by Tony Judt
In a crowded continent whose relatively short distances favored ground transportation over air travel, railways were an uncontroversial object of sustained public investment. The same countries that had come together in Schengen now cooperated—with significant EU backing—to lay an extended network of improved high-speed tracks reaching from Madrid and Rome to Amsterdam and Hamburg, with plans for its further extension north into Scandinavia and eastwards through central Europe. Even in those regions and countries that might never be favored with TGV, ICE or ES trains382, Europeans could now travel throughout their continent—not necessarily much faster than a century before but with far less impediment.
As in the nineteenth century, railway innovation in Europe came at the expense of those towns and districts not served by it, which risked losing markets and population and falling behind their more fortunate competitors. But now there was an extensive network of high-speed roads as well—and outside of the former Soviet Union, the southern Balkans and the poorest provinces of Poland and Romania, most Europeans now had access to a car. Together with hydrofoil ferries and deregulated airlines, these changes made it possible for people to live in one city, work in another and shop or play somewhere else—not always cheaply, but with unprecedented efficiency. It became quite common for young European families to contemplate living in Malmö (Sweden) and working in Copenhagen (Denmark), for example; or commuting from Freiburg (Germany) to Strasbourg (France) or even across the sea from London to Rotterdam; or from Bratislava (Slovakia) to Vienna (Austria), reviving a once-commonplace Habsburg-era link. A genuinely integrated Europe was emerging.
Increasingly mobile, Europeans now knew one another better than ever before. And they could travel and communicate on equal terms. But some Europeans remaineddecidedly more equal than others. Two and a half centuries after Voltaire drew the contrast between a Europe that ‘knows’ and a Europe that ‘waits to be known’, that distinction retained much of its force. Power, prosperity and institutions were all clustered into the continent’s far western corner. The moral geography of Europe—the Europe in Europeans’ heads—consisted of a core of ‘truly’ European states (some of them, like Sweden, geographically quite peripheral) whose constitutional, legal and cultural values were held up as the model for lesser, aspirant Europeans: seeking, as it were, to become truly themselves.383
Eastern Europeans, then, were expected to know about the West. When knowledge flowed in the opposite direction, however, it was not always in very flattering ways. It is not just that impoverished eastern and southern Europeans travelled north and west to sell their labour or their bodies. By the end of the century certain eastern European cities, having exhausted their appeal as rediscovered outposts of a lost central Europe, had begun to reposition themselves in a profitable niche market as cheap and tawdry vacation spots for down-market mass tourism from the West. Tallinn and Prague in particular established an unenviable reputation as the venue for British ‘stag flights’—low-cost package weekends for Englishmen seeking abundant alcohol and cheap sex.
Travel agents and tour organizers whose clientele would once have settled for Blackpool or (more recently) Benidorm now reported rapturous enthusiasm for the exotic treats on offer in the European east. But then the English, too, were peripheral in their way—which is why Europe remained for so many of them an exotic object. In 1991 the Sofia weekly Kultura asked Bulgarians to which foreign culture they felt closest: 18 percent answered ‘French’, 11 percent ‘German’ (and 15 percent ‘American’). But only 1.3 percent acknowledged feeling any closeness to ‘English culture’.
The undisputed centre of Europe, for all its post-unification woes, was still Germany: in population and output by far the largest state in the EU, it was the very kernel of ‘core Europe’, as every Chancellor from Adenauer to Schröder had always insisted it must be. Germany was also the only country that straddled the former divide. Thanks to unification, immigration and the arrival of the Federal government, Greater Berlin was now six times the area of Paris—a symbol of the relative standing of the Union’s two leading members. Germany dominated the European economy. It was the largest trading partner of most member-states of the EU. Two-thirds of the Union’s net income came from the Federal Republic alone. And despite being its primary paymasters—or maybe for that reason—Germans remained among the EU’s most committed citizens. German statesmen would periodicallypropose the creation of a ‘fast-track’ of states committed to a fully integrated federal Europe, only to retreat in undisguised frustration at their partners’ procrastination.
