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Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, by George Friedman
Ebook Download Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, by George Friedman
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New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman delivers a fascinating portrait of modern-day Europe, with special focus on significant political, cultural, and geographical flashpoints where the conflicts of the past are smoldering once again.
For the past five hundred years, Europe has been the nexus of global culture and power. But throughout most of that history, most European countries have also been volatile and unstable—some even ground zero for catastrophic wars. As Friedman explores the continent’s history region by region, he examines the centuries-long struggles for power and territory among the empires of Spain, Britain, Germany, and Russia that have led to present-day crises: economic instability in Greece; breakaway states threatening the status quo in Spain, Belgium, and the United Kingdom; and a rising tide of migrants disrupting social order in many EU countries. Readers will gain a new understanding of the current and historical forces at work—and a new appreciation of how valuable and fragile peace can be.
- Sales Rank: #37263 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-16
- Released on: 2016-02-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.20" l, .62 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Review
“There is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8-Ball.” —The New York Times Magazine
“In Flashpoints, Friedman combines analysis with prophecy. . . . Some personal biography woven into poignant narratives helps reveal how geography and history have always shaped Europe’s future.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“One of the country’s leading strategic affairs experts.” —Lou Dobbs
“Considering how right [Friedman’s] been over the years, he’s worth listening to.” —San Antonio Express-News
“Insightful. . . . Friedman vividly describes a region where memories are long, perceived vulnerabilities are everywhere, and major threats have emerged rapidly and unexpectedly many times before.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
GEORGE FRIEDMAN is founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, which specializes in geopolitical forecasting. Prior to this Friedman was chairman of the global intelligence company Stratfor, which he founded in 1996. Friedman is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
A European Life
On the night of August 13, 1949, my family climbed into a rubber raft along the Hungarian shore of the Danube. The ultimate destination of the journey was Vienna. We were escaping the communists. There were four of us: my father, Emil, thirty-seven, my mother, Friderika, known as Dusi, thirty-five, my sister Agnes, eleven, and me, age six months. There was also a smuggler, whose name and provenance have been lost to us, deliberately, I think, as our parents regarded the truth of such things as potentially deadly and protected us from it at all costs.
We had come from Budapest by train to the Hungarian village of Almasfuzito, on the Danube northwest of the capital. Budapest, where my sister and I were born. My parents had migrated there with their families, met, fallen in love, and then were sucked into the abyss of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. My mother was born in 1914 in a town near Bratislava, then called Pozsony and part of Hungary, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father was born in the town of Nyirbator in eastern Hungary in 1912.
They were born just before World War I. In 1918, the war ended and the structure of Europe cracked, wrecked by that war. Four imperial houses—the Ottomans, Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Romanovs—fell, and everything that had been solid between the Baltic Sea and Black Sea was in flux. Wars, revolutions, and diplomacy redrew the map of the region, inventing some countries and suppressing others. Munkács, the town my father’s father came from, was now in Ukraine, part of the Soviet Union. Pozsony was now called Bratislava, a city now part of a newly invented country fusing the Czechs and Slovaks.
My parents were Jews and for them the movement of borders was like the coming of weather. Pleasant or unpleasant, it was to be expected. There was something interesting about Hungarian Jews: they spoke Hungarian. The rest of the Jews in the east of Europe spoke Yiddish, fusing German with several other languages. Yiddish used the Hebrew alphabet, to further confuse matters. Yiddish-speaking Jews did not tend to see themselves as part of the countries in which they lived, and their hosts generally agreed, usually emphatically. Geography was a convenience, not something that defined them. Using Yiddish as their primary tongue represented their tenuous connection to their society, something that was both resented and encouraged by those with whom they lived.
But generally speaking, Hungarian Jews used Hungarian as their only language. It was my sister’s and my first language. Some, such as my father, knew Yiddish as a second language, but my mother didn’t know Yiddish at all. Their mother tongue was Hungarian, and when the borders shifted, my mother’s family, all twelve of them supported by her father, who was a tailor, moved south to Budapest. In the same period the rest of my father’s family moved west, out of what had become Ukraine, and into what was left of Hungary after the war. The point is that while the normal anti-Semitism of Europe flourished in Hungary as well, there was nonetheless a more intimate connection between Hungary and its Jews, far from simple or easy, but still there.
