In France, Guizot was no less committed to the Concert of Europe, and would become a fellow victim of the revolutions of 1848, when both rulers were toppled. But his intellectual achievement in the same cause was of another order: a historical synthesis weaving the two conservative motifs of unity and variety into a full-blown narrative of the destiny of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Restoration, in which pride of place was given to a ‘prodigious diversity’ as the very definition of the unity of European civilization, incomparably richer than any other. Distinctive in this vision was the—prudently—agonistic touch Guizot gave to the trope of variety that had been foregrounded by Schlegel. Europe was not just the theatre of an astonishing diversity of political systems, social structures, intellectual doctrines and aesthetic forms, but these were in ‘a state of continual conflict’, and this was the source of the vitality of European civilization.46 From the collision and combination of Roman, Christian and Barbarian elements had emerged the rudiments of the mediaeval order. Out of the struggles between the nobility, the church and the commons had developed the unity of nations, annealed only by monarchy—not aristocracy, theocracy nor any republic—into the form of the modern state. Out of the Reformation, as an insurrection of the freedom of thought against the absolute spiritual power of the papacy, had come the clash between that free spirit and centralized monarchy in seventeenth-century England, the land that was a veritable concentrate of all the successive diversities of European history.
Finally, out of the conflict in France between a still purer version of absolute monarchy and a yet more radical free spirit, had arisen the revolution of 1789. That, however, had been a too absolute triumph of human reason, leading to a tyranny of its own, now happily a thing of the past. For ‘it is the duty, and, I believe, will be the merit of our time, to recognize that any power’—be it spiritual or temporal—‘contains within it a natural vice, a principle of weakness and abuse requiring that a limit be assigned to it’.47 Conflictivity, salutary as it was, must also be wisely contained. Its natural outcome in Europe was compromise. For if ‘diverse forces are in continual conflict with one another, none can succeed in suppressing the others and taking entire possession of society’.48 Guizot gave his lectures on the general history of European civilization in 1828, on the eve of the July Monarchy, in which he would put the principles of the juste milieu into practice. As a French Protestant, he had inverted the schema of Saint-Simon and the German Romantics to make of the Reformation an emancipation rather than regression, and adjusted the principles of the Restoration from the absolutist reflexes of Vienna to the constitutional maxims of Paris, detaching them from legitimism. But the unity-in-diversity of Europe was no less the work of divine providence in this Huguenot edition, still bearing the stamp of a conservatism, however liberal in intention, for which the French were not grateful.49
Across the Rhine, similar ideas soon found expression. Five years later, the young Leopold von Ranke, a friend of Gentz in Vienna, while maintaining that ‘the complex of Christian nations in Europe should be considered as a whole, so to speak as a single state’, was also telling his German readers that ‘out of the clash of opposing forces, in great moments of danger—disaster, rising, rescue—the most decisive new developments are born’. It was a mistake to think that the nineteenth century had done no more than shed the baleful heritage of the French Revolution: it had ‘also renewed the fundamental principle of all states, that is religion and law, and given new life to the principle of each individual state’. Indeed, just as ‘there would only be a disagreeable monotony if the different literatures let their individual characters be blended and melted together’—for ‘the union of all must rest upon the independence of each, so that they can stimulate one another’—so it was ‘the same with states and nations. Conclusive, positive predominance of any one would inflict ruin on others. A mixture of all would destroy the essence of each. Out of their separation and self-development will emerge true harmony’.50 Ranke, watchful against contagion from the change of regime in France, and writing for a Prussian state that had yet to achieve its full place in the sun, lent a more combative note to common themes, making it clear that the principle of conflict extolled by Guizot in the European past found its classical expression in a field he had generally preferred to forget. War, as Heraclitus had noted, was the father of things. Half a century later, with the achievements of Bismarck before him, Ranke could be still more categorical: ‘Historical development’, he wrote in 1881, ‘does not rest on the tendency towards civilization alone. It arises also from impulses of a very different kind, especially from the rivalry of nations engaged in conflict with each other for the possession of soil or for political supremacy. It is in and through this conflict, affecting as it does every domain of culture, that the great empires of history are formed’.51
