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https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/geopoliti...den-ld.1674636


Geopolitics is back in Europe - and forcing the EU to reinvent itself

Moscow's invasion of Ukraine has made it clear: Europe's foreign policy must be more than enlargement policy. The return of hard power politics demands pragmatism and efficiency.

On September 11, 1990, U.S. President George H. W. Bush ("Bush Father") spoke for the first time before Congress in Washington of the dawn of a "new world order." This marked the beginning of what political scientists today call the unipolar moment. The thirty-year global dominance of the United States.

The non-violent decline of the Soviet Union had heralded the epoch. It passed its peak in the mid-noughties, when the Iraq War slipped away from the United States. Then the decline accelerated with the financial crisis of 2008, the end of the Arab Spring and the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2021. The abrupt end was marked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

To some observers, the new era is reminiscent of pre-World War I Europe. 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 another's loss: Politics as a zero-sum game.

More recently, a then-common school of thought has become more attractive again: geopolitics.

Geopolitics has a rather bad reputation in intellectual history, at least its German traditional strand. The concept emerged toward the end of the 19th century in close connection with a Darwinian view of history that propagates the right of the strongest. It sees peoples in an eternal struggle for supremacy and for "living space." A few decades later, Nazi Germany used this poisoned concept to justify its wars of conquest and extermination.

In the United States, a more abstract variant of geopolitical thinking developed and entered political science. It deals with the interrelation of geography and politics and draws conclusions for the relations between states in the "international system." At its core, it is concerned with how economic and military power are distributed in space. Indeed, this is how the global structures of international relations are formed.

It was two European migrants, Henry Kissinger of Germany and Zbigniew Brzezinski of Poland, who as advisors translated this school of thought, called "realist," into policy during the Cold War. The central role is played by the Eurasian continent, the vast landmass where 5 billion people now produce two-thirds of the world's gross national product. Eurasia, Brzezinski said in the 1990s, would continue to be the chessboard on which the struggle for global dominance would be fought.

Even after the demise 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 realist school, he saw early on that Ukraine would be the place where the Western sphere of interest would collide with that of Russia.

The country, he concluded, should therefore become neither the outpost of one power nor that of the other - otherwise it would be destroyed. Geography as destiny? Not quite, since the invasion of Ukraine is, after all, the act of an imperialist tyrant and is not simply dictated by its location. But the many conflicts in and around Ukraine, the dispute over its eastward or westward orientation, showed over many years that there is a dangerous geopolitical fracture here.

After the end of the Cold War, liberals rejected thinking in terms of power blocs, balances and buffer zones as outdated and unethical. They preferred to think of the common "House of Europe" from Lisbon to Vladivostok, which was to 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.

How was this order undermined? And what comes next? Most obvious is the rise of China, which is growing into a fierce competitor to the United States. But for American political scientist John Mearsheimer, the end of the unipolar world is also inherent in its own contradictions: Overstretching, overtaxing and also overconfidence ushered in the end. The hegemon overestimated its ability to export its own values and to reconstruct states worldwide in its own image.

Resistance to this encroachment, whether nationalistically or religiously motivated, led to a series of bitter defeats. For example, attempts to win the war on terror with regime change and state-building failed. The Iraq war in particular became a turning point after 2005 and a disaster for the country and the region.

Around the same time, it became apparent that the intervention in Afghanistan had driven the Taliban from power but had not defeated them. Last year's traumatic withdrawal only confirmed that. In Syria and Libya, too, attempts to bring about a pro-Western transition of power failed. These countries are now destroyed. The threat posed by the Islamic State has been contained, but not banished.

A decade earlier, the Americans had successfully ended the Yugoslav wars, but 140,000 people had died there before that. The EU failed to build a stable, high-growth postwar order in the region over the next 20 years. In contrast, in East-Central Europe, the Baltics and the Black Sea, NATO and EU enlargement progressed successfully. It was not an imperial project, but was absolutely wanted by the countries under former Soviet rule. Here, U.S. and EU soft power was transformed into security and relative prosperity.

What comes next? For Mearsheimer, things are clear. A world is emerging dominated by two superpowers, the U.S. and China, surrounded by a ring of allies. Unlike during the Cold War, however, these blocs continue to cultivate economic exchanges. What will Russia's role be? A junior partner of China or its vassal? Will it democratize after Putin, or will the giant empire disintegrate? Almost anything seems possible now.

The EU, that "sleeping giant," should wake up now. With a share of 25 percent of global economic output, it certainly has what it takes to become a serious geostrategic player. But to do so, 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. Europe does not need two dozen pocket-sized superpower armies, but 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 tragically experiencing this. In 2012, four years after NATO, the EU gave it an "accession perspective" that was never really serious. Brussels and its capitals entered into a great power competition with Russia with nothing in their hands but an enlargement policy that had already failed in the Balkans.

This strategy could work even less in Ukraine, a post-Soviet state with huge structural problems. New forms of connectivity are therefore necessary, flanked by security policy.

In the new geopolitical situation, the EU must be able to offer something to countries that are not ready for accession but are willing to join. This applies not only to Ukraine, but also to the six Western Balkan states. Otherwise, there is a real danger that the convulsions on the eastern periphery will be perpetuated there. The current crisis dramatically demonstrates that the "multi-speed Europe" needs to be thought of in much more fundamental terms.

In the new era, not only space but also time has become more important again. In order to become capable of action, a security policy-integrated "core Europe" should be created in which the participating states can decide quickly. Because what is needed now is adaptability: Only when the EU understands that geopolitics with its hard rules is back can it hold its own in the new world.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Zelensky recently said in an adress to European heads of states that the Ukraine "has now understood that it cannot be a member of NATO" (mind you, two years ago they wrote NATO membership as a goal into the Ukrainian constitution). That is last but not least a message and concession adressed at Moscow, indicating readiness to negotiate about that. For years the Ukraine was encouraged to nevertheless think it had a "perspective", same regarding EU membership. Europe is not without guilt in the current desaster. It encouraged the Ukraine to take an additionally provocative posture.

All the more unbearable, then, is the blasé, arrogant propaganda speak of von der Leyen and her ilk who still drive their ideology-heavy businesses as usual. As long as such empty-headed idiots and speech automatons focused on their own appearance lead the EU deeper and deeper into madness, nothing better will ever come of it. Europea's worst enemy is not even Putin, or China, but the EU and its bigwigs and top kings themselves. The EU doe snot prioivde the big solutions to the bog probelms, but its very existence, as it is today, defines the basic fundament of the main problem.



A free trade zone. 3% (!) defence budgets of all members. No shared currency. NATO resurrected, within NATO Europe taking more and more capabilties from the Americans who focus more on the Pacific. Not more, not less I want. This gets my vote, and only this. But they still babble all-ideology goals and cultural revolution and re-education and mass-drills for the plebs to get wanted ideology-dripping wordviews into unwilling heads. For this I always will only wish the EU: its destruction, so to make room for a new construction that is more down to the ground, more realistic, less-ideology-drunk, left and woke.