This article analyses the systemic, geopolitical and strategic implications of recent changes in the world and suggests the elements of a European global strategy. Identifying the Indian Ocean as the ‘geographical fulcrum of the twenty-first century’, the author believes the region is an unnoticed but vital space where Europe must be present. Europe’s political unity, he maintains, will not happen peacefully or through consensus, but of necessity and via an alliance of ‘volunteers’. It will be more Bismarckian than federalist.
A Different Strategy for Europe
Between 1989 and 1991, three significant pages of contemporary history, geopolitical, strategic and systemic, were turned. The international system went from bipolarity to an imperfect hybrid form of unipolarity, with an underlying multipolarity, where nuclear deterrence became strategically dormant, having the role, essentially, of sanctuary and political insularity. The world is treading a troubled path from stability to instability, and thus from a form of stationary equilibrium to a state of turbulence, of permanent and diffuse tension aggravated by a nuclear and chemical arms race.
The ‘governability’ of the system is evolving from a basis of negotiation to one of coercion in the settlement of disputes, old or new, between the competing players, whether in the Middle East or the Gulf, or in Central, South or South-East Asia.
History is once again on the move. Since 1945 it fed on the dilemmas and security preoccupations of the bipolar period, achieving a kind of relative stability between opposing systems, codified by nuclear deterrence that, throughout that period, played a major, not to say decisive, stabilising role.
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