If Germany—to pursue the Voltairian image a little further—was the country that ‘knew’ Europe best, it was appropriate that at the beginning of the twenty-first century two other former imperial states should have been most insistently seeking to be ‘known’ by it. Like Germany, Russia and Turkey had once played an imperial role in European affairs. And many Russians and Turks had shared the uncomfortable fate of Europe’s ethnic German communities: displaced heirs of an autocratic power now reduced to resented and vulnerable minorities in someone else’s nation state, the tidal refuse of imperial retreat. In the late 1990s it was estimated that more than one hundred million Russians lived outside of Russia in the independent countries of eastern Europe.384
But there the resemblance ended. Post-Soviet Russia was a Eurasian empire rather than a European state. Preoccupied with violent rebellions in the Caucasus, it was maintained at a distance from the rest of Europe by the new buffer states of Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova as well as by its own increasingly illiberal domestic politics. There was no question of Russia joining the EU: new entrants, as we have seen, were required to conform to ‘European values’—with respect to the rule of law, civic rights and freedoms and institutional transparency—that Vladimir Putin’s Moscow was very far from acknowledging, much less implementing.385 In any event, Russian authorities were more interested in building pipelines and selling gas to the EU than in joining it. Many Russians, including residents of the western cities, did not instinctively think of themselves as Europeans: when they traveled west they spoke (like the English) of ‘going to Europe’.
Nevertheless, Russia had been a ‘hands-on’ European power for three hundred years and the legacy remained. Latvian banks were the target of takeovers by Russian businessmen. A Lithuanian president, Rolandas Paksas, was forced out of office in 2003 under suspicion of close links with the Russian mafia. Moscow retained its Baltic enclave around Kaliningrad and continued to demand unrestricted transit (through Lithuania) for Russian freight and military traffic, as well as visa-free travel for Russian citizens visiting the EU. Laundered cash from the business undertakings of Russian oligarchs was funnelled through the property market in London and the French Riviera.
In the short run, Russia was thus a decidedly uncomfortable presence on Europe’s outer edge. But it was not a threat. The Russian military was otherwise engaged and anyway in dilapidated condition. The health of the Russian population was a matter of serious concern—life expectancy for men especially was falling precipitately and international agencies had for some time been warning that the country had seen a revival of tuberculosis and was on the verge of an AIDS epidemic—but this was primarily a source of concern for Russians themselves. For the immediate future Russia was decidedly preoccupied with its own affairs.
In the longer run, the simple fact of Russia’s proximity, its sheer size and unmatched fossil-fuel reserves, must inevitably cast a shadow on the future of an energy-poor European continent. Already in 2004, half of Poland’s natural gas and 95 percent of its oil came from Russia. But in the meantime what the Russian authorities and individual Russians were seeking from Europe was ‘respect’. Moscow wished to be more intimately involved in intra-European decision making, whether in NATO, in the administration of Balkan settlements, or in trade agreements (both bilateral and through the World Trade Organization): not because decisions taken in Russia’s absence would necessarily be prejudicial t
o its interests but as a point of principle.
European history, it seemed to many observers, had come full circle. As in the 18th century so in the 21st: Russia was both in Europe and outside it, Montesquieu’s ‘nation d’Europe’ and Gibbon’s ‘Scythian wilderness’. For Russians, the European West remained what it had been for centuries, a contradictory object of attraction and repulsion, of admiration and ressentiment. Russia’s rulers and people alike remained markedly sensitive to outside opinion while evincing deep suspicion of all foreign criticism or interference. History and geography had bequeathed to Europeans a neighbour they could neither ignore nor accommodate.
