Defining "Europe"

Some audiences might wonder at my title. "Is Europe becoming Europe?" They might say, "What on earth does he mean? You might as well ask 'Is California becoming California?' Or 'Is the North Pole becoming the North Pole?'" But I'm sure that a sophisticated audience of the Institute of International Studies at this great cosmopolitan university will at once understand precisely what I mean.

I refer of course to "Europe" as an idea and an ideal, a dream, a vision, a grand design. To those idealistic and teleological visions of Europe as project, process, progress towards some finalité européen: visions and ideas which at once inform and legitimate, and are themselves informed and legitimated by, the political development of something now called the European Union. And of course, the very name "European Union" is itself a product of this approach. A Union is what it's meant to be, not what it is.

At its most vertiginous this comes as the dialectical idealism of German Europeanism. Eurapa der Gegensätze auf dem Wege zu sich selbst is the title of a German work on the recent development of Europe: "The Europe of contradictions on the way to itself." In English, this makes about as much sense as "the San Francisco of traffic jams on the way to itself."

Less giddily, though, even in Britain we have grown accustomed to what I call, after Herbert Butterfield, the Whig interpretation of recent European history. European history since 1945 is interpreted as a story of progress towards more freedom, more democracy, more prosperity, more integration, and in the end -- or as the end -- to unity.

This view is peculiar to the continent of Europe. There may be talk of "Asian values," for example, or attempts to find a pan-African identity, but it would be hard to argue that the analyses and policies of the intellectual and political elites of Asia or Africa are routinely informed by any teleological or idealistic notion of their continent "becoming itself." The same would seem to hold for the Americas. That leaves Australia and Antarctica.

A classic example of this European self-interpretation can be found in the work of Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of its Peoples, published simultaneously in several European languages in 1990. Already on page 21, Duroselle finds it "possible to discern in Europe's history a general if halting growth in compassion, humanity and equality." Discussing several different possible ways of viewing the post-1945 history of Europe, he writes, "one may, finally, see this phase of history in a European light" -- by implication, the other lights must be un-European -- "and observe how many objective factors have combined with creative acts of will to make possible the first step towards a united Europe." Reflecting, in conclusion, on "the decline of Europe, the result of two World Wars after centuries of violence" he avers: "the only remedy is to build a Europe which at first will be confederal and later federal, while maintaining freedom and democracy. This project," he goes on, "is natural, realistic and legitimate, because there has long been a community of Europe -- embryonic at first, but growing with time, despite centuries of war and conflict, blood and tears." Note particularly the word "natural."

Now I don't want merely to oppose to this continental, idealistic-teleological reading of recent European history a classical English reading, sceptical, empirical, "realist" (in its own estimation, at least), epistemologically conservative, and often politically so too. The kind of reading you will find if you turn from Duroselle to the recently published Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, edited by the Cambridge historian T. C. W. Blanning, who, reflecting on developments since 1989, comments dryly: "Predicting whether these are the birth-pangs of a new, peaceful, and integrated Europe, or whether they herald a return visit from the four horsemen of the Apocalypse is happily not the brief of the editor or indeed of any of his contributors."

To make the familiar English-empirical critique would itself be all too predictable. Sharing the intellectual scepticism of many of my compatriots, but emphatically not sharing that insular hostility to European integration that in Britain goes by the name of "Euroscepticism," I propose to take the risk that Professor Blanning shuns. Not any attempt at scientific prediction, to be sure -- I am not privy to the secrets of political science -- but that kind of intelligent guesswork about the direction in which history may be heading which most historians do in fact make, implicitly if not explicitly. In this attempt I will glance only very briefly at the millenia before 1945, look a little more closely at the now finished period of what I have called "Yalta Europe," from 1945 to 1989, and then concentrate on developments since 1989.

Next page: Europe before 1945