The author recounts “the story of highly competitive and mutually
suspicious monarchies and republics; of empires, revolution, rivalry,
unification and utopias”. The idea of a European success story due in the main
to the competition between states and nations is not new, as readers of Eric L.
Jones’ The European Miracle know since
this latter book publication in 1981.
Neither is the other central geopolitical idea according to which
whoever controls the core of Europe controls the entire continent, and whoever
controls all of Europe can dominate the world, as Charles V, Cromwell, Pitt and
other British rulers, Napoléon, Bismarck, Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt clearly
realized. Halford John Mackinder new as much as early as 1904 when he wrote
“The geographical pivot of history” for The
Geographical Journal.
Simms emphasizes the continuing fractured nature of the continent as
well as the central role of Germany, under the guise first of the Holy Roman
Empire, and later as the Second and Third Reich, which has been a constant
preoccupation of Europeans because of its geography, its power, and its
policies.
Europe indeed
is a good read, and Simms strategic and geopolitical approach is illuminating. The
enthusiastic comments on the book, however, seem to me a bit exaggerated. What I
really enjoyed, among other brilliant insights, is the following analysis of
the euro crisis (pp. 527-528):
“If Greece and Ireland actually defaulted, this would cast doubt on the
value of previously sacrosanct government bonds and precipitate a general
collapse in Spain, Portugal and Italy as investors fled the state bond market.
It might even destroy the entire euro-system itself and tip the whole continent
and thus probably the entire world into recession. For this reason, the EU and
the IMF sought to prop up Irish and Greek finances through a series of largely German-funded
‘bailouts’, which lent money -- often at
high interest rates – to cover the shortfall, in return for a commitment to
further austerity measures to bring the national finances in order. The central
actor here was Germany, where a struggle erupted between the establishment,
which feared that a Greek or Irish default would destroy their own banking
system, which was heavily invested in the relevant bonds, and the population at
large which was increasingly weary of funding yet another ‘bailout’ for
improvident peripheral economies and was registering that fact in the regional
elections. By the middle of 2011, in order to avoid further electoral losses,
Chancellor Merkel had retreated from her original joint position with Paris in
defence of the bondholders, towards an insistence that international investors
would have to share some of the losses. This stance, however reasonable in
itself, not only infuriated the French, whose banks were even more exposed to
Greek debt, but also increased the chance of an escalating sovereign default
across substantial parts of the Union.
Taken together (with deep divergences regarding international relations
and military interventions, JJR), all this amounted to a severe and possibly
terminal challenge to the European project. At the time of writing (2013, JJR)
Europe remains in one of its deepest crises since the Second World War.”
(…)
And as “Germany was becoming a more ‘normal’ and thus more ‘assertive’
nation, as it left the past behind it … a ‘central secession’ from the EU, by
which Germany simply washed its hands of Europe, and reintroduced the
Deutschemark, could no longer be completely excluded.”
As I wrote in a previous post, Germany, indeed, is the key to the
solution of the “Euro problem”. This should mean, according to the Simms's analysis, the coming breakup of the euro that is more openly discussed in
Germany nowadays.
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