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Maritime Alps France

Between Menton and Monte Carlo the coast is broken by Cap Martin, between Monte Carlo and Nice by Cap Ferrat, between Nice and Cannes by Cap d'Antibes. The capes are larger and longer as we go west, just as the distances between more important towns grow longer. Although it does not seem so to the tourist, it is much farther from Nice to Cannes than from Nice to Menton. The eastern end of the Riviera is so crowded with things to see, and town follows town in such rapid succession, that you think you have gone a long way from Nice to the Italian frontier. And except for skipping the two larger promontories, railway and tramway alike follow right along the coast. From Nice to Cannes, the tramway is inland from the railway. So is the automobile road. You fly along at a rapid rate, with only rare glimpses of the sea, and pass through few villages until you reach Antibes.

From Nice, from Saint-Paul-du-Var, and from Cagnes you cannot see the Riviera coast beyond Antibes. The Cape, with its lighthouse and fort, is your horizon. This corresponds with history as well as with geography: for the Cap d'Antibes was the old Franco-Italian frontier. It is still in a very real sense a boundary line. The word Riviera, which has kept its Italian form, was applied historically to the coast lands of the Gulf of Genoa. From Antibes to Genoa we had the Riviera di Ponente, and from Genoa to Spezia the Riviera di Levante. Only after Napoleon III exacted the district of Nice as part payment for French intervention in the Italian war of liberation was the term “French Riviera” gradually extended to include the coast far west of Antibes.

What was added to France under Napoleon III has lost its purely Italian character. But it has not gained the stamp of France. From Antibes to Menton, the Riviera is more remarkably and undeniably international than any other bit of the world I have ever seen. Some of the old towns back from the coast are becoming French in the new generation. But along the coast you are not in France until you reach Antibes. You may have thought that you were in France at Menton and Beaulieu and Nice. But the contrast of Antibes and Grasse, which are French to the core, makes you realize that sixty years is not sufficient to destroy the traditions and instincts of centuries.

At Antibes and along the closely built up coast and between Antibes and Cannes, the international atmosphere is by no means lost. It requires the contrast of Cannes with Saint-Raphaël to show the difference between a cosmopolitan and a genuine French watering place. But the French atmosphere begins to impress one at Antibes. A knowledge of history is not needed to indicate that here was the old frontier.

Since the days of the Greeks Antibes has been a frontier fortress. Ruins of fortifications of succeeding centuries show that the town has always been on the same site, on the coast east of the Cape, looking towards Nice. Antipolis was a frontier fortress, built by the Phoceans of Marseilles to protect them from the aggressive Ligurians of Genoa. Nice was an outpost, whose name commemorates a Greek victory over the Ligurians. At the mouth of the Var, from antiquity to modern times, races and religions, building against each other political systems for the control of Mediterranean commerce, have met in the final throes of conflicts the issue of which had been decided elsewhere—and often long before the fighting died out here. Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Greeks and Romans, Romans and Gauls, Gauls and Teutonic tribes, Franks and Saracens, Spanish and French and Italians met at the foot of the Maritime Alps. There was never a time in history when governmental systems or political unities did not have as a goal natural boundaries, and, once having reached the goal, did not feel that security necessitated going farther. Invasions thus provoked counter-invasions.

On sea it has been as on land. Something is acquired. Immediately something more must be taken to safeguard the new acquisition.

All this comes to one with peculiar force at Antibes. You look at Nice from your promontory, and your eye follows the coast from promontory to promontory, and you can picture how the Phoceans, once established at Antibes, were tempted to extend the protective system of Marseilles. You have only to turn around and follow the coast beyond the Estérel to understand how the Ligurians, if they had captured Antibes, would still have felt unsafe. And then your eye sweeps the range of the white Maritime Alps. Hannibal had to cross them to carry the war into Italy. So did Napoleon. And Caesar, to save the Republic from a recurrence of the menace of the Cimbri and Teutoni, brought his armies into Gaul. The Saracens were once on this coast. When they were expelled from it, the French went to Africa as the Romans before them had gone to Africa after expelling the Carthaginians from Europe.

