Formations of European Modernity

FORMATIONS OF EUROPEAN MODERNIT Y A HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY OF EUROPE SECOND EDITION

GERARD DELANTY

Formations of European Modernity

Gerard Delanty

Formations of European Modernity A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe Second Edition

Gerard Delanty Department of Sociology University of Sussex Brighton, UK

ISBN 978-3-319-95434-9 ISBN 978-3-319-95435-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948812 1st edition: © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013 2nd edition: © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © saemilee/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Aurea

Preface and Acknowledgements

This book emerged out of an attempt to write a new edition of my earlier book, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (1995). The apparent success of the book, which was translated into seven languages and widely cited, and the need to take account of significant developments within Europe and the wider world that occurred since the early 1990s seemed to make a compelling case for a new edition. However, this soon became an impossible task as the direction of my own work had changed and the considerable amount of scholarship over the past two decades or so presented a challenge to some of the conceptual foundations of the book, which were primarily driven by a critique of the instrumentalization of history and uncritical notions of ‘European identity’. So it was not simply a case of updating and revising an older work in the light of changing times and new research. The result was an entirely new and longer book that offers a more comprehensive perspective on the course of European history than one confined to a critical history of the idea of Europe. My new book, which appeared in 2013, also saw a shift of perspective: rather than offering a critique of the notion of European identity as the expression of a common history, it seeks to understand the lineages of European modernity. The book vii

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is conceived as a historical and political sociology of Europe. It offers an anatomy of the making of modern Europe and the social and political forms that it produced. The basic problem that it deals with is how to find a non-Eurocentric account of the European heritage that might make sense for the present. The following, in brief, is where I have felt it is necessary to offer a new interpretation on the question of Europe and its history. First, it is now essential to look at Europe in both a historical and contemporary perspective from a global angle and to see it as one among many world historical regions. This requires addressed the legacy of European colonialism from the sixteenth century, but especially from the late eighteenth century. My earlier 1995 book, while certainly considering the global context in the historical analysis, was primarily focused on the internal dynamics of European integration as far as the present day was concerned. In the new book, the global perspective is more strongly emphasized both in historical and in contemporary context, and a greater place is given to the possibility of cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it builds on what is now a very considerable body of literature in global history that puts in new perspective the rise of the West and the relation of Europe to the so-called non-Western world, a theme I also explored in several publications and in particular concerning the relation between Europe and Asia and the relation with the Americas. However, recourse to the global context—which needs to be more than a northern hemisphere perspective—alone is inadequate. The theoretical challenge is to combine a consideration of the global context with internal processes of development, since without such a macro-sociological account it is not possible to explain how long-term structures are formed: endogenous factors alone rarely account for societal or cultural formations, but neither do purely external accounts. My aim has been to stress transformations and tensions in the making of modernity rather than long-term stability, unity and coherence. Such an approach necessarily calls into question the optic of an ‘identity’ that emerges from history and takes on a political form for the present. I have stressed the importance of looking at the early history of Europe in terms of encounters with other civilizations and have made the case for European civilization to be seen as an inter-civilizational constellation,

Preface and Acknowledgements     ix

rather than a singular self-contained civilization. However, I also argue that a cultural core formed by the seventeenth century based on the phased fusion of five cultural orientations, Greek philosophy, Christian theology, Roman civil law, Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century science. Second, I am less inclined to emphasize the overriding importance of the transnationalization of the nation-state by the EU and the coming of a new post-national community within Europe. Although there is no doubt that the Europeanization of the nation-state has been one of the most important developments of the past five decades, it cannot be regarded as the central focus for research on Europe, which is now in the throes of a crisis that calls into question some of the most important assumptions of the post-Second World War project of European integration. From a critical and normative perspective, one of the most important contributions of the project of European integration has been in the sphere of rights. This has tended to neglect the question of social justice and the problem of solidarity. The present work places a stronger emphasis on the social question in the analysis of European transformation and the need to take full account of not only the transformation of the state, but also major economic change in the nature of capitalism, all of which have implications for democracy, social justice and solidarity. Today, at the time of writing in 2018, it is all too clear that the EU has been founded on a double error: the creation of a common currency in the absence of a common macroeconomic fiscal policy and the erosion of borders without a common policy on migration. These structural faults in the design of the EU have fuelled the discontents of the present. Third, I am more sceptical today than I was in Inventing Europe of a constructionist approach that primarily seeks to show how notions of identity, Europe, nations, etc., are invented discourses; this includes the argument I made in this earlier work that Europe has always been produced out of a relation of hostility to the East and that without an external other the self had no identity. Such a position is useful for the critical purpose of unmasking the ‘Grand Narratives’ of history, but once this is done, and it has been done extensively, there are other and more important objectives, which cannot be easily achieved by recourse

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to what are fairly simplistic arguments and often polemical positions. How to take account of a more complex set of considerations, which suggest that Europe is not a single entity, has been one of the challenges in the writing of this book. So, methodologically, the book is interpretivist in its broad orientation in that it is focussed on narratives of Europe; it is also centrally about the historical formations that underlie and give shape to such cultural and political lineages. Moreover, it seems to me that the target of a critical approach must now not only be the older Eurocentric conceptions of the European heritage, but questionable claims made in the name of the critique of Eurocentrism, as well as the arrival of pernicious interpretations of history, such as the clash of civilizations thesis. So a corrective measure is needed not only of the illusions that the older approaches produced, where these are still influential, but also the self-serving proclamations of relativism or of Western triumphalism. So I have tried to find a midway position between the ‘Grand Narrative’ approaches and the critique of the ‘dark side’ of European modernity. In this respect, drawing on the critical theory tradition and cosmopolitan thought, I distinguish my position from post-colonial theory, which to my mind does not offer a satisfactory historical sociology of Europe that takes account of developments in transnational and global history nor of European history prior to the modern period. Post-colonial thought provides an ­important ­corrective of the Eurocentric assumptions of the received view of European history, as in for example the under-emphasis on c­ olonialism and racism, but does not provide an alternative that is distinct from developments in global history. The new edition reflects a stronger case for the centrality of colonialism in the making of European modernity. However, post-colonial theorists will be disappointed: the pre-modern history of Europe cannot be ignored in the making of modernity. I argue that the civilizational core of Europe was shaped between the twelfth and seventeenth century. Now, while this core was influenced by the wider inter-civilization context, it provided a basic developmental path that shaped, without predetermining, the particular course of modernity in Europe. Fourth, my work over the past two decades has become more firmly embedded in two bodies of theoretical literature, namely the social theory of modernity and cosmopolitanism, which inevitably led to a shift in emphasis.

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This book, as is suggested by the title, postulates the centrality of modernity as the context in which to understand the making of Europe and for making sense of its unity and diversity. As is much discussed in recent and extensive literature, modernity is now conceived as historically variable and is not specific to Europe, which represents only one variant, and one that may be losing its influence in the world today. This serves not only as a useful framework in which to address global questions, but also as a way to understand the internal processes and dynamics that led to the formation of Europe as a structural reality and not only as a discourse or idea. Moreover, it also suggests a way out of the impasse of constructionist approaches that confine the analysis to identity and cultural constructions and makes for a firmer macro-analysis of long-term change and continuity. An analysis that is confined to the level of an account of the idea of Europe will provide only a limited perspective. The cosmopolitan perspective, as developed in my book The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (2009), is also strongly present in this book as a critical and normative position that complements the perspective on modernity. Twenty years ago, political scientists and legal scholars dominated the study of Europe, but today the social sciences have a good deal more to offer to the study of Europe as a world historical region. The present work is primarily a contribution to the historical and political sociology of Europe. The macro-sociological perspective it offers is guided by the critical theory framework to provide a reconstruction of historical structures of consciousness and societal formations. The aim of such a ‘critique’ is to render intelligible that which is opaque in order to reveal alternative readings of the social world and the possibilities inherent in the present. Such a work is obviously extensively based on the work of numerous historians. Historians are concerned largely with the particular and are sceptical of accounting for phenomena by reference to broader constructions. Where they offer wider interpretations, they do so for the non-specialized reader and rely on the narrative structure for a unity that is otherwise not possible. The sociological approach I have adopted seeks to place historical phenomena in wider frameworks of analysis without necessarily relying on the form of a narrative. This is perhaps to do less justice to approaches in historical research, since the tradition of comparative history does offer a broader framework for

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the interpretation of specific phenomena. However, this has been predominantly confined to specific topics and is generally understood to be methodologically restricted to comparing different societies or phenomena within a shared time frame, thus making long-run analysis of Europe difficult except in comparative terms. The rise of transnational and global history offers scope for innovation in seeing societies as interconnected. However, it does not tell us much about the emergence and transformation of the moral and political self-understandings of societies and how they engage with their past and imagine their futures. This is where sociology and history meet. I explored some of these issues in a more recent book, The European Heritage: A Critical Re-interpretation (2018), which also informs this edition. The second edition offers an opportunity to clarify and expand on a number of points that need correction or elaboration. I have retained the threefold structure of the first edition and the chapter structure. However, it features two new chapters. Chapter 11 is a new chapter that expands upon the discussion of modernity introduced in Chapters 8 and 9 and above all offers a reflection on Europe as a world historical region in relation to other world regions. Inevitably, a new edition produced in 2018 would have to address the implications of Brexit, the rise of new nationalist movements and a deeper sense of the discontents of the present. The discussion of post-1989 nationalism in the first edition, which appeared in 2013, has been replaced by a new chapter, Chapter 15, which is informed by my more recent work on these topics. Chapter 14 on the current ‘age of austerity’ required a more extensive discussion of capitalism and the crisis of the EU than in the earlier edition. All chapters have been revised and updated where revisions were needed, some of which have been in response to reviews of the first edition. This book, inevitably given its coverage, owes a great deal to the work of others. I have been particularly influenced by the work of Johann Arnason in regard to the conception of civilizations and in particular his seminal work, Civilizations in Dispute. Peter Wagner’s work on the social theory of modernity has been an important influence in my own thinking. Piet Strydom’s cognitive approach to social theory has been hugely important. I am also very grateful to Paul Blokker, Patrick O’Mahony, the late Chris Rumford, Jasper Chalcraft and Monica Sassatelli

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with whom I have co-authored variously on papers and books for their insights, which have both directly and indirectly helped me in developing the arguments in this book. For comments on an earlier version, I am much indebted to William Outhwaite for reading the manuscript and, for extensive comments on the theoretical approach, Piet Strydom. My thanks to Sharla Plant of Palgrave for the proposal to produce the new edition. The work has benefited greatly from discussions with Aurea Mota and it is to her that the second edition is dedicated. Brighton and Barcelona

Gerard Delanty

Contents

Introduction: A Theoretical Framework

xix

Part I  Sources of the Europe Heritage 1

The European Inter-Civilizational Constellation 3

2

The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies 27

3

Christianity in the Making of Europe 51

4

Between East and West: The Byzantine Legacy and Russia 73

5

The Islamic World and Islam in Europe 91

xv

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Part II  The Emergence of Modernity 6

The Renaissance and the Rise of European Consciousness 109

7

Unity and Divisions in Early Modern European History: The Emergence of a Westernized Europe 133

8

The Enlightenment and the Idea of Europe 157

9

The Rise of the Nation-State and the Allure of Empire: Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism 183

10 Europe as a World Historical Region: A Global Perspective on the European Formation of Modernity 215 11 The Historical Regions of Europe: Civilizational Backgrounds and Multiple Routes to Modernity 241 12 Europe in the Short Twentieth Century: Conflicting Projects of Modernity 265 Part III  The Present and Its Discontents 13 Europe Since 1989: Globalization, Europeanization and the Crisis of the Nation-State in Late Modernity 305 14 Age of Austerity: Contradictions of Capitalism and Democracy and the Crisis of European Integration 341

Contents     xvii

15 ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’: The Return of Nationalism and the Spectre of Authoritarian Democracy 365 16 Memory, Heritage and History: The European Heritage as a Conflict of Interpretations 399 Conclusion: Europe—A Defence 421 Bibliography 429

Index 467 Map of Europe 479

Introduction: A Theoretical Framework

This book seeks to provide an interpretation of the idea of Europe through an analysis of the course of European history. In order to undertake this formidable task, it is necessary to clarify some of the theoretical questions that are at stake and to place the question of Europe and the crises of the present in a broader framework of analysis. The starting point in any such study is the recognition that the facts of European history alone do not answer the question of how we should understand the shape of Europe as it formed in the course of its history and still less how we should evaluate the European heritage in the present day. The significance of specific events can undoubtedly be understood by reference to a shorter timescale, but the long-term analysis that such a task requires is beset with many difficulties, leading most historians to avoid such ventures, which often are sustained only by polemics or a selective reading of history. This is in part because the historian generally does not begin from the perspective of the present day, which we are forced to do so in addressing the question of the contemporary significance of the idea of Europe. But it is also because the historian is not normally concerned with making sense of the unintended consequences of specific events for later periods or with the developmental xix

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dynamics of societies for which a broader framework of analysis is required. The contribution this book seeks to provide such a broader framework of analysis in terms of the idea and lineages of modernity. As such it is a historical and political sociology of the formation of European modernity. It is primarily sociological than historical in its approach. There are of course many works on the history of Europe. However, these are generally expanded national histories and often are encyclopaedic in scope, for instance Norman Davis’s (1996) Europe—A History. Works on shorter periods generally also rely on the form of the narrative and are potentially limitless in terms of possible coverage. Major ones on the twentieth century are Tony Judt’s PostWar, E. J. Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes and Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent (Judt 2005; Hobsbawm 1994; Mazower 2000). These studies on the whole tend to rely on narrative history and are sceptical of the usefulness of theoretical categories. The chronological form of the narrative does not offer an answer to important conceptual or normative questions, such as questions about the rise of modernity, the making of a political heritage, the formation of a structural pattern or the causal relation between cultural orientations and power. The solution for the historian who strays into such domains, as Tony Judt acknowledged, was the expression of the historian’s own point of view on what is important. The result may have been exemplary works on modern Europe, and PostWar is indeed one of the finest works on post-1945 Europe, but we do not get an organizing framework that renders history meaningful or a conceptual language for making sense of the past, which can only be described and recounted in chronological terms. The danger, on the other hand, with theoretically driven approaches to history is simplification and over-generalization, if not distortion. But it seems to me to be essential to distinguish between narrative or chronological history and reconstructive history, which seeks to understand how the present should relate to the past, a q­ uestion that Adorno (1998) famously posed in 1959, in an essay entitled ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past?’, and which has also been central to the critical theory tradition and to Foucault’s notion of a ‘history of the present’. This does not mean that the past should be re-written to fit the present. Approaching the past

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teleologically—explaining past events by reference to future conditions—is clearly nonsense. What it means is that the significance for the present or past events needs to be assessed. Present events need to be placed in a longer time frame. The book does not offer a chronological history of Europe; nor does it attempt to provide a narrative account of European history. It does, however, try to identify some of the elements of a new narrative of Europe history. I have also resisted the temptation of polemics as a luxury that the social scientist can ill afford. The aim is rather an attempt to account for the formation of Europe through the lens of a critical theory of modernity and from the perspective of the present day. The book seeks to offer a historical and political sociology of the lineages of modernity in Europe. However, in painting Europe on such a broad canvas, there are unavoidable normative questions at stake in a task that cannot be solely descriptive. The guiding question is how should the European heritage be assessed today and what is at stake in such a question? This is both a normative question and a theoretical one, for the object of inquiry must be theoretically constituted. It is not possible to know what questions to ask if one does not have a theoretical framework in which to pose questions. Europe, when viewed in historical and geographical perspective, is not a self-defined entity, but was shaped through a process of construction out of which cultural and social forms were produced. So in speaking about Europe we are also taking up a position in relation to history and to possibilities within the present. My objective, formulated in the terms of a critical theory of society, is a reconstruction of European modernity and the social and political forms that it has produced. Since the foundation of the European Union, there has been considerable interest in the question of the meaning or identity of Europe. This has been predominantly confined to the internal construction of Europe through the transnationalization of the nationstate, though with an increasing interest in the implications of Europe for the individual—in the sense of European identities—as opposed to the state. While encompassing much of what has been regarded as Europe, clearly Europe is not something that is defined only by the EU. Inevitably such questions as to the definition of Europe involve an

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interpretation of the history of Europe and of the place of Europe in the world. The number of publications on issues around the identity of Europe, the European heritage, Europeanization as a social and political transformation has grown enormously in the past decade or so and reflects, too, a Europeanization of the social and human sciences. There are now sophisticated theoretical works on European integration many of which are inspired by sociological theory (Zimmermann and Favell 2011; Favell and Guiraudon 2011; Wiener and Diez 2004), European identity (Risse 2010; Checkel and Katzenstein 2009; Sassatelli 2009), European citizenship (Eder and Giesen 2001) and the European public sphere (Eder 2006a; Fossum and Schlesinger 2007; Trenz and Eder 2004). Despite the appearance in recent years of sociological works addressed specifically to the relatively new notion of European society (Fligstein 2008; Outhwaite 2008, 2012, 2016; Roche 2009), there is as yet no systematic theoretically grounded work that offers an interpretation of the course of European history in which historical and sociological analysis is combined.1 Various authors have provided insightful accounts of specific historical and philosophical questions, but have not undertaken a systematic analysis of European history and the formation of modern European society.2 Stråth and Wagner’s (2017) European Modernity: A Global Approach is a recent example of an approach that is also reflected in the aims of this book with modernity as a framework of interpretation and likewise takes a global approach.3 The writings of historians such as Tony Judt (2005, 2010, 2012) and older ones, such as George Lichtheim, author of Europe in the Twentieth Century (1999 [1972]), are still among the most important interpretations we have of European history, though in the case of Judt these are not strictly historiographical books, but works of interpretation. Lichtheim appealed to the ‘category of totality’ and based his work on the view that there are ‘certain definable trends shaping the totality of events during a given period’ (1972: xiv). The very notion of a history of Europe as such is itself a relatively recent idea, with the first works appearing only in the 1930s, H. A. L. Fisher’s three-volume History of Europe in 1935 being one of the first (Fisher 1935). This book is a contribution to the debate on the idea of Europe and offers an interdisciplinary approach drawing especially from history,

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sociology and political theory, but also from geography and anthropology. The central theoretical arguments derive largely from social theory and historical sociology. Two additional reasons for the use of concepts in social theory are that they suggest a way to avoid theorizing Europe by using notions derived from the institutions of the EU’s own discourse of its history as well as from common-sense notions of history, which at best are a poor guide to history. One such example is the tendency to reduce cultural forms, such as Europe, to identity. The concept of identity when applied to such large-scale entities is considerably more complicated than when used with respect to individual or collective actors. Concepts and theoretical frameworks offer a means of understanding a historically and culturally variable phenomenon such as Europe without reducing it to the meanings people ascribe to it, thus making possible its explication even when it is not a consciously existing phenomenon. The now relatively advanced field of historical sociology offers a promising foundation on which to approach such questions.4 The sociological task is always to place a particular event or phenomena in a broader context, both historical and global. This modest aim is perhaps all that can be attained when it comes to the interrogation of the lineages of European history. The challenges in any such account of the course of European history are formidable, not least due to the impossibility of establishing clear variables, let alone independent ones, for virtually every conceptual reference point has varied over the course of history—for instance the borders of countries as well as Europe itself— and concepts used to make sense of later events cannot be retrospectively applied in many cases to earlier ones. The significance of major events, such as revolutions or moments of crisis, can only be discerned when they are placed in a broader historical context. In this Introduction, I outline the central theoretical framework that informs the work and the critical debates in which it is grounded. Some of the key arguments are returned to in later chapters, but are outlined in what follows in a necessarily concise manner and without extensive bibliographical referencing.

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Some Myths About Europe The older accountsof the idea of Europe attributed to Europe a foundational origin and an oppositional ‘Other’ that gave it form and meaning. These Eurocentric interpretations are now mostly discred­ ited, though they still have considerable influence in shaping what many people regard as the natural reality of Europe. This narrative is one of repetition and derivation and can be summed up as the view that Europe originated in Greece and Rome, it is Christian, but became secular, Western, and more or less coincides with the European Union. The ‘Other’ of Europe has generally been taken to Asia, or Islam, communism, the obscure category of the ‘Orient’, as the shifting signifiers of the East. The traditional account, which in this book is referred to as a ‘Grand Narrative’, postulates an underlying essence or spirit which progressively (and inexplicably) unfolds in history making possible progress and, in some accounts, the European Union. In the historiography of the European Union, this history is often presented as a story of the overcoming of internal divisions in the movement towards political unity. In such teleological accounts, unity and diversity become gradually reconciled to the progress of the European project and the overcoming of obstacles, which roughly summarized include the catastrophes of history. In opposition to these Grand Narratives with their characteristic selective reading of history and Eurocentric assumptions, alternative interpretations of history have now come to the fore and offer more critical accounts. The problem of Eurocentrism is also much more at the heart of any analysis of history (Amin 1989; Blaut 1993; Dainotto 2007). There are also works on the ‘idea of Latin America’ (Mignolo 2006) and the ‘idea of Africa’ (Mudimbe 1994) that need to be brought into the debate about the idea of Europe, which cannot be considered in isolation from the rest of the world. This book is largely a response to the new myths of European history that such alternative accounts have generated, since not much methodological progress has been made from the new critical interventions. Against the Eurocentric inclined Grand Narratives, the dominant tendency is to emphasize the ‘dark side’ of Europe. Even in standard histories of Europe in the previous century,

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the emphasis has been on the negative side of history (e.g. Mazower 2000; Meier 2005) or what Walter Mignolo (1995, 2011) has referred to in two books as the ‘dark side’ of history. Clearly, such correctives are needed to counteract the rosy picture of the rise of Europe and the uncritical celebration of its achievements. Under the influence of post-colonialism, stronger critiques of Europe argue that Europe is a product of a globally connected world and that its history is inseparable from colonialism and world domination. There is, however, nothing new or remarkable in this claim, since it is the basis of much of global and transnational history. Unmasking the illusions of Europe’s own narrative of its history is clearly important and recent historical research has opened up new and important avenues of inquiry. However, some works, for example Pasteur (2015), are largely correctives of largely discarded Eurocentric positions that, for example, celebrate European diversity and do not account, no matter how darkly it is painted, for the complexity of European history. Such works rarely address the pre-modern history of Europe. But a corrective is not an alternative and the critique of Orientalism has not led to new methodological approaches in sociological or historical analysis. Many such accounts end up in the contradictory position of using historiographical research to refute long-discarded conceptions of the European past while also claiming historical research is limited by a Eurocentric lens; others are seemingly unaware of important historical research to begin with and offer only thinly veiled polemics aimed against obscure or non-existent targets (see McLennan 2000, 2003). A favourite target is Max Weber’s much misunderstood, albeit enigmatic, opening statement of the Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism.5 Critiques of Europe inspired by Edward Said’s path-­ breaking Orientalism in 1978 offer a limited and often myopic account of the European heritage as one of the dominations of the non-­ European world. Said’s book was important in drawing attention to the role of cultural representations and in particular the representations that colonial Europeans constructed of the Orient (Said 1979). However, it offers a limited perspective on the entire course of European history, for which it was never intended (see Malette 2010). Most conceptions of the European heritage in recent times confine their scope to a limited

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range of questions and are cautious about universalistic claims, which are now more likely to be a critique of Europe that a proclamation of its uniqueness (for an exception, see Duchesne 2011). The orientalist argument is in any case incompatible with the global contextualization of European history. The trend towards global and transnational history over the past two decades or so has transformed historical writing by re-historicizing Europe in a more globally connected world. Many contributions to the field of transnational and global history in any case are not primarily concerned with Europe, and the field has advanced beyond the older Eurocentric approaches that assumed the exceptionality or exemplarity of Europe. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that a latent Eurocentrism has survived the demise of the Grand Narratives. One theme in the literature on the making of the idea of Europe is that its identity was forged against an external and often abstract Other—generally taken to be Islam, with later incarnations being variously the Orient, Russia and communism—that gave to it an identity that it otherwise did not have. This notion was implicit in the older literature, as in Henri Pirenne’s (2001) thesis in the 1930s that ‘without Mohammed there would not have been Charlemagne’, by which he meant the rise of Islam gave to Europe in the Middle Ages a notion of an Other. In the orientalist critique, this becomes a stronger thesis to the effect that the only unity possible in Europe was one created against an external enemy who had to be fabricated and imagined in ways that presaged the path to empire. Although I am sympathetic to the argument, it needs to be relativized for the following reasons. The relation between Europe and the East, especially Islam, included both positive and negative images, especially prior to the colonial period. Relations between East and West were not entirely based on ignorance or conflict, but included considerable exchange, borrowing and dialogue. Moreover, as discussed in Chapter 5 in more detail, images and relations changed and were often so variable that it is difficult to postulate a continuous Other. The radical and cosmopolitan vision of figures such as the Renaissance philosophers of the Spanish Salamanca school or Enlightenment thinkers such as the geographer Alexander von Humboldt needs to be incorporated into assessments of the European heritage, which also had a critical side to it.6 It is also now clear that the

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Enlightenment was not a uniquely European event or something that can be looked only through the lens of a Eurocentric account of history (see Conrad 2012). A relational approach requires a multidimensional account of interactions and encounters, in particular with respect to long periods in history when a dichotomous relation rarely predominated for long. It must also be considered that Europe was not sufficiently well defined to articulate an identity until the nineteenth century; internal differences always undermined the articulation of a collective European identity. It is not logically possible for a Self to construct an Other if there is no Self in existence to begin with. While the orientalist thesis assumes the existence of Europe and Asia as essentially separated and self-contained worlds, an alternative approach will find for every example of a clash or conflict an example that illustrates peaceful coexistence and negotiation, if not mutual acceptance and commonality.7 The implausibility of the orientalist argument ultimately runs into the objections that have been voiced against the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, which similarly postulates hermetically sealed civilizations that can only collide. Orientalism thus ends up requiring Occidentalism. The result of polemical positions of the right (Huntington’s clash of civilizations or the end of history scenario) or of the left (Said’s Orientalism or the liberal notion of a ‘dialogue of civilizations’) is a failure to uncover the complex pattern of encounters between Europe and the non-European world, including the unintended consequences of the earlier encounters and the reflexivity of modern culture. This book is both a critique and a defence of the idea of Europe; it is a reconstructive critique in that it seeks to discover the structure of qualitative shifts in the relation between state, society and individual, how they occurred and what their consequences were for the formation of social and cultural structures in European history. The aim is to offer an account of the significance of Europe that divests Europe of its illusions and to see it as one of many world historical regions. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000) has argued in Provincializing Europe, Europe needs to be ‘provincialized’, that is, it should not be viewed as a normative or evaluative reference point for all parts of the world. In other words, it should be seen as a world historical region whose historical experience is

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not a model through which the rest of world history should be viewed. ‘Provincializing Europe’ is a demonstration of the dangers of the false universalization of the European historical experience. So far, then, the polar opposites of Eurocentric and anti-Eurocentric accounts are a poor guide. What then is the solution? The tendency in current scholarship that moves beyond the orientalist versus occidentalist polarity is threefold. These trends will be briefly outlined before assessing the implications that follow. As a result of the global historical turn, there are now a larger number of studies that place Europe in the context of a more globally connected world. The emphasis on global connections in the analysis of major historical periods and episodes is one of the main historiographical alternatives to internalist accounts of the rise of Europe. The older approaches tended to see the global context as secondary or unimportant and to attribute primary causal weight to endogenous processes. As a result of many studies that build on the classic works of Braudel, McNeill, Hodgson and Wallerstein, the importance of the external context must now be seen as an essential part of the explanation of major social change in history. As argued, recent transnational and global history has opened up new avenues of inquiry that jettison the older notions of the uniqueness or exemplarity of Europe (see Bayle 2004; Frank 1998; Hobson 2004; Pomeranz 2000; Manning 2003; Osterhammel 2014). The global and transnational turn in history in part is a move to go beyond the limitations of national history, but in part is also an attempt to dismantle national history (see Hunt 2014). When it comes to European history, this is rather more complicated, since it is not possible to dismantle something that does not exist. The idea of Europe needs to be contextualized in a global context rather than, as is the mainstream tendency, to see Europe as emerging out of the internal relations between the nations of Europe, somehow creating itself out of itself. The concern with the global context also offers an alternative to post-colonial polemical positions on history as exclusively a history of domination. Ironically, such accounts generally concentrate on Western Europe and thus reinforce Eurocentrism. Entities such as nations, the European Union and social movements are not simply self-generating; they are shaped in a process of interaction

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with other social forms. Heterogeneous elements coalesce and undergo subsequent divergence and variation leading to the formation of new entities. The result is that the social world—whether contextualized as national, European, global—must be seen as a product of cross-cultural fertilization, encounters, dialogue and mediation rather than as self-contained and impermeable (see Arnason 2003; Burke 2010; Dallmayr 1996; Delanty 2011a). This suggests the importance of a relational approach, which is the theoretical assumption, though not always evident, underlying such insights. Moreover, it reveals a more complicated picture of domination and of the intertwinement of power and culture. For these reasons, I am fundamentally opposed to the argument set forth by Duchesne (2011) in his attempt to refute what he sees as the relativization of the ‘uniqueness’ of the Europe. He seeks to demonstrate that what he calls the ‘revisionist school’, by which he means global and transnational historians as well as post-colonial theorists, is misguided in its attempt to rewrite the history of the West. Against the global turn, he unfashionably defends the tradition of Eurocentric historiography. While there is much of value in his erudite critique, he goes to an extreme in the search for a ‘uniqueness’ to Europe in an account that rests on some very controversial claims about the legacy of the Indo-European speakers, who he claims created the essential European culture based on aristocratic equalitarianism. The overwhelming historical evidence is that the Indo-European influence was a linguistic one.8 Moreover, the origins of Europe in any meaningful sense cannot be traced back these early migrations. This all raises the thorny question of what should be taken as the starting point and how should such starting points be understood, for example as preconditions, formative factors, initial conditions that were later abandoned or simply contingent forces that influenced but did not shape later developments. A second development in the literature is what can be termed constructionism or the critique of representations approach that sees Europe as a socially constructed discourse. This was already signalled in Said’s work and is much influenced by the pioneering work of Foucault. It is commonplace nowadays to say that Europe is invented, and that it is a historically variable construction and has no objectivity other than in the discourses that construct it. Such an account of the idea of Europe will

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therefore have to consider the process by which Europe became a reality in terms of politics and culture. That entails a consideration of how such discourses were constituted and underwent change. This is where sociology meets history, for the sociological aim is in part to account for the formation of entities that appear to have a natural form and to demonstrate the connections that link the individual with history and with the wider global context (Sewell 2005). Thirdly, closely related to the constructionist emphasis on Europe in terms of a model of discourses, there is increasingly a position emerging that emphasizes multiplicity as opposed to unity. In this latter account, there is not a single conception of Europe, but multiple ‘Europes’ (Biebuyck and Rumford 2012). No longer is Europe seen as a singular entity akin to the West or Western Europe, but takes a plurality of historical forms. Such arguments have been influenced by perspectives on history from Central and Eastern Europe as well as the revival of some older accounts of Europe in terms of multiple logics of history. While none of the accounts deny the existence of Europe as such, there is a notable departure from Western/Eurocentric interpretations. Instead, Europe is portrayed as polycentric or de-centred and shaped more like a borderland than by bordered space or a relation determined by core and periphery (see Balibar 2003). In the work of scholars such as Balibar, it is more than a matter of multiplicity: the plurality of forms of Europe point to a hybrid conception of Europe as a borderland.9 While I am broadly sympathetic to the constructionist approach and the claim that Europe takes a plurality of forms, this in itself is insufficient. The problem with such approaches is that they are not able to address questions that go beyond a cultural level of analysis to account for societal structures, such as capitalism, state formation, demography and ultimately lack explanatory power. The aim of such exercises is generally, following Foucault, to demonstrate how something—an identity for instance—was created and thus to de-naturalize the object in question so that what appears as ‘essentialist’ or natural to its bearers is from the theoretical perspective constructed. To say something is invented is only to recognize its constructed nature and that it was constituted in a formative process, as opposed to being natural.

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The problem with the constructivist position is that it can lead to the view that identities should be perceived by social actors as constructed. This is to conflate an explanatory category—constructionism—with an empirical category. Social actors may still view their identities as essentialist, that is as natural, and thus produce effects that create reality. The objectivity of such realities can easily escape constructionist approaches unless complemented by a deeper macro-analysis of long-term societal trends and the formation of cultural structures. In other words, discourses and other such notions of social constructions produce ­structure—that is reality—forming effects. Constructionism alone does not adequately demonstrate how a structure is formed. Without such a perspective on structure formation, it is impossible to make sense of the formation of a historical pattern or a heritage that takes shape over the course of centuries. For these reasons, the approach adopted in this book while heavily interpretivist is not confined to the interpretivist paradigm, but also seeks to account for the formation of societal structures. The emphasis multiplicity brings in an important added dimension, but any account that considers only the fact of numerical difference ultimately fails to account for the phenomenon—in this case formations of modernity—that exists in multiple forms. The argument for multiplicity, ‘multiple Europes’, is essentially an argument for variation and needs to be supplemented with a perspective on what variation produces. So it is not enough to identify different European traditions or varieties of modernity without showing how they are linked and how the linkages produce structure-forming effects in terms of cultural models and societal forms. The appeal to the notion of hybridity does not solve the problem, for if people believe their societies are based on primordial and unique characteristics, the academic view that every society or culture is hybrid does not explain such beliefs nor account for the consequences that follow from such beliefs. For similar reasons, an exclusive preoccupation with the global context is inadequate if it is not accompanied with an account of the internal formation of the object under investigation. This book takes seriously the formative influence of the global context for Europe and asserts the more general relevance of an interactionist or relational account for the analysis of historical and sociological phenomena. However, the relational

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perspective is in danger of over-emphasizing process at the expense of structure. Structure formation is the other half of the process of the making of history. Structure is a form that is produced by processes, and while being constantly reworked by social actors, it gives shape to social life.10 In other words, the new directions—with their emphasis on global connections, entanglements, discourses, multiplicity, ­hybridity— do not tell us how social and cultural structures form.11 The result is a relativization of Europe to a point that the objective reality disappears or is explained away by process and discourse. With the demise of the Eurocentric Grand Narratives with their singular and universalistic conceptions of history, the critical function of such exercises in relativization has lost much of their purpose. The danger is now that new pernicious myths will take their place. This book is in part an attempt to counteract such new myths, including the myth of Europe as borderless, hybrid, cosmopolitan and inclusive. It is both a critique of Eurocentrism and the new myths of history that have been produced in the de-masking of Eurocentrism.

Problems in Conceptualizing Unity and Diversity One of the central questions that arises from the above considerations is how can similarity and difference be understood for a large-scale unit of analysis such as Europe. In conceptual terms, this is one of the key questions to be addressed in this book. The relation between unity and diversity can be posed in a number of ways and the solution resides in addressing each level separately and, above all, in avoiding to conflate them. The result of conflation is the production of meaningless analytical concepts, such as ‘unity in diversity’, which may have an appealing political function, but do not provide a methodological direction for scholarly inquiry. Unity and diversity should be theoretically conceived of as different expressions of the same phenomenon rather than two different realities. Rather than opting for one, both should be regarded as offering different perspectives. It is not that one is right and the other to be refuted. Thus, unity is something that emerges from the differences by reflection on them and thus allows making sense of the difference.

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Luhmann (1995: 240, 273) thus speaks of the ‘unity of the difference’. In this view, unity resides in the reflexive idea of Europe and can be found at the level of a cultural model that influences social structures. The work of Castoriadis is also interesting in conceptualizing unity and diversity. His work, as Klooger points out, suggests a model of unity as coherence as the mutual intelligibility and meaningfulness of signifying structures (Klooger 2013: 492). Notions of unity must be understood in relation to a social ontology, which in Castoriadis’s thought does not require the absence of contradictions, tensions or disunity for it is always partial.12 The following is a brief summary of six considerations in unpacking the question of unity and diversity.

Political Unity Versus Cultural Diversity One possible way to approach the problem of unity and diversity is to see unity as political and diversity as cultural. In this view, the political traditions of Europe provide a basic source of unity while each country has a unique cultural tradition. From an EU perspective, the thesis can be formulated to posit political unity in the framework of the EU, at least as a limited political unity, and to relegate culture to the regional and national levels. This is more or less the official position as far as the EU is concerned and has been the basis of such well-known philosophical positions as Habermas’s (2001b) conception of a post-national Europe that has overcome the divisions that nations engendered as a result of their different cultural traditions. The problem with this approach is that political unity is not quite so evident, and on the other side of the coin, the unity implied by cultural identity and tradition is not so easily reduced to group differences. More generally, the separation of culture from the political produces more problems than it solves. For instance, it is possible to find examples of both cultural unity (in lifestyles, consumption, education, health) and political diversity. Yet, on the whole in normative terms political bonds of commonality are easier to achieve than common cultural worlds. Nation-states have to varying degrees achieved the first but almost never the latter. Europe

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itself never created a common cultural identity. In contrast, for a time, in the eighteenth century, before the divergence of America into its components, there was for a time a sense of the civilizational unity of the continent (Mota 2014).

Homogeneity Versus Diversification/Heterogeneity Explaining unity is one of the most challenging tasks for sociological and historical inquiry. If the notion of a continent is no longer accepted as a meaningful analytical or historical category, what then is the alternative designation of commonality?13 Unity can be understood in terms of a homogenizing process whereby Europe is formed out of increasingly common structures or institutions that become adopted in a long-term historical process through which separate societies converge. But explaining how these structures arose is by no means self-evident. Narrative accounts of history simply declare their arrival or assume their existence. Is the development of individualism, religious dissent, trade unionism or the emergence of the charted town or cathedral city in medieval Europe to be attributed to a common structure that produces such outcomes, separate logics of development or—to follow Ragan (1987: 25)—the intersection of a set of conditions that produces large-scale qualitative shifts? Unity is now best seen as evolving through various mechanisms and processes, which include the conquest of the periphery by the core as well as through piecemeal diffusion and borrowing. In other words, the notion of unity points to the formation of a structural pattern that solidifies over a long historical period rather that something that is simply manifest on the level of consciousness. To grasp it is by no means easy and without a wider theoretical framework it is probably impossible. Europe is one such concept that has at a certain level some intuitive meaning but there is a lack of a scholarly grip on it and which has eluded many historical studies that either take it as a given or as encompassing the nations of Europe without inquiring too much into it. Homogenization does not eliminate heterogeneity, which can result from local variations of common structures. Borrowing from a common

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source—e.g. Christianity—can produce regional and national variations. The tradition of Roman civil law had much the same effect: it led to common structures but divergent cultural forms. The idea of Europe is also one such common cultural structure, but as with other ideas it was continuously subjected to new interpretations. From a longterm historical perspective, homogenizing or diversifying trends may variously be more in evidence. Long periods of homogenization may precede periods in which diversifying trends unfold, challenging the dominant codes, centres, elites and institutions. Both processes can be understood in terms of a model of conflict, for homogenizing forces can provoke the resistance of the periphery and thus undermine the possibility of commonality. However understood, commonality cannot be separated from conflict, which is always present since commonality is a product of power and, as argued by Foucault, where there is power, there is resistance. Such resistances can be seen as in terms of struggles over interpretations. But commonality is also more fundamentally a product of reflexivity, in the sense of the appropriation of normative and cognitive ideas, which in turn give rise to difference, since there are always different interpretations of such ideas. Perspectives on homogenization and heterogeneity require sociological analysis and cannot simply take sameness and difference for granted as somehow self-­positing cultural givens. So unity is a structure-forming process that is produced as opposed to being a fixed starting point. This does not mean that there is not a common starting point—for such a notion is essential in order to understand pluralization—but starting points do not lead to path dependency for the tracks of history can easily be switched when social actors reinterpret their situation. As a consequence of new interpretations, entirely new realities are created. Such new forms may also be products of moments of intensification, such as revolutions or major breakdowns in social and political order.

Commonality Versus Divisions A version of the previous discussion is to abandon any notion of unity and diversity as somehow reconcilable, due to internal divisions.

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According to this argument, which has been variously espoused, the history of Europe is characterized by major divisions which have undermined the possibility of unity. Thus, for instance, no single empire ever succeeded in dominating the continent, and since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the European political order was based on sovereign nation-states who opted for a shaky normative system based on a balance of power. In the same way, Christianity fragmented into rival traditions—Latin versus Orthodox and the internal divisions within the former as well as subsequent splits within the Protestant tradition— leading to a divided continent. Mainstream historiography, as noted above, is in effect premised on the basis of national histories and a general denial of something called European history. In this view, taken to the extreme, the only unity possible is that which has been forged against a common enemy. The position in this book is that while the divisions within European history were often more important than unity, it is essential to have an analytical notion of unity, unless the idea of Europe is entirely abandoned and replaced by national history. To speak of unity—or commonality—is to refer to the formation of a structure that shapes the space of action. It is not possible to reject this in favour of a view of history as without structure. The argument will be developed that the European heritage has been characterized by forms of commonality and that expressions of unity cannot be explained exclusively by reference to a common enemy since there is also a need to take account of reflexive relations with other actors and the demands and expectations of cultural values and normative principles. Such a perspective would lead to the view that the specificity of Europe does not reside in a fundamental matric or origin but in orientations that emerge from the evolution of cultural models. In any case, the existence of ‘enemies’ of Europe has never been sufficiently constant to provide enduring reference points to overcome internal divisions. The differences that have tended to be more important are, as Freud argued, those of the ‘narcissism of the minor difference’ (see Blok 1998), which goes some way to explaining the prevalence of civil war in European history. The notion of the enemy within or outside must be complemented with a consideration of friends and of the ambivalence of the stranger.

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Continuity Versus Rupture or Change To speak of Europe assumes in some sense continuity in history. Where that continuity begins is only one of the problems with any notion of continuity, which cannot be abandoned in favour of change or rupture. The emphasis in recent times has certainly shifted in the direction of rupture and a questioning of the older forms of periodization—historical epochs or, more recently, historical ‘transitions’—which were invented to solve the problem of rupture and to retain a basic model of continuity. However, history cannot entirely be reduced to rupture since any such notion requires a concept of a prior state that has come to an end. Moreover, if everything is in continuous change, it is not possible to discern continuity. Yet, a notion of rupture is necessary if everything is not to be reduced to long-run historical paths deriving from a common origin. The problem with a long-run analysis is compounded by the problem that there are no reliable independent variables—geographical, political, cultural—that have remained constant over long periods of time. Many of the supposedly enduring reference points—such as historical eras, continents, East and West—have in fact been products of later ages seeking to construct their history. Later attempts to postulate a three world system in which Europe is part of the first world have today been discarded following the disappearance of the second world in 1990 and the transformation of the third world into developing and underdeveloped countries. Other systems of world analysis such as core and periphery or North and South have not succeeded as viable alternatives. The recognition of this problem in defining world regions, which requires some notion of historical continuity, has led to the constructionist solution: entities such as Europe, Asia and Africa are discourses that exist only in the terms of the discourse. But this is an incomplete solution to the problem since it in effect abandons the possibility of a structuring process taking shape. One way in which to reconcile continuity and rupture is to see continuity in terms of progressive variation, which may entail reinterpretations of older traditions, as in the notion of ‘Renaissance’. This could also be conceived in terms of a working out of a problem, such as Weber’s notion of the problem of rationality and the explanation of suffering, Eisenstadt’s argument concerning the inherent problem of

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how the profane and the sacred might be overcome in the civilizations of the Axial Age, or the contradiction of capitalism and democracy in modernity. The approach adopted in this book is to see the continuity of the European heritage as a process of continuous translation, including both repudiation—rupture—and reinterpretations of that which has gone before. Thus, for instance, early Christianity emerged from the confluence of Greek and Judaic thought, while rejecting both; Renaissance humanism rejected the Gothic culture of the medieval age in favour of a new interpretation of pagan antiquity in order to reinvigorate Christianity; the post-modern came as a reinterpretation of the modern. The creative renewal of the past would thus appear to be a significant feature of the European heritage. One of the difficulties with long-term historical analysis—such as the concern of this book with an interpretation of the entire course of European history—is that it runs the risk of path dependency and ‘exceptionalism’, for instance the fallacy of attributing to early civilizations or religion a determining power over the present. The aforementioned notion of an elemental problematic is one way to avoid this, but it too runs the risk, as best exemplified by Weberor Marx, of giving to it a determining power.14 This is one reason why most historians15 avoid long-run accounts of history or when they do so they offer only a circumscribed narrative account, which ultimately explains nothing, for it offers only description and at best a limited causal explanation restricted to a short period (see Sewell 2005, Chapter 3). However, it is possible to offer a diachronic or long-run analysis of history if due consideration is given to the prevalence of rupture, the existence of developmental logics and the fact that historical outcomes are always contingent while producing structural patterns. To understand such contingencies, synchronic analysis is essential in order to explain how specific choices or courses of action are selected at specific points and how arising from these selections specific discourses are formed. Long-run structural variables become transformed in particular moments by the choices social actors make leading to social change, and thus, apparently historically embedded paths undergo radical transformation producing structural outcomes.16 It is the analysis of these that are the focus for the sociologist.

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Many of these issues concerning continuity and rupture relate to some very basic questions as to when a developmental path set in and thus when we can speak of Europe as such. The argument that Europe was basically defined by the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome must be rejected (it is argued in the Part 1 that these civilizations rather provided cultural orientations for Europe but did not define it). The position taken in this book is that the mainstream argument that the basic form of Europe was set in the Middle Ages is on the whole difficult to contest if this is seen as a common starting point, despite its emphasis on Western European history. However, this perspective does not account for the formation of modernity, which is a yet later phenomenon, and for colonialism. Indeed, the closer we look at the inception of modernity, the later it becomes. As Stråth and Wagner (2016) argue, Europe in the nineteenth century was not particularly modern. Although the term ‘modern’ has a long lineage, going back to the early Christianity, it should not be projected back on to early history without distorting the facts of history (Wickham 2016: 3). Modernity has been continuously reshaped and with it so has the idea of Europe. Both the ideas of Europe and modernity do not have stable meanings but evolve and shift in history as a result of changing circumstances.

Internal Versus External Accounts As noted above, accounts of Europe tend to be either endogenous— explaining the rise of Europe by reference exclusively to internal processes—or exogenous, where the emphasis is on the relation to the wider world. The former has constituted the dominant tradition in historical scholarship, but there is now a clear move in the direction of the latter. This is due in no small measure to the signal work of global historians such as Fernand Braudel, William McNeill and Marshall Hodgson and comparative historical sociologists such as S. N. Eisenstadt and Immanuel Wallerstein, who laid the foundations for much of contemporary scholarship on global linkages and effectively brought an end to the older Eurocentric accounts of world history in which Europe, always narrowly defined, could somehow explain itself or that it was sufficient

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to invoke a ‘European exceptionalism’. However, as argued above, the emphasis on the external context while being a necessary corrective to the Eurocentric inclined histories of the past cannot in itself provide an alternative. For instance, it cannot explain the internal transformation of Christianity as a result of the various traditions of dissent since the fifteenth century, class conflict or, for instance, the institutional transformation of the European university system or the invention of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Nonetheless, the position taken in this book is that a stronger emphasis on the global context is needed rather than seeing Europe as somehow a world within itself and that the external and internal perspectives are both required. For example, the revolutionary breakthroughs in European science of the seventeenth century cannot be fully accounted for without a consideration of the earlier appropriation of Islamic and Chinese science. However, to borrow something or to share a source does not determine the use to which it is put. The Chinese invented paper, but Europeans invented printing. The upshot of this is that while the very notion of the unity and particularity of Europe must be considerably relativized, a perspective is still needed on internal logics of development or what can also be called developmental paths. Without this, it is not possible to account for specificity or to comprehend history. The idea of Europe is a reflexive awareness on the part of the participants and an analytical category for the social theorist seeking to make sense of European specificity without succumbing to Eurocentrism. There are many methodological questions that need to be addressed. For example, how much weight should be given to connections and more generally to external factors? Are such external factors to be seen as influences or as major determining powers? The answer surely must be that some are only influences while others are of major determining powers, while yet others are catalysts. A stronger position is that there is no internality and no externality: the only reality is the fact of entanglements. This position offers a solution to the problem of what is the basic matrix that undergoes change, but in the final analysis begs the question of what is the reality in question. Such confusion arises because ultimately all social phenomena are of hybrid origin, but in time become new realities. The global context is also historically variable in its importance: it is ­crucial for an understanding of some episodes and events, less for others.

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My tentative conclusion is that a global approach to Europe is absolutely essential, but it does not in the end provide a solution to all questions about the making of modernity. It offers a corrective of the illusions of exceptionality and exemplarity, but does not in itself tell how developmental paths take shape. A lot of European history happened outside Europe, but a lot also happened within Europe and while much of that history has been shaped by the global context, it was also structured by its own developmental logics.

Specificity Versus Relativity While the trend in recent scholarship has been to relativize the idea of a unified and authentic European tradition, it is evident that a notion of European specificity is still needed, since it cannot be credibly argued that there is no difference between Europe and the rest of the world. The relativization of European specificity as reflected in some of the aforementioned points—generally concerning conflict, divisions and heterogeneity—has had value in bringing a much needed critical perspective to bear, but the danger is the loss of perspective and conceptual confusion. In this book, a strong argument is given on European specificity, but which will require both a definition and a consideration of Europe in terms of a theoretical framework. While we should be critical of naturalized conceptions of Europe as a geographically or culturally determined space, it is nonetheless possible to use the term in a meaningful sense. This will depend on the purpose to which it is put, for some objectives are better met by taking nations or regions or the global system as the point of reference. No concept can be used to explain everything and no category can be applied to every instance. It is therefore the case that Europe may be for some purposes an appropriate concept or category of reference. Instead of seeing Europe as a continent, the Occident or as a self-defining civilization, it should instead be seen as a world historical region shaped temporarily as well as spatially in a long-run historical process. In this view, then, the question as to the specificity of Europe is above all a question of the nature of the structural pattern of European

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history, for to speak of unity and cultural specificity is to refer to the formation of cultural and social structures that establish such commonality as a result of contingent conditions and choices. Such a re-historicization of Europe would lead to the conclusion that its form has not been finally set. There is no essence, so there is no limit to future directions. The question of the specificity of a phenomenon—in this case Europe—is not about looking for the positive aspects; it also includes the negative characteristics. In this sense, then, it is not an attempt to redeem the European heritage, but to reconstruct its lineages.

Towards a Theoretical Framework On the basis of the above considerations, the presuppositions of this book are that unity is co-terminus with diversity, and conceived of in terms of a developmental model in the sense of a historical process, it makes possible diversity. Diversity may be logically prior to unity where the latter establishes an integrative framework, but diversity requires some kind of matrix to define its elements. Both terms make sense only in relation to a constitutive structure. In other words, the idea of Europe as a world historical region refers to a constitutive process of structuration that produces unifying trends—that is societal structures and cultural models—as well as variations of those trends. These variations make possible diversity. Europe is constructed in a historical process in which commonality is produced through ongoing variation. Such commonality can be seen in terms of shared historical experiences as well as shared memories of those experiences. Historical memory is central to any notion of the continuity of a historical tradition. But structure-forming effects go beyond memory and cultural traditions to include the reflexively developed application of cognitive and normative ideas, such as freedom, equality, democracy, personal and collective autonomy, the idea of the individual, all of which derive from the cognitive order of society (Strydom 2011b). An important mechanism of change is adaptation, including appropriations from encounters with other cultural worlds. This results in entanglements and in hybrid cultural forms, which in time take on the

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solidity of fixed cultures that have lost their contact with their diverse backgrounds. It may also result in so-called hyphenated cultures, such as Greco-Roman, Romano-Germanic or constructions that rediscovered a commonality that had been forgotten, as in the notion of a ‘Judaeo-Christianity’ tradition. In these instances, the hyphen indicates two different, but linked cultures or ones that have a shared but distant common origin, but have undergone separate paths of development. This process does not exclude contradictions or require uniformity; it may also be multi-directional and uneven; and it may take the form of ‘invented traditions’, since the commonality produced may not have an authentic relation to its assumed past, but is a product of modern society seeking to define itself in relation to history (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Moreover, societal learning is also part of this as are regressions. Habermas’s notion of history having a learning process is an important part of the argument in this book.17 This does not mean that history moves by a cumulative logic towards ever greater progress, but that in the course of history societies evolve ways of problem-solving and living together that take communicative forms as opposed to recourse to violence to settle disputes or recourse to the received wisdom of the past. This is because human beings have the capacity for reflexivity, enabling them to articulate new relations to the world and new interpretations of established ideas and the development of knowledge.18 Such forms of learning are the basis of the possibility of culture and make possible solidarity and egalitarianism at least as an aspiration and provide normative or counterfactual reference points for modern societies to reach beyond themselves. This can be seen as occurring in three highly contingent steps, for one does not necessarily lead to the next: generative processes, transformative processes and institutional processes.19 Generative processes involve the creation of new ideas, or new claim-making, which cannot be accommodated within the given order. Such processes are associated with social movements, which are generally the initiators of social change. Transformative processes follow from the selection of the variety generated and occur typically when a dominant social movement brings about major societal change through the mobilization of large segments of the population and the transformation of the political system.20 Transformative processes occur typically when a dominant

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social movement brings about a major societal change through the mobilization of large segments of the population and the transformation of the political system. Institutionalizing processes occur when a social movement succeeds in institutionalizing its project in a new societal framework, for example in the establishment of a new state or in new legislation and brings about the reorganization of state and society. These processes can be observed to be at work in all modern societies, making possible their creative renewal. Moreover, they have both pluralizing and unifying tendencies insofar as they engender structural patterns that become the basis of modernity. While the tradition of critical theory as reflected in the social theory of Habermas is very much in the background to this book, it does need to be stated that this theoretical tradition itself suffers from latent Eurocentrism in that Europe has always been not only the reference point, but the categories of universality and modernity that are so central to Habermas’ thought are all entirely predicated on European history. While the earlier Frankfurt School theorists were ultimately concerned with the rise of totalitarianism and the holocaust, Habermas has sought to reinvigorate critical theory in a new direction that aims to capture emancipatory currents in history. However, none of these critical theorists addressed European colonialism or racism, other than the problem of anti-semitism, which was always curiously regarded as a separate phenomenon. Now, while this incipient Eurocentrism severely limited the critical scope of critical theory, the communicative turn with Habermas gave too much prominence to European modernity, which for Habermas was the essential form of modernity. This approach, despite some concessions to critics, never took on board the global turn in historical scholarship nor the contributions of post-colonial thought. Habermas’s cosmopolitan leanings have more or less entirely confined cosmopolitanism to the European tradition of liberalism. The position taken in this book is that there is no reason why the major theoretical innovations in Habermas’s work need to be empirically rooted in European history. Thus, societal learning, critique and reflective rationality are not products of European modernity but capacities of all societies and civilizations.21

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The broad theoretical framework in this book is also drawn from recent developments in social theory and historical sociology concerning the notion of modernity, and is influenced by Wagner’s work on the theory of modernity and Arnason’s work on civilizations (Arnason 2003a; Wagner 1994, 2009, 2012). As used in this book, modernity is a condition that involves the actualization of regulative ideas such as freedom, equality and autonomy and their realization in the modern world; it is an emancipatory condition that proclaims human autonomy, both individual and collective, as an aspiration for modern times and that this must be realized in the concrete institutional order of society. However, unlike Wagner, I see the social condition of modernity, which I refer to as a societal model, as a structure-forming configuration shaped by the relationship between capitalism/market society, state formation and civil society. Modernity thus entails ideas of freedom, liberty and autonomy, which derive not from modernity per se, but from what Strydom calls the cognitive order of society and are, as such, trans-historical in that are not products of any single part of the world, despite the fact that they have become important parts of the cultural models of modern societies and took root at a fairly early stage in the formation of Europe. There is also not simply one transformative idea, as Wagner claims, such as autonomy, but many, and it is often the combination of these ideas that make possible the specific form of a particular variant of modernity (e.g. the liberal, socialist, republican variants of political modernity were products of different appropriations of the ideas of freedom, equality, autonomy, self- government, individualism and social justice). These are part of what I call the cultural model of society22 and take the form of what Charles Taylor has termed a ‘social imaginary’, namely a future-oriented projection of the possibilities within the present (see Taylor 2004). Modernity is thus marked by the belief that human agency can transform the world in the image of a possible future. However, these ideas of modernity are in tension with the social order since, for either the existing societal model resists modernity or is incompletely realized in practice, leading to the feeling that modern society is fragmented, a theme central to social thought from Rousseau to Hegel and the classical sociologists. Thus, as many contemporary theorists—most notably,

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Arnason, Castoriadis, Habermas, Touraine, Honneth and Wagner— have argued there is a central conflict at the heart of modernity, between communicative rationality and instrumental rationality, between democracy and capitalism, between autonomy and power, different orders of recognition etc. This dual face of modernity gives to modern societies a dynamism and a creative force, since modern societies try to resolve or overcome the contradiction between the ideas of modernity and the concrete form modern society takes. The result, to use Kolakowski’s (1990) formulation, is that modernity is ‘on endless trial’. However, this does not mean that everything is entirely open, for modern societies have created structural forms. The various forms modernity have taken are determined by the relationship between capitalism, the state and civil society, as there has never been one configuration. Such structural configurations reflect the interpretation of the transformative ideas associated with modernity. The idea of Europe is itself one of these transformative ideas, and the way its realization is pursued depends on the selection and combination of cognitive order ideas (e.g. freedom, equality, solidarity, social justice) with it. It is this process of selection and combination that separates liberals, republican, conservatives and socialists. For this reason, modernity cannot simply be reduced to one basic orientation. Modernity thus needs to be defined to include cultural structures along with social, political and economic dimensions, which Stuart Hall (1992) considers to constitute the four main processes of modernity. Thus defined, modernity is not only a general theoretical framework, but a ‘middle-range’ theory with explanatory powers. In other words, the idea of modernity should not be confined only to the cultural dimension—as is the tendency in much of the literature, which tends towards an overtly philosophical conception of modernity—nor reduced to societal structures as in classical modernization theory, but involves cultural and social structures. This approach to modernity recognizes the plurality of historical forms, often referred to, following Eisenstadt (2003) as ‘multiple modernities’ but better considered, following Wagner (2012), as ‘varieties of modernity’, and that modernity is not necessarily European, but exists in numerous world settings. Moreover, modernity is not a historically path-dependent order, but is

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historically contingent and variable, since, first, the ideas of modernity, that is the cultural model, can be differently interpreted and, second, will be realized in different institutional ways. However, the varieties of modernity approach are insufficient, since what needs to be accounted for in specific instances is the formation of enduring structures. These structures are produced by societal models and by the cultural models of societies in particular times and places. They are given form by social actors from specific selections and combinations of ideas. This book concerns European modernity, which is itself a specific form that modernity took in Europe, roughly from the sixteenth century onwards, when the first consciousness of modernity arose around a new critical humanism, as Stephen Toulmin (1990) has argued in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. While not reducible to an age as such, it makes sense to locate it as far as the European context is concerned as having its beginning in the early modern period. The argument is that Europe, while having civilizational antecedents, is largely a product of modernity. The term itself was rarely used before the early modern period and only with modernity did the idea of Europe acquire a meaning that was not purely geographical. Modernity is the constitutive matrix that gave to Europe a direction and meaning. It cannot be emphasized enough that this modernity was simply the form modernity took in Europe, which does not mean that this is the only or universal form. As far as Europe is concerned, it does not make much sense to project it backwards into early history, despite the obvious existence of antecedents, in the sense of ‘early modernities’ (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998). The project of autonomy crystallized only in the early modern period and did not take on an enhanced momentum until the age of revolution from the late eighteenth century. A feature of modernity is the accelerated momentum of global connections and flows of ideas, a movement that is multi-directional. So, for instance, as Bayly (2004: 471) has pointed out, the language of rights was variously appropriated throughout the world in the revolutionary period from the end of the eighteenth century (see also Hunt 2010). This illustrates the tendency that once something has been invented it does not simply go away, but remains as a resource and is taken up in different ways. The history of modern societies is thus characterized, for instance, by

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the tendency towards the amplification of democracy. Once the seeds of democracy were set, they had often startling results that were never fully domesticated. The upshot of this approach, then, is that European modernity unfolded around a specific societal model, the chief characteristic of which was that neither the state nor capitalism entirely dominated society since both had to be balanced and accommodate claim-making from civil society. So a particular model of modernity developed in Europe in which the ideas of modernity influenced the shape of society in a very specific way. A key aspect of the shape of European modernity was the prevalence of a strong politics of solidarity emanating from class struggle and a relation between state and capitalism that set limits to the capacity of either to dominate entirely the social order. Europe as a result became neither entirely ruled by capital nor by a hegemonic state. Europe modernity unfolded over the centuries through contestation over its societal model and was marked by various crises; it was also realized at different speeds and with national and regional variations. This approach does not deny the pre-modern history of Europe as formative in the making of modern Europe, but rather places it in a wider context. The argument, outlined in the first section of the book, is that the formative process by which Europe was constituted was an inter-civilizational constellation of interacting civilizations rather than a primary Western Civilization. These were the Greek and Roman civilizations, the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions, the Byzantine off-spring of Rome and its Russian successor. Europe emerged from a formative process in which many cultures were involved and what was produced in the end was not a common civilization, but a matrix that was highly plural, albeit with high levels of commonality and at times high levels of reflexivity. The ancient civilizations bequeathed to modernity certain orientations and values, but the form it took, however varied, cannot be reduced to the civilizational background. The civilizational background is presented in this book as the sources of the European heritage and its modernity, but due to the globalizing nature of modernity these sources became considerably diluted. This perspective draws attention to Latour’s (1993) argument in his book, We Have Never Been Modern, that modernity produced forms of knowledge

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that purified themselves of their pre-modern past, which is a history of hybrid forms. Although Latour was writing about the sciences, the point is relevant to the historical formation of modernity. While the ancient civilizations have lost their determining power over the present, they have provided some of the most important orientations for modernity. This approach, as noted above, is influenced by ‘civilizational analysis’ as developed by Johann Arnason (2003a). However, in departure from Arnason, my analysis of modern Europe and the predicament of the present requires a broader framework than one based on civilizational influences and encounters, for the closer we get to the present the more difficult it becomes to account for change by recourse to civilizational logics. The most powerful influences on the present derive from the reflexive appropriation of new ideas and the development of normative and cognitive horizons that have been opened up with modernity. Civilizational influences provide common starting points and cultural orientations, and while they certainly do impact on the formation of modernity, they lose their power to shape the present. The framework of modernity offers the most promising way to make sense of Europe. It provides an interpretative paradigm capable of contextualizing the idea of Europe along with other discourses of Europe in institutional processes as well as generative and transformative ones and thus avoids the limits of purely constructionist approaches, which tend to see everything only in terms of discourses. It is also a way to make sense of long-term historical processes, which from the perspective of a theory of modernity can be seen as a variable configuration of state, capitalism and civil society relations. In these configurations, which define the societal model, the influence of civilizational legacies is also to be found shaping the specific form of society at a particular juncture. An additional advantage of this approach is that it builds into the very understanding of modernity an interpretative and reflexive dimension: modern society understands itself to be modern, and as part of this self-understanding, the normative consciousness of modernity—that is its cultural model—is built into the structure of society and its publics. This is why modernity is accompanied by a self-transformative condition for it involves the constant questioning of the world and the pursuit of different visions of how the social world should be organized.

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However, in departure from purely interpretative accounts of modernity, I am arguing for greater attention to the developmental dynamics arising from specific societal forms and also from the reflexive appropriation of cognitive ideas. Finally, the approach offers a way to understand the specificity of Europe from a global perspective as one version of the wider condition of modernity as a world historical region. A comparison of world historical regions and their forms of modernity can tell us more about the nature of European modernity than what can be discovered from an analysis confined to Europe.23

Defining Europe The account of modernity provided goes some way to defining Europe: there is neither a primary origin—geographical or cultural—that gives Europe its identity nor an external Other against which it formed its identity. Nor is there a historical centre that has remained constant, but shifting ones and which do not coincide with geography, though arguably the Carolingian kingdom constituted the most long-lasting historical core, as Jacques le Goff (2006) has argued. In any case, this was not a geographically defined entity. It is probably more accurate to see the period after the end of the Carolingian empire, which ended in the tenth century, as more significant. The cultural or civilizational basis of Europe was established by the seventeenth century. It was based on the early synthesis of Greek philosophy, Roman civil law and Christian theology. This synthesis was complete by the twelfth century, but was further transformed by Renaissance humanism in the fifteenth century and again by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (see Huff 2009, 2011). The result was the crystallization of a European cultural model that provided European modernity with an epistemic core that underwent further transformation. Europe was formed in a long historical process involving the interaction of many cultures and the subsequent transformation of the new forms by modernity. The referential basis of Europe is not only different cultures—within and beyond Europe—nor the social and material

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aspects of society, but also the sphere of ideas, in particular those that were reflexively engendered by modernity. These were not set in a permanent form with the rise of modernity from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but continue to take on new forms. Modernity is not settled for once and for all, but is a continuous project and may entail rival projects, as was the case for much of the twentieth century with the collision of liberal democracy, fascism and communism (which, as argued in Chapter 11, can be considered to be rival projects of modernity). Several theorists—Bauman, Lefort, Heller, Eisenstadt, Wagner—have characterized modernity as a condition in which there is a loss of markers of certainty with the result that everything is open to interpretation. The pursuit of stability and certainty in a world in which everything is open and contingent defines the modern spirit.24 What has remained relatively constant are the reference points—the ideas of modernity—but which are differently interpreted. While these are variously emphasized in social and political theory as autonomy (Wagner 2012) or freedom (Honneth 2011) or justice (Forst 2002), modernity entails not just one cognitive idea but several. These ideas themselves undergo change and reconfiguration as well as different combinations emerging. Thus, the idea of Europe was once associated with the idea of freedom, while in later times a shift occurred whereby it became associated with the idea of rights and justice. It has also been associated with love (see Passerini 1998, 2009). Once ideas become embodied in social and political forms, they inevitably undergo change in their meaning. Once the idea of Europe became embodied in the institutional form of the EU since 1958, its meaning unavoidably changed. However, its meaning is not confined to the EU and can take unexpected new forms. As argued in later chapters, one important aspect of the idea of Europe in recent years is anti-war. As noted, this characterization of modernity applies to any society that considers itself to be modern, which today includes more or less every part of the world. In this sense, modernity is a singular condition (Wagner 2012; Jameson 2003) while taking multiple forms. European modernity can be defined around three central dimensions, which can be seen as the concrete embodiment of the idea of Europe: a conception of the public, a conception of the individual and a conception of the

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world. These three dimensions crystallize the concept of modernity discussed above in terms of cultural and societal models, while also taking account of the relevant legacies of the inter-civilizational background and degrees of reflexivity. But such models are not permanent and can take on new shapes. The first concerns the basic form of the European social model, which can be seen in terms of a conception of the public defined in relation to solidarity. One of the characteristics of Europe is its concern with solidarity and social justice, as reflected in the history of social struggles over rights, conflicts between democracy and capitalism, and in modern times with the institutionalization of social citizenship (see Karangiannis 2007) and social democracy. The affirmation of solidarity and the constitution of the public have been the basis of a European tradition of political community that has often been neglected in accounts of the European heritage that have tended to overemphasize other features. As mentioned, a related idea is opposition to war. This was a major impetus in the project of European integration since 1945; it became took on a more pervasive and radical form in 1968 with European-wide revolts, and has taken on a new significance since the Iraq War in 2003. Second, the European heritage has a strong relation to a conception of the individual, in particular one that asserts the autonomy of the individual. The sources of this lie within Christianity and in Greek philosophy. It is not possible to conceive of Europe without a notion of Europeans, though the latter emerged only since about the sixteenth century and with the Renaissance and Enlightenment acquired an augmented meaning, which affirmed the concern with solidarity, for the autonomy of the individual and the autonomy of society are linked. The emphasis on the individual in European thought and in social practices had the paradoxical effect that it produced a certain tension between the individual and Europe, as it has between the pursuit of individual and collective liberty. In the past two decades, there has been a new interest in the idea of Europeans as opposed to Europe and the possibility of European identities. Third, Europe entails a conception of the world. Along with the idea of Asia, the idea of Africa, the idea of Latin America and the idea of Europe reflect a consciousness that is defined in relation to rest of the world. All notions of Self and Other have been mediated through the

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wider category of the World. Europeans became reflexively conscious of themselves as the inhabitants of Europe as distinct from other parts of the world, Asia, Africa, the Americas, the definitions of which changed over the centuries. The world projections of Europe included of course the equation of Europe with the world when Europe was a hegemonic order in the age of Empire. In the present day, Europe is a post-hegemonic and, as argued in Chapter 13, a post-Western power. Against the older notion of a continent, the idea of Europe is better conceived of as a world historical region. All three dimensions entail a form of knowledge, for Europe is an object that must be reflexively known, and in this respect, specific forms of knowledge gave to Europe the means of gaining knowledge of itself and its past. Such forms of knowledge include memories as embodied in literature and arts, public memories associated with political and military events, philosophy and the human and social sciences. It may have been a feature of Europe more than elsewhere that such memories and modes of knowledge were given a durable form in institutions such as academies and universities. As Foucault has shown, Europe devised elaborate ‘technologies of the self ’ by which the individual can be known. It also devised geographical and historical forms of knowledge that constructed the world according to its own self-image and categories using such notions as continents, civilizations, historical periods and races. All of these forms of knowledge, for good and for bad, worked to produce a European cultural model.

The Possibility of Cosmopolitanism In what sense can it be said that Europe might be cosmopolitan? I do not argue that Europe is cosmopolitan or that it is more cosmopolitan than other parts of the world. However, the question of the nature and extent of cosmopolitanism is highly relevant to the theme of this book for four reasons. First, there is a long tradition in European political thought that invokes the idea of cosmopolitanism from the Greek Stoics to Kant and developments in late twentieth century thought. The cosmopolitan idea

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exists to varying degrees of tension with the republican tradition and the idea of the nation. Social and political theorists have related cosmopolitanism to the politics of solidarity, in particular in the Kantian tradition taken up by Habermas of ‘solidarity among strangers’. This is relevant to an understanding of political community in Europe and the extent to which it can be widened in an inclusive direction. It should be stated that this does not imply that cosmopolitanism is distinctively European, for despite the Western genealogy of the word it is a condition that is present to varying degrees in any society. It may be the case that some non-Western societies are more cosmopolitan than Europe. In addition to the Kantian tradition of cosmopolitanism, there is also the important tradition associated with Alexander von Humboldt and the notion of a world consciousness (Kozlarek 2011; Walls 2009). We can also add to these traditions the Marxist legacy of the cosmopolitanism, as epitomized in the phrase in the Communist Manifesto that the ‘workers of the world have no country’. Second, as a mode of inquiry, cosmopolitanism offers an alternative approach to history from Eurocentric ones or approaches that see the relation between Europe and the rest of the world in terms of an orientalist model of domination or one of an irreconcilable clash of civilizations (see Bhambra and Narayan 2016). Cosmopolitanism is thus relevant to the concern with identifying the communicative relations between Europe and the world, without being reducible to the condition of dialogue, as in the notion of a dialogue of civilizations. It offers a perspective that challenges the Eurocentric assumptions concerning the uniqueness of Europe as well as the orientalist notion that the unity of Europe was formed only against an external enemy. While not all relations between Europe and the rest of world can be considered to be cosmopolitan any more than they can be regarded as based on domination or a response to an external enemy, it is important to identify those that are tangentially cosmopolitan. Moreover, many expressions of cosmopolitanism arose as the unintended consequences of non-cosmopolitan events. So it is possible that Europe through the reflexivity of modern culture became cosmopolitan in spite of a non-cosmopolitan past. Third, cosmopolitanism offers a critical perspective on the historical process and contemporary politics since the values and principles

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it is concerned with are largely counterfactual, in the sense of being opposed to the status quo. At the heart of cosmopolitan lies an imaginary, a way of imagining the world. Cosmopolitanism therefore tends to be in a relation of tension with social reality, but it is nonetheless part of social reality insofar as it concerns the raising of normative claims and the exploration of potentials contained within the present. From a cosmopolitan perspective, the question is not whether social reality is cosmopolitan, but to what extent it is or potentially might be. As such, it refers to an empirical condition that is present to varying degrees in terms of normative counterfactual ideas, in the projects of social actors seeking to bring about social change and in institutional forms. It is a misunderstanding of cosmopolitanism to see it as another term for the transnationalization of the state or to refer to a globalization. Cosmopolitan phenomena may be present more in social struggles than in institutional forms, which, as argued earlier, need to be in relation to generative and transformative processes. To uncover this logic is the task of a reconstructive critical theory of society and history.25 Finally, despite its origins in Greek thought, cosmopolitanism is largely a development that came with modernity and is therefore relevant to the analysis of modernity. With modernity came the sense of the global connectiveness of the world; indeed, the very notion of the world was produced with modernity as the extent of its domain was in principle limitless. Modernity gave to cosmopolitanism the sense of people being connected and thus set the stage for the enlargement of the scope of the project of human autonomy. My approach is guided by a critical cosmopolitanism.26 This involves an emphasis on (1) the identification of openness to the world in the sense of the broadening of the moral and political horizon of societies, (2) self and societal transformation in the light of the encounter with the Other, (3) the exploration of otherness within the self, (4) critical responses to globality and (5) the identification of transformative potentials within the present. This conception of cosmopolitanism is post-universalistic in that it does not proclaim universal values, but concerns the reflexive appropriation of universalistic values and principles in specific cases. It therefore entails a degree of relativization, self-problematization and reflexivity.

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From the perspective of critical cosmopolitanism, the task is to assess processes of self-transformation in which spaces of discourse open up and cultural models take shape. A critical cosmopolitan theory proceeds on the assumption that the cultural models of society contain learning potential in terms of moral and political normative criteria. It operates on the assumption that culture is a site of conflicting interpretations of the world. As used in this book, cosmopolitanism is a condition that makes possible the widening of the cognitive horizons of societies and individuals. This dimension of cosmopolitanism ties it closely with the idea of modernity, which is a condition that is inextricably connected with globality.

Structure of the Book The structure of the book is a balance between chronologically and thematically organized topics. The first part of the book looks at the civilizational background to Europe. Chapter 1 discusses the notion of European civilization in terms of an ‘inter-civilizational constellation’. This notion serves as a background for the following four chapters that comprise Part I on the main civilizational currents that provided the principal cultural orientations of the European heritage: the Greek and Roman civilizations along with the Judaic tradition; Christianity; Byzantium; and the Orthodox tradition within Christianity as taken up by Russia; the Islamic world, including the Ottoman heritage and European Islam. Part II concerns the emergence of modernity. The seven chapters cover the sixteenth century and generally the Renaissance, the early modern period, the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century to First World War and so-called short twentieth century. Chapters 10 and 11 deal respectively with the notion of Europe as a world historical region. Part III deals with the post-1989 context. Chapter 13 is a wide-ranging one on Europe since 1989, especially on the significance of the EU; Chapter 14 is specially addressed to the contemporary crisis of capitalism since 2008; Chapter 15 concerns the rise of nationalism; Chapter 16 returns to the question of the European heritage from the perspective of recent debates.

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In theoretical terms, to sum up, the book aims to make sense of the course of European history through an account, on the one hand, of the formation of a European cultural model that emerges out of the legacies of the inter-civilizational background and, on the other, how in relation to this cultural model a societal structure takes shape. The tension between both gives form to Europe’s path to modernity and defines the specificity of its heritage. European modernity is characterized by the formation of a societal model that has been strongly shaped by the creative tension between capitalism and democracy and between republicanism and cosmopolitanism. The structuring process that has shaped Europe made possible a model of modernity that has placed a strong emphasis on the values of social justice and solidarity. These values have been reflectively appropriated in different periods to produce different interpretations, societal outcomes and a multiplicity of projects of modernity.

Notes 1. Delanty and Rumford (2005), Therborn (1995) and Roche (2015) are examples of such trends. 2. See Anderson (2007), Braguue (2000), Morin (1987), Stråth (2000, 2002), and Wagner (2009, 2012). See also Fontana (1995) and on the idea of Europe Pagden (2002). 3. Stråth and Wagner’s book was published some years after the first edition of this book. 4.  See Adams et al. (2005) and Delanty and Isen (2003) for general accounts of trends in historical sociology. See Sewell (2005) and Tilly (1984) are good examples of major sociologically based studies on problems in historical analysis. 5. ‘A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western Civilization, and in Western Civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value’ (Weber 1978: 13).

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6. See my book The European Heritage: A Critical Re-interpretation (2018) where I attempt to develop this line of argument in more detail. 7. The volume I edited, Europe and Asia (Delanty 2006), is such an example of an approach that criticizes both the orientalist approach and the ‘clash of civilizations’ argument. See also Delanty (2018a). 8. See Anthony (2010), Mallory (1989), Pereltsvaig (2017), and Renfrew (1987). 9. This perspective informs the idea of the European Union as a new kind of empire (see Beck and Grande 2007; Zielonka 2006). 10. A full account of the notion of structure is not possible in the present context. See Giddens (1984) for an influential theory of structure and its relation to agency. See also for a discussion of the concept of structure in relation to agency, social change and culture, Chapter 5 of Sewell (2005). 11. However, arguments for hybridity are important insofar as they have a de-masking function, demonstrating how taken-for-granted entities are composed of diverse components. 12. I am following Klooger’s interpretation of Castoriadis here: ‘We must learn to think the unity of society without conflating it with homogeneity; we must learn to imagine a form of unity within which heterogeneity is essential’ (Klooger 2013: 503). 13. On the problem of geographical conceptions of continents, see Lewis and Wigen (1997). 14. In the case of Weber, the basic animus was the problem of the explanation of human suffering and in the case of Marx the class struggle arising from the experience of injustice. 15. For an exception, see North et al (2009). 16. For an application, see O’Mahony and Delanty (1998). 17. See Habermas (1979) and the debate on collective learning processes by Eder (1999) and Strydom (1987, 1993). 18.  This is a perspective variously present in the work of Castoriadis, Eisenstadt and Habermas. 19. This model has been developed in Delanty (2012a). See also Strydom (2012). 20. This can be broken into two, selection from variety and consequent cultural and societal transformation. 21. See my Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Theory. See also Allen (2016).

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22. I agree with Strydom (2011b) that properly speaking they are essentially part of the meta-cognitive order, but are realized within specific cultural models. See Delanty (2010). 23. See also Domingues (2011), Therborn (2002, 2003), Wagner (2011), Stråth and Wagner (2016). 24. For some time, this was a typical characterization of post-modernity, but is now seen as a feature of modernity and that the post-modern is a part of the project of modernity rather than something that succeeds it (Delanty 2000a). 25. On the methodology of a reconstructive critical theory, see Strydom (2011a) and Delanty (2011b). 26. I have developed this in Delanty (2009a, 2018b). See also Delanty (2012a).

Part I Sources of the Europe Heritage

1 The European Inter-Civilizational Constellation

Since the emergence of a European consciousness from about the sixteenth century, the question has been frequently posed as to the meaning of Europe. This was bound to be a contested matter, and since then, many definitions of Europe have been controversial. For some, Europe is a political project, while for others it is a civilizational heritage that has been principally realized in different national forms. There is also little agreement on the geographical limits of Europe and how geography relates to culture and politics. It has often been noted that Europe is a peninsula of Asia, but where Europe ends and Asia begins cannot be answered by geography alone. The large expanse of land that lies between both was the way through which the peoples of Europe arrived in the great migrations from Asia over thousands of years. Geography unites more than it divides and thus does not offer a ready-made natural barrier that might be the basis of a definition. The narrow isthmus that separates Europe from Africa at the straits of Gibraltar once made possible an Islamic civilization that occupied the two sides of the Mediterranean Sea, but in later times was seen as a frontier between ‘continents’. The notion of Europe as a continent is itself a construction that is not based on a geographical landmass that is self-defining.1 © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_1

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Such definitions are cultural creations of history. The allure of the idea of Europe in part resides in its cultural opacity than in the clarity of a geographical form or a historical explanation. The overall geographical size of Europe, including the Western regions of the Slavonic-speaking area such as the Ukraine, is comparable to the size of China and is just a little smaller than Brazil, but arguably reveals a greater cultural diversity. There is no common language or religion binding Europe. Geographical factors do not define Europe, as they do not define most other large-scale countries or world regions. However, geographical factors are not irrelevant to history and culture. The fairly temperate climate and low altitude influenced patterns of migration, settlement and agriculture, prior to the industrial age. The continent is relatively accessible through land—lacking major natural barriers, such as unpassable mountain regions—and has benefited from being generally navigable by sea and by rivers. The Ural Mountains that supposedly mark the boundary of Europe and Asia in fact presented throughout history a lesser obstacle than the Alps that to a degree separated Northern and Southern Europe. The result was a relatively high degree of mutual knowledge of the existence of the different cultures and civilizations of Europe and Asia. This has prompted many geographers going back to Alexander von Humboldt to argue that there is no geographical distinction between Europe and Asia and that the former is a peninsula of Asia. Others have claimed that these notions are redundant and should be replaced by the wider category of Eurasia. However that would be to ignore the differences that do exist. While Asia covers a wider and more diverse areas and civilizations, Europe in contrast acquired a separate identity in the course of its shorter history. Since the sixteenth century, Europe has also been shaped by its interaction with the American continent. The shape of Europe is closely related to the seas that surround it. No point in Western Europe is more than 350 km from the sea, a distance that is doubled for much of Central Europe and reaches some 11,000 km for the Russian plains (Mollat du Jourdin 1993: 4–6). Moreover, the course of Europe’s rivers facilitates links between the seas and the agriculturally rich hinterlands. The rivers of Europe—the Rhine, Elbe, Volga, Loire, Rhone—flowed through habitable and fertile

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land and made possible a high degree of mobility within the region and were the locations of many cities. They were the arteries through which European culture flowed and from where Europeans sailed to other parts of the world. If Europe is a peninsula of Asia, it is itself composed of peninsulas: the Iberian, Italian, Balkan, Jutland and Scandinavian. These peninsulas along with its archipelagos—the British Isles and the Aegean archipelago—and seas—the Black Sea, Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Mediterranean—gave to Europe a form that gave shape to its history. It was waterways as much as land that shaped Europe. While these factors did not lead to a common culture due to the differences between North and South, East and West, they provided environmental and spatial conditions for the formation of the diverse cultures that emerged in Europe and gave to it the character of a world historical region. It may be said that the geography of Europe provided a form that made possible a relatively high degree of fluidity and mobility of peoples, knowledge, cultures and artefacts. More important than geography are the cultural and political definitions of Europe, which have changed over the course of history. The idea of Europe in the nineteenth century was very different from the early modern idea that arose with some of the first references to a European identity in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. All of these ideas of Europe were very different from the twentieth-century notion of Europe that came with the Cold War and the emergence of the European Union. Underlying these historical conceptions of Europe is an ever-changing geopolitical configuration shaped in space and in time by many forces. The resulting geopolitical configurations cannot be simply explained as an ‘idea’ or as a cultural construction that exists only as a symbolic imaginary. The interplay of power and culture within a geopolitical arena has often been interpreted as civilizational. It has generally been an implicit assumption that a civilizational form can be discerned in a long-term analysis of the geographical, cultural and political dimensions of European history. To speak of a civilization, or a civilizational heritage, involves the production of imaginary projections, but also entails more than mental constructions; it includes an institutional or societal order in which the material conditions of social life are produced and take on the character of a structure-forming process.

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It is by no means self-evident what the term civilization means and what is European civilization. The term civilization is fraught with ideological associations of Western leadership, Eurocentrism. Kenneth Clark’s classic work, Civilization, in 1969, portrayed European civilization through the lens of the arts. The notion of European civilization has often been associated with ideas of the superiority of the West and other Eurocentric notions that have now been mostly discarded. In the nineteenth century, the notion of civilization, more or less equated with Europe, was generally defined in terms of distinctions based on civilization versus barbarism. In this definition, there could only be one civilization for the non-Western world was deemed incapable of civilization save in the adoption of Western Civilization. It was a common notion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that cultures were subordinate to civilization. Cultures were largely national and the diversity of cultures, it was believed, reflected the diversity of nations and peoples while underlying all these cultures was a unitary notion of civilization. Several cultures competed to be the true representative of civilization, which was a singular and universal condition. Since Hegel, it was often thought, too, that civilization first arose in the East, but due to the alleged decadence of oriental cultures, it declined and was resurrected by the cultures of the West. European civilization has generally been regarded as the equivalent of ‘Western Civilization’, which as a supposedly universal condition was more or less equated with modernity and hence the idea of what has been called ‘Western Civilization’ as the universal reference point for all cultures to be measured if not also judged. However, the notion of European civilization has generally been discussed since the early twentieth century in terms of a notion of decline, as in the work of Toynbee and Spengler. Indeed, the very notion of ‘decline’ seems now to be part of the idea of civilization. This was in part a reversal of the preoccupation with progress since the Enlightenment, but it still left open the question if something survived the decent into decline or if the origins of Europe could be revived in a reaffirmation of the European spirit. Setting aside the now questionable equation of Europe with a singular notion of West, the idea of civilizations in the plural did not exist, for only culture could be plural—civilization was the

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universal dimension of culture. This tension between the universality of civilization and uniqueness of cultures lay at the centre of European Enlightenment thought, which celebrated reason, progress, science as well as the romantic pursuit of culture and national uniqueness. Since not every nation could be the greatest, the idea of cultural diversity was born. When historical and sociological scholarship finally recognized the plurality of civilizations, as in the pioneering work of classical sociologists such as Max Weber and the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, there was generally an implicit assumption of the uniqueness of the civilization that emerged within Europe. These scholars recognized the plurality of civilizations, but tended to see them as self-forming and separate from each other and based on relatively uniform cultures. In addition, even in cases where Eurocentrism was much less prevalent, teleological notions of a civilizational logic tended to prevail in studies of the non-Western world. In such accounts, influenced by modernization theory and the legacy of colonialism, it was generally assumed that the civilizations of the non-Western world would eventually adopt the Western model of modernity and in doing so would inherit the universalistic aspects of European civilization. Clearly, such assumptions based on the distinction of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies can no longer be uncritically taken for granted. While much of the world has been influenced by European civilization, it is increasingly recognized that this undoubted fact has not led to the absolute universality of European civilization, which has itself been influenced by non-Western Civilizations. The contemporary world more than ever since the rise of the West from about the sixteenth century is a multi-civilizational order in which there are radically different projects of modernity, none of which are simply the adaptation of Europe’s route to modernity. The historical experience and the circumstances of the present day suggest the importance of a plural notion of civilizations as overlapping, entangled and hyphenated. Thus, the term civilization should be used in the plural rather than in the singular. European civilization thus owes its origin to a plurality of civilizations whose interactions produce specific fusions. This seems preferable to dismissing the use of the term civilization altogether, since if it were discarded, there would be no other term to capture related cultural orientations

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and historical formations among families of societies. Rather than deny the existence of a civilizational heritage, it is more instructive to try to understand it and to do so in a way that is relevant to the present day.

Some Considerations in Defining Civilizations A critical and reflexive view of the idea of civilization suggests a condition that is not underpinned by a specific cultural, political or geographical set of given facts that are somehow prior to history or provide a template for later experiments. Civilizations are ongoing structureforming processes which create the very elements that define them. They are not immutable or predetermined, but broadly defined cultural orientations that shape otherwise diverse societies and are continually changed as a result of new interpretations. The upshot of this is an anti-essentialist notion of civilization as a transformative process in which various elements and dynamics shape a broad spectrum of societies in terms of their cultural orientations and institutional patterns. In this view, civilizations are not to be defined as closed systems locked in conflict with each other and based on primordial cultural codes or an origin that gives to history an enduring form. Civilizations have also been shaped in inter-civilizational encounters: they are not selfpositing. Virtually, every major world civilization has been influenced by another civilization: Japanese civilization incorporated elements of Chinese civilization which itself appropriated Buddhist culture from Indian civilization. For these reasons, there is no pure or self-contained culture or civilization. Such cultural entanglements also made possible the emergence of European civilization. Any account of civilizational history will have to address the inter-civilizational dimension as much as the intra-civilizational: Europe was shaped through relations with the non-European world as much as it was shaped from the cultures within (what was to become) Europe. Civilizations develop in nonlinear ways: there is no one simple path from barbarism to civilization and modernity, nor is there a general descent from civilization into barbarism. Accordingly, what is needed is a multidimensional concept of civilizational patterns, encounters and subsequent entanglements.

