What is Europe?

Introduction

‘Europe’ is a key issue of contemporary political debate and provides one of the most contentious questions facing party leaders and the voters of more than one country. But what is the nature of the issue, and what does it actually involve? What are the precise questions that contemporary Europe poses? Europe is in flux, and many of the key reference points of a traditional Europe have weakened or disappeared altogether. One of the key aspects of the present situation, therefore, is that of rapid change and a thoroughgoing transformation of Europe from the years of the Cold War and the World War that preceded it. This course focuses on the different understandings of Europe that underlie the debates and disputes over the development of Europe.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 1 study in Geography.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you will be able to:

• appreciate the historical development of ‘Europe’ as a political and economic entity

• understand the rationale for the emergence of the idea of ‘Europe’ in policy making

• understand the contested nature of the idea of Europe

• understand that ‘Europe’ is not coterminous with the European Union

• appreciate the challenges facing the EU as it expands.

What is Europe?

1 Europe in the twenty-first century

Europe is changing, but so is the way in which it is governed. The beginning of the twenty-first century sees a new Europe emerging that is in many ways different from that which previously existed. Europe is less divided than it has been for most of its history, and certainly less than it was for the war-torn first half of the twentieth century or most of the ideologically divided decades of the second half. It is incomparably richer than at any other stage of its development, and seems to enjoy unparalleled prospects for concerted growth and harmonious economic development. Nevertheless, the nature of this new Europe remains ambiguous, its mode of governance uncertain, and the views taken of its future development highly contested.

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Figure 1: Europe in the year 2005

Two main complex paths of development led to the emergence of this new Europe. One was reflected in the reinvigorated, dynamic and increasingly confident European Community of the 1980s. This powerful vision of a modern, autonomous and more intensively governed Western Europe was formally drawn up in the Maastricht Treaty of 1991 (signed in 1992). Ambitious plans for further integration were adopted, and far-reaching proposals endorsed to expand the association beyond the 334 million people it currently embraced.

At the same time, another vision of Europe emerged with the sudden lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the abrupt ending of communist rule in the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union. The eyes of these countries were firmly fixed on the autonomous and strikingly dynamic social and economic community that had been constructed in the West, which seemed to offer hopes of a shared European future. There were also powerful, if more distant and abstract, conceptions of a common European heritage in terms of culture, religion and far-reaching historical links. It opened up perspectives on a broader Europe of a less well-defined character, but at least one that was unconstrained by structures of superpower control. The independence of the reconstructed eastern Europe and the severing of Russian links throughout the area was confirmed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union a couple of weeks after the Maastricht meeting. The newly independent eastern countries constituted a major community in their own right and, excluding Russia, contained 213 million people. Much of Russia's population (about 120 million people) lived in its European territory – and, at 333 million, this gave post-communist Europe a population virtually identical with that of the Maastricht countries.

Prospects of an enlarged core Europe and one more fully integrated on a continental basis emerged with two further decisions. One was the commitment made in 1997 to incorporate some of the post-communist countries into the European mainstream and begin the process that led to eight post-communist countries joining the European Union in 2004. (See Figure 2.) The second arose from the objective endorsed at Maastricht of closer integration through eventual monetary union and the birth of a European Single Currency (ESC) in 1999. Both of these developments took place against a background of considerable conflict and growing doubt and uncertainty about the nature of the Europe that was in prospect.

In the early 1990s the economic impetus underlying the developments of the previous decade within the EU was considerably weakened (Dinan, 1994, pp. 15 7–8). Added to this downturn were the enormous costs of German unification and the pressure this exerted on the country's economy. The process of further economic integration soon began to seem considerably more problematic than had appeared at the outset. In 1999 the entire European Commission resigned amid charges of incompetence and corruption. Relations between Germany and France, the two major players in the EU, continued to evolve and seemed to lose their former balance; the implications of this change had been sharpened by the death of former French President Francois Mitterand and the retirement of Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Germany. The generation of leaders with personal memories of the decisive military conflict that ultimately forged closer European relations had now passed. In the former communist region the more advanced countries continued to grow closer to the West, but others showed few signs of democratic development or economic growth – and in some cases, such as the former Yugoslavia and southern Russia, fell into open conflict, thereby putting the whole idea of overall stable European development in a more precarious light.

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Figure 2: Growing EU membership

Any idea of an inclusive new Europe created on the basis of events after 1989, therefore, also contains its own conflicts and contradictions, and major tensions can be detected in any model of contemporary European development. If not in terms of overt conflict (at least for the west-central core of the European area), Europe as an idea, a sphere of governance, and a model for development, continues to be driven by contradictions and contrasting expectations. Two kinds of issues arise:

• the precise nature of the new forms of European organisation and governance that are being proposed, and how those already established actually function at the beginning of the twenty-first century;

• more established questions of what is being referred to in any discussion of Europe itself, and the concept of Europe as a whole.

The second issue points to the broad historical processes that underlie contemporary European dilemmas and the particular questions they raise. Inherent in the contemporary conflicts and ongoing debates about the character of the region are different understandings of Europe and contrasting conceptions of what being European involves. They throw light on the context in which a new Europe has emerged and the nature of the influences that bear upon it. This course is designed to explore that wider context, its implications for contemporary processes of European development, as well as the nature of the new Europe that has emerged and the principles on which it is organised.

Your work on these issues begins with a supplementary reading. It is a classic statement on the nature of modern Europe. The short extract by Hugh Seton-Watson raises two basic questions. What is Europe? Where is Europe? Professor Seton-Watson was an eminent historian and directed the London School of Slavonic and East European Studies; thus he approaches European issues from the vantage point of the east, paying particular attention to the ambiguous role of Russia. His discussion touches four major tensions in European developments and the contrasts that continue to play a leading part in contemporary Europe. They emerge as major themes in the course as a whole, and can be summed up in terms of:

• unity and diversity,

• consensus and conflict,

• transformation and tradition,

• inclusion and exclusion.

One vision of Europe directs particular attention to cultural unity, how it came to flower towards the end of the nineteenth century, and its degeneration into nationalist fanaticism, unlimited class hatred and the blood-bath of the twentieth. Cultural unity is thus counterposed not just to diversity or disunity but to extremes of conflict on a military and class base. After 1945, though, a new European consensus began to emerge in response to the awareness of a common Soviet threat and American encouragement of European unity, in reaction to ‘the destructive nationalism of the Age of Fascism’, and to facilitate economic recovery and further material progress. But it is the cultural underpinnings of European unity, in Seton-Watson's (1985) view, that take precedence over the administrative incrementalism of the EU bureaucrats. He noted the importance for Europe of the ‘infidels beyond the Lubeck-Trieste line’ (by which he means the central and east Europeans then subject to communist rule beyond the Iron Curtain), and emphasised that they should not be neglected nor the idea of a broader Europe lost sight of.

The disappearance of the Iron Curtain four years after this article was published casts the issue of European unity in a different light and raises questions about the relationship between different parts of Europe. Europe has thus undergone a further major transformation since Seton-Watson wrote the article, and much of European history has been characterised by far-reaching and relatively rapid change. But elements of continuity and tradition have not been lacking, and they figure prominently in contemporary debates over Europe in Britain and elsewhere. Seton-Watson's stress on the role of European cultural unity, and its particular appeal both to the citizens of the defeated fascist states and the inhabitants of the then communist countries, also suggest that solidly established European traditions have carried enormous influence in twentieth-century Europe. His sceptical comments about the Brussels Eurocrats also reinforce the conviction that a properly European identity has to be based on a principle of inclusion rather than the acceptance of practices of exclusion, such as those that once wrote off Christians living under Muslim rule (referring to the Ottoman rule in much of the Balkans, which only ended in the early twentieth century) or, more recently, those that consigned much of central and eastern Europe to communist rule.

These different themes are, of course, intimately related and the further transformation of central and eastern Europe that began with the collapse of communist rule in the period 1989–1991 opens up radically new perspectives on the possibility of a more inclusive Europe. Such recent developments have, I think, definitely reinforced Seton-Watson's view of what ‘Europe’ really is – a conclusion that is, of course, inseparably bound up with what Europe should be. His preference for the cultural unity of a more traditional Europe and a broad inclusiveness also emerges quite clearly, as does his lack of enthusiasm for the politique of the Brussels Eurocrats. His answer to where Europe is remains quite vague, although it is quite clearly not just restricted to ‘the west’. These are questions that we shall now go on to examine in more detail.

2 Defining Europe

Preamble

It is important to distinguish between the different dimensions of European identity, and we shall begin by identifying some of the different ways in which ‘Europe’ has been understood. Basic distinctions can be drawn between a number of quite different conceptions. These involve ideas of Europe as a geographical entity, Europe as a sequence of ideas, and – following the near destruction of Europe as a project – something that had to be created anew if it was to exist at all. In this section we focus on Europe defined in terms of its geography and the different ideas it has been understood to embody.

