A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of geopolitics. Not only the President of the Commission in Brussels, but also the German Chancellor have recently called for a "geopolitical EU". The CDU, which was in power for 16 years, complained in the form of its foreign policy expert Kiesewetter that the European Union had not been "geopolitically defined" years ago.
Jochen Buchsteiner
Political correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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Foreign policy conferences, which used to talk about cooperation and global governance, now lure with the dark, almost mystical topic of geopolitics. But what exactly is it – geopolitics? And can we do that? Should we even be able to do that? Or do we have to?
In the search for answers, the first thing to do is to go to the place where a new geopolitics would have to be executed. A geopolitical EU, the Chancellery diplomatically says, should be understood as a Union that thinks in global contexts and draws conclusions from them.
This is followed by a description of the world situation on the basis of a catastrophe picture. According to this, the Ukraine war can be compared to a volcanic eruption that is now sending lava flows across the globe. The task of German and European foreign policy is not to allow itself to be buried under the currents and at the same time to steer it in the interests of its own interests.
The new pole of Europe
This sounds more like a rescue operation than a geopolitical blueprint, but at least it is a far cry from the earlier incantations of a happy multilateral future for all. The EU is now described as a "resonance chamber" that other countries did not have.
And it goes without saying that there is talk of a multipolar world order – after a very long time in which one imagined oneself in a bipolar and then unipolar world. Multipolar, at least, indicates the expectation that "Europe" should mark one of these new poles. But how?
Perhaps science can explain what geopolitics is and what it means for Europe. To do this, however, you have to leave your home country and travel to Great Britain. Because in Germany there is no "center for geopolitics" like at the University of Cambridge, for example. It is led by the historian Brendan Simms, who would not find it difficult to come up with an exact academic definition, but who, after a moment's thought, prefers to choose a provocative one: "Geopolitics is the threat that will kill us before climate change does."
As before the Second World War
Simms, who has written a lot about Europe and Hitler, sees a "confrontation of the major global systems" that began with the Ukraine war at the latest. "The universal space of Western democracies" and the "spaces at the center of which the dictatorships of Russia and China are located" may "not coexist in the long run," he predicts gloomily.
According to Simms' analysis, the current situation is frighteningly similar to the front line before the Second World War. This time it is not the Germans who dream of their own metropolitan area that has yet to be rounded off and see themselves challenged by Western universalism, but Russians and Chinese. In both nations, people today think in terms of categories that were popular in this country in the first half of the last century and were propagated by scholars such as Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler and Karl Haushofer.