Europe: A History (7 page)

Western Civilization

For the best part of 200 years European history has frequently been confused with the heritage of‘Western civilization’. Indeed, the impression has been created that everything ‘Western’ is civilized, and that everything civilized is Western. By extension, or simply by default, anything vaguely Eastern or ‘Oriental’ stands to be considered backward or inferior, and hence worthy of neglect. The workings of this syndrome have been ably exposed with regard to European attitudes towards Islam and the Arab world, that is, in the tradition of so-called ‘Orientalism’.
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But it is not difficult to demonstrate that it operates with equal force in relation to some of Europe’s own regions, especially in the East. Generally speaking, Western civilization is not taken to extend to the whole of Europe (although it may be applied to distant parts of the globe far beyond Europe).

Historians most given to thinking of themselves as from ‘the West’—notably from England, France, Germany, and North America—rarely see any necessity to describe Europe’s past in its entirety. They see no more reason to consider the countries of Eastern Europe than to dwell on the more westerly parts of Western Europe. Any number of titles could be cited which masquerade as histories of ‘Europe’, or of‘Christendom’, but which are nothing of the sort. Any number of surveys of‘Western civilization’ confine themselves to topics which relate only to their chosen fragments of the Peninsula. In many such works there is no Portugal, no Ireland, Scotland or Wales, and no Scandinavia, just as there is no Poland, no Hungary, no Bohemia, no Byzantium, no Balkans, no Baltic States, no Byelorussia or Ukraine, no Crimea or Caucasus. There is sometimes a Russia, and sometimes not. Whatever Western civilization is, therefore, it does not involve an honest
attempt to summarize European history. Whatever ‘the West’ is, it is not just a synonym for Western Europe.
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This is a very strange phenomenon. It seems to assume that historians of Europe can conduct themselves like the cheese-makers of Gruyere, whose product contains as many holes as cheese.

Examples are legion; but three or four must suffice. A
History of Mediaeval Europe
, written by a distinguished Oxford tutor, has long served as a standard introduction to the subject. Readers of the preface may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the contents do not coincide with the tide:

In the hope of maintaining a continuity of theme… I have probably been guilty of oversimplifying things… The history of mediaeval Byzantium is so different from that of western Europe in its whole tone and tenor that it seemed wiser not to attempt any systematic survey of it; in any case, I am not qualified to undertake such a survey. I have said nothing about the history of mediaeval Russia, which is remote from the themes which I have chosen to pursue; and I have probably said less than I should have done about Spain.
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The subject, in fact, is defined as ‘western Europe (Latin Christendom), the terms being more or less analogous’.
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One might then think that all would be well if the book were to receive a tide to match its contents. ‘A History of Medieval Western Europe’ or ‘A History of Latin Christendom in the Middle Ages’ might seem appropriate. But then one finds that the text makes little attempt to address all the parts even of Latin Christendom. Neither Ireland nor Wales, for example, find mention. The realm of the Jagiellons in Poland and Lithuania, which in the latter part of the chosen period was absolutely the largest state in Latin Christendom, merits two passing references. One relates to the policies of the German Emperor Otto III, the other to the plight of the Teutonic Knights. The huge, multinational kingdom of Hungary, which stretched from the Adriatic to Transylvania, gains much less attention than Byzantium and the Greeks, which the author has put a priori out of bounds. The book has many virtues; but, like very many others, what it amounts to is a survey of selected themes from favoured sectors of one part of Europe.