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In this account, the logic of the encounter with the culture of the Other is a key dimension of civilizational history. Such encounters take a diversity of forms, ranging from adaptations and borrowings, largescale institutional transfers, translations, migrations of elites or of whole populations, repudiations, reinterpretations, even violent clashes. Colonialism, since the sixteenth century, was of course one of the main ways in which Europe encountered the rest of the world. This did not exclude the possibility of more cosmopolitan encounters with the Other. Even before anything like a European consciousness emerged, Spanish colonization of the New World established a system of domination in which European civilization became embroiled with racism and cultural superiority. Cosmopolitan resistances and different forms of knowledge also took shape against this wider colonial culture that was to shape the course of European history. Together these currents form part of the European civilizational heritage. One of the most significant sites of civilizational encounters were universities. Universities throughout the Middle Ages were one of the most important places where other civilizations and cultures were studied. The process at work here can be understood as neither a matter of a clash of civilizations nor a dialogue: universities were sites where conflicting interpretations of the world became the subject of scholarly interest before they diffused in the wider society. But more generally, as will be argued in later chapters, much of the Renaissance and Enlightenment involved the interaction of civilizations and thus presupposed the possibility of dialogue and learning. The fact that the conflict between civilizations and their internal units was often more consequential than unity does not detract from the fact that civilizations were formed in part out of their mutual engagement with each other (see, e.g., Arjomand and Tiryakian 2004; Mozaffari 2002; Weingrow 2010). So what is a civilization?2 Four broad features define a civilization: a geopolitical configuration, institutional structures in which material life and power are embedded, cultural orientations and worldviews, and diasporic movements of peoples. As a geopolitical configuration, a civilization has a territorial dimension, which may be a world historical region. This does not have to be a very specifically defined territory, such as the territory of a state, and can be quite open. Most of

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the civilizations of the world have had a territorial basis, however undefined their frontiers have been, and have been associated with key cities. Indeed, most, if not all, of the major civilizations of the world were at some point in their history shaped by an imperial power and had an expanding border. An exception is the Judaic civilization, which was a diasporic civilization. But even this, although lacking an imperial centre, had in one of its later traditions, namely Zionism, a special relation to a specific territory. Second, civilizations also have a basis in material life and entail institutional structures in which resources and power are organized. These institutional structures are broader than specific societies and include what has been called ‘families of societies’. Thus, for example, the tradition of Roman law gave to European civilization an enduring institutional foundation as well as a tradition based on writing, which made historical memory possible. Without the institution of writing, civilizations would not have had a means of reproducing themselves (see Assmann 2011; Goody 1986; Goody et al. 1968). The emergence of capitalism was not necessarily specific to Europe, but, as Weber has shown, was a distinctive feature of Europe and can be seen as entailing a civilizational dimension. Third, civilizations have distinct cultural orientations or, what the historical sociologist Benjamin Nelson (1976, 1981) called ‘structures of consciousness’, which are also broader than national identities and more like worldviews based on major cultural orientations. The cultural component of civilizations has often been related to the major world religions. Judaism, Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity have been the most influential forces in shaping the world civilizations around worldviews based on written texts that provided the foundational reference points for the societies that they created. The internal differences within Christianity ensured that a common Christian civilization would not emerge. However, the affinities and cross-fertilization of the Christian religions did provide a basic mould that shaped what was to become modern Europe. The intersection of Greek philosophy, Roman civil law and Christian theology by the twelfth century provided a basic matrix that was complemented by Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century science. This gave to Europe a basic cultural model. Finally, civilizations are related to the diasporic flows of peoples. Such diasporas do not in

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themselves constitute civilizations, but without the migrations of large populations and the resulting creation of large-scale human settlements, no civilization is possible. The cultural sources of many of Europe’s civilizations were formed in the early migrations of the peoples who migrated to present-day Europe. According to one of the foremost civilizational scholars, S. N. Eisenstadt, the major civilizations of the world have been products of the ‘Axial Age’ civilizations, a term originally used by the philosopher Karl Jaspers (Eisenstadt 1986). These civilizations, which emerged in the second half of the last millennium BCE in ancient Greece, Israel, India, China and Iran, where far-reaching breakthroughs occurred and which led to lasting revolutions in the relation of culture and power. The Axial Age saw the birth of the world religions, which provided enduring reference points for intellectual elites to articulate different visions of the world. According to Eisenstadt, the most significant development was that the Axial Civilizations led to different degrees of conflict and creativity and what was to become European civilization was the civilization that was based on the greatest degree of internal conflict as a result of its distinct civilizational imaginary. Eisenstadt (2003) has stressed the multiple nature of modernity, which is not exclusively based on modern Europe, but is plural and a reflection of different civilizational paths. This tendency to relativize European modernity by emphasizing other models of modernity and diverse paths to modernity—some of which have not been directly connected to Europe—can be read in the light of readings of history that aim to stress the internal pluralization of Europe. One aspect of this is the internal pluralization of European civilization into different models of modernity as a consequence of, for example, major doctrinal disputes, as in the Reformation and counter-Reformation or different traditions of nation and statehood. This is not to neglect the possibility of pre-modern civilizational trajectories within the more general Western European civilization. Significant in this context would be the interaction of the Greek and the Roman civilizations with earlier civilizations, such as the Celtic one, which was largely replaced by Romanization, and the later encounter with the Germanic peoples and the subsequent formation of a RomanoGermanic culture. These interactions and the resulting entanglements

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and fusion were more important than the earlier Axial Age breakthrough. It has generally been recognized that too much casual determination has been attributed to the Axial Age for later history. On the basis of these ideas, a few points of a general theoretical nature can be made. What unites a civilization is not necessarily a set of values and dispositions that provide it with a worldview that can serve as a ‘Grand Narrative’. To follow Eisenstadt, it can be agreed that the Axial Age civilizations were all revolutionary developments in which radical and new creative visions of the world were introduced. What emerged out of these visions were new ways of interpreting the world leading to different conceptions of social and political order. It was inevitable that such interpretations would also produce conflicts, since there was often little agreement about such interpretations and their political implications. Nowhere were such disputes as great as in the Christian tradition, which arguably witnessed one of the greatest amounts of dispute over doctrine and political authority in the history of religion. It is possible that this internal contestation within religious worldviews gave to the European heritage its characteristic critical tendency, even if Christianity was also one of the chief sources of intolerance. However, this dimension was in part the inheritance of Greek philosophy and further development of this cultural orientation took place with the rise of humanism and seventeenth-century science. Cultural dynamics and interpretative systems alone will not determine the shape of a civilization. Important too is the geopolitical and institutional context in which cultural orientations impact upon the material and institutional organization of power. As specific configurations of power and culture, civilizations can be dynamic fields in which some of the most fundamental structures of the social world are shaped in an ongoing historical process. In this, the legacy of older traditions that have lost their power to shape the world often returns in new forms, providing civilizational continuity through their fragments. As the history of modern European secularism demonstrates, this continuity may often consist in the repudiation or reinterpretation of tradition, if not its outright re-invention. Civilizations come into focus only in the longer perspective of history when large-scale structures take on the character of a historical

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pattern. For this reason, the term ‘civilizational constellation’3 can be used to refer to a pattern that becomes discernible only when a wider, transnational view is taken. Therefore, civilizations cannot be reduced to short-lived political entities, whether nations or empires. Such political entities may be pivotal to the shaping of civilization, but civilizations are ultimately products of what Fernand Braudel called the longue durée—they are shaped in a long historical process of structure formation. This does not imply path dependency, but that contemporary societies, including world historical regions, are influenced by civilizational backgrounds. Rather than path dependency, it is more meaningful to speak of path development. At certain points, a society or a wider civilization is shaped by a path on which it embarks. Such paths are by no means irreversible or determine a future that cannot be chosen. However, here are points at which the tracks of history are set by fateful decisions or the formation of cultural orientations. These tracks are best seen as developmental paths that set a course that can be changed at what can be called switch points. Such moments will be discussed in this book. It can be noted in the present context that the emergence of a European civilizational constellation became evident with the emergence of diverse civilizational patterns, but a developmental path that is specifically European did not take shape until the early Middle Ages and became consolidated in the early modern period when the idea of Europe itself also emerges. A view of historical formation in terms of developmental paths suggests a different conception of history than the older view of a civilization core that, while not remaining unchanged, simply undergoes pluralization and variation through the incorporation of additional units. This perspective is critical of unreflective invocations of the notion of civilization that posit an original course that provides a long-term or trans-historical narrative of continuity. Such positions have no place for rupture or for those switch points that redirect the tracks of history. Instead, the notion of civilization can be retained to capture those cultural orientations and developmental paths that give shape to later social formations and which make up a civilizational heritage. As a singular condition, a civilization is internally pluralized. Benjamin Nelson (1971, 1986) who was instrumental in developing a comparative historical sociology of civilizations, used the term

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‘civilizational complexes’ to capture the sense in which civilizations were both internally differentiated and at the same time integrative frameworks. Often the integrative dimension was not apparent until a longer historical perspective is taken. It is perhaps better understood, then, as a unity in diversity than a genuinely singular form. The historical sociologist Johann Arnason, following philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Cornelius Castoriadis, refers to the cultural dimension of civilizations as ‘ways of articulating the world’ (Arnason 2003a). As such, civilizations have at their heart conflicting interpretations of world; they are not self-enclosed systems of meaning based on enduring ontological visions, but entail evaluative orders of meaning and also more radically creative impulses. In this sense, then, the civilizational thrust can be a source of societal transformation and should not be mistaken for that which is simply handed down unchanged. This gives to civilizations, according to Arnason, a radical reflexivity in that their worldviews offer reference points for the evaluation of the present and an orientation for the future. Finally, it can be remarked that civilization and in particular encounters between civilizations have been important carriers of globalization. It has been increasingly recognized that globalization is not a recent development, but goes back a long time and can be related to the rise and expansion of the early world civilizations (see Hopkins 2002; Robertson 1992). Civilizational encounters arising as a result of trade, diasporic movements, world religions and imperial expansion were early instances of globalization. The rise of global connections was a direct consequence of the intensification of civilizational encounters. Such encounters, which cannot be all explained in terms of wars and violent clashes, were decisive in shaping the worldviews of those civilizations that came into contact with each other. It has very often been the case that arising out of these encounters new civilizational forms emerged or new orientations within existing civilization took place. Increasingly, the logic of the encounter—adaptations, direct borrowings, cultural translations, mutual learning—has shaped the civilizations of the world: a phenomenon now known as globalization. Whether or not this has now led to the end of civilizations and the coming of a new global age is a matter that cannot be discussed here beyond making the claim that for

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the purpose of the present study, civilizations are the sources of modernity and it is modernity that will become the primary reference point for the idea of Europe when it eventually emerged as a consciousness. However, their legacies have left their structural mark on modernity and influenced its different directions or developmental paths. It is for this reason that the idea of a civilizational heritage is probably preferable to the notion of civilization as such, since the enduring civilizational features are to be found in the residues and fragments of older historical traditions.

The European Inter-civilizational Constellation The previous arguments suggest a multiple view of European civilization as entangled in other civilizations. The received view is that European civilization is underpinned by fixed reference points, which are often associated with the Greek and Roman civilizations of antiquity, Christianity, the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Modernity, generally defined by reference to the Enlightenment, is held to be part of this heritage, which culminated in ‘Western Civilization’. An alternative view, more in keeping with current philosophical thinking and research in comparative historical sociology and global history, would suggest that the civilizational nature of Europe is far less tightly defined and cannot be understood without considering the legacies of colonialism which Europe became entangled in the rest of the world. The historical heritage, including the conventional reference points, can be interpreted in different ways. Before exploring this below, a few points of a general theoretical nature can be made with respect to the sources of the European heritage conceived of as a civilizational heritage. European civilization can be understood in plural terms in two related senses. First, it can be defined in a way that includes a multiplicity of cultures within Europe, as an intra-civilizational constellation; second, it can be defined in a way that includes a wider trans-continental dimension to inter-civilizational encounters. The upshot of this is a notion of a civilizational constellation, which is particularly pertinent to the European case, although by no means exclusively European.

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Under the first heading would be a notion of an intra-European civilization including a broader spectrum of civilizations than the Greek and Roman civilizations or a unitary notion of the Judaeo-Christian civilization. An alternative and more inclusive civilizational approach would have to include the Byzantine tradition and its later Renaissance in imperial Russia where it lent itself to Orthodox and Slavic appropriations. Included, too, in a broad notion of the European civilizational constellation would be the Jewish diasporic civilization and the Islamic civilization, including modern Turkey and contemporary European Islam. These different civilizations are not entirely separate but interact with each other and become to varying degrees entangled. The Judaic civilization, for instance, is present in Islamic and Christian civilizations and the Byzantine civilization was related to both Western and Eastern traditions. Russian civilization includes both Western and Eastern civilizational currents. Modern Turkey is a combination of the Ottoman Islamic heritage and westernization (these points will be explored further in the next chapters in Part I). Implied in this plural notion of the European civilizational constellation is a strong emphasis on civilizational encounters and entanglements, extending into the wider Eurasia context as well as the Atlantic world. The notion of a civilizational constellation points to a hyphenated notion of civilizations as opposed to a singular notion, as in the notions of Greco-Roman civilization, the Judaeo-Christian civilization, Byzantine-Russian civilization. The second aspect, the transcontinental dimension of inter-civilizational encounters, highlights the role the non-European world played in the making of Europe which was never a pristine culture but one that was entangled in other civilizations. The encounter of civilizations took many forms, ranging from violent encounters to mutual learning. Europe variously borrowed, adapted and translated the cultural, technological and scientific creations of other civilizations, in particular those of Asia. The reverse of course also happened. As a result of centuries of trade and imperial ventures and colonization, the various European-Asian civilizations became mixed. The important point is that any consideration of ‘European Civilization’ must include the non-European dimension, a relation that has not one but many dimensions. This inevitably requires a global

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contextualization of the rise of Europe, which can no longer be looked at exclusively as self-creating. With respect to the various civilizations that make up the wider civilizational constellation, the internal pluralization of those civilizations must be emphasized. This internal pluralization can, in part, be explained by the wider inter-civilizational context, but it is more than this. Indeed, the very notion of a civilization suggests a diversity of social and cultural worlds that also bear some common patterns. As mentioned earlier, it has been argued by some scholars that civilizations have at their core certain cultural orientations that are common to the various social worlds of which they are composed. These orientations by no means provide stable reference points that constitute a received body of traditions such as a heritage or a self-enclosed world that remains unchanged. In the case of Europe, this is strikingly evident in the Christian tradition, often seen as the defining aspect of European civilization. From a civilizational perspective, this tradition has been internally highly pluralized and whose core ideas have given rise to conflicting interpretations of the world. The same can be said for the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which have been far from constituting a common singular culture. In sum, the sources of modern Europe lies in the plurality of civilizations that together constitute what can be termed the European inter-civilizational constellation. These sources constitute the basic orientation for the European heritage, which has been continuously reinterpreted in the light of the movement of that constellation. It is inevitable that the resulting heritage that it made possible would be a contested one, for it never gave rise to a single interpretation.

Memory and Conflicting Interpretations of Heritage The question of the European heritage is inextricably connected with the problem of memory. In memory, both historical experience and historical–cultural interpretation are played out. Since memory is always

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the memory of a subject, which can be a community, the interpretative dimension is unavoidable. Historical experience and historical interpretation provide a political community with a mode of historical self-knowledge that is more than a collective memory, which assumes a basic continuity in the history of the community. The kind of memory that a cultural heritage encapsulates is one that includes the ruptures as well as the continuities of history. It has been variously referred to as a cultural memory or historical memory, in contrast to a collective memory of a defined group. Viewed in such terms, the European heritage cannot be defined in straightforward terms as narrative history or by reference to a foundational civilizational origin of which it is the history. There is no one memory that provides a narrative of continuity for Europe. As a history of ruptures, the European heritage includes a relation to such discontinuities as major revolutions and periods of rebirth and renewal as well as controversies over the nature of authority as in religious doctrine and political ideologies, examples of which are the Renaissance, the Reformation, the wars of religion of the early modern period, the French Revolution, the October Revolution. All the great historical moments and events have led to a new relation to the past. Since 1492, for the first time, the connection between empire and European-based civilization was abandoned with an aspiration to an overseas empire, first in the Americas and later in other parts of the world. Earlier the Great Schism of 1054 effectively severed the unity of a Christian civilization, which was divided furthermore with the Reformation. In the twentieth century, the end of the two world wars marked the end of an age. The year 1918 marked the end of the nineteenth century and the ancien regime, when it was finally abolished; 1945 marked the emergence of an American-led Western world and the end of the European age; and 1989 marked the final demise of the post-Second World War order, the ‘short twentieth century’, as Eric Hobsbawm (1994) termed it. So major social transformations lead to new expressions of historical time consciousness in which historical experience is subject to new interpretations. This has implications not merely for collective memory—of groups, nations—but also has direct political implications when it

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comes to commemoration (Eder and Spohn 2005; Parker and Stråth 2010). For how memory records the past is reflected in the ways in which the past is commemorated in the public sphere. In such cases, we move from collective memory to the public recognition of a heritage. The cultural and political heritage of Europe is becoming increasingly difficult to commemorate in the ways nation-states have commem­ orated the past, ways which have mostly been connected with acts of liberation from an imperial power, wars against neighbouring countries or genocidal atrocities against minorities. Moreover, unlike most nation-states, which are based on a sense of peoplehood, there are no European people as such, and consequently, commemoration cannot be the remembrance of a given people. This is one of the main differences between Europe and its nations. So the question of a European heritage cannot be so easily related to a specific people. Indeed, nations themselves are increasingly finding it difficult to sustain such kinds of collective memory. What then might be the reference point for the European heritage? One view is that the reference point is the vanquished or absent other, the memories of the marginalized or those who were the victims of history. There is little doubt that Europe has been defined in opposition to an external Other at certain moments in its history, but this does not mean that a European self or identity has been the result. The idea of the individual has been a feature of Europe, but the sources from which it emerged have been more complicated than simply alterity. The idea of Europe, in any case, does not easily translate into an identity, and it has never been finally settled. It does, however, have implications for the making of heritage. Heritage is more than a matter of the collective memory of a given people; it is a category of historical interpretation in which the present redefines its relation with the past. The memory that is established in a cultural heritage goes beyond collective memories to include the subsequent interpretations of those memories by different and later peoples. These do not translate into each other very easily: Collective memories often live on to become societal or historical memories and thus transcend a particular subject. In this respect, an important aspect of heritage is a memory conceived of as a mode of interpretation. The memories that are encapsulated in a heritage allow a society to interpret

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history and the relation of the present to history. To speak of heritage, including civilization heritage, in such terms is to see it as a cultural model of interpretation. While this is pertinent to national traditions of memory and identity, it is highly relevant to the wider European context for the idea of a European heritage cannot be reduced to collective memories of a given people as such. Memory is central to any notion of a European heritage, but included in this will often be the range of previous interpretations; it may be the case that a heritage consists only of the memory of interpretations of a past that does not exist as history. The body of traditions and the historical legacy that constitutes the European heritage has been interpreted by every age in the light of the concerns of contemporaries. The European heritage cannot be separated from these interpretations. It was not until the Renaissance that the consciousness emerged that there was a European heritage based on a relation to antiquity. With this came the view that there was a European heritage that was shaped in the relation of the present to the past. This relation could only be one of heritage rather than a direct history since the present age was seen as a new experience. Thus, the Renaissance mind defined itself by reference to antiquity in order to break from the Gothic era. The cultural logic that was at work in this had an epistemic dimension in the way history was organized into epochs, ancient, medieval and modern. These were seen as ruptures—caused by regular episodes of forgetting, out of which there can be no direct heritage—and history was discontinuous while at the same time constituting paradoxically an underlying narrative of unity that transcended the ruptures. One of the problems that the very notion of a European heritage was faced with was that the principal voice of that tradition, Christianity, had repudiated the classical roots of Europe in the Greco-Roman civilizations. Periodization in effect amounted to the secularization of history, which was no longer seen as fulfilling a divine plan, and the separation of human history and natural history. In a classic work, the French historian Paul Hazard (1953) referred to this development, which occurred in the late seventeenth century, as ‘the crisis of the European mind’. Since the Enlightenment, this relation to the past constituted the basic dynamic of modernity which opened up new fields of interpretations. The European heritage itself constitutes the site of many of these

1  The European Inter-Civilizational Constellation     21

interpretations. The European heritage was not just defined by reference to an archaic and classical past that was lost, but by reference to other worlds. In a sense the European self, the subjectivity of modern Europe, was defined by reference both to an Other—the non-European—and to its own self—classical culture—which was experienced, especially since the twelfth century with the consolidation of Christian theology, as distant and often irrecoverable. Until then Christian theology was formed through a relation with Greek philosophy and Roman culture and law. The secularization of Christianity and the emergence of modernity added to this sense of ‘crisis’. Modernity replaced Christianity in much the same way Christianity had replaced antiquity. The resulting mood of uncertainty as to what Europe is as a political subjectivity translated into uncertainty as to what body of traditions constitute European culture and civilization. For these reasons, it cannot be said that there is a singular or essential foundation to the European heritage. By means of historicism—the view that each period in history and every expression of culture are historically unique—the European mind solved the problem of discontinuity. Historicism, which triumphed in Germany, did not challenge the basic assumption of a civilizational foundation: it rather postulated different cultural expressions of European civilization, the universality of which was guaranteed by the diversity of its particular forms. The historicist position has been very influential in accounting for the alleged worldwide validity of European categories and modernity while denying some of the consequences, such as self-government. In the last two centuries or so, there have been many attempts to define the European heritage; some of these have reflected the ambivalence of Europe’s historical self-identity, but others have been more self-confident. In the nineteenth century, the general preference was for a singular notion of civilization. But this very notion was itself in tension with heritage as culture: culture versus civilization offered two contrasting attitudes to the European heritage. Culture referred to the singularity of national culture, while civilization referred to a universal condition in which cultures participated. Since the Enlightenment, the civilizational theme was often portrayed as the progress of the human mind or by reference to a notion of moral progress. There can be little doubt that it was often a racialized category (Goldberg 2006).

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European civilization cannot be explained in racial terms. There is no European race nor is there a European ethnicity. European civilization can be seen as a diaspora of diverse groups formed out of waves of migration and civilizational processes over many thousands of years. The IndoEuropean tribes who spread across Europe and Asia about 5000 years did not leave a common culture or civilization, but a language which never became the basis of a common cultural or political system. Their tribal customs dissipated and they did not leave an enduring tradition other than linguistic traces. There is some controversy on this, but the consensus appears to be that they were a late Neolithic linguistic group, not an ethnic or culturally defined group and migrated westwards from the Pontic–Caspian steppe (Anthony 2010; Mallory 1989; Pereltsvaig 2017; Renfrew 1987).4 In any case, this Eurasian or Indo-European linguistic population did not coincide with the general geographical area of Europe, which also incorporates the non-Indo-European linguistic group, which includes—of those who have survived—the Uralic family of languages, comprising the Finns, the Hungarians and Estonians in addition to the Basques and Georgians and the latter arrival of the Turks, a non-Indo-European people from Central Asia. Aside from the Latin and Hellenic linguistic groups, the most important of the archaic cultures that stemmed from the Indo-European tribes, and which had civilizational tendencies, were the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic peoples. If any has a claim to be the early Europeans, it was the Celts who were the first of the major Indo-European tribes to settle in Central and Southern Europe. The Celts were not a racial or ethnically defined people but a diverse group who shared a common cultural heritage. However, they were later displaced by the Germanic tribes and many were subsequently Romanized and, like all early settlers, they were eventually Christianized. There was more or less no civilizational commonality arising from their common origins in the Eurasian linguistic group. For a time, Latin was a common language for the elites, but since vernacularization the European elites have never been consolidated by a common language. Language then is not a defining feature of European civilization. The notion of a civilizational constellation offers a way to comprehend the processes and traditions that were involved in the formation of the mosaic of Europe, which is perhaps best seen in terms of a web of interlinkages than in an underlying substance.

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Civilizational heritages are important vehicles through which historical memory is transmitted. European memory and the meaning of Europe are, in part, shaped by a civilizational context. But, as I have argued, what that civilization consists of is not self-evident and its heritage is not the only formative influence on the present. Many conceptions of European civilization are highly contestable, due to the assumptions they make about the nature of civilization and often have political implications that seek to divest it of its dark side. Yet, it is possible to understand the European civilizational heritage in a way that is relevant for the present day. Europe cannot be defined in narrow political terms as a set of core Western nation-states based on the Carolingian Empire of the early Middle Ages. Such definitions are often exercises in the political instrumentalization of history and culture. Europe can also be interpreted as being based on a wider and more cosmopolitan sense of civilization as an entangled web of cultures. As Brague (2002) and others have argued, the European self, the subjectivity of modern Europe, has been variously defined by reference both to an Other—the non-European—and to its own self—classical culture—which was experienced as distant and often irrecoverable. In Brague’s account, Europe since the medieval age was based on a fundamental rupture with the Roman heritage. It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to develop this further, but it can be stated that it is impossible to reduce the vast plethora of texts, struggles, laws, institutions that constitute the field of history to a single narrative, such as colonialism or, according to another narrative, to progress. Recent scholarship on the Renaissance, for instance, paints a very different picture of its constituent components. This, too, can be said of the Enlightenment and of almost every epoch. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that a civilizational core was formed in Europe from the twelfth when cumulative effects of earlier cultural movements produced a cultural model based on Christian theology. With the emergence of Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century science, Europe, prior to the advent of modernity, already has a cultural or epistemic core. As argued, this did not derive from a pristine origin, but was the product of processes of cultural interaction.

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Following the social theory of Jürgen Habermas, it is possible to see history in terms of learning processes that produce major moral and political transformations. Societies learn in ways different from the ways individuals learn, but it is possible to speak of such collective learning processes. Viewed in terms of a developmental learning process, cultural heritage can be seen as a constant reworking of the legacies of the past. The capacity to learn from history was, Habermas (1979, 1987a) has argued, particularly characteristic of modernity which produced a condition in which power—both state power and also class power—was constantly challenged by social movements and civil society. The great social movements of the modern age—the workers movement, the anti-slavery movement, anti-colonial movements, feminism and the ecological movement—have been among the most important carriers of collective learning. This implies not a conception of learning as progress in the sense of the Enlightenment notion of a history as a single continuous story of progress, but rather a more discontinuous and multi-directional one in which regressions can also occur. History conceived of in terms of learning processes places the emphasis on the critical capacities of social actors to challenge power and, moreover, draws attention to the potentials within modern culture for social actors to reinterpret the present and create new possibilities. Without the capacity to learn from history, as often said, the present will be condemned to repeat the errors of the past. While there is much evidence of such failures to learn from history, there are also examples of how societies have learnt from history. Certain aspects of the European civilizational heritage such as the constitutional and democratic state, human rights and the integrity of the human person, social solidarities, civil society and the critical reason associated with modern thought represent a legacy that is of continued importance for the present. These are products of the European political and cultural heritage and have become of universal significance in what is now a globally connected world, albeit one in which Europe is only a small part. Although these are values that are no longer specifically European, they have had their

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origin in the great social struggles and movements in the European past. As a learning process, then, history also contains the possibility for societies to transcend the given and the inherited. In the present day, such considerations are of the utmost importance as the European Union has for the first time established a political framework that embraces much of the European continent. However, it should be noted that such currents are as likely to run counter to the status quo than affirm it and thus cannot easily be harnessed for the purpose of constructing an identity for the EU. The following chapters offer a historical account of the main civilizational sources of the European heritage. In line with the theoretical argument outlined in the foregoing, the argument will emphasize the internal pluralization of the civilizations under discussion, their interrelations and the wider inter-civilizational context, both within and beyond ‘Europe’. The political, cultural and diasporic flows within the main civilizational currents will provide the principal reference points for a conception of European modernity deriving from tension of the republican and cosmopolitan orientations.

Notes 1. See Lewis and Wigen (1997) for a critique of what they call ‘metageography’. 2. My understanding of the notion of civilization has been much influenced by the work of Johann Arnason. See Arnason (2003a). 3. The notion of a ‘constellation’ is suggested by T. W. Adorno, who borrowed the term from Walter Benjamin, to mean a juxtaposed structure of contradictory elements that is not underpinned by a common foundation and does not have a core. 4. For an unconventional view, see Duchesne (2011).

2 The Greco-Roman and Judaic Legacies

The legacy of classical antiquity is an obvious place to begin an account of the origins of the idea of Europe, which has often been traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity. But the nature of that relation is far from clear, as is the question of the relation of the ancient civilizations to what later became known as Europe, a notion that was more or less unknown to the ancients. Any consideration of the legacy of antiquity needs to take account of the fact that the very notion of a classical age was a product of a later era and the relation to antiquity has not been constant. The Christian tradition commenced with a break with what it regarded as a pagan epoch, while the Renaissance looked to the recovery of certain elements of the classical age and the Enlightenment sought to distance the modern age from the ancient civilizations and their legacy, seeing as it did in Benjamin Constant’s formulation in 1819, a fundamental discord between the ‘liberty of the ancient and the moderns’.

© The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_2

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In our own time, we often hear claims that Europe derives its common culture from Greek and Roman civilization. It would appear that the legacy of antiquity has been marked by ruptures as well as continuities to the extent that the very notion of a ‘Greco-Roman’ civilization is questionable. A closer look at the civilizations of antiquity reveals less a picture of unity than one of diversity and of transnational movements. It is now increasingly recognized that the European heritage as it emerged out of these civilizations was formed not in isolation, but out of borrowing, re-appropriating and mixing from different societies. This included the early mixing of Greek thought with Roman law and Latin; the encounter of Judaic, Greek and Christian thought; and the encounter of Roman culture with the diverse group of Germanic peoples. So, rather than speaking of a single European civilization, we should instead see Europe as formed by a civilizational constellation whose classical roots were shaped by Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. While a unity was never achieved, the encounter and subsequent confluence of Latin and Greek culture were decisive for the formation of European culture. This argument is sceptical of the alternative view that a clash of civilizations emerged in antiquity or the argument that these civilizations were inconsequential for modernity. While not denying the significance of early rivalry between Greece and Persia, to take the most well-known example, the Mediterranean world was one in which the different cultures were deeply intermeshed due to trade, migration and conquest. Conflicts belonged to this, but it is not possible to postulate a primordial conflict that provided the foundation for later ones. Ancient conflicts did not predetermine later ones; there was no path dependency, but variation based on common origins and subsequent processes of homogenization and integration established structure-forming processes that gave to Europe its cultural and societal shape. As argued in the previous chapter, the legacy of early periods in history played a formative role in the development of later ones. In so far as the ancient civilizations were formed from inter-civilizational interactions, it follows that the legacy that they bequeathed also bears the imprint of those encounters.

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Greek Civilization and Hellenism It has generally been considered that European civilization begins with classical Greek culture in the fifth century BCE, a century in which Socrates and Pericles lived and when classical Athenian culture flourished. The received view of ancient Greek history has often reflected a Eurocentric conception of history that gave a special place to Greece but in a way that silenced its own history (Vlassopoulos 2007). Despite the instrumentalization of Greek history by later writers, there can be little doubt that important cultural developments originated there and were transmitted to later eras. In rejecting sacred kinship at an early stage, for example, the ancient Greeks made the most important breakthrough in the political organization of human societies. The Greeks established the political community of the polis in which a uniquely civic domain was institutionalized and which has often been regarded as the beginning of democracy and the republican tradition of the self-governing political community. The modern republican interpretation, as reflected in the writings of Hannah Arendt, saw the Greek polis based neither on the state nor on the private world of the household, but on the public domain of citizenship (Arendt 1958). Although its claims to be a democracy in the modern sense of the term must be greatly qualified, the Greek polis established the notion of the individual as a citizen defined as a status based on rights. It can be seen as having given birth to the conception of political community based on a civic solidarity and an opposition to despotism. These characteristics are probably more significant than a general notion of democracy, for the ancient Greek city states were highly exclusionary slave-based societies and hardly democracies in the modern sense of the term. A precursor to democracy, which is arguably more important in terms of the lineages of the political, is the practice of isonomia—that is equality between the superior elements of the citizenry (Meier 2011: 224). However different Greek practice was from the modern appropriation of Greek ideas, the existence of these ideas was significant for later times. Since history—understood as the unfolding of a structure—is largely the accumulation of

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unintended consequences, as well as later reinterpretations of older legacies, the Greek political imagination was an important source of democratic ideas and political innovation (see Arnason et al. 2013). According to Christian Meier (2011), the foundation of Greek thought and culture was freedom: freedom from domination, the freedom to establish one’s own existence. Even if this freedom was at the cost of the slavery of others and was highly restricted to men of high social standing, it was nonetheless a defining characteristic of Greek society and brought Europe on a path different from other world cultures. This may be an unfashionable argument, but without such a perspective it is not possible to explain the sources of the modern idea of freedom. While modernity was constructed around the idea of freedom, it drew on ancient sources. Greek culture and society was not a homogeneous world or some kind of a pristine culture that was the origin of modern Europe. The notion of a classical age was a later invention of the moderns, and while it is possible to speak of a Greek civilization, this cultural world—despite having the same language, gods and a way of life—was highly diverse and influenced by encounters with Asia, encounters that became more intensified following the conquests of Alexander who brought Greek civilization as far as India. It has been much documented how Greek culture was influenced by the Near East and Egypt.1 A historian of ancient Greece, Walter Burkert, has outlined how, for instance, Homer represented a combination of Greek and Eastern traditions (Burkert 1995). However, it is not possible to attribute whole-scale adaptation or cultural transfer, but influences and adaptations. Mesopotamian influences are also much in evidence in Greek poetry and philosophy, and there are links between Greek thought and Persian Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s oldest religions. But the classical age of Greek civilization did not see a direct link with the heroic age of Homer: this was already perceived as archaic, but nonetheless was a reference point for Greek memory. The codification of Greek memory in oral and written traditions was a crucial vehicle for later cultural memories and thus gave to Greek culture a special significance for the European heritage. This probably also explains the limits of the relation to the non-Greek world, which provided inspiration for a culture that had embarked on a different path based on the political form of the polis.

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To speak of Greek civilization, we need to refer more directly to the diasporic culture of Hellenism that arose with Greek colonization. The founding of colonies—small cities based on the polis—from the eighth century to the sixth BCE across the Mediterranean, from Asia Minor to the present-day Spain, extended the Greek world across a wider area. The founding of colonies were also acts of political foundation that created a Greek sense of a historical heritage that exerted long-lasting influences. It led to the idea of a society being part of a wider civilization and has a memory based on a moment of foundation. The early Greek colonization was based on the model of the polis, the spread of Greek culture from the period that followed the end of the classical fifth-century Athenian polis, when the alliance of Greek states that was the basis of Greek victory against the Persians collapsed and a new Greek power arose in Macedonia, took on a different form. In the fourth century BCE, the armies of Alexander the Great conquered much of the Near East and brought Greek civilization as far as India. The encounter with India replaced Egypt in importance for later Greek civilization, but the resulting encounter with Buddhism did not have a lasting impact on Greek consciousness (Arnason 2006b). The new Macedonian-based Hellenic civilization was weak in political terms and was eventually defeated by Rome, but it left an indelible mark on the cultural orientations of the civilizations it encountered. The Greek language was a global lingua franca; it was widely spoken for several centuries across a huge region; it was the language of trade, culture, philosophy, early Christianity and diplomacy. In inheriting Greek culture, Rome was also inheriting a cosmopolitan culture that was as much Asian as European. The significant feature of this culture for Europe was the fact that it was based on writing, as opposed to recitations, which had made possible the transmission of the Homeric tradition. The invention of writing made possible the creative renewal of the Homeric past and the construction of cultural memory that is the basis of identity. The Greek alphabet was one of the first systems of writing to replace the spoken word (Goody et al. 1968; Goody 1986). It was a scribal culture that incorporated the oral tradition and writing and thus made a breakthrough beyond pictorial cultures of writing. According to Jan Assmann, the Greeks created a scribal culture based on texts which in turn formed the basis of its

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cultural memory. The adoption of writing as the basis of a culture makes possible cultural continuity and coherence. Unlike Judaism, which was an early civilization based on writing, there were no sacred texts, and importantly, it formed part of a ‘free space that was occupied neither by the commanding voice of a ruler nor by god. This power vacuum favoured orality’s penetration of Greece’s scribal culture’ (Assmann 2011: 244). Such a transformation in the relation of speech and texts was because the world of texts did not occupy an official place and the Greek texts were not the basis of systems of political control or social organization. Thus, there was no ‘tyranny of the Book’ in the Greek world, as there was in the Judaeo, Christian and Islamic cultures. The Greeks, moreover, to follow Assmann, had numerous books, all of which were contradictory and constituted an inter-textual culture in which authority could never be fixed despite several texts achieving canonical status: ‘Thus a culture was born whose cohesion and continuity rested entirely on texts and their interpretation. Institutions of interpretation ensured cultural continuity, from philologoi to monks to humanists’ (Assmann 2011: 254). It is possible to see this aspect of Greek culture, known as philosophy, as constituting a core feature of the European heritage that gave to it a radical reflectivity and orientation towards critique. To be sure, Christian theology sought to impose an order based on official interpretations of a sacred text. However, the Christian tradition ultimately did not succeed in silencing revival interpretations and the calls for freedom of worship had important implications for other forms of liberty. In terms of its contribution to Europe, it should be reiterated that Hellenism was not European, but a mix of Aegean, Greek and Asian cultures. It did not include the Celts for instance, although the Celtic culture was greatly influenced by the Greeks. For the Greeks themselves, Europa was a name of a princess from Asia Minor, but was neither the name of a civilization nor of a continent. In the Greek myths, Europa was a name of a Phoenician princess who, having been seduced by Zeus disguised as a white bull, abandoned her homeland in present-day Lebanon for Crete where she later married the King of Crete. To the extent to which it had any significance, Europa in fact is a symbol of wandering and of cultural loss. It signifies that Europe is not of itself but represents the fundamental fact of displacement.

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It is in cartography that the earliest traces are to be found. In Greek cartography, Europe became a name given to territory beyond the Greek world and was often taken to be the half-sister of Asia and Libya (Africa). Aristotle believed Hellas was somewhere between Europe and Asia. Meier (2011: 21) appears to have been a term used to refer to the relatively small area in central and Northern Greece and was later applied to larger areas. Etymologically, its origins are unclear; although clearly Greek, it is thought to have had Semitic roots and was a term for the setting sun. Arnold Toynbee has suggested that Europe and Asia may have been nautical terms for a seafaring people. Despite its relative importance for the Greeks, the term Europe entered the medieval era due to the simple fact that Greek texts survived through the Arab translations. The later idea of Europe as a continental civilization was alien to the Greeks, who introduced the political distinction between Greeks and barbarians, Greeks and Persians or Asians. It appears that Europe and Asia as geographical regions were of little significance to the Greeks for whom everything non-Greek was simply ‘barbarian’. This was the view of Aristotle who made a threefold distinction between Greeks, Europeans and Asians, and held that the latter two were barbarians. However, the authors of antiquity in any case rarely if ever used Europe, which was a less defined term than Asia, and both were at most vague geographical terms. Herodotus referred to the area north of the Black Sea, not as Europe, but as Scythia. It is possible that the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians was more significant and probably provided terms of reference for later conflict between Europeans and Asia. However, this should not be exaggerated. The Persian Wars were not only a conflict between Greeks and Persians and more Greeks fought with the Persians than against it (Gallant 2006: 124). The Greek and Persian cultures overlapped to a considerable extent. When the notion of the barbarian was later reinterpreted to mean the opposite to civilization, the term acquired a meaning that was somewhat different from the Greek notion, for whom it simply meant speakers of a non-Greek language or a language that could not be understood. For this reason, any claims of a continuous genealogy of Europeans versus barbarians must be qualified with a consideration of changing meanings (Gruen 2011).

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According to Hay (1957: 3) in his authoritative study on the early history of the idea of Europe, Isocrates in the fourth century BCE constructed an identification of Europe with Greece and Asia with Persia. Ptolemy, in the second century AD, used the term Sarmatia and distinguished between Sarmatia Europea and Sarmatia Asiatica with the River Don separating them (Halecki 1950: 85). This was to prove an enduring distinction and still remains as one of the conventional geographical definitions of Europe. Hippocrates refers to the Sea of Azov as the boundary of Europe and Asia. At about this time, the earlier division between Persia and Greece gave way to a threefold division between Europe, Asia and Africa. Africa has earlier been associated with Asia but later these regions were regarded as separate with the Nile as the main dividing line. Such arbitrary distinctions should not disguise the cosmopolitanism of Greek civilization, especially in its Hellenistic phase when the relatively closed world of the classical polis was undermined by the Macedonian conquests, which brought Hellenic culture as far as the Himalayas. This was a time when the Greek world was looking eastwards, not westwards, and when a global consciousness began to manifest itself on the Greeks. There is an interesting paradox in this in that the origins of Europe— essentially Asia Minor—were in what later was regarded to be outside Europe. Indeed, many of these fell under Byzantine rule in the Eastern Roman empire. The idea of Europe as a geographical region began to emerge with the decline of classical Greek civilization. It should also be noted that the idea of Europe was often in tension with the notion of the Occident and was generally less important than the latter. The concept of the Occident first referred to the Eastern Mediterranean and was not identical with the idea of Europe. It was a Hellenistic Occident, though in another tradition the Occident was held to be the source of paradise and somewhere in the unknown Western oceans. It is possible that the Greeks were more strongly aware of the world being structured on a north-south axis than a west and east polarity. Troy, the mythic cradle of the Occident was after all East of the Dardanelles. Indeed, much of the Greek Occident was in what later became the Orient. For all these reasons, caution must be exercised in the claim that there was always a fundamental divide between West and East and that this coincided with a civilizational clash between Europe and the non-Greek world. Such notions tell us more about the present than the past.

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The characteristic distinction between barbarians and Greeks became less sharp in the era of the Hellenistic Empire. The Greek language bequeathed a tradition of cultural translation by which the cultures of the Hellenic civilization communicated through a common culture, which was decisive not only for the emergence of the ‘Axial Age’, but for the nascent idea of Europe civilization. The kind of culture this represented was one that by its very nature was not tied to a particular territory. There was a fundamental rupture in Greek civilization with the transition from Greek to Hellenistic culture, for the latter was not exclusively Greek, but absorbed elements of the new cultures that became part of the Hellenistic world, much of which derived from Persia (Assmann 2011: 252). It is possible to detect a shift from the polis to the cosmic order of, what the Greeks called the oikoumene, that is the wider inhabited world. This enlarged conception of the world was reflected, for example, in the first ideas of cosmopolitanism as expressed in the political thought of the Cynics and Stoics for whom loyalty to the wider human community was more important than the community into which one was born. Another expression of this cosmopolitan worldview was the movement towards ‘Universal History’ as the attempt to find ways to narrate the whole world rather than just one aspect of it. The emergence of what Inglis and Robertson (2005) have termed an ‘ecumenical sensibility’ which came with these developments bequeathed to later ages a European civilizational imaginary that cannot be understood as a narrow Eurocentric conception of the world. At this time, the relatively closed world of the republic and the open horizon of the cosmopolis established two visions of political community in Greek thought. The tension between these two visions of political community has been an enduring feature of modern political thought and in many ways reflects the two aspects of the idea of Europe that collide with each other in the present day: an open vision of Europe versus a closed one. The republican tradition of the Greek polis and the Hellenistic vision of a global order were to have a lasting impact on the European political heritage, which can be seen as a tradition that has continuously reconstructed and reinvented this tension between these two conceptions of political community, which were intertwined, but provided a basic set of orientations for the republican and the cosmopolitan traditions.

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The Greek sources of European civilization were characterized by both loss and recovery. The papyrus roll used by the Greeks for the written text was less durable than the culture they recorded. Consequently as a result of the decay of the papyrus rolls, many of the great works of classical Greek culture were lost by the sixth century, until Arab scholars of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries recovered and translated them using new methods of paper production. Greek civilization survived during the long period of Roman civilization not directly, but only through translations, appropriations and traces. The implication of this is that much of the ancient sources of the European heritage are known only indirectly. Yet, much of the later Hellenic civilization did survive well into Roman times and was especially present in the Byzantine tradition (see Chapter 4). All societies and civilizations have a myth of their origins, which has generally been linked to an act of emancipation or a revolutionary event that had a foundational status. The Roman myth of its origins was to become a foundational myth for Europe: the city of Rome was believed to have been founded in 753 BCE by Romulus, a descendant of Aeneas, who fled from Troy after its sack in the twelfth century BCE and eventually reached Latium where a Greek colony was founded. According to this myth, the Trojans fled to other parts of Europe to found a series of imperial dynasties. This myth of Aeneas was later appropriated by European monarchies for it was held that the exiled Trojans founded a series of cities in the West and many of the Western monarchies claimed to derive their genealogy from the exiles of Troy (Tanner 1993). The Tudor, Habsburg and Ottoman historical myths of legitimation all proclaimed the Trojans to be their ancestors. There is little if any archaeological basis to this myth, which tells a story of how the civilization that arose in Rome was a Greco-Roman civilization. As with all narratives, it tells us more about how contemporaries understood their past and present that an objective account of the past. Roman civilization emerged out of a long process by which Greek culture was reshaped into a new form. The civilizational continuity that Europe has with the Greeks has often been seen as very much a Roman creation. But it was until Augustus, with the transition the republic to empire, that Rome recognized the Greek heritage (Spawforth 2015).

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However, it should not be forgotten that much of the Greek culture survived independently and was not entirely absorbed into the nascent Roman civilization. Some of this remained outside mainstream Roman culture and can be seen as constituting a counter-narrative to the dominant tradition associated with the patrician Roman legacy. In one of the most important interpretations of Greek thought for the idea Europe, the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka (2002) in Plato and Europe, first published in 1973, sought to redefine the spiritual essence of Europe as a philosophical quest. The foundations of Europe are in the mind, rather than in political reality. Greek philosophy—from the Pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—along with the mathematicians such as Euclid—provided the epistemic core of Europe culture. Europe was born out of the ruins of the polis, but destroyed itself in the twentieth century; its most important idea is to be found in the philosophy of Plato and in particular the notion of the ‘care of the soul’: ‘The history of Europe is in large part, up until, let us say, the fifteenth century, the history of the attempt to realize the care of the soul’ (Patocka 2002: 37). This legacy later was in danger of disappearing ‘under the weight of something, something that might be deemed a concern, or care about dominating the world’ (2002: 88). Patocka identified the basic idea of the inner life of the individual as the core of the European heritage and which influenced the Christian tradition. He stressed as the Greek philosophical achievement to be the belief in the fundamental uncertainty of human existence that the individual is not a slave to the state or to history and that everything is open to scrutiny. This conception of the individual, he believed, was in danger of getting lost in later periods of European history. He may have been overly pessimistic about this, but the basic idea of the conception of the autonomy of the self was clearly one of the significant legacies of ancient Greece and constituted the basis of a tradition of anti-despotism that was an important influence in European history (see also Gasché 2018). In stark contrast to Patocka, Carl Schmitt (2006), writing in Berlin in the 1940s, saw the source of the unity of Europe neither in the polis nor in the soul, but in the Greek notion of the Nomos, which for him is the spatial and juridical basis of civilization in that it gives both ‘order and an orientation’. What he called the Nomos of the earth was

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in essence a juridical model for ‘land-appropriation’, which for Schmitt was a more important legacy than that of the polis for it laid the basis of what he called the Jus Publicum Europaeum—the legal order that governed Europe since the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The enigmatic suggestion in this work is that this world order is now finally coming to an end and a new and global one is coming and will herald the decline of Europe. However, the basic notion of a spatial and juridical order as defining the shape of a civilization accords with the notion of a civilizational heritage, which we can see as emerging with the Greco-Roman confluence of power and culture.

Roman Civilization Greek civilization as it emerged during the Hellenic era did not have the enduring significance of the Roman civilization, which was a civilization underpinned by an empire that established a lasting institutional framework for European civilization. Although the Greeks were partly colonized by the nascent Roman civilization, Greek culture has largely come to us today through the Roman tradition and the later Christian tradition which was formed out of the confluence of Greek and Jewish thought. Due to the overlapping nature of the two civilizations, it is only with some qualifications that we can speak of GrecoRoman civilization. However, there was never entirely a fusion of Greek and Roman culture, for Rome never fully absorbed Greek culture and consequentially Greek culture was never entirely Romanized. This may call into question the notion of a Greco-Roman civilization when what existed were simply two interacting civilizations. The Roman Empire emerged out of the Roman Republic, but was more than an empire; it was a civilization in that earlier phases of its history contributed the later ones. It was formed out of a geopolitical territory that emerged out of the conquests of the Roman Republic and by the time of Augustus was declared emperor in 31 BCE, when the Roman Republic finally became an empire, it included much of what we today call Europe, but more as well in that much of it lay outside the later historical territories of Europe. This empire was as much Eastern as European or Western;

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it included a great diversity of cultures, Celts, Germans, Romans, Iberians, Berbers, Illyrians and Libyans. The Chinese once believed Antioch was the capital rather than its third largest city (Dudley 1995: 243). It created an enduring institutional framework based on the rule of law, which served as an integrative framework for Europe, and a system of writing that provided a framework in which non-Romans, such as the Germanic tribes, used to construct their own history. Such ideological power was one way in which the identity of Europe was shaped. In this sense, civilization comes with the power that writing brings with it since it is writing that made possible historical memories. The worldview of the Roman Empire embodied both a civilizational worldview and various cultural orientations that were decisive for the course of European history. The civilizational worldview did not fully crystallize until the adoption of Christianity as the official state religion of the empire, but the cultural orientations were present from an early period and could be described as a nascent global culture, which like the European culture that was to follow in its wake was not based on a single native culture, but a plurality of competing ones. Tensions existed between the Greek, Roman, Germanic and the later Christian traditions. But alongside these tensions was also a co-evolution of a new culture.2 It is possible to see this in two main waves that laid the foundation for what was to become Europe the earlier encounter of Roman and Greek culture, and the later encounter of the Roman and Germanic cultures. As a geopolitical entity, the Roman Empire was itself a civilizational constellation embodying a vast array of cultures connected by transport networks of roads and seaways. The Roman Empire shifted the eastwardly Hellenic civilization westwards, though much of present-day Northern Europe lay outside it. The Roman Empire was above all a Mediterranean civilization. Its diversity reflected the multi-ethnic world of the Mediterranean as well as the wider European continent including much of Germany and England. The fault-lines in these two countries that shaped so much of their history can be related to the lines that marked the final advance of Romanization. Although we often see Europe divided between an East and a West, this distinction made no sense in Roman times when a conception of Europe did not

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exist. The empire was Asian and African as much as it was European. It was culturally cosmopolitan in the sense of being mixed, but was politically centralized and the imperial centre dominated the periphery. The pre-Christian Roman religion adopted many pagan traditions from all over the Mediterranean world with which it came into contact in its continuous expansion. The Roman Empire, while expanding in many directions from Rome after the Punic Wars against Carthage and the conquest of the Hellenic territories, was in its time a world empire. In his studies of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel portrayed the interaction of a plurality of civilizations within the unity of the Mediterranean: Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Orthodox civilizations interacted and the cross-fertilization of their cultures produced the world of the Mediterranean, which he associates with the multi-ethnic Roman Empire. Braudel (1994) never developed his concept of civilization, which remained a vague, suggestive notion entailing both unity and pluralism within it and at the same time included an intra-civilizational dynamic that was creative and transformative. Cultural trade, diasporas, translations, cultural diffusions and cross-fertilizations produced the world of the Mediterranean and its civilizations. It is possible to see the Roman Empire as consolidating a vast web of cultures that had already been in contact. It imposed on this already connected world a central authority, which was supported by superior military power, integrative systems of transport, law and communication across sea and land. It established technological innovations, trade networks, and a political and intellectual elite who were united by a common language. The Roman concept of empire is closer to a civilizational vision of an open world endlessly expanding than the Greek polis of the pre-Hellenic period; it was not confined to a specific territory, for empire and world were one and the same. While the Roman Empire was won by military conquest, the civilization that was created out of that process was a more universalistic one than the earlier Hellenistic civilization for all its cosmopolitanism. Hellenism was ultimately a cultural world based on the universality of the Greek language; the Roman Empire, in contrast, was a political and legal order in the first instance. The Roman Empire was based on a principle of universal rule that had no territorial limits. As a geopolitical configuration with a more

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developed legal system as opposed to a linguistic world, the empire was defined not by territory, but by the limits of its political system and a vast social, cultural and economic world. One of its major legacies was the tradition of civil law, which had its origins in the Twelve Tables of the fifth century BC and the Corpus Juris Civilis that was promulgated by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century (Lesaffer 2009). Since the third century, the Roman legal tradition died out in the Western Empire, until it was recovered in the late eleventh century. The Romans were conscious of peoples living beyond the frontiers of the empire, which in principle was limitless before it collapsed under its own weight. It is now recognized that it is not easy to speak of ‘barbarians’ beyond the frontiers in a very clear-cut way. The encounter of Rome with the Germanic tribes has often been portrayed as a clash of cultures but it has also been seen in terms of a gradual overlap and confluence of cultures that was also mediated by Christianity (see WallaceHadrill 2008). Roman frontiers were porous and not fixed points of closure; many served as points of communication in what in fact were very often expansive borderland areas (see Whittaker 1994). The establishment and expansion of such borderlands were instrumental in creating the foundations of a European civilization in which inside and outside were not absolutely fixed. The Roman frontier might be seen as the site of European civilization and not the central imperial core as such. The frontier was shaped in a constant push and pull in which the imperial territory expanded in multiple directions. In this sense, then, the frontiers of the Roman Empire connected as much as divided people. The lines on a map which we today call borders did not exist in the same way in the ancient world where the limes were not always linear and fixed, but zones or borderlands. It was through this expanding system of borderlands that Europe was created from Roman times onwards. It must not be forgotten than in a seafaring age the Alps represented a far greater geographical, and hence a cultural, divide than the Mediterranean. The sea served to unite people rather than divide them. The entire trading networks of the ancient world crisscrossed the Mediterranean linking Cadiz, Carthage, Alexandria and Constantinople. New interpretations of the Mediterranean influenced

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by Horden and Purcell’s interactionist analysis have stressed a world of interconnections established by exchange and commerce made possible by the sea (Horden and Purcell 2000; Harris 2006; see also Abulafa 2000; Gallant 2006). But the Roman Empire was an empire and asserted the dominance of the centre over the periphery. However, it should not go unremarked that it was in the end the periphery—in the form of the Germanic peoples—who defeated the empire, at least in the Western Latin half, following from the so-called Barbarian invasions that led to the final sack of Rome (see Heather 2017). An important part of the Roman contribution to European civilization has been commented on by Rémi Brague, namely a specific relationship to culture as the transmission of what is received (Brague 2002). Roman civilization was based on a culture that itself was a reworking of those cultures it came into contact with, in particular Greek, Hebraic, Near Eastern and African. These cosmopolitan currents were of course often checked by the republican tendencies of the metropolitan centre, but they established a dynamic that were long-lasting. This dynamic at the heart of the Roman Empire gave to Europe one of its creative impulses, namely the constant reworking of all cultures, including the heritage of the past. It was of course the case, as Brague argued, that much of the later history of Europe from the medieval age repudiated the Roman legacy. Nonetheless, despite a shift in consciousness with the ascendancy of the Christian theology and the Roman Church, the historical imprint of Rome remained. Christian theology, for example, was influenced by Roman law and by the rationality of the Roman mind with its concern with social and political organization. Church canon law was the ecclesiastical equivalent of Roman civil law. The implication of this is that Europe is not primarily based on peoplehood, but on a civilizational process that included law as a way in which the social world could be organized. But it also included violence as the primary means of securing its conditions of existence. The simple reality of the Roman Empire was its more or less total militarization, necessitated by the need to keep large standing arms. The armies of the modern age were far smaller and subject to greater restrictions than was the case in the age of the Roman Empire where war was a permanent feature of the age. So, behind the rule of law was military conquest of new territories.

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While the Roman civilization laid the basic structures of a European civilization in leaving behind an enduring tradition of civil law, it also created a deep division, which ultimately made impossible less a common European civilization than an interconnecting constellation of different societies. When the Roman Empire finally split into an Eastern and a Western half, the unity of its civilization was undermined but not fragmented. With the relocation of its capital in Constantinople in 330 AD, the Roman Empire had ceased to be exclusively Roman, although for long the citizens of Byzantium called themselves Romans. The consequences of the final political split between the Eastern and Western Empires in 395 have undoubtedly been exaggerated, at least until the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine capital in 1453 when the definitive break occurred. The early division, which is better located in the sixth century when a distinct Byzantine civilization crystallized, did not engender the later division between East and West (see Arnason and Raaflaub 2011). While the Eastern half included Egypt, the Western half included Africa, which meant for the Romans the Western parts of North Africa, Greece and the Aegean and most of the South of the Balkans went to the Eastern Empire. The Italian peninsula remained a dividing line between the two halves of the empire (Herrin 1987: 22–23). Yet, despite these shifts and divisions, the notion of the Roman tradition as such was not bound to Rome, and like Europe, it was transferrable to the parts of the world that it came into contact with. In this sense, it constituted what Stephen Greenblatt (2010) has called a ‘mobile culture’. The Byzantine Empire provided continuity with the Greco-Roman tradition which continued links between West and East after the division of the empire. It was founded as the ‘New Rome’, or the ‘Second Rome’ and its citizens called themselves Romans. But the decline of the Roman Empire was irreversible and complete in the sixth century when the Eastern Empire failed to recover the Western half. What survived was the empire’s main creation, a civilizational heritage, to a large degree now based on Christianity and which was to provide a framework for the homogenization of Europe in the medieval era. Of the many architects of this homogenization were the Normans whose

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conquests established unity that later laid the foundation of the idea of Europe. The institutional framework of feudalism they created was decisive in laying the structural foundations of a societal order in Europe. Significant, too, in particular in transmitting the Greek and Roman legacy, was the Irish monastic movement from the late sixth to early eight century. The Irish monks—such as Columbanus, John Scotus Eriugena—founded monasteries across Europe and were critical in the transcription and translation of the texts of antiquity, thus providing civilizational continuity in an era of major change following the break-up of the Roman Empire and the reconfiguration of core and peripheries. While the word ‘Europe’ did exist, albeit without much meaning, the term ‘Europeans’ was rarely used in ancient times. The word Franks was more commonly used by those who encountered Europeans well into modern times. This was simply because there was no other word to describe the invading Franks from Normandy who arrived from the West in the twelfth century. The notion of Europeans was absent and Europe did not signify a cultural or political reality other than a vaguely defined geographical domain that only roughly coincided with the notion of the Occident. The decline of the Roman Empire in the West, following the so-called Barbarian invasions of the Germanic peoples, may have been paradoxically the source of the eventual rise of the North-western region of Europe, where continuity with Rome was more an ideology of the Franks than a reality; for the fragmentation of the empire led to the emergence of new and very different societal structures, associated with feudalism and the Latin Western Church. In the East, the greater continuity of the Roman tradition under the Byzantines reached a point of major rupture in 1453 with the final end of the Eastern Empire (see Chapter 4). But by that time the Roman legal tradition was revived in the West after the twelfth century, but under conditions that were very different from the classical era. The encounter of the classical culture with the Germanic one had fundamentally changed the cultural matrix of Europe. It had established a new common starting point upon for the making of Europe.

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Jewish Civilization Along with Athens and Rome, Jerusalem is another important reference point in the formation phase of the European civilizational constellation. Together these cities and the traditions they established have shaped the European heritage. The Greek, Roman, Christian, Islamic and Judaeo traditions gave a lasting orientation to European civilization, which was never based on one single source. The European heritage has been shaped from a multiplicity of cultures. It was formed through the fusion, interaction and transformation of cultures, since the cultures did not always remain separate but became entangled. The tensions that have been a characteristic feature of Europe have reflected this process of continuous creation. The logic of this process can be described as the process of civilization to which belongs an integral cosmopolitanism and a questioning of the authority of political rule, which derives from an anti-despotic current in ancient thought. As a civilization, Judaism is a complicated case since the Jews unlike the Romans are specifically a people in an ethnic or religious sense and cannot be defined in terms of an imperial territory or state. The ethnic definition is of course contested as is the relation to a territory. The religious unity of the Jews distinguishes them from groups that are defined by membership of a political community, territory or a shared language. It is closer to a culture than to a civilization, but embodies some of the features of a civilization. However, one can speak of Jewish civilization as distinct from the notion of a Jewish people, religion or national groups. Jewish civilization exists in two senses: first, as a diasporic culture—as Eisenstadt (1992) argued—consisting of the entire historical experience of the Jews and second, as the religious culture out of which the Jewish civilization was formed. It is difficult to separate these dimensions, but the distinction is an important one, since the Jewish contribution to Europe has been twofold: first, as a diasporic people whose historical experience has included an important European dimension since the medieval era when Jews migrated to various parts of Europe; second, as the cultural origin of the Roman and Christian civilization. In this latter sense, what is important is the religious and cultural dimension, rather than the specific contributions of Jews, due to its formative influence on other civilizational currents.

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Regarding the diasporic dimension of the Jewish contribution to Europe, once they migrated to Europe in the period before the rise of the Roman empire, Jews played an important role in the translations of ancient texts into Latin, often through Arabic translations. However, the Jews are a diasporic people who moved to Europe relatively late and were not unified into an organized unit. Unlike Christianity, there was not a political order unifying the different Jewish traditions and there was not a territorial basis for Jewish civilization other than a myth of an original homeland. Of course, too, the Jews were excluded from much of the economic and political life of Europe until their political emancipation. The role of Judaism in the making of European civilization is closer to the example of Ancient Greece in that Judaism lay at the origin of the Roman and Christian tradition. Both Christianity and Judaism are based on the idea of a personal redeemer God. It is possible to see European civilization as a synthesis of the civilizational traditions that stemmed from Athens, Jerusalem and Rome. Unlike the GrecoRoman tradition, Judaism was monotheistic and it was this that provided a cultural orientation for Christian Europe. Jan Assmann has argued that Jewish civilization was in part shaped by the rejection of Egyptian sacred kinship (Assmann 1987). Max Weber (1952 [1911– 1920]) in his Ancient Judaism also stressed the rejection of magic in Judaism, which he saw as not having developed the rationalizing tendencies of Christianity. But unlike the Greeks, who also rejected sacred kinship, the notion of divine authority that the Jews created instead led to a civilizational form that was based on monotheism, which in turn was conducive to a spirit of individuality born of the struggle to gain salvation through redemption by a personal God. A particularly powerful influence emanating from Judaism was the experience of exile and with it the critique of domination. As Brunkhorst (2005: 28–30) has suggested in his reconstruction of European solidarity, the mythic story of the Exodus of the slaves from Egypt and the confrontation with foreign domination in the name of a higher law provided the sources for a European tradition of resistance to domination.

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The Old Testament has exerted a lasting influence on Europe. Many of the basic cultural orientations of Christianity were expressed in it, most importantly the idea of a personal God and the notion of a higher order of justice. It established the belief in the incomprehensibility and utter otherness of the divine. With Christianity, human history and divine history were conceived in non-cyclical terms. The emphasis shifted to the contingency of providence, in which human beings play a role in bringing about the conditions of their salvation. Christianity itself began as a Jewish sect in the Greek-speaking world and the schism of the sect and the religion was one of the major events in the making of Europe, since the new religion became the official religion of the Roman Empire and later of Europe itself. Thus, to speak of the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition is to refer both to a common origin and to a history of the rejection of that origin and its crystallization in new forms. It is possible that this contradiction has been at the core of the European consciousness, which has had to confront the reality of a civilization that has been formed from diverse cultures all of which had to be refashioned by a church that itself saw itself based on a higher-order truth as opposed to worldly wisdom. The history of the Jewish diaspora in Europe draws attention to an aspect of the European heritage that is best exemplified by the Jewish historical experience. The Jews were the most transnationalized group in Europe since they were forced to take on economic functions such as itinerant trade, money-lending and other pursuits that depended on networks of international contacts that could cross a variety of borders. These networks developed into a myriad of economic, personal and communal connections that often bound Jews across early modern Europe (Miller and Urry 2018). The Jewish experience is also a reminder of the spirit of rootlessness that has pervaded Europe from the earliest of times and has contributed to the shaping of its identity. Since the destruction of the European Jews in the Holocaust, the relation of Europe to the Jews has been subject of considerable debate and one in which the line between civilization and barbarism has had to be reconsidered in the light of the deep currents of anti-Semitism that have been a part of European civilization and which were endemic

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to Christianity at a number of points in its history. But from a civilizational perspective, the Greek, Judaeo and Christian traditions were interlinked in the making of the European civilizational heritage, which cannot be reduced to one of these traditions. The Christian tradition was itself the result of the intersection of the Greek and Judaic traditions. Despite this confluence of traditions within the Christian tradition, the notion of a ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition should be treated with caution, since the two religions went their separate ways and the fact of a shared origin does not guarantee commonality. As argued earlier, a common heritage would require that the earlier phase had a lasting impact on later ones. The very term ‘Judaeo-Christian’ was not in currency until the early twentieth century when it emerged along with the idea of a singular ‘Western Civilization’ in opposition to the communist atheistic one in the East. This construction was at the cost of the neglect of the much more plural nature of the civilizational heritage of antiquity. A general conclusion is that Europe as we know it today is not defined by the classical civilizations. They do not constitute an origin that shaped later history. They should rather be seen as multiple sources of a tradition whose developmental path was defined at a later stage in history. As Christian Meir has written, ‘no matter how close antiquity and medieval and modern Europe may seem in some respects, there is still a significant rupture that separates them’ (Meir 2011: 15). Views will differ on the extent of the rupture of the medieval age with antiquity, but a rupture there was. It has been argued in this chapter that the ancient civilizations should be seen in terms of interacting cultures that underwent considerable variation as a result of their interactions: the Roman culture was transformed as a result of the encounter with Greek world and it was itself further changed as a result of the encounter with Christianity and the encounter with the Germanic peoples. The latter encounter, especially from the fourth to sixth centuries, established the essential conditions that were consolidated in the twelfth century.

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Notes 1. The debate goes back to Bernal’s controversial ‘Black Athena’ thesis of the African roots of Greek culture (Bernal 1987). See Orrels et al. (2011). 2. The encounter of Rome with the Germanic tribes can be seen in terms of struggle (Wolfgran 2005) or in terms of acculturation (Heather 2017) depending on which events and time frames are used.

3 Christianity in the Making of Europe

Christianity was not originally European but Asiatic and its origins were in Judaism. The oldest known Christian church is in Jordan, dating between 33 and 70 AD in the Jordanian city of Ribab. The Greek inscription found on the mosaic on the floor is a reminder of the Greek origins of early Christianity.1 Yet, it was to become the most characteristically European feature of the civilization that followed in the wake of the Roman Empire. The Christian church did not see itself as European as such but as universal. It was not until the separation of the Roman and Byzantine traditions of Christianity from 1054 that the equation of the former with Europe, understood as the Occident, became established. For centuries, from the early medieval period to the seventeenth century, Europe was more or less equated with Christianity. Although based on a universalistic belief system that itself was not specific to Europe but global, Christianity was an integral part of European civilization in its formative period. Even the secular and republican societies that were to develop in Europe maintained links with Christianity, which adapted in different ways to modernity and to the secularization that it brought. Its influence may have waned in the twentieth century, when modernity broke direct legitimation with its religious past, but traces remain and a reminder of a time when a degree of unity was established that made possible later diversity. © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_3

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It is often claimed that the defining feature of Europe is Christianity, which is what marks it off from the non-European world. But what does it mean to speak of Europe as Christian? Given the diverse forms of Christianity that developed in the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire, the legacy of the Reformation, counter-Reformation and modern secularism, the Christian legacy is by no means a clearly defined one. Moreover, Christianity saw itself as a world religion and not as a European one. Indeed, a considerable part of the European heritage has been a distancing from its Christian past. Much of modern Europe was shaped in a process of secularization in which church and state were gradually separated. The early medieval struggle between pope and emperor was one of the constitutive forces in the making of Europe. Before modern secularism, the conflicts of the early modern period over the confessional identities of the European states established long-lasting tensions and much of modernity emerged in opposition and renunciation of the Christian heritage. In view of this to claim that Europe is defined by Christianity is by no means straightforward, for it was in many ways a paradoxical heritage since the internal divisions with Christianity have been the source of much of the divisions within Europe. Yet, there is no denying the tremendous impact of Christianity in the shaping of Europe. To appreciate this, we need to go back to the emergence of the early church in the late Roman Empire.

The Rise of Christianity Originally a sect that emerged out of Judaism on the African and Asian margins of the Roman empire, Christianity eventually became, during the reign of Constantine I in 331, the official religion of the Roman Empire. Christianity was to become the single most important influence in the making of Europe, but it was itself not European in origin. Christ spoke a Semitic language called Aramaic, while St Paul along with several other followers of the sect’s founder spoke Greek, which was the language of the earlier Christian movement and the language in which the New Testament was written, since this was the language used by Jewish scholars in the era. Greek philosophy was a formative influence on early Christian

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theology, which drew from Stoicism and Epicureanism, but especially from Platonism. Until the first century, Christian theology was deeply neo-Platonic and medieval Christian theology was formed through the assimilation of Platonism and Aristotelianism, which provided it with its ontological and epistemological arguments (Carey 2003; Pelikan 1993). Several centuries lapsed before the teachings of Christ, as interpreted by his followers, became the basis of an organized church and Latin as its language. With the decline of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion survived and preserved many of its features, above all the Roman legal tradition. Unlike many other of the world religions, Christianity was based on a written as opposed to an oral culture and a centrally organized legal an administrative system; it endured sufficiently long to become the defining feature of the religion of the empire. It thus came about that Christianity was Roman rather than anything else and adopted the Latin language and much of the imperial symbolism and the legal edifice of Canon law. Even with the relocation of the Roman Empire in Constantinople, the idea of a ‘New Rome’ was promulgated to provide continuity with the old Roman Empire. Although this invocation of Rome was to lose any real connection with the Western capital, it revealed the symbolic power of the Roman past over the present. Christianity developed in the geopolitical area we call Europe, originally the relatively small Carolingian Empire. Charlemagne who styled himself the ‘father of Europe’ established the first major association of Europe with Christianity. Since the Muslim conquests of North Africa and the Near and Middle East, Christianity became territorially consolidated only in those areas of the later Roman Empire. With the expansion of the Muslim world westwards across North Africa as far as the Iberian peninsula, Christianity did not gain much ground in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean and increasingly lost its earlier cosmopolitanism in becoming the religion of a Carolingian Europe, with its centre in the Franco-Germanic lands west of the Rhine. The emergence of a Romano-Germanic culture, following the encounter of Rome with the Germanic tribes and their subsequent Christianization from the third century was a major step in the making of Europe. Some qualifications are in order: the Germanic peoples did not see themselves as Roman. If anything, the encounter worked the other way with the Romans seeing

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themselves as Germanic, as in the case of the encounter with the Franks in Gaul and the Visigoths in Spain, the Romans began to see themselves as Franks and Goths (Wickham 2017: 27–28). The Christianization of the Scandinavians and later the Slavs from the eleventh century was a further step in the identification of Europe with Christendom. It marked the point at which the Roman legacy ceased to the dominant one and a larger cultural world emerged that included Northern and Eastern Europe, which had laid outside the Roman empire (see Smith 2005). Christianity provided Europe with a certain continuity from the Roman Empire to the rise of national states from the seventeenth century. The idea of a universal empire was taken over by the church, which cultivated a historical memory that linked Christendom with the Roman Empire, which was repudiated as pagan and taken over and translated into the new Christian culture: the universal empire became the universal church and the cult of emperor worship was transposed to the papacy. The church had the organization, the ideological zeal and political capacity to make this possible. Since the fourth century, when the Roman Empire embraced Christianity, a huge Christian material culture began leading to a major redefinition of space. Christians took an existing Roman architectural form, such as the basilica, and adopted it to their needs (O’Malley 2004: 186). The cathedrals, from the Romanesque of the eleventh centuries to the later Gothic styles, that were built across Europe gave to it a certain uniformity based on a common cultural heritage that was also linked to civic cultures since they formed the nucleus of major cities. Europe’s cathedral cities, even long after the decline of medieval Christendom, played a significant part in the formation of the tangible and intangible cultural heritage of Europe. Their size and above all their height dominated the cities of medieval Europe. Whether the continuity that Christianity established diminished the discontinuities of history is, and will probably remain, a controversial issue. The decisive matter in this may be the timing of major ruptures. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the basic value orientations and institutional structures were in place before the collapse of a unitary Christian worldview once known as Christendom. As we have seen, the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology and

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the synthesis of the latter with Roman civil law established a new cultural model that commanded philosophical, scientific and legal models of knowledge for the organization of the social world. Central to this was the growing importance of book and manuscript production. The twelfth and thirteenth century saw a huge increase in written production (Barbier 2017: 42). While the general move to modernity from the seventeenth century onwards resulted in the gradual erosion of medieval Christianity, what remained was a civilizational framework that proved to be highly resilient but also unconstrained by earlier designs. From the twelfth century, the basic institutional structures of European civilization were established in the legal and administrative systems of the medieval states and the cathedral cities, chartered towns and universities that were later born (Berman 1990; Grant 2010; Lesaffer 2009). This period was fundamentally different from the early Middle Ages and marked a major point of transformation with the medieval age, according to Wickham (2016: 99). The Frankish kingdom was the crucible for the formation of medieval Christendom and reflected a Northern shift in Christianity from the Mediterranean. The Franks, who can be regarded as one of the heirs of the Roman Empire, were a Germanic people who created an embryonic Europe, with a later Western core in the Carolingian kingdom, which extended as far eastwards only to the Elbe, the mountains of Bohemia and alpine districts of Austria. Indeed, one of the first uses of Europe was at Charlemagne’s court at Aachen (Barraclough 1963: 12). Originating in North-east Gaul, they can be seen as mix of French and German cultures. Ever since the crowning of Charlemagne, the Carolingian king, as Emperor of the Romans in 800, this association of imperial rule and Christianity was forged as a political and cultural identity for Europe for many centuries. The association with Rome was largely symbolic, as the Roman Empire had disintegrated. Gregory the Great associated the church with Europe by making the papacy the centre of gravity in Europe (Ullmann 1969: 135). However, it was not only Christianity that gave to Europe a certain civilizational unity, but also the system of feudalism that developed from the Carolingian Empire in the ninth and tenth century and was later adopted by much of Europe.

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Feudalism played an equally important role as Roman legacy in the making of modern Europe since it shaped the basic societal model of Europe. This has been referred to by Moore (2000) as the first European Revolution due to its transformative impact on European history; it was a period in which the peasantry and elite were both transformed by a social and political system of control and production. One of the main beneficiaries of the new system of power that it produced was the Catholic Church. Christianity enjoyed about 1000 years of supremacy in most of Europe, letting aside the question of the Byzantine schism (which will be considered in the next chapter). Some qualification is necessary here, for there were challenges to its ascendancy, as is evidenced by the numerous sects and heresies. What stands out in all of this was the capacity of the church not only to withstand such attacks, but to consolidate itself as the religion of the former Roman Empire and even to present its self as the heir of that empire. The medieval notion of a universal monarchy was the last and unsuccessful attempt to forge a synthesis of religion and the state. The notion of a universal monarch, which goes back to Dante’s De Monarchia, was a legacy of the Roman Empire and was invoked by the Habsburg emperor Charles V in the sixteenth century (Yates 1975). But the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which attempted to lay claim to the Roman legacy, was a German Empire and was challenged by France and the notion of a universal monarchy had become an anachronism when Napoleon invoked it. The early church established an institutional framework for Christianity to develop in close association with political authorities. For several centuries, Latin was a common language for the elites until its gradual vernacularization. However, the relationship between the church and state was such that neither side ever fully controlled the other. Although European states recognized ecclesiastical authority, they were rarely subservient to it and never embraced it to the same degree as in the Byzantine and Muslim traditions where the autonomy of the political was never as strong as in Western Europe. A civilizational feature of Europe was that religion never entirely dominated the state and ultimately the state remained the source of power. A feature of European political modernity has been the continued contestation of

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political power between the church, the state and civil society. Political authority always remained relatively contested, and the church’s authority had to compete with the authority of science, especially from the Renaissance period, and the authority of political elites. In the end, it was the state that won the struggle. The principle of cujus regio, ejus religio, whereby the ruler decided the religion of the population effectively, allowed political authority to assert superiority over clerical authority. In later centuries, state power had to compete with civil society, which further diminished the political power of ecclesiastical authorities. But in Europe the political neutralization of Christianity had already been accomplished by the sixteenth century. It was thus a paradox that the most distinctively European cultural form, medieval Christianity, developed in a way that while shaping Europe it led to an irreversible tension between power and culture. The Middle Ages—or the medieval age—is the key to an understanding of the making of Europe since it was in this period that the idea of Europe became concretely embodied in symbolic forms and the notion of ‘Europeans’ first emerged, though this was a term that had limited usage. This is the period between 500 and c.1500, as marked by the end of the fall of the Western Roman empire to the final end of the Byzantine empire after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 and the Spanish conquest of the Americas (see Wickham 2014: 4). The nature and form of Europe cannot be evinced from the word itself. In the fifteenth century, the first images of Europe as a contrast to Asia appeared. The heritage of antiquity was of course important, but more significant was the use made of that inheritance. The great historians of medieval Europe, Marc Bloch and Jacques Le Goff, agreed that it was in the Middle Ages that Europe was created as a process of unity and diversity that emerged out of the mixing of populations and the consolidation of political and societal structures. As Le Goff (2006) has argued, the emergence of a common Christian culture was decisive as far as Western Europe was concerned. According to Le Goff (1992: 68–80), Christianity was a religion of remembrance that gave a special place to the past through the commemorative liturgy and the commemoration of the saints. This culture of remembrance was passed down through the monastic orders, which laid the foundations of Europe in creating

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new modes of knowledge, including historiography, through separating written from oral memory. As a civilization based on writing and the commemoration of the saints, Europe could not escape the past. Such memories were inscribed in the names of places and in the names of people. The eleventh and twelfth centuries were critical in the consolidation of a common culture, generally referred to until the wars of religion of the seventeenth century as Christendom. The fact that the civilizations of the East were vastly superior to Europe, which derived many of its achievements from adaptations of Eastern sources in technology and science, does not detract from the significance of the gradual rise of the West in this Middle Ages. The twelfth century marked the moment of consolidation with the emergence of universities and the advancement of legal structures, based on Roman civil law, which considerably aided the urban centres by giving to them new institutional foundations and thus facilitated the rise of autonomous groups, such as guild-based organizations and various professional groups. Much of European law continued to be defined by the legacy of Roman civil law until the twentieth century (Berman 1990; Grant 2010; Stein 1999). The French Code civil of 1804 and the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch 1896–1900 preserved the civil law tradition that went back the late eleventh-century revival of the Roman civil law (Lesaffer 2009). The eleventh to the thirteenth century was also a period of the geopolitical expansion of Europe. But this was a process that occurred more through what has been referred to as ‘internal colonization’ than imperial conquest, which was a later development. In his study of the making of Europe in the Middle Ages, the historian Robert Bartlett (1993) has described the formation of Europe in terms of a process of internal colonization that brought about transformation and rapid societal convergence. Medieval Christendom was an expanding world in which the edge of Europe was pushed in many directions through settlements and migratory movements: the Norman conquest of England, the English conquest of the Celtic world in the Western and Northern regions of the British Isles, German expansion in the Baltic region and in Eastern

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Europe, the Catalan conquest of the South of Italy and the Castilian ‘reconquest’ of the Iberian peninsula. The ‘Europeanization of Europe’ was largely a product of the conquest and the resulting homogenization brought about by the expanding Frankish kingdom with its centre west of the Elbe. Bartlett describes how from this part of Western Europe, expansionary expeditions were launched in all directions and that by the fourteenth century a large part of Western, Northern and Southern Europe had a relatively high degree of cultural homogeneity. It is in this sense, then, it is possible to say that a developmental path took shape in the myriad ways in which centres expanded to incorporate peripheries. While the early Middle Ages was a world of diversity, this had all changed by 1300 due to the spread of Norman customs. The spread of the alphabet, the chartered town, monastic orders, the cults of the saints and the adoption of the names of the saints, coinage, the Latin language and the foundation of universities were structuring forming models for the fashioning of European societies. In all these movements, Christianity was implicated and Europe was, as a result, gradually consolidated. Europe was as much the product of conquest and colonization as, in later centuries, the initiator. The Europeans who later colonized much of the world were themselves products of societies that were themselves formed out of conquest and colonization over several centuries. In Bartlett’s (1993: 314) words: ‘The European Christians who sailed to the coasts of Americas, Asia and Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from a society that was already a colonializing society. Europe, the initiator of one of the world’s major processes of conquest, colonization and cultural transformation, was also the product of one’. But medieval conquest was different from later forms, for in the process of conquest and colonization medieval Christendom became increasingly homogenized, while its outer regions were often divided and fragmented until a point has been reached when the centre established its power of the periphery. European overseas colonialism took a different form since such colonialism was based on the separation of colony and imperial centre and frequently involved slavery, but always entailed the appropriation of the colony for

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the enrichment of the imperial centre. Yet, any account of the formation of Europe cannot ignore the process by which the various centres of political and economic power extended their power of the periphery incorporating it into territorial units that were themselves subject to later conquest. Bartlett’s characterization of the difference between medieval and modern colonization is worth noting: ‘When Anglo-Norman settled in Ireland or Germans in Pomerania or Castilians in Andalusia, they were not engaged in the creation of a pattern of regional subordination. What they were doing was reproducing units similar to those in their homelands. The towns, churches and estates they established simply replicated the social frameworks they knew back home. The net result of this colonialism was not the creation of “colonies”, in the sense of dependencies, but the spread, by a kind of cellular multiplication, of the cultural and social forms found in the Western Christian core. The new lands were closely integrated with the old. Travellers in the Middle Ages going from Magdeburg to Berlin and onto Wroclaw, or from Burgos to Toledo and on to Seville, would not be aware of crossing any decisive social or cultural frontier’ (Bartlett 1993: 306). This was a contrast to the colonies that Europeans established overseas, for there, despite the attempts of the colonial elites to preserve and replicate the culture of the homeland, nothing could disguise the unbridgeable gulf that separate the colony from the imperial centre. It does appear to be the case that despite the narrowing of the geopolitical base of Christianity and the exclusion of the Byzantine Empire, Christianity from about the sixth century to the fifteenth century had established itself as the common religion of Europe. It was more than a religion. Christianity provided the medieval European powers with a cultural model based on shared values. When that world was finally challenged from within by the Protestant reformers, the civilization it had shaped for more than a millennium entered into a new phase, which has generally been referred to as one of secularization. But even though since the seventeenth century, when the medieval Christianity declined and Europe changed course, it was decisive for its future that a common cultural world had been forged, even if that culture was soon to be discarded. Its fragments were a reminder of a once shared heritage.

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The Christian Worldview Christianity provided some of the most important cultural orientations for Europe, including, too, a civilizational worldview. At the core of Christianity lies the belief in redemption, which cultivated modern individualism and the belief that the profane world can be mastered by the individual. It is often argued that democracy, equality in the eyes of the law and the idea of the liberty of the individual, derive from the belief that all people stand equal before the eyes of God. This claim has been questioned on the premise that the fundamental breakthrough of the modern worldview, as Hans Blumeberg (1983) argued, involved the assertion of human autonomy. Modernity was a rupture with what went before. Nonetheless, the lesser claim that pre-modern traditions provided the modern world with sources for what were to become new cultural orientations whose legitimacy did not derive from its antecedents. It can also be argued that the values of solidarity and individual responsibility have a certain resonance in Christian ideas, although this should not be exaggerated since many of these values of ‘the gift of law’ can be related to both pre-Christian and non-Christian traditions.2 Indeed, S. N. Eisenstadt (1986) has made the claim that the key impulse of modernity—the notion that the world can be fashioned by human agency—was born with the great religions in Axial Age with the discovery of transcendence and the desire to bring the Kingdom of God onto earth. There is much evidence to suggest that the modern quest for liberty was related to religious struggles. The political demands of dissenters and many of the Protestant Reformers for freedom of worship provided the conditions for the recognition of other kinds of liberty, although largely only for Christian churches. Luther’s revolt, for instance, was made in the name of the German nation. The new demands for liberty took many forms—including counter-trends as in England where an established church emerged—the position that formed more generally from the end of the seventeenth century, while being very far from late modern pluralism, was part of the movement towards the democratization of state power and also leading to some of the early proclamations of nationhood.

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There is also an important connection between Christianity and modernity. Christianity was a relatively modernizing religion in that, to follow Max Weber, it promoted a worldview that proclaimed the ‘de-magicification’ of the world; it sought to eradicate paganism and replace it with doctrinal authority controlled by an ordained priesthood. It has often been observed that the term ‘modern’ was first used by Pope Gelasius in the fifth century to distinguish the Christian era from the pagan age. However, we should not conclude from this that modernity was the paradoxical product of the rationalization of Christianity, a thesis that would appear to have been the view of Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. As Blumenberg argued, modernity developed on quite independent foundations, however much it may have had a resonance in certain tendencies in the Christian religions. For instance, one of the distinctive features of modernity—modern experimental science—was greatly influenced by Christianity in that many Christian reformers believed that religion could explain the divine plan. There was also an integral link between the belief in the freedom of science and scholarship and the freedom of religious worship. This culture of inquiry was one of the defining features of seventeenth-century England and had European wide ramifications. Of the major world religions, Christianity was relatively late and effectively derives from the seventh century when ancient Christianity came to an end with the Carolingian Renaissance and the codification of new doctrines and the consolidation of the church and its monastic orders. As is well known, Christianity, in particular in its Protestant forms, was more compatible with the spirit of capitalism than were the other world religions. According to Weber, it was this affinity that led to the victory of capitalism in the modern world. Letting aside the complex question of the relation of Christianity to modernity, the cultural logic of Christianity was one that gave to Europe a certain character and which might be said to be the source of its cultural model and one of the defining features of its heritage. The significant aspect of this, which may have been connected to the contestability of doctrinal authority, was the constant revisions of doctrine. Christianity was a religion that underwent considerable change in the course of its history and ultimately brought about its own secularization. In this,

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socio-cognitive developments were significant. Shifts in doctrine occurred through reasoned disputes over the interpretations of the scriptures, and in the course of its long history, the church developed a considerable body of formal systems of theological interpretation which since Aquinas sought to balance revelation and reason. The intellectualization of religious belief in theology and institutionalized in universities gave rise to a cultural heritage that could be said to be characteristically European. The essential revisability of Christian doctrine was an expression of a religious movement that had conceived itself from the beginning as the source of all authority. Christianity repudiated the classical roots of Europe in the Greco-Roman civilizations, proclaiming itself as the new and the modern, while at the same time appropriating elements of those earlier cultures. There were certainly limits to its capacity for domination, and eventually, the modern world no longer saw itself in terms of what had become a divided Christian church. This did not mean that modernity was characterized by a break from the past or from the Christian tradition, for tradition was reconstructed by modernity. At the same time, the past exerted what might be best characterized as a non-determining power over modernity in that it provided sources that were constantly redefined and variously repudiated.

The Discovery of the Individual Christianity was important in the shaping of the idea of the individual, which came from the Platonic tradition (Carey 2003). However, Christianity gave rise to a different political tradition than that of the Greek one, which rested on, to follow Brunkhorst (2005), civic solidarity. The Christian tradition instead established the idea of brotherly solidarity, and unlike the Greek tradition, it was apolitical. It made possible a conception of the individual as a member of a larger human and a divine community. Individualism and solidarity were two sides of the same coin that shaped the self as both an individual and a collective actor. While Dumont (1986) traces the spirit of individualism to the origins of Christianity, it underwent major transformation in the first millennium. Its origins in Greek philosophy should also not be neglected, as noted earlier with respect to Patocka’s interpretation of the legacy of especially Plato.

