Europe: A History (234 page)

The most obvious fact of the Soviet collapse is that it happened through natural causes. The Soviet Union was not, like ancient Rome, invaded by barbarians or, like the Polish Commonwealth, partitioned by rapacious neighbours, or, like the Habsburg Empire, overwhelmed by the strains of a great war. It was not, like the Nazi Reich, defeated in a fight to the death. It died because it had to, because the grotesque organs of its internal structure were incapable of providing the essentials of life. In a nuclear age, it could not, like its tsarist predecessor, solve its internal problems by expansion. Nor could it suck more benefit from the nations whom it had captured. It could not tolerate the partnership with China which once promised a global future for communism; it could not stand the oxygen of reform; so it imploded. It was struck down by the political equivalent of a coronary, more massive than anything that history affords.

The consequences of so massive a shock were bound to affect the whole of Europe. It was an open question whether the peoples of the ex-Soviet Empire could continue to reorder their affairs with a minimum of blood and hate. That the collapse occurred so peacefully was proof that it was ripe to happen; but the national warriors who took the field in the Caucasus and in Yugoslavia had many potential imitators. Not surprisingly, the countries of Western Europe had reacted to the Soviet collapse with excessive caution. Governments were slow to assist the struggling republics. Some, in the name of misplaced stability, were eager to keep the Soviet Union and the Yugoslav Federation alive. They were in a phase of confusion, and of half-measures bungled by competing agencies.

Paradoxically, the threat of anarchy in the East may well act as a spur to closer union in the West. Last year, Albanian refugees sailed across the Adriatic in their tens of thousands, and tried to force their way into Italy. Hordes of Russian, Ukrainian, and Romanian tramps and traders are pouring into Poland, just as Poles recently poured into Germany and Austria. Germany’s wonderful capacity of absorption is under the severest strain, not only from millions of unemployed East Germans but also from thousands of legal asylum-seekers, whose presence cannot be popular. If scenes of disorder were to be repeated on a larger scale, and
in Central Europe, the sense of urgency in Western capitals would be wonderfully enhanced. So far, the consolidation of the European Community has been proceeding at the pace of the slowest. A strong blast of cold air from the East might quicken the pace.

Much depends on developments in America. So long as the USA remains strong and relatively prosperous, the status quo in Western Europe is unlikely to change suddenly. NATO will be preserved, and the European Community will evolve by measured steps. If and when the USA moves into crisis, however, the countries of Europe would draw together for common protection. An Atlantic gale from the west could have the same effect as a cold east wind.

Europe, like nature itself, cannot abide a vacuum. Sooner or later, the European Community in the West and the successor states in the East must redefine their identities, their bounds, and their allegiances. Somehow, at least for a time, a new equilibrium may be found, perhaps in a multilateral framework. Regional groupings such as the Baltic Council, the
hexagonale
, and some form of ex-Soviet club or clubs, could all play their part. But somewhere between the depths of Russia and the heart of Europe a new dividing line will have to be established—hopefully along a border of peace.

‘Europe, yes. But what sort of Europe?’ The old Europe, which existed before the Eclipse, has passed away. With the poet, one can regret its passing and its ancient, clear-cut walls:

Fileur éternel des immobilités bleues,
Je regrette l’Europe aux anciens parapets!
⁵³

But one cannot bring it back. The present ‘Europe’, a creature of the Cold War, is inadequate to its task. The moral and political vision of the Community’s founding fathers has almost been forgotten.

Europe is not going to be fully united in the near future. But it has a chance to be less divided than for generations past. If fortune smiles, the physical and psychological barriers will be less brutal than at any time in living memory. Europa rides on.
Tremulae sinuantur flamine vestes
.

*
Meaning ‘I am a doughnut’. He should have said, ‘Ich bin Berliner’.

*
To British ears,
federalism
was coloured by American, as opposed to German or Continental, usage, and was taken to be a codeword for a centralized United States of Europe.

THE LEGEND OF EUROPA

1.
See Chapter 1, note 15.

2.
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, ii. lines 862 ff. translated by A. D. Melville (Oxford, 1986), p. 50.

