The Railway That Tried to Change the Map

Towards the late nineteenth century, infrastructure projects such as railways, telegraph lines, and deep-water ports became central instruments of imperial power and control.

In this geopolitical landscape, the joint German-Ottoman endeavor to construct the Baghdad Railway represented undeniably the most ambitious attempt to turn physical infrastructure into strategic influence.

While Great Britain reigned as the world’s preeminent maritime power at the time, the German Empire was rapidly expanding as a continental economic powerhouse. Yet, Germany remained strikingly vulnerable at sea.

Through the Baghdad Railway, Berlin sought a continental counterweight to these exposed maritime routes. In doing so, the Empire not only challenged established naval powers, but also systematically expanded its reach across the Ottoman realm.

For the Ottomans, in turn, the railway provided a vital tool to consolidate their vast territory administratively and economically. Crucially, it enabled rapid military deployments to reinforce state authority across the empire’s periphery.

Despite its underlying economic rationale, the project functioned primarily as a vehicle for continental connectivity, an infrastructure link designed to bridge Central Europe with the Middle East. It aimed to consolidate Ottoman territorial integrity while simultaneously granting Germany strategic access to the Persian Gulf through capital investment and engineering expertise.

The Baghdad Railway thus illustrates how a single infrastructure project can simultaneously advance the distinct geopolitical objectives of multiple actors.

Infrastructure Changes the Strategic Meaning of Geography

The strategic importance of land connections and infrastructural corridors as a counterweight becomes clear when one understands the dominant maritime logic of the 19th century. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s thesis on the connection between maritime trade, sea power, and political influence is particularly decisive here, and Great Britain in particular reflected this logic in its highest form.

Halford Mackinder, by contrast, observed in 1904 in his famous key text The Geographical Pivot of History that a technological transformation was beginning to change the relationship between sea and land. The expansion and extension of railway lines would enable land powers to penetrate the Eurasian hinterland beyond the reach of sea powers. This would have connected previously difficult-to-integrate regions, economically and militarily.

However, physical geography remained the same. While infrastructure cannot change the physical landscape, it influences how states surmount geographic barriers in time, ease, and cost. Railways have thus made inland distances more strategically relevant, allowing economic, political, and military control to be extended to the interior.

The potential of the Baghdad Railway for Germany and the Ottoman Empire was therefore more than obvious.

The Ottomans in particular could gain great advantages and strengthen administrative control and economic development in the interior. The concession included telegraph lines along the route, investments in military facilities and, in the event of war, the provision of rolling stock for the military, the police and the gendarmerie. This was important in order to be able to control the extensive territory militarily and, in case of doubt, defend it.

Germany, on the other hand, benefited from the railway as an instrument for greater influence over the Ottoman Empire and also a land connection to the Persian Gulf. In this way, economic participation could be transformed into political influence through German investments and German engineering expertise, while the railway would reduce dependence on sea routes.

Indeed, the very same infrastructure thus took on two different geopolitical meanings: in the Ottoman Empire, it was a means of consolidating internal power, while in the German Empire, it was a way to project external influence.

In general terms, infrastructure reduces distances and enhances control over previously peripheral areas, while also creating new possibilities for economic, political, and military power.

Strategic Potential Creates Strategic Reactions

It was more than evident: the Baghdad Railway was not only a transportation project. It was an attempt to reorganize the region through infrastructure.

Britain, France, and Russia did not passively observe this continental network's emergence but actively responded by restricting access to capital and exerting financial and diplomatic pressure to limit further railway construction.

Even at the beginning of the project, France and Great Britain restricted access to their capital markets for Baghdad Railway bonds, leaving the project largely dependent on German banks.

Furthermore, the Entente powers made their consent to the use of increased Ottoman customs revenues for the project conditional.

Russia went even further, securing a right of veto over certain railway projects near its border in the Russo-Ottoman Agreement of 1900 and later attempting to prevent German railway projects in Persia.

Connectivity and Power

The geopolitical rivalries surrounding the project significantly delayed its completion. When these broader great-power tensions eventually culminated in the First World War, the German-Ottoman continental project was subjected to the reality of actual great-power conflict.

But despite its considerable strategic potential, the railway could not overcome Great Britain’s maritime supremacy, the competing alliance structures, or the other geopolitical constraints. Likewise, the German strategy to unleash an anti-colonial jihad1 through the railway network failed because the relations of force on the ground made this impossible.

Since the Royal Navy controlled the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, the Germans were unable to transport war materials by sea toward Afghanistan and India. At the same time, there was no continuous railway connection from Baghdad to the subcontinent; the German mission therefore had to travel onward through Persia using horses and mules.

The dilemma was stark. The Royal Navy blocked the maritime routes, while a fragmented rail network failed to offer a working alternative.

What the Baghdad Railway reveals is a fundamental rule of statecraft: infrastructure expands what is possible, but it rarely dictates the final outcome. In practice, no corridor operates independently of physical geography, political will, or competing imperial drives.

The Return of the Same Problem

A contemporary example can be found in Central and Eastern Europe. Much of the modern period has been oriented toward infrastructure along an east-west axis. New north-south transport, energy, and digital links gradually erode this legacy.

For example, connectivity projects like Via Carpatia potentially reduce the region’s traditional dependence on east-west transport links by creating a strong north-south connection between the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas.

A similar logic applies to energy infrastructure. The North-South gas corridor, linking LNG terminals in Świnoujście on the Baltic and Krk on the Adriatic, gives the region alternatives to conventional east-west energy flows. Such infrastructure, combined with domestic projects like Romania’s Neptun Deep, can drastically reduce dependence on individual suppliers and routes.

These projects do not by themselves create a new geopolitical order. But they do expand the range of political, economic, and strategic choices available to states in the region.

Nonetheless, the Three Seas Initiative has increasingly served as a political umbrella for efforts to consolidate north-south connectivity. But whether this connectivity creates a geopolitical space with internal coherence depends on factors beyond the physical infrastructure itself. Cohesion among states and peoples, strategic will, the nature of external competition, and the capacity of states to translate physical links into lasting cooperative relationships are all crucial.

Conclusion: Infrastructure Creates Possibility; Politics Creates Order

Ultimately, the Baghdad Railway failed in its ambition to alter the geopolitical map. Still, this does not mean that this railway was geopolitically insignificant.

When considering the reactions this project has provoked and the opportunities that have arisen from it, it becomes clear that it had the potential to change the strategic geography before a new geopolitical order had even formed.

This holds even today. New transport and energy corridors will not, by themselves, create a new geopolitical order in Central and Eastern Europe. They can, however, contribute to the diversification of dependencies, the development of alternative networks, and the expansion of the states’ strategic options.

Thus, it changes the conditions under which states operate within geography, and from this, new possibilities emerge.

Sources

• Christensen, P. H. (2017). Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure. Yale University Press.

• Mackinder, H. J. (1904). The Geographical Pivot of History. The Geographical Journal, 23(4), 421–437.

• Mahan, A. T. (1890). The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. Little, Brown and Company.

• McMeekin, S. (2010). The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Introduction

The theme of paradise has long preoccupied European thought. While medieval Christianity located paradise beyond this world, Renaissance humanism revived the classical ideal of Arcadia: a pastoral landscape of harmony between humanity and nature.1

Centuries later, this imagery remains central to the marketing of Mediterranean tourism. Advertisements promise pristine landscapes, authenticity and an escape from the pressures of modern life. But does this European paradise still exist?

The closer one looks, the more this idyllic realm begins to resemble something very different. Behind the postcard scenery lies an economic structure whose long-term consequences receive far less attention than its immediate prosperity. In the twenty-first century, the commercialization of the Arcadian ideal has evolved into a socio-economic monoculture—a Mediterranean variant of the Dutch disease.2

This essay argues that the Mediterranean Trap is not tourism itself, but the structural dependence that emerges when tourism becomes the dominant economic logic of a society, crowding out innovation, reshaping demographic patterns and gradually eroding national resilience.

The Unusual Suspect

Croatia is an unusual suspect because it has never been exclusively Mediterranean. Its geography and historical development have always been shaped by the intersection of Central Europe, Southeastern Europe, and the Adriatic Sea.3 These layers of history, which the Annales School calls the longue durée,4 created a country with political and economic traditions that reach far beyond the Mediterranean world.

Throughout Southern Europe, tourism increasingly drew upon the Arcadian myth of a slower pace of life and harmony with nature. But only a few countries in the Mediterranean embraced this strategy as comprehensively as Croatia.

Unlike Spain and Italy, where mass tourism had already taken off during the post-war Mediterranean tourism boom of the 1950s and 1960s5, Croatia was a relative “latecomer” in tourism; although the Yugoslav era was one of planned and subsidized tourism, it had not yet reached that scale, and following the geopolitical upheavals and the War of Independence in the early 1990s, Croatia’s tourism industry came to a near standstill.6

As a result, Croatia could avoid many of the structural problems that had already occurred in the older Mediterranean tourist economies. This allowed it to elevate the promise of timelessness to an economic dogma. The advertising slogan “The Mediterranean as it once was”7 became the strongest expression of this and commercialized a literary refuge.

Croatia was not necessarily the kind of place one would expect to find an Arcadia. On the contrary, Croatia’s past has been marked by defensive battles on the border between the West and the East. This struggle lasted for centuries. 8

Yet, this historical rupture made the promotion of Croatia as a peaceful Mediterranean destination politically and economically attractive after independence.

The Arcadian myth therefore served not only as a marketing choice, but as an essential post-war survival strategy. The strategy was neither irrational nor accidental.

In reality, tourism was one of the very few economic sectors capable of quickly bringing in much-needed foreign currency.9

At the time, it also perfectly fitted the narrative of the era of hyperglobalism10 in which tourism, services, and international integration were perceived as almost guaranteed roads to prosperity.

Rebranding Croatia as a peaceful Mediterranean destination therefore served both an economic and a political purpose, especially as it allowed the country to present itself as an untouched alternative to its commercialized Mediterranean peers.

The Economic Trap

Croatia’s post-war strategy in tourism proved to be very promising: it brought in foreign currency, created jobs, and was able to improve international visibility.11

This was not necessarily a given, considering the circumstances at that time and the fact that Croatia is geographically more diverse than the Mediterranean campaign suggested. Accordingly, the promotional material first showcased Croatia's diversity through images of coastlines, mountains, and fields, only to later group these distinct landscapes under the slogan “The Mediterranean as it once was.”12

The campaign nevertheless succeeded in reshaping Croatia's international image.13 The beauty of the country and the authentic Mediterranean flair of Istria and Dalmatia, which was also not yet overcrowded, became ever more attractive to tourists.

By the early 2000s, Croatia had regained most of the ground it had lost during the war, and GDP had surpassed its pre-war level and was expanding rapidly (Figure 1).

From this perspective, given the challenges faced at the time, the strategy appeared relatively successful.

Despite continued growth in tourism, Croatia was hit by the economic crisis in 2008. Croatia’s traditional industrial and export sectors were hit particularly hard, causing the country to slide into a six-year recession.14

Indeed, the 2008 crisis marked a watershed moment, and tourism steadily became the centerpiece of Croatia's recovery strategy.

While this approach generated foreign exchange and sustained economic activity, it failed to deliver typical long-term developmental benefits, despite strong headline figures. As the European Commission notes, Croatia's tourism sector is characterized by high import leakage, pronounced seasonality, and comparatively weak spillover effects on the rest of the economy, limiting its contribution to long-term growth.15

In this context, joining the EU in 2013 coincided with the onset of a more intensive investment wave in an already rapidly growing tourism sector. This led to an unprecedented surge of ‘apartmentization.’ Growing demand for tourism-related real estate, combined with the expansion of short-term rentals, transformed large parts of the Adriatic coast into a yield-oriented property market.16

This marked the culmination of Croatia's growing specialization in tourism, reinforcing a pattern of deindustrialization and expanding dependence on non-tradable sectors.17

What was at first a transitory source of foreign exchange quickly became a permanent monoculture. Eurostat data show that tourism generated 10.5% of Croatia's gross value added in 2022, the highest among all available data for EU member states. Other estimates, which also consider the indirect and induced impacts, place the total contribution of tourism at about one-fifth of Croatia's GDP.

This degree of dependence, combined with the highest level of seasonality in the European Union,18 suggests that Croatia no longer controls tourism; instead, tourism more and more shapes investment patterns, labor allocation and political priorities across the wider economy, bolstering a path-dependent model of development.

But Croatia is not alone in this development. All over Southern Europe, tourism has steadily evolved from an important economic sector into a broader model of growth.19

The main difference is that Croatia's transformation unfolded over a much shorter period.

Whereas Spain, Greece, and Portugal slowly transformed into tourism-driven economies over several decades, much of this structural change occurred in Croatia within a little over a decade following the global financial crisis.

Beyond its effects on growth and sectoral specialization, tourism may also generate broader inflationary pressures. Recent research on Croatia argues that in highly tourism-dependent economies, tourism demand can contribute to inflation through multiple transmission channels, extending its economic effects beyond the tourism sector itself.20

The Demographic Trap

In Mediterranean Europe, demographic decline has become one of the defining structural challenges of the twenty-first century. Low fertility, outward migration and rising housing costs mutually reinforce one another.

These dynamics are especially illustrative in Croatia.

Like most of Europe, Croatia’s fertility rate remains below replacement level. Despite a slight recent increase in births,21 the birth rate remains below 1.5 (Eurostat, 2024), well below the 2.1 needed for generational replacement.

While Croatia is no exception within the broader group of Mediterranean countries, the opposite is actually true regarding the severity of its birth rate: In 2024, its fertility rate (1.46) was the highest among EU Mediterranean states examined here, exceeding Portugal (1.41), Cyprus (1.38), Greece (1.24), Italy (1.18), Spain (1.10), and Malta (1.01), according to Eurostat. Only France remained a notable exception, with a fertility rate of 1.61, reflecting its distinct demographic and economic structure.

Croatia's demographic decline predates tourism and EU accession. But the 2008 financial crisis and the EU's open mobility regime deepened a generalized South-North migratory flow that, besides Croatia,22 impacted Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece.23

Moreover, in highly touristed cities along the Southern European coastline, such as Barcelona, Seville, or Lisbon, the practice of converting apartments into holiday rentals has increased the already large gap between local incomes and housing costs. Although historic centers may keep their architectural charm, they are losing permanent residents, local shops, and year-round community life.24

This tension has also manifested itself in housing markets, as recently published Eurostat data indicate. Croatia recorded one of the largest annual increases in house prices and, by far, the highest increase in rents among the countries shown (Figure 4).

Of course, these developments cannot be ascribed to tourism alone. Still, they fit within the overall pressures that arise in housing markets oriented toward tourism.25

But the demographic consequences affect more than just housing.