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In his account of the twelfth-century Carolingian Renaissance, Colin Morris (1972) attributes to that century the ‘discovery of the individual’. Self-knowledge was one of the dominant themes of the age as exemplified in a new concern with self-expression: ‘We hear the authentic voice of the individual, speaking of his own desires and experiences’ (1972: 67). The institution of the confession was a product of an age concerned with self-awareness as much as with punishment. The institution evolved as it was challenged by a new emphasis upon self-examination. Morris comments on the emergence of private confession, a new interest in psychology, the study of the passions and emotions and the emergence of autobiography. The latter was part of a general tendency to examine and to publish one’s personal experiences. The arts, too, reveal the emergence of the individual as the object of artistic representations. Until the twelfth century, portraiture was largely concerned with the representation of the rank and status of the individual. In this era, it changed to record personal features. Morris speaks of the personalization of the portrait along with a transformation in vision. ‘The twelfth century saw a distinct shift in the visual arts towards sensitivity to nature, and a more characteristically modern way of seeing the human form’ (1972: 90). This can be found in memorial or tomb sculpture where there was an increasing emphasis on the display of the details of appearance and personal features as opposed to status and rank. It can also be found in busts of the Roman Emperors where there was an attempt to represent a certain individuality. Other examples can be found in the literature of the age, such as satire and the romance, which were both affected by the individualism of the age and the idea of following one’s heart as well as protest against injustice. The emergence of the individual can be found in the idea of friendship and the different area of love and eroticism. The self finds its identity in a relation with another self. Close personal friendship was a creation of the century and contributed to the emerging culture of humanism. Following Morris’s characterization, the custom of letter writing was a key vehicle for the expression of friendship, which in turn made possible the construction of the individual whose external acts are the products of an internal world that knows another reality. Letter writing was given a new emphasis in the twelfth century as a stylistic

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device for self-exploration. This was an age that had not yet discovered the writings of Plato and Aristotle on the subject, but had become the focus of a great amount of poetry. The cult of friendship found a natural place in the church, and the symbolism of human relations to God gave to it an additional religious dimension that reinforced the idea that every individual can have a personal relation to God. Of the many examples than can be given the change in the appearance of the crucifix with a new devotional emphasis on the pains of Christ, who is increasingly represented in a more inwards and less formal spirit and in a manner that allows for the expression of personal grief. As Morris argues, the importance of the individual’s suffering with Christ is now paramount (1972: 141). Undoubtedly, the most powerful impetus for the new individualism was the idea of participating in a divine mission and having a personal relation and place in the Kingdom of God. The modern age may have lost much of this devotion, but what survived was the strong sense of the centrality of the individual. This found its expression in many forms: in religious piety and dissent, philosophy, literature and in the self-questioning attitude and exploratory zeal of modern science, as well as in alternative political movements. The social and economic order of the age made possible the first step in the direction of an autonomous life for an individual. At least for the upper classes and the citizens of the chartered towns, there were new professions as well as the higher ones, which might include being knight, a scholar, an administrator or a monk. As Morris points out, there was as yet no clearly ordered ethic prevailing in these domains, for instance there were major disputes about the proper nature of knighthood or that of the monastic life. The institution of feudalism may have created a space for people to think in personal as opposed to exclusively institutional terms insofar as it was based on personal bonds of commitment and obligation. Although they were hierarchical, they were also based on recognition of the other. However, it was in the cultural and religious developments of the age that the emergence of the individual is most evident. The twelfth-century discovery of the individual occurred within a narrow field of opportunities, mostly confined to the religious worldview of Christianity. In the following centuries, the exploration of individualism acquired more avenues for its expression. Medieval literature offers

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many examples of the search for the individual, such as the epic tradition and the new genre of biography and autobiography (Gurevich 1995). The injunction ‘know yourself ’ by gaining knowledge of one’s inner life rather than external acts opened the way for humanism and the cultivation of the European individual, leading eventually to Foucault’s account of the birth of the modern self in the movement from sovereign power to biopower. (This theme will be returned to in Chapter 6 with respect to the augmented humanism of the Renaissance.) The present discussion can be concluded with an observation of the wider implication of the revolution of the eleventh century. According to R. I. Moore, the Carolingian elite brought about a social revolution in creating a new system of power which in its implications was more expansive than feudalism, which would eventually be replaced by capitalism. The result was a restless dynamism that came from ‘their inner restlessness, their need to explore themselves and their destiny as well as the world they inhabited. The resulting combination of greed, curiosity and ingenuity drove these first Europeans to exploit their land and their workers ever more intensively, constantly to extend the scope and penetration of their governmental institutions, and in doing so eventually to create the conditions for the development of their capitalism, their industries and their empire. For good or ill it has been a central fact not only of European but of modern world history’ (Moore 2000: 197).

Unity and Division Any account of the Christian nature of European civilization must consider that this heritage divided as well as united Europe. Christianity, like Europe itself, did not lead to a single church. The most important split occurred between Latin and Greek Christianity. Since the eleventh century, this split became irreversible with the Orthodox Greek tradition, and a later Russian off-spring, representing a different version of Christianity. Hostility to the Orthodox Church was often greater than hostility to Islam. The fourth crusade was launched against the Byzantines rather than against the Muslims. This reveals a tendency to eradicate difference and impose a single belief system. The history of

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Christianity in Europe can be characterized by such tendencies towards intolerance and doctrinal uniformity. Where this was not possible through conversion, it was frequently imposed by force or the dissenters were either eradicated or marginalized. However, the resistance that such programmes provoked was as much a determining factor in the making of Europe, for the exercise of power attracts opposition. In the case of Christianity, dissent was never eradicated and its presence was an important factor in the internal transformation of Europe. It is also a reminder that not everything can be explained by external influences since the internal transformation of outside influences can be more consequential for the formation of developmental paths. The history of Europe in the early modern period until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 was shaped by the conflicts and upheavals that resulted in changes in the religions of the elites and masses. Since 1054, there was no pan-European religion, but three major religions: Catholicism, Orthodoxy and later Lutheranism. For several countries in Northern and Southern Europe and in Russia, these religions provided a framework of stability, while for others, unresolved religious conflicts had the consequence that modernity developed in an uneven manner. So whatever unity was established it was often at the cost of disunity on a wider scale and achieved through the persecution and silencing of heretics and political opponents. The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-Reformation divided Europe to an extent that Christianity could never again be a source of unity. Divided in doctrine, ritual and language between an Eastern Orthodox tradition and a Western tradition that was itself divided between a Catholic South and a Protestant North, the European Christian heritage could only be a divided legacy. It can also be noted that some of the greatest religious divisions occurred within Protestantism where the conflict over rival doctrines was often greatest. In addition, the institutional and doctrinal reforms of the Catholic counter-Reformation, produced by the Council of Trent (1545–1563), undermined a continuous Catholic tradition. Yet, despite such divisions the important point is that the basic value orientations and the societal shape of Europe were already established prior to these divisions. The most immediate consequence of the

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Reformation was the disappearance of an official Christian civilization. The conflicts of the Reformation, at least for Western Europe, had positive outcomes in that the states that consolidated from the sixteen and seventeenth century onwards developed on fairly clear-cut confessional lines. The adoption of a state religion allowed Western European states to pursue policies of integration and ultimately to establish the foundations for models of nationhood. This was less the case in much of Central and Eastern Europe where the outcome of the Reformation and counter-Reformation tended not to provide the same degree of national cohesion as in Western Europe. So the crystallization of Christianity in relatively secular states in the aftermath of the wars of religion in the early modern period eventually put Europe on the path to nation-state formation. The resulting divisions of European history, which were most notably evident in the twentieth century, should not disguise a more deeply rooted unity. This unity is less a homogeneous culture than a matrix of orientations that provided common reference points for different cultures.

The Secularization of Christianity Secularization did not lead to the disappearance of religion from Europe.3 From the seventeenth century, many European states pursued policies of creating established churches. Those countries shaped by the political modernity that arose from the French Revolution rejected established churches, but they gave an almost exclusively privileged role to the religion of the majority of the population. The pursuit of established churches was generally preferred by Protestant states, while the tendency in countries where Catholicism was stronger was a more radical separation of church and state, though for the greater part this was more a formal separation. This led to two models of secularism from the late seventeenth century: first, the constitutional conservative tradition whereby secularism entailed an official church established by the state and thus controlled by the state; second, associated with the republican tradition, whereby the state separated the church from the public domain, in effect privatizing religion. European secularism is a product of these two traditions.

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The important point is that in neither case religion did not disappear from society, but was institutionalized in the first case as an official religion and in both cases in the privatistic domains of family, education and other social institutions, such as in health. Indeed, by keeping religion out of the domain of the state, the more likely it survived the transition to modernity. Churches also played a key role as charitable institutions. The Enlightenment itself was for the greater part fostered by the reformed Protestant churches in Western Europe. It was only in France of the Catholic ancien regime that it took an anti-clerical form. But in France, Catholicism had a firm basis in the society and, for a time, when Napoleon re-established Catholicism as a state religion. The Enlightenment was a good deal less hostile to religion than is often believed. Many of the major Enlightenment philosophers believed that religion had a place in modern society, different from science and rationality but equally valid when judged by its own criteria. This was the basis of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who argued that religious belief and ideas could not be justified on the basis of reason. According to this interpretation, faith was protected from the critique of rationalists such as Voltaire, who argued only reason was a criterion of belief. Belief based on faith and belief based on evidence-supported knowledge have not always been equally acknowledged by the critics and defenders of modernity. Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, in a dialogue in Frankfurt in 2002 commented on this feature of modernity, which they both agreed cannot be reduced to the culture of rational science (Habermas and Ratzinger 2005). It would thus be wrong to see religion and reason as separate and thus assume modernity has simply two faces that never interact or that religion was a product of the world of tradition that was superceded by modernity. The secularization of church and state in Europe is rather a case of degrees of separation. France did not separate church and state until 1905 in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, although there was a gradual movement towards secularization from the late nineteenth century. Aside from the anti-clericalism of the short-lived Second Republic in Spain, only the communist countries were atheistic, in the sense of actively discouraging religion. The European trend is one of neutrality, but this has been ambiguous since there has mostly not been a total

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separation of church and state and there are different interpretations as to the meaning of neutrality, ranging from non-recognition to a principle of equality of all churches. In Ireland, for example, state neutrality was a means of maintaining the power of the church, especially in social policy, while in the Netherlands it has been a means of giving equal support to the main churches. Many states support the main Christian churches and do so in different ways, even if it is only in the official recognition of religious funerals or collecting tax. Several countries such as the UK, Norway and Denmark have state churches, which mostly have a minor official and symbolic significance. An exception in this regard is Greece where the Orthodox Church is the official established church, with the salaries and pensions of the clergy paid by the state, which appoints bishops and gives exemption to the clergy from military service. There has been a general increase in religion in the former communist societies, in particular in a rise in Orthodoxy in Bulgaria, Rumania and Russia. However, the increase in religious activity in post-communist countries is not greater than the extent of religious worship in Western Europe (see Norris and Inglehart 2004). While Europe has become secular, the vestiges of Christianity remain. There is no Christian unity in Europe, but there is evidence of a residual Christianity that is largely symbolic. Many countries have Christian parties and several have state churches, and throughout Europe, there are Christian commemorations and festivities which are all a reminder of the Christian background to European modernity. Most Europeans are affiliated to a church while being otherwise unreligious. The decline in religion in Europe is partly demographic in that the more traditionally Catholic countries, where religion was stronger, Ireland, Spain and Italy, have lower birth rates than the Lutheran countries. Religious practice is predominantly a matter of formal affiliation around birth, marriage and death, but is relatively unimportant for identity for the vast majority of Europeans. Christianity is no longer an important part of European societies, but in civilizational terms it was one of the major formative influences in shaping modern Europe.

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It is difficult to conclude from this that the European heritage is primarily transmitted by Christianity since so much of it over the past 300 years has been a product of quite different cultural influences. Yet, while the process of secularization has led to the decreased importance of religion in European societies, the very nature of secularization had its roots in the social organization of the Christian churches in relation to the state. In many cases, the path to nationhood was achieved through state churches and there never was a concerted attempt to articulate a European wide church aside since the end of the quest for a universal Catholic monarchy. It can be concluded that Christianity shaped Europe history, but did so in a way that undermined the possibility of cultural unity. This was precisely the condition that made possible the formation of a European cultural model, for a paradoxical consequence of Christianity was despite the intolerance and eradication of difference that it promoted, it was not unconnected to a spirit of freedom, criticism and individualism that arose in the questioning of doctrinal authority and in demands for freedom of worship.

Notes 1. It was discovered in 2008. 2. On Ottoman practices of ‘the gift of the law’, see Isin and Lefebrve (2005). 3. This section draws from Chapter 9 of Delanty (2009a).

4 Between East and West: The Byzantine Legacy and Russia

Most accounts of European civilization neglect the place of Byzantium. The Byzantine world is often dismissed as a chapter in the history of the decline of the Roman Empire, whose legacy in the conventional account was taken up by the Western monarchies and modern Europe emerged from a path that supposedly goes back to Rome and Athens. In this account, which will be challenged in this chapter, the main offspring of Byzantine civilization—Orthodox Christianity—was given a marginal role in European civilization in general and hardly figures in discussions on the place and significance of Christianity in that history. The general representation of the Byzantine tradition has been one of decline and irrelevance (see Arnason 2000a). In the Grand Narratives of the European heritage, the history of Europe has been essentially portrayed as the history of the Latin West, which was given an undue continuity and unity. This is a view that is increasingly challenged today in the light of a more general recognition of a wider conception of the European heritage and the need to take into account the historical experience of those parts of Europe whose route to modernity was shaped by the encounter with Russia and the earlier legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire. Any account of the European legacy today will need to consider the place of Byzantium in the history of Europe. © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_4

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The historical significance of Byzantium for a broader conception of Europe as a civilizational constellation should not be underestimated. The argument in this chapter is that the Byzantine Empire, as it was known, was an important transmitter of classical antiquity and that consequently continuity in European history cannot be entirely considered without reference to Byzantium. In addition is the significance of that tradition for those parts of South-eastern and Eastern Europe that came under the influence of Orthodox Christianity, most notably Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Cyprus. The Byzantine Empire was the most important basis of Christianity for centuries before the rise of the West and transmitted the cultural, legal and political legacy of the Roman Empire to Europe. In the present day with the revival of Orthodoxy and the enlargement of the EU to include parts of Europe that had been previously marginalized, the Byzantine legacy needs to be incorporated into a broader understanding of Europe, including Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. In view of the emphasis placed in this book on a conception of Europe as formed out of interaction with the cultures and civilization of those parts of the world with which Europeans came into contact, it seems essential to include in an account of the European heritage a consideration of the encounter with Russia. Russia, itself more than a nation and empire, but a civilization in its own right that is part European and part Eurasian, was deeply influenced by the Byzantine tradition. Given its impact on Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe for much of the twentieth century, it is hardly marginal to the European historical experience. Europe is constituted as much in its margins as in the centre. As is argued throughout this book, the very notion of a centre and margins needs to be replaced with a new emphasis on Europe as a world historical region comprised of borderlands. Borderlands are not present only in the periphery; they are everywhere and not defined by reference to a single centre but in terms of a multiplicity of centres. In the account offered in this chapter, those parts of Europe that were influenced by the Byzantine world and later by Russia constitute not only a borderland, but an integral part of the wider European civilizational

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constellation. Russia itself is more than a nation-state and empire but a civilization that has been significant in shaping European and world history. Russia embodies both European and Asian civilizational components, but it is best seen as a Eurasian civilizational form in its own right. No account of the origin of the idea of Europe can neglect the Russian counter-discourse (Neumann 1996). This has been one of the main competing discourses of the idea of Europe and one that also played its part in the formation of a European consciousness.

Re-evaluating the Byzantine Empire While Byzantine civilization did not survive the westward expansion of Islam and more or less disappeared in 1453 following the fall of its capital Constantinople to the Ottomans, it was important because the civilizational pattern that Byzantium established in Late Antiquity, between the third and seventh centuries, was based on a revival of the Greco-Roman tradition, which was later transmitted to Western Europe and had considerable influence on Russian civilization. Much of the Greco-Roman world other than what was continued by Christianity had been lost in the West after the fall of the Western empire. The result of this legacy is that the Byzantine tradition was an important transmitter of the cultures of antiquity and to the extent to which one can speak of continuity in European history, the Byzantine world cannot be neglected. It offered a civilizational model of unity in the East while in the West the Carolingian kingdom gave to Europe civilizational unity. Constantinople, renamed Istanbul after the Ottoman conquest in 1453, was founded in 324 AD as the ‘New Rome’, but the culture that consolidated there inherited much of the earlier Hellenic civilization of Alexander the Great, which was revived in Late Antiquity calling into question the older Eurocentric notion of the decline of the Roman Empire and a Dark Age prior to the rise of the Christian Middle Ages. The name Byzantium was the name of the empire that grew around Constantinople, generally regarded as beginning in 330. Byzantium was more a state than an empire and came to represent a cultural or civilizational world that was part a continuation of Rome and a new

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embodiment of the Latin civilization, which had re-encountered Greek culture and language. It was known as an empire as its leader was titled emperor and was an expanding territorial state with its centre at Constantinople. Its language was Greek, but its inhabitants considered themselves to be Romans. Its population was mixed, and over the centuries since its foundation, it became more hybrid so it is not possible to speak of a specific ethnic composition. This, of course, is true of much of Europe. Unlike the Roman Empire in the West, at least since the third century AD, as Averil Cameron points out, the Byzantines did not make a formal distinction between citizens and the non-citizens of the conquered provinces who formed the population, for ‘what mattered was not ethnicity or local background but shared culture, connections and status’ (Cameron 2006: 8–9). An education in classical Greek was the defining feature of Byzantine culture, but did not represent an ethnic category. The Byzantines incorporated groups who accommodated themselves to their Greek culture. Historians of Late Antiquity are now generally in agreement that after the end of the Roman Empire in the West, the Mediterranean world remained interconnected and much of the social and economic links forged by the Roman Empire continued. The Byzantine Empire was important in this advancement of Europe and the preservation of Greco-Roman culture as well as its transformation into new forms. It was a pan-Mediterranean civilization and one that established lasting links with Russia and the Muslim worlds. The Byzantine Empire stood between East and West, occupying as it did a nodal point in the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea. It was a culture based on the Hellenistic legacy and Orthodoxy. The sixth century saw the building of the great cathedral Santa Sophia in Constantinople. The Empire experienced a Renaissance of classical culture and from the sixth to the eleventh centuries during which time there was considerable cultural and intellectual energy not only in architecture and art, but also in literature. By the seventh century, there was a final break from the old Western Roman Empire and the foundations of a new civilization were established. The Byzantine civilization became increasingly Greek, especially since the reign of Justinian in the sixth century, and the version of Christianity that emerged was the Orthodox faith, which finally broke

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from the Latin tradition in 1054. For over a thousand years, this was the only direct line of continuity with Greek civilization. The civilizational significance of Byzantine goes beyond the Byzantine Empire. The Greek, Roman, Judaic and Christian civilizational heritages were consolidated in the pivotal period of Late Antiquity, and in the subsequent 1000 years, a distinct civilization developed based on Orthodox Christianity. Even though this finally shifted to Russia, the long-span of its earlier history was a defining part of the European heritage and illustrates the inter-civilizational composition of Europe. It played an important role in transmitting the art of government and the legal and cultural legacy of Rome to Western Europe. So here, too, structuring forming effects took place that had a formative influence in the making of Europe. From the eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire went into gradual decline, with many of its territories falling to the rising Islamic civilization as it expanded westwards. What survived was the Orthodox tradition, its major legacy. The term Orthodox emerged as a result of the defeat of iconoclasm in the seventh century and the exclusion of various heresies, such as the Nestorian and Coptic churches. With its roots in the Byzantine civilization, Orthodoxy preserved a direct link with the Greco-Roman world. Despite sharing the same Judaeo-Christian roots, Orthodoxy established a very different religious tradition to the Latin one. This was a culture that gave a stronger basis to spirituality and nurtured a different kind of subjectivity and one that had political implications which were most strongly felt in imperial Russia. The contrast with Latin Christianity was more pronounced following the Western Reformation, for Protestantism and Orthodoxy had little in common. The Protestant emphasis on freedom, questioning and individualism was a contrast to Orthodox spirituality and communality, and though the two traditions of Christianity placed a strong emphasis in the scriptures, the Protestant churches rejected the major tenets of Orthodoxy. After the burning of the papal bull issued to excommunicate the Eastern church in 1054, the break between Latin and Greek Christianity was definitive. This culminated in the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, which unlike the earlier crusades was directed against the Byzantium Empire, though its

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ultimate aim was to recapture Jerusalem. The defeat resulted in the loss of a considerable part of its territories. The bizarre circumstances of the Fourth Crusade, which is probably best explained by political opportunism rather than religious zeal, illustrate the ambivalent nature of Europe’s relation to the East, which by the thirteenth century did not appear to distinguish significantly between Islam and Orthodoxy as opponents, showing that the Eastern church could be as much a target as Islam. In 1261, the Byzantines regained control of the city, but the power of Byzantium had ebbed and the empire never regained its previous glory and gradually lost its territories to the rising Ottoman power. The Patriarch of Constantinople remained in the renamed city of Istanbul after its capture by the Ottomans in 1453, but Orthodoxy had lost its political power until the establishment of the Russian Patriarchate in 1589. Despite this decline, the political legacy of Orthodoxy remained. This legacy has been described as one of complementarity (Agadjanian and Roudometof 2006: 10–12). In this arrangement, church and state leadership not just coexisted but the church complemented the state. This led to a stronger and more institutionalized role for the church than in Western Europe, where as argued in the previous chapter, the state gained greater control of the church. In the dominant Eurocentric narrative of European history, there is an apparent contradiction. On the one side, Byzantium has been regarded as a marginal imperial, a relic of the Roman Empire and destined to doom while on the other side, one of the main off-shoots of Byzantium was the emergence of Greek Orthodoxy. While in the Eurocentric grand narrative, Europe begins in Greece, but the representation of Greece is one that does not give any consideration of Orthodoxy and the legacy of Byzantium. It is as though Greece’s role in the European heritage was confined to its pre-Byzantine phase in an earlier antiquity. While Greece fell under Western influence, especially since its independence from the Ottoman Empire after 1829, the other regions that were shaped by the Byzantine tradition remained for long under Ottoman rule and later came under Russian power, for example Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia. By the mid-fifteenth century, virtually all the Orthodox peoples were under Russian or Ottoman rule, except in some cases Hungarian or Polish-Lithuanian domination. The Byzantine

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tradition had an important influence on the countries, which reflect a multiple civilizational background. The example of Romania illustrates the combination of the Byzantine model of political rule, which was modelled on a religiously legitimated autocracy, and a later adoption and politicization of Western ideas of political community that made possible the construction of a national identity based on romantic nationalism (Blokker 2010). Since the early twenty-first century, these countries have reasserted their European identity, with Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU in 2007. The accession of Serbia has already begun since its application in 2009 and is likely to join along with Montenegro by 2025. It is not possible to ignore the different historical experience of South-western Europe in an account of the European heritage or to separate Greece from the Byzantine tradition. In view of the current transformation of the wider region and the complex relation between post-socialist identity and post-secular developments there, European identity must be seen as being shaped in an ongoing process of definition (Stoeckl 2010, 2011). The Byzantine legacy is part of that and an expression of the inter-civilizational nature of the wider European heritage.

Russia, Eurasia and Europe In addition to the significance of the Byzantine tradition for Europe, the Byzantine period was also important for Europe due to the influence it had on imperial Russia. In view of the influence of Russia on much of Europe, especially in the twentieth century, a consideration of its impact on Russia is in place. The Russian state, culture and people have for long been inextricably linked with much of Europe. The Russians, it should be recalled, were part of the wider Slav peoples. But the Slavs did not themselves constitute a civilization, divided as they were between the Western (Poles and Czechs), Southern (Serbian and Croatian) and the Eastern (Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian) Slavs. It was the Russian Slavs who emerged as the most powerful within that broad diasporic group, and the civilization that they established was

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inter-civilizational divided between European and Eurasian orientations. The model of modernity that eventually emerged incorporated elements of both. Byzantine culture played a formative role in Russian culture and religion in the aftermath of the defeat of the Mongols, who had effectively cut Russia off from the wider European civilization. The Mongols, however, did not leave a lasting influence on Russia, which later created new imperial institutions and a political culture very strongly influenced by Orthodoxy. Since the final abolition of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the Russian Empire inherited the mantle of Byzantine civilization and with it the link with the Greco-Roman and Christian civilizational heritages. More of Byzantine survived in Russia than elsewhere, although remnants of the Byzantine tradition survived in Istanbul until the Turkish nationalist movement eradicated the final traces of the Greek past in its attempt at Turkification. The Hagia Sofia—the Greek Orthodox cathedral and Muslim mosque—remains a great symbol of the entanglement of civilizational heritages. Moscow was proclaimed to be the ‘Third Rome’ and the protector of Orthodox Christianity. The Patriarchate of Moscow, established in 1589, became the most powerful Orthodox Church and was intended to be the continuation of the Roman legacy that Constantinople had all but surrendered. The messianic notion of the ‘Third Rome’ opened up the imperial vision of Christian conquest in Asia. The mission to be the religious and political heir of Constantinople—supposedly guaranteed by the political myth of the translatio imperii—also provided Russia with a major legitimation for expansion in the Balkan region. Byzantine political and religious ideas also had a direct influence on imperial Russian notions of statehood. It has often been said that the Orthodox religion cultivated a culture of spiritualism that stood in the way of democracy and the creation of liberal institutions. It is doubtful that the path of Russian and Eastern European history can be explained in this way since the cultural difference between Latin and Greek Christianity is not sufficiently large to account for major societal divergences, as the example of Greece shows. However, as Kharkhordin (1999) has argued, Eastern Christianity cultivated notions of the self

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and ecclesiastical practices that lent themselves to Bolshevik collectivist methods of social control, such as practices of mutual surveillance. Kristeva (2000: 138–139) claims that the different conception of God—whereby the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son rather than in Catholicism from the Father and from the Son— cultivated an ethic that suggested the annihilation of the Son and the Believer, whereas in Catholicism there was a greater emphasis on the autonomy and independence of the person. It has been for long debated whether Russia constitutes a separate civilization or is part of a wider conception of Europe. Southern Russia has been part of Europe far longer than many regions which we today consider to be core European countries. The original Rus, founded in Kiev in the ninth century, was a creation of the Vikings and through them a shared common heritage with other states conquered by the Vikings, including the British Isles, France and Southern Italy (Poe 2003: 18). Through the Byzantine heritage and Orthodox religion Russia preserves a distinct European inheritance. It has been argued (Lemberg 1985) that the idea of Russia as Asiatic was a nineteenth-century German invention which replaced the older view that the main division in Europe was a North versus South one. According to Poe (2003: 59), the early Muscovite state had all the features of a European early modern state. Certainly by the nineteenth century, the East–West divide became more pronounced and Russia increasingly ceased to be seen as part of the North as far as Western Europe was concerned. It may be the case that the new conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Central and Western European powers increasingly came to influence views about Asia and Russia as Asiatic. However, political and cultural hostility between Russia and the Ottoman Empire and the role of Russia in the balance of power system tended to cultivate favourable views of Russia in Europe. It has been argued that the idea that Russia was essentially Asiatic was itself a Russian creation of the eighteenth century and expressed the desire of the pro-Western Tsar, Peter the Great, to have Russia identified with Europe, where its capital, St. Petersburg, was located while its colonial territories would be identified with Asia (Bassin 1991). After the victory over Sweden in 1721, the idea of Russia as a tsardom was abolished and replaced by the Western

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and Roman idea of a colonial empire with the rural mountains as the newly invented boundary (Bassin 1991). So according to this view, it was Russia itself that invented the idea of Europe ending at the Ural Mountains. Such identity constructions are always relative and serve political purposes such as establishing relations between groups. It has been argued that imperial Russia saw itself as European to define Russia in relation to China and in relation to their Asian regions (Riasanovsky 1972; Sarkisyanz 1954). Russia is Eastern in two senses: first there was a long association of Russia with the Mongols who had ruled the country in the thirteenth century and, second, there was the conquest of much of North-eastern Asia and in particular Siberia, which was to have an important part in the Russian national identity. The late nineteenth-century debate between Slavophiles and Westerners on whether Russia was a Slavic nation with its own indigenous civilization origins in Asia or was a European nation polarized not only Russian positions on its identity, but gave credence to the view that Russia was not European. Dostoevsky, for instance, believed Russia should oppose the British Empire and itself take up the imperial quest to overcome Islam and further the cause of Christianity (Hauner 1990: 49). The conclusion of this debate must be that Russia was neither Asian nor European, but Eurasia. However, the notion of Eurasia did not always imply anti-Westernism, though it was certainly intended to signal a distinction between Asia and Europe. While the word was originally coined by a Viennese geologist in the 1880s to describe the unity of the combined landmass of Europe and Asia, it had its cultural origins in the attempt of Enlightenment intellectuals such as Alexander von Humboldt, to demonstrate the linguistic unity of the Indo-Eurasian family of languages (Bassin 1991: 10). However, by the end of the nineteenth century with the rise of the Eurasia movement, the idea of Eurasia had become politicized both within Russia and in the West and suggested not only a different and non-Western Civilization, but a divergent modernity that was politically and cultural anti-Western. The school of thought, which had its origins in the writings of Nikolai Danilevsky in the 1870s, had many supports throughout the Soviet period, including the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and has more recently been invoked by Vladimir Putin.

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Despite its Janus face, Russia was in this period increasingly seen as a threat to the West and as representing a different and alien civilization. The facts of history support different interpretations. When it was under Mongol rule, Russia had cut itself off from the West, but not fundamentally transformed. The Mongol tribes, with a population of some one million, had become the most powerful force in the world in the thirteenth century when they conquered China. When they turned westwards, Russia was unable to stop their advance, and in the early thirteenth century, Russia was conquered by the so-called Tatar Yoke, until 1480 when the Muscovite state under Ivan the Great was established. The Mongol conquest had severed Russia from the West from the mid-thirteenth century when the older centre of Russia based in Kiev was captured. The result of this was that Russia was weakened and unable to resist the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the spread of Islam. It also lost control of White Russia and Ukraine, which were not regained until after 1945. But throughout the period of Mongol rule, there was a basic continuity in the older social and political structures, making it difficult to claim there was a fundamental break and that Russia became more Asiatic. The relationship between Europe and Russia was influenced more by politics than civilizational differences. Much of this had to do with the ambitions of Russia to expand its sphere of influence. Russia’s westward mission was limited. The foundation of St. Petersburg as a ‘window into Europe’ by Peter the Great as the new capital in 1703 consolidated Russia’s Western face, but ultimately Russian expansion into Central Europe was restricted and it did not succeed in its aim to gain access to the Mediterranean by means of the Balkans and Adriatic. The relatively powerful state of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania prevented its Western expansion into Central Europe while the Ottoman and Habsburg control of the Balkans prevented access to the Mediterranean. The rise of Sweden after the Thirty Years War prevented Russia from control of the Baltic region. Russia, after acquiring Finland in 1809, was effectively landlocked in the West (Thaden 1984). It was this failure to expand in the West and South that sent Russia on an eastward mission of colonization beyond the Urals. It was thus decisive that, at a point when the Western powers were looking westwards and

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overseas in a new era of colonial expansion, Russia began to look eastwards in its colonization of Siberia in the seventeenth century (Diment and Slezkine 1993). Russia was feared as much for its large empire as for its Eurasian identity. The relation between Europe and Russia, as with the more general encounter of West and East, cannot be so easily summed up as one of conflict. While elements of a conflict of civilizations have been present, this was more likely to derive from groups within Russia, such as the Slavophiles, than from the West. Since Russia was after all Christian, and however hostile the two traditions had been, it was more favourably viewed than was the case with Islam. Moreover, the acrimonious split and the circumstances of the Fourth Crusade had all been between Byzantine and the Latin West, so that when Russian Orthodoxy arose the conflict with Orthodoxy had lost its force. However, vestiges of that conflict remained. The myth of ‘Holy Russia’ as protector of Christianity was directed not only against the Ottoman Empire, but against its neighbours, Catholic Poland and Protestant Sweden. For the Orthodox Church, Europe was still the land of the Antichrist. The Tsars invoked the idea of a European Christian order at a time when church and state were becoming increasingly separated in the West. Alexander I failed to impress Metternich and Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with the idea of a ‘Holy Alliance of Christian Monarchs’. The Napoleonic invasions certainly widened the great gulf that had already been formed between Europe and Russia. However, Russia was instrumental in the defeat of Napoleon. Despite its alienation from the West, Russia was accepted by the Concert of Europe largely because of its foreign policy, which was based on an attempt to crush Prussia, secure the neutrality of France and drive the Ottomans out of Europe. This situation led to military and political coalitions with French and Habsburg powers in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Russia was accordingly reawarded with a generous measure of Poland. However, the abiding idea remained that Russia was different. European perceptions of Russia in the nineteenth century were also deeply influenced by the rise of the USA. Europe was seen as hemmed in by the rise of two great powers to the East and to the West. Napoleon claimed that the world will soon be ‘the American Republic or the Russian universal monarchy’

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(de Rougemont 1966: 294). Alexis de Tocqueville (1948: 434) also reiterated this vision of a bipolar world. It is nonetheless not possible to speak of a frontier separating Europe from Russia, at least before the rise of communism. The relation is better described as one mediated by borderlands and by shifting borders. Ever since the Roman Empire created a limes system along the Rhine in the days of Tiberius, the formation of borderlands became a long-term feature of Europe. The limes were as much borderlands as frontiers and were the site of exchange and negotiation. Russia, for instance, allowed its border, or marcher, regions to enjoy special rights in order to guarantee the overall security of the empire (Wieczynski 1976). Since the nineteenth century, the Ural Mountains symbolically mark the division of a European Russia from its Asian territories, but this mountain range is of little geographical or political significance and, as noted earlier, was more a political construction than a geographical frontier. According to Szamuely (1988: 13), ‘Russia had no frontiers: for many centuries she herself was the frontier, the great open, defenseless dividing line between the settled communities of Europe and the nomadic barbarian invaders of the Asian steppes’. In this view, Russia has been a frontier country until the end of the eighteenth century when it became an empire. It is undoubtedly the case that henceforth there was a general increase in the hardening of borders with the rise of Russian national consciousness in the nineteenth-century movement. But in the longer perspective of history, Russia had many strong links with Europe. Two of its most northerly cities, Pskov and Novgorod, were part of the German Hanseatic league and a bridge to Europe. Russia in the eighteenth century was influenced by Poland, and much of the arts were inspired by developments in Catholic Europe. The anti-Western ideas of the Slavophile movement were also inspired by German intellectual currents and the ideas of Herder who emphasized the distinctiveness of national cultures (Matlock 2003: 232–234). Despite the clash of different visions of Russia as well as different perceptions of Russia in the West, in terms of its model of modernity and civilizational heritage, Russia is certainly different. Russia experienced a different historical path to modernity from that in the West. According to Marx and Lenin, feudalism was never fully established in

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Russia; it was the state not the feudal magnates that extracted the surplus from the population. Political domination and economic exploitation occurred primarily through the state, not society. This is the essence of the so-called Asiatic despotism associated with the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ (Wittfogel 1957). Unlike Western revolutions, the 1917 Revolution was a total revolution in its transformation of state, economy and society on a scale unprecedented even by the French Revolution. Most European revolutions preserved some continuity with what had gone before and even elements of the ancien regime were preserved until the twentieth century (Anderson 1974). In contrast, Russia’s transition to modernity was accomplished with a more decisive break from the past, even if not all traces of the Byzantine and imperial tradition were obliterated. It was inevitable that would entail the rejection of the European face of Russia. This rejection of Europe was paradoxically supported by the Orthodox Church, which was to suffer under communist rule. The de-Europeanization of Russia was reflected in the choice of Moscow as capital and the renaming of St. Petersburg first as Petrograd and then, after Lenin’s death in 1924, as Leningrad. Russia’s most Europeanized groups, the aristocracy and the intelligentsia, disappeared from Russian society after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Western element of Russian was henceforth carried forward largely by the émigré culture in the West since the 1920s (Personen 1991). However, it was also from that émigré culture that anti-Western Eurasianism and the notion of Russian exceptionalism received its support (Sakwa 2006a). The communist period cannot be fully accounted for without a consideration of the civilizational context and the late emergence of a distinctive model of modernity (Arnason 1993). Although MarxismLeninism was a Western European ideology that had its origin in the industrial societies of nineteenth-century European capitalism, Russian communism developed in the context of a society that had only lately emerged out of feudalism and which did not have a strong civil society tradition. Instead, a tradition of collectivism that had civilizational was formed. In many ways, the Bolshevik Party was a product of the imperial state tradition. It is also possible to discern connections between Bolshevik methods of organization and surveillance and the

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ecclesiastical practices in the Orthodox Church (Kharkhordin 1999). The Bolshevik Revolution despite the rupture it introduced can be seen as a continuation by a different means of the tradition of what Arnason (2003) has referred to as imperial modernization (see also David-Fox 2015). Since the 1860s when imperial Russia lost much of its power, it sought to regain power through the construction of an autocratic state and state-led industrialization. The Soviet state continued this tradition which is infused with the spirit of a revolutionary vision of a new society derived from the Marxist-Leninist ideology, which has been described as a political religion (Riegel 2005). Together these elements were the basis of an alternative model of modernity (see also Maslovskiy 2019). The Russian model of modernity can thus be seen to possess civilizational underpinnings. Communist modernity in Soviet Russia differed from its Chinese variant in that its civilizational context was different. In this view, which emphasizes civilizational currents and the formation of a model of modernity, the older emphasis on a fundamental rupture in Russian history with the October Revolution must now be modified with a greater recognition of, in this case, civilizational continuity as well as interactions with the wider Eurasian civilizational constellation. The emphasis on modernity, despite its very different nature from the Western model, suggests some common elements. These include colonialism as well as Eurocentrism (see Morozov 2015). The idea of Russia as European made a brief return with Gorbachev’s idea of a ‘Common European house’, but has not entirely disappeared. With the return of Orthodoxy the presence of the Slavic dimension of European civilization has been felt and with it a different route to modernity and a reminder of a different origin to the idea of Europe (Buss 2003). This has been also asserted by Putin, who has associated the idea of Russia with Eurasianism. According to Sakwa (2006: 218), anti-Westernism remains an important component in Russian national identity, with its roots in the nineteenth-century debate between the anti-Western Slavophiles and the Westerners (see also 2017). It can be considered an aspect of Russian Occidentalism and a defining feature of its national identity, which, like all kinds of Occidentalism and Orientalism, seeks to eliminate internal difference through the construction of a homogenized Other (Buruma and Margalit 2004). While

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this civilizational tension remains an abiding feature of the European– Russian relations, the clash of different models of modernity is perhaps a more important aspect of the post-1989 context. According to Sakwa (2015), the current clash is one of the two variants of capitalist modernity. In this clash, the revival of the civilizational heritage provides conservative state nationalism—or ‘civilizational nationalism’ Maslovskiy (2019)—with an ideological framework that did not have to address challenges emanating from the radical cultural pluralism that has been a feature of Western modernity since the middle of the previous century. To the extent to which cultural pluralism has entered the picture, it is possible to speak of a new cultural division within Russian modernity. Such tensions within Russian modernity are playing out in the context of the formation of a wider Eurasianism that links Russia, India and China (Macaes 2018). To conclude this chapter, an important dimension of the European civilizational constellation was the revived Greco-Roman civilization established in Late Antiquity in the Byzantine Empire and which migrated to imperial Russia, where from the fourteenth century onwards a distinct Slavic Eurasian civilization developed based on the earlier Greco-Roman heritage and Orthodox Christianity. Rather than seeing a sharp line dividing East and West, separating Europe and Russia, a more accurate view of the historical experience would be to see the relation in terms of a ‘cultural gradient’ formed out of interactions, exchange and the space of encounters (Evtuhov and Kotkin 2003). Russia thus represents a hybrid civilization—Slavic, Eurasian and European—that it is distinct from Western European civilization while incorporating elements of it. This mix of European and Asian components was the defining feature of Russian civilization and the basis of its route to modernity through the synthesis of the Western (the national state tradition), Eurasian (Slavic) and classical (Byzantine) traditions (Tolz 2001). Its participation in the wider European civilization cannot be denied, but it is more than European. Neither exclusively European nor exclusively Asian, Russia is perhaps best regarded as simply Russian, and thus as a civilization in its own right (Poe 2003).

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Due to the supremacy of the Soviet Union for much of the twentieth century, Central and Eastern Europe has been influenced by a civilizational pattern that has been very different from Western civilizational patterns. The Orthodox tradition remains an important reminder of the existence of a different civilizational route to modernity, but one that interacted with the West and with modernity (Stoeckl 2010). It thus should be seen as an alternative kind of modernity, as argued by Arnason (1993), Sakawa (2013), and Maslovskiy (2019). As argued by Maslovskiy, the confrontation between Russia and Europe is not the product of a fundamental clash of civilizations, but of different inter­ pretations of European modernity.

5 The Islamic World and Islam in Europe

Rethinking the nature of the relationship between Europe and Islam in our own time requires a re-evaluation of perceptions of history. In this chapter, the argument is made that Islam is a part of the European civilizational heritage and that as a result of migration in recent decades, a European Islam now exists and can be viewed as the latest expression of a long history of European-Islamic links. The place of Islam in European history has often been considered in terms of a clash of civilizations, and this has ignored the possibility of contradictory belief systems within a civilization and positive encounters (see Davies 2006: 203–222). The conventional narrative of Europe places Greece and Roman as the source of Europe with Christianity as a later tradition that provided the essential cultural model out of which modernity emerged. The previous chapters have offered a more differentiated account of the sources of modern Europe. Europe has never been purely Christian, despite the overwhelming importance of that tradition in shaping the European heritage. The Judaic and Christian traditions were mediated by the earlier GrecoRoman tradition and also by the Islamic world, which despite its huge

© The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_5

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internal differences constituted a civilizational constellation in its own right. The place and role of Islam in Europe need to be evaluated in the light of the notion of a European inter-civilizational constellation as opposed to a narrow notion of a Western Civilization based exclusively on the Christian tradition. As we have seen, this tradition, important as it was, fragmented into quite different churches. In terms of a notion of civilizational unity, the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions are all expressions of Abrahamic monotheism, for common to all three was the belief that God revealed himself to Abraham. Their common roots suggest the existence of a wider Islamic-JudaeoChristian civilizational matrix that underwent progressive variation. All three cultures underwent much the same stages of development, which Fowden (2011) has characterized as the prophetic, the scriptural and classical or patristic. However, Islam was the later arrival and probably for this reason was more concerned to define itself against Judaism and Christianity, which at the time of the birth of Islam was firmly established. The divergence of all three cannot be questioned, but their common origin and coexistence for many centuries remains an important dimension of the European heritage. The European civilizational heritage cannot be seen only as a product of the Carolingian Empire, which represented only one pole in a wider and more polycentric European civilization. Decisive was the early interaction of its Jewish, Muslim and Christian components. Islam played a greater role in European civilization than has often been acknowledged. While this cannot be exaggerated, or compared to the scale and influence of the Christian heritage, a case can be made for Islam to be seen as part of the European civilizational constellation. However, in the course of history, the different paths of development in Europe and in the main centres of the Islamic world ensured significant differences in their models of modernity. Yet, despite these differences, there was never a fundamental clash of civilizations or an ancient rivalry. The radical and anti-western elements in modern political Islam cannot be projected back into history to tell a story of a clash of civilizations when much of the historical experience was one of coexistence and cross-fertilization. Many of the conflicts of the present day concerning Islam are in fact more of a conflict within Islam than of a conflict

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with the non-Islamic world. In the terms of the theoretical perspective offered in this book, such conflicts in any case are less of a civilizational nature than a clash of different models of modernity. While these are influenced by civilizational traditions, the different expressions of modernity were formed as a result of later developments, which include the experience of colonialism. Within the broader European civilizational constellation, Turkey is an important example of an Islamic country that was also formed through the active engagement with a model of modernity derived from Western Europe. The relation between Turkey and Europe constitutes the most important intersection of East and West and an example of the coexistence of Islam as a variant of the Western model of modernity.

Europe and Its Others It is often argued that Europe emerged out of a process of self-definition in which Islam served as the ‘Other’ of the European ‘Self ’. Due to the highly differentiated and internal divisions within Europe, there was no central unifying cultural or political identity that could provide an identity for Europe for long. As a result, according to this view, the West became defined by opposition to the East, whose referent was variously Persia, Islam, the wider ‘Orient’ and later Communism. As the East changed, so too did the West, redefining itself along with changes in its alter ego. This argument, which was influenced by the notion that Europe is a discourse in which power and culture are entangled, needs to be modified in order to avoid the wrong conclusion that the relation between East and West was always antagonistic and binary. So what was the relationship? Or should such terms be abandoned altogether? One problem to begin with is in ascribing agency to something as diverse as Europe at a time when Europe did not exist neither as a place nor as a clearly defined geopolitical world. The Islamic world undoubtedly was more clearly defined before the rise of medieval Europe and was certainly more advanced in all aspects of culture, science and technology. It was also politically and militarily superior to the Western powers during the early Middle Ages. With the consolidation of

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Christianity as a political identity, the tension between Christendom and Islam grew. However, the formation of collective identities requires more than an Other to define the Self. Islam as the Other of Europe can hardly be a creation of Europe, if it preceded it. The relation between Europe and Islam cannot be easily summed up as a single one or as a continuous one. It can be described as threefold and that the three modes of relating to Islam have been present in every era, with some being more pronounced than others in particular periods: the first is a relation based on fear and xenophobia, the second is one of fantasy and moral superiority, and the third one of borrowing, translation and adaptation. The nature of the relation between Europe and Islam was variable, with the Self also being in part an Other. There is no simple boundary between a European Self and an Islamic Other; rather, Self and Other have been mutually implicated to a point that we need a new kind of analysis which recognizes such mutually interlinked histories. Islam has certainly been an object of fear since its expansion into Europe in the eighth century, when the European frontier was effectively the Pyrenees. From this period, the idea of Europe came increasingly to be expressed against Islam, and as with all such collective ideas, an external threat made possible a unity that was otherwise not apparent. After the death of Muhammad in 632, his followers spread out from Arabia and conquered the Persian Empire of the Sassanids and gained control of the Fertile Crescent (the lands of Iraq, Syria and Palestine). In the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, the Arabs conquered most of North Africa, with Alexandria falling in 642 and Carthage in 698. Muslim power spread over Anatolia, Persia and Mesopotamia, and eventually reached India. The Arab Empire of the Umayyad dynasty, established in Damascus in 661, began to look westwards and advanced into Europe with the fall of Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania in 711. The Muslim conquest of Spain was almost extended to France until its defeat at Tours in 732, and although further expansion was halted by Charlemagne’s defeat of the Moors in 778, Christendom was on the defensive against Islam. Collective identities are often born at time of crisis and this was the case with the idea of a European identity. As noted earlier, one of the first references to‘Europeans’, as opposed to ‘Europe’, was the army led

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by the Frankish leader, Charles Martell, who defeated the Muslims (Hay 1957: 25). The battle was of considerable significance for definitions of Europe since it marked a moment of Christian unity and vulnerability. It was the moment in which the idea of Europe as a geographical area became linked with the cultural and political domains of Christendom. This was a time when Christendom was relatively small and did not include the Vikings in Northern Europe. With the conversion of the Vikings to Christianity in the mid-eleventh century, the territory of Christianity was extended. For almost 1000 years, Christendom was on the alert against the rise of a large Islamic world that appeared to be seeking expansion westwards. However, the danger Islam presented was less religious—for it was a relatively new religion while Christianity has been in existence for several centuries—than military, since it was the religion of a new and expanding empire. In this period, Christians knew very little about Islam; the Qur’an was not yet translated; and the Muslims were regarded as pagans. This situation changed by the fifteenth century. To recount briefly a well-known story, the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 led to the rise of an Islamic power and the fall of Eastern Christianity. On the Western front, at much the same time, a considerably strengthened Latin Christian civilization defeated the Moors under the Spanish leadership, but on its Eastern limits it was confronted by a formidable imperial Islamic power, which laid siege to Vienna in 1688. What emerged in the sixteenth century, then, was a much divided system of Christian states, which were temporarily united by Christianity and who saw Islam as a threat, which was not only ideological but military. European fears of Islam derived from this period, when Christendom was relatively weak in relation to the Ottoman Empire. Spanish and Portuguese conquest in the Americas had of course begun, but these and other European powers were unable to match the might of the Ottoman Empire. It is difficult to assess the extent to which the Christian West needed Islam to define itself and exactly to what degree it was a threat (see Brague 2009). By the time of the last onslaught on Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire’s military strength had waned and probably did not present a threat to Europe at this time. But it is possible to speculate that the image of Islam as an Other continued to exercise a certain

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focus of hostility for Europe (Sayyid 2003; Yapp 1992). This should not be exaggerated. There is in fact not a lot of evidence to show that this was the most important expression of xenophobia. It is arguably the case that was the Jews who were the Others, for it was often the enemy within rather than the enemy outside that was more significant in defining European self-identity. Indeed, when many Europeans referred to the despotism of the East, this was often in praise. As Clarke points out, Enlightenment intellectuals, who were mostly ancien regime supporters, looked to China for an ideal model of despotism, a despotism based on the exercise of legal authority rather than whim (Clarke 1997: 4). It should also be recalled that the elimination of the heretic religions was more fiercely pursued than was Islam, which mostly lay outside the territory of Christendom, at least since the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The second aspect of the relation was one of fantasy and proclamations of European superiority. Since the outside lacked a certain reality or was unknown, it had to be invented and imagined. The Song of Roland, circa 1100, is an example of an early representation of Islam as Europe’s Other against which Europe is portrayed as superior. In early Christian times, the idea emerged that the peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa were descendants of Noah’s three sons. Japheth was the father of the Europeans, who included the Greeks, Gentiles and Christians, while Shem was the father of the Jews and Arabs and Ham the father of Africans. This idea of a divided humanity later became a basis for the creation of races. Since the Qur’an was translated into Latin in 1143, Christendom became familiar with Islam, but it is was generally a distorted version and one that gave rise to fantasies (Southern 1962). Islam was seen as a preparation for the final appearance of the Antichrist as forecast in the Book of Daniel and Muhammad was seen as a parody of Christ. Pope Innocent II characterized Muhammad as the beast of the Apocalypse. The idea of the barbarous Muslim world inhabited by evil tribes was a dominant theme in medieval literature (Metlitzki 1977). The medieval taste for the fantastic was not confined to fantasies about Muslims, and one of its many expressions was an interest in the existence of unusual races (Friedmann 1981). Another theme was the idea of an oriental despotism. For Dante, Muhammad represented evil and the

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opposite to Christ. The Orient was represented as not only despotic but evil and cruel. Machiavelli contrasted the despotism of the Orient with the free spirit of the West. The Orient was characterized by despotic kings as a contrast to peaceful republican government in Europe. It has been argued that Western republicanism relied heavily on the notion of despotic oriental prince (Springborn 1992). In this was the idea developed that Europe based on a political tradition that was the opposite to the forms of government that prevailed in the Muslim world. These notions gave legitimacy to counter-offensives from the time of the crusades to later attempts to curb the spread of the Ottoman Empire. Edward Said has written the most important examination of this culture of fantasy, which in his analysis was driven by the imperial quest to conquer the Other (Said 1979). Cultural and intellectual power invented the Orient in a way that prepared for its political and economic domination by the West. In order to define itself, Europe needed an Other. This was often an invented Other. According to Said, some 60,000 books were written on the Orient in the nineteenth century (Said 1979: 204). The orientalist thesis has led to a now huge literature on the unknowable Other where Islam appears to be an expression of the other face of the Enlightenment’s Reason. However, it should be noted that orientalism as described by Said refers to a later period when Western powers, mostly France and Britain, embarked on colonial conquest in Asia and Africa. It would be a distortion of history to see all representations of Islam in such light. Prior to the eighteenth century when the Islamic world and other Asian cultures were larger and more technologically and militarily more advanced than Christendom, negative representations and views about Islam were very much the expression of vulnerability and ignorance. A differentiated assessment, then, of European perceptions of Islam is needed, and not all representations of the Orient had the consequence of bolstering a European consciousness. The notion of oriental despotism could also imply a critique of European monarchy and reflect a preference for republican government. Indeed, it has often been the case that the Islamic world was used as a foil to provide a critique of Western despotism. A famous example of this was Montesqueiu’s Persian Letters in 1721. The contrast between democracy and despotism referred as much to two competing

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conceptions of political rule in Europe at a time when republican government was the exception and where it did exist, it was also far from democratic. Europe did not have a single image of Islam but several. It should also be considered that Europe itself did not have a clear identity other than Christianity. Once Islam ceased to be a threat to Europe, the discourse and representation of Islam and the wider Orient changed. The contrast between Christianity and Islam became slowly replaced by one of civilization and barbarism (Jones 1971). The idea of the Turkish infidel was replaced by the notion of the Turkish barbarian. The old myth of Europa as an Eastern migrant now becomes a triumphalist Queen Europe, who is portrayed in the sixteenth century as sitting on a throne holding the sceptre of world domination (Hale 1993: 49). This vision of European superiority as far as Islam was concerned remained an aspiration until the nineteenth century. Until the colonial period, Europe feared but also respected Islam. As Christianity became less important in defining Europe, the contrast with the considerably more religious Islamic world grew. The European path to modernity, partially reproduced in the Americas, differed from the route experienced in the Islamic world in that it presupposed secularization and the relative privatization of religion in republican states. This brings us to the third mode of relating to Islam, which can be termed the mode of translation and includes adaptation and borrowing. The first point to make is that despite the religious hostilities between Europe and Islam, Christianity had not gained hegemonic status at the time of the spread of Islam. The relation between Muslims and other groups was a good deal more diffuse than it was to become in later centuries. The notion of a clash of civilizations cannot be so easily projected back onto the early history of Islam and Christianity since these religions, along with Judaism, derived from the Near East and both Islam and Christianity aspired to be world religions. This possibly explains why it was sometimes thought that Islam was a Christian heresy. As is well known, much of the culture of Greek antiquity, itself allegedly eastern in origin (Burkert 1995), was preserved by Muslim scholars; Cordoba and Toledo were important cultural centres, and, until the early modern period, there was considerable borrowing from Arabic

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culture. There was a large Muslim presence in Spain until Muslims were finally expelled in the early seventeenth century (see Kennedy 1996; Meyerson and English 2000). Much of the Iberian Peninsula was Muslim not Christian during the Middle Ages. Significant pockets of Islamic culture survived until well into the fifteenth century (see Burns 1984). Throughout the Middle Ages, Europeans were indebted to Arabic achievements in science and Arabic scholarship was represented at many European universities. Sicily was for long a meeting place of two cultures. The Muslim civilization that emerged in the late seventh century was more advanced than much of what was later to be defined as Europe. Muslim civilization absorbed more of Greek culture than did much of Western Europe. We must not then see Europe and Islam as two mutually exclusive civilizations confronting each other. Much of classical culture, which had been extinguished in the West after the break-up of the Roman Empire, was preserved and indeed, expanded by the Arabs. Muslim Spain, in particular Cordoba and Toledo, was important in transmitting Islamic culture to Europe through a culture of translations, Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts. For much of the Middle Ages three cultures coexisted in the Iberian Peninsula, Islamic, Jewish and Christian. The importance of the twelfth-century Arab philosopher Ibn Rusd, known in Europe as Averroes, has been widely commented on for his rehabilitation of and commentary on Aristotle—who was unknown in the West prior to the eleventh century—and for his defence of Greek thought (see Brague 2009). Moreover, while Muslim Spain prior to the ‘Reconquest’ completed in 1492 has been portrayed as somehow outside Europe, the reality was extensive trading links with Christendom and which continued long afterwards. Sicily and Malta had been for long the crossroads of two civilizations and it was there that many ideas entered the two worlds. Arab culture with its concentration in Andalusia greatly influenced Europe until the sixteenth century. Even in the centuries of the crusades, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the crusades and holy wars occurred alongside considerable cultural exchange and trade. The significance of the crusades in defining relations between Europe and Islam has been a matter of dispute (Goody 2004: 33). Communication with the Arab world resulted in adoption of new methods in agriculture, in architecture and in the sciences and especially

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in astronomy and mathematics. There is much to suggest that Iberiancentred Islamic world in fact saw itself as a distinct civilization from Northern Europe as well as from sub-Saharan Africa, thus calling into question continental notions of Europe and Africa as historically meaningful categories (see Lewis and Wigen 1997: 116–117). According to Jardine and Brottom, the Renaissance was formed out of encounters between the Orient and the Occident, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, East and West met on more equal terms than was later the case (Jardine and Brottom 2000. See also Frankopan 2015). These authors have shown how some of the most potent symbols in European culture derived from the East and how the borders between East and West were more permeable than was later thought. It also needs to be recognized that Islam in the Middle Ages was a good deal more tolerant than what it later was to become and also more tolerant than Christianity as far as polytheism was concerned. This tendency within Islam, which also did not have a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure, in fact allowed for greater cultural transfusion than often has been recognized. The Enlightenment, while being less influenced by the non-Western world, was in many respects possible only by a relation to otherness. The extreme interpretation, and now discredited, is that the Enlightenment was based on an Orientalization of the East, which was the necessary Other for the European ‘we’ to be defined and a strategy of colonial domination. While there is little doubt that the Western heritage was used to legitimate imperialism and that in many cases it entailed a fantastification of the non-Western Other, a more differentiated analysis is needed. The category of Otherness in Enlightenment thought can equally well be seen as an expression of the distance that many Europeans were to their own culture, which they could view only through the eyes of the Other. This Other was indeed very often the Orient, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, but in this case and in many others it was a critical mirror by which the decadence of Old Europe could be portrayed. In many other cases, the attempt for genuine understanding of the ancient cultures of Asia cannot be

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underestimated, not least because much of the Enlightenment culture was formed in pre-colonial contexts, such as eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Germany (Clarke 1997; Halbfass 1988). There were many genuine attempts to understand Islam, especially prior to the imperial period. Catholic and Protestant thinkers sought to gain a deeper understanding of Islam during the Enlightenment (Bevilacqua 2018). Although this changed from the second half of the eighteenth century, for a long time Europeans had a high regard for Islam which they as a deeply spiritual religion from which Christianity could learn. It would not be possible to explain all of this in terms of a hegemonic culture of Orientalism. The history of that relationship often has been misrepresented. A closer reading of Herodotus’s account of the Persian Wars reveals in fact his view that the Persians were often more civilized than the Greeks. Certainly, a more differentiated reading of this text shows that there are no grounds to project the later East-West divide back onto the Greek-Persian conflict, not least since the Greeks did not operate with such a distinction of East and West. In sum, then, rather than see the relation between Europe and Islam as a single one, it is important to see it as threefold in terms of relations of fear, fantasy and cooperation. In this view, Islam was never entirely outside Europe and the relation was a highly variable one.

Europe and the Ottoman Legacy The case for Islam to be included in a wider and more inclusive definition of Europe can now be made on several grounds. The first evidence is the cultural role of Islam in shaping European civilization since the decline of the Roman Empire. Indeed, one perspective is that the Islamic Empire of the Umayyad and the later Abbasid dynasties was the successor to the Roman Empire (Robinson 2011). The early Ottoman rulers often saw themselves as the inheritors of the Roman Empire. According to Bang (2011: 326), the Ottoman version of supreme rulership involved a mixture of Roman, Islamic and inner Eurasian practices.

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Sülleyman the Magnificent competed with Charles V to be the true heir of Rome. Throughout the Middle Ages, both Spain and Russia were under Islamic rule, in the case of Spain by Umayyad Empire and in the case of Russia by the Mongol Empire. Although these empires did not give rise to a permanent civilization in Europe and eventually disappeared, in the case of the Mongols more or less without trace, they are an important reminder of trans-continental flows of peoples and cultures in earlier times. It is true, too, that the major centres of the Islamic civilization lay outside the European area, but this was not a clearly defined geopolitical area. The notion of Islam as ‘the other’ of Europe has often been noted; however, it was not only an enemy, but was also a cultural mediator. Despite the religious differences between Europe and Islam, Christianity had not gained hegemonic status at the time of the spread of Islam and differences did not always become the basis of hostilities. The relation between Muslims and other groups was a good deal more diffuse than it was to become in later centuries. It needs also to be recognized that Islam in the Middle Ages was more tolerant than what it was later to become and also more tolerant than Christianity as far as polytheism and heresies were concerned. The Muslims regarded the Jews and Christians living in their territories as ‘Peoples of the Book’ and tolerated them in ways that were often a contrast to the persecution of minorities by Christians in Europe. This tendency for tolerance within Islam, which also did not have a hierarchical ecclesiastical structure, in fact allowed for great cultural transfusion than has often been recognized. This should not be exaggerated since it was also discriminatory and became increasingly so. During the Reformation, there were links between the Protestants and the Ottomans and the Renaissance’s revival of antiquity would not have been possible without translations from the Greek by Arabic scholars. Western Europe borrowed heavily from the Muslim world, especially in science and agriculture (Hobson 2004, 2006). During the period of Muslim rule in Southern Europe, most of Northern Europe including Scandinavia and the British Isles was relatively backward. The spread of Islam in Europe occurred prior to the complete Christianization of Europe and at a time when the Islamic world was more territorially and politically integrated than was the case with Christendom.

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The second example of the role of Islam in Europe concerns the Ottoman Empire and its modern successor, Turkey. Islam created a civilization that had a major European component. The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic and multinational trans-continental empire that brought Islamic civilization into the heart of what had been the Byzantine Europe. The Ottoman conquest of South-Eastern Europe, Greece and the Balkans, represents one of the more significant examples of the spread of Islam in Europe. Much of the Balkans was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. The Albanians and Kosovians in Bosnia and Herzegovina converted to Islam between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but other parts of the Balkan remained Orthodox Christian. In Albania, Muslims were a majority, but in other parts of the Balkans they were minorities and were governed in accordance with the Ottoman millet system which was based on administering populations according to their religion rather than enforcing conversion. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1993–1995 highlighted the fate of Europe’s largest existing historical Muslim population. More than 8000 Bosnian Muslims were killed at Srebrenica by the Bosnia Serbs as part of Serbia’s ethnic cleansing. To claim, as often has been the case, that this was the outcome of an ancient fault-line deriving from a clash of Christianity versus Islam is a false characterization of the atrocity which was a state-endorsed policy of extermination in the name of the Serbian nation. It should also be recalled that Muslims and Christians lived peacefully for centuries in the region. There was nothing in the course of Balkan history that made such an outcome inevitable. The pluralist political framework of the Yugoslavian federation continued the Ottoman example of peaceful coexistence. The break-up of the federal state left the country bereft of the only means of peace, namely the political structure of the state. The Ottoman Empire played a not insignificant role in the European civilizational constellation; today, this civilization is principally represented by Turkey, which in itself can be regarded as a nation-state that has inherited some of the civilizational features of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman conquest was sufficiently enduring in political as well as in cultural terms to constitute a civilizational pattern that

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had long-lasting consequences for the region. The Ottoman Empire is a different case from the other historical examples of Islam in Europe, such as the Mongol conquest of Russia and the Umayyad conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, since it had a longer and more continuous presence. Turkey is a reminder—especially in the context of the relation to the European Union—of a third route to modernity and one in which Islam is very much present. Mention could be made too of Bulgaria, which has a 10% Muslim population, as well as other Balkan countries with Muslim minorities. The Mediterranean geopolitical face of Europe is becoming more and more important in the wider Eurasian and Mediterranean definition of Europe. Malta, for instance, is another example of this, albeit of a Christian country that has played a role in mediating the civilizations and cultures of the Mediterranean. The features of Turkey that gave to it a pronounced Western identity were the adoption of Western European models of republican government and secularization. Although the transition to democracy was slow, this was also the case in much of Western Europe. The Turkish route to modernity did not differ much more than the various models of modernity in Europe more generally. The question of the place and role of Islam in Turkey has mostly been worked out through democratic reform and is an example of the coexistence of Islam and democracy within a model of modernity that shares many features with Western countries (Keyman 2006). Despite the significance of Ottoman influence in the Balkan region, the question of modern Turkey and its relation to Europe draws attention to the wider civilizational context of Europe as an inter-civilizational constellation. The issue of Turkey and Europe is not a question of religion but of political modernity. Since the question of Turkey’s membership of the EU first arose, its relation to Europe has been discussed for a long time. Despite the beginnings of accession talks in 2005, it would appear that Turkish membership of the EU will be for some time not a likely prospect. The turn towards authoritarianism and the suppression of civil liberties under Erdogan since 2016 has led to new tensions between the EU and Turkey. However, as with similar tensions with Russia, the question about whether Europe can be defined in ways that include Turkey continues (see Baban and Keyman 2008).

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European Islam The third evidence of Islam in Europe is the rise of what can be called European Islam, or Euro-Islam (see Ahmed 2018; Nielsen 1999; Alsayyad and Castells 2002; Göle 2004; Hellyer 2009). Today, at least 3% of the population of the EU is Muslim. Some estimates suggest a figure of more than 15 million. Many Muslims are products of migration into Europe over the past four decades, especially in France and Germany. In this sense, it is possible to speak of a European Islam formed out of the diasporic movement of peoples. Viewed in the longer historical perspective, Muslim migration into Europe from Turkey and North Africa in the last decades can be seen in the context of diasporic flows that have occurred throughout history. This longer perspective also highlights the contours of a civilizational constellation that may be the best way to characterize Europe. Its major geopolitical components would be the Western Christian, RussianSlavic and Islamic-Turkish civilizations. Europe and its modernity have been shaped by not one, but by all three civilizations which opened up different routes to modernity. Any account of Europe will have to include the active relation with Asia and the wider East (Delanty 2006). This is partly because the origins of European civilization lie in the appropriation of Eastern civilizations and because a large part of the European civilization itself has been formed in relation to two Eurasian civilizations, the Russian and Islamic civilizations. Europe has been formed by precisely the interaction, cross-fertilization, cultural borrowing and diffusions of its civilizations. What this suggests is that Europe must be seen as a constellation consisting of links rather than stable entities or enduring forms. In this view, the Ottoman tradition represents a third European civilization and one based on Islam. This is also the position taken by Jack Goody, who has argued for a trans-continental European civilization that includes Islam, which has the same roots as Judaism and Christianity. Alongside the notion of a Judaeo-Christian civilization is the idea of an Islam-Christian civilization (Bulliet 2004). Europe never has been purely isolated and Christian (Goody 2004: 14). This is a view of European civilization that stresses mutual borrowings,

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translations and hybrid cultural forms. Europe can be identified by a mode of cultural translation rather than by reference to a particular cultural content (such as Christianity) or to allegedly universal norms (such as human rights or democracy) or territory or forms of statehood. Because of the different civilizations that make up the mosaic of Europe and the fact these were embroiled in each other through centuries of translations, Europe must be seen as a constellation consisting of links rather than stable entities or enduring traditions. In conclusion, the argument of this chapter has that the traditional image of Islam as the ‘other’ of Europe is in need of some qualification. Viewed in the longer perspective of history Europe has been shaped by a model of modernity that itself has been influenced by civilizational encounters between West and East. While the relation between Europe and Islam has often been fraught with conflicts, there is nothing in it that forecloses possibilities for dialogue and mutual respect. The task today is to recover some of the cosmopolitan possibilities that have been a feature of the relation. The emphasis here is indeed one of dialogue rather than integration. Some of the modes by which Europe and Islam interacted have been far from xenophobic, and there is evidence of the acceptance of differences that is an essential feature of the cosmopolitan imagination that is needed today. It would not be out of place to have a greater recognition of the place of Islam in European history than has been the case until now. The claims of Europe to a cosmopolitan heritage are incomplete if there is no recognition of the positive contribution of Islam to Europe.

Part II The Emergence of Modernity

6 The Renaissance and the Rise of European Consciousness

The Renaissance marks the arrival of both modernity and the crystallization of Europe’s cultural model. It refers to the cultural movement generally taken to be spanning the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. As the term suggests, the Renaissance means ‘rebirth’. It stood for the rebirth of classical antiquity, which was mostly the Greco-Roman culture, and humanism. It was a movement that played a decisive role in the making of modern Europe. But the term is not to be taken at its face value; indeed, it is a value-laden term and has generally been seen as an episode in the Grand Narrative of the European heritage as a continuous story from antiquity to modernity whereby Europe rediscovered itself in the past that it had broken from in the Middle Ages and thus made possible a continuity that was otherwise considerably ruptured. For this reason, many scholars prefer to use the term ‘early modern’ to characterize the period that culminated with, and included, the Reformation, for the Renaissance did not simply end when the Reformation began; indeed, the latter can be seen as a continuation

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of Renaissance humanism. The term ‘Renaissance’ will be used in this chapter with due caution on the grounds of its widespread currency to refer both to an era and to specific developments within that time. However, it needs to be re-situated in a more global context since the period in question was one that saw important encounters with the non-European world, which had as much a formative influence on Europe as had the rediscovery of the texts of antiquity. According to Jack Goody (2010), the European Renaissance was one of many such movements and should be located with the context of a wider rebirth of culture and knowledge that included the Islamic world from the ninth century when Greek texts were translated into Arabic. The era ends with the rise of European colonialism, beginning with the Spanish conquests in the New World. For these reasons, it can no longer be seriously upheld that in the Renaissance period Europe was reborn through a revival of classical antiquity. The rediscovery of the ancient culture was part of a more complicated story in the formation of European modernity. The term Renaissance, which is French, was a creation of the nineteenth century. It is important to note that much of what is taken to be European civilization were inventions of later periods and reflected the sense of historical time of that era rather the actual time of its contemporaries. In a famous work published in 1860 and translated into English under the title The Civilization of the Renaissance, the GermanSwiss historian Jacob Burckhardt celebrated the Italian Renaissance as the apex of European culture (the German title was Die Kultur der Renaissance  ). The reality was less coherent. The Renaissance is now generally seen as a European-wide movement, not as it was for Burckhardt an exclusively Italian development with universal significance. Almost every country in Europe in some way participated in a new interest in antiquity. It had particularly strong roots in Northern Europe (Kirkpatrick 2002). It can be seen as an expression of an emerging European consciousness as exemplified in cultural developments but also in new political ideas about the governance of societies. Underlying all these developments was a fundamental transformation in subjectivity. It was this change in consciousness that paved the way for the formation of modernity.

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The Renaissance marked the end of the medieval age and the birth of modernity. In this sense, it was a movement in historical consciousness, which defined the present in terms of its relation to the past. As an era, the Renaissance covers some of the cultural aspects of what is now more commonly referred to as the early modern period. However, it is best understood less as an era than a mood or consciousness that was variously present in Europe of the fifteenth century and which helped to shape a European consciousness. The significance of the Renaissance as a European civilizational development was the relation it established between past and present. Periodization was one aspect of this, for since the Renaissance it became customary to divide European history into three eras—an ancient, a medieval and a modern period. The modern period was thus defined by a distance from the ancient. The revival of antiquity occurred simply because the present had already broken from the past, which was recovered by an age that had already perceived itself to have broken from its origin, but reinterpreted that origin for the purposes of reorienting its identity in the present. This selective recombination of elements of the past that had as a whole been abandoned is a distinctive feature of European cultural as well as political revolutions and marked the path to the Enlightenment in which the consciousness of modernity was more pronounced. The Renaissance, then, marks the point of transition to an emerging modernity; its embracing of antiquity can be explained by its rejection of the Middle Ages. This turning away from the Middle Ages was visually represented in the abandonment of the Gothic style of art and architecture and thus gave to Europe a means of projecting itself in the world (Rabb 2006). The Gothic style, as reflected in the great Cathedrals of the era, gave a sense of a common cultural world to Europe and provided some of the elements out of which a cultural identity would later be forged. But the late medieval world did not itself create a European consciousness, which when it arose was in opposition to the culture of the medieval age. The Renaissance led to the emergence of a cultural identity for Europe and laid the basis for a nascent political identity. This was achieved in the following ways to be discussed in this chapter. First, it established through humanism a conception of human subjectivity and a

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self-questioning attitude along with new notion of authority based on science and exploration. Second, it also marked the birth of a new political imagination characterized by republicanism and which was to lay the basis for European political modernity. Third, it was the moment that saw the emergence of a new consciousness of Europe in the context of an awareness of other worlds beyond Christendom. These three moments— the humanistic and scientific worldview, the republican imagination and the encounter with the non-European world—were formative in the making of modern European identity. Burke (1998: 7) emphasizes the dimension of what he calls bricolage—the making of something new out of fragments—as a feature of the Renaissance, which was not based on a single cultural pursuit but many. As a result of these developments, but in particular of the emergence of a world consciousness, it was henceforth not possible to see Europe and modernity as something endogenous or self-contained. Yet, one can discern in the Humanism of the period the emergence of a distinctive European culture that was born before modernity as such took shape and gave to it a certain orientation that drew from the earlier intellectual currents.

Humanism and the Sources of Modern Subjectivity One of the principal cultural achievements of the Renaissance was humanism, which was a view of human nature as shaped by culture, by which should be understood a body of texts that allows the individual to renew themself. The culture of antiquity, as opposed to medieval Scholasticism, was supposed to make possible a more self-conscious human person. This cannot be equated with modern self-identity, but was not too distant from it in the emphasis it placed on what Stephen Greenblatt (2005) referred to as ‘self-fashioning’. It was nonetheless more of a modern than a medieval development. When William Shakespeare wrote in 1599 in As You Like It ‘all the world’s a stage and its men and women merely players’, he was expressing precisely this insight that social relations are dramaturgical and that society is not a natural entity but something that can be literally staged and fashioned. It was a

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time when the recognition dawned that people are not God’s creatures and that all is transient. Humanity was seen as occupying the place of God whose powers of creation were given to politics and to positive law. Modernity was born when transcendence became immanent and the idea of human freedom emerged. This was the core idea behind modernity. The result was a far-reaching new relation to authority both in science and in politics. However, the culture of the Renaissance remained firmly within the Christian tradition, which is sought to change but not to abandon. Indeed, it was as much about its creative renewal than its rejection. If medieval Christianity rejected antiquity in order to advance the new Christian worldview, the Renaissance appealed to antiquity in order to revive Christianity. In this sense, it is an example of a trend in European history whereby continuity is established through selective rupture. The sense of a break with the past is what gives identity to the present. The Renaissance was not about the disinterested study of antiquity. It was as much about the needs of the present than of inquiry into the past for its own sake. This was age of the New Learning in both science and in humanism when new ideas about the social and natural world emerged. The Renaissance world produced the Scientific Revolution that occurred at this time. Modern science based on the empirical inquiry began to separate from theological doctrines. Galileo, Bruno and Copernicus had de-centred humanity’s place in the universe. The revolution they brought about established as the criterion on truth human experience and the related notion of experimental inquiry to be the sole source of truth. Instead of ecclesiastical authority or the received wisdom of the past, truth is now to be based on that which is subject to observation through experimentation. This had a democratizing impact on human knowledge since it separated scientific knowledge from other kinds of knowledge and made possible the freedom of science from ecclesiastical censorship. Aside from the scientific discoveries of the period, the most important legacy could be said to be the epistemic shift it inaugurated in establishing new foundations for authority. In principle, it meant that anyone in possession of technical instruments could establish claims to knowledge. In this period, science begins to free itself from subservience to non-scientific forms of knowledge.

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Before its instrumentalization by the state, the new science of the Renaissance made possible a vision of knowledge that opened up for the first time the radical vision of a democratization of knowledge. This spirit of the freedom of science can be held to be a defining feature of the European heritage and one that has been preserved in the European university tradition. Even though the most important innovations in the European university took place later, the foundations were established in the Renaissance period with the movement towards the secularization of science. It is possible to see the network of European universities of the period as a basis for a cultural heritage that has endured to the present day and which constitutes a conception of Europe that is in tension with the imperial tradition that developed in later centuries. By 1500, there were about 100 universities and they continued to grow in size and number as Catholic and Protestant institutions competed with each other (Rabb 2006: 87). The basis of the innovations of the period, and which had a distinctively European characteristic, was the invention of printing. The invention of typography with movable characters by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz and Strassbourg in the 1440s was perhaps the single event that opens the way for modernity and for global consciousness. It has often been underestimated in the formation of modernity. Guthenberg’s printing of the 42-line Bible in 1455 in Mainz made possible a new mode of knowledge that was decisive for Europe in that it made possible communication across a wider area than before. Initially, this was within Europe, but by the eighteenth century it had become global. Printing made possible communication that was fundamentally different than that of the handwritten manuscript in that only one exemplar was needed and translations became easier to execute. Writing was previously tied to the author and to the orality. The copy was now the basis of knowledge. This first took place within the sphere of religious knowledge, which Luther recognized at an early stage and translated the bible in 1534: it delivered the Protestant hope for the individual to discover the meaning of the scriptures without ecclesiastical interpretation. But this was soon to break free from the bounds of religion. As Barbier writes: ‘the relationship to knowledge itself was changed by the irruption of the media. The traditional image was that of the text inspired in

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the author by a higher power, but with the entry into the graphosphere, this vision was undermined and the figure of the God tended to fade into the background, well behind the process of writing and reading’ (Barbier 2017: 162). Within 50 years, printing has spread over Europe with a new market for books. The invention of printing had less impact on the Ottoman World, which regarded the Qur’an as a sacred text that could not be subject to mechanical reproduction. The emergence and diffusion of printing in Renaissance Europe can be viewed, to follow Barbier, as a phenomenon of mass mediatization. Printing and the book trade had a radical dimension in that it made possible the emergence of forms of public life that were separate both from the church and from the court. Of course the opposite also occurred: the written word could now more easily be used for control over the new freedoms that were made possible by printing. It was in the tension between power and freedom that modernity was born. But nothing could alter the fact that with the arrival of the printed book reading and writing had changed and with it the transmission and representation of knowledge would also be fundamentally different than in the age of the manuscript. The Renaissance ushered in a scepticism that impacted many areas of life, though scholasticism and Aristotelian natural philosophy were to survive until the seventeenth century in the universities. The most important movement within it was humanism, which cultivated a critical approach to the reading of texts and made possible by the diffusion of printed texts since 1450, following the invention of printing and new methods of making paper (Eisenstein 1993; Nauert 2006). Humanism was a culture of thought that stressed tolerance and especially tolerance in matters of religious worship. It can be seen as the core of modern European culture. One of the most famous proponents of humanism in this tradition of critical humanism was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam who argued for the cultivation of persuasion over force as well as pacifism. His work and that of Petrarch has often been taken to be a major expression of Renaissance critical humanism since it was rooted in the rhetorical tradition, which saw the revival of humanistic studies, principally grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy (Remer 1996). Of these arts, rhetoric was particularly important and was linked to scepticism as well as moral and political tolerance.

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Rhetoric was an argumentative art that established a way of reaching truth without force, requiring toleration, moderation and persuasion. While the rhetorical tradition was rooted in the past and far from modern liberalism in its concerns, which ultimately were to arrive at truth, it was an important moment in the formation of modernity in that it admitted of the possibility of relativism and the need for a critical reading of texts and a questioning of conventional wisdom. For instance, Erasmus drew on early Christian thought to challenge the ideal of the crusade, which was still very much alive in this time, despite the military impotence of Europe in face of Ottoman expansion (Bisaha 2004: 174–175). Although Renaissance humanism operated largely outside the universities, it exerted an enduring aspect on almost all aspects of modern thought and scholarship as well as in politics in its non-dogmatic approach to life (Heller 1984). While it is commonplace in recent times to stress the ‘dark side’ of the Renaissance (Mignolo 1995), which coincided with European colonialism, it is important to see the Renaissance as differentiated and containing within its currents that cannot be explained only in terms of colonization and racism. If the Renaissance era is extended to the late sixteenth century, as in the English Renaissance, it is certainly the case that the first intimations of race and colonialism can be found in Shakespeare’s plays, since by that time European colonialism had already advanced (see Loomba 2002). The Tempest (1611) is often singled out as an example of such racialized thinking. Standing at the threshold of modernity, Shakespearean theatre gives fleeting glimpses into the emerging language of race, but also the sense of the world as a globe. This consciousness probably accounts for the naming of his theatre ‘The Globe’ in 1599, a reference to Petronius’s phrase ‘that all the world is a playground’. The language of race and colonial discourse in Shakespeare is nonetheless contentious and a product of a time when such terms had different meanings that those they were to acquire in later times and were often used for different purposes (see Hadfield 2007). It was a time when Europeans began to become conscious of a wider world beyond Europe (see Ramachandran 2015). But there can be no doubt that the Eurocentric world view began to emerge in the language of late Renaissance thought.

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The Renaissance like all temporal categories is a construction and includes within it many diverse currents. Stephen Toulmin (1990) saw in the Renaissance a different foundation to modernity than one founded on rational mastery and the aspiration for conquest. In the works of the sixteenth-century humanists, such as More, Erasmus, Montaigne, the sources of a different and more sceptical and benign modernity can be found than the one that he sees as emanating from the rationalism of Descartes in the seventeenth century. In Chapter 8, this theme of the conflicting currents in modernity will be returned to, but in the present context it can be noted that the Renaissance was both a mood and age in which Europe, outside Spain and Portugal, were not colonial powers with overseas territories; they had relatively weak central states and were very much overshadowed by the Ottoman Empire. The capacity for critique, and self-problematization that developed in later centuries, was cultivated in this period by the humanist movement which can be seen as constituting a major current within the European heritage and which began prior to European conquest of the Americas. Erasmus, for instance, was opposed to war and argued against war on both ethical and pragmatic reasons as both wrong and inefficient. The concept of human dignity was set forth by Pico della Mirandola in 1498 in his Oration on the Dignity of Man. The notion of human dignity along with the growing emphasis on the individual became an important dimension of the entire culture of modernity. At this time, what Marcel Mauss referred to as the category of the person was developed into a conception of the individual from which arose the modern ideal of self-realization (see Carrithers et al. 1985; Taylor 1989). The Renaissance gave expression to the emerging cult of the individual in the rise of portrait painting that in developing new techniques in perspectival painting was an innovative artistic feature of the era. The very notion of the modern self was consolidated in this period as an inner-directed morality. As argued in Chapter 3, the beginnings of this were in the twelfth century, but it was not until the Renaissance that an augmented emphasis on the individual developed (Garner 1990; Martin 1997; Morris 1972; Gurevich 1995).1

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The emergence of the modern self was crucial to the making of modern Europe. One of the distinguishing features of modern Europe was the cultivation of a concept of the self that made possible what Burckhardt saw as a product of the Renaissance, a new emphasis on the human being as an individual as an objective of study and reflection. For Burckhardt, this was simply the other side of the modern project of the state and institutions as something to be constructed (Garner 1990). The basis of the early modern discovery of the individual is a conception of the self as autonomous of the world. Jan Patocka (2002) in Plato and Europe and Charles Taylor (1989) in The Sources of the Self have shown in their pioneering analyses of the self that a defining feature of modernity in Europe was the cultivation of an inner self. For Patocka, it commenced as early as Plato with the ‘care of the soul’; for Taylor it was Augustine—who of course was influenced by Plato as transmitted through Plotinus—and marked the shift to the inner space of reflexivity through a distinction between an inner and an outer person, the inner being the soul and the path to God. For the European tradition, from Augustine through Weber to Foucault, the self is compelled to know itself and to discover truth within rather than in the objects of the world. Taylor (1989: 131) has argued: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Augustine introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought’. For Taylor, this was formative of the entire Western culture. It laid the foundation of a new cognitive shift: ‘Augustine shifts the focus from the field of objects known to the activity itself of knowing; God is to be found here. For in contrast to the domain of objects, which is public and common, the activity of knowing is particularized; each of us is engaged in ours. To look towards this activity is to look to the self, to take up a reflexive stance’ (Taylor 1989: 130). Of course Augustine was just one figure, who for Taylor stood between Plato and Descartes, in the articulation of the Western notion of the self. His thought serves as an illustration of how in Europe a particular and culturally specific conception of self and world emerged whereby the self saw itself to be separate from the world. This may explain how it was that the Europeans more than anyone else regarded their relation with the world to be fundamentally open and

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consequentially were not bound to Europe; it opened to them the prospect of finding the City of God anywhere in the world. This capacity led to a certain displacement and eventually to the great movement of Europe beyond the continent to the New World (Mota 2012, 2019). Without this notion of the inner self as the path to the City of God, Europeans would not have had the cognitive capacity to conquer other parts of the world or, compelled by curiosity, to seek out other parts of the world and to rule over them, to acquire knowledge of them and to convert them. One of the consequences of this was that the Europeans did not entirely see their world to be confined to Europe.

The Birth of Republicanism as a European Legacy The developments in science were reflected in new political ideas. The social thought of the medieval period subordinated society to the state, which in turn was embedded in a largely theological worldview. The pact of state and church began to be questioned with the advent of the modern age, which inaugurated new ways of thinking about society. One of the most striking aspects of this new thinking was the idea that society was an artefact, something that can be fashioned by human design. This insight marks the beginning of social theory. The idea that society is not a natural entity, created by divine will and based on fixed principles, led to a view of society as something that can be created and thus changed by people. Suddenly, then, in the sixteenth century, politics ceased to be seen as an exclusive instrument of royal and ecclesiastical authorities, but a medium by which society could shape itself in new ways. One notable outcome was utopian thought. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516 was the first of a genre of political allegories on the foundation of a new society. The political tradition of utopian thinking, which goes back to Plato’s Republic, was in part a response to the discovery of Europeans of other civilizations and in part a consequence of humanism, which in cultivating a questioning attitude opened the political imagination to new possibilities, including the possibility of human beings creating a new kind of society. Such works were both a

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critique of the existing society—and often, as in the case of More, written under conditions of political censorship—and explorations of what an ideal society might be (see Kumar 1991). While utopianism was to become an important part of modern political thought in the following centuries, arguably the most important direct legacy of the Renaissance for the European political heritage was republicanism. The Renaissance reintroduced the ancient idea of the citizen and the idea that society can be rationally planned by a benign state, ideas that were to be influential in shaping the Enlightenment and modern utopian and republican thought. A work of huge significance was Machiavelli’s The Prince which offered one of the first modern visions of the state and the work of politics as a secular undertaking. In this work, published in 1513 and dedicated to the Florentine ruler, Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler is not the servant of God but the representative of citizens. Until Machiavelli, politics was generally seen as the extension of morality and the state was primarily moral and legitimated by theological principles. Machiavelli changed all that in advocating a theory of politics that broke the connection between morality and politics. The Prince was written as a guide to modern politics as a purely instrumental art: the state is not founded in the image of God or on ethical principles, but on the need for protection in the context of a corrupt society. The theory of politics advocated by Machiavelli was a very modern one and challenged all organic conceptions of the state. He believed people could govern themselves and he believed in the idea of a republic, but saw absolute monarchy as an expediency. He was writing at a time when political and financial corruption was rife in the Italian city states. A viable social order required a strong state, but the state is only a means to an end. His famous principle that the end justifies the means must be seen in the light of humanism, namely the idea that a political order requires an act of political foundation rather than of legitimation by preordained moral or religious principles. In this, he differed from More, who was more concerned with the ends of politics and the ideal society. Machiavelli shifted the focus to the means and was more acutely aware than was More that the ideal society cannot be achieved. Despite his authoritarian tendency, Machiavelli was first and foremost a humanist, seeing society as something that can be fashioned by secular rulers

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and shaped in the image of humanist values. He is one of the founders of modern republicanism and believed in the idea of citizenship, that is, sovereignty is invested ultimately in citizens rather than in the state. The republican idea—the vision of a self-governing political community based on citizenship and the consent of the governed—could be said to be one of the major achievements of the European political heritage as it consolidated in the Reformation. It has often been commented that this tradition constitutes a uniquely European political legacy (Van Gelderen and Skinner 2002). While its origins go back to Greek and Roman thought, it should be noted that modern republicanism is different from classical republicanism in its view on liberty and rights. The sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher of the Salamanca school, Francisco Suarez, was one of the first proponents of popular sovereignty. It was not until the early modern period that republicanism became a pervasive political movement as well as a social and economic reality in several parts of Western Europe. The notion of citizenship on which it is based refers to a status defined by rights that are held by a community of individuals who constitute the public realm. The republic is thus an autonomous political community that governs itself. In republicanism, sovereignty is located within the people rather than in the ruler, who acts in the name of the people. Early European republicanism developed alongside nationalism since it asserted the principle of self-determination that was to become the defining principle of modern nationalism. Rousseau, in the eighteenth century, was a central figure in combining republicanism with nascent nationalism. However, the republican imagination is prior and largely a product of Renaissance thought and political practice. Republicanism while not reducible to democracy was important in shaping the progress of democracy insofar as it emphasized the right of a people to rule themselves and that political rulers ought to be answerable to the people in whose name they rule. However, much of modern republicanism was undemocratic. Springborn (1992) has argued that Renaissance republicanism was constructed out of a self-made myth that it was a stark contrast to ‘oriental despotism’. While many republicans promoted democracy, others did not see an immediate link, as was the case with Immanuel Kant, who strongly believed in republican government but distrusted

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democracy, which he believed could weaken the foundations of republicanism. The American and French Revolutions, too, appealed to republicanism in general, but did not embrace any single system of democratic government other than a general appeal to the principle of the consent of the governed. Republicanism was also in tension with liberalism and variously included a commitment to liberal values, such as the rights of the individual. While the contrast between liberalism and republicanism was not sharply drawn before the nineteenth century, the difference was present and it became more important in the age of nationalism. Republicanism is properly speaking a political philosophy about the nature of political rule and takes the political community as the primary reference point, not the individual. Unlike liberalism, it does not proclaim freedom, but autonomy as the overriding principle for the legitimation of a political order. Whether in the Renaissance city states of Northern Italy or in the later revolutionary movements of the eighteenth century, republicanism was to become a core feature of European political modernity, although it was often overshadowed by liberalism. The republican tradition makes sense only in the context of an arrangement between state and society whereby the former never entirely dominates the latter. The basic structure of political modernity in Europe was determined in the early modern period when political authority developed in a way that required the consent of the governed; in other words, state and society evolved in ways that the state rarely for long was able to assert itself over society. Rulers have always had to take account of demands emanating from civil society. In earlier times, the sovereign had, too, of course to seek the consent of the governed, but until the early modern era this was generally confined to the elites, initially the nobles and clergy but increasingly the burghers. Republicanism brought a new dimension to political rule in Europe in placing the source of sovereignty in the people rather than in the elites. The republican idea can be contrasted to another aspect of the European heritage, namely the cosmopolitan idea: the vision of the global context and human life as shaped by participation in a universal order. This was also present in the Renaissance period and existed in a relation of tension with the republican current. One of the hallmarks of the social and political thought of the Renaissance mind was the idea of

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a common humanity. This had its origins in the medieval notion of a universal monarchy and in the Christian idea of a universal church, but marked the transition to modernity with an emphasis on equality, human dignity and rights. The notion of a common humanity was embedded in humanism and in the movement towards the recognition of dissent and toleration (Headley 2008). The notion of a common humanity is not specifically a European creation; it can be found in most civilizations and has taken many different forms within the European tradition. In some forms, it was simply a Eurocentric vision of the world, while in other forms it was the belief all peoples are equal and can learn from each other. The notion of a common humanity, too, could be used as much against the colonial drive as in its name. To appreciate the cosmopolitan currents within the Renaissance, a consideration of the encounter with the non-European world is necessary since it was in these encounters that European self-consciousness becomes more clearly defined. Cosmopolitanism, to be discussed in Chapter 9, was more a product of the eighteenth century than of the Renaissance, which in opening up the vision of a wider world prepared the foundations for new ideas about nature, the individual and society.