Somewhat earlier, it was Burckhardt, once a student of Ranke, who left the most striking formulations of the passage from the differential through the conflictual to an uncompromising agonistics. From the Renaissance onwards, certainly, Europe had exhibited an ‘unprecedented variety of life’, where ‘the richest formations originate, home of all contrasts, which dissolve into one unity where everything intellectual is given voice and expression. European is: the self-expression of all forces, in monuments, images and words, institutions and parties, down to the individual’. But in this manifold, there was nothing eirenic. Viewed with detachment, ‘the life of the West is struggle’, and notwthstanding its ‘great violence’ and ‘the desire to annihilate adversaries’, Burckhardt held that ‘history should rejoice in this profusion’. For ‘a concealed supreme power here produces epochs, nations and individuals of an endlessly rich particular life’. From the ‘high and distant vantage point’ of a historian, the bells of Europe ‘harmonize beautifully, whether or not they seem dissonant nearby: Discordia concors’. Only one thing was fatal to Europe: a ‘crushing mechanical power’, whether barbarian, absolutist or—today—the levelling pressure of the masses. But from every homogenizing danger, Europe had so far always found men to deliver it.52
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Such, approximately, was the repertoire of ideas stretching from the Enlightenment to the Belle Époque and its aftermath, that could be regarded as the most direct of the ‘sedimentations’ conceived by the historian Krzysztof Pomian as latent connexions between successive incarnations of European unity.53 The First World War, shattering them all in one movement, gave them new life in another, as survivors sought to draw lessons from the catastrophe, and avert any repetition of it. The inter-war period saw a flood of books, articles and schemes for a united Europe—an incomplete inventory counts some six hundred publications in different languages—in which virtually all the topics and tropes of the previous century were recapitulated, selectively or in combination, and the appearance for the first time of organizations expressly devoted to the cause.54 Discursively, perhaps only one new theme gained salience in these years. It was difficult for Europe to regard itself any longer as paramount in the world at large. Decline, possible or actual, of the continent was now commonly discussed, as the growing wealth and power of the United States loomed over every European state, and the rapid development of the USSR and Japan was cause for alarm. Valéry’s famous dictum of 1919, ‘We civilizations now know that we are mortal’—the plural quickly gave way to the singular: other ‘shipwrecks were not our affair’—expressed widespread foreboding.55 A decade later he would drily remark: ‘Europe visibly aspires to be governed by a commission from America. All its politics tend in that direction’.56 Valéry’s own observations on the post-war scene, certainly striking enough—lending a pessimistic twist to the tropes both of European diversity, as now capsizing into disorder, and European superiority, as undermined by the very diffusion of its scientific advances—remained within the limits of an ironic Kulturkritik, without constructive issue. Other leading philosophical and literary lights of the period—Ortega, Benda, Croce—committed the
mselves more actively to ideals of European unity.57
Such eddies in the intellectual sphere were not unconnected to the political world. In 1929, official proposals for a European Union were floated through the League of Nations by France, holding public attention into 1931. The evaporation of Briand’s initiative, on which he had consulted Coudenhove, owed something to the calculated vagueness of the memorandum he and his aide Alexis Léger—Saint-John Perse—presented to the governments of the time. But if it had little chance of a practical outcome anyway, this was because it essentially represented a premature attempt by France to corral Germany into a system designed to prevent its return to predominance in Europe, as the state with the largest economy and population—the reason why so many hard-boiled politicians in the Third Republic, not just the effusive Briand, but Herriot, Painlevé, even Poincaré, backed a plan that gave the appearance of being all too idealistic. But the First World War, unlike the Second, had left Germany effectively intact, and Stresemann—Briand’s targeted interlocutor—had no intention of renouncing his nation’s ambitions to recover the status of a great power. Britain, resistant as later to the idea of European unity as such, especially if it involved any disconnexion from America, invoked the loftier international ideals of the League of Nations to help bury the French initiative as a small-minded substitute. In Paris alone, it was not entirely forgotten. Twenty years later, when France and Germany were each sufficiently humbled by the experience of defeat and occupation to be ready for a more sober union, the Schuman Plan would make a discreet allusion to its predecessor, noting that, then as now, France had set the ball of European unity rolling.