Of the medieval fortress, erected against the Saracens, two square keeps remain. The strategic importance of Antibes during the heyday of the Bourbon Empire is attested by the Vauban fortifications. The high loopholed walls enclosing the harbor have not been maintained intact, but the foundation, a pier over five hundred feet long, is still, after two centuries and a half, the breakwater. The view towards Nice from Vauban's Fort Carré or from the larger tower, around which the church is built, affords the best panorama of the Maritime Alps on the Riviera. Nowhere else on the Mediterranean coast, except from Beirut to Alexandretta or on the Silician plain or in the Gulf of Saloniki, do you have so provoking a contrast of nearby but unattainable snow with sizzling heat. This may not be always true. The day of the aeroplane, as a common and matter-of-fact means of locomotion, is coming.

Looking towards the Alps from the Fort Carré, the donjon of Villeneuve-Loubet and the hill towns of Cagnes and Saint-Paul-du-Var, where we had passed happy days, seem as near as Nice. Farther off on the slope of Mont Férion we could distinguish Tourette and Levens side by side with their castles, and in the foreground Vence. To the left was Tourrettes. Back from the Valley of the Loup was exploration and sketching ground for another season. But just a few kilometers ahead of us, halfway to Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot tempted us. We had driven through this town not mentioned by Baedeker, and had promised ourselves a second visit to the old church of the Knights Templar. But life consists of making choices, and one does not readily turn his back on the Cap d'Antibes. In the town you are just at the beginning of the peninsula whose conical form and unshutinness (is that a word: perhaps I should have used hyphens?) enables you to walk five miles punctuating every step with a new exclamation of delight.

Only we did not walk. Joseph-Marie, who would have been Giuseppe-Maria at Nice, stopped to look over the Artist's shoulder and incidentally to suggest that we might have cigarettes. A veteran of two years at twenty, his empty left sleeve told why he was reformé. Glad to get out of the mess so easily, he explained to us laconically; and now he was eking out his pension by driving a cart for the Vallauris pottery. The express train “burned” (as he put it) the pottery station, and he had come to put on grande vitesse parcels at Antibes. Cannes was a hopeless place for the potters: baskets of flowers always took precedence there over dishes and jugs. The Artist believed that Joseph-Marie's horse could take us around the cape with less effects from the heat than we should suffer, and that for ten francs Joseph-Marie could submit to his boss's wrath or invent a story of unavoidable delay. I agreed. So did Joseph-Marie. If we proved too much heavier than pottery, we would take turns walking. At any rate, the Artist's kit had found a porter.

We took the Boulevard du Cap to Les Nielles, were lucky in finding the garden of the Villa Thuret open, and then let our horse climb up the Boulevard Notre-Dame to the lighthouse on top of La Garoupe, as the peninsula's hill is called. Here the Riviera coast can be seen in both directions. The view is not as extended as that of Cap Roux, for Cannes is shut off by the Cap de la Croisette. But in compensation you have Nice and the hill towns of the Var, and while lacking the clear detail of Cap Ferrat and Cap Martin you get the background of the Maritime Alps which is not visible east of Nice. And the Iles de Lérins look so different from their usual aspect as sentinels to Cannes that it is hard to believe they are the same islands. Near the lighthouse and semaphore a paved path, marked with the stations of the cross, leads to a chapel.

The Villa Thuret is the property of the state, and is used as a botanical nursery for the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. In variety, however, it does not rival the Giardino Hanbury near Menton, and in beauty it is surpassed by the private garden of Villa Eilenroc, near the end of the Cap d'Antibes. These two gardens, the most remarkable of the Riviera, were made by Englishmen who preferred the sun and warmth of the Riviera to their native land. The most wonderful garden on Cap Ferrat is the creation of an American. Cannes was “made” by Lord Brougham. The other important estate of the Cap d'Antibes, Château de la Garoupe, is the property of an Englishman. As at Arcachon and Biarritz and Pau, as at Aix-les-Bains, Anglo-Saxon ownership of villas and German ownership of hotels and the prevalence of Teutons as shopkeepers and waiters prove the passion of men of the north for lands of the south.