Cultural Encounters Between East and West The humanism and republicanism of the Renaissance had a global dimension that has only recently been given much attention. The Renaissance should not be seen as an entirely inward movement, but was part of the European age of discovery and exploration, when European explorers ventured to many parts of the world far beyond the limits of the Mediterranean. The sixteenth century witnessed the beginning of European colonialism, especially in the Americas. It is impossible to think of that century without considering the significance of 1492, when Europe began to look westwards in the aftermath of Columbus’s voyage to America. However, it was largely an age that as far as much of Europe was concerned was pre-imperial. The period between 1492 and c.1800 was one in which Europe was relatively weak in relation to the Asian empires to the East.

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The conventional Eurocentric account of the relation between East and West has neglected not only the global context, but also ignored the positive moments in the encounter of Europe with the Asian world, emphasizing only hostility and the penchant for exoticism. As far as the Renaissance is concerned, the colonial period, beginning with the Spanish Conquest in 1500, occurred after the main developments of the movement. However, as noted above, this is not the case with the later so-called English Renaissance of the late sixteenth century. The encounters with other worlds that began in this period had the consequence that European civilization increasingly began to be defined in terms not just of a distance from its own origin, as Brague (2002) has argued, but also in terms of a relation to an Other, a relation that varied from being one of superiority to one of coexistence to one of mutual interest and respect to one of a goal to be reached. In this, a tension was set up between the republican idea, with its relatively closed vision of political community, and the open horizon of cosmopolitan idea. In short, the Renaissance was an era of major reorientation in terms of culture, politics and territory for Europe, but the implications of it were not felt until later centuries. The Renaissance period was one in which new contacts with the East were established and when the allure of the tropics was also present. A major dimension of the Renaissance was not only the recovery of classical antiquity, but also a fundamental shift in spatial perspective, which was reflected in the exploration of New Worlds. Headley (2008) draws attention to the recognition by Renaissance thinkers of the habitability of the new lands the Europeans encountered. This was a challenge to the Christian myth of a common human descent and the denial of an inaccessible yet habitable antipodes. The problem of the accessibility of a habitable world beyond the seas required a redefinition of the Christian ecumene in order to affirm the universal redemption of the human race. The complex entwinement of cartography, theology, racism and the history of exploration in the sixteenth century was the ground on which the medieval notions of universal empire and a universal church gradually underwent transformation and increasingly so in the direction of a non-religious way of imagining the world.

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A neglected aspect of this new way of imagining the world was the vision of globality that was made possible by cartography (Inglis and Robertson 2006). As argued by Inglis and Robertson, following Brottom (1997, 2002), while cartography was, on the one side, a tool by which Europeans gained control over new territories and an instrument of colonization, it was also a medium that made possible a nascent global consciousness for maps and globes which depicted the ‘whole world’. Europeans could thus place themselves in a larger context, the context of the whole world, and this shaped their own self-understanding as part of a larger whole which they might try to gain control over, but could never succeed given the overwhelming presence of global powers and civilizations. The vision and imagination of globality gave not only a sense of nationhood, but also helped to define Europe. Europe thus took shape in the imagination of people as part of an interconnected world. Developments in navigation, cartography and shipbuilding made possible greater exploration than was previously possible. The result was not necessarily the affirmation of a unified European continent, but one that was globally connected. In the conventional Grand Narratives of Europe, this global sensibility has been insufficiently emphasized and instead a picture painted of Europe growing in self-confidence as it rediscovers its allegedly true self in the cultures of antiquity. An alternative view, more in keeping with recent scholarship, rather stresses interactions with those parts of the world with which Europeans came into contact. This should also include the capacity for critique and a self-questioning attitude towards the relation between the Old and New Worlds, as the one that can be found in the writings of the Salamanca School of political and legal philosophers in sixteenth-century Spain. As the lectures of Francisco de Vitoria attest, colonization was not always regarded as self-evidently justifiable and he opposed the view that the Native Americans had no rights and that the Spanish were justified in appropriating their land (Vitoria 1991; Beneyto and Varela 2017). It should be noted that the rise of global consciousness in the Renaissance period was largely in a pre-imperial context when East and West met on different terms than what was later to be the case. Europe was relatively weak in comparison with the wealth and power of Asian civilizations. The Renaissance is often mistakenly taken to be a celebration of the European heritage based on a narrow conception

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of an inward-looking humanism without due consideration of the fact that much of that heritage was based on an active engagement with the East. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that the openness to the cultures of antiquity was also reflected in openness to the cultures of the non-European world. It is important to note that in this period the consciousness of being European or the consciousness of nationhood was not particularly pronounced and there was nothing obstructing the emergence of a global consciousness. The turn to a fixed conception of the self and the concern with the obliteration of otherness was a development that came with modernity, whereas by the sixteenth century there was less certainty about such matters. This was what the Renaissance expressed. It articulated a cultural identity that was not the unified culture it was often claimed to be, but a worldview that was open to cultural influences from antiquity and from the wider world. Such forms of consciousness certainly included colonial and racial views. In this sense, then, the Renaissance was very much the cultural expression of the European civilizational constellation, which, as demonstrated earlier, is an interconnecting web of civilizations and cultural flows that was constitutive of modern Europe. The basis for much of this was trade. The overseas missions of Europeans were initially for trade. This was the rationale for the Portuguese explorations in the Far East. The accidental discovery of present-day Brazil in 1500 by the Portuguese was regarded as unimportant, since it was believed that the newly discovered lands did not contain riches. The Spanish-led conquest of the Americas did not have an impact on all of continental Europe and only later did the rising powers of England and the Dutch seek to participate in the westward conquest. The encounter with Asia occurred at a time when the global economy was largely Asian. Europeans were in effect inserting themselves in this Afro-Asian economy which was the dominant world economy c.500 to 1800, when a New World economy more weighted to the West emerged (Hobson 2004, 2006). But until then the world economy centred on the Indian Ocean, which was the real focus for the Iberian explorations. The vast bulk of silver imported from the Spanish

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dominions went to China via Spain between 1500 and 1640 where, as Pomeranz argues, it became the monetary and fiscal basis of the greatest economy in the world (Pomeranz 2000: 271–272). Europe gained a new identity through the Renaissance that marked it off from the Asian world, but at the same time Europeans borrowed from the Asian civilization, from the Ottoman to the Chinese Empires. They borrowed extensively from them in science, mathematics, agriculture and navigation. Islamic, Indian and Chinese innovations were appropriated by early modern Europe much of whose rise to supremacy was made possible only due to inventions outside Europe (Bala 2006). The Scientific Revolution was greatly assisted by Islamic science and it is conceivably the case that the European conquests of the rest of the world would not have been possible without the adoption of navigational techniques learnt from the Muslims. This does not mean that Europe only borrowed from Asia or that its rise to global supremacy is due to such borrowings, but that without the prior Asian innovations there would have been far less advancement both in science and in technology as well as in European power. Such borrowings were possible in the first instance only as a result of centuries-long interaction between Europeans and Asians. The later divide of West versus East that came with the age of empire in the nineteenth century should not be taken to have defined all relations between Europe and the civilizations of Asia. It is now increasingly clear from recent scholarship that before 1800 East and West met on more equal terms, and frequently, it was the Europeans who were in the weaker position. Recent studies on the relation between Europe and the Ottomans show a more differentiated picture than exclusively one of hostilities between ancient rivals (Birchwood and Dimmock 2005; Bisaha 2004; Jardine and Brottom 2000; Goffman 2002). These studies question the existence of a binary divide between an infidel East and a Christian West, showing instead a more entangled geopolitical configuration. Some authors more than others stress an interconnected world (Bitterli 1986; Jardine and Brottom 2000; Goffman 2002; McLean 2005; Springborn 1992) while others emphasize constantly shifting attitudes, which included

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a willingness to learn from the Turks in the arts, civility and government (Bisaha 2004). Bisaha emphasizes the fact that Europeans were conscious of being weaker than the Ottomans, who they both respected and feared. This was not an era of aggressive European expansion in the East and no single Europe power, let alone Europe as a whole, had anything like the military power that the Ottoman Empire commanded, which by the fifteenth century ruled over Greece and much of the Balkan area. The discovery of the Americas was largely accidental and an effect of a search for a new trade route to the East. Yet, there can be no doubt that Ottoman expansion made possible cultural alterity in which a European consciousness was defined. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent conquest of the Balkan area, the writings of the Renaissance humanists clearly gave expression to a European consciousness confronted by an advancing Islamic power that was a threat to Christendom. This was reflected in the increased preference for the word ‘Europe’ over Christendom. However, this was far from being a racial category or even a political category, since in this time there was no pan-European power and the various powers continued to make alliances with the Turks. It is also evident that despite increased use of the term, the idea of ‘Europeans’ was a later development, illustrating that alterity was limited to a vaguely defined geographical and cultural area. It is clear that a re-evaluation is needed of relations between Europe and Asia in the period prior to 1800 as far as the Ottoman Empire is concerned and more generally concerning relations with the wider Islamic world as more complicated than previously assumed. The capacity of the Renaissance to provide Europe with a unified identity was limited. While establishing a cultural orientation and a nascent cultural model, the Renaissance also divided Europe. Politically, the ideas that emerged in the period that is more generally defined as the early modern period provided a foundation for sovereign states which gradually consolidated from the seventeenth century. The Renaissance was also the age of the Reformation, which led into the early modern revolutions and wars of religion that were to define

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the modern history of Europe, which henceforth was a story of national conflicts. As regards what can be said on the end of the Renaissance, Paul Hazard (1953) in a classic work published in 1935, The Crisis of the European Mind, argued that by 1700 the Renaissance was finally over due to a new and deeper level of scepticism and critique that did not look primarily to the past. What can be concluded from the present discussion is that the shape of modern Europe was set in the Renaissance period, but that was far from being predetermined as the outcome of long-run historical forces; nor is it something that can be explained teleologically by what happened in later centuries when Europe achieved near global supremacy either directly through empire-building or through the global diffusion of capitalism. It can also be concluded that the formation of modern Europe in this period cannot be explained internally as a self-induced process. What is needed is a global perspective that takes account of how the dynamics of the process were shaped by the interaction with the non-European world, which itself must be seen as a globally connected one (Abu-Lughod 1963, 1989; Bayly 2004; Darwin 2009; Gunn 2003; Hopkins 2002). Despite its marginality in the early modern period, which should now be considered in the light of a wider global economy that was centred in the Indian Ocean, it is nonetheless the case that in this formative period the seeds were set for its later advancement, which is now generally located much later than was previously assumed (Darwin 2009; Goldstone 2008; Pomeranz 2000; Studer 2017). The nearest the Europeans had come to a world empire before the nineteenth century was the Spanish one, but Spain lacked the resources for significant conquest in Asia, beyond its colonization of the Philippines, and there was no imperial strategy to make Spain the ruler of the world; Philip II was more concerned to defend Christianity against the Reformation than seek further overseas conquests (Darwin 2009: 97). As Arnason has argued, the formative effects of inter-civilizational encounters played a decisive role in developing capacities and institutions that could later serve to sustain new initiatives in a changed global environment (Arnason 2006b: 78–79).

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This all suggests that the formation of modern Europe can only be understood in a multidimensional and global context in which both internal and external factors played a role. The older accounts tended to stress only the internal forces that shaped Europe, and in the traditional and somewhat Eurocentric, historiographical accounts of the rise of the West, Europe did not suffer from the ‘oriental despotism’ that supposedly impeded Asian development. Recent accounts, on the other hand, such as Frank (1998), have over-stressed the external context, such as the claim that Europe’s rise was due to the decline in Asia rather than due to anything it did on its own or the view that Europe’s rise was due to having borrowed everything from the East, a thesis implicit in Dobson (2004). The truth lies somewhere in between and it is difficult to disagree with Arnason’s argument for an intermediate position that emphasizes the interaction between East and West without downplaying Europe’s capacity to develop in unique ways from its borrowings from other civilizations. John Darwin has argued for caution about assuming that the relative dynamism and wealth that Europe acquired in the early modern period was sufficient for empire-building ventures. Much of early colonization was in fact limited, at least in Asia and Africa. Darwin is struck by the limited influence of Europe until well into the nineteenth century (Darwin 2009). The ancien regime states were, he argues, ill-equipped for the conquest of the non-European world, and there was often little material incentive to do so. Dynastic struggles within Europe weakened Europe’s capacity for anything like an imperial order comparable to the Ottoman Empire. However, the warring nature of Europe was inevitably a breeding-ground for colonial wars as well as a basis for advances in military technology and organization (Darwin 2009: 114). It is clear that Europe can be understood only in a global context and this must include an appreciation of earlier waves of globalization that had a formative impact on the wider Eurasian world. The period that is conventionally referred to as the Renaissance marks the birth of a European consciousness. It is when the idea of Europe emerges and, above all, when distinctively European trends become discernible. It is also when the movement towards modernity takes on a new significance and when Europe becomes entangled in the rest of the world.

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Note 1. There were clearly national variations of a more general trend, such as the thesis of the special case of the origins of English individualism (MacFarlane 1978). For a discussion of the wider literature on the Renaissance and the emergence of individualism, see Martin (1997).

7 Unity and Divisions in Early Modern European History: The Emergence of a Westernized Europe

The very notion of European history suggests that there is a pattern that constitutes the basic unity of its history. Indeed, the very notion of a historical process seems to presuppose a structural pattern formed from the influence earlier stages had on later ones. Yet a closer look at the historical experience reveals a more complicated situation. Instead of unity, one finds divisions that undermine claims to significant unity. Much of the narrative in this book has stressed internal civilizational differences and has invited scepticism about proclamations of unity, at least without showing how they came into existence. This is not to deny the existence or possibility of a unity, but urges caution in assuming its existence as a self-defining reality or a teleological ideal that should be reached when divisions are overcome. In the traditional Grand Narratives, the assumption was that out of the divisions in history a greater unity would be possible due to an underlying common civilization that provided it with its basic orientations. Yet some notion of unity is conceptually needed, if only to make sense of diversity. Rather than speaking of unity, which tends to suggest a dominant order or underlying structure, the idea of a pattern may be

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more instructive to make sense of specificity. The specificity of Europe can be discerned in the Middle Ages, but it is not until the early modern period that we can speak of a European developmental path, which becomes entangled in colonialism by the nineteenth century. The seventeenth century was important in the emergence of new scientific ideas, which, as Toby Huff has argued, formed a cultural core around which European culture consolidated the earlier synthesis of Greek philosophy, Roman civil law and Christian theology. Developments in that century across Europe in the fields of astronomy, optics, the science of motion, mathematics and physics as well as in medicine and anatomy and in hydraulics and pneumatics opened up new possibilities and can be seen as a new fusion (Huff 1993, 2011). To call this a unity is too strong, but it can be seen in terms of the culmination of a cultural model formed around an epistemic core. In the previous chapter, I argued that developments in the Renaissance period should be included in that conception of European culture. The argument more generally in this book is that European civilization is to be understood as a constellation of civilizations whose interaction produced the basic matrix of modern Europe, which as a consequence is composed of multiple forms that were later solidified with the emergence of modernity and its different routes and projects. The key feature that makes possible a structural pattern is the ensemble of mechanisms and processes that establish connectivity and development, rather than a system of values that is somehow foundational or an underlying subjectivity or a path-dependent course. It is in this sense that a basic pattern of unity can be established from which diversity develops through internal logics of development and the creativity of social actors. Rejecting the notion of unity in favour of divisions does not entirely answer the question of how European history should be understood, especially if, as has often been the case, a notion of division stresses the binary divide between an internal European self versus a non-European external other. The notion of unity, understood in the above terms, is a basis on which to conceive of diversity, rather than assuming diversity, is prior to and generative of unity. This does not mean that it cannot be argued that because the history of Europe has been characterized by

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divisions arising from strife and competition between different regions, nations, geopolitical units, elites, etc., the only unity possible is that made possible by the existence of an external enemy. Then, focus on divisions and internal conflicts has been one corrective to the traditional account of a common European civilization (see Delanty 1995a). However, as argued in the preceding chapters, the view that the only unity possible is one formed against a common enemy must be relativized, not simply because of the scale of internal divisions, but because there has rarely been a constant external enemy and alterity has been as much internal as it has been external. Yet, it cannot be denied that at crucial moments—1453 (fall of Constantinople), 1688 (Ottoman Siege of Vienna), 1917 (October Revolution), 1939 (Second World War)— in the history of Europe the vision of the enemy outside has been significant in shaping European consciousness. However, alterity is not always negative; as argued in earlier chapters, the external other has also been a focus of positive identification, as in the example of the USA as a model for Europe since 1945. Other significant moments—1789, 1968, 1989—for instance were not built on constructions of an external enemy, letting aside the USSR as a foe of Central and Eastern Europe. The thesis of the unity forged against an external enemy assumes a degree of continuity that in fact has not continuously existed and sits uncomfortably alongside the recognition of major ruptures, which question any assumptions of continuity. If there is less continuity in history—from antiquity to modernity—than has traditionally been assumed in the Grand Narratives, it is difficult to postulate the existence of an external Other that gave to Europe its identity. This would not entirely explain the singularity of Europe—which requires some notion of a cultural and social structure—nor account for relative similarity in social and economic structures or other sources of the idea of Europe that can be more easily accounted for in terms of endogenous developments. The previous chapters have questioned the claim that the exteriority of Islam or the East was the defining tenet in European identity, for it oscillated between positive and negative positions too often to be of sufficient force for a long-run identity to emerge. The argument has in fact been stronger, namely that Islam is a part of the constellation of civilizations that make up Europe.

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The problem of unity and divisions cannot be disengaged from the problem of continuity and rupture. Recent approaches would appear to stress divisions over unity and rupture over continuity and in so doing relativize both the existence of a common European self as much as cast doubt on the possibility of an external Other that provided the enduring terms of alterity. As argued in the previous chapters, an interactionist account of Europe is needed to relativize the older emphasis on internal explanations of the rise of Europe, for European history cannot be entirely accounted for without taking into account the relation with the non-European world. The context for exploring this is Europe’s insertion into the global world of Asian trade and commerce, which had preceded the rise of Europe and its later colonial path and provided it with opportunities for innovation and expansion. Such developments were already present in the medieval age (McClure 2015; Moore 2016). This broader context offers a more comprehensive interpretation of the external relation than one focused only on responses to an external threat, whether real or an imaginary construction. These tensions between internal versus external, unity versus divisions, continuity versus rupture are related to another set of contradictions, which altogether define the formation of the European heritage as it unfolded over the centuries: the relation between homogenization versus pluralization. On the one side, it is possible to see history in terms of processes of increased uniformity arising from the consolidation of new centres of power which exert homogenizing influences through cultural, political and economic forces. This may lead to unity in terms of durable geopolitical units or societal frameworks, for instance states and markets, but such homogenization may also take a more varied form, as a particularization of the universal in the sense of different countries creating similar institutions. Thus, law has been one way Europe achieved a certain homogenization, while at the same time pursuing different national routes. The wider framework of modernity, to be discussed in the next chapter, is also a way in which to situate national patterns of differentiation within a wider context that provides a degree of commonality. This will require due attention to the ways in which disparate units—elites, regions, nations, etc.—connect up with others. Rather than looking for uniqueness and singularity on the

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level of the internal composition of the entity or subject in question, or Europe as a whole for that matter, more significant is the means by which the various components interconnect and undergo transformation as a result of their interactions. The formative process that constituted Europe can be best understood as one in which versatile structures of connectivity were created that made possible rapid innovation and learning in technology, science, government and the formation of cultural models that facilitated individualism, social movements that challenged authority, discursive shifts in the nature of power and new kinds of domination. All of this made possible a degree of contingency that has undermined any notion of a path-dependent view of history, but nonetheless makes possible developmental paths. Some of these issues will be taken up in the third section of this chapter and in the next chapter. The main focus of this chapter will be on those attempts to establish new patterns of unity through homogenization and new relations between interiority and exteriority. The first section deals with the rise of the West in the wake of the conquest of the Americas when a major shift occurred in the borders of Europe from an Eastern- to a Western-oriented one. The second section looks at the internal homogenization of Europe. The third section shifts the focus to network-based forms of integration and the tradition of popular rebellion and social movements that can be said to constitute the European heritage in ways that challenge the dominant homogenizing trends and suggest a model of integration through differentiation.

Empires and Borders: Expanding, Limiting and Overlapping By the end of the early modern period, a basic divide became evident in the cultural and the geographical definition of Europe. The geographical notion of a Europe, broadly the territory of Christianity, ceased to be a meaningful frame of reference following the westward expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the beginnings of the Iberian conquest of the Americas. This was a time when the gravity of Europe shifted westwards. From then onwards, the idea of Europe became increasingly a

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cultural and also a political construct that did not refer to a specific geographical territory. It was the beginning of the loosening of any underlying reference point for the idea of Europe, which first lost Christianity and then a specific geographical territory, as the reference points for its specificity. The older ambivalence between Christendom and Europe was replaced by a new one with Europe now becoming associated with the wider notion of the West. In this shift in the signifiers with which Europe has been identified, the ground moves in the direction, first, of Western and, later, the North-west of Europe in a process that can be termed the ‘westernization’ of Europe. As with many ideas of Europe, Europe becomes associated with something that is not specifically European. The encounter with what was to become the New World gave to Europe a new identity as the Old World, and along with this came a new notion of civilization, which in turn was contrasted variously to ‘primitive man’ and to the barbarian who had to be remedied by civilization. The ‘discovery’ of the New World irreversibly changed the self-understanding of Europe. It opened up the vision of a wider sense of the world beyond the limits of what until then was seen as the civilizations of the world. As in the famous words of John Locke in the Two Treatises on Government, ‘Thus in the beginning all the world is America’. America is now seen as the origin of civilization. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was to become the future itself for what remained of Europe. By the seventeenth century, Europe as a world region became more discernible, though its rise to global supremacy did not take place until well into the nineteenth century. The late fifteenth century witnessed several defining moments in the emergence of Europe as a distinct entity. As argued earlier, the year 1453 was a turning point in that it gave a certain geopolitical identity to the Latin West, if not culturally, certainly politically in that the Ottoman Empire had more or less encircled Europe to the east and south-east closing off any expansion in that direction. Europe was therefore more or less the area west of the Ottoman lands. To the North, Russia since 1480 became a rising power under Ivan the Great when it became free of the Mongols. The year 1492 symbolically marked the westernization of Europe with the completion of the Catholic ‘Reconquest’ of Spain following the seizure

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of Granada, which had been the last stronghold of the Muslims—and it was too the year that Columbus sailed for the Americas, claiming those lands for the Spanish crown. So after 1492 the ground had been prepared for the emergence of Europe as the West: Columbus replaced Charlemagne as the harbinger of the new age and with this the notion of the West became transformed into an outward movement. The sixteenth century began with the gradual reorientation of Europe in a new direction and with new centres of political power emerging. Spain, united under the union of the Catholic monarchs, was at the forefront of European homogenization. From being a frontier land, it had become a bastion of a revived and imperialist Catholicism. ‘Europe conquered the Peninsula’, Braudel has written (1990: 824), ‘by way of the Pyrenees by the Atlantic and Mediterranean shipping routes: along this frontier zone it defeated Islam with the victories of the Reconquest which were victories for Europe’. The marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand and the subsequent unification of Castile and Aragon in 1479 laid the foundation for Spain to become a leading power. In 1516 with the accession of Charles V to the Spanish throne, the Habsburgs ruled Spain and its emerging empire, which was also linked from 1520 with the Holy Roman Empire following Charles V’s election as Holy Roman Emperor. In 1521, Hernando Cortes conquered the Aztecs and 11 years later Francisco Cortes defeated the Inca Empire, thus opening the path for Spanish dominion of much of the New World. Spanish expansionist policy led it into conflict with the other rising powers, in particular England, France and the Dutch who all competed for control over the new territories. Until the completion of the ‘Reconquest’, Spain, under Muslim rule, was not in the ‘West’ as far as Christendom was concerned and did not exist as such. Alfonso VI captured Toledo from the Muslims in 1084 but further advance was halted until the thirteenth century as a result of Muslim revival. By the end of the fifteenth century, this had all changed and the pluri-civilizational world that had developed in the Iberian Peninsula linked to Northern Africa finally dissolved. This Ibero-African frontier became what Hess (1978) has called the ‘forgotten frontier’, which after the ‘Reconquest’ had become a closed frontier and Europe ceased to have any inclination in expansion beyond the Mediterranean.

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With the closure of the extended Eastern frontier, the vast border stretching south and east of Europe, a new and different kind of border was opened up to the west. This crystallized in what Webb (1952) has referred to as the ‘Great Frontier’, which has been one of the primary factors in modern history. While the Eastern frontier became increasingly one of defence, the Western frontier was one of expansion. The Atlantic Ocean replaced the Mediterranean Sea in setting the terms for a new conception of Europe as the West. The Western frontier of course was not initially regarded as a frontier, but a passage to the East and it was not for several decades that it had an impact; indeed, when the Portuguese landed in present-day Brazil in 1500 they did not know it was the same landmass as the one the Spanish landed a few years earlier. But when it became known that the newly discovered lands were part of one single continent, it was decisive in the reorientation of Europe westwards. The Portuguese were the first to set up a vast trading empire and were followed by Spain, which established from the beginning a colonial empire. England and the Dutch followed with the foundation of the English and Dutch East India Companies in the early seventeenth century and the bid to gain control of North-east Brazil. In England, the Cromwellian ‘Western Design’ to colonize the Caribbean began the march to empire. Internal conquest within Europe has come less attractive to the rising Western sea powers than overseas conquest, first in the Americas and later in Asia and Africa. European mastery thus passed to the control of the sea with the decline of the agrarian-based economies of the Middle Ages. It was the belated mastery of the sea that helped to shape modern Europe as a westernizing civilization. It may, too, have been the case that the Western reorientation in Europe made it less confrontational with the Muslim East. Though the struggle to gain control over the seas continued, Europe had abandoned its desire to conquer the Ottoman Empire, which remained a formidable power. It is significant that as the Western sea-based powers were looking increasingly westwards, the main Central Europe power, the Habsburg Empire, was largely landlocked and fostered a different civilizational identity that marked off East and West within Europe as

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an internal division that had a lasting consequence for the later history of Europe. The developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth century favoured nation-states with overseas territories and mercantilist trading economies. The result was the formation of two ‘Europes’: an ‘Oceanic’ Europe and a ‘Continental’ Europe (Cahnman 1952). These two notions of Europe found their embodiment in the two imperial traditions: the colonial sea-based empires and the Central European landbased empires. Thus, the relation to the exterior and the opening up of a new expanding frontier created the conditions for the future internal division of Europe. Imperial Russia was a slightly different case in that while being a land-based empire, it was an expanding one and extended to the Pacific with the conquest of Siberia, but like most land empires it did not have a strong separation of core from colony, as was the case with the nascent sea-based empires in the West. The existence of a relatively open and expanding Western frontier and an increasingly closed Eastern one should not distract attention from the fact that many of Europe’s frontiers in this period took the form of overlapping borders, or borderlands where a clear division between internal and external cannot be easily discernible. This was particularly the case with Europe’s internal borders, which have continually changed, and its borders to the north, which were less clear-cut, since, as argued in Chapter 4, Europe’s relation with imperial Russia did not have the rigid character it was to take in the twentieth century. Despite the separation of imperial core and colonial periphery that was a feature of the sea empires of the West, the reality was that much of Europe was also outside of the geographical territory of Europe. The largest European empire in modern times, the British Empire, was not considered to be European. The rise of empire created a hybrid Europe, which became increasingly shaped by its overseas colonies. In the case of Portugal, the colony overtook in importance the colonial country and shortly before its independence and the creation of the Empire of Brazil, the Portuguese crown was forced to relocate there following the French invasion of Portugal in 1808. The 13 colonies that formed the basis of the USA eventually grew to become the world’s largest power and overshadowed their European origins. Later emigration from Europe to the

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Americas, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, led to settler societies that were in part European, but developed distinctive national and transnational identities (Hartz 1964). The result was a new definition of the notion of the West that reduced its reliance on the Old World. All of these New World societies were shaped by the history of slavery, a reminder of the interconnected worlds of the Americas, Europe and Africa. While politically the turn to empire brought about a division between colony and imperial centres, which was later consolidated by the formation of independent states in the New World, the economic system that developed in the New World tied it to the colonial powers. Until its abolition in the nineteenth century, for almost three centuries slavery made possible the accumulation of wealth in both colony and the imperial centres. This again underlies the importance of a consideration of the global context for an understanding of the formation of Europe and an assessment of its political heritage. The factors that shaped the rise of Europe are simply not integral to Europe, but were constituted in a relation with many other parts of the world as is vividly illustrated in the case of the history of empire and slavery. As Stuart Hall has written: ‘colonization was never simply external to the societies of the imperial metropolis. … It was always inscribed deeply within them’ (cited in Magubane 2005). The prevalence of overlapping borders was particularly a feature of the geopolitical shape of Central and Eastern Europe where the major land-based empires—Prussian, Habsburg, as well as the Russian and Ottoman Empires—were spread across multi-ethnic territories. In these empires, the divide between interior and exterior is less clear-cut, especially given the tendency towards a constant expansion of the core to include the semi-periphery. The shape of Europe was very much the product of their complex ethnic and cultural composition. The outcome of this was a civilizational background that made the creation of territorial nation-states difficult, since most territories did not have a single ethnic group that could be the basis of a national community, due to greater discontinuity in nation and state formation. This brings us to the question of plurality and the notion of Europe as less defined by external borders than being itself a borderland.

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Homogenization and Plurality One of the most important accounts of the question of the unity and divisions in Europe is that of the Polish historian Oskar Halecki’s The Limits and Divisions of European History (1950). In this work, which reflects the historical experience of Central Europe, he identified four historical regions of Europe: a ‘Western Europe’, West Central Europe’, ‘East Central Europe’ and an ‘Eastern Europe’. These four regions effectively amount to two, since the first two are essentially part of what became known as Western Europe and the latter two became part of Eastern Europe. The fourfold division, however, draws attention to a more pluralized historical experience and the division within the Central European area between Germany and the less clear-cut line between the Western (Poland, Bohemia) and the Eastern (Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria) areas. This fourfold approach was later revised in another well-known essay in 1981 by a Hungarian historian, Jeno Szücs, ‘The Three Historical Regions of Europe’ in which he argued for three historical regions: Western, East Central and Eastern Europe (Szücs 1988; see also Arnason and Doyle 2010). The debate around Europe’s historical regions is of particular relevance to Central Europe— and will be returned to in Chapter 11—but in the present context it can be noted that it draws attention to the question of a conception of Europe that arose from within the land-based empires that shaped the history of Europe from the early modern period until the middle of the twentieth century. In this approach to Europe—which seeks to identify the regional specificity of Central and Eastern Europe—the external dimension is less significant, though with due consideration of the relation with Russia as far as East and Central Europe are concerned and the fact that all these regions had to define themselves in terms of a relation to Russia. The civilizational basis in the history of Christianity is taken as a basis for regional variations that later gave rise to distinctive national traditions. So Europe should be understood less in terms of a singular ‘Western Civilization’ than in terms of interrelated regions that while having common roots, in particular in Christianity, developed different

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trajectories. In view of the meaning that the notion of the West took on with the project of overseas expansion in the Americas, it is not surprising that the historians of Central and Eastern Europe would find in the designation Western Civilization a less than meaningful application to histories that were influenced by very different imperial traditions. The notion of the regional diversity of Europe is an important correction to over-generalized concepts of Europe as a unified region or as something that can be accounted for in terms of the notion of the West. From a continental perspective, geographers and historians have often implicitly attributed a unity to Europe in contrast to the great diversity of Asia or Africa. But understood as a world region, Europe is varied in a more different way and of course is considerably smaller and, if we take civilizations based on writing, it has a much shorter history. Plurality might be the best starting point for an adequate appreciation of the shaping of Europe since the Middle Ages in that Europe is constituted out of different units, which include nations and wider regions, while having common characteristics and shared backgrounds. To explore such commonality, a formative civilizational background can be postulated, but a stronger notion of a constitutive process is also required in order to explain change and variability. One such way to theorize the unity of Europe is to identify structure-forming processes of homogenization and the regional geopolitical variants that emerge from them. Empires can thus be seen as agents of homogenization and, with respect to the role of the Central European empires in the making of Europe, as we will see, they were also agents of pluralization, due to the nature of their internal organization and too because of their eventual fragmentation. Indeed, much of modern Europe is the product of the fragmentation of empire. Empire was the dominant form of state organization in Europe until the end of the nineteenth century when the nation-state emerged as an alternative model. The German Empire has been one of the most important, for in many ways it was the de facto basis of a large part of Europe in much the same way that the present-day European Union is. From the tenth century onwards in the wake of the break-up of the Carolingian kingdom, the Germans under Otto I shifted the centre of gravity to the East from the Franks and claimed the mantle of the Roman Empire, in 962 when Otto

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was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The imperial title thus passed to the Germanic lands. In this, a tension was established between the Germanic kingdom and the Frankish legacy of Charlemagne and the eventual emergence of two contenders for the leadership of Europe: the French and the German. Neither of these ever succeeded in their aim to establish a European wider empire, but the fact that they tried was itself a significant factor in the making of Europe. The German Empire—an alliance of counts and princes under an oath of allegiance to an elected emperor—was itself sufficiently large to be able to claim to be Europe, though this was more an aspiration than a reality and one that was also intertwined with Christendom. It was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, under Hapsburg leadership since 1520, that gave a certain geopolitical reality to what was to become Europe in aspiring to link the Germanic lands with Europe—it was to include the Iberian Peninsula, which Charles V inherited—and Christendom. When that somewhat artificial confederation collapsed following the Napoleonic occupation, the result was the emergence of an undefined European space that no power ever fully controlled. The German world itself became divided between two imperial traditions, the Prussian and the Austrian based Habsburg Empires. The PolishLithuanian state, a large and powerful dual state in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, disappeared in 1795 following the partition of Poland. Homogenization through empire formation in Central Europe is one way that the formation of modern Europe can be seen and in ways that duly give a place to a plurality of regional traditions, before the arrival of the modern national state. To develop this perspective further, an additional dimension is needed in order to capture the geopolitical dynamics of the process by which imperial cores consolidated themselves and established a system of political role over larger territories and in doing so constituted what has become known as Europe. In this regard, the notion of ‘internal colonization’ is useful. As already mentioned in Chapter 3, the shape of medieval Europe arose from a continuous process of the expansion of cores into the different regional centres of Europe. While some of this can be understood in terms of a process of pluralization—since it was spear-headed by different centres—it was effectively achieved through the homogenization of those territories it came into contact. Since

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many earlier such movements at empire-building—Norman and earlier Roman—were later incorporated into larger units, a secondary process of homogenization took place, leading to a greater degree of geopolitical integration. Since such processes were rarely in any sense complete and often coexisted with others, the result was a certain degree of polarization and conflict. The background to this was the collapse of the Carolingian kingdom in the tenth century and the consequent emergence of different political units, significant of which was the rise of Norman power and its extension after 1066 into England and Wales and Southern Ireland. Bartlett (1993) has referred to this as a process of internal colonization, which led in time to the creation of entirely new states (see also Chapter 3). In this case, the process of internal colonization produced a state that later broke from its original base and became a world power. The incompleteness of such processes of internal colonization can explain the nationalism of the periphery, as in the case of the incomplete conquest of Ireland by the later generation of Normans who had gained control of England and Wales but only partially conquered Ireland and did not extend their dominion into Scotland (O’Mahony and Delanty 1998; Hechter 1975). The loss of control of Sicily and Southern Italy was a basis for Catalan colonization of Sardinia, the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, and for a time Athens. The example of Catalonia is itself an interesting instance of the incomplete colonization of Castile and Aragon. Though it formed treaties with the latter, it was never fully absorbed into the Spanish state; yet, as a significant economic power, it acquired its own colonial dominion with Europe, of which only a trace remains today in Western Sardinia where a dialect of Catalan is still spoken, but the process of internal colonization had the cumulative effect of creating larger, more uniform and more linked geopolitical units, many of which remained part of the original colonizing project. Other such movements would include the ninth-century migrations of the Vikings to other parts of Europe and Magyars who moved into Carpathian Basin and established the kingdom of what was to become Hungary. The history of Europe is very much the story of how some of these migratory projects of state formation succeeded and others failed and the fact that none succeeded overall in dominating Europe. The migrations of the

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Vikings, for example, although significant for the making of Europe, did not amount to a single Viking state. The shape of Europe is as much due to the failure of internal colonization as to its success, since by 1919 all the European land-based empires—Prussian, Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian—collapsed, having been defeated by the more successful Western sea-based empires with the help of the New World offspring. Since these imperial projects were frequently in conflict, if not at war with each other, it is not surprising that the internal colonization of Europe took an uneven form. The notion of uneven development is highly pertinent to the wider regional variation of Europe and to an extent can explain the above-mentioned difference between a Western and an Eastern Europe. This in part resides in different experiences of state formation and capitalism, in particular in the transition from feudalism to modernity and the transition from the absolute state to the constitutional state. In Western Europe, the transition took place relatively earlier, while in many parts of Eastern Europe the transition was slower and more incomplete. The regional divisions within Europe, especially between North and South and between East and West, can be in part explained by the different patterns of state formation. Political orders enlarge by connecting with other generally weaker or smaller ones, which in turn become connected with other units leading to the formation of larger orders. Cleavages remain as reminders of the lines of division and aggradation. Many such cleavages survive as cultural conflicts, as in the case of the enduring divisions within the British Isles and within Spain. To account further for the homogenization of Europe in the Middle Ages and early modern period would require an extensive discussion on the different trajectories of empire formation. The above remarks suggest possible avenues for further exploration of how nations, regions such as Europe as well as smaller ones, become constituted in power relations between core, periphery and semi-periphery. The fact that some of these configurations have endured should not lead to the conclusion that these entities are somehow the natural building blocks of Europe. The nature and logic of all homogenizing processes is the elimination of difference, except where it lies outside the process. In this sense, internal colonization can be considered in much the same terms as Norbert Elias’s notion of a ‘civilizational process’, namely a process of

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increasing homogenization in the organization of social relations (Elias 1982). For this reason, the notion of unity is not a starting point for the identification of basic similarities in societies, but a condition that is produced from interaction and the more we approach the emergence of modern societies, the greater the extent of similarity will be. The notion of homogenization is therefore to be understood as a condition of similarity and is a developmental process rather than one that can be attributed to a pre-existing structure or design. It should also be emphasized that homogenization largely occurred within national and imperial frameworks and did not always survive the collapse of these political orders. To a degree, similar processes of statehood and government in different states led to more structurally similar political orders. Despite the various processes of homogenization that led to the formation of modern Europe, none succeeded in creating a lasting geopolitical framework. All imperial projects—the early Germanic and Frankish Empires, the later French, Habsburg, Prussian one—eventually collapsed, as did the Roman Empire and the German Reich. There were about 200 states in Europe in 1500, but by 1900 only 20 (Mann 1993: 70; Tilly 1990). Europe is as much the product of the failure of empire as it is of its success (see also Kennedy 1987). Despite the relative victory of the Western sea-based empires, the eventual retreat from empire in the post-1945 period is a further phase in the long history of the breakdown of empire in Europe and can be viewed as constitutive of the European historical experience. In this sense, then, plurality is a creation of the failed attempts at homogenization that began with the collapse of the Roman Empire. A consideration of the processes of homogenization should not neglect those that were less a direct product of empire-building project than those explicitly concerned with the elimination of difference. Throughout the early modern period, the persecution of minorities and in particular anti-Semitism was rife. The regional diversity of Europe disguised a drive towards cultural homogenization. Since the ‘Reconquest’, the Jews were expelled from Spain and the Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity, but were finally expelled by the early seventeenth century. The destruction of the mosques, the burning of the Moorish libraries and the establishment of the Inquisition in

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the late fifteenth century further enhanced the homogeneity of Western Civilization as Christian. After the twelfth century, the segregation of the Jews established a fear of pollution in Europe which underwent forcible homogenization. Europe became what Moore has termed a ‘persecuting society’ from the eleventh century when minorities, such as Jews, witches and heretics, became the object of policies of homogenization (Moore 1987; Cohen 1993). It is a reminder that the homogenization of Europe was often a forced one.

Networks, Societal Processes and Social Movements Finally, to complete the present discussion of homogenization and plurality in the early modern period when a ‘westernized’ Europe emerged, attention should be given to processes of integration that fall short of homogenization, but which were constitutive of modern Europe insofar as they reduced deep divisions without at the same eliminating pluralization. Significant in this respect are the processes that made increased interconnectivity possible between diverse regions and which brought about forms of integration than rested on societal differentiation rather than highly homogenized units. It has already been stressed that Europe was not endogenously created, but emerged from centuries-long interaction with the non-European world. This obviously also applies to the genesis of Europe from internal encounters, which extend beyond the dynamics of core and periphery relations discussed above in the formation of empires to relations that take place within the context of both formal and informal networks. It is important not to lose sight of the myriad networks that linked up different parts of Europe and which from a different perspective might be seen as separate. In the early modern period, Europe become increasingly interconnected through trade, the circulation of cultural products, scientific knowledge, travel, the lives of elites and dynastic lineages. The outcome of the networks that make such interconnectivity possible was not a more unified Europe, but a more transversally connected one. Common practices in the arts of government, including diplomacy and warfare, provided unity to what are otherwise culturally different political orders.

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If the tendency of the modern state towards territorial expansion led to a more homogenized Europe, capitalism and the nascent market economy tended to produce more and more heterogeneity insofar as it needed to seek out new markets, for by its very nature trade required access to markets beyond the context of production. While the state, at least in its formative phase, was a homogenizing force, capitalism was more likely to produce heterogeneity. The variety of transitions from feudalism is in itself an example of the logic of differentiation within capitalism, which of course is also not tied to state structures. (The tension between capitalism and the state will be returned to in the next chapter.) The gradual abandonment of mercantilism and the turn to the free market was one such way capitalism escaped the bounds of the state, which increasingly had to confront a capitalist class whose interests increasingly were widening beyond the national to the international context. Going back further into the early history of Europe, we can see several examples of how Europe became slowly constituted from processes that depended on establishing links between different centres than on a core subjugating and domesticating the periphery. Although it is not known for certain, the Celts, for example, were probably not a unified people but were interlinked peoples with common cultural practices. It may have been the case that it was their cultural artefacts and practices that were mobile and adapted by diverse peoples (in the way, for example, the English language or the Internet today links up very different people). A later and less speculative example is that of the Vikings, who were not only warriors, but also traders and established links between many different parts of Europe as far as Byzantium and left an indelible mark on the shape of Europe in examples as diverse as the English language and the foundation of Dublin and Cork, which were originally Viking settlements. Within the examples discussed early of empire-building, one can also find many instances of interconnectivity working alongside more pronounced processes of homogenization. This was certainly the case with regard to the Roman Empire, which did not sustain itself only through military subjugation but also required the operation of more networked-based processes. The Portuguese Empire is also a pertinent example of a trading-based empire than one based

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only on colonization, as were the Spanish, British and French Empires. However, a more differentiated analysis will require separating the institutional forms of empire-building from the unintended effects they produced. These effects led to more entangled relations between Europe and the non-European world. The worlds the Europeans encountered, many of which they conquered, were diverse and had different impacts on Europe but nothing could change the fact that the emerging model of modernity in Europe would bear the imprint of the new lands beyond the historical territory of Europe. The period from the second half of the fifteenth century was one of relative growth for Western Europe, which began to recover from decline in the previous century. Earlier in the mid-fourteenth century, the Black Death, which reduced Europe’s population, may have created some of the conditions for economic growth (see Herlihy 1997). The rise of autonomous cities not subject to the homogenizing power of other political structures such as empires was crucial for the making of Europe even if they became absorbed into centralizing nationstate in later times (Benevolo 1993). New trading centres emerged, for instance Antwerp, which was the centre of an extensive trading empire that stretched across Europe and beyond. The Baltic region acquired an enhanced importance with the foundation of the Hanseatic League, which played a decisive role in linking different parts of Northern Europe for some three centuries from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century (Tracy 1993). The Hanseatic League linked the major trading cities, or Hansa cities of Northern Europe, thus giving a basis to a Nordic Europe. At its zenith, there were 170 cities in the network, which represented an alternative form of social, economic and political organization to the nation-state, the rise of which eventually saw the demise of the Hanseatic League. The existence of networks of integration such as the Hanseatic League draws attention to forms of commonality that do not obliterate unity or provoke the nationalism of the periphery. Trading networks played an important role in laying the creation of modern Europe and offer further evidence of the interconnected nature of Europe and the rest of the world. They can in fact be seen as having a constitutive role in the making of the modern world and reflect a different modality of unity to ones that set it against divisions

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(see Bayly 2004; Curtin 1984; Parker 2010; Tracy 1993). Trading networks are of course not specifically European, but what was distinctive about the European experience was the location of these highly organized networks in urban and relatively autonomous centres. It was this that gave to Europe a distinct advantage in the accumulation of wealth since it combined trade with the pursuit of self-determination. Although the rise of the centralized nation-state and the overall dominance of major centres of imperial power ultimately brought about a decline in the tradition of the autonomous city, its legacy remained and shaped modern Europe in multiple ways. The societal formation of Europe can be accounted for by the propensity for networks to emerge. There was nothing natural or preordained about this; it was entirely developmental. The existence of navigational rivers and the relatively temperate climate offered distinct advantages for the movement of people and the expansion of cultures. Europe consolidated through diverse networks around trade routes, centres of learning from monasteries to universities, translations, map making and common agricultural practices. Technologies such as the early development of printing and the techniques for the manufacture of paper, the later invention of the steam engine and the telegraph all played a role in the formation of Europe, but in doing so they also ensured that Europe would be connected with the rest of the world through such forms of mobility and communication. The question of unity and division in European history is in danger of being overly concerned with the analysis of geopolitical unity. The above discussion has attempted to draw attention to different modalities of unity than ones that are essentially regional based. However, network-based conceptions of societal integration are insufficient. Any account of the question of unity and divisions must address the ways in which power itself undergoes transformation. In this sense, what is needed is an account of the impact of social agency in the making of Europe. When viewed in global terms, the distinctiveness of Europe resides in the popular radical tradition of dissent and protest which since the early modern period had a constitutive role in the shaping of the modern state and in the relationship between economy and society.

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What was unique in Europe was the opposition that the exercise of power received. Europe was never fully integrated from ‘above’ by the state or by an ecclesiastical authority due to long-standing traditions of popular rights that had evolved since the early Middle Ages leading to the constant challenging of power by civil society. According to Szücs (1988: 300), ‘the stability of the West was ensured in the long run precisely by the impossibility of integrating it “from above”. The integrative lines of force began “from below”, and in the first phase (9th–11th centuries) these displayed a specifically vertical orientation’. The thirteenth-century medieval state was a solidaristic self-organizing polity based on the different interests of the clergy, the nobles and the burghers or merchants who resisted the attempts of royal authority towards centralization (Ertman 1997). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, various groups succeeded in winning liberties from central authority, leading to what Szücs (1988: 306) has referred to as a ‘plurality of small freedoms’ and the birth of the idea of society. While most of these were the liberties of the elites, other groups also benefited from attempts to limit royal power. This was achieved both by increased representation and by limiting centralization through increased autonomy for factional interests, such as those of the clergy, the nobles and burghers, and through the existence of a strong tradition of law and related legal institutions. By the early modern period, there was a well-established popular tradition of revolt and dissent. The basis of much of it was in urban populations and in guild-based organizations that had formed in the cities and since the late fifteenth century the invention of printing, which consolidated the autonomy of those who mastered and controlled the production of texts: the town became based on mediatization (Barbier 2017). In this new context, craftsmen, artisans, the professional classes and merchants established statutory rights for their activities. Such rights were the basis for many challenges to power. The autonomy of cities had the long-lasting consequence of making possible a model of political modernity in which civil society would play a central role in the relationship between economy and state. In the course of the eighteenth century, there was a relative decline in the growth of the state, in terms of its size and spending, in relation to the growth of civil society (Mann 1993: 394). This was reflected variously in the

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republican tradition, religious dissent deriving from the Reformation and Renaissance humanism, agrarian rebellion, the socialist movement, the mixing of liberalism and republicanism and resulting in the constellation of forces that led to the French Revolution and its legacy for a tradition of political community based on collective self-determination. This will be discussed further in the next chapter. The making of Europe had a lot to do with the institutionalization of taxation since the fourteenth century. The growth of taxation, a neglected topic in the making of making of Europe, led to the growth and expansion of the state while at the same weakening the power of local elites. In the shift from, what Wickham calls, the gift state (based on the award of land to local elites) to the tax state, the state ensured its relative autonomy in respect of local elites and came to depend more on parliaments and urban communities. According to Wickham: ‘Rulers were thus stronger, but so were the communities of the ruled’ (2016: 255, see also 11/12). This was above all an achievement of the late medieval period, from the second half of fourteen to the late sixteenth century. It provided modernity with a societal foundation that proved to be decisive in the consolidation of central state and a crucial precondition for the modern economy. In conclusion, it can be said that by 1800 the basic structural shape of modern Europe had been created and that this was a considerably more westernized kind of Europe than had been previously the case. It was westernized in the sense that the geopolitical gravity had shifted to the Western half and that this was due to a shift in the wider global context from the Asian world economy to one based in the Atlantic. The emergence of a westernized Europe, too, was accompanied by homogenizing trends that were spear-headed by the new centres of geopolitical power. Since the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 1808, Spanish and Portuguese colonial power came to a final end with the independence of Spanish Latin America in its immediate aftermath. The new centres of colonial power were Britain and France, but also the Netherlands and to a lesser extent the newly created Belgium. Plurality was never eliminated but nor was opposition. The regional divisions within Europe survived the geopolitical frameworks that sought to eliminate them.

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Several centuries later we can now look back on this period and see that one of the main creations of the age, the notion of the West, did not survive the test of time. The colonial age that had began in the sixteenth century led to the equation of Europe with the West. By the twentieth century that idea had moved towards the USA and eventually went into decline following a period of de-colonialization. It illustrates the tendency in European history for unifying trends to generate new lines of division. Outliving the older frameworks are the ideas and many of the values on which they were based. The idea of Europe was itself one such idea that was open to new interpretations. However, the association of that idea with coloniality has not been entirely broken in that while Europe eventually de-colonized, the ‘de-colonization of the mind’ only partially took place. We return this in later chapters.

8 The Enlightenment and the Idea of Europe

From the end of the seventeenth century, the idea of Europe took on a more concrete form as a result of the crystallization of new political structures and geopolitical frameworks in the wake of the Thirty Years War, 1618–1648. The post-1648 Westphalian political order that ushered in the age of sovereign states saw the end of the era of the wars over religion and schisms that followed. The early modern period was an era of wars over religion and related dynastic struggles, at least since 1713 with the Peace of Utrecht that saw the end of the War of the Spanish Succession. The emergence of the idea of Europe can be seen in the context of what Rabb (1975) has called the ‘struggle for stability’ in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century, in contrast, was one of relative stability and consolidation for the post-1648 order. In this period, new political ideas emerged in response to the crisis of the wars of religion and the recognition that the unity of Europe cannot be a political unity. One concrete outcome was the rise of the nation-state and the European inter-state system which shaped world politics for the next three centuries (Tilly 1990). The Reformation had led to a major division between the Catholic South and the Protestant North, and as discussed in the previous chapters, a division had also taken root between the sea-based empires of the West © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_8

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and the land-based ones of Central Europe. The period that has been variously characterized as the Enlightenment and modernity is one in which new conceptions of European political community emerge in response to the historical experience of the age. From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the idea of Europe emerged with a certain ambivalence: it reflected consciousness of a broad cultural or civilizational basis and a politically divided reality. On the one side, the emerging idea of Europe is a reflection of the cultural unity of Europe that comes from its civilizational background, and on the other side, it is a response to the divisions that have resulted from its history. This partly explains the distinction that arose since the eighteenth century between civilizational unity and cultural diversity, where culture in this instance refers to national cultures. A distinction that is not without problems, given its assumptions about the nature of civilization, it does express the deep political discord that had become apparent within Europe. Whatever the civilizational basis of the idea of Europe, it had acquired a certain meaning and reality in face of divisions that increasingly took a national form. This was a period of creativity in the arts and in science, but especially in social and political thought when religion ceased to offer a basis for political community. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some of the major intellectual developments took place that defined the self-understanding of modern Europe and gave to it the means to interpret its own heritage in a more secular age. This chapter will examine three ways of looking at what can be termed a cognitive shift in European consciousness leading to the emergence of a new cultural model. The first is the Enlightenment, including the Romanticism of the nineteenth century. The second is the idea of Europe itself. The third is the idea of modernity. The argument of the chapter is that it is the latter, the idea of modernity, that should be seen as the context in which to view the emergence of the idea of Europe and that the Enlightenment is also best understood as a movement that forms part of modernity. From c.1800, it makes more sense to speak of Europe in terms of a model of modernity than in terms of a civilization, since the civilizational basis of Europe did not lead to a lasting political or cultural framework; it should rather be seen as providing orientations that were differently appropriated. As will be argued later in

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this chapter, the notion of modernity is better equipped to capture the contested nature of political community and divergent interpretations of the European heritage. This is because the idea of modernity signals a greater recognition of conflicting interpretations of the world than does the idea of a European civilization, however pluralized it may be understood. The cultural model of modernity was shaped by the ideas of both the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the romanticism of the nineteenth century. As we approach the present day, it becomes increasingly clear that Europe cannot be understood in terms of a model of long-run continuity. This does not mean that the degree of rupture has been so great that no continuity can be possible. European history has witnessed major ruptures—the wars of religion of the seventeenth century, 1789, and the Napoleonic wars, 1914–1918, the Russian Revolution 1917 and the Second World War, 1949–1945—that opened up new visions of social and political order and new interpretations of the past. These moments of rupture are themselves constitutive of the European heritage and have been moments of creative renewal. We have seen with respect to the formation of a European cultural model in the previous centuries. But it is only with modernity that they enter the self-consciousness of Europeans, who also become more the bearers of a nascent European identity. The perception of crisis is one way in which the idea of Europe has been perceived. This is also why the idea of Europe since the early modern period acquired also a certain normative character as a critique of the prevailing order. As such, it is best seen as a cultural model that formed part of a wider emergence of modernity in Europe and in which has contained conflicting interpretations of how Europe should be governed in an era of political crisis.

The Enlightenment The Enlightenment is often considered to be the epitome of European civilization and the birthplace of its modernity. In many ways, it was a continuation of the Renaissance’s concern with globality, republican freedom, the emancipation of the self and the quest

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for knowledge unfettered by intolerance and dogmatism. As with the Renaissance, the standard interpretation is in need of some correction. Often associated with France, just as the Renaissance was characteristically associated with Italy, the Enlightenment was in fact a European-wide movement and took a wide variety of forms. It cannot be considered exclusively European (Contrad 2012). However, there is little doubt that French ideas played a major part of its legacy. The Enlightenment can be taken to be both a particular period in European cultural history—roughly from the end of the seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century—and a specific mode and style of thought characterized by the celebration of the intellect, freedom and progress. The 36-volume Encyclopedia, which was edited by Denis Diderot and published from 1751, epitomized the Enlightenment in its aim to be a repository of all human knowledge. The freedom of knowledge was to be the basis of progress. The Enlightenment cannot be equated with an actual age, since the ideas it espoused were often in tension with social reality. However, the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment arose at the time they did and not in other times and places, so in a sense the Enlightenment was a historically specific event in the history of Europe. It was a time when ideas—cultural and political ideas—took on a new significance in shaping a world in which the consciousness of modernity was emerging. The world of the Enlightenment was a product of social change. New cultural and political elites began to challenge the received wisdom of the past. These elites were products of a social order in which intellectuals were becoming increasingly autonomous. This was a period when bourgeois society emerged along with the rise of an educated reading public and a commercial market for intellectual and cultural products. The Enlightenment, although an elite movement, was not confined to the closed world of the court society and constrained by patronage. Commercial independence nurtured intellectual autonomy and a radicalness of spirit that often led to conflicts with political authority. There was also an important popular Enlightenment as reflected in the diffusion of science and scholarship in the wider public.

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Yet, it would be wrong to see the Enlightenment as only a radical movement or as a product of social revolution. While it is often associated with the American Revolution and French Revolution, it should be noted that many of the Enlightenment thinkers were functionaries of the ancien regime and did not encourage rebellion. Condorcet, who embodied the spirit of Enlightenment thought, was a high-ranking aristocratic official and was executed by the French Revolutionaries during the Terror. In Germany, the leading representative of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, made a clear distinction between the cultural and the political aspects of Enlightenment thinking with the argument that intellectuals should be allowed to argue as long as they want so long as they obey their rulers. Kant epitomized the spirit of the Enlightenment as one of intellectual autonomy and cosmopolitanism, but he did not challenge the prevailing political order. Indeed, the version of republicanism he espoused was hostile to democracy, as Kant did not think that popular rule would be desirable. His critical philosophy confined critique to an analysis of the conditions of knowledge and to separating empirical knowledge from pure reason or faith, neither of which are grounded in the other. One of his most important ideas was that morality derives from the moral law, not from natural law and that human beings are therefore characterized by moral freedom. This had far-reaching implications for the philosophical and political understanding of modernity as a condition of autonomy and ultimately of freedom. The emphasis on freedom, which in many ways was the leitmotif of the Enlightenment, gave a tremendous legitimation to republican nationalism, which although having independent origins was very much a product of the Enlightenment. Both nationalism and republicanism are based on the central belief in the principle of self-determination, the notion that civil society ought to be self-legislating. This was championed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who gave a defence of the idea of the republic as a self-governing political community based on a notion of civil society rather than the state. In his thought, which greatly influenced nineteenth-century nationalism, the nation was for the first time associated with the republican idea of a self-legislating civil society. What this did was to set up a tension between nation and state, since what Rousseau was arguing for was

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a Europe of free nations (see also next chapter). The reality, of course, was one of ancien regime style states. In this example, republicanism expressed the radical side of the Enlightenment. The republican ideal was not always associated with the idea of a self-governing society and could be undemocratic and autocratic. In France, the republic became an empire. The beginning of the end of the Enlightenment is often taken to be symbolically marked in 1804 when Beethoven withdrew the dedication of the Third Symphony to Napoleon who betrayed the republican and cosmopolitan spirit that Beethoven admired by declaring himself emperor. As a political movement, the Enlightenment came to a final end in 1848, when a new age of social and political unrest emerged in the aftermath of the revolutions that occurred in Europe in the spring of that year. By then, as will be argued below, romanticism had offered an alternative to the rationalist vision of the French-influenced Enlightenment. One of the enduring features of the Enlightenment was the secularization of religion. But this needs to be placed in its context, as argued in Chapter 3. Although it was to be one of the signatures of the Enlightenment, the anti-Catholicism of the French Enlightenment intellectuals was an exception, even if it left an indelible mark on Europe. Secularization did not mean anti-clericalism, but the separation of church and state. But even this was not unambivalent. Indeed, it was not long after the French Revolution that Napoleon re-established Catholicism as a state religion. The Enlightenment’s separation of science and law from religion occurred precisely in order to preserve faith from the critique of science (Chadwick 1993). Virtually, all the major Enlightenment philosophers sought to place religious faith on a separate level from scientific reason or knowledge. This was encapsulated in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who argued that religious belief and ideas could not be justified on the basis of reason. In this respect, faith was protected from the critique of rationalists such as Voltaire, who argued reason was the sole criterion of belief. The Enlightenment, like the Renaissance, was cosmopolitan. On the one side, it was a European-wide movement, which took different forms in Scandinavia, Germany, Scotland and France, and of course it was particularly evident in the USA (see Porter and Teich 1981). On the other side, it was a globally oriented movement in that it was characterized by a great interest in non-European cultures. As a European movement as

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opposed to a specifically national movement, the Enlightenment had different faces ranging from the rationalism of the French intellectuals and the celebration of knowledge to the romantic cult of the heroic individual and the republican quest for a self-legislating community. In addition, there were the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was an important movement in the development of new ideas about the social and economic order (Strydom 2000). The other aspect of the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment was its fascination with otherness and in particular non-Western Civilizations. While this has often been dismissed as an orientalization of the East, which was the necessary Other for the European ‘We’ to be defined in terms of a dualism of civilization versus barbarism, this accusation is too simple. While there is little doubt that the European heritage was used to legitimate imperialism and that in many cases it entailed a fantastification of the non-Western Other, a more differentiated analysis is needed. The category of Otherness in Enlightenment thought can equally well be seen as an expression of the distance that many Europeans felt from their own culture, which they could view only through the eyes of the Other. This Other was indeed very often the Orient, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, but in this case and in many others it was a critical mirror by which the decadence of Old Europe could be portrayed. In many other cases, the attempt for genuine understanding of the ancient cultures of Asia cannot be underestimated, not least because much of the Enlightenment culture was formed in pre-colonial contexts, such as eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Germany (Clarke 1997). It was the capacity for distance that gave a crucial cultural foundation for the critical and reflexive dimensions of modernity to develop. European cultural modernity thus came to be very strongly associated with the critique of tradition and scientific reason. This self-questioning attitude was as likely to be used against Europe and as much as against the non-European. Eurocentrism and the critique of Eurocentrism were intertwined. As Sankar Muthu (2003) has argued, many of the major Enlightenment thinkers, including Diderot, Herder and Kant, were critics of imperialism and accepted the pluralism of different cultural forms of life. Others such as Alexander von Humboldt criticized slavery in his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba in 1856 and sought to find a way in

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which all human societies could coexist through mutual understanding and exchange (Walls 2009). There was not then one Enlightenment, but a variety of Enlightenments. Moreover, many Enlightenment thinkers, such as Kant, were not consistent in their views about other cultures (see Eldeen and Mendieta 2011). In this vein, Bronner (2004) defends the legacy of the Enlightenment for democratic and critical thought against both the conservative and anti-modern critique of thinkers such as Leo Strauss and against the leftist critiques of the Frankfurt School and post-modernism (see also Israel 2002).

The Romantic Critique The Enlightenment encapsulated the idea of modernity. The idea of the ‘modern’ comes from the Latin word modus, meaning now, but the term ‘modernity’ has a stronger meaning, suggesting a new beginning based on human autonomy. It is in this emphasis on the present as newness that finally marks the Enlightenment from the Renaissance. Where the latter looked to the past, the Enlightenment was firmly rooted in the present and in a mode of thought that emphasized argument and the critical exercise of Reason. The seventeenth-century French ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ on whether modern culture is superior to classical culture is often taken to be the point at which the Enlightenment embraces modernity. One of the most famous uses of the term was in 1864 when the French poet Baudelaire wrote: ‘By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent’. This definition of modernity was reflected in part in modernism to indicate a particular cultural current in modern society that captured the sense of renewal, revitalism and the cosmopolitanism of modern life. The idea of modernity ultimately goes beyond the Enlightenment, which is a term that is generally not applied to developments beyond the middle of the nineteenth century. Some consideration must be given to the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, for the notion of modernity by the mid-nineteenth acquired a second face, namely that of the romanticist pursuit of the creativity of the imagination and artistic freedom as opposed to reason and the advancement of science.

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This had two orientations, both radical and, unlike the mainstream Enlightenment, anti-bourgeois: one, a left-leaning revolt in favour of artistic and political liberty; a second and later one that was anti-modern and favouring an aesthetization of politics. In place of the intellect and science, the themes of life and nature became more attractive to a new generation of intellectuals whose world was more that of the nineteenth century than of the previous century. The object of their critique was not only the ancien regime, but bourgeois society. The romantic reaction has often been termed a ‘counter-Enlightenment’, but this overstates the divide and suggests greater coherence to the two movements than was in fact the case. Most of the Romantics, for instance, supported the ideals of the French Revolution, while departing from the cultural and philosophical assumptions of the French intellectuals. Yet, there was a stronger emphasis in it on the pursuit of meaning as opposed to reason and science. The post-Enlightenment period was thus marked by the rise of romanticism, which challenged many of the assumptions and proposals of the Enlightenment for the creation of a rational and largely secular society. Its emergence was decisive for European modernity. The romantic movement was especially prevalent in Germany—though very influential in England—and reflected a disenchantment with the French Revolution and with the ideas that were associated with France: rationalism, classicism, abstract thought, progress. German intellectuals in philosophy, literature and the arts generally developed new ideas that offered a new and very different vision of history and the future of Europe from the ideas of 1789. Schlegel distinguished between classical and romantic cultures and argued that the romantic culture was the truly modern one (Gouldner 1973; see also Ossewarde 2007). Unlike the so-called classical culture—which he associated with the French Enlightenment—Schlegel, and the romantic movement in general in Germany, saw the present as situated in the context of a history, which was less broken from than revitalized. Schlegel was less concerned to deny the Christian heritage than to diminish the significance of science as the innovative feature of the age and at the same time engage in a critique of the present situation of German society. The romantic

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movement sought to give expression to a notion of modernity that accommodated the past as much as the present. The romantics rejected both the German present and the dominant French ideas about the world. The romantic movement cannot therefore be understood as backward looking or exclusively concerned with German culture; it was European in its view of cultural revitalization and progressive in seeking alternative possibilities within the present through a re-evaluation of the past and the affirmation of sensibility and the emotions. One of its legacies was the belief in the unity of the world and the essential unity of a people. This had important consequences for collectivist movements, including Marxism and for nationalism but also provided a basis for a conception of Europe that transcended the particular. In philosophy, Hegel, Schelling, Fichte and Schlegel, and in literature Schiller and Goethe and the Sturm und Drang movement developed a new conception of freedom very different from the dominant French Enlightenment tradition; this placed at the centre of modernity the idea of aesthetic individualism and the pursuit of cultural creativity. It was a movement that had many affinities with romantic nationalism, with its stress on heroic individualism and emancipation from tyranny. This tie between romantic modernism and nationalism was exemplified in the figure of Byron and the cause of Greek nationalism in the 1820s. Other representatives of the Romantic tradition were the English poets Coleridge, Blake and Wordsworth. This movement has often been portrayed as reactionary and a conservative nostalgic defence of the lost world of medieval Christendom. This would be to misunderstand the place and significance of romanticism in European culture in the nineteenth century, a movement that provided both the idea of the nation and the idea of Europe with new possibilities. A famous example of what has often been taken to be the reactionary current in romanticism was Novalis’s Christendom or Europe in 1799. However, this was more an exploration in mysticism than in serious political analysis and also had a cosmopolitan dimension (see Kleingeld 2008). William Blake, for instance, invoked the idea of Europe in ‘Europe a prophecy’ in 1794 by means of visionary images of how Europeans had become victim to an enslaving religion and morality, while beyond Europe America was in contrast inspired by the revolutionary impulse.

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In rejecting the classicism of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on a universal order of reason, the romantics sought instead to uphold the imagination. In this tradition what is modern is the capacity to be creative. Modernity thus requires the liberty of the imagination, and in the German romantic tradition, it had a strong relation to the pursuit of individualism. Hence, the romantic movement stood for artistic freedom, which was often promoted above the cause of political freedom. German intellectuals unable to bring about social change sought refuge in the world of culture that was often divorced from politics. The result was a contradiction, for while they were more radical in their critique of bourgeois society and in the cult of the creative imagination than the proponents of the French Enlightenment, they were politically impotent and ultimately became more concerned about artistic freedom than political freedom. The legacy for Europe was the movement towards modernism and a conception of modernity as a cultural critique of the present. In the case of Germany, they tended towards a divorce of culture and politics, ultimately leading to the retreat of culture from political responsibility, as Fritz Ringer demonstrated with respect to the German universities and the rise of Nazism (Ringer 1990). In the second half of the nineteenth century, a second orientation developed from the romantic movement, namely cultural pessimism and a general drift towards anti-modernism. This will be considered in Chapter 12. It will suffice to mention in the present context that one outcome was an orientation within European modernity towards the aesthetization of politics. In the course of the nineteenth century, the European cultural model consolidated; it was not composed of one coherent set of ideas, but was comprised of diverse orientations, which had emerged from the Enlightenment and the romanticism of the nineteenth century, as well as from earlier developments. On the one side was the Kantian ideal of a republican order of states, the rule of reason, freedom, autonomy and progress, and on the other side was the pursuit of the creativity of the imagination, individualism, the revolt of nature and of art against bourgeois society. Both of these orientations, and their numerous offshoots, shaped the European imaginary and gave form to its cultural model.

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The Idea of Europe as a Cultural Model The idea of Europe is above all a product of the modern age. It had antecedents in earlier centuries, but as argued in the preceding chapters, Europe did not signify a cultural or political entity as such and was generally a term to refer to the territory of Christendom. The increased consciousness of Europe since the eighteenth century can be understood in terms of the emergence of a cultural model in which Europe signalled both a normative and an interpretative response to the crisis of the age and the perception that out of the present new possibilities could be realized. This fate in a new kind of society in which the conflicts of the past might be overcome was central to the idea of Europe. Rousseau envisioned an age when ‘there is no longer a France, a Germany, a Spain, not even England, there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same way of life’ (cited in Hampson 1984). Voltaire believed that Europe was replacing the nation-state. In a much quoted statement that echoed Rousseau’s, he wrote: ‘Today, there are no longer Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen: whatever people say, there are only Europeans – all have the same feelings, the same customs, because none has experienced any particular national formation’ (cited in Dann and Dinwiddy 1988). In 1796, Edmund Burke wrote that ‘No European can be an exile in any part of Europe’ (cited in Hay 1957: 123). These somewhat lofty claims need to be considered in the context of an age when the nation-state was not yet established as the primary territorial form of political organization. The idea of a European order that Enlightenment thinkers had in mind was more a product of a new kind of political imagination than one that followed from anything concrete. Such ideas, despite their background in ancien regime aristocratic society, are best seen as having a critical function in exploring new possibilities for political community in Europe at a time when it appeared that no durable solution had been found. It was evident that the age of the autonomous city state, which Rousseau admired, had no future and that the future also did not lie with empire. The idea of a nation-state was still in its infancy and had no real meaning until well into the nineteenth century when the nation began a focus of mass identification.

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The idea of Europe arose at a time of political uncertainty on how Europe should be governed. Inevitably, it was implicated in various national interests as well as in reactionary politics. The major European powers were expanding and many, such as France, saw their mission to contest the Habsburgs for the political leadership of Europe. These proclamations to be sure were the notions of a small group of intellectuals and had a little reality in terms of concrete political movements. Many of the ideas of Europe had the function of providing France with a wider association with Europe. Thus, Bismarck dismissed the idea of Europe as incompatible with the interests of Prussia: ‘I have always found the word “Europe” on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name’ (Crankshaw 1982: 352). But he could also find it useful in countering Jacobin rebellion, as when in 1863 he promised help to Russia to suppress rebellion (Wittram 1973: 105). For Metternich, the architect of the ancien regime, Europe was an Austrian necessity (Taylor 1942: 34). This was also reflected in Peter the Great’s statement: ‘We shall need Europe for a few decades, and then we can turn our backs to her’ (Szamuely 1988: 136). Other conceptions of Europe had a colonial dimension, as in Leibnitz’s ‘Egyptian Plan’ in 1672 which he proposed to Louis XIV arguing that the most effective means of securing peace in Europe would be a concerted European invasion of Ottoman-ruled Egypt and led by France. Such an invasion would be in the interests of France which would then be ‘the avenger of outraged justice, leader of Christendom, the delight of Europe and of mankind’ (cited in Yapp 1992: 146). There was little consistency in such views, for Leibnitz promoted the idea of ‘unity in diversity’ as a motto for Europe and believed Chinese civilization was superior. The French Revolution—though not supported by many who invoked the idea of Europe—was the single event that gave force and meaning to Europe as a political construct. The French Revolution was both a European event, a global event and a French Revolution (Hunt 2010). Initially, it had a wider European relevance, but its nationalist zeal was to have a contrary impact. The universalistic ideas it fostered were ultimately subordinated to the nationalist interests of the revolutionary government, which launched a war against the other major

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European powers until it was finally constrained. In effect, the French Revolution failed to unify Europe. In this, it was a contrast to the American Revolution, which made possible a new political community. Underlying Napoleon’s plans for the reconstruction of Europe was the idea of recreating Europe in the image of France. At first, there was widespread support for the French Revolution which brought about the abolition of the last vestiges of feudalism and was seen as signalling the end of the ancien regime and absolutism. Republics were set up in many parts of Europe and Europe itself seemed like it might become a republic. In 1812, the first liberal constitution was proclaimed in Cadiz, and it was there that the term liberalism was first used. But since 1814 the idea of Europe could just as easily have signalled an anti-French position, as in the so-called Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and the Habsburg Empires (Cahnman 1952: 609). Republicanism, so often associated with Europe, was in fact more advanced in Latin America in the nineteenth century. The appropriation of the idea of Europe in romantic ideas is another illustration of its wide-ranging signification. Novalis’s Christendom or Europe was an early Eurosceptical and romanticist nostalgic critique of Europe in the name of the vanished past. In this work, Europe is associated with the Reformation, modern philosophy and the Enlightenment, all of which he regarded as inferior to Christianity, which held out the promise of unity in contrast to the idea of Europe which appeared to symbolize division. Novalis epitomized the organic conception of political order in contrast to the modern acceptance of pluralism. However, as noted earlier, it was a work that was essentially an exploration of mysticism than of political philosophy. Nonetheless, romanticist ideas in Germany easily lent themselves to obscurantist political philosophies. Fichte regarded Germany as the cradle of civilization and the Germans were ‘to serve Europe’ by bringing it under their control (Taylor 1988: 38). Hegel saw Europe as the synthesis of German culture and Christianity. Leopold von Ranke believed that there was a natural bond between the Latin and the Germanic nations and that this cultural unity constituted the basis of the cultural unity of Europe (Schulen 1985). Europe could be invoked in the name of liberal and republican ideas as much as in the name of organic notions of culture. There had earlier been a strong association of Europe with the Orange

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cause. In the late seventeenth century, the English Whigs promoted it and it was in the name of Europe that William of Orange landed in England in 1688 to claim the English crown at the invitation of the Whig-dominated parliament (Schmidt 1966). The subsequent Battle of the Boyne in Ireland, in which William defeated the Catholic and the French supported James II, was seen as a battle for the future of Europe. The idea of Europe was later invoked on behalf of Protestant interests in the context of the War of the Spanish War of Succession in 1700 in opposition to the French cause and the Hanoverian Succession after 1701 in opposition to the Catholic cause of the Stuarts. As a normative idea, the idea of Europe was institutionalized in the Congress system of the Concert of Europe, following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This was a response to the rise of ‘international society’ in the early nineteenth century when in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon it became increasingly important for the European powers to regulate the world stage. The beginning of the scramble for colonies was one reason, as was the desire to keep Russia out of the Ottoman territories. The idea of a European order, too, was a pragmatic necessity to prevent either the Habsburgs of the Bourbons from dominating the continent. It was of course a devise to preserve the ancien regime and was composed of a negative unity: more of one power meant less of another. It was a balance of powers and did not signal any other kind of unity than the collective pursuit of self-interest. Thus, the Ottoman Empire joined the Concert of Europe in 1856 after the Crimean War in order to contain the Russian Empire. The Concert was redefined as around ‘a law of civilized nations’ as opposed to ‘a law of Christian nations’ (Alting 1975: 53). The idea of Europe also became a compelling reality in view of the rise of the USA. Europe became increasingly seen as occupying the space between Russia and Europe. Indeed, this was to be the major defining element in its identity in the twentieth century, but was already foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville (1948: 434). Since the early nineteenth century, it was the background for many federal notions of the unity of Europe. In this respect, the idea of Europe moved beyond ancien regime designs to preserve the status quo. If one looks beyond these notions, which ranged from the lofty to the bizarre and reactionary, to the broader aspiration to link the idea

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of Europe with programmatic ideals for the reorganization of European society and new political philosophies, such invocations of the idea of Europe have a more normative and critical function. The idea of Europe was attractive to Enlightenment thinkers as a utopian ideal. The leading Enlightenment utopian thinker Saint-Simon argued that Europeans should organize themselves in a new framework in order to preserve their independence. Kant in Perpetual Peace in 1795 put forward an argument for a republican order of free states as a solution to the problem of war in Europe and to secure a lasting peace. The association of the idea of Europe with visions of a peaceful Europe united into some kind of a republican transnational order survived the context in which they were originally put forward. (In the next chapter, the cosmopolitan implications of these developments will be discussed in relation to the rise of nationalism and the arrival of the nation-state.) The ensemble of ideas that Europe was associated with since the early eighteenth century point to the emergence of a European cultural model rather than a specific political meaning to what the notion might embody. The idea of Europe never had any clear basis in geography and it never coincided with a single civilizational tradition. By the 1800, it became apparent that it was not going to fit into a single political design or ideology. Yet, the development of modernity found within the idea of Europe a way of reflecting upon the nature of how Europe should be governed in the light of the absence of agreement on how this might be possible. For this reason, the idea of Europe is best seen in terms of a cultural model rather than a substantial political entity or a fixed idea underpinned by politics, culture or geography. As argued, this cultural model was influenced by diverse Enlightenment and romanticist ideas which gave to Europe different and often incompatible cultural orientations.

The Formation of Modernity The idea of Europe is a product of modernity, and as such, it needs to be contextualized as a reflective discourse on the state of European modernity. In other words, it is an idea of modernity, along with the many other ‘ideas’ that modernity in Europe produced about itself.

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The idea of Europe can be seen as a way European modernity has reflected upon itself with respect to the relation with the past and an orientation for the future. The notion of modernity itself was a product of the modern age and a way in which the present age defined itself in relation to past and future. A consideration of modernity is in place in order to better situate both the Enlightenment and the idea of Europe, which are different expressions of European modernity. The notion of modernity has greater relevance than the idea of civilization since the constellation of civilizational influences on modern Europe produced both ruptures and divisions that undermined the very possibility of a European civilization. The theoretical framework for the analysis of the idea of Europe is the general context of modernity. This will be returned to in Chapter 10 where the idea of modernity in global perspective is discussed in greater detail. The present discussion will focus on clarifying the theoretical framework of modernity. This can be summed up as entailing two dimensions, a cultural model and a societal model. First, it involves an interpretative level in the sense of a particular kind of consciousness or way of thinking as opposed to being an age or a specific time period. The cultural model of modernity can occur in any time or place. Fragments of modernity can be discerned in societies that can be termed pre-modern, and it is a condition that is not confined to Europe or the West. Second, modernity refers to what has been variously called modern society or the process of modernization and thus concerns the institutional order of society, which here will be defined in terms of a societal model based on relations between the state, economy and civil society (organized interests, social movements, the public). As an interpretative order, modernity has often been seen in terms of a social imaginary. This is the basic argument of Castoriadis (1987) for whom modernity involves a radical imagination that is always a projection of itself and an expression of the creative potentiality of the present. Arnason (2003a) has developed this idea, as has Charles Taylor (2004), who has formulated the notion of a social imaginary. The cultural model that developed in Europe and shaped its modernity was informed by the prior existence of a core cultural model that had developed since the early synthesis of Greek philosophy, Roman civil law and Christian theology that later fused with Renaissance humanism and

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seventeenth-century science. These fusions did not produce a cultural unity or an identity but provided European modernity with a matrix or set of cultural orientations that together constitute a certain specificity. However, modernity per se was a radicalization of this core cultural framework. Peter Wagner (1994) makes further advances on the basic vision of modernity as entailing a central conflict emanating from its radical imaginary, which in the most general terms resolves around the tension between the pursuit of autonomy or freedom or liberty, on the one side, and on the other mastery in that all societies must be able to reconcile the pursuit of autonomy with the need to master the material and institutional reality of power. For Wagner, a singular and generalizable definition of modernity is required before seeking its multiple forms. In later works, Wagner (2009, 2012) identifies central ‘problémátiques’ or questions that all modern societies seek to answer and which defines their self-understanding in terms of this tension between autonomy and mastery. The self-understanding of modern societies has not been constant but has undergone change with the result that modernity is an ongoing process of interpretations in the light of experiences made earlier. He highlights three such interpretative questions that modern societies seek to answer: the nature of knowledge, the rules for a common social life and how to establish the rules to solve the basic material needs of society. So what is finally common to all modernities is also what defines the specificity of their ‘societal self-understandings’: all societies need to find answers to these problemátiques in its own ways. The fact that these problemátiques are open to interpretations means that different answers will be found and thus there will be a plurality of modernities. To show what kind of answers can be found to these questions is ultimately a more fruitful approach to the analysis of modernity that a civilizational approach which tries to discover historical paths. As an approach to modernity understood as a consciousness or a condition, this has many advantages, and in particular, it divests modernity from Western path-dependent assumptions, since in principle any society can pose such questions. This conception of modernity can be related to other notions of modernity, such as what Arnason has termed ‘a field of tensions’ or Habermas’s theory of modernity as a conflict

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between communicative and instrumental rationality. Modernity is thus a condition that is irreducible to one element and is essentially open. A further implication is that modernity is not reduced to an age that has a clear end point that culminates in an ‘end of history scenario’ or one that is superceded by post-modern or a new global age. Instead of seeing modernity as temporally limited or sequential, it should rather be conceived of as a condition that is continuously reconstituted as opposed to being a condition that is defined by the transition from tradition to modernity. So rather than being marked by transition—as in the transition from pre-modern to a modern age—it is more characteristically marked by the condition of transformation. To capture the sense by which modernity is continuously reconstituted the notion of an interpretative order of conceptions or key questions is important. This interpretative dimension to modernity constitutes the cultural model of modern society and—drawing on Habermas, Eder and Strydom— moreover involves potential advances in learning.1 Thus, the cultural model of modernity opened up new ways of solving the problem of violence and of accommodating difference with notions of the constitutional state, the idea of collective self-determination, the idea of the citizen as the bearer of rights. Many of these remained for long only on the level of ideas, that is to say they were articulated within the context of the cultural model of society. In this respect, too, the idea of Europe was a product of the formation of a modern cultural model in which new conceptions of Europe were advanced. Without these ‘ideas’, the modern world would not have been possible. It follows from this that the cultural model of modernity precedes the realization of its ideas and that many of these remain unrealized. An additional implication is that the core ideas of modernity have not always commanded widespread agreement. As the history of democracy and modern political philosophy attests, there have been many major differences of interpretation on how normative ideas should be realized. This is quite evidently, too, the case as far as the idea of Europe is concerned, which, as will be argued in later chapters, has been subject to major conflicts of interpretation. Since the cultural model of modernity involved major disputes over its key ideas, the real significance of it resides not in simply offering normative ideas, but in opening up a cognitive order by which modern

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society could make sense of itself. The contents of the cultural model of European modernity were ways in which the various crises of the age could be interpreted. As Strydom has put it: ‘over a period of approximately two centuries the cognitive order of modernity arose which would henceforth, in interaction with the prevailing social practices, constitute, generate, guide and regulate the formation of modernity and the actualization, realization and expansion of its multilevel potentialities’ (Strydom 2012: 26). The cultural model of modernity as a cognitive order is made of ideas that present themselves in part as rules or reference points that are reflexively related to social contexts, but realized in situations of conflict between opposed social actors who may form different interpretations of them. The cultural model of modernity is thus a generative resource for social actors and may have a transformative impact when it comes into conflict with social reality in contexts of dispute. For the notion of modernity to be useful, it should also address societal structures and institutions, such as the relation between state formation and economy. In this sense, it refers to a societal model which in part bears the influence of the cultural model of society, but, and especially in times of major crisis, there is a tension or contradiction between both. The history of modern Europe can be written in terms of a conflict between the ideas of modernity and the concrete form it has taken. As a societal model, modernity refers to the ways in which the modern state, capitalism or more generally the modern market economy, and civil society interacted. This has been the subject of classical sociological theory, which concerned itself with the macro-level development of the major structures on modern Western society. For present purposes, the relevant points are that the specificity of European modernity resides in a model of modernity in which a particular relation between state, economy and civil society developed such that neither the state nor capitalism succeeded in becoming the other and that the relationship was one mediated by civil society. The relation between these forces, which defines the matrix of political modernity, gives rise to a societal model that in turn offers a way for modernity to interpret itself and articulate an identity, or what is better characterized as a social imaginary. Solidarity, democracy, autonomy and social

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justice, for instance, are not concrete institutional realities, but transcendental ideas or social imaginaries that make possible institutional arrangements and guide political practice. The concrete outcome has been a certain balance between capitalism and democracy. This has been variously reflected in the nation-states of modern Europe. T. H. Marshall’s famous 1949 essay on the formation of modern social citizenship reflected in part this view of democratic citizenship as a counterbalance to the inequalities of capitalism (Marshall 1987). Of course this conservative perspective was limited by the absence of any sense of social struggles, seeing as he did the social contract as an achievement of the state and not as negotiated outcomes of political mobilization spear-headed by trade unionism, socialist movements, labour and various social democratic parties. European modernity is a European modernity and not the only form modernity has taken. Modernity can take many different forms, as has been noted in what is now a significant body of literature on comparative modernity.2 The difference between modernity in Europe and elsewhere resides in the ways in which the cultural and the societal imaginary has been constituted and in the temporal development. The basic structures of both can be said to be relatively constant in that most societies have within their cultural model some conception of the individual and collective self-determination and in more general terms a particular way in which their social imaginary articulates a vision of freedom or formulates the key questions Wagner claims are constitutive of modernity. The specific form these take will vary, as will the level of cognitive development and the relation to political practice. Regarding the societal model, this too can be broadly generalized as relevant to all societies in that the interrelations between state, economy and civil society tend to be the most important forces shaping modern society. In the case of Europe, the state was constantly challenged by forces within civil society with the result that the power of the state was relatively constrained. This is a contrast to many other parts of the world, for instance Russia, and the various models of modernity that developed in Asia, with notable examples being Turkey, Iran and China. In these instances, civil society was less developed, and as a consequence, the state was subject to fewer constraints. The period of totalitarianism—to

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be discussed in Chapter 11—is an illustration of the fact that modernity also entails regressions and is not unilinear. The same can be said of capitalism, which was variously constrained by organized groups comprising civil society. In the USA, in contrast, a different model of modernity emerged that laid a greater emphasis on liberty and the market; it was one that was less based on rights and set fewer limits on the market. The route that Europe took towards modernity was considerably shaped by church and state relations. As argued in Chapter 3, a feature of Europe, in contrast to much of Asia, was that the church—which can be seen as a civil society actor—was relatively constrained by the state, which by 1648 had gained the upper hand. The result was that the subsequent history of European secularism was one of the compromises between church and state. This was ambivalent in that the state proved it could exert final power over rival forces, such as the Church, but it also had to make compromises. The history of civil society in Europe is one in which the power of the state is constantly challenged by organized social interests, which often become incorporated into the sphere of the state. The outcome of modernity for Europe was in the creation of a specific kind of societal model that while taking variable forms can be characterized as one in which the demands of social solidarity and social justice had to be accommodated. According to Claus Offe (2003: 442) if there is anything distinctive about a specifically European model of capitalism, it is the prominence of state-defined and state-protected status categories, which set limits to the rule of markets and of voluntary transactions. Stressing the diversity of types of capitalism in Europe, Offe notes that viewed in a global perspective it is possible therefore to speak of a European model of social capitalism that underlies the diversity of these different national models. This social fabric and the guiding principles of solidarity and social justice are more important in the formation of Europe than the specific form the consciousness of Europe took. A comparative analysis of modernity would reveal a more complicated story, but the basic societal model of European modernity can be described as a world regional variant of forms that have a more general applicability while having variable relations. The result is not progressed as once understood as a cumulative and unilinear the unfolding of

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Grand Narrative of improvement, but a more varied, multidimensional and multi-directional field of orientations that operate on the cultural model and on the societal model in ways that are highly contingent rather than the product of necessity or path dependency.

