Imagining European Unity since 1000 AD

Patrick Pasture

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137480477
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

European unity is a dream that has appealed to the imagination since the Middle Ages. Its motives have varied from a longing for peace to a deep-rooted abhorrence of diversity, as well as a yearning to maintain Europe's colonial dominance. This book offers a multifaceted history that takes in account the European imagination in a global context.

1

‘Peace for Our Time’: The European Quest for Peace

My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.

Neville Chamberlain, 30 September 1938¹

‘Peace for our time’?

‘Peace for our time’, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain was proud to proclaim on 30 September 1938, commenting on the Munich Agreement between Great Britain and Nazi Germany that he had signed earlier that day. With this agreement, Chamberlain hoped to have appeased the German Reich and to have rescued peace in Europe – a hope widely shared at the moment. The very next day, however, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, as the agreement did indeed permit the German annexation of the Sudetenland. The sacrifice of little Czechoslovakia, whose objections the boasting statesman ignored, obviously did not prevent WW II. Hence, Chamberlain’s words are usually invoked to illustrate either the cynicism of politicians or the irony of history, but what they express above all is the deep longing for peace in Europe, which obliterated all other considerations. Europeans were already doves well before 1945, it seems.²

The memory of the innumerable wars and, in particular, the utter destruction and insanity of WW I and even more so the atrocities of WW II have taught Europe to see itself as a deeply divided continent, always prone to devastating wars, a situation that was finally overcome by the European integration process. That is the reason why the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in 2012 conferred its most prestigious award on the EU and – significantly – ‘its forerunners [because they] have for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe’ (emphasis added).³ It was, incidentally, not the first time that the Norwegians had honoured European politicians for their contribution to peace on the continent: actually Neville Chamberlain’s half-brother Austen Chamberlain had already received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, together with the American Charles G. Dawes – followed by Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann the subsequent year for their solution to the Ruhr Crisis in 1923–1924. The occupation of the industrial Ruhr region by French and Belgian troops had brought Europe to the brink of a new war, and the Locarno Treaty (1925) was heralded as the dawn of a new era of peace for Europe.

There are many arguments in favour of this 2012 European Nobel Prize, though. The pacification of Europe is indeed no small feat. As one of the foremost commentators on the state of Europe observed, ‘we need this Europe to prevent our falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism’.⁴ That danger, this book will also show, is far more real than one sometimes imagines: war has been declared dead many times, by some of the most illustrious minds, but it has the very bad habit of always returning with a vengeance. Recent history has known moments where paths towards barbarism could have been chosen, but were, at least for now, avoided. Long may it remain so. But the award can be the start of a critical reflection nevertheless. One question is certainly to what extent the EU can be effectively considered the successor of the agencies that realized this post-war peace. I will argue in this book that while the European institutions certainly kept the peace, the institutions as such did not subdue the hatred and passion for revenge that existed after the war and they did not, at least not solely, originate from a general European wish to overcome the divisions that had provoked the war. Moreover, in its argumentation, the Norwegian committee somehow bypassed the division of Europe, which led to the situation of an ‘armed peace’ between 1947 and 1989. In particular, the committee also ignored many ‘smaller’ conflicts and, more importantly, the postcolonial wars in which European countries had been engaged, including the Algerian Liberation War (which was, legally speaking at least, an intra-European civil war and cost hundreds of thousands of lives).⁵ The latter, incidentally, is symptomatic of most traditional representations of Europe, which seems systematically disconnected from its colonial past. This neglect is quite illustrative of Europe’s post-war historical representation; that the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Committee consists exclusively of Europeans is significant in this respect. Europeans sometimes seem unaware that their cherished and carefully cultivated image as the harbinger of peace, advocate of human rights and ‘soft power’ is not always convincing to others because of its past.⁶

The following text is woven around a largely familiar story of how Europeans imagined the organization of their continent. Though this book is by no means a general history of Europe, these representations and imaginations of European unification do tell us something about European culture and identity, even if what they tell us is only related to the ideas and (self-)perceptions of a certain intellectual and political European elite. But that ‘something’ will nevertheless allow me to make some more general observations that I hope may help readers to look at European history in a slightly different manner, perhaps one that is more apt to the contemporary globalized world.

