I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties of late as I’ve been preoccupied studying for an exam on International Relations theory and history. With the exam safely behind me I’m back to blogging, but still have academic IR debates on the mind, so today I want to write about what the history of early 20th century European relations can tell us about the continent’s current political economy.

To grossly oversimplify, back in the pre-WWI days Europe was controlled by a number of Great Powers of roughly equal strength, who were in continual competition with one another to run the world. They typically pursued their goals by forming loose and shifting alliances; whenever any one state seemed to be getting too strong, a collection of the others would team up to balance against it (hence the “balance of power”). Britain, which then as now prized its position as being of but not in Europe, considered itself the ultimate balancer, frequently weighing in against the strongest continental power to ensure no state could establish hegemony over the mainland.

Now fast-forward to the Europe of today, as the debt crisis stretches into its third year. Of everything that has been written on the Euro crisis so far, I think one of the most perceptive and insightful pieces was an op-ed by Anne Applebaum all the way back in September 2010 (doesn’t that feel like a long time ago?), which made one simple but important point: thanks to the crisis, the East-West divide, which had dominated intra-European relations since at least the end of World War II, has now been overtaken by the North-South divide. The “North” – represented by Germany, Scandinavia, and some Eastern European economies like Poland and Estonia – are ruled by budget hawks committed to fiscal discipline; the “South” – including Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and perhaps Bulgaria and Hungary – are home to bloated public sectors and seem unable to get their public finances under control. The geography doesn’t match up perfectly, of course, and it’s easy to argue about which countries belong on which side, but the fundamental divide is hard to ignore. And while the two groups aren’t anything like formal alliances, the economic interests within each group are more closely aligned than those across the divide, and hence it’s easy to imagine the major disagreements about how to manage the European economy over the coming years falling more or less along this fault line.

As Applebaum noted at the time, “France floats somewhere in between”. I think this means that France is positioned, if it wanted to, to play something like the role Britain played 100 years ago, able to weigh in – perhaps decisively – on the side of either the North or the South. The analogy isn’t watertight – Britain’s role as balancer was based in its fundamental strength, whereas for France today it’s more about being considerably weaker than Germany but aspiring to be viewed as its neighbour’s equal. (Which, incidentally, is another theme that reappears throughout European history…) But still, in the new North vs. South Europe France could represent the crucial swing vote, and throw some political clout behind the interests of the South, preventing Germany from fully setting the economic agenda for the continent.

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