Globality and Modernity With regard to the earlier discussion of unity and division in European history, the implication of the above analysis is that the context of modernity provides the basis for a conception of unity in the sense of a way in which commonality can be understood. As various theorists have argued, modernity is primarily a singular condition whose basic elements make possible plurality. In this way, as with the notion of civilization, the assumption of unity can be made as a basis from which diversity follows. The implications for diversity are as follows: on the level of the cultural model, there is a diversity of interpretations as to the meaning of modernity’s core ideas; on the level of the societal model, there is a diversity, within some broad parameters, of institutional arrangements concerning the state, capitalism and civil society. It is possible to speak of a European model of modernity where there is relative cohesiveness in these structures. It follows from this that some parts of Europe may be more modern than others and that this is in part a temporal matter, in that modernity unfolds at different speeds. With regard to the question of modernity as an age, it can now be suggested that the association of modernity commencing with the Enlightenment—broadly defined as the period from the mid-eighteenth century—makes sense so long as modernity is not reduced to the Enlightenment itself, which instead should be seen as part of the articulation of the cultural model of modernity. But modernity ultimately goes far beyond the Enlightenment and the early formative period in the emergence of European modernity. Other modernities will not necessarily have been framed through the European Enlightenment. However, as argued through this book the underlying reality of globality means that societies are mutually influenced by each other. The Enlightenment itself was like the Renaissance influenced by contacts

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with other parts of the world and cannot be considered entirely on its own (see Conrad 2012). When viewed as an aspect of modernity, the wider global context is essential for an understanding of the genesis of modern Europe. The closer we approach the age of empire, the more essential a global view of Europe becomes. In this respect, we can add to the emphasis on civilizations as a formative early influence on Europe and modernity as the wider framework, globality as a condition that makes possible the encounters of different civilizations and modernities. Without such a concept, and in the absence of a universal model, there is no way to explain how modernities and civilizations came into contact and how even within specific models of modernity similar orientations developed. So globality can be taken as a context which is variously present and the degree to which it is present will be decisive for the spread of modernity. In the present day, it is unlikely that there is any part of the world that has escaped at least some of the consequences of modernity. However, in earlier centuries in the formative period of modern Europe, and even earlier in the early civilizations of the Axial Age, such contacts were limited, but where they occurred they were decisive for the emergence of modernity and within the European context for the formation of modernity. Indeed, it was the case that due to global connections between different parts of the world the emergence of modernity was often more advanced than in parts of Europe (e.g. Buenos Aires was more modern than parts of most Spain outside a few metropolitan centres). Globality should not be seen as derivative of modernity or a later development, but integral to modernity and also integral to the Axial Age of civilizations. What has changed in the course of history is the scale and speed of globalization, rather than the fact of global connectivity. Globalization arises when different parts of the world come into contact with each; it may be driven by economic or cultural forces, but it is ultimately made possible by the movement of people, goods or ideas from one place to another. The more extensive this is, the greater the impact of globality, which becomes a condition in itself when the extent of global connections makes possible a global imaginary, a social imaginary that extends beyond the immediate context to include an orientation to the world

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(see Robertson 1992). The emergence of the idea of Europe as with the emergence of national idea is part of this process of the broadening of the horizons of the present in both spatial and temporal directions. A European space opens up with the increased connectivity of different parts of the region due to the diffusion of cultural, economic or political forces with the result that previously separated areas become linked and the element of a shared history emerges. So by the mid-nineteenth century, the diffusion of Enlightenment and romanticist ideas, the ideas of the French Revolution as well as the idea of Europe had spread to most parts of Europe through networks of cultural and political communication. The diffusion of a new cultural model opened up new ways of imagining Europe. This will be explored in the next chapter with respect to the rise of the national idea and cosmopolitanism in the age of the nation-state and empire.

Notes 1. See Eder (1999, 2009), Habermas (1979), and Strydom (1987, 1993). 2. See Eisenstadt (2000, 2003), Gaonkar (2001), Jameson (2003), Taylor (1999), Taylor (2004), and Wagner (2004, 2004, 2009, 2011, 2012).

9 The Rise of the Nation-State and the Allure of Empire: Between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Two events that loom large in the making of European modernity occurred in the eighteenth century: the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and in 1789 the French Revolution. Both events had a European-wide significance in that they had a considerable impact across Europe in both the shape of the natural and political landscape of the continent. While the Enlightenment emphasized a narrative of progress and freedom, consciousness of crisis also lay at the source of the imagination of the age. The Lisbon earthquake had a huge impact on Europe due to both the physical effects that were widely felt across Europe of the earthquake that struck on 1755 and the destruction it brought to Lisbon, which was mostly burnt and destroyed following a tidal wave that followed in the aftermath of the earthquake. It was the first example of Europeanwide consciousness of a catastrophe that brought a certain sense of a wider unity to European intellectuals who debated its causes and significance. The event was not perceived as divine retribution—in fact it marked the end of theodicy—nor as a Portuguese catastrophe, but as a European event and a challenge for European science. Voltaire’s Candide is the most well-known work inspired by the Lisbon earthquake, but Kant wrote three short essays on it, Rousseau © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_9

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regarded it as evidence of his republican philosophy that small self-governing cities rather than imperial metropolis are the ideal places for people to live in for the future (Larsen 2006). Catastrophes are occasions for political reflection and political renewal, as was the case too with the Great Fire of London in 1666 when London was rebuilt. While the latter was largely a national crisis, the Lisbon earthquake in contrast had a wider transnational ramifications across Europe. The Portuguese empire, long in decline, was considerably weakened due to the destruction of the imperial core. However, the main consequences were largely in a consciousness of the physical vulnerability that it brought to Europe in a pre-risk age that its cities are subject to destruction by natural forces. This sense of vulnerability seemed to be in tension with the new belief in science, freedom and progress that the Enlightenment had proclaimed. It is a reminder that the experience of crisis and the imagination of catastrophe were not only political, but could also take a physical form. The Lisbon earthquake was reflected in a new discourse about the physical foundations of European societies and of the need for a new kind of knowledge about nature. It is possible to see the later development of natural science as a response to the need for greater mastery of nature. The example of the Lisbon earthquake illustrates how from the beginning of the modern age a cosmopolitan current accompanied modernity. It expressed the consciousness of an objective crisis and a challenge for European science and thought. The second major event, the French Revolution in 1789, was the marker of the modern age insofar as it demonstrated the vulnerability of the ancien regime state to destruction and the beginning of a new age of social revolution that had ramifications for the rest of Europe and the wider world. In this instance, it was of course presaged by the American Revolution in 1766, where republican thought was more advanced. However, 1789 was not just a French Revolution; it was also a European one in that its consequences changed the political landscape in Europe due to both the spread of new political ideas and the expansion of the post-revolutionary state in its aspiration to create a French-led Europe. Its legacy ultimately divided Europe and created the conditions for rival conceptions of modernity.

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In this paradox, we find the basis of European political modernity: the entwinement of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the particular and the universal. On the one side, 1789 signalled a new age of freedom based on republican government while, on the other side, the consequences were the assertion of national supremacy and leadership. Modernity witnessed both particularism and universalism as exemplified in the rise of nationalism and the nation-state, and at the other end of the spectrum of modernity, the consciousness of common problems and the need for common solutions. This is not to say that the cosmopolitanism and the nation-state were antagonistic or somehow incompatible. The aim of this chapter is to show how the rise of the modern nationstate contained cosmopolitan possibilities and that both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are not contrary, despite the gradual uncoupling of both. The chapter is broadly concerned with the ‘long nineteenth century’, from 1789 to c.1919. This is the period that falls between the two major movements of social and political crisis in the modern age: the French Revolution and the ending of the First World War. It is era of high modernity when the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment shaped the formation of modernity in Europe and the period of what Polanyi called the ‘Great Transformation’ that led to the rise of the market society or capitalism and the modern state. The First World War shattered belief in those ideas and the end of the long peace of the nineteenth century. At the point at which a new formation of modernity was shaped, it collapsed and a variety of often contradictory projects emerged. The first section looks at the rise of nationalism and considers the significance of the nation-state; the second section is concerned with the relation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as two sides of modernity; the third section discusses the nature and limits of the idea of Europe in the context of political modernity and the prevalence of crisis and critique as ways in which the very notion of the political has been experienced. The next section is a discussion of the emergence of a European society. While a European polity as such did not emerge, given the irreversible trend towards a Europe of nations, it is possible to speak of the rise of a European society by the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the place and significance of empire in the making of Europe, for Europe was not simply

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internally constituted, but was formed in encounters with the rest of the world, much of which were through colonization and the accompanying category of race. An assessment of the making of modernity in Europe must take into account that the European route to modernity was to a very considerable extent shaped through colonization.

The Rise of Nationalism and the Nation-State The idea of the nation, which precedes the nation-state and nationalism, signifies the idea of a people who share a common birthright. The word itself, natio, means birth and suggests the notion of the creation or establishment of a political community. In early modern Europe, it coincided with the rise of republicanism in that both the notion of the nation and the idea of the people referred to the public as the source of sovereignty. This understanding of the nation as a res publica was primarily civic insofar as it saw the nation as a public rather than a private category. Hence was born the modern idea of the nation and with it the notion of collective self-determination, for the nation must seek its autonomy if it has been denied. Thus, opposition to tyranny was a driving force in the rise of nationalism. Although not in itself a democratic philosophy, it had a democratizing effect insofar as the nation referred not to the court society of the elites but to the masses: the demos was the nation as a public body. It roughly corresponded to the rise of civil society and colonial independence seeking movements in the Americas where the break with the European ancien regime was most decisive. Indeed, it was in the Americas that some of the most important experiments were made with liberalism and republicanism. As such, early republican nationalism was civic in its essential self-understanding in the sense that it was based on a notion of peoplehood that was defined in terms of rights and thus linked collective self-determination with a notion of the individual as a rights-bearing citizen. The idea of the nation can be considered to be primarily a feature of modernity. The question whether the notion of the nation is a product of long-run ethnic identities or is a product of modern society

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has been much debated. Much of this concerns the question whether nationalism precedes the emergence of the nation-state or is largely, as Gellner and others have argued, produced by modern states for the purpose of social integration (Gellner 1983; Breuilly 1982; Delanty and O’Mahony 2002). Nationalism for Gellner is a development of industrial capitalism and the arrival of a new ‘high’ culture that can provide cultural cohesion for diverse people and replace local ‘low’ cultures with a common national culture. While having in many cases pre-modern roots in the memories and histories of ethnic groups around whom many modern nationalisms were created, the idea of the nation is not in itself an ethnic category. The association of the idea of the nation with a dominant ethnic group, an ethnos, was a development of the nineteenth century and should not detract from the fact that the nation is a political or civic category. It is a product of modernity. To the extent to which the notion of the nation was invoked in pre-modern times, it was more likely to have been an identity of elites than a mass identification, though exceptions will be found. As we have seen, the American and French Revolutions gave a tremendous boost to popular sovereignty and the idea of self-determination, which can be contrasted to the idea of sovereignty embodied in the ruler and can also be contrasted to the British political tradition that emerged from 1688, which posited the source of sovereignty neither in the monarch nor in the public, but in parliament, as in the doctrine of the sovereignty of Westminster. In contrast, 1766 and 1789 gave rise to the notion of popular sovereignty, which challenged what in effect was the continuation of the British ancien regime. However, it should be noted that the rupture brought about by the French Revolution was not total and elements of the ancien regime survived and post-revolutionary Europe continued much of the older absolutism in new forms (Anderson 1974; Mayer 1981). The ideology of modern nationalism emerged out of this background. Nationalism effectively came to mean the right of a people who define themselves as a people and who occupy a certain territory and the right to exercise collective self-determination. This was the principle of nationalism that was advanced by Giuseppe Mazzini, who was a proponent of Italian unification and independence and influential in establishing an ideology of modern republican nationalism. In this tradition,

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nationalism was in every sense an ideology, in the sense of a programmatic project for the reorganization of state and society in accordance with new political ideas. Influenced by the French Revolution and modern liberalism, Mazzini advocated the necessity of national unity as an aspiration for modern Europe and promoted the vision of a united Europe of nations. He believed the nation-state was the most democratic unity of political organization. Mazzini’s liberal nationalism was highly influential across Europe in the nineteenth century and helped to reshape the map of Europe in favour of nation-states as opposed to empires. Although primarily an Italian nationalist, he promoted the cause of European nationalism. He put forward the idea of a ‘United States of Europe’, essentially an early version of a united Europe based on democratic nation-states, and founded ‘Young Europe’ in Berne in 1834 to provide support for independence movements, such as Young Italy, founded three years earlier. The association led to the creation of Young Ireland, Young Poland, Young Germany and many others. This was a kind of nationalism that was underpinned by republicanism and liberalism and was an expression of a new wave of democratization that had begun with the French Revolution and culminated in the 1848 revolutions that occurred in many countries. Between 1789 and 1848, nationalism was generally associated with republicanism and liberal reform movements seeking to overthrow the ancien regime. Irish, Italian, Polish and Greek nationalisms were inspired by Mazzini’s ideals, which were also influential in Germany where liberal nationalists promoted the cause for German unity. The independence of Greece in 1829 was one of the first examples of national independence that the nascent revolutionary nationalism of the century and the ideals of national unity and the ideals of freedom, constitutionalism and self-determination. Despite the failure of the 1848 revolutions to bring about a lasting constitutional order based on liberal democracy and national independence, the vision of a Europe of nation-states was an enduring legacy and continued to inspire nationalist movements everywhere: Belgium was created in 1831, and after the Treaty of Berlin, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro were carved out of the Ottoman Empire, as was later in 1913 Albania; in 1905, Norway became independent of Denmark. The British Liberal

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Party under W. E. Gladstone embraced the cause of liberal nationalism in the case of Bulgaria and the Irish Home Rule movement. However, despite the prevalence of liberal nationalism from 1848, nationalism gradually lost its earlier revolutionary direction and association with a civic conception of the people and became increasingly an ideology of the existing state. After the unification of Italy in 1861 and the unification of Germany in 1871, nationalism became the ideology of the nation-state as opposed to revolutionary movements seeking national autonomy. Secessionist movements continued to seek national independence, such as Irish nationalism, but, as in this case, nationalism became increasingly open to diverse interpretations as to the meaning of nationhood. In the case of Irish nationalism, for instance, one movement sought independence within the UK and another, which became increasingly more powerful, sought the creation of an independent republic. In addition, nationalism also took on a more cultural direction from the late nineteenth century with the romantic rediscovery of national histories and a pre-modern past; it moved in the direction of an ethnic as opposed to a civic conception of the people. The idea of the people became defined as a community of descent; it was a powerful ideological instrument that located the nation ultimately in everyday life. According to Hobsbawm (1994: 121), the very term ‘nationalism’ was coined as late as the 1890s to describe reactionary lower middle-class militancy in countries where the ideologies of liberalism and democracy were weak. Not all nationalist movements asserted political aspirations, for they emerged at a time when there was little consciousness of the nationstate as a natural geopolitical organization. Empires were the norm, not nation-states. National communities were discovered or invented by national intelligentsias who created in many cases a national language and defined national heritage around a national literature, music and folklore. Such cultural programmes were made possible by new national institutions, such as museums, universities, art academies and mandatory schooling; they have been variously described as fabrications or the inventions of traditions that had in fact a relatively recent origin while projecting their history into early times and thus portraying a picture of continuity regardless of the record of history (Hobsbawm and

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Ranger 1983). Nationalism was a product of the age of ideology, and along with other ideologies of the age, it was promulgated by intellectuals who formulated the key ideas which were transmitted to the masses. In many cases, a national language had to be created where it did not previously exist or where it did, it had to be standardized. With few exceptions, almost every nation-state was based on a common language, which made possible greater communication and identification, even if such forms of identifications were based on an imagined national community, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has argued. One of the most important instruments for the diffusion of the idea of the nation was education and in particular the creation of a national curriculum. National schooling and literacy made it possible for the national community to be given a symbolic reality in the lives of people through the creation of a dominant national memory, the homogenization of cultural practices, sport and patriotic political culture based on xenophobia and the exhalation of the state as the embodiment of the nation. In this way, national identity became not just an identity of the nascent elites and an ideology of the modern state, but a collective identity for industrial society. Such forms of identification were underpinned by the growth of centralized state bureaucracies, which created new integrative mechanisms and systems of surveillance—such as passports and visas—to define the link between state and individual (Giddens 1985; Torpey 1999). In sum, the French Revolution popularized the notion of peoplehood, which was equated with the nation, but in doing so opened up new conceptions of peoplehood that quickly lost the earlier meaning. The idea of nationhood in many cases was not a clearly defined consciousness, and when it was defined, it generally took a largely ethnic kind. The confluence of an ethnically based definition of peoplehood with the notion of nationhood brought about a transformation of nationalism from a civic notion to a cultural one. This shift in the meaning of nationhood opened up nationalism to entirely new projects of nation-state building. Central to all of these was a strong emphasis on an external Other against whom the national Self had to defend itself. It was frequently the case that the Other was associated with an oppressor and the history of the nation had to be told in terms of a

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narrative of emancipation from such tyranny. Indeed, almost every nationalism has such a narrative of a founding moment that was related to liberation from tyranny or occupation by another power. The French Revolution gave a basis to this notion of emancipation from tyranny, but modern nationalism converted it into a territorially defined ‘us’ versus ‘them’. An inevitable aspect of this was xenophobia, since it became easier to know who the enemy was than to know who the nation was and all too often the external enemy was related to a national minority. Given the multi-ethnic nature of much of Europe, the formation of nation-states frequently resulted in the marginalization and persecution of national minorities, who were associated with a neighbouring nation-state or who did not fit into the emerging ethnic definition of the nation-state. A related development to the equation of ethnicity with nationhood was the emergence of the nation-state around a dominant region, as Eugene Weber has demonstrated in a classic study of the formation of the modern French state (Weber 1976). Many nation-states were constructed out of a single region whose cultural identity became the basis of the national culture and resulted in a process of homogenization or in the case of the UK, where one region, England, was constituted the core. Where homogenization was incomplete, as in Corsica, Ireland, or Catalonia, the result was a peripheral nationalist liberation movement. Federalism was for some the solution, but in many federal arrangements a dominant core—Prussia in the case of Germany—dominated. The tendency was for a dominant region to be a basis for nation-state formation which occurred alongside the simultaneous elimination of regional autonomy and the concentration of centralized systems of power in national capitals (see Watkins 1991). Hence, the project of state-building entailed the construction of national capitals with the characteristic monumental style of neoclassical architecture that was designed to showcase the symbolic power of the nation-state (see Jones 2011). Different traditions of nationalism arose in the second half of the nineteenth century and can be roughly characterized as: (1) republican independence movements, which were generally secessionist or seeking to assert national unity; (2) cultural nationalism that was inspired by organic notions of a historic peoplehood who constitute the soul of the

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nation; such types of nationalism were predominately ethnic in their self-understanding; (3) nation-state nationalism that asserted the territorial identity of the existing state; and (4) civic nationalism that was primarily inspired by republican ideas as opposed to an ethnic conception of the nation. The latter tended to be marginal or was variously present within the other dominant traditions. However, it was the third variety that became the dominant political force in the making of the modern Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism had become the patriotism of the state, which in turn came to constitute a territorial nation-state. Newly created states, such as those that gained independence at the end of the nineteenth century and after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, were all organized as highly militarized nation-states and set about the codification of a national identity. The re-drawing of the map of Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the First World War and the creation of independent nation-states out of the territories of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires demonstrate the power of the idea of the nation-state which had become the accepted solution to the problem of statehood. Nationalism increasingly lost its civic and emancipatory orientation and became an instrument by which the state secured loyalty from the masses. In many cases, it was easily reconciled with monarchy and with the pursuit of empire and congealed into new forms, such as fascism and authoritarian state socialism (see below and Chapter 12). This is not to say that nationalism severed any connection with the civic definition of the nation or that nationalism entirely lost its emancipatory significance. The notion of the nation, like the idea of Europe, continued to be open to diverse interpretations, with different groups making different claims in the name of the nation. However, it is clear that the notion of the nation became increasingly associated with ethnic definitions of the nation, on the one side, and, on the other, with a territorially defined state. This confluence of statehood, territory and ethnicity gave to the modern state what it previously did not have, namely a territorial identity. Territory then became the basis on which other claims could be made, such as citizenship rights and the related duties that the state could expect from its citizens. The legacy of republican nationalism in the end was a territorial conception of the nation.

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However, an ambiguity continued to exist between nationality and citizenship: the rights of the individual as a citizen and the rights of the individual as a member of a nation-state. The modern nation-state achieved a degree of inclusivity for its populations, but this was at the cost of the exclusion of those who did not belong to the nation; where this concerned national minorities, it often led to resentment that in turn fuelled secessionist nationalism. Nationalism provided the essential ideological bond that linked the individual with the state in ways that proved to be highly effective. By the end of the nineteenth century, a system of centralized states was in place in Europe. The record of history shows that it was the liberal democratic nation-state that was the most durable state form and that in time all of Europe became organized on the basis of the nation-state, with constitutional monarchies as variants on what was broadly a common trajectory. National identity made possible the identification of a rapidly growing industrial population with the state, which required the compliance and loyalty of the individual. Nation-states were also warring states and instituted military conscription as part of the duties of citizenship. This also produced strong bonds of identification between citizens and the state. The modern nation-state proved to be an effective organization for the control of populations and the pursuit of power on a global level. With few exceptions, since 1648 European states ceased to conduct wars within their own territory and concentrated wars with neighbouring countries, as well as colonial wars. This permanent preparation and engagement for war was a crucial aspect of the state tradition in Europe and which was critical in the formation of relatively strong states in contrast to other parts of the world where there was a higher degree of internal warfare (Centeno 2002). The pursuit of imperial projects from the middle of the nineteenth century possibly provided some of the conditions for relative stability within Europe and the consolidation of homogenized central states (Tilly 1990: 167). The nation-state was not only a territorially organized national community, but a state organization and like all states it acquired a monopoly over the means of violence, since in Europe since the eighteenth century the capacity to exercise violence was concentrated in the state (Tilly 1990). The European nation-state was a centralized and bureaucratized apparatus

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designed to extract resources and engage in war and territorial expansion; it devised effective powers of taxation and, since the mid-nineteenth century, military conscription; it regulated markets; provided a backup for law, which is essentially a command secured by the state’s capacity to enforce it; and secured relative loyalty from its populations through the institution of citizenship. As argued in the previous chapter, the modern European national state developed alongside the formation of a European societal model in which the state had to negotiate settlements with demands from civil society. This was achieved through the creation of legal frameworks that defined rights and duties for citizens and at the same time set limits to both state power and the rule of the market. The modern nation-state as a law-governed state was the principal vehicle by which the state was constituted and the basis of a model of modernity for Europe that resulted in both unity and diversity. The success of the modern nationstate was due in no small measure to the degree of social justice that it made possible, through in part to the creation of welfare systems and due to the constant need to negotiate between capital and labour. The expansion in claim-making was increasingly incorporated into the domain of the state, which can be seen as both a system of guarantees and a negotiated political order based on the rule of law. The popularity of the nation-state was due to the capacity of the state to meet demands from social interests as much it was to the appeal of nationalism as an ideology.

Cosmopolitanism and Political Community The homogenization that the nation-state achieved within its territory was at the cost of a more divided Europe. It was inevitable that the idea of Europe would be subordinated to the idea of the nation and that Europe could firstly be a Europe of nations and then only European. Since no pan-European state existed and due to the balance of power system, no state succeeded in overall supremacy. This does not mean that European modernity is to be understood exclusively in terms of the nation-state. International institutions were created, such as The

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Red Cross in 1857 and the Universal Postal Union in 1874. In 1861, the Suez Canal was opened linking European sea fare directly to Asia, the Panama Canal in 1914, and the adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as a global time standard in 1884 reflects the rise of internationalism. Other developments would include the construction of telegraph cables across the Atlantic seabed since 1858 and the invention of morse code. Internationalism did not decline in the age of the nation-state, but increased due to the need for cooperation between states and the needs of the capitalist economy. It also took numerous other forms that were not dependent on states, such as scientific and cultural institutions, including the expansion of universities. In terms of the distinction made in the previous chapter between a cultural and a societal model of modernity, it can be seen that the nation-state formed the institutional basis of the European societal model in that the various forms that modernity developed were largely mediated by the nation-state. However, the cultural model of modernity is not reducible to social arrangements with respect to the relation between state and economy that formed the basis of the modern nationstate. The cultural model of modernity offered a horizon beyond the institutional order and has been frequently in tension with the societal model of modernity. Part of the cultural model of European modernity was a cosmopolitan orientation that in part was expressed in certain nationalist movements, but was more generally in opposition and only in part realized in concrete political institutions. The thesis advanced here is that cosmopolitanism was an integral part of modernity in Europe and that it is no less important than nationalism. Modernity does not consist of one form, but is composed of different orientations, which have different degrees of significance. The cosmopolitan currents with modernity are not derivative of nationalism or secondary, but form part of the social imaginary of modernity. It has already been argued that the logic of globalization produces a more connected world in which consciousness of globality becomes part of the condition of modernity. The emergence of cosmopolitan thought was a product of such a consciousness of an interconnected world and influenced the idea of Europe as a normative idea. Indeed, the genealogy of cosmopolitanism is prior to the very idea of the nation (Delanty

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2009a). Despite its ancient origins, however, cosmopolitanism, like nationalism, is largely a product of modernity and existed alongside the early notions of the nation. The French Revolution itself embodied cosmopolitanism in the universalism it claimed for its notion of the rights of the individual. The eighteenth-century notion of a commonwealth of nations was essentially a cosmopolitan proposal for an alternative to nations and a way to secure lasting peace in Europe. Many of these proposals were based on the federal idea as a political framework for Europe to accommodate its diversity within a wider political order. While most of these programmatic ideas for a federal state of Europe did not progress beyond the level of ideas, one concrete outcome was the rise of international law theory, as espoused by Grotius and Pufendorf (Hochstramer 2000). Political modernity could not be confined to a world of nation-states; some kind of commonality had to be found in order to prevent constant warfare. The balance of power was one way in which states were contained, but this could never be enough without a normative international order as opposed to a purely contractual system based on treaties, which in effect was what the post-Westphalian state system was. Kant believed that republican states are less likely to go to war with each other and need to be embedded in a cosmopolitan order governed by the rule of law. Kant’s notion of a cosmopolitan legal order went beyond international law, which is a law of states. In Perpetual Peace in 1795, he championed the idea of a principle of hospitality as basis of cosmopolitan law. The right to hospitality, by which he meant the right of a foreigner to be recognized by the state whose territory they enter, must be upheld by all states. Although it was unclear how this was to come, it was eventually realized much later in the incorporation into the national legislation of European countries of international human rights. This illustrates how the elements within the cultural model of society become progressively embodied in the societal model, generally following an extended period of crisis in which increased claim-making forced a new wave of democratization. The cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment may indeed have been more a state of mind than a depiction of reality and it took more than 100 years for the first major normative international

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order to be created in the form of the League of Nations following the First World War. It would be wrong to claim than in face of the objective reality of the nation-state that cosmopolitanism was a fanciful world of ideas that were not politically effective. Cosmopolitanism was present within republican and liberal thought, though undoubtedly more in the latter than in the former, since republicanism has been predominantly concerned with a bounded conception of political community. It was a force behind the movement for the abolition of slavery, as reflected in the writings of Alexander von Humboldt who stood for a global cosmopolitanism that demanded the abolition of slavery. However, cosmopolitanism is not exclusively an aspiration to create a normative international order and nor is it opposed to the nation-state or to the idea of the nation. Cosmopolitanism, as a condition of the broadening of the moral and political horizon of society, is compatible with the idea of the nation insofar as this is the basis of political community. Thus, some national traditions more than others are open to external influences, while others are more closed. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism were inspired by the modern idea of freedom and by the notion of self-determination. On the whole, nationalism tended to give expression to the notion of collective self-determination, while cosmopolitanism gave expression to individual self-determination. In this way, both complemented each other in articulating the social imaginary of modernity. The emphasis on individual self-realization within cosmopolitanism was further embedded in liberalism, which more than republicanism emphasized the centrality of the individual. Both republicanism and liberalism were further complemented by the socialist tradition and its various offshoots, including democratic socialism, social liberalism and social democracy, with a concern with collective self-determination around social justice. This tradition contained within it cosmopolitan aspirations that were famously voiced by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 that ‘the proletariat has no country’. However, this tradition later developed along national lines, thus defusing its cosmopolitanism. The liberal conception of political community preserved the strongest link with cosmopolitanism, undoubtedly because it was easier to think of the individual having wider loyalties than collectively organized groups such as entire nations and,

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too, the negative conception of justice within liberalism was easier to achieve than positive justice, as associated with republicanism. Yet, it would not be correct to confine the cosmopolitan imaginary to the level of individual self-realization, which is one strand within it. It had a wider resonance in the search for a normative international order as well as in the very notion of a democratic political community that is inclusive. In this sense, cosmopolitanism might be seen as constituting the open horizon of modern political community while nationalism constitutes the tendency towards closure. In other words, political community is neither defined by nationalism nor by cosmopolitanism; both are present and the history of political modernity—mediated variously by liberalism, republicanism and socialism—can be seen in terms of the ever-changing relation between both sides of its Janus face. Both nationalism and cosmopolitanism reflected the homogenizing logic of modernity and the tendency in modern culture towards pluralization and dialogue (Delanty 2009a). The eighteenth century was a period when the cosmopolitan current was in many ways more prominent, while in the following century the balance had shifted towards the national ideal, an argument put forward by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke in 1907 (Meinecke 1970; Schlereth 1977). However, Meinecke mistakenly believed that the nation-state required the abandonment of cosmopolitanism which could not find a political embodiment; he did not see that both were linked and that the development of political modernity required these two sides. As Harrington (2004, 2016) has argued, throughout the Weimar period German intellectuals could find within the nation-state a means of reconciling German particularity with European universalism. The cosmopolitanism of German intellectuals did not suddenly stop in 1914. More generally, the spirit of cosmopolitanism was kept alive by a global consciousness that was never entirely dominated by a narrow nationalism, with some pertinent examples being the re-founding of the Olympic Games, the Nobel Prizes, Great Exhibitions and other ‘Mega Events’ which while showcasing the nation-state did so in ways that fostered cosmopolitanism (Roche 2000; Inglis and Robertson 2008). European elites continued to circulate as much of the world of art and music was cosmopolitan. Yet, it is clear that by the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism was in

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the ascendancy and it was not until after the destruction of two world wars that the cosmopolitan current became once again influential and a necessary compensation for the tendency within nationalism towards closure.

The Emergence of European Society The nineteenth century saw the consolidation of modernity and the emergence of a Europe of nation-states. The global significance of Europe only becomes evident by the middle of the century when its economic, technological and political structures proved to be highly resilient and innovative. This had a lot to do with the nature of state formation within Europe and, as argued earlier, to the particular kind of societal model that predominated whereby a balance had to be constantly secured between the interests of capitalism and the homogenizing tendency of the state. A feature of this was the opposition from civil society and the need to accommodate demands from diverse groups as well as to regulate capitalism. The result was a model of modernity that was marked by what Koselleck (1988) has referred to as ‘crisis and by critique’. Although Koselleck tended to see critique as the cause of crisis, in fact the trend was for critique to follow the onset of crises—social, political, cultural crises—which it offered various interpretations and remedies. The constant application of critique to the exercise of power— whether in the economic or political order—was a decisive feature of European political modernity which generated new expectations. Thus, at the heart of modernity was not the state as such, but various processes which generated variety and opened up alternatives that were variously selected and often institutionalized as a result of a period of extended social struggles. These processes within European modernity provided the primary ideas of modern Europe influencing both left and right conceptions of social order and political community ranging from social democracy, Christian democracy to democratic socialism and other radical democratic movements. As with all such models, it crystallized into different forms due to the ways in which it was taken up and

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transformed by different social actors. So in civil society claim-making and the broadening of the scope of democracy led to tensions between state and society, on the one side, and, on the other, between capitalism and democracy. It was not surprising then that the idea of Europe did not lead to the functional equivalent of the idea of the nation. The idea of the nation contained one ingredient that the idea of Europe did not have, namely a notion of peoplehood. There is not a meaningful sense to speak of a European people in the way nationalism can invoke a notion of peoplehood. There is no European-wide equivalent of the ethnic component that has been the basis of almost every national tradition. Most nations have a common language—Belgium and Switzerland being exceptions—while on a European level there has never been a common medium of communication at least since the vernacularization of Latin. French functioned for long as a common language of elites, but never became the basis of a European ethnos; nor did religion, which, as argued in Chapter 3, was more likely to be a source of division than commonality on a European level. The symbolic and emotional ties that made possible national identity around a notion of a people with a common history are clearly possible on regional or national levels, but not so easily on a multinational level. Moreover, as argued earlier, the idea of a national people was closely tied to a historical memory of emancipation from tyranny, while on a European level there had never been an enemy that was sufficiently threatening to constitute an Other against whom an enduring sense of a European people might be defined. The idea of a Europe does not entail a specific people as such, but refers more to a model of society and cultural orientations that has come to shape a historical world region. It is true that by the late twentieth century the notion of a European identity has become more tangible and it is possible to speak of Europeans, though it is arguably the case that this has not resulted in a European people as such. The important point in the present context is that the idea of Europe should not be approached from a subject-centred perspective as the expression of a collective subject, such as a notion of peoplehood. Instead of a notion of a European people or a European identity, it is more meaningful to

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speak of a European society. By the end of the nineteenth century, while a transnational European political order was not created and would not emerge until after the Second World War, it is possible to see the direction of social and economic change leading to common structures. As Michael Mann has written ‘What we call societies are only loose aggregates of diverse, overlapping, intersecting power networks’ (Mann 1993: 506). European societies were not only entangled in each other, but were embroiled through colonization in the wider global context. Already in 1893 Emile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society saw signs of an emerging European society emerging from increasingly common ways of life. What happens, he wondered, when two collective consciences confront each other. ‘For one people to be penetrated by another’, he argued, ‘it must cease to hold to an exclusive patriotism, and learn another which is more comprehensive’. Durkheim goes on to argue: ‘… this relation of facts can be directly observed in most striking fashion in the international division of labour history offers us. It can truly be said that it has never been produced except in Europe and in our time. But it was at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century that a common conscience of European societies began to be formed’ (Durkheim 1960: 281). Durkheim like many of the fin-de-siècle thinkers was deeply pessimistic that a genuinely European collective conscience would emerge and overcome the aggressive nationalism that was bringing Europe closer to war. Though he opposed the negatively defined conservative view of the move from the cohesive world of community to the individualistic world of society, he was ambivalent about the merits of society; he did not think modern society, because of its differentiated structures, could recover the traditional idea of community as a fusion of culture and society; yet, ‘the social’ was something deeply ambiguous. It could provide the individual with more autonomy, but it could also undermine it in the formation of anomie. Durkheim was one of the first thinkers to reflect on the idea of a European society as an emergent reality. The specificity of a European society for Durkheim lay in two dimensions. In terms of its social structures, it was characterized by the growing differentiation in institutions and by increasing size in space and demography. However, what is more central is the question of solidarity in a

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differentiated society. His sociology pointed to the view that social integration required a cooperative framework for social groups and one in which education would play an ever greater role in generating cultural cohesion around the formation of generalized values. The idea of how a society represents itself and creates a space which constitutes, what he called, the ‘meeting ground’ between two collective consciences is an issue of central importance in understanding the cosmopolitan dimension of social change. Durkheim’s reflections on social change and the making of European society remained undeveloped. Later sociologists offered more comprehensive accounts that are important correctives to the one-sided emphasis on nation-state formation in the making of European modernity. Talcott Parsons (1971) noted three social revolutions that laid the societal foundations of modern society: the industrial revolution, the democratic revolution and the educational revolution. Despite the limitations of his evolutionary approach and its conception of transition to new stages, his characterization of the emergence of modern society through these three social revolutions provides a useful perspective on major societal change. By the end of the nineteenth century, the basic shape of European society was made as a result of social and economic change deriving from these social revolutions. Since c.1800, industrialization transformed Europe from an agricultural to an industrial society in which class structures emerged. It was accompanied by urbanization and population growth. The second industrial revolution, which was based on new technologies such as electricity and chemicals made possible mass production, enhanced this momentum and brought about a transformation in all aspects of social life. In this period, the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a huge drop in fertility rates as well as in infant mortality along with a rise in life expectancy. This development, the so-called demographic transition, brought about population growth. In 1800, the population for Europe as a whole including Russia was 188 million. By 1900, the population for England, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands was more than 400 million, while in 1550 when these five countries represented more than 50% of the population of Europe excluding Russia, it was c.80 million (Livi-Bacci 2000: 7). This was mostly a development of the second half of the nineteenth century,

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which was a period of rapid population growth. From c.1840s to 1014, about 50 million Europeans emigrated to other parts of the world, mostly North and South America. The nineteenth century was not only the century of the rise of the nation, but it also saw the rise of classes. Classes and nations were of equal importance in the making of modern society; both arose alongside each other. The result was less uniformity than a more complicated picture of class conflict and the growth of industrial capitalism, which exerted the most pervasive impact on Europe. Within a relatively short span of time, European societies had become highly urbanized with manufacturing and commerce replacing agriculture; social relations everywhere were transformed by new kinds of conflicts that arose from the inequalities and exploitation produced by industrial capitalism. The growth of industrial capitalism, in particular from 1850, had as much significance for the shaping of European society that nationalism had, and as suggested earlier, the idea of the nation was very much a product of the formation of class society, for the nation gave a political and cultural expression to class. In the view of Marx, it gave to class a false consciousness that defused it of its potential capacity to bring about political change. The democratic revolution was in part a response to the need to extend political representation to a wider spectrum of society and to accommodate the demands of class, including the new middle-class and professional groups. The process of democratization, while having its roots in earlier developments, increasingly brought about the widening of political inclusion through the extension of the franchise and political reform to the working class and later to women. As argued in the previous chapter, the basis of the process of democratization was a societal model in which political and economic power had to be compromised to meet the demands of civil society and in particular the demands of organized labour. However, nationalism too tended to make demands for greater representation. Class and nation may have been the two most consequential developments for the shaping of modern European society. Often neglected in accounts of European modernity is the educational revolution. The expansion and development of education since the second half of the nineteenth century were the notable features of European modernity.

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Europe was relatively advanced in the development of education and science more generally. Despite educational segregation along class and gender lines before the twentieth century, the development of educational institutions was decisive for the formation of nation-states and national identity. Its gradual democratization was an essential condition for individual self-realization as well as for collective identities. The extension of education made possible citizenship and extended the sphere of rights to include the right to education. More fundamental was the extension of literacy and the growth of new media that all depended on literacy. The creation of universities and institutions of higher education and training since the early nineteenth century was a further crucial feature of European modernity that established a knowledge basis for social development. By the beginning of the twentieth century, major social and economic transformation that took place over the previous century brought about an increased homogeneity in social trends. It is not possible to speak of societal convergence and the disappearance of divisions or plurality, since national and regional differences remained, for the uneven development of industrialization ensured that societal convergence would not be possible. Conflict far from declining increased as a result of greater democratization as well to militarization and the creation of war-oriented economies. However, it is possible to speak of an increased homogeneity brought about by nation-state formation, industrialization and the formation of classes, a new range of social and cultural institutions, whereby common structures and institutions became adopted; the specific form that these took varied and all produced different outcomes in terms of patterns of consensus and conflict and the relationship between elites and masses. Nation-states tended to be on the whole not too different in their modes of social organization and institutional structures. Common architectural designs also played a role in shaping national trajectories of European-wide traditions (see Bergdoll 2000). Architecture since 1750 encapsulated the spirit of modernity, which was also reflected in the model Paris offered to many newly created nations, especially since the reforms of Hausmann. Paris was in every sense the capital birth of the nineteenth century and the capital of modernity (see Harvey 2005). Underlying the differences that

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did of course exist, some of which were very large and generated outcomes as different as fascism, state socialism and constitutional democracy, were relatively similar societal processes. Moreover, European societies were also increasingly intertwined to such an extent that it does not make sense to speak of separate societies. Nationalism and the nation-state were a principle of separation, but the social and economic reality was different. The economies of Europe were becoming increasingly interlinked and underpinned by the gold standard; indeed, though they went to war with each other, France and Germany were closely linked by the beginning of the twentieth century. Railways connected more and more parts of Europe. It is possible to speak of similar logics of social and system integration at work in different parts of Europe whereby similar dynamics and processes produce both common and different outcomes. The technological forces that connected Europe were not unrelated to the wider global connectivity that linked Europe to the rest of the world. The railway was not only a European development but was an effective tool of colonial expansion by which industrial capitalism could gain access to new markets; the steamship and the telegraph were also other technological means by which Europe in the age of empire and industry became linked to distant parts of the world.

The Allure of Empire Any account of formation of a European self-understanding in the nineteenth century will have to consider the place and significance of colonialism. Europe cannot be understood endogenously as somehow creating itself but, as argued in earlier chapters, was formed through relations with the rest of the world. As Said (1994: 4) has claimed, what is required is a perspective on history as shaped by ‘overlapping territories and intertwined histories’. Such a perspective must be a global one, for Europe was shaped by encounters with the rest of the world, which from the mid-nineteenth century were largely colonial and involved the construction of race as a category through which Europe was constituted. Both race and empire were constitutive of Europe.

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The nineteenth century was not only the century of the rise of the European nation-state, but was also the age of empire; indeed, both were connected. In this period, most European countries were colonial empires, either land or sea based. Much of Central and Eastern Europe was ruled by either the Habsburg, Russian or Ottoman Empires, while in the west were largely sea-based empires with overseas colonies. Several of these sea-based empires also acquired European territories and many sought territorial expansion within the European area: Britain ruled over Ireland, the French sought universal dominance over Europe until defeat in 1815, Denmark ruled over Norway until 1814 when it acquired Greenland as a Danish colony. However, the imperial drive lay in overseas colonization. Following the decline of Portugal and Spain and the independence of their colonies in Central and South America by the early nineteenth century, the independence of the USA in 1776, the age of European empire-building began with the conquest of Africa and large parts of Asia. Most of the Western European nation-states acquired overseas territories in the course of the nineteenth century. Between 1870 and 1900 virtually all of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, was under European control, largely British, French, Dutch, Belgian and German. However, most Western European countries were involved in the so-called scramble for Africa, including Sweden and Denmark; Italy finally acquired control of Ethiopia in 1936. Many of these were minor acquisitions, such as the Danish overseas empire which included a number of islands in the West Indies or the German acquisition of Western Samoa and did not lead directly to colonization, as in the case of Ethiopia. Empire-building and colonization did not always go together. Britain acquired direct rule over India by 1858, occupied Egypt since 1882 and gained considerable power over the Chinese by 1900, but with the exception of Hong Kong, neither colonized it nor incorporated it into its expanding empire. By 1914, Britain had created the largest world empire since the Roman Empire. France built up a considerable overseas empire but did not rival Britain, which concentrated on overseas colonization. France gained control over Algeria by 1847 when it became a French colony. There was no overall pattern to European imperialism and economic advantages did not always follow, as illustrated by German colonialism

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in Africa or the French bid for the control of Egypt, and in the early decades of the century, not all of it was under state control as in King Leopold’s colony in the Congo before it was taken over by the Belgian state. By the late nineteenth century, Spain, once the leading colonial power, had become an impoverished minor European nation with a minor possession in North Africa. Many colonial missions were originally neither attempts to build empires nor efforts at conquest, but the outcomes of colonial companies that operated with state sanction and in many cases had to struggle to gain state support, as the early history of the Spain conquistadors illustrates. The earlier exploration of the South Pacific prior to the nineteenth century did not always lead to colonization (Bitterli 1986). By the 1870s, colonization became a national project for almost every country and was related to nation-state formation and industrialization (Halperin 2007). The rush to acquire overseas territories was often driven by no better reason than to prevent another country getting there first. Imperialism as a state policy became too a means of buying off class discontent. The term ‘imperialism’ lost its earlier pejorative meaning when it was associated with the Napoleonic wars and acquired a positive goal for states (Kumar 2009: 292–294). The Berlin Congress in 1884 was a pan-Europe attempt towards organized European colonialism. The major imperial powers with stakes in Africa (Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and Portugal) met to agree on how the continent should be divided. In effect, since the mid-nineteenth century a state of exception had existed whereby the norms by which European states were governed were suspended in the territories they acquired. Genocides were common, as in the German-led Herero War in Namibia, 1904–1907. Other legacies of colonialism are more ambivalent, such as Denmark’s colonization of Greenland (Rud 2017). However, it is difficult to speak of European imperialism in general, since these were very different processes and belonged to different eras. Spanish imperialism was based on conquest and the pursuit of gold and silver, while French and British empire-building was primarily driven by trade and commerce rather than the search for natural resources (Pagden 1995: 66–68; Halperin 2007). The striking aspect of European imperialism in general is that it occurred on a significant scale outside the Americas relatively late, and when the rush started, it occurred with

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great speed, fuelled by the industrial revolution and technological innovations. European overseas imperialism in Asia and Africa was driven by two kinds of expansion: commercial and territorial, neither of which entirely coincided, but both were connected, with the latter a kind of ‘battering ram’ for the former: territorial imperialism could break open markets that resisted free trade (Darwin 2009: 16). The French favoured assimilation while the British preferred indirect rule though local elites (Cannadine 2001). By the end of the nineteenth century, indirect rule at least within the British Empire had become the norm and was backed up by the coercive power of the state. Despite the conquest of large parts of the world by European powers, much of Asia lay outside direct European territorial colonization: the major examples being Iran, Turkey, Thailand, Nepal, Korea, Japan, much of China and Afghanistan (until the Russian and later US and British invasions). Only Africa was entirely colonized, though the Islamic West resisted and Ethiopia was never colonized as such. This was an era when colonization was normal, for it was not only Western countries that practised colonization. Before the arrival of the modern nation-state, empires have generally been the norm in world history, as in the examples of the Alexandrian, Roman, Russian, Ottoman, Ming Empires, Persia under the Safavids as well as the Inca and Aztec Empires in Central and South America. Indeed, whether the notion of empire is the right word to characterize these different political orders is another matter. The notion of empire, like the notion of nation, is a contested term that has often an imprecise meaning when it comes especially to the pre-modern age when empires were the normal forms of state formation rather than the exception. Yet, it is evident that by the mid-nineteenth century both nation and state-building processes were embedded in colonialism. There was a European-wide movement to structure the global economy in a way that benefited European capitalism. Some powers were more successful than others at this, but all were implicated. This includes the German Reich and the Scandinavian countries (see Naun and Nordin 2013).1 Imperialism was a method to embed European capitalism in the economies of the rest of the world. The acquisition of overseas empires brought great wealth to Europe and had a formative impact on nationalism, which stood for a selective kind of emancipation. The

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nation was seen as having an imperial mission to rule as much of the world as it could. Bismarck decided it was in the interests of Prussia to abandon attempts to rule the German-speaking world and instead acquire territory in Africa. Imperial nationalism, or social imperialism, was one way in which the masses found identification with the state. The title of Empress of India, given to Queen Victoria, was for such domestic purposes. The allure of empire too was irresistible for liberal nationalist movements seeking autonomy, as the example of the Irish Home Rule movement in the nineteenth century illustrates. The Irish Parliamentary Party supported Home Rule for Ireland, but wanted Ireland to remain loyal to the crown and empire. The Catholic Church too supported the British Empire, which was seen as an indispensable for the worldwide spread of Christianity. European liberalism was also enthusiastic about empire. While the leadership of the British Liberal Party under Gladstone was opposed to imperial expansion, many liberals were strongly in favour and promoted imperial liberalism. Some of the main figures in political philosophy, such as de Tocqueville, Locke and Mill, were deeply implicated in imperialism. Mill opposed liberal government in India, for instance, and de Tocqueville supported France’s colonization of Algeria. Generally, liberalism did not see a contradiction between democracy and human rights at home while depriving the colonized of rights and self-government. Nineteenth-century liberalism had accepted social Darwinism and the idea of a struggle of nations and races. Underlying imperialism was a myth of Western Civilization and of the racial superiority of Europeans. This was part of a system of knowledge that made imperialism possible, which Said has characterized as ‘Orientalism’ (Said 1979). This system of knowledge was embedded in sciences such as anthropology, criminology, geography and cartography as well as in literature and travel writing. Europeans acquired great skill in collecting, translation and categorizing artefacts, languages and information which provided a cultural basis for economic and political mastery of much of the world. In all of these modes of knowledge, the category of race loomed large. Although European countries were in competition in the race to acquire overseas colonies in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, they were conscious of belonging to the same race and

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constructed a notion of a European race. The older principles of legitimation used by the Spanish to justify their conquests were less suitable for the age. The notion of a hierarchy of races and the superiority of Europe provided a justification for colonial rule, which was based on the separation of colony from metropole. This geographical and political difference was mirrored in a distinction of different races, which was variously interpreted as having a biological or a cultural basis. The idea of Europe as a racial entity gave to Europe what it was otherwise lacking, namely a foundation in something other than politics. In this way, the idea of Europe acquired a reality it had previously lacked. Europeans who worked in the colonies as soldiers, administrators, educators, traders, etc., gained a European consciousness as much as a national consciousness; many were able to acquire status and power that they would not have had at home. The notion of belonging to the white European race served to link colonial civil servants, soldiers, officers, merchants, etc., into a community that was not only national but racial. The British poet of imperial nationalism, Kipling, celebrated this in his famous poem, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, whose message is that Europe has a mission to bring civilization to the world. The inconvenient facts of history that the civilizations of Asia were older and superior to those of Europe was solved with the notion that these were in decline and that Europe was their inheritor and saviour. The missionary zeal of Christianity lent itself to colonization. The introduction of race and the idea of racial superiority by Europeans may have helped to define Europe, but it also could be used against European colonialism when it was taken over and used to redefine non-European cultural identities, as in the notion of the racial superiority of the Han Chinese race or the idea of a Bengali race and Hindu race (Darwin 2009: 348–349). Much of European thought and culture was embroiled in empire and in racism, but this took many different forms, ranging from cultural to biological notions of race. Eurocentrism was pervasive, but this did not necessarily always amount to racism or a pan-European ideology of imperialism. The Boer War in 1899–1902 was a war fought between two groups of settlers, British- and Dutch-born farmers. Opposition to empire and to slavery is also an important current of the age of empire.

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In Britain, there was considerable rethinking of empire after the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Some of this was opposed to empire, but it was mostly an attempt to rethink the imperial project in the face of major resistance. Cannadine (2001) has described this in terms of the construction of a monumental ‘ornamentalism’, namely a vast imperial structure based on the instrumentalization of status designed to incorporate local elites into the metropolitan project. However, this edifice based on alliances with local elites was not simply a matter of negotiation and accommodation, but underpinned by notions of civilizational differences. As Mantana (2000) has demonstrated, 1857 marked a turning point in British imperial ideology when the earlier liberal and reformist approach based on the idea of a civilizing mission was abandoned as it was seen to have been a failure. In place of this universalistic ideology, a new and pernicious one emerged that recognized unbridgeable cultural differences. Rather than embarking on a project of reform and modernization, a new culturalist project was put in place that aimed to rule through native categories, indirect rule, and managed by the crown rather than being left to the East India Company. Thus was born the notion of a traditional society locked into a different cultural world that was a contrast to the imperial modern world which henceforth would cease to try to transform its belief structure. While liberal discourse had constructed natives as amenable to reform and civilization, the new ideology proclaimed them irredeemably different. In effect, as Mantana argues, this left empire without a moral justification. This was the source of a new colonial racism. Awareness of the evils of colonization and slavery had a major impact on European publics in the nineteenth century. However, opposition to slavery, abolished in Britain in 1807, was compatible with colonial rule, which did not require slavery, and was generally regarded as inefficient before it was considered to be immoral. From the abolition of slavery to colonial independence, the debate over empire had a formative impact on European democracy and exerted a long shadow over the twentieth century. Most European countries were shaped by their colonial past. The consequences of empire for domestic politics were right-wing and often fascist trends. The Spanish Civil War and the subsequent defeat of the Republic were in effect an outcome of the loss of Spanish

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dominance in Africa and the creation of a large and dissatisfied cadre of officers who found themselves in a clash of culture with the newly created republic. The coup of 17 July 1936 that led to Franco’s eventual seizure of power was made possible by the Spanish African Army which spear-headed the invasion that led to one of the most repressive regimes in modern European history. The French-Algerian War and the eventual independence of Algeria had a formative impact on France which in effect led to a civil war. Since its incorporation into the France, Algeria had not been a colony but a département of the French state (Hansen 2002). Until 1975, Portugal retained a rigid control over Angola and Mozambique, which gained independence only after a long struggle against the Portuguese dictatorship. The thesis, then, is not that Europe and empire are the same or that everything is to be explained by imperialism. Colonization was not external to European societies; the territories may have been overseas, but it was also inside them in their economies, the modes of government, systems of knowledge and in their cultural self-understanding. Europe gained knowledge of itself through gaining knowledge of the peoples it had colonized. This was not always despotic or in the service of imperial power, but the result was much the same. The advancement of democracy in Europe was in some respects due to the developments in the colonies. The Haiti Slave Revolt in 1791 was important not only in leading to the end of slavery there and to colonial independence of the colony Saint-Dominique, but sparked off much debate in France on the meaning of freedom and democracy (James 1980; Buck-Morss 2009). The Haiti Revolution is also a reminder that democratic change in the colony is not only the result of the diffusion of European ideas, but that the opposite might be the case. The impact of the ideas of the American Revolution, too, had such a formative influence on European democracy, as did the later twentieth exit from colonization when the former colonial power became multi-ethnic societies. Europe was shaped by its colonies in both positive and negative ways; but in the end it lost its colonies and much of its identity in the twentieth century has been shaped by the exit from empire (Buettner 2014).

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Europe is thus best seen in terms less of separate nation-states than of transnational states, connected to each other as well as to overseas territories. This means that these states should be seen as shaped by the context of the transnational rather than the exclusively national (see Magubane 2005). For this reason, modern Europe cannot be separated from the legacy of colonialism and from the responsibilities that go with this legacy. However, this must not be exaggerated since the basic structures of most European states were established prior to the seventeenth century and in some cases (Spain, France, England) earlier. The formative processes that led to the European state system were primarily the outcome of the internal transformation of what Tilly (1990) has referred to as capital and coercion. Nonetheless, the condition of empire was constitutive of Europe from the nineteenth century, but not before; it gave to Europe a subjectivity based on race and made possible a new global economy in which European powers gained global hegemony. Above all empire gave to Europe a new global imaginary both was complemented by and competed with its national imaginary. Even if Europeans could not in the end rule the world they succeeded to a considerable extent in shaping it. As with all empires, imperial overstretch was reached and European decline began not long after Europe ruled the world. But what survived was the worldwide diffusion of European ideas, products and institutions and within Europe the legacy of empire created post-colonial societies that remained tied in multiple ways with newly independent nations. The history of the world in the twentieth century was in many ways the outcome of the adoption of European aspects of Europe’s own model of modernity, in particular its model of statehood, to vastly different conditions. The outcome was often as detrimental to Europe as it was to those countries that sought to adopt European modernity.

Note 1. For a review of the literature on colonization and late German imperial history, see Fitzpatrick (2018).

10 Europe as a World Historical Region: A Global Perspective on the European Formation of Modernity

As argued in the preceding chapters, the shape of Europe was not set at some point in early history and the form it now takes was never predetermined.1 Yet, at a point in history Europe embarked on a path that gave to it a certain specificity as a historical region of the world. But what defines this? Is it defined by consciousness or by societal structures? At what point in history do we take consciousness of the object to define the broad parameters of the object under investigation? As an object of consciousness, as argued in earlier chapters, Europe did not exist in any meaningful sense until the sixteenth century, but yet we speak of the history of Europe going back at least a thousand years earlier. This earlier history cannot be disengaged from the wider inter-civilizational context that is not confined to Europe. While this early history provided cultural orientations for Europe and created a basic cultural model, it underwent further transformation with modernity. The argument made in this book is that a certain developmental path— by no means path dependency—was formed in the twelfth century and was further consolidated by the seventeenth century, but it is not until the advent of the modern age, roughly from the mid-eighteenth century that we can speak of Europe as a historical reality in terms of culture © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_10

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and society. Europe is more than a discursive construction that can be related to ‘the idea of Europe’, and it is also a societal formation in terms of economy, political and social structures, and it is also related to subject formation in terms of identity and consciousness. In the course of the last two hundred years or so, the formation of a European modernity gave shape to Europe. However, as argued in the previous chapter, modernity was entangled in relation to the non-world world, which now included the Americas and Africa. Colonialism changed the nature of Europe and gave to it a new form that was a considerable modification of the developmental path that began with in the Middle Ages. The approach adopted in this book is to take the framework of modernity as the context in which to view the making of Europe as a historical world region. This did not set it off from its previous history, but it marked a point of transition in consciousness and in social structures that shaped the present day. Chapter 8 offered a preliminary account, but this will be returned to in the second section of this chapter. For present purposes, it can be noted that it entails a societal configuration of state, economy and society relations that is shaped by a cognitive model and a mode of knowledge that makes possible the self-constitution of the object through reference to a range of ideas that are characteristically modern. A defining feature of modernity is ideas that make possible the transformation of the present by human agency. There is a huge variability in the forms that modern societies take, but it is possible to specify what is distinctive about Europe in terms of the formation of modernity, which had long-lasting societal consequences and had an early formative period that led to a European cultural model based on an epistemic core. There are essentially two ways of addressing the question of the specificity of Europe. One way is to look at the endogenous formation of Europe out of its constituent parts, and the other way is to locate Europe in a wider global context. The first approach to the question will be given in the third section. However, a fuller account will require an external perspective beyond Europe. This, then, is the aim of the chapter, namely to explore what can be said about the nature of European modernity when viewed in a transnational or global perspective as a world region. This will be tentatively attempted in the fourth

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section. One approach to this question is simply to examine the range of external influences on Europe and thus correct a purely internalist or endogenous account of the rise of Europe. However, placing Europe in a global context offers a more far-reaching perspective than simply accounting for the impact of exogenous influences, important as this is for a full account of the making of Europe.2 The global perspective on modernity offered here is an attempt to illuminate what is distinctive about a particular formation of modernity, such as the European one. This chapter thus seeks to answer a very big question and, to paraphrase Charles Tilly (1984), will make some huge comparisons. The chapter is concerned with Europe viewed in global context. This however raises the question of defining the spatial and temporal reference points and establishing congruence between both, such that the term Europe is a sociologically meaningful category. So the concern is with the formation of modernity in Europe. The defining features of Europe are characteristics of modernity, as opposed to other attributes, such as nations or states, continents, civilizations or the notion of the West.

Problems in Defining Europe The proposal for an analysis of Europe from a global perspective while attractive on a theoretical level is fraught with methodological difficulties. The challenges in many ways relate to problems of comparative analysis and issues of Eurocentrism, quite apart from the immense difficulty of any kind of a global analysis.3 Comparative analysis that assumes national societies as coherent wholes has been much undermined by developments relating to the impact of globalization and cosmopolitan conceptions of societies as interrelated and heterogeneous (see Haupt and Kocka 2009). One of the main difficulties lies in specifying the referents, which in this case are Europe and its world comparators. This immediately raises the question of what are the units of analysis that correspond to Europe and whether the differences are too great to be comparable. Obviously, this also requires clarity on what we mean by Europe in broad geopolitical and historical terms as a bounded entity when it comes to global contextualization. The analysis begins

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with a discussion on what is missing in existing approaches in the human and social sciences to the definition of the specificity of Europe. The traditional approach is to regard Europe as a continent, and thus, comparable units are other continents. Continents have now been much criticized as viable units of analysis (see Lewis and Wigen 1997). This argument, as we have seen in Chapter 1, also gives too much explanatory weight to geography. Continents are artificial constructions and have had highly variable histories. The idea of Europe, while often associated with a continent or subcontinent, has long ceased to have a continental meaning. The notion of a continent is considerably more problematic when it comes to other parts of the world, Africa and Asia given their size and diversity. The notion of Asia is particularly a problem in that the term is largely a Western invention and not normally used by the Chinese or Japanese and has not been central to India. It is difficult to place such vastly different societies as Iran and Japan in the same category. Such problems also beset the proposal to make Eurasia a unit of analysis (Hann 2016).4 The problem with Africa as a continent also presents significant problems, given the huge historical and geographical difference between the sub-Saharan area and the Arabicspeaking regions to the north, the divide between the Christian and Islamic states, and the fact that in a formative period of European history the Mediterranean Sea united northern Africa and much of southern Europe. The notion of separate continents was a product of the divergence of those regions that Braudel once saw as constituting the unity of the Mediterranean world. More generally, the notion of continents fails to address one of the key insights that emerged out of global history approaches over the past two decades or so, namely a vision of the world as interconnected rather than as separate. There are now numerous studies that demonstrate not only interconnections arising from global influences, but also the existence of entire maritime regions, such as the Indian Ocean, Micronesia and the Pacific Rim, the Atlantic World (see, e.g., Benjamin 2009; Fawaz and Bayly 2001). There is the additional problem of defining a continent in the first instance, as the case of Europe itself illustrates, since there are no natural geographical criteria that distinguish what has often been called the western peninsula of Asia or where the internal borders of Eurasia lie. Historians will

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continue to debate the question of the unity of the history of Africa, for instance, or the unity of European history, but the idea of a geographical continent has played little importance in such arguments. Its shadow, however, remains in that such terms remarkably continue to persist as meta-spatial terms signifying a civilizational unity that transcends diversity. It is ultimately a testimony to the poverty of theory that when all else fails, geography fulfils the function of a definition, but one that presupposes other definitions and begs further questions. An alternative but related notion to continents is the concept of civilization. The old-fashioned nineteenth-century notion of Western civilization as a universal model that comes to replace all world civilizations has been for long discarded. Since the work of S. N. Eisenstadt and more recently Johann Arnason (2003), the rise of civilizational analysis has put civilizations back on the map in ways that overcome the discredited ideological associations of the older notion of civilization as a singular entity, for civilizational analysis is concerned with the plurality of civilizations and does not operate with a hierarchy of civilizations. Moreover, civilizations in this view are not underpinned by geographical parameters such as continents. Civilizational analysis has been discussed in Chapter 1. It can be noted that the advantages and disadvantages include the following. The concern with multiple civilizations and the related notion of multiple forms of modernity emphasizes pluralization in contrast to the concern with universality in the classical approaches to modernization; it offers a perspective that is wider than nations and while capturing tendencies towards pluralization it does not over-pluralize global analysis; it places a strong emphasis on the encounters of civilizations and thus avoids a view of the world based on separate cultures or a unitary and homogenous view of the world shaped by a single developmental logic such as westernization. On the negative side, it somewhat down plays world areas that cannot be so easily explained in terms of civilizations, by which is generally meant the civilizations of Europe and Asia. A weakness of civilizational analysis is that the units in question tend to be cultures formed from the major world religions, and as a consequence, the approach is weak in accounting for modernity, which is not necessarily tied to a civilizational origin. While a civilizational perspective does provide a partial account of long-run historical

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analysis, it cannot fully account for the major attributes of Europe and it is limited in addressing current issues and developments. Europe is certainly in part a civilization, albeit one that is best understood as a constellation of civilizations, for it was never entirely shaped by one civilization but has many (see Delanty 2013). The recognition of a plurality of inter-acting civilizations is a step in the right direction in terms of a long-term formative account of the origins and rise of Europe, but it is insufficient to account for some of the key features of modern Europe, such as those described above. Replacing civilizations with nation-states is obviously one way out of this problem of larger-scale units such as continents or civilizations. This is clearly implicit in the approach of much historical analysis, as in the work of Michael Mann, for instance, or in mainstream histories of Europe. A key problem in any global contextualization of Europe is that a comparison based on nation-states will not necessarily tell us much that is interesting about Europe, which is more than the sum of its constitutive parts. Since there are about 196 countries—192 UN member states—in the world, a global sociological approach will need a unit of analysis that is greater than nation-states but smaller than the world itself. The 28 nation-states that make up the present European Union are themselves of greatly varying size making comparison difficult and of little benefit when it comes to accounting for the specificity of Europe as a reality in itself. While many nation-states outside the European context are very large and for many purposes (see Wagner 2012) are useful comparators—Brazil, China, India, Russia and the USA—when it comes to issues relating to demography, economic development and political regulation, the fact remains that Europe is not a nation-state despite the growing political importance of the European Union. A global analysis that goes beyond a superficial account of socioeconomic and interstate issues will have to address civilizational questions and offer a long-run historical perspective, but it will also have to address major historical transformations in modern society and which are not simply civilizational in terms of path dependent processes that began with the Axial Age, the reference point for much of civilizational theory. In view of the limits of nations, civilizations and continents,

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what then is the alternative? An alternative proposal is to see Europe as a world region comparable, therefore, to other world regions. The argument advanced here is that a world regional approach offers a potentially more fruitful basis for global analysis than a country-specific approach or one based on continents. World regions by definition are larger than nations, and while having a civilizational dimension, they are neither reducible to nations nor to a single civilization. A unit of measurement is needed that is more than a country, but smaller than the globe itself. In short, world regions appear to fulfil this criterion. To be sure, most world regions are heavily influenced by particular nation-states, but they are not entirely shaped by them. Indeed, in many cases nation-states were relatively late developments, especially in Asia and in Africa. As has often been noted, for much of history most peoples lived within empires not nation-states (see Burbank and Cooper 2010). The imperial model, as best illustrated by Brazil following independence, was often the preferred model for statehood and others that did not formally adopt it did so in practice, as the example of the USA reveals in the expansionist ambitions of the thirteen colonies (Mota 2014). Where traditional approaches looked at the world in terms of homogenous units, generally continentally defined civilizations, a world region’s approach is arguably more attuned to a heterogeneous view of the world. World regions are heterogeneous in a number of ways. World regions are unavoidably overlapping and thus correct one of the chief failures of the traditional view of the world as composed of separate units that interact, but are not formed in any significant way from the interactions. Moreover, world regions are not necessarily defined by a conception of global space in terms of centres and peripheries. Indeed, specific world regions are more meaningful units in which to see centre and periphery relations at work. In the allegedly post-hegemonic world of contemporary global politics in which a plurality of global centres of power has consolidated, the notion of world regions is all the more relevant. A world region approach5 is also a much-needed corrective to dichotomous conceptions of East versus West, North versus South or northern hemisphere constructions of the West. It thus offers an alternative to Eurocentric conceptions of the world and approaches to history that take the history of Europe and

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North America as the universal reference points. It may also be suggested that consciousness of, and contestation about, world regions is now a significant part of the self-understanding of many countries as they re-position themselves and redefine their identities in a world of changing borders. As part of a wider region, nation-states too are defining themselves in ways that include the reality of interconnections and shared trajectories as well as reinterpretations of the past. The increasing importance of transnational regional organizations6 undoubtedly also plays a role in shaping such macro-regional ideas. It is inevitably the case that this will be highly varied, with some regions having stronger identities than others. However, despite these advantages, a world region approach is not without problems when it comes to comparative historical sociological analysis. Many if not all regions changed their shape in history and several of what are today considered world regions are contemporary constructions and are contested. The result is that there is no clear consensus on the defining attributes of many world regions, which are often constructed according to the requirements of the area of interest (health, security, demography). While they are numerically greater than civilizations, they are composed in many cases of very large and diverse countries, to a point that their usefulness may be questioned (see Anderson 1998). This is especially the case with regard to Asia, with numerous overlapping regions as in the Middle East and in the multiple ways Africa and Asia overlap. A problematical example is Turkey, which in historical terms cannot be separated from the Ottoman legacy, but the region that this constituted does not exist as a world region today. Another contemporary example of how volatile regions are is the conflict in the Ukraine around its geopolitical position within the Russian or European regional constellation. In sum, the geographical notion of world regions is useful, but in need of modification for the purpose of a sociological global analysis if the temptation of chronocentrism—taking the spatial constellations of the present—as timeless is to be avoided. Undoubtedly, fruitful results can be obtained from an analysis based on existing models and relatively short time spans. As largely geopolitical configurations, world regions are of limited use when it comes to long-run historical analysis since

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world regions are not necessarily world historical regions. This is due in part to the difference between present and past world regions, but also due to the internal differences within many world regions. The concept has been much influenced by a geographical conception of historical space and by the dictates of largely Western science in its need for an area studies categorization of the world. For this reason, I argue that a more temporal and long-run sociological approach needs to incorporate a focus on major historical transformations based on particular formations of modernity in order to account for the historically changing forms of world regions and comparisons between them. The notion of modernity offers this level of generality while at the same time allowing for variety in its historical forms. In the next step, this will be explored around the notion of formations of modernity and then illustrated with respect to Europe.

Modernity as a Framework The concept of modernity has come to mean both a particular condition defined by certain ideas and consciousness, on the one side, and on the other, the institutional matrixes of modern society. It thus captures both the philosophical and the sociological dimensions of the term as it has come to be used in a broad range of scholarship in the human and social sciences in recent years, complementing, if not replacing, notions of modernization. The approach put forwarded here is influenced by the notion of ‘multiple modernities’ as originally advanced by Eisenstadt (2000, 2003) as a theory addressed to the global diffusion of modernity and the recognition of its diverse cultural and political forms. A key insight emerging from his work and those who followed him is that there is not a singular Western or European modernity that is transplanted to the rest of the world but a multiplicity of different forms. However, I avoid the problem that besets the multiple modernity paradigm of an over-pluralization of modernity by which every nation-state embodies a different modernity. In this view, modernity is not a numerical condition as such, but a future-oriented condition in which societies seek to transform themselves in the light of certain

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ideas that have come to be defined as modern. Additionally, Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities framework is limited by an over-emphasis on what he called ‘cultural programmes’ that supposedly derive from the civilizations of the Axial Age and in which the European variant that later crystallized is given too much weight in shaping other world varieties of modernity. Moreover, it locates the common starting point too early and overstresses purely intellectual forces, neglecting, for example, the pivotal role played by Roman civil law and formation of the universities in the medieval period. The proposal made in this book is to define modernity as a condition that is constituted by certain ideas or principles that form the basis of, following Strydom (2011), what can be termed its cognitive model, which influences the shape of the cultural models and societal forms of modernity. These ideas, or ideas of reason, can be variously described as freedom, liberty, autonomy, collective and individual self-determination, equality. Such ideas make possible, following Castoriadis (1987) and Taylor (2004), a ‘social imaginary’, a self-projection of society, a way of imagining future possibilities. Second, the nature of these ideas is that they provide a basis for challenging power. Modern societies are thus characterized by contestation on the basis of these ideas, which form the structuring content of their cognitive model and provide them with an epistemic structure or mode of knowledge. The nature of these ideas is that they are regulative and reflective in offering modes of thinking, ways of viewing the world, a grammar of principles a social imaginary, etc. They embody, in addition to the cognitive level, normative, and aesthetic components. Unlike religious systems, modernity does not provide ready-made answers to fundamental questions, but only reference points and a lens through which the world is seen. Modernity entails a consciousness of being modern and of a condition that needs to be realized in social forms. A feature of modernity is that these ideas that give it form do not dictate how they should be realized. The cognitive model of modernity is therefore more akin to a set of reference points that require interpretation in concrete historical situations and are thus actualized in specific cultural models and societal forms. Consequently, there is no single or universal logic that modernity takes since the guiding ideas of modernity need to be interpreted and it is

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inevitable that they will be differently interpreted in different places and in different times.7 It is this condition that gives rise to a plurality of cultural models and societal forms of modernity. Moreover, all interpretations are essentially contested. Above all, modernity is a transformative project based on a social imaginary that seeks to create a new kind of society: Social and political order is based on a vision of the future rather than the past, which is consequently reinterpreted in the light of the demands of the present. There is a strong emphasis in it on the capacity of human agency to transform the world. This is what gives to the condition of modernity a basis for major historical transformations in the social and political constitution of society. The form that modern society takes can thus be seen as the result of specific interpretations of the regulative ideas. In many cases, this will entail a combination of ideas, such as freedom and autonomy or freedom and equality. The most influential cultural and political movements in modern society, such as romanticism, socialism, conservatism, republicanism and liberalism, have all derived from different combinations of these key ideas, to which we can now add freedom and religion. A feature of all these movements was their continuous transformation in the light of contestation over their defining ideas. Thus, nationalism, for example, was variously shaped by the diverse syntheses of romanticism, liberalism and republicanism. This was also the case with the idea of Europe, which had no stable meaning throughout history. This is not to say that modernity is entirely open in terms of its consciousness, though it can be argued in line with a postmodern perspective, that modernity has become increasingly uncertain in its orientation. However, a feature of modernity is the pursuit of knowledge, in particular scientific knowledge and the belief that truth can be established by the appropriate application of knowledge. Modern societies can thus be viewed as knowledge dependent in that knowledge is a prerequisite for many purposes, whether economic or political or cultural. Indeed, modern societies know themselves to be modern and this in itself is an instance of knowledge as constitutive of the social order of modernity. With modernity, knowledge is central to both the interpretation of the ideas on which modernity is based and the application of those ideas to social institutions, for modern society like all societies

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need to solve the problem posed by the objective facts of scarcity of resources and human needs. Modernity is then more than a condition characterized by ideas and knowledge; it is also a societal condition in which institutional arrangements are worked out in ways that reflect the cultural model. The societal model, or social formation, of modernity can be viewed in terms of specific configurations of state formation, capitalism, and the organization of social relations. The form it takes varies according to how the relation between these is worked out in specific historical transformations. There is no universal form, such as presupposed in the older theories of modernization, and while one particular form may be adopted by other societies, there will inevitably be differences, in particular in relation to the cultural model. It can also be hypothesized that there may also be rival projects of modernity within a given society. Viewed in such terms, modernity, while being based on a number of key impulses that give to it a certain singularity, takes a variety of different forms. Whether or not due to processes of globalization there is greater homogeneity in modernity throughout the world is not easily answered, but it can be said that if there is a convergence, it is not necessarily due to the condition of modernity itself or to ‘westernization’ or ‘Americanization’. The overwhelming empirical evidence points in the direction of considerable global variability in modernity (see, e.g., Inglehart and Norris 2009; Robertson 1992). In the longer perspective of history, it is undoubtedly the case that at different periods various Western powers were disproportionally influential as colonizing agents. However, in such cases the outcome has rarely been the whole-scale transplantation of one model of modernity into another setting, but its widespread appropriation leading in many cases to hybrid formations, if not ones antithetical to European modernity (Mota and Delanty 2015). It can be further hypothesized that the outcome is less a clash of civilizations than a conflict between different formations of modernity. This approach is preferable to Beck’s notion of a ‘second modernity’ that has civilizational variants, such as an ‘Asian Modernity’, (see Beck and Grande 2010). The problem with such a perspective is that it presupposes, despite its intention, a basic Western notion of modernity as a historical phase and a variety of projects of second modernity that have

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emerged as a reaction. This places too much emphasis on the present as a reaction to the past and that only in the present ‘second modernity’ can tradition become reflective. It also operates with an over-general notion of an Asian modernity, though paradoxically the applications are country-specific, as Calhoun (2010) has noted in a critical assessment. However, one important point has emerged out of Beck’s proposals, namely a strong sense of modernity as entailing a major historical transformation in which reflexivity is central, and in particular reflexivity of risks in a more transnationalized world. While his approach compartmentalizes such shifts into an epochal rupture brought about by a second modernity, the sense of a major historical transformation occurring in the present captures an important aspect of the condition of modernity today. One final point needs to be addressed, namely the process by which the ideas of reason that give modernity its basic animus get embodied in concrete social forms and institutional arrangements. In other words, it must be demonstrated how the cultural model of modernity is linked with the societal model of modernity. This is a weakness in current theorizing on modernity, which tends to be strongly cultural or interpretative to the neglect of the institutional dimensions and historical formations. A key feature of modernity is its transformational nature: modernity is a condition of ongoing societal transformation in which major historical transformations are generated from new interpretations of the cognitive reference points of modernity. The dynamics that make this possible are primarily the projects of social agents. The condition of modernity is one in which social agents generate new conceptions of society that take on a transformational force to become the basis of new social realities. Thus, revolutions and responses to crises are very much a feature of modernity, which is most strongly felt where there is consciousness of major historical events in which the present is reshaped in the image of a possible future. The logic of modernity can thus be described as one of the generation of new ideas at times of major change or crisis, such as the reinterpretation of the present in its relation to the past, the selection from the variety of new projects leading to societal transformation and, finally, the institutionalization of the new ideas.

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This approach is particularly fruitful when it comes to large-scale units such as Europe since it offers a broader context to make sense of its constitutive features. These are not only civilizational or geopolitical, but reside in the nature of modernity and in, what Sewell (2005) has termed, ‘logics of history’ by which structures are transformed by social actors in the light of new interpretations of the world. So, to identify specific formations of modernity, it is suggested that attention must be given to the ways in which social actors bring about major re-orientations in the cultural and societal models of societies. While these will be different, it is inevitable due to globalization that there will be considerable diffusion and mutual influence in the different trajectories of modern societies. However, significant explanatory power can be attributed to the various formations of modernity.

The Formation of European Modernity On the basis of the foregoing, the elements of the European variant of modernity can now be outlined in a tentative manner. These are the structures of modernity in Europe and do not define the nature of modernity more generally, which is geographically and historically variable. European modernity is only one of many forms. It may be the case that the characteristic features of modernity first appeared in Europe, but this does not make them European per se. The ideas of freedom, liberty, autonomy, equality, justice, etc., were taken up by various groups in Europe especially since the seventeenth century and came to reflect the general consciousness of modernity by the nineteenth century. They were counter-factual ideas that were generally articulated by oppositional social groups and movements against the status quo. As the history of the liberal idea attests, there were profoundly different interpretations of its implications for the design of society. The history of socialism shows that there were major conflicts between the liberal emphasis on rights and the idea of social justice. The example of nationalism, which is animated by the notion of collective self-determination, illustrates the tendency towards conflict in modernity around different cultural models.

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It is thus possible to see modernity in Europe as a process of cultural and political transformation in which new ideas emerge and are taken up by different social groups producing new interpretations of the social world. This occurred relatively early in Europe, but this does not mean that it was a specifically European development. However, the nature of urbanization, the consolidation of civil society, the legacy of Roman civil law and state formation meant that radical ideas received early institutionalization. As Weber’s analysis of Christianity suggests, it is possible that the nature of Christianity in part facilitated the emergence of modernity; indeed, as has often been noted, the idea of the modern was itself first articulated by the early Church in order to distinguish the Christian era from pagan antiquity. A significant factor was that since the investiture controversy the church never fully dominated the state. Later developments within Latin Christianity, from the Reformation onwards, were highly conducive to the spirit of modernity in promoting individualism, the work ethic, autonomous law and scientific inquiry. Counter-Reformation Catholicism also underwent a parallel transformation in the light of the encounter with modernity. The internal doctrinal contestation within Christianity, which weakened its political influence, created a space for other forms of critique. In this way, then, it can be hypothesized that modernity in Europe, more than in other parts of the world, emerged out of the fragmentation of its civilizational worldview in so far as this was predominantly shaped by Christianity.8 As noted in earlier chapters, Roman civil law established an autonomous body of law that provided the emerging states and cities of the medieval period with a foundation for societal coordination and organization that was independent of elites. It is possible to see in this legal tradition the basis of the relative autonomy of society in relation to the state. A defining feature of European modernity, to make a general claim, is that the relation between state, capitalism and civil society evolved such that neither the state nor capitalism dominated each other; the power of political and economic elites was mediated by organized interests and social movements or civil society. The relative strength of civil society in Europe played a formative role in the making of modernity, but too the contest between the state and the rising market society was

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also significant. This had its origins in feudalism, which was a political and social order that bound serf and master in relations of obligation. The rise of the centralized state since late medieval times had to meet the demands of organized guilds and non-state organizations which checked the growth of absolutism (Ertman 1997). In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, various groups succeeded in winning liberties from central authority and created, what Scücs (1988: 306) has referred to as, a ‘plurality of small freedoms’. Modernity in Europe was shaped by the interactions of different interest groups, the clergy, the nobles and merchants who resisted the attempts of royal authority towards centralization, but they also had to reach compromises between themselves. These of course were the liberties of the elites, but other groups also benefited from such early attempts to limit royal power. The result of this tendency whereby elites had to negotiate power locally was the emergence of representation and the limiting of centralization through increased autonomy for factional interests. It can thus be hypothesized that this all had a democratizing outcome in terms of long-term effects. However, such contestation was not only within the elites, for by the early modern period there was a well-established popular and largely urban tradition of revolt and dissent. The embryonic form of modernity lay in the establishment of statutory rights for different social groups, principally organized workers (see Offe 2003). Polanyi’s account of the ‘great transformation’ that saw the rise of market society with its ‘disembedding’ effects and countervailing currents for social protection is another way to see this aspect of modernity as a ‘double movement’ in which power meets with social challenges (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). The rise of capitalism occurred within a societal context of a state structure that had been domesticated by civil society as a result of successful popular and elite revolts. The resulting societal model that emerged out of the European route to modernity can be described as one that gave a central place to civil society, which in setting limits to central state power and in influencing the nature of political power determined that the rise of capitalism would be a conflict ridden one. In this view, one of the features of European modernity was then a strong concern with the politics of class, which had to compete with the politics of nationalism, and was arguably the dynamic force in the making

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of European modernity. Indeed, the success of nationalism had a lot to do with the formation of class-based political movements and the need to incorporate the working class into the political community of the nation. The entire project of modernity in Europe was marked by a tension between the democratic spirit that was fostered by class politics and the development of capitalism. This gave rise to competing projects of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, as represented by fascism, communism and liberal democracy. The outcome of the defeat of fascism in 1945 and the Cold War marginalization of communism in Central and Eastern Europe was, at least in Western Europe, a tradition of democratic capitalism that is a form of capitalism that was to varying degrees constrained by class politics and the democratic constitutional state. It can thus be argued that the legacy of European modernity has been in the traditions of solidarity and social justice that emerged from the history of social struggles. Despite the wide diversity of Europe, it is this legacy of modernity that lies at its core giving to it a certain identity or unity that is discernible in its many national and regional forms. This is not to say that these structures have always been the main drivers of social change, but it can be suggested that the major social and political transformations in Europe have been very much shaped by this legacy. The 1989 revolution in Central and Eastern Europe and the project of European integration in part preserved some of this legacy, but with the crisis of that project in the present day, it is possible to see the signs of a much greater crisis in the social imaginary that lay at the core of modernity. As a radically transformative project, European modernity lost its impetus by the early twentieth century when the First World War brought about a major division within Europe and the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 set the terms for a division that was to last until 1989, by which time modernity had been reduced to the project of the transnationalization of the European nation. By this time, the project of modernity had become more central to other parts of the world which witnessed great experiments with democratization producing new and more transformative models of modernity. In the final analysis, to make a general claim, the shape of European modernity has been characterized by the strong transformational capacity of social actors to set limits to the power of elites. The outcome has

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been major social and political transformations in the relation between state and economy leading to a plurality of centres of power than a single centre of power. The ancient civilizational heritage was consequently dissipated by modernity which brought into play a diverse range of cultural orientations and societal forces that made modern Europe a part of the world where consciousness of modernity was particularly powerful. The next section considers this view of the European formation of modernity in the light of other formations.