2.1 Europe as a geographical area

From a British point of view, judging from frequently heard expressions, Europe is something ‘out there’ (or perhaps, in the sense of EU- or Brussels-inspired regulation, ‘up there’). ‘Britain’ and ‘Europe’ are generally understood to be distinct entities rather than overlapping categories. When they ‘go to Europe’ most British people leave Britain behind – at least in the physical sense. In conventional geographical terms the situation is rather different. Europe is generally understood to be the western portion of the Eurasian landmass, together with a number of islands not far from the mainland (Corsica, Crete, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, Ireland and Iceland, as well as Great Britain) (see Figure 3). But that does not provide a clear-cut idea of where Asia stops and Europe begins.

Precisely where the division between Europe and Asia lies is still a matter of some debate. Europe was first spoken of in ancient Greece, and the Greeks generally thought of a water-bound Europe whose borders lay on the Black Sea and its northern extension, the Sea of Azov, as far as the banks of the River Don. Early modern conceptions pushed the European frontier further east in Russian territory. With the construction of the Volga-Don canal in the twentieth century, it became possible to think of Europe's easterly borders following a larger waterway and resting mostly on the Volga, a great river that embraces much of what is regarded as European Russia and which had considerable historical significance in delimiting an historic Muscovite heartland.

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Figure 3: Europe as it is conventionally mapped and understood

From the eighteenth century, though, Europe has often been understood to end (or begin) with the Ural Mountains and the river that takes its name from them and flows south into the Caspian Sea. This idea carries its own ambiguities. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 it leaves the Transcaucasus and newly independent states of Armenia, Azerbaidjan and Georgia in an uncertain relation with regard to Europe, while Turkey (currently identified – controversially – as a potential EU member) also lies to the west of the Urals. Turkey, or Asia Minor as it was known in ancient times, has long stood in an uncertain relationship with Europe and became a major antagonist of early Christian Europe with the Ottoman invasions of the fourteenth century. For centuries it dominated south-eastern Europe and remained a major force there until the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. Alien or not, Turkey was certainly a major European presence for several centuries. Following the revolution of Kemal Attaturk in the 1920s, a modern Turkey emerged with a quite different outlook, and it can now be claimed that the country ‘is not only Western, it is wholly European’ (Moïsi, 1999, p.47). Turkey belongs to the Council of Europe and first applied for membership of the EU in 1987, an initiative that was not received with much enthusiasm, and Turkey has only recently begun to participate in formal accession procedures.

A geographical Europe is not difficult to define in broad terms, then, but consideration of the status of its bordering areas leads directly to further questions about the nature of European identity. A description of Europe, or any other territory, as being ‘just a geographical expression’ invariably implies a diminished status and the absence of more elevated claims associated with the embodiment of some general values. The development of modern Europe has certainly not been devoid of such broad cultural associations. Even those who, like Tony Judt (1996, p.141), are sceptical about the future of a unified Europe and strongly aware of its mythic properties would accept that Europe is more than simply a geographical notion.

2.2 Europe as a sequence of ideas

Europe has also often been defined in terms of the ideas it is believed to represent and the particular system of values it is understood to embody. In different historical periods, therefore, Europe has been identified as the realm of Christianity and later as the home of science and progress. Different ideas of Europe prevailed during different periods, but they have also left their mark on contemporary conceptions. Europe has often been defined, then, in terms of a sequence of ideas, and not just with reference to what it is now, but also to what it has been in the past.

For the ancient Greeks ‘Europe’ was indeed little more than a geographical expression, and it was the principles of Hellenic civilization extending around the eastern Mediterranean that were paramount. The world of the Romans, too, was a Mediterranean one and the values of Roman citizenship had no need of any ‘European’ gloss. The civilization that began to emerge within Europe after the Middle Ages was emphatically Christian, and it was out of the realm of Christendom that an early ‘new Europe’ began to emerge, although the short-lived empire formed by

Frankish emperor Charlemagne in the late eighth century had also been called ‘European’. Christendom sustained a spirit of unity in the face of conflict with Muslim Arabs and Turks, and it was Pope Pius II – in the fifteenth century – who was the first to use the term ‘Europe’, in the title of a book (Neumann, 1999, p.44). It could hardly claim a single identity after the Reformation and the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for although Europeans remained mostly Christian they no longer shared quite the same faith.

2.2 Europe as a sequence of ideas (continued)

2.2 Europe as a sequence of ideas (continued)

2.3 Europe as a ‘non-other’

The idea of ‘otherness’ has always been a strong component in the formation of any European identity and it is a division that has, paradoxically, run as much through geographical Europe and its societies as it has demarcated Europe from supposedly alien, external civilizations. ‘Europeanness’, like other collective identities, has faced two kinds of others: those fully external to it and those located within. One of the problems surrounding the development of a modern European identity may be that the external other has often been distant and relatively weak, so directing attention to internal differences and encouraging tendencies to conflict within the European whole (Therborn, 1995, p.243). Definitions of Europe in terms of its system of values too, have rarely identified the same group of countries or geographical area. Peoples close to others on the continent, and even direct neighbours, have often been excluded from the European community because of an alien identity that has been projected on to them. Successive values have, indeed, been promoted as much to exclude certain regions, countries or powers – as well as certain groups within them – as to include others.

Early Europe as Christendom already contained significant religious minorities (Jews and Muslims) – and barely included the rural masses whose peasant status was closely linked with a ‘pagan’ (and thus non-Christian) outlook which presented a constant challenge to the consolidation of any regional Christian realm (Fletcher, 1998, Chapter 2). It could well be argued that the existence of such ‘others’ strengthened the emerging ‘European’ identity of an articulate elite and may well, indeed, have been a precondition for its development. The roots of modern sentiments of European superiority and colonial racism seem to lie deep in the early development of any common identity and were already linked at an early stage with the dealings of a Latin core with a greater European periphery (Bartlett, 1994, p.313). The strongly differentiated and historically rooted character of any European identity may well be one of its major features, and thus a prime source of the difficulties encountered in defining any contemporary system of European values. The fundamental nature of Europe over the long term may best be defined less by any commonality of values than by the persistence of division and conflict as sources of creative change (Malia, 1997, p.20).

The core area of European identity has also shifted over the centuries, and this has been linked with changing perceptions of who were the critical outsiders and major antagonists. For much of the early period the realm of Christian faith had been based on Constantinople and the eastern part of the Roman Empire rather than on the distant reaches of the west and north. The empire had already been divided into two parts for ease of administration in the third century AD as Goths and other ‘barbarians’ intensified their attacks. It was the eastern part, ruled from the capital founded by Emperor Constantine at the ancient settlement of Byzantium (and later transformed into modern Istanbul), that proved to be more stable and defensible than the portion ruled from Rome itself. But subsequent developments tended to identify the western variants of Catholicism and Protestantism as more authentically ‘European’ than the Orthodox faiths of the east and south.

The heartland of Latin Christendom was certainly more ‘European’ in its dynamism and capacity for sustained material and cultural development (Malia, 1997, pp.6–8). Russia in particular, although a Christian power for most of its five-hundred year existence as a state, has been distinguished for its persistent ‘otherness’ from a more authentic Europe. Russia was invariably portrayed as just having been tamed and civilized, and almost (yet never completely) ready for full participation in the European project. This has been the case once again since the collapse of communism and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Neumann, 1999, p. 110). Similar tendencies were present in the values of the European civilization of the eighteenth century, as the nations of the developed west increasingly premised their superiority on the backwardness of other regions and ‘invented’ a barbaric eastern Europe to substantiate their claims (Wolff, 1994). In more recent times, after the Second World War, the Europe of the west (although strongly underwritten by the USA) was clearly regarded as more ‘European’ than the Soviet-dominated east, a view that supported the special role played by the EU and its predecessors in the region as a whole. Its economic success, sustained democracy and overall stability all strengthened the conception.

It is a view that clearly prevails in post-communist Europe and is one reason why, following the removal of the Iron Curtain, it still remains difficult to conceive of a broader-based European identity or a set of values that might sustain it. ‘Europe’ has become identified with the affluent stability of the western community, and the long-established traditions of violence and instability now seem distinctly un-European. It is a dimension of the new Europe of the 1990s that has been strongly reinforced by the successive conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. In the context of the 1999 Kosovo conflict, a new definition of Europe as ‘the place where tragedies don't take place’ was pertinently advanced by Susan Sontag (Observer, 16 May 1999). Developments in more than one of the former communist countries of eastern Europe constituted a major practical problem for EU leaders, as well as posing a challenge to any definition of Europe in terms of a coherent system of values (the problems involved in governing diversity are the subject of Module 4). Relations within Europe as a whole and between its constituent parts continue to create new fields of conflict as well as forging constructive links. War could be waged on Serbia precisely because ‘European values’ were being infringed in Europe itself, but it was also the importation of values of nationalism and ethnic collectivism into the Balkan peninsula and the very recent encouragement of national separatism throughout the former Yugoslavia in the name of democracy (a policy surely discredited enough by developments throughout Europe in the inter-war decades) that created the conditions under which such abuses could flourish.

Measures designed to achieve monetary union were, moreover, simultaneously being pushed through in the ‘core Europe’ of the EU precisely to strengthen the internal cohesion of the centre and protect it from surrounding instabilities. Non-EU countries were, of course, not part of this development, and the Balkans and large parts of post-Soviet Europe continue to remain both within and outside ‘Europe’. Such divisions and the particular uses made of formally ‘European’ values place further doubts on the idea of Europe as an inclusive value system of any sort. It has, therefore, been argued that any new Europe has to be imagined afresh in the context of the particular problems and challenges it faces at any one time, and constructed as a conscious plan of action rather than deduced from existing values. The idea of such ‘projects for Europe’ is not a new one, and similar proposals have been prominent in discussions about the future of the region since the shattering of so many European illusions in the First World War.