The same might once have been said of Turkey. For nearly seven hundred years the Ottoman Turks had been Europe’s ‘other’, supplanting the Arabs who had occupied the role for the previous half millennium. For many centuries ‘Europe’ began where the Turks ended (which was why Cioran was so depressed to be reminded of Romania’s long years under Ottoman rule); and it was commonplace to speak of Christian Europe being periodically ‘saved’—whether at the gates of Vienna, or Budapest, or at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto—from the jaws of Turkish Islam. From the mid-eighteenth century, as Ottoman Turkey slipped into decline, the ‘Eastern Question’—how to manage the Ottoman Empire’s decline and what to do with the territories now emerging from centuries of Turkish rule—was the most pressing challenge facing European diplomats.
Turkey’s defeat in World War I, the overthrow of the Ottomans, and their replacement by Kemal Ataturk’s ostentatiously secular, modernizing state, had taken the Eastern Question off the European agenda. Now governed from Ankara, the Turks had troubles enough of their own; and although their removal from the Balkans and the Arab Middle East had bequeathed a tangled web of conflicts and choices with momentous long-term consequences for Europe and the world, the Turks themselves were no longer part of the problem. Had it not been for Turkey’s strategic location athwart the Soviet Union’s sea route to the Mediterranean, the country might well have disappeared altogether from Western consciousness.
Instead, Ankara became for the duration of the Cold War an accommodating participant in the Western alliance, contributing to NATO a rather significant contingent of soldiers. American missiles and bases were established in Turkey as part of the cordon sanitaire ringing the Soviet frontiers from Baltic to Pacific, and Western governments not only furnished Turkey with copious sums in aid but looked benevolently and uncritically upon its unstable dictatorial regimes—often the outcome of military coups—and their unrestrained abuse of minority rights (notably those of the Kurds in the country’s far east, one fifth of the total population). Meanwhile, Turkish ‘guest workers’, like the rest of the Mediterranean basin’s surplus rural population, migrated in large numbers to Germany and other Western European lands in search of jobs.
But the Ottoman legacy would return to haunt the new Europe. With the end of the Cold War, Turkey’s distinctive location took on a different significance. The country was no longer a frontier outpost and barrier state in an international geopolitical confrontation. Instead it was now a conduit, caught between Europe and Asia, with ties and affinities in both directions. Although Turkey was formally a secular republic, most of its seventy million citizens were Muslims. Many older Turks were not especially orthodox, but with the rise of radical Islam there were growing fears that even Ataturk’s ruthlessly imposed secular state might prove vulnerable to a new generation rebelling against their secularized parents and looking for roots in an older heritage of Ottoman Islam.
But Turkey’s educated professional and business elites were disproportionately located in the European city of Istanbul and identified enthusiastically with Western dress, culture and practices. Like other ambitious eastern Europeans they saw Europe—European values, European institutions, European markets and careers—as the only possible future for them and their ambivalently situated country. Their goal was clear: to escape out of history and into ‘Europe’. Moreover, this was one objective they shared with the traditionally influential officer corps, who identified wholeheartedly with Ataturk’s dream of a secular state and expressed open irritation at creeping Islamisation in Turkish public life.
However, Europe—or at least Brussels—was more than a little hesitant: Turkey’s application to join the European Union lay unaddressed for many years. There were good reasons for caution: Turkey’s prisons, its treatment of domestic critics and its inadequate civil and economic codes were just some of many issues that would need to be addressed before it could hope to get beyond a strictly trading relationship with its European partners. Senior European commissioners like the Austrian Franz Fischler openly voiced doubts about the country’s long-term democratic credentials. And then there were practical difficulties: as a member-state Turkey would be the second largest in the Union after Germany, as well as one of the poorest—the gulf between its prosperous western edge and the vast, impoverished east was huge and, given the opportunity, millions of Turks might well head west into Europe in search of a living wage. The implications for national immigration policies, as well as for the EU’s budget, could hardly be ignored.
