Europe: A History (5 page)

This concept is, in all senses, the traditional one. It is the yardstick of all other variants, breakaways, and bright ideas on the subject. It is the starting-point of what Mme de Staël once called
‘penser à ľeuropéenne’
.

For cultural historians of Europe, the most fundamental of tasks is to identify the many competing strands within the Christian tradition and to gauge their weight in relation to various non-Christian and anti-Christian elements. Pluralism is
de rigueur
. Despite the apparent supremacy of Christian belief right up to the mid-twentieth century, it is impossible to deny that many of the most fruitful stimuli of modern times, from the Renaissance passion for antiquity to the Romantics’ obsession with Nature, were essentially pagan in character. Similarly, it is hard to argue that the contemporary cults of modernism, eroticism, economics, sport, or pop culture have much to do with the Christian heritage. The main problem nowadays is to decide whether the centrifugal forces of the twentieth century have reduced that heritage to a meaningless jumble or not. Few
analysts would now maintain that anything resembling a European cultural monolith has ever existed. One interesting solution is to see Europe’s cultural legacy as composed of four or five overlapping and interlocking circles
³⁴
(see Appendix III, p. 1238). According to the novelist Alberto Moravia, Europe’s unique cultural identity is ‘a reversible fabric, one side variegated … the other a single colour rich and deep’.
³⁵

It would be wrong to suppose, however, that ‘Europe’ was devoid of political content. On the contrary, it has often been taken as a synonym for the harmony and unity which was lacking. ‘Europe’ has been the unattainable ideal, the goal for which all good Europeans are supposed to strive.

This messianic or Utopian view of Europe can be observed as far back as the discussion which preceded the Treaty of Westphalia. It was loudly invoked in the propaganda of William of Orange and his allies, who organized the coalitions against Louis XIV, as in those who opposed Napoleon. ‘Europe’, said Tsar Alexander I, ‘is us.’ It was present in the rhetoric of the Balance of Power in the eighteenth century, and of the Concert in the nineteenth. It was an essential feature of the peaceful Age of Imperialism which, until shattered by the Great War of 1914, saw Europe as the home base of worldwide dominion.

In the twentieth century, the European ideal has been revived by politicians determined to heal the wounds of two world wars. In the 1920s, after the First World War, when it could be propagated in all parts of the continent outside the Soviet Union, it found expression in the League of Nations and particularly in the work of Aristide Briand (see pp. 949–51). It was specially attractive to the new states of Eastern Europe, who were not encumbered by extra-European empires and who sought communal protection against the great powers. In the late 1940s, after the creation of the Iron Curtain, it was appropriated by people who were intent on building a Little Europe in the West, who imagined their construction as a series of concentric circles focused on France and Germany. But it equally served as a beacon of hope for others cut off by oppressive communist rule in the East (see p. 13 below). The collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 offered the first glimpses of a pan-European community that could aspire to spread to all parts of the continent.

Yet the frailty of the European ideal has been recognized both by its opponents and by its advocates. In 1876 Bismarck dismissed Europe, as Metternich had once dismissed Italy, as ‘a geographical notion’. Seventy years later Jean Monnet, ‘the Father of Europe’, saw the force of Bismarck’s disdain. ‘Europe has never existed,’ he admitted; ‘one has genuinely to create Europe.’
³⁶

For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia. Throughout modern history, an Orthodox, autocratic, economically backward but expanding Russia has been a bad fit. Russia’s Western neighbours have often sought reasons for excluding her. Russians themselves have never been sure whether they wanted to be in or out.