3 Europe as a project

Plans to refashion Europe or create it anew had been known in earlier times, although specific projects for Europe have been more characteristic of the modern period. Napoleon's attempt to create an ‘association européene’ was the first such explicit initiative, but it succeeded in the long term only in bringing into being a conservative alliance representing existing imperial and monarchical interests opposed to any alternative and more modern conceptions of European identity. There was particular resistance to the idea of a single European system imposed by one dominant power, and the concept of a balance of power continued to exercise a significant influence. Dominant for the rest of the nineteenth century, too, was the idea of progress on an international scale and strategies for European expansion were pursued throughout the globe, thus diverting many political ambitions from the European mainland. Conflicts involving the major European states broke out mostly around the margins, and particularly concerned the weakening of Ottoman power. The main exception was the transformation of Prussia into a German empire, and the pursuit of national values that brought it into conflict with first Austria and then France. It was the later outcomes of nationalism in the aftermath of the First World War that provided more fertile ground for the elaboration of broader projects for Europe as a whole.

One of the key principles applied to post-1918 Europe in the attempt to defuse the tensions that had produced world war was that of national self-determination, given concrete form by the creation of a number of new nation states (mostly from parts of the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires – the European part of the Ottoman Empire having been mostly dismembered in the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913). A supranational framework for the new pattern of states this produced was also created in the form of the League of Nations, although the USA never joined the organisation and the League's objectives were never fully realised. A more specific project for European integration was launched in 1923 with the creation of a ‘Pan-European Union’ by one Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. His objectives lay primarily in the realm of security, with the creation of a system of mutual defence pacts, as well as with the European economy, for which he envisaged a system of self-sufficiency. Both Russia and Britain were excluded from this project, the latter because of its strong international position which had led to it having ‘grown out’ of Europe.

Apart from establishing its own branches throughout Europe, the Pan-European Union attracted support from French politicians Edouard Herriot and Aristide Briand. In 1929 Briand, as French prime minister, was asked by the League of Nations to prepare an initiative in this area, but he came up with little more than proposals for a moral union and a series of meetings (Bugge, 1995, p.104). Moreover, he was convinced of the need for effective British cooperation if any European security organisation was to succeed – and this was certainly not forthcoming. Both the League of Nations and such tentative moves towards a project for joint European security remained quite powerless in the face of German rearmament and growing Hitlerite aggression.

It was only in 1945, with the complete defeat of the Axis regimes and the exhaustion of their nationalist traditions, that further projects for Europe not only returned to the political agenda but now appeared as a prime necessity if the idea of Europe was to retain any meaning or offer some hope for the future. If all traditional European values now appeared to be at least partially compromised, it was only in action towards a specific European project that former values might be restored or new values created. Europe in 1945 had little incentive to look back to its past; it was in redefining Europe as a new project that any contemporary political meaning could now be found for the region. As Jean Monnet, a French economist and leading proponent of the post-war European idea, wrote in 1950: ‘Europe has never existed. It is not the addition of sovereign nations met together in councils that makes an entity of them. We must genuinely create Europe’ (see Reading D). By 1945 the prime European value had become that of survival and the avoidance of further wars. The core of the European project had become the creation of a continent of relative security and sufficient mutual tolerance between states and their citizens to maintain that security. Monnet headed a commission to prepare for the restoration and modernisation of French industry after 1945 and in 1952, appropriately enough in terms of prime anti-militarist principles of post-war Europe, became president of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).

The growth of European integration and the launching of the ‘project’ was by no means straightforward or uncontested as a process. The UK was relatively active in this context although, in line with traditional perspectives, it sought to restrain federal initiatives and press for more limited forms of association (as occurred in 1949 with the formation of the Council of Europe). As its imperial base contracted, Britain placed growing emphasis on relations with the USA, although the USA itself was making strong efforts to integrate western Europe as a whole. In addition, Britain did not suffer the traumas of defeat experienced by most other countries of Europe during the Second World War, an experience that prepared them for participation in a radically new European project. Britain still had an extensive overseas empire which enabled it to link perceptions of its weakened contemporary position directly with the global supremacy it had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. It lacked the push of such factors for participation in the new European project as well as the pull of any prior strong continental commitment, having traditionally – and with much success – based its European relations on a detached insular position.

Among eminent Britons Winston Churchill did, indeed, argue in his famous Zurich speech of 1946 for a United States of Europe (Churchill, 1946). But the UK was never meant to be included in this continental association, and Europe was clearly understood to be composed of countries on the mainland. Britain remained in a different category and was still seen as a global, imperial power (Ponting, 1996, p.40). The then Labour government, like Churchill and the Conservatives, was equally unwilling to participate in any supranational European project. Britain thus pressed for a low level of integration and a high level of discretion to be left with individual states as the Council of Europe was founded in 1949. When the first supranational body was formed as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, it involved France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands – but not the UK and other countries less enthusiastic about European integration. The major objective was the political one of strengthening the prospects of a lasting peace between France and Germany, but also of making the waging of another war impossible in material terms. Further steps towards this goal were taken with the formation of Euratom and the European Economic Community in 1958, as well as the merger of the various organisations to form a single European Community in 1967. With some difficulty a Common Agricultural Policy was formulated and came into full operation in 1968.

Churchill's main idea in 1946 was to ‘recreate the European Family’, and ‘provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom’. Although he made the ‘astonishing proposal’ that a partnership between France and Germany was necessary for the recreation of the ‘European family’ and the establishment of a ‘United States of Europe’, he later makes it clear that this initiative would be led by France and Germany and should attract the support – rather than the active participation – of Britain, America and Soviet Russia. The first step, he said, was to establish a Council of Europe although, it soon turned out (predominantly under the pressure of British influence), this was to develop very much as a deliberative intergovernmental organisation rather than one with independent powers of its own.

In 1945 Jean Monnet (one of the 'founding fathers' of the European Union), too, argued for a federation of the ‘States of Europe’ or a ‘European entity’ to secure prosperity and social progress. He was fearful of the restoration of national sovereignty, which was likely to encourage the return of ‘prestige policies and economic protectionism’ with further consequences in terms of armed conflict. Particularly interesting was his recognition that the British continued to occupy a special position and, like the Americans and Russians, had a ‘world of their own into which they could temporarily withdraw … England had to be brought in’ somehow, however, and the revival of nationalism was to be prevented by a joint initiative. But precisely how this was to be achieved remained unclear. Monnet's Memorandum of 1950 continued to emphasise the salience of Franco-German relations – and by this stage it was assumed that the future of Britain lay in it being drawn closer and closer to the USA. It was in this context that Monnet emphasised that Europe did not exist but had to be created – and that France was the only country with the motivation and capacity to bring it into being. In this respect, it is the similarity of the views of Churchill and Monnet, particularly with their appraisal of the roles of Britain and France, that is as interesting as any differences. But the fate of the British turned out to be less divergent from ‘Europe’ than either thought, and you should consider why this turned out to be the case.

Europe as a project (continued)

The UK finally joined the EU in 1973 (with Denmark and Ireland), and was followed by Greece in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986. The original plan to weaken the capacity for the expression of Franco-German enmity had slowly taken on the form of a more credible European community, particularly with the accession of the UK (as the third major European power), the inclusion of Greece with its overtones of ancient democracy, and Spain as a major actor during centuries of European history and global expansion (Waever, 1995, p.171). Despite the unprecedented level of integration achieved in the half-century after 1945 by the various European communities and – eventually – the Union which was launched in 1993, the precise nature of the post-war European project contained major elements of diversity and the forces driving it were subject to quite different interpretations. After three decades of development in various forms, several enlargements from the original small group that had created it, and major changes in the international environment in which it operated, considerable differences emerged between the European partners about where the community was going.

In her famous 'Bruges speech' of 1988 (Thatcher, 1988) Margaret Thatcher describes Britain's place in Europe in the broadest of terms, in a discussion that extends back to Roman times but takes little account of the specifics of the post-1945 situation. The British ‘special contribution’ refers to the commitment to preventing Europe ‘from falling under the dominance of a single power’, and implicitly refers to the balance of power whose effectiveness turned out to be exhausted by the twentieth century. She refers both to a broader European identity that extends beyond the European Community (thus including countries on the other side of the old Iron Curtain) and to the reliance of the USA on ‘European values’. Her argument stresses the special role played by sovereignty and nationhood, and appeals to principles of European diversity. She stresses that Europe should be united in ways that preserve different national traditions. Interestingly, Jacques Delors also concludes his speech with an appeal to European diversity (Delors, 1988), but argues that it must be effectively managed if it is to survive. His argument highlights: the need to pool resources in order to preserve both the autonomy of Europe and its identity; the importance of cooperation and trade union solidarity across Europe (particularly in order to combat unemployment); and the role of the ‘social dimension’ as a vital element to complement the free play of economic forces. It is the latter factor that provides a main differentiating point from the views of Thatcher – both on Europe and more generally. In fact both stress the need for cooperation, although for Thatcher this should primarily be among independent sovereign states and for Delors between the national trade union movements and civil associations more generally.