Comparative Perspectives on Formations of Modernity It would be beyond the scope of the present chapter to provide a comparative analysis of the forms of modernity that can be associated with the major world regions. However, some of the main considerations and examples can be indicated from the admittedly limited perspective of an attempt to contextualize Europe. To demonstrate the working of a world regional approach, we can tentatively assume six major formations of modernity. In addition to European modernity, as discussed in the above, these are: New World modernities, Postcolonial modernities, Islamic modernities, Reactive modernities and alternative modernities. This schema is in part suggested by Therborn’s (2003) fourfold characterization of ‘routes to and from modernity’, but offers a different conceptualization that gives a stronger emphasis to those formations of modernity that were largely shaped independently of Europe, such as Iran, Russia, China, to take some of the major examples of traditions based on endogenous imperial traditions rooted in non-European civilizations.9 In these latter cases, a specific Islamic formation of modernity can be identified (quintessentially represented by Iran), alternative modernities that were generated largely from sources outside Europe (China and Russia), and reactive modernities, illustrated by Turkey and Japan, whose model of modernity was selectively borrowed from elements drawn from Europe. These different histories of empire and colonization were decisive in shaping the experience with modernity,

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which almost everywhere was contradictory, overlapping and uneven. European imperialism was a major force in both spreading modernity and provoking alternative visions of modernity, but as Bayly (2004: 3) notes, decisive was that it was only partial and temporary, for there were many points of resistance. The following is a necessarily brief discussion of some of the salient aspects of these formations of modernity and the extent of major historical transformations in their present constitution. New World modernities refer to the regions of the world that were originally settler societies founded by peoples of European descent. This includes America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Despite the considerable differences between all these societies, they all shared a trajectory based on a European origin, rebellion from that origin and the strong sense of what Louis Harz (1964) has described as the founding of a new society, which in some cases took on a messianic dimension. An initial contrast can be drawn between the USA, where a distinctive model of modernity crystalized, and Europe. In terms of the cultural model of modernity, the similarities are strong, with one notable exception. To cite Werner Sombart’s (1979) famous 1906 study, Why there is no Socialism in the United States, the guiding ideas that emanated from the revolt of the Thirteen Colonies were those of freedom and both individual and collective self-determination. The European concern with social justice was relatively absent, and the history of the USA was not shaped by a tradition of popular revolt based on the structure of rights that developed in both agrarian and urban settings in Europe. As a revolt from the European ancien regime, modernity was shaped from the beginning by a radical social imaginary that emerged from a foundational moment in which republican ideas mixed with Protestant reformism giving to the new society a future-oriented redemptive spirit that was absent in Europe. Civil society, as de Tocqueville noted, was strong in the USA, but it was predominantly located in local communities and did not produce major social movements as was the case in Europe. The US route to modernity led to the predominance of the market and ultimately a state form that was considerably more subservient to the market than was the case in Europe. The departure of ways between Europe and North America was on the relation with the market, both the relation of the state to the market

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and that of civil society. The broad trajectory of modernity in North America was then very different from Europe in both its cultural model and its societal form which was not negotiated by the political left. This does not mean two different modernities confronting each other, for Europe since the 1920s was greatly influenced by Americanization and the New Deal helped to provide a social model for post-1945 Western Europe and too for the formation of the project of European integration. But the lines of division were long drawn as the doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism’ (Lipset 1996) and the rise of North American neo-liberalism attest. For these reasons, despite the broad notion of the West, it is important to draw a distinction between European modernity and the variant that developed especially in the USA. A consideration of European modernity with Latin America reveals a slightly different trajectory. As in North America, the historical experience was shaped through liberation from the colonial powers of the old world, Spain and Portugal, large-scale immigration from late nineteenth century, but differed in that in many parts the outcome was one in which popular class-based politics played a far greater role. Latin America was one of the first experiments with constitutionalism, and the idea of social rights was considerably stronger than in the north. The abolition of slavery also occurred earlier than in the USA, and in the case of Bolivia, it was prohibited from the early years of the republic in 1826. However, unlike in Europe the pattern of state formation led to a highly dependent model of neo-colonial capitalism that was almost entirely oriented around the needs of the northern hemisphere and of local elites (Galeano 1997 [1971]). The result was a weaker tradition of democratic capitalism. As is best illustrated by Brazil during the Lula reforms and Venezuela in the Chavez years, the social agenda was re-asserted with reforms addressing the problem of significant social inequality and political polarization (see also Therborn 2012). However, as recent years show, such states are volatile and subject to major shifts in political orientations. The strongest contrast in models of modernity is in Asia. For reasons of space, only a few generalizations can be made. It is difficult to specify an overarching Asian model of modernity as a meaningful category.10 Perhaps the most striking difference between European and

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Asian forms of modernity in general is the relative absence in Asia of a strong tradition of civil society. It is this that possibly explains the late development of democracy and forms of statehood that were not constrained by traditions of popular rebellion and revolt that was a formative feature of European modernity. The major exception in this regard was India, which evolved a constitutional democracy by the middle of the twentieth century. State formation and imperial systems of rule in Russia and in East Asia, which were not subject to European colonialism, developed in entirely different directions and which were conducive neither to the formation of civil society nor, at least until very recently, to capitalism. These were predominantly state-centred societies in which capitalism and more generally industrialization was spearheaded by the state. Today, it is a different matter. Throughout Asia, there are today major conflicts, both latent and overt, around issues that are largely of social inequality and demands for democratization. The rise of civil society has had a transformative impact on states that only partially democratized and which fostered unbridled and highly exploitative forms of capitalism, most vividly in China and in India. As in Latin America, class politics plays a huge role in negotiating the rapidly changing relation between capitalism and the state. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of North Africa, which shared a history of colonialism that was closer to that experienced in parts of Asia (on African modernity see Deutsch et al. 2002; Thomas 2011). North Africa and the Middle East is today a less cohesive world region than in earlier times when the advent of modernity arrived in the late Ottoman world. In terms of formations of modernity, it is a hybrid world region shaped by both Ottoman and European colonialism and where Islamic forms of modernity can be found along with those that take a more overt post-colonial form. While European modernity emerged out of a fragmentation of its civilizational antecedents and the marginalization of religion, the advent of modernity occurred more directly through religion. Since the ‘Arab Spring’, the region has witnessed a social and political transformation in the model of modernity that has so far prevailed. It is possible to see in this the assertion of a new social imaginary that has so far transformed the cultural model of the region and has given space for diverse modernizing movements

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as well as anti-modern currents. It is not yet possible to see the consequences for societal formation, other than to note that due to the collapse of several states and widespread political stability the prospects do not look good. In India social protest against the Special Economic Zones and in China worker demands for rights as well as since 2011 pro-democracy protests inspired by the developments in the Arab world are potentially far-reaching in defining the relation between capitalism and democracy and in setting the terms for radical change (see also Witsoe 2013). South Africa since 1994 is also another pertinent example of variant of modernity that is in the present marked by a strong transformational project. In contrast, in North America and in Europe there are few signs of major political transformation. Europe was the location where modernity in the most discernible sense of the term first developed. This assumption does not mean that modernity is European or that its subsequent forms would follow the European route. It was inevitable that the form in which modernity unfolded in Europe would be a reference point for other parts of the world and in many ways European modernity was a catalyst for later forms of modernity in the rest of the world, which were considerably amplified by Europe. In both, the former colonies of the European powers and elsewhere modernity developed according to different civilizational and regional logics. It is arguably the case that the most far-reaching experiments in the twenty-first century are in the non-Western world, especially in Asia and in Latin America. While the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent break-up of the Warsaw Pact countries were momentous events, in particular as they coincided with the enlargement of the now crisis-stricken EU, the basic form of European modernity did not greatly change. The major social movements that shaped it have largely vanished, leaving only their consequences. Whether or not Europe undergoes major societal change remains to be seen, but there is not much to indicate—notwithstanding the Eurozone crisis—a continued transformation in state and society (see Chapters 13 and 15). It is a different matter in other parts of the world where the transformative impact of the ideas of modernity is being felt and where a new wave of popular social movements is emerging, leading in many cases to the transformation of the state. This

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worldwide wave of democratization may certainly be seen as a kind of catching-up on the Western world as far as democracy and social justice is concerned, in much the same way as the civil society movements in Central and Eastern Europe led to the collapse of state socialism. However, that would be too simple in that the nature and dynamics of these popular movements are different and the outcomes will also take different forms, which are not unrelated to very different demographic contexts and civilizational legacies. The Chinese experiment with modernity—capitalism without representative democracy—the growing confluence of capitalism and democracy in many parts of the Muslim world, strong socialist tendencies in Latin America, are three examples of far-reaching societal change. A feature of the global context is the predominance, especially in China and India, of state capitalism. In many of the leading economies, such as the BRICS group, large sectors of the economy are owned by the state and others are state managed, suggesting a contrast between Western market capitalism and diverse forms of state capitalism. Both of these models, for entirely different reasons, are in crisis today, setting the terms for new conflicts and for new institutional possibilities. Perhaps one of the most far-reaching implications of the new wave of democratization beyond Europe and North America will be a transformation in global politics. As the rest of the world undergoes democratization and new forms of state regulation emerge, the current balance of power will inevitably shift, posing new challenges for Europe. For instance, Europe is heavily dependent on Asian countries for its energy; if nothing changes, 70% of gas and electricity will be imported, mostly from Russia and the Middle East. To take a different example, China is increasingly interested in the EU as an alternative global player to the USA and China is dependent on trade with EU, which is its largest trading partner (and China is the EU’s largest overseas market). The alternative, which is less attractive, for China is to be more dependent on trade with the USA. This does not mean there will a global economic shift from West to East, as in the somewhat extreme thesis of Frank (1998) and a consequent European decline. The future is likely to be one in which the European model of modernity will have to accommodate the demands, both political and economic, of other rapidly

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developing parts of the world, but it is also in a strong position in its global standing, ironically due to the desire of the Chinese Community Party to preserve capitalism domestically and internationally. In this multi-polar and post-Western age, Europe will have considerably less to offer the world. The reference points for modernity will increasingly be less defined by the European historical experience. One of the major questions will be whether this means the worldwide dominance of the market or whether democracy will develop in innovative ways in the rest of the world. Some of these points will be discussed in later chapters. The main aim of this chapter has been to make the case for a global perspective on Europe as a world historical region, as opposed to some other conception, and that this is largely shaped by the formation of modernity in Europe. Modernity is not European, but it took a specific form in Europe that defined Europe as a historical region of the world. Having discussed this in relation to other world regions, the next chapter will look more specifically at the historical regions within Europe. As argued throughout this book, any account of the formation of Europe will need to take account of its internal diversity.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on ‘Europe in World Regional Perspective: Formations of Modernity and Major Historical Transformations,’ British Journal of Sociology 66 (3): 420–440. It has been much revised for this book. 2. This has been the subject of several studies since Pomeranz’s (2000) ground-breaking work; for example, Bayly (2004), Halperin (2008), Hobson (2004), and Osterhammel (2014). 3. For a discussion on developments in comparative historical sociology, see Adams et al. (2005). 4. Testa (2015, 2017) has summed up the conceptual and historical problems with notion of Eurasia and the claim that Europe is part of a wider macro-region, as opposed to itself being a macro-region. 5. I am partly following the argument on world regions set out by Lewis and Wigen (1997). For a civilizational approach, see Arjomand (2014).

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6. Such as MERCOSUR and UNASUR in Latin America, the Organization of American States, ASEAN in Asia, and the Organization of African Unity. 7. For example, the idea of freedom has been differently understood in Asia and Africa (see Taylor 2002). See also Bayly (2011) on the liberal tradition in India. 8. Eastern Christianity is a complicating case. See Delanty (2013: Chapter 4). 9. Therborn’s model (developed further in Therborn 2012) sees Europe as largely internally defined, neglecting the formative impact of the encounter with the rest of the world, and overemphasizes the role of Europe in the shaping of other formations of modernity. 10. The debate about Asian values as underpinning an Asian modernity is a largely Chinese political and normative discourse and lacks a social scientific basis. See also Duara (2014).

11 The Historical Regions of Europe: Civilizational Backgrounds and Multiple Routes to Modernity

The topic of this chapter returns to a theme discussed in Chapter 7 concerning the plural nature of Europe and offers an interlude before a more detailed survey of the twentieth century, which follows in the next chapters.1 The emphasis so far has been on identifying underlying processes of unity and departures from broadly common civilizational structures. The civilizational background has itself been diverse with routes, within it that was shaped by the Western and Eastern currents of Roman civilization, the Russian offshoots of the Byzantine tradition that developed in the East and the multifarious impact of Islam on the Iberian and the south-eastern regions. Four interlinked civilizational currents formed, what was termed, the European inter-civilizational constellation: the Greco-Roman, Western Christianity, the Byzantine, Russian and Ottoman-Islamic traditions.2 The unity and diversity of Europe derives from its civilizational diversity, which as we have seen also established the basis of different traditions of empire. However, this does not offer a sufficient basis for an assessment of the unity and diversity of Europe, for with the unfolding of the project of modernity new dynamics come into play bringing about a more complicated tapestry that cannot be so easily accounted for in terms of © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_11

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premodern civilizational forms alone. Modernity brought about a major transformation in the moral and political horizons of European societies. It placed the individual on a new level and put forward new ideas about political community that gave to the modern world a cultural model that both united and divided it, for the new ideas were not only differently interpreted in terms of their application, but also differently formulated. Yet, certain trends unfolded that can be said to constitute the basic matrix of a European societal model; moreover, the ideas of modernity, including the idea of Europe, gave to Europe an imaginary that defined its identity. As with the civilizational background, modernity, too, crystallized into different forms and were taken up in different regional routes. The objective of this chapter is to examine the historical regional diversity of Europe as a product of both civilizational backgrounds and the trajectories of modernity. This will entail in part a forward perspective to the twentieth century, since the shape of these routes was altered in the course of that century with the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the creation and expansion of the European Union. The notion of modernity offers a useful way to view the diversity of Europe since it includes a perspective on both unity and diversity. As argued, modernity is based on a cultural model that provides a general framework of ideas and a cultural orientation; it is also based on a societal model, which can be seen in terms of relations between state, economy and civil society. A feature of European modernity in general was the fact that civil society remained relatively strong. The state was constantly challenged by organized social interests, which often became incorporated into the sphere of the state domesticating both the state and civil society with both exerting a strong influence over the market so that capitalism was constantly held in check by the state. In this view, the varieties of modernity that developed in Europe can be in part understood in terms of the different ways this societal model crystallized in the different historical regions of Europe. The notion of a historical region, despite the problems of definition, offers a fruitful approach to the analysis of the idea of Europe and an alternative to purely national histories. The regions in question are historical regions and do not necessarily coincide with present-day transnational regions that are of a later origin.

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A broad definition of Europe’s historical regions would identify three, namely Western, Central and Eastern Europe, to follow Jeno Szücs (1988) classification in his famous essay ‘The Three Historical Regions of Europe’ in which he argued for three historical regions: Western, East Central and Eastern Europe. In an earlier classic work, Oskar Halecki (1950) identified four historical regions: Western, West-central, Eastcentral and Eastern. However, a more differentiated and systematic approach is needed given the especially complicated nature of Central Europe and the post-1989 context which led to a major reconfiguration of Central and Eastern Europe and the system of states established in 1919. A systematic typology or comparative analysis does not exist, and there is relatively little literature on the topic (see Arnason and Doyle 2010). The proposal in this chapter is that a sixfold classification is needed to capture the diversity of routes to modernity without reducing all such routes and models of modernity to national trajectories or collapsing them into more general civilizational categories. The forms of modernity that constitute Europe as a world historical region correspond to North-western Europe, Mediterranean Europe, Central Europe, East Central Europe, South-eastern Europe and North-eastern Europe. As with all such classifications, there is the problem of defining specificity and taking into account overlap as well as broader contexts of commonality. Furthermore, there is the complication that historical regions do not remain constant with the result that different configurations may be relevant in different periods. The map of Europe’s regions will have been very different from the standpoint of the tenth century or the seventeenth century. However for the purpose of the present analysis, assumptions will be made about the longue durée from the perspective of the present. An additional problem is the degree to which self-identification should be taken into account. In the case of historical regions, self-identification can be regarded as less important than in defining national identity, not least since regional identity is not the most important feature of a historical region whose specificity may be the basis of different but related identities. To add a further complication, many regions are the product of ideological constructions—for example the notion of Mitteleuropa, or Eastern Europe, or the notion of

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the Balkans—and can be hegemonic in the ways in which they establish taken-for-granted relations between peripheries and centres. The more general categories of Western, Central and Eastern, or a dichotomy of West and East also do not offer a sufficiently rich basis on which to explore the variety of models of modernity in Europe. The case for the specificity of these regions will be made below in more detail. The notion of a historical region implies that there is a common historical experience that can be discerned in the longue durée and that common features of the region’s history are more significant than the differences (Müller 2010: 114). The general rationale in this chapter for a differentiated approach to Europe’s historical regions is: first, each must correspond to a distinctive route to modernity and which is a variant of the more general form that European modernity took; second, there should be a broad background in civilizational contexts. Together, civilizational background and routes to modernity define the identity of a historical region and give to it a certain unity which in turn is the basis of a ‘mental map’. In short, it is necessary to define the regions as transnational historical spaces in terms of their relation to Europe—as variants of a more general historical space—and in terms of their specificity in relation to each other as areas of close interaction and historical commonality. A final preliminary observation is that all these historical regions are not self-enclosed geopolitical enclaves, but over-lapping and in many cases their historical experience entailed at different points a shared history, as in the case of those areas that fell under Soviet rule in the post1945 period. For these reasons, Europe’s historical regions might be seen as borderlands. The borders that have shaped the historical regions of Europe changed so many times that they are best seen less as lines of division than as zones that constitute intersecting spaces. For Balibar (2003), Europe is itself a borderland in that it is made up of multiple spatialities in terms of state formation, markets, social and cultural institutions and identities. In this view, any reference to a geopolitical or historical region must recognize its interconnections with other regions. Europe’s historical regions should thus be seen in terms of hyphenated spaces than as separated territories. The following discussion of Europe’s six major historical regions will consider the interconnected nature of

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these regions as much as their singularity relation to Europe—as variants of a more general historical space—and in terms of their specificity in relation to each other as areas of close interaction and historical commonality.

North-Western Europe The very notion of a North-western Europe is itself an acknowledgement of a borderland. Rather than speaking of Western Europe in general, it is more meaningful to take the more circumscribed category of North-western Europe. This includes the British Isles, France, the Low Countries, Germany and, what is arguably a distinct region, Scandinavia.3 As a borderland, the inclusion of Germany ties the area to Central Europe, given the overlapping nature of Germany, which includes more than one historical region. The region may be extended to include Northern Italy, and parts of the Iberian Peninsula could claim to be part of a wider notion of Western Europe. However, the notion of North-western Europe puts the emphasis on the northernness of the region, and for this reason, it is best seen in more limited terms as an area that can be located within the broader category of Western Europe, but which exhibits distinctively Northern features. North-western Europe has been influenced both by Central Europe in general and more specifically by Mediterranean Europe. In earlier periods, Southern Europe provided the basic civilizational orientations for all of Europe and North-western Europe bears this influence. However, in the course of history the Western area of Europe became progressively distinct from Southern Europe, and its shared characteristic with the regions of Central and Eastern Europe too became less formative. The Frankish leadership under Charlemagne gave to the region its essential identity, which according to Henri Pirenne (2001) in his famous thesis in 1935—‘without Mohammed there would have been no Charlemagne’—was made possible by the rise and advancement of Islam across the Southern shores of the Mediterranean. As we have seen, state formation since the nineteenth century tended to move in the direction of sea-based empires and with a relatively high

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degree of democratization in the metropole. With its historical basis in the Carolingian kingdom and the area west of the Rhine, the North-west region became what has often been called modern or core Europe and formed the basis of what was eventually to become the European Union. However misleading the idea of a core Europe is and despite the many wars fought within the region between the dynastic powers and the later national states, North-western Europe exhibits remarkable similarity in its political, economic and wider societal structures and institutions. It has undeniably played a major role in the shaping of modern Europe both for good and for bad. The diversity of its regions in terms of cultural factors, such as language and national identity, disguises a certain unity that is discernible more in the myriad of interconnections than in a common framework. No such structure developed, at least until the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1958; yet, the region has had a relatively common history in terms of both its civilizational background and its model of modernity. A crucial fact in its uniformity and overall dominance has been the fact that the region enjoyed relative uninterrupted growth and consolidation over several centuries, while the Eastern regions underwent major changes in their civilizational directions. The Mongol invasions of Russia, the latter’s expansion over Eastern and Central Europe, and the Ottoman conquests of the Southeast, the German onslaught in the 1940s led to more turbulent histories. The civilizational roots of North-western Europe were formed by Latin Christianity and in part by the Roman Empire and the legacy of civil law. However, much of the area lay outside the territory of the Roman Empire, which can be considered to have been less important than the state tradition and the institutions that developed in the medieval age. A key aspect of this was the struggle between Church and State and the fact that in the balance that was finally achieved, the state retained political autonomy and was not subordinated to ecclesiastical authority. Juridical autonomy was also established with the consolidation of an autonomous body of laws that were not at the disposal of rulers. The result was a clear separation of state and society. The states that formed in Northernwestern Europe have been relatively settled in their basic structures, and the territories and the nation-states that consolidated there witnessed greater stability and continuity than in most other parts of Europe where

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the state tradition and nationhood led to less peaceful outcomes. Earlier, feudalism established the conditions for economic and political stability as did its relatively early abolition. The ‘Great Transformation’ that led to the emergence of the modern market society that Karl Polanyi (1944) characterized as the basis of modern society was most vividly present in North-western Europe where the industrial revolution and the formation of the modern class structure were also most advanced. In addition to these factors relating to state formation and market society, Northwestern Europe had a long tradition of the autonomy of the city vis-à-vis the countryside. The rise of civil society, decisive for the emergence of modernity, was possible only because of the autonomy of the city and the kinds of authority that it cultivated. Later patterns of democratization were built on these foundations. The societal model of modernity that developed in North-western Europe can thus be characterized as a relatively distinct one whose early crystallization was important in the overall shaping of Europe. The Cold War and the rise of military and fascist regimes in Southern Europe in the post-1945 period gave to it an additional identity based on democracy and capitalism. For instance, Spain, under Franco until 1975, was relatively isolated and experienced a different transition to the European social model in the twentieth century that clearly demarcates it from the experience of North-western Europe. In this region, democratic capitalism enjoyed a period of uninterrupted growth since 1945 in contrast to Eastern and Southern Europe, where the democratic tradition was variously interrupted. Italy, at least until the 1980s, was the exception, but there was the huge divide between North and South and the power of the Mafia in Italian politics, which put it on a different trajectory from Northern Europe. North-western Europe contains the most powerful economies in Europe and in the world, Germany, UK and France, and the latter two having had the largest overseas empires. It can finally be noted that North-western Europe was Western in another sense: it was part of the wider West world with its centre in the Atlantic rather than in the Mediterranean or Black Sea. Today, in the twentieth-first century, this may have lost much of its force, but in the previous century, it gave to the area an identity that consolidated a historical trajectory that might otherwise have had less specificity.

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Mediterranean Europe The notion of a Mediterranean Europe presents some obvious difficulties since it covers a wider and more diverse area stretching from the Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, Italy, part of the Southern Balkans and Greece. As with all of the historical regions of Europe, it does not have clear-cut boundaries and more or less all of its constitutive countries are not entirely Mediterranean in their entirety. Unlike the other historical regions, it is more difficult to specify a historical core area, though arguably that core is Roman. The case of Greece is a complication, since its civilizational background and path to modernity is markedly different from the countries of the Western Mediterranean. For this reason, it is best located as part of South-western Europe even if it is geographically part of the Mediterranean. Another complicating case is Portugal, while not having a Mediterranean coast and more Atlanticist in orientation is nonetheless from its civilizational influences clearly not too far removed from the wider Iberian context. Despite these qualifications, it is possible to speak of the specificity of a Mediterranean Europe as a historical region. This region is above all a civilizational one that was shaped by the Roman Empire, the sea and later Catholicism. The Roman Empire provided the most enduring cultural and geopolitical framework for the emergence of Europe, but this was primarily a Mediterranean civilization rather than a Northern or Western one. The cities founded by the Romans as well as the roadways they built gave to the region a matrix that laid the basis of a civilizational orientation. However, the post-Roman empires were all greatly shaped by its legacy as were the national cultures and the modern nation-states that emerged in the area. The Holy Roman Empire is one such legacy that for almost a thousand years from the tenth to the eighteenth century gave a certain unity to much of Europe. While this had a pronounced Habsburg dimension since the early sixteenth century, when it became known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, it was modelled on the memory of Rome. The cultural heritage of the Roman Empire is easily discernible along the shores of the Mediterranean in ways of life, language, religion,

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climate and the built environment. Greece, different in its language and religion from the largely Latin-influenced Western areas, is equally part of the Southern Eastern historical region; its state tradition is different from the Western European one, as its model of church–state relations, and the slow development of capitalism marks it off from the wider Mediterranean area. The Roman origins of Mediterranean Europe draw attention to the wider unity of the Mediterranean and the fact that the Roman Empire was not simply European but included North Africa and parts of the Middle East. The Roman Empire, as argued in Chapter 2, was itself shaped by Greek antiquity and by the numerous cultures it encountered. Entailed in this is the idea of a Euro-Arab region, for both the European and the Arab shores of the Mediterranean form part of the wider unity of the region. This was not only in the distant past. Much of the Maghreb was part of Europe in the twentieth century, and several wars were played out in the area as a result of the imperialist ambitions of the European powers. Algeria was an integral part of France until after the war of independence in 1962; the circumstances that led to the Spanish civil war emerged from the loss of Spanish dominion in North Africa; fascist Italy sought to control Ethiopia. The notion of a Mediterranean Europe as a historical region is best understood as a borderland region formed out of cross-cultural encounters and the civilizational legacy of Rome. This borderland can be considered the basis of what Ian Chambers (2008) has termed a ‘heterogeneous modernity’ which is a particularly striking feature of the area. The examples of Malta and Cyprus capture the spirit of Mediterranean Europe as a borderland and one deeply influenced by the Roman origins, as well as the later Byzantine Empire. The two islands had been for long part of the Muslim world. Malta’s chequered history was marked by various periods of conquest by the Normans, the Arabs, the Germans, Spanish and British and was the scene of numerous wars. Cyprus is an example of Greek, Greco-Roman and Ottoman encounters and divisions. Today, these islands are part of the EU and constitute the heart of the wider Euro-Mediterranean area, an identity that was revived in the 1990s with the enlargement of the EU.

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The idea of a European Mediterranean took on a new form in 1995 with the Euro-Mediterranean partnership between the European Union and the countries of the Southern Mediterranean, and revived in 2008 with the idea of the Union of the Mediterranean, which was created to promote economic integration and democratic reform across 16 countries in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East (these being Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey). The EU has been effective in giving shape to the European Mediterranean as a regional identity (Pace 2004; Featherstone and Kazamias 2001). In terms of patterns of modernity that developed in the region, Mediterranean Europe, the historical models of modernity associated with France, Italy and Spain can all be considered to be firmly within the wider Western Europe tradition, albeit with large variations and uneven development, such as the contrast between Southern and Northern Italy. The twentieth-century fascist and military regimes in Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece—and the civil wars within the latter two countries—are a reminder of a weaker state tradition and an interrupted transition to democracy. The case for the distinctiveness of a Mediterranean Europe is largely made on the basis of its civilizational influences. However, considered as a whole the pattern of modernity in terms of state formation, capitalism and civil society bears the mark of the European societal model insofar as the democratizing influences of civil society are concerned. In all its areas, the national state was established by the nineteenth century, a feature it shares with North-western Europe and a contrast to Central and Eastern Europe. For all these reasons, the idea of a Mediterranean Europe can be regarded as a distinctive transnational historical region.

Central Europe Of all of Europe’s historical regions, Central Europe is the one that comes closest to having a regional identity rooted both in civilizational currents and in a model of modernity.4 The idea of Mitteleuropa has a

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long resonance in the German-speaking world. Although not an identity as such, it invokes a heritage that is distinct from both Eastern and Western Europe. Like the term Europe itself, it has always been a contested term and has had different uses depending on when and by whom it has been used. It had pan-German origins, but with the political instrumentalization of the pan-Germanism with the Nazis, it became most widely used as an Austrian nostalgic term for the Europe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the 1980s, it acquired a more pronounced political meaning in Hungary and Czechoslovakia as a way of defining the European heritage of those countries against the Soviet Union and communism. In this use of the term, as advanced by Milan Kundera and George Konrad, it signified civil society. As a historical region, Central Europe—as opposed to the idea of Mitteleuropa— includes Southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and much of what will be discussed separately as East Central Europe, namely Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia. The historical heart of the region is the area once covered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its centres were Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, Trieste, Bratislava and Budapest and could be extended to parts of South-eastern Europe, such as a Zagreb. In this sense, it is a polycentric historical region. The idea of Mitteleuropa has been the subject of several influential works that have contributed to the regional identity of the region. The most well known are Friedrich Naumann’s Mitteleuropa in 1915, Thomas Masaryk’s The New Europe in 1918 and, more recently, Claudio Magris’s Danube (2001). The geographical and political notion of Mitteleuropa by definition can only be a relative term since its definition rests on assumptions on the borders of Europe. In the case of the eastern border, which has been the most important in the self-definition of Mitteleuropa, this has shifted numerous times. As Milan Kundera (1984: 35) has written, ‘Its borders are imaginary and must be drawn and redrawn with each new historical situation’. Obviously, the notion is essentially cultural rather than geopolitical. The idea of Mitteleuropa had been part of German economic policy since Frederick List promoted it as an area of free trade, but it should not be equated with Prussian expansionism. For Naumann, Mitteleuropa referred to the larger German-speaking lands as well as

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the non-German regions of the Habsburg Empire and was as much a political and cultural category as it was economic; Thomas Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, in contrast, used the term to exclude German and Austria, essentially meaning the smaller countries of East Central Europe (see below). In this view, Mitteleuropa is not located between north and south and could include Greece and Finland. A related idea, influential in Germany in the interwar years, was the notion of Zwischeneuropa, first coined by the geographer Albrecht Penck in the early twentieth century, and which can be translated as a borderland Europe, though literally meaning ‘in between’ Europe, that is the in-between areas between East and West. The term was revived in Austrian nationalism to connect the country to the Habsburg past. Any discussion of the notion of Mitteleuropa runs the risk of either polemics or simplification. Like Europe, as a whole it lacks clear borders, suggesting it is more like a state of mind or a culture or fate, as Kundera has argued, than a state or territory. The notion of Mitteleuropa should not be dismissed as nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire, Catholicism or as a German expansionist ideology, simply because it had too many meanings, which include a certain cultural cosmopolitanism. In a region where the nation-state developed later than in North-western Europe, there is some value in reassessing it in the light of the region’s multi-ethno nationalism. In addition, there is the relevance of the wider appeal in the region for a supranational ideal. Without this, the very possibility of Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia, as a union of states, or the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary would not have been possible. These now vanished confederal states were a feature of the political landscape of Europe in the mid-twentieth century, and their disappearance has not been without a certain loss of opportunity to a create multinational state. It was this sense of the term that the Austro-Marxists sought an alternative to the nation-state in the aftermath of the first world, for they believed that the political structure of the Dual Monarchy could be used to construct a new post-imperial political framework. The idea of Central Europe/Mitteleuropa had considerable appeal to civil society intellectuals (such as Michnik, Konrad, Havel) in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. Kundera’s famous 1984

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essay ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, although written in exile, captured the mood of the period with his notion of a ‘return to Europe’ and thus signalled an anti-communist appeal to the European traditions of the region. In the 1989 discourse on Mitteleuropa, Russia is the Other. It was a contrast, too, to the Western triumphalist narrative of the ‘end of history’ and instead called for the ‘re-birth of Europe’. In this use of the term, modernity as a societal condition is most evident, for by Europe is signalled the political assertion of the autonomy of civil society against the absolute state and the suppression of individual and collective liberty. Viewed in such terms, Mitteleuropa is not just a civilizational milieu, but reflects a model of modernity in which the conflict between civil society and the state has been central to its identity. It is possibly this post-socialist conception of Mitteleuropa that has the most relevance for the present day; it offers a way to readdress the question of the intercultural and multinational legacy of a polycentric region whose borders have continued to change.

East Central Europe In recent years, the notion of East Central Europe has emerged less as an alternative to the idea of Central Europe than a demarcation within it of a more narrowly defined region (see Arnason 2005a; Arnason and Doyle 2010; Troebst 2003). Unlike the broader category of Central Europe, it does not have the same resonance in terms of an identity and has been mostly used by historians of the region, such as Szücs (1988) and Halecki (1950, 1953), who noted an inner dualism within Central Europe between its Western and Eastern orientations. Yet a case can be made for its relevance as a distinctive historical heritage. While Central Europe refers to a wider area that includes the Germanspeaking world and much of the Habsburg territories, the notion of East Central Europe pertains specifically to Poland, Hungary and the former Czechoslovakia. The notion should be extended to include Slovenia, which can also be regarded as part of Central Europe’s eastern face. However, the core has generally been taken to be Hungary, the Czech lands and Poland. The notion of East Central Europe in many

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ways approximates to the non-Austro-German Mitteleuropa, and a contrast to what might be more accurately termed West Central Europe. As a region, it is located between the Baltic and the Adriatic, on the one side, and on the other between Russia to the east, the Ottoman Empire to the south-east and the various incarnations of the German empires in the west. For this reason, it accords most precisely with the idea of ‘the lands in between’. The region is thus to be distinguished from the Ottoman-influenced South-eastern Europe and from Northeastern Europe, in the sense of the Western Russian-speaking world and the Baltic region (see below). Szücs, in his classic essay written in 1981, argued it lay between two areas of expansion: the western zone of expansion and the Russian one to the east (Szücs 1988: 313). In civilizational terms, East Central Europe is a product of Western Christianity, but represents the interface of the Carolingian tradition with Slavic, Hungarian and Eastern influences. Its identity was shaped against the Ottomans to the south-east and the Russians to the east. As Arnason (2005a: 392) has argued, its heritage is more intra-civilizational than inter-civilizational, since the dominant influences were variants of Western Christianity. However, the inter-civilizational dimension is also present in view of the older conflict in the region between Western and Eastern Christianity before the final alignment with the Western tradition in the ninth century. Before the formation of the Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms, the area was the scene of struggles between the Magyars and the Christian kingdom of Moravia, until power shifted to the other Czech kingdom to the West, namely Bohemia. The three kingdoms that consolidated in the region and gave to its identity as a historical region were themselves expansionist. Of the three kingdoms, though all integrated into Western Christianity, the Bohemian kingdom was more closely integrated into the Western tradition, being part of, and for a time, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Due to the Hussite movement, it has a good claim to be seen as the beginning of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. There is another sense in which the region can be considered to be an important area of inter-civilizational influences. In the three core areas, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, there has been for long a large Jewish

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population that was fully integrated into the social, cultural and economic life of the societies. The Jewish dimension of the region, by far the most important in all of Europe, added to its multi-ethnic diversity. The loss of this after the Shoah represents a major cultural loss for the region and for Europe. While Hungary and the Czech nation remained relatively intact in their borders over the centuries, the case of Poland is rather more complicated. Its borders have shifted many times in history, and as with much of Central Europe, it has had a divided heritage between its Eastern and Western orientations. Of these, it is undoubtedly the Western pull that has been decisive and led to the creation by the Jagiellonian dynasty of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom in the sixteenth century. Stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, this was a powerful and large multinational state that was created in 1385 when the Jagiellonian dynasty came to the Polish crown, consolidated into a closer union in 1569 and lasted until its demise in 1795 following the partition of Poland. This episode is also an illustration of the involvement of the region in a wider borderland area. The Lithuanian link did not endure, though arguably a case could be made for the inclusion of Lithuania and the Baltic states in the category of East Central Europe. However, their different historical paths and later patterns of state formation and societal modernization put them on a trajectory different from that of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, a region that can be extended to include both Slovakia and Slovenia. An example of the civilizational current in the region, pan-Slavism was for a time a reflection of a transnational identity that tied the region to a broader trans-region. Although it did not endure, due not least to the diverse Slavic traditions, significant cultural differences between the Russian and Polish Slavophiles, and the different routes that the Slavic peoples had embarked on, it illustrates a departure from the wider Central European region. The Eastern versus the Western faces of the region were less strong in the Czech lands and in Hungary, while in Poland the search for a Slavic nativism based on a peasant culture ceased to be significant by the twentieth century. In all parts of the region a pronounced European consciousness was present and, especially in the Czech case an integral part of its national identity.

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From the perspective of modernity, the core countries of East Central Europe can all be seen as within the broader category of what has been referred to earlier as the European societal model. Their historical experience has been marked by resistance to absolutism. In the early modern period, especially in Poland and in Bohemia, but also in Hungary, there was considerable resistance to absolutism; in the case of Bohemia resistance to the Habsburgs and in the case of Poland to the Russian Empire. Within their territories, absolute rule was curbed by traditions of rights and privileges of the nobles that set limits to imperial power without representation and eventually provided the ground on which nationalism would rise. This has been described as a political culture of government by estates and differs from Western monarchical and absolutist rule as well as from Muscovite autocracy and Ottoman-centralized statehood (Müller 2010: 115). This tradition gave to the region a political heritage that can be seen as basis of a democratic tradition, albeit a weak one. Unlike, other parts of what was once called Eastern Europe, such as Romania and Bulgaria, the area shared with the West a similar history based on feudalism and private ownership, though the transition to industrialization took place much later (Berend 2005: 402). Western influences were stronger than in the areas further east, to the south in the Balkans and to the north where Russia exerted more influence. Despite these similarities, nation-state building since 1919 put the region on a different course from the mainstream North-western and Mediterranean regions, for in this region the problem of linguistic, ethnic and cultural plurality was very great and not easily accommodated into the mono-cultural design of the national state. In the twentieth century, East Central Europe was massively transformed by the double impact of German fascism from the West and from the East by communism and Soviet occupation. This experience ensured that modernity would take a different form in the region, which also experienced an experiment with state formation. The creation in 1918 of Czechoslovakia can be seen as a variant of modernity that eventually proved too fragile to last and the two nations finally separated in 1992 (Arnason 2005b). Though it should be noted that in all of the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe, it was in the previously more European and Western-oriented Czechoslovakia that

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communism received considerable domestic support. Some of the most significant debates on the meaning of democracy and civil society took place in the countries of East Central Europe in the second half of the twentieth century (see Garton Ash 1993). The assertion of civil society by dissident intellectuals against the totalitarian state has been a significant aspect of European political modernity that had a transformative impact in the region leading to the eventual collapse of Soviet domination.

South-Eastern Europe As a historical region, South-eastern Europe presents a number of difficulties of definition, being in part an extension of both Eastern and Central Europe. However, the specificity of the region marks it off from both in very distinctive ways. The region in question concerns the Balkans, including Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Greece and Romania. The latter two, especially Greece, are by no means self-evident. The case for the inclusion of Greece within the category of South-eastern Europe is made on the basis of its participation in the Byzantine-Orthodox civilizational background, which has been arguably more significant for its history than its entry to the Western world since its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century. Moreover, in the course of that century Greek culture had a formative impact on the rest of the Balkans. As argued earlier, Greece can also be considered as part of Mediterranean Europe. However, in consideration of the overall historical, civilizational and geopolitical context, Greece can be seen as part of South-eastern Europe, as can Romania. Since Romania was formed in 1859 out of the historical region of Moldova, along with Wallachia, the present state of Moldova can be located with the wider region of South-eastern Europe. As a historical region, South-eastern Europe, while not being entirely reducible to the Balkans, is unavoidably more or less synonymous with it, thus giving to the area a certain identity as a borderland (see Kassabova 2018). From a civilizational perspective, the region is defined by two orientations. First, the Byzantine and Orthodox heritage

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has been an important civilizational influence. The entire Balkan region differs from the other regions of Europe by the Orthodox faith. Orthodoxy, deriving from the Byzantine tradition, has also remained an enduring feature of Bulgaria and Romania (Blokker 2010). The second civilizational influence is the Ottoman-Islamic heritage. Since the Ottoman conquests of the Bulgarian and Serbian kingdoms, the region underwent a very different history to that of the rest of Europe. Due to the nature of Ottoman rule, Islam was not imposed on the populations of the conquered countries, but Islamic influences were present, and in many cases, there were conversions to Islam, examples being Albania and Kosovo. More important than Islam was the wider Ottoman influence in the region. In European historiography, the area was once referred to as Turkey-in-Europe and was the object of much Western, especially British, Prussian and Habsburg, foreign policy-making in the nineteenth century (Müller 2001). In addition to these factors, the Slavic component has been significant, uniting at least linguistically the Croats, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes. Yugoslavia—meaning ‘the land of the Southern Slavs’— derived its name from this civilizational unity. The link between the Slavophile movement and Orthodoxy adds an additional layer of weight to the civilizational specificity of the region and has often been regarded as a basis for anti-Westernism. Many Bulgarians and Serbs, influenced more by Russian than Greek culture, saw Europe as a distinct cultural form different from the Byzantine legacy of Slavdom and Orthodoxy (Mishkova 2008: 245). As a geopolitical and civilizational space South-eastern Europe can be seen for much of its history located between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. In the case of Bulgaria, the Russian influences were significant, although in this instance to be explained less by the direct impact of Russia than by appropriation by the Bulgarian intelligentsia of Russian culture in order to combat the dominance of Greek cultural superiority in the Balkan region (Mishkova 2008: 242). In the second half of the twentieth century, the area along with much of Central and Southern Europe other than Greece fell under Russian domination. The Russian and Ottoman moments, in particular the latter, shaped the region in ways that mark it off from the rest of Europe. These amount

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to a civilizational influence and attest to the presence within Europe of neighbouring civilizations, which give to the European heritage its character as a constellation of interacting civilizations. Europe has been greatly shaped by the seas that surround it. This is especially true of South-eastern Europe. The Black Sea is as important, if not more, than the Mediterranean and the Adriatic seas in the region. Its place and significance in European history has been neglected. The Balkan region is generally seen as a mountainous region—the name Balkan means mountains—and one that is cut off from the rest of Europe. Placing the Black Sea rather than landmasses at the centre of stage gives a rather different view of the region. As Neal Ascherson (1995) has argued in his travel history of the Black Sea, over many centuries the Black Sea united cities and regions in Greece, the Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. In this perspective, the Black Sea is, like the Mediterranean Sea, a zone of interconnections between Europe and its neighbouring regions. The Black Sea, which receives five rivers including the Danube and the Don, has been important in European history since antiquity. The Crimea was one of the most important centres of the trading networks in the Greek world and it was especially important for Classical Athens; it was the site of a major war in the nineteenth century and the location of the Yalta conference, which symbolically represented the post-war division of Europe between East and West (Ascherson 1995: 10; Feher 1987). Such a view of South-eastern Europe would place it in relation to the Caucasus area, in particular linked to Georgia and Armenia. Instead of seeing the area as cut off, as in mainstream Eurocentric accounts, it should be seen as constituting links between the different cities and regions drawn together by the Black Sea. In this view, William McNeill (1964) locates the region as part of a wider Danubian and Pontic European region and constituting what he termed Europe’s ‘Steppe Frontier’. Any discussion of the modernity of South-eastern Europe is unavoidably complicated by the perceived view of backwardness with respect to Western Europe and a representation of the region in terms of ‘Balkanism’, which Todorova (1997) regards as another kind of Orientalism. Representations of especially the Balkan area as the opposite to the West and as an extension of the Ottoman East have also

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been reflected in the ways the Balkans have also perceived themselves. Such positions operate on the basis of a distinction of core and periphery whereby the periphery is always defined in relation to the modernity and high civilization of the core. This fails to capture the diversity of Europe and its multiple civilizational logics. By reducing the Balkan region to an extension of the Ottoman East, it also fails to understand how a different route to modernity is possible. This Eurocentric tendency should not be exaggerated, for it would appear that it was more recent than previously thought (Mishkova 2008). Larry Wolff (1994), for instance, claimed this hegemonic discourse was part of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, but it may have been a later nineteenth development. As Mishkova (2008: 251) has argued, while the ‘gaze of the Other’ was always a feature of the Balkans, in reality there existed many gazes often in conflict with each other.

North-Eastern Europe Any account of the historical regions of Europe is complicated by the question of what constitutes Eastern Europe or the East of Europe today in light of the absence of any clear lines of geographical or political demarcation. All such designations are relative—the northern tip of Norway is as geographically east as Istanbul—and generally based on the assumption that the core is the west. The Cold War division of Europe has left a lasting mark on the face of Europe, but in the longer perspective of history, the division it created between an East and West needs to be differentiated. However, getting entirely rid of the notion of an Eastern Europe is also fraught with difficulties. There is a sense in which as a consequence of the developments that have occurred since 1990 that Eastern Europe should now be projected further to the east and refers to the western regions of the Russian-speaking lands. In this view, Eastern Europe refers to the Baltic republics, Belarus, Kaliningrad, and, with some difficulty, can be extended to include the Ukraine and Moldova. The approach taken in this chapter is to define the eastern component of Europe by a logic that configures the mental map in terms of East Central, South-east and a North-east. According to this reasoning,

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Eastern Europe is best seen in terms of three inter-related zones. Of these the latter is the more complicated one; instead of being termed Eastern Europe—or even ‘far Eastern Europe’ or some such formulation—the term North-eastern Europe is the more accurate one. The area comprising it includes the Baltic Republics in addition to Kaliningrad, Belarus, Ukraine, and possibly Moldova. While North Western Europe would then extend inland into the vastness of Ukraine, as a region the area is centrally defined by its relation to the Baltic Sea which gives it its European character as a borderland area of interconnected cities. These areas are clearly primarily influenced by Russia and were for a long time part of the Soviet Union (Szporluk 1991). The three Baltic Republics, forcibly incorporated in 1940, have always been part of the wider European area and cities such as Tallinn and Riga were important Hanseatic cities and where German was widely spoken. Unlike other parts of the region, they are also part of Western Christianity, Lithuania being predominantly Catholic and also the most northern Catholic nation. Kaliningrad was the former German city and province of Königsberg in East Prussia. Moldavia, which was partially colonized by the Romans, was considerably influenced by Romania, the modern state of which was formed in part of Western Moldova. In the case of Moldova, North-eastern Europe merges into South-eastern Europe. Belarus and Ukraine are clearly only partially European and the latter does not entirely fit into the designation North-eastern, which as used in this chapter is partly as an alternative to the notion of Eastern Europe (which is perhaps a more pertinent term in the case of the Ukraine). However, both have strong European civilizational influences. Polish influences in Ukraine and Belarus have been historically strong, and of course, Lithuania was part of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Parts of Poland were incorporated into Belarus after 1945. Western Ukraine has traditionally been regarded as European and was the least Soviet area in the USSR (Szporluk 1991: 475). Russian and Ukraine historiography has traditionally distinguished both Belarus and the Ukraine from the general course of Russian history and have emphasized its Europeanness (Halecki 1950: 137). However, there can be little doubt that the Ukraine in general is more closely allied with Russia than with Europe,

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for Kiev was the common birthplace of both Russia and Ukraine. The trajectory of Russian history begins with the Kiev Rus before the foundation of Muscovite state, which became the successor of the Kievan kingdom. Due to the overlapping and entangled histories of the area, there is then a good case to include these countries in the mapping of the historical regions of Europe. In sum, in civilizational terms North-eastern Europe has been shaped by the Russian influence and to varying degrees by other civilizational currents. As a historical region, it possibly has the weakest identity as a region, given the divisions of its history and the forcible incorporation of its territories into the Soviet Union. The Baltic republics themselves do not have a clearly articulated collective identity as a region; each having quite different histories prior to their incorporation into the Soviet Republic. The model of modernity in the region has been equally fragmented, depending on the degree of Russification. Of the historical regions of Europe, it is the one that, with the exception of the Baltic republics, had the weakest civil society tradition and where democratization developed only relatively lately and incompletely. Again, with the exception of the Baltic Republics, where the modern market society was relatively advanced prior to their incorporation into the Soviet Union, virtually all these countries experienced a very late transition to capitalism. As a result, the model of modernity that evolved there was shaped more by a feudal legacy—a term to be sure that can be used only with some difficulty in the Russian context—left by German, Nordic and Russian conquerors, and the subsequent rise of Soviet totalitarianism. The six historical regions discussed in this chapter are historically variable and overlapping. They do not simply overlap with each other, but are also closely linked spatially and culturally with areas that lie outside the European region as a whole. The chapter has stressed in this regard the formative influence of the East in the West, and the importance of the Russian and Ottoman-Islamic worlds in the making of Europe. Such a conceptualization serves in part to correct the older Eurocentric view of the making of Europe that tended to see Europe as shaped by itself and to define all its regions in terms of their relation to the Northwest. In approaching the question of the historical regions of Europe from such an inter-civilizational perspective, it may be possible to avoid

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an account that sees unity only as possible in face of a common enemy, for as we have seen there was neither one enemy that predominated nor was there a single core that gave to Europe its identity. To the extent to which it is possible to speak of the ‘idea of Europe’, this must be found in the plurality of its regions, which offer an alternative to accounts of European history in terms of national narratives. The emphasis on a plurality of regions with their own civilizational backgrounds and routes to modernity does not, it must be noted, mean that there is no unity since all these regions interacted with each other and ultimately such interaction made possible the genesis of modernity and the formation of Europe as a world historical region.

Notes 1. I am grateful to Johann Arnason for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 2. Arguably a case could be made, following Eisenstadt (1992), for the inclusion of Judaism as a separate diasporic civilization. 3. There may be an argument for Scandinavia to be considered part of a distinct Nordic region. For present purposes, given the model of modernity that evolved there, it is considered part of the wider North Western Region (see Arnason and Wittrock 2012). 4. This section draws in part on Vidmar-Horvat and Delanty (2012).

12 Europe in the Short Twentieth Century: Conflicting Projects of Modernity

From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the previous century as far as Europe is concerned can be seen as defined by the two world wars and the political systems to which they gave rise. It is now commonplace to observe that 1918 did not mark the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one, which ended not in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany but in 1989, with the break-up of Russian domination in Central and Eastern Europe and within a year the collapse of the East versus West divide. This is what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) has termed the ‘short twentieth century’, which can be regarded as the most apt characterization of the century (see also Badiou 2007). Instead of a periodization that sees 1945 as the threshold to a new era in which democracy returned to Europe, a longer view of the century would see the era 1918–1989 as constituting a certain continuity. From both a global and a wider European perspective a re-conceptualization of the twentieth century is needed that takes account of all the historical regions of Europe. A disadvantage with Hobsbawm’s ‘short twentieth century’ is that it is a periodization that mostly refers to the history of Europe and is not necessarily relevant to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, despite

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this limitation, confined to the history of Europe, it offers a pertinent way to re-historize the twentieth century in Europe and, the concern of this book, the formation of European modernity and its social and political forms. Conceived of in terms of models of modernity, which places the twentieth century in the context of a longer-term historical view, the emphasis is less on the beginning and ending of wars than on the formative moments in the making of modern society. Such moments of great crisis as major revolutions are often more significant than the cessation of wars. European wars such as the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871, the First and Second World wars, the Cold War, important as they were in shaping the course of European history, need to be understood in a larger framework of analysis. The end of the First World War can be taken as a major turning point. Europe after 1918/1919 was a fundamentally different place than it was in the preceding decades. The carnage of the war and the social, cultural and political change it produced was far-reaching. The end of the war marked a fundamental rupture with the nineteenth century. The Russian Revolution in 1917, the collapse of the central European empires, the rise of the USA, the crisis of European bourgeois culture, and the emergence of new scientific and political ideas in the early twentieth century all amount to a fundamental transformation of modernity. The twentieth century in Europe was shaped by the turbulent arrival of a full-scale transition to modernity. While the origins of the many of the events of the era are of course to be located in at least the nineteenth century and are products of much longer-scale histories, there can be no doubt that the post 1918/1919 world was a fundamentally different one than before. No other time in history witnessed so much catastrophe and change than in the period from 1914 to 1920, as a result of the Great War and its aftermath when the so-called Spanish Flu killed more than 50m people. It should be noted that there was nothing inevitable about the First World War and nor about the Bolshevik revolution. The Franco-Prussian war of 1879 presaged the events of 1914, but it did not determine it and it had nothing like the same consequences. As Nigel Clark has shown, it was the blunders of politicians that allowed Europe to sleepwalk into war in 1914 (Clark 2014).

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The year 1945 in contrast did not mark the end of an era for much of Europe. It may have been once possible to tell the story of Europe from the perspective of European integration as commencing in the aftermath of World War Two or from an Anglo-American perspective. Judt (2012: 214–215) has commented that the Second World War cannot be contained within six years and the period 1936–1956 constituted a single period, from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and to the Soviet intervention in Hungary. In any case assumptions of such a narrative collapsed in 1989. Undoubtedly many still adhere to this conventional periodization and see the post-1989 context as one of the ‘enlargement’ of what was a Cold War inter-state system into a wider democratic political community. Such a perspective relies too much on the European Union’s own narrative of its short history and forces a view of European history from the vantage point of the West, with the East reduced to a deviation from a Grand Narrative that sees in the European post-war project the latest chapter in the rise of the West. Against such Grand Narratives of the idea of Europe, an alternative approach would give more weight to revolutions (including counter-revolutions) in defining the shape and identity of Europe, for revolutions were sites of contestation over modernity and the implementation of its basic programmes. They articulated new societal models and were rooted in cultural models that sought the transformation of state, society and the very conception of the individual. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the worldwide revolutions of 1968, and the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–1990, which we may term the 1989 Revolution, can now be seen as the formative events that shaped Europe in the twentieth century in much the same way as 1789 did two centuries earlier. It is now increasingly clear the protests of 1968 constitute an additional revolution that had a transformative impact on the culture and politics of Europe (Gildea et al. 2017, Ingo and Waters 2010, Klimke and Scharloth 2008). A feature of European revolutions, since 1789, is that they were mostly unsuccessful, even if they set new agendas that were taken up later in different circumstances.1 The French Revolution, unlike the American revolution of 1766 and Latin American revolutions, such as the Mexican revolution

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in 1910, is that they did not lead to new democratic societies. The French revolution led to the Terror and a period of counter-revolutions. The seventeenth-century English Revolution led to the restoration of royal power and absolutism as did the revolutions of 1848. Democracy had to find other ways. Indeed, it took major wars in the twentieth century for significant achievements in democracy. The early twentieth century saw the first major revolution in Europe in over a century. If anything this was a revolution in the very nature of modernity. In this case, it was a challenge not only to democracy but also to capitalism. It suffered the fate of all major revolutions in the end in that it did not succeed in the long run. In addition to bringing into the picture the Russian dimension of a wider Europe, as opposed to a narrow conception of Europe based largely on the North-west, such a perspective on revolution has the advantage of placing modernity at the centre of the analysis, since what was at stake for much of the previous century can now be seen to be rival projects of modernity with entirely different visions of how state and society should be organized. There were essentially four such programmatic models of modernity experimented between 1917 and 1989: state socialism or communism, fascism, liberal democracy, and European transnational governance. Of these, the first two failed and the second two succeeded with varying degrees of success. All four were products of Europe and variously appealed to the idea of Europe for legitimation; they were also quintessentially products of political modernity insofar as they articulated a social imaginary for the creation of political community on new foundations and the reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual, the state and society. Except in the latter case, there were revolutionary dimensions to the project of modernity that was entailed. It would be tempting to reduce the course of European history in the twentieth century to national patterns, such as aggressive German nationalism or the catastrophic path of nation-state formation in many countries or to tell the story as one that sees the Shoah as the final destructive outcome of European civilization. Certainly, no account of the idea of Europe can omit the ‘dark side of Europe’, the eclipse of democracy, and what Walter Benjamin referred to as the tie of

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civilization and barbarism. For all its brutality, the legacy of the twentieth century is ambivalent; it was not only the century of totalitarianism and genocide, but of peace-making and new experiments with democracy, emancipation and cosmopolitan justice. It would be equally wrong to see the destructive events of the twentieth century from 1914 to the Yugoslavian War of 1993 as the outcome of long-run historical forces driven by deeply rooted cultural identities rather than the contingent outcome of the times. The aim of this chapter is to offer an assessment of the idea of Europe in the short twentieth century around the conflict of rival models of modernity rather than national conflicts or civilizational conflicts. As argued earlier, there was not a single European civilization, but a plurality and which have been too interlinked to be considered as mutually antagonistic. As far as the twentieth century is concerned, the advent of modernity and the competing interpretations of how to realize and organize society and state according to its principles have had greater consequences than the civilizational backgrounds that lay behind the different projects of modernity. The diversity of Europe, which may have been greater than its unity, was as much an outcome of rival modernities, than a civilizational condition. The pursuit of these projects was decisive in shaping the course of European history in the twentieth century. These projects of modernity will be discussed as follows: beginning with an account of the background fin-de-siècle—c.1890s to 1918—period of crisis, the four main projects of modernity will be discussed, namely Western liberal democracy, communism, fascism, and European transnational governance.

The fin-de-siècle Crisis of Modernity The two decades or so preceding and following World War One marked a shift in European modernity away from the legacy of the French Revolution in so far as that was could be re-told in terms of the march of progress, freedom, and democracy. The ideas of 1789 did not fade, indeed if anything they became stronger, for the period saw the rise of more extreme interpretations and new and rival notions of modernity stemming from all parts of Europe, and especially from the

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German-speaking world. The very notion of a revolutionary transformation of society that 1789 stood for opened up new ways of conceiving the relation of the individual to the state. The fin de-siècle was a watershed in modern Europe; it was a period of cultural and scientific creativity in which new social and political ideas emerged. Throughout the nineteenth century, the ideas of the French Revolution greatly influenced European political modernity in all its expressions, from liberalism to nationalism and socialism. This was an age when the political ideologies of the nineteenth century crystallized into potent political programmes with different and incompatible emancipatory agendas. The notion of freedom, for example, was not necessarily tied to democracy and the idea of progress could mean something more than social improvement. As argued, the French Revolution opened up new visions of political community, but did not lead to a common project or conception of modernity. By the end of the nineteenth century, a major crisis of modernity developed with the recognition that the social fabric and cultural form of modern societies might be degenerating. The general diagnosis of the age was that European civilization was in crisis and that a new order had to be created, if necessary by violence. It is possible to characterize this as a crisis in modernity comparable to the crisis brought about by the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the most consequential expression of this crisis in modernity, for it led to an entirely different project of modernity to the one begun in 1789. It was not the only such departure from modernity. The intellectual currents of the age presaged the crisis that was to come in 1914 and which led to a new European order in 1919 when the European state system was re-organized by the principles set down in Versailles. There can be no doubt that the period 1917–1919 marked the arrival of a fundamental rupture in European modernity. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, European thought underwent an anti-modern turn marked by a widespread rejection of the Enlightenment. The promises of the Enlightenment were seen by many intellectuals as failures. Against the universality of Western Civilization came a new pessimism about its prospects. Oswald Spengler’s influential work, The Decline of the West, published in 1918, captured the mood of

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crisis and pessimism. The theme of the crisis of civilization influenced how Europe might be understood for an age that was also becoming aware that Europe might be falling apart and overshadowed by the USA and Russia. In this period, we see a clear shift from Grand Narratives of Europe to one of critique and crisis and a search for an alternative idea of Europe. Arnold Toynbee, who produced the most elaborate analysis of world civilizations in his monumental 12 volume A Study of History, took up the Spenglerian theme with an explanation of why civilizations decline (Toynbee 1934–1963). In his view, the crisis of the modern world was due to a failure in creativity among elites and it was the fate of Western Civilization, which he saw entering a period of decline akin to that of the Roman Empire. All civilizations eventually decline and the time had now come for Western Civilization. The crisis of civilization theme often assumed a distinction between culture and civilization whereby culture could redeem civilization. Thus civilization was deemed decadent, but European culture could overcome civilization. Nietzsche’s critique of the ‘malaise of modern European civilization’ was written in this mould of thought. He believed modern Europe had lost its way due to collectivist ideologies and what was needed was the creation of a new individualism, whereby ‘the Good Europeans’ would not rely on elites or values other than what they can create themselves. In Beyond Good and Evil in 1886 he wrote of the ‘slow emergence of an essentially supranational and nomadic type of man’, but saw ‘the democratization of Europe’ a potential breeding ground for the emergence of tyrants (Nietzsche 1973: 145). Yet, Nietzsche saw himself as a European: ‘I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” face in addition to the first one. And perhaps also a third… Even by virtue of my descent I am permitted to look beyond all merely locally, merely nationally conditioned perspectives, it costs me nothing to be a “good European”’ (1979: 41). The greatest danger is ‘that of losing the voice for the soul of Europe and sinking into a merely nationalistic affair (1973: 159). The spirit to which he appealed is that of a ‘transvaluation of all values’ which will rescue Europe from corruption by national cultures. The retrieval of the Dionysian elements of the European ‘will to power’, which is also ‘the return of the Greek spirit’, is the basis of Nietzsche’s idea of Europe, which is more like a state of

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mind than a political reality. His philosophy was one of radical autonomy that saw within the present the possibility for a new beginning. It was unfortunate that his argument for a regeneration of Europe would become the intellectual basis of the fascist ideology for a new modernity. A generation later, Nietzsche, along with other German thinkers, most notably Heidegger, whose relation to Nazism was more direct, became the principal inspiration for French post-structuralist thought, which was to find in the German tradition the sources for the overcoming of the Enlightenment legacy. Other examples are Carl Schmitt’s attempt in a work in 1943 to find a new and authentic European jurisprudence based on the idea of seeking an alternative the Jus Publicum Europaeum, which he saw coming to an end; Husserl’s examination of what he called the ‘crisis of European science’ in 1935 and the search for a new kind of philosophy beyond positivism that would be capable of articulating meaning; Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy from Plato to the Enlightenment in the name of a new philosophy of ‘being’ based on the pre-Socratic thinkers who he believed had an alternative to the dominant European tradition; Freud’s critique of civilization in works such as Civilization and its Discontents in 1930 where civilization is cast in the throes of a death wish and ruled by the destructive forces of the unconsciousness. Max Weber’s motif of the ‘Iron age’, although not specifically a characterization of Europe, was another such image of European modernity having rationalized itself to a point that all meaning had vanished from the social world leaving room only for an inner-directed spirituality and individualism to find meaning. For Weber, the social world was increasingly come to be a struggle between the Marxist vision of proletarian politics and the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment. Many of these interpretations of the crisis of European civilization were also critiques of mass society. Bourgeois society was regarded as in decline and the nascent ‘mass society’, a theme of the era, was seen as lacking authenticity, hence the appeal to a historical authentic Europe as an alternative to the status quo. The idea of Europe could then be a way of expressing hostility to mass society. As Ortega y Gasset (1932: 195) wrote in The Revolt of the Masses in 1930–1932:

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‘The world today is suffering a grave demoralization which, among other symptoms, manifests itself by an extraordinary rebellion of the masses, and has its origin in the demoralization of Europe’. The idea of Europe came increasingly to reflect the transformation in consciousness and much as in the structure of society and the nature of the state. The appeal to the ‘spirit of Europe’ or the European mind or consciousness in the early decades of the twentieth century reflects as much a sense of crisis and declines more than anything forward-looking (see Delanty 1995b). In a period in which Catholic thinkers were active, there were several pleas for a conservative organic conception of culture resisting politics, as in Henri Massis’s Defence of the West in 1928, the writings of T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain and Hilaire Belloc who thought that culture could overcome the crisis of civili­ zation, which included for them democracy. Paul Valéry, for instance, in a later work in 1974, ‘The Grandeur and Decadence of Europe’, saw the crisis to be the descent of high culture into the low culture of mass society. But not all thinkers of the era were prone to anti-modernist diagnoses of the crisis of modernity. Karl Jaspers (1948) in his book, The European Spirit, in 1947 proclaimed in more positive terms the need for the idea of Europe to be associated with freedom (see also Harrington 2012). The crisis of modernity that culminated in the 1914–1918 war was fuelled by the transformation of the social and economic order. Changes in capitalism, in work and in the class structure led to a more volatile situation that could not be managed by the existing structures. Economic policies shifted towards protectionism, a massive increase in industrialization, urbanization, and a trend towards monopoly capitalism and Fordist style production, all transformed the nature of work producing the conditions for a shift in political consciousness around social issues. Modernity appeared now to be in perpetual change and no longer could be made sense of through the categories of the previous century. The emergence of the social sciences and new theoretical insights as in the work of Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, was the beginning of a fundamental rethinking of the nature of social life, the individual and modernity.

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Within psychology and philosophy, too, new breakthroughs occurred in the analysis of consciousness, language and the nature of subjectivity, as reflected in Husserl, Heidegger and Freud. In literature and the arts, the modernist movement and its various offshoots led to a new emphasis on consciousness, time and the possibility of new realities beyond the empirically given. Above all, it was the thought of Marx and Freud that encapsulated the search for a new modernity. Both the individual and society henceforth could no longer be conceived in terms of a conception of modernity derived from the old social struggles of bourgeois emancipation. The individual now occupied the centre of stage and in a way that tied subjectivity to the pursuit of new collective goals, many of which involved the creation of a new kind of individual and the reorganization of the relation between state and society. While Marx declared a new goal for collective determination, Freud declared individual emancipation from domination as the goal. The revolutionary implications of Freud’s thought took longer to crystallize than Marx’s and took a different form. But together, Freud and Marx shaped the intellectual horizons of the twentieth century in far-reaching ways. In short, the project of the realization of human autonomy was open to new definitions; it was inevitable that some of these would be self-destructive. In the terms of the conception of modernity outlined in Chapter 8, it is possible to characterize these developments as part of the genesis of a new modernity insofar as they involved the articulation of diverse social imaginaries about how the social world should be organized and how human emancipation could be achieved. They had both a generative and transformative effect on the age in that they opened up new perspectives, which were in turn variously taken up by social, cultural and political movements in the early decades of the twentieth century. These new ways of seeing world in time became the basis of new societal systems, as well as the inspiration of many abortive attempts at social reconstruction as well as, with 1968, utopian ones The following sections consider four such projects that can be seen both as attempts to create new models of modernity and entailing conceptions of Europe that had cast a long shadow over the twentieth century.

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Western Liberal Democracy and Organized Modernity Democracy has often been associated with the European political heritage and the defining feature of its modernity. The experience of the twentieth century is a sober reminder of both the limits of democracy and of what Michael Mann (2006) has referred to as the ‘dark side of democracy’, namely their capacity for ‘ethnic cleansing’ and xenophobic nationalism leading to the persecution and elimination of minorities. Within the wider European area, the century began with the first genocide in modern times: the genocide in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turkish army. The tendency of the democratic nation-state was to equate the demos with a singular notion of the people. This could easily produce illiberal results as much as emancipation. The liberal democracies were nation-states and, on the whole, it was the nationstate, whether newly created or long established, that was the principle vehicle for the diffusion of nationalism in the twentieth century, especially from 1914 to 1945. Democracy was fragile in many European countries during the first half of the century and it was not until 1990 that all countries made the transition to liberal democracy. The only countries that did not have a break in their democratic tradition during the interwar period were Britain, Ireland, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland (Hobsbawm 1994: 111). Even where the constitutional state survived internal or external challenges, as in Britain, nationalism was a powerful force. The modern state, it is often argued, aimed at the homogenization of the population, through policies of assimilation, forcible repatriation, population exchanges or even elimination (Wimmer 2002). There are of course important differences between ethnic cleansing and policies of assimilation. Liberal democracies based on the constitutional state have generally resorted to less extreme measures for the control of their populations. Yet those liberal democracies that have had the longest history of constitutional and democratic government were the ones that presided over colonial empires for much of the short twentieth century and embarked on colonial wars while promoting peace in Europe. Democracy and constitutional government was for the imperial centre, not for the colony.

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Imperial nationalism was one of the major features of the liberal democracies of Europe until 1945 and continued for several decades later. While 1945 has generally been taken to be the point at which democracy returned at least to Western Europe, it is often forgotten in such conventional accounts that the Western liberal democracies continued to rule over colonial territories. India finally became independent in 1947, but Britain continued to rule over what remained of its empire and fought a war against Egypt in 1956 over Nasser’s nationalization and closure of the Suez Canal. Britain fought a brutal war in Kenya in the 1950s following the Mau-Mau Rebellion in which thousands were killed and many tortured. France was liberated from German occupation in 1945, but engaged in a war against an uprising against French rule in Madagascar in 1947 and continued to rule over Algeria until 1962 where it fought a war from 1952 to 1962 in which one million were killed. France also fought a war in Vietnam in 1950 at exactly the same time as France opened the way towards European integration with the Schuman Declaration. European integration itself was implicated in the legacy of colonialism since several overseas territories were incorporated into the then EEC in 1958 following the Treaty of Rome, including Algeria, which was an integral part of the French state, French Guyana, Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe and the Spanish territories of Melilla and Ceuta (Hansen 2002). British reluctance to join the EEC was not unconnected with the view that membership would be against its colonial interests. However, it has been argued that the project of European integration, when it finally gained momentum, was in part driven by the failure of the British and French to defeat Egypt and the desire for greater military control over the Suez Canal, which was regarded as critical for access to its colonial dominions. The fact that the USA put pressure on Britain to withdraw drove the French more firmly towards a plan for European cooperation (see Hansen 2002; Anderson 1997: 57). Eventually, Britain came to see that the EEC might be a substitute for its diminishing empire insofar as economic policy was concerned and too a possible source of international influence. The shadow of war never entirely left Europe, despite the overcoming of internal wars between the European states since 1945. Iraq became the scene of

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a global war led by the USA and the UK in 2003 and despite massive public protests, with the exception of the French and German governments, most EU member states directly, such as Poland, Spain and Italy, or indirectly gave their support to the war. Democracies may no longer go to war with each other, but so far they there is nothing hindering them from going to war with non-democracies on the dubious grounds of enforcing democracy upon them. Despite the experience of war, both internal warfare and external colonial and neocolonial, liberal democracy from the end of the nineteenth century onwards provided Europe with a means of solving the major challenges produced by modern society. The disastrous experience of war in the twentieth century should not detract from the fact that liberal democracy was the principal model for the realization and organization of modernity in Europe. Peter Wagner (1994: 73–74) has termed this the period of ‘organized modernity’, roughly from the 1890s to the 1960s when the exit began to a different model of modernity from the nineteenth century’s ‘restrictive modernity’. In this period European societies achieved a degree of stability and certainty following a long period of uncertainty. This was not finally achieved until the post-Second World War period, since the two world wars undermined the initial move in the direction of organized modernity, understood in Wagner’s terms, as state-led projects organized on national lines for the classification of social phenomena. The broad categories of organized modernity were the nation-state and social classes. Liberal democracies thus spear-headed programmes for material allocation and reward through institutions such as education, citizenship, health and welfare reform. These programmes went far beyond the nineteenth-century methods of state control for they required more extensive apparatuses of government and had to become more embedded in democracy. Democracy was no longer seen as a product of the free market, but required state-led programmes of integration including economic protectionism, technical shifts and changes in the nature of organization management, such as scientific management along the principles of Taylorism. The conflict between capital and labour increasingly became incorporated into this organized model of class conflict.

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Liberal democracy in the twentieth century brought about a transformation in citizenship in the direction of social citizenship. The notion of social rights, in addition to political and civic rights, as in the famous theory of citizenship of T. H. Marshall (1987) in 1949, was an achievement of the twentieth century, though not specific to liberal democracy, as it was also a feature of the Soviet Union. However in Europe it was more firmly tied to a belief in individual and collective determination and made possible a more expansive degree of democratization, even social citizenship was, in the terms of Marshall, a compensation for the inequalities of capitalism. This was a project shared by the right as much as by the left. Indeed, some of the major drives towards the welfare state were undertaken by the centre-right before it discovered neoliberalism. Liberal democracy within the model of organized modernity increasingly became wedded to the normative goal of equality and in theory the vision of an egalitarian society articulated the basic imaginary of the era which was animated by the idea of meritocratic achievement. The various national variants tended towards the egalitarian or the meritocratic ends of the normative spectrum of organized modernity. The societal model that underpinned social citizenship can be characterized as democratic capitalism, namely the integration of capitalism within a basic democratic framework; however this is relevant only to the three decades after 1945, when economic growth sustained a more social kind of capitalism, an expanding welfare state and public sector, full employment, the general acceptance of Keynesian economics and the assumption that capitalism had to be compatible with democracy (Streeck 2011). Thus, it can be said one of the major features of the short twentieth century was the transition to organized capitalist modernity and its subsequent crisis. This was orchestrated by the democratic nation-state and essentially in the direction of Fordist style industrialism. It was inevitable that this would not be a smooth transition, just as the transition from feudalism to capitalism or the transition from absolutism to the constitutional state did not produce uniform results. Democracy was weak in much of Southern Europe: in Spain, Franco ruled until 1975, Portugal was ruled by a military dictatorship until 1974, and in Greece,

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the colonels ruled from 1967 to 1974. However, in a relatively short space of time, it had become the dominant framework for the organization of state and society in Western Europe. With the transition to democracy in Spain and Portugal by 1980 and the return to democracy in Greece in 1975, liberal democracy within the framework of organized modernity had become stabilized, at least until the late 1970s when its edifice unravelled, though not before the demise of its main alternatives. Until then the nation-state, industrialism, and liberal capitalism formed the basis of the era of organized capitalism. There was of course nothing specifically European about it. This was a model already in operation in North America. It was a period in which Americanization had become a pervasive force in Europe, due not least to the Marshall Plan for post-war recovery, and when the wider context of the West served as an ideological orientation. The notion of the West competed with the idea of Europe, a development that was not surprising given that for most of this period Europe was confronted by a hostile and anti-Western Russia. For this reason, the notion of organized modernity could be contrasted to a wider idea of a ‘western modernity’ as part of the social imaginary of the twentieth century. There was certainly widespread belief in the idea of Europe as part of a wider civilization of the West from 1919 onwards. This was a period when the Anglo-Saxon world was influential right across the world outside the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries (see Katzenstein 2012). The liberal democratic project of modernity outlined here can also be seen in terms of what is often referred to as modernization, namely a normative conception of modern society based on the historical experience of the Western world and American economic and political leadership. The end of World War Two marked the ascendency of this model of modernity over much of the world. It came to an end when its main rival ceased to exit and at a time when the world underwent another major historical transformation. The first intimations of this were in the revolts that swept across Europe in 1968, which was a wider movement of rebellion that had its roots in the counter-culture in the USA.

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The Communist Experiment of Revolutionary Modernity and Its Aftermath The Russian Revolution in October 1917 marked the emergence of one of the major experiments in modernity and can be conceived of as an alternative to Western modernity. In some six decades of its existence, it reshaped the map of Europe. State socialism was not only a political system, but a project of modernity, which may have been an experiment that failed, but was nonetheless an experiment with the making of a new kind of social and political order that sought its legitimation not in the French Revolution, but in the ideas of the Russian Revolution of 1917 (see Arnason 1993, 2000b). Modernity, as argued earlier, does not take a singular Western form, but has taken many different forms. Non-Western variants of modernity should not be regarded as un- or anti-modern, traditional or aberrations from a universal model. As argued in the previous chapter, the historical regions of Europe all had different models of modernity, albeit variants of a broader European modernity. The Soviet Union is a particularly pertinent example of the plurality of forms of modernity in that it was one of the most radical experiments with modernity and one that cannot be considered a product of pre-modern tradition. The civilizational influences have often been noted in that the Soviet state inherited certain aspects of the Russian imperial state (see Chapter 4). However, there can be no doubt that 1917 brought about a major rupture with the past and the new state was a radical departure of greater proportions to the rupture of 1789, when part of the ancien regime survived or adjusted to the new order. As an experiment with modernity as revolutionary progrect, the Soviet Union instituted a new societal system in which state and society were to be organized in an entirely new way. The planned economy, rapid industrialization and the authoritarian state took to an extreme what the model referred to as organized modernity set out, namely an ideologically grounded programme for the total reconstruction of state and society. According to Feher, Heller and Markus (1983), the Soviet system, with its command economy, was the carrier of a modernizing trend. This was a self-proclaimed universalism based on growth driven by the two forces of

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maximization and control (see also Feher 1987: 13). State socialism was thus based on a societal model and a social imaginary. Without the social imaginary of communism, such a project probably would not have been possible since it was necessary to create an ideological blueprint and a project of emancipation in order to conceive of the possibility of an alternative society. As Furet (1999: 63) has commented, ‘[W]hat was so spellbinding about the October Revolution was the affirmation of the role of volition in history and of man’s invention of himself—the quintessential image of the autonomy of the democratic individual’. This vision crystallized in the Soviet Union’s pursuit of education and science as a means of transmitting its vision of modernity to its citizens. Despite its authoritarianism, it was another and extreme facet of the Enlightenment project of enlisting knowledge for social advancement. However, the course of Soviet history, since Stalin, set off on a different trajectory to that of the rest of Europe and, as argued in Chapter 4, it incorporated elements of the Russian Byzantine civilizational tradition. The Marxist Leninist project originated in Western Europe in terms of the genesis of its ideas, but it was implemented in Russia under very different circumstances in a society that had not yet fully emerged out of serfdom; it was also potentially, as propounded by Leon Trotsky, a universal movement of ‘permanent revolution’, probably with greater appeal in the colonies of Europe and in Asia than in the West. It did not see itself as a specifically European movement, since its aims were universalistic, though for a time the notion of a republican United States of Europe was voiced by the Bolsheviks and had the support of Trotsky (Anderson 2007: 483). However, in the end it settled for the model of ‘socialism in one country’. In 1919 there were two competing social imaginaries for the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the European empires. One was the Marxist Leninist project; the other was Western Liberal Democracy. The defeat of the Prussian, Austrian Habsburg, Ottoman and Russian Empires, along with the weakening of the British and French overseas empires, was a turning point in European and world history. The Bolshevists, especially Trotsky saw it as the opportunity to create a new modernity according to the principles outlined

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by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. The outcome was the creation of the USSR and the eventual extension of its area of influence to the countries of the Warsaw Pact in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Western powers that signed the Versailles Treaty in 1919, including the USA, had a different vision for Europe, namely the introduction of Western liberal democracy for a European of nation-states, a project that had the support of Churchill who believed enigmatically that Britain should be the leader of it without becoming part of it. The League of Nations, founded also at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, was created to oversee the new international order, which included Russia until 1939 when it was expelled following the offensive against Finland. While the Western powers invoked the idea of Europe for the post-1919 world order, the Soviet Union did not and generally saw its project as anti-Western and rooted in Russia’s own Eurasian tradition. In that sense, it had a distinct civilizational dimension to its modernizing impulse. At stake, then, were not just two ideologies, but two competing models of modernity, each having their own variants and imaginaries of emancipation. In the case of communism, the Chinese route since 1949 was the other major one and a reminder of the potential for communism to adapt and endure to become what is still the main alternative to the Western liberal democracy. The Second World War brought a new dimension to the emerging division between Russia and Europe. No European power ever succeeded in defeating Russia, as both Napoleon and Hitler discovered. Both Russian and the West were united in their resolve to defeat Germany. Indeed, without the Red Army the outcome of the Second World War would have been very different, for it was Russia, which also incurred the greatest losses that ultimately secured the first major defeat of Germany following the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. For the second time in the century, Germany was at the centre of the division of Europe. In the race to Berlin, the allied powers did not beat the Russians leading to the compromised division of Germany, which was a prelude to the division of Europe. The Cold War began with the occupation of Central and Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union and the subsequent construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

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The introduction of state socialism into Central and Eastern Europe in many ways was simply the forced extension of Soviet totalitarian rule on countries whose political heritage and civilizational background was closer to the European model of modernity. The reality was more complicated since there was also considerable domestic support both from elites and the masses for socialism in these countries; in several cases there were innovative attempts to create different models of socialism, the Czechoslovakian experiment to liberalize socialism being the most far-reaching one, if also the most short-lived when it came to an abrupt end in 1968. The Yugoslavian route was also a different path, as was the Hungarian. The fact that state socialism in the end failed does not mean that it was fated to do so or somehow incidental to history or an Eastern import and thus not really part of the European legacy. The four decades of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe should not be seen as a departure from an authentic historical path but as constitutive of modern Europe. Few ideologies, with the exception of religion and occasionally nationalism, were more powerful in commanding obedience and commitment than communism. Though in the final analysis it required barbed wire, terror and armed police to maintain it, in both the East and for the myopic left in the West it offered a vision of an alternative society. State socialism achieved a significant degree of social rights for workers as well as gender equality. The experience of making history, as Badiou (2007) has argued, the sense of living in historic times, was a powerful motivating force for many people for whom communism was a utopia that could be realized regardless of the amount of suffering involved. The example of China shows that there was no inherent reason for the Soviet system to fail. Lack of flexibility and adaptability to a non-Western context was a factor, but above all it was its incapacity to see through reforms that proved fatal. In the terms of a conception of modernity, it failed because it did not succeed in securing a workable balance between autonomy and power; in the end, it eroded the conditions of the possibility of modernity. The notion of a Cold War between East and West is in many ways a misleading picture of the short twentieth century. Despite a number of potential threats of war, both Russia and the Western NATO alliance were reconciled to the existence of each other and the war was, as

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often claimed, a phony war, especially since Khrushchev’s de-escalation of hostility. The real race was to gain as much control over the so-called Third World. The Trotskyist notion of worldwide permanent revolution had long been abandoned and the West saw no real advantage or possibility in bringing about the defeat of the USSR. The industrial war economies of East and West found more uses in the Cold War as the only source of justification that existed for their own hegemonic systems that required high levels of military spending and political control of populations and the suppression of dissent (see Kaldor 1990, 1991). The existence of one provided the conditions of the other with the threat of a politics of what E. P. Thompson (1982) called ‘exterminism’. The unexpected end of state socialism following the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the subsequent break-up of the USSR in 1991 was an event that was as momentous as 1917. First, the events of 1989 can be regarded as revolutions even if they were not based on fundamentally new ideas or new conceptions of the foundation of political community. They can be considered revolutions due to the transformational consequences for state and society in those countries, and due to the global significance, the outcomes had for the rest of the world. Second, the ideas that led to the collapse of state socialism were of considerable significance despite their short-lived consequences, such as the Perestroika (reform) and Glasnost (openness) initiated by Gorbachev in 1986 and the civil society movements in Hungary and Poland where the idea of civil society was revived not only for Central and Eastern Europe; in addition there was the earlier movement to create democratic socialism. These movements, in particular the civil society ideas, were also ideas of Europe and of how political modernity should be organized. The outcome was not only transformational for Central and Eastern Europe, but too for the rest of Europe and for the future direction of the European Union. It was not, then, that Western modernity was simply embraced and that henceforth liberal democracy triumphed over all competing political ideas—the so-called end of history thesis—but instead a transformation occurred within European political modernity leading to a plurality of outcomes (see also Blokker 2005, 2008). The recent spread of authoritarian democracy and xenophobic nationalism in many of the

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former socialist countries (Hungary and Poland for example) can be in part account for the fact that during the decades of the Warsaw Pact these countries did not undergo the same degree of cultural pluralization that Western Europe experienced. With a relatively weak cultural left, these countries were shaped by a model of modernity that made such societies more receptive to authoritarian nationalism.

Fascism, Civil War and the Path to Destruction The first half of the short twentieth century was a period of extremes, on the left communism and on the right fascism. The varieties of liberal democracy and nationalist movements occupied positions in between these extremes of right and left. But it was the extreme position that shaped the century and fundamentally changed how Europe would view itself. Fascism can be viewed in a number of ways. In Germany, it was initially a peculiar mixture of nationalism and socialism, though this became less important with the rapid development of Nazism and anti-Semitism; in Italy, fascism, the original birthplace, emerged in the 1920s with Benito Mussolini as the leader of a right-wing nationalist movement primarily opposed to the left; in Spain, under Francisco Franco, an authoritarian ultra-nationalist movement was established that opposed the liberally oriented Second Republic and various socialist and communist movements operative in it. While Franco parted from the fascist Falange movement and won power by military conquest, the regime he established embodied fascist characteristics despite relying on an anti-modern ideology of legitimation. The German, Italian and Spanish variants were the most important, but many other countries experienced the creation of fascist states, such as Romania and Hungary during the 1930s, and Portugal under the Estado Novo movement led by the military dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Other countries had fascist parties, such as Oswald Mosley’s party in Britain in the 1930, which did not gain control of the state. Mussolini was the inspiration for European fascism, which like state socialism, can be viewed as an attempt to create a new political order of modernity. Indeed, it was a rival to the socialist alternative to liberal capitalism. Fascism sought a position that was not mid-way, but an

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entirely different course. In the 1920s and 1930s, before liberal democracy in the West and state socialism in Russia consolidated, it appeared to many that the options were open and included the fascist alternative, which can be seen as a third variant of modernity in Europe in the twentieth century. Both fascism and communism offered to many intellectuals and political figures a credible alternative to liberal democracy. Those attracted to fascism were generally inspired by the movement’s opposition to communism. Despite the obvious similarities in that both were authoritarian one-party political systems, fascism was heralded as the most promising alternative to communism. Fascist ideology was very much a creation of the twentieth century. It lacked the intellectual and ideological sources that communism and liberal democracy could draw on, since it did not have in any significant sense than its nineteenth-century origins, being largely a counterrevolutionary movement that arose in opposition to the political modernity that came with the French Revolution. Fascism was based essentially on an ethnic notion of nationalism and a belief in the organic unity of the nation, but was more than nationalism. Fascism promoted violence as a political philosophy to create a new social and political order; although primarily a statist ideology of national regeneration, it also sought the radical reconstruction of society, often in the image of an idealized past of imperial glory and resentment against the present. Resentment was a powerful force. For Hitler, German resentment against the Versailles Treaty, which imposed heavy penalties and humiliation on Germany for the First World War, was the driving force; for Mussolini it was the mythology of the Roman Empire and the prospect of a new imperial state; for Franco it was the loss of Spanish dominion in Africa and hatred of communism that drove him and the Falangist movement to repel against the liberal and secular Republic. The centrality of the leader and charismatic authority was a feature of fascist politics as was the symbolism of masculinity and redemptive violence. A characteristic feature of all fascist movements was the worship of the state as the total expression of the nation. The fusion of society, nation and state defined fascism which sought the revolutionary transformation of society. The notion of totalitarianism strictly speaking derives from the Italian fascists, who used it in the positive sense of the state as

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the total representation of the nation. The fascist political order is better defined as radical authoritarian populism, and often embodies aspects of democracy and republicanism. All fascists were opposed to what they regarded as the internal enemies of the nation, who generally were the left, but also the liberal establishment; for Hitler, this included the Jews. The place of anti-Semitism in German fascism gave to it a different character since this characteristic became the dominant one in Nazism, while being more or less absent from Spanish and Italian fascism. In all cases, the capacity to gain control of the military and bring about effective mass mobilization ensured the relative success of fascism as a formidable political movement in the twentieth century. It may be considered to be as much a project launched against modernity than a movement of modernity. However to regard it only as anti-modern would be to neglect some of the modernizing dimensions within fascism and some of its core tenets which proclaimed the creation of a new kind of human being, innovative social and economic engineering and the assertion of the autonomy of the nation overall else. It was driven by a peculiar modernist aesthetic that proclaimed new transcendent values that would be realized through violent rebirth and revolution (Griffin 2009). It was closely linked with Futurism, which glorified modernity as a regenerative force. Gentile (2003: 61) has shown that fascist modernism sought to realize a new synthesis between tradition and modernity without renouncing the goals of the nation. Riley (2010) has argued that fascism was a form of ‘authoritarian democracy’ and was a product of civil society associationism, which did not contrary to de Tocqueville always block despotism, but facilitated it by providing it with a means of anchoring itself in local sources of power. Fascism drew from revolutionary movements and, according to Hobsbawm (1994: 127), owed its support to people who were attracted to its anti-capitalist and anti-oligarchic edge. Its modernity was a different one from that of Enlightenment liberalism. The sources on which it drew, which varied from political romanticism to nationalism and republicanism, were all products of modernity, however much convulsed they became in the fascist imagination, which did not have the same project of emancipation that communism had. As a project of modernity, it was a force of economic and political modernization but

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without the assertion of freedom and human autonomy. Through the creation of a monolithic state apparatus, it destroyed most of the foundations of modernity and failed in the end to create a viable alternative. While the principal ideology in fascism was nationalism, it had also a European dimension in terms of its appeal to the idea of Europe, such as Hitler’s vision of a ‘New Europe’. Fascists proclaimed the essential unity of Europe as both an ideal and a reality. In the case of Hitler this was taken much further than by Franco, who confined his movement to Spain, and Mussolini (see Roseman 2011). It was a supranational ideology that in its extreme version sought the creation of a new European civilization. Hitler and Mussolini believed in the Roman Empire as the model for a new fascist Europe. The One Thousand Year Reich was to be a European order. The inspiration for Hitler was Mussolini who articulated many of these ideas for the revival of the Roman legacy in a new fascist Europe. Despite its lack of philosophical foundations, fascism was embraced to varying degrees by many intellectuals, such as the philosophers Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger in Germany, in Italy Gabriele D’Annunzio, in France Charles Maurras and Andre Gide, in Britain the poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in Ireland W. B. Yeats (see Herf 1986). The fact that fascism ultimately failed and Europe today has turned its back on it does not detract from its importance as one of the major political movements of the twentieth century. It was not confined to Europe, but it was in Europe that it had the greatest impact in the twentieth century. Fascism received its first and most important defeat by Russia and by the Western liberal democracies in 1945, but in the case of Portugal and Spain it survived in the form of authoritarian and repressive regimes until the 1970s; until 1974 in Portugal following Salazar’s removal from power and in Spain in 1975 following the death of Franco. Indeed, in the case especially of Spain fascism proved to have been a durable system of rule for almost four decades. Franco, it should be noted, was not primarily a fascist figure in the sense of Hitler and Mussolini in that he acquired power through military means rather than through democracy. However, Francoist Spain nonetheless embodied many of the features of German and Italian fascism, though lacking effective economic policies. Franco’s restriction of the fascist project to

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Spain made possible its survival for several decades after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini. Francoist Spain was arguably more repressive than any of regimes in the Warsaw Pact countries, with over 500,000 people being charged and persecuted by the Political Responsibilities tribunals between 1939 and 1945 and more than 35,000 official executions of republican supporters during the Francoist Terror (Beevor 2006: 450). The rise of fascism in the 1920s and the challenge it offered to both liberal democracy and the variety of socialist alternatives was not entirely surprising and is a reminder of the vulnerability of democracy and the fragility of modernity, which was not entirely wedded to the democratic state. Parliamentary or liberal democracy was not firmly rooted in the political traditions of many European countries, and in those with relatively strong democratic traditions, there was nothing preventing mass mobilization to subvert democracy, which without strong institutional structures can easily take populist forms. For these reasons, caution must be exercised in associating Europe with the spirit of democracy. It was a feature of fascism that it gained considerable popular support, though not in all cases democratic legitimation. Since the First World War, in which 8 million died and as many as 13 million due to diseases that followed (Mazower 2000: 80), the reality of violence as part of the nature of the political had become apparent. Violence thus seemed for many as a way to rebuild a New World through creative destruction. Fascism was a product of this climate that also produced support for communism. As mentioned earlier, Badiou’s (2007) claim that underlying these radical projects was the sense of living in historic times rather than in the past. In many countries in North-western Europe Hitler offered a vision for the future that was more appealing than what liberal democracy could offer. The notion of submission to Hitler was not entirely objectionable to elements of an elite for whom mass democracy was not particularly attractive and the prospect of Bolshevist victory spreading to Western Europe was even more unappealing. The idea of a total state that controlled economy and society offered elites and masses alike certainty and stability. One of the major attractions for popular support for fascism was its social and economic programme of full employment. It was this more than anything that made it more appealing than liberalism (Luebbert 1991: 275).

