by Tony Judt
‘In Europe we were Asiatics, whereas in Asia we, too, are Europeans’.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
When Communism fell and the Soviet Union imploded, they took with them not just an ideological system but the political and geographical coordinates of an entire continent. For forty-five years—beyond the living memory of most Europeans—the uneasy outcome of World War Two had been frozen in place. The accidental division of Europe, with all that it entailed, had come to seem inevitable. And now it had been utterly swept away. In retrospect the post-war decades took on a radically altered significance. Once understood as the onset of a new era of permanent ideological polarization they now appeared for what they were: an extended epilogue to the European civil war that had begun in 1914, a forty-year interregnum between the defeat of Adolf Hitler and the final resolution of the unfinished business left behind by his war.
With the disappearance of the world of 1945-1989, its illusions came into better focus. The much-heralded ‘economic miracle’ of post-war Western Europe had returned the region to the standing in world trade and output that it had lost in the course of the years 1914-45, with rates of economic growth subsequently settling back into levels broadly comparable to those of the late nineteenth century. This was no small achievement, but it was not quite the breakthrough into infinitely incremental prosperity that contemporaries had once fondly supposed.
Moreover, the recovery had been achieved not in spite of the Cold War but because of it. Like the Ottoman threat in an earlier time, the shadow of the Soviet empire shrank Europe but imposed upon the surviving rump the benefits of unity. In the absence of the imprisoned Europeans to their east the citizens of western Europe had flourished: free of any obligation to address the poverty and backwardness of the successor states to the old continental empires and secured by the American military umbrella against the political backwash of the recent past. Viewed from the East this was always tunnel vision. After the collapse of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet empire, it could no longer be sustained.
On the contrary. The happy cocoon of post-war Western Europe—with its economic communities and free-trade zones, its reassuring external alliances and redundant internal frontiers—seemed suddenly vulnerable, called upon to respond to the frustrated expectations of would-be ‘Euro-citizens’ to its East and no longer anchored to a self-evident relationship with the great power across its western ocean. Constrained once again to acknowledge their continent’s broad eastern marches when sketching a common European future, Western Europeans were perforce drawn back into the common European past.
As a consequence, the years 1945-1989 took on a parenthetical quality. Open warfare between states, a constituent feature of the European way of life for three hundred years, had reached apocalyptic levels between 1913 and 1945: some sixty million Europeans died in wars or state-sponsored killing in the first half of the twentieth century. But from 1945 to 1989 inter-state war disappeared from the continent of Europe.373 Two generations of Europeans grew up under the hitherto inconceivable impression that peace was the natural order of things. As an extension of politics, war (and ideological confrontation) was outsourced to the so-called Third World.
That said, it is worth recalling that while remaining at peace with their neighbors the Communist states practiced a distinctive form of permanent warfare upon their own societies: mostly in the form of rigorous censorship, enforced shortages and repressive policing but occasionally breaking into open conflict—notably in Berlin in 1953, in Budapest in 1956, in Prague in 1968 and in Poland sporadically from 1968 to 1981 and under martial law thereafter. In Eastern Europe the post-war decades thus appear rather different in collective memory (though no less parenthetical). But compared with what had gone before, Eastern Europe too had lived through an age of unusual, albeit involuntary, calm.
Whether the post-World War Two era, now fast retreating into memory with the onset of new world (dis-)orders, would become an object of nostalgic longing and regret depended very much on where and when you were born. From both sides of the Iron Curtain the children of the Sixties—i.e. the core cohort of the baby-boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1951—certainly looked back with affection upon ‘their’ decade and continued to harbour fond memories and an exaggerated sense of its significance. And in the West, at least, their parents remained grateful for the political stability and material security of the era, contrasted with the horrors that had gone before.
