Prologue
Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
Man shall err as long as he strives.
God, in the ‘Prologue’ to Goethe’s Faust I1
Europe – and Europeanness?
Almost 100 years ago, one of the giants of European intellectual history, the historian and sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) wrote his ‘Vorbemerkung’, or foreword to a voluminous collection of essays, both previously published and new, which appeared in the year of his death asGesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (1920–1). Interestingly, in this foreword he did not primarily address the theme of the sociology of religion. Rather, it seems an almost independent piece, in which he ponders those elements of culture that he, and others, felt to be ‘typically’ European, that on closer inspection also could be considered characteristic of other, non-European cultures and societies and could, therefore, be termed ‘universal’.
Though nearly a century has passed, even now Weber’s musings can help us understand not only which notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ contributed to this German intellectual giant’s understanding of the ‘essence’ of Europe, but also to what extent new scholarship has modified and (though not always, I feel) invalidated many of his views and opinions.
Whether or not Weber intended his list of cultural phenomena to be interpreted as a prioritized or, even, causal sequence, science is the first aspect he identifies as typical of Europe – at least, he adds, quite perceptively, ‘as we now recognize valid science’. He admits that other Eurasian cultures have developed impressive (systematic) views of the cosmos, of the world, of nature, of man. Yet he feels that only in Europe occurred that specific combination of empirical observation and rational experimentation that resulted in modern science.
Weber’s second perspective is that of the arts, in, significantly, two manifestations, viz. music and architecture. For the paragraphs about music, he used a longer essay which also was published posthumously: Die rationalen und soziologischen Grundlagen der Musik (1921) – ‘The rational and sociological foundations of music’. European music, Weber felt, had been special for a long time since it produced, and, more importantly, uniquely combined a number of elements that, singly, also occurred elsewhere: rational tonal intervals, harmony, the use of the major and the minor third, counterpoint, the chromatic scale, and, on another plane, the creation of the (large) orchestra with the string quartet as its nucleus, and so forth. Whether this interesting analysis still holds is debatable.
In architecture, Europe created a very specific culture as well, what with, first, the use of the pointed arch not only as a decorative element but as a structural means to cross-vault huge spaces to which, in the Renaissance, the (re-)invention of the cupola added new possibilities. Nowadays, of course, people argue that the pointed arch may well have come from the Islamic world, while the cupola originated in Hellenistic-Roman culture. Yet, Weber rightly emphasizes that the (rational) combination and further elaboration of these various elements did, indeed, occur only in Europe.
Weber then continues to stress that only in Europe did the printing press, while first invented in China, create a world of texts – in his own times immensely enlarged by the proliferation of journals and periodicals – that only existed because of, and in the world of the printed word. Somewhat surprisingly, he does not relate this phenomenon directly to science and to print culture, as we would now. Nor does he relate it to the development of general education in most European countries from the early nineteenth century onwards.
He does go on to argue that whereas both China and the Islamic world had known academies and universities, only comparable European institutions have produced the professional man, or, to be more precise, the professional official; the ‘cornerstone of the modern state and the modern economy of the Occident’. As Weber argues, it is a professional bureaucracy that ‘determines our very existence, the political, technical and science-organizational preconditions of our life, [through] state officials who also carry the most important daily functions of society.’ Following his own logic, he then characterizes as typically European the phenomenon of the bureaucratic, rational, legal state. The link to the existence of an elected parliament may not be a logical one for every reader.
However, halfway through his text Weber states that the phenomenon that really determines ‘our modern lives in the most fateful way’ is capitalism. Having already published, in 1889, his Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter – ‘The history ofmedieval businesses’ – he then sketched the outlines of capitalism’s origins not only in (medieval) international and overseas trade, but also in (early-modern) merchant-venture businesses and the financing of colonial plantations, etc. He added that its modern specificity really lies both in its financing the economy through the stock exchange, for which Weber relied on his essay Die Börse (1896), and in its relationship to ‘(formally) free labour.’ In doing so, Weber distances himself from (near-)contemporary scholars such as Georg Simmel and Werner Sombart who also wrote about (the origins and nature of) capitalism. Interestingly, the capitalism debate has continued unabated till the present, though most younger scholars seem either not to have read or to have forgotten what Weber contributed.
Summarizing the elements that make up his foreword, Weber then states that what essentially differentiates the Occident from other cultures is ‘rationalism’. This, he feels, is not necessarily the same as the many forms of ‘internal’ rationalization that exist within almost all spheres of human life and culture, all over the world - as in, for example, the rationality of the mystical experience. Rather, it is a way of living one’s entire life in a praxis-related, rational way, not accepting the forces that, according to Weber, most tend to obstruct such a choice, i.e. the powers attributed to and ensconced in magic and religion, and the ethical beliefs and prescripts that follow from them. Obviously, he must have realized that in ‘the West’, too, many people still lived according to such premises but he seems to have felt that if one wants to understand Europe in its (recent) phase of modernity, it should be characterized as, in his word: ‘disenchanted’.
Admittedly, we no longer feel that manifestations of culture such as, for example, polyphonic and orchestral music, or Gothic and Renaissance architecture are uniquely European, or should even be considered as major features of European culture. More importantly, there is a definite danger in Weber’s general approach: anachronism, or even a de-historicizing and de-historicized perspective tending towards a timeless universalism, or Europeanism. Indeed, some authors who have recently adopted some of Weber’s categories have also used them for their own political ends, arguing that they are the very proof of the fact that ‘the West beats the Rest.’2
Those who are currently studying Europe’s past should realize that it is the sum total we create from what were really a myriad of pasts set in different times and spaces. And indeed, everyone and everything associated with such a single and singular moment is a ‘palimpsest’. A Greek tragedy, a Roman road, a Visigothic king, a medieval Polish monastery, an early modern French poem, a baroque tomb, a ‘Romantic’ garden, a ‘Modernist’ novel, a democratic society, a set of laws, a funk song: each of these manifestations of culture needs to be analyzed beyond the form and function they had in their time and place. Rather, we should see or, more importantly understand, each of these phenomena as an intricate compound. From our present-day point of view, it has its specific past, but also is characterized by its own set of experiences, and, also, its own acts of reiterated reception of other, earlier pasts; the past that every past accepted as its own history was a complex of things remembered and things forgotten, as is our own past, too. More complex still, all pasts once were their own present. And that present, as well as its reconstruction of its pasts, was shaped by its own, contemporary expectations of the future.