3.
More correctly, ‘tit for tat’. Herodotus,
The Histories
, Book 1.2.

4.
Ovid,
op cit
. ii, line 875.

5.
Possibly from the Assyrian word,
Ereb
, meaning ‘the West’.

INTRODUCTION

1.
Henryk Batowski,
Kryzys dyplomatyczny w Europie, 1938–39
(Warsaw, 1962);
Ostatni tydzień pokoju i pierwsze tygodnie wojny
, 2nd edn. (Poznarń, 1969);
Europa zmierza ku przepaści
(Poznań, 1989); see also his
Niedoszła “Biała Księga” z roku 1940: rozprawa
zródłoznawcza
Cracow, 1993); and ‘17 September 1939: Before and After’,
East European Quarterly
, 27/7 (1993), 523–34.

2.
L’Évolution de l’humanité
, ed. Henri Berr (Bibliothèque de Synthèse Historique) (Paris). J. Vendryes,
Le Langage: introduction linguistique
appeared in 1921, H. Verin,
La Gloire des ingénieurs
in 1993.

3.
From Juliusz Słowacki,
Journey to the East
(1836), trans, by Norman Davies, rather better than in
Heart of Europe
(Oxford, 1984), p. xi.

4.
The Cambridge Mediaeval History
, ed. J. B. Bury, H. M. Gwatlin
et al
. (8 vols., Cambridge, 1936–9).

5.
Handbuch der europaischen Geschichte
, ed. T. Schieder (7 vols., Stuttgart, 1968–79).

6.
Periods of European History
, ed. Arthur Hassall (9 vols., London, 1897–1936).

7.
e.g.
The Fontana History of Europe
(400–1945), General Editor J. H. Plumb (15 vols., London, 1963– );
The Library of European Civilisation
, General Editor Geoffrey Barraclough (London, 1965– );
A General History of Europe, from the Decline of the
Ancient World to 1945
, General Editor Denys Hay (11 vols., London, 1968– ).

8.
John Bowie,
A History of Europe: A Cultural and Political Survey
(London, 1979), 589.

9.
See Anthony Seldon,
Contemporary History: Practice and Method
(Oxford, 1988).

10.
Walter Raleigh,
A Historie of the World
, in his
Works
(London, 1829). Raleigh prudently confined his history to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

11.
H. A. L. Fisher,
A History of Europe
(London, 1936).

12.
Eugen Weber,
A Modern History of Europe: Men, Cultures, and Societies from the Renaissance to the Present
(New York, 1971).

13.
Kenneth Clark,
Civilisation: A Personal View
(London, 1969).

14.
Jacob Bronowski,
The Ascent of Man
(London, 1973).

15.
Michael Andrews,
The Birth of Europe: Colliding Continents and the Destiny of Nations
(London, 1991).

16.
Fernand Paul Braudel,
La Mediterranée et le monde mediterranéen à l’époque de Philippe II
(Paris, 1949), trans. as
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World
(London, 1973); see also William McNeil,
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human
Community
(Chicago, 1963); and Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World System
(New York, 1974).

17.
A. Low-Beer, ‘Empathy in History’,
Teaching History
, 55 (Apr. 1989), 8 ff.; J. Cairns, ibid. 13 ff.; also K. Jenkins and P. Brickley, ‘Reflections on the Empathy Debate’, ibid. 18 ff.

18. See David Lehman,
Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man
(New York, 1991); reviewed by Louis Menand, ‘The Politics of Deconstruction’,
New York Review of Books
, 21 Nov. 1991.

19.
Apocryphal. On my mischievous master, see Adam Sisman,
A. J. P. Taylor
(London, 1994).

20.
Claude Delmas,
Histoire de la civilisation européene
(Paris, 1969), 127, ‘il n’y a pas une Vérité, mais autant de vérités que de consciences.’

21.
Norman Davies, Preface to
God’s Playground: A History of Poland
(Oxford, 1981), vol. i, p. vii.

22.
Lord Acton, quoted by Geoffrey Parker,
The Thirty Years’ War
(New York, 1984), p. xv.

23.
‘It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History, could we tell it right’; Thomas Carlyle, letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 Aug. 1834, in
The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle
, ed. J. Slater (New York, 1964), 105.

24.
See Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘Telling It as You Like It: Post-modernist History and the Flight from Fact’,
TLS
, 16 Oct. 1992,12–15.

