Europe: A History (12 page)

The Council of Europe provided the forum within which most early discussions took place. As an organization supported by twenty-four governments in Western Europe, it was never bounded by the political horizons either of the EEC or of NATO; and in the cultural field it gained the co-operation of four non-member countries from the Soviet bloc, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the USSR. Its input ranged from the Vatican to the Kremlin. From the first colloquium, which was organized at Calw in 1953 on ‘The European Idea in History Teaching’, the Council organized at least one major international meeting on historical matters every year for forty years. A1965 symposium on ‘Teaching Histor’ at Elsinore and a 1986 seminar on ‘The Viking Age’ emphasized the desirability both of broad-based themes and of a generous geographical and chronological spread.

Apart from historical didactics, and the problems of introducing a skills-based ‘new history’ into school-teaching, the main focus lay on the elimination of national bias and religious prejudice from European education. Special attention was given to the shortcomings of national history textbooks. Numerous bilateral commissions were established for examining the sins of omission and commission of which all European educators were guilty in the presentation of their own and their neighbours’ past. In this the Georg Eckert Institute for International
Textbook Research, established at Braunschweig in West Germany played a pioneering role.
¹⁰⁷

The obstacles to creating a consensus about European history, however, were legion. One line, following the Gaullist concept of a
Europe des patries
, might have contented itself with an amalgam of national histories shorn of all offensive material. Others have sought to fuse the national elements into a more coherent whole. A major obstacle lay in shifting political realities, and the expanding membership of the (West) European Community. It was one thing to imagine a history which might reconcile the historical perceptions of the original ‘Six’; it was a much greater task to anticipate the sensitivities of the Twelve, the Nineteen, or even the Thirty-Eight. By the 1990s the notion of European unity could no longer be confined to Western Europe. ‘Modern History syllabuses will have to abandon the old bifocal view of Europe in favour of an all-embracing concept.’
¹⁰⁸
In the mean time, brave souls had not been deterred from attempting a new synthesis.

One history project that was financially supported (though not originated) by the European Commission in Brussels was conceived prior to the political deluge of 1989–91. Labelled ‘An Adventure in Understanding’, it was planned in three stages: a 500-page survey of European history, a 10-part television series, and a school textbook to be published simultaneously in all eight languages of the EC. Its authors were quite open about their ‘political quest’: their aim was to replace history written according to the ethos of the sovereign nation-state:

Nationalism, and the fragmentation of Europe into nation-states, are relatively recent phenomena: they may be temporary, and are certainly not irreversible. The end of Empires and the destruction wrought by nationalism have been accompanied by the defeat of totalitarianism and the triumph of liberal democracy in Western Europe, completed in 1974–5. This has enabled people to begin to rise above their nationalistic instincts.
¹⁰⁹

‘Nationalistic instincts’ was an unfortunate phrase. But the principal author, who had published both on early Christianity and on
L’Idée de ľEurope dans éhistoire
(1965), was convinced of Europe’s basic ‘unity in diversity’: ‘There are solid historic reasons for regarding Europe not only as a mosaic of cultures but as an organic whole.’

The timing of the venture was unfortunate, since it reached the market at the very time when its geographical frame of reference had just collapsed. It had defined ‘Europe’ as the territory of the member states of the EC, with Scandinavia, Austria, and Switzerland thrown in. The status of Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, it had intimated, was not clear. So here was yet another exercise in Western civilization. Several of the critics were not kind. Its moral tone was likened by one reviewer as ‘reminiscent … of Soviet-bloc historiography’. Elsewhere its approach was summed up in the headline ‘Half-truths about half of Europe’.
¹¹⁰

The Greeks in particular were incensed. Although Greece had been a member state of the EC since 1981, Duroselle had largely omitted the contributions of ancient Greece and Byzantium. Letters of protest were addressed to the European
Commission by several Greek MEPs, the Archbishop of Athens, and others. The text was likened to the
Satanic Verses
. Attention was drawn to the opinion of the French historian, Ernest Renan: ‘L’Europe est grecque par la pensée et ľart, romaine par le droit, et judéo-chrétienne par la religion.’ (Europe is Greek in its thought and its art, Roman in its law, and Judaeo-Christian in its religion.) A British correspondent invoked the Greek origins of the words
Europa
and
Istoria
. If the Greek contribution is to be denied, he asked, one wonders what this book ought to be called. In due course the European Commission was obliged to dissociate itself from the project.
¹¹¹

The most telling observation was made amongst remarks originating in the Academy of Athens. It concerned M. Duroselle’s concept of‘a European history of Europe’. If a study addressed almost exclusively to Western Europe was to be categorized as ‘European’, it followed that the rest of Europe was somehow not European. ‘ “Non-western” is made to mean “non-European”; “Europe” equals “West” in everything but simple geography.’
¹¹²
Eastern Europe—whether Byzantine Europe, Orthodox Europe, Slavic Europe, Ottoman Europe, Balkan Europe, or Soviet Europe—was to be permanently beyond the pale. Here was the fundamental fallacy which led M. Duroselle to discuss ‘the ancient peoples of Europe’ without mentioning either the Greeks or the Slavs. The author’s attempts to defend himself were not always felicitous. Charged that his book did not mention the Battle of Marathon, he was said to have countered with the news that it did not mention the Battle of Verdun either—in which case it must be judged as weak on West European history as on European history as a whole.
¹¹³