Twenty years ago, just after Fashoda, there was a strong current of uneasiness among British residents on the Riviera. The experiences of civilians caught by Napoleon and kept prisoners for years had passed into English history and literature. British consuls were surprised to find that thousands of their compatriots, of whom they had had no previous knowledge, were living all the year round on the Riviera. These people came to make inquiry about what would be done to them if France did declare war suddenly against Great Britain. Would they be given time to leave the country? Fifteen years later the calamity of a sudden interruption of a peaceful existence, basking in the sun, did fall upon foreigners, but statesmen had shuffled the cards around, and this time the civilians caught in the net were Germans and Austrians. The Napoleonic principle still held. Italy could be seen with the naked eye. But none were allowed to pass out. Tourists and residents, subjects of the Central Powers, were arrested and imprisoned on the Iles de Lérins, where they remained five years, many of them in sight of their villas on the coast and the hotels they had built and managed. They stayed longer than Marshal Bazaine, who managed to escape, but not as long as the mysterious Man with the Iron Mask.

One of the keepers at the Antibes lighthouse had been an auxiliary soldier in the fort of Sainte-Marguerite during the early years of the war. He told us that some of the trapped tourists were very restive, but that most of the German civilians who were residents of the Riviera were far from being discontented with their lot. Better a prison on the Ile Sainte-Marguerite than exile from the Riviera! This was better taste and wiser philosophy than we expected of Germans. One could go far and fare worse than an enforced sojourn on one of the loveliest islands of the Mediterranean, whose pine forests are reminiscent of Prinkipo. From 1914 to 1919 life was much harsher beyond those Alps.

Saint-Honorat, the smaller island half a mile from Sainte-Marguerite, was a monastic establishment from the fourth century to the French Revolution. It passed into ecclesiastical hands again in the Second Empire and became a Cistercian monastery. Although the restoration was accomplished with distressing thoroughness forty years ago, some parts of the chapel date back to the seventh century, and a huge double donjon—the dominating feature of the island from the coast—remains from the twelfth-century fortifications. A road, on which are ruins of four medieval chapels, runs round the island. We were unable to visit Sainte-Marguerite and on Saint-Honorat pencil and paper had to be kept out of sight. But I must not wander to another day.

Joseph-Marie liked our tobacco and the horse did not mind stopping en route. It was six o'clock when we reached Juan-les-Pins, only a mile from Antibes on the other side of the cape. Two miles farther along the coast, at Golfe-Juan, where the road turns in to Vallauris, we climbed down from the cart, brushed much dust from our clothes, and started home along the coast road to Cannes. Joseph-Marie waved his empty sleeve in farewell, happy in our promise to look him up some day in Vallauris with a pocketful of cigarettes.

This is the first of fifteen Sublime Strategic Reports (SSRs) covering global trends, regions, and geopolitics. I am going to start off by looking at Europe, defined as the region under the influence of Western Christianity and/or the European Union (not Russia or Turkey, which will be covered in a later Eurasia Report). I am disabling blog comments for this article and all future SSRs – please join the discussion at Sublime Oblivion Forums instead [REGISTER].

The Big Questions

1. Demographic problems: aging, low fertility and Eurabia?
2. The unsustainability of the modern welfare state?
3. Cultural decline & reaction against liberal rationalism?
4. The return of Great Power politics? (e.g. Mearsheimer 1990), & the decline of the EU and growing centrality of Franco-German relations, – or will the EU survive, and if so in what form?
5. National trends: a secure, “flourishing” France; a troubled but powerful Germany; Poland beset on two fronts; marginalized Britain, Spain & Italy, all in decline; Sweden as preeminent Baltic power; on the outskirts, both Russia and Turkey increase their power – realistic?
6. The retreat into authoritarianism and militarism? Europe as a Black Continent?

European Trends

Without much exaggeration, demography is Europe’s central issue for the foreseeable future. Just to keep the labor force constant, the EU needs 1.6mn immigrants annually (current population: 500mn); to maintain a 3:1 ratio of labor force to retirees, it will need 3.1mn immigrants yearly to offset the aging of the population. These kinds of numbers are probably unrealistic due to (justified?) European xenophobia, especially in the east and center.

The root explanation is Europe’s post-1970 fertility collapse, especially pronounced in Germania, the Mediterranean (Spain, Italy, etc), and the Visegrad region (East-Central Europe). It is most severe in Germany and Austria (both TFR = 1.3), where the total fertility rate (TFR) fell below the replacement-level rate of 2.1 children per woman in the early 1970’s; since the Germans have not been reproducing themselves for a full generation now (and have no desire to start doing so, as even the desired TFR is at a low 1.8), they will inevitably fall into a death spiral.

