Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

George Friedman, Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe Doubleday, 2015I read George Friedman's intelligence reports almost every day, and reviewed one of his books, The Next Hundred Years, several issues ago. Friedman is chairman and founder of Stratfor (Strategic Forecasts), a leading private intelligence company. I think he and several of his colleagues (including Robert D. Kaplan) are the best analysts of international geopolitics. Few other analysts regard geography as a major player in world affairs, an oversight that makes so many get it wrong.For the past few years, his reports have focused on the world's borderlands, those faultlines where countries or ethnicities meet with hostility latent. His latest book, Flashpoints, explores Europe's past and present (and potentially future) with an eye to the borderlands that can become flashpoints for conflict.The only other scholar mentioning this issue was Samuel P. Huntington, with his much discussed Clash of Civilizations. Huntington noted that every border shared with Muslim countries is and has always been bloody. This observation has proven itself many times over in the past decade.Europe has given much to the world in the past 500 years: the scientific revolution, religious reformations, political liberalism with participatory governance, and nationalism-the creation of nation states ideally governed by their own people in democracy. Europe has modeled the modern world with its peaceful civil life, rule of law, and amenities available for all that were once the exclusive luxury of the ruling elites. We are talking about only Western Europe here, along with its British offspring, the United States.But there is another side to Europe: a region of catastrophic conflicts along its many geographic and political flashpoints. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century has been much admired by the educated among us because it largely discarded religion as a governing institution, replacing it with 'reason. ' Friedman explores the underbelly of the Enlightenment, in which some of its prized institutions gave rise to unanticipated and ugly consequences.Nationalism can be a benign institution when it only means that a country's people love their country and its culture. However, when love of country morphs into hatred of other countries, nationalism becomes an excuse for violence. Europe's two world wars exemplify this.Nationalism in Europe is based on shared faith, common history, language and culture. This is why Jews, no matter how long they lived in a country, could not be accepted as that nationality; they did not share the predominant faith, Christianity. As all Europeans become more secular, this problem has melted.Although Muslims have long lived in parts of Europe, the immigration crisis today has brought far more Muslims than can be assimilated into European culture. Multiculturalism, a theory that makes all cultures relative, is not working in Europe as had been hoped. Too many Muslims are coming at one time, too many to be absorbed. And multiculturalism interferes with attempts to absorb an alien population. (In the US, migrants are free to practice their particular cultures, with the exception that if they want to be American, they must accept American norms of behavior and values. This has worked, and the price of American citizenship is the abandonment of the more alien aspects of the immigrant's culture.)What makes this migration even more unacceptable is the campaign of Militant Islamism to seduce the youth and endanger Europe's stability. Cyprus is the first European country to have split in two over religion and ethnicity; half is Greek Christian, half Turkish Muslim.In addition to the mutually hostile religious differences, immigration is facing an economic problem. There are not enough jobs for these immigrants. Peace and prosperity are inseparable. Without prosperity, there can be no peace. …