Perhaps most essential in studying the past, and indeed all pasts – embodied in persons, things, concepts – is to understand that they do, of course, express their contemporary present: ‘we are’. Only we, who now ‘receive’ them, are able to say of them: ‘you have been, and now are part of our past, of us, in this present.’ To put it another way: only we give the past its historicity. However, consciously or not, we do so from a ‘presentist’ need which, of course, always entails the risk that we adapt it beyond what we should scientifically accept as its inevitable alterity – the past as ‘another country’, where people did things differently. Setting out to ask the famous sequence of questions of who did what, when and why, obviously we will find an answer, if only because we will modify our questions till we are finally satisfied with the result. The danger is that, having found the answer, we all too easily assume it to represent the entire reality of the past we have sought to uncover, failing to realize that we have only uncovered one part of it. If we accept that we cannot establish the past, history, as a ‘hard fact’ but, rather, need to present it as the result of our consensual interpretation of the available data, we will realize that we see through the palimpsest as through a glass darkly, that shows us only vague, shifting contours.
Europe: old Europe, new Europe, old borders, new borders
Few people thinking about the part of the Eurasian land mass commonly called Europe will realize that, according to the geographers at least, its geographical centre is located some dozen kilometres north of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, a city itself situated near the border of Russia. Given this fact, we should accept that, geographically speaking, Europe is a world that extends from what is the westernmost part recognized as such – the Irish Atlantic coast – to the Urals.
Yet many Europeans have difficulty in accepting that the inhabitants of the Baltic countries of which Lithuania is one, which became members of the European Union in 2004, really belong to ‘their’ continent – let alone that they would consider Russia a ‘natural’ part of it. Nevertheless, travelling in those Baltic countries, one becomes very much aware of what Europe is. One experiences the urban culture of cities like Tallinn – formerly Reval – and Riga, the capitals of, respectively, Estonia and Latvia. This is a sea-oriented culture that became European because these cities were founded as port-towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by merchants of the German Hanse: they were part of the great shipping route that connected Flanders and the other Netherlands, on the North Sea, all the way around Denmark and the cities of northern Germany via the Baltic Sea to the upper reaches of the Finnish Gulf.3 As the Hanse was a sociocultural as well as a commercial-financial network, Hanse cities show all kinds of similarities. Thus, the churches of Tallinn and Riga have the typical, purely ornamental brick bands of the ecclesiastical architecture one also finds in Stralsund, Rostock and Lubeck, to name but a few finely restored cities of the Hanseatic heartland, but also in small Dutch Hanse towns like Doesburg. Other traces of an old common culture have recently been discovered and uncovered: the frescoed medieval saints who were plastered over during the iconoclast furies of the sixteenth century that happened here as elsewhere in Europe. In these towns, church schools were established where knowledge European-style – which, from the sixteenth century onwards, also meant through the printed book – was dispensed.
Though the – German-speaking! – elites of these Baltic towns turned Lutheran after the Reformation, they used the Italian baroque style – notwithstanding its ‘popish’ connotations – for their pulpits and baptismal fonts and richly carved pews and, indeed, for their funerary monuments as well. Besides grand churches, the burghers of these Baltic towns – traders and descendants of traders – also built grand town houses for their own use and even grander town halls and guild halls to express their collective identity, with gothic façades of glazed bricks; in later centuries they added baroque staircases and classicist assembly rooms.
Yet these Baltic cities survived within a rather different culture: the culture of the heirs of the Crusader German knights, who had first occupied these territories – for themselves and for the Church – in the thirteenth century, like the Spanish Christian knights had conquered the Muslim parts of Iberia from the tenth century onwards.
The German Balts, like their Spanish contemporaries, appropriated the land, dividing it into huge estates, and reduced the indigenous population – whom they converted from their own so-called ‘heathen’ religions to Christianity, as had happened to the Muslim population of central and southern Spain – to the harsh conditions of serfdom.
In the seventeenth century, this imported, but by now local aristocracy had to accommodate another imported elite: the Swedish rulers who came to create an empire encompassing the entire Baltic Sea. Although they became landowners as well, they tried to introduce some freedom for the populace, as had become the policy in Sweden itself. The Swedish kings also founded a university, at Dorpat, which soon became a centre of regional learning.
A century later, the tsarist empire occupied these lands. Now the local nobility, itself the product of different earlier cultures, became part of the cosmopolitan, Enlightenment culture that was first introduced from western Europe at the imperial court at St Petersburg in the early eighteenth century and, from there, spread to the seats of the regional aristocracy all over Russia. Tsar Peter I built his wife a baroque summer palace in Tallinn, while some decades later the favourite of one of his successors constructed a Versailles-like chateau in the depths of Latvia.
Thus, in the Baltic region, both an urban-bourgeois European culture and an aristocratic-feudal but equally European culture existed side by side, modelling themselves, during the nineteenth century, on St Petersburg but also on Berlin and Paris. Yet, this was also a border region, with a ‘different’ culture: for unlike in western Europe, most of what was European in the towns and in the country houses never really touched the majority of the population. And whereas in Europe the lot of the masses slowly improved, certainly from the late eighteenth century onwards, the conditions of the peasantry in the Baltic region deteriorated until, in the early twentieth century, the serfs were finally freed. Then, for the first time, they started to participate in the culture of their own region, to become its bearers, also because they became part of the larger, town-based economies that were now growing. At the same time, these regions, to stress their independence from the imperialist aspirations of Russia – meanwhile turned communist – showed a tendency towards cultural nationalism, as had so many other regions in north-western, southern and central Europe. Trying to find proof of their historic roots as a cultural community, they stressed the uniqueness of their language – Estonian, Livonian, Latvian – and of their art and customs to create their own national identity as the basis for a newly won statehood.
