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| Europe: Still in Search of a Definition | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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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