Epilogue
Es irrt der Mensch, so lang er strebt.
Man errs as long as he strives.
God, in the Prologue to Goethe’s Faust I1
In the Prologue, I compared this book to an extended walking tour, through space and time – through the geographical part of Eurasia commonly called Europe and through the thousands of years during which it has gained recognizable traits. Obviously, I did not intend it to be an aimless walk; rather, I set out with a number of questions in mind that subsequently guided me as I went along. Having arrived at the end of my journey, I would like to think I have reached a new vantage point. Standing here, now, and looking back, it seems that this journey through the past has resulted in questions for the present, and thus for the future. The English historian Robin Collingwood, being asked what purpose was served by the study of history, replied: to bring man to knowledge of himself, and added, ‘the only indication of what man can do, is what man has done; … the value of history lies in that it teaches what man has done and, thus, who he is’.2 Indeed, in my view, in their exploration of the past, historians ultimately not only depart from questions which fascinate them in the present, but also want to return there; if they do their job properly, it is their journey which determines where, in the present, they finally find themselves. Since, in that sense, writing history is a scientific form of self-discovery, the resulting questions, though they may claim only a limited general validity, yet they will help an author and his readers to better understand their own world.
In the course of 17 chapters and an interlude, and with the help of the 17 new dossiers, I have attempted to show how, in the long period since Europe was first introduced as a geographical concept, people all over that part of the world have expressed themselves in a variety of cultural forms. Over the centuries, many of these coagulated into a set of norms and values which people began to ascribe to ‘Europe’, thus transforming it from, at best, a specious territorial designation, a geographical coincidence within the Eurasian landmass, into a cultural concept, a real world. Slowly, Europe has emerged as an increasingly complex and compelling definition people used to identify themselves with, usually in hours of need. However, any identification implies a distinction that, automatically, marks others as, indeed, ‘other’ – in this case as ‘not European’.
Among these cultural forms, Christianity, absorbing a number of older beliefs and customs, slowly became the norm of all things, the challenging and at the same time restrictive context for Europe’s ideas and actions. Undeniably, for a very long time Christian culture was the most influential denominator of the world that felt itself to be distinctly ‘European’. Also, it decisively influenced the process in which, far more recently, a series of territorial political unities sought closer cooperation for reasons both eminently pragmatic and, many like to think, idealistic.
When the history of Europe had run its course to and through the Second World War, a climate of liberation and reconstruction, and the demand for peace and unity followed. Yet, a new divisive element quickly became manifest: the estrangement between, on the one hand, a group of basically democratic states in western Europe and, on the other hand, a number of countries in central and eastern Europe which had been brought under the totalitarian power of communist regimes, resulting, soon, in a new war, the ‘Cold War’. In that situation, in ‘the west’ a ‘dream of Europe’ developed, perhaps even had to develop. But while most politicians viewed this new Europe primarily as a political and military necessity for which economic reconstruction was a prerequisite, many also felt that to win over the citizens of their states an appeal to old, partly forgotten, images and ideas might prove helpful.
Significantly, Jean Monnet (1888–1979), one of the architects of ‘modern Europe’, at the end of his life is said to have remarked that if he had to start building the ‘European House’ anew, he would first address culture rather than economic or political life. Similarly, another early ‘European’, Gonzague de Reynold (1880–1970), wrote: ‘Wenn ich noch einmal meine Europaische Arbeit beginnen konnte wurde ich mit den Kultur anfangen’ (‘If I were to start again on my work for Europe, I would start with culture’). Yet, as in the past, when perceived dangers had engendered a process of self-reflection and self-definition, those ideas again proved difficult to formulate, and still more difficult to establish as indisputably valid for everyone. Indeed, I do not know what these two eminent men meant, exactly, for they did not define their concept of European culture. In this epilogue, it might be useful to try to find out what one might like it to mean, especially since the economic and political Europe, in May 2004, expanded beyond the dreams of its erstwhile founders and since, in November of the same year, a European constitution was signed which, despite not having been ratified by the European Union’s member states, will create a unity that definitely pretends to be cultural as well as economic and political. Indeed, the preamble to that constitution states that ‘The people of Europe are determined to transcend their ancient divisions, and, united ever more closely, to forge a common destiny’. In doing so, they will create a Europe based on ‘equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason’, and will draw ‘inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe’. These seemingly simple words are the result of some extremely violent political and, therefore, cultural debates. Also, they show how even on this exalted level words can be used to confuse. For, of course, religion is part of culture. And while, also, of course, Humanism in the above sense is no longer defined and monopolized solely by the Churches, yet it is the outcome of a struggle to create a set of values that, at least in Europe, was first articulated by and, indeed, spread through institutionalized religion, i.e. Christianity. Symbolically, but also rather ironically, the 25 heads of government who lined up to sign the constitution did so in Rome, the city that considered itself for so long the ‘capital of the (civilized) world’. To many, Rome, as the embodiment of the legal, secular values of the Roman Empire, is the preferred ancestor of