Europe As An Idea and An Identity

Europe as an Idea and an Identity

Heikki Mikkeli

EUROPE AS AN IDEA AND AN IDENTITY

Also by Heikki Mikkeli AN ARISTOTELIAN RESPONSE TO RENAISSANCE HUMANISM Jacopo Zabarella on the Nature of Arts and Sciences THE HISTORY OF HYGIENE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Europe as an Idea and an Identity Heikki Mikkeli Junior Research Fellow Academy of Finland University of Helsinki Finland

Consultant Editor: Jo Campling

First published in Great Britain 1998 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–67163–5 First published in the United States of America 1998 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–21039–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mikkeli, Heikki. Europe as an idea and an identity / Heikki Mikkeli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–21039–6 1. Europe—History. 2. Europe—Civilization. 3. Nationalism– –Europe. 4. Europe—Relations. I. Title. D104.M49 1997 940—dc21 97–27133 CIP © Heikki Mikkeli 1998 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 07

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Contents vii x

Preface Acknowledgements PART I 1 2

EUROPE AS AN IDEA

The Mythological and Geographical Roots of Europe

3

Christendom and Europe in the Middle Ages

17

The Balance of Power and the Quest for Peace

33

Nationalism, Federalism and the United States of Europe

59

5

A New Hope Emerging: the Interwar Period

91

6

Towards Maastricht: the Realization of the European Union

3 4

PART II 7

109

EUROPEAN IDENTITY

The Border of Expansion: Europe and America

135

8

The Border of Defence: Europe and Russia

157

9

The Question of Central Europe: Europein-Between?

177

The Historical Principles of European Identity

195

11

European Political and Cultural Identities

213

12

Writing European History

235

10

245 257

Bibliography Index v

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Preface This book is about the idea of Europe, and historical thinking on the essence of the European. Most recent literature on European integration seems to assume that the move towards unification since the Second World War marks a completely new era in the history of Europe. In the political and economic sense this is, of course, to a great extent true, but in the philosophical sense the situation is more complex. For people have been writing about Europe and Europeanism for centuries already, and there are thus some interesting points for comparison with the discourse on Europe of the present day. In a recent work Gerard Delanty makes a distinction between ideas, identity and realities in an attempt to trace the process by which Europe was born, first as a cultural idea and later as a conscious political identity. In recent times Europe has also become a geopolitical reality (Delanty, 1995a). Unlike Delanty, I shall be concentrating specifically on ideas about Europe and past thinking on the European identity. I shall therefore be devoting little space to the realpolitik history of Europe. This is partly because the political history of Europe is at the moment far more familiar to many than the ideas on Europe put forward over the centuries. Harmut Kaelble suggests that European integration has reached a point where the earliest philosophies on the idea of Europe and Europeanism no longer have anything in common with the present day. The political and economic situation having radically changed, the idealistic dreams of a United States of Europe entertained in former years are no longer relevant in an age demanding new attitudes and approaches (Kaelble, 1996). But is the issue as simple as that? For we may, in my opinion, well claim that study of even vii

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the earliest visions of European integration and union may provide the key to an understanding of the discourse on Europe today. Iver B. Neumann, in a work presenting Russian views on Europe, proves that the period since the downfall of socialism has quickly turned to ideas such as those prevailing in nineteenth-century Russia (Neumann, 1996). Similarly, the ongoing debate in Western Europe, fired by the principles of democracy, citizenship and subsidiarity, bears echoes of the arguments already put forward in the polemics on federalism of the 1860s and 1870s. It may also be claimed that when the Europeans encountered the Indians of the New World at the turn of the sixteenth century, the people of the Old World were faced with the issue of difference and ‘otherness’ – an idea very similar to that posed by Islam in Europe today. The arguments raised in this historical debate were naturally of a theoretical nature and did not even attempt to solve practical political problems in the way that many of today’s philosophies do. Yet the historical debate is fascinating in that it attacks many of the fundamental questions that will have to be answered by politicians in the European Union both today and in the future. Examples such as this are, to my mind, proof that a familiarity with even the earliest concepts of Europe is important if we are to understand the situation at the present moment, whatever we may personally feel about European integration. This book is divided into two sections, the first of which (Chapters 1–6) is the more or less chronological story of Europe as an idea. It is primarily concerned with the contexts in which the subject of Europe has been raised at different periods, and with the aims which the calls for unity sought in their day to serve. The second part of the book (Chapters 7–12), arranged according to theme, examines certain issues that are vital to the European identity and that have,

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particularly in the past few years, been in the focus of attention. It thus takes a look at the eastern and western border of Europe, the meaning of ‘otherness’ in defining what is European, the grounds for speaking of a common European identity and its position vis-à-vis national and regional identities. The first section of the book outlines the trend in the political integration of Europe, i.e. historical views on the forms of and potential for Europe union. The second part, by contrast, is concerned above all with the borders of Europe, in both the geographical and, especially, the psychological sense. The models for integration presented in the first part are thus subjected to critical scrutiny in the second: are the ideals guiding the integration of Europe sufficiently sustainable under the conflicting pressures of different European identities? Chapter 12 is a survey summarizing the way the history of Europe has been and could be written in the future. From which perspective should this history be viewed: the national, European or global?

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to many friends and colleagues whose advice and criticism of drafts of this book have been crucial to its completion. Professors Anto Leikola, Hannes Saarinen, Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Suvanto from the University of Helsinki have generously shared their learning and given me encouragement. My colleagues at the Renvall Institute for Historical Research provided the companionship I needed to see me through a project that at times seemed boundless. I am also grateful to Gerard Delanty for reading through the manuscript. Responsibility for errors of fact and judgement of course remains mine. The financial aid from the Academy of Finland made the planning of the earlier Finnish version of the book possible. It has always been a memorable pleasure to deal with Rauno Endén from the Finnish Historical Society. I am also indebted to my editor Jo Campling who has given me valuable advice throughout the project. I am grateful to the Finnish Literature Information Centre for giving financial aid for the translation of my book. My translator Susan Sinisalo worked effectively and had more patience with me than I dared to hope. My mother Anna-Liisa Mikkeli has constantly given me support throughout the various stages of this book. However, my greatest debt is to my family. My wife Jaana Iso-Markku and our children, Antti and Outi, have shown me the joys of life at times when I myself have been too busy to notice them.

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Part I Europe as an Idea

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1 The Mythological and Geographical Roots of Europe THE ABDUCTION OF EUROPE In ancient times, the term ‘Europe’ had two main contexts: a mythological and a geographical. Various hypotheses have been proffered for the etymology of the word itself (Bühler, 1968). The Greek word eurus means ‘broad’, so that Zeus europa is Zeus the broadminded. The feminine form europa is believed to have signified a woman with a beautiful, broad face and big eyes. According to conjectures that have subsequently been criticized, the words ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ have their roots in the Akkadian language of Mesopotamia, where asu and acu mean ‘rising’ and erib and erebu ‘entering’. The former would thus denote sunrise, the Orient, and the latter sunset, the Occident. No unchallengeable definition of the word ‘Europe’ has, however, so far been proposed (Dombrowski, 1984; Milani, 1986). The conception of Europe as a beautiful woman is a feature familiar from ancient mythology. Hesiod (c. 770 BC), in line 357 of his Theogony (History of the Gods), gives the genealogy of the Greek gods and mentions Europa as the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, mother of all rivers, and Asia as one of her sisters. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses (II: 858), refers to Europe as the daughter of Agenor, himself the son of the nymph Libya and Poseidon. The best-known of the mythical legends attached to Europe is, however, the one describing Europa as the daughter of Phoenix, 3

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one of Agenor’s sons – a genealogy also subscribed to in Homer’s Iliad (XIV: 321 ff). This story also incorporates the famous tale of the abduction of Europa, according to which the Cretan god Zeus abducts Europa, daughter of the King of the Phoenicians, in the form of a white bull and swims with her on his back to the island of Crete. Zeus was in love with Europa and together they begot Minos, builder of the famous Cretan labyrinth, Rhadamanthus and Sarpedon, who all, on their deaths, acted as judges in the underworld. Europa’s brother Cadmus is said to have set off for Crete in search of his sister and returned with the letters of the alphabet which, according to the legend, the Phoenicians had just invented. The Europa myth is reputed to have told of the feud between Greece and Troy. The Trojans, according to the legend, had stolen Io, daughter of Argos, from the Greeks and the abduction of Europa was thus a form of revenge. The story of the abduction of Europa has inspired numerous artists over the centuries. While the figures of Europa and the bull became part of the stock of ancient mythology, they also provided the archetypical scene for numerous frescoes and paintings on vases (Guthmüller, 1992). The legend of the abduction of Europa also provided inspiration for many later classical writers. In the second century BC the Sicilian poet Moschus wrote a poem entitled Europeia in which he links the abduction of Europa with the feud between the two continents: Europa, the virgin daughter of Phoenix, dreamt that two continents did battle on her account, the continent of Asia and the continent which lay opposite; and they took the form of two beautiful women. One was of foreign appearance while the other looked like a woman from her own country and held on more tightly to the girl as if she were her own daughter, claiming that it was she who had borne

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her and brought her up. However, the other seized her with her strong hands and dragged her away while she herself offered no resistance: this woman maintained that Europa was hers, that she was a present with which she had been honoured by Zeus, the protector. (Moschus, Europa, 6–15; quoted in Granarolo, 1992: 426) THE GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION OF EUROPE AND THE CONTINENTAL RIFT In addition to its mythological background Europe was in classical times understood as a geographical term distinguishing it from the two other known continents, Asia and Africa. The Homeric hymn dating from the seventh century was already using the word Europe for the first time in a clearly geographical context. The Hymn to Apollo says, ‘and as many as dwell on fertile Peloponnesos, and on Europe and throughout the seagirt isles’ (quoted in Granarolo, 1992: 426). This would appear to refer to the division of Greece into three parts, in which case Europe would mean the northern part of the Greek continent opposite Asia (later Asia Minor). The ancient Greeks gradually became better acquainted with their local geography and the coasts of the Mediterranean. For centuries it was nevertheless considered a foolhardy act to venture outside the Heraclean Pillars (Gibraltar) where the Titan Atlas bore the heavens on his shoulders. In an ode to Zeus composed in honour of the winners of the Nemean Games the poet Pindar (c. 520–c. 445) warned sailors against venturing beyond Gadeira (later Cadiz) into the unknown darkness, urging them instead to turn their sails towards the safe shores of ‘Europe’. Europe had thus expanded for Pindar to take in the whole of the known northern coast of the Mediterranean.

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The Greek historian Herodotus (484–406) wrote in his History that his contemporaries divided the globe into three parts: Europe, Asia and Libya (Africa). He nevertheless wondered at this division: the three regions differing so greatly in size (Herodotus, The Histories, I, Book 4, Chapter 42). The world had previously been divided into only two parts, east and west, Libya (Africa) being merely a subdivision of Asia. Only a generation before, Hecataeus of Miletus had still been dividing the world into two, yet Herodotus was already clearly in favour of a tripartite division. No one has ever determined whether or not there is a sea either to the east or to the north of Europe. All we know is that it is equal to Asia and Libya combined. Another thing that puzzles me is why three distinct women’s names should have been given to what is really a single landmass, and why too the Nile and the Phasis – or according to some, the Maeotic Tanais and the Cimmerian Strait – should have been fixed upon for the boundaries. Nor have I been able to learn who it was that first marked the boundaries or where they got the names from. (Herodotus, The Histories, 1972: 285) It appears from this quotation that ‘Europe’ already meant far more to Herodotus as a concept that it had done to earlier writers. He also puzzled over the word’s etymology and connotations. The Europe of Herodotus was also much larger than in previous centuries, bordering in the north on the North Sea, in the east on the Don (‘the Maeotic Tanais’), the Bosporus (‘the Cimmerian Strait’) and the Sea of Azov. The Europe described by him was nevertheless still clearly smaller than the geographical Europe known today (Amiotti 1986; Mora, 1986). Herodotus, however, failed to see why the globe, being ultimately a single entity, needed to be divided

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into three parts that were, to crown it all, named after three women. Nor did he know the etymology of the word Europe, but he commented in a few lines on the story of the abduction of Europa. This would make Europa a native of Asia, but – and this was even more important – because Crete did not, according to his classification, belong to Europe, linking its name with Greece and continental Europe was in his opinion illogical. Herodotus nevertheless felt it was wisest to keep to the terms already in common use in his day. EAST AND WEST: BARBARISM AND CIVILIZATION Dividing the world into continents was for the Greeks also a way of setting themselves above what they considered to be the inferior cultures of Africa and, especially, Asia. In this distinction the concept of barbarism occupied a central role. The Greek word barbaros meant a mumbler – a person unable to speak Greek. But the inability to speak Greek indicated not only ignorance of the language but also lack of reason. The ability to speak intelligibly and to form urban communities was for the Greeks the crucial factor distinguishing rational man from lower creatures. The barbarians of other regions lacked skill in both, because their societies differed from the city states of the Greeks. Herodotus made this classification into Hellenes and Barbarians in the preface to the first volume of his History (Pagden, 1986: 15–21). Later, in the Middle Ages, the term ‘barbarian’ acquired a different dimension, the barbarians being equated with non-Christians. ‘Barbarian’ became almost a synonym for ‘pagan’ (paganus). The barbarians thus differed from the inhabitants of Europe on two scores: they were non-Christian and inhuman, on a par with animals (Dauge, 1981; Jones, 1971). The vital thing about this use of the term ‘barbarian’ was that

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the opposition ‘despotic east’ and ‘freedom-loving west’ so familiar to us had already been born, and along with it of course the legitimate right to spare no means in defending the ‘free’ western world against the barbarians. Comparison of the different continents and their inhabitants was a recurring theme in Greek literature. Hippocrates’ Airs, Waters, Places written in the fifth century BC was a continuation of this tradition. It also made a clear contrast between the Hellenes and the barbarians, the fundamental dichotomy being one of east and west, Asia and Europe. The differences between these regions were partly due to the climate, which affected the quality of the mind, but partly to the political conditions. It is, however, noticeable that Airs, Waters, Places does not on all counts place the Europeans, by which Hippocrates primarily meant the Greeks, ahead of the Asians. According to him, everything grew better in Asia, the land was more cultivated and the customs of the people more restrained and polite. The reason for this, as for the lethargy and timidity of the Asians, lay in the temperate climate. They were not as warlike as the Europeans, and more placid, again a feature attributable to the mild climate (‘Airs, Waters, Places’, in Lloyd, 1987: 159–60). Hippocrates also recognized differences within the Asian and European peoples, which he claimed to be caused by the different topography and climate. He was not, however, adverse to drawing conclusions on the Europeans in general, even though they differed more in appearance from one another than from the Asians. He described European customs as follows: A variable climate produces a nature which is coupled with a fierce, hot-headed and discordant temperature, for frequent fears cause a fierce attitude of mind whereas quietness and calm dull the

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wits. Indeed, this is the reason why the inhabitants of Europe are more courageous than those of Asia. Conditions which change little lead to easy-going ways; variations to distress of body and mind. Calm and an easy-going way of living increase cowardice; distress and pain increase courage. That is one reason for the more warlike nature of Europeans. But another cause lies in their customs. They are not subjects of a monarchy as the Asiatics are and, as I have said before, men who are ruled by princes are the most cowardly. (‘Airs, Waters, Places’, in Lloyd, 1987: 167) The easy-going ways of the Asian did not, therefore, have much to commend them in the eyes of the authors of Airs, Waters, Places, tending to be symptoms more of a weakness of mind and lethargy compared with the more hot-headed Europeans. Finally the writer made a comparison of European peoples living in different places. He stressed that the people of the mountainous regions were larger, sturdier and of a bolder disposition than the inhabitants of the lowlands. This Hippocratic work was no doubt familiar to Aristotle, too, when in Chapter 7 of Politics, he drew an interesting contrast between the Europeans and the Asians, with the Greeks somewhere in between. In speaking of Europe, Aristotle was probably referring to the northern regions of Greece, especially the area round the Caspian Sea. Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organization, and are incapable of ruling over others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which

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is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent. Hence it continues free, and is the best-governed of any nation, and, if it could be formed into one state, would be able to rule the world. (Aristotle, Politics, 1327b 23–33; in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 1984: 2107) Aristotle thus ascribed to the Greeks the best traits of both the Asians and the Europeans and regarded them as potentially capable of ruling the whole world (Vanotti, 1986). Generally speaking, the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ did not bear any great political meaning for the Greeks, except perhaps in the writings of Isocrates (who died in 338 BC) who, in speaking of the opposition between Persia and Greece, likened the former to Asia and the latter to Europe (Hay, 1968: 3). THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GEOGRAPHICAL BORDERS OF EUROPE Was the Roman Empire the first European major power? The answer is no, for while it was a major power indeed, it was more of a global superpower than a European major power. The Roman conquests shifted the balance of Europe further west along the Mediterranean as Rome became the political centre of world power instead of Athens. The ethnocentricism of Rome was founded on the idea not of a united Europe but of Rome as the centre of the world. The Roman Empire was the first major power to encompass most of Europe, but Rome cannot be described as a European realm. For the empire centred on Rome depended on control of the trading routes around the Mediterranean, and it was specifically a maritime empire consisting of parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Nor was Roman civilization particularly European, and

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it became even less so as time went on (Zecchini, 1986; Grattarola, 1986). One reason for this was the Hellenistic view of the whole inhabited world as a civilized community (oecumene) and of a unity taking in all mankind. Accordingly, the human community was not to be confined by any geographical borders, and cultural influences did in fact flow, especially from east to west, within the Roman Empire. The philosophical heritage of the East and numerous oriental mystery religions found their way into Roman and Hellenic society. These traditions were not completely severed even by the fall of the Roman Empire, and features of them survived in, for example, the Christian teachings of universality and, say, the cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century (Barraclough, 1963: 5–6). The Aeneid of the poet Virgil (70–19 BC) likewise told of the mythical origins of the Roman Empire. In it he traced the roots of Rome right back to Troy, regarding the empire as a pillar of civilization transferred from east to west. In the Middle Ages this mythical background led to the belief that the Trojans had founded many of the European cities, and many of the royal houses, such as those of the Tudors and Habsburgs, were later to argue the legitimacy of their rule by historical roots stretching all the way back to Troy. Europe did not as such play much of a role in this historical tradition founded on the noble past of the Roman Empire, the opposition being more one between east and west, the former gradually becoming subordinate to the latter (Delanty, 1995a: 21). During the Roman era Europe was not, therefore, an ideological concept, the term being used above all in a geographical context. In the closing years of the pre-Christian era the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (c. 60 BC–c. 20 AD), who also lived in Rome, wrote a work in 17 volumes called Geographica giving a closer description of Europe than any previous work

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on the subject. Strabo began his account of the continents with Europe, it being the most varied in its topography and the most suitable for the development of man and societies. Europe’s strengths also, in his opinion, helped the other continents to develop. Added to this, the whole continent was inhabited, apart from some small, cold areas north of the Sea of Azov and around the River Don. As regards its shape, Europe was the most irregular of all three continents. It encompassed, so Strabo believed, the Iberian peninsula, the Celtic area between the Pyrenees and the Rhine, and Britannia. In the east it extended to the Danube valley. The Romans therefore, he claimed, commanded almost all of Europe apart from the most northerly corners. Strabo was not yet aware of the existence of Scandinavia, believing that the Baltic lands ended with the ocean. The valleys of Europe had a moderate climate and peace-loving inhabitants, but the mountainous regions produced brave warriors, or so Strabo said. These views appear to reflect those propounded in the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places. But since the inhabitants of the valleys constituted the majority of the continent’s population, they were, according to Strabo, able to rule in peace, as the Greeks had done before them and the Romans after them. For this reason Europe was also self-sufficient in times of peace and war alike. It was rich in minerals and food, needing to import spices and jewels at the most. The continent had plenty of cattle but only few wild beasts. In the following century the Roman Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD ) wrote Historia naturalis, the third and fourth volumes of which were dedicated to Europe. Pliny divided the continents in the by now familiar way, into Europe, Asia and Africa, announcing that he would deal with Europe first because its inhabitants had conquered other countries and were generally superior. His text nevertheless lacked the former

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clear contrast between Europe versus Asia and Africa. Nor did Pliny compare the European and Asian peoples according to their characteristic traits or political systems in the manner still prevailing in the Hippocratic Writings. Nor did he view the expansion of the Roman Empire specifically as a European phenomenon (den Boer, 1994: 18–19). Just how ignorant people were of the borders of Europe at that time is further revealed by Pliny’s work. He knew nothing of Scandinavia, and even in the second century AD Ptolemy still, in speaking of Europe, conceived of Scandinavia as an island. Ptolemy, one of the finest cartographers of antiquity in the first century AD, did indeed have some idea of where the borders of Europe ran, but he achieved little fame in his own day. Far more popular as a geographer was Solinus, whose treatises on the borders and scale of Europe were nevertheless far more confused (Hay, 1968: 5–6). The Roman Empire was largest in the days of the ruler Trajan in the year 117. At that time Roman might centred on the Mediterranean, on the sea known to the Romans as ‘our sea’ (mare nostrum). This was in itself no exaggeration, for in its heyday the Roman Empire encircled the Mediterranean in its entirety. The shipping routes were quicker trading routes than the roads, and faster too. Another concept associated with this period was the pax romana, the period of close on two centuries during which the Romans no longer sought to conquer new territories but concentrated instead on ruling those already in their power. Polybius, who travelled widely in the mid-second century BC, could thus write that Rome had annexed almost the whole of the inhabited world (oikumene or orbis terrarum, the terrestrial orb) (Voigt, 1960: 151–71; Fischer, 1957). After the split of the Roman Empire in 395 the eastern part and its capital, Constantinople, became increasingly oriental and Greek-speaking. The term

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‘Europe’ was used to refer more and more to the western part, just as the idea of the Empire became associated more with the eastern, Byzantine part. Thus West and East came more and more clearly to refer to the two halves of the Roman Empire. Whereas the eastern part adhered increasingly to the tradition of imperial Rome, the identity of the western part began to be founded on Latin Christianity. Little by little Europe and the West became synonymous with Christendom (Delanty, 1995a: 23). NOAH’S SONS AND THE DIVISION OF THE WORLD The Christian exegetics of late antiquity presented a theme of interest to the European ideal, the existence of which grew in the Middle Ages as the term ‘Europe’ gradually came to be equated with Western Christianity. The ninth chapter of Genesis tells the story of Noah’s three sons and their descendants after the flood. The three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, left the ark and Ham became the father of Canaan. According to the story of creation, all the people in the world are descended from Noah’s sons. Noah, says Genesis, drank of the wine and became drunk, whereupon his son Ham saw his father’s genitals and told his two brothers. Being decent boys, Shem and Japheth fetched a cloak and placed it over their father, but with their faces turned away so that they would not see their father’s nakedness. When he awoke, Noah cursed Ham and all who were born to him. The story of Noah’s sons gradually merged with the pagan story of the division of the world into three continents. The Jewish scholar Josephus had already spotted the link between the stories in the first century, but not until the fourth century did the exegetics of the Church Fathers Augustine and Jerome give any real impetus to the alliance. In his influential work De

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civitate Dei (City of God) Augustine speaks on the one hand of the division of the world and on the other hand of Noah’s sons and their descendants, so the two stories were easily confused. Augustine also meditated on the old division of the world into two, but decided it was impossible. Of the three sons of Noah, Shem and Japheth were associated with the Jews and the Greeks (Augustine, City of God, Book XVI, Chapters 2 and 17). In Jerome’s commentary on the Biblical story of creation Shem, Japheth and Ham were likewise associated with the Jews (Asia), the Greeks (Europe) and Africa. The alliance between Noah’s sons and the tripartite division of the pagan world was portrayed most clearly in the text of St Eucher, Bishop of Lyons, written around the middle of the fifth century, where he explicitly proved how the world was divided among the sons of Noah (Hay, 1968: 13). Ironically, some medieval Christians claimed that the ancient Greeks had assimilated the tripartite division, in their opinion of divine origin, from the book of Genesis. Volume 14 of the work Etymologiarum sive Originum written by Isidore of Seville in 636 and dedicated to the division of the world gave what was already a full account of it with references to the writings of Solinus, Orosius and Jerome. Isidore also pointed out Augustine’s rejection of a bipartite division. By the seventh century elements already existed in western tradition that could have given the concept of Europe an emotional charge that was still not there in the pagan era. Europe was the continent of Japheth and his descendants, the continent of Greeks and Christians. Asia, too, had a glorious past of its own, but the story of creation placed it subordinate to Europe. However, things looked even worse for Africa, the continent inherited by the descendants of Ham, for they were condemned to be slaves to the descendants of the other brothers (Genesis 9: 27).

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The Europe of antiquity was not, therefore, a uniform entity to which its inhabitants were more or less committed. No one living in Europe at that time ever defined himself as European. At the height of the Roman Empire in particular, the learned members of society preferred the idea of Rome as the centre of world power. The term ‘Europe’ did have its own mythological background, but it gradually became used more and more as a term for a precise geographical area, though admittedly one with shifting borders. Europe in the political sense was still unknown to the ancient world. As the Christian tradition gained ground, the division into continents was, in literary sources, tied with increasing regularity to the Old Testament story of Noah’s sons. It was thus possible both to argue the division of the pagan world into continents and to strengthen the view of a Christian Europe superior to the other continents.

2 Christendom and Europe in the Middle Ages THE KINGDOM OF CHARLEMAGNE – THE FIRST EUROPE? With the fall of the Roman Empire, its territor y became broken down into smaller areas all isolated from one another. The Empire and its universal strivings did indeed sur vive in the east, but the rise of Islam and the migration of the Slavic peoples to the Balkan peninsula severed both the sea and the overland links between Constantinople and the western parts of the empire. As Geoffrey Barraclough so aptly put it, the barbarians of Western Europe were excluded from the centres of civilization in the East (Barraclough, 1963: 8). In around the mid-seventh century the future of Western Europe appeared to be endangered. The Germanic peoples settling in Western Europe felt no sense of belonging together, and with the splintering of the former Roman unity, the joint cultural elements virtually disappeared. At this critical hour the situation nevertheless changed, due above all to the concerted efforts on the part of the Franks to set up a common state. These strivings culminated in the crowning of Charlemagne as Emperor in Rome in the year 800. There were at the time three centres of power in the former Roman area and its sphere of influence: the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople, the caliphate of Baghdad, and the Frankish kingdom ruled by Charlemagne from Aix-la-Chapelle. 17

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This attempt by the Franks to achieve at least some degree of unity prompted many earlier historians to call the period the birth of Europe or of a line in Western civilization that has continued almost unbroken right up to the present day (e.g. Dawson, 1932; Burns, 1947). The term ‘Europe’ was used in the Middle Ages more or less arbitrarily, but generally to drum up a feeling of solidarity in the face of a common threat. The army of Charles Martel fighting the Arabs at Poitiers was made up of ‘European’ troops who, having claimed their victory, returned ‘to their own lands’. Similarly, Pope Urban II, in calling for a Crusade, stressed the threat to Europe of the Seljuqs. And as the Mongols and Turks advanced in the late Middle Ages, many writers felt that Europe was under threat. It is in fact no coincidence that as the political integration of Europe gained momentum in the 1950s, medieval roots of this nature were sought for the rhetoric on Europe (Reuter, 1992). Historians today tend to regard more coolly the merits and failings of the Franks in their strivings towards European unity. The Franks’ first undisputed achievement was their success in halting the centrifugal process in Europe – an act that was to prove vital to the subsequent development of European societies. Secondly, the Franks succeeded in uniting much of France as it is known today, part of present-day Germany right up to the River Elbe, part of modern Italy, Rome included, and the Netherlands beneath a common administration and to some degree the same institutions. Many scholars have indeed pointed out that the Frankish state was, geographically, almost identical to the EEC created by ‘The Six’, i.e. the single market set up in Europe in the 1950s. Thirdly, the Carolingian Renaissance in the ninth century engendered a uniformity of thought and intellectual attitudes symbolized by the birth of a uniform script, the Carolingian minuscule. The cornerstone of this

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uniform civilization was the erudition of late antiquity, which the Carolingian scholars sought to rescue. The Franks also occupied a clear role in implanting certain social ideals, such as feudalism, throughout almost all of medieval Europe. But the Frankish kingdom also had its limitations when it came to European unity. To begin with, the Franks did not command the whole of Europe, and the unity which they were at pains to extend – sometimes by cruel and even brutal means – was not European unity in the deeper sense of the word. Furthermore, the Iberian peninsula, Britain, Scandinavia, the eastern parts of Central Europe and the Balkans remained outside the Frankish domain. The crucial point may, however, have been that the Roman Empire still existed only in a new guise; thus the creation of the Frankish state achieved not only unity but rather a dualism and dichotomy in the broader European sense. The same dichotomy was manifest in the Christian church, even though attempts were made in the early years to uphold the ideal of unity. From the Council of Frankfurt of 794 at the latest the Franks tried to confine Christendom to only its western part, where the Pope had little role apart from acting as the Frankish bishop. This resulted in a schism between the churches of East and West, which was in turn one of the initial stages of a process that ended in a decisive rift between the two churches in the eleventh century. It is therefore something of an exaggeration to regard the Frankish kingdom and the Carolingian Renaissance as the starting point for European integration. Rather, it might be regarded as the end of an era, as a late relic of ancient Rome and its civilization. This does not rule out the fact that the term ‘Europe’ was used in Charlemagne’s day for political reasons, to stress the unity of his kingdom. For Charlemagne sought to equate Christianity with Romanism, and thus

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to set himself up as the man destined to continue this Western Christian-Roman tradition (Goez, 1958; Ullmann, 1979: 58–73). The chronicler Isidore Pacensis, who was baptized in 732 and lived in the caliphate of Cordoba, described the battle of Tours, calling the army led by Charles Martel against the Saracens an ‘army of Europeans’. This was undoubtedly because the army had some non-Christians among its ranks, otherwise Isidorus would have spoken of an ‘army of Christians’. Similarly, before the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, he was extolled in rhetoric as the ‘venerable crown of Europe’ (Europae veneranda apex) and ‘king, father of Europe’ (rex, pater Europae). In the ninth century Charlemagne’s kingdom was referred to as covering the whole of western Europe (tota occidentalis Europae) (Baumann, 1958). Despite these political and rhetorical claims, Charlemagne’s kingdom was not, however, the ‘first Europe’ as it has sometimes been described in literature (Balzaretti, 1992). CHRISTENDOM AND EUROPEAN UNITY Three aspirants to power can be discerned in the Europe of the Middle Ages. The battle was to begin with fought by supporters of the Pope and the Emperor. The burning issue was who should hold supreme power in secular affairs, for the authority of the church in matters spiritual was never questioned even by supporters of the Emperor. The third party to the dispute from the eleventh century onwards were the territorial states that questioned Pope and Emperor alike as holding the highest authority on secular affairs. Each of the three parties to the power controversy further held different views on the grounds for unity. The Pope’s desire was, from the first Crusade onwards, to see a gradual expansion of Christianity until it

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encompassed the whole world. The supporters of the Emperor likewise drew on the universalist principles of the old Roman Empire, but felt that the Emperor should by rights stand at the zenith of this universal might. With the downfall of the Frankish realm in the tenth century the imperial power was transferred to the German king when Otto was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in the year 962. The German King and Roman Emperor was at the same time also King of Italy (Ullmann, 1979; 91–9; Baumann, 1962). The power ideology of the emergent territorial states in turn relied on royal supremacy, and their strivings towards European integration were always founded on single-state hegemony. Even in the days of Charlemagne the church had worked hand in hand with the secular ruler in propagating the idea of a Christian empire as the uniting force in Europe. From the eleventh century onwards at least, the church began to adopt a different strategy aimed at uniting the peoples of Europe in a Christian empire that would ensure them their independence as separate units. The Apostolic See became more international, which meant the Pope could be elected from one of many European states. To cap it all, the emerging university ideal was founded in the true sense on the international mobility of students and teachers. Latin was the lingua franca of teaching and the degrees conferred at the various European universities were highly commensurable. Internationalism was a feature taken quite for granted at the medieval universities – one modern academe is seeking to recapture with its Erasmus programmes and Europe universities. The prime factor in the creation of this new Europeanism was beyond all doubt the policy practised by the Popes. The influential Popes from Gregory VII (1073–85) to Innocent III (1198–1216) approved of the new states as part of the divine order, recognized their individuality, but at the same time they tried to

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unite them by offering them a common purpose and subordinating them to the Pope in Rome. The Crusades in this respect marked a clear turning point. The national disputes at around the time of the Second and Third Crusades were already clear to see, but the First Crusade (1096–99) was the first time Europe can be said to have presented a united front under the leadership of the Pope. It must, however, be noted that this unity was achieved primarily by the sense of a common enemy. The main incentives for the Franks in advocating unity had been enmity towards the Eastern Church and the threat of Islam from the direction of Spain. The unity urged by the Pope was likewise driven by hostility towards the Islamic world. For this reason the strength of the unity ideal was soon depleted as Islam became more familiar. European unity thus required some sort of external incentive. During the Middle Ages the view emerged of a world divided in principle into Christians and others. This dichotomy was to begin with by no means founded on any simple territorial division. In early medieval times Augustine, in his De civitate Dei, had already placed the church outside secular matters. Christianity was not, according to him, tied by any fetters narrowly defined by man, nor did it have any spatial or temporal boundaries. Yet not long afterwards Christianity began to be used as grounds for a temporal division of the world. In the ninth century the terms christianismus and christianitas were used as intellectual expressions for the Christian faith. Gradually, however, the latter began to be used in a spatial sense to denote the part of the world inhabited by Christians, i.e. Christendom. The division into Christians and barbarians lived on, even though it was not frequently employed in the Middle Ages. The term ‘barbarian’ increasingly often signified non-Christian rather than inhuman. Even more common were, however, the terms ‘Christian’

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and ‘pagan’. Although the thirteenth-century scholar Roger Bacon divided the world into areas inhabited by Christians or barbarians, he was alone in claiming that the pagans had a higher degree of social activeness and intercourse than the Christians. Far more common was the attitude crystallized in the words ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians right’ of the Chanson de Roland (Hay, 1968: 16–26). Not until the eleventh century did clear signs emerge within the church of a more closely defined connotation of the term christianitas (Christendom). Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) saw Christendom as a clear physical and territorial entity in speaking of its borders (fines Christianitatis). The idea however, was expressed even more specifically in a speech made by Pope Urban II (1088–99) in the year 1095 urging Christians to crusade against the Seljuq Turks that had captured Jerusalem. This speech has not, unfortunately, been preserved in the original but has been summarized in numerous chronicles. The term Christianitas acquired many meanings in Urban’s speech. To begin with he stressed the universal mission of Christians, including the eastern branch of the church in the Christian community. He also ascribed to the church a regional role in laying equal emphasis on the political and sacramental nature of Christian brotherhood. Urban also made the conventional distinction between barbarians and Christians. He pointed out just how little of the world was in fact inhabited by Christians. Nor could the people of the northern regions be regarded as anything but barbarians, since they did not live in accordance with Christian customs. Of special interest in Urban’s speech was the idea of a universal Christian community. Even though Christians may have been under the influence of the Eastern Church or of Turkey in Asia, they were still part of the universal band of Christians to be protected

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and defended. The Christian community was thus one and its centre was Jerusalem. Every Christian was under an obligation to try to strengthen this community and to protect it from outsiders and infidels. Christians in fact constituted one people, inheritors of the whole earth, but at that moment they ruled only a small part of it. The analogy with the universal Roman Empire was here obvious. The idea of a territorial Christian community was given extreme expression in the speeches of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216). He refered to a Christian people (populus Christianus) owning countries, to the combined interests of the Christians, to Christian territories (terrae Christianorum) and the bounds of Christianity (fines Christianorum). At the turn of the thirteenth century a view thus indisputably prevailed of a concrete and territorial Christianity as opposed to the former, purely spiritual use (Hay, 1968: 29–36). EMPEROR, CHURCH AND TERRITORIAL STATES AT THE TURN OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY For two hundred years from the mid-thirteenth century onwards there were very few signs in Europe of unity of any kind. This was partly due to the economic decline into which Europe sank in the latter half of the thirteenth century that was further aggravated by the plague, the Black Death, in 1348. Although the Black Death did not give the various parts of Europe and different classes equal treatment, it was nevertheless the biggest demographic catastrophe ever to befall the continent. The Christian church had in practice split in two: East and West. The Western church of the fourteenth century was further divided along national borders, and by the time it was reunited in the fifteenth century, it had lost much of its former authority and prestige.

