The New Old World (87 page)

In the short run, the triumph of Nazism in Germany put paid to any revival of such prospects.
⁵⁸
In its wake, a general ferocity of intensified nationalism swept most of Eastern and Southern Europe. By 1935 Marc Bloch, commenting on a conference held under Fascist auspices in Rome three years earlier (among the participants were Rosenberg and Göring), could view current notions of Europe as little more than expressions of panic, prompted by fear of economic
competition to the west, colonial revolt in the south, alien social forms in the east, and political discord within, which had suddenly produced such good—sincere or insincere?—Europeans.
⁵⁹
Within a few years, Hitler's New Order would proclaim its own version of a united Europe, ranged under German leadership against Anglo-Saxon plutocracy to the west and Bolshevik terror to the east. Too ephemeral and instrumental to be of any deeper effect, this confiscation nevertheless left a shadow in its immediate aftermath. When Lucien Febvre gave, for the first time, a course on the history of Europe in liberated Paris during the winter of 1944–5, his conclusions were subdued. No more than a ‘desperate refuge' after Versailles, the unity of Europe seemed capable of realization only by mailed force, and joy at liberation from it was now tainted with fear that the machinery of ever more murderous industrialized warfare might grind again, as the progress of scientific destruction could not be reversed. The building of a new, peaceful Europe was a herculean task—political-administrative, economic-financial and cultural-civilizational—that no mere dilute liberal pathos could manage. Yet was it even the right goal, marking a stage towards a true global fraternity, or one risking obstruction of it, and so better skipped?
⁶⁰

Two years later Federico Chabod published the first serious historical reconstruction of ideas of Europe, from the time of Queen Anne to that of Bismarck, in an introduction to a course of lectures in Rome that still remains without equal for perceptiveness.
⁶¹
But it too ended on a less than optimistic note.
Like many Italian intellectuals of his generation, Chabod had not opposed fascism in the thirties, indeed hailing Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia,
⁶²
but during the war he had joined the partisans in his native Val d'Aosta, and been active in the Liberation. He concluded his essay, in early 1947, with the triumph of the cult of force in the late nineteenth century, and the descent of Europe into the First World War, from which it had emerged permanently diminished. Politically, economically and culturally, it was henceforward determined or overshadowed by larger powers beyond it. At best, European intellectuals might still have something to say in a world republic of letters. In 1948, Chabod made mention of the first attempts at economic cooperation after the war, with Benelux. But there is no sign he had much confidence in the prospects of any wider European unity.
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Further north, in the same year, the great Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius published the work on which he had been labouring for fifteen years, since the Nazi ascent to power in Germany, as an affirmation of European unity. But, as the title of his monumental
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
announced, this protest against every geographical or chronological ‘dismemberment of Europe' retreated to one of the obscurest recesses of the past in the attempt to render it whole again—Curtius himself observing that ‘no stretch of European literary history is as little known and frequented as the Latin literature of the early and high Middle Ages', as if the true unity of Europe could now only find expression in a dead language.
⁶⁴

Yet within another two years Monnet had drafted the Schuman Plan, and the process of European integration that has led to today's Union was launched. What is the bearing of any of this abstruse pre-history on that process? In the early sixties, armed with a preface from Monnet himself, an authorized historian of the new Europe of
hauts fonctionnaires
had no doubt. There was nothing less than an ‘abyss', wrote Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, between ‘the so-called “precursors” and the Europeans of the era after 1945'. In an entirely new enterprise, his contemporaries had at last built a united Europe with the purpose of ‘restoring their wealth, power and radiance to nations that had lost them'. ‘What a difference', he exclaimed, from ‘the Europe of universalists and cosmopolitans who denied or despised the ideal of a fatherland', the assorted ‘hatchers of plans, profferers of advice, utopian system-builders' of old. He was not to imagine that the same robust scorn would in due course be poured on ‘the lives and teachings of the European saints', his own practically minded heroes, by a historian committed to a still more realistic view of the role of nation-states in the creation of the Common Market.
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Tougher minds can usually be found than those who imagine themselves tough-minded.

In reality, the ideas of Europe whose long and winding history preceded integration have continued to haunt it. Each has had its own after-life. On the left, the revolutionary tradition that took up the banner of unity earliest proved least able to hold it across the rapids of the twentieth century. There were at least two reasons for that. In this line of descent, the principal motivation of calls for a united Europe was always the prevention of war. Ideals of peace were, of course, central to virtually every shade of Europeanizing opinion, and explain why, at the beginning, the left led the field, in its sincerity and urgency: not only were the masses whose interests it sought to defend the principal victim of wars, but since the Left was always far from power, it was not exposed to temptations to launch them. But as time went on, the limitation of notions of unity springing only from the need to avoid war weakened it. This was partly because peace is of its nature not
only a negative goal, but an abstract one, as Leibniz had pointed out, specifying no particular political or even existential order. But it was also because Europe could decreasingly be taken as a theatre potentially defining it. Peace might reign between the Powers, so long as their Concert held, but what of the rest of the world, where wars of imperial annexation or repression proceeded without interruption throughout the nineteenth century?

