Authors: Henry Kissinger
They had to cope first with another division of Europe. In 1949, the Western allies combined their three occupation zones to create the Federal Republic of Germany. Russia turned its occupation zone into a socialist state tied to it by the Warsaw Pact. Germany was back to its position three hundred years earlier after the Peace of Westphalia: its division had become the key element of the emerging international structure.
France and Germany, the two countries whose rivalry had been at the heart of every European war for three centuries, began the process of transcending European history by merging the key elements of
their remaining economic power. In 1952, they formed the Coal and Steel Community as a first step toward an “ever closer union” of Europe’s constituent peoples and a keystone of a new European order.
For decades, Germany had posed the principal challenge to Europe’s stability. For the first decade of the postwar period, the course of its national leadership would be crucial. Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck’s career was nearing its end. Patrician in style, suspicious of populism, he created a political party, the Christian Democratic Union, which for the first time in German parliamentary history governed as a moderate party with a majority mandate. With this mandate, Adenauer committed himself to regaining the confidence of Germany’s recent victims. In 1955, he brought West Germany into the Atlantic Alliance. So committed was Adenauer to the unification of Europe that he rejected, in the 1950s, Soviet proposals hinting that Germany might be unified if the Federal Republic abandoned the Western alliance. This decision surely reflected a shrewd judgment on the reliability of Soviet offers but also a severe doubt about the capacity of his own society to repeat a solitary journey as a national state in the center of the Continent. It nevertheless took a leader of enormous moral strength to base a new international order on the partition of his own country.
The partition of Germany was not a new event in European history; it had been the basis of both the Westphalian and the Vienna settlements. What was new was that the emerging Germany explicitly cast itself as a component of the West in a contest over the nature of international political order. This was all the more important because the balance of power was largely being shaped outside the European continent. For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two
superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe. America had helped restart the European economy with the Greek-Turkish aid program of 1947 and the Marshall Plan of 1948. In 1949, the United States for the first time in its history undertook a peacetime alliance, through the North Atlantic Treaty.
The European equilibrium, historically authored by the states of Europe, had turned into an aspect of the strategy of outside powers. The North Atlantic Alliance established a regular framework for consultation between the United States and Europe and a degree of coherence in the conduct of foreign policy. But in its essence, the European balance of power shifted from internal European arrangements to the containment of the Soviet Union globally, largely by way of the nuclear capability of the United States. After the shock of two devastating wars, the Western European countries were confronted by a change in geopolitical perspective that challenged their sense of historical identity.
The international order during the first phase of the Cold War was in effect bipolar, with the operation of the Western alliance conducted essentially by America as the principal and guiding partner. What the United States understood by alliance was not so much countries acting congruently to preserve equilibrium as America as the managing director of a joint enterprise.
The traditional European balance of power had been based on the equality of its members; each partner contributed an aspect of its power in quest of a common and basically limited goal, which was equilibrium. But the Atlantic Alliance, while it combined the military forces of the allies in a common structure, was sustained largely by unilateral American military power—especially so with respect to America’s nuclear deterrent. So long as strategic nuclear weapons were the principal element of Europe’s defense, the objective of European policy was primarily psychological: to oblige the United States to treat Europe as an extension of itself in case of an emergency.
The Cold War international order reflected two sets of balances, which for the first time in history were largely independent of each other: the nuclear balance between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the internal balance within the Atlantic Alliance, whose operation was, in important ways, psychological. U.S. preeminence was conceded in return for giving Europe access to American nuclear protection. European countries built up their own military forces not so much to create additional strength as to have a voice in the decisions of the ally—as an admission ticket, as it were, to discussions regarding the use of the American deterrent. France and Britain developed small nuclear forces that were irrelevant to the overall balance of power but created an additional claim to a seat at the table of major-power decisions.
The realities of the nuclear age and the geographic proximity of the Soviet Union sustained the alliance for a generation. But the underlying difference in perspective was bound to reappear with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
After four decades of Cold War, NATO had achieved the vision of the Cold War’s end that its founders had proclaimed. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led rapidly to the unification of Germany, together with the collapse of the Soviet satellite orbit, the belt of states in Eastern Europe with an imposed Soviet control system. In a testament to the vision of the allied leaders who had designed the Atlantic Alliance and to the subtle performance of those who oversaw the denouement, the century’s third contest over Europe ended peacefully. Germany achieved unification as an affirmation of liberal democracy; it reaffirmed its commitment to European unity as a project of common values and shared development. The nations of Eastern Europe, suppressed for forty years (some longer), began to reemerge into independence and to regain their personalities.