In the short run, the triumph of Nazism in Germany put paid to any revival of such prospects.58 In its wake, a general ferocity of intensified nationalism swept most of Eastern and Southern Europe. By 1935 Marc Bloch, commenting on a conference held under Fascist auspices in Rome three years earlier (among the participants were Rosenberg and Göring), could view current notions of Europe as little more than expressions of panic, prompted by fear of economic competition to the west, colonial revolt in the south, alien social forms in the east, and political discord within, which had suddenly produced such good—sincere or insincere?—Europeans.59 Within a few years, Hitler’s New Order would proclaim its own version of a united Europe, ranged under German leadership against Anglo-Saxon plutocracy to the west and Bolshevik terror to the east. Too ephemeral and instrumental to be of any deeper effect, this confiscation nevertheless left a shadow in its immediate aftermath. When Lucien Febvre gave, for the first time, a course on the history of Europe in liberated Paris during the winter of 1944–5, his conclusions were subdued. No more than a ‘desperate refuge’ after Versailles, the unity of Europe seemed capable of realization only by mailed force, and joy at liberation from it was now tainted with fear that the machinery of ever more murderous industrialized warfare might grind again, as the progress of scientific destruction could not be reversed. The building of a new, peaceful Europe was a herculean task—political-administrative, economic-financial and cultural-civilizational—that no mere dilute liberal pathos could manage. Yet was it even the right goal, marking a stage towards a true global fraternity, or one risking obstruction of it, and so better skipped?60
Two years later Federico Chabod published the first serious historical reconstruction of ideas of Europe, from the time of Queen Anne to that of Bismarck, in an introduction to a course of lectures in Rome that still remains without equal for perceptiveness.61 But it too ended on a less than optimistic note. Like many Italian intellectuals of his generation, Chabod had not opposed fascism in the thirties, indeed hailing Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia,62 but during the war he had joined the partisans in his native Val d’Aosta, and been active in the Liberation. He concluded his essay, in early 1947, with the triumph of the cult of force in the late nineteenth century, and the descent of Europe into the First World War, from which it had emerged permanently diminished. Politically, economically and culturally, it was henceforward determined or overshadowed by larger powers beyond it. At best, European intellectuals might still have something to say in a world republic of letters. In 1948, Chabod made mention of the first attempts at economic cooperation after the war, with Benelux. But there is no sign he had much confidence in the prospects of any wider European unity.63 Further north, in the same year, the great Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius published the work on which he had been labouring for fifteen years, since the Nazi ascent to power in Germany, as an affirmation of European unity. But, as the title of his monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages announced, this protest against every geographical or chronological ‘dismemberment of Europe’ retreated to one of the obscurest recesses of the past in the attempt to render it whole again—Curtius himself observing that ‘no stretch of European literary history is as little known and frequented as the Latin literature of the early and high Middle Ages’, as if the true unity of Europe could now only find expression in a dead language.64
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Yet within another two years Monnet had drafted the Schuman Plan, and the process of European integration that has led to today’s Union was launched. What is the bearing of any of this abstruse pre-history on that process? In the early sixties, armed with a preface from Monnet himself, an authorized historian of the new Europe of hauts fonctionnaires had no doubt. There was nothing less than an ‘abyss’, wrote Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, between ‘the so-called “precursors” and the Europeans of the era after 1945’. In an entirely new enterprise, his contemporaries had at last built a united Europe with the purpose of ‘restoring their wealth, power and radiance to nations that had lost them’. ‘What a difference’, he exclaimed, from ‘the Europe of universalists and cosmopolitans who denied or despised the ideal of a fatherland’, the assorted ‘hatchers of plans, profferers of advice, utopian system-builders’ of old. He was not to imagine that the same robust scorn would in due course be poured on ‘the lives and teachings of the European saints’, his own practically minded heroes, by a historian committed to a still more realistic view of the role of nation-states in the creation of the Common Market.65 Tougher minds can usually be found than those who imagine themselves tough-minded.