But the Baltic states became border countries again when, after the Second World War, communist Russia occupied them. The Russian occupants created a culture of dependence, of fear, instilling anti-European, anti-Western feelings in these states now turned satellites.4
The same happened in Lithuania, though it shows a different culture: visiting Vilnius in the early twenty-first century, one is very much struck by its almost southern European character, with its churches – baroque, Roman Catholic – dominating a hill-top town. For hundreds of years, this too was a border region conquered and contested, mostly by Poland and Russia. Out of this struggle arose another national culture – one, moreover, which showed an aspect that, though largely absent in Estonia and Latvia, was very much part of the European experience as well: the Jewish aspect. For Vilnius was the ‘Jerusalem of Lithuania’ from the seventeenth century onwards: a town where almost one-third of the population was Jewish until, between 1940 and 1945, first some of the Roman Catholic inhabitants themselves – restrained all too little by the Lithuanian Church – then German Wehrmacht and SS soldiers and, finally, Soviet occupants slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews – as also happened in Latvia.
Not only did the Jewish Lithuanians create the better part of the country’s industrial economy and, therefore, its prosperity, they also created a magnificent Yiddish culture – around their synagogues (one built, incidentally, in the same baroque style and by the same architect who designed some of the city’s grandest eighteenth-century churches), their schools and their charitable institutions. In the early twentieth century, this essentially religious culture, like the other religious cultures all over Europe, produced not only a secular variant, in the so-called ‘Yiddische Wissenschaftliche Institut’ (the Jewish Scientific Institute), but also such outstanding men as Jascha Heifetz, the violinist, Itzak Lipschitz, the sculptor and Chaim Soutine, the painter.
In short, the experience of these regions – often seen as peripheral from a western European perspective, while the regions themselves considered their culture pure European, and rather thought of Russia as a border region – in many ways mirrored what has happened and is still happening elsewhere in the world we call Europe. Out of a continuous process of amalgamation that resulted from and, at the same time, existed alongside forms of multiculturalism, identities have grown – and are still growing – on a local, regional and even national level. At the same time, at least some people felt there was yet another identity overarching these, which they called European. Indeed, identities can and often do exist alongside each other, fulfiling different needs. Thus the Estonians, having won statehood and a national identity, as well as membership of the European Union, look for other forms of cohesion too. Together with the Finns and the Livonian-speaking minority in Latvia who, like their compatriots, have also opted for Europe, they want to stress their Finnish-Ugric identity, which linguistically they share with the Magyar-speaking part of Hungary. On the other hand, the many Russians living in the Baltic states, feeling their role has diminished with the demise of Soviet power, would like to create a Russian axis along what is now the eastern border of the European Union – a border that, even by that very fact, may well be extended further eastward during the forthcoming decades.
By the twenty-first century, all over geographical Europe, ‘nations’, mostly imagined communities created, like the Baltic ones, out of older, regional cultures, have to come to terms with institutional Europe: the Europe of the Union, of Brussels and its seemingly endless stream of rules and laws. But they also face another Europe, which terms itself the actual foundation for that very Union: a cultural Europe that, according to many, makes the political, social and economic Europe both logical and viable. Yet, over the centuries, but especially since the nineteenth century, many people, including historians, have questioned this cultural Europe: they have questioned its component parts, its divisions, its boundaries, even its very existence, arguing that it is no more than a convenient prop for politicians who dream of unity for the sake of increased power or to maintain their own state’s independence, or that it is a romantic but unrealistic notion cherished by artists, men of letters and, yes, some politicians as well, who all dream of unity because they cannot deal with diversity. Admittedly, I do not share the criticism implicit in these views, though the arguments are often useful tools for further analysis. Obviously, many questions remain to be answered.
Europe: ideas
In 1999, UNESCO put the so-called ‘Museumsinsel’ of Berlin on the world cultural heritage list. Yet, in thus rightly honouring one of Europe’s most impressive museum complexes, situated on an island in the Spree River, the UNESCO managers probably did not realize they were actually endorsing a complex vision of history, closely related to the genesis of European culture and the European self-image.
When, in 1830, the first museum on the island opened its doors, on a severely classicist building built from 1824 onwards to the designs of Prussia’s leading architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the visitors read the following inscription on the façade: ‘Studio antiquitatis omnigenae et artium liberalium’ – for the study of the origins of all people and of the free arts. The ‘Altes Museum’ was built to house the antiquities collected by Prussian princes and private persons in, mostly, ancient Greece and the ancient Near East. Obviously, these regions, both culturally and geographically, were only marginally related to nineteenth-century Europe, if at all. Yet, most Europeans, pondering and wondering about their origins, felt that, at least partly, they lay in these very regions – indeed, they had to lie in these regions. Thinking their own time was, in a sense, the epitome of human achievement, they felt the need to explain its genesis and therefore appropriated those earlier, neighbouring cultures which contained elements that had seemingly prefigured Europe’s contemporary culture. Europeans wanted to somehow show that their world had built its great civilization on a millennial tradition, that Europe was, in a sense, the rightful heir to these traditions. Consequently, in the vestibule of the ‘Altes Museum’ a cycle of paintings followed the history of mankind, beginning with man’s dispersion after the destruction of the Tower of Babel. Moreover, looking at the objects in the ‘Altes Museum’ that – as in so many other museums created in Europe during that period – were presented in a very persuasive (chrono)logical sequence, people began to think of themselves as the final product of the traditions embodied therein. In reconstructing history into a process of cultural continuity, nineteenth-century Europeans were actively creating a past that suited their present. This continuity, though empirically largely false, by the very fact of its creation became, in another sense, true. As the American poet Ezra Pound once remarked: ‘Not what happened, but what is remembered is significant’.
Plate 0.1 View of the ‘Museum Island’ in Berlin’s Spree River, with the Greek temple-like structure built from designs by Friedrich August Stuler between 1862 and 1876 to house the new German National Gallery. It stands amidst a number of other magnificent museum buildings, such as the ‘Altes Museum’, the Pergamon Museum, the Bode Museum etc. The entire complex was obviously meant to convey the idea that the German capital was, in a sense, Athens reborn, with this ‘Acropolis of the Arts’ enabling Europeans to study their civilization from its beginnings to their own times. When, by 2020, the rebuilding of the former imperial palace is completed, the museum-complex will be doubled in size.
Source: CKD RU Nijmegen
In 1841, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia decided the entire Spree River island should be dedicated to the arts and humanities. Expeditions to Egypt5 and Mesopotamia enlarged the kingdom’s collections of ancient Near Eastern art and artefacts. The king himself left an inscription on the great pyramid of Giza to record Prussia’s and, therefore, Europe’s cultural appropriation of Egypt. Moreover, in Berlin a ‘Neues Museum’ was built to exhibit the shiploads of artefacts. Again, the message of continuity was preached to the visitors the very moment they entered the museum: in the frescoed decoration of the so-called ‘Fatherland Hall’, the history of Egypt was, in a complicated way, connected to ancient Norse epics such as the Edda, which told the history of the early German people – or so they thought.
