The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  In this visionary text, the three political traditions that would contest conceptions of Europe over the following century are all present in embryo.23 Saint-Simon, who had fought in the American Revolution and made a fortune in the French Revolution, based his construction on a rejection of any return to the ancien régimes of Europe, and an accurate prediction of the violent overthrow of the Restoration in France. Within another decade, he would produce the first industrial version of utopian socialism. From this part of his legacy descended a sequence of revolutionary interventions and slogans for a united Europe. In the 1830s, Considérant, a disciple of Fourier, argued for a European federation based on productive labour and reciprocal recognition of rights and goods, to banish war from the continent. By the time of the Commune, when he worked with Courbet, Considérant was calling for a United States of Europe on the model of the USA. Now made possible by the progress of science and technology, it should begin with collaboration between France and Germany.24 In the revolutions of 1848–9, Mazzini and Cattaneo looked to European unity as the only safeguard against wars destructive of popular sovereignty and nationality, Mazzini envisaging a common market, Cattaneo a federal state.25 Hugo added his plangent voice for a United States of Europe, in a famous address to a peace congress in Paris.26 Proudhon and Bakunin followed in the 1860s—Proudhon arguing that Europe was too big for a federation, and should become a confederation of confederations, along Swiss lines; Bakunin, on the eve of joining the First International, attacking Mazzini’s nationality principle as calculated to crush weaker or more backward communities, and denouncing any bureaucratic structure as incompatible with the insurrectionary liberty of a United States of Europe to come.27

  In the Second International, views divided. In 1911 Kautsky declared that the only path to a durable peace in the world was ‘the unification of the states that belong to European civilisation into a federation with a common trade policy, a federal parliament, government and army—the establishment of a United States of Europe’, a perspective Luxemburg rejected as utopian.28 But when war broke out in 1914 the Bolsheviks themselves adopted the slogan of a republican United States of Europe in their first manifesto against it. A year later, Lenin would criticize this position, arguing that while a capitalist United States of Europe was possible as a common front of the continent’s possessing classes to suppress revolution and meet the challenge of faster American rates of growth, it was wrong for Marxists to call for a socialist version. For that might imply that the revolution could not triumph in one or several countries before sweeping Europe as a whole.29 Trotsky, by contrast, viewed the prospect of a capitalist United States of Europe as potentially a step forward that could help to create a united European working class, even if—he added a decade later—in answering to the needs of European capital to compete on more equal terms with America, reaction were to solve, not for the first time, tasks the revolution had failed to acquit. It was impossible to build socialism in a single country, as Stalin was claiming to do in the USSR, whereas Europe formed a logical field of struggle towards it.30

  Stalin’s victory in the CPSU closed down all discussion of a United States of Europe within the Third International. But not outside it. The revolutionary tradition found a final, spectacular expression during the Second World War, in the manifesto composed on the island of Ventotene by Altiero Spinelli, a member of the PCI expelled from the party for criticizing the Moscow trials, and Ernesto Rossi, a leader of Giustizia e Libertà, both prisoners of Mussolini since the twenties. Italy had been the classic land of radical struggle for national unity and independence, symbolized by the career of Garibaldi. The Manifesto of Ventotene drew a line under that experience. Although such nationalism had once been progressive, it had also contained the seeds of its degeneration into the imperialism that for a second time had set loose the furies of war in Europe. Nazism had to be defeated by the Allies. But the Soviet Union, vital to victory, had become a bureaucratic despotism, while the Anglo-American powers were bent on restoration of the old order, which had brought inter-imperialist war in the first place. Once the fighting was over, therefore, the revolutionary imperative was to abolish the division of Europe into sovereign national states. Needed was a single federal union, of continental dimensions. In the struggles to come, the critical line of division was not going to be over democracy or socialism, but internationalism. The European revolution would certainly be socialist, and it would require the temporary dictatorship of a revolutionary party, as the disciplined nucleus of the new state and the democracy it would create. But it should not involve the bureaucratic statification of all property, still less of the means of public expression and organization. A free press, free trade-unions and a free judiciary, all unknown in Russia, were essential to it.31 The manifesto, smuggled out to the mainland by Albert Hirschman’s sister, is without question the most powerful vision of continental unity to emerge from the European Resistance—libertarian and jacobin motifs fused white-hot in a synthesis that is testimony to the fludity of ideas possible before the Iron Curtain fell. Forty years later, Spinelli ended his career in full respectability, a member of the European Commission and father of the European Parliament, whose principal building in Brussels bears his name.

