Defining Europe

In the earlier period, before the fall of communism, and now after communism, the idea of Europe was very important for the people of Central Europe as a vision, as an ideal.

Absolutely. As I traveled to and fro across the Iron Curtain, I came to the conclusion that Europe was divided between those in the West who had Europe and those in the East who believed in Europe. You nowhere find such passionate Europeans as among the opposition intellectuals of Central and Eastern Europe. I mean, they believed in Europe as an ideal, as a location of values, almost as a Platonic essence.

In your lecture, "Is Europe becoming Europe?" you identified three motors, so to speak, for the evolution or the movement forward of Europe: idealism, the common interest, and the national interest of individual national groups or states. A sense of a kind of synergy exists between these forces, but also a kind of tension. What is your assessment of the balance of these forces today?

That's a very good question. I think that there is less European idealism of the kind that one saw in the postwar generation of classical Europeans. People say Helmut Kohl is the last European in German politics; that's an overstatement but there's something in that -- he's the last European of that kind. The common interest is still powerfully present. It seems pretty clear that we're in a world of trading blocs, we're in an information revolution, and individual national economies won't keep up, and that's pretty clear to most people so that's still a powerful element. The crucial one, and the element that I stress most strongly, is the meeting of individual national interests, notably French and German national interests in the common cause of building Europe -- for different reasons. The crucial question is whether those national interests are still so strong, and the decisive one here is obviously Germany. What now is the German national interest in Europe? Up until unification, the answer was very clear; the answer now is not clear.

And before unification, it was really to bring down the Berlin Wall and unite the country.

That's right, and to do that, you had to rehabilitate Germany in the international community among its neighbors, many of which had been occupied by Nazi Germany, and secure Western support for your policy toward the East. So that was an overwhelming German interest. That interest, in that form, has disappeared. Where now is the specific German interest?

In your lecture you indicated that many people make the mistake of believing that national interest is being displaced by the common interest, but in fact your interpretation is that the national interest was, in some way, being revitalized in the context of a greater Europe. Or at least that the greater Europe provided an arena which offered new opportunities for the national interests.

That's a perfectly fair statement, but it is only through these diverse institutions that we call Europe that countries like Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain have been able to realize their national interests. They couldn't have done so on their own. But those national interests remain very strong and very much present.

I sense that for you, the vision of Europe is important, although you call yourself a believer in a realistic Europeanism. For such a philosophy, an important goal for a greater Europe is the enlargement of Europe.

Enlargement is a pretty dull word as a goal for Europe. Enlargement is a means to an end; what is the end? The end is to ensure that we don't start fighting each other again, because that is what a great deal of European history has consisted of. This continent is extraordinarily diverse, extraordinarily rich in culture, in invention, but also extraordinarily disorderly. I quoted in my lecture the wonderful index entry in Toynbee's Study of History: "Europe, as battlefield." For me this is a central achievement of the European Union, or the first reason for the European Union: it is that we "make jaw jaw rather than more war." We are again threatened with war in post-communist Europe. We have war in Georgia, in Chechnya, in the former Yugoslavia, that could spread to the parts of Eastern Europe closer to us. I regard enlargement of the European Union as one of the crucial ways of making sure that doesn't happen.

And enlargement is also a way to further the values that you see as important for the states that haven't been part of the European Miracle, namely freedom and economic security, as long-term goals?

That's right, because if you ask what do my Central European friends mean by "Europe," you pretty soon find that it means a fairly classic catalog of liberal values: tolerance, pluralism, the rule of law, democracy, and to secure those good things in a larger Europe. What I don't believe in, when you say "values," is that we can very easily say, "These are European values," because actually Europe has everything. Almost everything has been done in Europe's name. There are some great fascist Europeans, there are some pretty unpleasant communist Europeans -- Europe has it all. What I think I would say is that there is a value of Europeanism as a stepping stone to internationalism, if you like, so that the European Union is not an end in itself, but a means to a larger end of international cooperation.

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