In the early twentieth century, the Pergamon Museum was constructed to house the huge monumental remains of the former Graeco-Roman world as well as of Assyria and Babylonia, excavated by state-sponsored archaeological expeditions. It was large-scale robbery, some people now say. Others argue that it was the timely preservation of works of art and other testimonies of the past that would have disappeared if Europe had not rescued them.
From 1865 onwards, yet another museum was built on the Spree island, for the Prussian state’s growing picture collection. The building itself, however, once more illustrates the underlying idea of Europe’s cultural continuity. The (Alte) ‘Nationalgalerie’ is obviously modelled on the Parthenon, the temple of the goddess Pallas Athena that crowns the Athens Acropolis. Continuing a long tradition among the European intellectual elite, by the nineteenth century many believed that ancient Greece, and more specifically Periclean Athens, the Athens of the fifth century BC – with its perfectly proportioned figures sculpted in pure, white marble, with its democracy and its man-oriented philosophy – was the cradle of all that was beautiful and noble in European civilization.6 Inside, continuity is the message, too, on a huge frieze depicting the ‘great men’ of German culture that runs around the stair well.7 Of course, the German tribes who, according to the accepted view of history, created the states that, by the 1870s – when the museum was opened – merged into the German Empire, had no direct links to the Graeco-Roman world. Yet, in this building dedicated ‘To German Art’ according to the huge inscription on its façade, the inventors of this tradition stretched the line of civilization from the Romans – who were seen as the heirs of Greece and of Greece’s cultural example, Egypt – and from the Christian heirs of Roman culture to their own times.
Although the Berlin museum complex is of a rare and fascinating sophistication, all over nineteenth-century Europe people were similarly occupied with inventing their history, their past – in museums, in history textbooks, in history painting and, soon, also in motion pictures set in the past8 – to show that it was precisely and, indeed, only Europe that had inherited everything mankind ever had created by way of things humane. Only Europe was truly civilized.
Europe: realities
There is a Europe beyond the idea and the ideal of it, a Europe forever between old and new borders; a Europe of people who have a shared history, a shared culture that identifies them, and makes them what they are – for, as the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote: ‘je suis mon passé’ – I am what my past has made me.
Despite all varieties of time and place, retrospectively Europeans have tackled the problems posed by nature – including the problems posed by their own bodies – to somehow solve the problems of living together in a society, and, finally, to have invented means of representing their natural surroundings, themselves and their society in such a way that the accumulated knowledge of these fields allowed them to survive through successive generations. Taken together, these three aspects of human action constitute humanculture.
Or should one rather use the term civilization? Actually, the distinction is not an easy one. Culture is, easily, the older term, having been used by Roman authors to denote the entirety of man’s actions, especially in relation to nature. Civilization is of far more recent vintage. It is actually an eighteenth-century French noun, formed from the older adjective ‘civilisé’, civilized, which was used as an alternative for ‘poli’, polite, polished – hence, for example, in Dutch ‘beschaafd’, shaven, smooth, polished, as against ‘ruw’, rough. Referring to such older concepts as ‘civility’, or the Italian ‘civiltà’ – the culture of a ‘civitas’, a town, where people knew how to behave, because they were not rustics or, even worse, barbarians – the new noun, too, soon came to signify a certain aspect of culture, perhaps more its superficial aspect than its essence. However, though it was incorporated into many European languages, ‘culture’ continued to be used as well. But while some used the two words indiscriminately, in German, for example, ‘Kultur’ – together with the concept of ‘Bildung’ – was considered to identify something of a more complex and indeed higher-ordered nature than ‘Zivilisation’, the latter sometimes seen as no more than a veneer, a polish. However, in France, it was civilization that prevailed, to indicate ‘high’ or elite culture; as French elite culture was, indeed, cosmopolitan, the notion spread to other countries. When, in 1879, the English anthropologist E.B. Tylor published his famous Primitive Culture, about the life of the native Americans,he specifically chose this title to challenge the distinction between civilization and culture; he felt that civilization had become rather too hierarchical and, indeed, exclusive and that culture was the more inclusive term. Since then the two terms have come to be used interchangeably, as I have done.
Culture can be lived and, indeed, experienced as an identity on various levels: of the individual, the family, the clan, the tribe, of the street or the neighbourhood, of the peer group, of the village, the town, the region, the nation or the state. And, perhaps uniquely so, it can be lived and experienced on the level of that very Europe. For while, during the past millennia, Africans, Native Americans and Asians have not identified themselves as such, Europeans have done so increasingly over the past centuries.
Now, despite all of the above, nothing about the genesis of the actual culture of Europe is ‘natural’, logical, pre-conditioned. What continuities there are, are balanced by as many changes that, in the end, make it impossible to describe European cultural history in terms of an evolutionary process. Moreover, at the beginning of what most people term European history, little that was achieved in this geographical region was ‘typically European’. Yet, especially over the past five centuries, a culture has grown in what we call Europe that has not only become different from most other parts of the world but has also changed many other parts of that world. To start with, in a world of agrarian civilizations – the Amerindian and African-sub-Saharan, Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Polynesian – Europe existed, but was no more distinctly recognizable than these others. Then, in a situation that was entirely contingent, many of its otherwise unremarkable features came together remarkably to create a transformation that was at that time unique: the transformation of an agrarian into an industrial culture and society that, for better or for worse – according to one’s perspective – came to dominate large parts of the world, economically, politically and culturally. This transformation started slowly in the fifteenth century, accelerated in the late eighteenth century and came to an end in the twentieth century. By that time, however – and through the cultural appropriation described above – Europe had gained characteristics as well as a cohesion most of the other worlds (still) lack.
But what, then, is Europe if we may question calling it a continent and attributing to it the specious security of a distinct geographical entity, as so often happens, and if its culture is not a ‘natural fact’ either? If anything, Europe is a political and cultural concept, invented and experienced by an intellectual elite more specifically whenever there was cause to give a more precise definition of the western edge of Eurasia, the earth’s largest land mass. When was there cause to give such a definition? Often in a moment or period of crisis, of confrontation. After all, it is only when self-definition is necessary that people become self-reflective and describe their own identity.