Hungary in the interwar period was not an unpleasant place—once the chaos of a communist regime followed by an anticommunist regime was completed to the usual European accompaniment of slaughter. Independent for the first time in centuries, it was governed by an admiral of a navy that no longer existed, who was regent to a nonexistent king. Miklós Horthy should have had as his family motto “Go with the Flow.” The flow in Hungary in the 1920s and part of the 1930s was liberal, but not immoderately. This meant that my father, a country boy from the east, could move to Budapest, learn the printing trade, and open a print shop by the time he was twenty years old. For this time and place that was extraordinary, but it was an extraordinary time. Deep into the 1930s it was possible to believe that World War I had so chastened Europe that its darker instincts had been purged.
But demons are not so easy to purge. World War I had settled nothing. The war was fought over the status of Germany, which ever since its unification in 1871 had thrown the balance and stability of Europe into chaos. A powerful and wealthy nation had been created, but it was also a desperately insecure nation. Caught between France and Russia, with Britain subtly manipulating all players, Germany knew it could never survive a simultaneous attack from both sides. Germany also knew that both France and Russia were sufficiently afraid of it that a simultaneous attack could not be discounted. Thus, Germany’s strategy had to be to defeat first one and then mass its forces to defeat the other. In 1914 Germany had tried to implement this strategy but instead had lost.
My grandfather fought in World War I, a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army. He fought on the Russian front, leaving my father at the age of two. He returned from the war, but like so many others, he returned broken in spirit and body. Those whom the war didn’t kill, it twisted into men utterly unlike those who had left home. He died shortly after coming home, possibly of tuberculosis.
Rather than settling Germany’s status, World War I simply coupled geopolitical fear with ideological rage. Germany’s defeat was explained as being a result of treachery. And if there was treachery, then someone had been treacherous. It was a complex plot, but Germany settled on the Jews as the malevolent conspirators, a decision that had particular implications for my family.
Geopolitically, Hitler’s desire to secure German interests meant that the “flow” Horthy now had to “go with” came from Berlin. Ideologically, my parents now found themselves the major threat to the German nation. For a Jew living in Hungary it had not been a bad deal to this point. But it was now becoming a terrible one. This left my parents with a choice that had been facing Europeans for over a century—staying or going to America. My mother’s sister lived in New York. I never knew how they did it, but somehow my parents managed to obtain visas to the United States in 1938. A visa like this was worth more than gold. For those who could see what was coming, it was life itself.
My father was a clever man, but he did not see what was coming. He had grown up with anti-Semites, and he knew the beatings and abuse that involved. By 1938 he had a profitable printing business in Budapest. To give that up and start over in a country whose language he could not speak was not something he was eager to do. The geopolitical reality demanded that he find an exit from the European madhouse. His personal needs dictated that he stay and tough it out. By the time it became clear that this was not your daddy’s anti-Semitism, it was too late.
The result for my family was catastrophic. In Hungary, Horthy protected the nation by submitting to the German will. Hungary remained internally free so long as it cooperated with German adventures. Having defeated France in a six-week campaign, Germany now turned its attention to the Soviet Union, confidently expecting a rapid victory. Horthy, going with the flow, committed Hungary’s army to the war, expecting as a reward to have returned to it the regions my family had to flee after World War I. But for the reward to be permanent, there had to be blood. Horthy understood this.
My father was conscripted into the Hungarian army. At first he was simply a soldier. But if the Hungarians were to fight alongside Germans, it was clear that Jews could not simply be soldiers. My father was transferred with other Jews to labor battalions whose assignment was, for example, to clear minefields the old-fashioned way, by walking through them. All soldiers were expected to be willing to die. Those in the labor battalions were expected to die. Horthy was no more of an anti-Semite than good manners required, and this was not something he may have wanted himself, but his duty was to preserve an independent Hungary, and if putting Jews into labor battalions was what was needed, he was going to do what was needed.