A highly influential
Handbook to the History of Western Civilization
is organized within a similar strange framework. The largest of its three parts, ‘European Civilization
(cad
900-Present)’, starts with ‘The Geographical Setting of European Civilization’, and explains how ‘the transitions from Oriental to Classical and from Classical to European civilizations each time involved a shift to the periphery of the older society’. The ‘original homeland of European Civilization’ is described in terms of a plain ‘extending from the Pyrenees… into Russia’, and separated from ‘the Mediterranean lands’ by an ‘irregular mountain barrier’. But there is no attempt in subsequent chapters to map out the history of this homeland. The former lands of the Roman Empire ‘came to be divided between three civilizations—Islam, Orthodox Christianity, and Latin Christianity’. But no systematic treatment of this threefold division in Europe is forthcoming. One sentence is awarded to pagan Scandinavia, and none to any of the other pagan lands which were later christianized. There is a small subsection
on ‘The Peoples of Western Europe’ in early times (p. 129), including unspecified ‘Indo-European tribesmen’, but none on the peoples of Eastern Europe in any period. There are scattered references to ‘Slavic’ or ‘Slavic-speaking’ peoples, but no indication that they represented the largest of Europe’s Indo-European groups. There are major chapters on ‘Western Christendom 900–1500’; but no chapter appears on Eastern Christendom. The paragraphs on ‘The Expansion of Europe’ refer either to German colonization or to ocean voyages outside Europe. Two sentences suddenly inform the reader that Western Christendom in the fourteenth century actually included ‘Scandinavia, the Baltic States, Poland, Lithuania, and Hungar’ (p. 345). But no further details are given. The largest of all the chapters, ‘The Modern World, 1500-Present’, deals exclusively with themes shorn of their eastern element until Russia, and Russia alone, appears ready-made under Peter the Great From then on, Russia has apparently been a fully qualified member of the West. The author apologizes in advance for his ‘arbitrary principles of ordering and selection’ (p. xviii). Unfortunately, he does not reveal what they are.
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The ‘Great Books Scheme’ is another product of the same Chicago School. It purports to list the key authors and works that are essential for an understanding of Western civilization. It was invented at Columbia University in 1921, used from 1930 at Chicago, and became the model for university courses throughout America. No one would expect such a list to give exact parity to all the regions and cultures of Europe. But the prejudices and preferences are manifest. Of the 151 authors on the amended list, 49 are English or American, 27 French, 20 German, 15 Classical Greek, 9 Classical Latin, 6 Russian, 4 Scandinavian, 3 Spanish, 3 early Italian, 3 Irish, 3 Scots, and 3 East European (see Appendix III, p. 1230).
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Political theorists often betray the same bias. It is very common, for example, to classify European nationalism in terms of two contrasting types—’Eastern’ and ‘Western’. A prominent Oxford scholar, who stressed the cultural roots of nationalism, explained his version of the scheme:

What I call eastern nationalism has flourished among the Slavs as well as in Africa and Asia, and… also in Latin America. I could not call it non-European and have thought it best to call it eastern because it first appeared to the east of Western Europe.
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He then elucidated his view of Western nationalism by reference to the Germans and the Italians, whom he took, by the time of the onset of nationalism in the late eighteenth century, to have been ‘well equipped culturally’:

They had languages adapted to the … consciously progressive civilisation to which they belonged. They had universities and schools imparting the skills prized in that civilisation. They had… philosophers, scientists, artists and poets… of’world’ reputation. They had legal, medical and other professions with high professional standards… To put themselves on a level with the English and the French, they had little need to equip themselves culturally by appropriating what was alien to them … Their most urgent need, so it seemed to them, was to acquire national states of their own…

The case with the Slavs, and later with the Africans and the Asians, has been quite different.
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It would be difficult to invent a more cock-eyed comment on the geography and chronology of Europe’s cultural history. The analysis of ‘the Slavs’, it turns out, is evidenced exclusively by points relating to Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, and Croats. Nothing is said about the three largest Slav nations, the Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles, whose experiences flatly contradict the analysis. Who, what, and where, one wonders, did Professor Plamenatz imagine the Slavs to be? Is Eastern Europe inhabited only by Slavs? Did the Poles or the Czechs or the Serbs not feel an urgent need to acquire a state? Did not Polish develop as a language of government and of high culture before German did? Did the universities of Prague (1348) and Cracow (1364) belong to the ‘East’? Was Copernicus educated in Oxford?

As it happens, there is much to be said for a typology of nationalism which is based on varying rates of cultural development and on the differing correlations of nationality and statehood. But there
is
nothing to be said for giving it the labels of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’. If one does, one finds that the best candidate for a nationalism of the Eastern type is to be found in the far west of Western Europe, in Ireland. As everyone knows, the Irish are typical products of Eastern Europe (see Chapter X, pp. 820–1, 829–31).

