these threats by expanding east and south until it hits natural geographical or impermeable political borders. Will the ‘lands between’, in Ukraine and Belarus, be absorbed to end instability and pre-empt their subversion by Moscow? Above all, will the European Union become a more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere. Will its army and navy serve as the ‘school of the Union’? Or will Europeans duck these challenges, retreat into themselves and even split apart? If that happens, history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting point of a great-power project.