Officially, about the end of Europe

An increasing number of European officials and analysts are threatening with the end of the European Union, whereas a few years ago that kind of statements was inconceivable.

The migrant crisis has become a major issue for the European Union, which is facing the biggest influx of immigrants since WW2.

The president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, yesterday said, in the European Parliament, that the European Union only has two months to deal with the migrant crisis, or else face the collapse of its passport-free Schengen zone.

"The March European Council (summit) will be the last moment to see if our strategy works. If it doesn't, we will face grave consequences such as the collapse of Schengen", Tusk warned yesterday, while also asking member states to apply the strategy agreed upon in the December EU summit, which stipulated the mandatory refugee quotas.

Moreover, Donald Tusk said the EU would "fail as a political project" if it could not control its external borders properly.

Austria recently announced that it has suspended the Schengen agreement, and everyone that wants to enter the country must show ID at the border. The chancellor in Vienna has explained that if the European Union (EU) can not secure its outside borders, then the EU member states have to reinforce their border security themselves. Norway, Sweden and Denmark have also suspended Schengen this week and have reinstated border controls.

Last week, the president of the European Commission (CE), Jean-Claude Juncker, said that the existence of the Euro would be meaningless if the Schengen space were to disappear. "Stopping the massive influx of refugees represents a priority, first and foremost for Germany, the most powerful economy of the 28 EU member states and the main destination for the newcomers to the European territory", Juncker further said, and he added that he can not accept for the relocation of the 160,000 refugees not to be implemented.

"Europe is currently returning to the Middle Ages or the early modern era, before the Industrial Revolution, a period full of dizzying incoherence- empires, kingdoms, confederations, minor states, [...]. It is a picture of a radically fractured world, as shown by the maps of the time", Robert Kaplan recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Online.

He says, in "Saturday's essay" published by the WSJ, called "Europe's new medieval map", that the separations in Europe had been visible for decades, since back when the EU was making efforts to expand its borders and its practical approach: "There were countries within the EU and outside it; countries within the EU Schengen space and outside it; countries that were capable of managing the financial rigor in the Eurozone and those that weren't.

But the deep roots of these divisions, in the history and geography of the continent, are less known.

The sturdy core of modern Europe approximates in large measure the Carolingian Empire founded by Charlemagne in the ninth century. The first Holy Roman Emperor, he ruled the lands from the North Sea down through the Low Countries and radiating outward to Frankfurt, Paris, Milan and so on. The weaker cousins of this Europe extend along the Mediterranean, from the Iberian Peninsula to southern Italy and the historically less-developed Balkans, heirs to the Byzantine and Ottoman traditions.

During the decades following World War II, this divide was suppressed because of Europe's relative isolation from its "near abroad"-that is, from the regions of North Africa and Eurasia that, for centuries, did so much to shape the distinctive character of the continent's periphery. Today that wider geography can no longer be ignored, as Europe's various regions adopt very different attitudes to the threats posed by Russia's bullying under President Vladimir Putin, the flood of refugees from the Middle East and the latest terrorist outrages at home and abroad.

The centralization imposed for decades by the EU and its distant, unrepresentative bureaucracy hasn't created a unitary Europe. Indeed, it has created a powerful backlash across the continent, one that the EU can survive only by figuring out how better to establish its legitimacy among its diverse nations".

In Kaplan's opinion, Europe's geographical defenses from the post-war period no longer work: "When the great mid-20th-century French geographer Fernand Braudel wrote his classic work on the Mediterranean, he didn't treat the sea itself as Europe's southern border. That, he suggested, was the Sahara. Today, as if to prove him right, migrant caravans assemble across North Africa, from Algeria to Libya, for the demographic invasion of Europe proper. The Balkans, too, have resumed their historic role as a corridor of mass migration toward Europe's center, the first stop for millions of refugees fleeing the collapsed regimes of Iraq and Syria".

