Benjamin Rhode
The stench of battle and bloodshed wafting over most of Europe’s history is common to the human experience across our planet. Europe, however, differs from other strategically significant continents in several important ways. The most recent of these distinctions lies in the nature of the security order established there after the Second World War and expanded after the Cold War, founded on the power and engagement of the United States, which now faces potentially mortal challenges. To appreciate this order’s full significance, however, it is worthwhile considering it in the context of other distinctive aspects of Europe’s history.
Perhaps one of the most notable of these is that, since the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 CE, no overwhelming hegemon has dominated Western and Central Europe for a sustained period, and certainly has not controlled most of its territory. In 1453, almost 1,000 years after Rome’s fall, the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople and the last remnants of what had been the Eastern Roman Empire. In the intervening millennium, while there had been pretenders to the imperial legacy in Western and Central Europe, such as the misnamed Holy Roman Empire, none had truly established itself as the inheritor of Rome’s crown. Europe had largely represented a backwater in economic, technological and strategic terms, and its constituent states appeared poor relations to the great empires in East and South Asia and the Middle East.
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