INTRODUCTION

History Today

HISTORY can be written at any magnification. One can write the history of the universe on a single page, or the life-cycle of a mayfly in forty volumes. A very senior and distinguished historian, who specializes in the diplomacy of the 1930s, once wrote a book on the Munich Crisis and its consequences (1938–9), a second book on The Last Week of Peace, and a third entitled 31 August 1939. His colleagues waited in vain for a crowning volume to be called One Minute to Midnight1 It is an example of the modern compulsion to know more and more about less and less.

The history of Europe, too, can be written at any degree of magnitude. The French series ĽEvolution de Ľhumanité, whose content was over 90 percent European, was planned after the First World War with no main volumes and several supplementary ones.2 The present work, in contrast, has been commissioned to compress the same material and more between two covers.

Yet no historian can compete with the poets for economy of thought:

If Europe is a Nymph,
Then Naples is her bright-blue eye,
And Warsaw is her heart.
Sebastopol and Azoff,
Petersburg, Mitau, Odessa:
These are the thorns in her feet.
Paris is the head,
London the starched collar,
And Rome—the scapulary.3

For some reason, whilst historical monographs have become ever narrower in scope, general surveys have settled down to a conventional magnification of several hundred pages per century. The Cambridge Mediaeval History (1936–9),for example, covers the period from Constantine to Thomas More in eight volumes.4 The German Handbuch der europâischen Geschichte (1968–79) covers the twelve centuries from Charlemagne to the Greek colonels in seven similarly weighty tomes.5 It is common practice to give greater coverage to the contemporary than to the ancient or the medieval periods. For English readers, a pioneering collection such as Rivington’s eight-volume ‘Periods of European History’ moved from the distant to the recent with ever-increasing magnification—442 years at the rate of 1.16 years per page for Charles Oman’s Dark Ages, 476–918(1919), 104 years at 4.57 pages per year for A. H. Johnson’s Europe in the Sixteenth Century (1897), 84 years at 6.59 pages per year for W. Alison Phillipps’s Modern Europe, 1815–99 (1905).6 More recent collections follow the same pattern.7

Most readers are most interested in the history of their own times. But not all historians are willing to indulge them. ‘“Current Affairs” cannot become “History” until half a century has elapsed,’ runs one opinion, until ‘documents have become available and hindsight [has] cleared men’s minds.’ It is a valid point of view. But it means that any general survey must break off at the point where it starts to be most interesting. Contemporary history is vulnerable to all sorts of political pressure. Yet no educated adult can hope to function efficiently without some grounding in the origins of contemporary problems.9 Four hundred years ago Sir Walter Ralegh, writing under sentence of death, understood the dangers perfectly. ‘Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the Truth too near the heels,’ he wrote, ‘it may haply strike out his teeth.’

Given the complications, one should not be surprised to find that the subject-matter of studies of ‘Europe’ or of ‘European civilization’ varies enormously. Successful attempts to survey the whole of European history without recourse to multiple volumes and multiple authors have been few and far between. H. A. L. Fisher’s A History of Europe (1936) or Eugene Weber’s A Modern History of Europe (1971) are among the rare exceptions. Both of these are extended essays on the dubious concept of ‘Western civilization’ (see below). Probably the most effective of grand surveys are those which have concentrated on one theme, such as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation,13 which looked at Europe’s past through the prism of art and painting, or Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973),14 which made its approach through the history of science and technology. Both were the offshoots of opulent television productions. A more recent essay approached the subject from a materialistic standpoint based on geology and economic resources.15

The value of multi-volume historical surveys is not in question; but they are condemned to remain works of reference, to be consulted, not read. Neither full-time history students nor general readers are going to plough through ten, twenty, or one hundred and ten volumes of general European synthesis before turning to the topics which attract them most. This is unfortunate. The framework of the whole sets parameters and assumptions which reappear without discussion in detailed works on the parts.

In recent years, the urgency of reviewing the general framework of European history has grown in proportion to the fashion for highly specialized, high-magnification studies. A few distinguished exceptions, such as the work of Fernand Braudel,16 may serve to prove the rule. But many historians and students have been drawn into ‘more and more about less and less’ to the point where the wider perspectives are sometimes forgotten. Yet the humanities require all degrees of magnification. History needs to see the equivalent of the planets spinning in space; to zoom in and observe people at ground level, and to dig deep beneath their skins and their feet. The historian needs to use counterparts of the telescope, the microscope, the brain-scanner, and the geological probe.

It is beyond dispute that the study of history has been greatly enriched in recent years by new methods, new disciplines, and new fields. The advent of computers has opened up a whole range of quantitative investigations hitherto beyond the historian’s reach, [RENTES] Historical research has greatly benefited from the use of techniques and concepts derived from the social and human sciences, [ARICIA] [CEDROS] [CHASSE] [CONDOM] [EPIC] [FIESTA] [GENES] [GOTTHARD] [LEONARDO] [LIETUVA] [NOVGOROD] [PLOVUM] [PROPAGANDA] [SAMPHIRE] [VENDANGE.] A trend pioneered by the French Annales school from 1929 onwards has now won almost universal acclaim, [ANNALES] New academic fields such as oral history, historical psychiatry (or ‘psycho-history’), or family history, or the history of manners, are now well established, [BOGEY] [MORES] [SOUND] [ZADRUGA] At the same time, a number of subjects reflecting contemporary concerns have been given a fresh historical dimension. Anti-racism, environment, gender, sex, Semitism, class, and peace are topics which occupy a sizeable part of current writing and debate. Notwithstanding the overtones of ‘political correctness’, all serve to enrich the whole, [BLACK ATHENA] [CAUCASIA] [ECO] [FEMME] [NOBEL] [POGROM][SPARTACUS]

None the less, the multiplication of fields, and the corresponding increase in learned publications, have inevitably created severe strains. Professional historians despair of ‘keeping up with the literature’. They are tempted to plunge ever deeper into the alleyways of ultra-specialization, and to lose the capacity of communicating with the general public. Much specialization has proceeded to the detriment of narrative history. Some specialists have worked on the assumption that the broad outlines need no revision: that the only route to new discovery lies in digging deep on a narrow front. Others, intent on the exploration of ‘deep structures’, have turned their backs on ‘the surface’ of history altogether. They concentrate instead on the analysis of ‘long-term, underlying trends’. Like some of their confrères in literary criticism, who hold the literal meaning of a text to be worthless, some historians have seen fit to abandon the study of conventional ‘facts’. They produce students who have no intention of learning what happened how, where, and when.

The decline of factual history has been accompanied, especially in the classroom, with the rise of ‘empathy’, that is, of exercises designed to stimulate the historical imagination. Imagination is undoubtedly a vital ingredient of historical study. But empathetic exercises can only be justified if accompanied by a modicum of knowledge. In a world where fictional literature is also under threat as a respectable source of historical information, students are sometimes in danger of having nothing but their teacher’s prejudices on which to build an awareness of the past.17

The divorce between history and literature has been particularly regrettable. When the ‘structuralists’ in the humanities were overtaken in some parts of the profession by the ‘deconstructionists’, both historians and literary critics looked set not only to exclude all conventional knowledge but also to exclude each other. Fortunately, as the wilder aspects of deconstructionism are deconstructed, there are hopes that these esoteric rifts can be healed.18 There is absolutely no reason why the judicious historian should not use literary texts, critically assessed, or why literary critics should not use historical knowledge, [GATTOPARDO] [KONARMYA]

It would now seem, therefore, that the specialists may have overplayed their hand. There has always been a fair division of labour between the industrious worker bees of the historical profession and the queen bees, the grands simplifica-teurs, who bring order to the labours of the hive. There will be no honey if the workers take over completely. Nor can one accept that the broad oudines of‘general history’ have been fixed for all time. They too shift according to fashion: and those fixed fifty or one hundred years ago are ripe for revision (see below). Equally, the study of the geological strata of history must never be divorced from doings on the ground. In the search for ‘trends’, ‘societies’, ‘economies’, or ‘cultures’, one should not lose sight of men, women, and children.