But those too young to recall the Sixties were often resentful of the solipsistic self-aggrandizement of its ageing memorialists; while many older people who had lived out their lives under Communism recalled not just secure jobs, cheap rents and safe streets but also and above all a grey landscape of wasted talents and blighted hopes. And on both sides of the divide there were limits to what could be recovered from the rubble of twentieth-century history. Peace, prosperity and security, to be sure; but the optimistic convictions of an earlier age were gone for good.
Before he committed suicide in 1942 the Viennese novelist and critic Stefan Zweig wrote longingly of the lost world of pre-1914 Europe, expressing ‘pity for those who were not young during those last years of confidence’. Sixty years later, at the end of the twentieth century, almost everything else had been recovered or rebuilt. But the confidence with which Zweig’s generation of Europeans entered the century could never be entirely recaptured: too much had happened. Inter-war Europeans recalling the Belle Epoque might murmur ‘if only’; but in the aftermath of World War Two the overwhelming sentiment among anyone reflecting on the continent’s thirty-year catastrophe had been ‘never again’.374
In short, there was no way back. Communism in Eastern Europe had been the wrong answer to a real question. That same question in Western Europe—how to overcome the catastrophe of the first half of the twentieth century—had been addressed by setting recent history aside altogether, recapitulating some of the successes of the second half of the nineteenth century—domestic political stability, increased economic productivity and a steady expansion in foreign trade—and labeling them ‘Europe’. After 1989, however, prosperous, post-political Western Europe was faced once again with its eastern twin and ‘Europe’ had to be rethought.
The prospect of abandoning the cocoon was not universally welcomed, as we have seen, and writing in March 1993 for the Polish journal Polityka Jacek Kuroń did not exaggerate when he surmised that ‘certain Western political figures are nostalgic for the old world order and the USSR’. But that ‘old world order’—the familiar stasis of the past four decades—was gone forever. Europeans were now confronted not just with an uncertain future but also with a rapidly changing past. What had recently been very straightforward was now, once again, becoming rather complicated. The end of the twentieth century saw half a billion people on the western promontory of the Eurasian land mass increasingly taken up with the interrogationof their own identity. Who are Europeans? What does it mean to be European? What is Europe—and what kind of a place do Europeans want it to be?
There is little to be gained by seeking to distill the essence of ‘Europe’. The ‘Idea of Europe’—itself a much debated topic—has a long history, some of it quite reputable. But although a certain ‘idea’ of Europe—reiterated in assorted conventions and treaties—informs the Union to which most Europeans now belong, it offers only a very partial insight into the life they lead there. In an age of demographic transition and resettlement, today’s Europeans are more numerous and heterogeneous than ever before. Any account of their common condition at the dawn of the twenty-first century must begin by acknowledging that variety, by mapping the overlapping contours and fault-lines of European identity and experience.
The term ‘mapping’ is used advisedly. Europe, after all, is a place. But its frontiers have always been more than a little fluid. The ancient boundaries—of Rome and Byzantium, of the Holy Roman Empire and Christian Europe—correspond closely enough with later political divisions to suggest
some genuine continuity: the uneasy encounter-points of Germanic and Slav Europe were as clear to an eleventh-century writer like Adam of Bremen as they are to us; the medieval frontiers of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, from Poland to Serbia, were much as we find them today; and the concept of a Europe divided between east and west at the Elbe would have been familiar to the ninth-century administrators of the Carolingian Empire, had they thought in such terms.
But whether those long-established boundary lines are any guide to the whereabouts of Europe always depended upon where you happen to stand. To take one well-known case: by the eighteenth century most Hungarians and Bohemians had been Catholic for centuries and many of them were German speakers. But for enlightened Austrians, ‘Asia’ nevertheless began at the Landstrasse, the high road leading east out of Vienna. When Mozart headed west from Vienna en route for Prague in 1787, he described himself as crossing an oriental border. East and West, Asia and Europe, were always walls in the mind at least as much as lines on the earth.