Major differences in views about the future of Europe were thus apparent in the 1980s. Underlying the numerous debates about strategy and tactics was also a profound uncertainty about what the EU was actually for now. Originally designed to defuse the established enmity between Germany and France, and thus prevent further internecine European warfare, the very success of the European project in these terms made peace less satisfying as a value in itself. Anyone who had participated in the Second World War as a young adult was at least seventy by the end of the century and war, if not organised violence more generally, was a personal experience only for a very small minority of contemporary Europeans. There were clearly different conceptions of Europe and the association it now formed among the different countries of Europe, and differing levels of commitment to the European idea between governing circles and elites on the one hand, and at least some national publics on the other. Europe as a project had been increasingly sold as an economic enterprise, particularly to some of the countries traditionally less inclined to European cooperation, such as Britain. This avoided the more contentious political issues that underlay the original initiative and fitted in with the outlook of secular materialism that prevailed in most modern societies. It clearly appealed to the mass of relatively affluent Europeans, but hardly fostered the growth of a distinctive European identity. Europe increasingly took on the appearance of a continental shopping mall, with a notional capital appropriately situated just outside Calais in a Cité d'Europe.

Differences thus became evident in the mid 1980s about how far strengthening the EU was an end in itself; that is, how far there was a European project per se, further to the particular benefits to be gained from specific aspects of international cooperation (Wallace and Ridley, 1985, p.7). By the end of the 1990s the nature of the post-1945 project was problematised precisely by the length of time it had existed, the degree of evolution it had undergone and the very level of achievement actually attained. A survey of Europe in 1999 thus identified five fundamental shifts in the structure of contemporary Europe and its international relations that prompted major questions both about its future and contemporary status (Economist, 23 October 1999):

• Having recovered both from material devastation and war-guilt, Germany has also, since the breaching of the Berlin Wall, become both a ‘normal’ European country and its leading power; this has brought about a major change in the position of France, whose position within Europe up to then had been pre-eminent.

• Leading EU countries have developed a strong sense that they should possess a capacity for collective military action and an identity separate from that of NATO, whose leadership dominated in the Kosovo conflict of 1999.

• The introduction of a common currency at the beginning of 1999 provided further impetus for the formation of a single European economy, and raised further questions about the development of an identifiable single ‘European interest’.

• The European Commission has been weakened not just by the mass resignation of 1999, but also by a more general process of decline since the end of Jacques Delors's presidency of the European Commission in 1994, a change that has brought the influence of national govern ments back into greater prominence. The European Parliament has also become a vigorous political body, as President-elect Barroso found to his cost when he struggled to get it to endorse his initial group of commissioners in October 2004.

• The removal of the Iron Curtain in 1989 opened up the prospect of extensive enlargement, a prospect that promised to turn the EU into a Union that would decisively embrace the greater part of Europe. A major step in this direction was taken with the accession of ten new members in 2004. Apart from Cyprus and Malta, they included the formerly communist countries of the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

In the late 1990s, as in the views expressed by Delors and Thatcher in the 1980s, there were major contrasts in the views expressed by leading actors and the governments of the major countries involved. Striking differences could be detected between the lines of analysis followed in defining the nature and consequences of this project, and diverse modes of conceptualising and theorising the issues involved were identified (Nugent, 1999, Chapter 18). Some judgements placed in question the existence of any European project as a political force in its own right. There were strong arguments that in so far as a distinct European project did exist, it was one governed as much by pragmatism and state interest as by the spirit of a more autonomous vision (Moravcsik, 1998; McCarthy, 1999). Conflicts also continued to break out over the desirability of some federal structure for Europe and the future of the nation state.

In any judgement on the fate of Europe overall, though, and in terms of the pursuit of a positive European identity, it could at least be concluded that the integration project pursued in the second half of the twentieth century was a dramatic improvement on the bitter conflicts and losses of the first.

4 Debates on the development of Europe

Not unlike that of earlier conceptions, the new Europe of the early twenty-first century involves a somewhat loose idea of Europe as a geographical entity and a project of European development based on the pursuit and expansion of core values. Early Christian Europe had developed a self-awareness in terms of fundamental religious beliefs and pursued them within and beyond its original territorial base in a series of crusades and related initiatives; the more secular Europe that followed fostered a culture of multi-faceted superiority that transformed the face of the entire globe. The closely linked, though somewhat diverse, projects of post-1945 Europe have all involved the attempt to confront and transcend the tendencies of militarist nationalism that emerged in the nineteenth century. They differ from earlier visions in that they are primarily concerned with the nature of Europe itself and the inner dynamics of its future development. Modern ideas of Europe have increasingly been concerned with the development of conceptions of democratic coordination that will be both effective and sufficiently broad to encompass the wide range of national traditions and political preferences that are expressed in the countries involved.

The considerable success that the EU achieved by the end of the 1980s in securing these objectives within its restricted western territory has now been followed by the challenge of defining and organising a broader, new Europe in which the post-communist countries of the east are again active members. The new global context and general dominance of liberal-democratic values represent a further dimension of this new European identity. The geographical dimensions of this new Europe have been in one way self-evident, in that the end of the Cold War division of the continent placed an older idea of Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals back on the agenda. But at the same time an even broader conception that took account of the realities of a more integrated world-system gained currency, in which a European system was understood to extend from Vancouver to Vladivostok (Story, 1993, p.509). It reflected the understanding that the civilization of North America stemmed directly from that of an older Europe, and had been carried forward in large part by people who had come directly from the old continent. Russia, too, reaffirmed a basic European identity as it embraced Western values and turned away from the communist mind-set that had placed it in direct opposition to the capitalist West.

Europe in this sense, defined once more with prime reference to its liberal and democratic values, could again be understood to embrace a large part of the entire globe – its two branches apparently meeting somewhere in the north Pacific. This, however, meant little more than the globalisation of European values and the spread of the respect for core human rights that had evolved over the centuries – a process by no means without severe setbacks – in the cultural centres of western civilization. A recognition of such values was already embodied in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights issued soon after the UN's foundation. The end of communist rule in Europe and throughout the rest of the Soviet Union certainly extended the possibilities for political freedom in some European countries, but it hardly spelled the emergence of any new European civilization in a broader sense. As the problems of coordinating and developing the more traditional ‘regional’ Europe – now politically liberated but only partly democratised – have come to the surface and become more pressing, less is heard of this global Europe.

Continuing uncertainty within Europe as to what it stands for and who the institutions of the EU actually represent create major contemporary difficulties of definition. One of the fundamental problems in defining the contemporary new Europe has remained the lack of any shared identity, the absence of an agreed understanding of what Europe represents and what it exists for – in short, the weakness of Europe as a system of values. By the end of the 1990s few German, British or French people saw themselves as being primarily European, more (16 per cent) being found in France than in the other two countries. Substantial numbers in most countries saw themselves being European after a primary identification as citizens of the appropriate nation state. But a majority of Britons and Danes still did not acknowledge any European identity at all after twenty-six years’ formal membership of a European community. Satisfaction with EU membership, or its expectations, actually declined between 1973 and 1998 in the region as a whole, and fewer than half of all Britons and Italians believed that European integration had achieved much at all in the post-war period (Moïsi, 1999, pp.49–52).

Support for European integration and what were generally termed western values was, on the other hand, strong throughout former communist Europe and particularly in the more developed countries of east-central Europe that envisaged a rapid and relatively smooth passage into the EU. But commitment to such values began to decline in the post-communist area during the mid-1990s, too, as accession negotiations began to place major demands on the newly liberated countries. On the eastern margins of geographical Europe, Russia has traditionally been divided in its attitude to Europe between Westernisers and Slavophiles (Neumann, 1996, p.28). After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 this was reflected in an equivalent distinction between Atlanticist and Eurasianist perspectives. Opinion polls conducted in 1993 showed majority support in all groups making up the Russian elite for the Eurasianist perspective. As some analysts emphasised, this by no means represented a rejection of western perspectives (these were more firmly rooted in a ‘neo-anti-imperialist perspective’), but rather an eclectic outlook characteristic of an emerging centrist position (Zagorski, 1994, p.71). Nevertheless, they hardly indicated the flowering of any full European consciousness or the acceptance of overtly European values.

Views ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ tend to suggest, then, a widespread hesitancy and highly qualified commitment within the new Europe to anything that could be identified as a commonly agreed vision of Europe. This by no means erected any major obstacle to the pursuit of the project that has underpinned the new Europe of the 1990s:

• a ‘deepening’ of the original west European Union in the pursuit of European Monetary Union; and

• its ‘widening’ to include, in 2004, eight post-communist countries in east-central Europe, as well as Cyprus and Malta.

But the project remains subject to qualifications on both counts. Internal resistance to the extension of monetary union persists in the case of the UK and a few other countries, and there is no conviction that the structures of the EU can be extended to include the whole of geographical Europe in the foreseeable future.