present-day Europe.3 Yet to subscribe to the European constitution, these leaders actually had to sit down at the feet of a huge bronze statue of Pope Innocent X (1574–1655) in the act of blessing the world – significantly, he was the pope who had to watch as Europe’s religious division was finally politically sanctioned at the Peace of Westphalia which, in 1648, ended perhaps the first all-European war. Arguably, the papacy represents that other strand of Europe’s culture, Christianity, though that religion, after years of debate, was emphatically not identified in the constitution. While one may feel the constitution thus shows Europe turning its back on part of its past, one might also argue that it heralds a Europe turning its face towards the future. Some prefer it to be a future without religion. Others know it will be a future of many religions. Some feel that religion accounts for much that has been wrong in Europe, for much that Europe has done wrong. Others feel that without religion(s), Europe will fail to survive as a moral community and, therefore, a viable culture. Though one might argue that religion is not, perhaps, the sole fount of a consistent set of moral values, the fact that such values are needed to sustain a community seems indisputable. Problematically, the question is at the heart of Europe’s present and future. What will be Europe’s stance on religious fundamentalism – especially Islamic fundamentalism? What will be its stance on the admission of Turkey to the European Union? Some people now argue that, after all, Europe is what it is because it once was – and, basically, still is? – Christian. Including Turkey would be betraying Europe, because most Turks are supposed to be Islamic at heart. Others feel that, precisely because Europe is no longer Christian, but secular, the inclusion of a state which for many decades has proclaimed its secularity and, moreover, its adoption of European, secular values, is purely a logical step that will strengthen what Europe stands for.
All these problems notwithstanding, there are those who argue that Europe already has much to be proud of.4 The Euro-zone has a trade surplus with most of the rest of the world though, of course, that creates problems of its own. By and large, the European economy is doing well, despite recurring crises and considerable (according to some) structural differences between the various member states of the Union. Also, Europeans have better public services than almost any other region of the world, and they are better educated than most other peoples, too, although certainly the middle classes in countries such as China, India, Korea, Japan and Taiwan are reaping the benefits of prospering economies and the investments in education these facilitate. Moreover, they are healthier, and seem, increasingly, to choose quality of life over increased consumption and its implicit ties to the workplace. Europeans cherish the environment, though, admittedly, in face of the global dimensions of the climate change problems, their attitude can be little more than an example which, if not followed, will not help them very much. By creating a flexible system of sovereignty-sharing, Europe may well be able to better adapt to new threats and possibilities; but, then again, some might argue that this precisely precludes taking the stronger stance often necessary in today’s increasingly complex global politics and the threat of terrorism that goes with it.
Yet, despite the grand claims of Europe’s first constitution, pessimists hold that any appeal to define ‘Europe’ as more than a mere geographical entity and an economic association that is still debating whether it wants or needs to go towards political union, will sound hollow as long as the pan-European institutions that have been created to manage shared sovereignty manifestly fail to attract the loyalty of Europe’s citizens. Indeed, one sometimes wonders whether over the past two decades many have not felt their allegiance should rather lie with the ‘old’, or at least tradition-hallowed national institutions which are, or seem to be, sustained by a familiar community narrative.
Others feel pessimistic about the future of a value-imbued Europe since fundamental intolerance has not disappeared and equal opportunities for all have not yet been realized there. Some argue that the so-called ‘Age of Reason’, ‘the Enlightenment’ that, to many, is one of Europe’s distinctive and distinguishing cultural characteristics, while it did contribute to the growth of tolerance and equal opportunity, has also fostered a specific, potentially negative kind of rational, scientific thinking. Stressing analysis, classification, inclusion and exclusion, privileging modernity and individualism as specifically European, that culture threatens one of Europe’s oldest – Judaeo-Christian and Roman – tenets, the fundamental equality of all humankind.5
Optimists, on the other hand, feel that one of the essential qualities of the European tradition is, precisely, that it has succeeded in creating unity out of diversity, while, at the same time, allowing diversity to continue to exist. They feel that though economic inequality has still not been eradicated, Europe, and more specifically the European welfare states, have realized a degree of prosperity and well-being for the majority of their population which has no precedent in the world’s past and is, indeed, what distinguishes Europe from and makes it so attractive to most other societies in the present-day world. They hold that this is or should be one of Europe’s contributions to humanity.
While the study of Europe’s history provides both groups with some justification, it is the future that will prove either of them right. However, Europe’s future will not be one in which it dominates the world as it has done over the past 200 years. We can all see that the third millennium of the Christian era will not be ‘ours’ anymore. With Europe having lost its global predominance – it symbolically ended in 1997, when Britain and Portugal handed over their former colonies of Hong Kong and Macao to China – it is predicted that the third millennium will be ‘Asian’ instead of ‘European’.6 Yet Europe will have a role to play. Having inherited a past that has helped to shape the world, it cannot but feel politically, economically and also morally obliged to contribute to its future. Precisely the interpretation and use of Europe’s past will determine the course of its future.