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In the closing centuries of the Middle Ages, political trends in Europe led to an intellectual dispersion of the continent that did not win the approval of all its inhabitants. The Turkish advance in the East was regarded as a punishment for this dispersion, and many felt that the re-establishment of unity was crucial if the Holy Land was to be recaptured. This demand for a return of unity began to be heard in the latter half of the thirteenth century, but it was given more explicit expression in the writings of Dante, above all in his De monarchia (Monarchy) dating from 1311. Dante opposed the Pope’s designs to achieve secular power and wrote rhetorically that the peoples of Asia and Africa, and of most of Europe, opposed the Pope’s intentions (De monarchia, III: 14). The problem was, however, that European unity was being used as a cover for furthering territorial claims. Even Dante used unity as a weapon for shooting a dart at France. Appeals to European unity were already being made in European debates of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when in fact the real goal was to further certain national or territorial interests. In order to safeguard the Emperor’s position, Dante outlined a sort of triumvirate in which political power was vested in the German Emperor, spiritual power in the Pope, and the intellectual leadership of Europe in the King of France (Heater, 1992: 8). Pope Boniface VIII (1295–1303) nevertheless stated in his bull Unam sanctum of 1302 that the highest power on issues both sacred and secular belonged to the Church. The secular rulers were by no means eager to relinquish their highest authority to the Pope in secular affairs. In this the Emperor and other secular leaders enjoyed the support of many of the leading early fourteenth-century scholars, such as William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua. In his book Defensor pacis (Defender of the Peace, 1324) Marsilius accused the Pope’s ambition as being the

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biggest source of unrest on Italian soil. Pope Clement VI, not to be outdone, found 240 indefensible errors in Marsilius’s work. Speaking in defence of the secular power of the King, John of Paris wrote in De potestate regia et papali (On Royal and Papal Power) that all believers should unite to form one community. Since the climate, languages and living conditions differed, there were different ways of life and different laws. John of Paris said that what suited one did not necessarily suit another. He came to the conclusion that it was nowhere stated in either the natural or the divine laws that there should be only one ruler in secular affairs (John of Paris, 1971: 85–7). PIERRE DUBOIS AND EUROPEAN UNITY UNDER FRANCE In Western Europe the early fourteenth century marked the birth of the territorial states in which power was concentrated more and more on the feudal lords rather than the king. The first step towards national awareness can thus be said to have been taken specifically by the nobility. At around the time of the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337–1453) people began to refer more to ‘the French’ and ‘the English’ instead of using the previous more limited territorial terms (Johnson, 1993). The peasants, however, continued to live their local lives without feeling any real affinity to the political units. Pierre Dubois (c. 1250–1320), a lawyer in the service of the French king, sought expressly to foster European unity under the leadership of his master. In 1306 he wrote the work De recuperatione terrae sanctae (On the Recovery of the Holy Land), in which he outlined his vision of a Europe organized under French might (Dubois, 1956). He studied in Paris in the 1270s

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under the famous scholars Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant and ranked among the counsellors of King Philip IV the Fair (1285–1314) hostile to Papal power. Dubois’ pamphlet was ostensibly designed to encourage the Western world to launch a new crusade. Jerusalem had already fallen to the infidels towards the end of the twelfth century, and with the downfall of Akra in 1291 went the last of the Holy Land strongholds held by the Christians. The pamphlet by Dubois was in two parts. The first was addressed to Edward I of England and directed at all the rulers of Europe. In it Dubois stated his plans for a new crusade, reform of the church and general principles of education. Europe was, he said, ready for a new crusade only if peace prevailed within the continent and an end could be put to the bickering between nations. If all the Catholics lived in peace crusaders would, he felt, stream from all directions to the Holy Land. They would then in all probability be able to seize and defend it (Dubois, 1956: 78). The second part of the pamphlet was, by contrast, intended only for the eyes of the French king. In it Dubois unleashed all his French patriotism, stressing the advantages his plans would have for the King of France. Although the first part of the pamphlet was addressed to the King of England, there was no doubt that the King of France would lead the crusade. According to the plan proposed by Dubois, the King of France would become ruler of both East and West, Greece included. It was quite probable that Dubois was genuinely in favour of a new crusade, but he was just as concerned with expanding the power of the French sovereign and state. For the crusade to be successful, the states of Europe would have to be at peace with one another. Dubois classified wars as being of two kinds: skirmishes between feudal princes, and wars between sovereign states, such as the city states or the emerging territorial

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states. The former type could be prevented if the princes could be persuaded to sign an agreement imposing strict sanctions on anyone who broke the peace. The attacker would suffer such heavy financial losses that he and his kin would face the threat of starvation. He would not therefore dare to engage in warfare for fear of retribution and of being banished from the realm. In Chapter 12 Dubois described the artificial apparatus by which wars between sovereign states could, he claimed, be avoided. Dubois accused Italian city states such as Genova, Venice and Pisa of repeated disagreements and skirmishes leading to the loss of the Holy Land. An end could be put to these skirmishes, too, if the cities feared retribution from their neighbours. Dubois would allow third parties the right to intervene in these brawls, and any state that succeeded in ending such a war would be entitled to economic benefits at the expense of the warring parties. But should the hostilities continue, the third party would be obliged to relinquish its war booty to the fund preparing the new crusade. Likewise, the rulers in whose territory the fracas first broke out should force the warring parties to make peace on threat of having their own property confiscated for the fund. Then what about the rulers and city states that did not recognize any higher earthly authority? Dubois had an answer to this, too: a tribunal should be set up of men of good repute that would swear an oath and promise to seek a just solution. These jurors should be men of authority and of such a nature that they would not be corrupted by love, hate, fear or greed. The members of the tribunal should be well versed in both canon and civil law, and they would be moderately repaid for their troubles; their remuneration would not, however, exceed what they would earn from their normal duties during the period in question. They would acquaint themselves with the written documents

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on the conflict and hear witnesses, but always in the presence of so many witnesses and scribes that it would be impossible for anyone to give false evidence. Should either warring party find cause for complaint in the tribunal’s decision, the judges would send the minutes of their sessions and their decisions to the Papal See. The Pope would have the right to amend the decisions should he consider this necessary in the name of justice. Should the Pope approve the decisions as such, they would enter into effect and the related documents be deposited in the church archives (Dubois, 1956: 78–80). Dubois’ pamphlet did not spark off any new wave of unity, nor did the contentious nations of Europe reach any agreement on the organization of a new crusade. The fairly detailed plan suggested by Dubois for solving confrontations does, however, indicate the high, sophisticated standard of jurisprudence at that time. The approach does, furthermore, display certain features typical of our own day and age. To begin with, it contains the idea of forcing states to make peace voiced in recent debate in cases where the parties concerned cannot otherwise be made to reach agreement. The judge’s attributes, his obligations and right to remuneration are also closely regulated. No one, according to Dubois, should be expected to sit on this ‘European Court’ without being paid for it. Another interesting feature is the sort of right of veto it gave the contending parties, in which the Pope was given the final say. Dubois probably realized that no quarrelmonger would very readily agree to abide by the court’s decisions. ‘EUROPE’ IN THE MIDDLE AGES Unity, and the idea of a unified state, thus came from two sources in medieval Europe: on the one hand the

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idea of a Christian community, and on the other the global inheritance of the universal might of the Roman Empire. Partly for this reason, the use of the term ‘Europe’ was both arbitrary and varied in the Middle Ages. In referring to the unity of the continent, some writers meant political unity, others intellectual or rather spiritual unity. For some, Europe signified a united Christendom, for others, merely a geographical entity. In addition to this, unity was above all enhanced in attitudes to an outside enemy, such as Islam, the Mongols or the Turks. None of the interests within the continent were a sufficient incentive for European integration. The actual term ‘Europe’ was used less frequently from the twelfth century onwards. Instead of the narrower ‘Europe’, a broader vision of a universal Christendom was better suited to the church’s needs. Lexically, ‘Europe’ carried no emotional charges, whereas ‘Christendom’ did. Geographers did indeed continue to use the term in its previous meaning, but medieval geographers were few and far between (van den Brincken, 1973). All the medieval encyclopedists from Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede right up to Albertus Magnus and Vincent of Beauvais gave a traditional account of the world divided into three parts: Asia, Africa and Europe. As we have seen before, this tripartite division merged without any problem with the Biblical story of Noah’s three sons. What was new, however, was the attempt by chroniclers in different countries to prove that their own rulers were direct descendants of Noah’s sons (Hay, 1968: 43–51). If any type of unity existed in medieval Europe, then it was more a unity at a cultural and civilization level rather than political. Common denominators included universal institutions and customs, such as the universities, feudalism and, for example, the culture of chivalry. The thirteenth-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote that ‘just as in former times the city of

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Athens was the mother of liberal arts and letters, the nursemaid of philosophers and of all the sciences, so is Paris in our day, not only for France, but for the whole of Europe’ (quoted in Duroselle, 1990: 185). The European unity that did exist in the Middle Ages thus derived more from the language of scholars and Christianity than from shared political views. Robert Bartlett aptly summarized this ‘Europeanization’ of Europe as follows: By 1300 Europe existed as an identifiable cultural entity. It could be described in more than one way, but some common features of its cultural face are the saints, names, coins, charters and educational practices … By the late medieval period Europe’s names and cultures were more uniform than they had ever been; Europe’s rulers everywhere minted coins and depended on chanceries: Europe’s bureaucrats shared a common experience of higher education. This is the Europeanization of Europe. (Bartlett, 1993: 291)

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3 The Balance of Power and the Quest for Peace THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE AND THE QUEST FOR UNITY UNDER THREAT There were in Europe at the beginning of the modern era several hundred more or less sovereign political units, in addition to which the western part of the Christian church was breaking up into smaller and smaller splinters. Previously, either the universal emperor or the church had at times at least commanded the political field of Europe, but towards the modern era they had been replaced by a patchwork of numerous little states. Examination of the Europe rhetoric of the time reveals one clear paradox with respect to the political trend: the deeper the political and religious rifts in Europe went, the greater the desire was to stress the unity of the continent and the significance of the unity of at least the western part. One distinct turning point both in the history of Europe and in philosophical thinking on Europe was the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, as a result of which the idea of European unity was actualized in a new way. Following the retreat of the Mongols, Europe had been able to enjoy a few centuries of peace free from any major threat, until the slow Turkish invasion reached the gates of Constantinople. The Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto raged that ‘the filthy Turks have conquered Constantinople, the most beautiful part of the world’. Another Italian writer, Torquato Tasso, saw the battle against the Turks as Europe’s battle against Asia. The Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives stressed the might of Europe. If only Europe were 33

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united, he said, it would be an equal not only to Turkey but mightier than all Asia. This had, according to him, been proved by the courage of the peoples of Europe, and Asia had not in fact ever succeeded in opposing even the partial might of Europe. The Italian humanist and scholar Enea Silvio Piccolomini, alias Pope Pius II (1458–64), was strongly moved by the threat approaching Europe. The Turks having captured Constantinople, he said: ‘We have been beaten in Europe, in our own country, at home.’ The reference to intrusion into the home was rhetorically cogent and sought to arouse in the inhabitants of Europe a feeling of solidarity in the face of a threat from outside. Alongside ‘Europe’ Piccolomini also used the term ‘Christendom’ that had spread in the Middle Ages. What is significant is the fact that Piccolomini made ‘Europe’ into an adjective and began speaking of ‘the Europeans’. Dante had, of course, already used the terms ‘Africans’ and ‘Asians’ in De monarchia in the fourteenth century, but he preferred to call the people of the third continent ‘the inhabitants of Europe’ rather than ‘the Europeans’. Despite the hyperbole underlying these statements, there appears to be no doubt that the term ‘Europe’ began to acquire more and more emotional charge in the period following the fall of Constantinople. In literary circles at least, Europe was conceived of as a unit with a positive connotation, and one worth defending against outside enemies. The Europeans’ attitude to the Turks at the beginning of the modern era was, however, somewhat ambivalent. The Indians, for example, tended to be classified far more readily as barbarians, because the Turks clearly possessed a wellorganized society and army, as many travellers at the time pointed out. The question of Islam was already raising the problem of European identity even in those days: since the Christian faith is most often presented as one of

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the cornerstones of all that Europe stands for, Islam automatically became a non-European phenomenon. Yet the role of Islam vis-à-vis Europe was already occupying minds at the beginning of the modern era. During the Renaissance Machiavelli had interpreted the religion of a given society as being a matter of political expediency. In the middle of the seventeenth century Henry Stubbe, successor to Thomas Hobbes at the University of Oxford, asked whether in fact Islam might, for political reasons, be a more suitable religion for the Western world than Christianity. EARLY PLANS FOR A EUROPEAN UNION Immediately after the conquest of Constantinople, a number of strategies for the establishment of a state of equilibrium and peace among the nations of Europe began to circulate the continent. Theories reminiscent of the later alliance between the peoples of Europe were mooted in the spirit of Christian unity. George von Podebrad, the King of Bohemia, and his French counsellor Antoine Marini put for ward a strange proposal for the unification of Europe in 1464. Like Pope Pius II, von Podebrad had only one objective in mind: to ward off the threat of Turkey. Their means of achieving this end nevertheless differed, for von Podebrad sought to resist the threat from the east by forming a European alliance in which the Pope would not be allocated a leading role. In 1462 von Podebrad accordingly made an agreement with King Casimir of Poland. The following year the two embarked on an attempt to broaden this union by forming an alliance with all the secular princes in Europe. Marini thereupon produced a treatise entitled De unione Christianorum contra Turcas. At von Podebrad’s request, he also set off to spread the word among the courts of Europe, especially

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France, whose support was considered vital to the success of the mission. The plan devised by von Podebrad and Marini was based on an alliance (congregatio) formed by the states of Europe to defeat their common enemies instead of bickering among themselves. Like the earlier plan of Pierre Dubois, that of von Podebrad proposed that some sort of tribunal be set up to deal with any disagreements that might arise between member states. But unlike Dubois’ tribunal, von Podebrad’s consistory or parliament would be a permanent one and would pass from one state to another, remaining for five years in each. It was proposed that the first seat should be Basel, from 1464 onwards. The Bohemian king’s plan for a European union failed due to lack of support from other states. One reason for this was von Podebrad’s intention to exclude the Pope from the alliance. Not unreasonably, Pope Pius II did not view projects such as this with the greatest of favour and instead came up with a counterplan for a Europe subordinate to the might of Rome to combat the Turks. The courts of Europe were thus being asked to issue statements on two different plans with the same objective simultaneously. Many of Europe’s rulers, being unwilling to endanger their good relations with the Pope, entertained reser vations about the von Podebrad–Marini plan. France and Bohemia nevertheless signed an alliance at Dieppe in 1464, but nothing ever came of von Podebrad’s and Marini’s plan for a European union (Heater, 1992: 13–14). JEWISH, CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM ALLIANCE In common with Enea Silvio Piccolomini, George von Podebrad and Antoine Marini, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–63) was also deeply distressed by the fall

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of Constantinople. His reaction was, however, quite different from that of the others. Unlike the Pope or the King of Bohemia, Cusa had no desire to incite the peoples of Europe to rise in any kind of reprisal against the barbaric Turks. While admitting that the Turks had indeed committed an atrocious act, he nevertheless, in De pace fidei written in 1453, set about formulating a realm inhabited by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike united in a single faith. De pace fidei takes the form of a dialogue in which representatives of different nations discuss the factors uniting their religions. Cusa’s radical plan was founded on the idea that all these peoples subscribe to a monotheistic faith. Since the Jews, Christians and Muslims all worship the same God, he saw no reason why they should not be joined together under a single religion. The things that separate the religions are their different sacraments and rites, but the fundamental belief is the same for all (religio una in retuum varietate, one religion in a multiplicity of rites). Under the religious alliance propounded by Cusa, the different religions could, for example, have their own prayers and ceremonies, so long as this did not endanger the common faith and peace (Cusanus, De pace fidei, 1990: 70). The unity and concord (concordantia) were founded not on exclusion but on a multivalency that embraced both the Greek and the Latin element and was not therefore confined merely to the western parts of Europe. It must, however, be borne in mind that the common faith envisaged by Cusa was based specifically on the tenets of the Christian faith. Had the Jews and the Muslims agreed to his plan, it would in practice have meant their conversion to the Christian faith. This was also the conclusion reached by Pope Pius II when, in 1460, he sent an epistle to the Sultan of Turkey, Mehmed II, who had captured Constantinople seven years earlier. The subject of the epistle was the

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Pope’s desire to convert the Turks to Christianity. Mehmed did not, however, warm to the idea. POLAND – EUROPE’S PERIPHERY AND SHIELD Having come under threat from the east at the beginning of the modern era, it was only natural that Europe should keep a special watch on its eastern borderlands, such as Hungary, Bohemia and Poland. Poland, in particular, had the doubtful honour of acting as Europe’s buffer with the East. Although the Reformation divided the Western church in the sixteenth century, it by no means weakened faith in a united Christian front against the threat from the East. This was also the mood prevailing in sixteenth century Poland, the eastern outpost of Europe. In his Discorsi of 1516, Machiavelli had already declared Poland the outpost of Europe against invasions from Asia, and his view was later shared by Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon. As humanism spread to Poland, Erasmus wrote enthusiastically about the Poles in 1523, saying that although they had never really been looked upon as barbarians, they had in recent times made magnificent advances in science, law and religion, so much so that they could be compared to almost any highly developed people of culture. In October 1556 Melanchthon wrote to King Sigismund II of Poland, saying that Europe should feel deep gratitude towards Poland. For while Germany and France had been concentrating on fighting among themselves over the fate of Italy, Poland had been defending the entire continent against attacks from the Tatars. The Poles themselves felt that this was indeed so. In 1545 the political philosopher Stanislaw Laski produced a free paraphrase of Erasmus’s Querela pacis in which he cursed the wars being waged by peoples subscribing to

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the same Christian faith. In 1572 Krzysztof Warszewicki, a Catholic, proposed the founding of a joint European army to fight against the Turks. This army would recognize no religious borders, and Spanish, French, Italian, English and German soldiers would fight side by side against the common enemy. A priest by the name of Wojciech Dembolecki wrote in 1623 that God was using Poland as a protective wall between the Christians and the pagans. The Poles were clearly part of the European Christian tradition and placed in the traditional manner face to face with the uncivilized hordes of Asia and Africa. The Polish chroniclers Marcin Bielski and Aleksander Gwagnin heavily underlined the written laws and freedom of movement of the civilized states of Europe in contrast to the barbarian Asians. Bielski, a Calvinist, wrote in his Chronicle of Poland or History of the World (1564) that Europe was far superior to Asia and Africa in terms of religion, morals and learning, even though it could not compete with them in size or riches (Tazbir, 1977). THE SUPERIORITY OF EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION The term ‘Europe’ that had gradually taken the place of Christendom was used at the beginning of the modern era in three main contexts. First, it was used to inspire in the Europeans a sense of belonging together in the face of threats from outside, especially the Turks. Second, European travellers had been convinced from what they saw abroad of the superiority of European civilization compared with the cultures of the other continents. Third, the various parties to disagreements within the continent were quick to stress the need for unity and security in Europe (Burke, 1980). Meanwhile a change was taking place in the definition of Europe and Europeanism that could be

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called secularization. Instead of identifying themselves with Christendom in the way they used to, the Europeans now began to claim for themselves a high degree of learning and civilization as the features distinguishing them from the inferior barbarians. As early as the sixteenth century certain Europeans, such as the Spanish Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas (who had actually visited the New World) and the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne stressed the human dignity of the American natives (Pagden, 1986; 1993). In practice, however, views such as this made little impression on the colonial policy practised by the Europeans. For in their colonialist and, later, imperialist policy the Europeans still felt justified in subordinating the inhabitants of other continents by appealing to the superior quality of Western culture (Adas, 1989). The third context for the term ‘Europe’ became particularly conspicuous in the seventeenth century, when a number of appeals on behalf of peace in Europe were written. In them the term ‘Europe’ replaced the former ‘Christendom’ with growing frequency, even though the latter was very slow to die. The Peace of Utrecht signed in 1714 still used the expression respublica christiana. Yet under ‘Christians’ in the index to the Thesaurus geographicus of Abraham Ortelius (1578) readers were already being asked to refer to ‘Europeans’, where he said that the Christians nowadays called themselves Europeans (Hay, 1968: 109–10). As the cultures of the Asian and African continents became more and more familiar, the theme of the superiority of the white European race appears with increasing regularity. Pope Pius II might boast in his Germania that ‘the inhabitants of Asia have always been considered inferior to those of Europe’. In dealing with the war against Turkey, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in a letter dated 1530 of ‘the prosperity of Europe’. The Protestant Sebastian Münster wrote in Cosmographia

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universalis (1544) that although Europe was the smallest and most humble of the continents, it was the most highly cultivated and had none of the searing heat of the African deserts. The English edition of Abraham Ortelius’s atlas The Representation of the Lands of the World (1606) described Europe as having a gentle climate and fertile soil. According to him, Europe was so pleasing and beautiful with its well-tended towns and villages that the courage and worth of its peoples and nations would have, if they could have been measured, exceeded those of all other continents. The theme of European might also found visual expression in the numerous maps and other drawings depicting Europe as a queen or some other ruler. The sixteenth century also marked the beginning of an endless series of histories of Europe leading off with the Florentine Pier Francesco Giambullari’s Historia dell’Europa (1566) and the Spanish Alfonso Ulloa’s Historia de Europa (1570). Both these works were, admittedly, histories of Europe in name rather than content, since Giambullari’s ended on the brink of the eleventh century and Ulloa’s concentrated on the military and political events of the 1560s. The glorification of Europe took on wider and wider dimensions as the sixteenth century proceeded. One example was the attempt to replace ‘Europe’ by the word Iapetia (Japétie). Iapetus was a figure from Greek mythology, a Titan and father of Prometheus and Atlas. The change of name would, it was thought, underline the world supremacy of Europe, which was already considered to extend beyond the geographical borders of the continent. Or so claimed the Frenchman Guillaume Postel in his De cosmographica disciplina of 1561. Postel did not, furthermore, like the idea of the figurehead of so precious a thing as the noblest continent on earth being descended from a mythological being of doubtful parentage engaging in amorous relations with a beast!

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At around the beginning of the modern era the term ‘Europe’ also began to appear with increasing frequency in the titles of books, plays, journals and atlases. The educated might read the Theatrum Europaeum (published 1618–1719), or The Annals of Europe, Europäische Annalen or L’Europe savante in the vernacular (Gollwitzer, 1951: 168–9). Jean Desmarets wrote a ‘heroic comedy’ called Europe for the stage in 1643, and Houdar de la Motte a ballet by the name of L’Europe galante in 1697. Despite its sweeping title, the former was a political allegory written in defence of the foreign policy of Cardinal Richelieu (Najam, 1956). ALLIANCES BETWEEN THE PRINCIPALITIES AND THE IDEA OF THE BALANCE OF POWER In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Europe was almost constantly at war. One of the reasons for this was the division of the Western church into Catholic and Protestant camps in the sixteenth century. The religious conflicts reached frenzied proportions in the early decades of the seventeenth century when the Catholic Reformation had finished revising its own doctrine and launched a counterattack to defend itself from the evangelical danger that threatened it. Not until the Peace of Westphalia concluding the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 was any real attempt made to implement the principle of freedom of religion, but even this was not in practice capable of guaranteeing peace in Europe for long. Exhausted by the endless battles for power, rulers began to work on the idea of a balance of power that gave no state too much strength and thus political supremacy. Criticism was levelled first at the growing might of the Habsburgs, and later of the Bourbons, which was regarded as a threat to European peace (Sheehan, 1995: 34–52).

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Instead of the national states consisting of a single unit, the predominant type of principality in the sixteenth century was the composite state. Such states were formed in one of two ways, as the Spanish lawyer Juan de Solórzano Pereira wrote in the seventeenth century. One was the political alliance of two states in which one held authority over the other. An example of this kind was the alliance between England and Wales in the 1530s. The overseas Spanish territories were also officially rules by the Castilian crown. The second kind of alliance, according to Solórzano, was that observing the aeque principaliter principle between two principalities or kingdoms in which each was a separate unit with its own laws and privileges. Most of the regions subordinate to the Spanish crown, such as the Kingdom of Naples, fell into this category, as did the various Dutch provinces. The advantage of this type of alliance was that it made the weaker party more willing to accept allegiance to the foreign king or prince, since it was allowed to retain most of its privileges. There were, however, growing signs from the 1620s onwards that rulers were no longer quite so content with such seemingly equal alliances as they were seen as an obstacle to the more efficient rule required by the times. In earlier times kings simply were not sufficiently strong to uphold a strict central rule. Gradually, as the power of the monarchs grew, there was an increasingly clear shift away from political alliances operating on the principle of equality towards the centralized nation states (Elliott, 1992). The question of peace in Europe became more pressing as certain royal families amassed more and more power. A petition addressed to the King of France in 1584 stated in no uncertain terms that whether the Christian world was at war or peace depended on whether a balance of power prevailed between the two strongest royal households, those of

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France and Spain. The English historian William Camden wrote at the end of the sixteenth century that France and Spain were the two sides of the European peace balance, and that England could tip the balance either way. Although the defeat of the Spanish Armada was a severe blow to the Habsburgs, the Habsburg hegemony was still felt to be the greatest threat to European peace in the early seventeenth century. Gradually, as France’s influence grew in the seventeenth century, the Bourbons assumed the leadership of Europe; this was in turn viewed as a threat to the balance of power. The French attack on the Dutch in 1672 resulted in a shower of pamphlets demanding that measures be taken against France in order to rescue European peace. The Glorious Revolution (1688) in England was likewise used as a war-cry on behalf of peace in Europe. During the eighteenth century Russia, Austria and Prussia all became major European powers, so that by the latter half of the century a balance had to be sought between five powers on the continent: France, England, Russia, Prussia and Austria. Apart from the Napoleonic era, this balancing policy was at least partly successful and prevailed in some form or another right up to the First World War. THE UNIVERSAL HUMANISM OF CRUCÉ The striving for a more lasting peace in Europe was also the motivation for two quite different interpretations of the justification for warfare. The first of these was the tradition of the just war tentatively formulated in the Middle Ages. According to this, there existed some justified and restricted wars that could be regulated according to humanistic principles. The supporters of this philosophy did not believe there would ever

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be an end to war, and that limiting wars to conform with certain rules would ultimately be the best guarantee of peace. Such thoughts were expressed by the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius in De jure bellis ac pacis (1625) and more than a hundred years later by the Swiss lawyer and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel in Le droit des gens (1758). More interesting as regards the Europe idea was, however, the striving towards lasting peace in Europe. This way of thinking had its roots in the utopian novels of the Renaissance in which eternal peace reigned in ideal states. Such visions no longer reflected a belief in the achievement of a just peace through an alliance between Emperor and Pope. Instead, a solution was sought in general alliances between nations (Johnson, 1987: 173–6). The first of these peace plans was Emeric Crucé’s Le Nouveau Cynée ou Discours d’Estat of 1623 (Saitta, 1991). Emeric Crucé was in favour of a political alliance in Europe that would be sufficiently strong to maintain peace, and that would rely basically on negotiation, resorting to force only if all else failed. Disagreements between states were, according to Crucé, only political conflicts; running far deeper than these was the striving for humanity common to all people. This common principle of humanity was already familiar from the writings of the Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose Querela pacis (1517) on the subject of peace had run to a total of 36 editions by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Erasmus’s text is based on the idea that war is contrary to the Gospels. It was not, unlike the majority of the texts produced by his contemporaries, directed against Turkey, however, for his ideal society also included Turkey. On the other hand Erasmus spoke of Christian brotherhood, adding that the states of Europe would be wise to cease their mutual quarrelling and consolidate their forces against Turkey (Dust, 1987).

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In this respect Crucé was in close agreement with Erasmus, since he did not propose a Turkish campaign either. Crucé dedicated his work to the monarchs of Europe and intended it as a statement on how to achieve universal peace and freedom of trade in the world. According to the preface, there was little hope of making any progress in the life of the state and the church for as long as the world was at war. Crucé listed four primary reasons for war: questions of honour, the interests of one party, the striving to rectify injustices and military manoeuvres. He proved that all these were unnecessary. Nor could he find any defence for war waged in the name of religion, since this was, in his opinion, merely a pretext for achieving worldly objectives. According to Crucé, honour could no longer be won by means of war, pillage and murder in the world of the seventeenth century, only by gentle government, just and well-organized administration. Soldiers should be used instead as border guards and hunters. Merchants received his blessing, since they add to their property not through plundering but by legitimate trading. Crucé’s peace plan also included the naming of a certain place where envoys from different countries could meet to solve their differences of opinion. As a suitable town for this he suggested Venice, which was politically neutral and was suitably placed between the various major powers. And one salient feature of Crucé’s peace plan was that it was not restricted exclusively to Europe; princely representatives from as far away as China, India, Japan and Morocco should also be invited to join the community. On the council of representatives, each would act in turn as chairman. Each would be obliged under oath to abide by the decisions of the majority, and the ruler of each area would be responsible for seeing that the decisions were carried out and peace maintained in their own area. Territory belonging to another could be entered only

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if the prince of the country in question requested help to quell a revolt. The plan of Emeric Crucé did, however, pose certain problems regarding how to reconcile the idealistic goals with the practical political realities. The rank ascribed to each state in the envisaged council was by no means obvious at the practical political level. Another problem was ensuring that the borders between states were justly defined. Crucé drew up a list of his own stating the priority to be afforded to each state. According to this list, the Pope was still the supreme ruler, followed by the Sultan of Turkey and the German Emperor, who outstripped the French and Spanish rulers next on the list. Persia came in sixth place, and way above the rulers of England, Sweden, Poland and Denmark, for between them stood the Grand Duke of Moscow, the kings of China and Ethiopia and the ruler of the Tatars. It somehow looks as if Crucé decided to promise the representatives of distant lands a good status in the organization in order to win their commitment and to ensure that they would not feel excluded among the states of Europe. Nor did Crucé have much to say about the just determination of national borders. Maybe it would be best, he said, to abide by the status quo, and should any disputes arise, the council would serve as a judge, the majority vote being binding in the event of a tie. Crucé also wondered how the Turks and Tatars, known to be aggressive, could be kept off European soil. He thought that since these nations were basically accustomed to obedience, they would probably submit to the peace orders issued by their princes. The interesting thing about Crucé’s vision is that his alliance was universal, encompassing the whole world. This was indeed in line with his view of the fundamental brotherhood of all mankind, but the political reality of seventeenth century Europe was unfortunately far removed from the idea of universal humanity.

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THE EUROPEAN PRAGMATISM OF SULLY Not all the European peace philosophers of the seventeenth century embraced the universal humanism of Erasmus and Crucé, however; nor did they believe so readily in the intrinsic human desire to avoid war. The Duke of Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, was a Huguenot and in charge of the purse of King Henry IV of France. In his memoirs the Duke of Sully recalls that before his death, Henry IV had entertained a plan, Le grand dessein de Henri IV (1638) for bringing about peace in Europe. In actual fact the man behind this plan was the Duke himself, motivated partly by bitterness at being passed over in his political career. He was eager to accent the political wisdom of his former master, King Henry IV, while at the same time criticizing the foreign policy exercised by Richelieu that had plunged France into a constant round of warfare. In his plan the Duke of Sully stated that the three dominant religions in Europe, Roman Catholicism, Calvinism and Lutheranism, were so well established that there was no longer any reason for them to destroy one another. Sully’s plan can thus be regarded as the first European formula for peace recognizing the division of Europe into three religious denominations – a fact there was no longer any point in trying to change. He interpreted the Eastern Church as being so heretical that he could safely disregard it. The princes should have the right to uphold their own religion in their own countries, and in countries with several religions they should seek to define the status of each in the name of tolerance. Sully’s ‘Grand Plan’ claimed to ensure that no seeds of envy and fear remained in Europe. In practice this meant reducing the might of the Habsburgs to the benefit of other states. By way of compensation, the Habsburgs should be granted the right to an overseas empire if their stature was reduced in Europe. This

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empire was fast becoming a practical reality, since Spain and its dominions were controlled by the Habsburg family. Europe should, according to Sully, be divided into six hereditary monarchies (France, Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden and Lombardy), five state monarchies (Germany, the Vatican, Poland, Hungary and Bohemia) and four sovereign republics (Venice, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands). The Duke of Sully nevertheless regarded France as being the mightiest state in Europe, both then and in the future – a fact that others would have to recognize and ensure (Heater, 1992: 32). The joint organ in Sully’s plan was likewise a senate chosen by the said states, to which the ten biggest states could elect four permanent representatives, the others only two. It would be the job of this senate to solve any religious, political or social disputes arising in Europe. The senate would also have the right to levy taxes and to maintain an international army. No nonChristian states would, however, be permitted to join the alliance; on the contrary, a joint crusade should be launched on Turkey. Although Sully’s plan did aim at widespread cooperation between states, it nevertheless had a topical political mission, too. To begin with, it sought to defend Europe against the Turkish threat in the East; it was time for Europe to close its ranks in the face of the enemy. It also aimed to bring about a shift in the European balance of power by destroying the might of France’s enemy, the Habsburgs. Sully’s plan did, however, display some novel features. More explicitly than any other peace plan ever proposed for Europe, it was an attempt to combine medieval ideals of an empire and a Christian community embracing the whole of Europe with the idea of a policy based on a balance of power between sovereign states ruled by a monarchy. The Italian Tommaso Campanella, who had in his La Città del Sole (The City of the Sun) himself dreamt of a

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utopian state such as this in which no form of private ownership would be allowed, produced a work in old age entitled Philosophia universalis (1638) in which he seconded Sully’s plan for achieving peace in Europe. WILLIAM PENN AND THE EUROPEAN PEACE PLAN The word ‘Europe’ became widely incorporated in political discourse in the latter half of the seventeenth century, as the states of Europe fought to oppose the hegemonic strivings of France led by Louis XIV. The opponents of France, such as the Dutch William of Orange, regarded themselves as fighting for the freedom of Europe. The concept of ‘Europe’ thus became associated in political discourse more and more clearly with the balance-of-power policy, religious tolerance and expanding trade of the sovereign states (Schmidt, 1966). All the plans so far discussed had been produced by Frenchmen. The next major peace plans in the seventeenth century flowed from the pens of English Quakers. These Quakers were a radical, pacifist group arising in England in around the 1650s and aiming at greater political tolerance and political equilibrium. The idea of a federation of states is a crucial element of the Essay toward the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693) by William Penn (1644–1718). Penn was familiar with the idea already put forward by Erasmus of the destruction wrought by war which no victory could ever make good as the outcomes of wars were always uncertain. The achievements of Penn and the other Quakers were to have broader consequences in the New World than in England. For in 1681 Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania where the Quaker Friends tried to apply their pacifist principles in practice. According to the view expounded by Penn in his Essay, the wars in Europe were not the only problem

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of the times; the rulers of Russia and Turkey should therefore be included in the parliament such as he envisaged. His primary objective was, however, to put an end to the constant round of warfare between the European states, and in this respect his plan does not ultimately differ from the ideas put forward by Crucé and Sully. Nor did Penn have any designs for major border adjustments; the preser vation of the international status quo would be founded more on a ‘European Parliament’ with a weighted system of votes. Like his predecessors, Penn argued that the various states should abide by the decisions on international affairs made by the parliament. And the parliament alone would be entitled to resort to force in the case of any disputes. Penn was optimistic about people’s sense of justice and did not believe an international ‘police force’ would be needed once the national armies had been disbanded. One particularly interesting feature of Penn’s plan was that the number of parliamentary representatives to which each state was entitled would be determined by economic and not by political criteria. Each country would be represented in proportion to its revenue, which would be estimated according to its imports and exports, its collection of taxes and national assets. Of the big states, Germany would thus have twelve votes in the parliament, France ten, Italy eight and England six. Although religious reasons also occupied a focal position for Penn the Quaker in the avoidance of war, the realization that peace would have material benefits was by no means one to be overlooked. A citizen of a naval power, England, with growing commercial and capitalist interests, Penn had difficulty condoning the enormous economic losses suffered by the people of Europe through war. At the end of his Essay Penn listed eight benefits to be derived from a European peace alliance. First, it would put an end to the useless bloodshed of

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Christians. Second, it would raise the prestige of the Christian faith in the eyes of non-Christians, among whom the constant wars between Christians had, according to Penn, been cause for amazement. Third, the implementation of the peace plan would save both rulers’ and citizens’ money. Fourth, the towns and villages would be spared the ravages and sufferings of war. Fifth, a state of peace would make travelling and trading easier. Sixth, if Turkey were included in the agreement, it would cease to be a threat on Europe’s eastern border. Seventh, it would strengthen the ties of friendship between the ruling families of Europe and thus raise the threshold to further warfare. And finally there was an eighth benefit: the princes and rulers of Europe could from then onwards choose their wives for love instead of for the political advantages a marriage would bring; this would in turn mean happier lives for these rulers (Penn, 1993: 16–20). JOHN BELLERS’ PROPOSAL TO THE RULERS OF EUROPE William Penn was a Quaker, which partly explains his interest in keeping the peace. The second great European peace proponent in the earlyeighteenth century was another Quaker, John Bellers (1654–1725). Some Reasons for an European State written in 1710 was dedicated to Queen Anne and addressed to all the rulers of Europe. Bellers’ plan for a common European state was again founded on the by now familiar idea of an annual congress to which all states would send representatives. All the rulers and states of Europe would, as it were, thus constitute a single unit. A common European law affecting all states would similarly be passed. The problem with Bellers’ plan is, however, a typical one: how to keep

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the balance between the sovereignty of the European states and the broader political unit. Extremely interesting and original in Bellers’ plan was the idea of dividing Europe into a hundred cantons or provinces that would each elect a representative to a joint European senate. Each canton would have at least one representative, but for each 1000 inhabitants it would be entitled to an extra representative. The representation of each state in the Europe senate would thus depend on the size of its population. Some see in Bellers’ plan the seed of a ‘Europe of the Regions’ rather than a Europe of nation states. Being a dedicated Quaker and envoy of the Christian ethic, Bellers also stressed the importance of religion as a factory uniting Europe. He reproached former generations for disrupting the Christian faith and proposed a general Christian meeting to prevent the growing fragmentation of the church. According to him, the Russians are Christians and even the Muslims are people that cannot be pressed into obedience by force. A better alternative would be to extend the peace alliance such as he envisaged to take in these regions, too. Of the two Quakers, Penn made more allowance for the political realities in his more systematic treatise, while Bellers had greater faith in the constructive power of a common faith (Heater, 1992: 59). L’ABBÉ DE SAINT-PIERRE AND LASTING PEACE IN EUROPE The Projet de traité pours rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe by the French Abbé de Saint-Pierre appeared in 1713, i.e. at around the end of the Spanish War of Succession and the Peace of Utrecht. The plan put forward by Saint-Pierre was based on recognition of the status quo in Europe and made no allowance for

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non-European states. Saint-Pierre has been called the first great propagandist for peace because his ideas were published at a time when they spread far wider than any previous peace plans had done. One reason for this was that Jean-Jacques Rousseau commented on Saint-Pierre’s plan in his own writings. By the time when the Abbé’s plan was published, the position of France had become weaker in Europe. According to him, the former political mainstay of Europe was the system of equilibrium that had already prevailed with little change for two hundred years. But now it had collapsed. This ostensibly peace-seeking regime had achieved only rearmament and new wars, and Saint-Pierre accordingly called it a regime of war. As the model for his peace federation he took the German empire, which he regarded as the ideal federation of sovereign states as rescued by the Peace of Westphalia. The cornerstone of Saint-Pierre’s plan was a league of nations founded by the kingdoms and republics of Europe. He rejected the idea put forward by certain earlier philosophers, of a federation taking in the whole world, because the long distances involved would make it impracticable. The states of Asia and Africa might later found leagues of nations of their own with which the European league could collaborate. Should this collaboration fail, the European league of nations would have to station troops along the borders with Asia and Africa. As members of his league of nations Saint-Pierre proposed either 18 or 24 Christian states or federations of little states. A state with a population of least 1 200 000 would qualify as an independent state; smaller states would have to form groups among themselves. The inclusion of Russia was, he felt, too risky. Nor did he envisage Turkey as a member of his league, though the league would have to form an agreement with Turkey. Each member of the

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league would appoint a senator or delegate having one vote to a league council. The council would convene in some free city of Europe, preferably Utrecht. He also devoted some consideration to the idea of giving rulers or states votes in proportion to their populations. The league of nations would not inter vene in matters of internal government, except to help rulers put down revolts. Rulers would be assured their hereditary rights according to the constitutions of their countries. Rulers who were not yet of age would be protected by the league against provocation from others. Any disputes between rulers and states would first be taken to arbitration, but should this fail, the league would solve the dispute by a decision gaining a three-quarters majority. Any ruler who refused to abide by the league’s decisions would be warred against until he was forced to surrender and lose his territories. Thus Saint-Pierre was not opposed to the use of force should the need arise. It might indeed be necessary to resort to force in forming the league or union in the case of a state that refused to comply, but it would later be possible to disband the national armies and cease fortifying and guarding the national borders. One striking feature of Saint-Pierre’s plan was its ruler-friendliness. Defending the interests of the princes was the primary task of the league; the people would also benefit indirectly from this fortuitous situation as the princes would soon realize the folly of engaging in warfare. Another arresting feature of this plan was the preservation of the European status quo, in theory for ever. Saint-Pierre did not have a dynamic view of politics or of the voice of the people, since he thought their interests would be protected via those of their rulers. Looking at the peace proposals of Crucé, Sully, Penn, Bellers and Saint-Pierre, they all shared a

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striving to put an end to war by founding a federation of states. Although they disagreed over who should belong to this alliance and just how it should operate, their views nevertheless clearly had the same foundation. They all thought the prevailing political system was at the root of the constant warfare. Yet they all – somewhat ironically – also thought that states would have a sufficient sense of justice and virtue to form an alliance of this type. Even the Duke of Sully, who was generally sceptical about states’ virtue in this respect, felt that one state at least, namely France, satisfied the necessar y conditions to achieve the goal. All these philosophers considered that while conflicts between existing states were the cause of war, these disputes would not prevent them from entering into some sort of league of nations. The plans did not, therefore, devote sufficient analysis to how the individual interests of states could be reconciled to make such an alliance possible. None of the peace philosophers seriously considered how the leap from national or state interests to remote objectives applying to the whole continent or even the whole world could be achieved at practical political level (Johnson, 1987: 181–3). CRITICISM FROM ROUSSEAU L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s work on ‘lasting peace’ in Europe aroused widespread debate in early eighteenth centur y Europe and prompted the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to write a pamphlet on the Abbé’s peace plan. Rousseau’s attitude to the plan in his Extrait du Projet de paix perpetuelle de M. l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre (1761) was somewhat divided. While admitting that the plan did indeed have noble objectives, he nevertheless regarded the proposed

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means for achieving these goals as somewhat naive. Rousseau had already taken up the same theme of peace in Europe in L’État de guerre written between 1753 and 1758. Rousseau’s text was basically concerned with criticizing the idealism written into the plans for peace. The problem to his mind was the European rulers, who were afraid of losing their rights and power. Rousseau pointed out that the ruler who on one occasion might do everything within his power to defend the republic of Europe, should it exist, might just as strongly oppose the founding of that republic if he thought it would restrict his power. No ruler who felt he could achieve more through power politics would voluntarily submit to being ordered around by others. Good will and the advantages of the possible outcome were not, Rousseau felt, sufficient grounds for founding the European republics proposed by Saint-Pierre (Johnson, 1987: 183–8). L’Abbé de Saint-Pierre felt a European league of nations would probably be set up one day. Its opponents had claimed that peace could not be permanent, but even if it lasted only 500 years, it would in Saint-Pierre’s view have allowed the people of Europe to live in peace and happiness for quite a long time. The league could be assured of a long life by means of sanctions and education. Rousseau in turn suspected that this education would have to be ver y strict. Nothing that was beneficial to a nation could, he said, be achieved other than by force, since it always went against the interests of some group. Since alliances between states were only ever achieved by revolution, Rousseau felt it was only reasonable to ask whether a European alliance was even to be hoped for, or whether it should rather be feared. For it could through its ver y inception cause more destruction than it could ever prevent in the centuries to come (Rousseau, 1920: 76).

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This was somewhat radical criticism of the earlier plans for peace. Rousseau was the first philosopher to formulate the gap between objectives and the means employed to achieve them. And if the birth of the European alliance proved to be as painful as it would appear, did even a noble end justify the means? Rousseau’s pessimistic and prophetic views were voiced barely two decades before the great French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars that ensued, once again shattering the dream of lasting peace in Europe.

4 Nationalism, Federalism and the United States of Europe EDMUND BURKE AND THE EUROPEAN IDEAL In around 1790, following the outbreak of the French Revolution, the English political thinker Edmund Burke wrote a number of works criticizing the new revolutionary ideals. The new revolutionary Europe was, to him, tantamount to the downfall of Europe. For Burke saw Europe as a body in which communal customs and traditions counted for far more than rational, economic-judicial factors. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) he observes that not even the wars between European states had succeeded in destroying the sense of affinity. Even at war, the states of Europe are closer to one another than the peaceful nonEuropean states. The reason for this, says Burke, must be sought in the institutions fundamental to all the nations of Europe: the Christian faith, monarchy rule, Roman law, similar customs and education. As a consequence of these mutual ties and way of life, ‘no citizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it … When a man travelled or resided for health, pleasure, business or necessity, away from his country, he never felt himself quite abroad’, as his famous saying goes (quoted in Welsh, 1995: 73). Europe was for Burke a cultural unit moulded by a common historical heritage. The various states of 59

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Europe were so similar in their customs, morals, laws and social structures that they could in practice be regarded as one big nation. In Reflections he defined religion and the gentlemanly spirit as the pillars supporting Europe. This Europe had been travelling towards its present manifestation ever since the downfall of the Roman Empire. In denying all institutional and cultural traditions, the French revolutionaries likewise disputed the very foundations of European policy. In this sense the Revolution should be compared not to the political upheavals of earlier centuries in Europe but to the Reformation, which was the last time in the history of Europe that the fundamentals of policymaking had been placed open to doubt. According to Burke, the reformers of the time had confused politics with religion and set Europe on fire with their peculiar secular religion. In just the same way the vulgar and brutal revolutionaries of his day were destroying the very core of the European concept (Thompson, 1994). Burke’s picture of European unity was, though undoubtedly aristocratic, no mere illusion. From the sixteenth century onwards the educated circles of Europe had with increasing momentum been envisaging Europe as a kind of unit bearing strongly positive value charges. Towards the beginning of the eighteenth century this feeling of belonging together prevailing among the European intellectuals, in the republic of letters, had been growing stronger and stronger. Montesquieu wrote his Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe in 1727, and it was full of references to European unity, joint trading, political tolerance, Gothic origin and the like. Nor did Rousseau, though critical of the means proposed by l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre for achieving lasting peace in Europe, dispute the basic fact that the states of Europe constituted a system united by their religion, laws, customs, literature and trade in a harmony that was the inevitable outcome of belonging together.

