Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 intellec-
tual 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 Mit-
teleuropa —as a beacon of multiethnic tolerance and historic liberalism, to which the con-
tiguous 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 Mit-
teleuropa: 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 com-
munications 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 contin-
ent, 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 nat-
ural 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.
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