Because much of Europe until recent times was not divided into states but instead accommodated within empires, it helps to think of the external markers of the continent not as frontiers but as indeterminate boundary-regions—marches, limes, militärgrenze, krajina: zones of imperial conquest and settlement, not always topographically precise but delimiting an important political and cultural edge. From the Baltic to the Balkans, such regions and their inhabitants have for centuries understood themselves as the outer guard of civilization, the vulnerable and sensitive point where the familiar world ends and barbarians are kept at bay.
But these borderlands are fluid and have often shifted with time and circumstance: their geographical implications can be confusing. Poles, Lithuanians and Ukrainians have all presented themselves in their literature and political myths as guarding the edges of ‘Europe’ (or Christianity).375 But as a brief glance at a map suggests, their claims are mutually exclusive: they can’t all be right. The same is true of competing Hungarian and Romanian narratives, or the insistence of both Croats and Serbs that it is their southern border (with Serbs and Turks respectively) that constitutes the vital outer defensive line of civilized Europe.
What this confusion shows is that the outer boundaries of Europe have for centuries been sufficiently significant for interested parties to press with great urgency their competing claims to membership. Being ‘in’ Europe offered a degree of security: an assurance—or at least a promise—of refuge and inclusion. Over the centuries it came increasingly to serve as a source of collective identity. Being a ‘border-state’. an exemplar and guardian of the core values of European civilization, was a source of vulnerability but also pride: which is why the sense of having been excluded and forgotten by ‘Europe’ made Soviet domination so particularly humiliating for many central and eastern European intellectuals.
Europe, then, is not so much about absolute geography—where a country or a people actually are—as relative geography: where they sit in relation to others. At the end of the twentieth century, writers and politicians in places like Moldova, Ukraine or Armenia asserted their ‘Europeanness’ not on historical or geographical grounds (which might or might not be plausible) but precisely as a defense against history and geography alike. Summarily released from Muscovite empire, these post-imperial orphan states looked now to another ‘imperial’ capital: Brussels.376
What these peripheral nations hoped to gain from the distant prospect of inclusion in the new Europe was less important than what they stood to lose by being left out of it. The implications of exclusion were already clear to even the most casual visitor by the early years of the new century. Whatever was once cosmopolitan and ‘European’ in cities like Cernovitz in Ukraine or Chisinau in Moldova had long since been beaten out of them by Nazi and Soviet rule; and the surrounding countryside was even now ‘a pre-modern world of dirt roads and horse-drawn carts, of outdoor wells and felt boots, of vast silences and velvet-black nights’.377 Identification with ‘Europe’ was not about a common past, now well and truly destroyed. It was about asserting a claim, however flimsy and forlorn, upon a common future.
The fear of being left out of Europe was not confined to the continent’s outer perimeter. From the perspective of Romanian-speaking Moldovans, their neighbors to the West in Romania proper were blessed by history. Unlike Moldova they were seen by the West as legitimate if under-performing contenders for EU membership and were thus assured of a properly European future. But seen from Bucharest the picture changes: it is Romania itself that is at risk of being left out. In 1989, when Nicolae Ceauşescu’s colleagues finally began to turn on him, they wrote a letter accusing the Conducator of trying to tear their nation away from its European roots: ‘Romania is and remains a European country. . . . You have begun to change the geography of the rural areas, but you cannot move Romania into Africa.’ In the same year the elderly Romanian playwright Eugène Ionesco described the country of his birth as ‘about to leave Europe for good, which means leaving history.’ Nor was this a new concern: in 1972 E. M. Cioran, looking back at his country’s grim history, echoed a widespread Romanian insecurity: ‘What depressed me most was a map of the Ottoman Empire. Looking at it, I understood our past and everything else’.378
Romanians—like Bulgarians, Serbs and others with good reason to believe that ‘core’ Europe sees them as outsiders (when it sees them at all)—alternate between defensively asserting their ur-European characteristics (in literature, architecture, topography, etc) or else acknowledging the hopelessness of their cause and fleeing West. In the aftermath of Communism, both responses were in evidence. While the former Romanian Prime Minister, Adrien Nastase, was describing for readers of Le Monde in July 2001 the ‘added value’ that Romania brings to Europe, his fellow Romanians constituted over half the total number of aliens apprehended while illegally crossing the Polish-German border. In a poll taken early in the new century, 52 percent of Bulgarians (and an overwhelming majority of those under 30) said that, given the chance, they would emigrate from Bulgaria—preferably to ‘Europe’.
