Europe: A History (8 page)

The WASP
*
variant
of Western civilization came to fruition through the common interests of the USA and the British Empire as revealed during the First World War. It was predicated on the anglophile tendencies of America’s then élite, on the shared traditions of Protestantism, parliamentary government, and the common law; on opposition to German hegemony in Europe; on the prospect of a special strategic partnership; and on the primacy of the English language, which was now set to become the principal means of international communication. Despite American contempt for the traditional forms of imperialism, it assumed that the USA was the equal of Europe’s imperial powers. Its most obvious cultural monuments are to be found in the ‘Great Books Scheme’ (1921) and in the takeover of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Its strategic implications were formulated, among others, by the ‘father of geopolitics’, Sir Halford Mackinder,
⁶⁹
and found early expression in the Washington Conference of 1922. It was revived at full strength after the USA’s return to Europe in 1941 and the sealing of the Grand Alliance. It was global in scope and ‘mid-Atlantic’ in focus. It inevitably faded after the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of American interests in the Pacific; but it left Britain with a ‘special relationship’, that helped NATO and hindered European unification; and it inspired a characteristic ‘Allied Scheme of History’ which has held sway for the rest of the twentieth century (see below).

The second German variant
, as conceived by the Nazis, revived many features of the first but added some of its own. To the original military and strategic considerations, it added ‘Aryan’ racism, Greater German nationalism, pagan mythology, and anti-Bolshevism. It underlay Germany’s second bid for supremacy in Europe, which began in 1933 and ended in the ruins of 1945. It specifically excluded the Jews.

The American variant
of Western civilization coalesced after the Second World War, around a constellation of countries which accepted the leadership of the USA and which paid court to American ideas of democracy and capitalism. It grew from the older Anglo-Saxon variant, but has outgrown its European origins. It is no longer dependent either on WASP supremacy in American society or on Britain’s pivotal role as America’s agent in Europe. Indeed, its centre of gravity soon moved from the mid-Atlantic to ‘the Pacific Rim’. In addition
to NATO members in Western Europe, it is supported by countries as ‘Western’ as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, South Africa, and Israel, even Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Through forty years of the Cold War, it was fired by perceptions of the worldwide threat of communism. One wonders how long it can continue to call itself‘the West’.

The Euro-variant
of Western civilization emerged in the late 1940s, amidst efforts to forge a new (West) European Community. It was predicated on the existence of the Iron Curtain, on Franco-German reconciliation, on the rejection of overseas empires, on the material prosperity of the EEC, and on the desire to limit the influence of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. It looked back to Charlemagne, and forward to a federal Europe united under the leadership of its founding members. So long as the community confined its principal activities to the economic sphere, it was not incompatible with the Americans’ alternative vision of the West or with American-led NATO, which provided its defence. But the accession of the United Kingdom, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, plans for closer political and monetary union, and the prospect of membership spreading eastwards all combined to cause a profound crisis both of identity and of intent.

From all these examples it appears that Western civilization is essentially an amalgam of intellectual constructs which were designed to further the interests of their authors. It is the product of complex exercises in ideology, of countless identity trips, of sophisticated essays in cultural propaganda. It can be defined by its advocates in almost any way that they think fit. Its elastic geography has been inspired by the distribution of religions, by the demands of liberalism and of imperialism, by the unequal progress of modernization, by the divisive effects of world wars and of the Russian Revolution, and by the self-centred visions of French
philosopher
of Prussian historians, and of British and American statesmen and educators, all of whom have had their reasons to neglect or to despise ‘the East’. In its latest phase it has been immensely strengthened by the physical division of Europe, which lasted from 1947–8 to 1991. On the brink of the twenty-first century, one is entitled to ask in whose interests it may be used in the future.

A set of assumptions recurs time and again. The first maintains that West and East, however defined, have little or nothing in common. The second implies that the division of Europe is justified by natural, unbridgeable differences; the third that the West is superior; the fourth that the West alone deserves the name of Europe. The geographical assumptions are abetted by selective constructs of a more overtly political nature. Every variant of Western civilization is taken to have an important core and a less important periphery. Great powers can always command attention. Failing powers, lesser states, stateless nations, minor cultures, weak economies do not have to be considered even if they occupy a large part of the overall scene.

Four mechanisms have been employed to achieve the necessary effect. By a process of reduction, one can compress European history into a tale which
illustrates the origins of themes most relevant to present concerns. By elimination, one can remove all contradictory material. By anachronism, one can present the facts in categories which suggest that present groupings are permanent fixtures of the historical scene. By the emphases and enthusiasms of language, one can indicate what is to be praised and what deplored. These are the normal mechanisms of propaganda. They devalue the diversity and the shifting patterns of European history, they rule out interpretations suggested by the full historical record; and they turn their unwitting readers into a mutual admiration society.

Anachronism is particularly insidious. By taking transient contemporary divisions, such as the Iron Curtain, as a standing definition of‘West’ or ‘East’, one is bound to distort any description of Europe in earlier periods. Poland is neatly excised from the Renaissance, Hungary from the Reformation, Bohemia from industrialization, Greece from the Ottoman experience. More seriously, one deprives a large part of Europe of its true historical personality, with immeasurable consequences in the miscalculations of diplomats, business people, and academics.

As for the products of European history, which the propagandists of Western civilization are most eager to emphasize, everyone’s list would vary. In the late twentieth century many would like to point to religious toleration, human rights, democratic government, the rule of law, the scientific tradition, social modernization, cultural pluralism, a free market economy and the supreme Christian virtues such as compassion, charity, and respect for the individual. How far these things are truly representative of Europe’s past is a matter for debate. It would not be difficult to draw up a matching list which starts with religious persecution and ends with totalitarian contempt for human life.