Specialization has opened the door to unscrupulous political interests. Since no one is judged competent to offer an opinion beyond their own particular mine-shaft, beasts of prey have been left to prowl across the prairie unchecked. The combination of solid documentary research harnessed to blatantly selective topics, which a priori exclude a full review of all relevant factors, is specially vicious. As A. J. P. Taylor is reputed to have said of one such work, ‘it is ninety per cent true and one hundred per cent useless’.19

The prudent response to these developments is to argue for pluralism of interpretation and for ‘safety in numbers’: that is, to encourage a wide variety of special views in order to counter the limitations of each and every one. One single viewpoint is risky. But fifty or sixty viewpoints—or three hundred—can together be counted on to construct a passable composite. ‘There is no one Truth, but as many truths as there are sensitivities.’

In Chapter II, below, mention is made of Archimedes’ famous solution of the problem of π, that is, of calculating the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Archimedes knew that the length of the circumference must lie somewhere between the sum of the sides of a square drawn outside the circle and the sum of the sides of a square drawn inside the circle (see diagram). Unable to work it out directly, he hit on the idea of finding an approximation by adding up the length of a 99-sided polygon contained within the circle. The more sides he gave to his polygon, the nearer it would come to the shape of the circle. Similarly, one is tempted to think, the larger the number of sources of illumination, the smaller the gap will be between past reality and historians’ attempts to reconstruct it.

Elsewhere, the impossible task of the historian has been likened to that of a photographer, whose static two-dimensional picture can never deliver an accurate representation of the mobile, three-dimensional world. ‘The historian, like the camera, always lies.’ If this simile were to be developed, one could say that photographers can greatly increase the verisimilitude of their work—where verisimilitude is the aim—by multiplying the number of pictures of the same subject. A large number of shots taken from different angles, and with different lenses, filters, and films, can collectively reduce the gross selectivity of the single shot. As movie-makers discovered, a large number of frames taken in sequence creates a passable imitation of time and motion. By the same token, ‘history in the round’ can only be reconstructed if the historian collates the results of the widest possible range of sources. The effect will never be perfect; but every different angle and every different technique contributes to the illumination of the parts which together make up the whole.

Distortion is a necessary characteristic of all sources of information. Absolute objectivity is absolutely unattainable. Every technique has its strengths and its weaknesses. The important thing is to understand where the value and the distortions of each technique lie, and to arrive at a reasonable approximation. Critics who object to the historian’s use of poetry, or sociology or astrology, or whatever, on the grounds that such sources are ‘subjective’ or ‘partial’ or ‘unscientific’, are stating the obvious. It is as though one could object to X-ray pictures of the skeleton, or ultra-sound scans of the womb, on the grounds that they give a pretty poor image of the human face. Medical doctors use every known device for prying open the secrets of the human mind and body. Historians need a similar range of equipment for penetrating the mysteries of the past.

Documentary history, which has enjoyed a long innings, is simultaneously one of the most valuable and the most risky lines of approach. Treated with incaution, it is open to gross forms of misrepresentation; and there are huge areas of past experience which it is incapable of recording. Yet no one can deny that historical documents remain one of the most fruitful veins of knowledge, [HOSSBACH] [METRYKA] [SMOLENSK]

Lord Acton, founder of the Cambridge school of history, once predicted a specially deleterious effect of documentary history. It tends to give priority to the amassing of evidence over the historian’s interpretation of evidence. [We live] ‘in a documentary age,’ Acton wrote some ninety years ago, ‘which will tend to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing.’

Generally speaking, historians have given more thought to their own debates than to the problems encountered by their long-suffering readers. The pursuit of scientific objectivity has done much to reduce earlier flights of fancy, and to separate fact from fiction. At the same time it has reduced the number of instruments which historians can use to transmit their discoveries. For it is not sufficient for the good historian merely to establish the facts and to muster the evidence. The other half of the task is to penetrate the readers’ minds, to do battle with all the distorting perceptors with which every consumer of history is equipped. These perceptors include not only all five physical senses but also a complex of pre-set intellectual circuits, varying from linguistic terminology, geographical names, and symbolic codes to political opinions, social conventions, emotional disposition, religious beliefs, visual memory, and traditional historical knowledge. Every consumer of history has a store of previous experience through which all incoming information about the past must be filtered.

For this reason, effective historians must devote as much care to transmitting their information as to collecting and shaping it. In this part of their work, they share many of the same preoccupations as poets, writers, and artists. They must keep an eye on the work of all the others who help to mould and to transmit our impressions of the past—the art historians, the musicologists, the museologues, the archivists, the illustrators, the cartographers, the diarists and biographers, the sound-recordists, the film-makers, the historical novelists, even the purveyors of ‘bottled medieval air’. At every stage the key quality, as first defined by Vico, is that of ‘creative historical imagination’. Without it, the work of the historian remains a dead letter, an unbroadcast message, [PRADO] [SONATA] [SOVKINO]

In this supposedly scientific age, the imaginative side of the historical profession has undoubtedly been downgraded. The value of unreadable academic papers and of undigested research data is exaggerated. Imaginative historians such as Thomas Carlyle, have not simply been censured for an excess of poetic licence. They have been forgotten. Yet Carlyle’s convictions on the relationship of history and poetry are at least worthy of consideration.23 It is important to check and to verify, as Carlyle sometimes failed to do. But ‘telling it right’ is also important. All historians must tell their tale convincingly, or be ignored.

‘Postmodernism’ has been a pastime in recent years for all those who give precedence to the study of historians over the study of the past. It refers to a fashion which has followed in the steps of the two French gurus, Foucault and Derrida, and which has attacked both the accepted canon of historical knowledge and the principles of conventional methodology. In one line of approach, it has sought to demolish the value of documentary source materials in the way that literary deconstructionists have sought to dismantle the ‘meaning’ of literary texts. Elsewhere it has denounced ‘the tyranny of facts’ and the ‘authoritarian ideologies’ which are thought to lurk behind every body of information. At the extreme, it holds that all statements about past reality are ‘coercive’. And the purveyors of that coercion include all historians who argue for ‘a commitment to human values’. In the eyes of its critics, it has reduced history to ‘the pleasure of the historian’; and it has become an instrument for politicized radicals with an agenda of their own. In its contempt for prescribed data, it hints that knowing something is more dangerous than knowing nothing.24

Yet the phenomenon has raised more problems than it solves. Its enthusiasts can only be likened to those lugubrious academics who, instead of telling jokes, write learned tomes on the analysis of humour. One also wonders whether conventional liberal historiography can properly be defined as ‘modernist’; and whether ‘post-modernist’ ought not to be reserved for those who are trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. It is all very well to deride the authority of all and sundry; but it only leads in the end to the deriding of Derrida. It is only a matter of time before the deconstructionists are deconstructed by their own techniques. ‘We have survived the “Death of God” and the “Death of Man”. We will surely survive “the Death of History” … and the death of postmodernism.’

But to return to the question of magnification. Any narrative which chronicles the march of history over long periods is bound to be differently designed from the panorama which co-ordinates all the features relevant to a particular stage or moment. The former, chronological approach has to emphasize innovative events and movements which, though untypical at the time of their first appearance, will gain prominence at a later date. The latter, synchronic approach has to combine both the innovative and the traditional, and their interactions. The first risks anachronism, the second immobility.

Early modern Europe has served as one of the laboratories for these problems. Once dominated by historians exploring the roots of humanism, protestantism, capitalism, science, and the nation-state, it then attracted the attention of specialists who showed, quite correctly, how elements of the medieval and pagan worlds had survived and thrived. The comprehensive historian must somehow strike a balance between the two. In describing the sixteenth century, for example, it is as misguided to write exclusively about witches, alchemists, and fairies as it once was to write almost exclusively about Luther, Copernicus, or the rise of the English Parliament. Comprehensive history must take note of the specialists’ debate, but it must equally find a way to rise above their passing concerns.

Concepts of Europe

‘Europe’ is a relatively modern idea. It gradually replaced the earlier concept of ‘Christendom’ in a complex intellectual process lasting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The decisive period, however, was reached in the decades on either side of 1700 after generations of religious conflict. In that early phase of the Enlightenment (see Chapter VIII) it became an embarrassment for the divided community of nations to be reminded of their common Christian identity; and ‘Europe’ filled the need for a designation with more neutral connotations. In the West, the wars against Louis XIV inspired a number of publicists who appealed for common action to settle the divisions of the day. The much-imprisoned Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), son of an Anglo-Dutch marriage and founder of Pennsylvania, had the distinction of advocating both universal toleration and a European parliament. The dissident French abbé, Charles Castel de St Pierre (1658–1743), author of Projet d’une paix perpétuelle (1713), called for a confederation of European powers to guarantee a lasting peace. In the East, the emergence of the Russian Empire under Peter the Great required radical rethinking of the international framework. The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 provided the last major occasion when public reference to the Respublica Christiana, the ‘Christian Commonwealth’, was made.

