Charles W. King

Today the European Union has been buffeted by crisis after crisis; Sovereign debt, refugees, Brexit, illiberal democracy in Eastern Europe. The recent election in France averted a possible complete collapse of the European project. It is worth noting in this time of crisis for Europe that the European Union has been an unqualified success at its original purpose; preventing war in continental Europe.

The history of Europe is one of conflicts, dating all the way back to the Roman Empire. During that history many attempts have been made to establish structures that would prevent future conflict. The Holy Roman Empire, The Peace of Westphalia, Napoleon's Empire, the Congress of Vienna, and Bismarck's Alliance system, and the League of Nations all failed to prevent the nations of Europe from descending to violence again. Compared to the span of European history the twentieth century was both brutal (as measured by the casualties of the World Wars) and tranquil (as measured by the number of conflicts). It is true that to an extent there now exists a cultural disdain for the Clausewitzian use of 'war as politics by other means' but that was also true to an extent between World War One and World War Two. The establishment of NATO was a significant factor in the prevention of another European conflict, as was the looming threat of the Soviet Red Army in Eastern Europe. External threats and the continued occupation of West Germany are not enough to explain how the Europe of 1946 became the Europe of today.

Established by the Treaty of Paris in 1951 the European Coal and Steel Community is another in the plethora of post-World War Two international institutions designed to prevent future conflicts. The United Nations' purpose was to prevent another World War, and NATO possessed a dual purpose containing both Germany and the Soviet Union. Proposed by the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman in 1950 the purpose of the common market was to, "make war not only unthinkable but materially impossible." The ECSC attempted to achieve this through a surprisingly limited means; it created a common market for two strategic commodities, coal and steel, between its six member states, France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. With these two essential war-making materials flowing unrestricted across borders nations would no longer have reason to fight over valuable borderlands like Alsace-Lorraine and the Ruhr, and it would be difficult to hoard steel or coal for military build up.

Then something surprising happened; the economies members of the European Coal and Steel Community began to flourish. They were some of the most ruined countries in Europe, devastated by two World Wars and the Great Depression, and yet they began to rebuild faster and stronger than those outside the common market. They quickly decided to expand their common market to more than two commodities, signing the Treaty of Rome in 1957 to establish the European Economic Community, based on the ECSC. The European Coal and Steel Community is the template upon which all of the subsequent supranational institutions of Europe have been based, from the European Atomic Energy Agency to the European Parliament. It facilitated recovery of Western Europe after World War Two, and its continued growth in the decades since. In those decades the original purpose of the European Coal and Steel Community has been forgotten. As Europeans struggle with economic disparity, refugees, and diplomatic deficits they should rejoice in the fact that they have transformed an institution designed to prevent war to an engine of growth. The European Union has turned swords to ploughshares on an epic scale.

Charles W. King

President Trump has moderated the disparaging comment he made about NATO during and after his campaign but these comments touched upon the identity crisis that NATO has had since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s. Since then NATO has been looking for the unity of purpose that it had when Soviet tanks sat in East Germany. In the 1990’s it expanded east and many former Soviet satellite states joined the alliance, and it intervened to quell the violence in the Balkans. In the 2000’s it responded to the US’s call for aid in its invasion of Afghanistan and turned its sights to terrorism and piracy. Understanding the alliance’s ongoing identity issues requires examining the purpose of the alliance when it was formed in 1949.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is famous for being the military alliance formed to prevent an invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the Warsaw Pact, but that is not the whole story. By 1949 the Americans, French, and British knew that it was not going to be conventional armies that dissuaded the Soviet Union from striking westward. Plans declassified since 1990 show that the Alliance knew that any effective defense of Western Europe would require the use of nuclear weapons. The Red Army simply had too many men and tanks for anything else to work. This raises the question as to the purpose of the continued presence of foreign forces in West Germany after the end of Allied occupation in 1954?

The answer lies in the fact that West Germany was not a founding member of NATO. When it was founded in 1949 NATO was just as much about deterring German aggression as Soviet aggression. The United Kingdom and France were justifiably concerned that a re-armed West Germany could turn its attentions west for a third time. West Germany only became a re-armed NATO member at American insistence. The French in particular did not want to let an independent West Germany re-arm. A solution was found in the European Defense Community which would’ve established multinational armed forces for Western Europe. The EDC was rejected by the French National Assembly as an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. This loss of sovereignty, particularly by West Germany, was the point. It would’ve prevented a re-armed West Germany from exercising direct control of its military. In the wake of the EDC’s rejection another solution had to be found. France and the United Kingdom were willing continue the occupation of West Germany, but the United States was not. Instead, over the span of a few short weeks, the leaders of the US, UK, France, and West Germany found another solution; West German membership in NATO. Not only would it permit West Germany to re-arm without an independent defense policy, it would permit the NATO militaries to have a continued presence in West Germany. From now on they would be allies rather than occupiers, but it was enough to soothe fears of another German war of expansion.

