Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe - Softcover

Friedman, George

 
9780307951137: Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307951138 ISBN 13: 9780307951137
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

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—from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman.

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 modern 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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

GEORGE FRIEDMAN is founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, which specializes in geopolitical forecasting. Prior to 2015, 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 100 Years and The Next Decade. He is a senior advisor to Gallup, Inc.  He lives in Austin, Texas.

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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...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307951138
ISBN 13 
9780307951137
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Penguin Random House Verlagsgruppe GmbH
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