This sense of being on the periphery of someone else’s centre, of being a sort of second-class European, is today largely confined to former Communist countries, nearly all of them in the zone of small nations that Tomáš Masaryk foresaw coming into being, from North Cape to Cape Matapan in the Peloponnese. But it was not always so. Within recent memory the continent’s other margins were at least as peripheral—economically, linguistically, culturally. The poet Edwin Muir described his childhood move from the Orkneys to Glasgow in 1901 as ‘one hundred and fifty years covered in a two days’ journey’; it is a sentiment that would not have been out of place half a century later. Well into the 1980s the highlands and islands at Europe’s edges—Sicily, Ireland, northern Scotland, Lapland—had more in common with one another, and their own past, than with the prosperous metropolitan regions of the centre.
Even now—indeed above all now—fault lines and boundaries cannot be counted upon to follow national frontiers. The Council of Baltic Sea States is a case in point. Established in 1992, it comprises Scandinavian participants: Denmark, Finland,Norway and Sweden; the three Baltic countries of the former USSR: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania; Germany, Poland, Russia (and from 1995, doing violence to geography but at Scandinavian insistence, Iceland). This symbolic reassertion of ancient trading affinities was much appreciated by one-time Hanseatic cities like Hamburg or Lübeck—and even more welcome to the city managers of Tallinn and Gdansk, eager to position themselves at the centre of a re-invented (and Western-accented) Baltic community and take their distance from their continental hinterland and recent past.
But in other regions of some of the participating countries, notably Germany and Poland, the Baltic means little. On the contrary: in recent years the prospect of foreign earnings from tourism induced Craków, for example, to emphasize its southern orientation and market its erstwhile incarnation as the capital of Habsburg ‘Galicia’. Munich
and Vienna, though competing for cross-border industrial investment, have rediscovered nonetheless a common ‘Alpine’ heritage facilitated by the virtual disappearance of the boundary separating southern Bavaria from Salzburg and the Tyrol.
Regional cultural distinctions, then, clearly matter—though economic disparities matter even more. Austria and Bavaria share more than just south-German Catholicism and Alpine scenery: in the course of recent decades both have been transformed into high-wage service economies dependent on technology rather than labour, outstripping in productivity and prosperity the older industrial regions further north. Like Catalonia, Italy’s Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, France’s Rhône-Alpes region and the Île-de-France, Southern Germany and Austria—together with Switzerland, Luxembourg and parts of Belgian Flanders—constitute a common zone of European economic privilege.
Although absolute levels of poverty and economic disadvantage were still highest in the former Eastern bloc, the sharpest contrasts were now within countries rather than between them. Sicily and the Mezzogiorno, like southern Spain, were as far behind the booming north as they had been for many decades: by the late 1990s unemployment in southern Italy was running at three times the level north of Florence, while the gap in per capita GDP between north and south was actually greater than it had been in the 1950s.
In the UK, too, the gap between the wealthy regions of the south-east and the former industrial districts farther north had grown in recent years. London, to be sure, had boomed. Despite keeping its distance from the euro zone, the British capital was now the unchallenged financial center of the continent and had taken on a glitzy, high-tech energy that made other European cities seem dowdy and middle-aged. Crowded with young professionals and much more open to the ebb and flow of cosmopolitan cultures and languages than other European capitals, London at the end of the twentieth century appeared to have recovered its Swinging Sixties sheen—opportunistically embodied in the Blairites re-branding of their country as ‘Cool Britannia’.