A Grand Illusion?: An Essay on Europe

2. EASTERN APPROACHES

2 EASTERN APPROACHES How MANY Europes are there? The question sounds odd, and one answer may seem intuitively obvious. There is only one Europe, just as there is but one Asia, one Africa, and so forth. Like the other continents, Europe has a north and a south, an east and a west, and appropriate subdivisions within these. True, the eastern boundaries of the European continent are fuzzy, shading into western Asia across a broad and topographically indefinite terrain; but elsewhere its limits are clear enough. Moreover Europe is a small continent with a long history of self-awareness, which means that to be a European is to have an identity rather more precise than that attaching to persons who are "African" or "Asian" or "American" by virtue of their geographical origin. Notwithstanding occasional attempts at constructing a "pan-African" consciousness, the peoples of Africa, for example, are united by very little more than a common experience of colonialism. "Europeanness" by contrast, is something the peoples of Europe have brought upon themselves. Between their geographical contiguity and their common past they do seem to share something indigenous and fundamental. [45 } TONY )UDT Curiously, though, one of the things that Europeans have long shared and that has bound them together is a sense of their divisions. Indeed, drawing distinctions among and between themselves has been one of the defining obsessions of the inhabitants of the continent. The breakup of the original Roman Empire into two distinct parts at the end of the fourth century A.D. began this process, whereby a single entity was defined by its very bifurcation; the emergence of the Carolingian monarchy reinforced the point by giving the western part of Europe , hitherto anarchic and administratively imprecise, distinctive and enduring frontiers. Charlemagne's ninthcentury empire corresponded with curious anticipatory precision to the original postwar "Europe" of the SixFrance , West Germany, the Benelux countries, and Italy , though it left out central and southern Italy and included present-day Catalonia. The Roman, Carolingian , and some later empires lacked precise borders, petering out instead in limes, marches, and military zones; and the eastern edges of the Carolingian monarchy, like the northern boundaries of Byzantium, were always imprecise. But by the fourteenth century, when the European frontier "closed," the east-west distinction in Europe was remarkably well established. It is sometimes supposed, today, that the line dividing eastern from western Europe was an artificial creation of the Cold War, an iron curtain gratuitously and recently drawn across a single cultural space. This is not so. In the nineteenth century, long after the Habsburg [46 } A GRAND ILLUSION? rulers had established effective authority over territories stretching well into today's Ukraine, the Austrian Chancellor Metternich could famously speak of Asia as beginning at the Landstrasse, the road leading east out of Vienna. Nor was his an original observation: the Englishman Edward Brown, who traveled through the Habsburg lands in 1669, remarked that upon entering Hungary "a man seems to take leave of our world ... and, before he cometh to Buda, seems to enter upon a new stage of world, quite different from that of the Western countryS."1 Whatever the sources of their prejudice , both the Austrian and the Englishman were noting , and confirming, an invisible line that already ran from north to south through the middle of Europe. Conradus Celtis, a German writer of the late fifteenth century , recorded strikingly familiar resentments: "Our famous harbour, Danzig," he wrote, "is held by the Pole, and the gateway of our ocean, The Sound, by the Dane." Not content with anticipating by more than three centuries one source of contemporary European conflict, Celtis then went on to complain about another: to the east were communities "separated from the body of our Germany . . . like the Transylvanian Saxons who also use our racial culture and speak our native language."2 1. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map o/Civilization on the Mind 0/the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994), p. 41. 2. See N.J.G. Pounds, An Historical Geography 0/Europe (Cambridge , 1990), where Celtis is quoted on page 215. [47 } TONY JUDT Like Adam of Bremen, an eleventh-century chronicler who noted that "Slavia" began east of the Elbe and ran south to the Black Sea, Celtis and his successors were recording a sentiment that has been repeated on many occasions in western Europe ever since the end of the tenth century: where the Roman...