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By 1700 the term ‘Europe’ was, especially in the political thinking of the Protestants, in regular use and had almost completely replaced the earlier ‘Christendom’. At around this time a sense of belonging to Europe, to a shared continent, can be said to have germinated in at least the educated urban population of Europe. The same cannot, however, be said of the rural population, where literacy was not very widespread and the unit of identification closest at hand was the local living environment rather than an abstract Europe shared by all (Burke, 1980). The Europeanism of the Enlightenment also differed in one crucial respect from the Christian humanism represented by Erasmus in which panEuropean values were to a great extent founded on a common religion. The idea of a European civilization developed by Voltaire and other philosophers of the Enlightenment was, by contrast, fundamentally nonChristian, and excessive reliance on the Christian tradition was even regarded as being injurious to the fostering of a pan-Europeanism (Chabod, 1961: 45–7). NAPOLEON’S EUROPE AND THE LEGACY OF THE REVOLUTION At around the beginning of the eighteenth century, an interesting tug-of-war was, as regards the European ideal, waged in Europe between the pre-Revolution ancien régime and the new Europe envisaged by the revolutionaries. Napoleon, and others too, saw in nationalism the spiritual seed of a new Europeanism. After being defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and subsequently deposed, Napoleon reported that his aim had been to create a European system, a common European law and supreme court of justice: a single European people. Had he succeeded, this would indeed have been a united state in which the traveller would always have been at home.

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Since Europe was, according to Napoleon, already a cultural and historical unit, he saw the creation of political unity as his primary mission. In 1805 he realized that the peoples of Europe were still not sufficiently united, and that Europe still required renewal. What the people of Europe needed was one nation to stand above all others and to take the lead, as it were. The state which this nation constituted would have to have sufficient authority to be able to force other nations if necessary to live in harmony. By a happy coincidence the French, claimed Napoleon, were the best equipped to assume this pioneering role. The ideal Europe of Napoleon was thus a truly French Europe. France would rule over the other nations of Europe, and Europe would become a federal state of France or a part of the French Empire. Paris would be the metropolis of Europe and French the citizenship to which all aspired. European cosmopolitanism was for Napoleon submission to the French ethos. There was not as such anything new about the equation of France with Europe, for to the European intellectuals of the eighteenth centur y France represented civilization and the European ideal par excellence. In the late eighteenth centur y this francophile euphoria evoked a reaction to all things French, its language and culture, especially in the Netherlands, Germany and Britain. Napoleon’s dreams of a united, Frenchified Europe were nevertheless frustrated. Banished to the island of St Helena in 1816, he bitterly admitted that his ideals had been no more than a beautiful dream at a time when nationalism, conservative virtues and ignorance were rife in Europe. He would have to bur y his dreams among those ‘ideas that are not ripe yet, but they are far-reaching’ (Thompson, 1994: 39). The sweeping changes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant the end of an era for Europe – an era in which Europe had, as by the

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intellectuals of the eighteenth century, been viewed as a political and cultural unit with a common historical and intellectual heritage. This philosophy, supported by Edmund Burke, was a theoretical construct with no basis in reality as the nineteenth century progressed. Unlike the theoretical vision of Burke, the new European concepts that took its place were not so firmly rooted in the European past. Yet some elements of his vision for Europe continued to exist in some form or other. After the Revolution it became increasingly common to speak of European civilization as something in a class of its own superior to the numerous cultures of the other continents, even though the emphasis on Europeanism was in fact a purely intellectual question. For the practical policy of Europe was very much in the hands of separate, independent and sovereign states leaving no scope whatsoever for any joint European mission. The idea of economic integration also persisted in Europe, of a community of states, regions and people joined in an economic alliance. This idea did not win much support in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, but it did make a strong revival in the years following the Second World War, paving the way for the European Community. Europe also remained a concept on paper, even though it had no practical political consequences. It continued to be an intellectual community founded on disparity (Thompson, 1994: 57–8). NOVALIS, BLAKE AND THE EUROPE OF THE ROMANTIC ERA Numerous diverse views of the nature of Europe and its fates were put forward in Europe during the upheavals of the eighteenth century. It was not simply a question of finding an alternative to the old regime or

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of building up a new, revolutionary-nationalist Europe. Representing one line of thought were the nostalgic, mythical visions of the Romantics of a Europe in which past and present were interwoven. The greatest of these visionaries was the German Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, who published Die Christenheit oder Europa. Ein Fragment in 1799. Von Hardenberg’s work has been interpreted as a nostalgic return to the Christian Europe of the Middle Ages. True, Novalis begins by painting a picture of a medieval Europe in which Christendom was still united, the whole of Europe stood on Christian soil and common interests dominated. Just like Burke, he thought the Reformation was to blame for destroying this virgin, spiritual unity. But unlike Burke, he also detected some positive sides to the destruction. The shattering of European unity during the Reformation was an inevitable prerequisite for a new, more lasting and more exalted unity. Novalis did not in fact thus preach a return to medieval Christian Europe, but conjured up instead a prophetic vision of a Europe in which the Christian faith had risen to a new and loftier level. Novalis thought that medieval Europe was not, perhaps, quite sufficiently developed after all. Materialistic strivings and selfish ambitions were still struggling to break the harmonious, Christian surface. The present fragmentation and emptiness could alone engender a new sense of unity from which a new, rejuvenated Europe could emerge. Thus while Protestantism was, according to Novalis, indeed the root of all the present evil and disunity, it did permit freedom of conscience and religion. The times might be anarchistic, but true anarchy is a creative element of religion. History went its own way regardless of man and had now reached a stage at which a new, poetic Christianity could be born, especially in Germany. Indeed, Novalis advised people: ‘Have patience only! It will, it must come, that sacred time of perpetual

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peace, when the new Jerusalem will be the capital of the world’ (quoted in Thompson, 1994: 54). The second, but more worldly, European prophet of the late eighteenth century came from England. In his book Europe: A Prophecy of 1794 William Blake claimed that neither the past nor the future of Europe was bound to the Christian faith. In this respect he thus differed from Novalis. Despite his use of the word ‘prophecy’, Blake’s was not an attempt at projecting a religious future. The issue at stake was, in his opinion, more the revealing of a fundamental truth. According to that truth, the Europe of the Revolution was a moment of artistic liberation from rationalism and religion. Blake saw Europe as a battlefield of superhuman forces, a sort of variation on the eternal theme of the conflict between good and evil. He placed the historical and cultural essence of Europe far above the deeds of real individuals. Europe was for Blake a dark continent in which a red light was now violently flashing; a light that radiated from ‘Orc’ (by which he meant the spirit of revolution in this materialistic world) and the red sun in ‘the vineyards of red France’ (Blake, 1966: 245). Blake drew a contrast between two mythological figures: Orc, who represented the Revolution, and Urizen, who in turn symbolized the human rationale at its most ridiculous. Historical actors and politics were depicted as being manipulated by these superhuman characters. Both Novalis and Blake denied both individual freedom and individual responsibility for the acts of man in the intellectual history of Europe. EUROPEAN FEDERATION OR PATCHWORK OF NATION STATES? The best known of all the plans for ‘eternal peace’ is probably Zum ewigen Fried written by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1795. Kant’s book,

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however, was of a philosophical nature, and he personally warned the reader that he was a theoretician and not a practical statesman. Accordingly, his work had very few hints for the reader concerned with the organization of Europe, interesting as it is in throwing light on the development of the universal peace ideal. Certain other German thinkers of about the same period did, however, work on the idea of a European federation aiming at ‘eternal peace’. Joseph von Görres, a revolutionary from the Rhine provinces, published a work entitled Der allgemeine Frieden, ein Ideal in 1798 in which he considered eternal peace an ideal to strive for. In practice he nevertheless dedicated his work to the Franks, saying that it was France’s duty to create a great people’s republic to which should be invited all the peoples ‘liberated’ by it and the United States of North America. This people’s republic would not interfere with the internal affairs of other states, but it would have a single government representing the common will. It would, however, be impossible for a state to renounce its membership, and should any state feel so inclined, it would have to be forced to change its mind. Once all states had had time to enjoy the bliss of this people’s republic, there would no longer be any need for social constraints and sanctions. Friedrich Gentz, a conservative statesman in the service of Prussia, wrote a treatise on eternal peace in 1800 under the title of Über den ewigen Frieden. He, too, felt eternal peace should continue to be the ideal, but being a more realistic thinker than Görres, he did not think it could ever be achieved in practice. In the theoretical section of his work Gentz debated three alternatives for the organization of the relations between states. The first would be to found one single state, and the second to separate states completely from one another. Thirdly, Gentz asks whether an organization set up for the prevention of disputes would serve the same purpose. He personally was in favour of a few

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large states, claiming that the majority of the wars fought in Europe over the preceding three hundred years had arisen out of arguments in small states over who should inherit the crown; large units would therefore reduce the number of such conflicts. In the practical section of his work Gentz appraised the potential for a union or states of Europe federation. He reckoned such an alliance could be achieved but did not forecast a long life for it. If it then had to be maintained by force, it would not meet its purpose of everlasting peace. Gentz did not, however, consider that the equilibrium prevailing in Europe for the previous one hundred and fifty years had been unsuccessful. On the contrary, it had guaranteed relative stability, even though the equilibrium had been upset whenever brute force had been resorted to. Since no knowledge of eternal peace existed, people had no option but to adhere to the knowledge, the politics, that could perhaps lead to it. Although Gentz began his career as a supporter of the European ideal, he grew very pessimistic about it later in life. In Vom politischen Zustand Europas vor und nach der Französchischen Revolution (1801–02) he already felt there was little left of value from the Europe before the Revolution. Gentz served as secretary to the Congress of Vienna and wrote in 1814 that ‘the word Europe nowadays fills him with horror’. He had ‘lost all desire to be European’ and his policy would from then onwards be ‘selfish’ and ‘narrowly Austrian’. Although he was not a nationalist of the new style, his opinions nevertheless indicate the way the wind was blowing in Europe at the time of the Congress of Vienna. DEFENDANTS OF THE OLD REGIME At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 Europe thus retraced its steps to its old balance-of-power policy. The

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primary objective of the Congress and the Holy Alliance it set up was, under the leadership of Prince von Metternich, to restore the equilibrium of the preRevolution period and peace between the nations of Europe. In his handbook for a political regime for Europe appearing in 1819 the German historian A.H.L. Heeren was pleased to note the return to the former system. To begin with, this conservative policy looked set to succeed, but with the troubles in 1840 and the Crimean War it eventually became clear that the time for federal projects such as this was past. The spirit of Europeanism based on the timehonoured idea of lasting peace was also resuscitated in the aftermath of the Congress of Vienna. In 1815 and 1816 numerous peace congresses were held in the cities of Europe and America. The literary works dealing with European peace plans also had a tendency to hark back to the old regime and to shake the mothballs from the theme of lasting peace. Jeremy Bentham, whose political dissertations were very popular in England and America in the nineteenth century, had written his Plan for a Universal and Perpetual Peace back in 1786–89, on the eve of the French Revolution, but it was not printed until 1839. This plan did not, however, add anything new to the idea of a European federation earlier proposed by l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre. In deliberating the chances of such an alliance succeeding, Bentham was content merely to ask why it should not be possible; such federations had, after all, already been established in Germany and Switzerland. In order to prevent wars breaking out, Bentham proposed that an international court of justice be set up. Only a year after the publication of Bentham’s Plan the American William Ladd wrote an Essay on a Congress of Nations (1840) that also took in the nonEuropean territories. It would now seem that the former schemes for a ‘lasting peace’ as the foundation for a political alliance were no longer sufficient, and

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that the new concept of nation states would henceforth have to be taken into consideration. Although the work by Ladd is in a sense a continuation of the earlier peace plans, he did try to infuse new life into the tradition by moulding his league of nations in accordance with the American system of government and democratic principles (Johnson, 1987: 233–4). HARBINGERS OF A NEW EUROPE There were at the time of the Congress of Vienna also some who, rather than reinstating the old regime, were looking ahead to a new form of integration in Europe. On the very eve of the Congress the French ClaudeHenri de Rouvrey, alias the Duc de Saint-Simon, and his pupil, the young French historian Augustin Thierry, were publishing a treatise entitled De la Réorganisation de la société Européenne (1814). Comparison with the earlier writings of Saint-Simon reveals that the ideas expounded in it were mostly his alone, and I shall therefore refer to it here as the work of SaintSimon. The work was designed to influence the Congress of Vienna about to assemble so that a start might be made to the construction of a new Europe. Although it became a very popular work, it left its true audience, the statesmen of Europe, cold. According to Saint-Simon, the time would undoubtedly dawn in Europe when its people would realize that the future of the continent must be founded on the common good and not on the interests and advantages of each individual nation. Only in this way could an end be put to misery and warfare. Saint-Simon and Thierry did not believe that Europe’s golden era lay behind it in the ancien régime, but that it still lay ahead in the future. It was also his belief that the former idea of the absolute sovereignty of the ruler could no longer succeed in post-Revolution France, however

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much men such as Metternich might wish to restore the old regime. Basically, Saint-Simon thought that Europe could not have a happy future until Britain was once again involved in deciding on the continent’s mutual affairs. The future of Europe lay in the creation of a federal community reminiscent of medieval society. As in the earlier cases of Novalis and William Blake, the vision of medieval society as one of outstanding peace and harmony compared with the Europe of the times was a widespread notion at the turn of the nineteenth century. Many, such as Edmund Burke and Novalis, saw in the Reformation and religious disintegration the seeds of later unrest. The future European society would, according to Saint-Simon, be united by its communal institutions and a single government. This supranational government would be to the various nations what the national governments were to the individual. What is more, and this is significant: Saint-Simon envisaged the institutional reconstruction of Europe as a gradual process rather than a sudden change. France and Britain had had their revolutions and civil wars, as a consequence of which they were now freer and ready to assume responsibility for the reorganization of all Europe on precisely the English model (Saint-Simon, 1976). This union is possible because France is now free like England; the union is necessary, because it alone can ensure the peace of the two countries and save them from the evils which threaten them; the union can change the state of Europe, because England and France together are stronger than the rest of Europe. (Quoted in Heater, 1992: 103) Following a general preface, Saint-Simon’s work is divided into three sections. In the first he debates the

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best possible form of constitution. The second is devoted to the government of the peoples of Europe, and the third to the nature of the future joint parliament of Britain and France. In addressing the best possible form of government as a theoretical issue, Saint-Simon is in no doubt at all: the answer is a parliament, and it should be applied both to the general government of Europe and to the national administrations. Representatives would be elected from the national parliaments to sit on a ‘European Parliament’. SaintSimon was far from lenient in specifying what he expected of these representatives. They should be persons free from national interests and cosmopolitan in spirit for whom ‘European patriotism’ rated above national interests. He expected to find such candidates in four occupations: businessmen, scientists, magistrates and administrators. Persons of sufficient means should therefore be elected as follows: one businessman, one scientist, one magistrate and one administrator for every million Europeans. Having sufficient means would guarantee that they would be steady and impartial. If, however, there should be any figures of note who would benefit the parliament but who did not possess sufficient means, they could, according to Saint-Simon, be supplied with funds and included in the work of parliament. The European community parliament would also have an upper house with members consisting of the wealthiest Europeans; their number would not be in any way restricted in advance. These members of the upper house would be chosen by the King of Europe superior to all others. The election of this King of Europe, and the formalities for his election, were a delicate matter to which Saint-Simon promised to return in a later work that he never actually wrote. Issues such as education, the drawing up of ethical rules and religious tolerance would belong to the jurisdiction of the

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‘European Parliament’ and not the national houses of representatives. Aggressiveness, according to SaintSimon, was such an inherent part of human nature that without a great deal of activity on other continents there could not be any peace within Europe. He also justified the colonization of other parts of the world on the grounds that the Europeans had developed beyond all other races. The third section of the work deals with the nature of the joint English-French parliament and its exemplary influence on the other nations of Europe. Since Britain did, in Saint-Simon’s opinion, have a form of government that could serve as a model to all others it should have twice as many representatives as France in the parliament. In time, the other peoples of Europe would come to assimilate this parliamentary form of government. Saint-Simon also predicated national agitation in Germany and advised that the revolutionary process should be made as brief and as bloodless as possible (Heater, 1992: 105). FROM AGREEMENTS BY MONARCHS TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT Saint-Simon was probably the first philosopher proposing a European alliance who rejected the traditional monarchy. Broadly speaking, his theories differed from those of the pre-Revolution period on seven main points. First, he shifted the perspective from diplomatic changes to social changes. Second, he stressed the gradual nature of the European integration process rather than sudden change. Third, he underlined that all members of the union should in principle have similar political regimes which should, fourth, be parliamentary. The fifth and most radical difference was, however, that Saint-Simon’s European parliament would make

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its decisions according to the interests of the people and not of the national governments. The exhaustive title of his work already indicated that his aim was a European unity in which national autonomy would be retained. Agreements were previously signed expressly between rulers, but Saint-Simon no longer had any faith in the chances of achieving lasting peace by means of royal alliances and instead launched a new European policy aiming at administrative reforms. Sixth, Saint-Simon emphasized the importance to unity of Britain’s example with unprecedented vehemence. Not even the Anglo-Saxon Quakers Penn and Bellers had ever suggested that integration could depend so much on Britain. Seventh, the majority of the earlier thinkers had regarded the safeguarding of peace as the primary objective in uniting Europe, but Saint-Simon also pointed out the broader political, social and economic advantages (Heater, 1992: 109–10). The work of Saint-Simon and Thierry was to have the greatest influence on the next generation of Europe supporters, as we shall see in the next chapter. In the 1860s, especially, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon carried the idea of a federal Europe further. In 1872 Camille Lemonnier of France called his book by the simple name Les États Unis d’Europe. Interest in the ideas of Saint-Simon was already waning by the 1870s, when European expansion began to shift to other continents. Nor did Saint-Simon foresee the power of nationalism, and not until the period between the First and Second World Wars were federal sympathies in fact revived. THE BASIS OF NATIONALISM The spirit of nationalism was not, however, a product of the revolutionary era, since it originated from a

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much earlier date and the concept itself had a longer history of various languages (Teich and Porter, 1993). Yet political developments in the late eighteenth century, especially in North America, contributed to the great popularity of nationalism. The principle of the sovereignty of the people had come out of the American War of Independence victorious, setting an example to many European nationalists. It had, furthermore, fathered the new, independent, United States of America pointing ahead to the European fights for freedom. The federal model implemented in America also made the idea of a United States of Europe more conspicuous. The history of Europe can be said to have witnessed two nation theories, both dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century. The first, politically oriented one gained ground in the France of the post-1789 Revolution period, where the creation of a nation of free and equal citizens was the common goal. At this point language was not a major criterion, and nation, people and state became conceptually one. The second nation theory, and one anchored on history and language, sprang from the German idealistic philosophy and above all Herder and Hegel. This philosophy stressed the importance of language, culture and a shared religion, which together epitomized the ‘spirit of the people’. This latter brand of nationalism foregrounding the nation’s common past was also evident in the leading nationalist manifestos of the nineteenth century, such as Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? by the Frenchman Ernest Renan of 1882. Yet John Stuart Mill had already, in 1861, pointed out the significance of a shared history as the core of nationalistic feelings in his Considerations on Representative Government: A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality if they are united among themselves by

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common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others – which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves of a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion, greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past. (Quoted in Woolf, 1996: 40) GERMAN THEORISTS ON NATIONALISM In 1807–08 the German Johann Gottlieb Fichte penned one of the basic works on nationalism, Reden an die deutsche Nation. In it he devoted numerous pages to proving how the German spirit of nationalism alone would serve the interests of all Europe; most of Europe was, after all, ultimately of German origin. It must be remembered that Fichte did not expound his views as representing any prevailing state of affairs, but rather as an educational programme for the creation of a new Europe. In an earlier work, Der geschlossene Handelstaat (1800), Fichte had regarded Europe from a slightly different angle. For according to Edmund Burke, the rise of trade had been precisely the factor ultimately drawing together the shared European cultural heritage and customs. Fichte, by contrast, saw commerce as a threat to European unity that would have to be

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opposed by creating closed, self-sufficient administrative states in which politics was subordinated to government. From the present perspective this idea seems somewhat strange: the unity of Europe had to be safeguarded by destroying the mutual dealings between states, apart from the intellectual dealings controlled by states themselves. In his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91) the German philosopher J.G. Herder (1744–1803) saw peoples or nations as the basic units in the history of mankind. These nations have been moulded in a specific physical environment in the course of a slowly emerging lifestyle manifest in their customs and beliefs. Language is the factor distinguishing one nation from another, and these separate nations could not, in Herder’s opinion, be either combined or even fully compared to one another. Herder also resisted all attempts by Europe to assume the status of a despot and force other nations to follow its lead. Rather, the goal of history is to achieve balance and harmony between nations. The German Georg W.F. Hegel further applied his view of dialectic history to the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘Europe’, as we can see from the introduction to his lectures on the histor y of philosophy entitled Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte (1822–31). The state was a true personality, absolute and a manifestation of the spirit of the nation. Although the theories put for ward by Hegel do resemble those of Herder before him, there are some differences. While agreeing that nations have a spirit of their own that guides their development, Herder nevertheless saw tensions and conflicts in the histor y of nations that could possibly be transformed into harmony and balance. For Hegel, on the other hand, everything was a manifestation of a single universal spirit, the development of which could be traced on a temporal scale. Everything in the world could be interpreted as

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a historical process with its own significance and goal. The history of mankind consisted of different stages, in each of which the absolute spirit was manifest via some specific national spirit. The historical stage of the early nineteenth century was in Hegel’s eyes a manifestation of the Western spirit of the state. According to him, the universal spirit of history had travelled through four stages from east to west. Europe was for him the absolute end point of history, just as Asia had been its starting point. The progress of history was the development of the spirit culminating in Europe, and with Germany at its core. Hegel headed the last section of his work ‘The German World’. Under the influence of Christianity the German peoples had, he said, realized that humanity meant freedom and, at its very heart, the freedom of the spirit. The final stage of civilization was for Hegel thus expressly one of the nation state and not a United States of Europe. Just as Hegel recognized in Germany the leading nation of Europe, so the French philosopher Théodore Simon Jouffroy saw France as the nation destined to occupy this role in the future. In L’État actuel de l’humanité (1826) he outlined a single European nation which he likened to the affiliation of the city states of Greece under Alexander the Great. Both Hegel and Jouffroy subscribed to the national mission of achieving unity in Europe. NATIONALISM AND EUROPEAN UNITY Following the French Revolution, Europe and Europeanism were set up as ideals with their own propagandistic value. During the nineteenth century the word ‘Europe’ appeared widely as a slogan in contemporary journals. The Journal européen, appeared in Berne in 1817, Philippe Buchez called his journal

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simply L’Européen, and there was also a Revue européenne. These were supplemented by a wealth of research examining European civilization, such as François Guizot’s Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe of 1826. From 1830 onwards, the idea of Europe as a harmonious community of nation states seemed to become more and more popular. The Romantics nevertheless began in increasing numbers to feel that writing about it was not enough, and they therefore advocated a radical, national political ideal. The Romantic political dream did not stop at national borders but spread to embrace the whole of Europe. In France Philippe Buchez in particular exploited the rhetoric of Europeanism. Buchez was the founder of the French Charbonniers, a secret society corresponding to the Italian Carbonari. He was an ardent supporter of European federation. At the political level it could, however, be achieved only after a long and bitter struggle, when the equality and freedom proclaimed by Christian law had been fully recognized as the foundation of society. The great hero of European nationalism, however, was probably the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, who is reputed to have uttered the word ‘Europe’ more frequently than any other political thinker. To begin with Mazzini was a member of the Carbonari, but later resigned to found his own La Giovane Italia (Young Italy) in Marseilles in 1831. Initially, Mazzini’s aspirations were purely nationalist: the unification of Italy as a republic. In a journal of the same name he debated the role of Italy in the future Europe and came close to Buchez in his ideas on the role of each state. From the role of the nations it was but a short step to a union of European nations. While in exile in Berne in Switzerland, Mazzini and 16 other young Italian, German and Polish militants signed an agreement on a ‘Young Europe’ on 15 April

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1834. Each nation in the Young Europe would have its own specific tasks that would, of course, together constitute the general task of mankind. Their plans for integration went even further than the holding of meetings to devise a plan of action in Mazzini’s blueprint for a federation made up of 14 European republics. By the middle of the nineteenth century it was becoming increasingly apparent that the nation state ideal alone would not be sufficient to create a united Europe. The thought of proceeding from the nation state to an alliance encompassing the whole of Europe appealed not only to Mazzini but also to a host of other Italian thinkers, such as the philosopher statesman Vincenzo Gioberti and the federalist Carlo Cattaneo. Cattaneo was one of the many to employ the expression the United States of Europe amid the turmoils of the revolutionary European year of 1848. In the course of 1847 and 1848 the idea of a United States of Europe was voiced in publications the length and breadth of Europe. The French lawyer Vésinet used the term in speaking at Rouen on 25 December 1847. In the spring of 1848 the Scottish journalist Charles McKay published two articles in The London Telegraph in which he spoke of the United States of Europe. In the Revue nationale a pupil of Buchez, Henri Feugueray, stressed the economic, political and spiritual solidarity of Europe and proposed a federation, but he did not indicate its juridical construction. Emile de Girard asked in La Presse of 14 August 1848 why there could not be a United States of Europe since there was a United States of America. In September 1848 Carlo Cattaneo reiterated the view proclaimed by Mazzini: we will have peace when we have a United States of Europe (Duroselle, 1990: 322–4). The literary trailblazer of the Romantic proEuropeans was the writer Victor Hugo, who in a number of contexts painted an elegant picture of what

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it would entail. In 1849 Hugo chaired the third Universal Peace Congress in Paris at which European unity was adopted as the movement’s objective. Hugo predicted that the time would come when two major powers, the United States of America and the United States of Europe, would shake hands across the Atlantic. In an article L’avenir (The Future) written in 1867 he proclaimed: In the twentieth century there will be an extraordinary nation. This nation will be large, which will not prevent its being free. It will be illustrious, rich, thoughtful, peaceful, friendly towards the rest of humanity … This nation will have Paris as its capital, but it will not be called France: it will be called Europe. It will be called Europe in the twentieth century; and in the centuries that follow, transformed still more, it will be called humanity. (Quoted in Duroselle, 1990: 324) The Romantics entertained great projects and beautiful visions in the nineteenth century. In this respect, too, Victor Hugo undoubtedly set a new record in painting a picture of a free, federalist, borderless Europe delivered for ever from many of its problems. And his imagination no doubt reached its peak in his description of the forests of a united Europe now free even from tigers! Although the Romantics’ dreams had little in common with the political reality of nineteenth century Europe, some concrete achievements were nevertheless recorded in the field of unification. From 1819 onwards attempts were made in the German territories to establish a customs union (Zollverein), masterminded by the economist Friedrich List. The customs union was in fact instituted from the beginning of 1843 and remained in force right up to the unification of Germany in 1871.

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FEDERALISM AND THE IDEA OF A EUROPEAN FEDERATION The period from 1830 to 1880 may be regarded in the history of thinking on Europe as one in which the theoretical and juridical grounds for a federalist Europe received the most ardent attention. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was already addressing the issue in the eighteenth century, but not until the 1860s did PierreJoseph Proudhon present the first systematic interpretation of what a European Federation might in fact be. This he did in his Du principle fédératif of 1863. Rousseau claimed that the relationship between the individual and the state could be likened to that between the state and a broader confederation. In both cases security and true freedom could be achieved only by belonging to some larger unit. This membership benefited the smaller states in particular, whose freedom and security were most open to threat. Rather than a strict federation, Rousseau was in favour of a loose confederation that would leave ‘each State master in its own house’, as he wrote in Émile. In speaking of the degree of sovereignty, Rousseau was not prepared to take the analogy of the relationships between the individual, state and confederation to extremes (Heater, 1992: 80–1). Proudhon, by contrast, criticized the nation states for their conservatism. He felt they were in fact returning to the pre-1815 situation and were not a manifestation of European progress. The borders of the nation states were arbitrarily drawn, but an even greater problem was the inequality within them. Proudhon nevertheless felt there was one good thing about the political situation in Europe at that time, and that was the moderate state of equilibrium under the aegis of which the inhabitants of these states could in theory at least work in peace. The nation states should not therefore be disbanded at a single stroke; instead they

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should be reinforced and gradually replaced by a new federation of European nations. A socialist, Proudhon emphasized the right of the people to govern themselves. Nation states were, he considered, too big and could not ensure the democratic rights of the people. Freedom and justice were possible only when one human encountered another at a concrete level. The true state was for Proudhon the commune. Federalism was the antithesis of a centralized regime based on a power hierarchy. How did these ideas fit in with the idea of a federation, where the aim was to set up units beyond the mutual dealings between individuals? These basic cells, consisting of free individuals and not forced to assume any national state or other guise, would said Proudhon, constitute a system. These various systems consisting of free individuals would further be linked in a confederation. In this sense the Europe formed via a confederation of free people would constitute an organic entity permitting the dreams of earthly union entertained by former generations. The essential thing, said Proudhon, was that the units making up the federative Europe were themselves federative. He also believed that a union of this kind, invalidating the former power structures, could not become reality in Europe without a revolution. Proudhon himself was, however, rather pessimistic about the chances of carrying out a revolution in nineteenth century Europe (Rougemont, 1961: 257–60). In the 1880s Proudhon’s theories were echoed in the journal Les États-Unis de l’Europe. The federalist and cooperative trends received a certain amount of support in the French workers’ movement right up to the turn of the century, but these trends were more interested in the position of the working class in the Europe nation states than in the unification of Europe. The name of Proudhon as a theorist on federalism did not in fact really come to the fore until the period

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between the two world wars, and especially after the Second World War in France and Belgium, where the historical federalist philosophies received growing attention as the integration of Europe proceeded. THE SWISS EXAMPLE AND ITS CRITICISM In debating the potential for a federation such as the United States of America, philosophers also looked around for examples at home in Europe. Their eye thus fell on Switzerland, which appeared by many to be the ideal example. Switzerland looked particularly attractive to those who were unable to believe in the ability and desire of the European nation states to agree on a federation that would bring all national borders crashing down but who did nevertheless believe in the desire of the European states to arrive at some kind of union. Johann Kaspar Bluntschli of Zürich considered that Switzerland had provided Europe with many ideas that had contributed to the prosperity of the continent and helped to guarantee its future peace. In an article headed ‘Die Organisation des europäischen Staatenvereins’ published in the newspaper Gegenwart in 1878 Bluntschli proposed a federation consisting of 18 sovereign European states. He had already outlined a similar construct in a work entitled Europa als Staatenbund (1871). This federation would be governed by a federal council representing the states in the federation or a senate representing the nations. His proposal thus has much in common with the present organization of the European community with its Council of Ministers and Parliament. Bluntschli did not, however, propose any kind of supranational organization because he was sure the nation states would want to retain their sovereignty. The integration of Europe could not therefore go any further than

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mutual cooperation. In a later work, Die Schweizerische Nationalität, he again stated that the formation of a European state incorporating the existing sovereign states was impossible (Duroselle, 1990: 344). Bluntschli’s work on the federation of Europe aroused extensive debate in Europe. In The Institutes of the Law of Nations published in 1872 the Scottish lawyer James Lorimer mapped out the juridical foundations for a European community. Lorimer did not approve of Bluntschli’s idea of a heavily armed federation ruled by Germany. Instead, he worked on the idea of a United States of Europe governed by an elected organ operating on liberal principles, one of the aims of which would be disarmament. According to Lorimer, the chief administrative organs of the United States of Europe would be a senate and a chamber of deputies. The six major European powers – Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia – would each be entitled to five life senators and 15 elected deputies, the smaller states fewer according to size. The European government would consist of 15 members, five of whom would be senators, and all six major powers would be represented on it. The government would be supervised by a civil and criminal judiciary under a European attorney-general. The European administration would operate from Geneva and the language of government would be French. To ensure that matters ran smoothly, the government would need a small army of officials and policemen. Lorimer believed that cosmopolitan service as a ‘Eurobureaucrat’ in Geneva would prove a promising career for many a gifted young man (Harvie, 1994: 40). Now it is possible to make some interesting observations on the nineteenth century theorists on federalism. The focal issue for the majority seems to have been combining the idea of freedom with the hierarchical structure of the European administration, i.e. safeguarding the sovereignty of individuals and inde-

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pendent states in a centralized federation, the United States of Europe. The main problem was thus deciding just where political decisions should be taken in the various federative models. In the radical federalism of Proudhon, power ultimately lay with the individual citizens, who voluntarily set up joint administrative units. In this ideal situation the free people of Europe would, as it were, be governing themselves; they would not be governed and nor would they be subjects (Ritter, 1969: 156–7). The federalist models of Lorimer and even more so that of Bluntschli were marked by strict central authority in which the peoples of Europe had in electing their representatives handed over their power to them and were consequently governed by them. Political decision-making in the future European community was thus already a focal issue for the federalist theoreticians a hundred years ago. And it is still a focal issue in debate on the European Union today. The question of autonomy, both of the individual and of the state, still has not been solved and it is probably a fact that no watertight model exists. But the dispute over the democratic deficit and the emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity to be observed in decision-making prove that such issues are even more topical today than they were for the nineteenth-century philosophers, for whom they were merely theoretical conjectures and not burning issues of practical politics. EUROSCEPTICS The political reality in nineteenth-century Europe was far from the dreamy visions of the nationalists and federalists. The Romantics had few practical suggestions to offer as to how nationalism could in reality be replaced by European cooperation. The road from

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dreams to reality was a long and rocky one. And the gap that existed is well illustrated by the attitude to the concept of Europe held by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In 1863 the British Ambassador informed Bismarck that Europe would not be offended if Prussia were to invade Poland. To which Bismarck tersely replied, ‘Who is Europe?’ In 1876 the Russian Alexander Gortshakov approached Bismarck in a report on ‘the European problem’. Bismarck noted in the margin that all those who speak of Europe are wrong. Europe is simply a geographical concept. He then went on to announce that the only people he had ever heard using the word ‘Europe’ were statesmen who wanted something from other states which they themselves did not dare to risk taking. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt felt that, in a sense, a European union already existed: Europe as our home. This home was the seat of numerous riches and inventions, and while encompassing many contrasts, it constituted a uniform entity. He nevertheless feared that states would turn to a military dictatorship in their desire to be republican. The conservative Burckhardt called the new, middle-class Europe a Europe of the ‘terrible simplifiers’. Like-minded thinkers did indeed admit the need for a certain degree of unity in Europe but did not approve of the projects aiming at European integration because they feared they would oversimplify the diversity that was such an integral element of the European ethos. IMPERIALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM The period around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been called the era of imperialism in the history of Europe. One of the beliefs legitimizing imperialist policies was that of the ‘white

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man’s burden’, i.e. belief in the superiority of Western civilization and the duty of the white race to spread it to every corner of the earth (Adas, 1989). In the closing decades of the nineteenth century no one seriously doubted the spreading in growing circles of the European regime and government to cover the entire globe. Europe’s imperialist policy was not without its critics even at the turn of the century. The most prominent of these early critics of imperialism was Imperialism. A study written by the British philosopher J.A. Hobson in 1902. Hobson did not subscribe to the white man’s superiority over other races or feel that it entitled nations to exploit their colonies. The main argument in Hobson’s book nevertheless concerned the future of Britain’s world power. In his opinion, imperialism was turning Britain into an economic parasite and a power bewitched by its might. Decay was thus inevitable (Hobson, 1968: 192–5). Hobson may also be examined as a European federalist, since he saw in collaboration between states the salvation of Europe. True internationalism was, according to him, alone capable of laying lasting foundations for rational choice and competition between nations. In a federation of Europe or Western states each state would retain its vitality, but only so long as the federation was not founded on imperialism. The internationalism foregrounded by Hobson was a cherished ideal in the workers’ movement. Hobson’s criticism of imperialism may also have acted as a stimulus for the internationalist ideas of Karl Kautsky and V.I. Lenin (Gollwitzer, 1964: 332). The Marxist classoriented view of internationalism was not, however, the internationalism represented by the thinkers anchoring their theories on Western liberalism. As far as the workers’ movement was concerned, the main question was: how far should the workers’ movement go as regards international solidarity? Did it go beyond the

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patriotic feelings associated with the nation states? Karl Marx had proclaimed that the proletariat have no fatherland. This ban on national sentiments did indeed have its supporters, such as Gustave Hervé in France, who claimed that ‘we anti-patriots despise our fatherland’. At the International Workers’ Congress held in Stuttgart in 1907 Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg drew up a resolution stating that should war break out, it should be brought to an end as soon as possible. The ensuing economic and political crisis should be taken as an opportunity to rise in revolt and overthrow the capitalist regime. Yet when the First World War did break out, nationalism proved to be far stronger than any class solidarity or internationalism. DOUBTS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY The turn of the century also provided fertile soil for more complex assessments of the nature of Europeanism. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886 that the Europeans had in his day come to resemble one another more and more and, through the process of democratization, become members of a herd. On the other hand, he also claimed that the short-sighted European politicians fired by nationalist sentiments were doing their best to bring about the disintegration of Europe. Following a nationalist policy that would prove to be only temporary, a new, supranational human species would, however, emerge whose salient feature would be its great adaptability. Nietzsche believed that aggressive nationalism would in time be forced to admit defeat as the ideal of cultural man gained ground. Nietzsche thus believed that the mingling of races would result in the birth of a nobler European species of man. He also claimed that Europe would have to

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assimilate influences from both East and West. In order to survive, Europe would have to assimilate the profundity of Asia with the direct action of America; it would be Europe’s role to act as an interpreter and mediator between East and West. In its role of mediator Europe would also find itself having to act the charlatan and parasite. Therefore it should not try to establish any single, fixed identity, because in its role as mediator and charlatan commitment of this sort could only lead to exposure and defeat. By adopting a single, lasting identity Europe would find itself merging with either East or West. At around the turn of the century Europe was engulfed by a wave of pessimism in the wake of which belief in the steady progress of mankind and Western civilization began to be widely dispelled. Europe was no longer regarded as the magnificent, ultimate stage in the history of the world. Instead, it looked more as if the seed of destruction had already been sown. In France, especially, many voices were raised in opposition to the most fervent champions of European integration. The Frenchman George Sorel wrote in 1908 of the plans for a United States of Europe: In America, they have made a federation of people who are all alike, living in similar states … Bravo! But how do you propose to federate the Slavs, who are either religious or mystic revolutionaries; the sober Scandinavians; the ambitious Germans; the freedom-loving English; the greedy French; the Italians with their economic crisis; the Balkan poachers; and the belligerent Hungarians? How will you settle this basket of crabs which snap at each other all the livelong day? Miserable Europe! Why conceal what is in store for her? Within ten years, she will sink into war and anarchy as she has always done two or three times every 100 years. (Quoted in Duroselle, 1990: 346)

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5 A New Hope Emerging: the Interwar Period THE SCARS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR Destroying the dreams of the internationalism of the workers’ movement and the imperialism of the European states alike, the First World War was a traumatic experience for the generation born at the turn of the century. Many French writers, such as Paul Valéry and André Malraux, saw European civilization as grappling in the throes of death. Valéry, in particular, crystallized the experiences of war as a spiritual and mental crisis. For as he wrote in 1919, ‘We civilisations now know that we are mortal.’ With the death of European culture, a continent once so mighty would in the future be no more than a western promontory of the Asian continent (Cadwallader, 1981). The years following the First World War were ripe for a wave of pessimism. People were asking whether the culture of the Western world in general, and Europe in particular, had any future. Europe was in ruins, and the changing status of Europe in world politics further added to the pessimism. Competition was now feared from the United States, Bolshevik Russia and even Japan. Had Europe irrevocably lost its position as the economic, political and spiritual leader of the world? This theme is very much to the fore in Le déclin de I’Europe (1920) by Albert Demangeon. Rather than addressing the broad lines in the development of cultures, Demangeon proved in very concrete terms, backing his arguments with statistical tables, that the European economy was suffering from a depression 91

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while keen competition was to be expected from other parts of the world, notably America and Japan. The mood at the end of the First World War is, however, best captured in the two-volume Der Untergang des Abendlands (1917–22) by Oswald Spengler. Although subsequent interpreters have claimed the work was born of the destruction wrought by the war, it was for the most part written before 1914. Its great popularity is partly explained by the fact that it fell on fertile ground – a Europe ravaged by war. Spengler was not, however, really concerned with painting a picture of the future of Western civilization, but rather with comparing the cultures passing through the pageant of history and creating a consistent theory for their rise and fall. Spengler did not in fact maintain that Western civilization was in a state of decline. Rather, it had merely passed from the culture stage to the barren civilization stage; this is no longer an intellectually creative stage in the evolution of cultures, but rather a kind of autumn before its gradual death possibly sometime around the year 2200. The ‘autumn of culture’ was for him stronger than a mere lofty figure of speech and he founded his theory of the stages in the growth of culture on the annual lifecycle of plants. Spengler used three metaphors for change, comparing culture to a plant, to life or a year, each with their own birth, development and withering stages. He himself was loath to speak of ‘Europe’, a word he thought should be eradicated from history. Instead he preferred the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’ as useful, historical concepts. It was possibly partly this feeling of the vulnerability of European civilization that prepared the soil for a recognition of the advantages of unity over free competition. The League of Nations set up to create and maintain order was, however, capable of solving only a few disputes. Ideologically, the League of Nations was nevertheless something new for European man. For the first time relations between states were referred to

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a permanent, organized institution, even though the League was not confined to Europe alone. Earlier philosophies focusing on nation states were criticized for two main reasons: the inevitability of wars between states and the weakening status of the individual. An answer would, it was thought, be provided to both problems by greater international integration and a federalistic policy (Stirk, 1989: 13–15). Despite the pessimism engendered by the war, the idea persisted of European supremacy. Although European imperialism had taken a knock in the war, its ideals had not been totally abandoned. Ramsay Muir’s The Expansion of Europe continued to equate imperialism with the maintenance of international order. According to Muir, the imperialist expansion of the nations of Europe had merely permitted a vision of a future world order. The further the 1920s proceeded, the more pronounced the desire for a new European unity became. A number of movements gradually sprang up, all striving towards European unity. The most notable of these was the Pan-European Movement postulated by Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894–1972) that was not without its share of European imperialism. THE PRINCIPLE OF PAN-EUROPEANISM: EUROPE A BUFFER BETWEEN EAST AND WEST Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s father was a diplomat of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and his mother Japanese, so the family was certainly cosmopolitan. Richard got a PhD from Vienna and had every intention of embarking on an academic career, but his experiences of the First World War and his disappointment over Wilson’s abortive bid for peace led him to a career in politics and deliberations on the future of Europe.

