The following special report " What Borders Mean to Europe - by Gearge Friedman" was published by EU-Digest. with the permission of the Global Stratford Intelligence Group .
"Europe today is a continent of borders. The second smallest continent in
the world has more than 50 distinct, sovereign nation-states. Many of
these are part of the European Union. At the core of the EU project is
an effort to reduce the power and significance of these borders without
actually abolishing them — in theory, an achievable goal. But history is
not kind to theoretical solutions.
Today, Europe faces three converging crises that are ultimately about
national borders, what they mean and who controls them. These crises
appear distinct: Immigration from the Islamic world, the Greek economic
crisis and Ukraine would seem to have little to do with each other. But
in fact they all derive, in different ways, from the question of what
borders mean.
Europe's borders have been the foundation both of its political morality
and of its historical catastrophes.
The European Enlightenment argued
against multi-national monarchies and for sovereign nation-states, which
were understood to be the territories in which nations existed. Nations
came to be defined as groupings of humans who shared a common history,
language, values and religion — in short, a common culture into which
they were born. These groups had the right of national
self-determination, the authority to determine their style of government
and the people who governed. Above all, these nations lived in a place,
and that place had clear boundaries.
The right of national self-determination has created many distinct
nations in Europe. And, as nations do, they sometimes distrust and fear
one other, which occasionally leads to wars. They also have memories of
betrayals and victimizations that stretch back for centuries before the
nations became states. Some viewed the borders as unjust, because they
placed their compatriots under foreign rule, or as insufficient to
national need.
The right of self-determination led inevitably to
borders, and the question of borders inevitably led to disputes among
states. Between 1914 and 1945, Europeans waged a series of wars about
national boundaries and about who has the right to live where. This led
to one of the greatest slaughters of human history.
The memory of that carnage led to the creation of the European Union.
Its founding principle was that this kind of massacre should never
happen again. But the union lacked the power to abolish the nation-state
— it was too fundamental to the Europeans' sense of identity. And if
the nation-state survived, so did the idea of place and borders.
f the nation-state could not be abolished, however, then at least the
borders could lose their significance. Thus two principles emerged after
World War II: The first, predating the European Union, was that the
existing borders of Europe could not be changed.
The hope was that by
freezing Europe's borders, Europe could abolish war. The second
principle, which came with the mature European Union, was that the
bloc's internal borders both existed and did not exist. Borders were to
define the boundaries of nation-states and preserved the doctrine of
national self-determination, but they were not to exist insofar as the
movement of goods, of labor and of capital were concerned. This was not
absolute — some states were limited in some of these areas — but it was a
general principle and goal.
This principle is now under attack in three
different ways.
The Movement of Muslims in Europe
The chaos in the Middle East has generated a flow of refugees toward
Europe. This is adding to the problem that European nations have had
with prior Muslim migrations that were encouraged by Europeans. As
Europe recovered from World War II, it needed additional labor at low
cost. Like other advanced industrial countries have done, a number of
European states sought migrants, many from the Islamic world, to fill
that need.
At first, the Europeans thought of the migrants as temporary
residents. Over time, the Europeans conceded citizenship but created a
doctrine of multiculturalism, which appeared to be a gesture of
tolerance and was implicitly by mutual consent, given that some Muslims
resisted assimilation. But this doctrine essentially served to exclude
Muslims from full participation in the host culture even as they gained
legal citizenship. But as I have said, the European idea of the nation
was challenged by the notion of
integrating different cultures into European societies.
Partly because of a failure to fully integrate migrants and partly
because of terrorist attacks, a growing portion of European society
began perceiving the Muslims already in Europe as threatening. Some
countries had already discussed resurrecting internal European borders
to prevent the movement not only of Muslims, but also of other Europeans
seeking jobs in difficult economic times. The recent wave of refugees
has raised the matter to a new level.