"Europe thus now finds itself facing an unhappy historical irony", the WSJ editorialist writes, who further says that "the decades in which it was able to develop its high ideals of universal human rights, including the right of the distressed to seek havens in Europe, was made possible by the oppressive regimes that once held sway on its periphery. The Arab world was slammed shut for decades by prison states whose dictator-wardens kept their people in order. Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Assad family in Syria, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya-they allowed Europe to have its idealistic cake and eat it, too.", Kaplan further writes, quoted by Mediafax.

The author further says: "Even worse to the European unity, geography and history have conspired to make some regions of the continent more vulnerable to the flood of migrants and refugees than others. As Germany and parts of Scandinavia lay down a very tentative welcome mat, Central European countries like Hungary and Slovenia erect new razor-wire fences. The Balkans, virtually separated from the rest of Europe by war and underdevelopment in the 1990s, have now been dealt another blow by the anarchy in the Middle East. At the southeastern extremity of Europe, Greece, once a poor Ottoman province, has seen its economic crisis exacerbated by its unlucky position as the gateway for hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing the Arab world's turmoil".

"Another critical factor in the period of relative stability now coming to an end in Europe was the geopolitical role played by Russia", says Robert Kaplan, who mentions that "during the Cold War, the Soviet Union was an obvious strategic threat, but it was a threat well-managed by the U.S."

The author further writes: "Today, needless to say, Russia is very much back as a strategic player in Europe. If you were a Pole or a Romanian in the 1990s, Russia was conveniently weak and chaotic, and membership in NATO and the EU held out the prospect of lasting peace and prosperity. The strategic horizon is very different now: The future of the European enterprise appears uncertain, and a revived Russia has annexed Crimea, overrun eastern Ukraine and again threatens your own borders.

In this context we may be witnessing a remarkable reversal of Cold War alliances. Europe is again redividing into halves, but this time it is Eastern Europe that wants to draw closer to the U.S. because it increasingly doubts that NATO alone will be an effective defensive barrier against Russia. Meanwhile, the countries of Western Europe, worried about the tide of refugees and terrorist attacks at home, seek to draw closer to Russia (the Ukraine crisis notwithstanding) as a hedge against the chaos emanating from Syria.

Putin knows that geography and raw power-both military and economic-are still the starting point for asserting national interests. Europe's elites take a very different view.

After centuries of bloodshed, they have largely rejected traditional power politics.

To maintain peace, they have instead placed their hopes on a regulatory regime run by the post-national technocrats of Brussels. In their minds, the continent's divisions could be healed by the social-welfare state and a common currency. Distinctive national identities shaped by centuries of historical and cultural experience would have to give way to the European superstate, whatever its toll on the political legitimacy of the EU among the diverse nations of Europe.

In the U.K. and much of Western Europe, there is now a backlash against the overreaching of Brussels, and it is finding powerful expression in domestic politics. Social-welfare policies once touted as a balm for the continent's divisions have acted as a drag on national economies, and this stagnation has provided, in turn, the backdrop for nationalist (sometimes reactionary) politics and rising hostility to refugees".

As the EU continues to fracture, this power vacuum could create a 21st-century equivalent of the late Holy Roman Empire: a rambling, multiethnic configuration that was an empire in name but not in fact, until its final dissolution in 1806, Kaplan further says, and he added that there still is no alternative to American leadership in Europe: "For the U.S., a Europe that continues to fracture internally and to dissolve externally into the fluid geography of Northern Africa and Eurasia would constitute the greatest foreign-policy disaster since World War II. The success of the EU over many decades was a product of American power, stemming from the victory over Nazi Germany. For all its imperfections, the EU, even more than NATO, has been the institutional embodiment of a postwar Europe that is free, united and prosperous".

"The decades when we thought of Europe as stable, predictable and dull are over", says Kaplan, who mentions "The continent's map is becoming medieval again, if not yet in its boundaries then at least in its political attitudes and allegiances that the map of the continent is once again becoming medieval, if not through borders, at least through attitudes and political alliances.