After that, the awareness of a European as opposed to a Christian community gained the upper hand. Writing in 1751, Voltaire described Europe as:

a kind of great republic divided into several states, some monarchical, the others mixed… but all corresponding with one another. They all have the same religious foundation, even if divided into several confessions. They all have the same principle of public law and politics, unknown in other parts of the world.26

Twenty years later, Rousseau announced: ‘There are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, or even English, but only Europeans.’ According to one judgement, the final realization of the ‘idea of Europe’ took place in 1796, when Edmund Burke wrote: ‘No European can be a complete exile in any part of Europe.’ Even so, the geographical, cultural, and political parameters of the European community have always remained open to debate. In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unintelligible poems entitled ‘Europe: A Prophecy’, he illustrated it with a picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens and holding a pair of compasses.28

Most of Europe’s outline is determined by its extensive sea-coasts. But the delineation of its land frontier was long in the making. The dividing line between Europe and Asia had been fixed by the ancients from the Hellespont to the River Don, and it was still there in medieval times. A fourteenth-century encyclopedist could produce a fairly precise definition:

‘Europe is said to be a third of the whole world, and has its name from Europa, daughter of Agenor, King of Libya. Jupiter ravished this Europa, and brought her to Crete, and called most of the land after her Europa… Europe begins on the river Tanay [Don] and stretches along the Northern Ocean to the end of Spain. The east and south part rises from the sea called Pontus [Black Sea] and is all joined to the Great Sea [the Mediterranean] and ends at the islands of Cadiz [Gibraltar]…’

Pope Pius II (Enea Piccolomini) began his early Treatise on the State of Europe (1458) with a description of Hungary, Transylvania, and Thrace, which at that juncture were under threat from the Turks.

Neither the ancients nor the medievals had any close knowledge of the easterly reaches of the European Plain, several sections of which were not permanently settled until the eighteenth century. So it was not until 1730 that a Swedish officer in the Russian service called Strahlenberg suggested that Europe’s boundary should be pushed back from the Don to the Ural Mountains and the Ural River. Sometime in the late eighteenth century, the Russian government erected a boundary post on the trail between Yekaterinburg and Tyumen to mark the frontier of Europe and Asia. From then on the gangs of Tsarist exiles, who were marched to Siberia in irons, created the custom of kneeling by the post and of scooping up a last handful of European earth. ‘There is no other boundary post in the whole world’, wrote one observer, ‘which has seen … so many broken hearts.’ By 1833, when Volger’s Handbuch der Geographie was published, the idea of’Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ had gained general acceptance.31

None the less, there is nothing sacred about the reigning convention. The extension of Europe to the Urals was accepted as a result of the rise of the Russian Empire. But it has been widely criticized, especially by analytical geographers. The frontier on the Urals had little validity in the eyes of Halford Mackinder, of Arnold Toynbee, for whom environmental factors had primacy, or of the Swiss geographer, J. Reynold, who wrote that ‘Russia is the geographical antithesis of Europe’. The decline of Russian power could well invoke a revision—in which case the views of a Russian-born Oxford professor about a ‘tidal Europe’, whose frontiers ebb and flow, would be borne out.32

Geographical Europe has always had to compete with notions of Europe as a cultural community, and in the absence of common political structures, European civilization could only be defined by cultural criteria. Special emphasis is usually placed on the seminal role of Christianity, a role which did not cease when the label of Christendom was dropped.

Broadcasting to a defeated Germany in 1945, the poet T. S. Eliot expounded the view that European civilization stands in mortal peril after repeated dilutions of the Christian core. He described ‘the closing of Europe’s mental frontiers’ that had occurred during the years which had seen the nation-states assert themselves to the full. ‘A kind of cultural autarchy followed inevitably on political and economic autarchy,’ he said. He stressed the organic nature of culture: ‘Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature …’ He stressed the interdependence of the numerous sub-cultures within the European family. What he called cultural ‘trade’ was the organism’s lifeblood. And he stressed the special duty of men of letters. Above all, he stressed the centrality of the Christian tradition, which subsumes within itself’the legacy of Greece, of Rome, and of Israel’:

‘The dominant feature in creating a common culture between peoples, each of which has its own distinct culture, is religion…. I am talking about the common tradition of Christianity which has made Europe what it is, and about the common cultural elements which this common Christianity has brought with it It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true; and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all… depend on [the Christian heritage] for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith.’

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 circles34 (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.’

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 vostochnikior ‘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.

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 withWashington 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.

During the seventy-five years when Europe was divided by the longest of its civil wars, the concept of European unity could only be kept alive by people of the widest cultural and historical horizons. Especially during the forty years of the Cold War, it took the greatest intellectual courage and stamina to resist not only persistent nationalism but also the parochial view of a Europe based exclusively on the prosperous West. Fortunately, a few individuals of the necessary stature did exist, and have left their legacy in writings which will soon be sounding prophetic.

One such person was Hugh Seton-Watson (1916–84), elder son of the pioneer of East European studies in Britain, R. W. Seton-Watson (1879–1951). As a boy he played at the knee of Thomas Masaryk; he spoke Serbo-Croat, Hungarian, and Romanian as effortlessly as French, German, and Italian. Born in London, where he became Professor of Russian History at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, he usually described himself as a Scot. He never succumbed to the conventional wisdom of his day. He set out his testament on the concept of Europe in a paper published posthumously. His argument stressed three fundamental points—the need for a European ideal, the complementary role of the East and the West European nations, and the pluralism of Europe’s cultural tradition. Each deserves a quotation of some length.

Seton-Watson’s first thunderbolt was directed at the low horizons of those who expected European unity to be built on nothing more than the security interests of NATO or the economic interests of the EEC:

Let us not underrate the need for a positive common cause, for something more exciting than the price of butter, more constructive than the allocation of defence contracts—a need for an European mystique.44

The second shaft was directed at those who sought to exclude the East Europeans in the name of Western civilization:

The European cultural community includes the peoples living beyond Germany and Italy… something in no way annulled by the fact that they cannot today belong to an all-European economic or political community … Nowhere in the world is there so widespread a belief in the reality, and the importance, of a European cultural community, as in the countries lying between the EEC and the Soviet Union… To these peoples, the idea of Europe is that of a community of cultures to which the specific culture or sub-culture of each belongs. None of them can survive without Europe, or Europe without them. This is of course a myth… a sort of chemical compound of truth and fantasy. The absurdities of the fantasy need not obscure the truth.45

The third shaft was aimed at those who harbour a simplistic or monolithic view of European culture:

The interweaving of the notions of Europe and of Christendom is a fact of History which even the most brilliant sophistry cannot undo… But it is no less true that there are strands in European culture that are not Christian: the Roman, the Hellenic, arguably the Persian, and (in modern centuries) the Jewish. Whether there is also a Muslim strand is more difficult to say.46

The conclusion defines the purpose and value of European culture:

[European culture] is not an instrument of capitalism or socialism; it is not a monopoly possession of EEC Eurocrats or of anyone else. To owe allegiance to it, is not to claim superiority over other cultures… The unity of European culture is simply the end-product of 3000 years of labour by our diverse ancestors. It is a heritage which we spurn at our peril, and of which it would be a crime to deprive younger and future generations. Rather it is our task to preserve and renew it.47

Seton-Watson was one of a select band of lonely runners who carried the torch of European unity through the long night of Europe’s eclipse. He was one of the minority of Western scholars who bestrode the barriers between East and West, and who saw Soviet communism for what it was. He died on the eve of the events which were to vindicate so many of his judgements. His intellectual legacy is the one which the present work is honoured to follow most closely.48

The writing of European history could not proceed until the concept of Europe had stabilized and the historian’s art had assumed an analytical turn. But it was certainly well under way in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The earliest effective attempt at synthesis was by the French writer and statesman Francois Guizot (1787–1874). His Histoire de la cvilisation en Europe (1828–30) was based on lectures presented at the Sorbonne.

