Europe today is riven by several urgent policy questions: How should its institutions evolve? How far and how fast should EU integration proceed? What should Europeans think about the concept increasingly referred to as “two-tiered” Europe? How should they think about common defense following the signing of the PESCO agreement by 23 European countries to develop a permanent framework for closer security cooperation? And how should they work out their differences over immigration, policy towards Russia, and relations with the United States?
Yet despite the need for answers to these urgent questions, throughout Europe’s capitals there seems to be a paucity of leadership capable of addressing the Continent’s deteriorating situation. Since last September, Germany has become more inward-looking, as Chancellor Angela Merkel has struggled to form a government after the electorate delivered a stunning blow to both the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Even if a Große Koalition of the CDU/CSU with the SPD comes to pass, the shrinking of the political center in Germany has called into question the German government’s durability and effectiveness going forward. Across the English Channel, Prime Minister Theresa May continues on the road to Brexit, even though the negotiations with the European Commission continue to sputter and aren’t offering much reason to be optimistic. In 2018, France is poised to test the public’s willingness and endurance when it comes to Emanuel Macron’s vision for reforming the country, and the jury is still out on whether the French electorate will support the President’s proposals (nor is Berlin likely buy into the common Eurozone budget idea). Italy’s political and economic problems are rearing their heads once again; amidst tensions in the run-up to the next election, these could end up being the trigger of the next major financial crisis. Both Italy and Austria are reeling from the impact of the immigration crisis, the latter having overturned in the last election many traditional assumptions about what drives the country’s politics. Meanwhile, Poland is locked in a bitter internal political fight over the recently passed law on the country’s judiciary, with the European Commission now having entered the fray by invoking the threat of sanctions against Warsaw under Article 7 of the EU Treaty. And in the Balkans continued political instability may lead to a new crisis in short order.
However, arguably the most powerful trend pulling Europe apart today is the growing acceptance of the idea that a bifurcated Europe will in fact happen, with the continent fragmenting in ways few thought possible in what was supposed to be an increasingly postmodern and globalist European project. Europe today is once again being split in half by its postmodern West and its modern East. In the process the idea of a new “Central Europe” geographically anchored along the German-Polish border, politically linking Berlin and Warsaw while cutting across Europe’s north and south—is fading fast.
Historically, the concept of Mitteleuropa rested on the notion of a common cultural space that is “Middle Europe,” one which amounts to more than simply nostalgia for the residual connectivity of the former German and Habsburg empires. It linked the cultural traditions of Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians but also of the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks—the western Slavic stateless nations of the 19th century—as well as Central European Jews. The golden age of the first Mitteleuropa ran from the mid-19th century up until the First World War, and was effectively snuffed out in 1918. The horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Iron Curtain completed the destruction, creating the political “West vs. East” divide across Europe, notwithstanding the bizarre fact that, for half a century, Prague, Warsaw, and Bratislava were in the “East” as part of the Soviet bloc, while, with Turkey in NATO, Istanbul found itself in the “West.” In 1989–90, as communism collapsed and Germany unified, the notion that post-communist Europe might find itself relegated to a peripheral “gray zone” of European security was fought—each for his own reasons—by statesmen as disparate as Germany’s Helmut Kohl and America’s Bill Clinton. Today, NATO and EU enlargement may seem like obvious and necessary consequences of the end of the Cold War, but at the time making them happen required both the vision and political will of leaders across the former West-East divide, thereby giving Europe its greatest chance yet for peace and prosperity. This was not to be achieved by asserting that a liberal global order had miraculously transformed humanity but by the willingness of the Europeans once more to take on the project of overcoming history in the name of a “Europe whole, free and at peace.” At the core of this common European project lay the notion of a “second grand reconciliation” between Germany and Poland—to mirror the Franco-German reconciliation after the Second World War—and the re-emergence of “Central Europe,” now rooted in shared markets and, through Schengen, also shared people. The EU institutional structures framed the historical project, in the process reconnecting the post-Cold War “West” and “East” while expanding democracy and markets, with the hope of eventually linking up with the new “Eastern Europe” of Belarus, Ukraine, and ultimately Russia.
The emergence after the Cold War of the idea of Central Europe as the place where “old” and “new” Europe met gave Europe its best chance since the end of the Cold War to overcome its historical geostrategic dilemmas. Central Europe is both a spatially defined entry point linking the West with the East as well as the embodiment of the idea that for Europe to be at peace it needs more than its Carolingian core—that only when it connects fully its West with its East can it in turn begin to bring Russia into a dialogue that will finally take Moscow beyond its fixation with the “Western vs. Eurasian” dichotomy.
The idea of Central Europe as a geostrategic space with the capacity to redefine and ultimately overcome the continent’s historical security dilemmas has always entailed more than the “Visegrad Four,” comprised of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Nor could Central Europe be some permutation of the V-4 plus the “Intermarium” linking the Baltic and the Black Sea, or the “Trimarium” with the Adriatic thrown into the mix. Most fundamentally, the idea of Central Europe held the greatest promise first and foremost because it was to include not just the post-communist democracies but also Germany and Austria, and possibly others. In today’s Europe, which has spent the last decade grappling with the aftershocks of the Greek crisis, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and war in eastern Ukraine, as well as the ramifications of MENA migration and Brexit, the early post-Cold War heady days of optimism seem to have long since passed. And yet the ingredients for success remain, provided Europe’s leaders can grasp the urgency of the hour.
Europe post-Cold War has always been more than the institutions it produced, or merely a collection of sovereign nation-states, “old” and “new.” The European project has never been a simple “either/or” proposition, for Europe remains a landscape of interconnected historical and cultural spaces that undergird both EU institutions and European nation states. There is still time to stop Europe’s fragmentation, and it is in the U.S. interest to work with our European allies to ensure that it does not come to pass; regardless of the rationale, both the “two-tier” approach and a full-bore re-nationalization would leave Europe weaker and diminished. Either vision would ultimately cause Europe to revert once more to a West vs. East formula, perhaps going so far as to offer a perverse “Yalta light” version of Vladimir Putin’s dream.
If nothing is done to reverse the process, the demise of the idea of Central Europe will constitute a singular failure of vision and leadership not only on both sides of the Oder and Neisse rivers, but also across Europe’s capitals and in Washington. As the idea of Europe’s bifurcation into a core and periphery continues to gain adherents, the idea of Central Europe is fast becoming an immediate casualty of this process, with the “West and East” framework returning to the fore of political discourse about Europe’s future, and ultimately threatening the decomposition of Western multilateral institutions, including NATO, as well as heralding the return of bilateralism as the modus vivendi in Europe. As we contemplate how to enhance the deterrence and defense of NATO’s eastern flank and how to reinvigorate the Transatlantic alliance, it is in the interest of the United States to do everything possible to prevent Europe’s second de facto political bifurcation from coming into being, lest a quarter century of successful post-Cold War transformation in Europe be undone at a time when multiplying threats to American interests in the Pacific are on the horizon.
Regardless of other United States priorities across the globe, Europe needs to be Washington’s focus in the coming year to ensure that our strategy includes a serious effort to work towards reconnecting Europe’s nascent Western and Eastern halves.