Indeed, the most recent research points to the fact that tourism leads to an increase in everyday living costs for local residents. Taking a sample of 1.3 billion retail price observations, Kuliš, Mikulić, and Srhoj (2026) find that during the summer season, grocery prices in Croatia's most tourism-exposed coastal municipalities increase significantly relative to those in the inland municipalities, describing this as a tourism-led cost-of-living externality. 26

Such pressures further reduce the attractiveness of remaining in tourism-dependent regions, particularly for younger households and workers outside the tourism sector.

Also, the labor market reveals a related contradiction. Tourism creates income and employment, but a heavily seasonal service economy offers a narrower range of stable, knowledge-intensive career paths than a diversified economy.27

This has led to a labor replacement cycle familiar to Spain and Italy: as young, educated locals emigrate for professional advancement, employers rely more heavily on third-country nationals to fill hospitality and construction roles.28 In Croatia, the number of guest workers has already surpassed 100,300 (according to the Ministry of Interior )29, a massive shift for a country of its size.

Again, this shows a growing divergence between the jobs created in the economy and the opportunities needed to retain the domestic population.

The demographic trap is thus not only a matter of population decline. Instead, it reflects a deepening misalignment between the economic frameworks bolstered by tourism and the demographic stability required for long-term resilience. After all, the challenge is as much structural as it is demographic.

The Strategic Trap

Across Southern Europe, strategic debates are increasingly intersecting with tourism-dependent development models. Coastal regions simultaneously host critical energy infrastructure, ports, naval facilities, and some of Europe’s most important tourism destinations. This means that at the local level, economic development, environmental concerns, and strategic priorities compete for the same geographical space.

A second consequence is what may be described as the visibility dilemma. Tourism-dependent coastal economies derive part of their commercial value from perceptions of tranquility, environmental quality, and visual attractiveness.

Strategic infrastructure, by contrast, require highly visible ports, energy installations, industrial facilities, or military activity. In other words, in developing infrastructure that enhances national resilience and security, governments will be faced with very difficult decisions about trade-offs in preserving the images on which tourism depends.

The LNG terminal on Krk has significantly strengthened regional energy diversification and the North–South Gas Corridor, highlighting the strategic value of critical infrastructure in the Adriatic.30

However, the process of planning and constructing this facility also shows that spatial competition between strategic and tourism-related uses has become one of the most important issues that can only be understood by placing tourism into a wider frame of spatial, environmental, and political constraints instead of being an issue of technical decision-making only.31

The case of Krk illustrates the tension that surrounds strategic infrastructure projects and also how tourism-related dependence leads to a form of strategic vulnerability.

Unlike manufacturing and diversified exporting sectors, tourism is very sensitive to perceptions of safety, stability, and accessibility. This fragility became obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic when mobility restrictions led to the near-total collapse of international tourism, exposing many economies to significant risk due to their dependence on visitor flows.32

Furthermore, other external shocks can negatively affect the perceived safety of a tourist destination. This includes the migratory pressure towards frontline states,33 such as Greece, Italy, and Spain, and increased geopolitical tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

Regional instability is a case in point for countries like Greece and Cyprus, which are affected by the negative spillovers of tensions in their neighborhoods, despite the absence of conflict on their own territory.34 Likewise, terrorism, cyberattacks, or disinformation campaigns may generate economic consequences that are disproportionate to their physical impact by discouraging visitors, reducing investor confidence, and triggering official travel warnings.

Thus, a country whose prosperity depends heavily on the voluntary spending of foreign visitors becomes increasingly vulnerable to external political, security, and psychological shocks over which it exercises only limited control. Tourism therefore represents not merely an economic sector but a structural vulnerability. The greater a country’s dependence on maintaining the perception of stability and paradise, the more constrained its strategic autonomy becomes during periods of international crisis.

The strategic consequences of this dependency can lead to a gradual restriction of national sovereignty.

For this reason, the “Mediterranean Trap” extends beyond economics. When national prosperity depends on sustaining an idealized Arcadian image, preserving that image itself becomes a strategic constraint.

Mediterranean Europe

Despite their different historical paths, Southern European countries are exhibiting convergent structural dynamics, such as a growing dependence on tourism, greater stress on housing markets, demographic decline, and ever more challenging economic diversification processes.

Croatia’s trajectory was unusually compressed. Late reconstruction after the war and delayed integration into world markets did not make it exempt from the “Mediterranean Trap”. On the contrary, they accelerated a process that has been much more extended throughout southern Europe.

In the popular imagination, historical cities such as Venice and Dubrovnik appear to occupy a geographical and temporal zone seemingly exempt from the pressures of economic and social modernity. The Mediterranean ideal is now symbolized around the world by these two cities.

However, this image is detached from both the historical development and current realities.

MacCannell’s concept of staged authenticity35 is relevant here. Tourism gradually transforms local culture into a performance for external consumption and progressively erodes the authenticity that preceded it. Here, the contradiction inherent in staged authenticity becomes clear: the marketed promise of untouched heritage is replaced by commercial performance. Venice sells a stylized vision of la dolce vita, while Dubrovnik transforms its historic core into a set for Game of Thrones. Though the narratives diverge, the economic logic driving them is precisely the same.

Furthermore, the very success of this image transforms the societies that sustain it. High housing costs, the transformation of living space into tourist accommodation, and the displacement of younger generations all signal an increasing distancing between the Mediterranean as a space marketed globally and the Mediterranean as a lived social reality.

As a consequence, Southern Europe is undergoing demographic shifts caused by minimal birth rates, delayed starts to independent living, and youth migration. Throughout the Mediterranean, young people remain in their family homes longer than the European average because of expensive housing and job insecurity. This postponement of independence diminishes overall fertility rates, particularly as the cost of living continues to climb.

Tourism is clearly not the only explanation for these developments. Nevertheless, an economic model characterized by seasonal employment, rising housing costs and relatively low value-added appears ill-suited to reversing them.

The widening gap is also political. As Javier Carbonell (2025) argues, economic upheavals and precarity are altering the political landscape in Southern Europe. Young men, particularly those without a college education, are gravitating toward the political right. In several European countries, including southern European nations such as Croatia and Portugal, a significant gender voting gap has emerged among voters under 25. Young men are much more likely than young women to support far-right parties.36

Fernand Braudel understood the Mediterranean through its enduring structures and long historical continuities.37 Yet one of the region’s most powerful contemporary continuities may now be the dominance of an economic and cultural model built around the external consumption of Mediterranean space.

This pattern, however, is not geographically inevitable. France, despite possessing a major Mediterranean tourism economy, has not experienced the same degree of structural dependence because tourism remains embedded within a more diversified national economy and a wider network of inland economic centers.

The Mediterranean Trap is not an inevitable geographical destiny. It arises when the Mediterranean image evolves from a mere source of income into the primary organizing principle for economic development, housing, and political decision-making.

The Forgotten Alternative

However, path dependency does not mean a certain outcome is inevitable. It simply means that choosing a different path is more difficult.

Alternative development paths are not unique to Croatia. Northern Italy,38 the Basque Country and Catalonia39 in Spain, demonstrate that Mediterranean economies have long combined tourism with advanced manufacturing, technology and export-oriented industries. These examples suggest that the “Mediterranean Trap” is neither geographically predetermined nor economically unavoidable.

Croatia provides a revealing case because these alternative trajectories emerged alongside a rapidly expanding tourism economy.

One of the clearest examples of an alternative path is Sveta Nedelja. Once a largely agricultural municipality, it has become one of Croatia’s leading technology clusters. The local Rimac Group underlines how investing in knowledge-intensive industries can generate greater innovation- and human capital-based value-added growth than the seasonal tourism model.

Even more impressive is the transformation of the Slavonian city of Osijek. Slavonia, the region in which Osijek is located, was once considered Croatia’s “breadbasket” and relatively wealthy. In recent decades, it has experienced emigration, economic stagnation, and war-related damage that affected Slavonia in particular.

Instead of reviving heavy industry or competing with coastal tourism, Osijek has pursued a different development path. Driven by the Osijek Software City initiative and close cooperation with the local university, the city has emerged as one of Croatia’s leading technology hubs, further reinforced by Jabil’s new production facility in Nemetin.40 By focusing on technology and skilled labour, Osijek has developed a modern comparative advantage.

These examples do not suggest that Croatia should completely abandon tourism but rather continue to diversify economically, as they demonstrate something more fundamental: alternative development paths have existed throughout this post-war transformation.

The country’s geographical diversity produced not only different landscapes, but also different economic models. While the Adriatic became more dependent on tourism, continental Croatia took a path that cultivated resilience through innovation, manufacturing, and technology.

The Croatian case illustrates the broader strategic choice facing tourism-dependent economies: whether tourism remains one pillar of development or evolves into its dominant organizing principle.

Of course, such a model shift implies a much more complex vision of the Croatian state and how it perceives itself, one that integrates the geographical, historical, and human factors besides the technical aspects.

Croatia also possesses assets that many Mediterranean economies lack. One of these is its exceptionally large diaspora (3.2 million)41 in relation to its resident population (3.9 million).42

This global network is perhaps most visible in Croatia’s disproportionate sporting success43, where the diaspora frequently provides elite talent44 and reputational capital that reinforces a strong national brand. But the importance of the diaspora is not only symbolic or demographic; it is also reflected in its continuing economic contribution.

This contribution remains economically significant. In 2024, personal remittances received by Croatia amounted to approximately 7.2 per cent of GDP, compared with less than one per cent in Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal (Figure 6). This shows that the Croatian diaspora continues to play a far greater economic role than in most Mediterranean economies.

Furthermore, it also highlights Croatia’s continued reliance on income generated abroad more than on productive activity within the domestic economy.

Several Croatian demographers, including Stjepan Šterc, therefore argue that long-term revitalization requires not only demographic policies, but also decentralization and a more systematic integration of Croatia’s diaspora into the country’s economic and institutional development.45

Conclusion

The allure of Arcadia has always been that it offers an escape from history, as a timeless refuge from the demands of progress, conflict, and change.

For decades, Mediterranean Europe, and Croatia in particular, successfully sold this escape to the world. In the immediate post-war era, turning the Adriatic coast into a commercialized paradise was a rational, perhaps even necessary, strategy to generate rapid wealth and rebuild a battered nation. It was a beautiful illusion, and for a brief moment, the reality of uncrowded beaches and slow-paced life almost matched the myth.

But as this essay has argued, the commercialization of paradise carries a steep price. When the logic of the tourist resort becomes the dominant logic of the state, it acts as a quiet, structural anesthetic. It hollows out housing markets, crowds out productive innovation, and drives the youngest and most ambitious citizens into exile, only to replace them with precarious seasonal labor.

Moreover, in an era of renewed geopolitical rivalry, the “Mediterranean Trap” morphs from an economic constraint into a strategic vulnerability. A society that prioritizes the aesthetic expectations of foreign vacationers over critical infrastructure, productive capacity, demographic resilience and the viability of its border regions slowly forfeits its own strategic autonomy.

At least in theory, the choice facing Croatia and its southern European counterparts is not between tourism and industry, but between treating tourism as one component of a diversified economy and allowing it to become the dominant organizing principle of the state. Therefore, the real choice is between substance and scenery.

The technological resurgence of cities such as Osijek, the innovative clusters of continental Croatia, and the diversified industrial economies found elsewhere in Southern Europe demonstrate that alternative development paths remain possible. They show that the region possesses the intellectual, institutional, and industrial capacity to thrive in the twenty-first century.

To escape the “Mediterranean Trap”, it is essential to realize that long-term sovereignty cannot be sustained by rental yields and postcard views.

Arcadia was never meant to become an economic model.

Paradise may attract visitors, but it cannot by itself sustain a nation.

For exposed nations along NATO’s eastern flank, the erosion of strategic depth is not an abstract academic concern but an operational reality. When the distance between a potential front line and critical political or logistical centers is measured in hours rather than days, the luxury of prolonged bureaucratic deliberation vanishes.

In the 21st century, strategic depth must increasingly be actively manufactured. It rests on three operational layers:

Connectivity Hardware: The physical ability to move mass rapidly across territorial space. Vertical corridors such as Via Carpathia, expanded rail infrastructure, and diversified energy routes create operational depth where geography alone cannot provide it.

Functional Specialization: No single state along Europe’s periphery can sustain full-spectrum autonomy. Strategic depth emerges through distributed roles: Poland provides kinetic mass, the Baltics function as advanced digital and intelligence nodes, while Adriatic and Black Sea regions secure critical energy access and logistical connectivity.

Societal Continuity: A society that treats defense purely as a specialized commercial service gradually loses strategic depth. Resilience depends on institutional trust, civic responsibility, and populations prepared to absorb the structural costs of security and operational endurance under pressure.

National cohesion thus becomes an asset in times of strain, rather than the backward anachronism that some assume it to be.

While parts of the traditional Western core remain constrained by procedural inertia and fragmented strategic priorities, the Baltic-Adriatic space is increasingly developing forms of practical sovereignty shaped by urgency, exposure, and functional necessity.

Strategic depth is therefore returning to Europe not primarily through territorial expansion or centralized integration, but through the emergence of resilient regional systems built on geography, infrastructure, and societal preparedness.

Selected Reading

• Carl von Clausewitz – On War (Book III: On Strategy in General [Moral Quantities]; Book VI: Defense [The Arming of the People])

• European Commission – TEN-T Corridor Framework

• Hal Brands (Ed.) – The New Makers of Modern Strategy: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age (2023)

Under conditions of low external pressure and predictable supply chains, efficiency and centralization appeared rational. Duplication was treated as waste to be eliminated. This logic becomes fragile in an era defined by systemic friction, geopolitical competition, and infrastructure vulnerability.

Redundancy, properly understood, is not inefficiency. It is systemic resilience.

When Europe’s traditional Franco-German core faces political gridlock or economic stagnation, the continent does not simply grind to a halt. Instead, overlapping functional spaces, such as the Nordic defense cluster or the Baltic-Adriatic infrastructure axis, increasingly compensate for this by distributed capacity and regional coordination.

This marks a broader shift from monolithic integration toward a distributed multi-node system.

The emerging European operational model does not require all states to move at the same speed or share the same political culture. It requires them to remain functionally compatible. If one energy corridor becomes vulnerable, alternative routes open up through the north-south connectivity of the Three Seas region. If institutional consensus slows, regional coalitions increasingly act where strategic necessity demands it.

The future European order may therefore depend less on consolidated efficiency and more on resilient redundancy, not as a sign of fragmentation, but as a condition for continuity under pressure.

Selected Reading

• European Commission – TEN-T Corridor Maps

• Three Seas Initiative Research Center – North-South Connectivity and Infrastructure

• Robert D. Kaplan – The Revenge of Geography

Across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), questions of defense, sovereignty, and societal continuity are treated as operational priorities. Military preparedness, civil defense structures, and energy security are not abstract policy areas, but embedded in national strategy. In many cases, this reflects historical experience: exposure to external pressure has reinforced a persistent awareness of vulnerability.