For my father and many of the men in my family, that meant a march from Hungary’s eastern border through the Carpathians, toward Kursk and Kiev, all the way to the River Don, to a place called Voronezh. Most of the men in my family were dead by then, but so were many regular army troops. The Soviet Union only seemed weak. Its strength was discovered in the fall of 1942, when the Soviets, having massed enormous forces east of the Don, counterattacked against the German Sixth Army, which had taken most of the city of Stalingrad. Germany’s goal was to choke off the approaches to the Caucasus, because on the other side of the Caucasus was the city of Baku, where the Swedish Nobel brothers had discovered and exploited a massive pool of oil in the late nineteenth century. Baku was still the source of most of the Soviets’ oil, and Hitler wanted desperately to take it from them. The Germans knew that if they took Stalingrad and the land between the Don and Volga Rivers, Baku was theirs and the war was over.
However, the Soviets did not counterattack in Stalingrad. Instead they attacked to the north and to the south, enveloping the German Sixth Army and starving it into surrender and annihilation. My father’s problem was that the Soviets’ northern thrust was aimed directly at him—they knew that Germany’s allies were the weak link. By the winter of 1942 the Germans depended on Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and other allies who did not want to die for Hitler’s historical vision of a Greater Germany. Therefore, when the Soviets launched their attack with massive barrages, the Hungarians broke ranks willingly. My father told me of the feared “Stalin Organ,” a multiple-launch rocket system that could launch a dozen rockets from a battery, all landing within seconds of each other. Those rockets haunted his dreams for the rest of his life.
Then began the long retreat of the Hungarians from Voronezh to Budapest, a distance of over a thousand miles through the Russian winter of 1942–43. The death toll was appalling, but the Jewish death toll was almost total. My father walked back through the snows without winter clothing, without food beyond what he could scavenge, and with the knowledge that encountering German SS troops to the rear meant certain death. He explained his survival in three ways. First, he imagined his daughter, my sister, a few meters ahead of him. He was always going to pick her up. Second, city boys were soft. He was a farm boy, hardened from birth. Finally, it was luck. Enormous luck.
Hitler needed Baku. If he was to defeat the Soviets, Baku was a geopolitical necessity. It was no accident that the Germans had to take Stalingrad and no accident that the Soviets couldn’t let them. It was not accidental that Germany’s allies were on the flanks and not in the center, nor was it accidental that the Soviet offensive focused on them. It was not accidental that my father was at ground zero, because wherever the Hungarians were was to be ground zero, and wherever the Hungarians were, the Jews would be the most exposed. What was accidental was that my father survived. Impersonal forces define the larger pieces of history. It is the small things, the precious things, that are defined by will, character, and mere chance.
When my father finally reached his home in Budapest in 1943, Hungary still retained its sovereignty from Germany. Sovereignty matters. It meant that while Hungarian foreign policy was shaped by the power of Germany, there was some space, small and decreasing, for Hungary to govern itself. For the Jews it meant that while conditions were extraordinarily difficult, more difficult than for other Hungarians, who also were facing deep problems, they were not confronted by the full fury of Germany’s anti-Semitism. My mother and sister were alive, and even the print shop still functioned in a way. They had a place to live and food to eat. Horthy was able to preserve that. Perhaps he could have done more, but perhaps trying would have brought the full fury of the Nazis to bear much earlier than occurred. In Europe at this time, retaining a space for Jews to survive, however precariously, was no small achievement for Horthy, or a trivial matter for my family. It was very different living in a sovereign Hungary than in occupied Poland. The sovereign nation-state could and did make the difference between life and death. I judge a man like Horthy not by the good he might have done, but by the evil that he did not commit and others did. It could have been much worse in Hungary, and much earlier. Others have judged him more harshly, my father and mother much less so. The argument still rages, but what is clear is that at the time, what he did was a matter of life and death. He, like the rest, was caught in the grip of European history gone mad, with few choices, all bad.
This was apparent when, in 1944, following his policy of going with the flow, Horthy opened secret negotiations with the Soviets over switching sides in a war that Germany was going to lose. German intelligence detected this, and Hitler summoned him to a meeting, where he threatened to occupy Hungary and demanded the deportation of Hungary’s Jews, nearly a million. Horthy conceded the deportation of 100,000. In Europe at that time, this was what humanitarianism had degenerated into. A man who collaborated in killing only 100,000 but kept perhaps 800,000 others alive a bit longer was doing the best that could have been expected of him. In due course the Germans took Hungary over, and even that little was impossible. The flow of history that Horthy went with had overwhelmed Hungary. The truth was that Horthy was finished, that the fate of Hungary would now be determined by Hitler and the Hungarian fascists, and my family, along with Horthy, had run out of time.