Thanks to the problems of definition, most historians would agree that the subject-matter of European history must concentrate on the shared experiences which are to be found in each of the great epochs of Europe’s past. Most would also agree that it was in late antiquity that European history ceased to be an assortment of unrelated events within the given Peninsula and began to take on the characteristics of a more coherent civilizational process. Central to this process was the merging of the classical and the barbarian worlds, and the resultant assertion of a consciously Christian community—in other words, the founding of Christendom. Later on, all manner of schisms, rebellions, expansions, evolutions, and fissiparities took place, giving rise to the exceedingly diverse and pluralistic phenomenon which is Europe today. No two lists of the main constituents of European civilization would ever coincide. But many items have always featured prominently: from the roots of the Christian world in Greece, Rome, and Judaism to modern phenomena such as the Enlightenment, modernization, romanticism, nationalism, liberalism, imperialism, totalitarianism. Nor should one forget the sorry catalogue of wars, conflicts, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the tale. Perhaps the most apposite analogy is the musical one. European historians are not tracing the story of a simple libretto. They are out to recapture a complicated score, with all its cacophony of sounds and its own inimitable codes of communication: ‘Europe … has been likened to an orchestra. There are certain moments when certain of the instruments play a minor role, or even fall silent altogether. But the ensemble exists.’ There is much to be said also for the contention that Europe’s musical language has provided one of the most universal strands of the European tradition, [MOUSIKE]

None the less, since Europe has never been politically united, diversity has evidently provided one of its most enduring characteristics. Diversity can be observed in the great range of reactions to each of the shared experiences. There is lasting diversity in the national states and cultures which persist within European civilization as a whole. There is diversity in the varying rhythms of power and of decline. Guizot, the pioneer, was not alone in thinking of diversity as Europe’s prime characteristic.

Eurocentrism

European history-writing cannot be accused of Eurocentrism simply for focusing its attention on European affairs, that is, for keeping to the subject. Eurocentrism is a matter of attitude, not content. It refers to the traditional tendency of European authors to regard their civilization as superior and self-contained, and to neglect the need for taking non-European viewpoints into consideration. Nor is it surprising or regrettable to find that European history has mainly been written by Europeans and for Europeans. Everybody feels the urge to discover their roots. Unfortunately, European historians have frequently approached their subject as Narcissus approached the pool, looking only for a reflection of his own beauty. Guizot has had many imitators since he identified European civilization with the wishes of the Almighty. ‘European civilisation has entered … into the eternal truth, into the plan of Providence,’ he reflected. ‘It progresses according to the intentions of God.’ For him, and for many like him, Europe was the promised land and Europeans the chosen people.

Many historians have continued in the same self-congratulatory vein, and have argued, often quite explicitly, that the European record provides a model for all other peoples to follow. Until recently, they paid scant regard to the interaction of European culture with that of its neighbours in Africa, India, or Islam. A prominent American scholar, writing in 1898, who traced European civilization primarily to the work of ‘Teutonic tribes’, took it as axiomatic that Europe was the universal model:

The heirs of the ancient world were the Teutonic tribes, who … gradually formed a new uniform civilisation on the foundation of the classic, and in recent times this has begun to be worldwide and to bring into close relationship and under common influences all the inhabitants of the earth.51

When Oxford University Press last dared to publish a one-volume History of Europe, the authors opened their preface with a similar choice sentiment:

Although a number of grand civilisations have existed in various ages, it is the civilisation of Europe which has made the deepest and widest impression, and which now (as developed on both sides of the Atlantic) sets the standard for all the peoples of the earth.52

This line of thought and mode of presentation has steadily been losing its attractions, especially for non-Europeans.

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is sometimes regarded as a central figure of the Eurocentric tradition, even as ‘an apologist for the civilizing mission of British colonial expansion’. His famous Ballad of East and West was composed with India in mind:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat.

But there is neither East nor West, Border, Breed nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the Earth.53

Kipling shared little of the arrogance which was usually associated with the European attitudes of his day. He did not shrink from the phraseology of his day concerning our ‘dominion over palm and pine’ or ‘the lesser breeds without the Law’. Yet he was strongly attracted to Indian culture—hence his wonderful Jungle Books—and he was a deeply religious and humble man:

The tumult and the shouting dies—

The captains and the kings depart—

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget, lest we forget.54

These words are a standing rebuke to anyone who would lump all ‘Western imperialists’ into the same gang of arrogants.

Opposition to Eurocentrism comes at present from four main sources. In North America it has emerged from that part of the Black community, and their political sympathizers, who are rebelling against an educational system allegedly dominated by ‘white supremacist values’, in other words by the glorification of European culture. It has found expression in the Black Muslim movement and, in scholarship, in a variety of Black studies (Afrology) directed against conventional American academia.55 In its most militant form, it aims to replace Eurocentrism with Afrocentricity—’the belief in the centrality of Africans in post-modern history’.56 This is based on the contention that European civilization has ‘stolen’ the birthright of mankind, and of Africans in particular.57 In the world of Islam, especially in Iran, similar opposition is mounted by religious fundamentalists, who see ‘the West’ as the domain of Satan. Elsewhere in the Third World, it is espoused by intellectuals, often of a Marxian complexion, who regard Eurocentric views as part and parcel of capitalist ideology.58 In Europe it is widespread, though not always well articulated, in a generation which, when they paused to think, have been thoroughly ashamed of many of their elders’ attitudes.

Map 3-East-West Fault Lines in Europe

One way forward for historians will be to pay more attention to the interaction of European and non-European peoples, [GONCALVEZ] Another is to use non-European sources for the elucidation of European problems, [RUS’] A third is to insist on honest comparisons with Europe’s neighbours—comparisons which in many aspects and instances will not be in Europe’s favour. Above all, it is essential to modulate the tone. For the last hundred years the conduct of those ‘Teutonic tribes’, and of other Europeans, has not been much to boast of.

In the end, like all human activities, the European record must be judged on its own merits. It cannot be fairly represented in a list of‘Great Books’, which selects whatever is most genial and ignores the dross (see below). It can be viewed with admiration or with disgust, or with a mixture of both. The opinion of one Frenchman strikes an optimistic note: ‘After all, crime and western history are not the same thing. Whatever [the West] has given to the world by far exceeds that which it has done against various societies and individuals.’ Not everyone would agree.

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’.60 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.61 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.62

The subject, in fact, is defined as ‘western Europe (Latin Christendom), the terms being more or less analogous’.63 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.64

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).65

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.66

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.67

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.68 [WIENER WELT]

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. [CAP-AG] Historical anthropologists have identified a Leningrad-Trieste line, which supposedly separates the zone of nuclear families from that of the extended family, [ZADRUGA] 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.

The really vicious quality shared by almost all accounts of‘Western civilization’ lies in the fact that they present idealized, and hence essentially false, pictures of past reality. They extract everything that might be judged genial or impressive; and they filter out anything that might appear mundane or repulsive. It is bad enough that they attribute all the positive things to the ‘West’, and denigrate the ‘East’. But they do not even give an honest account of the West: judging from some of the textbooks, one gets the distinct impression that everyone in the ‘West’ was a genius, a philosopher, a pioneer, a democrat, or a saint, that it was a world inhabited exclusively by Platos and Marie Curies. Such hagiography is no longer credible. The established canon of European Culture is desperately in need of revision. Overblown talk about ‘Western civilization’ threatens to render the European legacy, which has much to be said in its favour, disreputable.

In the United States the debate about Western civilization has centred on the changing requirements of American education. In recent years, it seems to have been driven by the needs of a multiethnic and multicultural society, and by concern for Americans whose origins lie neither in Europe nor in Europe’s Christian-based culture. Generally speaking, it has not re-examined the picture of the European heritage as marketed by the likes of the ‘Great Books Scheme’; and it has not been disturbed by demands from Americans of European descent for a fairer introduction to Europe. Where courses on Western civilization have been abandoned, they have been rejected for their alleged Eurocentrism, not for their limited vision of Europe. In very many cases, they have been replaced by courses on world history, which is judged better suited to America’s contemporary understanding of the ‘West’.

