Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
partly owing to Europe's need for natural gas from Russia, Russians could exert undue
influence on their former satellites in years to come: Russia supplies some 25 percent of
Europe's gas, 40 percent of Germany's, and nearly 100 percent of Finland's and the Baltic
to a world with greater Russian influence within the continent. Russia's investment activ-
ities as well as its critical role as an energy supplier will loom larger in a weakened and
newly divided Europe.
So, will a debellicized Germany partly succumb to Russian influence, leading to a some-
what Finlandized Eastern Europe and an even more hollow North Atlantic Treaty Alliance?
Or will Germany subtly stand up to Russia through various political and economic means,
even as its society remains immersed in a post-heroic quasi-pacifism? The former scenario
threatens to prove the fears of Mackinder and other geographers right: that, in a geograph-
ical sense, there is no Central Europe or
Mitteleuropa
, only a maritime Europe and a con-
tinental one, with a crush zone in between. The latter scenario, on the other hand, would
present a richly complex European destiny: one in which Central Europe would fully re-
appear and flower for the first time since before World War I; and a tier of states between
Germany and Russia would equally flourish, as Mackinder hoped for, leaving Europe in
peace, even as its aversion to military deployments is geopolitically inconvenient to the
United States. In this scenario, Russia would accommodate itself to countries as far east
as Ukraine and Georgia joining Europe. Thus, the
idea
of Europe, as a geographical ex-
pression of historic liberalism, would finally be realized. Europe went through centuries of
political rearrangements in the Middle Ages following the collapse of Rome. And in search
of that
idea
, Europe will continue to rearrange itself following the Long European War of
1914-1989.
Indeed, Europe has been in geographical terms many things throughout its history. Follow-
ing the Age of Exploration, Europe moved laterally westward as commerce shifted across
the Atlantic, making cities such as Quebec, Philadelphia, and Havana closer economically
to Western Europe than were cities like Kraków and Lvov in Eastern Europe; even as Otto-
man military advances as far northwest as Vienna in the late seventeenth century cut off the
Balkans from much of the rest of the European subcontinent. Of course, nowadays, Europe
is shifting to the east as it admits former communist nations into the European Union, and
to the south as it grapples with the political and economic stabilization of the southern shore
of the Mediterranean in North Africa.
And in all these rearrangements, Greece, of all places, will provide an insightful register
of the health of the European project. Greece is the only part of the Balkans accessible on
several seaboards to the Mediterranean, and thus is the unifier of two European worlds.
Greece is geographically equidistant between Brussels and Moscow, and is as close to Rus-