Demonstrably, many cultural expressions that, over time, have given Europe a certain cohesion as well as distinction were produced and experienced only by an elite, by the educated and the powerful. For more than 1,000 years, this elite was a Christian elite, though from the sixteenth century onwards Christianity was fragmented into a multitude of denominations. Since the seventeenth century, part of that elite operated in increasing opposition to the Churches and, even, to Christianity itself; they reformulated old ideas and created new ones, willing them to be secular, free from the shackles of any religion, truly human and, indeed, universal. Nevertheless, much of this elite culture – religious and secular – was not articulated by the majority of Europeans and, indeed, had little meaning or relevance for them. The institutions that were the embodiment and the bearers of culture were mostly dominated by the elite, too, and often also reserved for them. Of these, ‘Church’ and ‘Education’ were perhaps the most important. Moreover, as this culture communicated, basically, through texts, both in the arts and the sciences, and through travel, it was biased towards the elite as well.
Yet, the majority of studies charting ‘the’ cultural history of Europe fail to state the crucial fact that most Europeans, being illiterate until the very recent past, hardly participated in that specific culture. During the past millennia, through lack of education and reading, as well as through lack of travel or other physical communication, most Europeans lived unaware of their common culture and its historical roots, nor did they share in the ideas and values which the elite called its most noble expression and frequently propagated as universally applicable. Consequently, what was a literate, educated and therefore elite culture only, is usually characterized as ‘the’ European tradition par excellence. Often, this reflects a political and propagandistic point of view. It is not a scholarly one.
Undeniably, all Europeans, through the religions of the many Christian Churches, did become acquainted with a few core concepts. Perhaps the most important of these was the equality of every person before God in heaven and the ensuing idea of the equality under law of all people – on earth. The Apostle Paul had argued: ‘There are neither Jews nor Greeks, men nor women, masters nor slaves – for the Eternal One, all are equal’. Nor did some values vaguely derived from such tenets as ‘social justice’ fail to exercise great influence on the expectations of many people in Europe, though for a long time they existed as political rhetoric only. Only when the French and the Industrial Revolutions brought about a veritable, all-embracing cultural revolution as well, did Europe really begin to change, and a real European consciousness begin to take shape.
Basically, it was the expansion of education from the nineteenth century onwards that confronted the majority of Europeans with a set of values that were now considered essential by state governments. These values still derived from or were developed out of an originally Christian stock of ideas. Since the end of the nineteenth century, general education became available to the entire population. Yet, until the Second World War this was primary education only for most Europeans, and of very limited content and scope at that. Moreover, the quality of even this basic education differed greatly between north-west, central, eastern and southern Europe.
Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the influence of Christianity, both as a personal religion and as a general cultural tradition has declined. This has become manifest in people’s actual experience of beliefs in their everyday life as well as in education. With knowledge of classical antiquity and its traditions declining as well, people’s notions about life and the values that should guide their actions are no longer firmly rooted in a known past. Living their lives without a historical perspective, they also lack the foundation for self-criticism.
Meanwhile, since the late nineteenth century, mass communication has slowly become a major force in everyday life. However, its message was and is usually directed at reinforcing consumer culture – especially since it is dominated by largely anonymous, profit-oriented global corporations. Many feel that, as yet, the media have contributed little of significance to the (re-)creation of ideas and values, as opposed to lifestyles and a culture of everyday pleasures and emotions. Moreover, it is to be doubted whether mass tourism, though having evolved out of more elitist forms of ‘cultural travel’, will be a significant moral force, though, undeniably, it has increased a general awareness of cultural diversity and, at the same time, has fostered some cultural cohesion.
Yet, though in many European countries more or less similar ideas have been spread and are still being spread by similar cultural institutions, many of the so-called indisputable ‘European values’ have still materialized in widely different political-ideological systems. They were and are implemented in parliamentary-constitutional institutions, but within these have manifested themselves in a variety of liberal, social- or religious-democratic ways of thinking and acting. However, these values have also been appropriated by conservative-authoritarian ideologies, themselves the products of extreme or fundamentalist social or religious convictions. Frequently, during the recent past, in adopting these ideologies people have eliminated the possibility of thinking and acting within a parliamentary-constitutional context. Even in the new Europe, the danger of such a situation recurring still exists, if only because of the cultural contradictions recently resulting from the massive influx of people who have not been educated – and it is again necessary to stress the concept of education here – to accept Europe’s basic human values.
Moreover, though for the time being Europe itself hopes to be spared the horrors of another major war, many feel its pretensions to a unique humaneness and an exemplary role have not been translated into a policy that prevents the systematic oppression and even extermination of fellow humans elsewhere. This situation posits a question fraught with practical-political and, indeed, moral problems. If Europe has the strength of its convictions, should it ‘impose’ its ideas on the rest of the world – as, in another sense, it did during its colonial-imperialist phase – and should it then create a military force of its own to be able to do so? Or would it, in doing so, risk following the course taken by the USA that is, precisely, a course many Europeans condemn?