France, the US, and the UK are no longer afraid that Germany will invade its neighbors. The threat from modern Russia is not the same as when the Red Army occupied all of Eastern Europe. NATO has lost not one but both of its original purposes. Along with other post-war initiatives, it succeeded in mollifying German aggression. The question now must be asked whether or not it is possible to transition NATO to a new purpose. Thought of strictly as a defensive alliance it still can be an effective deterrent to foreign aggression. If policy-makers do not recognize how the alliance changed, dramatically, the geopolitics of Europe, then they fail to recognize how it is continuing to effect European geopolitics as NATO expands west towards Russia, and will not be able to shape those changes.

Further Reading

John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and The Cold War (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2007).

Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, C. Earl Edmondson, Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001).

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1998).

Charles W. King

Today much of the Western public and many Western policy-makers and diplomats have a dangerous conception of world history. In this popular version history Western liberal democracy is the inevitable result of hundreds of years of unbroken prosperity and progress towards ever greater suffrage and markets, and the collapse of Eastern empires in Russia, China and the Middle East in the twentieth century was a death rattle of a disease that lasted just as long. This is a profound misunderstanding of history and leads to an erroneous perception of Eastern nations being not only behind, but centuries behind the West. Acting on this incorrect conception of history demonstrates massive hubris, and makes it difficult to understand foreign perspectives and formulate good strategies and foreign policy.

The free market is one of the hallmarks of Western liberalism. Some historians and pundits have drawn a direct line from modern free trade back five hundred years to rudimentary markets in European towns and villages. This connection demonstrates a failure to understand how different medieval market trade and modern capitalism are. The former was not unique to Europe and the latter is a much more recent and dramatic change than this version of events would indicate. Stock exchanges may have existed for more than a hundred years when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but Britain would remain a mercantilist empire for another hundred years.

The point at which Europe set foot on the path would lead to its dominance in the twentieth century is possibly the most controversial ongoing debate in academic history. The problematic connection of medieval markets to industrial capitalism represents a small set of historians and others who have gone looking to find that divergence as far back as possible. There is much more convincing evidence to suggest that the divergence between Europe, Asia and the Middle East happened much later than many people believe.

Another major milestone of Western liberalism is the commoditization of land. In feudal systems land was ruled by lords, held in common, and rights to use a given plot of land were not inheritable. Enclosure and the Doctrine of Improvement in English Common Law changed this. As a commodity land could be traded, as something owned privately investment in increased productivity was worthwhile. The commoditization of land in Western Europe was an essential innovation that provided the agricultural output needed to fuel empire, or so the story goes. Except commoditization of land was not unique to England at the time, or even unique to Europe. Ottoman tax records from Palestine, Iraq, and Anatolia show that land was being traded as a commodity there too, independent of similar innovation in Europe. The failure of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century are frequently used as evidence of the empire’s status as ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ but this ignores the fact that the Empire was implementing these reforms not decades after its European counterparts but in the same time frame and its efforts, while not as successful as either the UK or Germany, were more successful than Spanish or Austro-Hungarian reforms. Treating the Ottoman Empire and the states that descend from it as backwards is a serious error.

That Western empires and their resulting liberal democracies have had a dominant position on the world state recently is not arguable. But this has not always been the case, and it is important that historians and policy makers avoid conceptions of history that emphasize how, and for how long Europe has been dominant. It leads to erroneous conclusions and poses significant problems for policy-making and the conducting of diplomacy. It makes it difficult to apprehend and understand the perspective of nations in Asia and the Middle East, and it prevents good policy-making by treating liberal democracy deterministically.

Further Reading

Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasats in Jabal Nablus, 1700-1900, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Pres: 1995).

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Charles W. King

The ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine has raised the question of how Europe and the United States should respond to Russian adventurism and aggression against its neighbors, particularly if the Russians make similar moves against nations with more established relationships or membership in NATO or the EU such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. It is important to address these possibilities and develop strategies to deter or Russian aggression. Asking, “How do we counter Russian moves” neglects an important question that will further illuminate the current situation in Eastern Europe and help to formulate effective strategies. The question that needs to be asked is why do the Eastern provinces of Ukraine (and Crimea) possess so much affinity for Russia that they would actively support Russian land grabs rather than resist as their Ukrainian neighbors are doing?