Thus, the question why the term and, even more so, the concept of ‘Europe’ was coined at all leads to another question: namely, when was it first used, and by whom? Of course it is equally important to know what was its content at different times in history, and for whom and in what way it was a living reality. Since the seventh century BC, when the word was first heard in the Mediterranean region called Hellas, much has been thought, written and said about Europe, right up to the present day. Europe has been described first, as an Asian princess of that name, subsequently, as a Greek demigoddess, and finally as the queen of the world. Europe has been expressed metaphorically in images and words that encode emotions. In short, Europe has been the result of ways of thinking, of ideologies that actively contributed to the creation of realities. Europe has even become an objective geographical concept. Because of all that, Europe now is a more or less strongly felt bond between those living in it. Europe is situated in that area of tension which links dream to deed, thinking to doing. But it has always been and still is an excluding criterion for those who want to distinguish themselves from an outside world as well.
To find answers to the above questions, one needs to go back far into the past before returning to the situation that developed from the fifteenth century onwards and, more specifically, to the years following the Second World War. For it really was only then that politicians, who were mainly economists and lawyers, attempted to bring to fruition what they, interpretively and sometimes manipulatively, presented as the ‘idea of Europe’, attributing it, sometimes rather idealistically, to a long historical tradition.9 They felt the strong need to forever suppress the chances of the European states once more destroying themselves with their own arms – for the two so-called ‘world wars’ of the twentieth century were, rather, European wars inflicted by Europe upon itself and the world. Therefore, they began to present Europe as a ‘culture’ or a ‘civilization’, as a unity with features distinctly its own that, ideally, would do away with interstate rivalry. To further the acceptance of what they felt to be a political, military and economic necessity, to help achieve the ‘integration’ of the European states, they tried to give it an ideological foundation. Admittedly, this idea had been raised in earlier ages too, but in circles rather more restricted. By now, through mass communication and education, ‘Europe’ was held up as an ideal to the majority of its peoples, urging them to give up some of their proudly felt but potentially always dangerous dreams of independence to realize, instead, a dream of cohesion, peace and prosperity. In short, insofar as a European consciousness exists among the majority of the peoples living in Europe, it is a consciousness that is of very recent vintage.
Yet, the fact that the ‘idea of Europe’ was often voiced explicitly either as an ideal community, a utopia, and/or as the instrument of a political elite – as, for example, the elite of Prussia, who wanted to create a basis for their own national identity and, consequently, power – in no way means that it has not become a reality of sorts in the course of time, first for that elite and, during the last century, for far larger groups of people. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: ‘Ein Traum, ewig wiederholt [kann] durchaus als Wirklichkeit empfunden und beurteilt werden’ (‘The continuous repetition of a dream may well turn it into a reality felt and judged’).10
Yet, in attempting to accelerate the process of European unification – of realizing the dream? – the twentieth-century politicians who started building the European Community, which has now become the European Union, have embarked upon a course whose consequences have reached – and still are reaching – much further than in any previous period, pitting a still much-debated belief in the power of a collective, European ideal against the tenacity of older local, regional and national allegiances.
Europe: on the problems of writing its (cultural) history
In view of the above, we need a historical analysis of the phenomena that have contributed to Europe’s cultural cohesion, to its past and present reality.
Writing history is always a cultural and political, perhaps even a moral dilemma. Indeed, historians of necessity involve their own culture and self in their writing. If they do not create a contemporary picture of the past, few will want to read them. But, if the images they conjure up are too period-bound, they will quickly fade. My search for Europe is unavoidably a wilful journey along a number of paths, some of which are not yet taken, others obviously well trodden. Whether my stroll leads anywhere is for the reader to decide. I hope this book will provide a time- and place-bound journey through selected fields of Europe’s cultural history, guiding readers past various points of recognition and yet stimulating their thought.
Obviously, this book cannot even begin to describe all the features of the European landscape, past and present. Nor does it intend to definitively define what cannot be defined, namely, what Europe really is, for Europe will continue to change, to be itself in new ways. Regardless of the extent to which one’s perspective is determined by the views of earlier travellers, what we see is always new. Just as a landscape and our perspective of it change during a journey, similarly, when we think about Europe its contours shift and its characteristics rearrange themselves. For Europe is a series of world-views, of peoples’ perspectives on their reality, sometimes only dreamt or desired, sometimes experienced and realized as well.
This was never clearer to me than when I had finished the first draft of the book. Obviously, a text like this is not written or published without being scrutinized by a number of readers, both critical friends and professional reviewers, who remain anonymous for the very reason that the publisher asks them to comment on the text in view of its scholarly acceptability and its commercial viability. By and large, their comments had prepared me for the criticism that a book on European culture was bound to receive and, that, now that I am writing its revised edition, I know it has received.
A basic problem is, of course, how to give body to the concept, the definition of culture outlined above. Many authors writing about the ‘culture’ of Europe – or, indeed, about ‘the’ culture of Europe – only vaguely indicate the actual design and extent of their research. Do they plan to study the ‘concept of Europe’ only, as argued in texts that claim for Europe a cultural and spiritual unity, voicing ideas and ideals that frequently betray an unspoken yet only barely concealed moral basis and bias? Or should one approach the problem of Europe by searching for and then analysing behavioural patterns and institutions, ways of looking at man and society, the things man makes – ‘manifestations of meaning’? Collectively, these constitute a given ‘culture’ and, consequently, can help answer the question of what elements, and when, did they (begin to) distinguish the region identified by them from other parts of the world.
Inevitably, these alternatives touch upon the much discussed problem of the difference between cultural history conceived as, on the one hand, a history of ideas and ideologies and, on the other hand, as a far wider-ranging history of the great variety of cultural forms, namely the manifestations of man’s handling of nature, of himself and of the society he lives in and of his representations thereof, that both give and constitute meaning.
Obviously, both are respectable approaches. As views of what has characterized, and continues to characterize, Europe are so charged with norms, values and political aspirations, it seems sensible to try to combine both perspectives. After all, if one would study articulate ideas about Europe without considering them in the context of the time, the circumstances and the social framework in which they were formulated, and on the basis of the very diverse cultural forms in which they became manifest, there would be a real danger of seeing such ideas as timeless and universal and to attach too much value to them. If the past has anything to teach us, it is that ideas claiming absolute validity are always dangerous.