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In 1923 Coudenhove-Kalergi published a book called Pan-Europe, the fourth, revised edition of which appeared in 1926. The Pan-European Movement centred on his native Vienna, and it was founded on the idea of a united, federal Europe (White, 1989). Coudenhove-Kalergi regarded the Europeans as the most capable and most productive people in the world, but Europe was now sliding downhill as the rest of the world developed. One reason for this was that ‘the face of Europe has turned backwards instead of looking forwards’. There were countless books debating the reasons for the First World War, whereas they should rather be doing something to prevent a major war in the future. ‘Europe has been forced from the centre to the periphery of the world.’ Although Coudenhove-Kalergi urged people to turn towards the future, he nevertheless cast a brief look at the six eras in the continent’s history. Ancient Greece was the first Europe and Rome the second. The migrations marked the beginning of the third, culminating in the reign of Charlemagne. The Pope then gradually took over the leadership of the world, yielding ‘the fourth Europe, the borders of which adhered to the confines of the Roman Catholic faith’. The fifth Europe was one of enlightened absolutism or autocracy. Coudenhove-Kalergi here presents an interesting portrait of Napoleon as the man destined to unite Europe: The zenith of this fifth Europe is represented by Napoleon. He was the last to restore the European empire of Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Innocent III. Had he been victorious at Leipzig, the United States of Europe would be in existence today, whether under a Bonapartist or under a Republican régime. His downfall plunged Europe back into international chaos. But the idea of a united Europe, which he renewed was no longer to be drowned; it

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persisted in the reactionary as in the revolutionary camp, under kings as under peoples. (Coudenhove-Kalergi, 1926: 26–7). The First World War had paved the way for the founding of ‘the sixth Europe, the United States of Europe, the Pan-European Federation’. The question as far as Europe was concerned was how long it could preserve its autonomy and its newborn peace under growing pressure from the global states without joining in some form of coalition. The answer to this question was either the voluntary membership of the peoples of Europe in a federation or an enforced alliance under Soviet Russian rule. This fear of nascent Bolshevism was one of the distinctive features of Pan-Europe. Due to its role as a world power, Britain would remain outside the Pan-European alliance, but it would nevertheless have close ties with the federation and would act as a mediator in dealings with the United States of America. According to Coudenhove-Kalergi, the interests of the British Empire and continental Europe differed so vastly that the tension between the two would ultimately lead to the disintegration of the federation should Britain be included. In Coudenhove-Kalergi’s opinion, Europe was threatened not only from the East. It was precisely because of the federation of its states that the United States of America had experienced such an unprecedented economic boom. He looked upon America as an outpost of Europe that was now succeeding in subjugating its former master. Whereas Soviet Russia wanted to conquer Europe, the United States was out to buy it. Unless it entered into some kind of alliance, Europe would not be able to compete with the United States. The Pan-American movement kindling in America was for him the perfect example of a search for unity that would serve as a lesson for Europe, too.

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PAN-EUROPEANISM AND ITS RELATIONS WITH IMPERIALISM AND NATIONALISM The League of Nations did not, for CoudenhoveKalergi, constitute a serious competitor for PanEuropeanism. He regarded the rules of the League as too mechanistic, because any nation in the world could join. It thus meant that non-European states were deciding European affairs, which he felt was unjust – Europe was for the Europeans. The League of Nations should deal only with intercontinental issues, and Europe’s own internal affairs should be left to the European federation’s own jurisdiction. CoudenhoveKalergi had difficulty denying the accusations that the attitude of his movement was hostile to and disparaging of the League of Nations. Pan-Europe would, in the spirit of the times, have its own colonies. Coudenhove-Kalergi here turned to Africa, where the most southerly provinces had the most suitable climate for Europeans, but they were already under British rule. That left the North African deserts and the tropical zone, which would to a great extent be left to Italy and Germany to populate. The desert would, according to the Pan-European utopia, put forth shoots and disease would be wiped out. The spread of superior European culture could not but benefit these areas, which Coudenhove-Kalergi seemed to regard as virtually uninhabited. He personally crystallized the imperialist legacy of Europe in the words: ‘Africa is a tropical Europe’. Coudenhove-Kalergi campaigned on behalf of European unity and its achievement by peaceful means. Yet the future Pan-Europe as a whole was constantly having to contest with the surrounding world. Had Pan-Europe materialized, there would have been five major power blocs in the world: Pan-Americanism led by the United States of America, the British Empire, Soviet Russia, the Asian bloc consisting of a

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united China and Japan, and Pan-Europe. The globe would thus be divided among these five. Nationalism, according to Coudenhove-Kalergi, was a dying ideal in Europe. As an example of destructive nationalism he quoted the almost thousand years of enmity between Germany and France that would be placated only by joint European efforts. CoudenhoveKalergi denied that nationalism was founded on any biological inheritance; it was just a predisposition that could with nurturing be transformed into a European spirit giving birth to one European nation instead of individual nations. Homogeneous in its civilization, Europe was united by the Christian faith, European arts, science and culture, with their roots in the Christian-Hellenic tradition. The uniformity of Western culture, according to Coudenhove-Kalergi, entitles us to speak of a European citizenship that is linguistically and politically subdivided into different groups. The concept of Europeanism was, CoudenhoveKalergi claimed, in fact alien only to the Europeans themselves, since it was perfectly familiar to the Asians, the Russians and the Americans. For them, Europe had become an entity, a sort of giant nation, long ago. The Europeans alone lacked the necessary distance for them to recognize the existence of kinship and common interests. The Pan-European Movement was therefore a mirror of Europe in which the Europeans could learn to recognize themselves. In one sense the Pan-European plan was reminiscent of earlier conceptions of a joining of the nations. Coudenhove-Kalergi was no more forthcoming with realistic suggestions for putting his plan into practice than any of his predecessors had been. Admittedly he did succeed in explaining why Pan-Europe was something to strive for, but he barely hinted at any ways of bringing his plans to fruition. Pan-Europe would, according to him, have to be realized by degrees. The

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first stage would be to hold a large conference, the second to set up a Pan-European security system and the third a customs union. In diplomatic circles Coudenhove-Kalergi won a reputation for being a hopeless daydreamer. He believed that states would almost automatically join a federation because it would be the most sensible thing for them to do. Finally it would be possible to set up a twochamber parliament to govern the whole of Europe. The official language would be English. Although Britain did not occupy a very central role in Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Europe, he nevertheless looked upon English as the natural world language. OTHER EUROPEAN MOVEMENTS Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s dream of a PanEuropean Europe was by no means the only vision of European unity proposed between the First and the Second World Wars. Even while the First World War was still raging and Germany appeared to be winning, Friedrich Naumann was working on a theory of a federation of Central European states which he called Mitteleuropa, to which I will be returning later. The idea of a Central European Federation led by Germany was widely supported in other quarters, too, during and even after the First World War. The Greek-German A. Poulimenos believed that a developed form of socialism would be the best means of achieving European integration. A Mitteleuropa led by Germany could later be expanded into a federation covering the whole continent as more and more Western European states applied for membership. Albert J.H. Vazeille of France was the author of a work entitled Pour les États-Unis d’Europe (1924) examining the idea of Europe in the light of the principles of natural law and history. According to Vazeille, the prin-

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ciples of federalism were inherent in natural law, and federalism would be the best means of balancing the trends leading to unity and disunity. As his models he took the types of federal government embodied in Switzerland and the United States. In the same year the German Social Democrat Hermann Kranold published a book on the Die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa in which he approached the problem of European unity from a socialist point of view. Unlike most of his socialist predecessors, Kranold did not believe that federalism would destroy the future socialization of Europe, and indeed would tend more to promote it. He thus urged socialists to work for a federalist Europe that would, even as a socialist unit, automatically be stronger than a politically dispersed continent (Pegg, 1983: 38–9). The Danish physician C.F. Heerfordt saw integration as the only way of rescuing Europe. He likened states to human individuals: just as states had made war between individuals impossible, so a federation would put an end to wars between states. In his manifesto Et nytt Europa II (1929) Heerfordt outlined his proposal for a form of government for an Anglo-European United States of Europe or Europa communis. For every half million inhabitants the parliament of each state would elect one representative to a legislative council, but states with a superior degree of civilization, natural resources, geographical location or ascendancy would be entitled to more. While advocating a United States of Europe, Heerfordt was nevertheless eager to safeguard the national development of each individual state. The federation would, accordingly, be concerned mainly with foreign and security policy, its primary aim being to guarantee peace in Europe. There were, in his opinion, two ways in which Europe could, in principle, proceed towards a federation. Firstly, the enlightened section of the population, such as the intellectuals, businessmen and journalists, could actively champion the integration

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process in their own countries, to be followed by action on the part of their governments. Secondly, each country could set up a national committee to promote the federation; these committees would then constitute the national subunits of this Pan-European organization (Tchoubarian, 1994: 128–9). Competitions were held, inviting articles on European integration. Towards the end of 1929 the French journal Revue des vivants launched an essay competition on the subject of a European federation. It yielded 502 entries, many of them over 200 pages long. The competition was won by a detailed proposal submitted by Robert Mang that was, at the suggestion of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, sent to the XIth General Assembly of the League of Nations. The most radical aspect of Mang’s proposal was perhaps his condition that the territorial demands of the states that lost the war be recognized before any agreement could be reached on a future federation. Thus the ‘infamous Treaty of Versailles’ would cease to be a cause of friction between the states of Europe. The late 1920s produced a spate of books – especially in France – extolling and idealizing Europe and Europeanism. These included Europe, ma Patrie (1928) by Gaston Rioun, Les États-Unis d’Europe (1929) by the Duke of Sforza and Edouard Herriot’s Europe (1930). The last of these presents a general survey of the history of the idea of Europe while also devoting attention to the topical issue of how to put an end to nationalist interests in Europe and bring about a transition to federalist integration. THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES AND THE EUROPEAN LIFE SPIRIT Spengler’s view of the gradual demise of Western civilization sparked off a host of comments and

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guided debate on the fate of Western culture until well after the First World War. Yet as immediate recollections of the war faded, faith in the viability of European civilization gradually revived. In 1930 the Spanish José Ortega y Gasset published La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses). Ortega y Gasset was one of the many influential thinkers of the 1930s meditating on the crisis of Europe, but he nevertheless saw light at the end of the tunnel. While seconding Spengler’s opinion that Europe was in the middle of a crisis, he seriously disagreed with him on the nature of that crisis and the future of the continent. The reason for the crisis was, according to Ortega y Gasset, what he called the ‘revolt of the masses’. It was not the exceptionally high growth of the population but their massing together, i.e. the fact that the broad ranks of society were marching forward and taking over the foreground of society. And strangest of all: while these ‘common men’ were themselves aware of their mediocrity, they had no qualms about fighting for their rights. According to Ortega y Gasset, the postwar period was a period of levelling during which the disparity between the continents dwindled. He did not, however, see this as the decadence of Western society, because European culture was below that of America in its standard of living: We are living in a levelling period; there is a levelling of fortunes, of culture among the various social classes, of the sexes. Well, in the same way there is a levelling of continents, and as the European was formerly lower from a vital point of view, he has come out the gainer from this levelling. Consequently, from this standpoint, the uprising of the masses implies a fabulous increase of vital possibilities, quite the contrary to what we hear so often about the decadence of Europe. This is a confused and clumsy expression, in which it is not clear what is being

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referred to, whether it is the European states, or European culture, or what lies underneath all this, and is of infinitely greater importance, the vital activity of Europe. (Ortega y Gasset, 1950: 19) The vital activity was for Ortega y Gasset the very factor that would assure the future rise of the continent. Europe had, he pointed out, ruled the world for three hundred years, and he saw no reason why it could not continue to do so. Even though Europe was in some sort of crisis, this crisis was nevertheless the first step on the road to recovery, along which the Europe of separate nations could strive towards a common European federation. The crisis facing the nations of Europe and their decadence was, in Ortega y Gasset’s opinion, inevitable if these disparate nations were gradually to form a United States of Europe and the continent’s differences were to give way to true community. The potential for integration already existed for Ortega y Gasset in the common European tradition and values, which would in the future bind nations even more closely together: The souls of the French and English and Spanish are, and will be, as different as you like, but they possess the same psychological architecture; and above all they are gradually becoming similar in content. Religion, science, law, art, social and sentimental values are being shared alike. Now these are the spiritual things by which man lives. The homogeneity, then, becomes greater than if the souls themselves were all cast in identical mould. If we were to take an inventory of our mental stock today – opinions, standards, desires, assumptions – we should discover that the greater part of it does not come to the Frenchman from France, nor to the Spaniard from Spain, but from the common European stock.

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Today, in fact, we are more influenced by what is European in us than by what is special to us as Frenchmen, Spaniards, and so on. (Ortega y Gasset, 1950: 133–4) Ortega y Gasset does indeed arrive at the optimistic conclusion that the Europeans all share three-quarters of their spiritual structure. THE BRIAND PLAN The problem was felt to be how to get the politicians and governments enthusiastic about the idea of European unity. The Briand Plan was a specific attempt to transfer the integration debate from the level of philosophical pamphlets and make the issue the political goal of governments. The Memorandum on European unity prepared by the French Foreign Ministry drummed up enthusiasm for collaboration between the states of Europe on the threshold of the 1930s. The idea of a Pan-European Federation was once again activated and the French premier, Aristide Briand, mainly responsible for the contents of the Memorandum, was in close contact with CoudenhoveKalergi. It was Briand who officially opened the second Pan-European Congress in Berlin on 17 May 1930 (Pegg, 1982: 128–39). The collaboration between states in the period since the First World War had not been to Briand’s liking. He felt the League of Nations had proved to be too powerless and unintegrated to achieve anything concrete on the European integration score. The Pact of Locarno had in turn been too restricted and too confined to the peace treaty of 1919. In place of these former schemes for integration Aristide Briand, assisted by a band of government officials, issued a Memorandum aiming at the

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development of federal cooperation in Europe. He did, however, stress that this cooperation should not compromise the sovereignty of any state. Christened Briand’s Memorandum in memory of him, the treatise comprised a preface appealing for European solidarity followed by four sections. First it pointed out the urgency of reaching a federal agreement of a general moral nature and the solemn reinforcement of solidarity. The second section dealt with the organization of the European federation, the third outlined the general principles and the fourth listed major areas for cooperation. Territorially, the federation envisaged by Briand would take in all the states of Europe with the exception of the Soviet Union (Heater, 1992: 135–8). European cooperation was in Briand’s Memorandum assigned a narrower role than in the Pan-European visions. According to the Memorandum, the European federation would, furthermore, be a firm member of the League of Nations, which Coudenhove-Kalergi opposed. The Memorandum also wanted Britain to be a member of the federation. Most of all CoudenhoveKalergi was, however, irritated by the Memorandum’s promise not to limit the sovereignty of states, and he went on to ask how any sort of federation could ever be imagined without limiting the sovereignty of the nation states. Yet Coudenhove-Kalergi was in principle favourably disposed towards the Briand Memorandum and especially the way it had stimulated debate on Europe. The Pan-European Congress went so far as to claim that it marked the beginning of a new era in European politics and that it was the first stage on the road to a European federation. The reactions of most of the European governments were not, however, so encouraging, and the more influential the state was, the more it criticized the Memorandum. In particular the governments of Britain, Germany and Italy failed to

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warm to the picture propagated by the Memorandum of the cultural and moral homogeneity of Europe (Pegg, 1983: 149–56). Coudenhove-Kalergi blamed certain details of the Memorandum for this cool reception and refused to admit that the European ideal did not in fact enjoy the support he had hoped for. The concrete outcome of the Briand Memorandum was slight. In autumn 1930 the XIth General Assembly of the League of Nations set up a separate committee to look into the establishment of a European federation. Considerably watering down France’s original initiative, the committee restricted itself to economic cooperation alone and only met once again after the death of Aristide Briand on 7 March 1932. THE RISE OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM AND THE FATE OF PAN-EUROPEANISM In the early 1930s tension rose on the international scene and any ideas of European unity were laid aside. The protectionism of the depression swept the ground from beneath the development of economic integration, the League of Nations proved incapable of enacting the role of guardian of international order and Europe’s political elite no longer witnessed the rise of advocates of the Pan-European ideal such as Briand and the German Stresemann. The Pan-European Movement continued holding meetings, but they suffered a further drop in popularity. The Pan-European Congress held in 1936 was by this time only a shadow of its former self and was held in conjunction with a conference on agriculture. Yet only in 1932 Coudenhove-Kalergi had, at the congress in Basel, expounded his belief in the ability of the rising generation to bring about a united Europe.

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With the rise of national socialism, the operation of the Pan-European Movement became impossible in Germany. One of the supporting pillars of the movement had been the rapprochement of France and Germany, which had looked quite favourable in the light of the 1920s but which became more and more of a distant dream as the 1930s progressed. CoudenhoveKalergi still believed in an Italian–French alliance as the axis of European unity even in the 1930s. When Italy, too, defected, Coudenhove-Kalergi pinned his hopes for unity on a French–British axis, at the same time modifying his previous views on the role of Britain in the Pan-European community. On the eve of the Second World War, as Hitler’s troops marched into Austria, Coudenhove-Kalergi emigrated to the United States along with many others. Following the Anschluss, the Pan-European Federation lost its base and archives when the Gestapo destroyed all traces of the by now prohibited organization. Coudenhove-Kalergi got a job teaching at a university in the United States, but he never abandoned his grand idea: the fifth Pan-European Congress was held in New York in 1943. Meanwhile Nazi propaganda had launched the phrase ‘a new Europe’, but the vision of a regime dictated by Hitler and Germany was a long way from the European Federation dreamt of by Coudenhove-Kalergi and Briand. After the war Coudenhove-Kalergi returned to Europe and again became an active proponent of European unity. The Europe of the late 1940s was, however, no longer the continent it was when he was writing his manifesto in the 1920s. An aristocrat, Coudenhove-Kalergi had difficulty swallowing the idea of collaborating with partisans and other members of the European resistance movements, and his clumsy diplomacy drove the entire movement to the sidelines of Europe integration. Many undoubtedly also recalled Coudenhove-Kalergi’s admiration of Mussolini in the

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late 1920s, when he was trying to build up a PanEurope by enlisting the support of Italy. The PanEuropean Movement held a few more congresses in the 1950s before gradually slipping into oblivion. THE MEANING OF THE INTERWAR PERIOD FOR EUROPEAN INTEGRATION Towards the end of the 1920s the new ideals championed by the Pan-European Movement, such as the demand for peace, the fear of the rising Bolshevism and the idea of economic integration, fell on fertile soil. But in the Europe of the 1930s they evoked less and less of a response. One reason for the movement’s meagre success is said to have been CoudenhoveKalergi’s false assessment of national socialism and his underestimation of its significance (White, 1989: 39). Yet between the wars the people of Europe clearly identified with their nation states and the PanEuropean ideal preaching an abolition of national borders never became a clear, concrete alternative or a plausible goal in people’s minds. Coudenhove-Kalergi also had great faith in his own personal connections, above all with Gustav Stresemann in Germany and Aristide Briand in France. The unification of Europe was, he felt, very much within the powers of these two wise statesmen. Their deaths left the movement’s objectives suspended in mid air, since Pan-Europeanism no longer had any influential supporters in leading positions in the two biggest European states. The Pan-Europeanism of Coudenhove-Kalergi never became a mass political movement grouped behind a clearly formulated manifesto for a European identity. Other reasons may also be put forward for the foundering of the Pan-European project. Britain was strongly opposed to all Pan-European policies and few

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were willing to embark on projects without its support. The economic depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s with its mass unemployment and civil unrest spurred the national governments along the road to a protectionist policy. By the time the Nazis rose to power in 1933, there was no longer room in Europe for the federationalist ideas of Briand and Coudenhove-Kalergi. Nor was the League of Nations with its own bureaucracy a potential competitor to the Pan-European Movement in the period between the wars, or at least no natural division of labour emerged between the two (Bugge, 1995: 105–6).

6 Towards Maastricht: the Realization of the European Union RECOVERY FROM THE WAR The Europe rising from the ruins in 1945 had suffered two major wars in the space of 30 years. It was no wonder, therefore, that its statesmen were in the right frame of mind to ponder ways of preventing another war of the same calibre. The West was also afraid of the Soviet Union. The spread of communism was felt to be a threat that could only be warded off by a strong, united Western Europe. Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian advocate of the policy of European integration and drafter of the Treaty of Rome, recalled in his memoirs that many European statesmen since the war have been honoured with the title of ‘father of European integration’. Yet there was not one, in his opinion, who deserved the title, which belonged exclusively to Joseph Stalin. Spaak naturally meant that the threat of communism encouraged the western European countries to a closer cooperation, which gradually led to European integration. Even while the war was still being waged, many Europeans, and especially those who had worked for the resistance movement, were trying to formulate a new Europe. These factions, united in their effort to combat fascism, tried to envisage the social trends of a postwar Europe in a spirit of comradeship. In Italy, Altiero Spinelli wrote from prison in 1941 a manifesto for a united, federalist Italy that subsequently spread among members of the Italian resistance. In August 109

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1943 a European federalist movement (Movimento Federalista Europeo) was founded on the basis of Spinelli’s plan that sought the collaboration of similar groups in other countries. This movement sparked off a major conference in Geneva in July 1944 at which a programme for a federalist Europe chiefly masterminded by Spinelli was announced. The federalist Europe would, according to this plan, be a supranational alliance with its own constitution that would be directly responsible to the peoples of Europe and not to any national governments. The alliance would have its own army and no other armies would be permitted. The government would be complemented by a juridical tribunal with exclusive rights to interpret the constitution and to reach a settlement on any disagreements. Declarations such as this engendered confidence among the resistance movements of the political reorganization of Europe once the war was over. It looked in the closing stages of the war as if Britain was the European state best able to withstand the military pressure from Germany. Winston Churchill was expected to continue at the helm when the war was over. As early as 1940, on the eve of the invasion of France, Churchill had been at pains to agree with France on the establishment of an Anglo-French union, but the collapse of France had put paid to all such plans. The situation rapidly changed, however. When the Labour Party came to power in Britain in 1945, attitudes to European unity were no longer quite so enthusiastic as they had been before the war, when all efforts had been geared to building up an alliance capable of withstanding a common enemy in the form of Nazi Germany. It was no doubt inevitable that the economic rebuilding of Europe should gradually take precedence over political integration projects. The United States contributed to the economic rebuilding process in the form of Marshall Aid: devastated by the

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war, Europe was more concerned with feeding the hungry than with contemplating new ideals. THE VARIOUS STEPS TO POSTWAR INTEGRATION The move towards integration in postwar Europe can be summarized in a number of ways. The story manifesting a traditional, institutional approach goes as follows. The primary goal was to maintain peace in Europe and avoid another major war. One way to do this would be to integrate the economic interests of the former enemy states. A move was therefore made to place the coal and steel reser ves of France and Germany under a supranational administration. In 1951 Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries accordingly set up the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), later to be expanded in 1957 under the Treaty of Rome into the European Economic Community (EEC). The same countries further established the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom). The acting bodies of the EEC, the ECSC and Euratom, were combined in 1967 under the Merger Treaty, and from then onwards there was growing talk of a European Community. The European Community expanded in 1973 with the accession of Britain, Denmark and Ireland. The European Monetary System (EMS) was set up in 1979, giving birth to the ecu (European Currency Unit) as the European unit of account calculated from the exchange rates of the currencies involved. Under the White Paper issued in 1985 the EC states approved the programme completing the European internal market and aiming at the abolition of physical, technical and fiscal barriers. The following year the Community carried out the biggest reform since the Treaty of Rome by passing the Single Act covering not only the single market but also

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technological cooperation, environmental policy, political cooperation, economic and social cohesion. The number of members also grew with the admission of Greece (1981), Spain and Portugal (1986) as member states. The process leading from the European Community to the European Union was concretely set in motion in 1989 when the European Council agreed that the first stage of economic and monetary union, the freedom of movement of capital, would begin as of July 1990. Meanwhile negotiations were beginning in Rome on a draft contract for the future European Union. The results of the conferences were written into a treaty that was finalized at Maastricht in December 1991 and signed on 7 February 1992. The Treaty came into force on 1 November 1993. On that day the European Union was born. The same process can be approached by looking at the builders of the single market and their objectives, thereby revealing more clearly the type of Europe envisaged at each stage. It also shows that the postwar integration of Europe has, far from being a dynamic progression towards the European Union, been a gradual evolution interspersed with sudden bursts of action. In this story the process may be divided into six stages marked off by the tensions between the actors advocating integration and the factors contributing to disintegration. The first stage up to 1950 was characterized by a search for suitable modes and organizations and debate over the underlying principles of cooperation. It was during the second stage, from 1950 to 1957, that the functional organizations took shape. The third stage, the 1960s, was once again a time for intergovernmental agreements. This era was strongly marked by the opposition of the French president, Charles de Gaulle, to far-reaching union projects. The 1970s and the fourth stage of integration were charac-

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terized by a new upsurge of union sympathies. The fifth stage, from 1979 to 1984, may be regarded as the ‘Britain’ period: how to incorporate Britain into the Community and decide on how far it could be allowed dispensations. During the sixth stage beginning in 1985 the cooperation has been made firmer and the Treaty of Maastricht has resulted in a growing European Union (Holland, 1993). The story of the process of integration in postwar Europe can thus be written from the perspective of either the institutions or the philosophies involved. Let us now take a closer look at the latter. THE EARLY Y EARS In the years immediately following the Second World War, organizations were formed in Europe that advocated a certain degree of economic and political unity: the United Europe Movement in Britain, the Catholic Nouvelles Équipes Internationales and the Socialist Movement for the United States of Europe in France, both with branches in Belgium and Luxembourg. The corresponding organization in Germany was the Europa-Bund. The federalist aspirations found joint expression in the European Union of Federalists founded in 1946 and taking in the groups operating in Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Holland and Switzerland (Urwin, 1991: 27). One of the milestones along the early path to integration was ‘The tragedy of Europe’, a speech made by Winston Churchill in Zürich on 19 September 1946, in which he claimed that the idea of a united Europe was inconceivable without a spiritually great France and Germany. The first in the recreation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany.

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In this way only can France recover the moral leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and a spiritually great Germany. The structure of the United States of Europe, if well and truly built, will be such as to make the material strength of a single state less important. Small nations will count as much as large ones and gain their honour by their contribution to the common cause. (Quoted in Nelsen and Stubb, 1994: 8) The first step towards a United States of Europe would be the establishment of a Council of Europe. Although Churchill did in his speech identify the United States of Europe as his objective, he nevertheless reserved for Britain a passive role in the integration of the continent. The continental solution did not in his opinion require the very strong presence of Britain. Churchill’s speech possibly served as an incentive for the relatively passive role adopted by Britain over the decades to come on the question of integration. In France Jean Monnet, the creative force behind the Treaty of Paris, was meanwhile formulating a European community relying specifically on the presence of Britain, and not until the 1950s did he reluctantly resign himself to the idea of a Europe without Britain should this prove inevitable. The literature on the postwar integration of Europe has devoted volumes to debating the precise role of Jean Monnet in the projects aiming at integration: was he a strict federalist and proponent of a United States of Europe, or was he simply a keen advocate of practical modes of operation? Observance of the way his ideas developed from the 1940s to the 1970s indicates that he was initially clearly in favour of a broad political alliance, but that in the face of opposition from Britain and, later, Charles de Gaulle, he became increasingly in favour of a gradual strategy proceeding in small steps.

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Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak can with good reason be regarded as the policy-makers on European integration in the late 1940s. They did, however, enjoy the support of three leading politicians, without whom it is probable that no plan would have reached fruition. These men were Robert Schuman (the French Prime Minister 1947–48 and Foreign Minister 1948–52), Alcide de Gasperi (the Italian Prime Minister 1945–53) and Konrad Adenauer (the German Chancellor 1949–63). These three mutual acquaintances were all Christian Democrats, spoke German and could see beyond their national borders on issues concerning Europe. Due to their church connections, they were sometimes known as the ‘Black Front’ (Heater, 1992: 153). Another milestone along the road to the single market was the European Congress of 1948, at which representatives of 16 states proclaimed as their objectives the setting up of a European Parliament, jointly approved human rights and a European court of justice. The outcome of the Hague Congress was the European Movement, to which the United States began to grant financial support the following year. The rebuilding of Europe in the late 1940s was to a great extent tied to the United States because of the Marshall Aid it received. The distribution of this aid was handled by the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC). The OEEC did not, however, set out to challenge the sovereign status of individual governments. Many later said of this organization that it suffered from an internal structural weakness in that it never attempted anything but to further cooperation between nations. The idea that 16 sovereign states could work together efficiently was in Monnet’s opinion a mere illusion. And the OEEC was indeed a conventional intergovernmental organization that either operated on the principle of consensus or not at all (Holland, 1993: 25).

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THE SCHUMAN PLAN AND THE OPTIMISM OF THE EARLY 1950S The Council of Europe was set up in Strasbourg in 1949. Its role was, however, to be that of a general forum for debate with little binding authority. The Council’s ineffectiveness was partly due to Britain’s unwillingness to commit itself to any close cooperation. The dominant strategy in 1950 was thus to further the integration of continental Europe. The Schuman Plan proposed in that same year, the Treaty of Paris and the agreement on the European Coal and Steel Community signed in 1951 were in fact among the first to produce any clear results in the process of integration. The Treaty of Paris can be regarded as the operational counterpart of the Schuman Plan, seeking at a practical level to foster economic cooperation between the states of Europe. Issued on 9 May 1950, the Schuman Plan was the most significant document presenting the goals for integration in the immediate postwar period. According to this plan, a state of peace could only be preserved in an actively working, organized Europe. The reason for the repeated wars in Europe was the lack of unity. The Schuman Plan clearly advocated the creation of a federalist Europe as the political goal of integration. Yet Jean Monnet, the chief architect of the plan, had already become aware that a federalist Europe could not ensue immediately, and that a different strategy would have to be observed, as clearly expressed in the wording of the Schuman Plan: Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France

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and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries. (Quoted in Nelsen and Stubb, 1994: 12) In practice the concrete achievement was to be the founding of European Coal and Steel Community in 1952. According to the Schuman Plan, the striving towards economic cooperation was at the same time the first step towards a European federation. As the 1950s wore on, it nevertheless became increasingly obvious that the idea of a united federation was not at that time politically feasible. In 1951 the Treaty of Paris already spoke more loosely of a process aiming to foster a sense of community among nations divided by long and bloody conflicts. The same document viewed the European Coal and Steel Community as an institution that would lay the foundations for a common future fate. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 then went on to advocate not only the laying of firm foundations but also the fostering of even closer ties between the nations of Europe. More detailed objectives for the creation of a political union are, with the exception of the possible nature of that union, conspicuous by their absence (Stirk and Willis, 1991; Deighton, 1995). The plan put forward by Schuman on the brink of the 1950s has in this sense become a major landmark in the integration of Europe. For it prescribes the political and supranational integration of Europe in a way that acquired new prominence in the course of the 1980s, when, with the economic boom and the collapse of the socialist regime in Eastern Europe, hopes of a federalist Europe once again began to be entertained: of a Europe in which the idea of a political union governed by a supranational body was optimistically revived as the goal in forming an alliance. In the early 1950s Europe found itself caught up in something of a single market euphoria following the

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success of the Schuman Plan and the founding of the ECSC. There were also calls for some sort of military cooperation between the states of Europe under the aegis of the European Defence Community (EDC). Towards the end of 1950 the French premier M. Pleven put forward a plan for a joint European defence force and defence minister modelled chiefly on the set-up at the ECSC. Political justification was found for this in the need to counteract the military might of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European armies in Europe. Attempts to create a common defence policy and a largely common foreign policy nevertheless proved abortive. Britain refused in principle to join any European defence programme and the plan was dealt its final blow in 1954 when the French Parliament declined to sign the agreement, partly for fear of the growing economic and military power of West Germany. The plans for the integration of Europe of the early 1950s did not stop at the ECSC or the idea of a common defence community and went considerably further. In spring 1953 a plan was raised for a European Political Community (EPC) that would incorporate the ECSC and the Defence Community. This Political Community would be highly federal in nature and consist of a governing board, a council of ministers, a seat of justice and a democratically elected parliament. This plan for a European Political Community did not satisfy the most ardent federalists, however, because they felt that it invested too much authority in the ministerial level of the nation states and would not therefore aspire to a sufficient degree of supranational European jurisdiction. But even this degree of unity was too much for the powers-that-be in some countries, and the idea of a European Political Community was abandoned with the failure to establish a common defence community (Urwin, 1991: 61–7).

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DE GAULLE AND THE COOLING OF ENTHUSIASM In around 1950 the ruling British Labour Party declared that the setting up of supranational organizations in Europe was not in Britain’s interests. This alone was not yet fatal to the integration of Europe since many of the advocates of the single market, such as Monnet and Spaak, felt confident that they could start by building up a union based on the continental countries. Some achievements had been recorded in the small-step policy since the foundering of the Defence Community and the Political Community: the European free trade area or European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community operating in a similar way to the ECSC in 1957. The Treaty of Rome signed in 1957, the chief architect of which was Paul-Henri Spaak, is, together with the Maastricht Treaty, still one of the cornerstones of the European Union. Far more fateful as regards the move towards integration than the few set-backs of the early 1950s was to be the rise to power of Charles de Gaulle as President of France in 1958. A national hero as a result of his role in the Algerian War, de Gaulle rejected the idea of expanding the European Economic Community and furthering the federalistic integration policy. Meanwhile, in 1961, Britain was applying for full membership of the EEC along with Denmark and Norway. But in 1963, after lengthy accession negotiations, de Gaulle made an unexpected press statement to the effect that Britain’s membership was not acceptable to France. In 1967 Britain renewed its application, but this time de Gaulle was adamantly against it right from the start. Once again the EEC expansion was nipped in the bud and no more steps were taken towards closer integration until the 1970s. De Gaulle’s view of Europe was diametrically opposed to that of Monnet – first President of the ECSC and the

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mastermind behind Euratom. De Gaulle’s Europe was founded on the idea of cooperation between independent nation states rather than of a supranational federation. Jean Monnet had connections with the United States, but the Europe of de Gaulle was to be independent of the United States and in fact oriented more to the east. De Gaulle liked to think of Europe as a continent stretching from the Atlantic right across to the Urals, but instead of being a political unit founded on a federation, this Europe was a loose body of independent states in which France would have most authority on questions of foreign policy. De Gaulle’s policy on Europe is clearly evident from the statements he made over the years. From the very outset he accused the supranational European organizations of being an alchemistic compound, an algebraic equation and a cabbalistic scheme. His comment in 1951 on the suggestion that a European Defence Community be established was that he could not imagine how enthusiasm, trust and obedience could be expected from any French citizen sold to an international organization. When the Common Market was formed, de Gaulle asked in May 1962 whether the people of France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium or Luxembourg could even dream of observing laws voted through by foreign members of parliament if these laws went against their own deeply anchored will. In January 1964, having refused Britain entry into the Common Market, he then went on to say that it was quite clear that no nations, no European nations, wanted their fates to be submitted to a court of justice consisting mainly of foreigners. It was also quite clear that Britain, being a big kingdom and a big nation, would not approve of it any more than any smaller nation. Back in spring 1962 de Gaulle had already said at a press conference that there was not and could not be any Europe other than a Europe of independent states – all else was a mythical illusion. To

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put it briefly, de Gaulle saw the EEC simply as an intergovernmental instrument by which France sought above all to safeguard its interests in Europe (Holland, 1993: 33–5). The EEC policy of de Gaulle’s France was a great disappointment to such Europe enthusiasts as Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak. As early as 1963, on de Gaulle vetoing Britain’s entry into the Common Market, Monnet had said that although it had turned off the motorway, the course of change would continue. That was something de Gaulle could not halt. By the end of the decade Monnet had grown even more pessimistic, and in June 1967 said he thought it was terrible what That Man was doing to Europe. He also regretted de Gaulle’s refusal to learn from history: General de Gaulle’s proposals are based on notions that are out of date, they forget the lessons of our most recent history. They completely ignore what a series of failures has taught us: that it is impossible to solve Europe’s problems among States which retain full national sovereignty. (Monnet, 1978: 433–4) Spaak likewise saw the ideal envisaged in the Treaty of Rome as vanished and gone to waste. He declined to attend the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Treaty in 1967 because in his opinion the self-centred, introvert Europe at which the official policy aimed was too far from the noble, liberal-minded Europe he personally had been trying to build in the late 1940s and the 1950s. SIX EUROPEAN SCENARIOS Winter descended on Europe’s federal aspirations in the closing years of the 1960s. This prompted scholars in international politics to develop various political

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scenarios for the future of Europe. One thing all these models had in common was their vision of Europe as a pawn in a game of power politics dominated by the United States of America and the Soviet Union. This sense of being a mere buffer between two world powers and the need to establish an independent role for Europe is very much to the fore in The New Europeans (1968) by the British journalist and writer Anthony Sampson. Sampson travelled round Western Europe, analysing his observations in a book in which the crucial issue was whether or not there was any need for Europe to be united. It would be surprising if, after the long peace, Europe were not showing signs of her old restlessness and aggressiveness. The idea of Europe uniting for its own sake, or for the sake of prosperity, peace or human happiness, has always seemed rather out of character. In the first years of the cold war there was the challenging motive, to unite against the fear of Russia; when that fear subsided, a new motive was proposed, to unite against American industry; but that is not a sufficient incentive. The belief that Europe should unite to become a third force, to have her own say in world affairs, can still animate those who remember the old days of the Belle Époque, when the chancelleries of Paris, Berlin or London had a decisive influence on the world; but I doubt how far it inspires a new generation. It is quite possible, of course, that in the years to come western Europe will find a new threat or challenge which will give her a new purpose, and perhaps a new unity … But as it is, western Europe, shorn of overseas commitments and empires and protected by the American umbrella, is a continent without a cause; and in this situation, its components are very likely to reassert themselves. (Sampson, 1968: 426)

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In 1969 Alastair Buchan, basing his arguments on calculations made at the Institute for Strategic Studies in London, proposed six alternative trends for the integration of Western Europe (Buchan, 1969). According to him, it was by no means certain that a single homogeneous culture such as that forecast would emerge among the young of Western Europe as a basis for future integration. The states of Western Europe could either remain passive with regard to their own development or assume a more active role and try to construct a new political regime. The first of the passive alternatives mentioned by Buchan was an evolutionary Europe. According to this, the ideal of European integration would at certain periods be regarded as an objective, but not as a realistic short-range political one. This was very much the situation prevailing in Europe in the late 1960s, when the political integration of Europe featured little in the various national governments. The goal of the evolutionary Europe would be to eliminate various obstacles without developing any positive modes of cooperation. It would be diplomatically weak and open to outside influences, but at its best it could nevertheless be conducive to dialogue between East and West. In the second of Buchan’s alternatives, the atlanticized Europe, the Cold War between East and West would become an accepted fact and Europe would have turned its gaze on the West. In this alternative Europe clearly would recognize the dominance and interests of the United States within the Atlantic context. Buchan thought this alternative could be realized by means of defence policy, but he expected it to meet with considerable opposition in the fields of politics and economics. As his third alternative Buchan identified a Europe of nation states, Europe des Etats. The nation state would here be the basic decision-making unit, but unlike in the first two alternatives, the states of Europe would be

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convinced of their own power to influence world politics. In this nation-state Europe the states would in principle nevertheless be unanimous over the political objectives and would seek to observe a policy independent of the United States. In the fourth alternative, a fragmented Europe, the integration ideal would be missing entirely and the various states would concentrate exclusively on handling their own internal affairs. There would admittedly be some cooperation between governments, as in the nation-state Europe, but the forum would tend to be the UN and its various organizations rather than any pan-European organ. Finally Buchan proposed two alternatives in which the states of Europe would more actively be committed to developing new modes of cooperation. In the partnership Europe there would be a federal Western Europe working in close collaboration with the United States. Unlike in the Atlantic Europe model, an equal partnership would in this alternative prevail between Europe and the United States. The aim of the partnership Europe, as of the independent Europe presented by Buchan as his sixth alternative, would be the creation of an independent federal Europe. The crucial difference between these models would be that the partnership Europe would rely specifically on cooperation with the United States, whereas the independent federal Europe would be neutral in its relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union. According to Buchan, the creation of a United States of Europe might in the partnership Europe be a gradual process, whereas the creation of an independent federal Europe and its joint organs would probably take place at a single stroke. The alternatives sounded out by Buchan are a clear indication of European thought at the turn of the 1970s, the future of Europe being dominated by relations between the superpowers. So long as the border between East and West ran through Europe, the vital

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question in any speculation on the future of the continent would be the nature of relations with both the Soviet Union and the United States. It was a fact, claimed Buchan, that so long as Europe remained divided, it could not hope to achieve a status on a par with that of the two major powers. Yet he, too, saw Europe’s joint cultural heritage as the basis on which to build a community. At the end of his book Buchan declined to nominate any of his six alternatives as the probable model for Europe, preferring to recommend a functional model in which the choice between intergovernmental cooperation and wider communal organizations would be made according to the case in question. This functional policy has in practice become the dominant strategy for European integration. THE GENERATION OF COMMUNITY IN THE 1970S De Gaulle was forced to resign at the end of April 1969 and Europe soon embarked on a new, active search for community. The General’s successor, Georges Pompidou, was probably no less of a French nationalist than de Gaulle, but he nevertheless felt that a European economic area would be the best way of boosting the French economy rather than acting as a competitor. By the time Willy Brandt had been elected German Chancellor in August 1969 and Edward Heath Prime Minister of Britain the following summer, the leaders of the three main European powers were once again set on a course towards integration. At the conference held by the heads of state in The Hague in December 1969 the idea of a supranational community was once again raised as a crucial political objective instead of cooperation between separate states and, in particular, their governments. Negotiations between the EEC and the four countries applying for membership – Britain, Ireland,

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Denmark and Norway – were resumed in June 1970 and the EEC was indeed augmented by three new states as of the beginning of 1973, the Norwegian referendum having yielded a slight majority of votes against. After two abortive attempts in the 1960s, the ‘Six’ had thus now grown to a community of nine states. This trouble-free period was, however, to be short-lived, for with Harold Wilson as its Prime Minister, Britain once again assumed a more reserved attitude to the community, even though it was now a member. The 1970s also yielded a report on the transition to political community in Europe instead of a mere economic community. The author of this plan was the Belgian premier Leo Tindemans. Known as the Tindemans Plan, it was completed in 1975 but did not receive sufficient support from the decision-making organs in the member states. The Tindemans Plan covered far-reaching proposals for economic integration, a common monetary policy, European civil rights, regional and social policy, institutional reforms and a common policy on the other continents (Holland, 1993: 60–2). CRISIS IN ‘EUROPE AS AN IDEA’ The Euro-euphoria of the early 1970s waned as the decade drew on. There were many reasons for this: Britain’s reservations over the European Community, the postponement of the administrative reforms emphasizing the role of the European Parliament and the democratic decision-making process, and the lack of consensus required for a federal administration. Nor did the election of Margaret Thatcher as British premier in 1979 ease the long haul towards integration that had been going on throughout the postwar period. Not until December 1984 did the meeting of

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the Council of Europe in Dublin mark the end of the persistent disagreement between the EEC and Britain, chiefly over the budget. The cooling of federal sympathies in the 1970s was also clearly manifest in the reflections on the crisis in ‘the idea of Europe’ put forward by the French sociologist and political scholar Raymond Aron in the mid1970s (Aron, 1976). According to him, de Gaulle’s pessimistic attitude to the idea of a United States of Europe had proved to be right. Although the EEC did indeed exist, it was nevertheless a commercial and economic community devoid of any idea of a united Europe. The idea of Europe had, in Aron’s opinion, become a myth impossible to achieve. A politically united Europe no longer evoked either heated opposition or interest, which was a clear sign that it had one foot in the grave. Aron, while regarding himself as a European, felt that the people of the Enlightenment two hundred years before were far more genuinely European. Since then European culture had become nationalized, as a result of which many cultural phenomena and institutions, such as the universities, were tending far more to look upon themselves as national rather than European. Aron stresses that the postwar period had not engendered a sense of belonging together and identity such as was evident in, for example, the identification of de Gaulle and his fellow countrymen with the nation state by the name of France. As in the case of Buchan’s alternatives, it is easy to detect in Aron’s articles the influence which the major powers were felt to have on European politics at the time they were written. Aron describes the political world as having two main centres with Europe as a buffer in between. The Soviet Union was, he felt, no longer feared in Europe in the way it was during the postwar period, but few were interested in Eastern Europe. Instead, people were turning westward, and

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Europe was becoming an Atlantic Europe in which the economic might of America was of primary significance. Aron nevertheless mentions in passing the possibility that, unlike America, Europe might have a chance of seeking an allegiance with the Islamic world of the Mediterranean should this prove to be in its interests. FROM 1985 ONWARDS: TOWARDS A POLITICALLY UNITED EUROPE? The election of Jacques Delors as President of the new European Commission in January 1985 helped the European Community to set a new course towards political union. Whereas Thatcher’s policy may be regarded as a continuation of the Gaullist legacy, the philosophy of Delors expressed a return to the community Europe envisaged by Jean Monnet. This rare, long thaw was marked by a striving to broaden the community both politically and geographically by admitting some new members (Greece as early as 1981, Spain and Portugal in 1986; but Greenland withdrew in 1985). The political dimension of the community was formulated under the Treaty of Maastricht signed in 1992 that came into force in November 1993. Under the Treaty, the European Economic Community became the European Union (EU). Another of the basic documents on which the EU is founded is still the Treaty of Rome, to which the Treaty of Maastricht is really only an annexe. It is also interesting to note that the Maastricht Treaty does not give any precise definition of the Union’s political objective. It merely says that the European Union aims above all at greater democracy, more effective decision-making and greater Union jurisdiction. According to the principle of subsidiarity designed to ensure greater democracy, decisions must be made as close to the people as possible.