The situation is similar in the Mediterranean nations and Visegrad (TFR around 1.3), with the exception that their fertility falls came a decade and two decades after Germany’s, respectively. However, much like Russia, Visegrad still has chances of effecting a demographic recovery, assuming their fertility collapse was primarily a result of “transition shock” instead of “social modernization”. Much better off are France (TFR = 2.0), the UK (TFR = 1.9), and the Nordic countries like Sweden (TFR = 1.7), whose fertility rates are all within a manageable distance of the replacement level rate.

However, conservatives who fear the coming of a Muslim Europe – “Eurabia” – are going to be happy. That theory rests on the assumptions that a) the size of the Muslim minority in Europe is severely underreported, b) the Muslim minority retains its extreme religiosity, c) “reversion” to Islam will increase, and that d) the high fertility rates of first-generation Muslims and e) high levels of Muslim immigration will continue indefinitely in the face of rising European xenophobia. All of these assumptions are very much open to question. The far likelier possibility is that the trans-European Muslim community will be scapegoated by a declining continent rediscovering its old geopolitical faultlines.

Napoleonic France introduced pensions for civil servants, Bismarck’s Germany invented the social security system, and Sweden developed the modern welfare state in the 1930’s – a system that reached its apogee on the European continent on the back of the post-war economic miracle and demographic expansion. Both have come to an end, and so too may the modern welfare state as we know it.

Due to their fertility crises, Europeans will find it increasingly difficult to maintain their generous welfare states. Sweden will likely soldier on with its “social-democratic welfare state”, given that it lies at the heart of its identity (social mobility, egalitarianism, progressivism); a (relatively) youthful France will also find it manageable to retain the extensive perks, privileges, and niceties of its dirigiste system. Though demographically healthy, Britain has an array of other critical problems that will force it to strip down the bloat and return to its traditionally minimal “liberal welfare state”. In low-fertility Europe, raising the retirement age and cutting down the “corporatist welfare state” to the spartan standards of the earlier 20th century is now the only realistic solution, the alternatives being one or two more decades of decay followed by fiscal and social collapse. The rightist wave sweeping the European elections of 2009 may be a subconscious realization that it’s time for taking responsibility.

The wealth, social solidarity, and geography of European nations means that overpopulation, pollution and climate change will not have quite the same critical impact as in other regions like the Middle East or China – though an inundating Holland, desertifying Spain and burning Greece may beg to differ. (This applies to the period until 2030; after that, all bets are off everywhere).

European Regions

Germany has a robust industrial ecosystem manned by a well-educated population, powered by a triad of coal, natural gas and renewable sources of energy, and underpinned by advanced technologies and a potent machine-building sector. It constitutes Europe’s economic and commercial powerhouse. However, it is artificially reliant on exports to provide the savings needed for its rapidly aging population – short of a mortality crisis, an irreversible problem compounded by the most intractable demographic crisis of any major European nation. This reliance is dangerous, given the imminent waning of globalization. Facing a subpar energy future, the loss of global export markets, and the rediscovery of a conservative nationalism bizarrely married to environmentalism, Berlin will again turn its baleful gaze to East-Central Europe.

In addition to the manifold soft power tools at its disposal, Germany is already beginning to unshackle itself from its post-WW2 military constraints. Though the Bundeswehr is of Cold War vintage with minimal power projection capabilities, Germany has the technologies and industrial potential to once again become a leading European land power. Its status as a “virtual nuclear weapons state” means it has the capability to develop and field a small arsenal of deliverable nuclear weapons within months of commencing a crash program. Thus, Germany has both the dormant potential and the incentives to return to the Reich, expanding into Visegrad to acquire captive markets and to guarantee Russian hydrocarbons supplies – and reigniting its old, paranoia-fueled duel with France for European hegemony.

Unlike in the first half of the 20th century, it is France that will be the more potent competitor this time around. Its fertility rates are the healthiest on the European continent – though its population of 62mn is smaller than Germany’s 82mn, it already has a higher number of annual births. Though they have a restive 10% Muslim minority in the deprived banlieues, French Muslims are culturally more integrated than their co-religionists in Germany or Britain. The French economy is versatile, productive, and robust, suffering little during the 2008 economic crash – though scolded for dirigisme and S&M business regulations that stymie employment, its dirigisme is arguably superior to Germany’s export dependency, the Mediterranean’s fiscal holes, and Britain’s bubble economy.