The uncertainties that accompany the continuing pursuit of the project cannot be regarded with much surprise. The dismantling of the Iron Curtain and the end of a division of Europe enforced by global superpower rivalry could hardly have led in itself to the sudden emergence of any conceivable single or unified Europe in a meaningful sense. Indeed it has led to a delineation or resurgence of several traditional and diverse Europes in place of the increasingly unified western Europe that the Cold War division of the continent had allowed, to present itself as the modern variant of Europe tout court. In this sense the new Europe of the 1990s emerged less as one that is just one stage on from the modern, post-1945 capitalist democratic Europe of the west than a region that is more differentiated and reminiscent of earlier conceptions of coexisting and multiple Europes (Malia, 1997, p.10). It also harks back to the three historical regions of Europe – the west, east and an ‘intermediate’ eastern-central (see Szucs, 1988).

Debates on the development of Europe (continued)

The fundamental challenges identified by Moïsi (1999) for the Europe of the 1990's are those of sovereignty, space and identity. Traditional notions of sovereignty have remained ambiguous in the wake of the Kosovo war, in that the sense of European ‘space’ is still problematic with the traditional questions about Russia and Turkey now raised in contemporary terms, while the idea of a common European identity seems to make some progress despite undoubted obstacles. Whether the ‘dream of Europe’ presents a convincing vision is, and will remain, debatable. To my mind, it seems to involve some questionable assumptions. Clearly some important changes have occurred, but it becomes increasingly difficult to share the view that a ‘spectacular change in attitudes and policy toward Europe has taken place in Tony Blair's Great Britain’ in the way suggested by Moïsi. Evidence presented in the article itself in terms of opinion surveys shows that the development of a European identity in Britain has been very limited. Furthermore, from the evidence gathered in 2004, the changes in British perceptions of the EU appear to be quite minimal. If 37 per cent of Britons thought that EU membership was a good thing in 1998, the percentage had risen by just one point to 38 in 2004 (European Commission, 2004). The British also perceived few benefits from EU membership, were mistrustful of its core institutions and showed scant enthusiasm for its proposed Constitution, coming just about last on all these scales.

Judt (1996) directs attention to the particular importance of the consequences of the end of communist rule in eastern Europe and the critical evolution in Franco-German relations that has taken place. He sees 1989 as bringing to an end a unique period in France's diplomatic history and facing Germany with rather too many problems in terms of European enlargement. Problems of economic growth, unemployment, immigration and a weakening welfare state all raise – in Judt's view – major problems for concerted European development and the growth of any broader European identity. ‘Europe’, he suggests, remains too large and too nebulous a concept to forge much of a convincing human community, and the traditional prominence of the European nation state in fact shows little sign of diminishing. It is time, in this view, to say goodbye to the strong idea of ‘Europe’ as a unified entity, which was able to take root and develop between 1945 and 1989 due to the conjunction of a particular set of conditions.

But here, too, recent developments might suggest a rather different perspective. If Moïsi may be over-optimistic about British sentiments for Europe, Judt may see too many problems inherent in the changing Franco-German relationship. With the launch of the euro in 1999, it can certainly be argued that relations between France and Germany have strengthened and a growing consensus seems to be emerging between their leaders about the future of the developing European framework. The common position taken by the two countries on the Iraq war has also strengthened their alliance within the EU. Public sentiments have also undergone a radical shift, and in a rather different direction from that seen in the UK. In 1992, just after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, only 45 per cent of a French sample declared themselves in favour of rapid European integration; in 2000 as many as 70 per cent opted for an equivalent policy, and 59 per cent were enthusiastic or favourable to further EU development compared with 41 per cent opposed to it or sceptical (Liberation, 26 June 2000). Support for a common defence and security policy has been quite high, at 78 per cent, within the EU as a whole, but it is particularly high in Germany (87 per cent in 2004) and 81 per cent in France, in contrast to 60 per cent in the UK (European Commission, 2004).

Precisely how Europe is best defined at the beginning of the twentieth-first century, and what prospects it has for further development, must therefore remain the subject of considerable debate. Traditional uncertainties about the geographical extent of Europe, the core values it may be understood to embody, and doubts about the commitment of many of the individuals, groups and nations that live there to any shared identity, remain. As the various European Communities founded in the 1950s developed and expanded to form a broader European Union in the 1990s, they have increasingly echoed these traditional uncertainties about what and where Europe is. This course will provide you with extensive material to explore these issues further and help you develop and clarify your own opinions.

We can nevertheless at least begin with certain observations about post-1945 Europe and the major developments that have occurred. Clear residues of the new project for Europe evolved in the middle of the twentieth century have remained, and certain achievements have held firm. There is still little dissension from the original post-1945 project for a Europe no longer led into war by Franco-German enmity or more general national rivalries.

Activity 6

It is now time to study ‘Europe in the Twenty-First Century’. The contributors are:

• Robert Bideleux, Reader in Politics, University of Swansea

• Mark Pittaway, Lecturer in European Studies, Open University

• Hugh Starkey, Staff Tutor for Languages, Open University.

The programme is designed to explore three different areas:

• questions of European identity;

• ideas of what Europe currently is and what it might become; and

• the relationship of different ideas of Europe to the evolving EU.

Spend some time considering (or reconsidering) these issues yourself, and jot down some answers to the questions they raise. Then listen to the discussion by clicking on the links below.

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Paul Lewis

Hello. My name is Paul Lewis and I’m a member of the Governing Europe course team and author of Unit 1. This tape is designed to discuss further some of the issues involved in that unit and further your understanding of a number of key questions such as questions of European identity, issues of what Europe is and what it might become at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the relationship of the different ideas of Europe to the evolving European Union. I have with me to discuss these issues Robert Bideleux Reader in Politics at the University of Swansea, Hugh Starkey who is Staff Tutor for Languages at The Open University and Mark Pittaway who is Lecturer in European Studies at the OU.

I’d like to start by asking Robert to comment or give an answer to the question initially posed by Hugh Seton-Watson, in the readings for the book we’ve just read What is Europe? Where is Europe? How do we answer that question fifteen years on from when Hugh-Seton Watson first raised it? Robert?

Robert Bideleux

In contrast to Seton-Watson who emphasises the cultural unity of Europe, I would emphasise that Europe is an idea, a concept, a state-system with an associated legal order. It lacks any kind of clear-cut criterion by which you can identify Europe as a single cultural area. Also I would stress that Europe is not a clear-cut geographical area. It lacks precise boundaries, it has always been debatable where Europe ends and where Asia starts. I would put greater emphasis on the European state system, the market associated with it, the legal order, a sort of thin set of values which is the nearest you get to a kind of cultural criterion of Europe, which Europeans share. The values placed on human rights, on democracy, on the rule of law and so on rather than cultural conceptions to do with language or ethnicity or religion. These divide Europeans rather more than they unite them. The hallmark of great civilisations is pluralism and this also carries the implication that conceptions of civilisation such as that put forward by Samuel Huntington in his Clash of Civilizations, are wholly misleading in the sense that he tries to define civilisations by a single cultural criterion rather than a plurality of cultural values and content. I’m much more inclined towards William MacNeal’s view of civilisation as areas of intense interaction, communication and trade, which is a fairly open-ended definition. Membership is defined by participation, by ability to participate. If you can subscribe to the rules of the club and the values of the club, you’re in! If you are unable to subscribe to those rules and values or you don’t want to, then you exclude yourself. I see no difficulty in admitting Morocco or Turkey at some future date Russia despite its size to an expanded European Union provided they are prepared to uphold what it stands for.

Paul Lewis

So very much a dynamic, diverse Europe emphasised there. Mark?

Mark Pittaway

We have enormous difficulty in defining Europe as a geographical area; of that I think there is no doubt. It is very difficult to define its eastern border running from the eastern Mediterranean I think, right up to the Arctic is a very fluid one.

That having been said I would defend a notion that there are certain common European experiences. There are certain common European historical experiences. Patterns of society, and cultural forms. Once again they are very problematic. A lot has to do with the way settlement patterns have developed. A lot has to do with the way dynastic states have developed and then, after 1918, the way nation states have developed in the eastern part of Europe right the way through from contemporary Eastern Europe to the countries of the former Soviet Union and to Turkey. I think it is very very important to make the point that many of us tend to automatically equate Europe with the countries of the European Community. I come to this as somebody who has spent a long time in Hungary, which has been affected by a very very different historical experience. I found in that country during my travels across the eastern part of the continent an enormous sense of cultural unity. Settlement patterns were very very similar. People’s expectations about the notion of the rule of law and the role of the state were essentially quite similar and therefore I think I’d be more inclined than Robert to think in terms of the cultural unity of Europe.