25.
Ibid. 15.

26.
Voltaire,
Le Siècle de Louis XIV
, quoted by Denys Hay,
Europe: The Emergence of an Idea
(Edinburgh, 1957), 123.

27.
Edmund Burke, from
Letters on a Regicide Peace
(1796), quoted by Hay,
Europe
, 123.

28.
William Blake, ‘The Ancient of Days’ (Urizen Creating the Finite Universe), frontispiece to
Europe a Prophecy
(1794), British Museum; reproduced in
William Blake
, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (London, 1965), pl. 4.

29.
John of Trevisa, translating Bartholomew the Englishman’s Latin Encyclopaedia; quoted by R. Barber,
The Penguin Guide to Mediaeval Europe
(London, 1984), 30.

30.
George F. Kennan,
Siberia and the Exile System
(New York, 1891), i. 420–2; quoted by Benson Bobrick,
East of the Sun: The Epic Conquest and Tragic History of Siberia
(New York, 1992), 267–8.

31.
See Hay,
Europe
, 125; also Egbert Jahn, ‘Wo befindet sich Osteuropa?’
Osteuropa
, 5 (May 1990), 418–40.

32.
See W. H. Parker, ‘Is Russia in Europe? The Geographical Viewpoint’, in
An Historical Geography of Russia
(London, 1968), 27–9.

33.
T. S. Eliot,
Die Einheit der Europaeischen Kultur
(Berlin, 1946); also published as ‘The Unity of European Culture’ in an appendix to
Notes towards the Definition of Culture
(London, 1948), esp. 122–4.

34.
Henri Janne,
Europe’s Cultural Identity
(Strasburg, 1981).

35.
Quoted by Margaret Shennan,
Teaching about Europe
(London, 1991), 241.

36.
Jean Monnet, quoted by Anthony Sampson,
The New Europeans
(London, 1968), 6; see also Mia Rodriguez-Salgado, ‘In Search of Europe’,
History Today
, 42 (Feb. 1992), 11–16.

37.
See J. Tazbir,
Myśl polska w nowożytnej kulturze europejskiej
(Warsaw, 1986), 101–5.

38.
L.-P. Ségur,
Tableau historique et politique de l’Europe de 1786 à 1806
, quoted by J. Fabre,
Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et l’Europe des lumières
(Paris, 1952), 8.

39.
Dostoevsky, 8 June 1880. For a full discussion see Milan Hauner,
What Is Asia to Us? Russia’s Asian Heartland Yesterday and Today
(New York, 1990), esp. pt. i, ‘Russian Ideology and Asia: Historians and Geographers’.

40.
Alexander Blok, ‘The Scythians’, in Cecil Kisch,
Alexander Blok: Prophet of Revolution
(London, 1960), 152–3.

41.
René Albrecht-Carrié, ‘Two Special Cases: England and Russia’, in
The Unity of Europe: An Historical Survey
(London, 1966), 24–7.

42. Timothy Garton Ash,
The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe
(New York, 1989; 2nd rev. edn. London, 1991); also G. Schopflin and Nancy Wood (eds.),
The Search for Central Europe
(Oxford, 1989); and J. Le Rider,
La Mitteleuropa
(Paris, 1994).

43.
Heart of Europe
is the title of an appeal for the fate of occupied Belgium (London, 1915); of a short history of Poland by Norman Davies (Oxford, 1984); of a guidebook to Prague by Bohomir Mraz (London, 1988); of a Hungarian art exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1992); and of J. P. Stern’s collected essays on German literature and ideology (London, 1992).

44.
Hugh Seton-Watson, ‘What Is Europe, Where Is Europe? From Mystique to Politique’, 11th Martin Wight Lecture, delivered at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 23 Apr. 1985;
Encounter
, 65/2 (July-Aug. 1985), 9–17.

45.
Ibid. 14.

46.
Ibid. 16.

47.
Ibid. 17.

48.
Dimitri Obolensky, ‘Hugh Seton-Watson, FBA’,
Proceedings of the British Academy
, 78 (1987), 631–41.

49.
Douglas Johnson, ‘What is European History?’,
UCL History Newsletter
, 8 (University College London) (Dec. 1991), 9–10.

50.
F. Guizot,
The History of Civilisation in Europe
(London, n.d.), 32.

51.
George Burton Adams,
European History: An Outline of Its Development
(London and New York, 1899), 6.

52.
Terne L. Plunkett and R. B. Mowat,
A History of Europe
(Oxford, 1927), preface, p. vii.

53.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’, in
The Definitive Edition of Kipling’s Verse
(London, 1949), 234–8.