By questioning the framework within which European history and culture is so frequently discussed, therefore, one does not necessarily query the excellence of the material presented. The purpose is simply to enquire why the framework should be so strangely designed. If textbooks of human anatomy were designed with the same attention to structure, one would be contemplating a creature with one lobe to its brain, one eye, one arm, one lung, and one leg.

The chronology of the subject is also instructive. The idea of‘the West’ is as old as the Greeks, who saw Free Hellas as the antithesis of the Persian-ruled despotisms to the East. In modern times, it has been adopted by a long succession of political interests who wished to reinforce their identity and to dissociate themselves from their neighbours. As a result, ‘Western civilization’ has been given layer upon layer of meanings and connotations that have accrued over the centuries. There are a dozen or so main variants:

The Roman Empire
, which stretched far beyond the European Peninsula, none the less left a lasting impression on Europe’s development. To this day, there is a clear distinction between those countries, such as France or Spain, which once formed an integral part of the Empire, and those, such as Poland or Sweden, which the Romans never reached. In this context, ‘the West’ came to be associated with those parts of Europe which can claim a share in the Roman legacy, as distinct from those which can not. (See Map 3.)

Christian utilization
, whose main base settled down in Europe, was defined from the seventh century onwards by the religious frontier with Islam (see Chapter IV). Christendom was the West, Islam the East.

The Catholic world
was built on the divergent traditions of the Roman and the Greek churches, especially after the Schism of 1054, and on the use of Latin as
a universal language. In this version, the West was equivalent to Catholicism, where the frequent divorce of ecclesiastical and secular authority facilitated the rise of successive non-conformist movements, notably the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment (see Chapter VII). None of these key movements made an early impact on the Orthodox world.

Protestantism
gave Western civilization a new focus in the cluster of countries in northern Europe, which broke away from Catholic control in the sixteenth century. The dramatic decline of major Catholic powers such as Spain or Poland was accompanied by the rise of the United Provinces, England, Sweden, and later Prussia, where naval or military pre-eminence was underpinned by economic and technological prowess.

The French variant
of Western civilization gained prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It found expression in the secular philosophy of the Enlightenment and in the ideals of the Revolution of 1789—both of which have had a lasting influence. The French language was adopted by the educated élites of Germany and Eastern Europe, making French still more universal than the earlier reign of Latin.

The imperial variant
of Western civilization was based on the unbounded self-confidence of the leading imperial powers during the long European Peace prior to 1914. It was fired by a belief in the God-given right of the ‘imperial races’ to rule over others, and in their supposedly superior cultural, economic, and constitutional development. Germany, England, and France were the clear leaders, whose prejudices could be impressed on the rest. Other major empire-owners, such as Portugal or the Netherlands, were minor players within Europe. Russia and Austria were impressive imperial powers, but fell short on other qualifications. For the rich imperial club in the West was marked by its advanced industrial economies and sophisticated systems of administration; the East by peasant societies, stateless nations, and raw autocracy.
The Marxist variant
was a mirror image of the imperial one. Marx and Engels accepted the premiss that the imperialist countries of Western Europe had reached a superior level of development; but they believed that the precocity of the West would result in early decadence and revolution. Their opinions carried little weight in their own day, but for a time gained greatly in importance thanks to the unexpected adoption of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Soviet empire.

The first German variant
of Western civilization was encouraged by the onset of the First World War. It was predicated on German control of
Mitteleuropa
(Central Europe), especially Austria, on hopes for the military defeat of France and Russia, and on future greatness to be shared with the Anglo-Saxon powers. Its advocates harboured no doubts about Germany’s civilizing mission in Eastern Europe, whilst their rivalry with France, and their rejection of liberalism and ‘the ideas of 1789’, led to a distinction between
Abendlich
(Occidental)
and
Westlich
(Western) civilization. The political formulation of the scheme was most closely associated with Friedrich Naumann. Its demise was assured by Germany’s defeat in 1918, and was mourned in Spengler’s
Der Untergang des Abendlandes
(1918–22). In the sphere of secular culture, the ethos of Mitteleuropa owed much to the influx of a strong Jewish element, which had turned its back on the East and whose assimilation into German life and language coincided with the peak of Germany’s imperial ambitions.
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[WIENER WELT]