George Friedman
Europe has become a lightning rod in the United States lately, particularly with regard to the U.S.’ desire to stop guaranteeing European security. It’s become vogue to ask how Europe will respond to this or that event in the world. But those very events raise an important question: What is Europe?
Crucially, Europe is not a country. It is a continent containing, according to the United Nations, some 44 countries. They have different languages, cultures and histories, which include wars with neighbors and mutual loathing. I was born in Hungary and brought to the United States as a young child. My first language was Hungarian, which was all that was spoken at home. I learned English later. I don’t speak a word of Polish, Russian, Slovak or Romanian, all languages spoken in neighboring countries to Hungary. (I do speak some German, though badly.) My parents did not trust Hungary’s neighbors. My mother still lamented the Trianon pact, the post-World War I treaty that gave Transylvania to Romania. When a cousin married a Romanian, the rancor of Trianon followed us to the Bronx.
The U.N. definition of Europe stretches from Iceland to Russia, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Arctic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. But when we speak of Europe today, we speak of the part of the peninsula that juts out of Europe’s mainland and the countries that are members of political and economic structures developed after World War II, namely NATO and the European Union. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, that part of Europe was the dividing line drawn between the Soviet army and Anglo-American armies, the former occupying the east and the latter occupying the west. When the Soviet Union fell, so did the dividing line, and the countries previously occupied by Russia became part of what I would call the American zone.
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