The struggle to keep the Eurozone intact threatens the future of a united Europe. It is not, however, the only threat the EU faces, and perhaps not even the primary one. Robert Kaplan, in a new essay (“Europe’s New Map” for The American Interest) gives proponents of a robust EU additional reasons to worry. Many of Kaplan’s concerns center on Russia as a resurgent energy power, and its attempts to leverage the energy dependence of some former Warsaw Pact nations now in the EU (such as Poland) in an attempt to re-create its Soviet-era sphere of influence. Empowered by its energy dominance, Russia will pull at the EU’s seams in the near term. Central European nations will seek to align with it, rather than a financially weakened EU, and these “subtle” (Kaplan’s word) strategic realignments will pose a long-term threat to Europe’s union. Current attempts to weigh the EU’s longevity only through the lens of the current debates over the Eurozone are “parochial,” Kaplan says. Rather than a united Europe, he predicts that over the coming decades “Several Europes will emerge, intertwined and overlapping, that will recall former empires but will not really fit within any particular set of fixed borders.”
Kaplan is perhaps best known for his book Balkan Ghosts, which examined the ethnic and strategic roots of the conflict that absorbed Southeastern Europe in the mid-to-late 1990s. Many inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia looked back centuries to inform their national identity and present-day worldview. U.S. readers may have wondered how the Battle of Kosovo, fought in the Fourteenth Century, could be so resonant with citizens of the former Yugoslavia. As an American author examining the relationships between European nations, Kaplan reminded readers of the degree to which the U.S. operates from a shorter historical timeline than any other major power. European powers operate from a different historical base than does the U.S. Containing inflation is a constitutional prerogative in Germany; a fact that has impacted the course of Europe’s austerity debate. Russia’s desire to secure a sphere of influence was a historical trend that George Kennan articulated in his famous “Long Telegram.” Kaplan has demonstrated the pertinence of historical context in prior work, and he is right to expand the conversation about Europe’s future to contain more of it.
His assumptions about Russian power and intentions leave more room for debate. Kaplan discusses the significance of Ukraine to Russia as its traditional territory, and to Europe as a “buffer” against Russian encroachment. What exactly Ukraine would “buffer” against is left unexplained and is less clear. Similarly, Kaplan discusses Russian desires to undermine the “sovereignty” of the Baltic states, former annexed territories of the Soviet Union. But it is also unclear, particularly given its energy leverage, what modern-day Russia would stand to gain by trying to exert control over the territories of these now-sovereign nations. It seems unlikely that Russia would want to re-draw the borders of some greater empire simply for the sake of regaining past territory. Further, as Kaplan explains, new energy developments in neighboring Poland and other countries may undermine the energy leverage Russia currently enjoys, and the influence that comes with it.
Kaplan also risks under-emphasizing the difficulty in predicting the “influence” of powerful nations accurately over the long term. Russia’s recent history provides a good example. Its own emergence from a 1998 debt default to the current strength of its energy-driven economy demonstrates the potential for underestimating change in a nation’s economic outlook over the course of a decade. Japan provides another case of failed “groupthink” about rising national power: its regress from widespread predictions of its global dominance in the 1980s to its recession and underperformance through the 1990s were another about-face in consensus about the future of the global economy. Turkey’s trajectory has undergone a similar re-assessment. As a stable democracy in the turbulent Middle East, its strategic role there is growing. Its economic growth is far more robust than the average in an EU that has long fought to deny it membership. Finally, as Kaplan mentions, the year-to-year volatility of global energy markets challenges attempts to assess the long-term health of nations, like Russia, that depend on them.
Kaplan concedes that a U.S.-EU Free Trade Agreement would be a “game changer.” It is certainly aimed at bolstering EU growth, and recovering some of the influence that, as Kaplan notes, has waned in the face of the Eurozone debt crisis. This hints at a perspective that Kaplan leaves under-explored. To what degree is Europe’s inability to project power a question of a perpetually weak economy or historical influences, and how much is it a question of political will? Europe opted for union. Its creation and expansion resulted from political consensus. Current EU leaders have fostered a series of hard-fought consensus decisions in response to the current crisis that suggest a commitment to union. It also suggests that a strengthening or weakening of the EU will not be the passive result of external pressures.
