The New Old World (84 page)

86
. Rehn, speech to the European Parliament, 21 May 2008.

87
. Michael Lake (ed.),
The EU and Turkey: A Glittering Prize or a Millstone?
, London 2005, pp. 11, 13 (Lake); 177 (Stone). Homage to the Independent Commission comes from Hakan Altinay, p. 113.

88
. ‘Europe Can Learn from Turkey's Past',
Financial Times
, 12 October 2005.

89
.
The Great Game of Genocide
, New York 2005, p. 228.

90
. ‘This Is the Moment for Europe to Dismantle Taboos, Not Erect Them',
Guardian
, 19 October 2006.

91
.
Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris
, London 1998, p. 211. For Scheubner-Richter, who like Rosenberg came from the Baltic, see Georg Franz-Willing,
Ursprung der Hitlerbewegung
, Oldendorf 1974, pp. 81–2, 197–8, 287–8.

92
. The best discussion is by Vahakn Dadrian, ‘The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective', in Alan Rosenbaum,
Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide
, Boulder 2001, pp. 133–68.

 

 

The demarcation of Europe poses one set of questions for the Union, another for the history of ideas. As a geographical expression, Europe has, of course, existed since classical antiquity. But attempts to trace later conceptions of it back to the time of Hesiod, as Denis de Rougemont famously sought to do, are artificial.
¹
The unity of the Graeco-Roman world was Mediterranean, embracing both shores of the inland sea, extending east to Syria rather than north to Scandinavia. In that universe, Europe was scarcely a salient category. Nor, although historians can date the emergence of Europe to the Middle Ages, as the arena of a distinct civilization, was it a significant notion for those who lived through those centuries. Mediaeval Europe indeed displays, retrospectively, an impressive unity of religious beliefs, social practices, cultural and political institutions, replicated across all but the south-eastern quadrant of the continent. No work has demonstrated this more powerfully than Robert Bartlett's study of its expansion by proto-colonial violence, implanting common feudal hierarchies across the continent in a prefiguration of what the descendants of predatory lords, religious-military orders and crusaders would, in time to come, do to the non-European world.
²
Bartlett's title is
The Making of Europe
. But it is not to be understood in the sense of, say, Edward Thompson's
The Making of the English Working Class
. For while objectively the Europe of later ages had its birth in this period, no general subjective consciousness accompanied the process. For contemporaries, their world was Christendom.
The concept of ‘Europe' did not exist for them, and to attribute it to such forebears is an anachronism.
³

It was not until long afterwards, towards the end of the seventeenth century, in the coalition against Louis XIV, that the term started to acquire any general currency.
⁴
As late as 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht still invoked a
Respublica Christiana
, and two years later Leibniz could criticize the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, who had helped negotiate it, for his project of perpetual peace in Europe, in the name—that continued to be for him more hallowed—of Christendom.
⁵
It was only with the secular turn of the Enlightenment that there emerged a strong sense of Europe as such, as the designation of a unitary civilization. But when it came, it took swift and strikingly uniform hold. From the Regency to the outbreak of the French Revolution, Europe was conceived in virtually identical terms by one leading mind after another. It was Montesquieu who set the categorical note to come: ‘A prince believes he will become greater through the ruin of a neighbouring state. On the contrary! The condition of Europe is such that States depend on each other. France has need of the wealth of Poland and Muscovy, as Guyenne has need of Brittany, and Brittany of Anjou. Europe is a State composed of several provinces'.
⁶
The formula rapidly became a trope. For Voltaire, ‘Christian Europe could be regarded as a single republic divided in several states'.
⁷
For Vattel, modern Europe was ‘a sort of republic', united for ‘the preservation of order and liberty'.
⁸
For Robertson, ‘the powers of Europe' formed ‘one great political system'.
⁹
For Gibbon, ‘Europe
could be considered one great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation'.
¹⁰
For Burke, Europe was ‘virtually one great state, having the same basis in general law, with some diversity of provincial customs and local establishments'; in it a traveller ‘never felt himself quite abroad'.
¹¹
So perceived, the unity of the continent was not an aim, but a given.

The vocabulary of the trope—a state, a republic—was political, but its meaning was essentially social. What unified Europe were common religious beliefs, public laws and customary manners—the trinity most often cited, from Voltaire to Burke. Yet, crucially, it included a political dimension, formally at odds with itself. For what also defined Europe were the virtues of division. Central to every depiction of the continent, as what most distinctively set it apart from—and above—the rest of the world, was a unique equilibrium between its constituent parts. Within its civilizational unity, the good fortune of Europe was to be divided into a set of competing yet interdependent states, each of moderate size, incapable of universal dominion. It was this balance of power that was the condition of European liberty. It was Montesquieu again who gave the first and pithiest expression to this notion: ‘In Asia, strong are opposed to weak nations', he remarked, ‘the one must therefore conquer and the other be conquered. In Europe, on the contrary, strong nations are opposed to strong; those who border each other have nearly the same courage. This is the grand reason for the weakness of Asia and the strength of Europe, of the liberty of Europe and the slavery of Asia'.
¹²
Robertson, too, judged that ‘when nations are in a state similar to each other, and keep equal pace in the advances towards refinement, they are not exposed to the calamity of sudden conquests',
¹³
while Gibbon observed that ‘the division of Europe into a number of independent states',
in which ‘the balance of power will continue to fluctuate', was ‘productive of the most beneficial consequences to the liberty of mankind'.
¹⁴
Voltaire was no less emphatic: ‘the wise policy of the European nations to maintain among themselves, as far as possible, an equal balance of power' was a political principle ‘unknown in the rest of the world'.
¹⁵
For Vattel, the political system of Europe was, more simply, inseparable from the ‘famous idea of the balance of power'.
¹⁶