Robert Bideleux

Yes. As a linguist I have to draw attention to the fact that Europe, if it is anything, is a multilingual community and this makes a considerable contrast with say the United States of America, which is essentially a monolingual community and therefore has certain facility that is given it through its unity of language. A language is an expression of the culture and by definition Europe is multicultural, always has been through its multilingualism and should not therefore have particular difficulty in integrating new cultural forms that come in because they are merely other cultural forms that add to the multicultural nature of Europe. So I would see Europe in terms of a project and essentially something that is becoming and the basis of this Europe is a common set of principles and values which enable such a diverse set of communities to live together. And these fundamental principles and values have been written down, they are encoded in the post-war settlement particularly, we have got the European Convention on Human Rights to which virtually all of the member states of the Council of Europe, which is the forty-three countries currently subscribing to the Europe Convention on Human Rights so it is a very broad definition of Europe and the European Convention of Human Rights insists on those. I quote ‘those fundamental freedoms which are the foundation of justice and peace in the world’. So Europe is a project that is based on a desire for peace, a desire for justice, based on fundamental freedoms and the European Convention also says how this is going to come about. It is based on an effective political democracy on the one hand and on the other by a common understanding and observance of the human rights upon which these things depend. And so Europe is a concept. It depends on its members understanding democracy and understanding human rights which is why some member states within the broader Europe are having more difficulty in coming to terms with being Europe than perhaps more established democracies. But it is amazing to see what’s happened for instance to Spain and Portugal which until the mid ‘70s were in fact fascist, far-right dictatorships, how they have democratised and become very easily assimilated within this culture of human rights.

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Paul Lewis

One aspect I would quite like to bring is that I quite agree that the emphasis on diversity and the principle of acceptance of diversity is terribly important but one might go a bit further and say actually Europe is so diverse it is actually very difficult to get unity. Or it has been very difficult, and one way the Europeans and Europe has done this is to identify an ‘other’ that Europeans are not historically – that was the Saracens or the Turks, the Muslims in a general sense, and during the years of the Cold War it was Russia.

Even now for many people Europe is distinct from America and essentially the Europeans often need an out-group, another whom they identify themselves in opposition to. I mean the British are rather good at this, I mean the British and the English are clearly not French! They are not German and they are not Turkish and a few of the more enthusiastic football supporters will go along with that! So I mean this is one way of getting European unity. Otherwise this diversity might be formally accepted but instinctively and in terms of personal or national identity is actually difficult to comes to grips with. I mean there’s all these more passionate emotions you know raging in people’s breasts and it is difficult to summon up that kind of identity in terms of rather abstract principles I think. How do you cope with the ‘other’ and in particular someone like Russia and Turkey who were the historic European ‘others’. You know, how do we get over this problem?

Robert Bideleux

In part through recognition that these ‘others’ have actually contributed in massive ways to European civilisation. In terms of the Renaissance for example the Moorish kingdoms in Spain and other parts of the Mediterranean region were crucial and the rediscovery of Aristotle and Greek science, the transmission of mathematics were in fact the development of mathematics and astronomy and so on and played a crucial role in the Renaissance. To those who wish to emphasis Russia’s otherness, I would emphasise against that it’s hard to think of European culture without thinking of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky and Shostakovich and Russian ballet is the greatest sort of ballet by anyone’s judgement in Europe. So Russia has made huge contributions to European culture and Turkey has contributed an awful lot too – not least gastronomically. So that even these ‘others’ that Europeans at times have defined themselves against are in many ways more part of us than them but in ways that Europeans much of the time don’t wish to recognise.

Mark Pittaway

I think you have raised two very interesting separate issues when you discuss ‘otherness’. One is about countries or societies which are only ambiguously part of Europe. We have no problem for example identifying Belgium as part of Europe but we have problems identifying Russia, some have problems identifying Romania others have problems identifying Turkey. I think the way to cope with this is to actually not attempt to define an eastern border and to recognise that contemporary Europe has been created out of an enormous flow of different peoples throughout its history. If we go back 2000 years one can see for example that the Slavs and the Magyars who populate most of eastern Europe came from Asia.

We can see much more recent migration and conversion. We had Islam in southern Spain several hundred years ago. We had an Ottoman presence in south-eastern Europe until the very beginning of this century. And we also in the post-war period have a lot of inward migration into western European states like Belgium, like the Netherlands, like France and Great Britain form colonial powers and therefore I think we ought not to exclude those elements of Europeaness that Europe has existed in a dialogue with the broader world. The second issue I’d like to address is the one about internal ‘others’. One of the very distinctive things

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The second issue I’d like to address is the one about internal ‘others’. One of the very distinctive things about Europe over the past 200 years is the way nation states across the continent have been formed or there have been attempts to form nation states and that has essentially meant that within one territory a dominant ethnic group, defined by language and culture, has attempted to create a homogenous national state. We have seen this in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century and this is very much behind a lot of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia which we see today and it is something that we should not neglect that this process of nation building has very distinctive European dimensions and, as a product of European culture.

Robert Bideleux

I would also emphasise that all great civilisations have been multicultural rather than based on a single cultural identifier or marker and the plurality of their culture, their diversity, the fact that they contain substantial minority groups who don’t subscribe to the dominant or majority culture as always being the strength of great civilisations. Civilisations which lack this diversity tend to stagnate. Likewise I would emphasise against those who see Christianity or Christendom as the core of Europe that the Muslims of Albania or Bosnia-Herzegovina or other parts of the Balkans, even Turkey, are as entitled to see themselves as Europeans as are the British or the French or the Germans. Being Muslim doesn’t make you a non-European, and that doesn’t just apply to Bosnians or Albanians, Kosovans; it also applies to the large numbers of Muslim immigrants from outside Europe, from Asia or from parts of Africa.

Hugh Starkey

I would want to remind ourselves of the colonial past of much of Europe and particularly these islands, and the fact that clearly the colonies were perceived as ‘other’, and the European then defined as superior. We then have the German and Nazi Hitler project [sic] of trying to unite Europe under an ideology that was expressly racist and had a hierarchy of human beings. The post-war settlement is then all about creating a consensual and democratic Europe, in which case the ‘other’ becomes the enemy of democracy, and the main enemy of democracy is racism, because racism is the ideology that does not accept that all human beings are equal which is the fundamental underlying tenet of human rights. So I would see this new project of interior ‘other’ which is the forces that actually oppose a democratic project for Europe and particularly racism.

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Paul Lewis

I’d like to ask you now, you’ve mentioned the term the ‘European Projects’ and effectively use that term to refer to the project of European unity unification launched by Jean Monnet in the 1940s. Where are we in terms of this project at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Robert.

Robert Bideleux

Well we’ve succeeded really against all the odds and all expectations in a way in creating a supranational European legal order, which is the most promising achievement, a much undervalued achievement, very much taken for granted. There is too much focus on what’s happened in the economic field which I don’t think is anything to shout about, we’re no more integrated economically now than we were in the late nineteenth century. But what is truly remarkable has been the creation of a supranational legal order putting relations between states, as well as within states, within a single overarching framework of law. And I think this achievement has deep roots historically as well as in recent sort of post-1945 experience, in that it has been the main way in which Europe, or Europeans, have tried to cope with their diversity, in contrast to other continents which have usually had a dominant power, usually an imperial power, and other states in so far as they exist as states or tributaries or subsidiary it’s still this dominant power. Europe has always been made up of plurality of small-and medium-sized states there’ve, been a few attempts to establish a single imperial hegemony but these have never succeeded, so that Europe had to try and devise ways of coming to terms with living with and making possible a peaceful co-existence of very diverse states as well as peoples. And Europeans have set about doing this by creating a state system and a legal order going back to the beginnings of the whole concept of international law, and […] and the accomplishments of the European Communities and latterly the European Union should be seen as a continuation of that, taking it a stage further to actually put all relations between European states within a single overarching legal framework, which doesn’t just apply to the current members of the European Union but now applied to virtually all the states of Europe in that nearly all the states of Europe are either aspiring to membership or have some kind of treaty of association with the European Union and these treaties tie or commit these aspirant states to adopting most of the acquis communautaire, the accumulated body of European Union law in their own domestic legal frameworks in order to prepare them for eventual membership. So that this has now become a unifying force and a very powerful one.

Mark Pittaway

I worry very much about the status of the current European Union project and I think as Hugh said earlier, there are different European projects. The current European Union project is in principle an attractive attempt to create a democratic supranational Europe, and that I think offers Europeans a much more attractive future than the alternative projects of fascism and certainly communism which have ravaged the continent during the past sixty or so years. What concerns me about the current European Union project is that to succeed it has to create a democracy which protects the rights of the citizen and, in other words it has to be explicitly supranational, and it has to command the loyalty of a range of diverse peoples. And I think we have seen over the past ten years or so that Europe has increasingly divided individual nations against themselves, and I’m not talking about Britain solely though Britain is a very interesting case of this but of France and of Denmark, and so forth.

I think the fundamental problem with the European project is the strategy with which it has been realised that you have economic integration first through creating a common market. You then move to superimpose on to that common market social regulation, and eventually you build political regulation. Europe I think has been seen overly technocratic, and it’s understood overtly in terms of economic cost and benefit and the reasons why sections of opinion in member countries support continuing membership is precisely for that reason. And I think if political union is to command greater loyalty, it is incumbent upon political leaders who support the European project to go out and sell the idea of a country called Europe that can command the loyalty of those people within the European Union, if that project is to succeed.

