Re-recommended: Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

Continuing my re-reading of George Friedman's works, I have just finished re-reading his 2016 book Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe. This book addresses the question of whether Europe can continue to be peaceful or whether inevitably it will fall back into the violent patterns of the last thousand or so years.

Friedman begins by a marvelous and thought-provoking  review of the dynamics of Europe since Henry the Navigator of Portugal began the age of exploration that eventually lead to the various European empires and made Europe the great artistic and intellectual center of the Western world. That occupies the first third of the book, and it would be well worth reading the book just for this sweeping review of European history. Then he examines the geopolitical forces that produced the 31 years of unimaginable destruction and brutality that comprise the first and second world wars of the 20th century, in which despite the high level of civilization Europe had reached, it tore itself apart. Finally, with that as a necessary background, he discusses Europe's likely future.

Much of human thinking, and especially of ideologies, is based on the fantasy that humans somehow will of stop acting like humans. Friedman argues that this is true of those who envision a united Europe. Europe is a continent packed with very different ethnicities and nationalities and cultures, who have lived cheek-by-jowl with each other for millennia and fought with each other through most of that time. As he says, for many of these groups the outrages and massacres of 500 years ago are still as fresh in their memories as if they happened yesterday. Temporary prosperity papered over those differences for a while, but when times get hard (as they are now) these old prejudices and distrusts and hatreds reemerge, and reshape (or perhaps more accurately, restore) the geopolitical landscape.

This book is an education in itself, and worth not only reading but re-reading several times.