Some critics have argued that an undertaking of this magnitude – describing the infinitely complex cultural history of Europe – is doomed to fail if the author does not harness his data in an economic or sociological ‘grand design’ such as, for example, the ones chosen by the French historian Fernand Braudel11 or the German sociologist Norbert Elias,12 or judges them against some all-embracing and explaining concept or even ‘theory’ of culture. I cannot but say that though I have found many of the ideas put forward by cultural historians largo sensu during the past decades immensely fruitful, I have nevertheless found none that will satisfactorily allow me to use any of them as an overall, structural concept, let alone theory.13
Some critics vehemently accused me of being too irreverent regarding the biblical sources of Christian tradition. I persist in saying that no sources should ever be beyond critical analysis. Others, however, felt that the text should not give such prominence to the influence of Christianity on European culture as it does. I happen to think that in every culture of this world, the role of religion(s), and of institutionalized churches cannot be overestimated. Yet other critics argued that a cultural history of Europe should at least chastise the churches for the iniquities perpetrated by them or in their name, showing that Europe’s Christian record is far from unblemished, indeed, that there is a definite black side to European culture – which, of course, there is and which I do acknowledge. In short, I should have written extensively on the various inquisitions, on witch-hunts and, in another context, on the genocide perpetrated by so-called Christian Europeans against their Jewish co-Europeans. Of course, I also should have used the gender perspective to analyse how a patriarchal society not only suppressed the female part of its population but also succeeded in silencing its voice in the story that is history or, as some would rather have it, her-story. Yet, though I actually did and do write about all these issues – but, apparently, not enough to satisfy the tastes of these critics – I admittedly do not think that writing history is about apportioning praise or blame to the actions of those who have lived before us, who thought and acted under different circumstances and from different moral precepts. Rather, writing history is about trying to understand them, in their own time and place. Indeed, we can actually try to do so, for contrary to the views of some of the more extremist post-modernist theorists, the texts, the stories historians produce are not only fictions or interpretations, they are solidly and scholarly, scientifically based on facts.14
In a comparable vein, some took me to task for not writing about ‘the masses’, the ‘common people’, if only because, according to these critics, they suffered most in the making of Europe. However, there seems little sense in expatiating on the human costs of the cultural process, both in Europe and elsewhere. Though it is important to know, for example, how many people worked on the construction of the colonnades in St Peter’s Square in Rome and, also, how many died in the process, yet to give such an indication for each and every one of Europe’s great buildings or, in another context, to try to work out how many died at the hands of each of Europe’s institutions – for example, the Spanish inquisition, or the Soviet Russian army – is both tedious and often fraught with problems of methodology and statistics. Others, however, wondered why this cultural history contained so many details about the economic and political background in the first place. So, yes, while I do think cultural history is, in a way, all-encompassing and, consequently, should pay attention to those human actions we term economic or political, I do not think it should be burdened by graphs and tables.
Some wondered whether the text did not prove what they had always thought and said, namely that cultural history is nothing but a paean to great men and great ideas. Others noted the dozens, nay hundreds of eminent culture makers that I failed to mention, arguing that its art, its literature and its music constitute Europe’s most precious heritage and, indeed, its very identity. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the past culture makers I failed to include in my pantheon often proved to be the compatriots of the present reviewers; the latter were not convinced by the argument that any attempt at strengthening the old canon of ‘great men (and women)’ – or, for that matter, creating a new one – would invite only a host of hostile reactions.15 Yet, I do feel that culture is made by people; that, consequently, a cultural history should name the men and women who, somehow, have contributed to its making. However, I also feel that, rather than describe people with whom almost everyone is familiar from the age of primary school onwards, it is far more revealing to quote those men and women who, though lesser known, are equally representative of their place and time.
Finally, a few readers were convinced I was in the pay of the European Union, writing an apologia for the ideologies of its power brokers. Others, however, blamed me for being a Euro-pessimist, for presenting altogether too bleak a view of the reality of the values that during the past 50 years have been presented as uniquely European, and of the blessings of the unification that is, according to the Euro-optimists, logically based upon them.
If writing this book – and reading the reviews it has elicited – has taught me anything it is that in talking and writing about Europe the biggest problem is actually the reality of present passions aroused by Europe’s past, whether these be religious, moral, nationalist or political. Indeed, even before the present book’s first edition was published, I was confronted with some reviewers who, after its first publication, were nothing less than vituperative in their criticism, revealing a bias that, I felt, was both extreme and definitely uncalled for in the scholarly debate that a review always is. While others showed genuine passion, I yet realized that Europe continues to change in time, its idea differing from individual to individual, from group to group. Just as in the early 1990s, when I had wondered whether I should not renounce my project altogether, and again in 2004 when asked to write a revised edition, I felt I should perhaps decline the offer. However, in re-reading my own position, I felt I did need to reconsider some issues as there was some truth in many – though certainly not all – of the critical remarks made over the past ten years. Thus, the challenge and the pleasure involved in presenting a revised text have prevailed.
On choices: the scope and structure of this book
Writing history means making choices. These choices are made against a background of complex factors, including the questions a writer poses himself, his assumptions about his reader’s interests and the mass of disorganized details from different and often discordant sources about the past at his disposal. Ultimately, all these factors contribute to the story. But in the last instance, of course, the author’s interpretation is the result of an effort to ask meaningful, which means present-minded, questions while trying to avoid meaningless, that is to say present-minded, answers.
In view of all this, writing a ‘cultural history of Europe’ is not an easy task. One not only must determine the chronological scope of such a tale, more importantly one must decide where, both geographically and culturally, Europe begins and ends. Having dealt with my definition of culture in the previous section, a definition is now called for of the other constituent element of this book: Europe in its spatial and temporal dimensions.
Must everything be described which has happened from the North Cape to Gibraltar, from the west coast of Ireland to the Urals – the accepted geographical definition of Europe as a continent? Or should only those developments be emphasized that can help us understand Europe’s culture as it is seen today? Rather than engage in a futile attempt at writing an all-inclusive, encyclopedic and, consequently, unreadable book – and aware of the risk of taking too teleological a view – I have decided to follow the latter approach. However, in doing so choices have been made that limit both the geographical scope of the Europe described and the elements of culture discussed, knowing that to some these restrictions will be disappointing, not to say painful.