In 1517, for example, the Rector of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Maciej Miechowita, published a geographical treatise which upheld the traditional Ptolemeian distinction between
Sarmatia europaea
(European Sarmatia) and
Sarmatia asiática
(Asian Sarmatia) with the boundary on the Don. So Poland-Lithuania was in and Russian Muscovy was out.
³⁷
Three centuries later, things were not so clear. Poland-Lithuania had just been dismembered, and Russia’s frontier had shifted dramatically westwards. When the Frenchman Louis-Philippe de Segur (1753–1830) passed by on the eve of the French Revolution, he was in no doubt that Poland no longer lay in Europe. ‘On croit sortir entièrement de l’Europe,’ he wrote after entering Poland; ‘tout ferait penser qu’on a reculé de dix siècles.’ (One believes oneself to be leaving Europe completely; everything might give the impression of retreating ten centuries in time.) By using economic advancement as the main criterion for European membership, he was absolutely up to date.
³⁸

Yet this was exactly the era when the Russian government was insisting on its European credentials. Notwithstanding the fact that her territory stretched in unbroken line through Asia to North America, the Empress Catherine categorically announced in 1767 that ‘Russia is a European state’. Everyone who wished to do business with St Petersburg took note. After all, Muscovy had been an integral part of Christendom since the tenth century, and the Russian Empire was a valued member of the diplomatic round. Fears of the ‘Bear’ did not prevent the growth of a general consensus regarding Russia’s membership of Europe. This was greatly strengthened in the nineteenth century by Russia’s role in the defeat of Napoleon, and by the magnificent flowering of Russian culture in the age of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Chekov.

Russian intellectuals, divided between Westernizers and Slavophiles, were uncertain about the degree of Russia’s Europeanness (see Chapter X, pp. 811–12, 817). In
Russia and Europe
(1871), the Slavophile Nikolay Danilevskiy (1822–85) argued that Russia possessed a distinctive Slavic civilization of its own, midway between Europe and Asia. Dostoevsky, in contrast, speaking at the unveiling of a statue to the poet Pushkin, chose to launch into a eulogy of Europe. ‘Peoples of Europe’, he declared, ‘they don’t know how dear to us they are.’ Only the small group of
vostochniki
or ‘orientals’ held that Russia was entirely un-European, having most in common with China.
³⁹

After 1917 the conduct of the Bolsheviks revived many of the old doubts and ambiguities. The Bolsheviks were widely regarded abroad as barbarians—in Churchill’s words, ‘a baboonery’—a gang of wild Asiatics sowing death and destruction like Attila or Genghis Khan. In Soviet Russia itself, the Marxist revolutionaries were often denounced as a Western implant, dominated by Jews, backed by Western money, and manipulated by German Intelligence. At the same time, a strong line of official opinion held that the Revolution had severed all links with ‘decadent’ Europe. Many Russians felt humiliated by their isolation, and boasted that a revitalized Russia would soon overwhelm the faithless West. Early in 1918, the leading Russian poet of the revolutionary years wrote a defiant poem entitled ‘The Scythians’:

You’re millions; we are hosts and hosts and hosts.

Engage with us and prove our seed!

We’re Scythians and Asians, too, from coasts

That breed squint eyes, bespeaking greed.

Russia’s a Sphinx! Triumphant though in pain

She bathes her limbs in blood’s dark stream.

Her eyes gaze on you—gaze and gaze again—

With hate and love in a single beam.

Old world—once more—awake! Your brothers’ plight

To toil and peace, a feast of fire.

Once more! Come join your brothers’ festal light!

Obey the call of Barbar’s lyre.
⁴⁰

Not for the first time, the Russians were torn in two directions at once.

As for the Bolshevik leadership, Lenin and his circle identified closely with Europe. They saw themselves as heirs to a tradition launched by the French Revolution; they saw their immediate roots in the socialist movement in Germany, and they assumed that their strategy would be to join up with revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. In the early 1920s, Comintern mooted the possibility of a (communist-led) United States of Europe. Only under Stalin, who killed all the old Bolsheviks, did the Soviet Union choose to distance itself spiritually from European affairs. In those same decades, an influential group of emigré Russian intellectuals including Prince N. S. Trubetskoy, P. N. Savitsky, and G. Vernadsky, chose to re-emphasize the Asiatic factors within Russia’s cultural mix. Known as
Yevraziytsy
or ‘Eurasians’, they were fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, whilst maintaining a sceptical stance to the virtues of Western Europe.