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The reality of such illusions and the collapse of the fascist modernist project was the social and political destruction for Europe in a war that left over 40 million dead, half of whom were civilians. One outcome was that the European legacy would be redefined around the centrality of the persecution and extermination of the European Jews. The Shoah would henceforth be the central event in the twentieth century for Europe and an illustration of Walter Benjamin’s claim in his 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History that ‘There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism’. The idea of Europe could no longer be invoked without recognition of the destructive forces that modernity could unleash. The writings of Hannah Arendt, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and Zygmunt Bauman, explored the relationship between modernity and the holocaust. Their work offers a perspective on how fascism and in particular the Shoah was not simply a product of a national mentality or a path dependent course of national history determined by the cultural characteristics of the Germans or can be explained by the weakness of German culture to resist the Nazis. In Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 Arendt (1963) argued that a significant factor was the way in which the Holocaust had been bureaucratized by the state leading to the removal of individual responsibility. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer (1979) placed the holocaust in the context of the instrumental rationalism within Western Civilization. Bauman (1989) in Modernity and the Holocaust argued in a similar vein that the holocaust was an expression of modern instrumental rationality and made possible by a self-perpetuating technological and administrative apparatus which led to the growing distance between action and responsibility. Of the many genocides of the twentieth century within Europe—those of Stalin, Franco, the Turkish massacre of the Armenians—the singularity of the Nazi’s genocide of the Jews stands out from all others. In this case, genocide was the primary aim of the state; rather than being a means to an end, it was an end itself. Virtually every aspect of the state was involved in a programme of extermination that had no rational aim while paradoxically requiring complex rational organization to achieve its objective.

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The conflict of rival projects of modernity—between liberal democracy, communism and fascism—led to major divisions within Europe in the short twentieth century. These divisions are also illustrated by the prevalence of civil wars from 1919 to 1949, the major ones being the Russian Civil War 1917–1922, the Finnish Civil War in 1918, the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939, the Greek Civil War 1943–1944. Others, such as the Irish Civil War in 1922–1923 emerged out of a split within the nationalist movement and did not involve major ideological disputes. These wars, which could be seen as part of a wider European civil war, were more than national conflicts, but entailed conflicts over the nature of political modernity; all arose following revolutionary changes leading to different conceptions of nationhood and statehood and in all cases the international context was important (see Armitage 2017; Casanova 2000; Minehan 2006). The Russian Civil War—the most fateful of all civil wars—resulted in the victory of the Bolshevists over the White Army, but in the other examples, it was the counter-revolutionary right that won. In the case of Finnish Civil War the Red Guards won, but within weeks the Grand Duchy of Finland was invaded by Germany leading to their flight to Russia. The Spanish Civil War is undoubtedly the most vivid example of the conflict of modernities. The attack on the Second Republic, created following the collapse of the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera in 1931, by Francisco Franco’s African Army in 1936 was a struggle between a democratic state, in which socialist and anarchist groups sought to reform, and a fascist counter-revolutionary movement that sought a return to an autocratic Catholic national state that could command total obedience from society. For the fascists, the Republic represented the worst excesses of secularism and socialism, which from 1936 took a more radical egalitarian direction, as recalled by George Orwell in Homage to Cataluña in 1938. The struggle took on a wider European dimension with the involvement of the International Brigade in support of the communists. Franco’s victory, aided by Nazi Germany, over the republicans and communists led to the creation of an authoritarian state that survived until Franco’s death in 1975. The Spanish Civil War was the scene of some of the clash of most radical political projects in modernity and involved an unprecedented level of violence, which continued long after the end of the civil war.

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The Project of European Integration and Post-sovereign Modernity The post-Second World project of European integration was a product of the experience of war and the expression of a desire by a new generation of visionary political leaders for a new beginning. It had pre-1945 antecedents in various pan-European movements and proposals for federalism on a European level, but these rarely progressed much beyond the level of ideas and ultimately could not compete with nationalism and the appeal of the nation-state as the crucible for modernity (see Hewitson and D’Auria 2012). The circumstances of both the 1939– 1945 war and the subsequent division of Europe between East and West was the context for European integration, a project that ran parallel to the building of socialist republics in the Warsaw Pact countries. It can be viewed from the perspective of modernity as an alternative course, albeit with uncertain outcomes, to the three main models of modernity that clashed over the preceding four decades. European integration was in the first instance born of the desire to overcome the destruction that fascism had brought to Europe, which in its original goal was a bid to unite the economies of Germany and France, countries that had gone to war three times since 1870. Indeed, even after 1945 there were still fears, especially in France of a potential Nazi revival in Germany. But it also a product of the emerging Cold War and designed to integrate Western Europe against the spectre of communism and Soviet expansion. Finally, it was a project aimed at the transnationalization of the European nation-state. While it did not achieve this aim, which is probably unrealizable, it did bring about lasting change to the hitherto existing model of liberal democracy. The implications of European integration for modern Europe are only beginning to become clear. We return to this in the final chapters of this book, but for now it can be stated in what is by no means an uncontroversial claim that in the longer perspective of history, the post second world project of European integration can be considered to be watershed in the history of Europe amounting to a new direction for European post-sovereign modernity. While European integration

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initially was movement seeking economic integration and political coordination, it eventually brought about a lasting transformation in the constitutional fabric of European societies. It is in this sense that it can be seen as a project of modernity. Even though liberal democracy in the end survived, it did not do so unscathed. As a project of modernity, European integration was less radical than the two major modernities it sought to overcome, its inception was not entirely opposed to the democratic constitutional nation-state, but in time it sought the transformation of political community and the creation of a new kind of a polity in which sovereignty no longer resided in one source of power. For these reasons, it can be considered a project of modernity, even if it did not seek the overcoming of liberal democracy in the way the earlier competitors did. However, it did bring about a constitutionalization of the political in ways that went beyond liberal democracy and its model of national sovereignty. The post-1945 period was marked by a movement away from nationalism and European triumphalism in the recognition of the need for a new international normative order. Although this was initially within the framework of the liberal democratic project of modernity, it eventually went beyond it in creating the conditions for the emergence of a new model of political community that was essentially post-sovereign. The resistance movement, at least as represented in the work of intellectuals, played a role in the reorientation of politics in the direction of a greater recognition for the need for a new European morality (Wilkinson 1981). The foundation of the United Nations in 1945, the creation of UNESCO also in that year, the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the establishment of a new legal principle of ‘crimes against humanity’ were the most prominent signs of the emergence of a new cosmopolitan imaginary that sought to embed the pursuit of national interests in a normative order beyond the nation-state. Initially, this did not seek anything more than to avoid war and in the case of Europe to bring about lasting peace between countries whose entire economies and national psyches had been organized for war for several decades. Such an ambition required the diminution of nationalism and a commitment to international cooperation. The experience with fascism had corrupted

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nationalism, not least due to the fact of very widespread collaboration and a political legacy of violence that few countries could overcome through a myth of fascist resistance. Resistance to fascism, where it occurred, was often weak and due to the extent of collaboration and rival interpretations of who resisted and in what cause, it was not always a viable basis for a new beginning, except in the case of Britain where it played a major role in national identity. The result was widespread amnesia, as Judt (2005) has documented and which was probably necessary for post-war recovery. European integration in contrast held out the promise of a new beginning and it had the advantage that it was without memory. As a memoryless project, it was not burdened by the legacy of the past. This may have proved to be in the long run a weakness, but in the decade or so after 1945, it had advantages for those wanting to escape from history. Peace and prosperity were attractive goals to be achieved by moderate social engineering in an age when state intervention and planning was regarded as normal (Schrag 2013). As is now well known, social democracy was one such project of social engineering and was based on the vision of the national state as the container of what was often held to be a pure conception of society. The escape from history was incomplete, for as discussed earlier while within Europe the conditions for a lasting peace were secured, with only the serious prospect of war being between Greece (which joined in 1981) and Turkey over the question of Cyprus. It was possibly the case that international crises, such as the Korean war (1950–1953) had the potential implications for a conflict within Europe between the USSR and NATO. The reality was that this was generally contained and the two sides reconciled themselves to each other existence. Nonetheless, while France and Germany appeared to bury the past, the war was not far from the horizon. In the early decades of European integration, the exit from imperialism had begun, but it was a slow one: France embarked on a war in Indochina in 1950, the year the French foreign minister, Robert Schumann opened the path to European integration, and between 1954 and 1962 France was involved in a bloody war in Algeria in which one million were killed. Both France and Britain went to war against Egypt in 1956 (see Hansen 2002). As discussed earlier,

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Britain fought a brutal war in Kenya in 1956 following the Mau-Mau Rebellion and in 1971 Britain fought a war in Northern Ireland in which there was a suspension of civil liberties and a state of exception created. Such developments are an important reminder of the importance of situating the history of European integration in a global context, and as also illustrated by these examples of European self-deception, is the longer perspective of Europe’s colonial history (see also Böröcz 2010). The political circumstances in any case had changed. Europe was effectively reduced to Western Europe and economically, politically and militarily weakened, it aligned itself with the USA at the same time as pursuing its own uncertain course, which was also for many of its members an exit from colonization. From the Schumann Declaration in 1950, which made the first step, to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, which created the European Economic Community—renamed the European Community in 1993—European integration began with the objective of economic integration, though the higher political aim of securing peace was for some the ultimate aim. The economic rationale earned it the opposition of the left, especially in Britain, while it enjoyed almost total support from the centre-right as it was seen in the interests of capitalism. European integration was mostly advocated by the right and the European idea since the early twentieth century was often invoked in the context of opposition to both Americanization and to communism. However, by the 1960s the project of European integration had won general support by the centre-left and centre-right. The EEC was founded to make possible four kinds of mobility, those of capital, labour, services and goods. While it acquired complex legal competences in the course of its history and evolved a range of other policy objectives, these remained the primary objectives of European integration on which there was widespread consensus. Created to make possible market integration and to remove obstacles against internal trade within Europe, European integration was initially based on, to follow a distinction made originally by Scharpf (1998) a model of negative integration in terms of the removal of barriers to integration rather than the creation of new structures.

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This is not to say positive proposals for integration did not exist. The post-war project was also inspired by the New Deal in the USA and generally by Keynesianism, giving to it an additional social dimension. In the first phase of European integration from 1950 to the Single European Act in 1986, political integration was kept low key with the emphasis on economic cooperation; from 1986, positive modes of integration became more prominent, with greater coordination in order to achieve the objective of what was now to be a single market. With this move towards enhanced integration, the question of political integration became an issue. However, European integration was never designed to supplant the nation-state, being largely a market-based conception of Europe. Yet the logic of European integration was such that the creation of a common market necessitated ever greater political coordination, which led not entirely inexorably but steadily in the direction of political unity. However, the normative nature of European unity was never clear and remained contested. This was in part due to the nature of its design which did not set constitutional restrictions on its future course. Increasingly the European Court of Justice has come to represent another dimension of integration based on the supremacy of European law. On the one side, the proponents of Euro-Federalism sought the progressive transnationalization of the nation-state through the strengthening of the European level of supra-national governance; while others saw in the project of European integration nothing more than inter-governmental cooperation with sovereignty remaining on the level of the nation-state. Academic debates in political science and the new field of European Studies highlighted two perspectives, the largely realist school that argued the nation-state was the primary driver of integration, which could remain only inter-governmental; and the neo-functionalist school that saw a deeper level of inter-dependence at work and which was more than international cooperation. The nature of the process was such that it was able to foster two competing interpretations of its direction: the vision of a Europe of nations—with the emphasis on European diversity—and a federal Europe—where the aspiration would be unity. Underlying these positions is a difference of view as to whether the EU is driven by normative goals—which are more evident in the

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second position—or by functional requirements, including political bargaining between the nation-states. These interpretations fed into the political process influencing its direction, which in effect was multidirectional. European integration was not one, but several kinds of integration. It also won the support of the social democratic left who saw in it the prospect of greater egalitarianism and, for a generation who still believed in it, progress. Prior to the so-called deepening of European integration from 1993 with the Maastricht Treaty, which created a level of constitutionalization, the aspiration to unity was tolerable within certain limits. With the consolidation of the EEC in the 1970s, there was a widely felt need for a stronger political identity in order to give it greater weight in the world. So long as it remained a European inter-state regulative order this was not important, but with its growing importance the leaders of the EEC saw the need for greater political unity and with this an identity that went beyond the general desire of the post-war period for peace and prosperity, which as Schrag (2013) has argued was frequently invoked in appeals to the common European good in this period. Thus, in 1973 the Copenhagen Declaration of European Identity pronounced a strong notion of a European political identity founded on ‘common values and principles’ that provide a basis for the pursuit of a ‘united Europe’. It referred to a ‘common European civilization’ based on a ‘common heritage’ and ‘converging ways of life’: ‘The diversity of cultures within the framework of common European civilization, the attachment to common values and principles, the increasing convergence of attitudes of life, the awareness of having specific interests in common and the determination to take part in the construction of a united Europe, all give the European identity its originality and its own dynamism’. Notions of unity, such as this one, were of course sufficiently vague and lacking in political substance. With the enlargement of the original EEC to include Denmark, Britain and Ireland in 1973, Greece in 1981, and in 1986 Spain and Portugal the EEC included most of the core Western countries except Norway and Switzerland, which never joined (though Norway remained within the common market and Schengen area). There was only one secession prior to the as yet uncertain outcome of Brexit in

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2019: Greenland in 1985, after having secured Home Rule from its former colonial master Denmark, voted to leave. The EEC could claim to represent Western Europe. The prospect of further enlargement— beyond the inclusion of Austria, Sweden and Finland, who joined in 1995—was not a serious prospect given the objective and apparently permanent existence of the Iron Curtain. The EEC constructed a political identity for Europe based on the values of liberty and Grand Narratives that celebrated the received values of European civilization. The appeal to Christianity as the basis of the European heritage along with the capitalist free market gave additional weight to the emerging idea that European unity will blossom from national diversity. Interpretations of European history that stressed unity, and often a Grand Narrative of unity, played an important part of the construction of a European identity. Historians such as Jean-Baptiste Duroselle (1990), Henrik Brugmans (1966, 1987), Christopher Dawson (1932), and author of voluminous writings, Hugh Seton-Watson are among the most notable Europeanists who wrote explicitly pro-Europeanist histories of Europe. In both academic and in popular writings as well as in European policy, a discursive shift occurred towards the idea of a common European identity that has progressively unfolded in history revealing a unity of purpose that finally takes a political form with the foundation of the EU. Such Grand Narratives were often attempts to offer counter-rival accounts. Thus Karl Jaspers (1948) argued for a vision of the European heritage in terms of a notion of freedom and diversity and which was conceived in opposition to the pessimistic Spenglerian theory of the decline of the West and notions of European decadence. Other forward-looking Grand Narratives include the writings of the Swiss philosopher of history, Daniel de Rougoment (1965, 1966), who sought to articulate a notion of a common European identity that was intended to be an alternative to purely market notions of European integration. The short twentieth century was a period in which such Grand Narratives were the most common ways in which the European heritage was conceived as an alternative to national histories. However, these Grand Narratives of the European heritage were largely

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modest, if not naïve, attempts to provide alternative approaches to history and politics and to articulate a different conception of modernity beyond that of liberal democracy and the free market. It is easy to be dismissive of such grandiose concepts of Europe’s political heritage, especially today in the light of more critical theories of culture and post-Foucauldian approaches to history that stress rupture over continuity, but to conclude that if there is no Grand Narrative there can be no meaningful sense of a European heritage is unwarranted and something like a post-universalistic and post-Western conception of the European heritage is possible. In recent years there has been considerable questioning of some of the assumptions that lay behind the Grand Narratives. The idea of Western Civilization as a singular and universalistic condition with a capital ‘C’ has been mostly refuted. Such developments have been linked to reconsiderations of the ontological assumptions of the values on which civilizations are supposed to be based. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see these values as primordial or as given. The political Left since the 1980s has attacked the very idea of civilization, which has generally been seen as a legitimation of colonialism. Post-modernism, which emerged out of this Left discourse, and post-colonial thought declared not only the obsolescence of modernity but also the civilization that modernity was based on. The idea of a ‘western canon’, based on the core texts of ‘Western Civilization’ came increasingly under fire since the late 1970s. As a result of the discrediting of a universalistic idea of European civilization, the idea of culture moved into the fore bringing about a concern with identity as an attribute of individuals. With this was born the notion of Europeans as bearers of European identity, leading to a new concern in the 1990s within European policy-making around cultural issues, such as the European Capitals of Culture programme, Erasmus exchange programmes, European research, and a communication policy, the idea of a European citizenship (Sassatelli 2009; Schrag 2013). In this, the concern increasingly shifted from a focus on unity to one of diversity. Since its creation in 1974, the Eurobarometer was to be an instrument to determine, and at the same time influence, the degrees to which Europeans were becoming European.

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As a project of modernity, European integration was part of what was earlier referred to, following Wagner, as organized modernity; it was conceived in programmatic terms as a major attempt at interstate coordination and became more and more a transformative project in the economic, social and political realms of all countries. Whether or not it can be seen as a Europe of nations or as a transnational polity, on balance it is evident that European integration has become a rival to a conception of modernity based on national models of liberal democracy. Notwithstanding the realist interpretation of the EU as a project of states or the modified position that the EU is nothing more than a coordinating mechanism, it is evident that five decades of Europeanization have produced one of the most significant experiments in statehood and in the articulation of normative ideas of post-national political community. One of the key aspects of this is the question of sovereignty and the prospect of the EU—re-named as such in 2009 replacing the term EC—being a post-sovereign political order in which sovereignty is shared between national and European levels of governance. The shift from a conception of the state in terms of government to governance in the 1980s was too an expression of a wider change in the nature of the state which increasingly is seen as an order of governance in which different political actors are involved, the political parties, civil society organizations, various governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as the increasingly important transnational level. However, in the period under discussion there never was anything like a European social imaginary with a clear articulation of political community. As an institutional project based on treaties, the creation of an identity was limited to slogans such as the promise of ‘ever greater union’ or a unity to come. The short twentieth century ends with the revolutions of 1989 and the break-up of the Cold War system in the following two years. This was also the end of the period of organized modernity when the impact of globalization was felt everywhere with the return of uncertainty and the search for a new framework to re-establish stability. Thus the end

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of the short twentieth century did not lead to the ‘end of ideology’, for instead of liberal democracy becoming the unquestioned normative alternative to the death of state socialism, a plethora of alternatives were opened up leading to new visions of modernity. The post-1989 world order and its implications for the idea of Europe will be explored in the next chapters.

Note 1. See Tilly (1990) and Hoggach and Stedman Jones (2018).

Part III The Present and Its Discontents

13 Europe Since 1989: Globalization, Europeanization and the Crisis of the Nation-State in Late Modernity

The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe occurred at much the same time as the project of European integration entered into a new phase with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. On the one side, the countries of the Warsaw Pact underwent what Offe has called a ‘triple transition’ to capitalism and to democracy, as well as in many cases a transition to national autonomy, while on the other side in Western Europe the EU was embarking on a major project of enhanced integration (see Offe 1997). Alongside these processes, other changes took place, all of which had implications for the making of political community in late modernity: German unification in 1991, which led to a shift in the balance of power in Europe towards Germany; the emergence of a global multi-polar world; changes resulting in major technological developments in information technology; the steady rise of the new centres of economic and political power, most notably China and India and later Brazil and Russia; the growing significance of global civil society; the end of apartheid in South Africa by 1994. For all these reasons, the post-1989 period marked the beginning of a new era in the history of Europe producing new ideas of Europe and a major shift in modernity towards the inclusion of the post-national © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_13

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dimension and counter-currents. In this shift, cosmopolitan tendencies can be found along-side contrary ones, which include many different shades of nationalism, racism and xenophobia, and neoliberalism. The tremendous transformations took place in the context of a new era of neoliberal capitalism that came with globalization. While many countries in Central and Eastern Europe rediscovered national autonomy, they did so at a time when the nation-state began to enter into a period of decline and when new visions of political community surfaced. The full implications of the decline of the nation-state took another two decades to become evident, but in this time, the new visions of post-national community failed to realize their promise. In the early 1990s, it was still possible for nation-states to seek the pursuit of national autonomy. In this period, the main concern of this chapter, the dynamic of European integration moved in the direction of greater constitutionalization and transnationalism, while on the other side, partly in reaction but also an outcome of 1989, the nation-state was re-asserted and the period saw a revival of nationalism that was still nourished by the spirit of civil society movements of 1989/1990. The result of this was not only multiple directions of travel for Europe—the post-national and the nostalgia for the nation—but greater uncertainty since the different understandings of political community mutually challenged each other. Unlike in 1957 with the Treaty of Rome and the beginnings of European integration, there is an absence of consensus on the future of Europe. The political challenge in the formative years of European integration was largely an intra-European one and required a commitment to cooperation. The global context—was less important and mostly confined to the context of the Cold War and the need for a strong and more positive relation with the USA. The present situation, more than two decades later, is characterized by the more complex environment of a globalized economy and the apparent systemic failure of the model of integration that had been created hitherto by the modern state. This is both a failure of the nation-state and of European integration. We can see today now more clearly that both have failed. The early twentieth-first century is thus a time when the assumptions that underlay European modernity began to be challenged by a new global situation as well as internal systemic problems of coordination.

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In this new situation, Europe would find itself increasingly shaped by global forces that undermined the integrity of both the national state and of European integration. The external context had changed, and with this change, the internal situation also underwent change in a direction that led to greater uncertainty and increasing imbalances. One of the most significant developments in recent years is the crisis of both the centre-right and centre-left. The election of Macron to the French presidency in 2017 captures this tendency, which in many ways reflects the end of political tradition that began in 1789 with the formation of a right and left.

Towards a Post-Western Europe The revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989–1990 were unpredictable, but had huge implications for all of Europe, which in the subsequent two decades underwent major social and political transformation. The events of 1989 mark the end of the era shaped by the First and Second World Wars and the project of communist modernity. Old states disappeared—Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—and new ones were created, suggesting a possible return to a ‘Europe of Nations’. The unification of Germany in 1991 was one of the most significant events to arise out of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact countries. Despite the rise of nationalism in the period and the Yugoslavian civil war, it would be a simplification of the tremendous changes that occurred to see only the return to the nation-state or the assertion of national sovereignty. One of the possible alternative narratives of European identity that has emerged in the wake of 1989 in opposition to the more familiar Western narrative of Europe is what one could call a ‘postWestern Europe’, in which the emphasis is on a recognition of the cultural plurality and pluri-civilizational background of Europe.1 This notion includes recognition of Europe’s participation in a wider West, but it is now increasingly recognized that Western Civilization is one among other foundational sources of Europe. Moreover, a post-Western understanding of Europe requires critical reflection of the notion of the West, entailing its relativization, and the acknowledgement of Europe

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being the result of encounters with other European, peripheral cultures and civilizations. This is not to say that such a pluralist understanding of Europe is now a dominant vision, or that it is the only alternative to the now less prominent idea of Europe as part of a more or less homogeneous wider Western world. Significant other definitions of European identity often include a more essentialistic and homogeneous understanding. Such an identity is in most cases understood as more distinctly European rather than Western, and Europe is supposed to represent the authentic core of Western Civilization as such. In political terms, this is then often translated into a need for protection of such a core identity (as in the idea of a ‘Fortress Europe’ or a ‘Core Europe’). Other narratives take a more open, but nevertheless distinct, understanding of Europe as their core idea, in which they sometimes find Europe’s significant Other in the USA. The end of the Cold War has often been hailed as a triumph of the West, in particular in the sense of its liberal understanding of democracy and a market model of capitalism, suggesting that we are all Western now, or soon will be, while others have claimed more durable, civilizational divides that prevent Western culture from spreading easily. However such accounts of the post-1989 context as leading to either an ultimate triumph of the West, sometimes referred to as the ‘end of history, or to its contrary, i.e., the clash of a Western with other civilizations, is difficult to uphold when considering the complex evolutions of, and contestation over, European identity. In contrast to such claims, it has become increasingly clear since the diminishing significance of the East–West divide that European identity is not entirely based in the acceptance of a Western ideology of liberal politics and free markets. In this, a search for a specifically European identity has increasingly come to the fore. The necessity of such a quest for a specific European identity is stimulated even more by an increasingly complex situation in Europe, in which there is no clear significant Other anymore. It can be argued that the old East–West divide is difficult to uphold, now that a good part of former ‘Eastern Europe’ is part of the European Union, while the eastern borders of the EU are difficult to define, in the light of pending membership of some other Eastern European countries,

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and evolving forms of cooperation between East and West through the eastern dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy. It can also be argued to a degree that Islam has become the substitute for the Communist East and that the post-September 11th context has confirmed this trend. However, such a view simplifies a more complicated situation in which positive relations with the Islamic world are also present along with negative ones. Negative images do not in any case translate easily into a new European identity, which has become considerably pluralized (see Chapter 5). The disappearance of the Cold War bifurcation of East and West, and the subsequent rapprochement between Eastern and Western Europe, has made an exclusive identification of Europe with the modernist integration project of the early EU (as it had emerged in the 1950s), and by implication with the West and Western modernity as such, increasingly difficult. The idea of a reunification of Europe, or as Gorbachev put it in a speech in Strasbourg in 1989, a ‘common European home’, entails a shift away from a larger Western identity to an identity with a more specifically European direction. The enlargement of the EU brought to the fore various historical traditions and legacies that do not fit into a strictly Western reading of Europe, even if they are not necessarily incompatible with it. As a result in the post-1989 period European identity has been open to various interpretations and has been essentially contested. The events of 1989 have clearly had important consequences for the European integration project and the idea of a European identity. At least three issues are significant in this. First, as noted, 1989 meant the collapse of an East–West distinction as providing an almost unchallenged identity marker for both East and West, thereby putting any proposal for Europe as part of the West to the test. The collapse of the Cold War constellation meant not so much the triumph of Western liberal democracy and the unquestioned continuation of the subordination of Europe to the idea of the West. Rather, the end of the binary division of the world into East and West in important ways unravelled the older grounding of Western Europe in a wider notion of the West and opened up new directions that only in limited ways pointed to a continuation, or in some cases a reinvigoration, of a US-dominated idea of the West. The disappearance of the

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rigid division between East and West in Europe meant that ways were now open to search for new identity markers, which has also meant a return to older ideas (such as in the case of the re-emergence of Islam as Europe’s main significant Other). Europe as the West has thus not disappeared, but is now more critically challenged by alternative narratives of Europe. The new context for Europe is a more global one than a narrowly circumscribed one defined by the USA and Russia. Second, 1989 made possible the political, economic and cultural reunification of Europe, i.e., the inclusion of the former East into the Western European integration project, thereby strengthening any proposal for a more distinct European identity, neither necessarily fully coinciding with (the older notion of ) the West, nor with a notion of Western Europe. The unification of Eastern and Western Europe in the form of the inclusion of the former into the integration project of the latter has often been taken to entail a mere fortification of the Western European integration project, as expressed in the notion ‘return to Europe’. From the point of view of the old, Western European member states, the Eastern enlargement of the European project often did not seem to imply much more than the further diffusion of this normality, and the confirmation of the unviable nature of what had arguably been the most successful alternative interpretation of modernity, i.e., communism, and any alternative, for that matter. At the same time, it seems undeniable that the reunification of Europe has induced the calls for more distinctly European notions of European identity, i.e., as different from a wider notion of the West and a narrow understanding of a West-European identity. Third, with the enlargement of the EU, there was a prominent (re-)emergence of forms of cultural and civilizational diversity, rendering more difficult any proposal for homogeneous forms of a European identity, particularly in an explicitly Western understanding. Those promoting a more or less homogeneous understanding of European identity—either grounded in a wider notion of the West or not—have now to reckon with the cultural diversity that the reunification of East and West brought with it. The predominant grounding of the European project in the Western European states that mostly identified themselves with Christianity, the Roman and Greek heritages, and the hallmarks

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of Western modernity was now to be reconciled with a re-emerging awareness of different traditions. The Western European project did not reflect Slavic culture, nor Eastern Orthodoxy or Islam, and was not designed to deal with the complex legacies of state socialism. In sum, Europe emerged out of the short twentieth century with the task of fundamentally redefining political modernity. The post-Second World War consensus no longer existed and the global context had entirely changed by 2001 when a new security order emerged and in the same period a tremendous transformation in capitalism took place. This was to change again by 2008/2009 with a major crisis in the world economy and from 2015 with an unprecedented refugee crisis, in 2016 the Brexit referendum and the rise of right-wing populism and in 2018 a major de-stabilizing crisis in Italian politics. The three key dynamics that shape the future of Europe are: the pluralization of European societies in culture and politics; the emergence of new processes of integration led by the EU; and the diverse and often catastrophic impact of global forces including global capitalism and global wars (the latter will be discussed in the next chapter).

Europeanization and the Making of Political Community How should we understand political community in Europe today? Has nationalism attained the upper-hand over cosmopolitanism? Has the social project of European modernity been strengthened or abandoned? It has been widely recognized that there have been major shifts in collective identity and political culture more generally in Europe since 1989 due not only to the impact of Europeanization, but because of the wider context of globalization and global politics as well as within Europe of developments that are not specifically linked to the EU, which is not the only initiator of change. Political community can no longer be discussed as a nationally specific matter, but it is also not entirely in the hands of EU’s transnationalizing institutions. The shape of European post-national political community is far from clear. Proponents of cosmopolitan politics argue for the existence of

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political community beyond the nation-state, while their critics dismiss such visions as either undesirable or unrealistic. Nationalism has clearly become a potent force in most European countries, and increasingly, the national interest is asserting itself over the European level of policy-making. Despite this assertion of the national interest, the European Union has advanced its transformative project and the logic of Europeanization has increasingly worked towards a kind of post-sovereign political order that has brought about a significant transformation of both the institutional framework as well as the political imaginary that lies at the core of every society’s political self-understanding. But this is at best incomplete and uncertain. Since 1989 nationalism has emerged as a significant challenge for most countries whose models of national identity have paradoxically incorporated significant reflexivity and post-national consciousness, even though it is undeniably the case that these cultural models fall short of what might be termed cosmopolitanism. The European transnationalization of the nation-state is one of the most significant developments in the wider transformation of political community. Since the Single European Act in 1987, there has been a steady growth in the power of the EU with more and more power in the hands of non-elected politicians. It is also one of the most contested political experiments since its implications for democracy are unclear. Democracy developed within the bounds of the nation-state and any attempt to erode the foundations of the nation-state will have adverse implications for democracy. However, the EU is primarily a development of the state system and was never intended to be an instrument of democratization. Democracy was never mentioned in the founding treaties. This was in part because democracy was seen as something for national governments to take charge of and also because there was a still a lingering fear of the consequences of major experiments with mass democracy, which had led to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. In short, the popular will was perceived to be potentially dangerous (see Norman 2017). However, transforming in fundamental ways the nature of the nation-state would inevitably have implications for democratization. Though the EU did not embark on a project of democratization, in effect it changed the conditions of the possibility of

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political community in ways that created new kinds of democratic politics. As a rights-based regime, the EU asserted the rights of the individual and created a new constitutional context for the national state that was far-reaching. The main institutions of the EU—the EC, the Council of Ministers, the European Central Bank—have acquired significant powers over their member states; other institutions such as the European Parliament and the European Court of Justice have also considerable influence, if on a smaller scale. The result of the huge expansion in the scale of European institution-building, as discussed in the previous chapter, is post-sovereignty, with sovereignty shared between national and European levels of governance. The national level still retains sovereignty over the traditional areas of the state, namely a monopoly over the means of violence: powers of taxation and of defence. It also retains control over social policy and migration, though with the Schengen Agreement since 1995 control over borders has been much diminished. However, this does not lead simply to a two-tier political system with the European level of governance impacting on the national level bringing about its transformation. The EU is no longer an instrument for the member states to pursue their interests, as Milward (1982) claimed in a classic work, The European Rescue of the Nation-State. The member states have surrendered their veto powers in several arenas of policy-making, but by no means in all areas. However, the political form of the EU is not simply a super-national state or merely a regulatory order. Eriksen (2009: 418) has referred to the constitutionalization of the treaty system which has led to the transformation of the EU from an interstate governmental organization into a quasi-federal legal system based on precepts of higher legal constitutionalization. As far as democracy is concerned, the EU is closer to what Colin Crouch (2004) calls, ‘post-democracy’, since it relies only on indirect democratic legitimation via the nation-states. The relation between the EU and nations is a reflexive one as opposed to being a hierarchical one and consequently nations, generally, are ‘Europeanized’ such that Europe is not an external entity, but integral to its member state. This is the case even where Euroscepticism is predominant. Indeed, one could argue Norway has been Europeanized more than some of the recent member states and in many ways

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Switzerland is the most ‘European’ of countries. Depending on what indicators one chooses—identities or institutional arrangements or lifestyles and mobility—the UK, despite Brexit, may be more European than countries that often see themselves as European. Indeed, Brexit has enhanced the European identity of large numbers of people and led to a deep division within the country on the question of Europe (see Chapter 15). So European identity can be conceived of as a Europeanization of identities, that is an internal transformation of national identities. The result is a pluralization of Europe into different national projects and colliding currents of Euroscepticism and Europhilia. For some time now there is growing recognition that the European project cannot be conceived entirely within the conceptual lens of political science of European integration, which has traditionally operated with an empirically reductive concept of integration drawn directly from the EU’s own discourse. This has failed to discern different logics of integration that may be at work. For this reason many theorists have preferred the term Europeanization in order to avoid the difficulties associated with the term European integration, for instance, the notion of European integration as an EU-led project that integrates diverse units into a new framework, the notion that integration leads to societal convergence or the notion that underlying the cultural diversity is a logic of unity (see Delanty and Rumford 2005). Instead, Europeanization should be seen as multi-directional and extending to include a broader reach of the political beyond the level of government. From the perspective of a notion of governance rather than government, a different interpretation of the state and the transformation of political community can be arrived at. The EU is a framework of governance in which different groups, be they nations or regional governments, civil society actors, pursue different goals. It offers opportunities for social actors to pursue their interests, often through lobbying and in opposition to the EU itself. Like all states, it is not a homogeneous entity, but a complex ensemble of different interests and includes within it political contestation. The EU is itself only one political actor in a more complex political field involving elites, masses, the media and technocrats of all kinds. From being

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an elite-driven project, European integration is now a more pluralized framework and operates within a context of the structural weakness of the state and a more globalized capitalist system over which its regulatory order does not control. As theorists of the state have argued in recent years, the state can no longer be understood as separable from civil society, which has expanded the sphere of the political (Johnson 2011; Sassen 2008, 2009). The result is the incompleteness of democracy with a perpetual challenge to democratic legitimation (Trenz and Eder 2004). This, then, is one of the paradoxes of Europeanization: while the growth of non-democratic organs of governance on the EU level appears to undermine representative democracy and has not put in place alternative forms of democratic organization, it has widened the scope of the political in numerous ways, in particular through the domain of the law and the incorporation of huge areas of civil society into the sphere of the state. States operate in an increasingly complex field of rights and which they do not entirely control, as Benhabib (2011) has argued. The EU has produced a political system that has the capacity to bring about change in areas of social and political life that it does not itself control. This is due not least to the fact that Europeanization is a medium of legal communication and one that very often is open-ended in terms of consequences, but in many areas, such as monetary policies, the capacity of social actors at national levels is very limited. The various measures the EU created to redress the democratic deficit—the European Parliament and the notion of a European citizenship—have not solved the basic problem of European integration, namely democratic legitimation. Instead its legitimacy is mostly derived from its capacity to be an effective problem-solving apparatus; moreover, as has often been noted, for the EU the sphere of activities it generally deals with are of secondary importance for national politics and thus do not normally require direct democratic support. So long as the EU delivers on its promises, legitimacy is not in question, but when problems of coordination happen, the result is a withdrawal in legitimacy and an increase in demands for democratic legitimation. This is now the case since the financial crisis of the Euro-zone area and the apparent failure of the EU to provide a framework for long-term stability.

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The size of the EU—with currently 27 members and a population of 500 million—has certainly not helped. With the likely exit of the UK in 2019, it will lose 65.6 million, but will gain 7 million through the eventual membership of Serbia. The enlargement of the EU to include much of Central and Eastern Europe, as is generally recognized, has worked to undermine the prospects of extending democracy to the transnational level. The new member countries found in EU membership a means of asserting national autonomy, many for the first time. The rapid inclusion of a large number of very small countries also imposed a further burden on democratic representation leading to a return to a Europe of nations as far as the democratic state is concerned. However, the conflict between ‘widening’ and ‘deepening’ did not lead to a change in the course of European integration, for the same period saw the increased expansion in the institutional edifice of the EU at the expense of democratization. The two decades or so since 1989 thus saw the expansion of the EU to include more or less all the Warsaw Pact countries and the Baltic Republics, with plans for the inclusion of the former Yugoslavian countries, and concomitantly the construction of a novel type of state system. The result of such processes of integration was not the founding of a new polity, such as a constitutional republican state, as envisaged by Habermas. Yet something had changed on the level of the state, which had been considerably transnationalized. Political community entered a post-national phase in which there were gains and losses for democracy. The gains the EU was responsible for are often ignored: increased social rights for workers and for women and children, anti-discriminatory legislation, increased rights of mobility, environmental policies, progressive initiatives in research and in education, the incorporation of human rights into national legislation. Although falling considerably short of a social project, these were not insignificant gains for social citizenship and a social conception of democracy. Given the open nature of European integration and the wider context of uncertainty and contingency, caution should be exercised in any prognosis of the where the EU is heading. In view of the current situation—to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter with respect to social and economic questions—it may be suggested that

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the transnationalization of the European nation-state has reached its limits as far as major societal change is concerned. The foreseeable future will probably see a greater emphasis on multiple levels of memberships, with more opt-out conditions, and too a multi-speed EU, or at least a two-speed Europe. Brexit has made such scenarios all the more possible. The logic of constitutionalization will undoubtedly continue its present course, though it is unlikely that the 2003 proposal for a European Constitution will become a reality. The nationstates of Europe have been forever changed as a result of the EU and now exist in what is best termed a post-national polity rather than a supranational state, for the national state has not disappeared, however much it has been changed. The problem of democratic legitimation is a problem not only for the EU, but is also a challenge for nation-states, which also have to operate in an increasingly globalized context that presents perpetual challenges for democracy. Looking at the EU from the broader perspective of modernity, the major development undoubtedly has been the transition to a post-national political community at a time when the nation-state is in crisis. The European experiment can be seen as one step in the direction of a more general shift towards transnational forms of governance worldwide. The inevitable short-comings of European integration should be viewed in a broader context of the need everywhere for transnational cooperation and global solutions. Much of the debate has been confused by a concern with the loss of national sovereignty. This however fails to distinguish popular sovereignty from state sovereignty, for the loss or erosion of the latter does not necessarily mean the loss of the former. The existence of state sovereignty in itself does not in any case guarantee popular sovereignty and it may be the case that post-national forms of governance are more effective in affirming popular sovereignty. One of the major challenges for the EU is to enhance popular sovereignty and, what such kinds of sovereignty have traditionally fostered, social citizenship. The rise of the radical right in many European countries in the past decade is to a very large degree due to the erosion of social citizenship and the failure of a model of modernity to guarantee the autonomy of the individual in an era of neoliberal capitalism (the next two chapters take up this topic).

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The Pluralization of Political Community Rather than looking for a new post-national or cosmopolitan European identity beyond the nation, a more fruitful line of inquiry is to examine the national imaginary or the cultural model of the nation, which is fragmented and the site of diverse orientations around the figure of the migrant. So the answer to the question whether post-national political community can become cosmopolitan and democratic will largely depend on how national models of society develop in more inclusionary directions. Post-1989 nationalism has not foreclosed the possibility of a cosmopolitan Europe, for both nationalism and cosmopolitanism are intertwined elements in the cultural models of all societies today since these concern problems of the definition of self and other. Yet there can be no doubt that when viewed from the perspective of 2019, the resurgence of nationalism since 1989 has fundamentally altered the situation. However, it is also evident that despite the comfortable illusion of security that national sovereignty cultivates for many people, nationalism is unable to reverse the historical decline of the nation-state. This may have been possible in 1919 but one hundred years later it is a different situation. It is also now becoming all the more clear that the European Union does not have an antidote to the problems that beset the chaos of the modern state in the face of globalization. The EU has nonetheless led to a more cosmopolitan Europe but it has not done this by abolishing the nation-state, which in fact has been given a new lease of life through Europeanization. The lesson of Brexit appears to be that the nation-state, despite its dysfunctionality, cannot be undermined by transnational governance while at the same time the nation-state cannot exist without transnational cooperation. It is therefore becoming clear that the chances for a more cosmopolitan Europe do not lie in transcending the nation as many cosmopolitan theorists claim, but in introducing greater reflexivity into it and extending the national horizon in the direction of a socially inclusive model of political community. Europeanization—in the sense of the transnationalization of the European nation-state and the project of European integration—has brought about a major transformation of political community, producing for instance a European public sphere (Eder 2006a; Trenz and Eder

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2004). However, it has not brought about the end of national identity and its replacement by a post-national or cosmopolitan European identity. National identity appears to have survived the decline of the nationstate and possibly so because of its decline. While it can be argued that the EU has created a European political identity, albeit a weak one, this has not replaced national identities, but sits alongside national identities to varying degrees of tension. A different perspective, informed by the above reasoning, is that what has come about is a pluralization of European identity as opposed to a supranational EU-based political identity. The extent of the latter is limited and stands in contrast to a more pervasive Europeanization of identity. The impetus here is not the impact of an EU political identity, in the sense of more and more people identifying with the EU, but rather the influence of a European cultural model. The cultural model of Europe is less an identity construct than a medium of self-interpretation that is mostly worked out in a huge variety of public spheres (Fossum and Schlesinger 2007). The consolidation of a European symbolic culture based on the EU is not the only dimension of cultural Europeanization. The symbols of the EU—the blue and yellow flag, anthem, currency icons, burgundy passport covers, pink driving licenses, etc.—have in most cases been absorbed into national cultures and are not in a significant sense the basis of collective identities. European identity, understood in this sense of a European cultural model, is more diluted than the concept of identity normally suggests, but it is also open to more interpretations. The result is that there is more, not less, contestation as to the meaning of Europe as well as greater uncertainty as to what it consists. For this reason, again, what is at work here is not an identity that is progressively assimilated or adopted by different people, but the internal transformation of identities. National culture and national identities are themselves highly diverse and there is often greater internal differences within a given country than between countries. It is not the case of a coherent national identity resisting a dominant European identity any more than it is a matter of national identity being replaced by a new European identity. The main form that European identity takes is, as argued earlier, a Europeanization of national identity, that is an internal transformation of national identity.

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The logic of cultural Europeanization is not unlike the logic of political Europeanization. The EU does not erode the nation-state, but brings about its transformation through a reflexive relation between the national and the European levels. The nation-state may be in decline, but it is not disappearing as a result of Europeanization; it is rather the case that it is being reconfigured. Nations adjust to the EU rather than being rendered obsolete. Sovereignty, like identity, has been relativized and pluralized today in the European polity. The notion of a network state, as proposed by Castells (1996), is one way of understanding the European political order which is connected by nodes rather than to a centre in which sovereignty resides. The simple fact in all of this is that Europe resides in nations as much as it is outside then (see also Stråth 2002). Europeanization is not a project of unity or of integration as such and, it follows from this, that the absence of unity is not itself a reason to conclude that Europeanization has failed. The logic of Europeanization is rather one of internal transformation arising out of the reflexive relation between the national and the European whereby each acts on the other. The relation is reflexive as opposed to being one of coexistence, since each level acts on the other (Eriksen 2005, 2009). This is particularly evident in the case of the European citizenship, which is a phenomenon that makes sense only when seen as a Europeanization of national citizenship. The European space has now become a part of the national space as a result of trade, tourism, consumption. In addition to these factors, it is also the case that European societies are more and more connected for reasons that have nothing to do with the EU, for instance due to wider processes of globalization. The result of these transversal processes is inter-societal interpenetration and a greater hybridized modern Europe, as suggested by Balibar’s (2003) notion of Europe as a borderland. However, the critical factor is that the Europeanization is reconfiguring the nation-state at a time when the nation-state (and European integration) is being underlined by wider global forces over which it has little control. If Europeanization is not only a project of integration, what then is it? Integration does not simply produce a unified framework in which differences disappear. Integration in complex societies proceeds through processes of differentiation, including pluralization, and reflexive

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adaptation whereby one unit undergoes change in response to interaction with another unit. In other words, Europeanization cannot be understood in terms of a state or a EU-led project integrating diverse societies into a unified framework. Indeed, in recent years it has been increasingly recognized that Europeanization has become a kind of unity in diversity (Sassatelli 2009). The nation has been the instrument by which it has achieved its goals. It follows from this that the nation is not going to disappear, but rather will change its form and it is inevitable that as it does so it will become more and more implicated in Europeanization. A European cultural model is taking shape around debates within the public culture about Europe. Europe is thus not prior to the political but is expressed in debates that are often about national identity. All of identity and culture has witnessed a loss in markers of certainty; it has become fragmented and fluid. This situation has led to a greater emphasis on a communicative conception of culture and it is in this that we can see the signs of a European cultural model in which Europe becomes a frame of reference that exists alongside and in tension with national frames. The notion of a cultural model is then different from a shared collective identity; it operates at a more general level as a cultural process that cuts across collective identities and is best exhibited in zones of interaction, as in the debates in the public culture. As a cultural model, Europe is not a clearly defined political project as in a collective identity that distinguishes between self and other, but is marked by contradictions, ambivalences and paradoxes. The European post-sovereign polity has contributed to the formation of a highly pluralized post-national culture. This post-national culture is one in which a diversity of cultural models and collective identities compete with each other. It is post-national culture in the sense that national identity is no longer the dominant or only collective identity that shapes the cultural model of nations and Europe more generally. National societies have been pluralized and their political identity has been challenged by different cultural models. The paradox in this is that cultural Europeanization can lead to more nationalism, not less; but it can also lead to a greater role for European identity, the significance of which is not always apparent from opinion

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research of personal identifications with Europe. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism may ultimately be incompatible, but from the perspective of a critical cosmopolitanism the category of the nation should be seen in terms of a conflicting constellation of cultural and political forces. These include nationalist movements as well as postnational orientations including cosmopolitanism. European identity is thus a field of interacting cultural and political orientations and identities. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are not mutually exclusive, except in highly normative terms or where two extreme positions are contrasted. Cosmopolitanism is present in degrees as opposed to a condition that is either present or absent. One is more or less cosmopolitanism and similarly one is more or less local (see Roudemetof 2005). This position differs, then, from, for example, the Habermasian post-national position or, in a different key, from Beck and Grande’s argument for a cosmopolitan Europe (2007), in that it does not require the overcoming of the nation-state. A critical cosmopolitan approach, in contrast, would see European post-nationalism in more interactive terms as formed out of the interaction of multiple publics and chiefly realized through nations. It follows from this that one of the challenges for a cosmopolitical European project is to capture and transform the ground of the national imaginary, rather than seeking to overcome it. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are embroiled in each other in many ways. In normative terms, there is no essential contradiction between value commitments to a nation or to a wider sphere of community, in particular since both rarely present a challenge to each other and mostly tend to pertain to different contexts. As argued above, European transnationalization has mostly been realized through nations and most nations today have been transformed as a result of European integration. Nations adjust to the EU, rather than simply being eroded, and as they do so they are themselves transnationalized. While nationalist movements and nationalism more generally understood as a collective identity has expressed hostility to Europe and to cosmopolitan values, it is important to see that collective identities do not fully capture the entire space of cultural signification.

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European Identity: Europe as a Social Space and a Space of Identities To begin some clarity needs to be established on the vexed question of European identity as a meaningful term. The notion of European identity has been increasingly used as an alternative to what was once referred to as the ‘idea of Europe’ or the even more elusive ‘spirit of European’. The literature on it is now vast. It gained currency due to the recent interest in identity and cultural politics in social and political science, on the one side, and on the other, as a result of a clear shift in the project of European integration from a concern exclusively with the integration of states and markets to the integration of peoples and cultures. But systemic forms of integration did not lead directly to social integration, and we do not have neatly formed European identities, however understood. Identity cannot so easily replace integration and it has been criticized for being an elite-led view of Europeanization, a construction imposed by elites on people (Shore 2000). The notion of a European identity can mean at least four different things and clarity needs to be established on which sense is being used. Much of the debate on Europe identity commits basic category errors, looking for evidence of one type by using evidence of another, or simply conflating the different levels into a single undifferentiated category of ‘European identity’. First, European identity can refer to processes of identification by which individuals identify with a referent that can be designated ‘Europe’. To speak of European identities is to refer to the personal identities of individuals. Such identities are often vague in their European self-understanding. Europe may be the EU or it may be an undefined imaginary that lacks political content (Bruter 2005). As with many identities, a European identity may coexist alongside other identities, since individuals generally have more than one identity. Moreover, as has been often noted in identity research, identities are not static, but in continuous formation and, too, are often ambivalent and contested (Calhoun 1994; Jenkins 1996; Melucci 1996; Woodward 1997). This all applies to European identities as a form of identification

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(and for clarity, it is probably best to speak of European identifications). There is considerable empirical research demonstrating the existence of European identification at least as a secondary identity that complements national and regional identities (Herrmann et al. 2004; Risse 2010). In this instance, what is interesting is the combination of identities in the sense of the relation of the components than the replacement of one by another. Second, European identity can exist in a somewhat more coherent form as a collective identity of a collective actor, such as an organization or movement. For instance, to an extent it can be argued the EU and EU-oriented organizations have a collective identity that is specifically European. However, this does not mean that it underpins the identities of individuals. Such identities may be strong or weak. Unlike personal identities, collective identities are by their nature more likely to be singular (movements generally have one aim which defines their identity). The EU may have an evolving political identity, but this is quite a separate matter from the question of whether Europeans have a European identity or identity with the EU. The institutional complexity of the European and that fact that it operates through the language of law has made it difficult for the EU to articulate an identity. There is clear evidence of a progressive expansion in European institutions and organizations many of which have identities that can be described as European. But of course, there is also considerable contestation as to the identity of the EU (Is it a post-national polity, a supranational federation, a Europe of Nations, etc.?). Nonetheless after some five decades of consolidation, its symbols, legal competence and the Euro currency, the EU has become a reality in the lives of many people. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the symbolic and juridical reality of the EU and its collective identity. Third, quite separate from personal and collective identities are wider and much more fuzzier societal identities, such as the identities of whole national societies or of Europe broadly defined. Societies have identities—often called national identities—but unlike collective identities such identities are less clear-cut and more likely to be ambivalent, contested and multiple. Whether or not the EU has a political collective identity does not mean that this is the equivalent of a European

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identity. It is on this level that one can speak of the European heritage or the cultural legacy of Europe. It may be more useful to refer to this as the level of European cultural identity, as opposed to the question of collective identity, since any notion of a collective presupposes a specific actor and there is no such actor as a ‘European people’. European identity in this broader civilizational sense can be discussed in much the same terms as national identity can be, that is as a societal identity it is not a coherent identity or one that is neatly encapsulated in personal or collective identities. In this sense, European identity can perhaps be better understood as a consciousness—the broad awareness of a cultural heritage—rather than something that can be understood in social psychological terms. Four, there is the level of a European political identity in a more specific sense of the political identity of the EU as opposed to a more general European cultural identity. Three further points can be made. As with many identity constructions, European identity in all these senses is not static but changing. This raises the question of how and where we find it as an ever-changing and contested category. As a cultural and social activity, identity can be understood variously as performative, as a discourse or as a narrative depending on the theoretical position adopted; it is expressed in concrete form in communication and in cultural acts of meaning. If anything of a general nature can be said about identity, it is that it is about self-interpretation: an identity is the expression of how an individual or group sees itself; it is a specific kind of self-understanding (Kantner 2006). It follows from this that it involves reinterpretations and a relation to both the past and future. Generally, identities tell something of the history or memory of the subject, its project and its present situation in the world. Rather than looking for identity as an underlying structure of meaning or a holistic system or a cultural system, it is best evidenced in specific sites of communication. In the case of European identity, one such place to look for it is in debates about Europe. In this view, then, Europe is not an objective entity—a geographical or political structure that confers meaning which then becomes the basis of identities—but a cultural construction that is variable and contingent on

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specific circumstances. So, a concrete methodological implication is that European identity is expressed in debates about Europe. The second point is that European identity can be conceived of as a Europeanization of identities. Rather than looking for quantitative evidence of European identity in terms of the number of citizens who claim to have a European identity, an alternative approach is to see it more as an internal transformation of national identities. In these terms, it is not a case of European versus national identities, but of the Europeanization of national identities that is significant. Thus many national identities have found within the project of European integration the means of advancing their interests, but too of re-orienting their self-understanding. Germany is a very good example of this process of the Europeanization of national identity in the context of a more critical approach to history. As Habermas has argued, the movement of European integration had unavoidable normative lessons to offer Germany and Europe. Other examples are Portugal and Spain. In these cases, European integration offered a means of re-positioning national identity in the aftermath of the end of the dictatorships when democracy was slowly introduced after 1980. In the case of Ireland, European integration was a means of re-orienting national identity in a more positive direction than one that was predominantly shaped by negative relations with the UK. Depending on what indicators one chooses—identities or institutional arrangements or lifestyles and mobility—the UK may be more European than countries that often see themselves as European. On the political level, strong currents of anti-Europeanism are clearly present, but in terms of social, cultural and economic criteria a different and more European Britain can be discerned. Europeanization has occurred everywhere, to varying degree, and is mostly irreversible, which is not to say it cannot change direction, as the example of Greece today illustrates. The Ukraine in Spring 2014 is an interesting example of how the spectre of Europe was present in mass revolt against autocratic rule. This is not to deny that there are also projects that seek to advance a conception of Europe that is hostile to nations, though many of these do use the language of Europeanization to advance their cause and are, as in the case of the UK, embroiled within Europe. It follows from this, finally, that European identity

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exists on different levels and is expressed less in zero-sum terms than in degrees, that is to say it is always more or less present. The consolidation of a European symbolic culture based on the EU has entered into the national cultures even if it is also partly external. The symbols of the EU—the blue and yellow flag, anthem, currency icons, burgundy passport covers, pink driving licences, etc.—have in most cases been absorbed into national cultures and are not in a significant sense the basis of collective identities. European identity is more diluted than the concept of identity normally suggests, but it is also open to more and thus involves more interpretations. The result is that there is more, not less, contestation as to the meaning of Europe as well as greater uncertainty as to what it consists. For this reason, again, what is at work here is not an identity that is progressively assimilated or adopted by different people, but the internal transformation of identities through the constant reinterpretation of identity and meaning. National culture and national identities are themselves highly diverse, and there are often greater internal differences within a given country than between countries. It is not the case of a coherent national identity resisting a dominant European identity any more than it is a matter of national identity being replaced by a new European identity. The main form that European identity takes is, as argued, a Europeanization of national identity, that is an internal transformation of national identity. This is one of the more significant forms that post-national identity takes today. Rather than a supranational identity, it is a self-understanding that recognizes the relativity and plurality of the notion of the nation. It follows from the foregoing, finally, that European identity exists on different levels and is expressed less in zero-sum terms than in degrees, that is to say it is always more or less present (though this is an empirical matter). A methodological point is that identity is best seen in contexts of interaction as opposed to being reduced to the mind-sets of individuals or the objective structures of cultural systems of meaning or societies. Looking at identity, on any of the three levels referred to above, requires an interactive perspective: identity takes shape in contexts of interaction, be they the interactions of individuals, collectivities, or of

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large-scale entities such as societies. Viewed in such terms, the objective reality of identity lies then in contexts of interaction where one group seeks to advance its interests or assert its self-interpretation. Moreover, as indicated, given the discursive and contested nature of, in this case, European identity, the most interesting sites are debates and controversies. Indeed, it has often been noted that identity arises most strikingly in moments of crisis. As mentioned earlier, there is also a European political selfunderstanding in relation to the rest of the world. It has often been noted that consciousness of Europe arose in relation to the wider world which supplied it with an external reference point. This has varied from being a relation of superiority to one of inferiority. Europeans thus came to know themselves through the eyes of non-Europeans, who were frequently the Other against which European self-identity was forged. Due to colonialism, much of the history of Europe took place outside of Europe, giving to the European legacy a certain ambivalence concerning the relation between Europe and the non-European. However, the idea of Europe as a world consciousness was always internally weak due to the internal rivalries within Europe and the fact that no single power ever gained supremacy. The two world wars of the last century undermined the possibility of Europe articulating a world consciousness, still less a political identity. European political identity is almost entirely a post-1945 construction and only in the past couple of decades since 1989 is it possible to speak in a meaningful sense of Europe in terms of identity, but for the greater part, this was an internal identity. The consolidation of the European project after the Second World War provided the elements out of which a European identity was constructed. International youth movements and travel were formative of the making of a European identity among young people. The year 1968 was a moment of transformation in the number of young people who through travel and activism had come to see themselves belonging to a European-wide transnational social group (see Jobs 2009). Gildea and Mark (2013) argue that activists across Europe often had a sense of being part of a wider revolt that went beyond their own national context and had a European dimension that also included the experiences of Central and Eastern Europe

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(see also Passerini). This movement, which was underpinned by cultural developments in music and popular culture, represented an alternative cultural activism to the inter-governmental project of European integration. The formative period of European integration European revival was subordinated to the wider category of an US-led West. The bifurcation of Europe that came with the Cold War more or less put an end to any coherent sense of a European identity, given the huge divide between state socialism and liberal democracy. The European project in its inception did not have any political aims other than to bring about peace, especially between Germany and France; its aims were largely economic and rather than being primarily integrative in the sense of attempts to create new political and economic structures, they were conceived in more negative terms as the removal of obstacles to competition. Moreover, the early project was a product of an age that still believed in statist planning. The gradual move away from the planned economy—the era of the New Deal and Keynesianism—following the first major crisis of capitalism in the early 1970s, at precisely the same time that the European project gained momentum, inevitably had consequences for European integration as a supranational process. The result of this constellation of forces and circumstances was that Europe lacked significant identity. Those attempts to cultivate a European cultural identity, as discussed in the foregoing, were a response both the absence of any concern with culture or identity in the early project and the fact that it was largely an elite-led project that had little to do with popular legitimacy. Indeed, its most enthusiastic supporters were initially more likely to be the centre-right than the centre-left, as witnessed by the support given by the British Conservative party in the early 1970s. Moreover, European integration has little to do with democracy. This all changed in an era that saw the rise of a new wave of democratization and the related crisis of capitalism presaging new calls for democratic legitimation. The European project became increasingly embroiled in conflicts over democracy, which were enhanced by a new drive towards political integration following the Single European Act in 1986.

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After 1989 with the end of the USSR and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact, the question of European identity took on a new salience with the re-assertion of Central and Eastern Europe, challenging the earlier de facto equation of Europe with Western Europe and with the wider notion of the West. The subsequent enlargement of the EU to include Central and Eastern Europe for the first time marked the consolidation of an integrated political Europe. I have characterized this turn as the making of a ‘post-western’ Europe (Delanty 2013). This does not mean Europe has become un-Western or anti-Western, but that its identity can be seen as no longer predominantly defined by Western Europe— such as the core founding states of the EU—or by its participation in the increasingly diffuse notion of the West. In short, Europe’s new post-1989 identity is marked on the one side by increased confidence as European rather than simply Western and as an appendage to the USA, but it has also become more uncertain in that there are now more and more forces at work. Additionally, the wider world is also increasingly post-Western in that the global context is now marked by the rise of a multiplicity of powers and with a major shift in gravity towards Asia. This all means that Europe is no longer simply the Eastern frontier of the US confronting USSR, as it was for much of the previous century. It is still premature to speak of a new European political identity that captures the identity of Europe in the world. The enlargement of the EU is generally recognized to have brought about a weakening of political identity. In addition, there is increased contestation as to what European integration represents. This contestation has been exasperated by the global economic crisis of 2007–2009 which has been detrimental to the Eurozone countries and more generally has had a devastating impact on the future of European integration. From a politics of stability and certainty there is now a new age of uncertainty and with this comes the striving for the comfort and illusions of national identity. The global context is still dominated by large-scale nations—the USA along with the so-called BRICS countries, China, Russia, India, Brazil in addition to New World economies such as Indonesia—all of which are able, by virtue of being nations, to project their identity in the world, but the EU still remains uncertain as to what its identity is. The EU while having many features of a state is neither a state nor a

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nation. It is now beset with a crisis for which there is no apparent solution. It is torn between an identity based on the market and one based on the vision of a state or polity. The relative weakness of Europe’s identity, which at most exists as a post-national self-understanding, has not relinquished the nation-state, but has also not replaced it with something else. Yet, the normative model of a post-national Europe has been very influential worldwide. It has given a major impetus to normative regionalism in many parts of the world, as illustrated by MERCOSUR and UNASUR in Latin America, the Organization of American States, ASEAN in Asia and the Organization of African Unity. It would be inaccurate to conclude that Europe has become cosmopolitan; indeed, the opposite is equally plausible. However, a space has been created for a cosmopolitan Europe in so far as a level of normativity has been created that goes beyond the national level (see next section). European integration has led to a deep and far-reaching process of constitutionalization that has fundamentally transformed the nation-state which is now a post-sovereign polity in that sovereignty is shared with the European level. Cosmopolitanism has been in many ways strengthened by European integration, but so too have anti-cosmopolitan trends, which include increased xenophobic nationalism. While borders within Europe are being eradicated a new border has been erected between Europe and the rest of the world. Yet, this is not clear-cut but ambivalent. European integration does not lead in one direction and its shape is fundamentally contested. Moreover, due to the reality of globalization, it is no longer possible to delimit the space of Europe from the rest of the world. Much of the world is within Europe and much of Europe is beyond what is normally called Europe. Identity may be the wrong word to characterize the emergence of Europe as a domain of meaning and normativity. National identities are themselves also undergoing tremendous change and the uncertainty that underpins many national identities is also a feature of European identity. The current crisis is in no small way due to the fact that the European project has achieved many of the aims it set out to achieve several decades ago. The challenges of the present day are of a different order than they were in the early decades of European integration. The goals of peace and prosperity were relatively uncontroversial, but in the

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context of multiple directions of travel and a more attenuated process of democratization, the result is inevitably greater uncertainty. With respect to the four levels of analysis discussed in the foregoing— the idea of a cultural identity, European identifications, Europeanized collective identities and a European political identity—it can be seen that Europe is not a fixed reference point, but a variable term whose meaning will always change in response to changing circumstances. Rather than denying the existence or possibility of a European identity, it is perhaps best found in the myriad of discourses in which Europe figures as a term of reference as well as itself a mode of discourse. In this way more and more issues are framed in the terms of Europe—both in positive and in negative senses—and thus bringing into existence not just an order of discourse but a new reality that has normative significance. Political scientists often deny the normative content of European integration, seeing it instead as institutional process driven by specific instrumental goals. This neglects the normative transformation that has taken place in European societies on both the level of identities and on the wider societal level, not all of which of course can be attributed to European integration (which cannot be entirely disengaged from other processes). It may be the case that such learning processes are now in crisis, but that they occurred can hardly be denied when one considers the enormous gains that have been achieved in peace within Europe and in the past three decades in rights. If identity implies a relation to another, it may be the case that the Other of Europe’s identity is in fact its own past and that what is needed more urgently today is the re-discovery of the diversity of traditions that constitute what we know as Europe. What is needed is undoubtedly new narratives that can capture the plurality of the European heritage. But if identity is at all a meaningful term what is needed above all are ways of collectively defining new goals for European integration. The old goals have been achieved or are no longer capable of generating sufficient loyalty or conviction. What might these be? Identities cannot be merely backward-looking narratives, but must entail a look to the future and based on the reality of people’s lives. The most important challenges for the future are ones that were not present in the founding treatises such as ecologically sustainable economies and democracy.

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The Prospects of Cosmopolitanism for Europe What then does it mean to say that Europe has become more cosmopolitan or that there is a European cosmopolitanism emerging? Various authors have argued that Europeanization can be understood in cosmopolitan terms (Beck and Grande 2007; Rumford 2007; Robertson and Krossa 2012). By this is usually meant that the internal national borders have been eroded and that Europe has acquired the features of a political community or polity. In this view, Europe is a post-national polity. This position has been advanced by Habermas (2001a, b, 2003, 2006) and Eriksen (2005) who have argued that the European Union needs to take up the republican political legacy of Europe and that European identity is best defined in terms of citizenship rights, constitutionalism and democracy which henceforth must be conceived of in European terms than in national terms. In this view, it remains unclear whether the resulting polity will have no national structures of organization. Benhabib (2008) has drawn attention to cosmopolitan norms of justice embedded in the juridical structure of the EU. Another view, put forward by Beck and Grande (2007), is that Europe has become cosmopolitan due both to the alleged obsolescence of the nation-state and to the transnationalization of European societies. Others have argued that many characteristics of the EU can be seen as being either cosmopolitan or bearing meanings and implications that point in a cosmopolitan direction (Roche 2010). It is certainly the case that the collective identity of the EU embodies cosmopolitan ideas, such as the general concern with human rights or the pursuit of a unity in diversity (Sassatelli 2009). It has also been argued in numerous studies of European identities that there is increasing evidence of a European dimension to identities and an increase in the number of people with primary and especially in secondary European identity (Hermann et al. 2004; Pichler 2008; Risse 2010). These latter arguments are not generally related to cosmopolitanism, and in others, cosmopolitanism is roughly equated with post-national trends or with transnationalism. A general assumption also in the literature is that cosmopolitanism is a European political legacy that has become somehow more real today to the alleged transnationalization of the nation-state and the

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emergence of a more Europeanized society. This opens up the charge of Eurocentrism, the complaint that such a perspective ignores, on the one side, anti-cosmopolitan trends within Europe and, on the other side, it ignores similar developments in other parts of the world (Delanty and He 2008). These various positions to do not amount to an overall cosmopolitan interpretation and many claims or assumptions can be disputed or relativized. For instance, as in Habermas’s writings, the intimation that European political modernity is somehow superior to that of other parts of the world because of the relative advancement of the constitutional nation-state and democratization. It is also not clear if cosmopolitanism is simply another term for transnational cooperation, internationalization, or for the blurring of borders and thus where the line separating a cosmopolitan polity and a supranational one is not clear. Is Europe a new normative power that has lessons to teach the rest of the world or is it a global power itself competing alongside other major players? It would not be difficult to argue that as far as identities are concerned European identities—in the sense of the identities of individuals—are quite weak and can be related only to those who have benefited from European integration, a point made by Neil Fligstein (2008). However, this is quite substantial and confirms a general hypothesis that support for EU, and generally support for European integration, is correlated with education and younger people rather than with nationality. This suggests that the clash of values is more likely to be generational than territorial. But not all are so sanguine about the prospects of a cosmopolitan European identity. Adrian Favell (2008) has argued that Europeans who travel within Europe and who would normally be considered to be the bearers of European identity lack belief in Europe where they did not find the new freedoms they were looking for or found that they came at a considerable cost. The implication of Favell’s thesis is that identity, in particular anything like a common identity, cannot be easily built out of freedom of movement. The current situation today with major economic and financial crisis suggests that European solidarity and identity is limited. The project of European integration was after all built on the basis of economic

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recovery and growth. It was this prosperity that made possible political integration. The current crisis—post-2008/2009 to the current crisis of Brexit and right-wing radicalness—has occurred just as cultural integration gained a new momentum. It is likely to be severely abated. Systemic forms of integration—the basis of the Europe project—do not generate social integration, which is a prerequisite for the formation of political community and the expansion of cosmopolitan identities. However understood, identities need some affective bonds of commonality. When put to the test, as in referenda, the trend has been towards popular questioning if not outright rejection of the EU, as in the initial Danish rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, the initial Irish rejection of Lisbon in 2008 and the French and Dutch no votes in 2005 and in June 2016 with Brexit. (Chapter 15 returns to some of these questions). For those in search of a European cosmopolitan identity, there may not be much to find comfort in. But it should be considered that all kinds of identity find themselves in much the same predicament: the bonds of commonality are weak in a globalized and crisis-ridden world. This is true too of national identities, which are also embattled and now more defensive than forward-looking. However, in any case most national identities have been considerably Europeanized, one of the paradoxes of European integration. So the kinds of national identity in existence today are not always to be reduced to atavistic nationalism. What then can be claimed for a cosmopolitan interpretation of Europe? In what sense can it be reasonably argued that Europe is cosmopolitan?

A Critical Cosmopolitan Perspective As used here, cosmopolitanism is primarily a critical term and refers to a number of characteristics which are variously present in contemporary societies. A critical cosmopolitan approach emphasizes the inherently critical undertaking in a cosmopolitanism analysis; it is focused on the identification of how normative principles are interpreted and appropriated by social actors and the processes and mechanisms by which these enter into institutional forms. Much of the project of

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European integration is imbued with the language of cosmopolitanism, but this does not make Europe cosmopolitan, since cosmopolitan norms are often not realized in practice or are partially realized and, moreover, they are interpreted differently by various social actors. This is easily illustrated by the example of human rights. Today we live in age of rights and of democracy, but not everyone understands rights and democracy in the same way. Critical cosmopolitanism is also about the identification of the transformative potentials within the present. Cosmopolitanism itself is a transformative condition that seeks the transformation of the present in the light of universalistic ideas or principles of inclusion by which the horizons of the political community are broadened. In this respect, it is possible to associate support for Europe—and more generally support for European identification—with cosmopolitan values, understood as a general support for human rights and the extension of solidarity beyond the nation-state. Cosmopolitanism is based on an imaginary, in much the same way that nations are based on imaginary communities. However in the case of a cosmopolitan form of life, the imaginary would be based on the imagined reflexive counterfactual principle of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan imagination is not unreal, but is part of the self-understanding of contemporary society and of many social actors. What needs to be understood is how this imaginary becomes part of the cognitive structures of contemporary society and how, as a consequence, it enters into the self-understanding of social actors. Two mechanisms by which this might be understood are learning and interaction. As a learning process, cosmopolitanism is expressed in cognitive shifts, for instance in seeing the world in abstract terms or reflexively from the perspective of others. In this sense it is possible that the cosmopolitan ethic of, what Habermas (2006: 76) has called, a ‘solidarity among strangers’ becomes a reality. So here the reality in question is more cognitive than symbolic or juridical and it is to be found in modes of communication. A second mechanism is through processes of interaction. One of the most important characteristics that can be called cosmopolitan is those that arise from the interactions or encounters between

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culturally different groups who interpret themselves in a new light as a result of the encounter. The assumption for cosmopolitanism is that a process of learning occurs as a result of one group encountering another. Without this, it is meaningless to speak of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is thus not a matter of multicultural coexistence, but of the mutual interaction and learning from cultural diversity. However, it is not only a question of the interaction of diverse cultures, but relevant too are other groups that are not specifically culturally defined, such as corporations, governments, activists and various kinds of international organizations. To speak of European identity as cosmopolitan must therefore involve a shift in self-understanding and not simply identification with a transnational order. It is undoubtedly the case that in the course of European history the project of European integration was a major case of societal learning insofar as it was a project to bring about lasting peace within Europe and in moving beyond a politics based exclusively on the national interest. It is possible that its capacity for sustained learning has reached its limits and that as a consequence there is now the real possibility of blockages leading to regression. If this is correct, then, a cosmopolitan European politics will have to find alternative forms of expression beyond the current institutional channels. An additional characteristic of cosmopolitanism is its transformative potential and the creation of alternative spaces. These need not be always in opposition to the nation-state or in the service of transnational orders. Indeed, they may be quite local and nationally specific. It needs also to be considered that not all aspects of Europeanization are cosmopolitan and that national politics may often be more cosmopolitan. Critical cosmopolitanism as a political imaginary is best seen as a critique of both nationalism and of globalization: it rejects the limits of nationalism without embracing the capitalist vision of a globalized world. Unfortunately, for now, it would appear that the main opposition to globalization is not coming from the bearers of cosmopolitan values, but from the defenders of nation-states. The result is the false comfort of the nation-state.

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Cosmopolitanism is a process, not an end state. So the question is not whether Europe is cosmopolitan or not but of the degree to which it is. This can be answered only by reference to concrete instances and will require a differentiated analysis, for it is possible that cosmopolitanism is more in evidence in a particular sphere (for example, in legislation on rights or in education) than in an entire society. An adequate view of Europe as cosmopolitan will therefore have to go beyond an internal European cosmopolitanism to a consideration of the external aspect. Most discussions of Europe and cosmopolitanism consider only the internal erosion of borders within the EU and the order of governance it has created. Rarely if ever is attention given to its relation with the external world. The question of what is Europe today is not easily answered by reference to the political project of European integration. This project itself is currently at a turning point in its more than 50-year history. Many of its older objectives have now been achieved and it is unlikely the transnationalization of the European nation-state will continue its course. The present situation is one of uncertainty. The reality of Europe is not simply a post-national polity, but a more complex field of practices, memories, narratives, forms of symbolic representation, imaginaries; it is a field of exchange and of dialogue, as it is too of contestation. The result is that Europe is open-up for new definitions. Cosmopolitan trends are part of this multiplicity as is nationalism, but one should not draw the conclusion that the project of European integration leads inexorably to cosmopolitanism. As argued, it may indeed be the case that the EU has fostered anti-cosmopolitanism more than cosmopolitanism. A critical cosmopolitan approach does not assert that Europe is cosmopolitan, but offers a critical angle on how Europe may or may not be cosmopolitanism. In this view, cosmopolitanism emerges in contexts of interaction and of learning from cultural interaction through the reflexive application of normative ideas and new cognitive frameworks. A cosmopolitan approach thus seeks to identify such spaces and sites of both self and societal transformation. The critical cosmopolitan approach thus distinguishes itself from the post-national position in that it is not primarily about the transnationalization of the nation-state or the creation of a new kind of polity. It does not seek the completion

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of a project of integration, but the exploration of exchange, dialogue and the space of the encounter. It may be the case that a deeper level of democracy is at stake in this venture which is about the transformation of the meaning of the political. Democracy, after all, is based on the space of relations between citizens and as such it is the logic of the encounter that defines the space of the political. This has been the basic insight in much of modern political philosophy, as in specifically the writings of Hannah Arendt and more recently in approaches as different as those of Bonnie Honnig (2001) and Claude Lefort (1989). A broader perspective of the project of European integration should view it as part of the wider transformation of the political of which the transnationalization of European nation-states is only one part. The wider context is the 193 states that comprise the United Nations. The future of democracy will not be settled within Europe alone, but will require dialogue on an international level rather than a simple transfer of sovereignty from the national to the European. Just as national domestic politics fails to deliver democratic outcomes, it is now apparent that EU level domestic politics needs to be expanded in a more cosmopolitan direction. The global economic crisis since 2008, which has been particularly damaging for Europe, is evidence of the need for a new direction beyond the existing model of statist integration. The stakes in this are as much about democracy as about capitalism.

Note 1. Some of the following in this section is based on a section of Blokker and Delanty (2010). The notion of a ‘post-western Europe’ was originally formulated in Delanty (2003).

14 Age of Austerity: Contradictions of Capitalism and Democracy and the Crisis of European Integration

The project of European integration has been marked by many shifts in its more than five-decade history. This history can of course be viewed as having a much longer span since the foundation of the EU. The general dominant tendency both in academic discussion and in popular opinion has been to see in that project a progressive movement towards unity and alongside this an emphasis on continuity over discontinuity. The EU has certainly become embedded in its member states, which have been irreversibly transformed as a result of European integration, and the various enlargements of the EU can be seen as a continuation of a project of systemic integration that began in the post-Second World War period. The crisis that began in the financial markets in 2008–2009 and escalated in 2012 as a result of Greek debt suggests a shift of a different nature and the possibility of a rupture that calls into question a narrative of continuity and one of progressive integration based upon the institutionalization of solidarity. Any account of the European project today will have to consider the reality of a deep crisis, the possible failure of the project of European integration, and an emerging new political landscape marked by a certain fragmentation of Europe between what could be characterized as © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_14

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Old and New Europe, North and South, a two or multi-tier Europe, or a generational clash between Eurosceptics and Europhiles and different forms of political mobilization (see, for example, Habermas 2009, 2012; Fligstein 2008; Taras 2009). This chapter is an exploration of the extent to which it can be said that the European project has entered a new stage in which a more divided Europe is emerging in the context of an age of austerity and of what it means to speak of a crisis. The aim is to offer a framework to conceptualize the current situation of Europe, which can be variously described as divided along national lines or according to some other geopolitical or sociocultural categories such as creditor and debtor countries. Until the post-2008 context it could plausibly be argued that the popular opposition to the EU—such as that expressed in no votes on EU treaties, as in 2005, 2008—was not decisive and an expression of the application of democratic legitimacy to something that previously was seen as lying outside the domain of democratic political community. However, the current situation that is now marked by the far greater challenge of Brexit and the rise of the radical right suggests a deeper crisis—economic, political, cultural and social—at the heart of the European project as now embroiled in a more complex field in which national, European and global forces collide. Yet, this should not be exaggerated. Despite a more dangerous and complex international context represented by Putin and Trump, Brexit has also triggered counter-movements and new calls for European self-preservation. Europhilia is much alive, but alone it does not dispel widespread dissatisfaction and alienation with worsening economic conditions, as is very well illustrated by the political crisis that erupted in Italy in the Spring of 2018 with the prospect of Italy leaving the Eurozone. The next chapter will access the implications of the political crisis posed by trends towards authoritarianism linked to the rise of radical right-wing populism. The present chapter is concerned with the economic dimension of the crisis of European integration and of the wider model of democratic capitalism. The argument is that there needs to be far greater attention to the relation between capitalism and democracy in the

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making of Europe and that this is now undergoing a major shift in an uncertain direction. The model of social capitalism—which can also be termed democratic capitalism—was the basis of European capitalism in the post-second world period and is now in crisis as a result of major changes in the economy both in Europe and worldwide. The promise of European integration was of prosperity and peace; the second has been delivered but instead of prosperity the reality for many people is austerity. There is a strong trend towards neoliberalism in many countries and the Euro currency has imposed severe restrictions on national autonomy for several countries. As European economies enter into a period of low growth, if not stagnation for some, the relationship between capitalism and democracy becomes increasingly tense as new contradictions surface. This is a development that is not merely manifest on the level of European integration, but also occurs in national contexts since it is a problem that all kinds of state formation are faced with. As argued in the previous chapter, it is the nation-state that is primarily in crisis. Today the conflict between capitalism and democracy is all the more stark and the forms of identity that can be associated with the democratic ethic may be in tension with the capitalist spirit of the European project, which appears to have lost its relationship with solidarity as a basis for political community. The economic argument was once the basis of European integration, but with rising inequality, it is now becoming evident that economic rationale of economic integration has lost its force. In this chapter, it is argued that modernity is underpinned by two kinds of integration—systemic and social integration—and that as crises on the first become manifest, crises on the second follow. European integration was based on system integration, but as this now becomes crisis-prone, new crises in social integration are emerging and these are shaping the political field. Such movements can be understood in terms of Polanyi’s notion of a ‘double movement’ whereby disembedding processes driven by the capitalism market produce countermovements seeking social protection. However, in Europe today these take two forms, negative movements aimed at social closure and positive ones seeking democratic renewal.

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The Idea of a European Societal Model A useful place to begin is to return to the argument made in Chapters 8 and 10 concerning European political modernity. What defines Europe is ultimately best answered by considering what is distinctive about Europe from other parts of the world and what might be said to define patterns of identification and claim-making (see Roche 2010; Therborn 1995). The specificity of Europe as a world historical region does not consist in democracy, human rights, republican government, liberty, freedom—all of which have been regarded as defining the core of European values—but in the ways in which these ideas have been taken up in social struggles as well as in the institutional forms that followed from such struggles. If there is a core European value it has been the assertion of social justice and has been expressed in the ways in which modernity has unfolded in Europe generally. Despite the huge variability in the social, political and cultural shape of modern Europe, something like a European societal model—as opposed to the EU institutional notion of a European model of society—has existed and is based on solidarity and the pursuit of social justice. This has been partly reflected in the phenomenon of social capitalism, which can be seen as a variety of capitalism that stands in contrast to the liberal market model of capitalism (Hall and Suskice 2001). According to Claus Offe (2003: 442) if there is anything distinctive about a specifically European model of capitalism, it is the prominence of state-defined and state-protected status categories, which set limits to the rule of markets and of voluntary transactions. Stressing the diversity of types of capitalism in Europe, Offe notes that viewed in a global perspective it is possible therefore to speak of a European model of social capitalism that underlies the diversity of these different national models. Although Offe is sceptical that this can be reproduced on the EU transnational level, he thinks it has been an integral part of the European national states. From the perspective of a theory of European modernity such a conception of capitalism suggests that the form that political modernity has taken has been in a certain tension between state, economy and civil society whereby capitalism has always been constrained

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by civil society, which has also set limits to state power. The relation between these forces, which defines the matrix of political modernity, gives rise to a societal model that in turn offers a way for modernity to interpret itself and articulate an identity, or what is better characterized as a social imaginary. Solidarity and social justice are not concrete facts, but transcendental and cognitive ideas that make possible institutional arrangements and guide political practice. The concrete outcome has been a certain balance between capitalism and democracy. This has been variously reflected in the nation-states of modern Europe and is an important structural feature of modern Europe, as Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation also recognized with the argument that a certain consensus was worked out between European socialism and conservatism. In his account, modern capitalism based on the market produces major disembedding effects whereby social relations are disembedded from traditional social institutions and subject to the determinations of the marker. However, this is not a one-way direction of travel, for a double-movement is produced by which society reacts in the assertion of social protection. T. H. Marshall’s famous account in his 1950 essay of the formation of modern social citizenship reflected in part this view of democratic citizenship as a counter-balance to the inequalities of capitalism (Marshall 1987). It is true that these perspectives were limited by the absence of any sense of emancipatory social struggles, seeing as he did the social contract as an achievement of the state and not as negotiated outcomes of political mobilization spear-headed by trade unionism, socialist movements, labour and various social democratic parties. With the foundation of the EU, from 1958 onwards, this basic balance between capitalism and democracy has been a structural presupposition in the project of European integration. The contentious elements of this were mostly kept out of the European sphere as they were largely negotiated within the national state. The project of European integration from the early years after the Second World War was made on the basis of economic recovery and growth and underpinned by a firm belief in the need for state planning. While that project was primarily economic in its initial aim to link the economies of Germany and France, its political aspirations were to secure lasting peace in Europe

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through the stabilization of liberal democracy. The success of the early EEC and its gradual enlargement was due in no small measure to the fact that it operated within the confined space of the Cold War, postwar economic recovery and the values of liberal democracy and industrial capitalism. Economic growth, wealth creation and the democratic constitutional state gave to that project its basic animus and support from both the right as well as the left, which increasingly came to take on the cause of European integration following an initial scepticism (it often forgotten today the UK Conservative Party was pro Europe and the Labour Party anti). European integration can thus be situated within the horizons of European political modernity and a belief in the desirability in the pursuit of social goals. This can be characterized as the embedding of capitalism within democracy in the form of what has been often referred to as democratic capitalism (Streeck 2011, 2014). It was characterized by the predominance of a political culture based on the centre-right and centre-left. The two and a half decades of more or less uninterrupted economic growth from the late 1949s, Les trentes glorieuses, which saw the emergence of the EU and the consolidation of democratic capitalism left a paradoxical legacy. On the one side, as Wolfgang Streeck has argued, this was not a period of normality and hardly lasted three decades. The series of crises that followed should rather be seen as representing the normal condition of democratic capitalism when it became more apparent that capitalism and democracy do not fit together so neatly. On the other side, in the subsequent decades, despite the conflict between capitalist markets and democratic politics, the project of European integration sought to achieve a balance between economic competitiveness and social cohesion. In the longer view of history, it may thus be the case that the present crisis is more normal and, as a result, state intervention is a necessary measure to ensure the delivery of social goals. This would explain the rise of anti-systemic politics. It should not be forgotten that the model of social capitalism that was fostered by democratic capitalism was a product of the age of industrial capitalism. This was an era of worldwide economic growth that followed post-second world war recovery. This age has long passed. European economies are no longer based on same degree of

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industrialization. Capitalism has been fundamentally transformed along post-fordist and neoliberal lines. Moreover, the gendered nature of work that came with industrial capitalism, which was predominantly based on the white male worker, underwent major change with the incorporation of women into the workforce and, as we approach the present, the increased number of migrant labour, leading to the relatively new phenomenon of the precariat, i.e. a workforce based on temporary and precarious work. As a result of these and other developments, the pact that capitalism and state made has begun to unravel. Democracy can no longer be confined to a narrow range of issues and capitalism has not succeeded in delivering an acceptable degree of equality and prosperity for all. Liberal democracy has been undermined by the rise in social inequality, while on the other side of political modernity, the constitutionalization of rights that European integration has brought about has not been sufficient to offset the negative effects of the erosion of liberal democracy. This is quite aside from the argument, most notably advanced by Streeck, that neoliberalism has crept into the design of the EU (Streck 2014). This is however a contested claim and the degree of neoliberalization is also a matter of definition in view of the over-generalized meaning that the term has come to signify. On the one side the EU is by definition based on markets, but on the other hand, it is about the regulation and coordination of markets. On balance, while the EU is obviously underpinned by a market model of integration, the influence of neo-liberalism in the formation of the EU was limited. This is hardly surprising since the formative period of European integration was a time of ‘big government’ and of the belief in coordinated economies and the need for state intervention. The existence of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), created in 1962, which absorbs a large share (currently c.34%) of the EU budget is enough evidence of the absence of neoliberalism in the design of the EU. After its creation, it absorbed over 70% of the budget. It is difficult to see this highly interventionist policy in neoliberal terms. It is also difficult to see the single currency as a neoliberal project, given the central planning that is the basis of it (see also Majone 2011: 154–160). Indeed, UK Euroscepticism has been to a large degree fuelled by opposition to the EU on the grounds that it is contrary to neoliberal policies.

