Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Germany. West Germany, according to Cohen, was a “remarkable reflection of Maritime
Europe,” whereas East Germany belonged to the “Continental Land-power Realm.” Co-
hen supported a divided Germany as “geopolitically sound and strategically necessary,”
kinder, too, wrote presciently in 1919 that “the line through Germany … is the very line
which we have on other grounds taken as demarking the Heartland in a strategical sense
Germany was less so.
Cohen called Central Europe a “mere geographical expression that lacks geopolitical
rebirth of Central Europe, would simply lead to a renewed battle for Europe and, by in-
ference, for the Heartland of Eurasia: Which way, in other words, would Germany swing,
to the east and toward Russia, with great consequences for Poland, Hungary, and the other
former satellite countries; or to the west and toward the United Kingdom and the United
States, providing a victory for the Maritime realm? We still do not know the answer to
this because the Post Cold War is still in its early stages. Cohen and others could not have
foreseen accurately the “debellicized” nature of today's united Germany, with its “aver-
sion to military solutions” existing at a deep cultural level, something which in the future
cisely because they have occupied the center of Europe as a land power, Germans have
always demonstrated a keen awareness of geography and strategy as a survival mechan-
ism. This is something which Germans may yet recover, allowing them to move beyond
the quasi-pacifism of the moment. Indeed, might a reunited and liberal Germany become
a balancing power in its own right—between the Atlantic Ocean and the Eurasian Heart-
land—permitting a new and daring interpretation of Central European culture to take root,
and thus providing the concept of Central Europe with geopolitical ballast? That would
give those like Garton Ash credence over Mackinder and Cohen.
In sum, will Central Europe, as an ideal of tolerance and high civilization, survive the
onslaught of new great power struggles? For such struggles in the heart of Europe there
will be. The vibrant culture of late-nineteenth-century Central Europe that looked so invit-
ing from the vantage point of the late twentieth century was itself the upshot of an unsenti-
mental and specific imperial and geopolitical reality, namely Habsburg Austria. Liberalism
ultimately rests on power: a benign power, perhaps, but power nevertheless.
But humanitarian interventionists in the 1990s were not blind to power struggles; nor in
their eyes did Central Europe constitute a utopian vision. Rather, the restoration of Central
Europe through the stoppage of mass killing in the Balkans was a quiet and erudite rallying
cry for the proper employment of Western military force, in order to safeguard the meaning
of victory in the Cold War. After all, what was the Cold War ultimately about, except to