Of course, seventy years of totalitarian Soviet rule built huge mental as well as physical curtains across Europe. The public face of the Soviet regime grew blatantly xenophobic—a posture greatly assisted by experiences during the Second World War, and assiduously cultivated by the Stalinists. In their hearts, however, many individual Russians followed the great majority of non-Russians in the Soviet Bloc in fostering a heightened sense of their European identity. It was a lifeline for their spiritual survival against communism. When the chains of communism melted away, it enabled them to greet, in Vaclav Havel’s phrase, ‘the Return to Europe’.

None the less, scepticism about Russia’s European qualifications continued to circulate both inside and outside Russia. Russian nationalist opinion, which heartily dislikes and envies ‘the West’, supplied a rallying-point for the Stalinist apparatus, which felt humiliated by the collapse of Soviet power and which wanted nothing more than to get its empire back. As the core of opposition to hopes for a post-communist democracy, the unholy alliance of Russian nationalists and unreformed communists could only look askance at Moscow’s growing
rapprochement with
Washington and with Western Europe.

For their part, Western leaders were most impressed by the need for stability.
Having failed to find a lasting partnership with Gorbachev’s humanized version of the USSR, they rushed headlong to shore up the Russian Federation. They responded sympathetically to Moscow’s requests for economic aid and for association both with NATO and with the European Community. But then some of them began to see the drawbacks. After all, the Russian Federation was not a cohesive nation-state, ripe for liberal democracy. It was still a multinational complex spanning Eurasia, still highly militarized, and still manifesting imperial reflexes about its security. It was not clearly committed to letting its neighbours follow their own road. Unless it could find ways of shedding the imperialist legacy, like all other ex-imperial states in Europe, it could not expect to be considered a suitable candidate for any European community. Such at least was the strong opinion of the doyen of the European Parliament, speaking in September 1993.
[EESTI]

Some commentators have insisted that Britain’s European credentials are no less ambiguous than Russia’s. From the Norman Conquest to the Hundred Years War, the kingdom of England was deeply embroiled in Continental affairs. But for most of modern history the English sought their fortunes elsewhere. Having subdued and absorbed their neighbours in the British Isles, they sailed away to create an empire overseas. Like the Russians, they were definitely Europeans, but with prime extra-European interests. They were, in fact, semi-detached. Their habit of looking on ‘the Continent’ as if from a great distance did not start to wane until their empire disappeared. What is more, the imperial experience had taught them to look on Europe in terms of ‘great powers’, mainly in the West, and ‘small nations’, mainly in the East, which did not really count. Among the sculptures surrounding the Albert Memorial (1876) in London is a group of figures symbolizing ‘Europe’. It consists of only four figures—Britain, Germany, France, and Italy. For all these reasons, historians have often regarded Britain as ‘a special case’.
⁴¹
The initiators of the first pan-European movement in the 1920s (see pp. 944,1065) assumed that neither Britain nor Russia would join.

In the mean time, a variety of attempts have been made to define Europe’s cultural subdivisions. In the late nineteenth century, the concept of a German-dominated
Mitteleuropa
was launched to coincide with the political sphere of the Central Powers. In the inter-war years, a domain called ‘East Central Europe’ was invented to coincide with the newly independent ‘successor states’—from Finland and Poland to Yugoslavia. This was revived again after 1945 as a convenient label for the similar set of nominally independent countries which were caught inside the Soviet bloc. By that time the main division, between a ‘Western Europe’ dominated by NATO and the EEC and an ‘Eastern Europe’ dominated by Soviet communism seemed to be set in stone. In the 1980s a group of writers led by the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, launched a new version of ‘Central Europe’, to break down the reigning barriers. Here was yet another configuration, another true ‘kingdom of the spirit’.
⁴²

The ‘Heart of Europe’ is an attractive idea which possesses both geographical and emotional connotations. But it is peculiarly elusive. One author has placed it in Belgium, another in Poland, a third in Bohemia, a fourth in Hungary, and a
fifth in the realm of German literature.
⁴³
Wherever it is, the British Prime Minister declared in 1991 that he intended to be there. For those who think that the heart lies in the dead centre, it is located either in the commune of St Clement (Allier), the dead centre of the European Community, or else at a point variously calculated to lie in the suburbs of Warsaw or in the depths of Lithuania, the dead centre of geographical Europe.