Chapter 6: Geopolitical and Geostrategic Regional Dynamics of Europe with the Global Geopolitical Dynamics

The Geopolitical Identity of Europe

The European Peninsula really has a unique geography which historically has enabled it to become wealthier and more resilient than other regions, while also making it more diverse and fragmented in return. Today, European integration has emerged as a colossal entity in this wide European geopolitical space. In classical geopolitical terms, it sits on the western edge of Spykman’s Rimland which encircles the Heartland consisting of western Russia and Central Asia, and extends from northeastern Asia to Greenland. Nonetheless, Europe does not meet the requirements of what constitutes a territory as a continent, because it makes up only one part of two geographicallycontiguous landmasses entitled together Eurasia.

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). (Please check figure 6.1 on the page 150 in the lecture book for European regions.)

Indeed whether Russia, Turkey and Cyprus are constitutive parts of Europe, or outsiders in geographical terms, has remained an open question until now. As it is geographically contested, (South)Eastern Europe has also been subject to fierce and sometimes violent competition by regional powers such as the Russian, Austrian and the Ottoman Empires for a hegemonic influence over the region. Today, while Central and Eastern European countries are both EU and NATO members, and the Balkan states are either EU and NATO members or on their way to join both organizations, the remaining nations - Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus - appear the objects of geopolitical rivalry between the EU and Russia.

Nowadays the EU increasingly tends to represent the whole of Europe and be a unified geopolitical actor as an increasingly continental polity, seeking to have partners in its own image in its close vicinity. Indeed the EU membership covers 28 of more than 40 European nations, while it still continues to expand its influence well beyond the European core.

Internal Geopolitics of Europe

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.

Drainage divides or water courses play a central role as the basis of the natural border theory. Following physical geography logic, international borders are drawn using these natural formations, while they provide a useful means in mountainous areas of separating one nation from another, as exemplified in southern, northern and central Europe by the Franco-Spanish, Swedish-Norwegian and Polish-Czech and Polish-Slovakian borders in the Pyrenees, the Scandinavian and the Carpathian Mountains respectively.

In the past several decades, both the deepening and enlargement of the EU has affected the meaning of the internal borders and the Dynamics of bordering across Europe. 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. This has led to a change in the meaning of borders across the EU, and external borders have gained a new relevance and importance in the face of security concerns following the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the growing tide of illegal immigrants in the 2000s. Thus, the protection of external borders has become a pressing necessity.

External Geopolitics of Europe

Before the outbreak of the First World War, most of the world was under the rule of European colonial powers. However, this 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.

Despite the success of decolonization, the newly independent states faced enormous challenges in the aftermath of their emancipation from their colonial rulers. They still are dependent on their former colonizers, as proven by European overseas territories such as French Guiana in Latin America, British Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and the Antarctic territories of Britain and Norway. These European outposts are critical for Europeangeopolitics, thanks to either their strategic locations and their importance for the European aerospace industry as in the case of Guiana which has rocket launch capabilities, or military purposes as in the case of Diego Garcia which has been rented by the US Army from the UK, or their scientific value as in the case of Antarctic territories. Because of these overseas territories and dependencies scattered across the world, the EU and some of its members have enjoyed a global geopolitical presence. Apart from these overseas territories, there are also EU territories which are referred to as ‘outermost regions’ such as the Spanish Canaries or the Portuguese Azores and Madeira islands in the Atlantic Ocean. These regions, too, give the EU a geopolitical leverage beyond continental Europe. While these regions are an integral part of EU territory, the above-mentioned overseas territories are not EU territories legally, and are only dependent on the EU member countries concerned, as their nationals hold EU nationality because of the nationality of an EU member state.

The Return of Geopolitics in Post-Cold War Europe

During the heightened Cold War era, Europe was geopolitically divided into two bitterly hostile parts in the form of Eastern Europe (the Socialist bloc) and Western Europe (the Capitalist bloc), signifying the ideological and political enmity between the two competing blocs. With the end of the Cold War and the subsequent desecuritization of the European political order, the geopolitical division of Europe has seemed to disappear completely following the accession of the formerly Eastern bloc countries to the European Union and NATO in the 1990s and 2000s. In terms of an ever-expanding integration, the post-Cold War EU has already been a geopolitical actor that seeks to play a global role in the world economy and politics among others such as the US and China. Thus, as has been seen in peace studies, it is anticipated that geopolitics now would serve for a more benevolent international order in Europe and beyond.

However, the influence of geopolitics on European politics, and the geopolitical thinking on the part of European states, resurfaced as an appropriate response in a time of foreign policy identity crisis despite the peaceful end of the Cold War, thereby leading to the conditions under which a re-securitization of European security relations took place. This new wave of geopolitical resurgence was a desperate quest for a new spatial imagination on the part of Europe. With its not only physical but also cultural logic, this resurgence of geopolitical thinking would arguably lead to a Hobbesian culture of anarchy, with a militarist and nationalist tone in the continent.