Adolf Eichmann was sent to Hungary to oversee the “final solution” in the largest still-existing community of Jews in Europe. In the midst of a desperate war that Germany was losing, scarce manpower and transport facilities were diverted to move hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews north to Auschwitz and other camps, to be exterminated.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
LOTS OF USEFUL INFORMATION
By The Curmudgeon
Friedman is great at summarizing important points. I have read historical books two or three times as long which provide less information, filled with countless details which are forgotten as soon as read. Friedman comes from a Hungarian Jewish family and he first explains the history of his family in Europe. As he states, being Jewish was the family's main identity and being in Hungary was just a geographical accident.
He then begins the history of modern (post-medieval) Europe which started in the 1400s. At that time Islamic civilization abutted Europe, controlling much of Africa, western and central Asia, and parts of the Pacific. Europe's main demand then was for black pepper from India, and Prince Henry of Portugal (aka the Navigator) began the process of oceanic voyages around Africa to bypass the Islamic center and get spices directly from India. In 1498 Vasco da Gama made it around Africa to India. Meanwhile Spain had entered the race and in 1492 had Columbus sail west and discover what he thought were the outskirts of India. This led to Spain becoming the first world power, followed by other European world powers, with the last European world power the Soviet Union ceasing to exist on the first day of 1992, exactly 500 years after Columbus's discovery.
Three men jolted Europe out of its medieval self-centered isolation and began the modern world. These are the previously mentioned Columbus in 1492 (Europe is not the center of the world), Martin Luther in 1517 (Rome is not the center of Europe), and Copernicus in 1543 (Earth is not the center of the universe). Especially important was Luther's belief that individual Christians can interpret the Bible for themselves, thereby launching modern individualism.
This led to the scientific revolution as formulated by Francis Bacon (born 1561) where knowledge is based on observation and experimentation (not ancient authority). But back then it was necessary to say that science would be used to understand the world God had created. All this led to the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries where reason would overcome superstition, merit would overcome aristocratic privilege, and the meritorious would govern through a republic. Meanwhile Europe had fragmented into different nations, originally influenced by Luther's system of printing the Bible in local European languages (not Latin). Modern Europe became governed by science and nationalism.
In 1914 life was good in Europe. There was peace and prosperity as well as technological and artistic innovation. European empires controlled most of the world. The last major war was a century ago in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon. Europeans were optimistic. Then World War I suddenly broke out and much of the old order collapsed. Europe was devastated, especially Germany and Russia. Two new ideologies then developed in these countries led by two ruthless men. Stalin wanted to create a new society based on communist theory, kill or arrest any opponents, and end up with a worker's paradise. Hitler wanted to strengthen Germany by colonizing parts of Europe, ridding it of subversive elements like Jews, and end up with a thousand-year German Reich (empire). World War II ensued which further devastated Europe. In the 31 years between 1914 and 1945 about 100 million were killed. Europe ended up being occupied by American and Russian forces.
Friedman states that Americans "pitied" Europeans and were generous with help. Russians "envied" Europeans and stole from them, shipping whole factories back to the Soviet Union. They came from a place where watches and indoor plumbing were luxuries. (When I visited the Soviet Union in 1984 toilet paper was a luxury - they used newspaper which showed Pravda had some use after all). Europeans were suffering from what is today called post-traumatic stress disorder. But back then people were expected to recover by themselves.
While occupied eastern Europe became part of a new Russian Empire, western Europe pursued unification to prevent another war. The main idea was to unify Germany and France (enemies since 1871) plus the other countries. This resulted in Franco-German economic unification with the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and the Treaty of Rome and the European Community (1957) which also contained Italy and Spain as well as smaller countries. Meanwhile Britain tried to maintain its independence by creating the European Free Trade Association which included countries like Sweden and Switzerland. Britain eventually joined the European Community in 1973 and the EFTA faded away. Further unification came in 1991 with the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union (now 28 countries). The main theme in Europe today is that it is a place of peace and prosperity that has made war obsolete.