The Russian people descend from the Kievan Rus whose cultural and political capital was Kiev, but Kiev was in the southern reaches of the lands populated by the Rus. In addition the Rus were driven north in the 1240s by invading Mongols and they did not return for almost 250 years (see Russian Territorial Anxiety in Context). When the Russian Empire reacquired Ukraine in the 1700s it was populated by new people. The Russian Empire began a policy of “Russification” in Ukraine that would not only mandate Russian as the official state language and promote Russian culture, but also import Russian peasants to colonize the region. For a short time in the 1920s the Soviet Union promoted national minorities but many of minority leaders were later purged, especially in Ukraine. In addition a famine caused millions of Ukrainians to perish in the 1920s, and rather than attempt to alleviate the famine the Soviet government under Stalin used it as a punishment for Ukrainian peasants who were resisting the collectivization of farmland. This was followed by another wave internal colonization of the Ukrainian breadbasket by Russian peasants, directed by the Soviet establishment.

It is these policies of Russification and internal colonization that made Nikita Khrushchev confident that giving Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954 would be a change in title only. They are also what made Crimea and Eastern Ukraine a permissible environment for Russia’s ‘Little Green Men’. Recognizing the history of Russian attempts to solidify its hold over Ukraine over the centuries can help to understand how its operations in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea were so effective and better asses where such operations might plausibly be attempted. The exclave of Kaliningrad will remain an area of concern for the US and Europe for this reason, as will the large populations of ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. It is also important to recognize that much of Eastern Europe is not a plausible target of these kinds of operations. Understanding that Russian adventurism in Ukraine is not simply an operation by Russian Special Forces, but the culmination of centuries of Russian policy will allow a more accurate assessment of Russian capabilities, and the creation of better strategies to counter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

Charles W. King

The 1240's were a landmark decade in Russian history. Victories at the Battle of the Neva and the Battle of the Ice turned back invasions by the Swedish and the Teutonic Knights. The year 1240 ended with more than a dozen cities of the Kievan Rus being sacked by invading Mongols, including the capitol, Kiev. This marked the beginning of hundreds of years of tribute and vassalage to the Mongols.

After Ivan III “threw off the tartar yoke” in 1480 the territorial incursions did not cease. The Ottomans burned parts of Moscow in 1571. The 1600’s were a time of internal conflict between the Rus princes and continued invasions from the north, west, and east. It was not until the 1700’s under Peter the Great that a single Russian state formed, and Catherine the Great that Russia began to exercise control over its neighbors instead of the other way around. This stability did not last long. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 he had yet to be defeated by any European power. In the 1850's Russia lost the Crimean War to an alliance of the British, French, and Ottomans, ceding territory and right to base naval forces in the Black Sea.

The twentieth century treated the Russian state no better. The tumult of the First World War precipitated two revolutions. Foreign powers intervened in the civil war that followed in the favor of the anti-Bolshevik White Army. Hitler’s Germany invaded in June 1941. Neither the end of the Second World War nor shared ideology would put a stop to the territorial incursions; the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. fought an undeclared border war in 1969.

Russian history begins with the loss of its cultural and economic capitol, hundreds of years of foreign domination, and after establishing control over its own sovereignty the encroachments never stopped. It is unsurprising that to this day the Russian state and people exhibit an anxiety bordering on paranoia for their territorial integrity. Combine this with the fact that when the Russian state has successfully turned back invaders it has been by trading territory for time and the territorial ambitions of the Russian Tsars, Soviet leaders, and Vladimir Putin are comprehensible, although not condonable. Even when Russia exerted control over its near abroad, the region was always a source of tension and concern in ways that other great powers did not experience.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia’s neighbors are increasingly looking west. Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania are members of NATO and the European Union. Finland and Sweden are EU members and cooperate extensively with NATO on defense. Ukraine and Georgia have both looked to the EU and the US in recent years for trade and security. From the Russian perspective this expansion fits with hundreds of years of precedent of dangerous encroachment on Russian territory and security and must confronted. That this is not necessarily the intent of the EU, US, or NATO is irrelevant. A sphere of influence is historically important to the Russian state. What may appear to Western observers like unchecked aggression or exploitative meddling is to Russian policy-makers the crucial reinforcement of necessary regional order and defensive credibility. By recognizing this, the US and its European allies can better formulate strategies to deal with unacceptable acts of aggression as well as more insidious actions on the part of the Russian state.

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Further Reading

Jane Burbank, and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Lorenz M. Luthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 2008).