Proposals for a European organization, first of all, reflect the ways in which Europeans have imagined and tried to contain the many diversities that they felt confronted by within the continent, be these religious, political or ethnic, and which they learned to fear and aimed to contain. Secondly, they are also formulated with a view to Europe’s position in relation to others. In this context, most contemporary references are to the world of Islam – in the wake of Sam Huntington’s infamous ‘clash of civilizations’ – but especially since the nineteenth century, Europeans have thought far more about organizing their continent against upcoming economic powers such as the US, Japan and, more recently, the ‘Asian tigers’ and ‘BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).⁷ In this respect, one should certainly also take into account that Europeans have tried, successfully, for a long time, to dominate, conquer and exploit peoples, lands and seas. Keeping this position of superiority and dominance has been an important motive in considering the organization of Europe as well, though not all visions of Europe have been imperialistic.⁸ Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that European integration gained momentum in parallel with decolonization. Even if the relationship is less straightforward than it may appear, decolonization profoundly affected the post-war turn towards European integration as well as the way European institutions defined themselves.

But my focus in this book remains on European institutional integration history itself. It is a story of ups and downs, one that represents European integration history as a reconstruction afterwards – one that was not written on the face of the earth, but largely imagined in the light of the present – and hence a non-linear history, one of roads taken and not taken, one of dreams as well as nightmares, of vision and blindness, of learning but also, and perhaps more significantly, of forgetting – perhaps, then, a more human history.

European identity and diversity

In this book, I want to review in particular the relationship between European organization and the idea of peace in Europe. Although my focus is on plans and sketches for a (con-)federal European organization, I cannot avoid reflecting on European identity. It only makes sense to discuss ways to unite and organize Europe after one has developed some understanding of what Europe is, even though institutions and policies no doubt further foster such identity.⁹ Identities do not arise in isolation, but always in interaction. That certainly applies to a term as vague as ‘Europe’.

Europe is by no means a ready-made concept: not only is it, from a geographical perspective, just ‘a small cape of Asia’ (Paul Valéry); there were times when no such thing as ‘Europe’ existed in the minds of people, and since it has so existed, its meaning has shifted over time.¹⁰ Acknowledging that Europe has no existence outside the human imagination does not, of course, imply that it is pure chimera. After all, we do use the term ‘Europe’ frequently, knowing what it means and assuming others do too. Nevertheless, opinions about the meaning of ‘Europeanness’ diverge both within and outside Europe. Moreover, all interpretations and perceptions are temporal: they reflect the ever-changing contexts in which they are articulated. This clearly comes to the fore, for instance, in the shifting boundaries allotted to the continent – though these also suggest there is some consistency in the representations as well: discussions about European boundaries oscillate around the same questions and regions again and again, since the concept is used to denote not only a territory but also a political and cultural space – the British Isles, Russia and Turkey, with the Dardanelles as an established frontier. Still, we have to ask ourselves from when has it been meaningful to speak about Europe and what is meant by it, and in the more limited aim of this book, when was the need for a European organization first advanced. Given the interactional character of identity-building, in particular in the case of collective identities, the formation of a European identity refers to both internal and external dimensions. This history of European integration particularly focuses on challenges and threats, and on plans and institutions to organize Europe as a means to assure peace: if I had focused on European identity I would have rather followed Delanty’s example (at least in this respect) and emphasized interaction with other ‘civilizations’ (borrowing from, as well as opposition to and rejection of). Looking at plans for European unity or federalism – in all its variations – requires an assessment of the association between war, peace and the concept of Europe. It will allow me not only to highlight the strong desire for peace and the ways originally envisaged to achieve it, but also to uncover some root causes of major problems Europe has been, and still is, confronted with.

One of the most enduring representations of Europe is that of a deeply divided continent, which has nevertheless finally managed to overcome its ‘curse’.¹¹ In this respect, the standard narrative emphasizes that Europeans developed values of toleration, freedom and equality – humanism and enlightenment are hence considered essential European features. In this perspective, it appears that Europe finally overcame its ‘demons’ by choosing the path of institutional integration, of a European federation: European integration as an ‘escape from history’. The present EU has actually made this representation an essential dimension of its identity, epitomized in its motto ‘united in diversity’.¹²

