Last week I began this series with a Net Assessment of the World, in which I focused on the growing destabilization of the Eurasian land mass. This week I continue the series, which will ultimately analyze each region in detail, with an analysis of Europe. I start here, rather than in the Middle East, because while the increasing successes of the Islamic State are significant, the region itself is secondary to Europe in the broader perspective. The Middle East matters, but Europe is as economically productive as the United States and, for the past 500 years, has been the force that has reshaped the world. The Middle East matters a great deal; European crises can destabilize the world. What happens between Greece and Germany, for example, can have consequences in multiple directions. Therefore, since we have to start somewhere, let me start with Europe.

Europe is undergoing two interconnected crises. The first is the crisis of the European Union. The bloc began as a system of economic integration, but it was also intended to be more than that: It was to be an institution that would create Europeans. The national distinctions between European nations is real and has proved destabilizing, since Europe has been filled with nations with diverging interests and historical grudges. The EU project did not intend to abolish these nations; the distinctions and tensions were too deep. Rather it was intended to overlay national identities with a European identity. There would be nations and they would retain ultimate sovereignty, but the citizens of these nations would increasingly come to see themselves as Europeans. That European identity would both create a common culture and diminish the particularity of states. The inducement to all of Europe was prosperity and peace. The European Union would create ongoing prosperity, which would eliminate the danger of conflict. The challenge to Europe in this sense was that prosperity is at best cyclical, and it is regional. Europe is struggling with integration because without general prosperity, the seduction of Europeans away from the parochial allure of nations will fail. Therefore, the crisis of the European Union, focused on the European Peninsula, is one of the destabilizing forces.

I use the term European Peninsula to denote the region that lies to the west of a line drawn from St. Petersburg to Rostov-on-Don, becoming increasingly narrow until it reaches Iberia and the Atlantic Ocean. France, Germany and Italy are on the peninsula, with its river systems of the Danube and Rhine. To the line’s east is Russia. Whereas the peninsula is intimately connected with the oceans and is therefore engaged in global trade, Russia is landlocked. It is very much land constrained, with its distant ports on the Pacific, the Turkish straits its only outlet to the Mediterranean, and its Baltic and Arctic access hampered by ice and weather. On the peninsula, particularly as you move west, no one is more than a few hundred miles from the sea. Russia, reliant upon land transportation, which is more difficult and expensive than maritime trade, tends to be substantially poorer than the peninsula.

The second crisis rests in the strategic structure of Europe and is less tractable than the first. Leaving aside the outlying islands and other peninsulas that make up Europe, the Continent’s primordial issue is the relationship between the largely unified but poorer mainland, dominated by Russia, and the wealthier but much more fragmented peninsula. Between Russia and the peninsula lies a borderland that at times as has been under the control of Russia or a peninsular power or, more often, divided. This borderland is occasionally independent and sovereign, but this is rare. More often, even in sovereignty, it is embedded in the spheres of influence of other countries. The borderland has two tiers: the first and furthest east is Belarus, Ukraine and portions of the Balkans, while the second consists of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. After World War II, Russia’s power extended to the second tier and beyond. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these countries became sovereign, and the influence of the peninsula moved eastward as two peninsular institutions, the European Union and NATO, absorbed the second tier. As this happened, and the Baltics were included with the second tier, Belarus and particularly Ukraine became the dividing line and buffer.

Two things must be noted here. First, it was the existence of the European Union that gave the peninsula a framework for eastward expansion. NATO, in many ways, became moribund as it lost its rationale after the Cold War. However, in the years after Soviet collapse, the European Union was dynamic and seemed destined to unite the peninsula. As Soviet power collapsed and European power seemed to expand, the European Union provided a united framework for expansion and an attractive option for newly sovereign nations in the borderland.

Second, Russia was in a state of systemic shock in the 1990s. It was a period of chaos, characterized by the complete loss of both controls and plans. It was almost as though Russia was unconscious. From the European and American points of view, this was the new normal in Russia. In fact, it was inevitable that this was merely a transitory state. The single institution that historically had held Russia together was the secret police. In a poor country with minimal communications and transportation, the ability of the center to control the periphery is limited. The institution of an efficient security system would be indispensable if Russia were to avoid fragmentation. From the Czars onward, this is what held Russia together. It followed that when the first shock of collapse passed, the security apparatus would reassert itself and stabilize Russia. It was not the personality of Vladimir Putin that mattered; if not for him, another leader would have emerged and halted the disintegration of the Russian economy and polity.

This process inevitably led Russia to restructure itself, within the limits of its diminished power. The effort included an attempt to both stabilize the country’s economy and reassert its geopolitical interests, first in the Caucasus and then in Ukraine. Without a buffer in the eastern peninsula, Russia lacks strategic depth, and it has only been this strategic depth that has saved it from peninsular invasions in the past. Therefore, any attempt to stabilize Russia would necessitate a look westward to the borderlands, where the second tier was completely lost and even the Baltics had become part of the peninsular system, and an interpretation of eastern expansion as an existential threat to Russia.