On the strategic level, France is a powerful independent actor. With 80% of its electricity generation coming from nuclear power, its industrial and residential infrastructure is invulnerable to gas disruptions – be it Russian “energy blackmail” or Ukrainian intransigence. The country is underpopulated relative to the rest of Western Europe. France possesses Europe’s sole fully-autonomous military-industrial complex, producing the whole panoply of weapon classes from helicopter carriers to fighter jets; it has substantial power projection capabilities; and its extensive nuclear infrastructure supports the world’s third largest strategic nuclear stockpile, the bulk of its 300 warheads mounted on MIRVed SLBM’s held on four ballistic missile submarines.

All these factors put it in good stead for a symbiosis with its former North African colonies. Algeria is a major oil and gas producer, while Morocco has 2/3 of the world’s rock phosphate reserves – “a critical component in global fertilizer supply”. Facing a demographic “youth bulge” and shrinking agricultural yields under the stress of global warming and an advancing Saharan desert, the Maghreb nations may feel compelled to offer energy & phosphate supply guarantees to France in exchange for its commitment to a high immigration quota and protection of Muslim rights. Further afield, it has a strong military and neo-colonial presence in energy-rich West Africa. Occupying an enviable geostrategic location from a position of immense strength – demographic, economic, and strategic – there can be little doubt that France will be the predominant European power of the next decades.

On the surface, Britain appears to be a strong contender for European preeminence in the coming decades. It has respectable demographic indicators and, at least so far, a relatively low level of sovereign debt. The island nation occupies the most strategically secure location on the European continent – it has never been successfully invaded since 1066, largely thanks to its efforts to maintain a continental balance of power, spoiling attacks on potential European hegemons, and as a last resort, the English Channel. The island nation hosts significant power projection capabilities and a robust SSBN-based nuclear deterrent (much like France); furthermore, it also maintains a “special relationship” with a United States that shares its fundamental goal of stymieing the rise of a European hegemon. At the same time, London is not averse to profiting from European markets and the pursuit of its neo-colonial interests further abroad, as befits the descendant of an empire on which the sun never set. As the sun sets on Pax Americana, could its British satrapy continue its legacy on the old continent?

The answer is almost certainly not. Despite its ostensible strength and vigor, the United Kingdom faces a set of imminent, interlinked challenges – economic, fiscal, energy, and nationalities – that could not only preclude its rise to preeminence, but put at peril its very existence as a federated state.

Britain has seen accelerating deindustrialization since the neoliberal revolution of 1980’s Thatcherism, culminating in the false boom of the 2000’s driven by construction and finance. At the same time, government spending increased as Britain moved to implement a social-democratic welfare state – partly because of the need to satiate the emerging victims of market fundamentalism, and partly because of a general expansion of state power relative to the citizenry (surveillance, databases, etc). However, it should be noted that unlike in Scandinavia, this development did not lead to higher socio-economic mobility, which remains the lowest in Europe.

Even before the current crisis, government spending (purchases and transfers) was approaching 50% of GDP, with the figure rising to 56% in Scotland, 72% in Wales and 78% in Northern Ireland. With the discrediting of the neoliberal model, soaring budget deficits (12%+ of GDP), plummeting foreign investor confidence, and widespread indebtedness stymying a consumer-led recovery, Britain finds itself locked into a predicament, between the Scylla of inflationary fire and the Charybdis of a painful fiscal retrenchment and deflationary “debt trap”. Though on current trends the former seems to be the more prevalent, the likely triumph of the Conservatives in the 2010 elections may herald a sea change in favor of the fiscal restraint championed by their middle-England electoral base.

This fiscal predicament is compounded by its energy woes, in which the absence of a long-term energy policy, mindless liberalization, and above all the rapid depletion of the North Sea gas and oil fields, may see it enter a period of Third World-style blackouts by the mid-2010’s. Britain’s growing need for gas imports will necessitate costly investments in LNG terminals, put its current account further into the red, and even develop a German-style dependence on Russia. This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – forced into buying expensive energy supplies and suffering from power disruptions, the British economy will go into stagnation or outright decline. This cannot be squared with the level of requisitions needed to support the metastasizing British welfare state, and it will have to give.

