(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Whenever I’m browsing the geopolitical headlines and feeling the need for nostalgic reprieve, I think of Alsace.
Up to World War II, the history of that region along the Rhine used to be an example of everything that was wrong with Europe. Then it became a case study in everything that could go right in Europe — and potentially the world. But as I ponder this, a pang of recognition — those headlines — wakes me from my reverie: Are we forgetting the Alsatian lesson and going back to the bad old world?
That Alsatian lesson was about borders — that you shouldn’t let them divide people, and certainly mustn’t kill to redraw them. The better way was instead to make borders increasingly irrelevant, indeed almost invisible, so that people hardly cared anymore on which side they found themselves at any given moment.
Recall that the Alsatians, like so many other Europeans, spent much of their past being passed back and forth between rival powers. Speakers of a German dialect, they became French in the 17th century, German in the 19th, then changed sides three more times in the 20th, each time following a war. You could live all your life in the same house in Strasbourg and keep swapping citizenships — as well as burying fallen fathers, brothers and sons.
In the 1950s, France and Germany, with the keen support of Italy and the Low Countries, finally decided to end this insanity. They buried the hatchets, agreed never again to challenge the borders, then set about making them unimportant. They called that dynamic the “ever closer union.”
In time it has led to boons such as a Common, and then a Single, Market; a European Community, then Union. It has created an area of completely unrestricted travel (no passports needed), whether for tourism or daily commutes. Even Switzerland, which isn’t formally in the EU, is part of this Schengen area.
As a result, Alsace now sits at the heart of a prosperous transnational mega-region sprawling across parts of France, Germany and Switzerland. It’s not unlike the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, except with more representation at the United Nations. Europeans living near Mulhouse, Freiburg or Basel live, work and play in their common Tri-national Metropolitan Region of the Upper Rhine as though they were all part of the same country, or none at all.
Enamored with their post-nationalist approach, the Europeans proselytized everywhere. It often worked. It definitely helped in pacifying Northern Ireland. As long as both Ireland and the U.K. were EU members, Unionists and Republicans alike could keep feeling connected to their respective homeland of choice, given that no noticeable border separated any of them.
The Alsatian way was especially helpful once several nations formerly behind the Iron Curtain joined the EU. Central Europe is a hodgepodge of ethnicities and nationalities, with Hungarians, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Romanians and others spread out and mingling well beyond the territories of their respective states. But thanks to permeable borders, all that no longer posed major problems.
In the 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke apart and descended into round after round of ethnic cleansing and war, the Europeans saw this as an atavistic throwback. With the aid of American hard power, they eventually pacified the Balkans, and again offered the Alsatian way as a solution to Serbs, Bosnians, Montenegrins, Kosovars and others. One leading think-tanker has called that the Pax Europeana.
The EU’s implicit bargain was this: You Balkans treat all your people well, no matter which side of these new borders they find themselves on. In return, we’ll one day admit you to our club, so that your borders, like ours, don’t matter anymore.
Upbeat about its good run, the EU tried to export the Alsatian way even farther. In 2009 it offered the so-called Eastern Partnership to six nations that had broken out of the former Soviet Union — Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Here the message was: We can’t make you members, because Russia would be upset. But if you accept the Pax Europeana, we can make life better for all of us.
How distant this European thinking seems today, a relic of an innocent — or naive — era. In recent years, the old border fences, walls and wires have been coming back. And the pace of atavism seems to be accelerating.
When more than a million refugees showed up in 2015, EU members like Hungary instinctively closed their borders with razor wire. When the pandemic struck five years later, EU countries slammed their other borders shut. Schengen isn’t gone, but it keeps being put on ice.
In the northwest, the U.K. left the EU, re-opening that fight about the Irish border. In the southeast, a bellicose Russia had already trampled on the borders of Ukraine, and all the countries of the Eastern Partnership have, one way or another, bid farewell to the Pax Europeana. Belarus has turned from a latent into an open dictatorship, one that cynically uses its borders to turn refugees into hostages.
In the Balkans, the specter of ethnic strife and border disputes is back, owing in part to disappointment with the EU’s insincerity about future membership. Serbia and Kosovo are glowering, and a top EU envoy worries that even the fragile peace in Bosnia may crack.
In my lifetime, Europe thought it had banished its old demons. Instead it seems to be evicting its better angels. I have no solutions, I just read the headlines. And then I think: At least we’ll always have Alsace.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Andreas Kluth is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously editor in chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist. He's the author of "Hannibal and Me."
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