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The British question has not, however, been completely deleted from the Community or Union agenda. Speaking in autumn 1988, Margaret Thatcher claimed that while the European Community was indeed a manifestation of a European identity, a successful, working political European community could only be based on voluntary, active cooperation between sovereign states. Again Britain was unwilling to accept the federalist policy advocated by President Delors, since Thatcher felt that a higher degree of integration would be at odds with Britain’s sovereign status. John Major’s election as the British premier to some extent reduced the friction between the European Union and Britain. STAGES AND PHILOSOPHIES OF INTEGRATION The history of European integration since the Second World War has been one of alternately waxing and waning enthusiasm. At times when the enthusiasm has run high, various plans have been made for the future course of integration. The first of these was the Schuman Plan and the Treaty of Paris with Jean Monnet as its chief architect (1950–51). The second notable manifesto was the Treaty of Rome masterminded by Paul-Henri Spaak (1957). The agreement championed by Leo Tindemans was signed in the mid1970s but had few concrete repercussions. The philosophies of Altiero Spinelli, a man already urging integration during the Second World War, served as a basis for the draft treaty of 1984 paving the way for the European Union, while the Luxembourg premier Jacques Santer can be regarded as the architect of the Single European Act. Lastly, Jacques Delors can be identified as the man behind Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) (1989). Most of these policies were drafted at times when the idea of European integration was sailing before the

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wind; there is nothing surprising about that. What is, however, more interesting is to examine the nature of the united Europe envisaged in the various plans. To begin with, talk about political integration, to say nothing of its timetable or the organization of the future Europe, has been less and less forthcoming as the years have gone by. In this respect those claiming that great political ideas have been given way to economic integration proceeding in little steps are undoubtedly correct. Although the goals for integration are indisputably founded on some degree of political alliance, the best way to achieve this alliance is by a short-step policy negotiating practical details rather than the overall principles. Whether in fact this is a deplorable state of affairs as regards the progress of European integration is another matter. It is in any case probably the only way of converting the rhetoric into concrete results. The decision to take this line of action was also a deliberate policy on the part of the postwar pioneers of the European ethos such as Jean Monnet. In the 1960s Monnet and Spaak became increasingly pessimistic as they saw their ideal of a united Europe, especially as a political and psychological ideal, slipping further and further away. A functionalist short-step policy thus seemed to be the only realistic course of action for those wholeheartedly committed to a united and possibly a federal Europe. Towards the end of his memoirs Jean Monnet tried to sketch the future of integration; his vision may well be regarded as a practical guideline for many of today’s politicians seeking to implement the single market. While stressing the necessity of integration, Monnet also reminded his readers of the slow, unpredictable nature of change: Where this necessity will lead, and towards what kind of Europe, I cannot say. It is impossible to foresee today the decisions that could be taken in a new

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context tomorrow. The essential thing is to hold fast to the new fixed principles that have guided us since the beginning: gradually to create among Europeans the broadest common interest, served by common democratic institutions to which the necessary sovereignty has been delegated. This is the dynamic that has never ceased to operate, removing prejudice, doing away with frontiers, enlarging to continental scale within a few years, the process that took centuries to form our ancient nations. I have never doubted that one day this process will lead us to the United States of Europe; but I see no point in trying to imagine today what political form it will take. The words about which people argue – federation or confederation – are inadequate and imprecise. What we are preparing, through the work of the Community, is probably without precedent. The Community itself is founded on institutions, and they need strengthening; but the true political authority which the democracies of Europe will one day establish has still to be conceived and built. (Monnet, 1978: 523) The interesting thing about Monnet’s statement is that he saw the formation of a Europe federation or confederation as something of a necessity, not just as one option among many. It is not very clear just what this belief was founded on, since he was content merely to say that the roots of the European Union and the process of integration lie deep in the European soil, and that there is no alternative to this process. People are slow to change their minds, yet integration is, in Monnet’s opinion, nevertheless inevitable despite some passing adversities. European unity is the most important event in the West since the war, not because it is a new great power, but because the new institutional method it

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introduces is permanently modifying relations between nations and men. Human nature does not change, but when nations and men accept the same rule and the same institutions to make sure that they are applied, their behaviour towards each other changes. This is the process of civilisation itself. (Monnet, 1962, quoted in Nelsen and Stubb, 1994: 24) Thus although, somewhat in the spirit of Hegel, Monnet even regarded integration as part of the process of civilization, he was loath to define the objectives. While he clearly stated the ultimate goal – some form of federation or confederation – the approved policy was nevertheless precisely that of proceeding in small steps without any sweeping idealistic manifestations. The price of this policy has been the vague nature and goals of the European Union, its lack of clarity, and complaints that the decision-making system is undemocratic. On examining the postwar integration of Europe as a whole, the attention is inevitably caught by the underlying political polemics between two models for integration divergent in their principles. De Gaulle, and later Thatcher, most clearly represent a model in which European integration is seen primarily as an alliance between sovereign states without even any attempt to further far-reaching integration projects. On the other hand, the champions of a federal Europe such as Monnet and Delors refuse to accept the idea of a united Europe until the community has risen from the level of national decision-making to a supranational level, at least on the fundamental issues affecting it. Although the federalists are prepared to accept very different models for integration, they are still unanimous in their view of a Europe characterized by at least some degree of political unity in which national frontiers have ceased to matter.

Part II European Identity

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7 The Border of Expansion: Europe and America THE MANY BORDERS OF EUROPE Krzysztof Pomian once suggested that the integration of Europe is a cyclic process marked by periods of rapprochement and détente (Pomian, 1990). According to him, Europe is now seeking unity for the third time. The first was when Christendom became united under a common faith in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This stage in the history of Europe was cut short by the Reformation and the division of the Church. The second was the convergence of literary and high culture in the eighteenth century, this time severed by the turmoil of the French Revolution. Since the Second World War Europe has possibly been travelling a third road to integration, and the first that may lead to political unity. The crucial feature of Pomian’s thinking is an understanding of the significance of borders in the history of Europe. One of the many ideas about Europe is the idea of borders. The history of Europe can be said to have been dictated by its borders, both within the continent and in relation to others. The borders of Europe are just as much physical as they are political and ideological. One of the many Europes is the Europe of the European Union, which physically does not cover anywhere near the whole of European territory. What other Europes are there within Europe, then? 135

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It is not simply a question of drawing a geographical line, since its borders have occupied an important role in moulding the European identity. Whereas the western border of Europe has been an expanding one, the eastern border has been one of defence. In this sense the eastern border of Europe in particular, the location and importance of which have been the subject for debate ever since antiquity, has been a significant factor in defining the European identity (Delanty, 1995a). Although the ancient Greeks looked upon the border between Greece and Asia (Persia) as the demarcation line between civilization and barbarianism, the border between East and West has not been the only significant dividing line in the history of Europe. Even during the Roman Empire, the border between south and north marked a vital distinction between civilization and barbarianism. Tacitus was engraving on the minds of his fellow civilized Romans his view of the Germanic barbarians incapable of appreciating the finer points of culture: ‘When not engaged in warfare they spend a certain amount of time in hunting, but much more in idleness, thinking of nothing else but sleeping and eating’ (quoted in Wolff, 1994: 5). The Turks pouring in from the east during the Renaissance were seen as a threat to European civilization, but the term ‘barbarian’ was also applied to the northern peoples. The Italian humanists regarded the attack by Charles V and his men on Italy as a barbarian invasion and did not hesitate to liken the sacking of Rome, the Sacco di Roma of 1527, to the capture of Rome by the Goths in 476. As the economic and political centre of Europe gradually shifted northwards in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even the barbarians had to be sought in a new direction. The republic of letters of the Age of Enlightenment thereupon turned its gaze to the east, where above all Russia, in its search for a western model, raised the question of the borders of European civilization (Wolff, 1994).

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BARBARIANS AND CIVILIZED EUROPEANS As we have seen, the ancient Greeks dissociated themselves from the barbarians, by which they primarily meant the Persians living in Asia. The word ‘barbarian’ actually meant a ‘mumbler’, i.e. someone who spoke an incomprehensible language. The barbarians were therefore ‘others’, a species of non-human being with whom it was impossible to communicate. In the Middle Ages the term acquired a second meaning: barbarians were people who were not Christians but pagans. This dichotomy of ancient Greek origin between the civilized West and the barbaric East did not, however, occupy any great role in the Middle Ages. At the beginning of the modern era a shift took place in the definition of Europeanism by which the Europeans, instead of identifying themselves solely with Christendom, began to lay more and more emphasis on their educational and moral standards. They did this in an attempt to enhance the distinction between themselves and the lower barbarian peoples only just discovered. The ‘discovery’ of America threw the Europeans into a state of perplexity: how should they regard the natives of the New World, clearly members of the human race but so vastly different from the Europeans? Since the Indians encountered on the American continent were undoubtedly human beings, why had they not developed as the Europeans, learnt the same things and acquired the same religion and culture? According to the teachings of Aristotle handed down from antiquity and propagated by the medieval universities, the generic characteristics are dominant in each species; how, then, was it possible that there could be so much variation within one and the same species? An answer to the problem was sought in the theory of natural slavery expounded in Aristotle’s Politics.

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According to Aristotle, there were two types of slaves: natural and conditional. The latter referred to situations in which certain persons had for some specific reason lost their civic freedom and acquired the status of slaves. To be a natural slave was, by contrast, congenital and derived from the personal characteristics of slaves. The natural slave was indeed regarded by Aristotle as a human being, but one whose mind was, for some reason or another, not capable of controlling his baser instincts. These people might well be able to comprehend matters, but they were not in full possession of their minds and were not wholly capable of deciding on matters concerning them. It was, according to Aristotle, thus the task of a natural slave to be nothing but a slave. Just as the living conditions of wild animals might improve if these animals were tamed, so the natural slave might become more human if able to observe and imitate the customs of free people. It was thus in the interests of both master and slave to relieve the slave of his ‘non-natural’ freedom and cast him in the role of the natural slave. In 1504 King Ferdinand of Spain announced that the Indians and their lands belonged to Spain under both secular and ecclesiastical law. Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery was first applied to the Indians in 1512, at a meeting convened by King Ferdinand at Burgos. The meeting decided that the only way to rule the Indians was by tyranny, since barbarians and slaves are incapable of making decisions and understanding, and because the Indians were akin to talking animals. The King and his followers also applied the idea of a civilizing process in which the Indians could, at least to some extent, take part by imitating the Spanish conquerors. The Indians would, furthermore, benefit from the opportunity to serve their masters without any pay or compensation, since complete freedom could do them nothing but harm.

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The term ‘barbarian’ was widely used in the sixteenth century in speaking of Indian cultures. Juan de Matienzo, a Spanish lawyer who had spent some time in Peru, wrote in 1567 that the Indians themselves were quite devoid of reason, but that they were indeed capable of sensing reason in the way that animals do. In comparing the Indians to animals, he went on to say that they were content so long as they had enough to eat and drink. Hernan Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs, could only wonder how the Mexicans had created such an advanced material culture, ‘considering that they are barbarians and so far from the knowledge of God and cut off from all civilised nations’ (quoted in Pagden, 1986: 125). BARTOLOMÉ DE LAS CASAS AND HIS VIEW OF BARBARIANISM As the European conquerors gradually widened their territories and learnt more about the Indian cultures and customs, voices were raised in protest at the Indian oppression. A famous debate raged at Valladolid in Spain in the 1550s on the rights of the Indians and of the whites to rule over them. The partners to this debate were the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas and the chronicler Ginés de Sepúlveda. The Bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomé de Las Casas, was the creator of the ‘black legend’, the ‘Apostle of the Indians’, and had personally spent the years from 1502 to 1514 on the American continent. He was motivated to defend the inhabitants of the New World, the Indians, and to criticize the policy adopted by Spain. Yet he, too, was a child of his time: as a young man he had recommended that black slaves from Africa be used instead of Indian labour, because they were tougher and better able to withstand the grinding toil. He also felt that since Africa had been previously ruled

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by Christians, winning the continent back from the infidels was a just war. In 1544 Sepúlveda had written a treatise in Latin entitled Democrates secundus sive de justis causis belli apud Indos justifying the wars waged by the Europeans against the Indians. In it he set out to demonstrate that the difference between humans and human-like beings was in fact that between Christians and pagans. He described the lack of organization in Indian society and repeated the widespread rumour that they were cannibals. This made them look like semi-mortals and the white Europeans their natural masters. The rescripts issued by the Pope and other European authorities also, according to Sepúlveda, gave the Europeans the right to rule the New World. During the Valladolid debate Las Casas refuted such claims as put for ward by Sepúlveda that the Indians were barbarians. A later work by Las Casas, Apologética historia (1561), was an attempt founded on a wealth of historical and empirical evidence to prove that until they were conquered by the Europeans, the Indian societies satisfied all the criteria mentioned by Aristotle for civil society. According to Las Casas, the Indians were, admittedly, non-Christian, and as individuals they were sometimes wild and ruthless, acting in a way that defied all reason. But as a group they were only secondary barbarians, and not in absolute terms. It was, he went on to say, a question of cultural evolution: with the help of the Europeans the Indians might rise to the second stage in their cultural evolution and gradually aspire towards the achievements of European civilization, rather as the Europeans had risen from their barbaric origins via Greek and Roman culture to become Christians and builders of a high civilization. The majority of the Indians were, in fact, already leading a social life in their communities, said Las Casas; they had big towns, kings, judges and laws and

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also engaged in trade. They had also built magnificent temples in high places to which access was denied by law to all those in the service of production only. Here again the life of the Indians did in Las Casas’ opinion come very close to Aristotle’s account of the good city state. Were the Indians not thoroughly rational people, they would not have succeeded in setting up such a regime or in maintaining it for very long. Las Casas also pointed out that the Indians were extremely proficient in the arts (Pagden, 1986: 119–45). THE OBSERVANCE OF ‘OTHERNESS’ As Tzvetan Todorov has pointed out in his analysis of the ‘discovery’ of America, the year 1492 was for Spain one of confrontation with two kinds of ‘otherness’. While the Spaniards were banishing the ‘interior Others’, the Moors and the Jews, from the Iberian peninsula, they were discovering an ‘exterior Other’ in the New World. The beginning of the modern era was, according to Todorov, extremely important to the formation of the European identity. [It is] the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity; even if every date that permits us to separate any two periods is arbitrary, none is more suitable, in order to make the beginning of the modern era, than the year 1492. Since 1492 we are, as Las Casas (Historia de Las Indias) has said, in that time so new and like to no other. (Todorov, 1984: 5) The crucial difference between the peoples of Europe and America was, says Todorov, that the latter had no efficient system of writing. This resulted in a loss of manipulative power in their dealings with the

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Spaniards. Stephen Greenblatt crystallized the difference as follows: The unlettered peoples of the New World could not bring the strangers into focus: conceptual inadequacy initially precluded an accurate perception of the other. The culture that possessed writing could accurately represent itself (and hence strategically manipulate) the culture without writing, but the reverse was not true. For, in possessing the ability to write, the Europeans possessed an unmistakably superior representational technology. (Greenblatt, 1992: 11) As Greenblatt noted, the Europeans on the eve of the sixteenth century felt that they had a culture superior to any other. And this faith was supplemented by the belief that other cultures would assimilate European customs and convert to Christianity. The idea of the universal victory of the Christian faith thus occupied a central position for the Spanish Conquistadors as well. Faith and knowledge were, however, not the only factors at play in the encounter of Europeans and Americans, for it also involved a confrontation of identities and levels of identity. Todorov put forward the three axes in the localization of ‘other’. First of all, there is a value judgment (an axiological level): the other is good or bad, I love or do not love him, or, as was more likely to be said at that time, he is my equal or my inferior (for there is usually no question that I am good and that I esteem myself). Secondly, there is the action of rapprochement or distancing in relation to the other (a praxeological level): I embrace the other’s values, I identify myself with him; or else I identify the other with myself, I impose my own image upon him; between submission to the other and the other’s submission, there is

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also a third term, which is neutrality, or indifference. Thirdly, I know or am ignorant of the other’s identity (this would be the epistemic level); of course, there is no absolute here, but an endless gradation between the lower or higher states of knowledge. (Todorov, 1984: 185) By comparing the attitudes to the Indians of Cortés the Conquistador and Las Casas, Todorov proved that the relations between ‘self’ and ‘other’ could not be defined only at one level. Las Casas ‘loved’ the Indians more than Cortés, but at the epistemic level Cortés nevertheless knew much more about them than Las Casas. At the praxeological level both proposed a relationship that would lead to their integration – some degree of humiliation or subjugation of the ‘other’ – even though they each proposed different methods. As the sixteenth century proceeded, more critical voices nevertheless began to be raised among the Europeans. Though the conquest of America was not questioned as such, the oppressive measures and the treatment of the Indians by the Europeans in the New World did indeed call forth censure. In the latter half of the century some Europeans, such as the French sceptic Michel de Montaigne, were, like Las Casas, calling for relativism in attitudes to the inhabitants of other cultures. Montaigne wrote, ‘we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of options and customs current in the land where we live’ (Montaigne, 1990: 108–9). Such views did not, however, change the prevailing opinion of the superiority of the Europeans over the people of other continents. And later colonialist and imperialist European policy continued to feel perfectly entitled to oppress the peoples of other continents by appealing to the superiority of Western culture (Adas, 1989).

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THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA MODEL In the eighteenth century, with the American War of Independence, the Europeans began to shift their gaze away from Latin America towards the northern part of the continent. European attitudes to the United States and Russia in the nineteenth century passed through various stages. In the first half of the century Europe was viewed as the centre of the universe and the goal of history. While information was sought on America and Russia, they were not really felt to be major powers capable of threatening Europe. Between 1850 and 1870 it was feared that Europe would be squashed between these emergent powers. The brief period of optimism kindling after 1870 soon gave way to a return of pessimism, however, at around the turn of the century, when the fear that the world would be Americanized began to be expressed. As early as the eighteenth century, the American Revolution and the resulting democratic constitution were already arousing interest among the Europeans. Leopold von Ranke declared in the mid nineteenth century that the American Revolution had heralded a bigger change than any previous revolution in the world. For prior to the revolution, an autocratic monarch had ruled his land with the kind assistance of God. But now, all of a sudden, the power was said to belong to the people. These two views were, said Ranke, like two different worlds. The youthful new America was readily associated with such concepts as constitutionalism, citizenship and tolerance, while Europe was felt to be old, aristocratic and undemocratic. The Frenchman Michel Guillaume de Crèvecoeur settled and married in New York state. In 1782 he wrote (in English) his Letters from an American farmer; this was immediately translated into French, German and Dutch and was a great success in Europe. He regarded the North American provinces as a land of

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freedom, as the cradle of the nations of the future and as an escape for the oppressed Europeans. Unlike aristocratic Europe, America had no kings or courts, and people were not divided into great men and ordinary folk. Even those who, according to Crèvecoeur, lacked the strength to grow in Europe because of the poor soil, derived sustenance for their future growth in the laws, the social systems and customs of America. The only disadvantage he could see in the American way of life was that sometimes the people became a little too hasty in rushing from one extreme to the other. Among the writers expounding on the United States there were, however, some who were not quite so enamoured of the liberal spirit of the New World. In 1797 Dietrich von Bülow wrote Der Freistaat von Nordamerika in seinem neusten Zustand, describing the Americans and their mentality in a negative tone. Far from being liberal-minded, strong-willed and equal in the way the Europeans mostly wished to see them, the Americans were young, mentally unstable, depressed and neurotic. For von Bülow youth was equated with instability and the old European cultural tradition with permanence and stability. The reason for the Americans’ instability was, he thought, the absence of the traditional authoritarian educational methods familiar in Europe (Ambjörnsson, 1994). DYNAMIC AMERICA, STATIC EUROPE In around 1820 the first works appeared placing America and its relationship with the Old World open to serious scrutiny. The literature on America became more diversified and was no longer based so firmly on the black-and-white opposition of good and bad. Professor Conrad Friedrich Schmidt-Phiseldeck, a German of influence in Denmark, wrote two works at around this time comparing Europe and America:

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Europa und Amerika, oder die zukünftigen Verhältnisse der civilisierten Welt (1815) and Der europäische Bund (1821). American independence in his opinion turned a new leaf in the history of the world. Europe could well look towards the future by studying the developments in the United States. The United States were an emerging superpower which the outdated Europe still under the spell of the Congress of Vienna would have to counteract by forming a federation. It was also at about this time that the French Abbé de Pradt was writing such works as L’Europe et l’Amerique en 1821 (1821) that created a stir at the time in which he addressed the relationship between the two continents. De Pradt belonged to the conser vative writer brigade who failed to believe that developments in America and Europe would ever converge, but rather that each would develop in its own direction. One reason for this was, he said, their different forms of government: the New World was in his eyes republican while Europe was still royalist and aristocratic. In America decisions were made with a view to the common good, and in a civil spirit that was still missing in Europe (Barraclough, 1966). Some twenty years later, in about 1840, two English travellers each wrote about their experiences in America in which they compared the Old World with the New. These books became extremely popular; they were translated into many European languages and were often referred to in later contexts. Harriet Martineau’s Society in America was published in 1837. In it she mentioned the American tradition of equality and the fact that there were not really any social classes in America. Europe, by contrast, was too steeped in its hidebound traditions and had become a readyfashioned continent. The ingrained habits and traditional outlook limited the Europeans’ field of vision. By contrast, America was for Martineau an enormous social experiment from which the Europeans could

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learn and become rejuvenated. Martineau also mentioned some less reputable features of American society: its slavery was disgraceful and the position of women was not always all it could be. Charles Dickens’ American Notes appeared in 1843. He had been impressed by many of the major institutions on the American continent: the universities, prisons and hospitals. But he also felt there was something boring about the grand perspective: the cities were too monotonous in their layout and the streets too straight. The European city was, by contrast (he felt), the outcome of an organic process, as was European society, and not of modern, artificial planning. The calculating American society lacked the positive input of a cultural heritage. This was reflected in the American press, which horrified him and could in no way be compared to the quality press of Britain or continental Europe (Dickens, 1957: 247–8). The most famous forecast of the future importance of America put forth in the early nineteenth century was that of Alexis de Tocqueville in La démocratie en Amérique (1835–40). As the title of the book suggests, de Tocqueville was mainly concerned with describing the liberal regime of American society, but he made repeated comparisons with Europe. According to him, America was in a way part of Europe, since the ocean did not in fact effect a division between the two continents. America, however, has gone its own way, because the Americans were Europeans who had chosen to leave Europe. America, in de Tocqeville’s eyes, was free whereas Europe was closed; this was due to the absence of democracy and civil rights on the old continent. The Americans were brought up to take part in public life, and as a result American society was political through and through. By contrast, Europe had a society of individuals, due to its ideal which emphasized private life. American society was a class society, but it was also a

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meritocracy, whereas in the static class society of Europe, a person’s status was defined by his birth. De Tocqueville was not, however, blinded by his admiration for America, since he could also discern some shortcomings in it. One of the main problems was, in his opinion, the excessive power vested in the majority, or rather their moral views. This in turn would lead to a situation where people would no longer dare to criticize those in power. Public opinion would become so important that all would seek to conform and society would become too homogeneous. One manifestation of this was the fact that America had no schools of philosophers, no great scientists or world literature. Europe was where knowledge was born. Any lack of democracy in the Old World was compensated by the large number of local administrations and authorities such as were not to be found in the forward-looking United States. De Tocqueville reckoned that this modernization trend would at some point also extend to Europe, where local decisionmaking would gradually disappear (de Tocqueville 1984). EUROPE BETWEEN AMERICA AND RUSSIA During the Cold War, it became the custom in Europe to examine the status of the continent in relation to the two major power blocs. The future of Europe would, it was felt, depend on how well it managed its relations with the United States and the Soviet Union. This view of Europe as a buffer between two major powers is not, however, one created since the Second World War, for its roots stretch right back to the nineteenth century. The idea of a fight between America and Russia for the dominion of Europe spread in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a subject taken up by three

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German writers in particular: Julius Fröbel, Josef Edmund Jörg and Konstantin Frantz. Julius Fröbel had spent the period 1849–57 as a refugee in America and thus had personal experience of the New World. In 1858 he summarized the results of his observations in a book entitled Amerika, Europa und die politischen Gesichtspunkte der Gegenwart. Fröbel worked on the assumption that the civilized world would expand to take in America and Russia as well as Europe. He thus arrived at a triadic world in which the role of Europe between the two centres of power was not an enviable one. True, Europe was the geographical centre of world politics, but it was also a battlefield of conflicting ideals. The entire future of world civilization would, according to Fröbel, depend on the relations between these three centres (Nurdin, 1978: 150–76). Josef Edmund Jörg contributed a number of articles to the Historisch-Politische Blätter in the 1850s dealing with the position of Europe between America and Russia. Like Fröbel, he saw the future of Europe as being very black. He even envisaged a war between the two emerging major powers, to be fought on European territory (Gollwitzer, 1964: 291–4). According to Jörg, the political prestige of Europe would fall in the world, but the moral and religious importance of the continent would rise. A Catholic-conservative thinker, Jörg somewhat naturally pinned his hope on Christianity as the safeguard of European civilization (Nurdin, 1978: 216–17). The main works expounding the idea of Europe of Konstantin Frantz were the Untersuchungen über das europäische Gleichgewicht of 1859 and Die Ereignisse in Amerika in ihrer Rückwirkung auf Deutschland appearing two years later. Frantz defined the borders of Europe according to the Roman-Germanic tradition, extending right up to the British Isles and Finland. But Russia did not, in his opinion, belong to Europe and was, being an authoritarian and undemocratic state, a

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threat. Frantz had no difficulty siding with America in comparing it with ‘democracy’ and the east with ‘barbarianism’. He predicted that America would grow richer as Europe grew poorer. Later in life Frantz became increasingly pessimistic over the preservation of European civilization (Nurdin, 1978: 231–99; Gollwitzer, 1964: 297–302). The idea of a Europe surrounded and threatened by America and Russia appeared to dominate thinkers between 1850 and 1870. Then in 1870 the situation changed, and for at least five reasons. First, memories of the Crimean War that had shattered Europe in the 1850s began to fade. Second, the United States did not, after all, appear to be displaying the expansive aspirations previously feared, nor was Russia exerting any political pressure on the states of Europe. Third, technical developments in Europe were generating new optimism for the future of the continent, and the wave of colonialism and imperialism showed that Europe did, after all, still carry some weight in world politics. Last but by no means least in this boosting of European self-awareness was the unification of Italy and, in particular, Germany in 1871. At the very end of the nineteenth century the British statesman James Bryce published a weighty treatise on The American Commonwealth (1888) which ran to countless editions even into the twentieth century. Bryce seconded de Tocqueville’s emphasis on American democracy but criticized him for regarding the ‘tyranny of the majority’ as the threat to democracy. For according to Bryce, it could not be said that majority opinion dominated in America, since all were free to think as they pleased. The American cultural tradition was admittedly more homogeneous than the European with its numerous different historical legacies. Correspondingly, America was marked by a certain restlessness, which was not the most auspicious ground for the production of works of culture requiring profound,

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sustained meditation. Europe, he said, was both tied to its traditions and dynamic and had not sunk to the stagnation manifest in Asia. On the other hand, people in Europe realized that the main thing in life was not to earn money and count one’s material assets in the way it was in America, and Europe was the best continent on which to live (Bryce, 1891). Bryce’s optimism notwithstanding, many observers of the late nineteenth century were overcome by pessimism over the future role of Europe. In England in 1900 Alfred T. Mahan wrote The Problem of Asia and its Effect upon International Policies in which he predicted that Asia and the Pacific regions would fall within the sphere of interest of almost all states, and for this very reason the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ states (Britain and the United States) would come into conflict in the region with the ‘Slavic’ race (meaning Russia). The English journalist W.T. Stead wrote in 1902 a book called The Americanisation of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century in which he viewed the rise of the United States to become the star of the world political scene as a turning point in the history of the world. From that point on, no state in the world would be able to compete with the United States (Barraclough, 1966: 310–14). AMERICA: EUROPE’S MODEL – OR THREAT? Although fears that Europe was losing its economic supremacy were already being voiced after the First World War, by the end of the Second at the latest America really had inherited Europe’s role as the world’s economic superpower. The growing American influence gradually also engendered literature recognizing the inherent value of American culture and the achievements of American society not only in the creation of the world’s first democratic constitution. Harald J. Laski examined American society from numerous

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angles in The American Democracy (1949), noting that James Bryce had at the end of the nineteenth century been the first European who did not immediately view the United States as a reflection of Europe, pointing out its ‘youth’ and its lack of profundity. De Tocqueville had admittedly been writing widely about America half a century earlier, but according to Laski his primary objective had nevertheless been to predict the future of France rather than to gain a spontaneous understanding of America (Laski, 1949: 722). At about this time the Swede Gunnar Myrdal was, in An American Dilemma (1944), taking up what he called the ‘Negro problem’. The position of the black population in the United States’ ostensibly democratic society was a problem which, he said, was the core to understanding the whole of American civilization. Myrdal, who unlike Laski and his comments on the status and attitudes of the white majority had examined American society from the perspective of the blacks, was much more pessimistic about the future of American society, even though he did believe that the conflict of race could be defused by means of education and greater enlightenment. Since the Second World War America has been described by many European writers as more of a threat than a model. In 1968 the French economist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber wrote his best seller Le défi américain describing the economic threat of the United States to the future of Europe. American companies were buying up European ones. As a result, he said, there was a threat that Europe would sink to a lower cultural level and would no longer be the centre of world civilization (Ambjörnsson, 1994). We may well ask whether Europe still deserved to be called this in fact in 1968, but the onslaught of the American entertainment industry in Europe has, if nothing else, finally banished any doubts about that country governing the production of contemporary popular culture.

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AMERICA – A UTOPIA COME TRUE? The ‘peripheralization’ of Europe is also the subject of Amérique (1986) by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is, however, interested not so much in the influence of the American economy on the Old World as in the way the Europeans themselves have construed the matter at the level of mentality and lifestyle in debating the American ethos. To quote de Tocqueville and to borrow his concept, arriving in America still means, according to Baudrillard, landing amid ‘a lifestyle religion’, a material utopia in which success and being active are fundamental manifestations of morality. As in the work of de Tocqueville, Baudrillard’s book is in place reminiscent of Dickens’ American Notes and its observations on the breakthrough of the modern American way of life. Baudrillard even speaks like Dickens of the proportions of urban American architecture, but unlike Dickens, he misses the soft and curving lines of Europe. Baudrillard does not in fact call for any deep European philosophizing; instead, as a European, he finds the American ‘superficiality’ almost a purging experience: We fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavour and seduction, we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the cities as in the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of in-difference. (Baudrillard, 1988: 123)

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Baudrillard also calls to mind his compatriot l’Abbé de Pradt writing about America in the nineteenth century in that he does not believe the paths of America and Europe will cross at any point in the future: The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn’t just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity. You are born modern, you do not become so. And we have never become so. What strikes you immediately in Paris is that you are in the nineteenth century. Coming from Los Angeles, you land back in the 1800s. Every country bears a sort of historical predestination, which almost definitely determines its characteristics. For us, it is the bourgeois model of 1789 – and the interminable decadence of that model – that shapes our landscape. There is nothing we can do about it: everything here revolves around the nineteenth-century bourgeois dream. (Baudrillard, 1988: 73) The focus of Baudrillard’s comparison of Europe and America is the view that America is a utopia come true and Europe is not. The principles once so dear to the Europeans – revolution, progress, freedom – all evaporated even before they became reality. The result is the melancholy characteristic of the Europeans. America, by contrast, founds its very existence on the belief that it is a utopia come true: it has achieved all the things which others have only dreamt of – justice, prosperity, rights, riches and freedom. Since the Americans themselves know this and believe in it, others are beginning to believe in it too. The paradox of the ‘American dream’ lies in the fact that the utopian heavens have descended on earth, i.e. all the dreams have come true. And the utopia come true is no longer a utopia.