But cracks began appearing in this scenario. At first wars erupted in the 1990s in tense areas such as the Balkans and the Caucasus. Meanwhile Russia had recovered from the collapse of the Soviet Union and began attempts to re-establish its empire in 2008. This happened in Georgia where two northern provinces broke away from the country with the help of Russian troops. Contrast this with four years earlier when the Orange Revolution in Ukraine ousted a pro-Russian government which had won with a rigged election. By 2014 Russia felt powerful enough to invade and incorporate the Ukrainian province of Crimea. It is true that Crimea had historically been a part of Russia until Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954 (since it was attached to Ukraine but across the sea from Russia), but in 1994 Russia signed an international agreement to guarantee the borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine abandoning its nuclear weapons (the biggest mistake it ever made).
There were also economic problems caused by the worldwide Great Recession of 2008. Prosperous countries like Germany weathered the storm but poorer countries like Greece sank further into bankruptcy. Germany is a country which produces more than it consumes and is a major exporter. Greece is a country which consumes more than it produces and is a major importer. The tension there is that Germany does not want to be the welfare department for southern Europe while countries like Greece want more welfare (foreign aid or "loans" expected to be forgiven).
Friedman cites various flashpoints which are too numerous to mention here. There is always Germany which is generating resistance by trying to impose economic discipline on resistant poor southern European countries and mafia-style eastern European countries. Russia has had its borders pushed back to before Peter the Great, with the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine now independent. Putin wants them back.
Towards the end of the book Friedman finally addresses the biggest problem facing western Europe, which is the Muslim invasion (Russia is eastern Europe's biggest problem and the current battleground is Ukraine). Western Europe has been operating under the myth that due to its official policy of tolerance it has made war archaic and can accommodate millions of Muslims. The reality is that Muslims are there to benefit economically and despise tolerance as well as its proponents. They are more interested in imposing their culture on a culturally weak western Europe.
European elites sponsored this invasion to gain cheap labor to benefit themselves as the main investors. They then imposed this policy on the rest as a manifestation of morally superior tolerance and understanding. As usual the European middle and lower classes had little influence over this matter and resented the imposition of this invasion. This conflict has led to Muslim terrorism, a return to warfare in Europe which the new policies were supposed to have banished.
Once again we can see that history repeats itself. A dying Roman Empire imported Germanic barbarians to solve its economic and military problems. When additional waves of these barbarians invaded the empire, there was no one left able or willing to defend it. It took Europe a thousand years to recover from the fall of Rome. The current situation may be the beginning of a similar outcome.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Quo vadis Europe?
By Martin Schweiger
Do you want to better understand the European Union and its fate?
Can you explain in short words why Germany wants to have Greece remaining in the EU and the EUR, whatever it costs?
If you want comprehensive answers to all these questions and more, then this is a book for you: "Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe" by George Friedman.
Friedman's objectives
Friedman sets out the following questions that he wanted to answer with his book:
How did Europe achieve global domination, politically, militarily, economically, and intellectually?
What was the flaw in Europe that caused it to throw away this domination between 1914 and 1945? and
Is the period of peace that followed 1945 what the future of Europe will look like?
The last question is the most important one for Friedman.
His answer - in short - is: "No, it is not very likely that there will be continued peace throughout Europe".
What is so special with this book?
Friedman covered the big picture by providing detailed support, country by country. At the same time he lays open his working techniques which made him one of the very few internationally recognized geopoliticians.
George Friedman also reveals a lot of himself. He is letting the reader into his life, he tells the exciting story of his family's escape from persecution in WW II Hungary. And his starting point is impressive. He was born in Hungary, escaped with his family to the USA, and then travelled almost all European and close-European countries that he is writing about in his book.
This obviously shaped him to become someone who comes close to a world citizen, although he is usually putting the USA in the first place. I would not call this "arrogant" but one can throughout the entire book see that Friedman sees the USA to be the successor of Europe's domination of the world. And this is what this book has in common with most other books in the area of geopolitics, the USA are take as the center of the geopolitical universe and everything else follows from there.
