Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
larly German dynamism; as the political philosopher Peter Koslowski once explained to
me, “because so many Germans started from zero after World War II, they are aggressively
modernist. Modernism and middle-class culture have been raised to the status of ideologies
here.” United Germany is also spatially organized to take advantage of an era of flourishing
northern European regions. Because of the tradition of small, independent states arising out
of the Thirty Years' War in the seventeenth century—which still guides Germany's federal
system—there is no one great pressure cooker of a capital, but rather a series of smaller
ones that manage to survive even in an era of a reborn Berlin. Hamburg is a media center,
Munich a fashion center, Frankfurt the banking center, and so on, with a railway system
that radiates impartially in all directions. Because Germany came late to unification in the
second half of the nineteenth century, it has preserved its regional flavor that is so advant-
ageous in today's Europe. Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, in historical terms, is
still recent, with trends taking decades to fully emerge, has reconnected Germany to Central
Europe, re-creating, in exceedingly subtle and informal ways, the First and Second reichs
of the twelfth and nineteenth centuries: roughly equivalent to the Holy Roman Empire.
Besides the Berlin Wall's collapse, another factor that has buttressed German geopolit-
ical strength has been the historic German-Polish reconciliation that occurred during the
mid-1990s. As former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski writes, “Through
Poland, German influence could radiate northward—into the Baltic states—and east-
ward—into Ukraine and Belarus.” In other words, German power is enhanced by both a
larger Europe, and also by a Europe in which
Mitteleuropa
reemerges as a separate entity.
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A critical factor in this evolution will be the degree to which European, and particularly
German, quasi-pacifism holds up in the future. As the Britain-based strategist Colin Gray
writes, “Snake-bitten … on the Somme, at Verdun, and by the Götterdämmerung of 1945,
hasn't only been the legacy of war and destruction that makes Europeans averse to military
solutions (aside from peacekeeping and humanitarian interventions), it has also been the
fact that Europe during the Cold War decades had its security provided for by the American
superpower, and today faces no palpable conventional threat. “The threat to Europe comes
not in the form of uniforms, but in the tattered garb of refugees,” says the German Amer-
there might be a threat. For what drove the Soviet Union to carve out an empire in Eastern
Europe at the end of World War II still holds today: a legacy of depredations against Russia
by Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Frenchmen, and Germans, leading to the need for a cordon
sanitaire of compliant regimes in the space between historic Russia and Central Europe. To
be sure, the Russians will not deploy land forces to reoccupy Eastern Europe for the sake
of a new cordon sanitaire, but through a combination of political and economic pressure,