Finally, Britain’s latent separatist pressures will come to the forefront – no one wants to remain on a sinking ship. Scotland is a viable nation with a substantial industrial base and still significant North Sea hydrocarbons deposits – given independence, it will resurrect its Auld Alliance with France. Similarly, there will be less enthusiasm for maintaining Northern Ireland on the English dole; once ditched, it will inevitably drift to the hearty embrace of the Republic of Eire. Only Wales is likely to remain within the new Republic of England & Wales (the Queen will have moved to Scotland). Though England will retain the vast bulk of the UK’s population, economic, and military assets, their general degradation during this time period will have relegated it to the status of a secondary European Great Power like Italy or Spain. However, its longer-term prospects are slightly brighter due to its relatively healthy (current) demography and preparedness for global warming.

Not even that can be said about the Mediterranean nations, however, which suffer from all the challenges facing Germany, France and the UK – collapsed fertility rates (TFR = 1.3), social immobility, sclerotic economies, unsustainable welfare states, debt traps, and imminent fiscal collapse thanks to the ECB depriving them of the ability to engineer a currency depreciation (their traditional solution to fiscal crises).

Italy is sinking back into political cronyism, the level of corruption is astounding for a First World nation, and its artisanal manufacturing is being destroyed by Chinese competition. There remain huge gaps between the advanced Nord and the Mafia-riddled, poverty-stricken Mezzogiorno – thus, opportunities for domestic tensions abound. As for Spain, it is facing an excruciating bust as the foreign credit flows pumping up its construction-fueled economy subside; furthermore, it faces an uncertain energy future (despite its impressive expansion into renewables, the scale is still far too small), exponentially-rising damage from global warming, and separatist tensions from the Basque region.

The performance of their education systems (both basic and tertiary), spending on R&D, and levels of corruption, are all far behind their north European neighbors. Too preoccupied with their manifold domestic challenges and isolated by the Alps and the Pyrenees from the North European Plain, these two nations have neither the incentive nor the capability to play a major role in future European power politics. They are likely to succumb to an accelerating, self-reinforcing decay, eventually culminating in the emigration of millions of young Spaniards and southern Italians to France and the US (being whites, xenophobia will not play a big role).

Finally, there are two European nations that are currently marginal, but may assume a much more prominent role in future decades – Poland and Sweden. Let us start with the former. Poland has a balanced, protected, and fast-growing economy that was little affected by the 2008 crisis (relatively speaking); a strong sense of national unity; and although it suffered from a sharp fall in fertility from the early 1990’s along with the rest of the socialist bloc, it may have a chance of recovery for the same reasons as Russia, i.e. because there is evidence to suggest its demographic decline was a result of the “transition shock”, i.e. not permanent. However, the likelihood of that occuring is smaller because a) its desired fertility (around 2.1) correlates with those of the low-fertility Med nations, whereas Russia’s is higher (around 2.5), and b) its transition shock was much less pronounced than Russia’s, but unlike Russia from 2006 it has yet to see any firm signs of demographic recovery. And although it does not have Russia’s mortality crisis, the main impact of that will be to put more pressure on the Polish pensions system, on which it already spends more than 10% of GDP (i.e. a figure similar to the rest of “old Europe”).

As such, it is hard to give credence to credence to George Friedman’s (Stratfor) prediction that Poland will become a Great Power any time soon. That said, as the strongest barrier between Germany and Russia – and hence a bulwark against the emergence of a European hegemon – much of the rest of the continent, especially France, England, and Sweden, as well as the US, will find it in their interests to extend technical and military aid. And should the resurgent Russia Empire collapse and wither back into its Muscovite heartlands, the recreation of a modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, encompassing much of Visegrad and western Ukraine, beckons.

With its cold climate and poor internal communication lines, the Scandinavian Peninsula’s population was always concentrated along the southern coasts. This is where Sweden first emerged as a maritime Power based on riverine trade within the Hanseatic / Baltic region – and that is where its modern interests lie. It naturally dominates energy-rich Norway and its maritime traditions enable a flexible military posture in Europe, while Finland serves as an excellent buffer against Russian expansionism. Sweden exerts financial domination over the Baltic nations, maintains friendly relations with NATO, and hosts an advanced military-industrial complex. As such, Swedish power is incommensurate with its small population, though overall it remains, and will remain, a minor player. Global warming will open up more of its lands to sustainable settlement, which coupled with its respectable demography and immigration from climatically-stricken zones from Europe and farther abroad will ensure the continued growth of its relative power. Finding a natural ally in Poland to contain German ambitions and Russian revanchism, the two could prove to be a potent combination.

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