Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

by George Friedman

Europeans ceded their empire, their power, even in some ways their significance, to the principle that they should never again experience the horror of those years nor live on its precipice as they did in the Cold

Those whom the war didn’t kill, it twisted into men utterly unlike those who had left home.

Geopolitics argues that people do what they must, always in the brutal grip of reality, and that the direction in which nations go can to some extent be predicted by the reality in which they find themselves.

Geopolitics was something that crushed you. Politics was something that tied your hands as you tried to survive.

Europe will never change. It will just act as if nothing happened.

When I look at the European Union now, I think of my father’s words. It is an institution that acts as if nothing happened. I don’t mean by this that it doesn’t know what happened or isn’t revolted by it. I mean that the European Union—as an institution and idea—is utterly certain that all that is behind it, that it has willed its demons to depart and they have listened.

Very true

There was no great leap, but decades of increasing knowledge.

The Europeans began not with myths but with the will to shatter them. This was the beginning of empire. The resurrection of myth in the twentieth century was the end of empire.

behind every great fortune there is a great crime.

The European obsession with possessing everything and where it comes from and where it leads to—the reasons Faust made a deal with the devil—is my concern here.

The most dangerous were the ordinary, mediocre minds who used the insight of the great thinkers to claim the right to believe anything they chose, and argued that anything offensive was by nature true.

But superstition hath been the confusion of many states, and bringeth in a new primum mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of government.

But there is a temptation in science to elevate the material over the spiritual because it can be studied with precision, while spiritual studies are less disciplined.

It opened the door to the superiority of the most persuasive, not the most rational.

democracy—but democracy can be as ruthless and limitless as despotism.

tales both terrifying and electrifying.

The Enlightenment increasingly dispensed with religion in the name of progress, and in the end, it was, as Peter Gay put it, a form of paganism.

If people are obligated to the nation, what are the limits of that obligation and, more to the point, what are the limits on the right of the nation in relation to other nations? This inevitably leads to a belief by some that their own nation is more beautiful than others or that they have been victimized by lesser nations.

Art is ruthless in a different way from reason. Reason goes to its logical end, no matter how absurd. Art demands adoration, no matter how defective it might

Reason leads you to your conclusion. Art is the conclusion because beauty is an end in itself.

In the end, as we shall see when we consider the rise of fascism, the nation itself became the work of art a...

The fascists created a fairy tale about the nation, similar to the rational Enlightenment in that both created ideologies, but these ideologies were wildly different in their roots and ...

The Enlightenment’s love of systematic thought led to a love of systematic politics, which led to the desire to impose systems on the world.

The war turned loose soldiers fresh from the battlefield and unleashed intellectuals to shape the world according to their imaginations, which were breathtaking in their scope and ambition.

The Nazi and Communist parties were World War I armies out of uniform but operating on the same principle.

Fear of their own leaders and fear of the enemy caused them to do what was needed.

The Enlightenment had elevated intellectuals to the center of the moral universe, replacing the priests who had been there before.

Logic is often best managed at a distance from its consequences.

Fascism was a revolt against the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment refused to judge people by birth and rejected inequality. It elevated the individual. Hitler embraced blood, inequality, and the mass.

Sounds eerily familiar

For Hitler, the Enlightenment, just like Christianity, had sapped the will of the German people.

Ideology is ruthless and prides itself on its willingness to go wherever its logic demands.

a very real catastrophe without clear explanation or justification, and apparently without end, creates a fear that craves understanding.

Unemployed youth are dangerous. They become thieves or gravitate to extremist organizations. But by themselves, they lack the weight to pose a political threat. But combine them with a shattered, older middle class, and you have both the gravitas and energy needed to threaten the status quo.

It is ironic, therefore, that the creation of the European Union coincided with the start of major European wars in both the Balkans and Caucasus.

But it also coincded with the collpse of the soviet union so...

In fact, since the EU was created, there have been more wars in Europe than between 1945 and 1992.

Enemies are enemies, no matter what flag they must live under.

The entire point of the battle of Stalingrad was to open the door to Baku.

It is very easy to regard the political passions of others as irrational and misguided.

We fully understand our own loves and hates, so we take them seriously, but regard those of others as frivolous, and even pathological.

Failure to understand the passions of others can lead you into grave political error.

but there is a saying about German philosophers: they go down deeper, stay down longer, and come up dirtier than any others. I am not

Hannah Arendt, a postwar philosopher, once said that the most dangerous thing in the world is to be rich and weak. Wealth can only be protected by strength, as unlike the poor, the wealthy are envied and have things others want, and unlike the strong they are subject to power.

Nations do not become strong because they feel like it but because they must.

A prosperous economic life without needing to protect it is not sustainable.

The idea that the Russians could feel threatened by support for democratic NGOs was dismissed as so implausible that the Russians couldn’t possibly be serious.

You, the author , can't possibly be serious in believing that such naivete existed!

Russia is looking to secure itself, not expand.

German leaders understand that there is a boundary that once crossed would return Germany to its past. The boundary consists of a sense of unjust victimization coupled with a military threat.

interdependence breeds friction.

Russians have made clear that no matter where they live, Russians are under their protection.

The decision of the Cypriots to join the EU always puzzled me. Obviously the EU was going to shut down the secret banking and corporate operations. This is one of the reasons that Switzerland avoided the EU.