The collapse of the Soviet Union changed the emphasis of diplomacy. The geopolitical nature of the European order was
fundamentally transformed when there no longer existed a substantial military threat from within Europe. In the exultant atmosphere that followed, traditional problems of equilibrium were dismissed as “old” diplomacy, to be replaced by the spread of shared ideals. The Atlantic Alliance, it was now professed, should be concerned less about security and more about its political reach. The expansion of NATO up to the borders of Russia—even perhaps including it—was now broached as a serious prospect. The projection of a military alliance into historically contested territory within several hundred miles of Moscow was proposed not primarily on security grounds but as a sensible method of “locking in” democratic gains.
In the face of a direct threat, international order had been conceived of as the confrontation of two adversarial blocs dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively. As Soviet power declined, the world became to some extent multipolar, and Europe strove to define an independent identity.
What a journey Europe had undertaken to reach this point. It had launched itself on global explorations and spread its practices and values around the world. It had in every century changed its internal structure and invented new ways of thinking about the nature of international order. Now at the culmination of an era, Europe, in order to participate in it, felt obliged to set aside the political mechanisms through which it had conducted its affairs for three and a half centuries. Impelled also by the desire to cushion the emergent unification of Germany, the new European Union established a common currency in 2002 and a formal political structure in 2004. It proclaimed a Europe united, whole, and free, adjusting its differences by peaceful mechanisms.
German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no
constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding itself together?
The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system.
The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either. The European Union diminishes its member states’ sovereignty and traditional government functions, such as control of their currency and borders. On the other hand, European politics remains primarily national, and in many countries, objections to EU policy have become the central domestic issue. The result is a hybrid, constitutionally something between a state and a confederation, operating through ministerial meetings and a common bureaucracy—more like the Holy Roman Empire than the Europe of the nineteenth century. But unlike the Holy Roman Empire (for most of its history, at least), the EU struggles to resolve its internal tensions in the quest for the principles and goals by which it is guided. In the process, it pursues monetary union side by side with fiscal dispersion and bureaucracy at odds with democracy. In foreign policy it embraces universal ideals without the means to enforce them, and cosmopolitan identity in contention with national loyalties—with European unity accompanied by east-west and north-south divides and an ecumenical attitude toward autonomy movements (Catalan, Bavarian, Scot) challenging the integrity of states. The European “social model” is dependent upon yet
discomforted by market dynamism. EU policies enshrine tolerant inclusiveness, approaching unwillingness to assert distinctive Western values, even as member states practice politics driven by fears of non-European influxes.
The result is a cycle testing the popular legitimacy of the EU itself. European states have surrendered significant portions of what was once deemed their sovereign authority. Because Europe’s leaders are still validated, or rejected, by national democratic processes, they are tempted to conduct policies of national advantage and, in consequence, disputes persist between the various regions of Europe—usually over economic issues. Especially in crises such as that which began in 2009, the European structure is then driven toward increasingly intrusive emergency measures simply to survive. Yet when publics are asked to make sacrifices on behalf of “the European project,” a clear understanding of its obligations may not exist. Leaders then face the choice of disregarding the will of their people or following it in opposition to Brussels.
Europe has returned to the question with which it started, except now it has a global sweep. What international order can be distilled from contending aspirations and contradictory trends? Which countries will be the components of the order, and in what manner will they relate their policies? How much unity does Europe need, and how much diversity can it endure? But the converse issue is in the long run perhaps even more fundamental: Given its history, how much diversity must Europe preserve to achieve a meaningful unity?
When it maintained a global system, Europe represented the dominant concept of world order. Its statesmen designed international structures and prescribed them to the rest of the world. Today the nature of the emergent world order is itself in dispute, and regions beyond Europe will play a major role in defining its attributes. Is the world moving toward regional blocs that perform the role of states in the Westphalian system? If so, will balance follow, or will this reduce
the number of key players to so few that rigidity becomes inevitable and the perils of the early twentieth century return, with inflexibly constructed blocs attempting to face one another down? In a world where continental structures like America, China, and maybe India and Brazil have already reached critical mass, how will Europe handle its transition to a regional unit? So far the process of integration has been dealt with as an essentially bureaucratic problem of increasing the competence of various European administrative bodies, in other words an elaboration of the familiar. Where will the impetus for charting the inward commitment to these goals emerge? European history has shown that unification has never been achieved by primarily administrative procedures. It has required a unifier—Prussia in Germany, Piedmont in Italy—without whose leadership (and willingness to create faits accomplis) unification would have remained stillborn. What country or institution will play that role? Or will some new institution or inner group have to be devised for charting the road?
And if Europe should achieve unity, by whatever road, how will it define its global role? It has three choices: to foster Atlantic partnership; to adopt an ever-more-neutral position; or to move toward a tacit compact with an extra-European power or grouping of them. Does it envisage shifting coalitions, or does it see itself as a member of a North Atlantic bloc that generally adopts compatible positions? To which of its pasts will Europe relate itself: to its recent past of Atlantic cohesion or to its longer-term history of maneuvering for maximum advantage on the basis of national interest? In short, will there still be an Atlantic community, and if so, as I fervently hope, how will it define itself?