Putin, Merkel, Hollande and Poroschenko at the Minsk Summit 2015. flickr/Poggemann. Some rights reservedThe unveiling of the debt crisis in Europe foregrounds the resurgence of the forgotten discipline of geopolitics, along with its significance as a credible analytical tool in current transatlantic foreign policy analysis. Up until very recently geopolitics was one of the most unpopular and outdated intellectual concepts in contemporary Europe. The period of geopolitical uncertainty which started in 2009 has reintroduced strategic tensions between European powers. These tensions have paved the way for introducing a new geometry of state relations that will continue altering the balance of power among key EU regional groupings.
The predominance of the creditor-debtor divide rather than a consistent European-wide response to the crisis, apart from sustaining systemic ambivalence, structural vulnerability and loss of confidence, above all introduces elements of geopolitical uncertainty. Due to these creditor-debtor relationships rather than any other form of geopolitical friction, a number of core EU balances have upset intra-European power correlations and progressively pave the way for the evolution of geopolitical dilemmas impacting on both Europe and the US. On top of that, growing US concerns over the strategic implications of Europe’s debt crisis and the geopolitical necessity of maintaining an unbroken and coordinated Atlantic West, increase the need for a forward thinking transatlantic analysis.
Rejecting the eurozone’s rebalancing: what happens next?
As long as Europe fails to escape its debt crisis, neither can the global economy. What comes next involves confessing an inconvenient truth about the dominant economic paradigm in the Eurozone (EZ) and exposes the shortcomings of the creditors’ economic thinking over the past five years. In other words, the creditors’ export-led model cannot survive without a debtors’ consumer-led model. But the debtors' acceptance of fiscal discipline (Club Med, Eastern Europe) has an inevitable consequence -Germany’s growth model in Europe’s present economic environment is simply unattainable.
