Understanding Europe (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

III. Europe Not a Continent but a Society of Peoples

38 iii Europe not a Continent but a Society of Peoples The question of the nature of Europe—of the relations of the European states to one another, and of the parts to the whole— has always been the great problem in all attempts to establish an international order. But the concept of Europe has usually been taken for granted in international discussion. It is seldom defined, and when defined, it has usually been only in a superficial way. In the past this did not matter, because the international community was regarded as practically identical with the European community, and the law of nations was in practice simply the body of rules which were commonly accepted by the states of Europe in their dealings with one another. The situation changed gradually and almost imperceptibly during the nineteenth century—first by the rise of the United States and the independence of the states of Latin America, and secondly by the development of the international status of the independent powers of Asia and their conformity to European diplomatic usages. But Europe remained the centre and pattern for the international system, and when, the League of Nations was founded in 1919 as a world organization , it was really not so much the creation of a new system as the completion of the process of European expansion and the application of the European international system to the rest of the world. But the Treaty of Versailles which inaugurated the League of Nations failed to establish European order. The old system of the Balance of Power and the Concert of Europe was abandoned, but there was no place in the Europe a Society of Peoples 39 new system for Europe as a society of peoples. Europe was no longer sufficiently united to lead the world, and the world was not sufficiently organized to impose order on Europe. And consequently, instead of being the organizing centre of world order, Europe became the focus of international disorder. The Second World War, which was also a European civil war of unprecedented destructiveness and bitterness, has left Europe weaker and more divided than ever before. The leadership of the world has passed to the giant states of the non-European world—to the U.S.A., and the U.S.S.R.—and Europe occupies a position somewhat similar to that held by the Balkans in the later nineteenth century—a breeding ground of conflicts between the great powers and a dependent region to be organized and divided in rival spheres of influence. In the new international organization of the United Nations which has taken the place of the old League of Nations, Western Europe has only 8 member states out of a total membership of 59. Thus it can be outvoted in the General Assembly not only by America with 22 votes and Asia with 16, but even by the Caribbean and Central American states alone, which number 10. Nevertheless it is not possible to judge the importance of a culture by the artificial regulations of a temporary international organization, nor even by the material and military standards of power politics. For even to-day after the immense expansion and political advance of the non-European world which have changed the scale of our thought and altered the standards by which the statesmen and historians of the past reckoned, Europe still remains the greatest centre of world population and the richest and most highly cultured area in the world. It is also, in spite of its feuds and dissensions, the most interdependent and interrelated group of states that exists. Every European state depends on its neighbours to a degree that is unknown in Asia and Africa and which is only partially attained in America. This diversity and interdependence of the European state system has always been an essential condition of European culture and the source of its strength as well as of its weakness. The basis of this diversity is to be found in the physical structure of Europe, which is a continent 40 Understanding Europe of peninsulas and narrow seas, where the land runs out into the Atlantic , and the Mediterranean and the Baltic penetrate into the very heart of the land. Geographically speaking, it is not a continent at all, but merely a peninsular extension of the great Eurasian land-mass. As we have seen, it is a man-made continent, an historical creation...