Hugh Starkey

Yes well I think actually the social project of Europe is extremely important and that’s, I think the price of the economic union of Europe is that because we’re a democracy we’ve got referendums as to whether nation states, member states, go forward to the next stage of integration and so on. So you have to be able to sell the project to the people, and the way you do it is to say okay, economic union may involve huge changes associated with globalisation and flexibility of workforce and so on, and so we will protect you as citizens we will protect your cultural identities. We say we will believe in a multicultural Europe, and we will protect your employment status or we will provide you with help for finding a new job if you lose your job as a result of the economic changes. And so, the price of the economic union is the social project and that’s why that’s so important, I think you have to be able to persuade people that the social project is what potentially will persuade people that the economic policy and the political policy is in fact worthwhile

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Paul Lewis

I can go part of the way along with that argument but doesn’t the social project then come up against problems of economic cost.

Hugh Starkey

Well yes, but given that it is a democratic system the leaders have to take the people along with them, and maybe they would want to go faster, but there has to be an education programme and there has to be the social and cultural programmes that will convince people that they want to voluntarily go along with this project and the social cost is part of the price that has to be paid for the economic project.

Mark Pittaway

Well I think you have to have a little more than persuading people that this is in their interests. I think giving loyalty to a state or to a political system is very much about a gut feeling of loyalty. It is about sharing a feeling of a of a kind of common culture a common set of principles and having a sense of patriotism about this thing called ‘Europe’. And at the moment I think that the subdivisions particularly the national subdivisions command so much more loyalty that it is going to take a prolonged programme of education to actually combat that.

Hugh Starkey

To put it very simply that democracy needs a demos you know, where is the people that support this democracy. Amongst the most popular cultural activities there are of course sporting activities, and we notice in things like European football championships and so on, quite I would say radical changes. I mean, in this country with none of our teams going forward to the final stages people were nonetheless watching the competition and being interested in the competition, in their millions, because they felt part of that competition. It’s the same with go for athletics championships and so on, that this is part of the cultural project for building Europe’s sport.

Paul Lewis

Robert.

Robert Bideleux

I would beg to differ from both Mark and Hugh in a sense that by downplaying the democratic character of the European project and the entities being created, what has been created is much more like the nineteenth century Liberal conception of a constitutional state, that of the rule of law, limited government. Nineteenth century liberal elites were actually rather fearful of democracy and of the masses, and looked on with apprehension as the franchise was extended to more and more people in the late-nineteenth early-twentieth centuries, and some Liberals took the view that all the horrors of fascism, extreme nationalism, communism, were in large measure related to the development of mass politics and mass democracy. And in a sense, whether consciously or not, what the legal order that the European Union has created, is to take us back to the mid nineteenth century, when politics was to be conducted within the legal framework which is very constraining, which is not particularly democratic, involves elements of indirect representation and consent, but essentially it is based on negotiation of frameworks within which we can all co-exist peacefully and profitably. But it’s negotiation by elites not based on mobilisation of strong loyalty or attachment to the new entity that’s being created, and indeed I would go further. As a Liberal I’m actually rather fearful of the attempt to build a Europe analogous to the nation state, to try and create a European country or a European nation, because that would run the risk of reproducing all the horrific consequences of the European nation state system and European national identities which have contributed in such a major way to the two world wars that nearly destroyed Europe in the twentieth century.

Paul Lewis

Mark.

Mark Pittaway

I just feel that if that is what is created I wonder whether we would end up creating a kind of twenty-first century version of the Hapsburg monarchy, something which in its time is a very well-functioning concept between different nation’s regions, and ethnic groups, characterised by tension. But when inevitable pressures arise for people to take control over their own government and form a demos which can actually act as a constraining factor, a constraint on the state, I just wonder whether the whole thing will be blown apart by the winds of change and social forces beneath.

Robert Bideleux

I would simply point to the longevity of the Hapsburg monarchy and its ability to adapt to changing conditions. It’s lasted much longer than any democratic state has lasted, even the United States, which has a very long continuous history as a democracy.

Paul Lewis

So perhaps Winston Churchill was right when he wanted to restore the Austrian – Hungarian empire at the end of the Second World War, as an alternative project for Europe. Well I’d like to thank you very much for that stimulating talk and I think what it’s left us is a quite distinct sort of views to ponder. Like Rabbi Lionel Blue perhaps I’d like to leave you with a thought for the day really, the particular thought that struck me the quotation from Arthur Schnitzler, a well known Central European writer, who said that the things that are often talked about most actually in effect don’t exist at all, so you know one might then ponder well why do we talk about Europe so much if perhaps it doesn’t exist anyway. I’d like to thank you very much Robert Bideleux, Mark Pittaway and Hugh Starkey, thank you.

End transcript: Audio 5

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I introduce the discussion by asking contributors to give their own answer to the question posed by Seton-Watson and discussed at the beginning of this course: What is Europe? Where is Europe? You may like to use this opportunity to confirm and consolidate your understanding of the material you have studied in this course so far by constructing your own answer to these fundamental questions. Now compare your answer with those of the contributors on the audio files. How do their answers differ? How do they compare with your views on the nature of twenty-first century Europe? The contributors go on to raise questions about the conditions for European unity and current prospects for the ‘European project’ as originally conceived in the years immediately following 1945.

At least part of any project for Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century will be to manage the conflicts and diversity of modern Europe in ways that are equally successful in avoiding general warfare. Although significantly differentiated, much of the new Europe is also involved in a broad project of integration for which the main points of reference are to be found in the process of EU enlargement, as well as the changing framework and processes of evolution within the EU itself. A whole range of perspectives and opinions have been brought to bear on these processes. This leaves the new Europe of the early twenty-first century defined as much by what differentiates it, as by any principle of integration. But it does at least suggest some perspective of coordinated development that maintains the principle of peaceful evolution on which the growing community of Europe has been based since 1945.

5 Themes in European development

5.1 Unity and diversity

The development of a new Europe in the early twenty-first century relates to four main themes that were introduced at the beginning of this course: unity and diversity, conflict and consensus, tradition and transformation, and inclusion and exclusion.

The striking differences that emerged within Europe (cultural, linguistic, political) have long been associated with the existence of a common framework within which the different parts of Europe were able to develop productively and sustain a broad European civilization that, in the nineteenth century, took on global proportions. One summary thus refers to ‘political diversity within a common cultural inheritance, with the diversity outranking the commonality’ (Calvocoressi, 1991, p.1). It was a diversity that was increasingly associated with currents of nationalism and expressed in the development of a system of nation states. From the seventeenth century this was regulated by principles first articulated in the Peace of Westphalia which contributed to the maintenance of a rough balance of power that held in Europe until the cataclysm of the Second World War. The Westphalian state tradition was, of course, not unbroken, nor were its principles unchallenged, but its essentials persisted for much of the life of what we regard as modern Europe. It provided a unified framework capable for most of the time of holding the divisive tendencies of a rapidly modernising and increasingly dynamic Europe in check.

The spread of a more intense nationalism that gained the capacity to mobilise whole societies – or, more accurately, the emerging industrial states and their rapidly growing citizenry – produced conflicts that this order could no longer contain, although it took the two world wars to destroy it completely. Within the framework of Cold War Europe a new form of European unity began to develop in the form of the successive communities and markets, although it remained partial and restricted to the developed capitalist west. European diversity has also increased, both with the emergence of an independent eastern Europe and the expansion of the EU, which has been accompanied by growing disagreement within the latter over its principles of operation and the form its future development should take. The new Europe that has emerged has, therefore, considerably greater possibilities for unity than for most of the period since 1945, but also increasingly powerful pressures for diversity that raise serious questions about how such ideas of unity might be realised.

5.2 Conflict and consensus

The diverse forms of conflict that have marked long periods of European history hardly require further emphasis here. The first half of the twentieth century, in particular, was clearly dominated by what many have described as a European civil war. Since 1945, in marked contrast, the western part of the continent has been increasingly dominated by a growing number of freely associated countries in the name of a newly constituted ‘Europe’. It has been remarkably successful in developing mechanisms of consensus both within the majority of the nations engaged in processes of post-war reconstruction and development, and throughout the west European community as a whole. In this process it has steadily enlarged its sphere of influence and depth of commitment to a common project of integration.

Much of the internal consensus that prevailed was sustained by state-dominated processes of post-war economic recovery and a common commitment to the growth of various forms of welfare state. The continued existence across the Iron Curtain of the ‘other’, communist Europe, held in common subjugation by the Soviet Union, was also a major factor in sustaining western Europe as a political and security-conscious community, factors that had always played some part in its development despite its formal and undoubtedly prior identity as an economic association. The east/west divide thus produced a ‘permissive consensus’ that helped support (west) European cooperation (Wallace, 1994, p.21).

The military commitments this entailed further strengthened the role of the state in west European economic development and had clear implications for patterns of state expenditure. All this began to change, first with the strengthening commitment to liberal, free-market practices from the end of the 1970s and then with the end of the Cold War at the close of the following decade. While readily recognised as a stimulant to major change in central and eastern Europe, the removal of the Iron Curtain was a catalyst for greater turbulence in western Europe as well (Wallace, 1994, pp.19–20). The strengthening of neo-liberal currents in the global economy during the 1990s and early years of the new century placed the activity of the welfare state under greater pressure and prompted dissension within the EU (not least in discussions of the proposed Constitution) about the kind of guarantees that collective social and economic rights should receive.

