Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Europe
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- The Rise of the Europe : Hubris, Daring and Brutality
| Chapter 1: The Rise and Fall of Europe
There is a fixed belief in America that the United States is on the eve of destruction. Disastrous wars, uncontrolled deficits, high gasoline prices, shootings at universities, corruption in business and government and an endless litany of other shortcomings—all of them quite real—create a sense that the American dream has been shattered and that America is past its prime. Obviously, we are talking about the Nixon era, with the Vietnam War going badly, shootings at Kent State, surging inflation, gasoline prices soaring and Watergate, it’s understandable that Americans in 1974 thought America’s best years were behind it. It’s not that the Nixon years weren’t troubling. It is just that they were no more troubling than the Great Depression or today. The feeling that things have gone to hell is something Americans express even in good times. We look back on the 1950s as an idyllic period, but you’d really have to be dense to believe that. With the Korean War and McCarthy at one end, Little Rock in the middle and Sputnik and Berlin at the other end, it was actually a time of intense anxiety and foreboding. Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of utter hubris and profound insecurity. As we will discuss in the chapter on culture, this is pretty much what you’d expect from an adolescent. In fact it is the precise description of the adolescent mind and that is exactly the American condition in the 21st Century. The world’s leading power is having an extended adolescent identity crisis, replete with irrational mood swings. But if we think of the United States as an adolescent, early in its history, then we also know that, regardless of its self-image, adulthood lies ahead. Adults tend to be more stable and more powerful than adolescents. Therefore, contrary, to the darker side of America’s self image, my view is that we are entering a century in which the world will be dominated by the United States. I also believe that given the nature of the United States, the 21st century will be simultaneously enormously creative and profoundly unstable. This view has to be justified, both because it is an extreme claim and because it runs so counter to the American mood of the moment. We need to describe carefully the method we use to arrive at this conclusion. That method is geopolitics. Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying “international relations.” It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith called “The Wealth of Nations.” Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to something else that is quite useful, predictable behavior. It is this tendency that makes it possible to forecast the future of the international system. Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short term self interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, at least not randomly. Think of a chess game. On the surface, it appears that each player has twenty potential opening moves. In fact, there are much fewer because many of these moves are so bad, they quickly lead to defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see the options, and the fewer moves there actually are available. The better the player the more predictable are his moves, except for the brilliant grandmaster who plays with absolute predictable precision—until that one, brilliant stroke. Nations behave the same way. The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational. Climbing to the top of millions of people is not something fools often do. They do it by understanding their next move and executing it, if not flawlessly then at least pretty well. An occasional master comes along with a stunningly unexpected and successful move, but for the most part, it is simply executing the necessary and logical next step. When politicians run a county’s foreign policy, they operate the same way. If they die and are replaced, another leader emerges, and continues what the other was doing. I am not arguing that political leaders are geniuses, scholars or even gentlemen and ladies. Simply, political leaders know how to be leaders or they wouldn’t have emerged as such. It is the delight of all societies to belittle political leaders, and they surely make mistakes. But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid mistakes and are most likely forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to believe that we—or our favorite candidate—would never have been so stupid. It is rarely true. Geopolitics therefore does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously. They are both players who know how to manage a process, but aren’t free to break its very intense rules. The politician is rarely a free actor. His actions are determined by circumstances and public policy is a response to reality, not to its creator. Within narrow margins, political decisions can matter. But the most brilliant leader of Iceland will never turn it into a world power, while the stupidest leader of Rome at its height could not undermine Rome’s fundamental power. Geopolitics is not about the right and wrong of things, it is not about the virtues or vices of politicians and it is not about foreign policy debates. Geopolitics is about broad impersonal forces that constrain nations and human beings and compel them to act in certain ways. Part of this, as economists know, is the idea of unintended consequences. Actions people take for their own good reasons have consequences they don’t envision or intend. The same is true with geopolitics. It is doubtful that the village of Rome, when it started its expanding in the 7th Century BC, had a master plan for conquering the Mediterranean world 500 years later. But the first steps the inhabitants took against neighboring villages set in motion a process that was both constrained by reality and filled with unintended consequences. Rome wasn’t planned and it didn’t just happen. Geopolitics doesn’t mean that everything is predetermined. It does mean that what people think they are doing, what they hope to achieve and what the final outcome is are not the same things. Nations and politicians pursue their immediate ends, as constrained by reality as a grandmaster is constrained by the chessboard, pieces and the rules. Sometimes they increase the power of the nation. Sometimes they lead the nation to catastrophe. It is rare that the final outcome will be what they initially intended to achieve or that in the end, it was simply their personal responsibility. Geopolitics assumes two things. First, it assumes that humans organize themselves into units larger than families, and that by doing this, they must engage in politics. It also assumes that humans have a natural loyalty to the things they were born to, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a city or a nation is natural to people. That means that in our time, national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics also teaches that the relationship between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that matters of war and peace are therefore crucial to humans. Consequently, war is sometimes preferred to peace. Second, geopolitics argues that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography as is the relationship between nations. We use the term geography broadly. It includes the physical characteristics of a location, but it goes beyond that to looking at the effects of a place on individuals and communities. In antiquity, the difference between Sparta and Athens was the difference between a landlocked city and a maritime republic. Athens was wealthy and cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial and very tough. A Spartan was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics. In the same way, the geography of America compared to the geography of Europe leads to a very different age. Bear in mind that this isn’t going to be a book about the theory of geopolitics. But we need to put some core concepts into place in order to get to our task, which is thinking about the 21st century. What we are doing in this book might be called applied geopolitics. We are using geopolitics as a framework for thinking about the North American Age, how it came about and what it will look like. However, we can’t understand the future without understanding the moment we are in and we can’t understand that without having a clear sense of what led up to it. Geopolitics is about the unfolding of the history of nations. We can’t start the movie in the middle. We have to start with how Europe became the center of gravity of the world, and why it fell. The Rise of the Europe: Hubris, Daring and Brutality Let’s begin with this question. What was it that made Europe the center of the world? It was neither the most civilized nor the most advanced civilization in the world. Europe really was a technical and intellectual backwater in the 15th century. Compared to the Islamic world, China or Japan, Europe had little to recommend it. The European conquest of the world cannot be ascribed to cultural superiority, regardless of how Europe felt about itself. I need to be more precise. It wasn’t Europe as a whole that was behind Europe’s rise. It was the part of Europe that was on its Atlantic Coast: Portugal, Spain, France, The Netherlands and England. We will call this Atlantic Europe. 