In reality, the ideas of Europe whose long and winding history preceded integration have continued to haunt it. Each has had its own after-life. On the left, the revolutionary tradition that took up the banner of unity earliest proved least able to hold it across the rapids of the twentieth century. There were at least two reasons for that. In this line of descent, the principal motivation of calls for a united Europe was always the prevention of war. Ideals of peace were, of course, central to virtually every shade of Europeanizing opinion, and explain why, at the beginning, the left led the field, in its sincerity and urgency: not only were the masses whose interests it sought to defend the principal victim of wars, but since the Left was always far from power, it was not exposed to temptations to launch them. But as time went on, the limitation of notions of unity springing only from the need to avoid war weakened it. This was partly because peace is of its nature not only a negative goal, but an abstract one, as Leibniz had pointed out, specifying no particular political or even existential order. But it was also because Europe could decreasingly be taken as a theatre potentially defining it. Peace might reign between the Powers, so long as their Concert held, but what of the rest of the world, where wars of imperial annexation or repression proceeded without interruption throughout the nineteenth century?
By the early twentieth century, the left had divided between radical and moderate wings, and Luxemburg, in her exchange with Kautsky, summed up the underlying objections of the radicals: ‘The idea of European civilization is utterly foreign to the outlook of the class conscious proletariat. Not European solidarity, but international solidarity, embracing every region, race and people on earth, is the foundation of socialism in a Marxist sense. Every partial solidarity is not a stage towards the realization of g
enuine internationality, but its opposite, its enemy, an ambiguity under which lurks the cloven hoof of national antagonism. Just as we have always fought against Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism and Pan-Americanism as reactionary ideas, so we have nothing whatever to do with the idea of Pan-Europeanism’.66 But as soon as the League of Nations was founded, the same reservation found expression even among moderates. Was not the League a higher instance, a more compelling ideal, than any mere European confederation? The legacy of this doubt has not gone away. In Habermas’s conception of today’s Union as commendably more abstract than the nation-state of old, yet still not abstract enough to represent a fully cosmopolitan value-system, and so at best a transition to a Kantian world order to be embodied in the United Nations, suitably equipped with policing powers, there is more than an echo of the same tension. In the shadow of the universal, the particular can only exist on sufferance—or, in a late corruption, as already the universal in nuce. The contemporary ideology that offers the Union as moral example to the world, now embedded in the self-image of its officialdom, is essentially a product of minds belonging to what was once the Left.
There was, however, another reason why this tradition faded as an active force over time. After the early utopians—the moment of Fourier and Saint-Simon—the socialist movement was little interested in political institutions. Even the federalism of Proudhon, or in more democratic-republican register Cattaneo, remained more ideational, as a principle, than articulate as a programme. The Commune was too brief an experiment to leave behind, for revolutionaries, more than the negative lesson that the existing state machines could not be appropriated, but had to be broken, if real social change was to come. For reformists, on the other hand, bourgeois parliaments were good enough, requiring little further thought, other than full extension of the suffrage. Though a united Europe remained a slogan well into the twentieth century, both wings were sterile so far as its construction was concerned. Even the Manifesto of Ventotene, remarkable in so many other ways, offered a much more developed social vision of a United States of Europe than a political structure for one.
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