Therefore, some may be inclined to ask whether the inhabitants of this Europe can rightfully maintain that the appellation ‘European culture’ designates more than a mere location. Others will argue that this culture has not formed every ‘European’ now included in the Union that claims it in the same way and to the same degree. Finally, there will be those who feel that, for many people living in Europe, this specific cultural Europe is a thing of the past.
While I do not presume to pronounce on the direction that Europe should follow culturally and politically, I do feel that it is precisely in these fields that the past has helped to shape the present. Therefore, the reader of this epilogue may benefit from a final, albeit short, in-depth look at the qualities people in the past have wanted to attribute to ‘Europe’. For using the name consciously or unconsciously, but always with a certain intention, Europeans need to know what their ‘being European’ does, and perhaps should, mean. Indeed, as the preamble to the 2004 constitution seems to suggest, asking what ‘Europe’ means essentially is asking about the moral-ethical load necessarily implicit in every definition of group identity. As, moreover, ‘European’, used as an adjective, frequently seems to imply a criterion for quality – if not outright superiority – the following nuancing of the complex reality of present-day ‘Europe’ seems apposite.
During the last three or four decades, ‘Europe’ has presented itself as a relative unity. It partly legitimizes itself by pointing to a number of economic and political choices and achievements that are said to imply moral choices as well. More importantly, it tries to defend certain values, the results of a rich cultural tradition. Yet one sees how between Europeans themselves, on every level of political or sociocultural organization, the description ‘we’ and ‘the others’ results in narrow-mindedness and restrictive behaviour. Frequently, even the freedom and, hence, the tolerance often put central stage in many definitions of ‘the European tradition’ are lacking, let alone that others are actually accepted.
For centuries, Europeans have used disconcertingly simple but nevertheless deeply felt we–other, insider–outsider oppositions to define their world: such oppositions as civilized vs. barbarian, Christian vs. heathen, believer vs. heretic, town vs. country, ‘high brow’ vs. ‘low brow’ and, in a later period, white vs. black – or red, or yellow – and ‘modern and progressive’ vs. ‘old-fashioned and static’. Moreover, there were the oppositions of north vs. south and west vs. east.7 As for these latter two, they, too, implied differences of quality, strengthened by the influence of the Industrial and French Revolutions on the material and political-social conditions of parts of Europe. Since the early nineteenth century, the north-west has tended to present the prosperity realized within its own region and the genesis of certain political institutions there as absolute criteria for civilization and progress – as signs of a superior culture, even. These criteria have been applied to describe, measure and judge differences both outside and within Europe. Moreover, within Europe itself, the lack of understanding of other national or regional customs and traditions has created opinions of and attitudes towards others that, though mostly voiced only laughingly, are in times of conflicting interests caused by scarcity or other restrictions, articulated rather more fiercely and, also, reprehensibly.
The question of whether Europe’s values of freedom, tolerance and equal opportunity were living realities within a democratic system surfaced once again when, in the 1980s, a new phenomenon appeared, which was quickly and propagandistically referred to by many as a new ‘enemy’. It was the phenomenon of the culture of the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers whom, since the 1960s, north-west Europe had brought in especially from southern Europe, from Turkey and from the countries along the north coast of Africa – while, of course, Britain and the Netherlands also saw an influx of people from their former colonies. Indeed, by 2011, some 6 per cent of British people descend from black or Asian settlers who have come to the United Kingdom during the past 50 years. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands nearly 10 per cent of the population consists of people who have newly arrived there from outside Europe, or their first- or second-generation descendants. Though some of the immigrant groups did assimilate surprisingly quickly, others manifestly did not. This has created a situation that, rather poignantly, has come to serve as a test of the strength and indeed the validity of European values.
For many ‘Caucasian’ Europeans surely the three most important questions, namely whether they feel European, whether they consider the non-Caucasian people inhabiting their world to be Europeans as well and, finally, which norms and values they share with each other, seem to be slowly receding before their need to define themselves against ‘others’. These are not necessarily the people whose skin colour is different; far more important, they are the people whose cultural expressions, especially in religion and in the various customs and norms resulting from it, diverge from or are precisely more pronounced than what most Europeans now consider ‘normal’; many ‘old’, ‘real’ Europeans feel the presence of these ‘new’ Europeans will endanger both Europe as a social and cultural system and its prosperity. Now, of course, all over the world such opposition between ‘us’ and ‘the others’ always results from a need to ensure group safety, in which ‘same’ and ‘different’ serve as criteria on which distinction, self-assurance and power can be founded. Also, any social system – the tribe, the nation-state or Europe – will only be able to provide cohesion as long as it can remain true to its dream, and to the promises, material or immaterial, that its dream holds. Consequently, each and every system has its limits of capacity; it can only expand if, by some form of common consent, it alters its cultural premises, its self-image.
