Europe’s union will be respectable only when the big states support the smaller ones
SÉAMUS DEANE recounts an almost certainly apocryphal incident at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, when British PM David Lloyd George asked an aide: “Please refresh my memory, but is it Upper or Lower Silesia that we are giving away?”
True or not, it’s a perfect example of what would today be called geopolitics. A recent history of modern Cyprus by William Mallinson defines geopolitics as “exploiting military, economic and political power to achieve national objectives outside one’s own country”. In other words, small countries being bullied by big ones. It’s what the European Union is all about.
The idea that a statesman could contemplate assigning territory over which his country had no authority might seem outrageous to all but the most cynical. But it has happened repeatedly in modern history. One of my textbooks starkly states: “In 1815 Sweden gained Norway from Denmark”. One wonders how the Norwegians felt about that. After the defeat of Napoleon, the map of central Europe was redrawn, as it was again following the first World War and the collapse of the Habsburg empire, with the creation of satellite states such as Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
The totally unworkable state of Belgium was created in 1831 to create a buffer zone between the irreconcilable Dutch-speaking Flanders and the Francophone Wallonia. Today Brussels, ironically the capital of the EU, has no national government, for the simple reason that there is no Belgian nation. It has two national broadcasting stations, two ministries of education, two ministries of culture, culture being the key word in this dichotomous plaything of the major powers. It was a divided country before it left the drawing board.
The sad story of what became known as “brave little Belgium”, which the allied powers ostensibly set out to protect from German aggression in 1914, mirrors the deep divisions within the EU today, as the big boys throw their weight around to rescue their most favoured creation, the euro zone, by waving the big stick at the little people such as the Greeks, the Irish and the Portuguese.
This is just another form of geopolitics: those with the greatest power appear to be protective of the little people while safeguarding their own more central interests.
As Greeks celebrated national “independence day” on March 25th (the date in 1821 when the flag was raised on the 10-year war of independence against the Ottoman empire) many were asking what Greece’s independence consists of today, when the country is utterly dependent on Brussels. The Hungarian PM recently tried to resist EU pressures, prompting a headline that declared, “Brussels will not dictate to Hungary”. Oh yes it will. The litany of big-boy/small-boy in the European playground goes right through the 27 current members and candidates such as Albania and Turkey.
One of the most severe examples of geopolitics is Cyprus. It won its freedom from Britain in 1960, yet today remains an example of history’s infinite capacity for repeating itself, with Greece, Turkey, Russia and the United Nations using it as a cat’s paw of competing powers.
Mallinson reproduces two examples of geopolitics in recent history. In the first, US secretary of state Henry Kissinger wrote to his opposite number in Britain, foreign secretary James Callaghan, in the mid-1970s, when Britain was contemplating withdrawal from its military bases in Cyprus, which it considered of minimal strategic importance. Kissinger emphasised the US view that withdrawal could have a destabilising effect on the region as a whole, “encouraging the Soviet Union and others to believe that the strategic position of the West has been weakened in that area”. There is no question, judging by Callaghan’s weak-kneed reply, that this was an act of international bullying on Kissinger’s part of an independent state where neither the US nor Britain had moral rights.
The second episode occurred during a phone conversation between Kissinger and Callaghan later in the 1970s, after the latter had become British PM, on the eve of a UN resolution on the division of the island between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It suggests Callaghan was not merely Kissinger’s gofer but, as PM and former foreign secretary, did not have a clue what was going on: “I’m on holiday really. I am in touch all right. But I haven’t been following this one in particular except in the newspapers.”
Kissinger was anxious Britain would have other EU countries on its side – as the lackey of the US, of course. The French, Kissinger said, “are pushing a very pro-Greek line”. Callaghan: “What’s the line-up at the moment then? Anybody with the French?” “You and the Italians”. “We’re with the French, are we, at the moment? . . . I’m not sure what answer it is you want me to give you.”
Is it so inconceivable that similar conversations are taking place today behind the backs of Enda Kenny, Greek PM George Papandreou and Portugese PM José Sócrates?
Ireland, with its medieval missionaries throughout Europe; Greece under Alexander the Great; and Portugal with its Brazilian and Far Eastern territories all enjoyed a form of empire but are now reduced to what in the 1970s we called “the Brussels begging bowl”.
What is Europe? After the second World War, it was intended to become a community of mutual respect and diverse cultures. Politicians and eurocrats have reduced that vision to a “common market” where what we have in common is bewilderment, suspicion and despair.
The EU will be respectable only when the big states support and encourage the smaller ones without bullying them or jeopardising what makes them what they are. Giving away Upper or Lower Silesia has its contemporary equivalent in the fate of some of the Aegean islands in the ongoing Greek-Turkish territorial dispute. A modern Lloyd George or another Kissinger sitting in Brussels might be excused for confusing one island with another. After all, it’s only a game.
Garret FitzGerald is on leave