One well-publicized reaction against the shortcomings of‘Western civilization’ was to abolish it. Stanford University in California took the lead in 1989, instituting a ‘Culture, Ideas and Values’ course in place of the former foundation course in ‘Western Culture’ that had hitherto been compulsory for all freshpersons. According to reports, the university authorities surrendered to chants of‘Hey-ho, Hey-ho, Western Culture has to go!’ Readings in Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus, Dante, Luther, Aquinas, More, Galileo, Locke, and Mill were replaced by excerpts from Rigoberta Manchu, Frantz Fanon, Juan Rulfo, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neale Hurston (none of whom suffered the stigma of being ‘Dead White European Males’).71 This event was excessively satirized. Stanford can take some pride from seeing a problem and trying to tackle it. The trouble is that the cure may prove worse than the malady. In theory, there is much to be said for introducing ‘mul-ticulturalism’ and ‘ethnic diversity’ into American academe. It is unfortunate that there is no known Tibetan Tacitus, no African Aquinas, no Mexican Mill for students to study. Indeed, there is nothing very much in any of the recorded non-European cultures that might illustrate the roots of America’s supposedly liberal traditions.72

At the time of the furore over Stanford’s program on Western Culture, its parallel courses on European History escaped the spotlight. But they were cast in the same mould. The choice of 39 set readings for the program in ‘Europe I, II, and III’, for example, revealed a brand of selectivity with far-reaching implications. Apart from Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), there was no single author from Eastern Europe. (Conrad was included for his novels about Africa, such as Heart of Darkness, not for his writings on Eastern Europe.) Apart from Matthew Arnold, there was no single author with any sort of connection with the Celtic world. (Arnold was included as English critic and poet, not as Professor of Celtic Literature.) There was no single Italian author more modern than Baldassare Castiglione, who died in 1528. There was one novelist from South Africa, but no one from Ireland, no one from Scandinavia, no one but Germans from central Europe, no one from the Balkan countries, no one from Russia. Most curiously, from a history department, there was no historical text more modern than one from Herodotus.73

To be fair, selection is always necessary, always difficult, and always unsatisfactory: Stanford’s quandary is not unique. But the particular form of selection practised by one of the world’s most expensive seats of learning is indicative of wider concerns. It purports to introduce ‘Europe’, but introduces only a small corner of the European continent. It purports to introduce ‘the Western Heritage’—the title of its textbook—but it leaves much of the West untouched. It purports to give emphasis to Europe’s ‘literary and philosophical aspects’, but emphasises only a partial slice of European culture. It mentions neither Joyce nor Yeats, neither Andersen, Ibsen, nor Kirkegaard, neither Kafka, Koestler, nor Kundera, neither Solzhenitzyn nor even Dostoevsky. No Trades Description Act could ever sanction a product whose list of ingredients lacked so many of the basic items.

No zoo can contain all the animals. But, equally, no self-respecting collection can confine itself to monkeys, vultures, or snakes. No impartial zoologist could possibly approve of a reptile house which masquerades as a safari park and which contains only twelve crocodiles (of both sexes), eleven lizards, one dodo, and fifteen sloths. In any case, Stanford was hardly alone. By 1991, the National Endowment for the Humanities was quoted with an assessment that students could graduate from 78 per cent of US colleges and universities without ever taking a course in Western civilization.74 One suspects, in fact, that the problem lies less in the subject-matter of European studies than in the outlook of those who present them. Many American courses, like the Great Books Scheme, were directed at a particular generation of young Americans, who were desperately eager to learn a simplified version of the lost heritage of their immigrant forebears. Nowadays, they obviously need to be modified to match a new generation, with different perceptions. Readings about Europe might arouse less resentment if they were laced with some of its less savoury aspects. Intelligent students can always sense when something is concealed, when they are not expected to understand, but to admire.

Some of America’s minorities may indeed have a case for contesting Eurocentrism. If so, America’s majority, who are overwhelmingly European in their origins, may choose to challenge ‘Western civilization’ on other grounds. Many of America’s most numerous communities—Irish, Spanish, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, Greek, Jewish—came from regions of Europe which find little place in existing surveys of ‘Western civilization’; and they have every reason to expect an improvement.

The great paradox of contemporary American intellectual life, however, lies in the fact that the virtues most prized by the American version of Western civilization—tolerance, freedom of thought, cultural pluralism—now seem to be under attack from the very people who have benefited from them most. Critics have observed ‘the Closing of the American Mind’.75 Self-styled ‘liberals’ have been shown to be pursuing an ‘Illiberal Education’.76 Sixty years on, the author of the Great Books Scheme, still proud of‘The Opening of the American Mind’, prefers to lambast his colleagues at the University of Chicago rather than to modify his prescription.77 The wrangles may be over-reported. But America’s historic drive towards a unified language and culture looks to be losing out to those lobbies and pressure groups who shout loudest.

It is an understatement to say that history did not quite work out as the devotees of‘Western civilization’ would have wished. All of them were believers in one or another form of European domination. Spengler was as right to record the West’s decline as he was wrong to believe in the future supremacy of Russia. But the ideas linger on, and their final defeat has not yet occurred. For most Europeans, they have lost their former vitality. They have been shattered by two World Wars and by the loss of overseas empires. They will obviously make their last stand in the USA.

For only in the USA do the true well-springs of‘Western civilization’ still flow. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, the USA is the sole heir of European imperialism, and has inherited many of its attitudes. It may not be an empire of the old sort; but it has been left with ‘the white man’s burden’. Like imperial Europe before it, the USA struggles to police the world, whilst battling the ethnic and racial conflicts within its own borders. Like Europe today, it is in urgent need of a unifying mystique to outreach the dwindling attractions of mere democracy and consumerism. Unlike Europe, it has not known the lash of war on its own face within living memory.

An absolute majority of Americans have European roots. They have adopted and adapted the English language and the European culture of the founding fathers, often in creative ways. Yet those Euro-Americans will never draw their main inspiration from Asia or Africa, or from studying the world in general. In order to cope with themselves, they have a profound need to come to terms with Europe’s heritage. In order to do so successfully, they must liberate their view of Europe’s past from its former limitations. If the European example shows anything at all, it shows that belief in the divisive propositions of ‘Western civilization’ is a sure road to disaster.

The greatest minds in Europe’s past have had no truck with the artificial divorce of East and West:

Gottes ist der Orient!
Gottes ist der Okzident!
Nord- und südliches Gelande
Ruht im Frieden seiner Hände.

(God’s is the East; God’s is the West. Northern and southern lands rest in the peace of His hands.)

National Histories

In modern times, almost every European country has devoted greater energy and resources to the study of its own national history than to the study of Europe as a whole. For reasons that are very understandable, the parts have been made to seem more significant than the whole. Linguistic barriers, political interests, and the line of least resistance have helped to perpetuate the reigning citadels of national historiography, and the attitudes which accompany them.

The problem is particularly acute in Great Britain, where the old routines have never been overturned by political collapse or national defeat. Until recently, British history has generally been taken to be a separate subject from European history—requiring a separate sort of expertise, separate courses, separate teachers, and separate textbooks. Traditional insularity is a fitting partner to the other widespread convention that equates British History with English History. (Only the most mischievous of historians would bother to point out that his English History referred only to England.)Politicians have accepted the misplaced equation without a thought. In 1962, when opposing British entry to the European Economic Community, the leader of HM Opposition felt able to declare quite wrongly that such a step would spell ‘the end of a thousand years of British history’.80 The English are not only insular; most of them have never been taught the basic history of their own islands.

Similar attitudes prevail in universities. Honourable exceptions no doubt exist; but Britain’s largest history faculty did not start teaching ‘British history’ until 1974; and even then the content remained almost entirely English. The students rarely learn anything about Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. When they take examinations in ‘European history’, they are faced with a few optional questions about Eastern Europe and none about Britain. The net result can only be a view of the world where everything beyond England is alien.81 The basic, and fallacious, assumption, writes one dissenter, ‘is that everything important in British History can be explained in terms of British causes’. Or again: ‘The deeply ingrained and undiminished segregation of “British”—in reality English—history from European history … creates a narrowness of vision that has become a powerfully constricting cultural factor.’ According to another harsh critic, a combination of traditional structures, arcane research, and excessive professionalization has reduced British history to ‘incoherence’. ‘At the universities as in the schools,’ he wrote before sensibly emigrating, ‘the belief that history provides an education … has all but vanished.’