Undeniably, the second wave of immigrants, who originate from the various and diverse non-Christian cultures of the eastern and southern Mediterranean, have contributed to a very large extent to the unprecedented economic flowering which Europe experienced in the 1960s and 1970s and which has made Europe the affluent society it now is. Though tens of millions of Europeans now are Islamic,8 it would be both dangerous and rather stupid to see or represent them as belonging to a ‘monolithic’ Islam, just as Christians themselves cannot be so represented. Knowing, as we do, that these ‘new’ Europeans often represent the second, third or even fourth generation to be born here, and yet questioning their right to live in Europe by (re-)drawing a dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is not only inhuman but also reveals the lack of historical perspective that so often seems to blight Europeans, politicians not least. For we should, of course, consider the very genesis of European culture itself, analysing it as the result of millennia-long, constantly recurring contacts with ‘others’ – often migrating into Europe from non-European regions. Moreover, it is increasingly obvious that Europe – i.e. everyone living in it now – faces an enormous demographic problem, with its population falling and drastically ageing. Alongside the effect of the continuing economic power of the USA and the inevitable rise of China and India, this will definitely decrease Europe’s share of world GDP and, at the very least, jeopardize its continued superstatehood. Nor, of course, will it guarantee the level of economic and social welfare to which Europeans have become accustomed. In short, immigration on a scale greatly exceeding the influx of the 1960s and 1970s seems the only way to prevent Europe from becoming a second-rate region in almost every conceivable respect. For this reason alone, addressing the question of what Europe wants to be is more pressing than it ever has been. Obviously, the problems created by the continuing clash between national identities and a European multiculturalism are severely compounded by the hostility to cultural integration provoked by, in particular, militant Islam.
Meanwhile, simply as a result of the demographic factor – for the time being the birth rate among the new Europeans is considerably higher than reproduction amongst the older groups – the descendants of the 1960s and 1970s immigrants will play an increasingly active role not only in every ‘national’ culture but also in ‘European’ culture. They are an undeniable factor in European society which is being changed by them as much as it changes them. For Europe, the confrontation with the dark-skinned African, a believer in Islam, was one of the oldest historical confrontations with ‘the other’. In Shakespeare’s Othello (1611) the eponymous ‘Moor’ is the protagonist. This tragic character, a Moorish admiral in Venetian service, was, one might say, Europe’s first immigrant worker. Shakespeare sketched Othello ‘objectively’, that is to say, with his positive and negative sides, which are indicated as generally human. Moreover, Othello’s opponent, the ‘white’ Iago, is the real scoundrel of the piece, as if the playwright wanted to indicate that stereotypes must be avoided. It has been suggested that, preferably, the ‘Moor’ be played by a white actor wearing a black mask, and Iago by a black actor with a white mask. Perhaps Europeans, of whatever background, should more frequently try such a form of ‘role playing’ in the drama of everyday life.
Shakespeare’s plea for tolerance, however, seems to go still further. When Prospero in The Tempest eventually calls the ‘wild’ Indian Caliban his ‘shadow’, he recognizes the essential ‘darkness’ in himself, in every human being. Yet although tolerance can thus acquire a function as the self-criticism and, hence, the self-acceptance of any human amidst other humans, either permanent or not according to the extent to which a person enters into confrontation repeatedly with new ‘others’, this certainly does not explicitly guarantee complete acceptance of the fundamentally different. Even if only in order to remain himself or itself, every human, every culture will consider certain behaviour or situations to be unacceptable as long as the confrontation has not led to gradual adaptation, change or inculturation. Tolerance without norms and values ends in chaos, arbitrariness and, inevitably, repression.
Whether Europe’s three-fold post-Second World War confrontation with ‘the other’ – the people from the former European colonies, the immigrant workers from, mostly, the Islamic Mediterranean, the political and economic exiles from Africa and Asia – will be a process of acculturation or of inculturation cannot yet be ascertained. That Europe might perhaps return to its Mediterranean, partly Asian-African, origins is a fascinating thought. That the culture of any political unity in or of Europe during the third millennium of the ‘Christian era’ can be no longer specifically Christian seems to me indisputable.
Despite widespread nostalgia among the ‘old’ Europeans, Europe will be a world in which church towers, crosses and the ringing of bells will no longer almost instinctively evoke a multitude of emotions and images which, all-encompassing, describe culture and solidarity. But among the group of Islamic Europeans, too, secularization will become stronger and the power of the mosques, the minarets and the muezzin to retain or even recreate their group spirit will inevitably weaken as well. The same, perhaps, will happen to other religious cultures that have come to live in Europe. However, economic problems such as long-term unemployment coupled with inadequate education obviously create a climate of frustration that induces some to turn to fundamentalist interpretations of their own religious and cultural traditions, and, more dangerously still, to act accordingly. To provide the very different cultural traditions – Christian, Islamic, humanist, religious and secular, western and eastern European – that now are struggling to shape Europe with a set of common values, with shared ideals, is one of Europe’s greatest challenges.