In contrast, parts of Western Europe increasingly exhibit what can be described as strategic drift. Defense is often subordinated to fiscal constraints, while societal fragmentation complicates the formation of long-term priorities. The issue is not a lack of resources, but a lack of alignment between capacity and intent.

This divergence does not imply superiority of one region over another. It reflects different historical trajectories and threat perceptions. However, under conditions of systemic stress, alignment tends to matter more than scale.

As a result, regions that combine material capacity with strategic will gain disproportionate relevance. In the emerging European order, this may prove more decisive than established measures of power.

Selected Reading

• Estonian Defence League (Kaitseliit)

• Finland’s Total Defence

• Lawrence Freedman – Strategy: A History

• Poland’s Territorial Defence Forces (WOT)

• Wrange J, Bengtsson R, Brommesson D. – Resilience through total defence

This shift is driven by a new spatial logic: the Baltic-Adriatic Axis. Unlike the East-West orientation of the 20th century, this north-south corridor is not ideological but functional.

Particularly visible examples include the Via Carpathia and Amber Rail freight corridors, which strengthen regional connectivity, as well as energy infrastructure projects such as the LNG terminal in Krk and Romania’s Neptun Deep project. Together, these systems enhance supply security, redundancy, and strategic independence.

These systems are therefore not merely peripheral developments but the concrete foundation for Europe’s resilience.

What distinguishes this axis, however, is not infrastructure alone. It is the alignment of material capacity with political intent. States along the Baltic-Adriatic corridor treat defense, societal continuity, and sovereignty as operational priorities, not abstract commitments. This produces a form of resilience that is less visible than institutional integration, but more decisive under stress.

The implication is not European decline, but reconfiguration. A Polycentric Europe does not rely on a single engine, but on multiple functional centers. Within this emerging structure, CEE is not a periphery but a stabilizing core in domains where the system is most exposed: energy and security.

The “buffer zone” has not disappeared. It has been transformed into a structural backbone.

Selected Reading

• 3SI Research Center – Via Carpathia and Regional Connectivity Projects (2024)

• Ágnes Bernek, Geopolitics of Central and Eastern Europe in the 21st Century – From the Buffer Zone to the Gateway Zone (2021)

• Robert D. Kaplan – The Revenge of Geography (2012)

Today, this spatial logic is shifting. The emerging North-South orientation running from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black Sea, is not driven by ideology, but by function. It reflects the material requirements of a continent under pressure: energy security, logistical resilience, and strategic depth.

Unlike the East-West axis1, which connected political systems, the North-South corridor connects critical infrastructures. LNG terminals, pipeline networks, transport corridors, and industrial supply chains are increasingly aligned along this vertical spine. Initiatives such as the Three Seas Initiative are not creating this shift; they are responding to it.

This reorientation reveals a deeper structural change. Europe is no longer primarily organized around political convergence, but around functional necessity. Space is being redefined not by shared norms, but by shared dependencies.

In this context, the Baltic-Adriatic Axis is not a geopolitical project in the classical sense. It is the spatial expression of a new organizing principle: that resilience, not integration, is becoming the primary driver of European order.

References & Selected Reading

• Aspen Institute Central Europe. The North-South Axis: A New Backbone for Europe. Prague: Aspen Review, 2017

• Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

• Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS). The Three Seas Initiative and Europe’s Next Frontier of Strategic Autonomy, 2025

• Hey, Jono. Sketchplanations: The continental axis hypothesis.

Nowhere is this more visible than in Europe’s evolving energy landscape. Projects such as the Krk LNG terminal in Croatia or Romania’s Neptun Deep gas field are not isolated national developments. They form part of a structural reconfiguration of supply routes, storage capacity, and redundancy systems across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).

The result is not simply diversification, but a shift in spatial relevance. Regions that can provide stable energy inflows and logistical flexibility gain structural importance within the system. This is particularly critical for the industrial core of Europe, which depends on a predictable and scalable energy supply.

The Baltic-Adriatic corridor concentrates many of these functions. It links maritime access points, inland distribution networks, and emerging energy hubs into a coherent operational space. In doing so, it transforms geography into capability.

This highlights a broader principle: strategic autonomy is not declared, it is built. It depends less on political statements than on pipelines, terminals, storage facilities, and transport corridors that can withstand disruption.

In other words, infrastructure is not a background condition; it is a defining variable of the European order.

Selected References

• Three Seas Initiative

• LNG Terminal Krk (Croatia)

• Neptun Deep Project (Romania)
  

Introduction

The current debate about Europe’s future is increasingly misguided.

Framed as a choice between centralization and fragmentation, it overlooks the structural transformation already underway.

Europe is not breaking apart.
It is reorganizing into a polycentric system.

A System of Overlapping Spaces

Europe’s emerging structure is not defined by clearly separated blocs, but by overlapping functional spaces. These spaces do not exclude one another. They reinforce, compete, and adapt simultaneously.

This is not fragmentation. It is a system.

The Nordic security cluster illustrates this logic. Long-standing institutions like the Nordic Council provide the social and political cohesion, the “software” of trust. In parallel, NORDEFCO operates as a flexible, functional defense layer. Cooperation here does not wait for European consensus. It acts where regional conditions demand it.

At the same time, Central Europe is consolidating a vertical infrastructure axis through the Three Seas Initiative (3SI), linking energy and logistics across the continent’s eastern flank as a form of “connectivity hardware”.

While France continues to pursue centralized strategic autonomy, the decisive capacity for action is increasingly generated at the periphery where necessity meets functional integration.

Taken together, these dynamics do not produce hierarchy, but redundancy. If one center weakens, others compensate. What appears incoherent from a centralist perspective is, in fact, a resilient order one built not on uniformity, but on overlapping strength.

Some observers have described Europe’s evolving structure as “neo-medieval1,” emphasizing overlapping authorities and blurred sovereignty.

This captures an important aspect of the transformation.

Yet it remains incomplete: the key question is not the existence of overlap, but the functional logic that allows such a system to remain stable.

Beyond Regions: Functional Roles

A polycentric Europe is not only structured by regions, but by roles within the system.

Germany remains an embedded core: economically central, yet increasingly constrained in strategic initiative.

The United Kingdom operates as an external balancer detached from EU structures, yet deeply engaged in European security.

Switzerland represents an autonomous node, highly integrated economically while retaining maximum political independence.

Others occupy interface positions. Countries such as Italy, Austria, or Croatia connect different regional systems linking the Mediterranean, Central Europe, and the Adriatic space.

These roles are not fixed. They change with context and necessity. What remains constant is the absence of a single center.

From Hierarchy to Redundancy

This reflects a deeper structural shift: from hierarchy to redundancy.

Traditional political orders rely on clear centers and linear chains of command. Their strength lies in efficiency, but their weakness lies in fragility. When the core fails, the system as a whole is at risk.

Europe’s emerging structure follows a different logic. Functions are distributed across multiple regions, often overlapping rather than replacing one another.

Redundancy, in this context, is not inefficiency. It is resilience.

That which seems inefficient from a centralized stance is often adaptive in practice.

Polycentric systems trade speed at the center for flexibility at the edges, allowing responses to emerge where conditions are best understood.

The system does not depend on a single center. It endures because similar functions can be performed across different nodes.

The End of the Single Engine

For decades, Europe’s stability was associated with the German-French engine. This meant that a central core set the direction for the entire system.

However, this model is now losing its significance. In its place, the emerging structure is not a new center, but one in which leadership is situational rather than permanent.

Earlier visions of the European order, as formulated by Herfried Münkler, for example, assumed the existence of a stabilizing core that often relied on Germany’s leadership capacity.

Such models were plausible under conditions of relative cohesion and economic strength.

Today, these conditions no longer exist.

In other words, the foundations that sustained this model are eroding: economic constraints, political fragmentation, and shifting external pressures.

Also, when it comes to fiscal discipline or digital governance, actors from the north and east often set the pace. On security issues, particularly on the eastern flank, the focus is shifting toward Poland and its regional partners.

This is not a “two-speed Europe” that still assumes a single course. It is a multi-track system in which leadership shifts depending on the required function.

This does not eliminate leadership. It redefines it.

Leadership is no longer anchored in a single core, but emerges where capacity and necessity align.

Compatibility Instead of Uniformity

The decline of a centralized model under Franco-German leadership is clearly evident in the sluggish progress of large-scale military industrial projects such as FCAS.

Centralized efforts often get bogged down in bureaucracy and national rivalries, while smaller actors demonstrate the agility of a polycentric model.

Estonia and Croatia illustrate this shift by innovating in cybersecurity and drone technology to build defense capabilities instead of waiting for European solutions, demonstrating that decentralized speed triumphs over centralized mass.

The concept of “ever closer union” is based on convergence. A polycentric Europe follows a different logic: compatibility, not uniformity. Different systems must be able to work together.

Regional infrastructure initiatives complement the single market rather than replace it. In security, smaller and more flexible coalitions often provide capabilities that a centralized structure would struggle to deliver.

By reducing the demand for uniformity, Europe also reduces internal friction. Cooperation becomes more selective, but also more sustainable.

As a consequence, the new order’s strongest argument is the surprising alliance of opposites between egalitarian, progressive Northern societies and structurally conservative, sovereignty-focused Central European states, as seen in the military cooperation between Sweden and Poland.

These actors cooperate not out of ideology but out of necessity, demonstrating the superiority of polycentrism and showing that functional realism is more resilient than the attempted export of uniform values.

The common objection is often that such a system becomes a playground for external powers. This misunderstands the logic. Centralized systems can be pressured at the top. Polycentric systems cannot.

Influence may occur locally, but systemic control remains out of reach.

The Resilience of the Patchwork

The strength of this polycentric order lies in its ability to contain risk.

In a centralized system, failure at the core is systemic. In a distributed system, disruption remains localized.

A financial crisis in one region or a political shift in another does not necessarily destabilize the entire structure. The system adapts because it is not dependent on a single center of gravity.

This supposed fragmentation is actually diversification.

Europe’s “patchwork” is not a weakness. It allows different regions to respond to different pressures simultaneously, rather than forcing a single response onto fundamentally different conditions.

The Limits of a Polycentric Order: The Mediterranean Paradox

Polycentricity is not a guarantee of frictionless cooperation. The Mediterranean illustrates the limits and the conditions of this model.

While northern and eastern Europe are increasingly integrated through functional necessity, the Mediterranean remains a space of connectivity without coherence. Physical connections (energy corridors in the Levant Basin or submarine cables across the Ionian Sea) often generate rivalry rather than integration.

In subregions such as the Aegean, dense proximity and overlapping claims further compress space and reproduce tension rather than alignment.

Moreover, in the Mediterranean, migratory pressure manifests itself as a constant systemic strain that underscores the limits of centralized control and forces the actors involved to enter into independent, often bilateral security arrangements with transit countries, going beyond the consensus-based decisions made in Brussels.

The region highlights a fundamental feature of a polycentric Europe: it must coexist with zones of persistent instability and overlapping claims.

The Mediterranean is no longer a mare nostrum that can be stabilized from a single center. In a decentralized Europe, it becomes a testing ground. Not for resolving fragmentation, but for managing it through flexible balancing mechanisms and regional security arrangements.

These zones do not invalidate the system. They define its operational boundaries.

Not every region can be integrated under the same logic. Beyond certain thresholds, attempts at uniform expansion risk producing instability more than cohesion.

This reflects a broader pattern: complex systems rarely fail because they lack reach. They fail when their reach exceeds their capacity to organize what they incorporate.

Conclusion: Europe Without a Center

The shift toward a polycentric Europe is not a sign of decline, but a structural adjustment.

Europe is aligning its political organization with its geographic and cultural reality.

It will not function as a unified power in the traditional sense. But it does not need to.

Europe’s emerging structure is often seen as a break with its past. In reality, it is closer to a return.

Some of these emerging structures are already visible.

Among them, the Baltic–Adriatic axis illustrates how Europe’s polycentric order takes concrete form: not as a political project, but as a corridor shaped by geography, infrastructure, and necessity.

It is along such lines that Europe’s future is not decided, but organized.

As Eric Jones observed in The European Miracle, Europe’s long-term dynamism did not arise from unity, but from plurality and competition between multiple centers.

What is taking shape today follows the same structural logic.

Stability in the 21st century does not require a center. It requires the ability to remain connected across multiple centers.

Europe does not endure despite its lack of unity.

It endures because unity was never its natural form.

Geography, history, and politics all shape the Eastern Mediterranean. Yet none of them fundamentally alters its structural conditions. Actors change, alignments shift, and interpretations of the past evolve. But the underlying spatial constraints remain constant, reproducing rivalry across time.

This stands in contrast to Braudel’s1 vision of the Mediterranean as a coherent historical space shaped by exchange and continuity.

Nowhere in Europe is this difference so visible, and nowhere does geography shape the space so intensely as in the Aegean. Islands, coastlines, and narrow sea lanes create a framework in which proximity is inevitable.

Throughout history, various powers have tried to organize this space, ranging from empires to alliances. But despite these efforts, no stable order has emerged.

This sea reveals a deeper reality: geography does not determine outcomes, but it defines the limits within which they can occur.

Geography As Structural Pressure

The defining feature of the Aegean is not only its history, but its geographical configuration.

A dense constellation of islands lies in immediate proximity to the Anatolian coast, compressing maritime space to such an extent that distance becomes almost meaningless. There is no clear separation, no strategic depth, and no natural boundary that can stabilize interaction.

This geospatial compression transforms closeness into constant friction. Where distance is absent, interaction cannot be avoided, and where interaction is unavoidable, rivalry becomes constant.

Geography in the Aegean does not dictate specific outcomes. But it imposes structural limits: it prevents stable separation, complicates control, and continuously reproduces zones of overlap.

In such an environment, stability is not the default.

Connectivity Multiplies Friction

If geography creates proximity, modern connectivity intensifies its consequences.

The Aegean Sea is both narrow and tightly connected. Maritime routes and claims over exclusive economic zones transform physical nearness into strategic competition.

This spatial contraction is finalized by modern surveillance and military technology. In a region where drones and high-frequency radar eliminate any strategic 'dead zones,' transparency does not lead to trust, but to a permanent 'greyzone' of conflict.

Beneath open warfare, hybrid tactics become systemic, but technology does not resolve geographical constraints; it detects and escalates every dispute in real time.

Migration, in particular, is a pressure point in this limited space. The proximity of the Greek islands to the Anatolian coast enables strategic control over migration flows and turns geography into a diplomatic lever. The 2016 agreement between the EU and Turkey illustrates how this contested sea forces Europe into a long-term dependence on a transactional regional power.

Historical attempts to organize this space (from ancient maritime networks to imperial control) failed because of its physical limitations. Different actors temporarily dominated, but none changed the underlying logic.

