Europe is in turmoil. But then, you could well raise the question: When has Europe ever been free of crises? You do not have to go too far back in time to study the changing fortunes of a continent which has been at the centre of some of the more disturbing of circumstances in history. What has been happening around Ukraine falls into that pattern. What will happen to Ukraine, now that Russian President Vladimir Putin has opted to recognize the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent republics, is what will determine the path Europe will take to the future.
And that is where we need to pause, for Europe’s past has, for ages, impacted its future. The Napoleonic Wars changed the continent in a way that, in the opinions of such statesmen as Henry Kissinger, created a new world order. The term “balance of power” took hold of the imagination, with men like Metternich, Talleyrand, and Castlereagh working out the contours of a new political landscape in the continent. The Congress of Vienna remains a point of reference in any conversation on European history. And yet, the Congress of Vienna would not be the final word on the state of Europe.
Which leads us to the belief, grounded in precedence, that the polarization which defines the Ukraine situation today is no sign that the future will reach a definitive shape once, if at all, the current crisis is over. That, of course, will take a long time, despite the diplomacy French President Emmanuel Macron thinks he can bring to bear on the situation. With Putin formally decreeing Ukraine’s breakaway regions as independent states, coupled with his decision to send in what euphemistically is referred to as Russian peacekeepers into the two "states’, diplomacy has certainly taken a bad battering. Macron must surely be disappointed with the way things are turning out.
Europe is, thus, in a condition of new upheaval. The tentative plan for a summit between US President Biden and President Putin patently promises to be a non-starter. The Russian leader does not now need to invade Ukraine for Biden to step back from the summit the world would like to see take place. Those moves over Donetsk and Luhansk have done the job. Nato is in a state of indignant ferment; Germany is angry and so is Britain; and the Americans and the EU have, in knee-jerk fashion, come in with a slew of sanctions against Moscow. Where does that leave Russia? True, it has Chinese support on the Ukraine conundrum. True, Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko stands beside Putin in these dangerous times.
But none of that is a guarantee that Europe is a safe place today.
A number of Western governments, and other governments, have asked their citizens in Ukraine to leave the country. A new Cold War? Of course, but the fear now is one of the Cold War blowing up into a hot war, the likes of which Europe has regularly experienced in history. Remember the 1990s, when Serb nationalism, in the aftermath of the break-up of Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia, pushed the continent into a new bloodbath through its violence against the Muslim population of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Slobodan Milosevic’s brand of nationalism was, in more ways than one, a crude reminder of the beginnings of Nazism in the 1930s, except that Milosevic was stopped at a point. But the damage had been done. Serbian nationalism may seemingly be dead today. It is not really dead, only lying low. Alija Izetbegovic’s people keep looking behind their shoulders, for they have suffered once.
The Balkan mayhem of the 1990s is for all of us proof, if proof were at all needed, of the historical instability in which Europe has operated in these present times. When you compare that with the way conditions are heating up around Ukraine, you may shake your head all you want. But what you cannot ignore is the fact that some of the biggest global crises have had their roots in Europe. The First World War, that first modern conflict which left millions dead and many more millions in a state of misery all over the continent, was brought to an end -- or so it was thought -- with Germany’s defeat and the humiliating treaty its leaders were compelled to agree to in Versailles. The victors demonstrated no grace in battlefield triumph and the vanquished would not forget the abject disdain with which they were treated.
The end of the war in 1918 brought about an armistice, but little of peace with it. What did come was a simmering feeling, especially among Germans, that Europe remained unstable. It was a sentiment that would lead to the rise of megalomania in the person of Adolf Hitler. The rise of the Nazis, bizarre as it was, could not be prevented by the rest of Europe. Joseph Stalin went for a pact with Hitler. Neville Chamberlain did not have the foresight of anticipating the danger Hitler and his cohorts represented. And so Hitler’s army marched, seizing one country after another. One by one, those countries fell to the German onslaught. Nothing was more painful than the collapse of France, whose government ate humble pie in the way the Germans did at the end of the First World War.
We do not forget these details of European history. We do not forget either that the term ‘holocaust’ remains associated with Europe. The murder of six million Jews in the 1940s was for the world a lesson which came alive once again in the 1990s in the Balkans. The end of communism, that post-1945 reality in eastern Europe, in the early 1990s, while being a matter of satisfaction for capitalists everywhere, did not obscure some other inconvenient truths about Europe. The long division of Germany into two states, the Berlin blockade of 1948, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the face-off between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) and the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet incursions into Hungary and Czecholovakia were indelible marks of an unstable Europe despite such diplomatic moves as détente.
That instability has now taken 21st century forms. President Putin will not have Nato come closer to Moscow through welcoming Ukraine as the newest member of the organization. Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Jens Stoltenberg, Boris Johnson, and Olaf Scholz are determined to punish the Russian leader over his Ukraine maneouvres. A fine mess is what the world has before it. Russia’s President has only compounded matters with his action over Donetsk and Luhansk.
Let’s not say diplomacy -- Macron’s or anyone else’s -- is dead. But its light is getting increasingly feeble. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” lamented Edward Grey in August 1914. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.