The Idea of Europe

In 1991, at Princeton University where I then taught, "The Idea of Europe" was selected as the topic of a newly established senior seminar to be offered jointly by the departments of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages and literatures. The cold war had very recently ended; the last customs barriers among the member states of the EEC, now the European Union, were about to come down; and the prospects for Europe seemed extremely promising. The EU was at that time a predominantly Western European affair, but since 1991 the Central and Eastern European states of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have been added, along with Sweden, Cyprus, and Malta; and of course the two Germanies have been reunited. During the same period, however, there have been serious outbreaks of ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflict in the southeastern part of the continent, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and Basque separatism in Spain. There is even a violent independence movement on the island of Corsica, which from time to time requires significant deployments of French police and military. In Turkey-supposedly a candidate for full membership of the European Union in the near future-popular support for a more religiously based, Islamic society has continued to grow. Meanwhile, unrest and instability in Albania, virtual civil war in Algeria, and economic hardship in Morocco and parts of the Near East and Central Asia have led to an influx of immigrants, many illegal, across the Mediterranean and the Adriatic into Italy, Spain, and France, aggravating the social tensions caused by severe unemployment in those countries. Far-right nationalist, racist, and anti-immigrationist movements in France, Austria, to some extent Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and most recently Britain show no sign of abating. And in Britain generally, the EU is essentially thought of as a confederation of independent states-a huge Zollverein or free trade zone-with close but voluntary cooperation on most other matters, rather than the federal state that most of the other original members have in mind as the ultimate goal for Europe.

It seems, however, that the movement toward such a federal state is unlikely to suffer more than temporary setbacks or pauses, especially against the background of the rise of militant Islam, the spectacular development of China to world power status, and the current economic upheaval, against which the euro has proven to be a bulwark. Some reflection on what "Europe" stands for or should stand for thus seems, at this juncture, once more appropriate.

It is hard enough to define America in purely geographical terms-America means much more-but at least it is possible to trace fairly unambiguous physical boundaries. In the case of Europe, geography is less decisive, especially in the East, where Europe meets Asia. As a result, geographical boundaries are inextricably bound up with history and culture, as the Polish historian Oskar Halecki made clear in his book The Limits and Divisions of European History, published in London not long after World War II. Halecki's book reflects the anxieties and concerns of a Polish Catholic scholar faced with the postwar division of Europe, which cut Poland off from the European culture many Poles felt they belong to. But at least Halecki had no doubt that there is a unified European culture. Others have argued quite plausibly that the divisions in European culture are as important as, perhaps more important than, any supposed unity. One who put forward such an argument as recently as the mid-1990s is the French political scientist and professor of public law, Gérard Soulier. I would like to quote a longish passage from his book L'Europe: Histoire, civilisation, institutions:

The idea of European unity supposes a harmony between the history and the geography of the continent. Such a harmony, however, is by no means an established fact. Geographically, Europe is far from being a natural given; often it is defined as . . . a peninsula extending out of Asia. . . . Conventionally, geographers have set its eastern limit-the one that nature did not clearly draw and that therefore causes problems-at the...