Indeed both the major powers of Europe such as Russia, France and Italy, and smaller states experienced this unprecedented return of geopolitics in their foreign affairs thinking and practice. Many books and other studies on geopolitics have been published in a wide range of European languages, while the term has widely appeared in newspapers and periodicals across Europe.

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.

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.

European countries were involved in finding out and redefining their role and strategic importance in the emerging new world order. They did this by shifting towards geopolitical thinking, or at least debating its relevance in the conduct of their foreign affairs. But there exist, of course, some differences among European states over whether geopolitics is a convenient or acceptable concept when it comes to achieving this goal.

Beyond the national revival of geopolitics, the EU’s launch of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), also called the Barcelona Process, in 1995 was an ambitious response to the new geopolitical environment in the postCold War era. The region has always been a focus of EU attention during the Cold War years not only because of its proximity to Europe, but also its continued strategic salience in the aftermath of the EU’s southern enlargement encompassing Greece, Spain and Portugal. With this Partnership, 12 Mediterranean Countries plus the EU members are included in a multilateral scheme with a strong regional emphasis. In accordance with its dominant commercial approach, the establishment of a free trade area with these states was among the main priorities of the EMP, but the 2010 deadline for achieving this was missed. With the introduction of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) in 2003, the commercial approach that characterized the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership during the 1990s was replaced with a more explicitly ‘normative’ approach the following decade.

Contemporary Geopolitics of Europe in the 21st Century: Enlargement and Neighborhood Policies as Geopolitical Investments on the Part of the EU

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. 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

However, beyond geography, there are other sets of conditions called the Copenhagen Criteria which are applied to the acceding countries in terms of whether or not they conform to the political, economic and legal norms and standards of the EU. The Copenhagen Criteria includes:

• 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.

The pace of EU enlargement has been slowed down since the accession of Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 because of enlargement fatigue. Indeed, only Croatia has been able to join the Union since then. Of other candidates, Turkey was unable to finalize the accession negotiations thanks to the Cyprus question, and the opposition of some member governments to its membership, as well as its deteriorating democratic and human rights record, while Macedonia was not able to start negotiations due to the naming dispute with Greece, which was only solved in June 2018 with the signing of a deal in the border town Prespa which resulted in the renaming of the country as the Republic of North Macedonia. In the meantime, the Western Balkan countries - Serbia, Montenegro, Albania and Bosnia - joined the membership queue starting from 2009 by officially applying for membership successively. Of these, Serbia and Montenegro are in the phase of accession negotiations with the Union with a prospect of accession around 2025.

The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) was first introduced in 2003 “Wider Europe” communication by the European Commission and then launched in 2004 as a response to the eastward and southward enlargements of 2004 and 2007. In other words, the purpose of this policy was to bring these countries closer together as part of EU integration through further cooperation in areas of economics, commerce, diplomacy and politics. In May 2009, the Eastern Partnership (EaP) was launched in terms of the eastern flank of the ENP, and it was meant to be complementary to the ENP goals. Eastern European EU members such as Poland and the Czech Republic are the most prominent proponents of the EaP, since their approach is geopolitically motivated in the face of the Russian threat with regard to Eastern Europe

The southern dimension of the ENP was the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) which was launched in 2008, as a response to the failure in the fulfillment of the EMP’s objectives, and in need of the reassertion of the central importance of the region for the EU, in a wider regional context than the EMP by including 28 EU members plus 15 Mediterranean countries.

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.

The ENP partner countries were offered only partnership based on cooperation in various areas, but not an EU membership perspective. In the words of the former European Commission President Prodi, the ENP enables the neighboring countries to share everything with the Union but institutions.

There is a strong link between the character of EU’s enlargement and neighborhood policies, as the latter was designed on the model of the former, in the sense that both the adoption of the EU acquis and its implementation by the recipient countries, and the imposition of the conditionality principle by the EU on them, were nearly identical to the strategy of enlargement with regard to the acceding countries.

The coverage of highly diverse neighborhoods such as Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean in geographical, political and cultural terms under a single scheme with a remarkably wide geographic scope as if they have more commonalities than differences, was the most heavilycriticized aspect of ENP on the part of scholars. From the onset, the ENP was based on the idea of “one size fits all”, and thus did not even attempt to differentiate the specificities of recipient countries.