The challenge is all the greater because of another development. Since 1989, the communist regimes which had ruled the economy, politics and society of most states in central and eastern Europe for two or sometimes even three generations have collapsed, at least formally. The question as to whether these states and their inhabitants will take – or be given – the opportunity to adapt to the achievements of the Western world cannot definitely be answered at present. Undeniably, the change from an until recently totalitarian political and economic system to one that sets a high store on a liberal or social democracy and a free market economy will be difficult despite, or perhaps even because of, the inclusion, in 2004, of so many formerly communist-dominated societies in the European Union – which, one needs to be reminded, does not equal Europe, for Iceland and Norway have not joined it, nor have Albania or, for that matter, Turkey, which even William Penn said should be considered part of Europe!
Yet, the ten new states completely altered the cultural make-up of this ‘united’ Europe. No longer can we say, as H.A.L. Fisher did in his 1935 History of Europe: ‘We Europeans are the children of Hellas’. If that ever was true, it is certainly no longer so. Of the new states, only two, namely Cyprus and Malta, have a Mediterranean culture with some obvious ‘Hellenic’ elements – although, of course, the Maltese language is a mixture of Italian and Berber-Arabic. Of the eight that have no such obvious ‘classical’ roots, six are, by and large, Slavonic, linguistically and culturally – Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Slovenia – while Estonia and Hungary, at least linguistically, share Finnish-Ugric ties with Finland. Also, these eight states have all been subject to long-time imperialism: German, Austrian and, of course, Russian and the latter both tsarist and communist. Indeed, only three of them have existed as independent states since the early 1990s. While other European states have a long history of shared traditionsthat have coalesced in a definite ‘national’ culture, the Union’s new members, with the exception, perhaps, of Poland, are still trying to find their own, national traditions, sometimes inventing them. Has their joining a Europe that, in its form as a union, is an economic institution, first and foremost, increased the chances of that Union ever becoming the embodiment of a cultural Europe? The problem is all the more complex because it is not clear whether new economic choices will result – automatically? – in new, i.e. western-European, cultural attitudes and manifestations. Does, for example, the consumer culture eagerly adopted by many in central and eastern Europe after decades of relative hardship necessarily entail the adoption of western forms of democracy and secularization as well? It remains to be seen. Also, of course, the inclusion of so many new countries in the European economic system has increased tensions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europeans. Those parts of the original Union that feel and indeed are demonstrably poor, for whatever reason – e.g. southern Italy, Greece, eastern Germany, etc., vociferously claim that they should by right be given preferred treatment. Indeed, even such manifestly wealthy countries as Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands are now staunchly defending their privileges because some politicians and economists argue this is the only way to retain their own economic, and social, systems: their welfare society.
The process of adaptation certainly cannot be one-sided. For the present, the values that have come to characterize western Europe may seem to be triumphant all over the continent as well as, or so some hope, all over the world. But whereas the state-dominated socialism of the former eastern Europe definitely no longer seems to be a viable way, we should not forget that one of its most important, underlying values, the wish to create a system of social justice, of human dignity, was created in and by Europe, and, moreover, should remain one of its fundamental values. Perhaps it can be redefined as a capitalist society’s form of radically reformist self-criticism – as it was conceived, originally, in the nineteenth century. Arguably, to continue or, where necessary, to introduce it is another of Europe’s great challenges for the future.
The final question is, of course, which of Europe’s many professed ideals will prove strong enough to give it cohesion in the years to come? It is a question which historians may ask, but which they cannot ‘scientifically’ answer.
It is quite difficult to prove that man has an innate morality that keeps him from doing wrong, if only because the notions of right and wrong seem, at least partly, culturally conditioned. The quest for a ‘global’ ethics, a quest that many Europeans are now pursuing in order to find spiritual coordinates in a secularizing and increasingly global society, is real if not yet very successful.
Nevertheless, we assume that all people have moral instincts, at least such as that make them want to protect those they know and feel close to. In this sense, morality almost precedes social reality. It is imperative to preserve this morality as a weapon against the possible dehumanizing aspects of social structures with a high degree of organizational rationalism – the ‘modernity’ that now characterizes European society. To be able to do so, pluralism, with its political concomitant, democracy, seems the essential prerequisite. However, we cannot assume that everybody shares these views. As recent discussions between Europe and Asia – or, to avoid dangerous reification, between a number of western European states and a number of south-east Asian states – show, Europe’s assertion that the rights of the individual should always rank highest and that democracy is their best guarantee are offset by Asian, more specifically Confucian ideas about the primacy of the community’s stability, to which the individual should subordinate himself.