The refugee crisis has forced the Europeans to face a core issue. The
humanitarian principles of the European Union demand that refugees be
given sanctuary. And yet, another wave of refugees into Europe has
threatened to exacerbate existing social and cultural imbalances in some
countries; some anticipate the arrival of more Muslims with dread.
Moreover, once migrants are allowed to enter Europe by any one country,
the rest of the nations are incapable of preventing the refugees'
movement.
Who controls Europe's external borders? Does Spain decide who enters
Spain, or does the European Union decide? Whoever decides, does the idea
of the free movement of labor include the principle of the free
movement of refugees? If so, then EU countries have lost the ability to
determine who may enter their societies and who may be excluded. For
Europe, given its definition of the nation, this question is not an odd,
legal one. It goes to the very heart of what a nation is, and whether
the nation-state, under the principle of the right of national
self-determination, is empowered
to both make that decision and enforce it.
This question does not merely concern Muslims. In the 19th and 20th
centuries, the Ostjuden — the Jews coming into Western Europe as they
fled czarist edicts — raised the same challenge, even though they sought
more vigorously to assimilate. But at that point, the notion of borders
was unambiguous even if the specific decision on how to integrate the
Jews was unclear. In many countries, the status of minorities from
neighboring nations was a nagging question, but there were tools for
handling it.
The Muslim issue is unique in Europe
only to the extent that the European Union has made it unique.
The bloc has tried to preserve borders while sapping them of
significance, and now there is an upsurge of opposition not only to
Muslim immigration, but also to the European Union's understanding of
borders and free movement.
The Greek Crisis
The question of borders is also at the
heart of the Greek crisis. We
see two issues: one small, the other vast. The small one involves
capital controls. The European Union is committed to a single European
financial market within which capital flows freely. Greeks, fearing the
outcome of the current crisis, have been moving large amounts of money
out of Greece into foreign banks.
They remember what happened during the
Cyprus crisis, when the government, capitulating to German demands in
particular, froze and seized money deposited in Cypriot banks. Under EU
rules, the transfer of deposits in one country of the bloc, or even
outside the bloc, is generally considered legitimate. However, in the
case of Cyprus, the free movement of capital across borders was halted.
The same could conceivably happen in Greece.
In any event, which is the prior principle: the free movement of
capital or the European Union's overarching authority to control that
flow? Are Greek citizens personally liable for their government's debt —
not merely through austerity policies, but also through controls
imposed by the Greek government under European pressure to inhibit the
movement of their money? If the answer is the latter, then borders on
capital can be created temporarily.
The larger issue is the movement of goods. A significant dimension of
this crisis involves free trade. Germany exports more than 50 percent
of its gross domestic product. Its prosperity depends on these exports. I
have argued that the inability to control the flow of German goods into
Southern Europe drove the region into economic decline.
Germany's
ability to control the flow of American goods into the country in the
1950s helped drive its economic recovery. The European Union permits
limits on the movement of some products, particularly agricultural ones,
through subsidies and quotas. In theory, free trade is beneficial to
all. In practice, one country's short-term gain can vastly outweigh
others' long-term gains. The ability to control the flow of goods is a
tool that might slow growth but decrease pain.
The essential principle of the European Union is that of free trade,
in the sense that the border cannot become a checkpoint to determine
what goods may or may not enter a country and under what tariff rule.
The theory is superb, save for its failure to address the
synchronization of benefits. And it means that the right to
self-determination no longer includes the right to control borders.
Ukraine and the 'Inviolability' of Borders
Finally, there is the Ukraine issue — which is not really about
Ukraine, but about a prior principle of Europe: Borders cannot be
allowed to change. The core of this rule is that altering borders leads
to instability. This rule governed between 1945 and 1992.
Then, the fall
of the Soviet Union transformed the internal borders of Europe
dramatically, moving the Russian border eastward and northward. The
Soviet collapse also created eight newly free nations that were Soviet
satellites in Central and Eastern Europe and 15 new independent states —
including Russia — from the constituent parts of the Soviet Union. It
could be argued that the fall of the Soviet Union did not change the
rule on borders, but that claim would be far-fetched. Everything
changed.
