Eastern Europe in British Grand Strategy | Dominic Lawson
Grand Strategy and a Conservative Foreign Policy
Despite the perception of a world in constant flux, certain underlying truths will always remain the same. This is especially true in geopolitics, which is based on deeply embedded and evolved aspects of human psychology and the (mostly) unchanging landscape of the Earth.
This means that we will see similarities emerge throughout the ages, perhaps the best expression of this is ‘grand strategy,’ by which we mean the long term plans that states follow. These are intergenerational and often take decades to implement and bring to fruition.
Grand strategy acts as a multigenerational blueprint which has proven itself by virtue of the fact that the country has remained independent from foreign domination.
Following a grand strategy is a natural offshoot of the logic of social conservatism which embraces the imperfect known. Notwithstanding certain technological changes that the world has witnessed, it would be arrogance to ignore a strategy which has been handed down from our ancestors who occupied these islands for millennia and has largely ensured its independence from outside threats.
So what has distinguished British grand strategy throughout the ages? Primarily, it can be simplified down to the need to deny a single power complete dominance of the European continent. The British home islands are geographically and economically miniscule in comparison to the entire continent. This means that if Europe were ever unified under a single hegemon, we would be facing the prospect of a power which has about six times the economic output and over five times the population.
Even if the ruling power was not necessarily hostile, this scenario would place the UK in the delicate position of being positioned next to a power which possessed overwhelming capability and this would inevitably affect the UK’s ability to operate as an independent state. When one understands this we see why considerable British diplomacy, and as a last resort, military effort has gone to prevent this circumstance from arising.
This is what motivated our ancestors in their drive to prevent French domination under Napoleon and his continental system of commercial blockade, or the hegemony of the Third Reich. More recently, it was the reason that the UK was one of the strongest advocates of NATO and preventing Soviet expansion across the continent.
While we should strive to always have good relations with the continent, we should never forget one of the oldest lessons of geopolitics; that countries have neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, but only permanent interests.
This means that, even if we want to deny it, British strategy is still devoted towards preventing a single power from dominating the European continent.
As the United States looks to retrench and is moving their diplomatic focus from Europe to the Asia-Pacific, something which will probably be a permanent trend as they realign to contain Chinese ambition, and which Trump’s recent repatriation of American forces from Germany is only the first practical sign, the British must look to rekindle our pragmatism in regards to Europe.
We are lucky, however, that this is occurring at a time when the EU appears to be fracturing into regional blocs based on culture and common economic level. As this happens we can find firm allies, whose grand strategies align with our own, in Eastern Europe.
Our Friends In The East
Countries such as Hungary, Poland, and the various Slavic peoples (as well as the Estonians and Romanians) who inhabit the eastern portion of the continent have marked themselves as quite unique in modern Europe. At a time when the rest of the continent is experiencing a crisis of confidence and identity, these nations seem to be re-asserting themselves.
Partly, much of this is to do with the historical experience they have had. We, on our islands and protected by the might of the Royal Navy have often been fairly isolated from the harsh logic of geopolitics. Eastern Europe has not had that luxury, located as they are on one of the longest running pieces of flatland in the world, the Great Northern European Plain.
Running from the Franco-Spanish border to the Ural Mountains, this area has played host to an uncountable number of armies and conquerors throughout history. It was this causeway that the Huns took to raid into Europe during the times of the Roman Empire, as well the same way that brought the Mongol Empire westward.
More recently, it was this route that the armies of Napoleon took when they invaded Russia, and it served as the highway of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa into the USSR, finally it was the place the Soviet Union erected it’s iron curtain across Europe. Historically, this vast flatland has always been the highway of continental empires, and the native inhabitants of the area have been the victims of it all.
Towards a Modern Intermarium?
This unforgiving experience of conquest from outside is what has produced a grand strategy that entails entering coalition with one another to overcome the disadvantage of their relatively small sizes. The need to unite their resources was the main drive to integrate themselves into NATO so swiftly after gaining independence.
However, NATO is under stress like never before. The alliance is being pulled apart by a belligerent Turkey, a US which is re-focusing on the Asia-Pacific and a France and Italy who have found themselves leaning towards Russia’s position in the ongoing Libyan civil and proxy war.
This all means that British strategic planners and diplomats should prepare for a Europe in which NATO is no longer practically functional or too divided to balance against Moscow. For Eastern Europe, who must contend with Russia's suffocating presence, this is an issue which is fundamental to their security. Fortunately, the institutional framework to create an Eastern European defence bloc already exists in the form of the Three Seas Initiative and Visegrad Group.
The historical dynamics of Eastern Europe, which invariably include pictured Poland, will be pivotal in British foreign policy approaches towards the region.
Such a bloc does have historical precedence in the form of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Intermarium (meaning ‘between seas’).