Yet, many Europeans feel that this notion of pluralism – both within the existing nation-states and, a fortiori, in the European Union – is the best cultural guarantee for a society that wants to foster ideals, and be fostered by them. It seems the best way to create a civilization in which culture as a set of values keeps social structure and the economy in check. It helps to prevent society from being ruled by automatisms and single-issue movements. It checks the growth of authoritarian or even totalitarian attitudes and organizations. It forces people to take responsibility for themselves though, perhaps, at the risk of creating a situation in which no one person or group can claim the moral authority to provide the rules and regulations that help to give society the cohesion it needs.9
For the intellectual background of such ways of thinking one might refer to the analysis of present-day European culture offered by the Jewish-Lithuanian-French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1905–93), who survived the Nazi efforts to destroy the Jews. In growing opposition to the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927) had such enormous impact on European thinking between the two wars, Levinas held that ‘to be’ is not man’s ultimate function, but ‘being’ is, because it means living with the constant reminder of ‘the other’ and his needs. This does not lead to alienation, non-comprehension. On the contrary, it results in a basic form of Humanism, an awareness of the other that generates an ethic with such basic moral precepts as ‘thou shalt not kill’ and ‘thou shalt do unto others …’.10
Indeed, there seems to be a consensus in Europe that looks at man in society under a three-fold aspect: each man is unique, each person has to make his own choices for good and evil but, first and foremost, being human means taking responsibility for others, means protecting others to preserve the quality of society at large. Freedom, safety, prosperity for everybody seem to be the values European culture has come to cherish most; without, of course, being justified in claiming them as uniquely European. While transcending man’s egocentric instinct for simple everyday survival, these values still do not come naturally: they have to be constantly reaffirmed within the context of the culture that purportedly holds them.
Confronting an always uncertain future from the vantage point of the past, we might say that those Europeans who want the culture they have built and which they cherish to provide a continuing stimulus, in the context of the myth and reality which ‘Europe’ has now become,11 will have to evaluate constantly and critically the actual meaning of the great values and traditions which have been articulated and codified in the past – first by intellectuals,12 but from the late eighteenth century onwards increasingly by larger groups.
This participation is, of course, precisely the process we should continue to foster. After all, intellectuals on their own will never make Europe into an experienced reality of the pretensions that have grown in the past,13 or, as the Oxford professor of ancient history, Michael Rostovtzeff, who was of Russian origin, wrote: ‘Our civilization will not survive unless it is a civilization not of one class, but of the masses’. However, consciously or unconsciously revealing his own position as an intellectual, he added two rather telling questions:
Is it possible for the lower classes to participate in a higher civilization without lowering its level and diluting its quality to the stage where it disappears? Is not every civilization doomed to disappear as soon as it filters through to the masses?14
The above was written in 1926 and even then, raised unpopular questions with uncomfortable presuppositions. Nowadays, political correctness seems to forbid their being openly uttered at all. However, they are at the back of every debate about culture, whether in the media or in politics or in academia. Undoubtedly, Europe’s greatest challenge is to make certain that the values which it deems important are constantly reaffirmed and, indeed, practised by as large a part of its people as is possible. If Europe wants to preserve its cultural heritage, it requires, to paraphrase the German poet Novalis, ordinary people who share the same ideals; for, as he said, with a few words betraying his hopes and beliefs: ‘Mit den Menschen ändert die Welt sich’ (‘The world changes as man changes’).
Consequently, the most apposite answer to Rostovtzeff’s implied question, ‘What to do?’, would be to pay as much attention as possible to sound education. For the transmission of any ideology, of moral values which can create cultural cohesion, remains the most important task of education, increasingly so since it is one of the few ‘socializing institutions’ still functioning within the traditional state for the whole of society. Yet this poses the question as to who determines the values that education will teach? In the wake of the indisputable globalization of culture, will there still be values which circumscribe some sort of national identity, as well as a European culture which is experienced as the logical sum of a number of such identities, through a complex of common roots?
At least, to create a climate for the continuity of these values, we should be concerned with raising historical awareness among the many Europeans who are increasingly in danger of losing it. With the State and industry stressing the need for vocational or in-house training, and those who enter secondary and tertiary education increasingly involved in non-school activities, the lack of a common body of knowledge and values makes itself painfully felt.15
Does this result from the fact that pupils and students know less and less about the cultures from which these values supposedly stem? Should it be blamed on the fact that the ideals that have come to constitute the ‘canon of European values’ especially in the economically dominant north-west of Europe after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, were for several decades during the past century certainly not structurally guaranteed in Greece and Italy, the so-called cradles of civilization, nor, indeed, in Spain, in Germany and in the better part of central and eastern Europe? Or should we raise an accusing finger at growing materialism, at the commercialization of life and culture that is, perhaps all too easily, blamed on the influence of the United States?