Instead of integrating the region, connectivity multiplies points of tension; infrastructure does not dissolve boundaries, it redistributes them. Connectivity doesn’t eliminate competition; it reorganizes it.

Structural Rivalry

The rivalry between Greece and Turkey is often framed in political or historical terms. Yet in the space, it is better understood as a permanent condition than as an occasional dispute.

Geography also reinforces enduring perceptions of vulnerability on both sides. The fear of being surrounded in Turkey, on the one side, and the fear of losing sovereignty in Greece, on the other, make an agreement nearly impossible.

Both states occupy the same maritime space, where coastlines, islands, and competing zones of control make clear separation difficult. This creates a setting in which actions by one side are immediately perceived as restrictions by the other.

Under such conditions, even defensive measures acquire an offensive character. Military presence, territorial claims, and legal interpretations are not simply policy choices, but responses to the same underlying spatial pressures.

This does not eliminate agency, but it limits it. Different governments may pursue different strategies, yet none can fundamentally escape the structural logic of proximity and overlap.

What emerges is not a temporary conflict but a rivalry that is continuously reproduced, regardless of political alignment or external mediation.

In this geographical area, restraint is difficult to signal, and escalation is easy to perceive.

External Powers & Shatterbelt

The structural pressures of the Aegean are further increased by external involvement.

The Eastern Mediterranean resembles what Saul Cohen described as a “shatterbelt”: a region in which internal fragmentation intersects with continuous external intervention. In such spaces, outside powers do not impose order. They become part of the fragmentation itself.

The Aegean and its wider environment are influenced by overlapping interests of actors not restricted to the region. The United States, Russia, and the European Union all operate within it, each pursuing distinct strategic objectives. Their presence does not resolve local rivalries but adds additional layers of competition.

Cyprus represents the shatterbelt logic in its most visible form: a divided space where overlapping claims and external involvement converge. It is not an exception, but a blunt expression of the region’s structural condition.

External engagement reinforces fragmentation rather than resolving it.

The Aegean as a Terminal Fault Line

The absence of a stable order in the region is not the result of insufficient cooperation or failed policy. It reflects structural constraints that no actor has been able to overcome.

Geography prevents clear separation, and no single actor can dominate the region. This makes it impossible for there to be stable hierarchy or equilibrium. Attempts at organization remain partial, temporary, and contingent.

Recurring instability is therefore not a deviation from order, but the normal condition of a space that resists consolidation.

The Aegean is not merely a periphery of Europe; it marks the limits of European coherence.

While the European project is built on integration through law and interdependence, the Aegean exposes a space where these mechanisms reach their limits. Geography does not allow clear separation, but it also prevents full integration.

As a partially occupied EU member state, Cyprus illustrates the collapse of this order. Turkey’s power strategy contradicts the legal definition of the region and presents Europe with an inescapable dilemma. It cannot abandon Greece’s position to uphold its own principles, yet it cannot negotiate away Turkey’s territorial reality either.

In the Aegean, the universalism of the Liberal International Order (LIO) comes into conflict with local particularities. The sea shows that geography and history can create “unsolvable” issues where legal compromise is seen as existential surrender.

The result is neither unity nor stable division, but a condition of permanent tension that must be managed rather than resolved.

The Paradox of Sovereignty

From a historical perspective, the conflict here is between two heirs to a similar imperial legacy. Both Byzantium and the later Ottoman Empire shared a drive for undivided control over this maritime space. This legacy of spatial indivisibility affects modern legal attempts to draw borders through a sea that both nations view as their own.

This deep-seated conception of sovereignty explains why modern diplomatic solutions often fail. It is a conflict between the modern Europe of treaties and an older understanding of space and power that continues to shape both sides of the Aegean.

The current stalemate, therefore, reflects a deeper tension between legal logic and spatial reality.

While Greece emphasizes the continuity of international law and insular sovereignty, Turkey insists on the geographical relevance of the Anatolian mainland. In the Aegean, universal rules encounter a geography that resists their application.

Consequently, the conflict is not simply political or legal, but structural. Neither side can fully yield without undermining its own security logic.

Implications for a Polycentric Europe

The case of the Aegean Sea illustrates that Europe’s strategic architecture is not a monolithic entity, but a mosaic of regional logics. In the Aegean, geography, history, and politics merge into an inseparable structural unity.

Geography clearly imposes an inescapable spatial constraint, making distance impossible. History legitimizes claims to sovereignty, making any division of this space seem like a loss of identity. Politics exploits these conditions, for example, by instrumentalizing migration or exploiting resources, thus transforming physical closeness into permanent strategic tensions.

Within this framework, Turkey acts not as a temporary disruptive factor but as a structural adversary. This rivalry stems from a region that defies universal rules, such as those established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). These rules are based on the premise of clear boundaries, which the geography of the Aegean Sea does not permit.

For a polycentric Europe, this means accepting reality as it is: the Aegean is not a “problem” that can be solved through integration, but a permanent condition that requires strategic management.

Stability does not arise from the absence of conflict here, but through the precise balancing of points of friction.

The Aegean remains the decisive fault line where European idealism regarding legal norms collides with the harsh reality of a region that allows no compromise.

In the future, Europe will define itself not through uniformity but through its ability to permanently moderate such inherently unstable regional systems without being shattered by them.

References & Selected Reading

• Fernand Braudel– The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II

• Saul Bernard Cohen– Geography and Politics in a World Divided

• Ziya Önis– Greek-Turkish Relations and the European Union: A Critical Perspective

• Geoffrey Till – Seapower: A Guide for the Twenty-First Century

• Nicholas J. Spykman– The Geography of the Peace

• C.M. Woodhouse – Modern Greece: A Short History

The idea of the Mediterranean as a unified strategic space is a persistent geopolitical fiction.

Fernand Braudel famously portrayed it as one coherent world shaped by geography, climate, and centuries of exchange. In his longue durée, the sea binds more than it divides.

Strategic reality looks very different.

The Mediterranean has almost never functioned as a single political or military space. Unity only existed when one empire imposed it by force. The moment that force disappeared, fragmentation returned.

In practice, the sea is a fragmented arena of overlapping sub-regions: the Adriatic, the Aegean, the Western Mediterranean, and the Levantine coast. Actors do not think or act in terms of “the Mediterranean.” They act within their own narrower maritime environments.

The Mediterranean is connected, but not coherent.

This distinction lies at the heart of its enduring resistance to any unified strategic order and explains why it remains a space of overlapping competition rather than stable integration in an increasingly polycentric Europe.

From System to Overlap

While the Roman Empire briefly imposed a single operational order as Mare Nostrum, Greek colonization and Byzantine struggles reveal a more enduring pattern: connectivity without coherence.

Historically, the Mediterranean has rarely been a political subject. It has usually been the object of overlapping power claims. That condition persists today. No dominant power organizes the space. Instead, medium-sized actors project influence within limited horizons. Their interactions produce no coherent system, only a fragmented equilibrium of competition and partial alignment.

The space is also wide open to external intervention. Major powers operate inside it without being contained by it, reinforcing existing divisions rather than resolving them.

This is particularly visible in the Eastern Mediterranean, where regional rivalries intersect with outer military and energy interests. Saul Cohen described such zones as a “shatterbelt”, where internal fragmentation is reinforced by constant external pressure.

The result is not disorder, but a form of order without hierarchy.

In reality, there is no “Mediterranean” as a unified strategic actor, only a set of overlapping sub-regions with their own dynamics.

Sub-Regions Instead of a Mediterranean Whole

The Mediterranean should be understood as a constellation of sub-regions, shaped by geography, balance of power, and connections.

The Adriatic, for instance, operates less as part of a Mediterranean whole than as a gateway between Central Europe and the sea, where inland economic and strategic dimensions align with maritime access.

Further east, the Aegean is defined by bilateral tension, where geography compresses space and intensifies rivalry between Greece and Turkey.

Beyond that, the Eastern Mediterranean emerges as a zone where regional disputes are intensified by external involvement, as energy competition and Great Power presence collide along the Levantine coast.

Paradoxically, this continuous fragmentation is not resolved by modern technological connectivity. It is, in fact, intensified.

While Braudel still derived the unity of the Mediterranean from the exchange of grain and spices, the region is today physically held together by a dense network of undersea cables and gas pipelines.

This “hardware of connectivity” does not produce integration; it turns the maritime space into a competitive arena. The dispute over exclusive economic zones (EEZs) in the Eastern Mediterranean shows that physical interconnectivity, like planned pipelines between the Levant and Europe, increases subregional rivalries.

Here, infrastructure does not foster unity; actually, it creates new geopolitical bottlenecks over which actors such as Turkey, Greece, and Egypt compete in a zero-sum game.

These sub-regions overlap but don’t integrate, maintaining a fragmented pattern that resists a single strategic order.

The Adriatic as a Partial Exception

The Adriatic offers a useful contrast. Its narrow, semi-enclosed geography has historically limited exposure and concentrated interaction.

Robert D. Kaplan’s interpretation of the Adriatic as a “Concert of Civilizations”1 overlooks a deeper continuity and reflects a perspective shaped by Great Power relations.

Over the longue durée, however, a different constant emerges: the long-standing coexistence and friction between Latin-Italian and Slavic-Croatian settlement areas. Stability here has not come from shifting imperial architecture, but from this bicultural reality.

Rivalries between Venice, the Habsburg sphere, and the Ottoman frontier did not disappear, but they unfolded within clearer spatial constraints than in the wider Mediterranean.

The experience of Dubrovnik further illustrates how smaller actors could survive in such an environment not through strength, but through diplomacy, intelligence, and flexibility.

Today, the Adriatic remains more contained and structured than the rest of the Mediterranean Sea. Competition exists, but it stays bounded.

Implications for a Polycentric Europe

The Mediterranean reveals a central truth: Europe will not consolidate into a single strategic core. It will operate through multiple regional logics shaped by geography and history.

In some regions, such as the Nordics, it enables relatively high levels of coordination and cohesion. In others, such as the Baltic–Adriatic corridor, it supports functional alignment around shared strategic interests.

In the Mediterranean, it produces something more diffuse, overlapping influence and external intervention. France, Italy, and Spain all project power into the region, but with different priorities. Their presence adds layers without creating order.

Nevertheless, there are various theoretical proposals for the region that go beyond the European framework. Proposals such as Herfried Münkler’s call for top-down consolidation of the European periphery misread the structural reality of the Mediterranean. Fragmentation here is not a temporary failure of leadership, but an intrinsic feature of a space that is connected yet never coherent.

Extending the European model of order to the African shatterbelt would not stabilize the region. It would simply entangle Europe deeper in its centrifugal dynamics.

In such environments, however, smaller states can navigate fragmentation through flexibility, alignment, and strategic positioning, as the example of the historic Adriatic Sea reveals.

A polycentric Europe will not be defined by unity, but by its ability to organize fragmentation across multiple strategic spaces.

“La France ne peut être la France sans la grandeur”

(France cannot be France without greatness)

–Charles de Gaulle

Few European states still think in such terms. France does. It retains a strategic tradition that views Europe not merely as a market or a legal order, but as a space of power, shaped by sovereignty, capability, and political will. The current question is not whether this vision is coherent, but whether it still corresponds to Europe’s evolving structure.

France’s Strategic Tradition

France’s approach to European security is rooted in a long-standing strategic tradition that places sovereignty, autonomy, and state capacity at its core. Unlike many other European states, France never fully abandoned the idea that power (military, political, and symbolic) remains the foundation of international order. This strategic logic can be traced back to Charles de Gaulle, whose insistence on independence and national grandeur continues to shape French thinking today. However, this Gaullist legacy increasingly faces a structural tension: the gap between national ambition and European reality.

Still, this logic is embedded in concrete capabilities. France maintains an independent nuclear deterrent, a globally deployable military, and a diplomatic network shaped by decades of engagement far beyond Europe. From Africa to the Mediterranean, French strategy has consistently operated on the assumption that security cannot be outsourced indefinitely. Yet, the erosion of French influence in the Sahel1 and the shifting dynamics in the Mediterranean suggest that these traditional instruments of power are becoming more limited in a changing geopolitical environment.

At the European level, this translates into the concept of strategic autonomy. In its French interpretation, this does not simply mean independence from external actors, but the ability to act collectively under European leadership, with France as its central organizing force. Initiatives such as the push for a European defense industrial base, as well as projects like the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), reflect this ambition. Nonetheless, FCAS has become a prime example of the gap between strategic ambition and operational reality2: a project conceived in a different industrial era and aimed at a distant future, in an era where the Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that agility and rapid technological cycles now outweigh centralized, multi-decadal programs.

The Limits of Centralized Autonomy

Equally, the viability of this model is increasingly constrained by Europe’s internal dynamics. Strategic autonomy, as envisioned by France, presupposes a degree of political cohesion and alignment that remains difficult to achieve. Germany’s strategic culture remains a structural constraint to this vision. While Paris conceptualizes defense as a lever for sovereignty, Berlin often treats it as a subset of industrial and budgetary stability. This divergence is illustrated by the current status of FCAS, which has turned from a strategic cornerstone into a case study in how strategic ambition struggles to materialize as capability.3

Beyond the Franco-German axis, the challenge is even more pronounced. Many states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have a different perception of security. Security here is not a concept; it is a condition. This mentality stems from their proximity to Russia and historical experience. For these actors, the United States is seen not as a ‘raumfremde Macht’ (external power) that disturbs European order, but what can be described as a “strategic enabler”. In this view, American military and logistical support is the very foundation upon which national sovereignty is built. Security is not perceived as something that must be generated against the US, but through it.4

A Polycentric Reality Emerging

While France seeks to restore coherence through centralized autonomy, Europe is moving toward a functional polycentricity. Coordination now emerges through interaction rather than central design. This is particularly visible in recent developments within the Three Seas Initiative (3SI).

By focusing on the material infrastructure of resilience (LNG hubs, North-South energy interconnectors, and digital corridors), regional actors are creating a ‘hard’ sovereignty that operates alongside slower, more institutionalized European frameworks.

This can be explained as a form of “sovereignty of execution”, the ability to translate strategic necessity into immediate capability. Poland’s rapid procurement of South Korean and American platforms, prioritizing immediate deployment and local license-production5, stands in stark contrast to the ‘paper capabilities’ of the FCAS project. Similar dynamics can be observed in the Nordic region, where coordination emerges through practical defense integration rather than centralized planning.

In this new European environment, coordination is an emergent property of shared constraints. Security is no longer conceptualized as a long-term diplomatic project, but as an essential requirement met by regional clusters, such as the Nordic security cluster or the 3SI momentum.

Conclusion: Between Autonomy and Structure

France’s vision of strategic autonomy remains one of the most coherent attempts to reintroduce power and direction into European politics. Yet, it encounters a reality that no longer aligns with centralized designs. What emerges instead is a system defined by multiple, functionally driven poles.