But the real impediments lay elsewhere.386 If Turkey entered the EU, the Union would have an external frontier abutting Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. Whether or not it made geographical sense to take ‘Europe’ to within one hundred miles of Mosul was a legitimate question; in the circumstances of the time it was unquestionably a security risk. And the further Europe stretched its frontiers, the more it was felt by many—including the drafters of the constitutional document of 2004—that the Union should explicitly state what it was that defined their common home. This, in turn, induced a number of politicians in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia and elsewhere—not to mention the Polish Pope in Rome—to try unsuccessfully to insert into the preamble to a new European constitutional text a reminder that Europe was once Christian Europe. Had not Václav Havel, speaking at Strasbourg in 1994, reminded his audience that the ‘European Union is based on a large set of values, with roots in antiquity and Christianity’?
Whatever else they were, Turks were assuredly not Christian. The irony was that precisely for this reason—because they could not define themselves as Christian (or ‘Judeo-Christian’)—would-be European Turks were even more likely than other Europeans to emphasize the secular, tolerant and liberal dimensions of European identity.387 They were also, and with increasing urgency, trying to invoke European values and norms as a lever against reactionary influences in Turkish public life—a goal that the member-states of Europe itself had long encouraged.
But although in 2003 the Turkish parliament finally removed, at European bidding, many longstanding restrictions on Kurdish cultural life and political expression, the lengthy hesitation-waltz performed by governments and officials at Brussels had begun to exact a price. Turkish critics of EU membership pointed insistently to the humiliation of a once-imperial nation, now reduced to the status of a supplicant at the European door, importuning support for its application from its former subject nations. Moreover, the steady growth of religious sentiment in Turkey not only produced an electoral victory for the country’s moderate Islamist party but encouraged the national parliament to debate a motion to make adultery, once again, a criminal offence.
In response to explicit warnings from Brussels that this could definitively jeopardize Ankara’s application to join the EU, the motion was abandoned and in December 2004 the European Union at last agreed to open accession talks with Ankara. But the damage was done. Opponents of Turkish membership—and there were many, in Germany388 and France as well as closer to home in Greece or Bulgaria—could point once again to its unsuitability. In 2004 the retiring Dutch EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein warned of the coming ‘Islamisation’ of Europe. The likelihood of negotiations proceeding smoothly diminished still further—Günter Verheugen, the EU Commissioner for enlargement, acknowledged that he did not expect Turkey to become a member of the Unio
n ‘before 2015’. Meanwhile, the cost of future rejection or further delays—to Turkish pride and the political stability of Europe’s vulnerable edge—ratcheted up another notch. The Eastern Question was back.
That history should have weighed so heavily upon European affairs at the start of the twenty-first century was ironic, considering how lightly it lay upon the shoulders of contemporary Europeans. The problem was not so much education—the teaching or mis-teaching of history in schools, though in some parts of southeastern Europe this too was a source of concern—as the public uses to which the past was now put. In authoritarian societies, of course, this was an old story; but Europe, by its self-definition, was post-authoritarian. Governments no longer exercised a monopoly over knowledge and history could not readily be altered for political convenience.
Nor was it, for the most part. The threat to history in Europe came not from the deliberate distortion of the past for mendacious ends, but from what might at first have seemed a natural adjunct to historical knowledge: nostalgia. The final decades of the century had seen an escalating public fascination with the past as a detached artifact, encapsulating not recent memories but lost memories: history not so much as a source of enlightenment about the present but rather as an illustration of how very different things had once been. History on television—whether narrated or performed; history in theme parks; history in museums: all emphasized not what bound people to the past but everything that separated them from it. The present was depicted not as heir to history but as its orphan: cut off from the way things were and the world we have lost.
In eastern Europe, nostalgia drew directly upon regret for the lost certainties of Communism, now purged of its darker side. In 2003 the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague mounted an exhibition of ‘pre-revolutionary clothing’: boots, underwear, dresses and the like from a world that had only ended fourteen years beforebut was already an object of detached fascination. The exhibition attracted many older people for whom the grey sameness of the shoddily-made items on display must have been a recent memory. And yet the response of visitors suggested a degree of affection and even regret that caught the curators quite by surprise.