Then came the "velvet divorce" of Slovakia and the Czech
Republic, and now there are potential divorces in the United Kingdom,
Spain and Belgium.
Perhaps most importantly, the rule broke down in Yugoslavia, where a
single entity split into numerous independent nations, and, among other
consequences, a war over borders ensued. The conflict concluded with the
separation of Kosovo from Serbia and its elevation to the status of an
independent nation. Russia has used this last border change to justify
redrawing the borders of Georgia and as a precedent supporting its
current demand for the autonomy and control of eastern Ukraine.
Similarly, the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia shifted
dramatically as the result of war. (On a related note, Cyprus, divided
between a Turkish-run north and a Greek-run south, was allowed into the
European Union in 2004 with its deep border dispute still unsettled.)
Since the end of the Cold War, the principle of the inviolability of
borders has been violated repeatedly — through the creation of new
borders, through the creation of newly freed nation-states, through
peaceful divisions and through violent war. The principle of stable
borders held for the most part until 1991 before undergoing a series of
radical shifts that sometimes settled the issue and sometimes left it
unresolved.
The Europeans welcomed most of these border adjustments, and
in one case — Kosovo — Europeans themselves engineered the change.
It is in this context that the Ukrainian war must be considered.
Europe's contention, supported by America, is that Russia is attempting
to
change inviolable borders.
There are many good arguments to be made against the Russians in
Ukraine, which I have laid out in the past. However, the idea that the
Russians are doing something unprecedented in trying to redraw Ukraine's
borders is difficult to support. Europe's borders have been in flux for
some time.
That is indeed a matter of concern; historically, unsettled
borders in Europe are precursors to war, as we have seen in Yugoslavia,
the Caucasus and now Ukraine. But it is difficult to argue that this
particular action by Russia is in itself a dramatically unprecedented
event in Europe. The principle of national self-determination depends on
a clear understanding of a nation and the unchallenged agreement on its
boundaries.
The Europeans themselves have in multiple ways established
the precedent that borders are not unchallengeable.
There are two principles competing. The first is the European Union's
desire that borders be utterly permeable without the nation-state
losing its right to self-determination. It is difficult to see how a
lack of control over borders is compatible with national
self-determination. The other principle is that existing borders not be
challenged. On the one hand, the union wants to diminish the importance
of borders. On the other hand, it wants to
make them incontestable.
Neither principle is succeeding. Within Europe, more forces are
emerging that want to return control over borders to nation-states. In
different ways, the Muslim immigrant crisis and the Greek crisis
intersect at the question of who controls the borders. Meanwhile, the
inviolability of borders has been a dead letter since the fall of the
Soviet Union.
The idea of borders being archaic is meaningful only if the
nation-state is archaic. There is no evidence that this is true in
Europe. On the contrary, all of the pressures we see culturally and
economically point to not only the persistence of the idea of
nationality, but also to its dramatic increase in Europe. At the same
time, there is no evidence that the challenge to borders is abating. In
fact, during the past quarter of a century, the number of shifts and
changes, freely or under pressure, has only increased. And each
challenge of a national border, such as the one occurring in Ukraine, is
a challenge to a nation's reality and sense of self.
The European Union has promised
peace and prosperity.
The prosperity is beyond tattered now. And peace has been
intermittently disrupted — not in the European Union, but around it —
since the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992 to create a common
economic and monetary union. All of this is linked to the question of
what a border represents and how seriously we take it. A border means
that this is
my country and not yours.
This idea has been a source of anguish in Europe and elsewhere.
Nevertheless, it is a reality embedded in the human condition. Borders
matter, and they matter in many different ways. The European crisis,
taken as a whole, is rooted in borders. Attempting to abolish them is
attractive in theory. But theory faces reality across its own border."
The above report was published by EU-Digest with the permission of the Global Stratford Intelligence Group
EU-Digest 