The countries of this region carried out the explorations and conquests that transformed the world. The rest of the European countries were not able to because they had no ports or all their ports were on the Mediterranean, which was controlled by the Turks. So, how was it that Atlantic Europe, a backwater not only by world standards, but by many European standards, conquered the world? Why these small, out of the way countries? Why not China or Turkey or the Incas? And why now and not five hundred years before or five hundred years later? The Europeans weren’t looking for glory, they were looking for money. Europe depended on imports from Asia, particularly India. The importation of pepper, for example, was not simply for cooking, but as a meat preservative and a critical part of the European economy. Asia was filled with luxury goods that Europe needed and would pay for. Historically Asian imports would come overland along the famous Silk Road and other routes until reaching the Mediterranean. The rise of Turkey closed the routes and increased the cost of imports dramatically, when they were available at all. The Iberians—Portugal and Spain--having managed to force the Muslims out of Spain, were in no position to wage war against Turkey. Europe either paid or did without. 
Whichever European power solved the problem posed by Turkey would be both wealthy and in a position to dominate Europe economically and politically. If war was impractical and doing without the goods was unappealing, then what other option could be developed? This was a unique moment. At other points in history, there would have been no choice. Atlantic Europe would have fallen even deeper into poverty. But the economic pain was very real and the Turks were very dangerous so there was pressure to do something. It was also a crucial psychological moment. The Spaniards, having just expelled the Muslims from Spain, were at the height of their barbaric hubris. Finally, the means for doing this was at hand as well. Technology existed that, if properly integrated, might provide a solution. The problem was that Europe couldn’t get Asian goods at reasonable prices. The solution was to go to Asia directly without going through Turkish territory. The European traders needed to go around the Turks. The Spaniards and the Portuguese--the Iberians--chose the low cost alternative. They sought another route to India. The Iberians knew of one route to India, down the African coast and up into the Indian Ocean. They theorized about another route, assuming that the world was round, a route that would take them to India by going west, using newly available technologies. Sailing down the west coast of Africa on a coastal route with smaller boats that put to shore periodically was dangerous. The Muslims controlled the coastal waters of the African bulge and were likely to capture any European boats that put in to shore. When Europeans were captured by Muslims, they were killed or enslaved. So, avoiding coastal navigation in Africa was important. But if they were traveling out of sight of land, they would need a way to know where they were and where they were going—navigation. They would also need larger ships to make the trip worthwhile. Finally, since they were going to distant places where they would be vastly outnumbered, the Iberians needed weapons that would kill enemies or at least scare them to death. The Iberians had the ship. The caravel, a type of ship suited for both coastal waters and deep water navigation, had already been developed and perfected. It was fast, stable and could carry cargo. An array of navigational devices, from the compass to the astrolabe already existed in some form and needed to be perfected. Finally, tubes that expelled projectiles driven by chemical explosives—guns and cannon—already existed. They needed to be mounted on the caravels and the caravels adjusted to carry them. The Iberians could now sail to distant places, arriving at their destination and returning home. When they arrived they were able to fight with an excellent chance of winning. People who heard a cannon fire and saw a building explode tended to be more flexible in negotiations. Columbus could sail west across the Atlantic and return, Vasco da Gamma could go south around Africa to India, and return. When they reached their destinations they could kick in the door and gain a first foothold. None of these technologies was first developed by the Iberians. They had been developed by Muslims or Chinese and had circulated in the Eastern hemisphere over time. What the Iberians did was successfully integrate them into a single efficient system. They did this not for the pleasure of creativity, but out of geopolitical necessity. We can see the basic elements of geopolitics here. There was geography, political and economic necessity, technology, and the level of cultural development. They needed to flank the Turks and get to India and back. They had appropriate technology and the culture that was prepared to take extreme risks.  This was a pivotal moment in human history, but it didn’t look like it at the time. The Portuguese did not send Vasco da Gamma to India to create a new global system. They sent him there to get a better price on spices. Nor did the Spaniards send the Conquistadors to South America for great and noble ends. They sent them to find an alternative route to India than the one the Portuguese had found, and once there to find gold and silver and slaves to aid them in their rivalry with the Portuguese. Their reasons were practical and immediate. But there was an unintended consequence. Having demonstrated that a small number of men armed with firearms could defeat and loot great empires, the Iberians couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. They fought each other for the world and then other European powers joined in the fight for loot. And in this competition we see not only the rise, but also the germ of the fall of Europe and the emergence of the American Age. We now have the answer to the question of why Spain and Portugal started the conquest of the world and not some other country at some other time. First, they needed to find a route to India to solve a pressing economic problem. Second, there was technology at hand that they could use to get to India. Third, Spain and Portugal were at a point in their national history when hubris, daring and brutality were plentiful. They had the need, they had the means and they were barbarians. So they went to India and began to conquer the world. This defined the geopolitics of the European Age. 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