At the same time, this emerging polycentric Europe may reflect the original Gaullist Europe des États6 more closely than the centralized model currently promoted by Paris. De Gaulle envisioned a concert of sovereign states acting upon the ‘realities’ of power. Today, those realities are found in the functional integration of the eastern flank and the agile defense networks of the North.

Strategic autonomy is being achieved not through centralization, but through the distributed capability of multiple European actors to generate coherence within a shared but differentiated space.

For France, the challenge is to adapt to a system where coordination arises from necessity, and where the center of gravity is shifting toward those who can act, not just design.

Selected Reading

• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace– Reports on European defense and transatlantic relations

• Charles de Gaulle– Selected Speeches and Memoirs

• Robert D. Kaplan– The Revenge of Geography

• Hans Morgenthau– Politics Among Nations

Introduction

For thirty years, Central Europe was a space to be integrated; today, it is a space that integrates.

This shift marks the end of the post–Cold War order. In my previous analysis of the Nordics as a security cluster, I argued that Europe is becoming increasingly polycentric and no longer defined by a single Western core, but by multiple functional centers. Central Europe is the next decisive piece in this new geopolitical geometry.

This space is no longer just an in-between zone. It has turned into a pressure chamber. Historically, the classic Zwischeneuropa was the arena where the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires collided. Today, under renewed geopolitical pressure and systemic competition, a new structural logic is taking shape: the Baltic–Adriatic axis.

This north–south alignment breaks with the traditional west–east orientation of the 20th century. What defines the region now is not the absence of sovereignty, but the intensity of constraint. Limited strategic depth and the concentration of key access points across three seas force interaction.

Geography does not determine outcomes, but under pressure, it enforces coordination.

The Vertical Spine

The region’s growing coordination is no longer a political fiction, but an emerging structural reality. Central and Eastern Europe is no longer waiting for integration; it is driving it.

This is most evident in the way the region is closing functional gaps left by decades of East-West alignment. Initiatives such as the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) are far more than diplomatic forums; they are the blueprints for a new European vertical spine. When Poland and Croatia connect their gas networks via interconnectors, they are not only integrating energy markets but are creating a geopolitical insurance policy against external blackmail.

Projects such as Neptun Deep in the Black Sea are transforming this vertical integration from a logistical necessity into a strategic reality. When Romania becomes the EU’s largest natural gas producer starting in 2027, it will shift the balance of power across the entire continent. Neptun Deep is not merely a Romanian energy project; it is the fuel for regional autonomy.

In combination with the LNG terminals in Świnoujście and Krk, a closed system is emerging that will finally break the dependence on east-west pipeline structures. Gas from the Black Sea provides the necessary base load to stabilize the industrial base in countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, while the northern and southern ports ensure connectivity to the global market. Here, the geography of the Black Sea, once a Russian sea, is redefined as an integral part of Europe’s energy security.

This functional integration now extends significantly to Ukraine. While Western Europe debates the legal hurdles of EU accession, CEE is carrying out de facto integration on the ground. It is the railways, the repair hubs for Western weapon systems in Poland and Romania, and the synchronization of power grids that are pulling Ukraine irreversibly into the European orbit. The geographical space functions as the operational engine that is reassembling the continent.

What is emerging here is not a classical aligned bloc, but a system of overlapping functions. Coordination does not require ideological unity; it arises from the interaction of differentiated roles that, under the pressure of necessity, merge into a coherent whole.

A System of Specialized Nodes

The new vertical backbone is a network of specialized nodes. In this system, a state’s role is defined by function, not size. The result is a functional division of labor that transforms geographical constraints into strategic advantages.

• Poland as the kinetic center: Through massive investments in conventional capabilities — including hundreds of South Korean K2 tanks and K9 howitzers — Warsaw is positioning itself as the region’s primary military anchor.

  Poland provides the mass and strategic depth that others lack. It is the heavy lifter of NATO’s eastern flank.

• The Baltic States as digital sensors: Lacking strategic depth, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have shifted their defense toward the cyber and information domain.

  They function as an early warning layer for the wider system. Their integration of society into total defense concepts makes them a prototype for modern hybrid warfare.

• Romania as an energy anchor: Through projects such as Neptun Deep in the Black Sea, Romania is evolving into a regional energy provider.

  It supplies the base-load energy that supports the industrial backbone of landlocked states such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, reducing vulnerability to external pressure.

• Croatia as a maritime hub: With the LNG terminal on Krk and its position on the Adriatic, Croatia secures the system’s access to global energy flows.

  It functions as a logistical gateway linking Central Europe to maritime routes.

• The Czech Republic as an industrial heart: With its industrial base and role in defense production, the Czech Republic provides the material backbone for regional resilience.

  It underpins the system’s capacity to sustain prolonged pressure.

This division of roles is not designed; it is imposed by structural pressure. As strategic depth shrinks and external pressure increases, no state can afford full-spectrum autonomy. Specialization becomes essential, creating an interconnected system.

Fragility and The Limits of Cooperation

Despite growing coordination, Central and Eastern Europe remains shaped by divergent strategic priorities, historical tensions, and competing political paths. These frictions do not vanish under external pressure; they persist and often intensify.

Political differences impose structural limits on the region’s cohesion.

Hungary is the most visible example. Its repeated clashes with Brussels over the rule of law and foreign policy repeatedly test the limits of European alignment. Yet, Hungary does not break the system; it reveals its limits. Its emphasis on national sovereignty is both an obstacle to deeper cooperation and, simultaneously, the very reason these states cooperate in the first place. For countries in this region, joining the EU or NATO was never about giving up sovereignty. It was about strengthening it under new conditions.

That means, cooperation is accepted only as long as it serves national sovereignty, not when it begins to erode it. That is the fundamental difference between East and West.

Historical rivalries further complicate this picture. For example, the historical Romanian-Hungarian quarrels over issues like minority rights, energy policy, or historical narratives. At the same time, strategic orientations diverge. Poland focuses on deterring the eastern threat while maintaining strong transatlantic ties; Hungary is more flexible, at times accommodating Russia.

For this reason, alignment in the region remains situational, not structural. Cooperation increases when immediate security interests overlap, but it fragments as soon as national priorities or historical sensitivities reassert themselves.

The region’s strength lies in its adaptability, but this adaptability also defines its limits.

The Question of Social Continuity

Societal dynamics form an additional layer of the region’s strategic development.

Beneath the level of hard security, another important development is taking shape. While Western Europe has largely tried to solve its demographic decline through migration, several countries in Central and Eastern Europe are testing a different approach: strengthening internal cohesion and demographic continuity.

Poland and Hungary have introduced extensive family policies with substantial financial incentives. Croatia has focused heavily on diaspora engagement, trying to bring its own people back as a source of continuity. These efforts are not just social policy.

They represent a strategic attempt to maintain societal resilience without relying primarily on external population influx. The logic behind this is: in an era of long-term demographic pressure, social cohesion can itself become a strategic asset. High institutional trust and a sense of shared identity can make societies more willing to accept the costs of defense and stability.

However, these strategies are young and unproven. Their long-term success depends on many factors. It’s uncertain whether they can deliver sustainable results or if they will need to be supplemented by other measures.

This approach is not a finished model, but rather an experiment to preserve societal continuity in an increasingly competitive and open environment. This path’s ability to withstand challenges remains one of the central open questions for Europe’s future.

Growth vs. Power

Economic growth in Central and Eastern Europe has outpaced its translation into strategic power. Central and Eastern Europe has often outperformed “old Europe” economically. But growth alone does not equate to power.

The region is rising in relative terms, but it is not replacing the Western core. Three structural constraints continue to limit the conversion of economic dynamism into genuine strategic influence:

First, the capital and technology gap. Despite strong growth, CEE remains a net importer of capital and high-end technology. Its industrial base is still deeply embedded in Western supply chains.

Second, security dependency. The eastern flank has become far more important for NATO, but it continues to rely heavily on the American security guarantee.

Third, institutional weight. In Brussels, real influence still flows through long-established networks and continuity. CEE is only beginning to translate its economic gains into personnel and agenda-setting power.

Yet here lies a striking paradox. Precisely because of its exposed position and strong support from the United States, Central and Eastern Europe is developing a form of practical sovereignty that much of Western Europe has largely lost.

Poland, the Baltics, and Romania are spending far higher shares of GDP on defense than Germany or France. Their populations show a much greater willingness to bear the costs of security. Also, national sovereignty is not treated as a problem to be managed in Brussels, but as a core political value to be defended.

The result is an asymmetry that goes beyond simple dependence: the region has become indispensable for Europe’s stability, but it is also becoming more autonomous in its willingness to act.

It is an emerging pole but not (yet) a new center of gravity. The direction is visible. The outcome remains uncertain.

Conclusion: From Gravity to Polycentrism

In my essay, “Europe’s New Center of Gravity,” I argued that the continent’s political center of gravity is shifting eastward. This essay refines that claim: the shift is not simply geographic, it is structural.

Central and Eastern Europe is no longer a passive space of integration, but an active strategic system within an increasingly polycentric Europe.

This “New Europe” is neither a bloc nor a replacement for the West. Its strength lies in coordination across the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

Its limitations remain equally clear: political fragmentation, divergent strategic cultures, and continued dependence on external security guarantees constrain its ability to act as a fully autonomous power center.

Yet the path is unmistakable. The era in which Central and Eastern Europe functioned primarily as the object of external influence is coming to an end.

In a Europe increasingly defined by multiple functional centers, including the Nordics and the Western core, CEE is emerging as the integrating space between them.

It does not yet replace the center of gravity.
It redistributes it on its own terms.

Selected Reading

• Three Seas Initiative, Official Project Portfolio

• Atlantic Council, The Three Seas Initiative stands at an Inflection Point

• European Commission/industry reports on Neptun Deep and regional energy integration

• Robert D. Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography

• Zbigniew Brzeziński, The Grand Chessboard

• Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality

• Nicholas J. Spykman, The Geography of the Peace

Introduction

In my previous essay, I argued that Europe is unlikely to move toward either full centralization or dissolution but instead toward a polycentric order shaped by multiple regional centers.

Northern Europe provides one of the clearest contemporary examples of this development. Over the past decades, the Nordic countries have developed an unusually dense form of security cooperation that reflects shared strategic conditions and historical experience.

The Nordics as a Security Cluster

The Nordic countries show an unusually high level of cooperation in security and defense policy.

The Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO) is the central mechanism of this coordination. It allows the Nordic states to pool capabilities that would be too costly to maintain individually and to coordinate responses to regional threats more effectively than within the broader EU framework. Their armed forces are highly interoperable, integrating air and land capabilities ideally. The concept of Total Defence ensures resilience not just for the military but for society as a whole.

Geography and history influence coordination levels. Finland’s 1,340-kilometer border with Russia and the legacy of the Winter War shaped its strategic culture. Norway faces similar pressures in the Arctic, with its maritime border with Russia stretching across the Barents Sea. Sweden and Finland remain exposed in the Baltic region, and Denmark occupies a strategically important position due to its control of key maritime access points and Greenland.

Consequently, despite their NATO membership, the Nordic countries take a particularly serious and coordinated approach to security policy. This is no coincidence.

Coordinated Strategic Shift

Shared security challenges, limited strategic depth, and a geographically exposed region make close coordination among the Nordic countries a structural necessity.

Russia’s war against Ukraine accelerated this process significantly. Finland and Sweden abandoned their long-standing military neutrality and joined NATO in close coordination, underlining how strongly Nordic security decisions remain aligned even during major strategic shifts.

Simultaneously, NORDEFCO adapted to the new security environment. Under Vision 2030, the framework increasingly focuses on supporting deterrence and defense within NATO while improving interoperability, joint operational planning, and cooperation with the Baltic states and transatlantic partners.

Finland and Sweden’s NATO accession is no break with tradition. It is an adaptation1 of long-standing Nordic security thinking to new geopolitical realities.

Military Preparedness

Nordic security policy places strong emphasis on societal resilience. Concepts such as Total Defence and Comprehensive Security integrate military preparedness with civilian infrastructure, economic stability, and societal readiness.

Finland represents the most developed form of this territorial defense model. Despite its small size and a population of just 5.6 million, the country can mobilize around 900,000 reservists2. Civil preparedness is equally extensive: approximately 4.8 million people—about 85 percent of the population—can be accommodated in more than 50,000 shelters.

These examples illustrate how closely military and civilian preparedness are intertwined. Norway, Denmark, and Sweden follow similar principles, although their security models differ in important ways.

These differences are particularly visible in their systems of military service. While Finland relies on universal male conscription to generate manpower, Sweden and Norway operate selective gender-neutral systems designed to recruit highly qualified specialists.

Taken together, these variations illustrate a broader pattern: security models emerge from specific social, geographic, and historical conditions rather than from universally transferable institutional designs.

Societal Preconditions

Accordingly, the effectiveness of Nordic defense models is tightly linked to two sociological factors: high institutional trust and social consensus. The Nordic countries consistently rank at the top in terms of social trust and trust in their own governments3.

The Nordic model is a promise of an extremely high level of social security and education, and citizens are willing to protect this state in return. The concept of Total Defence is strongly rooted in societal resilience. This also encompasses the private sector and civil society and requires that the population be psychologically prepared for crises. The introduction of gender-neutral conscription in Sweden and Norway is a modern expression of the Nordic model’s egalitarianism and inclusivity. It must thus be emphasized that such a model does not represent a military necessity but is part of a genuinely sociocultural context.

Therefore, the Nordic model serves as the sociocultural foundation of Total Defence. Thanks to the world-class level of social trust and the tradition of consensus-building, security becomes a joint product of the state and society.

Yet the very conditions that make the Nordic model effective also limit its transferability to other European states.

Limits of Transferability & Structural Implication

More concretely, this means that the Nordic approach to defense readiness reflects more than just a set of military strategies. It represents a broader societal model of resilience shaped by specific geographical, historical, and political conditions.

The Nordic concept of societal defense should therefore not be understood as a uniquely Nordic invention. Similar approaches have appeared in different historical and geopolitical contexts, ranging from the Swiss militia system to Prussia’s nineteenth-century Landwehr or early American militia traditions.

What distinguishes the Nordic case is not the principle itself but the particular way in which it has been adapted to the region’s geography, historical experience, and security environment. As an example, a gender-neutral conscription system would be difficult to implement in most other European countries because of differing social traditions and constitutional principles.

For this reason, the Nordic model cannot simply serve as a universal blueprint. It represents a regional adaptation of a wider strategic principle.

Assessment

Although many principles of the Nordic approach in security terms are interesting, a full implementation by other European states is probably not easy tranferable due to different historical experiences, cultural traits, and other strategic environments.

At the same time, the long-term cohesion of the Nordic cluster should not be taken for granted, as shifting strategic priorities and domestic political developments could still introduce new internal divergences. Additionally, it cannot be ruled out that political and cultural tensions similar to those in other European countries may increase in Nordic countries in the future.

