Geopolitical and Geostrategic Regional Dynamics of Europe with the Global Geopolitical Dynamics

Europe sits in the westernmost part of a vast Asian landmass (or World Island as defined by the US geopolitical theorist Nicolas Spykman as it stretches from the Atlantic shores of Portugal in the West to the western parts of Eurasian-wide Russia in the East, i.e. from the Atlantic Ocean to the Ural Mountains). Peninsular Europe has identifiable boundaries in the north (The Arctic Ocean), the west (The Atlantic Ocean) and the south (The Mediterranean Sea). Thus it is separated from the North Pole, America and Africa by the sea or ocean. Europe itself is also surrounded by various peninsulas from north to south such as the Scandinavian and the Italian (the Apennine), and from east to west such as the Balkanic and the Iberian as well as islands (Great Britain, Ireland in the northern Atlantic and Cyprus, Sicily, Sardinia and others in the Mediterranean Sea).

To the west of the Northern European Plain lie the British islands. Britain as an island seems relatively invulnerable to any continental invasion, while there have been historical attempts to do this that have failed in most cases. Therefore the prevention of the rise of any hegemonic state on the other side of the English Channel which would pose a security threat to the British islands, has been a pressing necessity for the British Empire as the offshore balancer of continental Europe.

Italy’s long coastline makes it more accessible by sea, and that is why the Roman Empire needed to conquer the whole Mediterranean basin in order to halt any invasion attempt by sea.

Central Europe, or Mitteleuropa, does not have a clear boundary. Defining the limits of where it starts and ends precisely is a challenging task as proven by the unusual inclusion of the Netherlands, Switzerland, Slovenia and Croatia in its definition, in company with the less disputably central European nations, Germany, Poland and Austria. While this definition makes it difficult to agree on whether it is a distinct European subregion, other factors such as the domination of Mitteleuropa by the Germanspeaking empires such as those of Germany and Austro-Hungary over the shared cultural heritage among the nations settled there, help justify its distinctiveness as a subregion.

The EU membership covers 28 of more than 40 European nations.

The major aim of the EU for developing relations with neighbors is stated in the Wider Europe Communication of the European Commission: “…to develop a zone of prosperity and a friendly neighbourhood – a ‘ring of friends’ – with whom the EU enjoys close, peaceful, and cooperative relations” (The European Commission, 2003: 4).

The boundaries between the nations in Europe has been drawn up based upon two different principles:

(1) the natural border theory based on the drainage divides of mountains on the borderlines and

(2) the principle of linearity and hydrofrontiers such as river or lakes located on the inter-state borders.

Western Europe also provides examples of hydrofrontiers. For instance, the Rhine River serves as the frontier on Switzerland’s borders with Austria, Lichtenstein and Germany, as well as the latter’s border with France, which is also separated from Spain by the Bidassoa River in its southern plains. Alongside these rivers, Lake Constance too, marks the Austrian-Swiss border.

With the entry into force of Schengen Treaty in 1985, and the completion of the EU’s single market in 1992, the internal borders of the EU have become fuzzier and individual countries are easily accessible, since border checks and controls have been removed and cross-border interactions have increased steadily.

colonial domination came to an end in the post-Second World War period, facilitated by the post-war fall of major colonial powers, most notably Britain and France, which led to the independence of European colonies in Africa and Asia from the 1950s to the 1970s.

In the aftermath of German unification in 1990, there were debates over whether the country broke with traditional pre-unification German foreign policy and began to shift towards adopting an assertive power political stance as shown by its participation under the Schröder government in the US-led Kosovo campaign of NATO against Serbia in 1999. However, Behnke (2012) asserts that the new German assertiveness did not signify a return or revival of traditional but highly problematic Nazi-era Geopolitik, and instead there was even continuity with the restrained post-Second World War German foreign policy.

For some European countries such as Italy and Turkey, the end of the Cold War meant a decreasing strategic importance in the Western security architecture, while for others such as the neutral states of Europe including Finland, Austria and Sweden, the post-Cold War era made their neutrality mostly irrelevant in the absence of the opposing camp. The search for a new foreign policy identity via geopolitical thinking is also the case for the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as well as the new independent states born out of the break-up of former Yugoslavia. But in some cases (Russia, Italy and Turkey) this search ended with the revival of geopolitical thinking and practice in foreign policy, but not necessarily in other cases (the Czech Republic and Germany).

Enlargement, in conjunction with the neighborhood policy, is one of the two EU foreign policy tools which have a geopolitical component. It is a geopolitical endeavor on the part of the EU because it amounts to a territorialized power projection over an external territory which it intends to integrate with. “EU enlargement has been widely seen as the EU’s most effective external policy and one of the EU’s main historical accomplishments” (Leigh, 2014: 203). In this sense, enlargement was initially regarded as a natural result of the success of European integration, but over time, especially with the eastward enlargement in the post-Cold War era, it turned into a foreign policy instrument to stabilize EU’s borders with its immediate neighborhoods, thereby urging the EU to seek regional and global influence. Therefore, enlargement has been a constitutive process by which the EU has evolved incrementally into a foreign policy actor, as well as a regional and global power.

The Copenhagen Criteria:

Political criteria: democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;

Economic criteria: the existence of a functioning market economy as well as the capacity to cope with competitive pressure and market forces within the Union;

The adoption of the EU acquis: the ability to take on the obligations of membership

Strengthening stability, security and well-being for European Union member states and neighbouring countries, and preventing the emergence of new dividing lines between the enlarged Union and its neighbours” (The European Commission, 2004).

The ENP has evolved since its inception, and thus was reviewed in 2011 and 2015 in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, terrorist attacks across Europe, and other regional challenges. After the failure to create a ring of friends around the borders of Europe, it was necessary for the Union to revitalize the ENP with a new focus on democratization in response to the outbreak of the Arab Spring. In the meantime, the follow-up events in southern and eastern neighborhood countries such as the Syrian civil war, the coup in Egypt in 2013, and the Ukraine Crisis and the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, forced the Union to make another revision in 2015. These reviews seem to be in parallel with the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy, which contains the goal of building a stronger and more resilient neighborhood against these challenges.

What is implied here is that the EU’s way of integration, with its superior or universal values, is the perfect model to be followed unquestionably by the neighbors, and that their complete compliance with this model is in their best interests.

Partners in EU’s Neighborhood Policy: ten Mediterranean countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestinian Authority, Syria and Tunisia) and six Eastern countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine).

EU integration is currently encountering a great deal of state-based difficulties and challenges arising from the rise of nationalism, great power competition, and a lack of transatlantic solidarity, as well as non-state challenges including ISIS terrorism and illegal immigration. The differing geopolitical interests of the member states have been a setback for EU unity in the face of international crises.

China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative, which was launched in 2013 under the new Chinese President Xi Jinping, is a geopolitically motivated endeavor to expand its influence and clout westward, and this policy is expected to have a strong impact on the EU and its neighborhood. It aims to build new trade corridors reaching to Africa and Europe, crossing Central Asia and the Indian Ocean, thereby establishing a Belt and Road circle of friends. To this end, China has developed strong trade and political ties with both EU members and peripheral countries in the European neighborhood. Indeed it has sought to make strategic investments in many sectors of the EU economy, while trying to “…leverage prospects of investments in European countries to have them veto EU statements criticizing China’s human rights record” (EPSC Brief, 2018). Member states compete with each other to attract more Chinese investment, and China tends to play one country against another. Thus it seeks to pursue a divide and rule strategy within the EU by taking advantage of the deep divisions among member states.