Greece, Ukraine, and Europe's existential crisis

What a sad commentary that Europe, home of existentialism, should find itself so often in an existential crisis.

Try as Europe might, continental union keeps eluding its grasp. This is something the diplomats who rebuilt the order of things in Napoleon's wake understood all too well.

Napoleon's empire proposed a colossal but elegant solution to the problem of European union. As the artists say: When it doubt, cut it out. Britain could be left to the British, the Balkans to the Ottomans. Only the invasion of Russia violated Napoleon's sense of Europe's true boundaries (see a map of Napoleonic Europe here), and only the invasion of Russia brought Napoleon's Europe crashing down.

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In Europe's present identity crisis, the limited borders of Bonaparte's empire offer a deep and powerful lesson. Mistakes and illusions about the viability of "greater Europe" can be more than costly. They can be devastating.

Consider the continent's latest spasm of panic over two crises. On the one hand, there is the slow-motion destruction of Ukraine; on the other, the much more rapid realization of so-called "Grexit," the Greek departure from the European Union on account of financial default.

For the economic supremacists, a Greek default threatens a chain reaction of calamities, one that culminates at the very heart of the EU system — and the EU's identity. With the Greeks in default and back on the Drachma, Portugal and Spain could be next, and then, who knows?

Europe's ideal identity is above all economic. This vision promises that unity can and must be found beyond politics. But the peripheral disintegration of euro membership is always a contagion waiting to spread. There is no economic logic that permits the EU to kick out one and only one member state. That logic pertains to a kind of solidarity that has no economic rationale. The crisis of Greece is that European unity will be revealed as a political idea after all. And no one is really prepared to deal with the implications of that.

Similarly, the Ukraine crisis calls Europe's whole being into question. In Ukraine, Europeans find an impossible country: one that both does and doesn't belong. Holding Kiev to European standards of economic and political order means freezing Ukraine out of Europe. But including the former Soviet state within the bounds of Europe means attacking Europe's identity at its core, all while reopening the awful question of whether Europe's "internal" affairs affect Russia's core national security interests. The Ukraine crisis reveals that, with or without Greece, Europe is still a political idea at bottom — that is, an idea that must be acted upon politically. And in a terrible reprise of Europe's most traumatic times, it appears that no political choice can protect both European unity and European peace.

Here in the real world, the Greek crisis and the Ukraine crisis are playing out together, and inescapably so. What's more, Europe must accept that it has brought both crises upon itself.

It may well be rash to ask what Napoleon would do. On the other hand, the bounds of Napoleonic Europe provide an even better guide to Europe's insurmountable constraints than the emperor's ultimate failure. It seems likely that the only way for a united Europe to withstand its existential challenge is to maintain conceptually defensible borders — borders that exclude Greece and Ukraine alike.

If this is good news for Russia, which has unabashed designs on both countries, it is bad news for America, which will — yet again — be left holding Europe's bag. Grexit promises a return to the dynamic of Greece after WWII, where a bankrupt Britain had to hand the country's dubious fate to the U.S. In effectively handing Ukraine to Russia, Europe will be handing another burden to America. The financial and military strength of the U.S. will once again be put to the test to underwrite the existential sanity of the European people.

In that sense, the core of Europe will have come a long and sad way from Napoleon's day. European unity is still a political idea in search of a political master, and Europe's democracy is still more of a puzzle than a solution for the question of its identity.