While the elements of consensus in post-1945 western Europe should not be overestimated (the upheavals of 1968, continuing elements of ethnic conflict, the violence implicit in the partial democracy of post-war Italy, as well as the repressive elements of rule in authoritarian Spain, Portugal and Greece cannot be discounted), the significant progress made in creating the EU rested on substantial agreement, both at international level and within the states concerned. Although the elements of conflict implicit in the new, post-Cold War Europe (at least in its western portion) should not be overemphasized, there has undoubtedly been a stronger malaise and general uncertainty about the whole European project which has given rise to a range of social tensions and political antagonisms. Sharp disagreements developed within the EU and its potential members over US policy towards Iraq. Developments in eastern Europe, after the original liberation and restoration of national independence, were less positive overall in terms of conflict development, although violent clashes of any size have been avoided in many countries. But war and civil disturbance were prominent features during the 1990s in Russia, the Transcaucasus and, above all, the Balkans – where most EU members became involved in the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo/Serbia by virtue of commitment to NATO operations.

5.3 Tradition and transformation

Identification of specifically European traditions, such as that of a European system of values, is no easy task. Europe arrogated the Christian faith to itself, but it was hardly in Europe that it originated and the practice of Christianity has never been restricted just to Europe. Modern Europe also identified itself with traditions of civilization, progress and a general superiority over other cultures and peoples, although European practice and the ends to which its growing power was put suggested that any superiority it possessed did not reside in any particular morality, culture or form of social organisation. Rather, what was notable in the development of modern Europe was the dynamism of its growth, the attention it paid to science and technology as a motor for development and the capacity it showed for the rapid accumulation of power and its intensive use both within and beyond the societies of Europe. In this sense a dominant European tradition has been that of change, and the transformations of urbanisation, industrialisation, and intensive economic development have been at the core of the European experience. Such processes contributed to the rapid pace of European modernisation, the expansion of its power and global reach, and the strong material base of the civilisation it came to develop.

In terms of politics and the patterns of state organisation, European traditions have equally tended to emphasize – as outlined in discussion of the two themes above – diversity rather than unity, and conflict rather than consensus. In consequence of this, and in relation to the primary focus of this course, one of the main features of European development has been the lack of any tradition of overall governance and the growing prominence from the seventeenth century of a balance of power as the major means for keeping conflict tendencies under control. Under the growing pressure of modern nationalism and the strong competitive tendencies inherent in modern state organisation this balance was increasingly disrupted and the mechanism finally broke down. Two world wars demonstrated the failure of this balance of power and led to the overall collapse of the European state system. Europe survived after 1945 with the support of the structures of global governance erected by the two superpowers.

By 1991 one of these, the Soviet Union, had disappeared, by which time at least part of Europe had developed new structures of political coordination and novel forms of self-regulation in some key areas. As the remaining superpower, the US continued to exercise an influence on the EU that was broadly supportive but also played a part in promoting elements of dissension that pointed to further elements of transformation. The distinction made by Donald Rumsfeld between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Europe (the latter generally referring to a number of east-central European countries), and the preference he stated for the latter in terms of its support for the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003, cast a different light on the integration process that EU enlargement generally represented. But such views were by no means uncontested in the United States itself and there is clearly no such thing as a single American vision of Europe (Dalgaard-Nielsen, 2004, p.76).

It is in this context that the question can be posed of whether current transformations point to the eventual emergence of new and effective forms of governance for Europe on a lasting basis and, indeed, whether they can eventually be extended to apply to the European continent as a whole. If so, this will indeed mark a significant change. Europe and the societies it has formed have been defined far more by division and conflict as sources of creative change than by any commonality of values, shared vision or, even less, common form of rule or political allegiance. The emergence of what Martin Malia (1997, p.20) has called a ‘unity within integration’ would indeed represent a profound change and a development never seen on any inclusive European basis. If the illusions both of nationalism and communist ideology could be dispensed with, a new law-governed community might emerge throughout Europe as a whole. Such a fundamental transformation would, in this view, reflect the emergence of a modern new Europe comparable to, but quite different in nature from, that of mediaeval Christendom and the later secular formation of the early modern period, whose early democratic principles – given concrete form in the French Revolution – soon led to the disasters of political nationalism and the aberrant forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

5.4 Inclusion and exclusion

Contemporary Europe is, like that of earlier times, divided on several counts and reflects the continuing existence of several major identities. Individuals and groups invariably have several, overlapping or nested, identities at the same time. But there is also a hierarchy of different identities, with some groups having preferential access to particular European values and resources and others being partly or wholly excluded from them. Contemporary patterns of inclusion and exclusion refer partly to physical location, but elements of social ranking are also closely involved. Any geographical definition of Europe obviously excludes territories that lie outside its designated area. Africa and Asia have been distinguished from Europe since ancient times, but were ‘excluded’ only in the sense that they and their peoples belonged somewhere else. Geographical marginality with regard to contemporary Europe now has strong economic, political and social connotations as well. Ambiguities currently exist in this sense with particular regard to a number of Europe's border areas such as Turkey and north Africa, whose development in recent times has been closely bound up with that of the European continent and with whom economic and security links have been particularly strong. The inhabitants of such border-lands are also represented within Europe by major immigrant communities. Yet more have sought entry and residential rights and feel excluded when these are denied, although this is a status shared with many other potential immigrants from other parts of the globe. Turkey, in particular, has long sought admission to the EU and asserted a national claim to membership and European identity, and its refusal has provided a basis for growing sentiments of exclusion. In fact, decisions taken at the Helsinki EU Conference in December 1999 endorsed Turkey's long-term aims for membership and its application has been taken far more seriously in recent years.

But far more is involved here than the exclusion of border areas and the people who live in them by drawing boundaries around a geographical Europe. At issue is also the definition of a European identity by reference to certain values (in so far as they can be agreed upon), an area in which religious attitudes and racism often play a major part. Perhaps even more important is the question of who has access to Europe's diverse resources and the material advantages associated with its well-developed social and economic infrastructure. Lines of inclusion and exclusion also exist within Europe and may be drawn between different regions, national, ethnic and socio-economic groups – and on such bases often exclude numerous categories on all these counts at the same time. This has long been part of the European experience. The core Europe of the north-west of the continent has traditionally been distinct from a poorer south and east, which was subject to contrasting cultural influences and held a different religious faith or form of organisation. Distinct ethnic, socio-economic or class groups occupied different positions in this respect – as, indeed, they also did within the area of any ‘core Europe’ itself.

To this extent the idea of a fully inclusive Europe may be an illusion, in the sense that any game played to the end also involves both winners and losers. An emphasis on the different status of minority groups within a greater European whole may be a major mechanism that helps confirm the identity of the majority and strengthen the integration of Europe as the regional whole. Such examples range from the early persecution of Jews and Muslims in early modern Europe (at the same time as a distinctly European identity began to emerge) to the affirmation of distinctively ‘European’ values in the context of the NATO war on Serbia in association with the Kosovo crisis. But some developments also point to the possible emergence of a new situation in this sense. One important characteristic of the new situation with the end of the Cold War is that Europe as a whole is now more open to a stronger flow of internal influences and diverse forms of communication, and thus a stronger pull from an increasingly integrated EU core.

The more intensively governed EU, but one formally organised on inclusive rather than exclusive principles, is better suited for operating as a stable centre for the region. It may exercise an overall integrative pull and moderate, if not abolish, at least some aspects of exclusion. The further development of the EU's ‘cosmopolitan’ legal order may have distinct advantages in this respect over the nation-based provisions of established state legislation (Bideleux, 1999, p.33). Rather than developing as an exclusive European union, the EU also has the capacity to evolve as a Union of Europe, a prospect that may give more substance to the claim accepted and publicised by the Economist (23 October 1999) that it is no longer propagandist or even contentious ‘to speak of the European Union as synonymous with its continent’.

6 Conclusion

The major thematic contrasts of European development in terms of unity and diversity, and conflict and consensus, thus persist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, although aspects of unity and consensus had tended to prevail following the relaunching of the European project after 1945. Although this represented something of a break with tradition for modern Europe, it was by no means clear that this represented a full-scale transformation or pointed to the emergence of a Europe that was both inclusive and more intensively governed.

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Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material within this course:

Course image: P K in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

Seton-Watson, H. (1985) ‘What is Europe, where is Europe? From mystique to politique,’ Encounter, Vol. LXV, No. 2, July/August 1985, Encounter Ltd; Churchill, W. S. (1946) ‘The tragedy of Europe’, Speeches of Winston Churchill, Cassell. Reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston S. Churchill. Copyright Winston Churchill 1945; Monnet, J. (1978) in Mayne, R. (trans) Memoirs, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright © Jean Monnet, reproduced by permission of Librairie Artheme; Delors, J. (1988) ‘Extracts from a speech’, TUC Congress Report, 1988, Trades Union Congress; Foreign Policy, 115, Summer 1999; Judt, T. (1996) ‘Goodbye To All That?’ (excerpts), A Grand Illusion? An Essay on Europe, Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giraux. Copyright © 1996 Tony Judt. Text and tables from Eurobarometer No. 62 (2004). Copyright © European Communities.

Pages 58, 61, 62, 63, 66 in Readers: Eurobarometer 50, Copyright © European Communities, 1995–2000.

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