As a result of many geoeconomic, geopolitical and cultural-religious developments, some of which can be traced far back into past millennia, while others are of more recent origin, many internal divisions have come into existence creating a multiplicity and diversity of culture(s) in the Europe geographically defined above. Perceptibly the most obvious is the ‘dividing line’ separating western Europe from what, geographically at least, is called eastern Europe. This ‘line’, actually a wide transitional zone sometimes referred to as central or even central-eastern Europe, stretches from the Baltic to the Balkans and roughly coincides with the Baltic states, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics and Hungary.
This book mainly, though not exclusively, records events that occurred in the western zone, dwelling somewhat less upon the central European countries and their cultures, and giving but scant attention to Russia and the Balkans. Although there are sound scholarly reasons, besides considerations of a politically correct nature, to induce an author to fully include the cultures of eastern Europe, I have chosen not to do so. First of all, I lack the language skills necessary to delve into the relevant literature. More important, however, I believe that this non-inclusion can be defended on the basis of past developments themselves. With its many ‘accidents’, history has forged links between a number of regional cultures in western and central Europe which increasingly have shown a comparable historical development, resulting in a more widely experienced culture that, however diverse in many of its elements, has yet grown towards an overall unity.16
One factor often named as determining the relative unity of this area is the way of life and of thinking which was paired with and is still coloured by the development of western Christianity after the break-up of the Carolingian Empire in the tenth century and the schism between the churches of Rome and Byzantium in the eleventh century. However, another, far more important element is the fact that a number of countries in western and central Europe, while being ruled by ‘absolute’ monarchs up until the end of the eighteenth century, have yet developed towards consensual and finally even constitutional government. Moreover, these parts of Europe first experienced a slow transition from a mainly agrarian to an industrial economy and culture. Over a long period, a tradition of civic societies has evolved there, characterized by increasing economic and political freedom for the individual and, from the late nineteenth century onwards, also by some sort of collective care for that individual – a mixture of consumerism, liberalism and social democracy. If judged by those criteria, the Europe that now projects itself with such a pretence of historical inevitability is, indeed, only a recent creation;17 some would even say that it is really a creation of the late nineteenth century.18
Due to a number of historical accidents as well as to the absence of certain preconditions, in eastern Europe such structures and traditions have not developed, or only marginally so. Obviously, even as I write and, certainly, in the near future, economic and political changes will result in a growing integration not only of already superficially comparable lifestyles but also of the views of the people and societies of, respectively, western(-central) and eastern Europe. In this process, people in the West increasingly will be forced to reconsider their notions of what Europe is.
However, my conscious choice to make this cultural-geographical restriction does not solve the problem of other choices. Looking backwards, one has to establish which of the traditions one feels Europe is characterized by – each one of them perhaps not specifically, let alone uniquely ‘European’ – which, taken together, do constitute a coherent culture, a heritage that is worth exploring from a historical point of view.
This first involves choosing the amount of detail to give on developments and cultures that, while geographically speaking are manifestly not European, yet are traditionally included in most histories of Europe. Thus, the so-called ‘neolithical’ revolution, which introduced agriculture and the forging of iron to the world, did not occur in Europe first – though it soon spread there and influenced the environment there and elsewhere as, since then, only the Industrial Revolution has done.
Precisely because of the search for continuity outlined above, most European histories nowadays begin with an extensive analysis of all that occurred in Egypt, the Near East and Greece from c.5000 BC, acting on the assumption that the world of the eastern Mediterranean was the ‘cradle of European civilization’. As this is indeed where Graeco-Roman culture and Christianity began, and became probably the two most important ideological cornerstones of the concept of ‘European’ civilization, developments in this region will be described, albeit only sketchily, in Part I, chapters 1, 2 and 3. However, limiting the story to these ‘roots’ of Europe would do no justice to what was occurring at the same time in, from a modern perspective, Europe proper and, more specifically, in its western and central regions. Therefore, this aspect is included in the story as well, also in the first chapters.
In trying to isolate the relevant traditions, or sources of inspiration, of these cultures in their chronological appearance, we should first, but cautiously, name the nascent democracy of ancient Greece, specifically Athens – cautiously because it was a democracy that left out the majority of the town’s population. We should then go on to the legal structures devised in classical Rome, which protected both life and property, and to the moral values of Christianity that tried to teach that protecting only oneself would not result in a humane society.
Specifically, the fusing of the classical tradition with the beliefs of Christianity, and the characteristics of the society that brought about this fusion – and was formed by it – are described in Part II, chapters 4, 5 and 6.
After these two extended introductory parts, an Interlude looks at Europe from another point of view, namely as a world that, for many centuries, consisted largely of local, enclosed, rural cultures and of more open, urban cultures. Through their more dynamic culture, the latter were, many historians have argued, the motors that brought about the change that altered Europe from the fifteenth century onwards.
To substantiate my thesis that Europe slowly underwent its most important transformation since that period, Parts III and IV take up two-thirds of the book, covering Europe’s history since then. According to Max Weber, Europe during these centuries acquired some of its prevailing characteristics: nationalism, as well as rationalism and scepticism; while the first phenomenon embedded Europeans in an often ‘invented’ tradition that tried to give them security, the other two represented a process in which Europeans became, in a sense, ‘disenchanted’. This development, Weber felt, was exemplified in the bipolarity of the Enlightenment, with its glorification of the ‘logos’, and Romanticism, with its continued search for the inspiration of the ‘mythos’. The tension seems to characterize European culture to the present day.
Also, in Parts III and IV I have chosen to highlight the relationship between Europe and the other worlds as, to me, this seems as important as the question of Europe’s pre-European roots discussed in Part I.
Europe and Europeans – as everything and everyone – exist only by virtue of their contrasts, their opposites. Moreover, they have an ‘un-known side’, i.e. some characteristics of fears and desires which define them. Man, and therefore also European man as he sees himself, has made and known himself through a confrontation with the ‘other’, and will always do so. Therefore it is crucially important not to forget that from the earliest times onwards a diversity of peoples living in ‘Europe’ as well as, more visibly and to Europe more profitably – especially between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries – peoples from other worlds have played an important, not to say an essential part in shaping Europe’s culture. Conversely, Europeans themselves have always had a perspective on those other worlds, the more so as they came to dominate large parts of them – culminating, of course, in the inclusion of North America in its own culture, which resulted in the concept of the ‘Western World’. Though for those parts of Asia and Africa that came into its orbit, European dominance effectively lasted only two centuries, covering the short period of c.1750 toc.1950, its consequences for the culture of the present world, and for the process of globalization, have been enormous. Indeed, if Europe is to be called ‘unique’, as it is by some, one of the reasons given surely should be that no other culture has ever influenced the globe as completely, for better or for worse.