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The appeal of America is easily seen as something artificial and superficial, even though the popularity of the American entertainment industry has assumed completely new proportions in Europe. What if the whole question has simply been wrongly framed? If ‘vulgar’ American products – streamlined, plastic and glamorous – have long been attractive to European audiences, perhaps the problem is not really about a brash and material American culture, but rather about a fake, ‘antique’ Europe? Perhaps America is now within, now part of a European cultural repertoire, part of European identity. (Morley and Robins, 1995: 57)

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8 The Border of Defence: Europe and Russia The East–West border is always wandering, sometimes eastward, sometimes west, and we do not know exactly where it is just now: In Gaugamela, in the Urals, or maybe in ourselves, so that one ear, one eye, one nostril, one hand, one foot, one lung and one testicle or one ovary is on the one, the other on the other side. Only the heart, only the heart is always on one side: if we are looking northward, in the West; if we are looking southward, in the East; and the mouth doesn’t know on behalf of which or both it has to speak. Jaan Kaplinski (1992: 9) This poem, ‘The East–West Border’ (1987), by the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski admirably epitomizes the idea that the frontier between East and West is not just a line on a map or even a geographical border. Instead, it is a constantly shifting frontier moulded in the course of history by changing political conditions and cultural identities. REPORTS OF THE EARLY TRAVELLERS Does Russia belong to Europe? The physical border between Europe and Asia has most often been drawn at the Ural Mountains, but intellectually Europe and 157

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Europeanism have as a rule covered a far narrower area. Russia has been regarded as belonging to Europe only during the relatively short period in history during which Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and a few of the other tsars set about Westernizing it. Since the collapse of socialism, the question of the eastern border of Europe has seemed all the more topical. Now that East and West are no longer ideologically divided, distinguishing a clear borderline is even more laborious. The shifting physical border in the east of Europe has in an interesting way tied in with the changes that have taken place in the political set-up. The reason given in recent times for excluding Russia from Europe has been its economic backwardness, but the Europeans’ bewilderment and fear of Russia in fact run far deeper than this. In the Middle Ages and early modern era Russia was not considered as belonging to Europe. Though a member of the Christian church, Russia was not part of Western Christendom. Following the fall of Constantinople, Moscow declared itself the defender of the Eastern faith and the Byzantine inheritance, the ‘third Rome’. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Turkey was identified as the specific threat to Europe in the East, but Poland was just as much an outpost on the border with Russia. In the eyes of the Western world, the Roman inheritance was in different hands. This non-physical limit to Europe, following the eastern borders of Poland and Sweden, evoked an echo in the geographers too. Until the seventeenth century the eastern border of Europe was most often drawn from the Black Sea via the River Dnieper and the city of Kiev to Lake Ladoga and on up the waterways to the White Sea. To some extent this fear of Russia was simply due to ignorance of conditions there. The most famous sixteenth-century report by a traveller in Russia was the Rerum Moscovitarum commentarii by Sigismund von

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Herberstein, published in 1549. This was based on the reports of two German envoys of journeys made by them in 1517 and 1526. In the foreword von Herberstein specifically mentioned that he was not writing about Hungary, Poland or Turkey, because unlike Russia these countries were already known in the West. Referring to the classical geographers, von Herberstein defined the River Don as the border between Asia and Europe. Even this, the first widely distributed travel report on Russia, already spoke of the ‘despotic’ government in the East and asked whether the insubordinate people of Russia really needed such a despotic ruler or whether the cruel regime had in fact given birth to such a wretched nation. The writer of the most famous seventeenth-century account of travels in Russia was the German Adam Olearius, who had been sent by the Court of Holstein to establish trading relations with Persia through the possible mediation of Russia. Olearius noted that in the colour of their skins, the Russians were indeed reminiscent of the Europeans, but that as regards their customs he was forced to classify them as barbarians. He accused them of being lazy, prone to swearing and bad manners, and sexually perverted. Yet the seventeenth century also saw the emergence in Western Europe of the first texts suggesting that the Russians might after all have been a civilized nation; an example here was John Milton’s Brief History of Moscovia written in the 1630s (Wolff, 1994: 11). The concept of Russia as inherently belonging to Asia persisted in the Western world right up to the turn of the eighteenth century and the reign of Peter the Great. In the peace plan of the Duke of Sully, the Russians were likened almost to barbarians, in the same category as the Turks. Backwardness and barbarianism were the epithets most commonly applied to the Russians in the seventeenth century. Yet geographically, as knowledge of Russia gradually increased, the

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eastern border of Europe began to shift further and further eastwards. First it dropped anchor on the River Don, then on the Volga and Ob, before pressing on to the Ural Mountains, where it became more or less fixed in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Forming the border to the south were the Caucasus Mountains. One reason for the shift in the eastern border of Europe was the classical authors, who for the most part placed the frontier along the Don and Volga. But already by the seventeenth century, the principality of Moscow was increasingly being regarding as European, for political reasons, too, especially since it did, after all, subscribe to the Christian faith and was fighting against the Tatars. Europe was not, however, considered as including the whole of Russia, and the border between Europe and Asia was said to run through Muscovy, usually somewhere in the Urals, these mountains also acting as a psychological border between the more developed western part of the principality and the more primitive eastern regions. PETER THE GREAT AND THE EUROPEANIZATION OF RUSSIA A major change took place in European attitudes to Russia in the early eighteenth century. The time between the Peace of Uusikaupunki (1721) and the October Revolution (1917) was one in which Russia was regarded most clearly as being part of Europe. The biggest reason for this change in attitude was the policy of Europeanization launched by Peter the Great after his tour of Europe. In particular he wished the customs, language and pastimes of the upper class to be brought in line with those of Europe, and his city, St Petersburg, was made a new European-style capital after the example of London, Paris and Vienna. The

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new army, also built up on the European model, demonstrated its efficiency in the wars with Sweden. The fact that Russia was conceived of as part of Europe was also reflected in the peace plans of the eighteenth century. L’Abbé Saint-Pierre felt it would be wise to include Russia in his European federation in order to keep the peace. Saint-Pierre also pointed out that although the religion practised in Russia did indeed differ from the Western Christian faith, it was nevertheless a Christian one. He finally presented the most hardened sceptics with an irrefutable economic argument: it would be wise to make the tsarist empire part of Europe, because this would save considerable sums of money that would otherwise have to be spent defending the eastern border of Europe against Russia. The contemporary almanacs also made note of the new European accessory: the list of states in the Paris ‘Royal Almanach’ for 1716 still ends with Poland, but by the 1717 edition Moscow was already bringing up the rear. The educated circles of eighteenth-century Europe saw Russia as a country of cultural potential that could undertake the task of civilizing (for which read Europeanizing) the continent of Asia, then at a lower stage of development. Not all the Europeans had faith in Russia’s ability to achieve this mission, however, any more than they thought the Russians had anything in common with the Europeans. The works of Montesquieu contributed much to the polarization of East and West at the time of the Reformation. In his Persian Letters Montesquieu stressed the opposition between Europe and the East and in The Spirit of the Laws between the freedom of Europe and the despotism of Asia (Chabod, 1995). In the latter work he identified three different forms of government: republic, monarchy and despotism. The despotism of the East was in his eyes a regime in which blind obedience was demanded to a ruler with unlimited power. Montesquieu classed

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Russia as a typical despotic state, along with such countries as China, Persia and Turkey. In just the same way Rousseau warned the Europeans to be on their guard with respect to ‘Asian’ Russia. On the other hand, Russia did not feel that Europe was necessarily an unconditional model to strive towards. Peter the Great reckoned that it might serve as a model for a time, but that Russia would then be able to turn its back on it. Western Europe might yet set an example for states still at a lower level of development for a while, but the tables would turn once Russia achieved the same level of civilization as Europe. Belief in Russia’s mission as the chosen people, the defender of the Orthodox faith and the propagator of the Byzantine inheritance and Russian culture was by no means quenched by the European sympathies of the eighteenth century. THE EASTERN BORDER OF EUROPE: FROM THE OB TO THE URALS The Russian westernization programme of Peter the Great also moulded opinions on the location of the eastern border of Europe. Although this border had already been slowly pressing eastwards in the course of the seventeenth century, not until the 1730s were any clear arguments put forward for why it should be precisely the Ural Mountains. There were two men chiefly responsible for this: the Russian historian and geographer Vasilii N. Tatishchev, and an officer in the Swedish army by the name of Philip Johan von Strahlenberg. Tatishchev had internalized the strivings of Peter the Great to westernize Russia. Like the ancient scholars and the Renaissance humanists, he was full of praise for the Europe of the 1730s, placing it above all other continents in its learning, strength and honour, and even its temperate climate. He became accustomed to

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the division of Russia into a civilized European core and an uncivilized Asian periphery, but the question was: where did the border between them run? Tatishchev had an answer to this: the ‘natural’ border between the European and the Asian Russia ran along the Ural Mountains and River to the Caspian Sea, and down through the Caucasus Mountains to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea (Bassin, 1991). Meanwhile the Swedish officer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg was proposing a similar interpretation. Captured by the Russians in the Battle of Poltava, he spent the time until he was freed under the Peace of Uusikaupunki in Russia, where he became familiar with the Russian sources and debate on the eastern border of Europe. In 1730 he published the results of his meditations in Stockholm in a book entitled Historisch-geographische Beschreibungen vom nord- und östlichen Theil von Europa und Asia. According to him, the Urals, and certainly not the Ob, were the true eastern border of Europe. To begin with, the Ob was not the political border of Russia; it had simply been chosen as a suitable demarcation line before anything was even known about the Urals. The geographers had, he claimed, also felt that since Asia was much bigger than Europe, it could afford to be magnanimous and allow Europe a little more territory. Rejecting these arguments, von Strahlenberg then went on to defend the Urals as the natural border of Europe. In support of his claim, he called upon not only physical geography but also views founded on politics and classical literature. Firstly, the Urals were a natural watershed between two physically different geographical areas. The rivers on the Asian side all flowed north, while those on the European side flowed both north and south. The Urals were also a natural divider on questions of flora, fauna and minerals. Strahlenberg had no misgivings about equating the Urals with the Ripai Mountains regarded in classical

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literature as being on the northern periphery of the entire inhabited world (Parker, 1960). The border championed by Tatishchev and von Strahlenberg gradually gained more and more support, especially when seconded by the Russian scholar P.S. Pallas in 1771. By 1802, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant considered the Urals as the natural dividing line between two divergent continents on physical, economic and civilization grounds. The French geographer M. Malte-Brun was by 1811 absolutely convinced that the Urals were the border of Europe and Asia. This was partly due to the sheer size of the mountain range: being in every way on a par with the Alps, they naturally acted as a border. In the course of the nineteenth century the Urals became increasingly identified as a border in treatises emphasizing race, economic factors and differences in civilization, as in the lectures on Europe by the German geographer Ritter in the 1850s. By the end of the century the Urals had become both a ‘natural’ border, especially among French and English writers, and a ‘political’ border, above all in the texts of German and Russian writers. The nineteenth century also produced a school examining Europe as part of the larger Asian continent, and specifically from the East as an Asian peninsula. This theory often appears among the French geographers of the early nineteenth century. E. Suess coined the term Eurasia in Prague in 1885 to denote the continent of Europe and Asia as a whole. This continent was regarded as having a heartland with four branching peninsulas: China, Southeast Asia, India and Europe. Among geographers Eurasia was taken as something of an organic entity in which the European peninsula had no more right to be called a separate continent than India. The idea of Europe as a peninsula off the continent of Asia found its way from the geography

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textbooks of the nineteenth centur y to broader European awareness. The French poet Paul Valér y referred to it after the First World War, as did Gonzaque de Reynold in his influential Qu’est-ce que l’Europe? (1948). The view has since been adopted by many French historians, such as Fernand Braudel in his vast treatise on the history of civilization (Braudel, 1993: 304). ZAPADNIKS AND SLAVOPHILES As the wave of democracy rolled through Europe in the nineteenth century, more and more criticism was levelled at the autocratic Russian regime as a nonEuropean form of government. Ranke, in Germany, felt that Russia had so much Asian about it that it could never become an integral part of Europe. This rejection was partly founded on the idea that nothing could give Russia the Graeco-Roman legacy that was common to all of Western Europe and a core element of the European ethos. The French marquis Astolphe de Custine described Russia, in a travel book La Russie en 1839, as a country ruled in the manner of the patriarchal Asian tyrants. According to him, the semibarbarian Russia ruled by terror was trying by force to integrate the incompatible national characters of East and West. Marquis de Custine did not, however, blame the Russians for what they appeared to be in his eyes but accused them of pretending to be just as civilized as the Europeans (Wolff, 1994: 364). The above attitudes to Russia have chiefly been ones held by Europeans, so it would only be fair to ask what the Russians thought of Europe in the nineteenth century. During the first third of the century three different attitudes to Europe appeared to prevail in Russia. The first was the legitimistic attitude represented by Tsar Alexander I at the Congress of

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Vienna. For him Europe was a continent ruled by Christian princes. Due to the military power of Russia and its Orthodox Christianity, the Tsar considered that his country held a leading role in European politics. The second attitude, that of the Dekabrist revolutionaries in 1825, was that the non-constitutional monarchy in Russia was politically and economically reactionary, and that Russia should therefore heed the example of the constitutional monarchies and republics of Europe. The third attitude was the Romantic, nationalist view taken in the 1820s and 1830s that regarded the traditional cultural heritage, such as the organic tie between the Tsar and his people, as a fundamental Russian value. These nationalist-minded Romantics regarded the increasingly secular Europe as being morally inferior to Russia (Neumann, 1996: 26). The views on Europe put forward in Russia in the 1840s culminated in two manifestations. Firstly, the Zapadniks or ‘Westernizers’ saw in Europe and the Europeans an ideal to which Russia, too, should aspire in its civilization. They set out to prove that Russia had been following the same path of Western civilization ever since Peter the Great. Secondly, the ‘Slavophiles’ sought to further the solidarity between the Slavic peoples and looked with enmity upon the values represented by the West, which were felt to be alien to Russia. Europe, with its nationalist movements, was also regarded as violent and over-individualistic compared with the steady developments taking place in Russia. The conflict between the Zapadniks and the Slavophiles really began in earnest in 1836, when Petr Chaadayev published his Philosophical Letter, admittedly written in 1830 and described as ‘a shot in the dark’. Following the schism and rift in the Western church in the year 1054, Russia had, according to Chaadayev, fallen by the wayside of the historical progress that

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continued in the West. Since then Russia had not succeeded in creating anything itself; everything had been borrowed, Russian culture was all imported imitation. Chaadayev also saw imperfections, defects and depravity in Western society, but they nevertheless contained the seed of development out of which the Kingdom of God would one day grow. Another great Westernizer, Vissarion Belinsky, was likewise prepared to equate the humane with the European and to look upon Europe as the torchbearer of civilization setting an example that Russia would be wise to follow. In protest against Chaadayev and Belinsky, the Slavophiles underlined the value of Russia’s traditions and, especially, its Orthodox faith, and in doing so in a way radicalized the former legacy of the Romantic nationalists. Aleksey Khomyakov postulated that Western Europe had by no means developed under the influence of the true Christian faith, merely that of the Roman Catholic church, which had accepted only the idea of external unity or authority. Unity and freedom could be combined only in spiritual love, which lay at the heart of the Orthodox faith. This was embodied in the Slavic peoples, above all the Russians, because they had by God’s blessing long ago assimilated the pure Christian faith. According to Konstantin Aksakov, the Western states were founded on conquest and characterized by violence, want and selfish individualism, unlike Russia, which was blessed with harmonious togetherness, free will and peace. Peter the Great with his new Western notions was not in his eyes a Russian hero but a ruler who had severed the organic development of Russia by force. From the West he imported bureaucracy and hollow forms to a capital built from nothing and that did not even stand on Russian soil but a Finnish swamp. This model would have to be replaced by a new, harmonious Russia with a mission vis-à-vis the West.

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In Aksakov’s view, Europe could be redeemed only if a new cast with fresh views took the stage of history, just as Christianity had in its day infused new life into the decrepit life of antiquity. The Russians straddled the border between past and future, they had no part in the former crimes of Europe; their mission was to act as the redeemer of the European soul. This idea of a Russian mission was not new, since it had already been stressed by Vladimir Odoevsky back in the 1820s (Vihavainen, 1990). Nor was the Slavophile claim concerning the sharp opposition between Russia and Europe entirely historical. For the Russians, too, were very European in their civilization and did not in this respect differ greatly from the Zapadniks or Westernizers. Aleksandr Gertsen, a strict Westernizer in his youth, lost faith in European ideals amid the nationalist turmoil of 1848 and tended increasingly to stress the unique nature of Russia as a nation between East and West. In a letter to the writer Turgenev dated 1857 he wrote that Russia was a world all of its own with its own character. Its way of life was neither European nor Asian; it was Slavic. Since Russia had no part in Europe’s historical heritage, and was thus free from its encumbrances, Russian culture could achieve a higher social order than that of the West. THE PAN-SLAVISM OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The Pan-Slavism of the 1860s tightened its grip on the Russian patriots. According to its principles, Russia was the chosen leader of the various Slavic peoples. This nationalism was very apparent in the work Russia and Europe of the most famous representative of the movement, Nikolay Danilevsky, written in 1869 (Danilevsky, 1920). Danilevsky called in

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biological arguments to substantiate his claim. The future Slav state should beyond any doubt be ruled by Russia, because the development of Russia would at the same time signify the development of all mankind. Danilevsky rejected the idea, widely supported even in Russia, of Europe’s superior civilization. Instead he drew a picture of Europe beset by violence, unhealthy individualism and unpredictable lust for economic advantage. Russia should, according to Danilevsky, thus be only too pleased to have an unbridgeable cultural chasm dividing it from Europe. No way was Russia part of Europe; Europe hated Russia, and before long there would be war between the Germanic and the Slavic peoples. The smaller nations, such as the Finns, sandwiched between these greater ones would therefore do well to bend to the will of the Slavs, other wise they would have no chance of survival. Towards the end of the century the ideas of many of the Pan-Slavists had a strong spiritual undercurrent of conviction that it was Russia’s historical duty to lead Europe, now in a state of moral collapse, back onto the Christian path (Neumann, 1996: 69–70). Being a geographer, Danilevsky rejected the idea of a ‘natural’ gap between the European and Asian continents. Africa, of course, was naturally divided from both Europe and Asia, but Europe was not a separate continent. Danilevsky saw Europe more as a peninsula to the Asian continent and therefore afforded it a lesser status in relation to the ‘motherland’, Asia. The entire division of Russia into European and Asian thus lost all significance. Refuting the ideas of Tatishchev and Strahlenberg, Danilevsky did not regard the Urals as any more of a land divider than the Alps, the Caucasus Mountains or the Himalayas, and asked why India was not a separate continent, since it was, like Europe, set off by mountains and surrounded on three sides by sea.

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Since, according to Danilevsky, Russia no more belonged to Europe than to Asia, he developed the idea of Russia as an independent geographical region that was naturally separated from both continents. To support his geographical perspective, he also stressed Russia’s separateness as a historic-ethnographic unit. In the 1890s the political geographer Vladimir I. Lamansky improved on the idea of Russia as a geographical and cultural region distinct from both Europe and Asia. This outlook was by no means cut short by the Revolution of 1917, since Russia continued to emphasize its unique ‘Eurasianism’. This school of thought was in particular developed by the wellknown economic geographer Petr N. Savitsky in the 1930s: Eurasia is indivisible. And therefore there is no ‘Europe’ or ‘Asiatic’ Russia, for the lands that are usually so designated are identically Eurasian lands. The Urals … (merely) divide the country into cis-Urals Russia and trans-Ural Russia. (Quoted in Bassin, 1991: 14) 1917: THE SOVIET UNION IS EXCLUDED FROM EUROPE Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, two Europes were distinguished in the Europe-oriented policy of Soviet Russia: the ‘false’ and reactionary vs. the ‘true’ and progressive. The leading socialists nevertheless represented opposing views on the attitude to which Soviet Russia should adopt on Europe. Trotsky wrote on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914: In the present historical conditions, the proletariat is not interested in defending an anachronistic

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national ‘Fatherland’, which has become the main impediment to economic advance, but in the creation of a new, more powerful and stable Fatherland, the republican United States of Europe, as the foundation for the United States of the World. To the imperialist blind alley of capitalism the proletariat can oppose only the social organisation of world economy as the practical programme of the day. (Quoted in Neumann, 1996: 98) Later, as the Soviet Union became stronger, Trotsky was in favour of trading with the ‘false’ capitalist Europe, believing it would also strengthen the Soviet economy. Stalin, by contrast, believed that socialism could be created in one country alone and therefore advocated an isolationist policy in relation to the rest of Europe. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had, even before the First World War, been keeping a close eye on the exchange of views between the European social democrats on a possible United States of Europe. When war broke out, he penned his doubts about this alliance in an article published in 1915 and entitled ‘On the Slogan of the United States of Europe’: If the slogan of the republican United States of Europe, put forward after the three most reactionary European monarchies, with that of Russia at the head, had been toppled, is absolutely vulnerable as a political slogan, then another essential problem remains, that of the economic content and meaning of that slogan. From the viewpoint of the economic basis of imperialism, i.e., the export of capital and the world’s division by ‘advanced’ and ‘civilised’ colonial powers, and under capitalism the United States of Europe is either impossible or reactionary. (Quoted in Tchoubarian, 1994: 86)

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If capitalism were to prevail, the United States of Europe would, according to Lenin, mean the same as the redistribution of the colonies, and he doubted the capitalists’ ability to compromise over their own countries’ national economies for the good of any other country. He did, however, see the possibility of some kinds of agreements between capitalist states: Of course, temporary agreements between capitalists and powers are possible. In this sense the United States of Europe is also possible as an agreement between European capitalists … but what sort of agreement? Exclusively in order to suppress socialism in Europe by joint efforts and protect the plundered colonies by joint efforts against Japan and America. (Ibid.) Under these circumstances, Lenin felt that a United States of Europe really would not be any guarantee of peace but only a new tool used by the imperialists to safeguard their income. The political upheavals sweeping through Russia in 1917 also affected Western European attitudes to Russia as part of Europe. The Pan-European vision of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi revealed the incentive provided by fear of the East for the integration of Europe after the First World War. In 1935 Coudenhove-Kalergi put the question of the eastern border of Europe to the continent’s leading political geographers. Of the 42 who replied, only 12 were still in favour of the Urals as the eastern border of Europe, whereas 14 felt that the western border of the Soviet Union was a suitable eastern border for Europe. The remainder had either chosen some other line between these two or refused to give any precise answer. An even greater threat to Europe was posed by the Soviet Union as one of the victors of the Second World

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War. Historians, in particular, took it upon themselves to demonstrate that despite the leanings towards Europe of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, Russia had never been part of Europe in the true sense of the word. The Swiss historian Gonzaque de Reynold also addressed the role of Russia in his multi-volume history of Europe of 1950 and came to the conclusion that Russia belonged not to Europe but to Asia. According to him, Russia was the antithesis of Europe in the physical sense too, and this antithesis was manifest at every level. The Polish-born historian Oscar Halecki, who defected to the West, operated within roughly the same limits in his work on the borders of Europe and Europeanism. It was in his opinion clear that Russia had become non-European by 1917 at the latest. Even the administrative border between the European and Asian parts of Russia (i.e. the border along the Urals) had vanished, so according to Halecki, there were no longer any grounds for any regions of the Soviet Union to be part of Europe. The western frontier of the Soviet Union was a much clearer border and corresponded more closely to people’s true images (Halecki, 1962). Arnold Toynbee the historian likewise accused the geographers of drawing an artificial line along the Urals, claiming that it divided ‘European Russia’ from ‘Asiatic Russia’. In Toynbee’s view, no border existed apart from that between Europe and the Soviet Union. Numerous geographical sources of the 1950s defined Europe as the part of the Eurasian continent west of the Soviet Union. Despite the criticism, the majority of the Anglo-Saxon and French geographers continued to regard the Urals as the eastern border of Europe. Some criticism was, admittedly, voiced, such as the question asked by G. Cressey: if the Urals are a national frontier, then what about the Appalachians in America? In an article dealing with

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the historical development of the eastern border of Europe W.H. Parker arrived at the suggestion that a line running from the Black Sea to the Baltic should once again be drawn as the border of Europe. Europe would then include the part of Eurasia west of the Soviet Union. He felt that this corresponded to people’s actual views both of the historical developments and of the physical location of the eastern border of Europe. Parker also sought natural, climatic and botanical grounds for his Black Sea–Baltic line (Parker, 1960: 291–2). THE IRON CURTAIN FALLS AND RISES This sur vey of the debate surrounding the eastern border of Europe over the centuries will suffice to show just how nebulous the concept is. Though geographers have substantiated their arguments by referring to physical landmarks, the eastern border of Europe has shifted according to the Western European attitudes of the times to Russia or the Soviet Union and its political status. It is unlikely that the eastern border of Europe will remain for very long at the western border of the former socialist Eastern Europe or even the western border of the former Soviet Union. Instead, the eastern border will in all probability once again creep slowly eastwards. In defining ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’, scholars will no doubt shake the mothballs out of the ideas put forward by von Strahlenberg over 250 years ago, of the Urals as the natural – and not just a theoretical geographical – borderline between the two continents. In 1946 Winston Churchill, on a visit to the United States, gave a famous speech at Fulton, Missouri in which he said, ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent.’ The curtain lowered by Churchill

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remained on maps and in people’s minds for close on fifty years. And although Churchill stressed the need for unity in Europe, he nevertheless felt that the Iron Curtain gave Western Europe the protection it needed from the communist totalitarianism of Eastern Europe, which threatened the traditional Western Christian values. Greece alone, in Churchill’s eyes, represented Western freedom and the finest traditions of European culture in the East. Like Churchill nearly fifty years before him, Mikhail Gorbachev made a speech in Fulton, in May 1992. This time the speech declared the end of the Cold War and raised the Iron Curtain lowered by Churchill. Five years earlier he had, in his Perestroika, claimed that certain states had been trying to exclude Russia from Europe. Gorbachev refused to accept this idea, pointing out the long historical dealings between Russia and Europe. The Russians were, he said, Europeans, and Russia’s history was part of the great history of Europe. ‘The Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Moldavians, Lithuanians, Letts, Estonians, Karelians and other peoples of our country have all made a sizeable contribution to the development of European civilization’ (quoted in Wolff, 1994: 372). By including the Russians in the tradition of European civilization, Gorbachev tried to sweep aside the ideological Iron Curtain and to bridge the gulf dug in previous centuries between ‘civilized’ Europe and ‘barbaric’ Asia. The downfall of Gorbachev and perestroika finally put paid to any ideas of the Soviet Union being the ‘right’ socialist Europe. Since the demise of socialism, Russia has, on the one hand, shown itself willing to strengthen its ties with Western Europe by proving that it has always had a role to play in European politics. On the other hand, strong nationalist sympathies are once again raising their heads in Russia, which have, drawing inspiration from Danilevsky and others,

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stressed the need for Russia to follow her own course and to break away from Western politics and the capitalist economic system. In this respect the front lines have in a way reverted to those of the nineteenth century, when the Slavophiles and Zapadniks (‘Westerners’) were arguing over Russia’s relations with the states of Western Europe (Neumann, 1996: 179–210). But the question of whether or not Russia belongs to Europe will in any case continue to be a crucial one for further European integration.

9 The Question of Central Europe: Europe-in-Between? THE START OF THE MITTELEUROPA DEBATE One of the subjects attracting considerable debate in the past few decades has, in addition to the right place for drawing the border between Eastern and Western Europe, been the question of Central Europe (Mitteleuropa) between East and West. The discourse has also raised the concept of an ‘in-between Europe’ (Zwischeneuropa), especially when the term Mitteleuropa is felt to have too many political implications. There has also been talk of a ‘third Europe’ – to indicate not that Europe falls into only three areas but that Central Europe represents a third alternative to East and West. The views on Central Europe, its precise location and character, have in particular tied in with the role of Russia as the eastern border of Europe. The second factor governing the debate on Central Europe has been the role and position of Germany in drawing the western border. The opposition of France and Germany has been dominating European politics for a very long time, but since the war of 1870 between these two countries it has been at the very heart of debate. It was in Germany that the idea took root during the victorious early years of the First World War of making Central Europe a strong Mitteleuropa with a dominant position in Europe. As the war dragged on and the Central Powers continued to hold the upper hand, Friedrich Naumann wrote his famous Mitteleuropa (1915) envisaging a postwar Europe 177

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in which a strong Central Europe, with Germany as its leader, would occupy the central role in European politics. The conceptions formulated by Karl Haushofer in the 1930s of the geopolitical state of the world further went hand in hand with the expansive policy of Nazi Germany. Geographers had been trying to define what was precisely meant by Central Europe ever since the nineteenth century (Stirk, 1994: 4–6; Delanty, 1996a: 96). The whole term Mitteleuropa was in fact coined towards the end of the century by geographers trying to conceptualize a separate geographical region with its own distinctive characteristics between Western Europe and Russia. The French geographer A. Himly noted in 1876 that defining Central Europe was no easy task, since it had no common factors apart from a name indicating some kind of common identity. By the turn of the century German geographers in particular were doing their best to generate a sense of national cohesion by means of the concept called Central Europe. Josef Partsch, in his Mitteleuropa of 1904, gave a decidedly sketchy geographical definition of the area, his underlying motif being to further economic cooperation in Central Europe as a means of combating the world might of Britain and Russia. In doing this he stressed the cultural uniformity of the region. Central Europe was for him an area in which German culture acted as the common denominator; the whole of Central Europe, either consciously or unconsciously, therefore belonged within the sphere of German culture. Partsch’s book was also a continuation of the nineteenth-century debate of the ‘natural’ borders of Germany (Schulz, 1989). The Mitteleuropa of Friedrich Naumann, a work that was already making a stir during the First World War, begins in the nature of a travel book. He asks rhetorically where the traveller might head once the war was over. By way of reply he paints pictures of the Central

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European landscape and the region’s achievements in the arts. The work itself is not, however, a travel advertisement, since the author very soon attacks his real theme: hard economic facts and a presentation of the resources in an area in which Germany would, he felt, undoubtedly occupy the leading role as the victorious nation at the end of the war. Naumann did, however, make some attempt to couch his statements in softer tones in case anyone should be intimidated by this demonstration of German might. Although Central Europe is indeed German at heart and speaks a tongue that is both a world language and the language of philosophy, the German-speaking area would nevertheless have to show flexibility and tolerance towards other languages because this was the only way to achieve harmony. Naumann’s vision of Central Europe was an elegantly expressed portrait of Central Europe ruled by Germany from the North Sea to the Middle East. The Austrian Social Democrat Karl Renner, a former political opponent of Naumann’s, was convinced that Naumann was an advocate of peace and that his view of Central Europe was indeed an idea that could be put into practice and that would also benefit the Social Democrats (Schwarz, 1989). In 1916, in a work by the same name, K. Eichhorn correspondingly outlined his ideas for a federation of Central European states based on the theories of Naumann that would be ruled by Germany and based on the German constitution. CRITICISM OF MITTELEUROPA AND THE IDEA OF ZWISCHENEUROPA Naumann’s rhetoric did not, however, appeal to the German Social Democrat Karl Kautsky, who condemned the plan in crushing terms. In an article

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entitled ‘Mitteleuropa’ published in 1915/16 in the journal Die neue Zeit Kautsky set out to prove that Naumann’s plan was designed solely to ensure German hegemony in Central Europe. This hegemony would be achieved not only at the expense of the smaller Scandinavian and Baltic states but also by overthrowing the monarchies along the Danube. Kautsky also stressed that Naumann’s unwillingness to see Germany entering into any sort of agreement with Britain or Russia was dictated by his fear that Germany would fall within the influence of these states and that any attempts at expansion would be curbed. Kautsky rejected Naumann’s idea that the existence of Central Europe was due specifically to the Prussians’ victory and instead proposed the founding of a supranational federation of equal, socialist states. Not all the philosophers addressing the question of Central Europe after the First World War were very much in favour of setting up a chain of small independent states. The British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, writing in Democratic Ideas and Reality in 1919, suggested the creation of a strong buffer zone between Germany and Russia. He regarded the idea of national autonomy launched by the US President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles peace conference as a threat to the future stability of Central Europe. A band of numerous small sovereign states in Central Europe would be politically unstable and vulnerable to any aspirations to power on the part of either Germany or Russia (Kumar, 1989). Mackinder’s theories greatly resemble those put forward by the Hungarian Oszkar Jászi in the final years of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. With the Habsburg dynasty on the brink of collapse, Jászi likewise considered that a small band of Central European states would be too open to national and ethnic conflicts and thus defenceless against pressure from Germany and Russia. Jászi’s solution to this problem was to set up a United States of the Danube

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Region founded not on national but on federative principles (Fehér, 1989). Even while the First World War was still being waged, Thomas Masaryk, later to become President of Czechoslovakia, also challenged the attempts inspired by Naumann’s book to build a Central Europe on German hegemony. In Das neue Europa (The New Europe, 1918) he claimed that the core of Central Europe would be a chain of small nations beginning with the Lapps and the Finns and stretching right down to the Balkan peoples and the Greeks but not including either Germany or Austria. Unlike either Mackinder of Jászi, Masaryk did not want to see any supranational state being set up in Central Europe, since this would in his opinion be too reminiscent of the unsuccessful Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Instead, he believed in a future for the small, independent states in a democratic and liberal spirit (Szporluk, 1982; Kumar, 1989). One thing which the Central European plans of Mackinder, Jászi and Masaryk all had in common was their total exclusion of Germany. Many writers in between the world wars firmly avoided the term Mitteleuropa with its overtones of German dominion, and preferred instead to speak of a Zwischeneuropa (‘Europe in-between’) that had none of the political stigma. The term itself did, however, have roots almost as far away as Central Europe. At around the turn of the century the German geopolitical school was using the term Zwischeneuropa coined by the geographer Albrecht Penck and presumably derived from the geographical term Zwischenland meaning the land between two seas. Between the wars the term Zwischeneuropa was, like Mitteleuropa, associated with the question of the historical and future role of Germany, as in Zwischeneuropa und die deutsche Zukunft by Giselher Wirsing (1932). Wirsing’s Zwischeneuropa was specifically the area within

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Germany’s geopolitical and economic sphere of influence. Drawing on ‘natural facts’, Wirsing argues the necessity of Germany’s economic expansion into the central regions of Europe. Despite differences of terminology, Wirsing’s work thus ties in seamlessly with the earlier German-minded literature on Mitteleuropa. Similarly, the Austrian historian Heinrich von Srbik claimed in his Mitteleuropa published in 1937 that the salient feature of the Middle Ages was Germany’s unsuccessful attempt to make the geographical Mitteleuropa an ethnic German area. Srbik further drew a distinction between the eastern Zwischeneuropa and the genuinely German, German-speaking Mitteleuropa (Okey, 1992). In the 1950s the Austrian Forst de Battaglia entertained plans for a three-volume work on Europe inbetween, but only the first volume ever reached print (in 1954). Forst de Battaglia did take the issue slightly further than his predecessors in that in the political juxtaposition following the Second World War he clearly recognized Zwischeneuropa as incorporating the idea of being ‘in between’. Zwischeneuropa has always belonged to both east and west, to both the Orient and the Occident, and will continue to do so. THE THREE REGIONS OF EUROPE The question of Central Europe and its nature has again been on the agenda for the past ten years or so. The impetus for this debate was supplied not by the collapse of the socialist states, even though the debate has included criticism of the socialist regime, but by the appeals on behalf of the lost Central European element at a time when the confrontation between East and West would, it was feared, destroy this cultural area entirely. In 1983 the Hungarian Jenö Szücs wrote an article that was later (in 1987) published in English under the

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heading of ‘Three Historical Regions of Europe’. In it he develops the ideas put forward by the Hungarian political scholar István Bibó in The Misery of the Small East-European Nation States, which appeared in 1946 immediately after the war, regarding the historical fates of the eastern states of Central Europe. Bibó’s main thesis was that at the time when the modern nation states of Western Europe were just beginning to develop, the Ottoman Empire was if anything severing the old national ties in Eastern Europe. When, after the First World War, the downfall of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and Germany’s defeat, nations found themselves presented with a historical opportunity to establish independent Central European states, they were plunged into national conflicts because they had not at any previous stage undergone the process leading to the formation of nation states familiar in the West. Bibó also warned against founding supranational or large federative units in the eastern regions of Central Europe, as they would only repeat the mistakes of the Habsburg dynasty (Le Rider, 1995: 15–16; Fehér, 1989). In his article on the three regions of Europe Jenö Szücs starts with the reign of Charlemagne in the ninth century, when there were, according to him, two regions in Europe. The main reason for this was at that time religion, dividing the continent into eastern and western Christendom. According to Szücs, this division did, however, have far-reaching political consequences, such as the rift between Church and State in the western part that was not mirrored in Byzantium. When, in around the year 1500, the division of Christendom became even stronger, it followed the ancient borders, which, Szücs claimed, put the seal on the East’s decline to serfdom while the West, with the emergence of the modern state, developed civil society and its democratic values. It was the fate of Eastern Europe, said Szücs, to fall between these two regions, the East and West of

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Europe. This ‘third region’ is something of a hybrid in which the people have always adhered to one or the other of the Western Christian churches; for this reason Central Europe does not culturally belong to the East. On the other hand, the local nobility succeeded for a long time in maintaining the serfdom typical of the East, which in turn caused stagnation in the region. In the absence of the strong absolute states typical of Western Europe, the nobility were able to safeguard their own interests for a long time. On the other hand, as Szücs points out, these noble privileges were never extended to embrace the whole of society. In other words, the eastern parts of Central Europe never saw the birth of a civil society – or the opportunity to do so is presenting itself only now. Should Central Europe wish to be reborn as a political unit, it must, in Szücs’ opinion, therefore bring to its conclusion the interrupted process of westernization in which civil society becomes emancipated from the state (Szücs, 1988). THE MYTH OF CENTRAL EUROPE? Despite the recent political changes in Europe, it is difficult to conceive of Central Europe as a homogeneous political unit. At least two Central Europes have, however, featured in debate: the German cultural domain, and the region east of Germany, call it eastern Central Europe or Europe-in-between. But is the whole concept of a Central Europe or a Europe-in-between a mere illusion, a myth of a uniform cultural inheritance that has in fact never even existed as a political region? If we consider that the debate on Central Europe has basically depended on drawing a border between two different economic systems that was wiped away by the collapse of socialism, then it may be claimed that Central Europe is something of a myth (Le Rider, 1995).

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The Hungarian Csaba Kiss proposes that the entire ‘Central European project’ is just one more round in the traditional fight stretching right back to the Enlightenment: Many motives may be hidden behind the discovery or rediscovery of Central Europe. During the construction of modern national culture, roughly over two centuries, writers and thinkers have been confronted by the dilemma – sometimes sooner, sometimes later – that they must expound the backwardness of their own national cultures and the differences from that European culture from which they sprang. This was how two possible solutions were formulated and these have, in effect, recurred repeatedly since the Enlightenment and romanticism. One of these is the imitation of Europe and the other is total differentiation from it. (Kiss, 1989: 135) The ‘Central Europe project’ may thus be examined as an identity-forming project one fundamental element of which is a distancing from both East and West. If upholding it is a vital aspect of identity, we may well ask who the rightful owners of the Central European identity are. There is probably no single answer to that question. ‘The debate about “Central-Europe” was and is a moral appeal to western Europe on behalf of an imagined community, born of frustration with the Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe’ (Neumann, 1993: 366). Gerard Delanty has pointed out two implications of the new Mitteleuropa debate: First, the notion of Mitteleuropa suggests an alternative to the more all-embracing and hegemonic notion of Europe as the West. It is an affirmative statement of the cultural diversity of the continent and a reminder that there is more to Europe than

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the Western ideology. Second, in the context of the rise of neo-nationalism and right-wing ideologies, including anti-semitism and neo-fascism in eastern Europe, the notion of Mitteleuropa, may not be without normative significance. As a concept that embraces the cultural diversity of central and eastern Europe, it can also be seen as an alternative form of integration to that of the current wave of nationalism and one appropriate to the political culture of the post-Cold War. (Delanty, 1996a: 93) The writing on Central Europe has, however, undergone a renaissance in the past ten years or so. The British expert on Central Europe Timothy Garton Ash wrote an article in 1986 in which he reported an interesting observation: Central Europe is back. For three decades after 1945 nobody spoke of Central Europe in the present tense: the thing was one with Nineveh and Tyre. In German-speaking lands the very word Mitteleuropa seemed to have died with Adolf Hitler, surviving only as a ghostly ‘Mitropa’ on the dining cars of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. Even in Austria, as exChancellor Fred Sinowatz has remarked, ‘until ten years ago one was not permitted so much as to mention the word Mitteleuropa.’ In Prague and Budapest the idea of Central Europe continued to be cherished between consenting adults in private life, but from the public sphere it vanished as completely as it had in ‘the West’. The post-Yalta order dictated a strict and single dichotomy. Western Europe implicitly accepted this dichotomy by subsuming under the label ‘Eastern Europe’ all those parts of historic Central, East Central, and Southeastern Europe which after 1945 came under Soviet domination … In the last few years we have

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begun to talk again about Central Europe, and in the present tense. This new discussion originated not in Berlin or Vienna but in Prague and Budapest. (Garton Ash, 1986: 45) Garton Ash makes a particular point of mentioning the Czechs Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel and the Hungarian George Konrád as being among the people who have once again raised the question of Central Europe for debate. But he personally regards this new opening shot merely as a new version of the traditional political romanticism associated with the Mitteleuropa debate (Fehér, 1989). Agnes Heller, in turn, does not regard the talk of Central Europe merely as nostalgia for a past era. According to her, the area represents the middle course between the individualism of the West and the collectivism of the East, though she does admit that this view is slightly utopian in the political sense. Similarly, another Hungarian, George Konrád, examines Central Europe in his Antipolitics (1984) as a phenomenon somewhere in between the consumerist capitalism of the West and the communism of the East. To Konrád, Central Europe represents an area of ‘antipolitics’ in which civil society has turned its back on the state and replaced it with its own values and structures (Kumar, 1992: 447). A vision of Central Europe as something of a ‘third road’ was also at the heart of the writings of the Czech emigrant Milan Kundera, even though he did tend, far more than many other debaters, to link Central Europe with Western Europe and its values, from which he felt it had been wrenched with violence. His long article ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’ appeared in The New York Review of Books on 26 April 1984, having previously been published in French under the title of ‘A Kidnapped West’. In his article Kundera defined Central Europe in a way that sparked off widespread debate on the essence and identity of the region.

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KUNDERA AND THE NON-GERMAN CENTRAL EUROPE Central Europe consists, according to Kundera, of states that had always regarded themselves as belonging to the West but which in 1945 suddenly found themselves belonging to the East. Central Europe is the eastern border of Western Europe: the states that won their independence amid the upheavals of the First World War but which fell within the Soviet sphere of influence after the Second World War. Central Europe is for Kundera precisely the Europe in between two strong powers, the German and the Russian. The disintegration of Central Europe has in his opinion sealed the political fate of some of the states involved, and the strength of the cultural identity of a state will, he feels, be decisive in determining its political future. An area that no longer feels any cultural togetherness cannot have a political future. Kundera seeks in the historical Central Europe an identity that is neither German nor Russian (nor Slav), and he finds it in the Jewish cultural inheritance. The persecutions of the Jews by the Germans were not, according to him, part of the Central Europe inheritance, except as victims. Nor does he accept the merging of Central Europeanism with Russian or Soviet interests. Although Eastern Europe was still dominated by the Soviet Union at the time when Kundera was writing his article, the Russian cultural tradition to his mind differs decisively from the European tradition to which the states of eastern Central Europe belong. Russia represents for Kundera ‘a different civilization’ and a fundamentally different culture, despite the periods when Russia has had stronger ties with the West. When his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published, Kundera gave an interview in which he analysed the cultural difference between Central and Eastern Europe:

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As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria, have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation – a movement which has its cradle precisely in this region. It was here, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulse: psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartók’s music, Kafka’s and Musil’s new esthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity. It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our country, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end of Europe as a whole. (Quoted in Matejka, 1990: 131) It was precisely here that the tragedy of Central Europe lay, said Kundera: it had been forced into ‘another civilization’, as a result of which the entire Central European identity gradually crumbled during the most recent generation. At the same time, Central Europe was blotted out of the European panorama. But this, according to Kundera, was fatal not only for the identity of Central Europe but for Europe as a whole. In allowing Central Europeanism to vanish, Western Europe at the same time lost its common European identity, of which the Jewish-oriented cultural heritage of Central Europe had been an integral part. In stressing the uniqueness and high quality of Central European culture Kundera has from time to time nevertheless gone considerably too far in lashing out at the Russian cultural heritage. In the introduction to Jacques and his Master (1985) he made Dostoevsky the

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personification of Russian intolerance and brutality. Reading Dostoevskly during the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Kundera discovered in him a strange, non-European mentality, an overemphasis of sentiment that lacked the Western balance between reason and the senses. ‘In this other balance (or imbalance) we find the famous mystery of the Russian soul (its profundity as well as its brutality)’ (quoted in Matejka, 1990: 132). Joseph Brodsky, a Russian emigrant in the United States, claimed that in rejecting the Soviet Union and the socialist regime, Kundera was nevertheless a captive of the geopolitical division into East and West. According to Brodsky, much of the evil to be found in the East had in fact been brought there by the West, so that the West should in fact be accused as being the cause of Russian intolerance and brutality. Brodsky nevertheless understood Kundera’s attitude, because it was only natural for a person who had lived in Eastern Europe for a long time to wish to be more European than the Europeans themselves (Brodsky, 1986). Bridging the cultural gap between the eastern and western regions of Europe is, however, proving far more difficult than was at first realized in the euphoria of political change in around 1990. Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prize winner born on the border of East and West, recalls in his memoirs Native Realm his status as an Eastern European writer: ‘In Western Europe it is enough to have come from the largely untraveled territories in the East and North to be regarded as a visitor from Septentrion, about which only one thing is known: it is cold.’ On the subject of his belonging to the ‘European family’, Milosz retorts ironically, ‘Undoubtedly I could call Europe my home, but it was a home that refused to acknowledge itself as a whole: instead, as if on the strength of some self-imposed taboo, it classified its population into two categories: members of the family (quarrelsome but respectable) and poor relations’ (quoted in Wolff, 1994: 373).

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EAST AND WEST: A CIVILIZATION GAP? The border drawn by Szúcs between Central and Eastern Europe has also featured in other writings on the reorganization of the continent. The one to receive the most attention has been the article by the American Samuel P. Huntington ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ (1993). In it Huntington sets out to prove that the line running down the eastern border of Finland, right through Bylorus, Ukraine and Romania and on via Serbia and Bosnia to the Albanian border on the Mediterranean is the permanent, historical border between Eastern and Western civilization. Huntington interprets the conflicts between East and West as being specifically ones between civilizations and reckons that, despite the economic integration and the collapse of socialism, these different civilization will continue to be at loggerheads with one another: V.S. Naipaul has argued that Western civilization is the ‘universal civilization’ that ‘fits all men’. At a superficial level much of Western culture has indeed permeated the rest of the world. At a more basic level, however, Western concepts differ fundamentally from those prevalent in other civilizations. Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures. (Huntington, 1993: 40) The Czech President Vaclav Havel has criticized Huntington’s view of the nature of civilizations, claiming that with the advances being made in communications networks, civilizations are, if anything, drawing closer together:

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In the traditional sense of the word, civilizations tended to have very limited mutual contact and, if they did influence one another, it was only very slowly and indirectly. Many civilizations had no idea that others existed. Today the situation is radically different. Practically the entire world is now connected by thousands of political, economic and communication networks and bonds. We are all aware of one another, and we have thousands of common habits, technologies, modes of behaviour, civilization forms, aims. It seems to me more appropriate, therefore, to understand the world of today as a single global civilization, and I would call the conflicts that loom in the future merely conflicts of individual cultures or spheres of civilization. (Havel, 1995: quoted in Patomäki, 1996: 63–4) Naturally Huntington is equally aware of these changes, but he makes a different interpretation of the global consequences: The world is becoming a smaller place. The interactions between peoples of different civilizations are increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness and awareness of differences between civilization and commonalities within civilizations. (Huntington, 1993: 25) Huntington also points out that people will, as a result of global economic modernization and social change, gradually relinquish their nation state oriented identities. The religions behind the various civilizations are, he says, especially in their fundamentalist manifestations, taking the place of states as means of identity moulding, which is in turn increasing the potential for the clashing of civilizations.