If mainstream claims to European supremacy have undoubtedly come out of the West, it should not be forgotten that there has been no shortage of counterclaims from the East. Just as Germany once reacted against the French Enlightenment, so the Orthodox Church, the Russian Empire, the pan-Slav movement, and the Soviet Union have all reacted against the more powerful West, producing theories which claim the truth and future for themselves. They have repeatedly maintained that, although the West may well be rich and powerful, the East is free from moral and ideological corruption.

In the final years of communist rule in Eastern Europe, dissident intellectuals produced their own variation on this theme. They drew a fundamental distinction between the political regimes of the Soviet bloc and the convictions of the people. They felt themselves less infected by the mindless materialism of the West, and argued that communist oppression had strengthened their attachment to Europe’s traditional culture. They looked forward to a time when, in a reunited Europe, they could trade their ‘Europeanness’ for Western food and technology. Here was yet another exercise in wishful thinking.

In determining the difference between Western Civilization and European History, it is no easy task to sift reality from illusion. Having discovered where the
distortions of Western civilization come from, the historian has to put something in their place. The answer would seem to lie in the goal of comprehensiveness, that is, to write of Europe north, east, west, and south; to keep all aspects of human life in mind; to describe the admirable, the deplorable, and the banal.

None the less no historian could deny that there are many real and important lines on the map which have helped to divide Europe into ‘West’ and ‘East’. Probably the most durable is the line between Catholic (Latin) Christianity and Orthodox (Greek) Christianity. It has been in place since the earliest centuries of our era. As shown by events during the collapse of Yugoslavia, it could still be a powerful factor in the affairs of the 1990s. But there are many others. There is the line of the Roman
limes
, dividing Europe into one area with a Roman past and another area without it. There is the line between the western Roman Empire and the eastern Roman Empire. In more modern times there is the Ottoman line, which marked off the Balkan lands which lived for centuries under Muslim rule. Most recently, until 1989, there was the Iron Curtain (see Map 3).

Less certainly, social scientists invent divisions based on the criteria of their own disciplines. Economic historians, for example, see a line separating the industrialized countries of the West from the peasant societies of the East.
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Historical anthropologists have identified a Leningrad-Trieste line, which supposedly separates the zone of nuclear families from that of the extended family,
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Legal historians trace a line separating the lands which adopted forms of Roman law and those which did not. Constitutional historians emphasize the line dividing countries with a liberal, democratic tradition from those without. As mentioned above, political scientists have found a line dividing ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ forms of nationalism.
⁷⁰

All these lines, real and imagined, have profoundly affected the framework within which European history has been conceived and written. Their influence is so strong that some commentators can talk disparagingly of a ‘White Europe’ in the West and a ‘Black Europe’ in the East. The division of Europe into two opposing halves, therefore, is not entirely fanciful. Yet one has to insist that the West-East division has never been fixed or permanent. Moreover, it rides roughshod over many other lines of division of equal importance. It ignores serious differences both within the West and within the East; and it ignores the strong and historic division between North and South. Any competent historian or geographer taking the full range of factors into consideration can only conclude that Europe should be divided, not into two regions, but into five or six.

Similarly, no competent historian is going to deny that Europe in its various guises has always possessed a central core and a series of expanding peripheries. European peoples have migrated far and wide, and one could argue in a very real sense that Europe’s periphery lies along a line joining San Francisco with Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Sydney, and Vladivostok. Yet, once again, there can be no simple definition of what the core consists of. Different disciplines give different analyses. They have based their findings on the geographical Peninsula of Europe; on the ethnic heritage of the European branch of the Indo-European peoples; on
the cultural legacy of Christendom; on the political community which grew from ‘the Concert of Europe’; or, in the hands of the economists, on the growth of a world economy.

For the purposes of comprehensive treatment, however, the important thing about all these definitions is that each and every one contains a variety of regional aspects. Wherever or whatever the core is taken to be, it is linked to the Ebro, the Danube, and the Volga as well as the Rhone and the Rhine; to the Baltic and the Black Seas as well as the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; to the Baits and the Slavs as well as the Germanics and the Celts; to the Greeks as well as the Latins; to the peasantry as well as the proletariat. Despite their differences, all the regions of Europe hold a very great deal in common. They are inhabited by peoples of predominantly Indo-European culture and related kin. They are co-heirs of Christendom. They are connected by every sort of political, economic, and cultural overlap and interaction. Despite their own antagonisms, they share fears and anxieties about influences from outside—whether from America, from Africa, or from Asia. Their fundamental unities are no less obvious than their manifest diversity.

Western supremacy is one of those dogmas which holds good at some points in European history and not at others. It does not apply in the earlier centuries, when, for example, Byzantium was far more advanced than the empire of Charlemagne (which explains why Byzantium is often passed over). It has applied in many domains in recent times, when the West has clearly been richer and more powerful than the East. Yet as many would argue, the criminal conduct of Westerners in the twentieth century has destroyed the moral basis to all former claims.

The title of ‘Europe’, like the earlier label of ‘Christendom’, therefore, can hardly be arrogated by one of its several regions. Eastern Europe is no less European for being poor, or undeveloped, or ruled by tyrants. In many ways, thanks to its deprivations, it has become more European, more attached to the values which affluent Westerners can take for granted. Nor can Eastern Europe be rejected because it is ‘different’. All European countries are different. All
West
European countries are different. And there are important similarities which span the divide. A country like Poland might be very different from Germany or from Britain; but the Polish experience is much closer to that of Ireland or of Spain than many West European countries are to each other. A country like Greece, which some people have thought to be Western by virtue of Homer and Aristotle, was admitted to the European Community, but its formative experiences in modern times were in the Orthodox world under Ottoman rule. They were considerably more distant from those of Western Europe than several countries who found themselves on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain.