With Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, it became clear that Europe’s foreign policy must be more than an enlargement policy. The return of hard power politics requires pragmatism and efficiency.
Red, blue, green: The world is divided into spheres of interest. 1957 NATO summit.
On September 11, 1990, the American President George HW Bush («Bush’s father») spoke before the Congress in Washington for the first time about the dawn of a «new world order». This began what political scientists now call the unipolar moment. Thirty years of US global dominance.
The non-violent fall of the Soviet Union heralded the epoch. It peaked in the mid-nineties, when the Iraq war slipped away from the United States. Then the decline accelerated with the 2008 financial crisis, the end of the Arab Spring and the 2021 Taliban victory in Afghanistan. The Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the abrupt end.
For some observers, the new era is reminiscent of Europe before the First World War. Back then, established and emerging powers formed rival alliances with Britain, France, and Germany as anchor points. It was an order in which one’s gain was always interpreted as the other’s loss: politics as a zero-sum game.
Recently, a school of thought that was widespread at the time has become more attractive again: geopolitics.
Geopolitics has a rather bad reputation in intellectual history, at least in the German tradition. The concept arose towards the end of the 19th century in close connection with a Darwinian view of history that propagated the right of the strongest. It sees the peoples in an eternal struggle for supremacy and for “living space”. A few decades later, Nazi Germany used this poisoned term to justify its wars of conquest and annihilation.
In the USA, a more abstract variant of geopolitical thinking developed, which flowed into political science. It deals with the interrelationship of geography and politics and draws conclusions for the relations between states in the “international system”. The core issue is how economic and military power is distributed in space. This is how the global structures of international relations are formed.
Eurasia as the World Chessboard
It was two European migrants, Henry Kissinger from Germany and Zbigniew Brzezinski from Poland, who, as consultants, translated this school of thought, described as «realistic», into politics during the Cold War. The central role is played by the Eurasian continent, the huge land mass on which 5 billion people today produce two thirds of the global gross national product. Eurasia, according to Brzezinski in the 1990s, will continue to be the chessboard on which the struggle for global dominance will be fought.
Even after the end of the Soviet Union, Kissinger was convinced that Russia would continue to play a decisive role because of its location in this “geopolitical heartland” and its imperial past. Like other representatives of the realistic school, he saw early on that Ukraine would be the place where the western sphere of interests would collide with that of Russia.
The country, he concluded, should therefore not become the outpost of either power – otherwise it will be destroyed. Geography as Destiny? Not quite, because the attack on Ukraine is the act of an imperialist despot and not simply dictated by their situation. But the many conflicts in and around Ukraine, the dispute over its east or west orientation, have shown for many years that there is a dangerous geopolitical fracture here.
After the end of the Cold War, liberals dismissed thinking in terms of power blocs, equilibria, and buffer zones as outdated and unethical. People preferred to think of the common “House of Europe” from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which should be based on common rules and values. The liberal social model seemed universally transferable. Only in retrospect does it become really clear that this vision was only possible as long as the USA kept its competitors in check.
The failure of the global hegemon
How was this order subverted? And what comes after that? The rise of China, which is growing into a tough competitor to the USA, is quite obvious. For the American political scientist John Mearsheimer, the end of the unipolar world is also inherent in its own contradictions: overexpansion, excessive demands and also high spirits heralded the end. The hegemon overestimated its ability to export its own values and rebuild countries around the world in its image.
Resistance to this outreach, whether motivated by nationalism or religion, led to a series of bitter defeats. The attempts to win the fight against terror with regime changes and state-building failed. The Iraq war in particular became a turning point after 2005 and a catastrophe for the country and the region.
Around the same time, it became apparent that the intervention in Afghanistan had ousted the Taliban from power, but not defeated them. The traumatic deduction last year only confirmed that. Attempts to bring about a pro-Western change of power also failed in Syria and Libya. These countries are destroyed today. The threat posed by the Islamic State has been contained, but not banned.
A decade earlier, the Americans had successfully ended the Yugoslav wars, but before that 140,000 people had died there. In the next 20 years, the EU did not succeed in establishing a stable post-war order with potential for growth in the region. In contrast, the enlargement of NATO and the EU progressed successfully in East-Central Europe, the Baltic States and the Black Sea. It was not an imperial project, but rather wanted by the countries under former Soviet rule. Here the soft power of the US and the EU has been transformed into security and relative prosperity.
Where is Europe?
What’s next? For Mearsheimer things are clear. A world emerges dominated by two superpowers, the United States and China, surrounded by a ring of allies. Unlike during the Cold War, however, these blocs continue to maintain economic exchanges. What will Russia’s role be? A junior partner of China or its vassal? Will it be democratized after Putin, or will the giant empire fall apart? Almost anything seems possible now.
The EU, this «sleeping giant», should wake up now. With a 25 percent share of global economic output, it certainly has what it takes to become a serious geostrategic player. To do this, however, it must be able to defend itself independently. Higher military spending is not enough. It is much more important to finally coordinate defense between the countries. Because Europe does not need two dozen pocket-sized great power armies, but rather European armed forces in alliance with the USA.
The EU must now also define its external borders. Vague promises of accession that do not lead to decisive steps towards integration are dangerous in the new age. Ukraine is now experiencing this in a tragic way. In 2012, four years after NATO, the EU gave her a “perspective of joining” that was never really meant to be taken seriously. Brussels and the capitals embarked on a great power rivalry with Russia with nothing in their hands but an enlargement policy that had already failed in the Balkans.
This strategy was even less likely to work in Ukraine, a post-Soviet state with huge structural problems. New forms of connection are therefore necessary, flanked by security policy.
In the new geopolitical situation, the EU must be able to offer something to non-accession countries that are willing to join. This applies not only to Ukraine, but also to the six Western Balkan countries. Otherwise there is a real danger that the tremors on the eastern periphery will spread there. The current crisis shows in a dramatic way that the “Europe of different speeds” must be thought of much more fundamentally.
In the new epoch, space and time have become more important again. In order to be able to act, a “core Europe” integrated in terms of security policy should be created in which the states involved can make decisions quickly. Because now the ability to adapt is required: only if the EU understands that geopolitics is back with its tough rules can it assert itself in the new world.