The project’s textbook, composed by twelve historians from twelve different countries, appeared in 1992. The text had been established by collective discussion. A French account of‘the Barbarian Invasions’ was changed to ‘the Germanic Invasions’. A Spanish description of Sir Francis Drake as a ‘pirate’ was overruled. A picture of General de Gaulle among the portraits on the cover was replaced by one of Queen Victoria. For whatever reason,
The European History Book
did not find a British publisher, and was judged unlikely to pass the strict authorization criteria of the sixteen German
Länder.
¹¹⁴

Eurohistory, however, was not engaged on frivolous business. Its strong point lay in the search for a dynamic vision of a European community that would be capable of creating its own mystique. In its initial form, that vision was of necessity stunted. After all, it saw its origins in the middle of the Cold War. But it may have grasped an essential truth—that sovereign national states do not offer the sole form of sound political community. National states are themselves ‘imagined communities’: they are built on powerful myths, and on the political rewriting of history:

All communities larger than the primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined… . members of even the smallest nation will never know their fellow members … and yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion.
¹¹⁵

Europeans need that same imagination. Sooner or later, a convincing new picture of Europe’s past will have to be composed to accompany the new aspirations for Europe’s future.

The European movement of the 1990s may succeed or it may fail. If it succeeds, it will owe much to the historians who will have helped to give it a sense of community. They will have helped to provide a spiritual home for those millions of Europeans whose multiple identities and multiple loyalties already transcend existing frontiers.

European History

When asked to define ‘European history’, many professional historians cannot give a clear answer. They do not usually concern themselves with such matters. If pressed, however, most of them would contrast the certainties of past assumptions with the confusions of the present. An enquiry organized by a historical journal in 1986 brought some revealing replies. One distinguished scholar said:

When I was a schoolboy in France in the 1930s, the answer to … ‘What is European History?’ seemed simple and obvious …; any place, event, or personality that has a relationship to France belongs to European History (nay, to History
tout court.)
… [But now], there is no single European history, but rather many.
¹¹⁶

A second respondent delivered a homily about Europe’s traditional parochialism and the need for world-wide horizons:

The concept of European History, indeed the History of Europe, was but history seen with the eyes of Europe and with a European vision of History … This kind of presentation is indefensible today.
¹¹⁷

The implication seemed to be that the Eurocentric attitudes of his misguided predecessors had somehow invalidated the entire subject.

A Hungarian contributor pointed to the eccentric British habit of distinguishing ‘European’ from ‘British’ history.
¹¹⁸
Through this distinction, ‘European’ is made to mean ‘Continental’, and the British part is made to appear as something completely unique.

Yet another contributor offered an analysis of three separate definitions of European History. He listed ‘the geographical’, ‘the cultural or civilizational’, and a category which he described as ‘a convenient shorthand for the central zone of the capitalist world-economy as it has developed since the sixteenth century’.
¹¹⁹

In Magdalen College, one was used to more incisive opinions. Mr A. J. P. Taylor produced an inimitable sample for the benefit of the journal’s enquiry:

European History is whatever the historian wants it to be. It is a summary of the events and ideas, political, religious, military, pacific, serious, romantic, near at hand, far away, tragic, comic, significant, meaningless, anything else you would like it to be. There is only one limiting factor. It must take place in, or derive from, the area we call Europe. But as I am not sure what exactly that area is meant to be, I am pretty well in a haze about the rest.
¹²⁰

As usual, my old tutor was more than half-right, and completely amusing. But he put himself in the company of those who imply that European history, even if it exists, is not a subject worth worrying about.

In the end, therefore, intellectual definitions raise more questions than they answer. It is the same with European history as with a camel. The practical approach is not to try and define it, but to describe it.

*
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—the dominant social and cultural group during the formative years of US history.

PENINSULA

Environment and Prehistory

T
HERE
is a marked determinism about many descriptions of Europe’s environmental history. Many Europeans have assumed that their ‘continent’ was so magnificently endowed that it was destined by Nature for world supremacy. And many have imagined that Europe’s good fortune would somehow last forever. ‘The empire of climate’, wrote Montesquieu in 1748, ‘is the first of all empires’; and he proceeded to show that the European climate had no rival. For Montesquieu, as for his many successors, Europe was synonymous with Progress.
¹

There has also been a good deal of national parochialism. Even the founder of human geography, the great Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), one of the intellectual ancestors of the
Anuales
school, was not above a touch of Gallic chauvinizing. The geography of France, he stressed, was marked by the keynote of variety. ‘Against the diversities which assail her’, he wrote, ‘France sets her
force d’assimilation
, her power of assimilation. She transforms everything that she receives.’ On Britain, in contrast, he quotes the doggerel lines about ‘this paltry little isle, I with acres few and weather vile’. One hundred years later one finds Fernand Braudel doing similar things.
²
Variety is indeed a characteristic of France’s superb make-up. But it is not a French monopoly, it is a hallmark of Europe as a whole.