Europe before 1945

To start with the millenia. One of my favourite index entries is that under "Europe" in Arnold Toynbee's Study of History. Toynbee's first reference reads: "Europe, as battlefield," his second: "as not an intelligible field of historical study," and his last: "unification of, failure of attempts at."

The most fundamental point is, of course, his second one: "not an intelligible field of historical study." Toynbee has a splendid dig at H. A. L. Fisher, who in his History of Europe famously claimed to detect "no pattern" in history. Actually, says Toynbee, in calling his book A History of Europe, Fisher embraces one of the oldest patterns of all, "for the portmanteau word 'Europe' is a whole Corpus Juris Naturae in itself." It is, Toynbee claims, a "cultural misapplication of a nautical term" to suggest that Hellenic history -- the Ancient History of Greece and Rome -- and Western history are successive acts in a single European drama.

He gives more credence to the Polish historian Oskar Halecki's periodisation, in which a Mediterranean Age is followed by a European Age, running roughly from 950 AD to 1950, but that in turn is succeeded by what Halecki called an Atlantic Age (today we might refer to it simply as a global age). But even in the European Age, the continent's eastem edge remained deeply ill-defined -- was it the Elbe? Or the dividing line between Western and Eastern Christianity? Or the Urals? Its political history was characterised by the astounding diversity of peoples, nations, states and empires -- relatively stable nation-states being the norm only in the modern history of Western Europe -- and the almost ceaseless and often violent competition between them. Another historian describes as Europe's permanent characteristic "that which critics call anarchy; for the absence of common rule means struggle, fighting, and war, a ceaseless confusion between rival units of government [contending with one another] for territory and predominance."

In short, no continent is externally more ill-defined, internally more diverse, or historically more disorderly. Yet no continent has produced more schemes for its own orderly unification. The paradox is only apparent. The former cries out for the latter. So our teleological-idealistic or Whig interpreters can cite an impressive list of intellectual and political forebears, from George of Podebrad through the Duc de Sully and William Penn (writing already in America!) to Aristide Briand and the half-Austrian, half-Japanese prophet of Pan-Europa, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi.

The trouble is that those designs for European unification that were peaceful were not implemented, while those that were implemented were not peaceful. They involved either a temporary solidarity in response to an external invader or an attempt by one European state to establish continental hegemony by force of arms, from Napoleon to Hitler. Yet the latter, too, failed, as Toynbee's index dryly notes.

Next page: "Yalta Europe": 1945-1989