To provide Europeans with a proper perspective on the present and thus enable them to make balanced choices for the future, education should certainly ensure they know that the past matters: it is man’s only more or less reliable experience, the horizon he needs to know if he wants to position himself in the present and plot his path into the future. A sound perspective, i.e. a vision that balances tradition and renewal, seems essential. Now, increased communication, especially through the cinema and even more so through television and computerized information services has created a visual ‘knowledge’ of almost every aspect of the present as well as of the past that somehow can be visualized. On the one hand this would seem to ensure the working of one of history’s basic mechanisms, the increase of human interdependence, because people and groups, social configurations, will have to continue to learn from each other. But precisely because of the deliberate unreality of much that is shown by the new media, the resulting encyclopedic memory is in danger of being turned into an unreal, largely sentimental, less than human vision of the world. It is futile to refer to the classical roots of European civilization and the way it has creatively intertwined with the Christian tradition if these and other aspects of European culture are not outlined, interpreted and, in their consequences for our own age, criticized both in teaching situations and in the modern mass media, which hold an enormous responsibility in this respect.
Therefore, history education in its broadest sense will have to give an adequate as well as critical survey of the genesis of the culture that has developed in most (west) European countries in the course of the past millennia stressing, more than has been the case, that, originally, there was little that can be named ‘European’ and, also, emphasizing the contingent character of the development towards what, by now, can be called European after all.
This education will need to explain how and why fewer and fewer recognizable sociocultural cores can be distinguished which, traditionally, have provided security: (extended) family, neighbourhood, religious community, and so on. It will ask whether, as some believe, life in the present lacks dimensions of identity. It will show that, perhaps, other forms are in the making.
Such education will also outline the consequences of the influence of Christian religion and Christian culture on Europe, showing that the Churches, both the united Roman Catholic Church as well as the Greek Orthodox and the many Reformed Churches,however controversial their policies, have for centuries been the bearers of civilization, profoundly influencing Europe’s norms and values. It will also need to stress that, though unbeknownst to many, Islamic civilization has been a prime force in European culture for centuries as well, challenging it and infusing it with many of its profoundest ideas. It will analyse the process of disenchantment, in which a formalized belief in the supranatural power of the divine, especially in matters of this physical world, has slowly declined, at least in most societies of western and, increasingly, central and eastern Europe. It will explain why, after the Second World War, in the West the Churches lost their traditional authority to set strict norms for everyday behaviour while also, in a broadersense, losing their cultural authority. It will also draw attention to the genesis of other, more recent certainties, whether based on an intrinsic belief in the sciences or in forms of Humanism and, sometimes, spiritual forces; while less institutionally powerful than the traditional Churches, these new certainties seem yet to be emotionally satisfactory and, thus, culturally important to many.
History teaching will then analyse the growth of a more rationalist way of thinking and acting both in economic life and in culture at large, and explain the parallel ascendancy of the sciences. Both processes have become evident since the sixteenth century and have increasingly dominated European life since the eighteenth century. It will stress that these processes have created enormous prosperity and also show how this situation has resulted in all sorts of creative internationalization that now manifests itself in the ‘globalization’ not only of the economic but also of the cultural sphere. It will ask whether these developments threaten to accentuate and reinforce the declining value of group solidarity, traditions and national identity or if, rather, cultural uniqueness and cohesionneed no longer always be tied to a specific location: religion and science, music and film, for example, have increasingly transnational or even global dimensions easily accepted by many.
Yet people born in the 1950s and 1960s will probably be the last ‘Eurocentric generation’.16 Therefore, the education of their children and grandchildren will have to show how, in the course of the past centuries, the appeal to the central values which have been, or have sometimes been thought to have been articulated in the culture of classical Greece and Rome – freedom, individuality, creativity, democracy, in short pluralism – has been continuously adapted to suit changing needs. It will try to explain why this appeal had not yet sufficiently proven itself in the first half of the twentieth century. It will also show that, after the Second World War, it regained its impact, even if reformulated.
Exploring the past and, through it, understanding the present, is the main purpose of history. Society and politics should, therefore, give it pride of place both in education and in the media, in order to provide the contemporary world with a sound intellectual basis. But though history’s purpose has always been and will be to give guidance, to provide hope, one has to admit that the validity of values does not result from historical example, only, but has to be proven from everyday practice. Therefore, I feel safe in saying that only by continuing to distinguish itself humanely, will ‘Europe’ continue to have a meaning that goes beyond the economical and the political. At the same time, taking pride in one’s cultural inheritance should not imply uncritically or unthinkingly imposing it on others. In the recent past, many of the values and other cultural forms that have originated in or been elaborated by ‘Europe’ have all too easily been termed ‘universal’. We would do well to discard this much-discussed notion as scholarly irrational and morally irrelevant. The only test of any culture – as a set of values and institutions and, through it, as a way of life – is whether it enhances human welfare. If Europe, or rather, if Europeans can convince the world that their most cherished traditions do so enhance this, their past will, indeed, contribute to a better future, both for themselves and for humankind.