Cultural history as taught at Britain’s universities often clings to a narrow, national focus. There is a marked preference for the old-style study of national roots, over broad international comparisons. At the University of Oxford, for example, the one and only compulsory subject for all students of the English Faculty remains the Anglo-Saxon text of Beowulf.84 Until very recently in Oxford’s Faculty of Modern History (51c), the one and only compulsory reading was the Latin text of the seventh century, ‘History of the English Church and People’ by the Venerable Bede.85

Curiosities of the same order no doubt exist in all countries. In Germany, for instance, universities suffer from the ramifications of the Humboldtian principle of ‘academic freedom’. German history professors are reputedly free to teach whatever they like. German history students are free to learn whatever they choose from the menu served up by their professors. In most universities, the only rule is that each student must choose at least one course from ancient history, one from medieval, and one from modern. At times of great pressure from the German state, therefore, professors sympathetic to official ideology were free to load the menu with a heavy dose of German national history. (Back to the Teutonic tribes, once again.) In more recent times, when the state has been loath to interfere, they have been free to devise a menu where German national history can be completely avoided by any student so inclined.

The problem of national bias is probably best observed in the realm of school textbooks and popular histories. The more that historians have to condense and to simplify their material, the harder it is to mask their prejudices. A few comments are called for.

In the first place, it may be taken for granted that historical education in most European countries has traditionally possessed a strong nationalistic flavour. In its origins in the nineteenth century, history-teaching was recruited to the service of patriotism. In its most primitive form, it consisted of little more than a rota of the names, dates, and titles of the ruling dynasty. From that it progressed to a recital of the nation’s heroes, victories, and achievements, [BOUBOULINA] In its most extreme form, it deliberately set out to condition schoolchildren for their future role as killers and casualties in the nation’s wars.86 On the other hand, it is not right to assume that nationalistic history-teaching has passed unchallenged. There has been a long countercurrent of trying to inculcate an awareness of wider horizons; and practices changed radically after 1945, at least in Western Europe.87

A remarkable textbook on ‘modern history’, published in Austrian Galicia in 1889, directly confronted the assumptions of the age of nationalism. The book was designed for Polish-language secondary schools. Its author, a historian from Warsaw, who could not publish freely in his home city, then under Russian rule, explained the priorities:

In the struggles and achievements of the modern era, nations do not act on their own, but collectively. They are joined together in a variety of interrelated groupings and alliances. For this reason, we are obliged to use the ‘synchronic method’, that is, to speak of all the nations who participated in the events of any given time. Such general history cannot present a complete picture of all the nations involved; and … their individual histories … must be consigned to (the category) of special, national histories.88

The result was a book where, in volume I, covering the period from the Renaissance to 1648, Habsburg and Polish events occupy exactly 71 and 519 pages respectively. The author makes a careful distinction between ‘Poland’ and ‘the Polish-Lithuanian-Ruthenian-Prussian state’. The student could learn in some detail about ‘the Catholic and the Lutheran Reformations’, as about Islam and the Ottomans. The geographical range stretched from the Portuguese voyages of discovery to Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Khanate of Kazan, from Mary Stuart’s overthrow in Edinburgh to Charles V’s expedition to Tunis.89 This volume would rate more highly on the non-nationalist scale than many still emanating from member states of the European Community.90

It is also fair to say that concerted attempts have been made in recent years to purge educational materials of the grosser forms of misinformation. Bilateral textbook commissions have worked long and hard on such matters as militarism, place-names and historical atlases, and one-sided interpretations. Scholars and teachers are possibly more aware of the problems than previously.91 In the last analysis, two extremes can be observed. At one extreme is the cosmic approach, where historians are expected to write, and students to learn, about all parts of the world in all ages. At the other extreme lies the parochial approach, where attention is reserved for one country in one short period of time. The cosmic approach has breadth, but lacks depth. The parochial approach has the chance of depth, but lacks breadth. The ideal must be somehow to strike a balance between breadthand depth.

On this score, one has to admit that the centrally planned syllabuses and textbooks of Soviet bloc countries were sometimes more successful than those of their Western counterparts. Though the actual content tended to be horrendously chauvinist and ideological, the chronological and geographical framework was often admirably comprehensive. All Soviet schoolchildren had to work their way through the five stages of historical development, gaining some knowledge of primitive society, classical antiquity, ‘feudalism’, ‘capitalism’, and from 1917 so-called ‘socialism’. Courses on the history of the USSR insisted on giving priority to the leading historical role of Russia and the Russians. At the same time, even in the worst years of Stalinism, any standard Soviet textbook would devote space to the ancient Greeks, Scythians, and Romans, to the history of the Caucasus, to the empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, and to the Muslim states of Kazan or Crimea. One would look in vain for such things in most general histories of Europe.

In England, in contrast—where the syllabus of history-teaching has largely been left to individual schools and teachers—the chronological and geographical framework tends to be extremely narrow. Even senior pupils studying history at advanced level are often confined to standard courses such as ‘The Tudors and Stuarts’ or ‘Britain in the Nineteenth Century’.92

Local history provides an interesting solution to some of these dilemmas. It draws on the familiar and the down-to-earth, encourages individual exploration and research, and is relatively resistant to nationalistic or to ideological pressures. It is well suited to subjects such as the family, which is readily understood by schoolchildren, whilst being used by specialists as the basis for far-flung international theorizing.93 At the other end of the scale world history has been developed, both at schools and universities. It has strong arguments in its favour for the education of a generation which must take their place in ‘the global village’.94 Its critics would argue, as some argue about European history, that the sheer size of its content condemns all but its most able practitioners to deal in worthless generalities.

Naturally, narrowness of one kind provides an opportunity for breadth of a different kind. The narrowing of chronological and geographical parameters enables teachers to widen the variety of techniques and perspectives that can be explored within the chosen sector. Generally speaking, English pupils are relatively well grounded in the study of sources, in causational problems, in the connections between political, socio-economic, and cultural factors, and in the art of thinking for themselves. Here, their historical education has strength. On the other hand, there really must be something wrong if their studies are limited to 5 or 10 per cent of the span of only one-third of just one of the 38 sovereign states of the world’s smallest continent.

The problem of national bias will only disappear when historians and educators cease to regard history as a vehicle for state politics. More than 1,800 years ago the Greek writer Lucian (ad 120–80) advised that ‘the historian among his books should forget his nationality’. It was sound advice. In the longer term, the definitive history of Europe will probably be written by a Chinese, a Persian, or an African. There are some good precedents: a Frenchman once wrote the best introduction to Victorian England; an Englishman is now established as the leading historian of Italy, and the only survey of British History to give proportionate weight to all four nations was written by an exile in the USA.95

So far, none of the experiments aimed at writing history ‘from the European point of view’ has met with general acclaim. Some historians, such as Christopher Dawson, have made the attempt by appealing to Europe’s Christian foundations.96 But Dawson’s Catholic thesis did not illuminate the pluralism of recent centuries, and did not convince his predominantly WASP readership. Others have taken the task of tracing the drive for European unity.97 The trouble here is that the list of contents is exceedingly short. Nation-states and national consciousness have been dominant phenomena throughout the era when history has been written as a systematic science. To a large extent, national histories have been allowed to predominate through the lack of alternatives. This may be regrettable; but it reflects the true condition of a Europe that has been deeply divided over recent centuries. Ever since the fragmentation of Christendom during the Renaissance and the Reformation, Europe has had no unifying ideal; historians cannot pretend otherwise. As some analysts have realized about the United States, the mosaic of Europe is every bit as important as the melting-pot.

In all probability, therefore, it is still too early for a satisfactory European synthesis to be conceived and accepted. National sensitivities still abound. National histories cannot simply be abandoned; and it would be a gross distortion if the differences between Europe’s nations were to be wilfully submerged ‘in some bland Eurohistory’:

European history may be more than the sum of its parts; but it cannot be built except by studying those parts in their full idiosyncrasies … It seems that… we cannot be content with national history; but ‘pan-European history’ cannot be easily achieved.98

This is wise counsel. The implication is that the reformulating of European history must inch forward alongside the gradual construction of a wider European community. Neither will be built in a day.

Unfortunately, national bias dies slowly. In April 1605, soon after England and Scotland were joined in personal union, Sir Francis Bacon wrote to the Lord Chancellor recommending that ‘one just and complete history be compiled of both nations’. His wish has not yet been granted. In the words of one of the few British historians who are trying to address the problem of British identity, ‘the ingrained reluctance to ask fundamental questions about the nature of Britain remains constant.’