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What is interesting is that neither Havel nor Huntington exclude the idea of conflicts of values. Whether we call these conflicts clashes between different civilizations or between different parts of a single global civilization is perhaps semantic pedantry. More to the point is probably that, in Huntington’s opinion, Western civilization will have to continue relying on military supremacy to safeguard its interests. But he also hopes that the West will improve its understanding of other civilizations so that people can continue living side by side in a world not of a single universal civilization but of a range of different ones.

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10 The Historical Principles of European Identity THE CORNERSTONE OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY The trend towards integration in Europe over the past few decades has raised the question of whether this process can continue. Will the political and economic integration at some point call for the creation of some joint European identity? And if it does, what will be the nature of that identity, and how will it stand in relation to the existing national identities? Before taking a closer look at the identity debate stimulated by integration, it may be a good idea to pinpoint the factors with which the common European identity has tended to be associated. The historical cultural heritage of the continent has generally be regarded as resting on three pillars: reason, justice and charity. Paul Valéry equated the inherent values of the European identity with these factors in an article in a collection entitled Variété I, saying that there are three factors which constitute the true European identity: Roman law and order, the Christian faith, and the critical spirit of Greece (de Rougement, 1961: 334–5). Richard Hoggart and Douglas Johnson proposed that the three pillars of Valéry were not enough, and that a fourth would be needed, too: the period of Enlightenment and its stress on the significance of critical reason (Hoggart and Johnson, 1987: 8–11). Other compilers of lists quote human rights, democracy and government by the people as major values uniting the Europeans. 195

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Sometimes these ingredients of the European identity are supplemented by the ideal of pluralism and an emphasis on dialogical discourse as one of the items belonging to our European cultural heritage (Morin, 1987). Nico Wilterdink neatly summed up the traditional foundations of the Europe inheritance: Europe’s roots are usually searched for in a less distant past. A conventional image situates the beginning (the ‘cradle’) of European civilization in Greek antiquity, which produced the values of individual dignity and critical, independent thought. After that follows Roman civilization, in which legal thought is developed to impressive heights, and in the bosom of which a third tradition emerges: the tradition of Christianity, which specifically emphasizes community spirit. Some authors add a fourth tradition: the tradition of the Renaissance, Reason and Enlightenment, in which the secular ideals of rationalism and humanitarianism are developed. In this view, the cultural unity of Europe is the result of old, continual, successive and mingling cultural traditions, which together produced a unique amalgam and found their expression in, among other things, organized science, institutionalized protection of human rights and democratic political institutions. (Wilterdink, 1993: 121) The American born British poet T.S. Eliot analysed Europe’s spiritual inheritance in a collection of essays, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, appearing in 1948. In ‘The Unity of European Culture’, an essay appended to the book, he first expounded in elegant tones on the freedom of European art. From there he proceeded to the question of whether European culture had anything in the way of a common basis. In his essay Eliot presented the view that concentration

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on the events of political life did not draw the peoples of Europe together; rather, it tore them apart. Some political ideal could unite like-minded people in different countries, but they would immediately be attacked by the supporters of opposing views. The marriage of politics and culture could, in Eliot’s view, result in a situation such as that in Hitler’s Germany, where anything that was not German was regarded as either decadent or barbaric. An equally dangerous situation was that striving towards a universal, global regime dominated by a single, universal culture. According to Eliot, such designs may be all right in engineering, but not in the field of culture. European culture should be diverse and pluralist rather than striving towards political homogeneity. If what was called the spirit of Europe was allowed to die, then political integration would lose all its meaning. Eliot did in fact stress diversity in unity – not in a unified organization but in natural, spiritual unity. Eliot ended his essay by debating what the uniform aspects of European culture might in fact be. Topping his list of factors was religion. But he was interested not so much in the importance of religion in Europe today (to say nothing of converting people to Christianity) as in the role of the shared Christian inheritance in moulding what we nowadays know as Europe. Our arts have developed and our laws have been fashioned by the centuries within this Christian inheritance, he said. Even the critics of this tradition have acted under its influence. No political or economic alliance would be able to supplant the cultural unity of the Europeans. RELIGION AND SCIENCE AS POTENTIAL RESCUERS OF EUROPEAN CULTURE Europe in the 1950s tended to assign religion a far greater role than that of the mere tradition bearer

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emphasized by T.S. Eliot in his essay. In debating the state of Western society, many cultural theoreticians of the time came to the conclusion that religion alone can rescue our culture from decay and ultimate destruction. Comments such as this were stimulated by Spengler’s work on the development of cultures and the multi-volume Study of Histor y (1934–61) written over several decades by the British historian and cultural scholar Arnold Toynbee. Spengler’s work acted as an inspiration for Toynbee in the comparison of cultures, but Toynbee’s interpretation was much broader and more complex. Instead of the eight great cultures mentioned by Spengler, Toynbee came up with 21 civilizations. In the early volumes of his work Toynbee was rather pessimistic about the future of Western civilization, but he later modified his views and decided that the West was not, after all, condemned to destruction. The Western world has, with the force of its cultural onslaught, conquered almost the entire globe. Toynbee saw in Christianity the life force by which Western culture could, through transfiguration, be reborn on a higher spiritual plane as a Respublica Christiana. For the Westerners had in the seventeenth century assimilated a belief in science instead of Christianity, and this, Toynbee felt, was most regrettable. Although Toynbee did in principle believe in the vitality of Western culture, the two world wars set him thinking about the future of European culture. This was made very clear in his collection of essays Civilization on Trial published in 1948. In the essay ‘The Dwarfing of Europe’, the first version of which dated back to 1926, he speculated on the role of Europe in post-1945 world politics. His comments on a European union were as follows: But is ‘union’ the right name for the constellation of forces that we are forecasting? Would not ‘partition’

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be a more accurate word? For if Eastern Europe is to be associated with the Soviet Union under Soviet hegemony and Western Europe with the United States under American leadership, the division of Europe between these two titanic non-European powers is the most significant feature of the new map to the European eye. Are we not really arriving at the conclusion that it is already beyond Europe’s power to retrieve her position in the world by overcoming the disunity that has always been her bane? The dead-weight of European tradition now weighs lighter than a feather in the scales, for Europe’s will no longer decides Europe’s destiny. Her future lies on the knees of the giants who now overshadow her … On the morrow of the Second World War, the dwarfing of Europe is an unmistakable accomplished fact. (Toynbee, 1948: 124–5) Pitirim A. Sorokin, a sociologist of Russian descent living in America, also addressed the problem of the rise and fall of cultures in a book called Social and Cultural Dynamics that originally appeared in 1937. During the Second World War he then took up the themes of the book in The Crisis of Our Age. According to Sorokin, ‘the body and soul of Western society are sick’. The cultural crisis was manifest in the fact that our culture was plagued by internal conflicts, by a chaotic syncretism, its worship of anything colossal, and its creative forces had run dry. Nevertheless, he said that this was not necessarily the road to ultimate destruction, since Western culture could be progressing from an age of the senses to a new age of ideas. This could in practice be achieved by reinstating the Christian values and God as the only absolute value. Like Toynbee and Sorokin, most of the Western culture researchers of the 1940s and 1950s looked to religion for the salvation of the West. As we have seen,

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this in itself is nothing new. Even in the days of the French Revolution, scholars such as Novalis were turning to the old Christian values as a means of salvation amid the storm and turmoil. Then again, the Europe recovering from the two world wars desperately needed something permanent on which to build for the future. Although religion was in many people’s opinion the only option as the cornerstone of the European identity, there was in fact a second candidate for the job, and that was science. Gunnar Eriksson has briefly summarized the Western belief in scientific and technical process as follows. The science furthest developed by the Europeans, especially natural science, distinguishes Western culture from all other cultures (Eriksson, 1991). The American anthropologist A.L. Kroeber stressed the significance of science as part of the Western identity in his expansive Configurations of Culture Growth (1944). Like earlier theoreticians on culture, he claimed that a certain decline in the creative powers of the arts, in particular, had been evident in Western culture ever since the late nineteenth century. This had been manifest in, for example, the various modern schools devoid of any sense of shape and harmony, in literature, sculpture, painting and music alike. The West’s only hope was, Kroeber felt, therefore science, which unlike the arts had maintained a high standard. Kroeber believed that as long as science and the nation’s general well-being flourished, Western culture was not in any mortal danger. In La mutation humaine of 1960 the Frenchman Pierre Bertaux examined Western society in the throes of ever-faster change and debated the role of Western culture in this change. Bertaux rejected the outright pessimistic forecasts that Western culture was heading for extinction. According to him, the progress curve of the collective organism did not on a large scale correspond to the individual lifespan. Communities had an

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infinite capacity for renewal, and their development could be viewed organically in Spenglerian fashion as a cycle of youth, maturity, old age and death. To Bertaux the European ethos was more a question of attitude than of existence in some geographically defined area. He refuted the view fed by the geographers of Europe merely as a headland off the Asian continent or as a bunch of disparate states. To him, Europe was by contrast above all a spiritual approach and attitude: a person was not born a European, he developed into one. There was thus, he said, no reason why Europe should not be in the vanguard of development if only it could become aware of its position. Europe was neither ‘old’ nor ‘tired’; so far it had always had the sense to rejuvenate itself at the right time. THE TRIPARTITE DIVISION OF KARL JASPERS Karl Jaspers was another philosopher debating the inherent features of Europe in a number of articles published after the Second World War. According to him, there was something false about the optimistic faith in the European spirit before the First World War. True, the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were trying to prove that European unity was no more than a belief created by a culture which only the upper class upheld. If a more lasting base was to be found for a united Europe, then it would have to have deeper and stronger roots than the traditional attributes associated with Europeanism, such as humanism, education and political balance. Jaspers himself relied on three factors which he considered to be the essence of Europe: freedom, history and science (L’Esprit européen, 1947). Jaspers claimed that the need for freedom kept the European in a constant state of unrest and ferment. The longing for freedom was a universal one, but in

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Europe it had grown to full awareness. Freedom, he said, meant a sense of justice and reality, and he in fact defined it as a victory over despotism. The second factor mentioned by him, history and, specifically, the need to understand time, was born of freedom. Only in the history of the Western world was the striving for freedom manifest as a quest for political freedom. All over the world, in Europe too, there had been individuals who had sought personal freedom by cutting themselves off from their communities as hermits. But concrete freedom was for Jaspers manifest only in life within the community, as man developed along with the world surrounding him. The greatness of Western history lay precisely in the strivings towards freedom realized in mutual understanding, as in ancient Athens, the Rome of the Republic, ancient Iceland, the city states of the late Middle Ages, the constitutions of Switzerland and the Netherlands, the idea of the French Revolution (even though, according to Jaspers, it quickly degenerated into a dictatorship) and the political history of Britain and America. Freedom also demanded the third characteristic mentioned by Jaspers, science – science specifically as an absolute endeavour to get to the heart of everything that could be penetrated. A passion for science was in Jaspers’ opinion a specifically European feature. Knowledge made man free, but the outward freedom achieved by conquering the forces of nature was not decisive. What was decisive was the inner freedom that ensued when, on perceiving with clarity a reality that once had been opaque, we ceased to be dependent on it. But freedom was made complete only by a deeprooted love for a knowledge of facts, which was in fact the whole purpose of knowing. Jaspers thus arrived at a slightly Nietzschean view of a European identity that defied definition. Europe could, in his view, arrive at any ultimate goal, because freedom, history and science knew no borders. Europe did not signify

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anything final for him, and the fundamental essence of the continent always went unexpressed. The spiritual essence of the West was manifest only in the world we are living in at any given moment. Jaspers also pondered the actual state of Europe in the postwar world. According to him, Russia was physically close to Europe, but spiritually far. America, by contrast, was physically remote but spiritually so close that we could almost see our own faces in it. America would appear to reiterate for Europe its own potential and opportunities. For Europe was no longer a power radiating an awareness of its own might in between two superpowers; it was a continent that had to go on living, broken and unable to trust in itself. The main question in this situation was whether Europe really was facing ultimate ruin or just a crisis in which it was being born again with all the birth pangs. Jaspers did indeed ask whether we could adapt to the new external conditions created by technology. The spirit that gave birth to science and technology also concealed within it the power necessary to order the chaos it had created. This was not, however, an impossible task in Jaspers’ view since nowhere had humanity borne such significance as in Europe. When the ideal of Europe had grown to become the ideal of humanity, it would seek to become a universal system. The Europeans attached too much weight to their past, because being a museum and relying on tradition could not be enough. Instead the past had to be refashioned in order to meet the challenges of the times. CRITIQUE OF THE EUROPEAN ETHOS These historical and rather conservative definitions, relying basically on the humanist and Christian tradition, have only too often tended to amount to no more

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than empty rhetoric on a continent torn by nationalist conflicts and religious wars. In view of the course taken by developments in the twentieth century, it seems unlikely that a Europe based on Christian values alone can ever be created. Any claims that the West has a higher degree of civilization and that the mission of Christianity is part of that civilization began to seem somewhat absurd after two world wars and the Holocaust. Instead, many Europeans started questioning the meaning of existence and the purpose of life. People also began to have their doubts about science and technology as the means to happiness and bliss, since they also appeared to contain the seed of destruction. The technical world with all its laboursaving gadgets came to be regarded by many as a false paradise that caused disturbances in the human body and soul. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl wrote in Volume I of his never-completed Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie of 1936 that the nations of Europe were sick. For Husserl, too, Europe was above all a spiritual concept and the crisis one of the spirit. He dated the birth of the European spirit back to the seventh century BC in ancient Greece. It was then that the theoretical approach to life – which some have called reason – was born, and it may be described as a pure desire for all knowledge and understanding. In later generations this theoretical approach was manifest specifically in science, and European science was for Husserl a vital aspect of European culture. This science was in turn manifest primarily and most purely in philosophy, so that the philosophical approach in the broad sense was for Husserl the core of the European ethos (Patocka, 1988). The crisis of Europe was for Husserl tied specifically to this theoretical approach crisis, but in speaking of crises, he did not intend that the theoretical approach should be abandoned. On the contrary, it had tended

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to be abandoned only too easily, even though it should in fact have been revived by infusing it with new substance. Husserl saw European culture as being faced in the 1930s with an irreversible choice in which the descent into barbarianism could still have been prevented by reason. This reassessment was at the same time a return to the pillars of European culture, to the philosophical approach that had not lost its power but that would not be automatically perpetuated without constant self-criticism and renewal: The crisis of European existence can end in only one of two ways: in the ruin of a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life, fallen into a barbarian hatred of spirit; or in the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy, through a heroism of reason that will definitely overcome naturalism. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. Let us ‘good Europeans’ do battle with this danger of dangers with the sort of courage that does not shirk even the endless battle. (Quoted in Delanty, 1995b: 26) The period following the Second World War was not marked solely by an optimistic faith in the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the seemingly almost infinite potential of science. By the 1950s Geoffrey Barraclough was, in his essay The Continuity of European Tradition, already criticizing the view carried along on the federative wave of a Europe united in a single culture and world of values (Barraclough, 1956: 31–53). The early 1960s also produced a spate of works questioning the development optimism of the West. There were two books in particular which raised the problems of Western society to public awareness in an unprecedented way. Scientific and technological development had for most meant an increase in welfare, until Rachel Carson, in her Silent Spring (1962), pointed out to the masses the pollution and

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the exploitation of nature being carried out by Western consumer society. In addition to the budding awareness of the need to protect the environment, Western imperialism and the ideal of solidarity were set on a collision course in Frantz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). In his work Fanon launched a bitter attack on the developing country policy practised by the West and questioned the propagation of Western ideals by the states of Europe in the Third World. In the postscript to his work, Fanon painted a gloomy picture of the present state of European culture and expressed the hope that the emerging African states and those just gaining their independence would not adopt the European values of a past era as their ideals: Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration. And yet it may be said that Europe has been successful in as much as everything that she has attempted has succeeded. Europe undertook the leadership of the world with ardour, cynicism and violence. Look at how the shadow of her palaces stretches out ever farther! … Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. Europe now lives at such a mad, reckless pace that she has shaken off all guidance and all reason, and she is running headlong into the abyss; we would do well to avoid it with all possible speed.

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Yet it is very true that we need a model, and that we want blueprints and examples. For many among us the European model is the most inspiring. We have therefore seen in the preceding pages to what mortifying set-backs such an imitation has led us. European achievements, European techniques and the European style ought no longer to tempt us and to throw us off our balance … Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. (Fanon, 1969: 251–2). In Fanon’s view the physical degeneration and social alienation of Western man have combined with racist attitudes to representatives of other cultures. He was, however, keen-sighted with respect to the attraction of Western technology to the peoples of the Third World, and he warned these peoples against espousing European values and Western technology as such. In the eyes of the American sociologist and writer Susan Sontag it was quite significant that the Europeans’ choice of the road to integration should coincide with the crumbling of the colonialist and imperial structures. On examining the European policy of France and Germany in the 1950s and 1960s it was not, she said, difficult to obser ve attempts to gain ascendancy within the continent once the world ascendancy seemed to have been irretrievably lost. Sontag pointed out that while the importance of Europe in world politics has waned, there has been a growing tendency to speak of the ‘Europeanization’ of Europe rather than of the whole world (Sontag, 1989). Colonialism and imperialism could, alongside Christianity and science, thus be added to the factors contributing to the European cultural inheritance.

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In his essay ‘Chaosmos: The Return of the Middle Ages’ (1992) the Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has given a slightly exaggerated account of the upheaval that has taken place over the past few decades and that is still going on in Europe: We are facing migration comparable to the early Indo-European migrations, East to West, or the invasion of the Roman Empire by the Barbarians … The new migration will radically change the face of Europe: In one hundred years Europe could be a coloured continent. (Quoted in Morley and Robins, 1995: 88) The debate on European civilization and the common European identity has in the past few years acquired increasingly critical overtones. The Swedish professor of sociology Göran Therborn specifically linked the birth of European awareness with the birth of modernity: Europe was the chief organizer of modernity, giving the latter its characteristic forms of vast seaborne empires, politically organized overseas settlements, intercontinental trade and investment, and deliberate diffusion of religious belief and techniques of rule. All this was linked to a system of increasingly national and secularized states at the centre, from which originated new technologies for the world and curious bodies of science and learning, developing physics, astronomy and political economy, as well as Enlightenment, nationalism and orientalism. (Therborn, 1995: 19) Having presented his broad vision of Europe and modernity, Therborn went on to examine which particular traits have fed the image of a common European ethos. In addition to the Christian tradition,

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he mentioned – somewhat surprisingly – as common European identity factors wars and class awareness. The philosopher Agnes Heller, with her critical attitude to the common European identity, also identified modernism as the factor uniting Europe. The modernism born of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment reached its peak in the nineteenth century, but by the end of the First World War the literary-minded ideal of Europe was dead. Heller has made an interesting distinction between the Greek and the ‘European’ cultural inheritance: Homer and Plato organically belonged to Greek civilization: where Greek civilization went, Homer and Plato followed. Yet Gothic cathedrals, or even Mozart, do not belong to the West or Europe in the same way as Homer and Plato belonged to the Greeks. Wherever modernity (the West, Europe) goes, Mozart does not necessarily follow. For Mozart and Shakespeare are Europeans in a sense completely different from the one in which Homer and Plato were Greek. (Heller, 1992: 16) Heller regarded the European cultural awareness prevailing from the French Revolution to the First World War as one of the most short-lived of all the cultures emerging in the history of mankind. EUROPEANISM AS A CONFLICT OF VALUES Examination of the essence of Europeanism reveals two diametrically opposed views of the state of our culture in the present day and age. One is that the European spirit is still alive and thriving and is still founded on a combination of pluralist and shared values. This is above all the ideal of Europe which the

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European Union has sought to foreground. The other view is that Western idealism is dead, that there are no longer any shared values on which to found a European spirit of unity. The death of this idealism is not, however, altogether a bad thing, because some say that only by relinquishing past values is it possible to construct a global culture based on new values. But is the existence of diverse, to some extent conflicting value systems ultimately the factor that penetrates to the heart of the European ethos? Simo Knuuttila, the Finnish professor and expert on the history of philosophy, regards the conflict of values as a typical feature of Europeanism. As an example he mentions the tradition of political thought characterized by unceasing competition between the community model derived from antiquity and the individual model born in the late Middle Ages. These conflicting ways of thinking are still causing tension even today, as manifest in, for example, the debate on the ‘welfare state’ or the ‘nanny state’. According to Knuuttila, the Europeans have, within what is in fact their relatively brief history, generated common values that have simply accumulated without ever being ordered to form a harmonious synthesis. The dilemma of European sense and sensibility lies in precisely this mass of values not ordered to form any balanced entity. The European mind is not, according to Knuuttila, therefore very reliable, having a ready tendency to assimilate various fashions, ideals and values. On the other hand, the diversity or even contradiction of the idealistic subconscious prevents very biased ideologies from gaining ascendancy for very long. The economic-political European Union may therefore, according to Knuuttila, prove to be rather short-lived; earlier coalitions of this type in Europe have not tended to survive for long (Mikkeli, 1994). The said conflict between community and individual need not be regarded purely as a bone of contention

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between political schools, for it could also be a fundamental conflict of values constituting an obstacle in the path of the European Union. The Finnish marketing professor Liisa Uusitalo claims that there is a constant collision in the European Union between the stress on the role of markets operating in a spirit of liberalism and strivings to develop a communicative form of community. The architects of the European Union have so far not succeeded in finding any balanced compromise between extreme market liberalism and the communicative society valuing community and diversity within it. According to Uusitalo, measures supporting market liberalism are still being given preference in Union politics. Neither the democratic critique of Habermas nor the critique stressing the significance of communities and traditions has had any visible effect on the objectives and action of the European Union (Uusitalo, 1996). What if the value conflict is one of a fundamental and unsolvable nature? We may further ask whether a pluralist European cultural identity is even considered as something desirable in all political quarters. John Keane has said that the emergence of a federative and democratic Europe that permits a diversity of values and identities is at odds with the Thatcherist view of Europe as one giant capitalistic market area. The ‘Europe as a market area’ view would only lead to an even wider economic rift between the rich and the poor areas, and to even greater ecological problems. The United States of Europe ideal is, according to Keane, irreconcilable with the ‘Europe Ltd’ ideal (Keane, 1992). The next chapter will examine the attempts being made to solve the various value conflicts within the debate on the outlook for a common European identity and its substance.

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11 European Political and Cultural Identities ‘GOING TO EUROPE’ The expression ‘Going to Europe’ launched at around the time the European Union began to expand is, according to the British historian E.P. Thompson, humbug, and for four reasons: First, we are there already. Second, Europe is not that set of nations but includes also Warsaw, Belgrade, Prague. Thirdly, the Market defines the diversity of Europe cultures at its crassest level as a group of fat, rich nations feeding each other goodies. Fourth, it defines this introversial white bourgeois nationalism as ‘internationalism’. (Thompson, 1980: 86) Though somewhat exaggerated, Thompson’s ‘humbug’ does in fact clearly reflect many of the problems that arise in alluding to a ‘common European identity’. As Chris Shore has said, defining identity does nevertheless have its own functional significance in the European Union, for ‘it is a tool for promoting the EC’s political legitimacy as well as the goal of “evercloser union”’ (Shore, 1993: 786). Yet the 1992 report of the European Commission dealing with expansion left the definition of Europe and the European identity open in a way that is quite astonishing: The term ‘Europe’ has not been officially defined. It combines geographical, historical, and cultural 213

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elements which all contribute to the European identity. The shared experience of proximity, ideas, values, and historical interaction cannot be condensed into a simple formula, and is subject to review by each succeeding generation. The Commission believes that it is neither possible nor opportune to establish new frontiers of the European Union, whose contours will be shaped over many years to come. (Commission, 1992; quoted in Shore, 1993: 786) Despite the difficulties of definition, the idea of European identity has become an important issue even within the EU. This is partly because an increased awareness of a common European ethos is regarded as a major means of counteracting the growing nationalist tendencies. We should, therefore, take a brief look at the waves of European nationalism before scrutinizing the attempts at a definition of identity. NATION STATES BORN IN WAVES Ernst Gellner, in his studies of nationalism, has observed that national identity enters the scene of history when it is no longer possible to make functional reference to the status of a particular individual in the hierarchy of society. For example, the rise of capitalism and industrialism made it vital to acquire greater mobility and to spread over a wide area, but in the process it also became essential to define this area. This, according to Gellner, is the very reason for nations’ existence (Gellner, 1983). Europe can, he said, be divided into different time zones according to the development of nation states; in the case of Europe he identified five such time zones. The nation states (in the sense of states with a uniform culture) in the westernmost or Atlantic zone have the longest history and, according to Gellner, include the

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British Isles, the Netherlands and the Iberian Peninsula. The second time zone could be called the Roman zone with France as its historical centre; here the emergence of the nation state is closely tied to the Revolution of 1789 and Napoleonic rule. The third European time zone covers Central Europe and mainly consists of Germany and Italy, where nation states were established in the second half of the nineteenth century. The fourth of Gellner’s time zones comprises the eastern parts of Central Europe in which the nation states date only from the collapse of the imperialist Austria-Hungary and Russian regimes and of Turkey in conjunction with the First World War. One feature of the political development of this area has been its subjection to Soviet influence from the end of the Second World War right up to the early 1990s. The fifth time zone is described by Gellner as the area covered by the former Soviet Union with the exception of the Baltic republics in the fourth zone. Opposition to the forming of a national identity has in this area been marked throughout the twentieth century, which, according to Gellner, accounts for the fact that it has been strongest and the most difficult to control in the 1990s (Gellner, 1993). Gellner’s time-zone classification demonstrates that nation states do not all proceed through similar stages to the vanishing of national identity and national frontiers. Although the nation states are much older in the west than in the east, their position has not shown any signs of declining in any of the time zones presented by Gellner. If anything, the Cold War looks set to be followed by a new wave of strengthening national identity in Europe. CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE STATE The whole concept of nationality in the sense of citizenship may be said to have lost the original

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meaning acquired way back at the time of the French Revolution. The revolutionary concept of nationality was closely tied to the ideals of radical democracy and popular sovereignty. The idea of self-determination thus lay at the core of the early nationality concepts. The individual was seen primarily as a democratic citizen and no longer as the subject of an autocratic monarch or the church. But in the nineteenth centur y citizenship/nationality became associated with the concepts of nationalism and the state, and in the process lost its former meaning of popular sovereignty. The concept of freedom was meanwhile transformed to mean freedom from tyranny, and nationality became restricted to the political sphere. The concept of nationality thus lost some of its idea of free civil action in which each citizen is a free political actor (Delanty, 1995a: 160). One popular theme in the European identity debate is nowadays the concept of civil society and its development as a substitute for the diminishing power of the state (Delanty, 1995b). But we may, therefore, well ask whether the state and civil society are in fact substitutes for one another. As Immanuel Wallerstein has pointed out, they are if anything more complementary and mutually dependent in nature. Civil society means the political organization of the people in the sphere of the state (parties) or indirect, non-political organization to further individual issues and thus to influence the government (social movements). In this respect civil society can exist only as long as the state exists (Wallerstein, 1995). Ole Waever likewise argues that the fashionable debate on ‘European citizenship’ only goes to show that Europe is historically founded on civil society and not on some vague ethnic-cultural identification. In practice, however, the meaning and use of the concept of citizenship differ greatly from one EU member state to another. For Spain, for example, which proposed

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the idea of European citizenship, it symbolizes solidarity and political union, but for Denmark it points to a process of nation formation (Waever, 1995a: 26). In the 1970s, in considering the possibility of supranational citizenship, the French political scientist Raymond Aron argued that there were ‘no such animals as “European citizens”. There are only French, German, or Italian citizens’ (quoted in Meehan 1993: 1). There is, however, no denying that ‘European citizen’ is, as an abstraction, much easier to conceptualize than it was a hundred years ago. One of the architects of the united Italy, Massimo d’Azeglio, said in 1861 at the first session of the royal Italian parliament, ‘We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians’ (quoted in Hobsbawm, 1991: 44). At that time the majority of the inhabitants of the new Italian state were not even aware that their principalities had united. The architects of European unity do at least have the advantage that the majority of the people in the member states are aware that they belong to the European Union. FROM FEDERATION TO UNION? The future of the European Union may also be addressed from the angle of greater integration, debating what it would take to create a common political identity. If the political constitution of the Union is to be some degree of federation, then what conditions would that federation have to fulfil in order to be achieved? The Swedish political scientist Herbert Tingsten was already in 1940s discussing the terms of federalism in a work about various models of federalist states (such as the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and South Africa) (Tingsten, 1942). Tingsten made an observation on the establishment of federations, namely that the fundamental principles

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usually regarded as outlandish and impracticable before the birth of the federation have tended to be regarded as national necessities once the federation has been set up. Tingsten presented three factors that have customarily been deemed necessary for a federation to be formed. First, it must cover a single geographical area, and in most cases one that is clearly distinct. Second, the federation must have indisputable foreign policy and economic advantages for those involved. And third, it must as a rule have a common cultural tradition and a common language. This third factor is particularly interesting when we shift the perspective from Tingsten’s federations to unions. Nico Wilterdink has also identified three factors in the process of nation formation. As the first he gave the equalization of living conditions in a certain area, accompanied by political democratization. Secondly, the inhabitants of the area must be aware of the borders of the area, which must coincide with the political and cultural borders. In short, national awareness implies the notion of a country, a state and a socio-cultural community, and of a natural and unbreakable connection between them. It means there is a differentiation between ‘we’ and ‘they’, it implies both feelings of solidarity with those within the projected boundaries and feelings of distance or even enmity for those outside them. (Wilterdink, 1993: 130) Thirdly, Wilterdink went on to say that national cultures are not born of their own accord, and that there must be continuity with regard to earlier cultures. Wilterdink stressed that these criteria are only partly fulfilled at the level of European integration. Even though some degree of economic equality is taking place, there are no signs of any great political democratization. The absence of clear borders is another

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obstacle to the formation of a clear image of Europe. What is the role of, say, Turkey or Russia in Europe? The historical ingredients exist for a common European cultural identity, but there are just as many disruptive elements, such as the large band of European languages. Wilterdink finally comes to the conclusion that ‘the idea of European identity will remain relatively vague, the object of lofty reflections rather than a source of spontaneous emotions’ (Wilterdink, 1993: 134). THE POTENTIAL FOR A COMMON EUROPEAN CULTURAL IDENTITY Anthony D. Smith, an expert on nationalism, reduced the problem of the European identity to the question of a new dichotomy in Europe (Smith, 1992). On one side of the balance are historical myths and memories; these do not, however, concern the entire continent and are thus not universally shared. On the other side there is the non-historical, ‘scientific’ culture held together purely by the politicians and economic interests while yet being easily susceptible to change. Any desire to create an all-embracing European identity with which the inhabitants of the continent can – and wish – to identity, cannot, in Smith’s opinion, be founded solely on the dissemination of Western values to the northern, southern and eastern peripheries. Smith considered that the popular myths and symbols, the historical memories and traditions are of great significance in moulding both the national identity and any sense of European kinship. But we may well ask whether Europe as a whole does in fact have a common historical memory, or whether the prerequisites for this even exist. How can the Jews, for example, be part of the ‘single European family’, since so far they have been no more than victims in the historiography

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of Europe? It is no doubt fair to say that so far, only nations with their own political history have had any say in a history suffused with strife between nations. Smith also looked for any factors uniting Europe. Not all the peoples of Europe belong to the same linguistic family, even though the Indo-European family is well represented. Physically, Europe is fragmented, with no clear heartland. Religious unity is a thing solely of the past, since even the Christian church has undergone several divisions, to say nothing of the growing number of adherents to other denominations, especially Islam. Racism has, furthermore, been raising its head as a dividing factor in many of the states of Europe. At the level of myths, symbols and ceremonies Europe as a whole has nothing in the way of an Independence Day or an Armistice Day with which all may identify. Nor are there any royal birthdays or saints’ days that unite the continent as a whole. Not even the flag of the European Union is yet, at least, one for which many Europeans feel affection. It is, however, interesting that the European Union has, in its search for community, fallen back on the symbols typical of nationalism, such as a flag, an annual day and a standard passport colour and size (see also Shore, 1993). Should any symbols enhancing a sense of affinity be found, they might, according to Smith, nevertheless primarily signify the spread of Western European values to the eastern and northern peripheries. For as Smith has said: National identifications possess distinct advantages over the idea of a unified European identity. They are vivid, accessible, well established, long popularized, and still widely believed, in broad outline at least. In each of these respects, ‘Europe’ is deficient both as an idea and as a process. Above all, it lacks a pre-modern past – a ‘prehistory’ which can provide it with emotional sustenance and historical depth. (Smith, 1992: 62)

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Anthony D. Smith summed up his point about the importance of the common historical tradition for the European identity: Without shared memories and meanings, without common symbols and myths, without shrines and ceremonies and monuments, except the bitter reminders of recent holocausts and wars, who will feel European in the depths of their being, and who will willingly sacrifice themselves for so abstract an ideal? In short, who will die for Europe? (Smith, 1995: 139) Despite the numerous differences, it is, according to Smith, nevertheless possible to speak of ‘cultural families’, common features that apply to the majority of the European peoples, even though there is no single feature that applies to all. Whether a comprehensive feeling of European community can be created by future generations on the basis of such family similarities is – to apply the concepts of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – something that remains to be seen. Within the European Union the emphasis has been specifically on ‘unity in diversity’, meaning that the various nations of Europe may, while recognizing their specific national traits, join together under the aegis of some common denominator. So far this slogan has, however, remained a highly abstract concept almost totally devoid of any concrete substance (Bloomfield, 1993). INTEGRATION AS AN ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL ISSUE Not all the advocates of a federal Europe wish in any way to see the progress of integration as a cultural issue, however. In contemplating the trend in the

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process of European integration, the British scholar John Pinder has given a very pragmatic definition for federalism. He examined the Union specifically from an administrative perspective and thus did not address the necessity of a common European culture in order to achieve such a federation. According to him, the European Union will enter a federalist stage so long as it satisfies three vital conditions: (a) the EMU really does materialize; (b) the revision of the joint decisionmaking procedure gives the European Parliament a status completely equal to that of the Council of Europe and at the same time broadens the procedure into the main areas of Union activity; and (c) foreign and defence policy is gradually transferred to the Union institutions (Pinder, 1992). Pinder himself reckoned that these criteria may actually be met before the turn of the century, in which case the European Union could then justifiably be said to be federative. His thoughts were, however, concentrated on the level of political and economic decision-making and he was not interested in the broader questions of the European cultural identity. We may, however, well ask whether the functionalist approach represented by Pinder can solve the problems of legitimacy raised by closer integration. As Brigid Laffan has said: ‘The legitimacy crisis in the Union demonstrates the limits of the Monnet method at a time when national governance structures are challenged; shared values and even identities matter if the Union is to become a focus for legitimacy in the New Europe’ (Laffan, 1996: 83). Unlike Pinder, the British sociologist Michael Mann does not believe that Europe is travelling towards a lasting union or federation, but rather towards political arrangements that are reminiscent of ‘feudal power relations’ in the sense that there will not in the future be any center of sovereign power. According to Mann, it is unlikely that the degree of federalism in the

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European Union will rise, or that the nation states will come to the end of the road. Although supranationalism in general and the European Union in particular have for the most part been capitalist phenomena, capitalism is in Mann’s view reaching the stage where it can no longer contribute to the overthrowing of the state as an institution. Thus Europe is not moving toward a single state or even toward a federal state. Different political arrangements for three main types of state function may be distinguished. First, for most economic policy, sovereignty is divided between the EC and the nation-states, though not according to clear, ‘federal’ or ‘nonfederal’ constitutional principles. Second, in other civilian policy areas, sovereignty remains largely, though not entirely, in the hands of the nation-state. Third, in defence and foreign policy, ver y little effective sovereignty is located anywhere. Overall sovereignty is now divided and messy. (Mann, 1993: 127) Mann does not see the European Union as actually engendering any feeling of European identity or citizenship. To him, being ‘European’ always more or less means being friendly, courteous and civilized. A European identity of this nature could perhaps be introduced as an aid to the ‘pan-European’ policy and to achieving the jointly agreed social objectives. But the problem is, he says, that no such objectives exist at Union level. Therefore the political parties are still national in their organization and almost national in their orientation. Even the referenda on the European Union have, in his view, tended to become votes of confidence on the policies of the national governments. Brigid Laffan has come to a similar conclusion: ‘The “European project” has been

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embraced by many of the Member States as a means of strengthening their existing state identities and as an arena within which to project their state identities’ (Laffan, 1996: 87). The Finnish expert on international politics Jyrki Iivonen has put forward three reasons why it has not proved possible to create a pan-European identity and why the creation of a united Europe looks uncertain. To begin with, there are the strong national traditions in the different parts of Europe, linguistic and cultural differences, and the innate, latent belief in the superiority of one’s own ethnic group. Secondly, most European countries lack the historical and cultural prerequisites for the use of administrative sanctions in the creation of a new citizenship and a supranational identity. Thirdly, the European welfare state was built at a time when there were rewarding incentives to strive to improve one’s standard of living. But now that the welfare state exists, efforts are being made to preserve a certain sense of security and well-being precisely by the defence of national interests (Iivonen, 1993). A COMMON POLITICAL IDENTITY AND NATIONAL CULTURAL IDENTITIES Ole Waever has said that one of Europe’s dilemmas is that while it is witnessing the emergence of an increasingly global economic sphere, the cultural sphere is becoming more and more national or regional. Europe cannot therefore be built simply by replacing the national identities with a European identity. As one possible solution to this problem Waever has drawn a distinction between two levels of identity: the national and the pan-European. According to Waever, it might be possible to construct a supranational European identity – a sort of European citizenship – in the field of politics and economics,

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while at the same time adhering to national identities at the cultural level and leaving the decisions on culture to the national governments. In this way we could, he has said, be citizens of Europe while still representing our national and regional cultures. The political construction of the continent would thereby signify a command of the multiple identities (Waever, 1995b). Even Waever does not consider this division into identity levels entirely without its problems. It may, to begin with, be asked whether it is realistic or even possible to make a distinction between culture and politics. Are not these different identities really and truly working towards the same ultimate aim? For another thing, we could always point out the unease widely felt by the defenders of national identities in the face of supranational, homogenizing forces that may also be the downfall of national cultures. Another major factor conducive to integration is, in Waever’s view, the security inherent in the definition of identities; the security of Europe as a whole accordingly needs rethinking: Thus, debate over European integration is not a matter of raison d’état but rather a matter of raison de nation. Whether European integration is allowed to proceed will depend on the ability of nations to secure their own survival. A nation will only allow integration when it is secure that its national identity will not be threatened, that it may be strengthened by its exposure to different identities. If a nation feels that it is only able to survive through a close correspondence with a state that is sovereign and independent, if it does not believe that the state can be integrated while its culture is reproduced, it will block further integration … What is suggested is a reconceptualization of the security field in terms of duality of state security and societal security, the

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former having sovereignty as its ultimate criterion and the latter based on concern for identity. Both actually mean ‘survival’: if a state loses sovereignty, it has not survived as a state; if a society loses its identity, it has not survived itself. (Waever, 1995b: 404–5) Identity is often produced by speaking of threats. Waever has pointed out that it could, paradoxically, even be claimed that identities can be maintained only by being not entirely secure. Integration projects and European security cannot, he has said be established by bolstering Europe up with new quasi-national identities. If the European Union really intends to create a European identity by assuming the form of a nation state, i.e. a national, European identity, it will simply crush outright the old, national identities. The Finnish communications researcher Ulla-Maija Kivikuru has also drawn a distinction between national and cultural identity, at the same time stressing their different objectives. National identity is founded on the ideology of integration: its aim is to legitimately link the nation with the nation state. The identity is then a shared one that lays the foundations for the self-understanding of a nation in the form of a state. In substance cultural identity can, in Kivikuru’s opinion, be seen as the opposite side of the coin to national identity. It is unorganized and it has several layers: it has elements of cultures, subcultures and countercultures operating side by side. Whereas the national identity unites and integrates, the cultural identity divides and creates the potential for diversity and self-expression (Kivikuru, 1995). Drawing a line between the political and national cultural identities in the case of Europe as a whole is again by no means easy, since their simultaneous strengthening does not, after all, ser ve the formation of any ‘common European identity’.

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A CHANCE FOR REGIONAL IDENTITIES Scholars formulating the idea of a New Europe have also proposed the idea of a Europe of the Regions – of a Europe basically made up of provinces, towns or some other units smaller than sovereign states in the conventional sense. The slogan ‘Europe of the Regions’ has become embedded in the language of those who see even nation states as being fundamentally made up of smaller units. They therefore regard the integration of Europe as a form of direct cooperation between the regions over and beyond the cooperation between nation states. The principle often mentioned in this context is that of subsidiarity advocated by the European Union, according to which decisions are made ‘as close to the people as possible’; this is felt to be a vital condition for a new Europe based on the regions (Harvie, 1994). The oldest cooperation area in Europe, Euregio, set up in 1958 on the borders of the Netherlands and Germany, does, by contrast, represent a form of regionalization across states and free from their immediate control. Euregio is an alliance launched by 104 municipalities and towns in the border region, the existence of which has been ratified under a legal treaty signed by the Dutch and German governments. One of the aims of Euregio has been to develop the economy, technical infrastructure and cultural exchange of a predominantly agrarian region that is, from the governments’ point of view, a peripheral zone. Being bilingual, the area has not had any linguistic obstacles to interaction across the territorial frontiers. Euregio may thus provide substance for the inhabitants’ sense of identification that bypasses the two states, as it were. So far at least there have been no separatist demands for independence or autonomy in the 30 years since the region was founded (Jukarainen, 1996).