  3

  Later to emerge than this revolutionary tradition was a second filiation, closer to the best-known legacy of Saint-Simon to the nineteenth century—his conception of desirable social change as the work of scientific and industrial elites, reforming society from the summits of expert knowledge. Incorporated in his prescriptions for a European parliament, this technocratic vision passed down not only to his followers, the Saint-Simonian politicians, bankers and engineers of the Second Empire and Third Republic, but out into wider areas of reforming opinion. In its European applications, it was marked by a concern with detailed institutional machinery typically missing from the revolutionary line. The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune were the signals for its emergence. In 1867, the League of Peace and Freedom was founded in Geneva, run for the next twenty years by Charles Lemonnier, editor of Saint-Simon’s selected works and former secretary of the Crédit Mobilier, who from 1868 onwards produced a monthly journal for the League, Les États Unis d’Europe.32 With Hugo as an associate and Garibaldi as its president, the League visibly descended from the republican traditions of the revolutions of 1848. But by 1872, when Lemonnier, in the wake of ‘the sad and terrible year’ that had just ended, published a book calling for a federal United States of Europe, a shift of emphasis was clear. A united Europe composed of republican governments required a single army, a supreme court, and a common market, and needed the consent of its citizens, expressed by universal suffrage. But it should keep completely clear of the ‘social question’, other than by imposing arbitration to prevent strikes, and promoting economic growth.33

  Still more moderate, and yet more detailed, was the proposal that came five years later from the Swiss jurist Bluntschli, who after the defeat of the conservative Sonderbund in his homeland had moved to Germany, becoming a leading authority on international law. Ruling out either an American or a Swiss model, he explained that any future European union would have to respect the sovereignty of the states—carefully enumerated: eighteen in all—composing it, with major and minor powers accorded different voting weights. The ensuing organization should have neither fiscal nor military authority over its members, but should concentrate on administrative and legal issues that could be resolved in common. With this, a fully-fledged inter-governmental, as distinct from federal, conception of European unity was for the first time set out, and a shift towards the technicalities of constitutional law begun.34

  Early political science was not far behind. In 1900, the Sciences Po organized a colloquium in Paris at which rival schemes for European union were debated. The historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, scion of a leading establishment family, made it clear that the slogan of a United States of Europe was counter-productive: an American-style federation
was not on the cards. The first steps towards European unity would have to be economic—a customs union—not political, and should start from the historic core of European civilization, the Latin and Germanic nations of West and Central Europe. Of the three empires surrounding these, Russia was needed as a counterweight to Germany, and Turkey should be admitted to avert the dangers of war over its fate. But Britain should be kept out: it was an overseas empire, without European solidarity, against which a confederal Europe should be made—fear of the Anglo-Saxon powers providing a better spur to its formation than mere democratic sentiments. Another rapporteur, the lawyer Gustave Isambert, included Britain but excluded Turkey on ethnic, religious and moral grounds, and warned against dividing its member-states into two categories of powers. Only a confederation was feasible, but it should be a strong one, endowed with a legislature, a high court, an executive and an army, with a capital perhaps in Strasbourg. For to entrust the prevention of war simply to the effects of technical and economic progress was delusive—waiting for water to erode a rock, rather than lifting it with the lever of political will. United, a Europe of 375 million souls could lay down the law to the earth—naturally in keeping with principles of justice and equity.35

  The juridical and geo-political cast of these reflections acquired further life after the First World War, when Europe’s position in the world was more visibly threatened. The technocratic tradition had always been moderate in its instincts, lying more or less in the middle of the political spectrum. But in the inter-war period, its leading sequel became much more explicitly a doctrine of the centre, in both senses of the word. In the ideas, tactically variable over the years though these were, of Coudenhove-Kalergi, the Austrian count who launched the Pan-European Movement in 1923, the unity of Europe was always based on a double opposition. Ideologically, it was to be a bulwark against communism on the left, and extreme nationalism, later Nazism, on the right. Geopolitically, it would be an effective military barrier to Russia and an economic competitor of Anglo-America—later, when he adjusted his sights to include England in Europe, of the United States.36 More self-consciously elitist than any of his predecessors, Coudenhove—whose bent was less technological than aesthetic and philosophical—sought support from the great and the good of the time: from Einstein to Rilke, Mussolini to Adenauer, Mann to Claudel, Brüning to Briand. In practice, his organization benefitted from the patronage of the clerical regimes of Seipel and Dollfuss in Austria—a country that, both stripped of its empire and denied self-determination, was the most glaring of all victims of Wilsonian diplomacy at Versailles—and from the funds of a Teutonic banking establishment—Warburg, Deutsche Bank, Melchior, Kreditanstalt—worthy of the Crédit Mobilier of old.37

  Publicly, democracy was upheld by Coudenhove as a regime of the golden mean between left and right, even if too many democrats—bourgeois or social—were spineless defenders of it. Earlier, he had made no secret of his liberal disdain for it as a ‘lamentable interlude between two great aristocratic epochs: the feudal aristocracy of the sword and the social aristocracy of the spirit’.38 In due course, once Hitler had absorbed Austria, Coudenhove’s outlook shifted away from an original anti-parliamentarism, and he ended close to Anglo-French professions of the connexion between liberty and collective security. But throughout, his constitutional schemes for Europe—from a treaty of arbitration through a customs union and a high court to a single currency—were to be bestowed on the peoples from above. In temperament not entirely dissimilar to Saint-Simon—another flamboyant, semi-worldly, semi-unworldly adventurer—the Austrian count proved in the end an appropriate descendant of the French one: completely unpractical, yet uncannily premonitory of what was to come.

