PETE #2 - The Geographical Problem
PETER
Germany had a difficult birth. One of the first things to note for that rare cadre of people that haven’t spent years reading about it, is that Germany is very young. Obviously that bit of land in the middle of Europe is pretty old, in the same way that the bit of land under Australian feet is pretty old, but that doesn’t stop us taking the piss with crap lines like my house being older than your country. In fact, Germany in vaguely its current form is younger than America and Australia and only really came into being in 1871. This is the same year that Scotland beat England in the first ever rugby international and Britain had its first ever bank holiday.
Central Europe – mitteleuropa – has spent millennia with an unusually large number of fairly small communities exchanging goods and often competing for the riches as well as the political and cultural hegemony of a comparatively small area. By the time of the German unification in the 19th Century the region had settled into a number of powerful blocs, France to the West and Russia to the east, and a host of small and medium countries, such as the Baltics, the Balkans, Eastern Europe with Romania, Poland, Denmark, the southern empires of Austria-Hungary and Italy and the patchwork quilt of principalities, kingdoms and dukedoms of the German lands right in the middle.[1]
The different populations in the central European region are particularly numerous when compared to global norms. The presence of major rivers for transportation that do not interconnect has created a latticework of urban areas and surrounding kingdoms and nations. Each kink in the Danube and Elbe allowed a town and latterly city to grow up and become a focal point for a regional culture and economy, in turn developing into communities, kingdoms and nations. For example, the major central European river, the Danube, is 1,780 miles long. It starts in Germany’s Black forest and crosses 18 countries forming the natural border for countries such as Slovakia and Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, Serbia and Romania, Romania and Bulgaria. A boat trip down it would give you views of Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade.[2]
The second geographical factor is the fertility and flatness of the ground. The North European Plain stretches from France to the Ural Mountains in Russia and the North and Baltic Seas to the North and South. It allows for successful farming on a massive scale and the waterways and flat ground allow for the easy movement of goods and ideas.[3] Inevitably, this same terrain allowed for constant warring with the easy movement of armies and supplies.
In summary, mitteleuropa and the people that lived there is and was primed for conflict and competition. In my next blog I'll take a look at exactly how and why this part of Europe became a unified state.
