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After exactly 60 years of attempting to build a new European structure under the aegis of the European Union, Europe in 2008 will return to an earlier geopolitical arrangement: the Concert of Powers. For most of its history, Europe has existed as a dynamic constellation of states struggling for local, regional and continental power. The geography of the Continent — packed with mountains, peninsulas and islands — has made it impossible for any single power to emerge dominant, while the presence of the Northern European Plain and myriad rivers has ensured constant contact. The result is that the Continent is united by trade but divided by war in an ever-shifting array of alliances among rising and falling powers.
During the Cold War the division and occupation of the Continent by the United States and the Soviet Union smothered the Concert of Powers, as all of Europe was forced into one camp or the other. During this period — which in essence was a fundamentally new political geography for the Europeans — the various states no longer needed to struggle against each other. In the early Cold War years, Germany, Austria and Italy were occupied; Spain languished under dictatorship; the United Kingdom licked its wounds; and all of Central Europe lay behind the Iron Curtain. Peace of a sort had been imposed and the Europeans could focus on economic matters. The result — merged with the ideology of France’s Charles de Gaulle, who sought to unite Europe under a single political framework and become a third pole in geopolitics — was the European Union.
But such a format was only possible so long as the geography of Europe was superseded by the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell and Central Europe re-entered the equation, the Gaullist dream began to unravel — first with the failure of the European constitution and then with Gaullist Jacques Chirac’s departure from the French presidency.
The year 2008 will see the European Union slowly evolve from a pan-continental government to a glorified free trade zone. We do not mean this as an insult: Europe’s achievements in the past 60 years — indeed, in the past 10 — have been impressive, bringing Europe peace and prosperity it has never before possessed without somehow putting some of its own members at a severe disadvantage. But this affluence and stability was ultimately achieved in the context of a political geography that no longer exists.
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