This was a concept which was elucidated by the renowned Polish strategist Jozef Pilsudski. A military officer by trade, geopolitics was not some abstraction to be debated by academics but was a life or death matter. His argument was that Eastern Europe, to compensate for their lack of size (termed ‘strategic depth’ in the language of geostrategy) should pool their economic and military resources to balance against outside powers.
The modern variant of this diplomatic endeavour is being led by Poland, who, owing to the large sizes of her population and economy, has the potential to become a regional leader in security and military affairs. These nations have already demonstrated the effectiveness of their solidarity when they were able to resist EU overreach in the context of the 2016 mass migration crisis.
In our relations with the Eastern European states, aiding the formation of such a bloc should be the first priority of British diplomacy.
From the Black Sea to the Baltics
Of course, we can’t discuss Eastern Europe without mentioning Russia. The brooding presence of this regional power is an ever present reality in the calculations of governments in Eastern Europe.
I recently wrote that Russia is experiencing terminal decline, encumbered as it is by deeply set societal and economic problems which are beyond the abilities of it’s rapacious elite to solve. Russian weakness vis a vis the West is compensated for by attempts to divide the allied powers.
One of the key ways that Russia is able to gain leverage within Europe is via it’s dominance of the hydrocarbons that the continent depends upon, being the source of some 40% for the central states and close to three quarters for the East. This energy hegemony allows Russia to exploit the natural tendency of state elites to pursue their national interests over any pretence of collective defence. Recently, Germany has demonstrated this with her decision to continue with the building of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline despite the fears of NATO partners in Eastern Europe.
Russia uses a variety of tactics to “discipline” it’s neighbours and prevent them from pursuing independent security policies, of which threatening the oil and gas supplies is a potent one. By aiding in the creation of an Eastern Europe which is decoupled from the Russia hydrocarbon infrastructure, we will remove one of Moscow’s most effective means of leverage.
The Three Seas forum is spearheading an initiative to create an energy infrastructure along the North-South axis. Facilities on Poland’s Baltic coast and Croatia’s Adriatic coast will allow the import of liquified natural gas from the United States, whereas a network of pipelines will bring fuel up from Romania.
The Many Europes - And Britain’s Place In Them
The problem that the EU is facing is that there is no common ‘European’ identity. There are diverse nations who happen to be situated on the Europe continent but who hold vastly different historical origins and political histories which have formed their unique view of the world. For a time, the EU sought to create an artificial European identity based on certain ideas and backed by the money from the northern states but this is contingent on people having faith in those ideas and the money being there.
With this money and these ideas, the EU believed it could keep a lid on old rivalries and political tensions, or channel them into the organisation’s institutions but I believe that these differences are resurfacing before our eyes.
Foreign policy is one of the areas where the differences come to the fore. When facing Russia, Germany and France often express a desire for cautious engagement, with Mr Macron signalling his desire to eventually see Russia integrated into a greater security infrastructure. Eastern Europe, aware that Moscow considers them part of its ‘near abroad’ and fundamental to its security, fear that any integration with Russia will sacrifice their freedom of operation, and they are in favour of a far more hardline against Moscow.
This split will likely intensify in the coming years. Recent events in Belarus could signal the start of a more assertive ‘Eastern’ foreign policy. The core European states have no stomach for a fight with Moscow, but the Eastern Europeans would be more than happy to push Moscow’s influence further eastward and this may mark the start of a more assertive and united Eastern foreign policy in which direction comes, not from Brussels, but from Warsaw.
Warsaw may have a greater role to play in the strategic geopolitics of the 21st Century.
A strong and militarily integrated Eastern bloc within the wider NATO apparatus promises to be a capable partner for the British military. The Enhanced Forward Presence already plays a large role in the training of the armies of the region and could be expanded and integrated into the command structure. The grand goal would be a Europe which is buttressed by an integrated Eastern coalition on one end and an independent and militarily capable United Kingdom on the other, all with the support of distant Washington.
Such a scenario would represent a united front against the development of a EU military, which would threaten the interests of all three of those partners.
The Long View
Geopolitics is similar to the movement of continents, it’s slow and tectonic, and calls for long term planning.
The United Kingdom must recover a sense of multigenerational strategy within this changing world. One thing that such an approach realises is that the relative unity that our continent has witnessed since the fall of the USSR is the aberration from the historical norm. Assuming that Europe is now permanently immune to the competition which has been the feature of its entire history is the height of arrogance.
As we are Europeans we will naturally need to accept this returning geopolitics if we want to have any regional influence in the future. Unfortunately modern politics seems obsessed with the next soundbite or deleterious short termism. Ending this culture of deleterious short termism and recovering the long view is fundamental to our security. And we can do that by looking back to the strategies which guided our forefathers.
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