Two Failed Visions

The prevalence of nationalism in the twentieth century has not encouraged inter-, nationalist history. But two forceful attempts were made to overcome prevailing divisions, and to provide the ideological framework for a new, universal vision of Europe’s past. Both attempts failed, and deserved to fail.

Of the two, the Marxist-Leninist or Communist version of European history started first and lasted longest. It grew out of Marxism, whose spirit and intentions it ignored, and in the hands of the Bolsheviks became one of the coercive instruments of state policy. In the initial phase, 1917–34, under enthusiasts such as M. N. Pokrovsky (1868–1932), it was strongly internationalist in flavour. Pokrovsky fully accepted that history was ‘politics turned towards the past’; and he threw himself with gusto into the fight against chauvinism. ‘Great Russia was built on the bones of the non-Russian nations,’ he wrote. ‘In the past, we Russians were the greatest robbers on earth.’ Yet for Stalin the rejection of Russia’s imperial traditions was anathema; and from 1934, when Stalin’s decrees on history-teaching took effect, the direction changed abruptly. Pokrovsky died, and most of his unrecanting colleagues were shot. Their textbooks were suppressed. In their place there appeared a virulent brew of vulgar Marxism and extreme Russian imperialism that was served up by all the ideological agencies of the USSR for the next fifty years.100

The twin elements of communist history were at bottom contradictory. They were held together by the messianic dogma of an ideology that no one could openly question. The pseudo-Marxist element was contained in the famous Five-Stage Scheme, that led from prehistory to the Revolution of 1917. The Russian element was predicated on the special mission awarded to the Russian nation as the ‘elder brother’ of the Soviet peoples and the ‘vanguard’ of the world’s proletariat. By Lenin’s own admission, Soviet Russia was not yet as advanced as Germany and the other industrialized countries. But the ‘world’s first socialist state’ had been created to sow the seeds of the world revolution, to hold the fort of socialism during capitalism’s terminal decline, and to inherit the earth at the end. In the meantime, superior Soviet methods of social organization and economic planning would soon ensure that the capitalist world was rapidly overtaken. Indeed, as the final chapter of the textbooks always stressed, the Soviet Union was surging ahead in everything from military might to living standards, technology, and environmental protection. The final victory of socialism (as communism was always called) was taken to be scientifically proved and inevitable.

Despite its lip-service to ‘socialist internationalism’, the historical thinking of the Soviets paid homage both to ‘Eurocentrism’ and, in a backhanded way, to ‘Western civilization’. Its Eurocentrism found expression in the fund of European examples on which Marxist-Leninist argument was based, and in the mania for European-style industrialization. It was specially blatant in the emphasis placed on the historic destiny of the Russians. Soviet assumptions on this last score caused offence to the European members of their empire, had an unsettling effect on the comrades of the communist movement in the Third World, and was the principal cause of the Sino-Soviet split. In Chinese eyes, the droves of Soviet advisers and technicians who appeared in China in the 1950s gave a worse display of European arrogance (and bad machinery) than any previous wave of ‘foreign devils’ they had known. For the Chinese, as for Baits, Poles, or Georgians, the Russians’ belief in their own superiority was bizarre. If Russians were accustomed to think of themselves as ‘Westerners’ in relation to China, they were obviously ‘Easterners’ in relation to the main body of Europeans.

There is no doubt that Soviet communism proclaimed ‘the West’ to be the ideological enemy. At the same time it did not deny that its own roots lay in Europe, and that Lenin’s dearest wish had been to link the revolution in Russia with the expected revolution in Germany. So ‘Western civilization’ was not all bad. Indeed, so long as they were dead, leading Western figures could be readily admired. The point was: the West had grown decadent; the East, in the hands of the heroic proletariat, had stayed vigorous and healthy. Sooner or later the capitalist regimes would fade, the socialist fatherland would give them a final push, the frontiers would fall, and East would be rejoined with the West under Soviet Russian leadership in a new revolutionary brotherhood. This is what Lenin had dreamed of, and what Leonid Brezhnev would have in mind when he talked of‘a common European home’.101 This view of the communists’ messianic mission was exported, with local variations, to all the countries which the Soviet Union controlled. In its strictly historical aspect it sought to instil two cardinal dogmas—the primacy of ‘socio-economic forces’ and the benign nature of Russia’s expansion. It was greatly boosted by the Soviet defeat of Germany in 1941–5, and was still being taught as gospel to tens of millions of European students and schoolchildren in the late 1980s. Right at the end of communism’s career, the General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, revived the slogan of ‘a common European home’.102 It was seized on by many foreign commentators and widely welcomed; but Gorbachev never had time to explain what he meant. He was dictator of an empire from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka—a peninsula as remote, and as European, as neighbouring Alaska. Could it be possible that Gorbachev’s dream was of a Greater Europe, stretching right round the globe?

The rival, fascist version of history started later, and nourished more briefly. To some extent it grew up in response to Communism, and in the hands of the Nazis became one of the instruments of their New Order. In the initial phase, 1922–34, it contained a certain socialist flavour both in Germany and Italy, but was dominated by the Italian variant and by Mussolini’s dream of a restored Roman Empire. From 1934, when Hitler began to remodel Germany, the direction changed abruptly. The socialist element of National Socialism was purged. The German variant of fascism took the driving seat, and overtly racial theories came to the fore. As a result, there appeared a virulent brew of racism and German imperialism that was served up by all the ideological agencies of the Nazi Reich as long as it lasted.103

Despite Nazi-Soviet hostility, Nazi ideology was not so completely different from that of Stalinism. The racial element was predicated on the special mission supposedly awarded to the German nation as the most vigorous and healthy branch of the white Aryan race. The German imperial element was predicated on the criminal ‘Diktat’ of Versailles, and on Germany’s supposed right to recover its leading position. Together, they formed the basis of a programme which assumed that Nazi power would spread across Europe, and eventually beyond it. There were serious incompatibilities with fascist ideologies elsewhere in Europe, especially in Italy, whose nationalism had always possessed strong anti-Germanic overtones. But these did not have the time to ferment.

The historical thinking of the Nazis contained the most extreme versions of ‘Eurocentrism’ and ‘Western civilization’ that have ever existed. The ‘Master Race’ was identified with Aryan Europeans, wherever they lived in the world. They were the only true human beings, and were credited with all the most important achievements of the past. All non-Aryans (non-whites and non-Europeans) were classed as genetically inferior, and were placed in descending categories of Untermenschen or ‘subhumans’. A parallel hierarchy of biological merit was established within Europe, with the tall, slim, blond, Nordic type—as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering, as blond as Hitler—considered superior to all others. The Slavs of the East (Poles, Russians, Serbs, etc.), who were wrongly classified as a racial subgroup, were declared inferior to the dominant Germanic peoples of the West, and were treated on a level with various non-Aryan subhumans. The lowest categories of European inhabitants were those of non-European origin—principally gypsies and Jews—who were blamed for all the evils of European history, and were deprived of the right to life.

Nazi strategy was largely constructed from these absurdities, where the distinction between ‘West’ and ‘East’ was paramount. Beyond the removal of recalcitrant governments, Hitler harboured few designs against Western Europe, of which he felt himself to be the champion. He despised the French, whose Frankishness had been much diluted, and whose historic hatred for Germany had somehow to be cured. He disliked the Italians and their Roman connections, and felt them to be unreliable partners. He respected the Spaniards, who had once saved Europe from the Blacks, and was puzzled by Franco’s reluctance to co-operate. With the exception of certain degenerate individuals, he admired the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, and found their persistent hostility towards him distressing. In his own terms, their behaviour could only be explained as that of fellow Germanics who were preparing to compete for mastery of the Master Race. All he wanted from them was that they should leave him alone.

All of the Nazis’ most radical ambitions were directed against the East. Mein Kampf clearly identified Eastern Europe as the site of Germany’s Lebensraurriy her future ‘living space’. Eastern Europe was inhabited by an assortment of inferior Slavs and Jews; its genetic stock had to be improved by massive German colonization. The ‘diseased elements’ had to be surgically removed, that is, murdered. Eastern Europe was also the sphere of Soviet power; and the ‘nest of Jewish Bolshevism’ had to be smashed. When the Nazis launched the German invasions of Eastern Europe, first against Poland and then against the Soviet Union, they felt they were launching a ‘Crusade’. And they said so explicidy. They were told by their history books that they were marching in the glorious steps of Henry the Fowler, the Teutonic Knights, and Frederick the Great. They claimed to be speeding to the ultimate showdown of‘a thousand years of history’.