Also, it is precisely in these two centuries that Europe really came to acquire the characteristics it now prides itself on. It seems to me that in this period the economic importance of Europe’s Eurasian, Atlantic and African empires, and the complex interaction of these empires with the building of a consumer-oriented, literate, democratic society in Europe itself, really constitute the ‘miracle of the West’. Without at least indicating the role that various non-European worlds and their peoples and cultures played in its creation, my story of the European world would be both partial and incomprehensible. Consequently, justice must be done to the global aspects of Europe’s past, too, to avoid misrepresenting history.
In Part III, I have stressed the various ways in which, since the sixteenth century, forms of tolerance have been slowly developing both through interregional and interconfessional contacts within the narrow confines of Europe and through intercultural relations between Europe and the ‘other worlds’. At the same time, we should stress the intolerance that often characterized the daily practice of the majority as against what was preached by only a minority.
I have also chosen to stress the invention of the art of printing as the first communications revolution since the introduction of scripture: an essential stimulus not only to the wider distribution of knowledge and to the diffusion of a spirit of criticism and debate but, perhaps more important, a road to better education and consequently to more widely spread opportunities for cultural diversity and personal development, although this only became a mass phenomenon since the nineteenth century. By then, Europe had become the first ‘knowledge society’ of the world. But as the information density increased from the nineteenth century onwards – not as a result of any political will but, basically, as a consequence of technological developments – the context of identity in which European people lived was much enlarged as well. In this ongoing process, inevitably people increasingly search for distinction – when ‘others’ become too near, people retire to their ‘self’, and its trusted social and cultural parameters that are often local and regional rather than national, European or global. Consequently, tolerance, multiculturalism even, and the perceived need to retain one’s own identity are certainly not easily reconciled.
Meanwhile, forms of representative government emerged in intricate interaction with economic changes that, between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, turned Europe from a mainly agrarian society in which, through a complex set of social and legal rules, equality of chances was largely absent, into an industrial society with opportunities that were, at least in principle, open to all. The process in which people articulated ideas of social equality and social justice eventually resulted in the concept of human rights, a concept not unequivocal but certainly inspiring.
Of course, we should be well aware that much of the above represents ideas and ideals that neither were nor yet are fully realized in practice. On the contrary, Europeans have often been untrue to their vision of themselves and of the heritage they claim. One of the historian’s tasks, I think, is to evaluate – though, again, not to judge – past practices precisely to allow people to determine what they feel to be important enough to preserve as an inheritance for the future.
Throughout the book, I will try to establish how Europeans, often but certainly not exclusively intellectuals and scholars, shaped their lives, created culture, in increasingly complex manifestations. Many if not all of these manifestations were formed within the fundamental cultural context Europe acquired when, from the first century AD onward, a fusion started between Graeco-Roman traditions and Christianity, a creed in itself the product of several Near Eastern, ‘Asiatic’ religions. This fusion resulted in a frequently difficult partnership of resolute rationalism on the one hand and beliefs based on revelation on the other hand. For the past 2,000 years, this has stimulated a creative tension that has become one of the motors of European culture, influencing both the thoughts and actions of those Europeans who remained religious and of those who, precisely because of that tension, sought new ways.
This book also hopes to show how, as a result of this process, many ideas were absorbed as normative values in the self-image of Europe, which was mainly articulated by the intellectual elite. Though elites, certainly intellectual elites, are groups whose cohesion is determined by various socio-economic and cultural factors, they share a way of thinking which determines their spoken and – much more powerful – written words as well as, at least partly, their deeds. In this way, and as long as they dominate society’s communication and, thus, information processes, they have a strong influence on the cultural expressions of society at large, certainly on those expressions that one encounters on the surface: political and social ideas, the public manifestations of power, customs and manners, and so on.
All this does not mean that this book deals with ‘elite culture’ only and omits any reference to ‘popular culture’. These concepts, also referred to as the ‘great’ and ‘small’ traditions, are too simple and, hence, distorting to be tenable. Rather, I prefer to stress that precisely the question of what people thought and, more important, how and in which circumstances they acted gives direction to every study of cultural history.
Having made all of the above choices, including the one not to search for an all-encompassing framework to present the data that follow from these choices, I still felt that I needed to avoid a simple chronology – though, of course, there is no denying the influence of time evolving, of new generations choosing from the inheritance of their forebears, changing it, adding to it. Yet, having said that, I need to stress that cultural histories never follow the strict chronology used by the more traditional political histories. Moreover,for various reasons categories like ‘the Middle Ages’, the ‘Early Modern Period’ and ‘Contemporary History’, long in use, are more or less inadequate, if not actually misleading. The patterns shown by different domains of culture and, also, in different sectors of society can sometimes remain static for centuries, and sometimes change in quick succession within relatively short periods. Therefore, searching for useful beginnings and endings, for synchronicity, would mean distorting the past only to suit the format of a textbook.
To give some structure to a story that stretches over thousands of years, this book charts Europe’s past along the lines of what I have termed four grand phases of continuity and change. These phases can be summed up in the following phrases.
The effort at survival, characterizing the history of all of mankind from the beginning, produced a great change in European culture with the transition, from the fifth millennium BC onwards, to an agricultural society, and a rather more secure livelihood. The move towards one dominant religionin Europe, which really started in the fourth century AD, had enormous consequences for life and thought. With some rhetorical exaggeration, one might say that from the sixteenth century onwards the genesis of a broader view of the world brought Europeans slowly out of the confines of the village into the orbit of the state, of Europe, and finally even of other worlds. Last but not least, the development towards mass consumption and communication in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave European culture its present characteristics; also, more than anything that came before, it robbed Europe of many of its traditional cultural forms.
Obviously, this is not to say that the phases outlined above were peculiar only to European history, for at least the first and second definitely occurred in other regions of the world as well. But it may be maintained that, taken together and seen in their historical interaction, they represent both the result of and a framework for choices that have contributed to Europe’s singularity, to its cultural identity as it stands today.