Another highly criticized aspect of the ENP is the lack of political will on the part of EU member states to cope with authoritarian regimes in neighboring areas for the sake of both stability and the prevention of irregular migration towards Europe. Also the economic crisis hit the EU severely, and dealt a severe blow in terms of its reliability and credibility for neighboring regions. In addition to the Middle East, the EU has also softened its rigid conditionality in Eastern Europe, as proven by its attempt to convince Ukraine under the Yanukovych government to sign the Association Agreement, which was dubbed as a “bulwark against Russian aggression”, while lifting sanctions on Belarus in 2016, which were imposed because of its poor democracy and human rights record.

Current State of the EU as a Geopolitical Actor: Challenges Ahead in a Turbulent Era of Global Geopolitics and Great Power Competition

During the 1990s, the EU enjoyed a period of no proximate geopolitical threat or competition emanating in its close vicinity, and believed that the geopolitical power struggle among majör powers of Europe was a thing of past centuries. A postmodern and transnational worldview held by the Europeans was commonplace across the continent, while the EU rules and institutions were consolidated sufficiently in order to put this “utopian” worldview into practice.

As for the 2010s, the outside world facing Europe, its periphery in particular, has become increasingly more dangerous and unstable. In times of such a global power shift and arising peripheral threats, geopolitical discourses become almost immediately ascendant and popular worldwide.

The main goal of the EU neighborhood policy, creating “a ring of friendly states”, has become “a ring of fire” in the second half of 2010s. While other states, most notably Russia, did not view Brussels as a partner but a geopolitical competitor, the Arab Spring dealt a severe blow to EU efforts to export its values and norms to the Middle East and North Africa. These unfavorable events and developments in Eastern and Southern neighborhoods “arguably altered the Union’s strategic environment significantly.”

The most disturbing problem in overcoming these crises has been the decreasing leverage of the EU in shaping the course of events because of the divergent and sometimes even opposing geopolitical interests of member states.

In the run-up to the Arab uprisings, some member states did not cease to engage and cooperate with authoritarian Arab regimes in a pragmatic fashion, whereas the EU institutions were seeking to put pressure on these regimes in terms of good governance, democratization and human rights. This wedge between member states and the EU brought the principle of conditionality and the credibility of the EU institutions into question.

Not only has the EU had enormous difficulties in acting as one in regional conflicts, but also it remains disunited in dealing with two intertwined non-state challenges: the waves of irregular migration from its southern and southeastern neighbors and sea borders, as well as the terrorism threat posed by cruel ISIS attacks across Europe. Indeed the bloody Syrian civil war has caused a flow of irregular immigrants to southeastern Europe through Turkey and the Aegean Sea, where many of them have lost their lives on unsafe boats while crossing the sea. Human losses while crossing the Mediterranean Sea from south to north have been even higher following the increase in the number of refugees fleeing from instability, terrorism and civil strife in North Africa. The EU’s response to this humanitarian challenge was only from a security perspective given the EU-led measures which prioritize border security over the safety of immigrants.

Currently it appears that the EU’s relations with President Donald Trump’s United States have been increasingly uneasy despite the fact that the United States is referred as the EU’s core partner in its 2016 Global Strategy document. The US under Trump follows a policy of “America First” and even seeks to undermine the European integration project in its hardest times. Thus the EU is no longer shown any unconditional solidarity by its key trade and security partner across the Atlantic.

Under these dreadful conditions of geopolitical darkness that do not function in the EU’s favor, it is arguable that “Europe, divided internally, is losing agency on the world stage, and the Trump administration, acting as a predator more than as a partner, is tempted to exploit this weakness. As great powers compete for influence across the globe, Europe, like the Middle East or Latin America, will become another battleground”

Under these dreadful conditions of geopolitical darkness that do not function in the EU’s favor, it is arguable that “Europe, divided internally, is losing agency on the world stage, and the Trump administration, acting as a predator more than as a partner, is tempted to exploit this weakness. As great powers compete for influence across the globe, Europe, like the Middle East or Latin America, will become another battleground.” This will arguably be a dramatic shift from the EU image as an effective and influential global actor to that of an ordinary, vulnerable and inward-looking player in a Europe as one of the theatres or chessboards of fierce global geopolitical competition between other major world powers.

In this environment, the EU appears to remain the only defender of a rule-based liberal international order in the Western world. Yet this will also mean that the EU in its current form will be able to respond to this shift towards revisionism across the world only defensively, rather than taking action preemptively or proactively. The EU’s recent economic woes, social unrest across many member states and its insistence on its conditional approach to its neighborhood, only help weaken its attractiveness further for neighboring countries which will be attracted by the alternative development, trade and aid models of rival powers. Therefore, it can be suggested that the normative approach of the EU in terms of foreign policy will be tested hard by these realities of great power politics, and will need to be replaced by a more geopoliticsoriented one which can deal with the growing influence of rival powers over the Wider Europe and its neighborhood.