TIRANA, June 17/ATA/- Fourteen EU countries signed a letter this week to quickly start negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia on the membership in the European Union.The fourteen countries are regions of the Central and Eastern Europe. Their letter is mainly addressed to the Netherlands and France, who say that Skopje and Tirana are not ready for EU accession talks and that there is no ‘support’ for expansion in their country.
Here we see the classic dynamics of so-called ‘ interstitial power ‘ in other words, a superpower that is between other superpowers, and facing challenges from all sides. The EU is such a force. Eastern EU countries see Russia and Turkey, just as in the past, attracting Balkan countries into their sphere of influence.
If the EU does not offer the Balkans a perspective, they reasoned, the region will become unstable. Then conflicts will arise. That is dangerous for the EU. Western EU countries find that exaggerated. They see worse threats: a trade war with America; Brexit; cyber attacks; migration pressure from the south; Russian and Chinese military activities in the arctic. To give a few examples.
In his recent book “The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire”, the American writer, A. Wess Mitchell tells the story of the “forces facing pressure among other forces” leading to a short and turbulent existence: they were surrounded by enemies, but at the same time they lacked the tools to defeat or secure peace.
That is precisely what the EU is increasingly bothered about, given that, the safe cocoon of the Western Alliance is disintegrating. Only the Habsburg Empire managed to survive, “wedged in” for centuries. In the heyday, the empire extended from Spain to the Netherlands, and from Ukraine to Croatia. Emperor Joseph I once complained: “[My allies] know how divided my military power is, fragmented into every corner of Europe … [They know] how I am in Hungary and Transylvania and how difficult it is for me to create an army in case of a sudden threat coming from Sweden, they know how weak I am.”
The parallels with Europe are just obvious. How could a complex multi-ethnic state with Germans, Hungarians, Italians, Slavs and others, so large and so divided internally, survive so long in an environment full of assertive competitors despite permanent financial problems?
Mitchell notes that, precisely because Habsburgs were weak, always tried to gain time. That was their strategy: postponing conflicts and preferably avoiding them altogether. “Muddling through” was the Habsburg motto – sounds familiar? The Habsburgs had a small army that was primarily defensive. Due to neighbors such as Prussia, Russia, Turkey and France who always tried to separate Habsburg peoples, the emperor formed alliances with peoples on the outskirts of his empire.
For example, he put a buffer around the external border and he could often fight conflicts outside his territory. Also Habsburgs formed alliances with some great powers. If Habsburg faced difficulties, he could count on their help. They had larger, stronger armies than him. Habsburg often lost battles, but rarely wars.
According to Mitchell, things went wrong with Habsburg when Emperor Frans Joseph abandoned this strategy in the mid-nineteenth century. The army became bigger, able to fight more. He argued with the neighbors. He gave his ‘buffers’ too little attention, what causes them to cheat him.
Let’s apply the Habsburg logic: beware that buffers along our external borders do not become unmanageable.. According to President Tusk, North Macedonia and Albania have “done everything we asked for”. They need a European perspective, otherwise Russia and Turkey will take them over. If the
Habsburgs made a fateful decision to act carelessly in the Balkans.
Caroline de Gruyter writes every week about politics and Europe.
A version of this article was also published on NRC Handelsblad on June 15, 2019
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