Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
northwestern Europe, but also in comparison to northeastern Europe, with its Prussian tra-
dition. 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 eco-
nomies. 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, Ger-
many, 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 prosper-
ous, but for so long were inside the Warsaw Pact.
The Soviet thrust into Central Europe in the latter phases of World War II created this
entire turn of events, even as it bore out Mackinder's thesis of Asiatic invasions shaping
European destiny. Of course, we shouldn't carry this determinism too far, since without the
actions of one man, Adolf Hitler, World War II would not have occurred and there would
have been no Soviet invasion in the first place.
But Hitler did exist, and so we are left with the situation as we have it today: the Europe
of Charlemagne rules, but because of the resurgence of a united Germany, the balance of
power within Europe may shift slightly eastward to the confluence of Prussia and
Mit-
teleuropa
, with German economic power invigorating Poland, the Baltic states, and the
upper Danube. The Mediterranean seaboard and the Byzantine-Ottoman Balkans lag be-
hind. The worlds of the Mediterranean and the Balkans meet in mountainous and peninsu-
lar Greece, which despite being rescued from communism in the late 1940s remains among
the most economically and socially troubled of European Union members. Greece, at the
northwestern edge of Hodgson's Near Eastern Oikoumene, was the beneficiary of geo-
graphy in antiquity—the place where the heartless systems of Egypt and Persia-Mesopot-
amia could be softened and humanized, leading to the invention of the West, so to speak.
But in today's Europe dominated from the north Greece finds itself at the wrong, oriental-
ized end of things, far more stable and prosperous than places like Bulgaria and Kosovo,
but only because it was spared the ravages of communism. Roughly three-quarters of Greek
businesses are family-owned and rely on family labor, so that minimum wage laws do not
on that has deep cultural, and therefore historical and geographical roots.
