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yhb99
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13th Jan 1999

I'm 35 years old, from China.


 
Europe: Still in Search of a Definition
Europe: Still in Search of a Definition
Though the idea of "Europe" has been
around for more than a thousand
years, there is still little agreement as
to what it actually means

BY TONY JUDT

It is a mistake to speak of Europe, "a
mere geographical expression," sniffed
the 19th century German Chancellor
Otto von Bismarck when threatened with
its disapproval for his actions. Maybe
Europe is just a geographical
expression, but at the very least it
is quite an old one. Europeans have
been conscious of their part of the
world for a long time--its boundaries,
topography, languages and ideas have
been recognized and debated for at
least 1,200 years. More than any other
continent, Europe has been obsessed
with its own self-definition, with
ascertaining just what it is that
binds "Europeans" together and
distinguishes them from their
neighbors. In short, with asserting
the distinctive claims and
self-evidence of "European
civilization."

These claims--based on the intuitively
obvious features of Europe:
Christianity, the heritage of the
Roman Empire, various natural
boundaries--provide the backdrop to
the modern drive to unity. But on
closer inspection, the picture blurs.
European civilization, for example,
has had a checkered past. In the 12th
century Renaissance which saw the
birth of universities and city-states,
throughout the Enlightenment and again
since World War II, it was common
practice to talk--and think--European.
But in other times, much more
attention was paid to local interests
and parochial conflicts. And even when
Europeans did invoke the idea of
Europe, they frequently had very
different things in mind.

Thus there has always been a
Mediterranean Europe, an Atlantic
Europe, a Northern Europe,
distinguished by more than geography
alone. There has also, for many
centuries, been a mainstream Europe
and a marginal one: the former defined
by wealth, trade routes and
established political regimes, the
latter by poverty and vulnerability to
invasion and imperial domination. And
cutting across these there has always
been the distinction between center
and periphery. The center in this
perspective has shifted at various
times from Rome to Paris, from Vienna
to Brussels. But the peripheries have
remained much the same--sometimes
wealthy, sometimes poor. And it is
among these peripheral peoples of
Europe, especially the more affluent
ones to the north and west, that
skepticism about the project of a
united Europe has always been most
marked.


Then there is the important element of
size. The dimensions of European
states vary greatly--from the 80
million citizens of Germany to tiny
sub-Alpine statelets like Slovenia.
Populous countries with
long-established, secure state
systems, like France or Britain, have
always been wary of being absorbed
anonymously into pan-European
projects, whether led by popes,
emperors or bureaucrats. For Europe's
smaller countries it is quite
different. Whatever national identity
Greece has, for example, is largely a
function of its place in other
people's ideas of the roots of
European civilization. Greece is
aggressively European just because it
is Greek. The Czech Republic, under
the presidency of Vaclav Havel, is
enthusiastically European as the only
defense against the demons of its
history--most of which consists of
being attacked and absorbed by
overmighty neighbors, first imperial,
then fascist, finally communist. For
Czechs then, as for Hungarians and
Poles, Europe is not just a place but
an ideal of national independence and
political and cultural freedom.

Vulnerable small countries like those
of Central Europe, or the Netherlands
and Belgium, can best maintain their
distinctive cultural identities by
identifying with Europe as a bulwark
against their own past or ambitions of
their stronger European neighbors. For
them as for regions like Catalonia or
Lombardy, which have long strained
against the demands of a centralizing
Spanish or Italian state to which they
feel only an ambivalent allegiance,
being European and taking pride in
local identity are complementary.
Larger countries, some of which have
at various times aspired to absorb
Europe into themselves, are nowadays
more modest in their ambitions.
However they remain wary of losing
their special place, their distinct
national image, through too close an
identification with a Europe they
cannot control.

But more even than size or location or
history, the most significant fault
line of all in Europe today runs
through countries, not between them.
Whatever is distinctively European
about the thought or tastes or
practices of the Continent has always
been restricted to a transnational
elite. United by command of a common
language--first Latin, then French,
now English--and by a freedom of
movement afforded them by private
resources or public support, such men
and women have always been, and felt,
European. It might surprise modern
business executives, lecturers or
politicians, as they flit from one
Eurocapital to another, to know just
how much they have in common with the
traders, theologians and emissaries
who traversed the same routes, in
rather less comfort, in centuries
past. Such cosmopolitan Europeans have
always had more in common with one
another than with their monolingual,
less well-educated national
compatriots.

For this other Europe of
farm-laborers, shopworkers, clerks and
storekeepers, Europe is an
abstraction. Thanks to television,
even the poorest of European citizens
today share--or aspire to--a certain
common culture. But this universal,
interchangeable popular culture is of
course not distinctively European at
all. In Bratislava as in Bangkok, it
is a sort of adapted para-American
culture superficially grafted onto
local life. At a deeper level the
underclass of European states remains
confined within narrower boundaries.
Its cares and concerns are national
rather than continental--and
accordingly more susceptible to
populist and nationalist appeals
against changes wrought to its
disadvantage in the name of Europe.

In Western Europe something new is in
the making. The disappearance of
effective national frontiers in the
movement of goods, money and people is
forging a sort of hybrid: men and
women who feel French/Italian/Dutch
and European too, depending on what
they are doing. In Central Europe,
however, Europe is still a project, a
solution to national dilemmas rather
than a newly experienced way of life.
And in "outer" Europe, from Latvia to
Serbia, Europe is still a hotly
contested notion, a cosmopolitan
aspiration of one part of the local
elite angrily contested by others for
whom the national option offers
emotional appeal and political
advantage.

Yet even in Western Europe there is
something odd about the latest version
of European civilization. A common
currency is being imposed from above
and from abroad. The member states of
the European Union have come together
and forged a community less to build a
clearly envisioned future than to
avert return to an all-too-well
understood past (in this respect, at
least, Western and Eastern Europe are
at one). Europeans, in short, are
bound together above all by the
unpleasant memory of their mutual
antagonisms and the desire to keep
them at bay. And, worse, they are
increasingly bound by their common
fear of Europe's continuing
vulnerability at its edges, no longer
to military threat so much as to waves
of immigrants from the south and east.

Between an open-ended ambition for
continental union and a return to
Fortress Europe, the dividing line is
thin and far from clear. When we add
to this the growing division within
Europe itself, between the haves and
the have-nots, the "Europeans" and the
"nationalists," it becomes difficult
to say for sure just how far the
Continent, and especially its
peripheries, has truly resolved the
dilemmas inherited from its divided
past. The idea and ideal of Europe
remain as murky as ever. More than
just a geographical expression,
certainly, but less than an answer.
 
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