Starting around the 1300s and onwards, both European states and other empires scattered across the globe experienced a rapid change in their structure and development. While Europe swiftly picked up its pace and began industrializing at a much faster rate, becoming one of the strongest powers of the 21st century, other empires such as the Qing, Mughal, and Ottoman empires declined in power. The clearest difference between the two is that Europe was a politically fragmented mass of states in close proximity, while the Qing, Mughal, and Ottoman powers were large masses of land united under multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires. Adam Watson finds that “when a number of political entities are sufficiently involved with one another, they form a system of some kind,” and this indeed happened in Europe through all the different independent states, which he goes on to call “political entities that retain the ability to make external/domestic decisions, but freedom in external decisions is limited by the constraints which involvement in any system imposes.” Other places, rather, ended up evolving into empires, each with “direct administration of different communities from an imperial center,” like the Ming Empire. The main reason that Europe was not able to unify its state system the way Asian empires did is due to the complicated geopolitics caused by Europe’s fragmented geography and the impact it had on the culture and economy that further divided  the land.

 The principal complication in geopolitics was caused by the topography of Europe. It was vastly different to the landscape of the other empires—“there were no enormous plains, or broad and fertile land like those around the Ganges, Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates… instead, Europe’s landscape was much more fractured, with mountain ranges and large forests separating the scattered population centers.” This geological separation helped the natural formation of states and created “a fractionated Europe.” Most importantly, the variegated landscape encouraged the growth of decentralized power, something the other empires did not have. Thus, politically, Europe “came to be partitioned into a series of well-consolidated states” and even when states fought small wars they did nothing but harden the boundaries between the two territories; as Tilly states, “War makes states and states make war.” This was especially true in Europe. The competitive landscape made it unlikely that one state could conquer its neighbors and the ongoing competition fueled an increase in Europe’s technological developments to maintain the balance in power from one state to the next, which became the only way to avoid getting conquered. The constantly shifting political power sparked an arms race throughout the continent.  It made it simply impossible for the land to unite the same way the Asian empires did due to the varied landscape, and by the time the states started gaining the power to conquer their predecessors it was too late—cultural and economic impacts made it impossible without suffering a severe backlash.

As a result of the creation of states due to geopolitics, the culture, language, and customs of the different states were very different. Thus, they were unable to unite in the same way larger empires did. McNeill establishes this using the example of language formation: “Modern French acquired its literary form through the labors of three utterly diverse men: Francois Rabelais, John Calvin, and Michel Eyquem, while English owes its literary definition to Elizabethan writers—William Shakespeare above all, and to the King James Bible. Modern literary German is the creation of Luther’s translation of the Bible, while most of the other tongues of Germanic Europe took form as a by-product of Protestant translations of the Bible.” Using language as an example, it is impossible for the cultures to align even remotely when different people with different values established the basic parts of them. This intellectual pluralism brought about by decentralized power had some side-effects that allowed Europe to start advancing miles faster than the Asian empires: every single nation “was in a position to pursue truth according to its own lights, and such diversity assured the continued and very rapid development of European thought.” In other words, cultural differences kept the states further separated and unable to unite like the Asian empires because it was a vast difference that would not allow for the two states to become one. These intrinsic contrasts in culture, established in even the small things such as language, thus created a huge gap that would not allow the states to unite, and if it was even attempted fights would break out due to clashing cultures, further hardening the state lines created by geopolitics.

The unification of the different states was also unable to occur due to economic linkages brought about by the geopolitically shaped landscape. The economic consequences of this decentralized, largely unsupervised growth was significant because while other empires in Asia were hampered by the bureaucracy, “there existed no uniform authority in Europe which could effectively halt commercial development and no central government whose changes in priorities could cause the rise and fall of a particular industry.” Thanks to how fragmented Europe was, there was no one in Europe to stop the economic growth, and this allowed for rapid technological development. What must be noted about Paul Kennedy, however, is that as a British-born and raised author writing about Great Britain, his writing displays a prominent skew towards Great Britain and as such puts it in a positive light while ignoring the technological developments that occurred elsewhere. However, because trade with other states was such an integral part of their economy, there existed an “agreement on shared values [that] inhibit[ed] the desire to overthrow the international order.” Basically, a self-imposed system of checks and balances was created thanks to the balance of power in Europe that stopped them from unifying the system in the same way as the Asian empire because “no new monarchy could increase its dominions without stirring rivals to seek compensation.” A prime example of this is during the Napoleonic Wars—“At the height of the Napoleonic empire in 1810-1812, France controlled Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and much of Germany, Poland, Croatia, and Slovenia.” However, while France did get incredibly close to conquering Europe, Austria, Prussia, Britain, and Russia were all allied against Napoleon and fought to beat him back until they won and restored balance to Europe. Thus, the European states were unable to unite under a single regime like the Mughal, Qing, or Ottoman empires due to the how the economic impacts of state formation further hardened the system of balance of power.

It was altogether geopolitics and its cultural and economic ramifications that stopped Europe from unifying as the Asian empires did and caused a differentiation in state formation. It stands that if Europe did not have the diverse landscape it has, it is likely that it would all be united under one flag due to how simple it would have been to conquer the entire continent, similar to what other empires did. A historical example is how the Mughals had trouble taking over certain places in India due to geological barriers—a prime example of what effect geology has on conquest. Even further, the hardest part of America to take over was the west, just because of how hard it was to get through the Appalachians. Thus, the impact of geopolitics cannot be denied—if Europe had in fact been one empire due to the lack of geological variety, there is no knowing what the world would be like today.

Bibliography

Agrawal, Nikki, and Mel Cowan. 6 Oct. 2019.

Agrawal, Nikki, and Sarah Willrich. 6 Oct. 2019.

Agrawal, Nikki, and Sofia Ibarra. 6 Oct. 2019.

Kennedy, Paul M. The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. Random House, 1990.

Kissinger, Henry A. Diplomacy. Vol. 1. Simon & Schuster, 1994.

McNeill, William Hardy. A World History. 2nd Ed. Oxford University Press, 1971.

Watson, Adam. The Evolution of International Society: A Comparative Historical Analysis. Routledge, 2010.

Tilly