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Ole Waever has nevertheless warned against an overromantic interpretation of regional identities. In particular he has pointed out that broad alliances within or between states are not fashioned by any ‘natural’ common culture, history or community. The Baltic and Barents Sea areas often quoted as examples of regional collaboration in Northern Europe are first and foremost joint projects between states. Even if the cooperation between these areas does draw its strength from the grassroots activities of civil society, they have not primarily set out to implement the idea of a modern state by means of societal institutions – not ‘bottom down’ (Waever, 1990). The creation of a mythic-symbolic, community perspective in, for example, the Baltic Sea area was begun by the administrative elite and the intellectuals (Käkönen, 1994; Neumann, 1994). ASYNCHRONOUS LEVELS OF IDENTITY Hartmut Kaelble has observed that the national identities and the European identity have not developed simultaneously even in the European past (Kaelble, 1996). Instead, there have tended to be periods when national identities have prospered and times when the focus has been specifically on the cultural heritage of the continent as a whole. The emphasis on the latter was in earlier times accompanied by a strong belief in the superiority of European civilization over that of the other continents. This belief was not really shaken until the turn of the last century, when the national identities began to gather strength. In Kaelble’s view, it was not until the 1950s that the Europeans began to experience a new, broader awareness of being part of European civilization and a desire to emphasize it, but without any of the previous stamp of cultural imperialism. Kaelble’s view may be regarded as somewhat narrow in that he has specifically stressed the role of the

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European Union as the institutional core of the European identity. Meanwhile, the factors he has identified as contributing to the European identity do not touch upon the question of national culture difference, stopping short of them at the level of common political goals. His basic conception that the panEuropean identity is of a different nature from the national identities is in itself sensible. Yet, as we have seen, it is not possible to create a European identity that transcends the nation states purely as a substitution for the national identities. Brigid Laffan has also analysed the feeling of community and shared identity required for political integration and has come to the conclusion that the identity will have to rest on three principles: First, the importance of appeals to the future, of a shared identity, is potentially powerful. The image of a collective future has been used by political leaders in the past to give political cement to multicultural states such as the US. Second, is the idea that diversity itself is a value that must be protected in the New Europe. The EU cannot and should not seek to produce a European people … Put another way, different Europeans experience their Europeanness in different ways. Tolerance would be institutionalized insofar as the recognition of ‘other’ would be a condition for the recognition of each particular identity. This leads to a third factor in the development of an inclusive identity: the sense that a European identity must be built on the civic dimension of nationality, such as citizenship, rather than myths or dubious historical validity. (Laffan, 1996: 99) The crucial value for Laffan is tolerance, which leads us to examine the question of ‘otherness’ as one possible factor moulding Europeanness. But will the idea

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of enmity ultimately be the decisive factor giving substance to the European identity? ‘WE’ AND THE ‘OTHERS’ Europe has, at different points in its history, been equated with civilization, Christianity, democracy, freedom, white skin, the temperate zone and the Occident. Correspondingly, its opposites have been identified as barbarianism, paganism, despotism, slavery, coloured skins, the tropics and the Orient (Burke, 1980). The classification of cultural differences is not, however, in itself accompanied by any necessity to be either for or against one side or the other. Otherwise Europeanness will once again be defined via hostility. Instead of barbarians such as the Mongols, the Russians and the Turks of former times, Islam and the Arab world are, at the turn of the millennium, emerging as the antithesis of all that is European. In his famous work Edward W. Said has taken a look at the Europeans’ attitude to Islam and defined Orientalism at three levels. First, it refers to an academic tradition meaning the study of the Orient, and writing and teaching about it. Second, Orientalism is a way of thinking based on the ontological and epistemological distinction between eastern and western countries. The inhabitants of the Orient and the Occident differ radically from one another, and knowledge of the Orient is possible only as produced by inhabitants of the West. Third, Orientalism is a way of defining and commanding the Orient. The Western states stand in a dominant relationship to the Orient and assume the role of experts on matters of intellect and economics. To put it precisely, Oriental is, according to Said: a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans against all ‘those’ non-Europeans, and indeed it can be

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argued that the major component in European culture is precisely what made that culture hegemonic both in and outside Europe: the idea of European identity as a superior one in comparison with all the non-European peoples and cultures. (Said, 1991 (1978): 7) Instead of emphasizing the fundamental juxtaposition of East and West, some European writers, such as the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, have concentrated on the advantages of being a borderland in the deep understanding of two different cultures. The European identity then looks – or at least it could look – a richer area in which both East and West are everyday phenomena and not just something mythical to be afraid of: alien, barbaric and ‘other’. If, however, we go on the assumption that the European identity is something positive to be pondered over and worked towards, then what is there to prevent ‘us’ from becoming part of ‘them’? Could it be our mental attitude to everything that is different, our rejection of anything in the least bit alien? Cornelius Castoriadis describes ‘otherness’ as the central factor moulding the European identity. This ‘negative principle’ of identity is marked by ‘the apparent incapacity to constitute oneself as oneself without excluding the other – and the apparent inability to exclude the other without devaluating and, ultimately, hating him’ (quoted in Morley and Robins, 1995: 22). The Finnish peace researcher Vilho Harle has also stressed that the true foundation of Europeanism lies precisely in the concept of enmity through which it acquires substance: Europeanism will not be an alternative to dualism, Europeanism is from beginning to end just a new application of dualistic patterns. And in this application, there are candidates for the role of common

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unifying enemy: Islam in religion, Japan and the other Pacific-Asian countries in economic competition, and the United States in economics, politics and security. (Harle, 1990: 11) Iver B. Neumann and Jennifer Walsh have provided an interesting treatment of the role of the area called ‘Turkey’ as the antithesis of Europe, as something ‘other’. They have worked on the premise that for states to be able to act rationally, their inhabitants must be at least to some extent unanimous on the rules concerning their society, i.e. there must be some degree of cultural homogeneity within a state. This consensus, which Neumann and Walsh have called the logic of culture, nevertheless differs from the logic of economics and politics. The debate over ‘Turk’ in the history of Europe proves that although Turkey was, economically and politically, regarded as a state with which others were at times on amicable terms, it could not be considered as part of the European ethos in the cultural sense: In European eyes, the ‘Turk’, with his pagan and barbarian political culture, could not be incorporated into such a cultural consensus. Thus, while the logic of raison d’état, through diplomatic and economic contact, extended the boundaries of the European international system to encompass ‘the Turk’, the prevalence of the logic of culture made his status ambiguous from a societal point of view. ‘The Turks’ remained the relevant Other for the cultural community of Europe … This logic of culture, far from being eschewed by the logic of raison d’état when ‘the Turk’ entered the system of states, continued, and continues, to affect both the European selfimage and European–Turkish relations. (Neumann and Walsh, 1991: 348)

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‘Otherness’ can also be analysed at a more conceptual level. The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur was writing about ‘otherness’ back in the 1960s. As he noted: when we discover that there are several cultures, instead of just one, and consequently, at the time we acknowledge the end of a sort of cultural monopoly, be it illusory, or real, we are threatened … [by] our own discovery. Suddenly, it becomes possible that there are just Others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among Others. (Quoted in Morley and Robins, 1995: 25) The French philosopher Julia Kristeva, who was born in Bulgaria, went on to stress that ‘otherness’ and ‘alienism’ are not only among us; they are also within us. According to her, the alien, the other, is the hidden face of our own identity. Contemplating what is forbidden or suppressed in us makes us feel uneasy. Keeping this ‘alienness’ at a distance is, according to Kristeva, precisely what keeps ‘us’ together (Kristeva, 1991: 20). Ole Waever has, however, recently questioned this view of the non-European ‘Other’ as the factor constituting our European identity. According to him, it is time, rather than any external state, that constitutes the threat to the future Europe, as is reflected in the rhetoric stressing the necessity of integration. Integration is considered as vitally necessary to ensure that the continent will not once again revert to its former state of competition. Waever thus views Europe’s own past as the real enemy it has learnt to fear since the Second World War, more than any external ‘Other’, either the communism of Russia or the ‘fundamentalism’ of Islam. He has summarized his view of the link between the history, identity and security of Europe in the following way:

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‘Europe’ is not primarily built as a political category through nation-state imitating rhetorics of cultural identity and shared ancestry, but rather through a peculiar security argument. Europe’s past of wars and divisions is held up as the other to be negated, and on this basis it is argued that ‘Europe’ can only be if we avoid renewed fragmentation. And if first fragmentation sets in, it will be a self-reinforcing force that rules out for a long time any possibility of ‘Europe’. Integration is thus the referent point for a security rhetoric of ‘Europe’, and it takes on the existential quality characteristic of security, because integration/fragmentation is not a question of how Europe will be, but whether Europe will be. At this very point security, politics, identity and Europe meet in something which is even self-declared as a project of constructing a ‘security identity’. (Waever, 1996: 128) To my mind Waever, coming from the stable conditions of the Nordic countries, may nevertheless be underestimating the significance of ‘otherness’ in the construction of European security and identity. But his argumentation does present an interesting vision of Europe’s opportunity to secure its future by avoiding the mistakes of the past – its mutual bickering and the resulting wars. This poses an interesting question for the writers of Europe’s history: how could it help in this task so important for the future of the continent? This is the subject of the final chapter.

12 Writing European History NATIONAL HISTORIES AND EUROPEAN HISTORY The recent trend towards the integration of Europe has raised the question of whether Europe’s past should be examined from some different perspective. Should the traditional national histories be replaced by some pan-European perspective? And if so, what would this mean in practice? In order to even partly answer to these questions, it is necessary to take a look at the way European history has been written since the Second World War. In the 1950s, when European integration was still sailing with a strong, fair wind, European histories began to appear that sought to place the early stages of European integration and awareness of a common Europe as far back in the past as possible. They accordingly often focused on the kingdom of the Franks ruled by Charlemagne, even the borders of which were evocative of the Western European market set up by the EEC ‘Six’. These ‘Europe’ histories of the 1950s wanted specifically to draw a direct line from the ninth century to the period of integration following the Second World War (Reuter, 1992). Appeals also began to be heard during the course of this same decade for a history of European decolonialization. The fact that Europe’s importance in world politics was waning and that the former colonies were gaining their independence should be reflected in the writing of history, too. These two approaches did not, however, in any way coincide (Brands, 1987). 235

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In the very first chapter of L’idea di Europa (1947) the Italian historian Federico Chabod suggested that the history of the theme would have to start by determining the origin of the concept of Europe. Before we can decide when ‘Europe was born’, we would have to know when it became aware of itself. Chabod himself went back to antiquity, but gave special stress to the importance of the republic of letters of the Enlightenment to the birth of European self-awareness. Heinz Gollwitzer in turn claimed in his work on the idea of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that a distinction needed to be drawn between examination of the idea of Europe and the writing of Europe’s history. It was important, from the point of view of the former, to examine ‘perceptions of Europe as a family of nations, a cultural unity and a political community of fate’ (‘Europabild’) and also on ‘specimens of European consciousness as a community as well as proposals for organizing this continent’ (‘Europagedanke’) (Gollwitzer, 1951: 8; trans. from Swedberg, 1994: 379). In his Europe: A History of Its Peoples financed by the European Union Commission and appearing in 1990 in eight languages, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle specifically tried to combine the national histories of Europe with the writing of a history of the ‘European idea’ (Duroselle, 1990). June Bloomfield nevertheless recorded the problems of Duroselle’s book: Although this is a valiant effort, as the title indicates, to produce a non-racial and non-monoethnic narrative, it is not a history from the perspective of minority peoples or of the periphery. The Jews crop up when they are massacred in the Crusades and in the Holocaust, and the Dreyfus scandal is mentioned, but there is no history of them as a people with a long European history predating Christianity. The Arabs in Spain are treated as separate and other, rather than

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an integral part of Europe, although their intellectual influence in transmitting the ancient Greek texts is acknowledged along with their impact on science and medicine, trade, language, and architecture. Decolonization is related to Europe’s revised position in the world, not to the multicultural transformation of Western Europe from post-colonial migration. Some of the peoples in Europe command more attention than others, even in what purports to be a cultural anthropological account, rather than one focussed exclusively on state power. (Bloomfield, 1993: 265–6) DIGGING UP THE ROOTS OF THE ‘IDEA OF EUROPE’ Hartmut Kaelble has picked out three approaches in the history-of-Europe boom of the 1980s. First, the roots of the idea of Europe and Europeanism have been sought ever since the Middle Ages, tracing them right back to antiquity. The second version of the histories of Europe emphasizes the pluralistic nature of the European identity and civilization, while the third examines the history of Europe via the trend in integration, in which case the years since the Second World War occupy a focal position (Kaelble, 1996: 58–63). Kaelble has also compared the history books written over the past few decades sounding out European awareness with those of earlier eras and as a result has come up with five differences. First, the history of the idea of Europe and European awareness nowadays tends to be written in a broader historical context. Second, now that integration has reached its present stage, the earlier treatises on the idea of Europe and Europeanism are felt to belong far more clearly to a past historical era. It has become plain, Kaelble has said, that many of the renowned historical texts were

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actually rather unrealistic and naive and were not particularly influential even when they were published. Third, far more attention is nowadays paid to the concepts of the people at large and not just of the political elite. Fourth, the same applies to people’s action, and not only to the image communicated by books, political pamphlets, speeches and election polls. ‘René Girault has summarised this approach in the notion of Europe vécue (living Europe) in contrast to Europe construite (building Europe) and the Europe pensée (thinking Europe) that were exclusively investigated by the traditional history of the idea of Europe’ (Kaelble, 1996: 67). Fifth, Kaelble has added that the research into European awareness carried out in the past few decades has drawn on larger source materials than before, such as private correspondence, TV programmes and other visual material. This broader awareness of Europe was, according to Kaelble, to a great extent overlooked by previous generations of historians: No doubt European consciousness during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries never was a predominant identity. But it was a framework in which Europeans thought, discussed and sometimes also acted … Besides the nation, the region, the community, Europe always was a reality for contemporary Europeans. In this broad sense of an awareness of Europe rather than of a movement for European unity, European consciousness was an important topic for contemporaries often underestimated by historians. (Kaelble, 1996: 69) The emergence of this broader awareness of Europe has been the subject of an ongoing research project in France (Girault, 1995).

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IN SEARCH OF A EUROPEAN AWARENESS Kaelble wished to point out four questions that have been overlooked by the traditional research into the ‘idea of Europe’. To begin with, we can only speculate on what Europe meant to the people of ages past; how far did they look upon Europeanism as a special civilization, and if they did discern a difference, did they look upon it as a sign of progress or of degeneration? Research has been carried out into the relations between one European nation and another, yet very little has been dedicated to the image of European civilization in the eyes of the Europeans themselves. Secondly we should, in Kaelble’s opinion, know far more about the inherent features of the European identity. So far it has been likened far too much to national identities, which have been regarded as something in the manner of ‘normal’ identities. The European identity should not, however, be sought as an alternative to or version of a national identity, but as something inherent in itself. Thirdly, the earlier writings on the ‘idea of Europe’ did not, according to Kaelble, pay enough attention to the nature of the pan-European identity. This was to his mind far more rational than the national identities, which he regarded as more emotional. Kaelble identified four factors that contribute to the European identity and that are jointly approved by the Europeans as objectives: democratic influence, the preservation of peace, economic prosperity and well-being, and social security and solidarity. As his fourth point Kaelble raised the question of the early stages of the European identity. Whereas it was once dated even as far back as the Middle Ages, the primary elements of the modern European identity were in fact born at different times. Even before the First World War people were beginning to reject the idea of the superiority of European civilization.

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This period ended, according to Kaelble, with the decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s. Then after the Second World War democracy, peace, well-being and social security gradually became factors in the identity of the continent as a whole, and not just the objectives of national governments and certain socialist movements. In the 1980s and 1990s the European Union has, in Kaelble’s opinion, in turn become the focal European institution and at the same time the core of the European identity (Kaelble, 1996: 69–73). Kaelble’s view may be criticized for not problematizing the role of the European Union as the institutional core forming the identity of the whole continent. Similarly, the factors of the European identity which he has identified do not touch upon the differences between national cultures, remaining solely at the level of joint political objectives. We may also ask whether the view of the superiority of European civilization as the factor creating the European identity is entirely a thing of the past, as Kaelble leads us to understand. It might be more to the point to say that the view of a ‘European Fortress’ defending its own economic interests is by no means alien within Union circles (Miall, 1994). The ongoing globalization of the world economy is not in itself removing the frontiers between cultures or as such in any way furthering global solidarity. HISTORY AS THE LEGITIMIZER OF INTEGRATION Although scholars have, during the wave of integration of the past decade, been approaching history from a broader perspective than during the Europe boom of the 1950s, it is by no means certain that the results have in any way radically differed. The bulk of European historiography continues to be conventionally national,

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and that covering Europe as a whole to concentrate mainly on the present-day integration and the legitimation of the European Union. Yet Romano Guardini was already pointing out in the 1960s that if a new European identity was to emerge, each nation of Europe would have to rethink its history in order to be able to envisage the concept of Europe via its own past. But he also reminded that this would call for considerable application and self-subjugation. Nico Wilterdink has observed that awareness of a common European past is, somewhat paradoxically, also used as a legitimation of future integration: On the one hand it is explicitly stated that there is a fundamental unity and that this unity is still insufficiently ‘realized’. So a discrepancy between essence and manifestation, between the essential unity and the empirical reality of the moment is assumed, and this implies a summons to achieve, and justifies the pursuit of, further unity. (Wilterdink, 1993: 122) Wilterdink has also pointed out that whereas the focus in the national histories of the nation states is on battles, wars and military heroes, that of the ‘Euronational’ histories tends to be more on common European cultural values, and specifically those of high culture. This approach assumes that European integration will proceed peacefully, overcoming any disagreements between states and avoiding the threat of war. A view such as this of the history of Europe is not compatible with the traditional view in which inter-state conflicts occupy a central role. On the contrary, the new ‘Eurohistory’ is concerned more with factors that transcend the national boundaries and tie the continent together, and these are to be found precisely in the field of culture. This difference is in itself quite understandable, since the military history of Europe is

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to a great extent one of conflicts between European nations in which it would be very difficult to recognize any ‘pan-European’ heroes. Wilterdink also drew attention to another interesting point that will in the future be having more and more influence on the ‘idea of Europe’ and, more widely, the writing of Europe’s history: It is exactly during the period of Europe’s relative loss of power that Europeanization, or rather Westernization is stronger than ever before. So it becomes more and more difficult to speak in terms of separate culture areas or civilizations of which the European or Western civilization is one. The demarcation of Europe as a cultural unity therefore becomes more problematical than it already was. (Wilterdink, 1993: 125) However eager scholars may be, in the name of integration, to refer to the homogeneous nature of the European cultural area and its achievements, it will be increasingly difficult to determine its borders and to distinguish it from the other cultures of the world. THE EUROPEAN IDEA AND IDENTITY Richard Swedberg has compiled a list from various works on the ‘idea of Europe’ of factors generally thought to have contributed to Europeanism: (1) Europe as a word with a distinct etymology; (2) Europe as a geographical concept; (3) Europe as a concept in mythology; (4) Europe in the thought of Medieval Christianity; (5) Charlemagne as the Father of Europe; (6) Europe in the peace plans of the 17th and 18th century; (7) Cosmopolitan Europe;

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(8) Napoleon’s attempt to unify Europe; (9) The Concert of Europe; (10) Europe and Nationalism (‘The United States of Europe’); (11) Movements for a united Europe during the interwar period; (12) Hitler’s New Europe; (13) The plans for a federal Europe in the resistance movements during World War II; (14) The revived European movement after World War II; (15) The creation of the European Union (the European Coal and Steel Community, Euratom, the European Common Market, the European Union). (Swedberg, 1994: 381) The items on this list were roughly dealt with in the first part of this book in the narrative outlining the philosophies on Europe at various times in history. But is a narrative of this kind sufficient as a common European history? There are at least three factors that speak against it. Firstly, the narrative of the ‘idea of Europe’ has built into it a vision of the progress of a set, largely invariable ideal towards a legitimate European Union. This narrative is by nature teleological, progressive and deterministic in a way that the real history of Europe has not always been, or at least not in every respect. Secondly, it is the ‘history of the victors’: it is the story of the gradual, global conquering of a superior civilization. Although the spread of Western civilization cannot be disputed, little room is allotted in the traditional story of the ‘idea of Europe’ to the less honourable episodes in the history of Europe. Thirdly, it does not problematize the nature of Europe, its possible identity, its inner divisions and conflicts, or its relationships with the rest of the world. It is thus an almost organic story of the life of a being called Europe, developing as if determined by its genes, that is born and grows but whose essence and lifespan are virtually glossed over.

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For the history of the ‘idea of Europe’ to acquire depth, there will have to be debate on the essence of Europe, its borders and identities. This is precisely what the European Union is coming up against. Unless the Union halts at some point to devote some serious thinking to the essence of the ‘Europe’ it is creating, it will inevitably stop short at the level of a single economic market devoid of any deeper unity. On the other hand, it looks as if the difficulty of defining this essence and identity is to some extent the very reason why the issue has tended to be avoided. But as I hope this book has proved, European unity will in the third millennium no longer be able to rely on the story of the gradual victory of the ‘idea of Europe’. For first of all we must decide what the Europeanism we are building really is and has been – however difficult the task.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad, 115 Africa, 5–7, 10, 12–13, 15, 25, 30, 34, 39, 54, 96, 139, 169, 206 Agenor, 3 Aix-la-Chapelle, 17 Akra, 27 Aksakov, Konstantin, 167–8 Albania, 191 Albertus Magnus, 30 Alexander I, 165 Alexander the Great, 77 Alps, 164, 169 America, 40, 68, 89, 92, 95, 101, 122, 128, 135–55, 172, 199, 202–3 American Revolution, 74, 144 Anne, 52 Appalachians, 173 Argos, 4 Ariosto, Ludovico, 33 Aristotle, 9–10, 12, 137–8, 141 Aron, Raymond, 127–8, 217 Asia, 3, 5–10, 12–13, 15, 23, 25, 30, 33–4, 39, 54, 77, 89, 91, 96, 136–7, 151, 157, 159, 161, 163–5, 168–70, 173–5 Athens, 10, 31, 202 Atlas, 5, 41 Augustine, 14–15, 22 Australia, 217 Austria, 44, 84, 106, 181, 186, 189, 215 Azov, Sea of, 6, 12, 163 Bacon, Roger, 22 Baghdad, 17 Balkan, 17, 19, 181 Baltic lands, 12 Baltic Sea, 228 Baltic states, 174, 180 Barents Sea, 228 Barraclough, Geoffrey, 17, 205 Bartholomeus Anglicus, 30 Bartlett, Robert, 31 Bartók, 189 Basel, 36, 105 Battaglia, Forst de, 182 Baudrillard, Jean, 153–5 Bede, 30 Belgium, 113, 120

Belgrade, 213 Belinsky, Vissarion, 167 Bellers, John, 52–3, 55, 73 Benelux countries, 111 Bentham, Jeremy, 68 Berlin, 103, 187 Berne, 77–8 Bertaux, Pierre, 200–1 Bible, 14–16 Bibó, István, 183 Bielski, Marcin, 39 Bismarck, Otto von, 86 Black Death, 24 Black Sea, 158, 163, 174 Blake, William, 63, 65, 70 Bloomfield, June, 236–7 Bluntschli, Johann, 83–5 Bohemia, 35–8, 49, 189 Boniface VIII, 25 Bosporus, 6 Bosnia, 191 Bourbons, 42, 44 Brandt, Willy, 125 Braudel, Fernand, 165 Briand, Aristide, 103–5, 107–8 Briand Plan, 103–5 Britain, 12, 19, 62, 70–3, 84, 87, 95, 104, 107, 111, 113–14, 116, 119, 125–7, 129, 151, 178, 180, 202 British Isles, 149, 215 Brodsky, Joseph, 190 Bryce, James, 150–2 Buchan, Alastair, 123–5, 127 Buchez, Philippe, 77–9 Budapest, 186–7 Bulgaria, 233 Bülow, Dietrich von, 145 Burckhardt, Jacob, 86 Burgos, 138 Burke, Edmund, 59–60, 63–4, 70, 75 Byzantium, 14, 158, 162, 183, 189 Bylorus, 191 Cadiz, 5 Cadmus, 4 Camden, William, 44 Campanella, Tommaso, 49–50 Canaan, 14

257

258

Index

Canada, 217 Carson, Rachel, 205 Casimir, 35 Caspian Sea, 9, 163 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 231 Catherine the Great, 158, 173 Cattaneo, Carlo, 79 Caucasus Mountains, 160, 163, 169 Central Europe, 19, 177–93, 215 Chaadayev, Petr, 166 Chanson de Roland, 23 Charlemagne 17, 19–21, 94, 183, 235, 242 Charles V, 136 Charles Martel, 18, 20 Chiapas, 139 China, 46–7, 97, 162, 164 Christendom, 14, 17, 19, 22–4, 30, 39–40, 61, 64, 135, 137, 158, 183 Christianity, 11, 14–16, 19–20, 22–4, 30–1, 35, 38, 77, 142, 149, 166, 196–9, 203–4, 208, 220, 230, 236 Churchill, Winston, 110, 113–14, 174–5 Clement VI, 26 Congress of Vienna, 67–9, 146, 166 Constantinople, 13, 17, 33–4, 37, 158 Cordoba, 20 Cortés, Hernan, 139, 143 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard, 93–8, 103–8, 172 Council of Europe, 116, 127 Council of Frankfurt, 19 Cressey, G., 173 Crete, 4, 7 Crèvecoeur, Michel, 144–5 Crucé, Emeric, 44–8, 51, 55 Crusades, 18, 20, 22, 27, 236 Cusa, Nicholas of, 36–7 Custine, Astolphe de, 165 Czechoslovakia, 181, 190 Danilevsky, Nikolay, 168–70, 175 Dante, 25, 34 Danube, 180 d’Azeglio, Massimo, 217 Decabrist Revolution, 166 Delanty, Gerard, vii, 185 Delors, Jacques, 128–9, 132 Demangeon, Albert, 91 Dembolecki, Wojciech, 39 Denmark, 47, 49, 111, 119, 126, 145, 217

Desmarets, Jean, 42 Dickens, Charles, 147, 153 Dieppe, 36 Dnieper, 158 Don, 6, 12, 159–60 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 189–90 Dublin, 127 Dubois, Pierre, 26–9, 36 Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste, 236 Eco, Umberto, 208 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), 129, 222 Edward I, 27 Eichhorn, K., 179 Elbe, 18 Eliot, T.S., 196–8 England, 26–7, 43–4, 47, 49, 51, 70, 151 Enlightenment, 61, 127, 136, 185, 195–6, 205, 209, 236 Erasmus, 38, 40, 45–6, 48, 50, 61 Eriksson, Gunnar, 200 Ethiopia, 47 Eurasia, 164, 173 Euregio, 227 Europa, 3–4, 7 European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), 111, 120, 243 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 111, 116–19, 243 European Community (EC), 63, 111–12, 126, 128–9, 223 European Currency Unit (ECU), 111 European Defence Community (EDC), 118, 120 European Economic Community (EEC), 18, 111, 119, 121, 125, 127, 235 European Monetary System (EMS), 111 European Political Community (EPC), 118 European Union (EU), viii, 112, 119, 128, 132, 135, 210–11, 213–14, 217, 220–3, 226–9, 236, 240–1, 243–4 Eucher, 15 Fanon, Frantz, 206–7 Ferdinand, 138 Feugureay, Henri, 79 Fichte, J.G., 75

Index Finland, 149, 191 France, 18, 25–7, 31, 36, 38, 43–4, 48–9, 51, 54, 56, 62, 65–6, 69–72, 74, 78, 80, 84, 97, 102, 105–7, 110–11, 113, 119–21, 177, 207, 215 Franks, 17–22, 235 Frantz, Konstantin, 149–50 French Revolution, 58–63, 65, 67–9, 74, 77, 135, 200, 202, 209, 215–16 Fröbel, Julius, 149 Fulton, 174–5 Garton Ash, Timothy, 186–7 Gasperi, Alcide de, 115 Gaugamela, 157 Gaulle, Charles de, 112, 114, 119–21, 125, 127, 132 Gellner, Ernst, 214–15 Genesis, 14–15 Geneva, 84, 110 Genova, 28 Gentz, Friedrich, 66–7 Germany, 18, 38, 49, 51, 62, 64, 68, 72, 77, 80, 84, 96–8, 104, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 120, 177–88, 197, 207, 215, 227 Gertsen, Aleksandr, 168 Giambullari, Pier Francesco, 41 Gibraltar, 5 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 79 Girard, Emile de, 79 Girault, René, 238 Glorious Revolution, 44 Gollwitzer, Heinz, 236 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 175 Gortshakov, Alexander, 86 Goths, 136 Greece, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 77, 94, 112, 128, 136, 195, 204, 209 Greenblatt, Stephen, 142 Greenland, 128 Gregory VII, 21, 23 Grotius, Hugo, 45 Guardini, Romano, 241 Guizot, Francois, 78 Gwagnin, Aleksander, 39 Görres, Joseph von, 66 Habermas, Jürgen, 211 Habsburgs, 11, 42, 44, 48–9, 180, 183 Hague, 125 Halecki, Oscar, 173

259

Ham, 14–15 Harle, Vilho, 231 Haushofer, Karl, 178 Havel, Vaclav, 187, 191–3 Heath, Edward, 125 Hecataeus of Miletus, 6 Heeren, A.H.L., 68 Heerfordt, C.F., 99 Hegel, G.W.F., 74, 76–7, 132 Heller, Agnes, 187, 209 Henry IV, 48 Herberstein, Sigismund von, 159 Herder, J.G., 74, 76 Herodotus, 6–7 Herriot, Edouard, 100 Hervé, Gustave, 88 Hesiod, 3 Himalayas, 169 Himly, A., 178 Hippocrates, 8–9, 12–13 Hitler, Adolf, 106, 186, 197, 243 Hobbes, Thomas, 35 Hobson, J.A., 87 Hoggart, Richard, 195 Holland, 113 Holocaust, 204, 236 Homer, 4, 209 Hugo, Victor, 79–80 Hungary, 38, 49, 159, 189 Huntington, Samuel, 191–3 Husserl, Edmund, 204–5 Iapetia, 41 Iberian peninsula, 12, 19, 141, 215 Iceland, 202 Iivonen, Jyrki, 224 India, 46, 164, 169 Innocent III, 21, 24, 94 Io, 4 Ireland, 111, 125 Isidore of Seville, 15, 30 Isidore Pacensis, 20 Islam, viii, 18, 22, 34–5, 230, 232–3 Isocrates, 10 Italy, 18, 21, 49, 51, 78, 84, 96, 104, 107, 109, 111, 113, 120, 136, 150, 215, 217 Japan, 46, 91–2, 97, 172, 232 Japheth, 14–15 Jaspers, Karl, 201–3 Jászi, Oszkar, 180–1 Jerome, 14–15

260

Index

Jerusalem, 23, 27, 65 Jews, 15, 37, 141, 188–9, 219, 236 John of Paris, 26 Johnson, Douglas, 195 Josephus, 14 Jouffroy, Théodore, 77 Jörg, Josef, 149 Kaelble, Hartmut, vii, 228, 237–40 Kafka, Franz, 189 Kant, Immanuel, 65–6, 164 Kaplinski, Jaan, 157 Kautsky, Karl, 87, 179–80 Keane, John, 211 Khomyakov, Aleksey, 167 Kierkegaard, Søren, 201 Kiev, 158 Kiss, Csaba, 185 Kivikuru, Ulla-Maija, 226 Knuuttila, Simo, 210 Konrád, George, 187 Kristeva, Julia, 233 Kroeber, A.L., 200 Kundera, Milan, 187–90 Ladd, William, 68 Laffan, Brigid, 222–4, 229 Lake Ladoga, 158 Lamansky, Vladimir, 170 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 40, 139–41, 143 Laski, Harald, 151–2 Laski, Stanislaw, 38 Latin America, 137–44 League of Nations, 92–3, 96, 100, 103–5, 108 Leipzig, 94 Lemonnier, Camille, 73 Lenin, V.I., 87–8, 171–2 Libya, 3, 6 List, Friedrich, 80 Lombardy, 49 London, 123, 160 Lorimer, James, 84–5 Los Angeles, 154 Louis XIV, 50 Luxembourg, 113, 120, 129 Luxemburg, Rosa, 88 McKay, Charles, 79 Mackinder, Halford, 180–1 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 35, 38 Mahan, Alfred, 151

Major, John, 129 Malraux, André, 91 Malte-Brun, M., 164 Mang, Robert, 100 Mann, Michael, 222–3 Marini, Antoine, 35–6 Marseilles, 78 Marsilius of Padua, 25–6 Martineau, Harriet, 146 Marx, Karl, 88 Masaryk, Thomas, 181 Matienzo, Juan de, 139 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 78–9 Mediterranean, 5, 10, 13, 191 Mehmed II, 37–8 Melanchthon, Philip, 38 Merger Treaty, 111 Mesopotamia, 3 Metternich, 68, 70 Middle Ages, 7, 11, 14, 17–31, 34, 44, 64, 135, 137, 182, 202, 208, 210, 237, 239, 242 Middle East, 179 Mill, John Stuart, 74 Milosz, Czeslaw, 190, 231 Milton, John, 159 Minos, 4 Missouri, 174 Mitteleuropa, 98, 177–82, 185–7 Mongols, 18, 30, 33, 230 Monnet, Jean, 114–16, 119–21, 128–32, 222 Montaigne, Michel de, 40, 143 Montesquieu, 60, 161 Moors, 141 Morocco, 46 Moscow, 47, 158, 160–1 Moschus, 4–5 Motte, de la Houdar, 42 Mozart, 209 Muir, Ramsay, 93 Münster, Sebastian, 40 Musil, Robert, 189 Mussolini, Benito, 106 Myrdal, Gunnar, 152 Naipaul, V.S., 191 Naples, 43 Napoleon, 61–2, 94, 243 Naumann, Friedrich, 98, 177–80 Netherlands, 18, 49, 62, 120, 202, 215, 227 Neumann, Iver B., viii, 232

Index Nietzsche, Friedrich, 88–9, 201–2 Nile, 6 Noah, 14–15, 30 Nordic countries, 228, 234 North America, 66, 74, 144–55 North Sea, 6, 179 Norway, 119, 126 Novalis, 63–5, 70, 200 Ob, 160, 163 Occident, 3, 182, 230 Oceanus, 3 October Revolution, 160, 170 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 168 Olearius, Adam, 159 Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), 115 Orient, 3, 182, 230 Orosius, 15 Ortega y Gasset, José, 101–3 Ortelius, Abraham, 40–1 Otto, 21 Ottoman Empire, 183 Ovid, 3 Oxford, 35 Pact of Locarno, 103 Pallas, P.S., 164 Pan-European Movement, 94–8, 103–8, 172 Pan-Slavism, 168–70 Paris, 26, 31, 62, 80, 160–1 Parker, W.H., 174 Partsch, Josef, 178 Peace of Utrecht, 40, 53 Peace of Uusikaupunki (Nystadt), 160, 163 Peace of Westphalia, 42, 54 Peloponnesos, 5 Penck, Albrecht, 181 Penn, William, 50–3, 55, 73 Pennsylvania, 50 Persia, 10, 47, 136, 162 Peru, 139 Peter the Great, 158–60, 162, 166–7, 173 Petersburg, 160, 167 Phasis, 6 Philip IV, 27 Phoenix, 3–4 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 34–7, 40 Pindar, 5 Pinder, John, 222

261

Pisa, 28 Plato, 209 Pleven, René, 118 Pliny the Elder, 12–13 Podebrad, George von, 35–6 Poitiers, 18 Poland, 35, 38–9, 47, 49, 86, 158–9, 161, 189 Polybius, 13 Pomian, Krzysztof, 135 Pompidou, Georges, 125 Portugal, 112, 128 Poseidon, 3 Postel, Guillaume, 41 Poulimenos, A., 98 Pradt, Abbé de, 146, 154 Prague, 164, 186–7, 213 Prometheus, 41 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 73, 81–2, 85 Prussia, 44, 66, 86 Ptolemy, 13 Pyrenees, 12 Ranke, Leopold von, 144, 165 Reformation 38, 42, 60, 70, 135, 189 Renaissance, 45, 135, 162, 189, 196 Renan, Ernest, 74 Renner, Karl, 179 Reynold, Gonzaque de, 165, 173 Rhadamanthus, 4 Rhine, 12 Richelieu, Cardinal, 42, 48 Ricoeur, Paul, 233 Rioun, Gaston, 100 Ripai Mountains, 163 Roman Empire, 10–14, 16–17, 19–21, 24, 30, 60, 136, 208 Rome, 10–14, 16, 18–19, 22, 36, 94, 136, 202 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 54, 56–8, 60, 81 Russia, viii, 51, 54, 84, 86, 91, 95–6, 122, 136, 144, 148–51, 157–176, 178, 180, 188–90, 203, 215, 219, 233 Said, Edward, 230–1 Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, 53–7, 60, 68, 161 Saint-Simon, duc de, 69–73 Sampson, Anthony, 122 Santer, Jacques, 129 Sarpedon, 4

262

Index

Savitsky, Petr, 170 Scandinavia, 12–13, 19 Schmidt-Phiseldeck, Conrad, 145–6 Schuman, Robert, 115 Schuman Plan, 116–17, 129 Sepúlveda, Ginés de, 139–40 Serbia, 191 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 152 Sforza, Duke of, 100 Shakespeare, William, 209 Shem, 14–15 Shore, Chris, 213 Siger of Brabant, 27 Sigismund II, 38 Single European Act, 129 Sinowatz, Fred, 186 Slavophiles, 165–8, 176 Smith, Anthony, 219–21 Solinus, 15 Solórzano Pereira, Juan de, 43 Sontag, Susan, 207 Sorel, George, 89 Sorokin, Pitirim, 199 South Africa, 217 Soviet Union, 104, 109, 118, 122, 124–5, 127, 148, 170–5, 185, 190, 199, 215 Spaak, Paul-Henri, 109, 115, 119, 121, 129–30 Spain, 22, 44, 49, 102, 112, 128, 138, 140–1, 216, 236 Spengler, Oswald, 92, 100–1, 198, 201 Spinelli, Altiero, 109–10, 129 Srbik, Heinrich von, 182 Stalin, Josef, 109 Stead, W.T., 151 Strabo, 11–12 Strahlenberg, Philip, 162–4, 169, 174 Strasbourg, 116 Stresemann, Gustav, 105, 107 Stubbe, Henry, 35 Suess, E., 164 Sully, Duke of, 48–51, 55–6, 159 Swedberg, Richard, 242 Sweden, 47, 49, 158, 161 Switzerland, 49, 68, 78, 83, 99, 113, 202, 217 Szücs, Jenö, 182–4, 191 Tasso, Torquato, 33 Tatishchev, Vasilii, 162–4, 169 Tethys, 3 Thatcher, Margaret, 126, 128–9, 211

Therborn, Göran, 208 Thierry, Augustin, 69, 73 Thirty Years War, 42 Thomas Aquinas, 27 Thompson, E.P., 213 Tindemans, Leo, 126, 129 Tindemans Plan, 126, 129 Tingsten, Herbert, 217–8 Titan, 41 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 147–8, 152–3 Todorov, Tzvetan, 141–3 Tours, 20 Toynbee, Arnold, 173, 198–9 Trajan, 13 Treaty of Maastricht, 112–13, 119, 128 Treaty of Paris, 114, 116–17, 129 Treaty of Rome, 109, 111, 117, 119, 121, 129 Treaty of Versailles, 100, 180 Trieste, 174 Trotsky, Leon, 170–1 Troy, 4, 11 Tudors, 11 Turgenev, I.S., 168 Turkey, 35, 45, 47, 49, 51–2, 54, 159, 162, 215, 219, 232 Turks, 18, 23, 25, 30, 33–4, 36–9, 47, 136, 159, 230, 232 Ulloa, Alfonso, 41 Ukraine, 191 United Nations (UN), 124 United States, 66, 74, 80, 83, 91, 95, 99, 106, 110, 115, 120, 122–5, 144, 146, 148, 150–2, 217, 229, 232 United States of Europe, vii, 59, 74, 77, 79–80, 84–5, 89, 94–5, 99, 102, 113–14, 131, 171–2, 211, 243 Ural Mountains, 157, 160, 162, 164, 169–70, 172–4 Urban II, 18, 23 Utrecht, 55 Uusitalo, Liisa, 211 Valéry, Paul, 91, 165, 195 Valladolid, 139–40 Vatican, 49 Vattel, Emmerich de, 45 Vazeille, J.H., 98 Venice, 28, 46, 49 Vienna, 93–4, 160, 187 Vincent of Beauvais, 30

Index Virgil, 11 Vives, Juan Luis, 33 Volga, 160 Voltaire, 61 Waever, Ole, 216, 224–6, 228, 233–4 Wales, 43 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 216 Walsh, Jennifer, 232 Warsaw, 213 Warszewicki, Krzysztof, 39 West Germany, 118 White Sea, 158 William of Ockham, 25 William of Orange, 50 Wilson, Harold, 126

263

Wilson, T. Woodrow, 93, 180 Wilterdink, Nico, 196, 218–19, 241–2 Wirsing, Giselher, 181–2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 221 World War I, 44, 88, 91–2, 94–5, 98, 101, 103, 165, 172, 177–8, 180–1, 188, 209, 215, 239 World War II, vii, 63, 73, 98, 129, 135, 148, 151–2, 172–3, 182, 188, 199, 201, 205, 215, 233, 235, 237, 240, 243 Zapadniks, 165–8, 176 Zeus, 3–5 Zürich, 83 Zwischeneuropa, 177, 179–82