  4

  Saint-Simon, however, also anticipated a third, no less significant current of reflections on Europe. In his description of a peaceful original unity in the Catholic faith and institutions of the Middle Ages, and dismissal of the balance of power between states that had been cherished by the Enlightenment as a ruinous substitute, supposedly mitigating war while actually fomenting it, he struck two notes that would be central to the culture of the Restoration, and the conservative traditions that issued from it. Idealized images of feudalism and religion, a world of graceful piety and chivalry, as what most truly made Europe one, had already been a leitmotif of Burke’s counter-revolutionary message. But a far more powerful, because dialectical—thereby also ambiguous—version lay unpublished. Written three years after Letters on a Regicide Peace, Novalis’s Europa (1799) represented mediaeval Christendom as a fabled realm of harmony, love and beauty, united by the papacy, that had been destroyed by Luther’s insurrection against the Church, which in turn had set loose the revolution—‘a second Reformation’—in France. In its wake, Europe was now rent by a battle between old and new worlds, that revealed the dreadful defects of its traditional organization of states. But what if the ‘primary historical goal’ of the unprecedented conflict now engulfing the continent was actually to bring Europe together again? Might not war be reawakening it into a higher ‘state of states’, in which tradition and emancipation would be reconciled in a post-revolutionary faith to come?39

  This volcanic text, alternatively ecstatic and ironic, was too incendiary for print in Novalis’s lifetime. Goethe, when consulted, quashed its publication in the Athenaeum, and even when it finally saw the light of day in 1826, his fellow Romantics Tieck and Schlegel, who had suppressed it for a quarter of a century, treated it as a ‘divisive’ error that was better ignored—a discomfort still in a sense more perceptive than its later reception as an exalted piece of politico-religious reaction.40 Schlegel, instrumental in censoring his friend’s manifesto, moved to Paris in 1802, where he started a new journal, Europa—by then, a far from popular rubric—in which he began to develop a theme that would have a longer future before it than the vision of European renewal from a Christianity transformed by the French Revolution. In its first editorial, he explained that it would deal with ‘the greatest diversity of topics’, and in his first substantial essay in it, recounting his trip from Germany to Paris, he observed that while for the crowd there appeared, unquestionably, a ‘European sameness’, for a more discerning eye there remained significant differences between nations, and there it had to be admitted that the French had the advantage over the Germans, as closer in character and way of life to the spirit of the times. In that sense, Paris could be held the capital of the universe, and the revolution it had undertaken regarded as a welcome experiment, all the more interesting for the resistance of the material on which it was being exercised. But Northern and Southern Europe as a whole consisted of two radically different kinds of society, and their contrast was constitutive. ‘What in the Orient springs from its origin with undivided force into a single form, is here divided into a manifold and unfolded with greater art. The human spirit must here decompose, dissolve its powers into infinity, and so become capable of much it would otherwise never attain’. Still, if its telluric powers—the iron force of the north and glowing embers of the south—could be harmonized, a truer Europe might yet emerge.41 Schlegel never quite lost the nostalgia for unity of the Frühromantik, which in his later work would find expression in recurrent claims for the superior wisdom of the East, but the critical theme would remain diversity. In 1810, by then a sworn enemy of the revolution, he told the audience of his lectures on modern history: ‘Asia, one could say, is the land of unity, in which everything unfolds in great masses, and in the simplest relations; Europe is the land of freedom, that is, of civilization [Bildung] through the contest of manifold individual and isolated energies … It is precisely this rich variety, this manifoldness, that makes Europe what it is, that confers on it the distinction of being the chief seat of all human life and civilization’.42

  By the time this was written, Schlegel had moved to Vienna, where he was rapidly integrated into the Habsburg establishment, working first for the Austrian general staff and later on schemes for a post
-Napoleonic order in Germany. It was in this milieu that the second leading theme of conservative thinking about Europe, the shift away from balance-of-power principles as understood in pre-revolutionary diplomacy, took shape during the struggle against Napoleon. Gentz, translator of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France before becoming Metternich’s aide and secretary to the Congress of Vienna, can be taken as a conduit of the change. His first public interventions, in the time of the Consulate, while defending in more or less conventional terms the balance of power since Westphalia, as a system so organized that ‘every weight in the political mass would find somewhere a counter-weight’, had argued that more than this was required if Europe was to acquire its appropriate federal constitition. Beyond such checks and balances, positive mutuality between the powers was needed, and this must include the right to intervene in the affairs of any state that threatened the international order, as a principle of public law.43 With the Restoration, the corollary became the axiom. The political system set in place at the Congress of Vienna, of which Metternich could regard himself as the chief guardian, if not architect, and Gentz as the theorist, was not a re-edition of the balance of power of the eighteenth century. It was a fundamentally novel one—a system not of competition, but coordination between the leading powers, to stabilize the restoration of the old order and crush any danger of revolutionary risings against it.44 For its creators, this was no mere cartel of the anciens régimes, but the realization of a new kind of continental unity—the Concert of Europe. Metternich, who regarded himself as ‘representing European society as a whole’, could write to Wellington in 1824: ‘Depuis longtemps l’Europe a pris pour moi la valeur d’une patrie’. A century later Kissinger would call him the ‘Prime Minister of Europe’.45