That equipoise, in turn, was the condition not only of the liberties, but the arts and sciences of Europe. For here too the continent was a world apart, enjoying a commanding intellectual lead over all others. For Voltaire, it was the republic of letters, responsible for prodigious achievements of the mind, to which every country had contributed, of which Europe could be most legitimately proud.
¹⁷
But what was the spur to this cultural pre-eminence? By common agreement, it lay ultimately in the division and competition between states. As Gibbon put it: ‘In all the pursuits of active and speculative life, the emulation of states and individuals is the most powerful spring of the efforts and improvements of mankind. The cities of ancient Greece were cast in the happy mixture of union and independence which is repeated on a larger scale, but in a looser form, by the nations of Europe'.
¹⁸
In the fruits of this emulation, moreover, was to be found the key to European dominion over the rest of the world. ‘We cannot say that letters are a mere amusement for a number of citizens', wrote Montesquieu, ‘their prosperity is so intimately linked to that of empires that it is an infallible sign or cause of it. If we cast an eye over what is now happening in the world, we will see that just as Europe dominates the other three parts of the world and prospers, while all the rest groan in servitude and misery, so Europe is in the same measure more enlightened than the other parts, which are sunk in a deep night of ignorance'.
¹⁹
If he had few illusions about what this
marriage of knowledge and power meant for the dominated world, others were typically more sanguine. ‘The nations of Europe', Robertson remarked, are ‘like one great family', since ‘their acquisition of knowledge, their progress in the art of war, their political sagacity and address are nearly equal'—by contrast with the wide gap in ‘character and genius which, in almost every period of history, has exalted the Europeans above the inhabitants of the other quarter of the globe, and seems to have destined the one to rule, and the other to obey'.
²⁰

Social similarity—political balance—intellectual emulation—cultural supremacy: such was the general syllogism of Europe, in the consensus of the Enlightenment. Although by no means always uncritical of European empire abroad—Diderot, Raynal, even Smith famously had their doubts—it was certainly contented enough with the unity of polite society at home. It was left to Rousseau, virtually alone, to strike a tarter note, deriding the cosmopolitanism of the age and its self-satisfaction: ‘Say what you like, in our day there is no longer any such thing as a Frenchman, a German, Spaniard, even an Englishman. Nowadays we have only Europeans, all with the same tastes, the same passions, the same mores', he scornfully observed, ‘all speaking of the public good and thinking only of themselves; all affecting moderation and wanting to be Croesus; ambitious only for luxury, passionate for gold'. So ‘what do they care which master they serve, the laws of which state they obey? Provided they find money to steal and women to corrupt, they are everywhere at home'.
²¹
National
institutions were what gave character and vigour to a people, he told the Poles, not international fashions or desires.

In this advice, as in much else, Rousseau was premonitory. With the outbreak of the French Revolution, the Enlightenment image of Europe faded from view, as social similarity collapsed under the pressure of the Jacobin insurrection and mobilization, and all political balance was destroyed by Napoleonic expansion. Burke's
Letters on a Regicide Peace
—warning that France was no ordinary community or state: ‘it is with an
armed doctrine
that we are at war'—offer a desperate register of the change. Social revolution and national awakening put paid to the ecumene of the one great republic. But ideal conceptions of Europe were not extinguished. Out of the upheavals of twenty years of revolution and war, they re-emerged in altered form to punctuate the next century. Appropriately, it was the emblematic thinker to bridge the worlds of the Enlightenment and of early socialism who can be regarded as setting much of the subsequent agenda. In October 1814, after the Bourbons were restored and before the Hundred Days, Saint-Simon published, with the assistance of his newly acquired disciple Augustin Thierry, a proposal for the ‘reorganization of European society'. In its strange combination of themes, his scheme prefigured nearly all future lines of development.

Reversing the judgement of the Enlightenment, Saint-Simon depicted the Middle Ages as the time when Europe had formed a single, and generally peaceful, political body, united by Catholic Christianity and its clergy. The Reformation had destroyed this unity, unleashing the religious conflicts that had led to the Thirty Years' War. Out of these had come the Treaty of Westphalia, which instituted a political system based instead on the balance of power between states. But far from benefitting the continent, once this principle was established ‘war became the habitual state of Europe', culminating in the disastrous conflagration that had only just ended. A century earlier, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre had conceived a project for perpetual peace, but in accepting the residual feudalism of his time, he had offered no more than a reciprocal guarantee between
tyrants for the preservation of their power. What was needed now was a system of government that extended the principles of the free constitution of England to Europe as a whole, whose first nucleus should be a joint Anglo-French parliament, setting an example to all the continent's peoples to put an end to absolutism. Once each had its own representative government—the Germans should be next in line—a European parliament would arise above them to govern the continent, every million literate citizens electing four deputies each: a scholar, a businessman, an administrator and a magistrate. There was no time to waste. Revolution still threatened, with public debt at crippling levels in England, and the recovered throne still precarious in France, where the Bourbons would do well to remember the fate of the Stuarts after their Restoration. Only with such a reorganization could Europe enjoy a peaceful and stable order. ‘The golden age is not behind us, but in front of us'.
²²