I believe this (multifaceted) representation is a myth. First, one may wonder if Europe is such a divided continent. There is no doubt that there are important diversities in Europe and that the continent is deeply divided politically.¹³ But can one really make the case that Europe is (or perhaps was) more diverse than the ‘melting pot’ of North America (in this respect, clearly to be distinguished from the ‘old continent’), the Indian subcontinent with its multitude of languages and faiths, or Southeast Asia, sometimes labelled Asia’s ‘noodle box’ because of its intermingling of languages, ethnicities and religions? The ‘diversity index’ compiled by the team of Alberto Alesina and Arnaud Devleeschauwer at Harvard certainly suggests otherwise: it is rather African and Asian countries that one finds at the top of the different indices, not European ones (with former Yugoslavia being the exception that proves the rule, as well as reminding us that the eastern parts of Europe are actually more diverse than Western Europe, an issue to which we will return).¹⁴ If one takes language as an indicator of diversity, Europe pales in comparison to India, where the number of languages runs into the hundreds.¹⁵ Certainly, Europe nowadays has become more diverse as a result of migration and processes of social and cultural differentiation, but one should be aware that previously the continent, as a result of the Holocaust and massive ethnic cleansing during and immediately after WW II, became more homogenous than it had ever been. Moreover, it still remains debatable whether early twenty-first century ‘super-diversity’ (Steven Vertovec) is so much more pronounced in Europe than elsewhere.¹⁶

And is Europe really more apt at coping with diversity? From a postcolonial perspective, the opposite rather seems to be the case: the many postcolonial conflicts between ethnic and religious groups in Africa and Asia can often be attributed to colonial legacies – the case of Rwanda immediately comes to mind. Although there is a great deal of discussion about the pre-colonial origins of ethnic conflicts in the region of the Great Lakes, there is a little doubt that they were reinforced considerably by the British, German and Belgian colonizers and that the latter introduced borders that reflect their respective power relations but not the existing pre-colonial divisions.¹⁷ Pre-colonial societies certainly had their conflicts, but at least the main Asian civilizations, even when separating ‘civilized’ people from ‘barbarians’, were far more tolerant towards religious, linguistic and ethnic diversities than Europe, as their definitions of identity were more inclusive.¹⁸ Southeast Asia, for example, without doubt had known many bloody conflicts long before the arrival of European colonizers, but religion and ethnicity were rarely if ever the root cause of them, and race was arguably an unknown concept. Ancient civilizations such as Srivijaya and Melakka developed a cosmopolitan, ‘multicultural’ model of living together long before the first millennium AD. It was put to the test by the introduction of Islam in the fifteenth century, and largely set aside by the Portuguese, Dutch and British when they introduced their characteristic European policies of racist, ethnic and religious separation and segregation, setting up populations against each other. But it seems that old patterns return today. Alfred Stepan’s study of contemporary ‘multiple secularisms’ shows how and why large and diverse nations such as India and Indonesia – the latter predominantly Islamic – adopted a far more inclusive model of state–church relations, which may be more effective in integrating huge religious diversities than the European model.¹⁹ Likewise, governments in Malaysia and Singapore have to a large extent been able to overcome the ethnic tensions that resulted from the colonial occupation, and to reinvent a multicultural common identity for all Malaysians and make its diversity an asset, not only for tourism purposes.²⁰ Many African states, far more disturbed by European colonialism, were not so lucky, as the genocide in Rwanda illustrates.

Even if Europe appears a safe haven for many today, its long history of religious wars, ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust shows that the continent was rarely a model as regards coping with different ethnicities and religions. But I contend that Europe is actually not so diverse at all, especially not if one considers religion and even ethnicity as basic forms of identity: Europe became predominantly Christian from around 800, and since then people of other faiths – Muslims and Jews in particular – have essentially been defined as ‘outsiders’ and hence often persecuted or expelled. The divisions of Christianity in Europe remain limited after all – more limited, incidentally, than in North America, where the process of fragmentation of the Christian religion led to considerably more divergence than in Europe.²¹ An exception may be the rise of atheism and secularism, but in many (paradoxical) ways they are also the product of Christianity.²² Also with regard to ethnicity, one could make a case that Western Europe, at least, is more rather than less homogenous than some other parts of the world. Though comparable data are lacking, it is hard to imagine that European capitals and ports even in Renaissance and Enlightened Europe, after the establishment of the first global European empires, were particularly multicultural and multi-ethnic compared to the great African and Asian port cities in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. ‘Peace for Our Time’: The European Quest for Peace
• 2. Peace in Christendom?
• 3. Enlightenment, Revolution and the Evaporating Dream of a Perpetual Peace
• 4. Peace during the Concert
• 5. Between Empire, Market and Nation
• 6. The Long War
• 7. Hope and Deception
• 8. Pacification by Division
• 9. Epilogue: The EC’s Colonial Empire
• Conclusion: In Search of European Unity
• Notes
• Literature
• Index