By the early twentieth century, the left had divided between radical and moderate wings, and Luxemburg, in her exchange with Kautsky, summed up the underlying objections of the radicals: ‘The idea of European civilization is utterly foreign to the outlook of the class conscious proletariat. Not European solidarity, but
international
solidarity, embracing every region, race and people on earth, is the foundation of socialism in a Marxist sense. Every partial solidarity is not a stage towards the realization of genuine internationality, but its opposite, its enemy, an ambiguity under which lurks the cloven hoof of national antagonism. Just as we have always fought against Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Americanism as reactionary ideas, so we have nothing whatever to do with the idea of Pan-Europeanism'.
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But as soon as the League of Nations was founded, the same reservation found expression even among moderates. Was not the League a higher instance, a more compelling ideal, than any mere European confederation? The legacy of this doubt has not gone away. In Habermas's conception of today's Union as commendably more abstract than the nation-state of old, yet still not abstract enough to represent a fully cosmopolitan value-system, and so at best a transition to a Kantian world order to be embodied in the United Nations, suitably equipped with policing powers, there is more than an echo of the same tension. In the shadow of the universal, the particular can only exist on sufferance—or, in a late corruption, as already the universal
in nuce
. The contemporary ideology that offers the Union as moral example to the world, now embedded in the self-image of its officialdom, is essentially a product of minds belonging to what was once the Left.

There was, however, another reason why this tradition faded as an active force over time. After the early utopians—the moment of Fourier and Saint-Simon—the socialist movement was little interested in political institutions. Even the federalism of Proudhon, or in more democratic-republican register Cattaneo,
remained more ideational, as a principle, than articulate as a programme. The Commune was too brief an experiment to leave behind, for revolutionaries, more than the negative lesson that the existing state machines could not be appropriated, but had to be broken, if real social change was to come. For reformists, on the other hand, bourgeois parliaments were good enough, requiring little further thought, other than full extension of the suffrage. Though a united Europe remained a slogan well into the twentieth century, both wings were sterile so far as its construction was concerned. Even the Manifesto of Ventotene, remarkable in so many other ways, offered a much more developed social vision of a United States of Europe than a political structure for one.

By contrast, the technocratic line descending from Saint-Simon inherited both his attachment to institutional projections and his economic productivism. This is the combination that allows it to claim paternity rights in the eventual process of European integration, when it came. Untroubled by imperial operations overseas—indeed, not infrequently promoting continental unity at home as a way to preserve colonial supremacy abroad—it was not hampered by scruples over where the line of peace should be drawn: it was enough that Europe itself should be secured from war, and devoted to the growth of industry and the progress of science, for the well-being of all its classes. But for that, detailed administrative and legal engineering was needed, requiring all the ingenuity, if less of the fantasy, of the first modern proposal for its reorganization. The closeness of much in the institutional thinking of this tradition to the shape of the actual Community that came into existence after the Second World War is striking. In some ways, however, no less so is the extent to which it foreshadowed problems that still dog the Union. Bluntschli, who produced perhaps the most impressive single anticipation of much of the design of the EU, explained, long before Paul Kirchhof or Dieter Grimm, why there could be no federal democracy in Europe.

Federal union in America, he observed, was based on an American people bound together by a common country, language, culture, legal system and common interests. Europe, on the other hand, was composed of very different nations, divided in all these respects. There, only a confederation of states, where real political power must remain—not a sovereign parliament or an overall government—could advance the goals of a European public law, European peace, and common cultural concerns. ‘The political unity of a state without a people is a contradiction in terms.
Since there is no European people, there can be no state called Europe'.
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Nor has one arisen. But if a hybrid quasi-state were to be constructed, on these premises it could only be done from above, by those capable of joining and ruling over a popular void. The logic of such elitism is still with us. The elite does not contain as many scientists, though certainly as many bureaucrats and executives, as Saint-Simon would have wished; it is not confined to cabinets, as Bluntschli imagined it would be; nor is it adorned with many aristocrats, of birth or spirit, as hoped by Coudenhove. But of its character as a construction from on high, by—according to contemporary lights—the best and the brightest, there can be little doubt. It was Coudenhove who foresaw, and welcomed, the corollary. Writing in the twenties, he remarked that for the moment democracy was a protection against chaos. But in the Europe of the future, ‘once a new, authentic nobility is constituted, democracy will disappear of itself'.
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In that respect, today's EU would not have disappointed him.

What of the conservative tradition? Its legacies surfaced later, once regime change in the economies of the West had set in, and the Cold War was won. Then, as the EU expanded to the east, the principles of 1815–23 came into their own again: not balance, but coordination of powers, to police zones of potential turbulence and ensure ideological placidity, in the spirit of the Protocol of Troppau. Well before it was openly theorized, a modern
droit d'ingérence
was being practised by Brussels, wherever developments in the lands of former communism fell short of the expectations of a new Concert of Europe. The restoration of capitalism was naturally a very different affair from that of absolutism, its interventions more economic and political than military. But as successive actions in the Balkans would show, where force was required it would be used. The new legitimism speaks of the rule of law and human rights, not the sanctity of thrones. But geo-politically, the pedigree of even such modest operations as EUFOR and EULEX goes back to Chateaubriand's
cent mille fils de Saint Louis
.

Yet such continuities have been perhaps the less important bequest of this line to Brussels, since the principles of a Concert of Powers are no longer specifically European, but Atlantic; even, in the new century, increasingly if still imperfectly, global. Where
the greatest strength of the conservative tradition always lay was rather in its speculations on what distinguished Europe from the rest of the world. This heuristic, not programmatic, concern it paradoxically inherited from the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, since the alternative traditions, revolutionary or technocratic, were, of course, politically closer to the Enlightenment. Yet in the pursuit of the practical goal of a European unity that could no longer be assumed as a meta-political reality in the manner of the
philosophes
, they largely abandoned its intellectual agenda. In the conservative tradition, on the other hand, where constructivist slogans of a United States of Europe rarely had any standing, the question of what defined the singularity of Europe as a meaningful unit in the first place remained a central preoccupation. The result was to leave an intellectually richer deposit of ideas than either of the other traditions. The plurality of states celebrated by the Enlightenment became the diversity of forces, cultures and powers that set Europe apart from the rest of the world—the advantages of quantity transformed into virtues of quality. In the spiritual arsenal of the Union, that too lives on. But in an after-life that is less predictable.