Unlike Communism, Nazism was not granted seventy-five years in which to elaborate its theory and practice. It was destroyed by the combined efforts of its neighbours, before the Greater Reich could be consolidated. It never reached the point where a Nazi-run Europe would have been obliged to articulate its posture towards the other continents. Yet if the Soviets had succumbed, as they very nearly did in 1941–2, Nazism would have become the driving force of a Eurasian power of immense size; and it would have had to prepare for a global confrontation against rival centres in the USA and Japan. Conflict would surely have ensued. As it was, Nazidom was kept within Europe’s bounds. Hitler was not given the chance to operate beyond the world of his fellow Aryans. Both as theorist and as political leader, he remained to the end a European.

Though Nazidom once stretched from the Atlantic to the Volga, the Nazi version of history was only free to operate for a very brief interval. In Germany itself, its career was limited to a mere twelve years—less than the school days of one single class. Elsewhere, it could only sow its poison for a matter of weeks or months. Its impact was intense, but fleeting in the extreme. When it collapsed in disgrace in 1944–5, it left a gaping vacuum that could only be filled by the historical thoughts of the victorious powers. In Eastern Europe, occupied from 1944–5 by the Soviet army, the Soviet version was imposed without ceremony. Western Europe, liberated by the Anglo-Americans, was left open for ‘the Allied Scheme of History’.

The Allied Scheme of History

Contemporary views of Europe have been strongly influenced by the emotions and experiences of two World Wars and especially by the victory of the ‘Grand Alliance’. Thanks to their triumphs in 1918, in 1945, and at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the Western Powers have been able to export their interpretation of events worldwide. They have been particularly successful in this regard in Germany whose receptiveness was heightened by a combination of native guilt and Allied re-education policies.

The priorities and assumptions which derive from Allied attitudes of the wartime vintage are very common in accounts of the twentieth century; and are sometimes projected back into more remote periods. They may be tentatively summarized as follows:

—The belief in a unique, secular brand of Western civilization in which ‘the Atlantic community’ is presented as the pinnacle of human progress. Anglo-Saxon democracy, the rule of law in the tradition of Magna Carta, and a capitalist, free-market economy are taken to be the highest forms of Good. Keystones in the scheme include the Wilsonian principle of National Self-determination (1917) and the Atlantic Charter (1941).

—The ideology of‘anti-fascism’, in which the Second World War of 1939–45 is perceived as ‘the War against Fascism’ and as the defining event in the triumph of Good over Evil. Opposition to fascism, or suffering at its hands, is the overriding measure of merit. The opponents or the victims of fascists deserve the greatest admiration and sympathy.

—A demonological fascination with Germany, the twice-defeated enemy. Germany stands condemned as the prime source both of the malignant imperialism which produced the First World War, and of the virulent brand of fascism which provoked the Second. Individuals and nations who fought on the German side, especially in 1939–45, bear the stigma of‘collaboration’. (N.B. German culture is not to be confused with German politics.)

—An indulgent, romanticized view of the Tsarist empire and the Soviet Union, the strategic ally in the East, commonly called ‘Russia’. Russia’s manifest faults should never be classed with those of the enemy. For Russia is steadily converging with the West. Russia’s great merits as a partner in the ‘anti-fascist’ alliance, whose huge sacrifices brought fascism to its knees, outweigh all the negative aspects of her record.

—The unspoken acceptance of the division of Europe into Western and Eastern spheres. Whereas ‘Atlantic values’ are expected to predominate in the more advanced West, Russia’s understandable desire for security justifies its domination over the backward East. It is natural for the Western Powers to protect themselves against the threat of further Russian expansion, but they should not interfere in Russia’s legitimate sphere of influence.

—The studied neglect of all facts which do not add credence to the above.

The Allied scheme of history grew naturally out of the politics and sympathies of two world wars, and has never been consciously or precisely formulated. In the hurly-burly of free societies it could never establish a monopoly, nor has it ever been systematically contested. Yet half a century after the Second World War it was everywhere evident in academic discussions and, perhaps unknowingly, in the conceptual framework which informs the policy decisions of governments. It was the natural residue of a state of affairs where Allied soldiers could be formally arrested for saying that Hitler and Stalin ‘are equally evil’.104

In the academic sphere, the Allied scheme can be seen at work in institutional priorities and structures, as well as in debates on particular issues. It has contributed to the crushing preponderance of research in history and political science that is devoted to Nazi or Nazi-related themes, and to the prominence of German studies, especially in the USA. It helps explain why the analysis of East European affairs continues to be organized in separate institutes of ‘Soviet’ or ‘Slavonic’ studies, and why the sovietological profession was notoriously reluctant to expose the realities of Soviet life.105It was responsible in part for the excessive emphasis on Russian within the Soviet and Slavic field, often to the total exclusion of non-Russian cultures. It was present, above all, in the assumptions and illusions surrounding views on the Second World War. Half a century after that war was fought, the majority of episodes which contradict the Allied myth continued to be minimized or discounted, [ALTMARKT] [KATYN] [KEELHAUL]

Many wartime stereotypes have been perpetuated, especially regarding Eastern Europe. One can observe a clear-cut hierarchy of perceptions at work which are related to the degree of subservience of various nations to the Allied cause. The Czechs and Serbs, for example, who had a long tradition of co-operation with Russia and of hostility towards Germany, fitted well into the Allied scheme. So they could be hailed as ‘brave’, ‘friendly’, and ‘democratic’—at least until the wars in Bosnia. The Slovaks, Croats, and Baltic nations, in contrast, who were thought to have rejected the friends of the West or to have collaborated with the enemy, deserved no such compliments. The Poles, as always, fitted no one’s scheme. By resisting German aggression, they were obviously fighting staunchly for democracy. By resisting Soviet aggression, they were obviously ‘treacherous’, ‘fascistic’, ‘irresponsible’, and ‘anti-democratic’. The Ukrainians, too, defied classification. Although they probably suffered absolutely the largest number of civilian casualties of any European nation, their main political aim was to escape from Soviet and Russian domination. The best thing to do with such an embarrassing nation was to pretend that it didn’t exist, and to accept the old Tsarist fiction about their being ‘Little Russians’. In reality they were neither little nor Russians, [UKRAINA]

In the political sphere, the Allied scheme has been the foundation stone of the USA’s supposed ‘special relationship’ with the United Kingdom, and one source for the exclusion of democratic Germany and democratic Japan from bodies such as the UN Security Council. It was explicit when a British Prime Minister scolded the French President over the relative merits of Magna Carta and the ‘Rights of Man’, or when the prospect of a European ‘superstate’ was blasted in tones reminiscent of Pitt or Churchill. It underlay the vote in the British House of Commons in favour of a War Crimes Bill which limits those crimes to offences committed ‘in Germany or in German-controlled territory’—as if no other war crimes count. Arguably, it was present when a national Holocaust Memorial Museum was opened in Washington.106

The hold of the Allied scheme was perhaps most strongly evident, however, in reactions to the collapse of communism after 1989. The outburst of‘Gorbymania’, the priority given to the integrity of wartime allies (first the USSR and then Yugoslavia), and the wilful confusing of patriotism with nationalism in Eastern Europe can only be explained in terms of pre-set historical reflexes. It was only by a slow process of readjustment that Western opinion learned that ‘Russia’ and the ‘Soviet Union’ were not the same thing; that Gorbachev headed a deeply hated regime; that the Yugoslav Federation was a communist front organization; that the most extreme nationalism was emanating from the communist leadership of Serbia; or that Lithuania, Slovenia, Ukraine, or Croatia were distinct European nations legitimately seeking statehood. The realization that ‘the West’ had been misled on so many basic issues was bound to swell demands for the revision of European history.

Eurohistory

The movement for European unity which began in Western Europe after 1945 was fired by an idealism that contained an important historical dimension. It aimed to remove the welter of ultra-nationalistic attitudes which had fuelled the conflicts of the past. All communities require both a sense of present identity and the sense of a shared past. So historical revision was a natural requirement. The first stage sought to root out the historical misinformation and misunderstandings which had proliferated in all European countries. The second stage was to build a consensus on the positive content of a new ‘Eurohistory’.

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.’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.’ 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.