The Geopolitics of France: Maintaining Its Influence in a Changing Europe - 0 views
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Mountain ranges inhibit trade and armies alike while peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller ones. Because of such features, it isn’t as much of a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is that anyone has ever tried.
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Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place.
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The second and third places where the fragmentation pattern does not hold are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys
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The one thing these three geographic exceptions have in common is that they all have long resided in the political entity known as France.
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Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain.
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Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low-lying terrain with occasional hills.
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Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic — connected by the Seine — to benefit from oceanic trade routes but far enough away to be insulated somewhat from a direct naval invasion.
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In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage because of its geography.
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The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state because of its fertile land and strategic location on the North European Plain.
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French, one of the Langue d’oil, did not become the official tongue until the 1500s, and linguistic unification was not completed until the 1800s.
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England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions
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As in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was toward centralization rather than decentralization.
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The combination of the political disasters of the feudal period and the success of consolidation in the battles with the English served as the formative period of the French psyche.
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In three major wars — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763, against Britain in North America) — France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts.
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First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789.
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Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Hapsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.
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From nationalism grew the nation-state, a political entity that harnesses all people sharing a similar ethnicity into a single governing unit.
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Not only was France the only state to have embraced the concept of nationalism, but it also grafted the concept onto an already centralized system, allowing French power to pour forth across Europe and North Africa.
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From 1803 to 1815, France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.
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The lesson was a simple one, again rooted in geography. Even when France is united and whole, even when she is not under siege, even when her foes are internally distracted and off balance, even when she is led by one of the greatest organizational and military minds in human history, even when she holds the advantage of nationalism — she still lacks the resources and manpower to rule Europe.
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But most of all the advantage of nationalism spread. Over the next few decades the political innovation of the nation-state spread throughout Europe and in time became a global phenomenon.
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The culmination of this dichotomy was the events of May-June 1940, when the French military crumbled in less than six weeks. The defeat was by no means solely the result of geopolitical forces, but it sprang from the fundamental imbalance of power between France and a unified Germany.
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as France is concerned, however, STRATFOR views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase, France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.
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And far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history.
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The stated gains of the EEC/EU have always been economic and political, but the deeper truth is that the European project has always been about French geopolitical fear and ambition.
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Eventually the Cold War ended, and the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France. While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted.
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Twenty years on, Germany cannot abandon the European Union without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought.
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First, the cage breaks, Germany goes its own way and attempts to remake Europe to suit its purposes.
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France is the only country on the North European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power.
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Being situated at the western end of the North European Plain makes France the only country on the plain that has only one land approach to defend against.
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Unlike the United Kingdom, whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial.
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Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned — despite being home to some 1 million ethnic French — so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in the rest of Europe.
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Geopolitics is not ideological or personal, although few countries have the discipline to understand that.
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"France is bound by the Alps in the southeast and the Pyrenees in the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea in the south and the Atlantic in both the west and north. In the east, France is bound by the river Rhine and the low mountains of the Ardennes, Vosges and Jura." At StratFor on September 13, 2010.