Nevertheless, the Nordic case is more than just a regional security example. It illustrates how different parts of Europe develop distinct strategic responses shaped by their geography, history, and political culture. Instead of converging toward a single model, Europe is becoming a polycentric security landscape composed of multiple regional clusters.

That means, the Nordic experience serves less as a template for a universal European security model than as evidence of a dynamic and polycentric European order.

However, a similar dynamic can be observed in Central and Eastern Europe, where regional cooperation increasingly extends beyond security to include infrastructure, energy connectivity, and economic coordination. Initiatives such as the Visegrád Group and especially the Three Seas Initiative point toward the emergence of another regional cluster shaped by different strategic pressures and opportunities.

Selected sources include Nordic defence policy documents, NORDEFCO cooperation frameworks, and recent academic analyses of Nordic security coordination.

Europe is under strain. External geopolitical constraints and internal divisions have raised fundamental questions about its future course, primarily whether the continent will continue to consolidate or drift toward fragmentation.

This binary view overlooks a deeper pattern: Europe has rarely stabilized through centralization. It has repeatedly reorganized itself around multiple centers of power.

Structurally and historically, Europe tends toward a renewed polycentric order rather than permanent centralization or complete dissolution.

The Present Moment

Seen from the outside, Europe looks weakened and internally fragmented. A continent unsure of its direction. Economic stagnation dominates Western Europe, and growth is mainly in Central and Eastern Europe. This dynamic is gradually reshaping internal balances and strengthening states once considered peripheral. This is gradually altering the internal balance of power.

At the same time, political divisions over sovereignty, migration, and relations with Russia, China, and the United States further complicate the search for a coherent continental strategy.

These divergences are no longer merely rhetorical. They increasingly take institutional form, and regional coalitions such as the Three Seas Initiative (3SI) are deepening economic and infrastructural connectivity between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas. This is shifting Europe’s internal center of gravity eastward. What emerges is not simple fragmentation, but the reappearance of multiple centers operating within a shared framework.

Yet despite these visible pressures, the European Union endures. Neither Brexit nor constant political disputes have led to a collapse. This obvious paradox, divergence without dissolution, suggests that Europe might not be falling apart, but rather entering a new phase of major long-term change.

The Historical Analogy

What appears paradoxical at first glance actually indicates a gradual shift in the continent. A historical parallel can be found in the reforms of Rome under Diocletian at the end of the third century.

During the third century, Rome was ravaged by multiple internal and external crises and was even temporarily divided into three parts. The Crisis of the Third Century almost led to the fall of Rome. With a combination of bureaucratization, centralization, economic and military reforms, Emperor Diocletian mitigated the crisis and restored temporary stability.

But this stability came at a price. Over time, administrative control replaced the voluntary integration of local elites and civic participation. The state became more rigid, more bureaucratic, and increasingly dependent on coercive mechanisms to maintain cohesion. Centralization postponed collapse but weakened the organic foundations of imperial unity.

Ironically, the Christianity persecuted under Diocletian outlived the imperial system itself. After Rome’s collapse, no centralized successor state emerged. Instead, a landscape of competing kingdoms, cities, and ecclesiastical territories took shape. Out of that fragmentation grew the plural political order that later defined Europe.

In times of crisis, state systems instinctively turn toward centralization and bureaucratic control. History shows, however, that such measures stabilize only temporarily and do not determine the long-term path.

The Structural Pattern of Europe

Europe’s future is often framed in two opposing scenarios: either further centralization toward a federal superstate or gradual fragmentation and dissolution. Both perspectives assume that Europe must either consolidate or collapse.

But historically, Europe followed a different path. It was rarely shaped by a single center of power. Instead, it developed as a constellation of competing states and overlapping authorities.

Europe’s plural structure was noticeable even in the European Middle Ages, when kingdoms, principalities, free cities, and prince-bishoprics coexisted within a shared civilizational framework. The Holy Roman Empire illustrates this polycentric order, a dynamic patchwork of semi-autonomous entities bound together without true centralization.

This pattern culminated institutionally in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which formalized the coexistence of sovereign entities rather than restoring universal imperial authority. Fragmentation was not a symptom of weakness, but the organizing principle of Europe’s political order.

As Eric Jones argues in The European Miracle, this competitive state system became a driving force of Europe’s economic and intellectual dynamism. The absence of a single hegemonic center fostered adaptation, innovation, and resilience.1

The unity of Europe did not arise from uniformity, but from complex competing authorities within a shared civilizational space. This means that pluralistic centers, rather than permanent centralization, were the norm on the continent.

Assessment

Great power politics and geopolitical pressures have exposed Europe’s internal divides. External challenges reinforce regional differences rather than dissolve them, as states increasingly coordinate within smaller coalitions to advance shared interests. The relative weakening of the traditional Franco-German axis further signals a redistribution of influence rather than renewed central consolidation.

Under current conditions, durable centralization appears unlikely. Public skepticism toward deeper integration remains significant, while rising Central and Eastern European states emphasize sovereignty even as they value cooperation within the European framework. At the same time, the structural costs of dissolution remain prohibitively high, as Brexit has demonstrated.

Taken together, contemporary dynamics and historical precedent point toward a reconfiguration rather than either consolidation or collapse. Europe is more likely to become polycentric again, with shifting, coexisting centers of power, than to turn into a centralized federal state or fall apart completely. Periodic bursts of integration may occur, but the continent’s structural course suggests plurality rather than unity as its enduring pattern.

With this structural perspective, The Geopolitical Transformation Series reaches a provisional conclusion.

Introduction

Political systems rarely collapse when they appear weakest, but when they believe themselves stabilized.

When Emperor Diocletian initiated his reforms at the end of the third century, the Roman Empire did not appear to be on the brink of collapse, but rather on the verge of renewal. Administration and military structures were reorganized, borders stabilized, and political authority restructured. For contemporaries, this was not the beginning of the end, but the successful overcoming of crisis. Specifically for this reason, subsequent developments demand explanation.

Paradoxically, long-standing political orders often look most stable to people living in them exactly after successful adaptation. Stability hides new tensions just when the system seems safest. Stability itself can obscure the emergence of tensions precisely when a system appears most secure.

The fundamental question, therefore, is not why such orders collapse in moments of crisis, but why new frictions and vulnerabilities emerge after reform, recovery, and apparent stabilization.

The Roman Solution

Until the third century, the Roman Empire was the model of a successful superpower, whose appeal extended far beyond its borders. Naturally, it was not without tensions, frictions, and external threats, but it had the ability to endure crises and to stabilize quickly.

But from the third century on, this picture changed completely. The empire was hit by internal and external crises. On Roman soil itself, peasant factions and barracks emperors fought civil wars against each other. The economy kept breaking down. Natural disasters hit hard. Germanic tribes and the Sassanid Empire pressed from outside. The empire nearly collapsed under the strain and was temporarily split into three parts. It seemed as though Rome was about to fall.

However, the eventual overcoming of the imperial crisis and the definitive end of the era of the barracks emperors coincided with the reforms of Emperor Diocletian. The reason for Diocletian’s success in stabilizing the empire was four main reforms.

First, he established the tetrarchy and divided the empire into western and eastern parts, each ruled by a senior emperor and a junior emperor. This reaction suggests that he was aware of the problem of the empire’s overextension and also aware of the reason for the struggle about the succession of rulers.

Secondly, he focused on bureaucratization and centralization. In order to maintain control, he broke up the old, powerful provinces into many small units. At the same time, he created a huge hierarchy of officials who reported directly to the emperor, and military and civil power were separated. Governors were no longer allowed to command troops, which significantly reduced the risk of rebellion.

This was complemented by his military reform, which created highly mobile professional troops that were agile and concentrated at the borders. This enabled him to stabilize the borders. He also reformed the economy with tax reforms and price caps. The aim was to revive the frail economy, curb inflation, and replenish the empty state funds.

Indeed, Diocletian saved the empire, and it ceased to disintegrate, but this came at a price in the long term.

The Price Of Stability

Yet exactly these reforms that brought back stability also changed the character of the Roman state. Earlier imperial governance relied heavily on local elites, social mobility, and a certain amount of voluntary participation that tied provincial societies into the imperial order. Under Diocletian, stability depended more and more on administrative control, fixed obligations, and permanent structures.

The empire became more governable and therefore less flexible.

As a result, Rome became increasingly dependent on a permanent state presence embodied in an expanding civil service. Centralization enlarged administrative control and marked a clear departure from earlier forms of imperial governance that had relied on local elites and civic participation. Stability increasingly depended not on social cohesion, but on administrative performance itself.

What had once allowed flexible responses through local initiative increasingly required formal procedures and centralized approval, slowing the empire’s ability to react to emerging challenges.

The administrative and military reforms that restored order also imposed permanent financial obligations on the empire. Stability now depended on maintaining a large standing army, an expanded bureaucracy, and fortified borders. As a consequence, the Roman state required continuous and predictable revenues on an unprecedented scale.

Taxes rose sharply. This put more pressure on provincial populations. Attempts to fix prices through imperial decrees often backfired: black markets grew, and tax evasion increased. To secure revenue and keep production going, professions became more and more hereditary. Farmers, artisans, and officials were suddenly bound to their roles. Fiscal necessity gradually transformed governance from integration into coercion.

Military reforms stabilized the borders, but they also changed the relationship between the army and society. Earlier Roman armies had been closely tied to citizen participation. Now, imperial defense relied more and more on federate forces from outside the traditional Roman social framework. These arrangements reduced immediate pressure on manpower but introduced new tensions of loyalty while sustaining rising military expenditures.

At the same time, civic participation declined, and local elites lost autonomy. Integration became increasingly administrative rather than voluntary, and loyalty evolved from a source of prestige into an obligation. The distance between society and state widened as imperial authority grew more sacralized. Stability appeared stronger, yet it rested on increasingly fragile social foundations.

The empire remained vast while control replaced self-organization, and complexity expanded faster than adaptability. Internally, cohesion eroded even as administrative routines continued to function. This apparent stability increasingly concealed the very fragilities it had been designed to prevent.

The paradox of Diocletian’s reforms became visible only generations later. When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 AD, they struck an empire whose administrative machinery still operated with remarkable efficiency. Provincial officials maintained tax registers, notaries continued to seal contracts according to classical law, and grain taxes were collected for armies that no longer existed or had already become part of the invading forces.

Rome had become a system capable of preserving its procedures even as the political and social foundations that had once sustained them disappeared. Institutional survival no longer guaranteed political survival. This pattern is not unique to Rome.

When Stability Becomes Constraint

The Roman case suggests that political decline rarely appears as a rapid breakdown. Complex systems often respond successfully to crisis, restoring order and extending their lifespan. Yet these solutions may gradually shift instability from the present into the future, replacing visible crisis with accumulated structural strain.

In fact, the solutions that restore stability often do not eliminate structural pressures, but rather reorganize them. Through increased coordination, institutional capacity, and administrative control, systems gain resilience to immediate shocks, but simultaneously become more dependent on their own complexity. Accordingly, the crisis is not resolved, but only delayed. Stability may solve immediate crises, but it often transfers instability into the future.

The central challenge for complex political systems is not just achieving stability. It is preserving adaptability and social cohesion even in times of success. The question is not whether stability can be restored, but whether it can endure without eroding the foundations that make long-term survival possible.

Beyond Rome

The dilemmas revealed by Rome’s example are not confined to antiquity; they reappear whenever complex political systems succeed in stabilizing themselves over extended periods of time. Modern Europe represents a political order that has achieved an unprecedented degree of institutional stability, a success that nevertheless raises questions familiar from earlier historical experiences.

Here, conflicts are increasingly managed through regulation, negotiation, and procedural coordination rather than being resolved through rupture. Crises rarely threaten immediate breakdown; instead, they are absorbed, redistributed, and administratively contained within existing structures.

For decades, institutional stability and relative prosperity have allowed European governance to mitigate tensions and postpone structural conflicts. Yet the very mechanisms that sustain stability also reveal underlying strains: political cohesion develops unevenly, regional differences persist, and the balance between central coordination and national autonomy remains unsettled. At the same time, questions of strategic responsibility and collective security increasingly expose the limits of a system designed primarily for management rather than confrontation.

The central question, thus, remains whether a political order built on administration, consensus, and conflict avoidance can maintain sufficient adaptability in an increasingly accelerated geopolitical environment.

Conclusion

History suggests that political systems rarely disappear at the moment of visible crisis. More often, decline unfolds gradually within periods of apparent stability, as institutions designed to preserve order slowly alter the balance between governance and societal vitality. The Roman experience illustrates not the inevitability of collapse, but the paradox that successful stabilization may postpone rather than resolve underlying tensions.

Stability, therefore, cannot be understood as a permanent achievement. It is a condition that must continually reconcile institutional continuity with adaptability, participation, and legitimacy. When stability becomes an end in itself, systems risk preserving their structures while weakening the foundations that sustain them.

The enduring question for complex societies is not how crises can be avoided, but how renewal remains possible in times of success when success itself makes transformation least likely, yet most necessary. History rarely collapses in moments of crisis; more often, it continues to function long after adaptation has quietly become unavoidable.

Like Rome in the age of Diocletian, modern systems may appear most secure exactly at the moment when adaptation becomes hardest.

Part of the Geopolitical Transformation Series

Further Reading

• Peter Heather — The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History

• Robert D. Kaplan — The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate

• Edward Luttwak — The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century A.D. to the Third

• Joseph Tainter — The Collapse of Complex Societies

• Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War

Introduction

Historically, political order has rarely rested on a single organizing principle. Stability has alternated between sovereignty and hierarchical space, depending on the distribution of power. The resurgence of great power politics and the simultaneous return of spheres of influence is therefore not an accident of history but a historical constant.

Westphalia and the Limits of Sovereign Equality

Since ancient times, spheres of influence have been a recurring feature of relations among states. The German lands during the Thirty Years’ War illustrate this dynamic vividly. While the Holy Roman Empire was divided by religious conflict, Central Europe became a strategic arena for competing external powers, particularly France and Sweden.

In response to the devastation of the war, European powers sought to reorganize interstate relations in ways that could contain rather than eliminate conflict. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 marked one of the most influential attempts to stabilize political order through sovereign equality instead of spatial hierarchy.1 The settlement recognized territorially defined states as legally equal and aimed to preserve balance rather than domination.

This framework proved relatively stable as long as power remained fragmented among multiple actors.2 Yet sovereign equality never erased disparities in capability or geographic exposure. As power differentials widened, informal hierarchies emerged beneath formal equality. Spheres of influence developed quietly within a system that officially treated states as equal, producing a relentless tension between juridical sovereignty and strategic dependence. Once asymmetry increased, hierarchy resurfaced beneath the language of equality.