Anything missing in the book?
If Friedman completely left out one significant point in his book then it is the future of manufacturing and its implication on geopolitics. Friedman emphasizes several times on international sea trade and the importance of protecting an empire's sea trade (namely the one of the USA) with a navy, but he does not recognize that the future of 3D printing and rapid machining will bring more decentralized manufacture and less international logistics. It is yet to be seen if the USA will be able to continue in the future maintaining a navy that can invade any place of the world within 24 hours.
And, of course, the Brexit is not captured in Friedman's book because this event is too young. I got the second edition of November 2015, which has updates about the ongoing refugee invasion, and Friedman already has somewhat anticipated the Brexit in chapter 15 of his book. But he qualifies this view with the following statement:
"The Europeans see the British as being different from them. The Americans see the British as different from themselves as well. The British see themselves as both unique and needing to have a foot in each camp."
George Friedman's professional background
George Friedman is the founder and chairman of a commercial company that specializes in geopolitical forecasting. Before that he was the chairman of the global intelligence company Stratfor, which he founded back in 1996. This explains the style of the present book, George Friedman is surely a seasoned expert in geopolitics.
Important ideas to remember
According to Friedman, Germany - and not France - plays a central role in Europe. One of his main points is that the EU created an only temporary abatement of Europe's core problems, which are nationalism and power - in particular German power. According to him, we are now in a period where that abatement is in the process of failing.
Friedman summarizes the role of the USA as follows, which is probably true but certainly diffiult to swallow for some:
"After the war, the United States became the first power to control all the world's oceans. It had expelled the Japanese from the Pacific - and the British and the French as well. It now dominated the North Atlantic, and through NATO, what was left of the Royal Navy was, in part at least, under American command. It was a maritime empire, and the British no longer controlled the sea lanes."
This is only one example for Friedman's mercilessly straight approach in his book. He presents facts in order to back up his theories and ideas, regardless of whether these facts hurt or not.
Here is one more merciless slap, right in the face of one-world order supporters:
"... the European Union ... is crumbling. There are four European Unions. There are the German states (Germany and Austria), the rest of northern Europe, the Mediterranean states, and the states in the borderland. The latter face the retaking of their old borderlands by Russia. The Mediterranean Europeans face massive unemployment experienced by Americans in the Great Depression. The northern European states are doing better but none are doing as well as the Germans."
Being of German origin myself, I can say that this book is not a bad read at all, but I may be biased ...
Key facts of this book
This book is so much filled with a large variety of facts that it is difficult to select which facts are the most important ones.
What was certainly new for me was the fact that the British - under tremendous war pressure from Germany after the fall of France - agreed to take 50 old destroyers from the USA, in return of a 99-year lease of land and bases, including the eastern Bahamas, the southern coast of Jamaica, St. Lucia, western Trinidad, Antigua, parts of British Guiana and basing rights in Bermuda and Newfoundland.
Letting the Greeks off the EU hook would not hurt Germany or the EU at all, as Greece is only 2 percent of Europe's total economy. But it would set a precedent that would endanger the entire European project. And this cannot be as - this is an important fact - half of Germany's exports goes to other EU countries, and exports make half of Germany's total GDP. And this with Germany being the world's third largest single exporting nation. This is unique within the EU. So what is good for Germany may not be good for the rest of the EU and vice versa.
Conclusion
In very short words, what I took from Friedman's book is this: if one has to decide on expanding his business into Europe, then Germany, Austria and Switzerland are surely top tier candidates, followed by the nordic countries. The UK - and with it the Netherlands - are playing in a different but still very attractive league. The remainder of Europe should be taken with a pinch of salt, to put it diplomatically. And don't bet the farm on that there will not be a war in Europe again, especially along the Russian border.
Whether you like these ideas or agree with them or not, this book is a must read if you are interested in Europe's future.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
superb
By BookHawk
Sophisticated analysis of the history and dynamics underlying current upheavals within Europe and conflict with Russia. Well written and accessible. Required reading for knowledgeable Americans seeking the context that current political discourse seems unable to provide. Bravo George
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