Westphalia limited domination in law, but it could not prevent power from reorganizing space through influence. Law changed the language of power, not its logic.3

Spheres of Influence: Order Without Equality

A sphere of influence describes a geopolitical environment in which a dominant power shapes the strategic choices of neighboring states without exercising formal sovereignty over them. Such arrangements do not necessarily arise from deliberate expansion, but from structural asymmetries of power, geography, and security dependence.

The logic behind spheres of influence is far older than the modern state system. Already in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, political space was shaped less by formal sovereignty than by disparities of power and security dependence.4 The Athenian alliance system shows how influence could organize regional order without direct annexation: weaker poleis retained nominal autonomy while gradually adapting their strategic behavior to the expectations of a dominant power.

In the modern era, spheres of influence became more explicit without turning into outright imperial projects. The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 marks this transition. Rather than claiming sovereignty over Latin America, the United States defined the Western Hemisphere as a security space in which external European intervention would be resisted.5 Influence functioned primarily as a boundary of security, not as territorial domination. States remained formally sovereign, yet their strategic environment was increasingly shaped by the capabilities and preferences of a regional power.

If spheres of influence emerge organically from structural realities, the concept of a Großraum represents the political attempt to formalize and stabilize such hierarchies through an explicit spatial order.

From Influence to Great Space

Unlike spheres of influence, which emerge gradually from structural conditions, the idea of a Großraum represents a conscious attempt to impose political order upon space. Where influence develops informally through asymmetries of power and security dependence, Großraum thinking seeks to stabilize hierarchy by defining legitimate authority within a bounded geopolitical area.

This transition becomes explicit in the work of Carl Schmitt. Observing the erosion of the Westphalian system and the growing instability of interwar Europe, Schmitt argued that political order was increasingly organized around large spatial units shaped by dominant powers. Significantly, he regarded the Monroe Doctrine as an early example of such an arrangement, insofar as it excluded “raumfremde Mächte” and defined legitimacy within a particular geopolitical sphere.6

Whereas spheres of influence arise pragmatically from structural realities, the Großraum concept transformed this condition into an explicit doctrine of spatial order. Hierarchy was no longer an unintended outcome of power relations but a principle to be institutionalized. Political space was to be stabilized not through balance among sovereign equals, but through regional dominance justified as order.

Yet this transformation introduced a new tension. By formalizing hierarchy, Großraum thinking risked turning flexible arrangements into rigid geopolitical claims. What had previously adapted to shifting balances of power became tied to ideological definitions of space and legitimacy. Attempts to eliminate uncertainty through spatial order thus carried the danger of intensifying conflict rather than containing it. The search for perfect order, paradoxically, often produces greater instability.

The Structural Tension: Protection vs Sovereignty

All spatial orders built around dominant powers confront a recurring dilemma: protection and sovereignty rarely expand together. Smaller states may gain security within a structured geopolitical environment, yet this security almost always carries political costs.

The tension becomes clearest when hierarchy presents itself as protection. The Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere offers a revealing example. Framed as “Asia for Asians” and presented as liberation from Western imperialism, it promised regional autonomy within a shared civilizational project. In practice, however, cooperation gradually gave way to alignment, and alignment to dependence. Political and economic decisions increasingly reflected Japanese strategic priorities rather than reciprocal regional order.7

This outcome was not an anomaly but an intensified expression of a broader structural logic. Influence reduces uncertainty, yet it also narrows strategic choice. Security guarantees create expectations, expectations produce alignment, and alignment slowly transforms autonomy into conditional sovereignty. The more explicitly space is organized around hierarchy, the more sovereignty becomes negotiated rather than assumed.

An underlying strain for this reason lies at the center of geopolitical order: stability may require hierarchy, yet hierarchy continually unsettles the autonomy it claims to protect. Samuel Huntington later observed similar dynamics along civilizational fault lines, where cultural identities and geopolitical structures fail to align.8 Whatever the limits of his categories, the essential insight remains relevant: political space becomes fragile where overlapping spheres of influence intersect with divergent historical orientations.

Political systems rarely resolve this contradiction. They learn to operate within it.

Consequently, a durable political order emerges neither from absolute sovereignty nor from rigid hierarchy alone. History repeatedly rewards restraint more than dominance. Stability tends to arise where power remains plural, where cooperation moderates domination, and where regional arrangements allow security and autonomy to coexist without demanding uniformity. Political order endures not where power disappears, but where it is prevented from becoming absolute.

Political space becomes sustainable not through consolidation, but through negotiated coexistence among multiple centers of authority. Sovereignty survives, therefore, not as isolation, but as the capacity to act meaningfully within shared constraints.

Conclusion — The Limits of Spatial Order

From Thucydides to Westphalia, from spheres of influence to Großraum thinking, political order has long moved between competing logics of sovereignty and hierarchy. Attempts to eliminate power asymmetry through legal equality regularly proved incomplete, while efforts to stabilize space through dominance introduced new forms of instability. Neither model resolved the underlying tension between protection and autonomy; each merely managed it under different historical conditions.

Still, the persistence of spheres of influence does not signal the failure of international order, but its structural reality. Which means, political order is never fully neutral, nor entirely hierarchical. Accordingly, stability emerges not from the abolition of power differences, but from their containment within arrangements that remain flexible enough to adapt to change.

The challenge facing contemporary political systems is thus not how to escape geopolitics, but how to organize it without turning influence into domination or sovereignty into isolation. The future of political order will therefore depend less on the abolition of power than on the ability to shape space without extinguishing plurality.

Understanding this balance becomes particularly important in regions where multiple centers of power intersect — a question that remains central to Europe’s future.

Introduction

Great powers rarely fail through defeat. More often, they collapse under the strain of their own alignments. Power tends to expand far faster than the capacity to provide order and accountability. What begins as security turns into obligation; what begins as order hardens into overstretch.

The temptation of power is not conquest, but control. Yet reach and control are repeatedly conflated. Presence generates dependencies, expectations, and escalating pressures. The larger the space, the greater the friction; the more diffuse the space, the weaker the legitimacy.

Expansion often starts rationally, even defensively, but it ends as a structural failure. The decisive error is not aggression, but the absence of self-limitation. Power does not collapse because it reaches too far, but because it mistakes reach for resilience. Overstretch, therefore, is not a moral failure. It is a systemic effect of power without limits.

The Structural Trap

Where many observers equate great-power status or imperial reach with resilience and global stability, realist theorists such as Paul Kennedy and Robert Gilpin have emphasized a counter-dynamic: expanding commitments often erode the very foundations of power.

Paul Kennedy’s analysis in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers captures this logic with particular clarity. His central insight is deceptively simple: great powers decline not because they suddenly lose strength, but because their commitments expand faster than the economic foundations that sustain them. Power grows unevenly. Military reach, political obligations, and security guarantees tend to accumulate incrementally, while the underlying resource base adjusts only slowly, if at all. A similar logic underpins Robert Gilpin’s analysis in War and Change in World Politics, where rising costs erode hegemonic stability.

This imbalance rarely appears as a crisis at first. On the contrary, it often emerges during periods of apparent success. Expansion seems manageable, deterrence credible, and additional commitments marginal. Yet each new obligation reduces strategic flexibility. Resources are no longer allocated to priorities, but to maintenance. Defense replaces strategy.

Kennedy shows that over time, great powers become trapped by their own alignments. Security commitments harden into permanent obligations, even when the original conditions that justified them have changed. The result is not immediate collapse, but a gradual erosion of choice. Decision-makers retain power, but lose freedom of action.

Overstretch, in this context, is not the product of reckless ambition. It is the cumulative effect of delayed adjustment. The strategic problem is not expansion itself, but the failure to realign commitments with material capacity before imbalance becomes structural.

Power and the Illusion of Control

Structural imbalance alone does not explain overstretch. A second error compounds the problem: the assumption that power automatically translates into control. Classical realists have long warned against this confusion. Power may enable action, but it does not guarantee manageability.

As Hans J. Morgenthau in Politics Among Nations argued, power generates countervailing forces the moment it is exercised. Influence provokes resistance, presence creates expectations, and security commitments harden into political obligations. What appears as deterrence from the center often manifests as pressure and dependency at the periphery.

This dynamic is reinforced by the logic identified by John J. Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. According to him, even defensive measures tend to be interpreted offensively by others, provoking escalation without intent. As a result, reach expands and uncertainty multiplies. Whereas control does not scale with power, friction does.

There is another important factor to consider: as power extends across larger and more diverse spaces, the density of political claims inevitably increases. Authority must then balance competing expectations, interests, and demands for participation, each imposing additional constraints on decision-making. Stability becomes less a function of control than of continuous negotiation. The assumption that such complexity can be managed indefinitely through centralized authority alone has rarely been sustained.

Consequently, the result is a widening gap between capability and governance. Decision-makers retain military and economic superiority, yet lose the ability to shape outcomes predictably. Over time, power becomes a burden rather than an asset. The strategic failure lies not in the pursuit of security, but in the belief that dominance can substitute for restraint.

Geography and Friction

In any case, structural imbalance and misjudged control are further compounded by geography. Distance does not merely stretch supply lines; it multiplies friction. Power projection becomes increasingly costly the farther it extends from its center of gravity, regardless of technological sophistication.

For that reason, Robert D. Kaplan in The Revenge of Geography repeatedly emphasizes that geography does not determine outcomes, but sets enduring constraints. Terrain, distance, and exposure shape what power can realistically sustain over time, while political authority weakens as operational complexity increases.

This reality aligns with the classical concept of Carl von Clausewitz, who identified friction as the normal condition of action rather than its exception. What appears manageable on maps and planning documents becomes unpredictable in execution. Each additional commitment introduces new variables, new actors, and new risks.

Geography thus transforms overstretch from a political choice into a structural condition. Control decays not because power disappears, but because the environment resists simplification. Expansion does not collapse strategy immediately; it erodes coherence gradually, until effort exceeds effect.

Overstretch as a Systemic Pattern

Overstretch, in fact, is not an anomaly limited to one era or political system. It is a recurring pattern. It appears whenever power expands faster than the capacity to coordinate and sustain it. Different great powers reach this point by different routes, but the underlying logic stays the same.

The Habsburg monarchy shows this pattern in its clearest form. The empire sat at the center of Europe, controlled vast territories and could draw on long military traditions among its peoples. Yet this potential never turned into coherent strategic power. Authority stayed fragmented due to other dynastic, linguistic, and confessional traditions. Simultaneously, fiscal integration remained weak and the military focused more on internal balance than on external priorities. Expansion happened through marriage, inheritance, and dynastic deals – not through institutional consolidation. Obligations grew with every new claim, but the means to meet them did not. Even the long Ottoman wars only created temporary unity. The structural imbalance never disappeared. Overstretch here was not caused by excessive conquest. It was the direct result of trying to hold universal authority on a permanently divided base.

The Roman case followed a similar logic. Expansion first looked like an opportunity. Later it became an obligation. Resources shifted from strategic projects to perimeter defense. Flexibility gave way to maintenance. The empire did not fall at its peak. It fell when commitments outgrew the ability to adapt.

The British Empire experienced the same dynamic. Global reach rested on naval supremacy and commerce. Yet distant obligations piled up faster than relative economic strength. Formal power remained. Strategic choice narrowed. Commitments turned into permanent responsibilities.

The Soviet Union took a different path. Driven by ideology rather than trade, it nevertheless arrived at the same outcome. Military reach and political ambition outran economic capacity. Constant prioritization replaced strategy. In the end, defense consumed resources, and strategic thinking stagnated.

These cases differ in culture, geography, and motivation. However, what connects them is not overambition but imbalance. Thus, overstretch arises when expansion takes the place of adjustment, and when keeping reach alive becomes more important than keeping coherence.

The Temptation Returns

The structural forces behind overstretch have not vanished. They have simply reappeared under new conditions. Multipolarity, technological acceleration, and persistent instability at the margins of power all increase the pressure to extend influence beyond what can be sustained.

The temptation to overreach shows up across very different strategic cultures. Eurasian ideas of continental dominance, European efforts at supranational consolidation, Chinese narratives of civilizational restoration, and American assumptions of global stewardship all reflect the same basic impulse.

Each presents expansion as stability, reach as responsibility, and presence as order. The differences are in rhetoric and geography, not in the underlying structure. In every case, the risk is the same: commitments grow faster than resilience. In such environments, restraint becomes politically costly, and security guarantees multiply. In consequence, peripheral commitments are presented as tests of credibility, and disengagement is read as decline.

The temptation is rarely expansion for its own sake. It is the belief that stability can be maintained through permanent presence. Visions of comprehensive control have repeatedly underestimated these pressures. Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard implicitly recognized that global influence requires constant attention and resources, even as the material foundations start to erode. What looks like leadership turns into managerial entrapment. But the real danger is not sudden collapse. It is strategic paralysis. Thus, power stays visible, but becomes increasingly reactive.

Finally, commitments pile up faster than options. Effort begins to exceed effect. Overstretch returns, though not from aggression, but from the refusal to accept limits.

Conclusion – Why Restraint Is Strategic

Overstretch does not mark the sudden collapse of power. It marks the gradual loss of strategic choice. When commitments multiply faster than capacity, strength becomes maintenance, and influence turns reactive. What remains visible as power increasingly functions as constraint.

The recurring failure of great powers is therefore not rooted in aggression or ambition, but in the refusal to accept limits. Expansion appears rational in isolation, yet destructive in accumulation. Without adjustment, reach replaces resilience, and control is mistaken for order.

Strategic restraint is not weakness. It is the recognition that order cannot be sustained everywhere, at all times, and at equal cost. Power endures not through continuous extension, but through selective commitment and deliberate limitation.

To understand how order survives despite these constraints, one must move beyond the logic of overstretch and toward the mechanisms that contain it. This requires examining how influence is bounded—and how space itself becomes a tool of restraint.

References

• Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

• Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

• Gilpin, Robert. War and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

• Kaplan, Robert D. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate. New York: Random House, 2012.

• Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987.

• Mearsheimer, John J. The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

• Morgenthau, Hans J. Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.

Introduction

The return of great power competition has fundamentally altered the strategic environment of the international system. While much attention focuses on the behavior of major powers, the consequences are often most acute for smaller states. Lacking strategic depth and margins for error, they face a recurring question: not how to shape the system, but how to endure within it.

The Structural Reality: Why Small States Cannot Opt Out

In an international system shaped by the erosion of the post–Cold War order, renewed power competition, and the return of geography, small states operate under fundamentally different conditions than great powers. Their margins for error are narrow. Miscalculations that larger states can absorb often carry existential consequences for smaller ones.

International institutions such as the European Union, NATO, or the United Nations provide frameworks for cooperation and legal constraint. They do not provide guarantees. Their effectiveness depends on the balance of power and the political will of dominant actors. Rules endure only as long as those with the capacity to violate them choose not to do so. Treaties and institutions alone cannot secure sovereignty.

As Hans Morgenthau noted, the survival of the state precedes all other political objectives. For small states, this is a structural condition, not a theoretical proposition.

Survival therefore requires orientation rather than improvisation. Military capabilities, intelligence services, societal cohesion, and diplomacy are not separate domains but interdependent requirements. Geography sets hard political and economic limits. These limits cannot be ignored. They must be understood and used.

In an era of geopolitical shocks, the primary strategic objective of small states is not influence, but survival. Influence may follow. It cannot precede it.

Recognizing survival as the objective does not solve the problem. It defines it. If small states cannot opt out of power politics, the decisive question becomes how they adapt.

The False Comforts: What Does Not Ensure Survival

Despite growing instability, many small and medium-sized states continue to search for easy exits. Moral appeals, legal guarantees, technological superiority, and alliance membership without corresponding obligations promise security without difficult choices.

This logic avoids the development of an independent strategy. Orientation is replaced by procedure, responsibility by delegation. In parts of Europe, administration substitutes for strategic design because it appears less costly. Demography, cohesion, and defense capability are postponed—not because they are irrelevant, but because they are uncomfortable.

Moral superiority does not tame power. Legal rules constrain only those willing to be constrained. Technology amplifies capacity but does not replace resolve. Alliances reduce risk but do not eliminate the need for national contribution. Where security is fully delegated, credibility erodes.

These approaches offer reassurance, not protection. If comfort substitutes for strategy, the question is not whether adaptation is necessary, but how.

Strategic Adaptation: What Survival Requires

Adaptation does not mean imitation. For small states, it is not about copying great powers, but about adjusting to constraints they cannot escape. Survival depends less on ambition than on alignment—between objectives, societal capacity, geography, and means.

Strategic adaptation begins with prioritization. Small states cannot afford expansive agendas or permanent improvisation. They must decide what truly matters, what can be delayed, and what cannot be compromised. This logic favors resilience over reach.

However, prioritization produces trade-offs. Strategy becomes less about maximizing options than about accepting limits. Every commitment absorbs resources and credibility. Every expansion creates vulnerability. What cannot be defended cannot be sustained.

Restraint is therefore not a moral preference but a structural necessity. Small states gain resilience not by doing more, but by doing less deliberately.

Speed, Depth, and Cohesion

Small states must react quickly. Delay multiplies vulnerability. Anticipating shifts in the international environment is not optional.

Speed depends on information and interpretation. Intelligence, technological awareness, and diplomacy must interlock. Yet speed alone is insufficient. Geography and limited strategic depth impose hard limits that must be accounted for and exploited.

As Colin S. Gray has argued, strategy does not operate in a vacuum but is embedded in political culture, geography, and historical experience. For small states, this context defines both possibilities and limits.

Consequently, depth is not only territorial. For small states, society constitutes the ultimate reserve. Fragmentation, polarization, or demographic erosion reduce resilience and increase exposure.

Cohesion is therefore a strategic asset. Politics, economy, intelligence, security services, and the military cannot operate as separate spheres. In small states, such separation is a luxury they cannot afford.

Society as Strategic Depth

Limited strategic depth and constrained resources are structural realities. They cannot be offset through scale. They can only be compensated through societal resilience.

A society that participates in its own defense gains advantages that larger adversaries struggle to neutralize. Security that is shared rather than outsourced creates both motivational and geographic depth. Where defense is embedded in society, resistance becomes harder to break. In Clausewitzian terms, societal cohesion constitutes a decisive element of national resistance rather than a background variable.

This logic requires institutional form. Militia- and reserve-based systems anchor defense within the population rather than separating it into a professional caste. The Swiss militia model illustrates this principle. Military service remains a civic obligation rather than a delegated profession.

Such arrangements prevent the isolation of the military and preserve civilian expertise. In small states, civil–military interlocking is not optional. It is a functional necessity.

In states with significant diaspora communities, strategic depth can extend beyond national territory. Diaspora networks provide skills, capital, and access to external environments. When integrated coherently, they reinforce resilience. When unaligned, they risk fragmentation or external instrumentalization.

Society, in this sense, constitutes strategic depth—not as symbolism, but as capacity.

Intelligence and Integration

For small states, surprise is rarely survivable. Lacking strategic depth, they cannot absorb intelligence failure in the way larger powers can. What is missed early is paid for later and at disproportionate cost.

Following Michael Herman, intelligence in small states functions less as an instrument of power than as a mechanism of anticipation.

Intelligence is therefore a sensor. Its function is early warning, pattern recognition, and intent interpretation. It reduces uncertainty rather than controls outcomes.

This requires institutional integration. Intelligence cannot operate in isolation. Military planning, diplomacy, economic policy, and technology must share situational awareness. Fragmented information slows decisions. Divergent interpretation fractures response.

As Mark M. Lowenthal emphasizes, intelligence only has value when it informs decision-making. Collection without integration does not enhance security; it merely produces information without consequence.

Nevertheless, technology enhances intelligence but does not replace judgment. Data without synthesis produces noise, not clarity. For small states, coherence matters more than volume.

Diplomacy as Time Management

Diplomacy plays a distinct role in small-state survival. But it is no substitute for strategy. According to Christine Ingebritsen, small-state diplomacy can be understood primarily as a mechanism for buying time rather than resolving asymmetries.

Where asymmetries cannot be resolved, diplomacy delays escalation and preserves room for maneuver. It is less about grand initiatives than discipline.

Multilateral frameworks provide access, but their effectiveness depends on stronger actors. Cooperation is necessary, yet dependence erodes sovereignty. Alignment, not submission, must guide engagement. Coalitions are instruments, not shelters.

Diplomacy does not resolve structural constraints. It buys time. Used wisely, that time becomes resilience. Used poorly, it merely postpones exposure.

Conclusion

For small states, survival is not a minimal objective. It is the precondition for everything else.

Survival depends on cohesion and strategic orientation. Society, military, economy, intelligence, and diplomacy must function as an integrated whole. Fragmentation multiplies vulnerability.

Yet integration alone is insufficient. Without discipline, adaptability, and restraint, even coherent systems will fail.

Hence, survival, for small states, is a function of coherence under constraint.

Further Reading

• Carl von Clausewitz – On War

• Colin S. Gray – Modern Strategy

• Michael Herman – Intelligence Power in Peace and War

• Christine Ingebritsen – Small States in International Relations

• Mark M. Lowenthal – Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy

• Hans J. Morgenthau – Politics Among Nations

Why Geography Had to Return

For more than three decades, geography was treated as a diminishing factor in international politics. Globalization promised frictionless trade, institutions were expected to neutralize power, and technology appeared to compress distance to irrelevance. Strategic thinking increasingly assumed that space could be managed, bypassed, or overcome.

Recent events suggest otherwise. High-intensity war in Eastern Europe, renewed tensions in maritime chokepoints, and the re-emergence of territorial contestation demonstrate that geography never disappeared. It was politically ignored—until power returned. With it, long-standing assumptions about history itself quietly collapsed.

Geography does not determine outcomes. But it defines the limits within which strategy operates.

What Geography Is —and What It Is Not

Geography refers to the physical and spatial conditions within which human activity takes place. It encompasses distance, terrain, climate, access, and the geographical distribution of resources and populations. These conditions shape movement, interaction, protection, and vulnerability, not by dictating outcomes, but by setting enduring constraints.

Throughout history, geography has influenced how societies organize trade, project power, defend territory, and sustain themselves. Mountain ranges channel movement, seas enable exchange, and proximity creates both opportunity and risk. Such features persist regardless of political systems, technological change, or normative preferences.

What geography provides, therefore, is not a script for action, but a structural environment. Strategy operates within this environment, responding to its limits and possibilities rather than escaping them.

Thus, geography does not determine political decisions, cultural choices, or strategic intent. States and societies respond differently to similar geographic conditions, depending on organization, perception, and time.

From Classical Geopolitics to Contemporary Constraints

In the past, the discipline of classical geopolitics translated geographic constraints into dominant spatial categories. Sea power emphasized mobility, trade, and global reach; land power emphasized depth, resources, and protection from maritime influence. This distinction was analytically coherent in an era when strategic domains were largely separable and distance imposed severe limits on power projection.

Thinkers such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford J. Mackinder, and Nicholas J. Spykman offered influential frameworks for understanding these dynamics. Their concepts captured enduring aspects of geography, but they reflected the technological and organizational realities of their time.

However, today, this land–sea dichotomy no longer provides sufficient explanatory power. Advances in air and missile capabilities, cyber and space domains, and globally integrated supply chains have rendered strategic domains increasingly porous. Distance has been compressed, though not eliminated.

In other words, geography still matters, not because one domain guarantees superiority, but because access, depth, and chokepoints continue to shape vulnerability, resilience, and strategic choice in a tightly coupled system.

Geography as a Strategic Constraint

Geography constrains strategy not through abstract principles, but through concrete and recurring conditions. These conditions shape how pressure is absorbed, how quickly decisions must be made, and how reliably systems remain connected. Three structural mechanisms are particularly consequential: depth, proximity, and access.

Depth refers to the availability of space, time, and resources that allow a political entity to absorb pressure without immediate collapse. Strategic depth enables dispersion, mobilization, adaptation, and recovery under stress.

Depth shapes how long a state or society can sustain conflict, respond to shocks, and adjust strategy over time. Where depth is limited, decision-makers face compressed timelines and higher escalation risks. Where depth exists, strategy gains flexibility—not because outcomes are guaranteed, but because failure is less immediately terminal.

Modern technology can reach deeper than before, but it does not eliminate the need for depth. Precision, speed, and range reduce physical distance, yet they simultaneously increase the value of redundancy, dispersion, and resilience.

Depth, therefore, does not ensure success. It expands the margin for error within which strategy can operate.

Proximity, by contrast, refers to the physical closeness of political actors and the density of their immediate surroundings. Where proximity is high, interaction is constant, reaction times are short, and the margin for misinterpretation narrows.

Proximity shapes escalation dynamics more than intent. Close neighbors are exposed to each other’s movements, signals, and miscalculations, often forcing rapid decisions under uncertainty. In such environments, perception can matter as much as capability, and minor incidents can acquire disproportionate strategic weight.

Technological advances accelerate these dynamics but do not remove them. Faster communication and precision systems compress time rather than eliminating risk, increasing the speed at which decisions must be made.

Proximity, therefore, does not predetermine conflict. It intensifies pressure on judgment and amplifies the consequences of error.

Under these conditions, access and chokepoints become critical constraints on power projection.

Access refers to the ability to connect territory, resources, and populations to wider systems of movement and exchange. In an interconnected world, access shapes economic resilience, strategic flexibility, and the capacity to sustain prolonged stress.

Chokepoints emerge where flows are concentrated rather than dispersed. Their significance lies not in symbolic control, but in systemic vulnerability: disruption at narrow passages can generate effects far beyond their immediate location.

Technology has increased the reach of disruption but has not reduced dependence on access. Global supply chains, energy flows, and data networks remain spatially anchored, making redundancy and protection as important as control itself.

Access, like depth and proximity, does not guarantee advantage. It defines exposure and, with it, the strategic choices available under pressure.

Europe’s Geographic Condition

Europe occupies a structurally exposed geographic position. Unlike large continental powers with significant strategic depth or natural buffers, Europe is defined by proximity, fragmentation, and dense connectivity. Its geography provides access to markets, infrastructure, and human capital, but it also limits insulation from external pressure.

Europe’s high neighborhood density compresses strategic space. Multiple regions of instability lie in close geographic and functional proximity, while internal borders and political fragmentation reduce the ability to absorb shocks uniformly. As a result, developments beyond Europe’s immediate borders rarely remain distant in their effects. Geography ensures that external dynamics translate quickly into internal challenges.

This condition contrasts with geographically insulated powers such as the United States, where oceans and scale provide time, distance, and strategic depth. Europe lacks comparable buffers. Pressure originating in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia is transmitted through tightly coupled systems of trade, mobility, energy, and communication. Distance is limited not only physically but also functionally.

Europe’s exposure does not stem from weakness but from openness. Transnational phenomena such as irregular migration, organized crime, or extremist networks exploit connectivity rather than vulnerability. Geography, in this sense, does not generate threats; it accelerates their transmission and compounds their interaction.

Limited strategic depth further amplifies this condition. Where shocks occur in rapid succession, Europe faces cumulative pressure rather than isolated crises. Strategic options must therefore be exercised under conditions of simultaneity, constrained timelines, and high interdependence. Geography does not dictate Europe’s responses, but it narrows the margin for delay and miscalculation.

Europe’s geographic condition is thus best understood not as a deficit of resources or capability, but as a surplus of exposure. Strategy in such an environment depends less on insulation than on adaptation, coordination, and resilience within a structurally open space.

Implications — Not Conclusions

Europe’s geographic condition does not dictate outcomes, but it narrows the range of viable strategies. Exposure, proximity, and limited depth do not produce automatic weakness; they impose requirements. Ignoring these requirements does not preserve flexibility; it erodes it.

First, insulation is not a realistic strategic option.
In a densely connected and geographically exposed environment, attempts to separate internal stability from external dynamics are structurally unsustainable. Developments beyond Europe’s borders will continue to translate into internal pressure, regardless of intent or normative preference.

Second, deterrence is not optional.
Where proximity compresses timelines and reduces margins for error, the absence of credible deterrence increases escalation risk rather than mitigating it. Deterrence in such an environment functions less as a tool of dominance than as a mechanism for time-gaining and risk management.

Third, alliances are not idealistic constructs but structural necessities.
Limited strategic depth and high exposure make collective frameworks indispensable. Coordination, role differentiation, and interoperability are not political preferences; they are geographic responses to constraint.

Fourth, strategy must prioritize resilience over control.
In tightly coupled systems, the ability to absorb shocks, adapt under pressure, and maintain continuity matters more than the illusion of comprehensive control. Redundancy, flexibility, and societal cohesion become strategic assets rather than secondary considerations.

Finally, illusions are costlier than constraints.
Misreading geography as irrelevant, manageable, or obsolete does not eliminate its effects. It merely shifts the burden of adjustment to moments of crisis, when options are fewer and errors more consequential.

These implications do not prescribe a single course of action. They define the boundaries within which strategy in Europe must operate, whether acknowledged or not.

Why This Matters Now

Geography has always shaped power, but for a prolonged period it was treated as politically manageable. Globalization, institutions, and technology created the impression that spatial constraints could be softened indefinitely. That assumption is no longer sustainable.

The return of high-intensity conflict, systemic disruption, and cumulative pressure has exposed the limits of strategic abstraction. Geography now asserts itself not gradually, but abruptly, compressing timelines and narrowing options. In such an environment, misjudgment carries immediate costs.

For Europe, this shift is particularly consequential. Strategy can no longer rely on insulation, delay, or benign assumptions about space. It must operate within constraints rather than against them. Survival in this context depends less on intention than on adaptation.