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It is nonetheless the case that since the financial crisis of 2009 there has been a steady uncoupling of capitalism and democracy. This has now manifested itself not only on the national level, but also on the European level of governance, as expressed in increased levels of anti-EU politics. Despite the inflation crisis in the 1970s and the arrival of economic liberalism in the 1980s, European integration was broadly conceived within the terms of the European societal model. Indeed, in the early 1990s the notion of a European Social Model was articulated by the policy-makers within the European Commission as an alternative to a purely market-based model of European integration. Although this notion lacked substance and ultimately did not offer an alternative to national social models, it reflected a concern with social cohesion that was to become an increasingly important part of the project of European integration and supposedly a counter-balance to market competitiveness and growth (see also Pichierri 2013). The idea that capitalism had to be made compatible with democracy remained a strong influence on European integration. The European social model can be described as one which holds that political control of markets is a necessity in order to achieve a certain degree of social justice. There are of course different national models and the balance between capital and labour, capitalism and democracy, market forces and solidarity, Keynesianism and monetarism, has never been constant for long. The European welfare state and the aspiration for full employment were among the outcomes that were achieved despite the basic tension between capitalism and democracy. But, as Streeck (2011: 14; 2014) has argued, this balance became difficult to maintain and when inflation was finally defeated the result was a new period of crises in which unemployment became the problem and with this the increase in public debt, which became for a time the functional equivalent of inflation in securing social peace. In the early 2000s, the solution found was private indebtedness through house prices, which fuelled relative wealth creation and temporarily solved the fiscal crisis of public indebtedness. Until 2008, it is possible to see European integration as broadly within this model, increasingly crisis-prone to be sure, of European political modernity as a period of what Wagner (1994) has termed ‘organized

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modernity’ in which the state—responding to the demands of labour— seeks to manage the crises produced by capitalism, thus averting what Habermas (1976) termed a ‘legitimation crisis’. The Euro currency, launched in 2002 in 12 countries, was part of this general framework in which political steering of the economy was considered to be a viable basis for Europe. Has something changed? The current situation suggests that something has indeed changed. Organized modernity has become a disorganized late modernity. In 2002, there was still optimism about the prospects of globalization and of transnational European governance. The implications of September 2001 had yet to become manifest. The crisis of the financial markets that began in September 2008 marked a point at which capitalism entered a new phase leading to the fragmentation of the European model of social capitalism and with it the wider European societal model. Crisis in the financial markets may be seen as yet another crisis generated by capitalism, which according to David Harvey (2010) is by its very nature crisis-prone. As Streeck (2012) has also argued capitalism is dynamically unstable. The present situation is different in that the capacity of the state to reconcile capitalism and democracy has reached a point at which this may no longer be possible due to the global scale of the problems, the destabilizing consequences of crisis management, as well as to new kinds of mobilization and the corrosive effects of social media (see also Deutschmann 2011). Until now the national state was able to secure the pact between labour and capital, market and democracy. The regulatory framework of the EU assisted in this. However, this functional system is less equipped to deal with the scale of the problems produced by financial liberalization and the so-called ‘privatized Keynesianism’ adopted by several countries (in particular those that have experienced the most severe economic crisis). National states are no longer able to secure the balance between capitalism and democracy, as is evident today in the case especially of Iceland and the southern European countries, including Italy. The result is a pervasive crisis of confidence in institutions of governance. But this is also apparent in the case of the larger economies, such as the UK and Italy (both of which have huge internal regional divisions and in the case of Spain this is the

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now the basis of a revitalized Catalan nationalism drive for independence—see next Chapter). The overall result is a widely felt instability in the institutions of European integration and the prospect of failure cannot be ignored. The current political and economic crisis—and post 2008/2009— occurred in a period when the EU had embarked on both enhanced integration and enlargement, placing additional strain on its regulatory capacity. It is now apparent that the single currency without a sovereign state to back it up produces outcomes that undermine the very possibility of integration in any meaningful sense. The spectre of several states becoming bankrupt brings disintegration, not integration; it has but an end to the unbridled optimism that has was a characteristic of European Union politics. Within the Eurozone, the member states have lost the power to devaluate their currencies, leading to a potentially unsustainable economic and political situation of financial and political bankruptcy for some countries. This was a basic mistake in the fiscal design of the single currency that is now all too evident. Offe (2017: 3) describes this crisis in its most basic form as a crisis of political agency in that the common currency has been designed such that no country has the means to regulate its own currency exchange. As a result, all countries are tied into a model that only benefits some countries. However, Europe is ‘entrapped’ because the mistake of creating a common currency without a common fiscal policy cannot be corrected by abandoning the common currency since that would produce even worse outcomes. Instead of increased prosperity—the promise of European integration—the reality for many is increased austerity. Many of these design faults go back to major mistakes made in the design of the institutions of the EU, for example the absence of contingency plans or an assessment of the risks involved in the creation of a single currency (see Majone 2011). As Majone points out, one assumption central to European integration from the beginning was the separation of the economy from politics, with the result that the economy has been de-politicized. The full consequences of what was unconstrained optimism in elite decision making are only becoming apparent in the present day, as are the problems with the ‘bicycle theory’ of European integration, namely that it must keep going to avoid falling down and that it can ignore potential future problems.

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Given the absence of an EU level public budget and the prevalence of so-called austerity measures in several countries along with more awareness of corporate corruption and the questionable morality of European banking, it is hardly surprising that Europeans are increasingly looking to other sources of solidarity leading to a potential governability crisis for the EU. Brexit was the first major indication of this trend and the most recent is the anti-EU coalition elected in Italy in 2018.

Social and System Integration The project of European integration is essentially driven by systemic forms of integration as opposed to social integration, to follow a distinction made originally by Lockwood (1964) and later developed by Habermas (1984, 1987a) in his theory of communicative action. This offers a useful framework to understand the logic of European integration in relation to the formation and crisis of political modernity in Europe, especially in the light of the argument made in Chapter 12 that the project of European integration amounts to a new model of modernity beyond liberal democracy. Although developing from liberal democracy, European integration has moved in the direction of a novel form of political governance that has far-reaching implications for the relation between the individual, society and the state. System integration, in Habermas’s analysis, is achieved via the state and economy through the media of power and money while social integration is culturally produced by social institutions and the life-world. Both are forms of institutionalization. Applied to European integration, it is evident that it has been essentially driven by systemic forms of integration and has not in any significant sense generated social integration, which is a prerequisite for the formation of political community. The nation-state is a welfare state, but the political form of the EU, where neoliberal tendencies are strong, lacks the integrative mechanisms of the national state. If we view the state as a system of guarantees and a sphere in which diverse interests are worked out, it must entail a capacity for social integration. This historically has been the basis of the nation-state and the forms of citizenship associated with it. To develop further the

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notion of integration, both social and system integration can be negative or positive, to borrow a distinction made variously by Claus Offe (2003) and others (Scharpf 1998; Majone 2011: 90–97). Negative integration concerns the removal of obstacles while positive integration entails the creation of new structures. All modern societies require both social and systemic forms of integration. No society or societal system can operate without either. The success of a society will depend on getting the right balance between both. Similarly, negative and positive mechanisms will operative in both kinds. The four mobilities—labour, capital, goods and services—that were the basis of the project of European integration were predominantly conceived of in terms of a model of negative integration and one that was entirely seen in systemic terms. It is easier to remove obstacles than create new structures, thus making the basic aims of European integration more achievable than if they were to be a design for a new kind of state and society (see Scharpf 1998). Thus the general logic of European integration has been to remove national barriers to enhance competitiveness. The economic liberalism that lay behind this was constrained by statist tendencies, the result of which was that negative integration was complemented by positive integration thus checking the erosion of national autonomy. In the course of its history, there had been indeed a shift to positive systemic modes of integration (e.g., the adoption of the Euro, the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty, the structural funds), but there has been little by way of social integration, which has been more or less entirely the domain of the nation-state. This is not to say the EU did not bring about or contribute to social integration. Anti-discriminatory legislation, labour rights and gender equality, ‘European’ citizenship, have been notable achievements and can be seen in terms of a model of social integration, though these have been predominantly limited to negative forms of integration, i.e. the removal of obstacles rather than the creation of new social forms. Indeed, much of this was the consequence of the more extensive diffusion of systemic forms of integration. These have now been complemented by the adoption of neoliberalism by the EU and by many countries, notably in Central and Eastern Europe where the attraction of economic deregulation and privatization for

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the ex-communist elites has proven to be irresistible (Supiot 2012: 35). In other words, as the need for social integration became stronger, the tendency on both national and European levels of governance was for greater systemic integration. The result was an overburdening of the integrative capacities and the intensification of crisis tendencies (see below). There is a limit to the extent to which system integration can achieve social cohesion and solidarity. At most, it can put in place some of the institutional prerequisites needed, such as legislation and the creation of policies designed to maximize economic and technological development. Social integration requires more extensive and positive steps, including social protection and welfare, that is social and economic citizenship. Such forms of citizenship have been underdeveloped at the European level and to the extent to which they exist, it is only at the level of negative integration and on the level of what Scharpf (1999) has referred to as ‘input’ legitimacy as opposed to ‘output’ legitimacy. This macroeconomic balance between, on the one side, public support rooted in democratic will formation and, on the other side, pragmatic support based on efficiency as a system of trade-offs runs into problems when there are major shifts in at least one of the two types of legitimacy. Citizenship not only entails rights, but also involves participation, responsibilities and solidarity. It is possible to discern in the project of European integration a tension between solidarity and mobility, which reflects the conflict between social and system integration. Much of the tension between the national and the European levels can be explained in terms of the conflict between these two forms of integration, and the resulting lack of congruence between them is the basis of the divisions within European societies. This is now being fought out as a conflict between different types of legitimation. Solidarity figured increasingly in the EU’s policies in the 1980s and 1990s, but has been noticeably in decline in the past decade since the Eastern enlargement and the crisis of sovereign debt. When Italy invoked the principle of solidarity in March 2011 when faced with an influx of Arab migrants from Tunisia in the aftermath of the Arab Spring it was refused and the French government introduced border controls leading to a disintegration in the Schengen system (Monar 2012).

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With the crisis in sovereign debt and the transformation of Europe into creditor and debtor countries, the notion of solidarity has been further tested by austerity measures. The crisis in the Eurozone countries, which form the core of the EU, draws attention to an additional problem with the nature of European integration, which was based on economic and political integration. Currency integration is a different matter than other kinds of trade or an entity that can be simply regulated since it cannot be given a stable value, and, for every country, the Euro is in effect an external currency (see Aglietta 2012). The attempt to fix exchange rates within a context of national banking systems with very different economies pre-supposed economic stability in Europe and worldwide, but when that stability ceased the result was catastrophic for both the banking and the public sector. The result is a shift from East and West to North and South, with the sharpest lines of division now between the Mediterranean South and Germany. Alongside this division is a further one between the 17 Eurozone and ten non-Eurozone countries, in particular the UK. Viewing European integration in this light it is apparent then that there is not just one process at work, EU-led systemic integration—or some notion of political integration—but many and all of them are embroiled in a more complicated societal field that ultimately extends beyond the contours of the EU to include global processes. Indeed, from the national perspective, the EU is in part a globalizing force in that it is often viewed as having an impact on European societies similar to that associated with economic globalization. However, it is important to distinguish between globalization, in the sense of the expansion of global markets, and the dynamics of the European free trade area, given the regulated nature of the latter and the fact that it is deeply embedded in national economies. The complicated issue of whether the EU can resist globalization cannot be entirely separated from the question of whether nation-states can resist globalization. The societal complexity of European integration also cannot be so easily disengaged from globalization given the multiple forms of integration, pluralization and differentiation involved: the national, European and global dimensions are all entangled in a complex political and economic field. For this reason, European integration and the normative question of political resistance is best viewed in terms of a wider theory of political modernity.

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European political modernity took shape around a conflict between capitalism and democracy whereby state, economy and civil society interacted in ways that led to the domestication of capitalism by forces emanating from civil society and the state. The result was a societal model built on solidarity and social justice as a generative force that was to form the basis of political community. The European societal model can be seen as a generative process that provided the primary ideas of modern Europe influencing both left and right conceptions of social order and political community ranging from social democracy, Christian democracy to democratic socialism and other radical democratic movements. As with all such models it crystallized into different forms due to the ways in which it was taken up and transformed by different social actors. So in civil society claim-making and the broadening of the scope of democracy led to tensions between state and society, on the one side, and, on the other, between capitalism and democracy. What we are witnessing today is the re-activation of these generative and transformative processes, which are re-activating the field of European integration understood as a largely institutionalizing process. What is at stake is more than simply the assertion of social integration over systemic integration, but an emerging politics that is not so easily explained by recourse to notions of ‘European identity’ or ‘European citizenship’. In the longer perspective of modernity, the current situation in which crisis looms large might be best seen in terms of a major shift in the relation of economy and society. The assumptions of European integration are in question, but with uncertain outcomes. These assumptions can be summed up as follows: The assumption that social justice can be taken care of by the nationstate and that EU integration is supplementary (i.e. entailing a balance of negative and positive mechanisms of integration). The assumption that globalization can be resisted by the EU. The assumption that there is a durable balance between capitalism and democracy. The assumption that European societies are on a broadly similar trajectory and one which can be steered by the EU towards a common future. The assumption that economic growth will provide the basis for a politics of solidarity.

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The assumption that the economy can be separated from politics These assumptions are now in question with the return of the economic question, a transformation in the nature of the state and with it new questions about social justice and the meaning of the political. Examples of a shift in the political landscape abound: the London Riots in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement and other anti-capitalist movement such as Podemos and the 15th May Movement in Spain, the riots in Greece in 2011 and election of the Syriza government, the public protests against the austerity cuts to public spending in the UK and in other European countries, an increase in homelessness and poverty, Brexit and the rise in the radical right in many other countries. These seemingly unconnected examples as well as a growing scepticism about the EU among the European electorates, a crisis in public confidence in national institutions and, too, the rise of nationalist and populist parties and movements suggest the ground is shifting in the direction of anti-systemic politics in an increasingly crisis-prone Europe. As argued in a recent work, there is not one crisis but many—the EU crisis, the migration crisis, the rise of the radical right, Brexit, etc.—and the cumulative effect is the most serious crisis in the history of the EU (Castells et al. 2018). Such crises are further exacerbated by an external context that is volatile and also crisis ridden (the implications of the Trump presidency, new tensions with Russia, and political instability and failed states in the Middle East).

A Crisis? Four Kinds of Crisis The notion of a crisis needs to be clarified and unpacked of the general claims and apocalyptical scenarios in recent literature (e.g., Bongiovanni 2012, 2018; Kirchick 2017; Krasteve 2018). Not all societal problems amount to a crisis, as a real event in contrast to a possible future event. According to Habermas in a work that has been considered to be a landmark book on idea of crisis, Legitimation Crisis in 1973, a crisis has both an objective and a subjective dimension to it. Following the medical metaphor of a patient with a critical illness, it is a turning point at which the

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patient’s self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery. The critical condition has an objective side to it but the patient is also subjectively involved in the recovery. To that extent, it has also a normative aspect in that the subject is deprived of their ‘normal sovereignty’ (Habermas 1976: 1). His main point is ‘only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises’ (p. 3). Crises bring about the disintegration of social institutions; they are disturbances on the level of systemic integration in its ‘steering capacities’ that undermine social integration. Habermas’s concern is with a specific kind of crisis, namely legitimation crisis, which he examines in relation to other kinds of crisis. On the basis of Habermas’s conception of a crisis, it can be said that it has its roots in an objective condition associated with failures in system integration and is manifest on the level of consciousness as a crisis on the level of social integration and more generally raises normative challenges. Four kinds of crisis1 can be distinguished to make sense of the current situation: economic crisis, political crisis, social crisis and cultural crisis. The first is an economic crisis. The most severe example of an economic crisis in Europe in recent time was the post-2009 crisis in sovereign debt. This is a clear example of a system crisis in that complex economies require advanced banking system for even the most basic steering and coordination of functions. By 2017, the worst implications of sovereign debt for countries such as Ireland and Spain have been overcome, due not least to harsh austerity measures and the erosion of the welfare. The problem of Greek debt remains. In Ireland, the state bailed out a major bank, while in Greece, the problem was not the banking system but state debt that had reached unsustainable levels. In the strict sense of a crisis, the financial crisis remains, largely because the problems that gave rise to it remain and therefore the return of the worst case scenario of a collapse of the Euro currency is still present. The election of the left-wing Syriza—meaning ‘Coalition of the Radical Left’—to government in January 2015 is an expression of the subjective dimension of the deeper problems that continue to exist in that national debt remains unsustainable and there is no clear solution ahead. For Europe more generally, a wider economic crisis is less evident as modest

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economic growth in the Eurozone countries has been achieved and the Eurozone as a whole remains strong, for example in contrast to the US economy. However, across the EU there is a pervasive failure in the capacity of the economy to deliver prosperity. This is now manifest on the level of political consciousness. A general conclusion is that while the worst aspects of the crisis have been averted, Europe is still in crisis due to the structural contradictions of the single market. In the context, it is difficult to see how there can be a full recovery. A political crisis has in part become evident in terms of the capacity of the state and the EU, as well as other global institutions, to manage the crisis and maintain political legitimacy. This has not yet reached the level of a governability crisis—which would be a tipping point in systemic integration—and as yet there is no evidence of any state, with the exception of Greece collapsing. In the latter case, the application of austerity measures has prevented a systemic crisis. As previously mentioned, the management of crisis is the normal condition of capitalism. However, there are now signs of a growing political crisis in legitimation with widespread scepticism of the EU. Brexit can be seen as in part an expression of this trend as is more generally the growth in support for right-wing populist parties. However, a full-scale political crisis has not yet become apparent, in that Brexit has not had the contagion effect that was initially expected to have. The example of Hungary in 2018 with the re-election of Orban with major electoral support is possible an indication of a wider crisis for the EU for its political values. The outcome of the Italian election of 2018 with right and left anti-EU populist parties in the ascendancy is another example of a crisis in political legitimation for liberal democracy and for the EU. The year 2016 was one of shocks to liberal democracy: Trump and Brexit. However, a shock does not necessarily lead to a crisis and it is possible that both Trump and Brexit reflect less a crisis of European integration and liberal democracy than the end of Anglo-American influence in Europe. There are also signs of an emerging social crisis in terms of the corrosive impact of the economic crisis on the social fabric of societies. While the current austerity measures adopted by many countries have had significant implications for citizenship and social wellbeing, there are as yet no signs of a new kind of austerity polity resulting

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and there is considerable room for a social project to appear. Austerity has eroded social citizenship, but has not resulted in a fundamentally different situation. This is part of a more general trend towards the normalization of neoliberalism but without full-scale abolition of the welfare state or measures comparable to those of the Trump presidency. However, an example of a social crisis is social pathologies. The existence of social pathologies is a symptom of a deeper crisis in social integration. In addition, it is possible to speak of a cultural crisis in a common normative system of values that provides the basic cultural orientations for the functioning of societies. This is what Habermas has referred to a ‘motivation crisis’. On this level, it is more difficult to speak of a crisis since it is arguably the case that cultural value systems are always prone to crisis in so far as modernity cultivates a culture of critique. However, critique does not necessarily lead to crisis, for crises come about as a result of an objective problem (as, e.g., an economic crisis). Critique arises as part of the subject’s attempt to respond to the objective condition by, for instance, attempting to change the objective conditions. A cultural crisis—in the sense of a broader crisis in social and political values—may precede political crisis, but can also follow on from a political crisis that persists. Such a crisis may take negative or positive forms. Negative expressions are when there is a withdrawal in commitment and belief in the fundamental values of modern society and antimodern values set in (e.g., a revival of fascist ideas). Positive expressions of cultural crisis are when the cultural and political legacy of modernity is invoked to overcome the very social problems that gave rise to the crisis. Crisis moments can be times when new ideas are generated leading to social transformation and possibly opening up the way forward for new institutions. This happened in the period after 1945 when the crisis of the war led to new political ideas and a transformation in the idea of Europe to embrace peace. The year 1968 was another such moment, as was 1989. The crisis tendencies of the post-2008 period do not have appeared to lead towards renewal.

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Anti-systemic Politics and Political Crisis The context in which to view current developments is a theory of political modernity that recognizes its various currents, such as generative, transformative and institutionalizing processes, which have led to a European societal model and a growing tension between social and system integration. Many of these tensions and processes play out in the conflict between democracy and capitalism where a new phase in political conflict is becoming manifest. The new politics of Europe can be seen as anti-systemic, challenging new sources of power. The rise of anti-systemic trends is not primarily directed against the EU and also cannot be entirely understood in terms of diversification or some vague notion of ‘unity in diversity’. They are anti-elite and anti-mainstream and are in part an expression of a new wave of democratization, which has also spread to the Arab world. Not all can be characterized as progressive, as the example of the Golden Dawn nationalist movement in Greece suggests. However, in Europe a social movement whether of the right or of the left is not emerging and claims of a new age of riots and the ‘rebirth of history’ are premature (Badiou 2012). For the foreseeable future, the challenge is not the end of capitalism, as Badiou claims, but its taming by democracy and the recovery of a social project. There is not a cataclysmic crisis of capitalism nor or the modern state and the EU is not in the midst of such a crisis. Yet, there is a system crisis that is reflected in a crisis of integration. As argued earlier, the paradox is that the EU may itself have formed the ground on which this has unfolded. From being an elite-driven project, European integration is now a more pluralized framework and operates within a context of the structural weakness of the state and a more globalized capitalist system which its regulatory order does not control. In this sense, the EU is not unlike an over-stretched empire that has created the conditions both for opposition and for re-directions of its project. The adoption of positive modes of system integration has possibly come too late—quite aside from too little—or at least they have not succeeded in securing social forms of integration. Indeed, many of its most

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progressive integrative processes—labour rights, anti-discriminatory legislation, environmental legislation—have politicized the wider political field and made possible increased political contestation. EU cultural policy-making, which has increasingly embraced diversity as opposed to cultural unity, had confirmed the broader trend towards pluralization (Sassatelli 2009). So what we witness today is a general expansion in claim-making and contentious politics on a European level. This is because the democratic state—and the EU is in part at least a democratic polity—is inseparable from civil society which has expanded the sphere of the political (Johnson 2011). The result is a perpetual challenge to democratic legitimation (Trenz and Eder 2004). This is the context—the collision of different logics of integration—in which we should view the apparent collapse of consensus on the European project. If elites do not share a collective sense of purpose—and they are seemingly divided between the proponents of market liberalism and statism, let alone have a collective identity—it cannot credibly be expected that the citizenry will generate identification with a state perceived to be in crisis and whose capacity for action in the wake of the financial collapse of several member states has been severely tested. The current situation is one in which systemic integration—at the price of democracy and social integration—has been the means to save a project that has undermined its presuppositions and at the same time has also increased the capacity for a politicization of the population. What in fact we are witnessing is a conflict between capitalism and democracy in the wake of the break-up of democratic capitalism as a model for European integration, which has become what Colin Crouch (2004) has called a ‘post-democracy’. The major crises of the twentieth century—the Great Depression, the Second World War—all led to new solutions, such as the welfare state, the New Deal, the United Nations and the European Union. The present predicament, which has generally been recognized to be the most serious crisis since 1945, has not led to any new ideas other than the production of rescue packages that result in the pile of public debt rising to a level that can no longer be satisfied by austerity measures. This is the point at which a political crisis becomes both a social and a cultural crisis.

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To conceptualize this situation we need to locate the current crisis—in its economic, political and social dimensions—and a new wave of contentious politics in a broader framework of modernity of a shift in the relationship between capitalism and democracy. In this, Europe may be becoming more European in that conflicts around social justice appear to be returning and there is now a debate about capitalism on a national, European and wider global level. Indeed, all elections in recent years have been dominated by the global crisis of capitalism and the systemic failure of democratic institutions to alleviate the situation. The notion of ‘European citizenship’ will need to be reconceived beyond its current status as a right to mobility for EU nationals. The notion of citizenship needs to be connected to a political conception of society not as a normative ideal or one that can be formulated in the EU’s own discourse, but one that can be linked to the European societal model. The way forward is not simply the creation of a European federal super-state, but nor is a retreat to national unilateralism the way forward. With increasing differences between the economies of the European countries, it would take a powerful central federalized state acting over the heads of national governments to alleviate the current situation. The dilemma is a great one, for such a transfer of sovereignty upwards would come at the cost of democracy unless new political structures were created to safeguard what remains of popular sovereignty. It would go far beyond all previous understanding of the meaning of ‘integration’ and it is not for now a likely prospect. To sum up, the main identity currents in Europe today are more likely to be oppositional, the background to which is the uncoupling of democracy and capitalism. Citizens, as taxpayers who now have to pay for the systemic failures of the banking system, are less likely to embrace the technocratic and elite-driven project of European integration, which is becoming increasingly viewed as another face of globalization that leads to the de-nationalization of the state (Kriesi et al. 2008). This however is ambivalent in that these democratic identities are in part products of the European project, which should be seen as the extension

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of the state rather than its negation. The overall consequence has been a fragmentation of European integration into a plurality of projects, many of which are anti-systemic while others may be carriers of new kinds of social integration which may involve a different model of solidarity to that which was sustained by democratic capitalism. It is unlikely that the social pact on which this was based can be renewed in the same way as the economic presuppositions, which were those of industrial capitalism, as they no longer exist and the political context has changed, making class compromise, the basis of democratic capitalism, all the more difficult due to new demands. The possibility of economies based on full employment, which were a realistic objective in the post-Second World War decades, is no longer an option for the post-industrial societies today which have also witnessed the tremendous incorporation of women into the workforce. This is possibly the greatest challenge for Europe in the future and a challenge that will have to be addressed in the context of a changing global economic order and environmental limits to growth. Satisfying social expectations along with the demands for democratic legitimacy without growth-driven economies will be the test of the Europe project for many decades to come.

Note 1. His analysis refers to motivation crises, legitimation crises, rationality and political crises.

15 ‘The Centre Cannot Hold’: The Return of Nationalism and the Spectre of Authoritarian Democracy

Discussion of the current situation of Europe in the press and public sphere naturally focusses on the present. A sociological and historical perspective offers a deeper view of the current situation that sees in the crises of the moment both continuity and rupture. Making sense of current times should not lose sight of the continuities of the past. This all raises the question of what is the present time. Here, some periodization is useful, since the present needs to be defined in relation to temporal horizons. A backward glance at the post-1945 period reveals four points of rupture, which can be briefly characterized as follows. First, there can be no doubt that 1945 marked the threshold to a new phase in European modernity in which post-war reconstruction and the foundation of the EEC were the main achievements. It was an era of industrial capitalism and of economic growth in which a certain balance existed between capitalism and democracy. As noted in Chapter 12, the centrality of 1945 must be qualified since this was less of a rupture for much of Central and Eastern Europe, for whom 1989 was of greater significance. The post 1945 period saw the consolidation of social democracy and the welfare state, which entered into crisis in the early 1970s. The second era begins to take shape from 1973 when © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_15

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capitalism enters into a new phase and neo-liberalism by the 1980s emerges as the novel political force. It was a period when the new or cultural left emerges—presaged by the revolts of 1968—and new cleavages are formed. This pattern continues through the next phase, which is marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Warsaw Pact and the unification of Germany. The third era is from 1990 when a New Europe takes shape with the consolidation of the EU and its later enlargement to include much of the former Central and Eastern Europe. This was an era of globalization and the advancement of the neoliberal project. The current situation is characterized by the transition to a new phase, which is marked by the global financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the related, though different, problem of Greek debt, the unprecedented migration that followed the collapse of Libya and the war in Syria, and now Brexit and the European wide rise of authoritarian populism. This is the era in which we are now in and it is not clear what the direction of travel is. This chapter is an exploration of the implications of the apparent rise of a nationalism across Europe and the mood of crisis and uncertainty that has gripped Europe since the momentous Brexit referendum of 23 June 2016. W. B. Yeats’ much-cited line in the poem of 1919 the Second Coming ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ has a new and unexpected resonance in the current situation in Europe and in the wider context of world politics in which a new wave of authoritarian populism has posed serious challenges to liberal democracy. It is of course a different situation today a century later than the one that Yeats was commenting on when the old European empires crumbled after the Great War. Europe today is not at war but there are wars in the vicinity and internal nationalist stirrings that raise the spectre of a clash of nationalisms. However, social and economic collapse does not appear to be a likely prospect. Democracy is not in danger. However, the signs are that the established liberal democracies are in a period of uncertainty as a new international conflict between— to use the characterization of the alt-right—‘nationalists and globalists’ unfolds.

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The current situation should also be situated in the context of major shifts in the relationship between capitalism and democracy. As discussed in the previous chapter, the era of democratic capitalism that offered a period of stability for Europe in the post-Second World War has come to an end. One of the hallmarks of the present is the crisis of neoliberalism, which ran its course from the early 1980s to c.2008. The collapse of this ideology has opened up a space for new visions and ideas. While neoliberalism may have been normalized today, it exists in a much more complicated political context and no longer commands ideological supremacy. The crisis of the present is in many ways due to the re-opening of the space of the political. Nationalism and varieties of populism are one response to the current hiatus and are the concern of this chapter. The chapter provides an analysis of Brexit as a special case. This leads on to a wider discussion of the trend towards cultural and political authoritarianism. The chapter proceeds with a look at the rise of regional nationalist movements and concludes with an assessment of the implications of nationalism more generally for Europeanization and for political modernity in Europe.

The Tyranny of Brexit: How a Referendum Fractured a Nation The phenomenon of Brexit is one of the most disturbing occurrences in the history of modern Britain. It invites many questions, such as how has been possible for the UK to embark on what is almost universally regarded as a calamitous course? The answer most commonly given is that the government must implement the result of a referendum. This imperative is supposed to be because of democracy. But why does a non-binding referendum result have to be implemented when it is clearly detrimental to the national interest? Britain today appears to be trapped by a decision that is proclaimed even by many of the opponents of Brexit to be path dependent even if its leads to national catastrophe. A mistake was made but it cannot be corrected. The direction of travel,

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by almost every account, is not in the national interest. While Brexit is seen by many to be the outcome of a democratic decision, it is also an example of the tyranny of majoritarianism and part of a trend towards cultural and political authoritarianism. Democracy is supposed to have the capacity to allow societies revise decisions in the light of public debate, but in this instance it has served to block deliberation. The problem, in essence, is that Brexit has unleashed two colliding conceptions of democracy: liberal democracy (centred on parliament) and plebiscitarian democracy (direct democracy). Normally, the latter is contained within the former, but in this instance, it gained the upper-hand. Brexit has been widely described as the most serious crisis of post1945 Britain. It is more than a challenge, but is a crisis of huge dimensions, with constitutional, political, economic, social and cultural ramifications. As discussed in the previous chapter, a crisis is a critical turning point at which solutions will be found or catastrophe may result. The proponents of Brexit defend their position and project with the claim that the UK voted to leave the EU and that therefore, come what may, Brexit is inevitable. This assertion somewhat downplays the potential calamity that may result, since the argument is that Brexit must happen and must happen in the way the Brexiters deem the correct interpretation of the outcome of the referendum of the 23 June 2016. In this view, they are simply implementing a decision that has been made by the British people and cannot be subject to scrutiny, let alone revision. There is, however, an alternative view of the referendum and an account of how the UK sleepwalked into the abyss of Brexit. The project of Brexit is not only a matter of changing the constitutional relation between the UK and the EU. It is not comparable to the decision made in 1975 for the UK to remain within then EEC, which it joined in 1973. It is a momentous project of societal change that seeks to unravel much of the political, social and economic fabric of British society as it evolved over the past more than four decades. Brexit is nothing short of a political revolution of a hard-line neoliberal right that seeks to use the unexpected majority vote to bring about major changes to British society that otherwise would not be possible. The referendum, called to placate the nationalist fringe with the Conservative Party, has also played

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to the subterranean forces of English nationalism. This confluence of a latent nationalism and the buccaneering capitalism of neoliberal politicians has created a new populist project that has unleased dangerous currents. Brexit is part of a movement that can be called authoritarian democracy. I argue that authoritarian democracy—an expression of illiberal democracy—is a feature of our time and that Brexit is a reflection of a more general trend that takes different shapes and forms. This will be discussed more generally in the next section. The first myth that must be exposed is the claim that the referendum of 23 June 2016 resulted in a constitutionally and politically binding decision and that it is the ‘will’ of the British people. What I call the tyranny of Brexit is the tyranny of majoritarianism. A referendum is different from an election in that election outcomes are normally decided by simple majorities. Indeed, most governments are elected by very slim majorities. Governments are thus elected by rules are that well known and accepted. Referendums are different; they are exercises in so-called plebiscitarian democracy, where political decisions are made directly by voters. In such cases, the rules are different and normally established by governmental or parliamentary decrees, for example in specifying a quorum and the threshold that constitutes a majority where the outcome is binding. Such safeguards are particularly important when it comes to major issues with open-ended outcomes, as opposed to relatively minor single-issue politics. It is evident that leaving the EU and all it entails, such as the abrogation of rights, is not a minor matter. In the case of the referendum in 2016, no such conditions were set, since the referendum was an advisory referendum, as opposed to legislative one. So to begin with, the referendum did not have the constitutional status of a plebiscitarian decision that had to be implemented. It was not binding. Furthermore, the problem that the question put to the electorate— whether the UK should leave the EU—had numerous contradictory answers on which no consensus exists. Secondly, although proBrexit politicians and their supporters claim the outcome is the ‘will of the people’, it is the will only of some of the UK’s 65m population; to be precise, it is the will of the 17.4m who constitute only 37% of the electorate. This is an electorate that was also not representative of the population; it did not include c.2m voters

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who were not registered, quite aside from the 12.9m who were on the electorate but did not vote. The fact still remains that 63% of the electorate did not vote Leave. So, while the Leave vote won by a narrow 3.8% (1.2m), it was a slim and Pyrrhic victory.1 It cannot be described as decisive. These figures do matter since the claim is that the people have voted and that they voted according to a procedure that leads to a simple majority whose will must be implemented. When combined with a campaign that was based on lies and a question that invited only further questions, the conclusion must be that Brexit lacks democratic legitimacy. The founding fathers of the Constitution of the USA, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, drew attention to how democracy in its pure form can produce a tyranny when it is based on simple majoritarianism. The ‘tyranny of the majority’ results when a majority oppresses a minority. The Brexit referendum is an illustration of such tyranny, whereby political decisions are made on the basis of numbers. In many of such cases, the majority is in fact a majority only by dint of the voting procedure, but is otherwise a minority since it was not qualified by a percentage majority. The truly alarming outcome is the ex post argument that the referendum outcome had to be implemented and is irreversible. Parliamentary democracy was silenced in the aftermath of the referendum and every attempt was made to prevent a parliamentary vote. The new government, which sought to rapidly implement the outcome by retrospectively redefining its scope, also sought to prevent a supreme court ruling on whether parliament should make the decision, since this is required both by the terms of leaving the EU and by parliamentary sovereignty. The ‘decision’ that parliament finally made following the ruling of the supreme court in January 2017 against the government remained for long a source of legal contention. However, the political climate changed to a situation in which for many people and politicians Brexit has become an irrefutable fact that cannot reversed. The tyranny of Brexit is in every sense the tyranny of authoritarian democracy whereby representative (or parliamentary) democracy is subverted by a crude application of plebiscitarian democracy in which safeguards were taken off. The result is that in the end it is democracy that is thwarted.

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While there is no doubt that 17m is a large number of people, they are not the British people. It is evident that today the UK is a deeply divided society and the notion of the British people is now a fiction. It is indeed an irony that the will of the people is appealed to as a legitimation of the Brexit project when the people have been rendered deeply fractured by the event that was supposed to have given them a voice. To be sure, elections are often divisive and democracy itself is based on the fact of difference. The major cleavages in most countries have been deep political divisions between the right and left. But it is generally the case that the basic procedures of parliamentary democracy are respected when it comes to elections. The Brexit referendum does not command that respect since the rules that led to the outcome are in dispute due to a reinterpretation of those rules after the referendum. This act of reinterpretation was extended to the view that the outcome was also a decision on immigration. The fracturing of the British nation also is also present on a regional level with a new tension with Scotland and an irresolvable problem for Northern Ireland on the question of the open border with the Republic of Ireland. It is not a coincidence that the maelstrom of Brexit is playing out at a time of major social and economic transformation. Neoliberalism has divided the people socially and economically. Brexit was in part an expression of a revolt against major inequalities, but it was also an expression of the latent forces of nationalism. Paradoxically the nationalism that vented its fury on the 23 June 2016 presaged the end of the British nation, which no longer, if it ever was, a source of unity. The fracturing of the British nation is not unique to the UK, but it takes a heightened form there because of the referendum putting to the test a question that includes within it a range of other issues about the sort of society that has taken shape. The divisions within the UK on class and inequality are arguably greater than in other European countries. These forces along with the potent radicalness of English nationalism formed a toxic mix that has led to the current situation in which small elite are forcing a project that has only a slim basis in democratic will formation. It remains to be seen what will finally come of this project, but one thing is clear: within a relatively short time, a major reinterpretation of the British nation has occurred for many people.

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What needs to be properly understood is how a new narrative of national belonging has gained so much force and how this coalesces with a particular British brand of buccaneering capitalism. Until recently the UK can be seen as a much a normal European country as any, taking account of different shades of Euroscepticism that exist in most countries, including France and the Netherlands. Why is it that the question of Europe has become such a decisive and existential matter dividing the people into two segments? To answer this question it is necessary to go beyond the specific context of the referendum and its aftermath. As an expression of authoritarian democracy, the phenomenon of Brexit and all it entails must be placed in a larger context and one that is not specifically British, even if the form in which it manifests itself is British.

Authoritarian Democracy and Radical Right-Wing Populism The rise of populist politics is clearly a feature of our time. In Europe, the presence of right-wing populist parties has been a mark of the political landscape since the early 1990s when they emerged to challenge the centre-right mainstream parties. However, it would appear that something has changed today. Until recently, such movements were relatively marginal to mainstream politics, though it is certainly the case that the centre-right in many countries has increasingly adopted much of their populist rhetoric (Caiani et al. 2012; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012). In this respect, Silvio Berlusconi may have been an early sign of a shift to authoritarian politics and was not a specifically Italian phenomenon. The British Conservative Party, for instance, has become increasingly anti-immigration and this is also the case with the French Republican Party. In other countries, such as Austria, the far right has had for several years a considerable presence. Radical right-wing populism, galvanized by the Trump presidency, is now on the brink of becoming the new mainstream and therefore it is more than a protest movement. But it is not uncontested. It has triggered off counter-protest movements, as in the wave of anti-Trump and anti-Brexit movements.

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The Brexit referendum of the 23 June 2016 in the UK and the election of Trump in the USA on 9 November 2016 have been much discussed as markers of a change in the political climate, at least in the Western world. It is not clear what these momentous events portend and the only certainty at the moment is that for the next years politics is volatile and unpredictable. Yet, it is possible to read the signs of the times as having major challenges for liberal democracy. It is not to be denied that there may also be opportunities in the current interregnum for a renewal of the political field, but the prospects are not good for progressive democracy. Brexit and Trump are markers of this shift, which is also discernible in other developments in Europe, especially in Hungary, but also in Poland and in the Czech Republic. The UK remains a highly pluralized country, where arguably there is more opposition to Brexit than support for it. This is also the case in general for Western Europe. However, in many countries in Central and Eastern Europe cultural pluralization remains weak and thus the radical right is stronger. Despite these important differences, from being political outsiders, right-wing populism is now very likely to be a transformative force. As with all movements, it is both an expression of change as well as a cause of change. Both Brexit and Trump at the moment of their victory—24 June and 9 November 2016—were highly contingent events in that the outcomes could have been very different, for both were won with very slim majorities and were contested. This illustrates that neither phenomena were predetermined by the social forces that made them possible. In the case of Trump, there is nothing fundamentally new in the phenomenon that he represents, except in the fact that the presidency is now the fulcrum of what has generally been an opposition force. In the case of Brexit, the ill-fated decision to hold the referendum in the first instance obviously accounts for the current situation in which new forces have gained momentum and which probably would have been abated had the referendum not been held or if had produced another outcome. In the case of Trump, had there been a higher turnout than 58% and, for example, if more Hispanic voters turned out, the result would have been very different. There is also undue influence of social media in swinging the vote in the case of Brexit and Trump. That is to say, it is not possible to attribute path dependency to a new era of authoritarian populism.

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It is perfectly possible in the USA that anti-Trump forces will change the political landscape by the time of the next presidential election. However, it does appear to be case that in Europe radical right-wing populism is on the rise and that such movements are building capacity and transforming political dissatisfaction and social discontent. While a serious challenge for the left and for progressive politics, it would be a mistake to see radical right-wing populism as something fundamentally new and aberrant revolutionary force that is contrary to democracy. It is rather protean, contradictory and volatile and enabled by democracy, which allows for popular expressions of resentment. The Italian election of 2018 is a good example of this trend towards anti-systemic politics whereby two populist style parties emerged as the largest parties, one a left included and one a right-wing party. One of the fundamental problems of liberal democracy is that it can do nothing to stop people from becoming illiberal. Liberal democracy, as left-wing critics often complained, has been a means by which democracy is confined to safe issues that do not call into question major inequalities in society. Recent developments indicate that it is also unable to stop the rising tide of authoritarianism. If people hold authoritarian views, then quite simply democracy allows such views to take a political form. Authoritarianism was once seen as the opposite to democracy. Since the collapse of the USSR, liberal democracy appeared to be on the rise, as a well-known thesis has stated. However, in many parts of the world today democracy has taken a pronounced authoritarian form. Democracy has often been a vehicle by which authoritarianism entrenches itself in the political process. This is perhaps a reason why the founders of the post-Second World War project of European integration feared democracy, given the memory of fascist politics (Norman 2017). It is important to distinguish the different forms of illiberal democracy. A distinction can be made between authoritarian democracy and democratic authoritarianism. The latter are authoritarian states that are only formally democratic.2 The most obvious examples of democratic authoritarian are Russia under Vladimir Putin and Egypt under Sisi. Another example is Turkey in recent years under Recep Tayyip Erdogan,

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which is an instance of a country that has shifted from liberal democracy to illiberal democracy. In all cases power is acquired through the democratic process—generally faulty, lacking safeguards and the oppression of opposition—but consolidated through authoritarian means, including press censorship and, in the case of Erdogan, a referendum. In these cases, some of the key features of democracy are absent, such as a free press, an autonomous public culture, opposition parties, the protection of human rights, etc. Authoritarian democracy, in contrast, refers to states that are primarily liberal democracies but embody features of authoritarianism whereby the liberal dimension—for example constitutional rights—is eroded. Authoritarian democracy is closely linked to populist politics that seeks to oppose liberal democracy in the name of a more fundamental assertion of the ‘will of the people’. Many liberal democracies in Europe today are vulnerable to such kinds of authoritarian interpretations of democracy. Authoritarian democracy is therefore a kind of illiberal democracy, but not in the sense of essentially authoritarian states such as Russia that are only formally democratic. The most striking example of authoritarian democracy in Europe today is Hungary under the Fidesz party led by Victor Orbán, who has presided over the erosion of democracy. Authoritarian democracy seeks to use democracy to restrict inclusion. It is fundamentally opposed to cultural pluralism. In the UK the government of Theresa May marks the transition from the liberal conservatism of her predecessor, David Cameron, to a more authoritarian brand of conservatism. The lead-up to the election of the French presidential election in 2017 raised the spectre of the Marine Le Pen as a possible incumbent. French politics, for divided between right and left, has now been re-shaped around a new division of right-wing populism and the centre. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders has gained increased popularity, despite no serious prospect of forming a government, and in Greece, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement has gained substantial popular support. The AfD in Germany is also part of this trend towards exclusionary oriented authoritarian populism. As Ivan Krastev, notes in the age of migration, democracy becomes an instrument of exclusion, not of inclusion (Krastev 2018: 15).

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The rise of authoritarian populism—in weak forms with May and in strong forms with Orban and Wilders—cannot be dismissed as undemocratic, despite the obvious authoritarian nature of their politics. Theresa May, for example, is pursuing the implementation of the result of the referendum of the 23 June despite the fact that the majority of the British population and majority of the electorate did not support the outcome. The problem is that the different dimensions of democracy are in tension with each other, for example the will of the majority and the protection of liberties. Democracy, it has been increasingly noted, exits in a variety of forms. These varieties derive in part from different cultural presuppositions and historical experiences, but are also assembled from differing relations between the main dimensions of democracy. Referendums can be important instruments of democracy, when they are properly legislated for and confined to clear-cut issues. Once shorn of all other democratic processes, they easily become tools for tyranny. Democracy consists of three main dimensions. The first is the representation of social interests whereby the people do not rule, but instead vote to elect their representatives who make decisions on their behalf. One account of democracy in this sense is parliamentary or representative democracy, i.e. democracy is the selection of elites through direct majority voting. Most advanced liberal democracies are organized through elections on roughly four-year cycles with the elected representatives grouped into political parties. The second dimension is a safeguard against the dangers of majoritarianism, since limits must be set on what majorities, or their representatives, can do. This is reflected in constitutionalism. Liberal democracies are also constitutional democracies in that they are bound by constitutional principles and a legal framework in which rights, and increasingly human rights, figure centrally, and in which there is a separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. Thus, referendums are constrained in their scope. These two dimensions of liberal democracy reflect the formal or procedural nature of democracy as embedded in the rule of law. It follows, then, that there is no pure democracy in the sense of the rule of the people. The demos is embedded in a formalized and quasi-universalistic framework of rule and established rights. However, democracy also has a third face that is more characteristically that of the demos or people. In this sense, democracy

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concerns participation through citizenship. The republican tradition has generally given prominence to this popular conception of democracy as the voice of civil society. In some political traditions, most notably Switzerland, popular sovereignty is institutionalized through the use of the referendum, which is not normally used by representative democracies as a method of decision-making. The participatory, including the grassroots, dimension of democracy is also reflected in public debate and deliberation and the basis of deliberative conceptions of democracy. This is not the place to elaborate further on these aspects of democracy. The important point is that democracy is not holistic, but a bundle phenomenon and that its dimensions may be in tension with each other. This is evident when, for example, a party that has an electoral landslide majority finds that it is constrained by the constitutional framework of democracy or in a situation when a conflict emerges between the executive (government) and the legislative (parliament) branches. The illiberal face of democracy may be illiberal, but it is nonetheless a face of democracy. In extreme forms, it is manifest in what Michael Mann has referred to as the ‘dark side of democracy’ when ethnic cleansing is the result of an intertwinement of the demos with the ethnos (Mann 2005). The rule of the people has often resulted in genocide, which democracy has either failed to prevent, or in certain circumstances, provided the conditions for its emergence. This would be an extreme example of populism, where the rule of the people is the extermination of another people. However, the general tendency in mature democracies is for populism to take the form of a dichotomy of ‘the people’ with a dominating elite or set of elites. Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as an ideology that declares society to be divided between two homogenous and antagonistic groups, a ‘pure people’ versus a ‘corrupt elite’ is one of the most robust definitions of populism in mature democracies (Mudde 2010). In this conception, populist politics is legitimated by an appeal to democracy where democracy is conceived to be the rule of the people and reflected in expressions of popular sovereignty whereby the elites are deemed to be antagonistic to the interests and values of the people. Populist democracy reduces the triple dimensions of democracy to one and reduces that dimension further to the expression of an undifferentiated conception of the people. Mudde’s emphasis

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on the vertical dimension of populism, which defines the people versus the elite, should be complemented, as Brubaker (2017) argues, with the horizontal dimension whereby the people are also defined by reference to outside groups and forces. As in much of far-right populism, white supremacism and xenophobic nationalism, the appeal to demos is often a thinly disguised call to a dominant ethnos. However, right-wing populism is generally careful to avoid accusations of blatant racism and seeks instead to manipulate the language of democracy to mean the ‘will of the people’, which usually means the will of some of the people. For example, during the French presidency election in 2017, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen used the slogan ‘in the name of the people’. In embracing the politically acceptable term ‘populist’, which is not a neutral academic concept, populist politicians rhetorically escape the accusation of being ‘fascists’ and at the same time accuse the establishment, itself a pejorative term, of being ‘out of touch’ with the ‘people’. The success of right-wing populism in Europe and in the USA can also be attributed to the fact that mainstream democracy—the main political parties and the wider public sphere—has nurtured its values. As David Runciman (2013) has argued, the factors that make democracy successful—its flexibility, variety, and responsiveness—also serve to undermine it and encourages democracies to make mistakes. Democracies have safeguards against tyranny and demagogues, but ultimately cannot stop them nor prevent crises. The success of democracy is a trap, ‘a confidence trap’ that fails to warn that it also includes the bad as well as the good. Jan-Werner Müller (2016: 6) has made a similar argument that the danger to democracies is not in some kind of a counter-democratic ideology, but comes from within democracy, as in claims of populists ‘to make good on democracy’s highest values’. In other words, right-wing populism is not a new or aberrant political phenomenon, but is a radicalization of issues and ideas in mainstream politics. One powerful source is popular resentment, which can be targeted against almost anything, including migrants and elites. As noted above, it has already had considerable impact in changing the terms of much of public debate and many of the mainstream political parties on the right have been close to its values, e.g. the Spanish Popular Party, the British Conservative Party, and the French Republican Party. In the Nordic

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countries, the success of right-wing populism can be in part attributed to social democracy in so far as it produced a vision of a homogenous society. Populist politics owes much of its success to radicalizing centre-right and centre-left values. Thus, while radicalizing cultural authoritarianism, right-wing populism often takes on board left-wing social values in relation to social security and equality. For these reasons, Mudde is justified in his claim that the apparent pathology that right-wing populism appears to represent is in fact an expression of a ‘pathological normalicy’. In this view, then, the pathology is to be found within the political centre rather than from outside it. The implication is that right-wing populism amplifies the defects and failures of liberal democracy. Counter-strategies based only on anti-populism are therefore not only destined to fail, but will fuel the very forces that authoritarian populism thrives on. It can also be observed that populism is protean and takes right and left wing forms. It can be based on exclusion (defining the political community against migrants or Others) or it can be inclusionary, with demands for social justice for all. Left-wing populism has been prominent in Latin American politics and has been a feature of global politics since the Occupy Wall Street movement. In terms of voters, it is evident that voters can swing from one to the other. In the UK, the Leave the EU vote included both right and left voters and it has been noted that in the USA many voters who voted for Obama in the previous two presidential elections switched to the populist politics of Trump in 2016. It would appear to be a major weakness of the left, both the centre-left and the populist left, that it is less adept than the right in responding to the forces that have nurtured right-wing populism. There are few examples in Europe of left wing-populist parties. In Italy the left inclined Movimento 5 Stelle—the Five Star Movement—is one such example of right-wing politics that incorporates leftist elements in that it is anti-EU but also anti-global capitalism and anti-liberal establishment. The election in 2018 led it to be the largest political party, with one-third of the vote. The Podemos movement in Spain is, in contrast, an example of a stronger brand of left-populism. A general trend is that on the whole in Europe populism takes right-wing forms, where the emphasis is on exclusion, while in Latin America, it takes left-wing forms and the emphasis is on inclusion (see Filz 2015).

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Divided Societies and Fractured Nations Contemporary societies are now ever more divided than ever before. An emerging feature of their divisions is a new cleavage between two groups of people, who can be characterized as nationals and cosmopolitans. In other words, those who are locked into an inward-looking nationalism and those who see themselves as belonging to a wider political community. The divisions within societies are now arguably greater than differences between societies. Brexit and Trump express such divisions that in part can be attributed to three decades of neo-liberalism and economic globalization that has seen societies divided into two main groups, the winners and the losers of globalization. This divide has led to a re-casting of the older cleavages in Western societies. The old cleavages in Western societies largely revolved around the politics of redistribution and were reflected in the conflict between labour versus capital, much of which was domesticated by the centre-right and centre-left parties. Since the 1980s, another cleavage became apparent, which complicated the older one and in which left versus right lost its clear-cut edge. The politics of radical pluralism that emerged from the cultural politics of the new left since the 1960s challenged both the old left and the established right, but it had to face a new challenge from the New Right and by the 1990s, the lines of division had become blurred. Since the early 2000s, a new cleavage arose following the rise of cosmopolitan political movements that unlike earlier left-wing movements were not confined to the parameters of the nation-state and also challenged the very meaning of the nation. Since the Global Social Forum and anti-capitalism movements such as Occupy Wall Street since 2008, this cleavage has become a potent structuring force in national and global politics. The rise of cosmopolitics has increasingly led to a new cleavage between those who largely identify with the nation and those who do not. This cleavage is driven by one-nation nationalism and populist reaction to globalization but is also antagonistic to radical cultural pluralism; it draws on right and left currents. We are thus witnessing a situation of the diminishing influence of the national culture on many people whose habitus is increasingly

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more plural, if not hybrid, and whose lifeworld has been transformed by anti-authoritarian and post-material values. This value divergence is now very great and underpinned by very different kinds of work and increased diversity. In the UK this group is likely to be Europeanized in their self-identification and in their lifestyles, but will reflect different positions within the left-/right-wing divide. The Brexit Referendum is a vivid example of this division within the national community to a point that the very unity of the national culture is in question. The account given here has stressed the coalescence of right and left wing political currents in making Brexit and Trump possible. For this reason and due to the protean and volatile nature of the left/right divide in the light of new cleavages, it is difficult to pin down a specific socio-economic group or class. However, two trends stand out: education and age. Older and non-university educated figure overwhelmingly in voting trends in favour of Brexit and Trump. This pattern would appear to confirm the general trend towards deeply divided societies. It is also likely to increase given that European populations are increasingly characterized by older voters and while many of these older voters will be highly educated and thus less included to support right-wing populist politics, many are not. The result is likely to be an increased generational and wider sociocultural clash between two quite different segments of the population and in which right and left political sympathies is likely to be complicated and displaced by age and above all by education. It has also been observed that there were significantly higher leave voters in areas where large numbers of people do not have a passport. Not having a passport and thus not having travelled abroad in recent years correlate with cultural authoritarianism as expressed in hostility to other cultures.3 The conclusion would be tempting that absence of university education is the required antidote to illiberal tendencies. This would be to confuse effect with cause, since this pattern only makes sense in the context of social polarization brought about by widening socioeconomic differences leading to cultural clashes. Yet, some qualities are required. The social polarization thesis would not entirely explain the rise of support for right-wing populist parties in the relatively affluent

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countries such as Austria and Netherlands, where the negative consequences of globalization are not strongly present and not entirely evident in voter support. It is possible that Austria is an exception and where cultural factors can have not only an independent cause but greater weight. But this would not in any case explain the Dutch context and nor would it explain British middle-class support for Brexit. A simple account in terms of the winners and losers of globalization ultimately fails. If this were the case, it would not account for the relative absence of right-wing populism in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, where social polarization and the economic effects of globalization are abundantly in evidence. Deprivation does not lead directly to rightwing populism. In the UK more Labour party voters voted to remain in the EU than voted to leave (approximately 70%).4 It would be for this reason more plausible to account for current trends, which are clearly divergent, in terms of the onset of a new cleavage between nation-centred groups and cosmopolitan oriented groups, a division which is amplified by the societal consequences of globalization. Societal polarization amplifies the politicization of the nation, which can undergo politicization for other reasons. The politicization of Englishness, for instance, would be an example of cultural change that is highly conducive to populism, in particular right-wing populism, but is not entirely driven by a negative reaction to globalization. This is evident in the political aims of the Brexit government to shift the British economy from the EU to global markets and thus offer more not less globalization. Thus, the trigger of change—social polarization resulting from neo-liberalism—feed into the latent but potentially explosive forces of, in this case, English nationalism. One of the causalities in this ferment was Britishness, which supposedly stood for the political unity of the UK. The reopening of the question of Scottish independence may quite well lead to the exhaustion of British national unity and underscore the trend towards de-nationalization. The paradox in this is that as the nation is re-nationalized, it is also de-nationalized due to the fact that the idea of the nation no longer commands unity but produces division. Since Brexit, the UK is now an even more divided country. This is true too of the USA as it is of European countries, such as France and Italy. Socio-economic polarization may have been the trigger, but

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it led to the re-politicization of a category of the nation that enhances division. In the case of relatively prosperous European countries, such as Austria and the Netherlands, where right-wing populism is strong, social polarization may play a smaller role in triggering the shift that otherwise has similar features and where the latent forces of populist nationalism have found other ways of rising to the surface. However, neither the existence of such movements nor the social discontent that they thrive on can account for their growing success. Social polarization alone does not cause right-wing populism. This is true of Brexit. As is very well illustrated by Brexit, which is part of this trend, something else must also be present. I argue that this is a new register of meaning; in other words, it must be possible for the agents of change to bring about a discursive shift in national identification and political purpose. This is where all these movements have been successful: they offered less an ideology than a discourse in which social and political reality could be re-described. The notion of social inclusion is thus transformed around a vision of invasion. Social discontent alone is insufficient, even if serves as a trigger. More important is the power of words and images of an alternative reality, no matter how implausible it may be. Powerful metaphors of an invasion of migrants are enough to change the political optics. Major rebellions against the status quo, when the masses rise against the elites, require the availability of new codes and frames of meaning in which social and political reality can be reinterpreted. In this transformation economic rationality will not necessarily be the decisive force. More important will be the ability of the movement to frame the situation in new terms and to tap into the power of mass emotion. This accounts for how many people support Brexit, even when it is demonstrably neither in their interests nor in the national interest. One force in this kind of nationalism that is particularly potent and which has an independent existence is hostility to elites, whether the mainstream political elites or the global corporate ones. The elites are portrayed as divorced from the people, they are frequently corrupt and do not represent their interests. This was clearly a crucial factor in the Brexit referendum and in the election of Trump, whose evocative language included such powerfully resonating phrases as ‘draining the

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swamp’ of Washington corruption. The ideological appeal of populism is probably not sufficiently strong or coherent to command large-scale support. This is reflected in the incoherent and contradictory campaigns of the Brexit campaign and is also evidenced by Trump’s mixed messages. That is not surprising in that the power of ideologies alone to command support is insufficient without offering frameworks of meaning that allow people to reinterpret their situation differently. This is what populism is often successful in doing. Both Trump and the Leave campaign in the UK offered less an ideology than a discourse in which old issues could be framed in new and more symbolically compelling ways. In the case of the Leave Referendum campaign, a major shift in public attitudes to the EU occurred as a result of the remarkably successful ability of the Leave campaign to reframe the meaning and significance of the EU and the UK’s membership of it. The power of language was decisive. Ideology did not play a huge role. A more complicated consideration is the extent to which the worsening situation of the ‘losers of globalization’ played a role. The argument given here is that antiglobalization may have been a crucial precondition for many voters but it alone did not make the decisive break. In the case of Brexit, the populist argument emphasized less the escape from globalization than anti-immigration, EU bureaucracy, and national sovereignty. There is a great deal of historical and sociological evidence to support the argument that in general the socially marginalized do not seek to change their situation for reasons of the objectivity of their circumstances. Major rebellions against the status quo, when the masses rise against the elites, require the availability of new codes and frames of meaning in which social and political reality can be reinterpreted. In this transformation economic rationality will not necessarily be the decisive force. More important will be the ability of the movement to frame the situation in new terms and to tap into the power of mass emotion. The persuasive power of words and slogans was a major factor in shifting the balance in favour of Brexit and this is true too of the election of Donald Trump. The arguments were not necessarily rational and those who tried to make rational arguments were widely ignored and the culture of experts on which the arguments in part rested was derided. In part, it may be that the rational arguments were weak and

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those who made them were either not convinced of them or did not make the arguments with sufficient force. The slogans adopted were couched in the language of democracy, such as ‘taking back control’ and ‘breaking point in the Leave campaign and in the US ‘America first’. The Leave campaign was highly successful in constructing a discourse of popular democracy in which the EU was undemocratic and national elites had betrayed the sovereignty of the people. The rhetorical and symbolic resonance of ‘taking control’ is a more powerful message than the message of Remain, especially where the only argument to remain is the avoidance of the risks that leave poses. What is very well illustrated in all of this is the cultural politics of ‘post-truth’. The Oxford English Dictionary declared ‘post-truth’ in the era of Donald Trump and Brexit to be its international word of the year for 2016. This is defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ’. The use of the term ‘post-truth’ had increased by around 2000% in 2016 compared to last year.5 This spike in usage is ‘in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States’.6 Post-truth is a condition in which truth is not contrasted with falsehood, but a condition in which the notion of truth is meaningless since validity claims do not need to be addressed. It is increasingly acceptable for politicians not only to lie but to do so without impunity. There have been formal investigations and legal challenges to the legitimacy of Brexit due to wilful deception and lies that, it is alleged, were decisive in persuading many voters to vote in favour. The widespread derision of expert opinion during the campaign also underlies the rise of the politics of post-truth over reason argument and expert assessment. Another illustration of this preference for the non-rational, is the apparent absence of any consultation with constitutional experts in the drafting of the EU Referendum Act of 2015, which, as noted above, was passed by Parliament without much scrutiny and consideration of possible consequences. The politics of untruth need to be seen in wider terms that simply a problem of lies and the dystopian culture of fake news and ‘alternative facts’. As Habermas has argued, a mature democracy requires the existence of a public sphere in which political will formation occurs in

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a context of open and free public debate whereby citizens can debate issues in an informed and rational manner. The availability of information, the absence of censorship, and a commitment to speaking the truth is the basis of the participatory dimension of democracy. The separation of the media from the political sphere is also essential. In a climate in which politics is confounded by personality clashes and where direct links exist between media interests and political projects, the dangers for democracy are very great, especially when such processes can claim to be serving the ‘will’ or the ‘voice’ of the people. In 1973 then the UK joined the EU the power of the media was less trenchant than it is today in the context of mediated politics. In contrast to the Referendum in 1975 on whether the UK should remain in the then EEC, the Referendum in 2016 took place in a context in which the exposure most people have to the media is exponentially greater. This does not lead to a more enlightened public. It remains to be seen whether democracy will prevail. The prospects are not good. Britain is now a changed country and it is difficult to see anything positive in the Brexit project. However, democracies are continually being renegotiated and cannot reach a point of final validity (Offe 2017). Brexit was one attempt to search for a ‘constitutive’ moment through a misguided referendum. There is no reason why it must be the final one.

The Revival of Nationalist Self-Determination Movements: Regions Against States In the 1970s Western Europe experienced the rise of waves of secessionist nationalism. These were variously constitutional, cultural and violent. Prominent examples of violent republican nationalism were the Irish republican nationalism since the early 1970s when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) reorganized as a paramilitary force in Northern Ireland, Basque nationalism led by ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna or Basque Homeland and Liberty organization) and in Corsica the Corsican National Liberation Front (FLNC). On the other side of the

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spectrum, Welsh nationalism as represented by Plaid Cymru sought regional government and recognition for the Welsh language and the SNP in Scotland oscillated between self-government and independence, but within the sphere of liberal democracy. These developments were for the greater part absent from the Warsaw Pact countries for the obvious reason that Soviet repression restricted national self-determination, as Hungary discovered in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. This was also the case in Spain until the transition to democracy in 1980. However, in Central and Eastern Europe the politics of self-determination could not be entirely silenced and it remained a latent force, which finally took on a political form with the Solidarity movement in Poland since 1980. Secessionist nationalism in Western Europe was very much a feature of the 1970s and 1980s and in many cases lost its momentum in the late 1990s due to declining popular support for organizations that were widely perceived to be terrorist as well as due to internal changes in the dynamics of the organizations. The IRA gave up the armed struggle in 2005, ETA in 2011 and FLNC in 2014. The post-1989 context and the collapse of the USSR gave an entirely new meaning to the politics of self-determination in Central and Eastern Europe. Throughout Europe, the course of European integration provided a new context for regional nationalist movements to pursue their projects through more peaceful means. This was the age of the ‘new regionalism’. The late twentieth century contained a plethora of various nationalist causes that reflected the diversity and complexity of the tumultuous history of Europe over the preceding two centuries. It was inevitable that some of these would not go quietly away in the way that the IRA, FLNC and ETA did over the past decade. The idea of self-determination that all these nationalist movements rested was that of an external source of domination which had to be removed, if necessary by violence and at any cost. A feature of nationalist movements is that they were only partially democratic, and in most cases, they were hostile to liberal democracy. The notion of self-determination closely ties in with democracy, but it is different in that the idea of selfdetermination does not need to be given a popular mandate since it has an absolute and sacred validity. It is often enough that it has appealed to

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intellectual and political cadres who see themselves as the custodians of the nation. Nationalism emerged at a time when democracy was poorly established and in many cases absent. In liberal democracies, such as the UK, the demands for democracy were relatively weak. It therefore did not matter too much for the success of nationalist movements that they commanded only minority popular support. This is what has changed today: self-determination does not always easily pass the test of democracy. Democracy, while empowering collective actors, also restricts what they can achieve. The paradox of nationalism today in Europe is that while there is ever more demand and opportunities for nationalism it has become more decisive than ever before. Nationalism now divides the nation more than anything else. For this reason, its capacity to offer an alternative is severely limited. The history of secessionist nationalism in Europe reveals a history of internal conflicts and splits. Few nationalist movements succeeded in uniting for long the states they created. Civil war was frequently the result of independence. This is not least because nationalist movements are often a coalition of diverse elements that unravel once the aspiration of nationhood has been realized. However, there can be no denying the fact that nationalism—whether aspirational or an accomplished reality—has been relatively successful in gaining popular support. In many cases, its popularity can be attributed to suppression of dissent and the perception that an external tyranny must be resisted in the name of self-determination. Too often an internal minority has been identified with the external enemy and whose persecution has helped the national identification. There is today an entirely new context for nationalism and the appeal to self-determination is no longer able to achieve the same results. There are at least three reasons. The first is that it is less easy today to point to an external source of domination than it was in the past two centuries. This is not because domination has ceased but because of a more complicated situation whereby domination is no longer seen as emanating from a single location. Both in popular perceptions as well as in academic theory since Foucault, domination is multifarious; it is internal as well as external. The liberator very quickly becomes a tyrant. The self is the source of its own domination. It is less easy to combine the notions

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of the ‘self ’ and ‘determination’ in a straightforward notion of self-determination since any kind of determination is inescapably bound up with a project of domination because the group that establishes its self-determination will have to ensure that others accept its definition of the situation. What is emancipation for some is very likely to be domination for others. There are of course ever changing readings of history in any account of domination and emancipation. Second, nationalism, which invariably rests on some notion of nativism, has always had a difficult relationship with cultural pluralism, which is the contrary to nativism. The nation was posited as the source of all authority and the people an undifferentiated entity. The reality of almost every society today is widespread cultural pluralization, though this is considerably greater in Western Europe than in Central and Eastern Europe. Dominant cultures remain in many cases, but they have been considerably pluralized by more than four decades of cultural politics. In these circumstances, with the fragmentation of monolithic cultures, it is less easy for nationalist causes to appeal to a common self or a homogenous people. Democratization has resulted in a situation in which it is more difficult to reach agreement on what the problem is as well as the proposed solution. This is what makes separatist nationalism more or less impossible: its main resource—the idea of a single people—has vanished. As mentioned above, nationalism in the past did not have to face this problem since the demands of democracy were more limited and many such movements emerged in pre-democratic (or only partially democratized) societies. In the past, the notion of collective self-determination was not complicated in the way it is now by personal or individual self-determination. Demands for personal selfdetermination inevitably undermine collective self-determination in that they are not easily satisfied within the confines of collective demands. This is more generally a problem for all politics of collective goals, which are always frustrated by the plurality of individual goals. Yet, personal self-determination drives collective self-determination in that it fuels the desire for self-determination while at the same time frustrating its capacity to realize it. The result is that self-determination loses meaning and can come to mean simply what it is declared to be, as in Brexit politicians proclaiming they are taking ‘back control’ while setting limits

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to what can be controlled. Taking back control does not mean much to those who see that many of their erstwhile rights have been abrogated. Third, as a result of societal complexity, the reality today is that most societies are inextricably bound up in each other. They cannot be so easily separated in the way secessionist nationalism once believed possible. One hundred years ago it may have been possible for one region of a larger entity to remove itself and establish a new polity. This cannot be so easily achieved today. Globalization has reached a level of intensity and complexity that all the major economies of the world are entangled in each other. Within the European context, circa five decades of European integration has led to interlinked economies and polities that are so embedded in each other that it more less impossible to reverse the clock and exit in the way the British Brexiters are trying. The constitutionalization of regional politics has also helped to make simple calls for separation realistic. Majorities are difficult to secure. Catalan nationalism is an interesting example of all of these trends. As with many nationalist movements, it is not a single movement but a collation of diverse factions that cut across the right and left divide. Catalan politics is dominated by the question of independence, with the pro-independence parties forming the governing coalition. However, it is a fragile and volatile coalition of the centre-right and various leftwing parties. There is a further cleavage between support from urban and rural areas, with the two major cities in Catalonia, Barcelona and Tarragona, having more anti-independence voters (many of whom are Spanish speakers who moved to Catalonia from other parts of Spain in the course of the past four decades). The controversial referendum of 1 October 2017 led to greater division than before on the question of independence. While 90% voted for independence, the turnout was only 43% of the electorate and was held under fraught conditions (since it was illegal in the eyes of the Spanish government). In effect, only those in favour of independence voted. While it is impossible to know what the outcome would be in the event of a legal referendum, it is reasonable to conclude that the country is split on the issue, with marginally more against independence than in favour. Under such

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circumstances it is difficult to envisage a situation in which a supermajority could be secured. Indeed, the governing coalition declared that no matter what the outcome of the referendum there would be declaration of independence. The Catalan case illustrates more broadly the problem of political polarization and the apparent impossibility for consensus. The Catalan case is further complicated by the fact that Spain does not recognize referendums and while the majority of voters in Catalonia appear to favour the union with Spain, a majority are in favour of a legally held referendum to resolve the issue. In Scotland, on the other hand, the referendum of 2014 was a legally constituted one, but like Catalonia it led to a similar division. In this case, the outcome of 55% opposed to independence and 44.7%, while by any accounts decisive, reveals a deep fissure that was subsequently exacerbated by Brexit, which re-opened the case for a new referendum. The outcome of the 2014 referendum was decisive but not sufficiently so to put an end forever to the question of independence. Yet, it is difficult to see how Scottish independence is a realistic political possibility. As with Catalonia, there is the basic question of what does independence consist. Scottish nationalism is decidedly unrepublican, in contrast to Catalan nationalism. The Scottish nationalists see Scotland as remaining under the British crown and retaining the British national currency. This may be for pragmatic reasons, but to retain the head of state of the country from which you are seceding is a highly ambiguous kind of self-determination, and especially so when the head of state is a hereditary monarch. Both Catalonia and Scotland have the same problems with the practical feasibility of independence. The systemic interdependence of Catalonia with Spain and Scotland with England makes independence extremely difficult, which is more or less impossible if the country from which the new state is seceding does not recognize the secession. Their major trading links are with the countries from which they want to secede. With some small exceptions, the entire institutional infrastructure of Catalonia—the major transport arteries (motorways, airports, rail, ports), finances (taxation, customs, etc.), national communications,

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security—are all centralized. The process of state-building is highly complicated, not least given the fact that the entire legal fabric of the society is now mediated by Europeanization. It is clear that in these circumstances self-determination cannot be achieved simply through a symbolic act of a declaration of independence. Self-determination may be attractive as a vague goal to be achieved in a distant future, but bringing it about in contentious circumstances is a different matter. Many of these issues are reflected in Corsican nationalism. In December 2017, a pro-independence coalition government was elected with 56.3% of the vote in an election that had a turnout of 54% of the electorate. The political reality of self-determination has now been much reduced to securing greater autonomy than outright independence. Corsican nationalism is divided between those seeking independence and those seeking a more pragmatic kind of autonomy. Unlike Catalonia, which is the wealthiest part of Spain, Corsica, with its 330,000 population is poor and depends heavily on subsidies from Paris. In contrast, Madrid is the net beneficiary from the Catalan economy, a situation that has given Catalan nationalism an economic impetus. This economic nationalism is also reflected in Flemish separatism. In all these examples, the myth of an external source of domination is often difficult to sustain. That does not mean it has no reality. The intransience of the Spanish government and the fact that the Catalan politicians are imprisoned or have fled to Brussels gives some substance to the myth. The memory of the Franco dictatorship is strong, though for those born since the late 1970s the dictatorship is a distant past. Corruption is rife in Spanish politics, but this is also the case in Barcelona. But the concrete political reality is the absence of any consensus on the nature of the problem and therefore there can be no agreement on a solution or the means to achieve. This is vividly reflected in Brexit, which has led to a situation of entrapment. Whatever the outcome it will be unfavourable and nothing will reverse the extreme polarization that has taken developed since June 2016. Selfdetermination in this instance has led to less control, not more, and the outcome will in all probability lead to an arrangement that will not end up looking very different from the current one except in the loss of economic and political advantage.

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There are of course significant differences between the different kinds of nationalism discussed here. Catalan and Scottish nationalism are not characterized by xenophobia, which is one of the distinguishing features of the English nationalism that is the driving force of Brexit. Scottish nationalism has a strong civic tradition and is not beset with the problems of factionalism in Catalan nationalism. Catalan nationalists, using curious logic, endorse Brexit; yet they see the EU as their saviour. It is not the aim of this chapter to offer a detailed comparison but to highlight the problems that all movements seeking to advance collective self-determination face. The reality of the political struggle today unlike until the relatively recent past—perhaps until 1945 which may be taken as a watershed—is social, economic and political fluidity. It is only in the last couple of decades that this has become less a trend than a reality. As argued above, all economies are intermeshed. The political field is ‘post-sovereign’ in that power is no longer entirely located in national governments. In these circumstances, the politics of self-determination easily loses impetus and flounders in a sea of multiple currents. So, then, why the pursuit of self-determination? Catalan nationalism for a time appeared to be content to redefine itself in the context of Europeanization. Many national identities found an accommodation within the European integration. This has also been the case with the majority of European national states, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Italy, for example. Europeanization offered a larger context to overcome the problems of the past. While Brexit has placed on the agenda the prospect of the unity of the island of Ireland, the cherished dream of Irish republicanism, it is not being seriously pursued. Ireland has entered into what can be called a ‘post-national’ phase in which national-self-determination—once framed exclusively in terms of opposition to Britain regardless of the economic costs—is no longer seen as something than be pursued outside a larger political framework. The commitment to uphold the Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998 reveals an acceptance of shared sovereignty as a political fact. However, post-national politics has not worked for all. It is clear that whatever the merits of Europeanization, it does not provide a solution for everything and at a time when more and more demands are made in the name of democracy, it does not offer ready-made solutions for

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problems that do not derive from European integration. The revival of calls for national self-determination is a response to the search for a pure and absolute politics of self-determination that is frustrated by the status quo. Neither the national state nor the EU is able to deliver democracy in this pristine form which is presented as a radical alternative to the status quo, which is associated with corruption, liberal elites out of touch, the perception of domination deriving from an outside force. Against the status quo is the authentic voice of ‘the people’. Yet, none of these calls—which can be from the left or the right—can be sustained without a project. The current situation reveals problems in the creation of a project of self-determination, but also major problems in defining the people.

The Resurgence of Nationalism The present situation has often been compared to Europe in the 1930s with the spectre of fascism. Indeed, there are many similarities in terms of the rise of the extreme right, populist politics, a rise in hate crimes, and a rapid deterioration of the international cooperation. On closer inspection, the differences are greater. The current wave of authoritarian populism cannot be seen as the expression of fascism; it is rather specific to the current context. Historical parallels while tempting can be misleading. Unlike in the 1930s, there is not within Western countries something comparable to the Versailles Treaty as a background and the subsequent drive to re-armament. One hundred years ago, the October Revolution in 1917 provided the counter-ideology to fascism, the attraction of which for many was its alternative to communism and to liberal democracy, which was widely seen as weak when faced with the rise of the Soviet Union. Today there is no major counter-ideology or something comparable to the USSR and liberal democracy, as argued in foregoing, is not itself in question. Democracy may be taking an authoritarian form, but liberal democracy is not in question, at least in the Western world. The EU is certainly undergoing a challenging time, but it makes little sense in comparing it to the moribund League of Nations. Moreover, as argued, authoritarian populism does not have

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a new ideology to offer in the way that the Hitler and Mussolini did. Instead, the appeal of authoritarian populism is due to a more diffuse platform of anti-establishment politics and attacks on cultural pluralism in the name of the nation first, but where the nation is defined in exclusionary terms to be what populists declare it to be. There can be no doubt that there is a European-wide assertion of nationalism and that the radical right is now emboldened as a result of the election of Donald Trump in the USA and as a result of trends towards authoritarianism in Russia and Turkey. There is an international movement that seeks to pit ‘nationalists’ against ‘globalists’ led by the alt-right. Within the countries of the EU, right-wing parties have enjoyed much success in recent years, as reflected in the government of Poland and Hungary. In France, the country that invented left and right has seen the political landscape redrawn since the presidential election in 2017 which saw a contest between Marine Le Pen and the centrist Macron. Prosperous Western countries such as Austria have seen the rise of the extreme right. This is not the place to review these trends (see Caiani et al. 2012). An overall conclusion is that the rise of nationalism is destabilizing for Europeanization but does not endanger it or pose major dangers for liberal democracy. It does however suggest limits to the prospect of a European sense of peoplehood. The first point is that all these assertions of national autonomy or identity are multifarious. There is no one big challenge and nor do they present an alternative. Brexit may quite well be a warning to others of the dangers that such exercises bring. Diminished politically and with long-term economic downhill ahead, the future does not look positive for the UK, whose influence in Europe will wane. Not all nationalist movements are led by the extreme right. The UK government in 2018 is in thrall to a group of right-wing politicians, who hold the balance of power, but this is not true of all those in favour of Brexit, which in part is due to appealing to a diversity of right and left positions. Catalan separatism is a tenuous collation of right and left factions. Scottish nationalism is largely civic rather than ethnic and thus less divisive than linguistically based nationalisms. Flemish nationalism is based on a coalition of right-wing parties. There is no pan-European alliance of right-wing nationalism. Catalan separatists are proEU and

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seek EU approval for their goals. There is also the paradox that it is the EU through the European Parliament that creates the conditions that make Euroscepticism possible. One of the paradoxes of Brexit is that two years after the referendum there has been considerable bolstering of what had previously been mild support for the EU into unrequited love leading to new clashes of Europhilia and Euroscepticism. Second, the politics of national self-determination has great difficulty in achieving its goals. Many movements for self-determination seek only greater autonomy, as in movements in Lombardy and Veneto. They do not have the capacity to bring about independence or pose major risks to the national state, still less to the EU. Third, nationalist resurgence is more of a problem for the nationstates in which it arises than for the EU. Many countries are experiencing extreme polarization, a trend that is most evident in the UK since the referendum in June 2016 (see Delanty 2017). Brexit is widely seen as increasing the problems that led to people to voting leave and this will increase polarization. Catalan separatism poses a challenge to the unity of Spain, not to the unity of the EU, but as argued there is little to suggest that there will be a future Catalan national state. A more likely scenario is the end of Belgium if the Flemish nationalism gains further momentum. However, for the moment the constitutionalization of Belgian politics has defused it of its capacity to bring about the interdependence of a Flemish nation from the French-speaking Wallonia. Four, a more likely outcome than countries leaving the EU is re-positioning. This may quite well be the outcome of Brexit. It is evident, nonetheless, that European integration will not continue in a single direction. There will be rather different speeds and possibly different directions of travel. This will include a degree of de-Europeanization, but this does not necessarily imply an end game or the return to an anterior point. As the experience of Brexit shows, the clock cannot be so easily put back and four decades of Europeanization reversed by a Great Repeal Bill. In any case, the course of the post-second world project of European integration was never one of a steady march to unity that is now experiencing discord.

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Yet, it is clear that current developments call into question the idea of a European people. European integration is not leading to the creation of a common European people. National identities are still strong and show no sign of vanishing. However, national identities are increasingly also unable to provide models or values that integrate increasingly diverse and fractured societies. As the examples of the UK and Catalonia show, in the wake of controversial and divisive referendums, the sense of a common people has lost its capacity to unite people. It is therefore hardly surprising that on the wider European level there is an absence of a strong sense of a European people. For those in search of European people, there is perhaps some comfort in the knowledge that there are clear trends towards a significant degree of European identification in the youth of Europe, in particular those with university education.

Notes 1. If 684,752 + 1 voters had voted the other way, the outcome would have been different. 2. On democratic authoritarianism, see Brancati (2014) and Zakaria (1997). 3. See FT blog, http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2016/06/24/brexit-demographicdivide-eu-referendum-results/. 4. While c.70% of Labour party supporters voted to remain, about the same percentage of Labour constituencies voted to Leave. 5. See Keyes (2004). 6. Cited in the Guardian newspaper, https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries.

16 Memory, Heritage and History: The European Heritage as a Conflict of Interpretations

As is now only too apparent, the open horizon of the future that seemed to have been signalled by 1989 considerably faded by the early 1990s when the European past re-asserted itself in the form of numerous nationalist conflicts and the revival of memory. Prior to 1989, it was possible to speak of European unity only at the cost of excluding Central and Eastern Europe. The unity of Europe was the unity of the West and a unity that could with some plausibility be described as a political project underpinned by certain assumptions, such as liberal democracy, capitalism and Christianity. The year 1945 represented liberation only for Western Europe. The revolts of 1968 to an extent reflected European and worldwide currents for an emancipatory politics. While 1989 opened up new opportunities for the project of European integration, leading to the enlargement process and the movement towards a quasi-constitutional structure, it has paradoxically led to greater uncertainty as to the identity of Europe and its values. The movement towards enhanced unity that came with the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, which led to widespread debate on a post-national future for Europe, met with the stark reality of a divided Europe. This was first most vividly characterized by the ethnic-nationalist conflict © The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6_16

399

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that followed in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia, but they returned in a different guise in 2008/2009 and continues into the present with the rise of racism, intolerance, and a wave of new nationalisms. This final chapter examines this crisis with respect to the question of how we should understand the European heritage today in the light of the issues opened up by 1989 and the subsequent crisis of European identity in the era of Brexit.1 How has been possible for one of the most capitalistic countries in the world to have permitted a revolt against the interests of the economy? The challenge for the present is whether it is possible or meaningful to speak of a common European tradition or heritage. In what sense should we understand the idea of ‘unity’ or commonality today as a feature of the European heritage? Is it meaningful at all to speak of common values in post-modern times? Heritage is ultimately about what people value. So what is it then that Europeans value today and can be said to be the basis of their heritage? The argument of the chapter, in essence, is that instead of a conception of culture as a system of common values it is best seen in terms of a field of conflicting interpretations around ideas and values that have emerged from history. These ideas—peace, liberty and democracy—for example do not in themselves provide new foundations but widen the cultural and political horizons. The European heritage is a carrier of such ideas, which should not be seen as unifying master narratives, but as reference points that will often have different interpretations. They can also be seen in terms of what Max Weber referred to as ‘value orientations’, the basic values that give shape to an age. The idea of Europe is a cultural model that has had a formative influence in the making of social identities and the diverse cultures of Europe. It is not a common culture but a framework of interpretation out of which a shared culture is possible. Europe did not emerge out of a single culture, but out of numerous exchanges and interactions. What are often seen as separated histories are in fact interconnected and entangled. While unity is probably not possible today, a more attainable goal is the cosmopolitan aspiration for a shared public culture, which has the virtue of accepting differences while striving to find solutions to common problems.

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No conception of cultural commonality can exclude the dimension of critique and reflexivity that has been a feature of modernity. Consequently what should be resisted is a view of the European heritage as one that is defined in terms of repetition and derivation from an original model. Instead, what is needed are new narratives of European modernity that can give expression to the diversity of Europe but also to what has been learnt from history. This will demand a step beyond a conception of heritage defined only in terms of memory or the inheritance of history as defined by a specific standpoint or a collective identity. It would be tempting to conclude that a large-scale multi-national entity such as the European Union cannot be based on a shared value system and that therefore there is no possibility for Europe to exist outside the domain of ideology and politics. Despite the apparent obstacles it is possible to conceptualize commonality in ways that are appropriate to the present day. Before looking at this in more detail, I would like to offer two refutations of the possibility of a European identity that one often hears and which derive from two quite different positions. The first is the thesis that a European political identity either does not exist or can be only a weak identity in contrast to allegedly durable national identities. The second is the view, often associated with post-colonialism, that philosophically the European heritage is necessarily Eurocentric and inseparable from colonialism or is beset by internal divisions to a point that no unity is possible or even desirable. Regarding the first argument, the current situation is less one of the absence of a political identity than one of competing visions of the future of the crisis-ridden project of European integration. This element of competition is more important than is immediately apparent since it does not mean the impossibility of identity or community. Such competition can be seen as productive of new realities which are generated in contexts of debate. The dominant force is undoubtedly the idea of a democratic Europe based on the sovereign national constitutional state, with the EU as a regulatory regime concerned largely with economic pursuits around market regulation. Against this largely inter-governmental vision of Europe rooted in notions of sovereignty and national autonomy,

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there are various post-national visions that stand for a post-sovereign Europe in which the nation-state has reduced significance. For the moment it would appear that the latter trend has been weakened, due both to the consequences of the enlargement of the EU and the global financial crisis, which has revealed a limited capacity of the EU to act as an integrated body. However, whatever shape the EU will take in the future, it will not entirely escape from the post-sovereign course it has embarked on and its political identity will doubtlessly be contested. But, then, too most expressions of national identity are also contested. The absence of a straightforward European political identity does not foreclose the possibility of a European political community based on values other than technocratic ones relating to market integration and administrative coordination. The fact that these values may be contested does not mean that there can be no community or warrant the conclusion that it can only be a ‘thin’ kind of commonality in contrast to an allegedly ‘thick’ national identity. Collective identities of all kinds are variously both thin and thick and increasingly take more discursive forms than they did in the past and they are open to more and more interpretations. Indeed, it has often been noted that people’s identity is often too ambivalent to amount to a coherent fully formed collective identity. This lack of coherence in the optics of identity formation is particularly apparent when it comes to considerations of Europe and the question of a European post-national identity. Post-national identity should be distinguished from supranationalism in that it refers not to a layer of identity that is above and beyond national identity. It is rather a condition shaped by a reflexive relation whereby both the national and the European act on each other. This means that nations are variously ‘Europeanized’. As argued in Chapter 13, European identity is best conceived of as a Europeanization of identities, that is an internal transformation of national identities. This is not unlike how national identity emerged out of a process of the nationalization of regional identities or in some cases of other collective or societal identities. The identity of many countries has been greatly transformed due to European integration leading to a change in the national self-understanding whereby the national community is no longer defined in exclusive terms. This is also why the argument that only small nations can achieve strong collective

16  Memory, Heritage and History: The European Heritage …     403

identities is wrong: where this might once have been true is now only possible through the suppression of difference. Hybrid or highly diverse societies can more easily achieve strong collective identities if they see diversity as a positive factor. The absence of a coherent and dominant national identity does not signal the impossibility of political community. Instead, political community should be seen in terms of difference, conflict and self-problematization as opposed to seeing it as a coherent and underpinned by a fixed set of cultural reference points. This is a challenge for all kinds of political community, whether they are large nation-states, such as the UK, Germany or France or larger polities, such as the European Union: all have to find within their own forms of life ways to solve common problems. A second argument is addressed to a wider conception of Europe beyond the political. An objection frequently made against the notion of a European identity or the viability of an alternative reading of the European heritage is that the very idea of the European past is inseparable from Europe’s legacy of colonialism. There can be no doubt that the history of Europe in modern times is inseparable from the history of colonialism. Without in way diminishing the importance of colonialism in the making of modern Europe, it is also important to see that the European heritage encompasses wider historical experiences. I have argued that a European cultural model was formed through the synthesis of diverse currents that culminated in the fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman civil law, Christian theology with the later fusion of Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century science. This intra-European entanglement was also related to the inter-civilizational entanglement of the various European cultures and the non-European worlds, which all led to diverse outcomes. The advent of modernity, which coincided with colonialism, brought about further transformations and complications. The main consideration to highlight in this context is the need to recognize the critical and post-universalistic strand within European culture over the past 200 years and the premodern cultural model that took shape by the seventeenth century. An interpretation of the European heritage that takes into account the diversity of these currents is what is needed rather than one that is based on only one dimension or one time period.

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One core tradition within the European heritage, with its origins in humanism, is the on-going interrogation of the past and the genesis of a post-traditional conception of culture. The critical conception of heritage can be associated with the notion of modernity understood as a site of conflicting interpretations of the world rather than a legislating authority. This notion of modernity has been variously suggested by Zygmunt Bauman (1987), Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), Jürgen Habermas (1987a), and Alain Touraine (1995) as a tension between different orientations. Habermas has argued for a conception of culture based on collective learning processes in which communicative modes of reason gain increased salience and conflict with instrumental rationality. Post-universalistic conceptions of truth and identity have been widely recognized in almost every aspect of late twentieth-century thought. The various philosophies of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault have also argued for the absence of a constitutive subject and oppose representational conceptions of culture with more transformative ones. Derrida has specifically taken up the implications of deconstruction for the possibility of European identity (Derrida 1992). History contains no inherent pattern of meaning and cannot be viewed in holistic terms as constitutive of an overall unity or the expression of a subject. The importance of these ideas for theorizing the European heritage should not be underestimated. What they point to is an anti-essentialistic view of culture that has lost its capacity to legitimate and which exists only as a mode of communication in which the past is interrogated. In short, what is required is a theory of cultural heritage that is sensitive to dialogic concepts of rationality, self-problematization and critique. This perspective places the experience of crisis and the exercise of critique as central to Europe’s cultural heritage. It suggests the need to arrive at a conception of culture that is capable of capturing its diverse currents and moments of self-transformation. To discuss culture—in the sense of cultural identity or heritage or European or national values or ethnicity—unavoidably requires recourse to the symbolic level of meanings but it also requires recognition of the fact that all of culture is today fragmented, fluid and there is no form of life that is not contested and divisive. Culture moreover has a cognitive dimension in

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that it involves ways of thinking and an imaginary component that is irreducible to the symbolic level and offers societies with a resource of renewal (Strydom 2012). Rather than choosing one of these options or abandon the notion of culture altogether it makes more sense to find a more general definition of culture that makes possible an accommodation of these divergent approaches. Many of the problems reside in the reduction of culture to a particular subject. The question of a European cultural heritage needs to be posed in a way that does not reduce heritage to a specific subject to which a particular form of life can be related. Rather what is more pertinent is to specify the ways by which European societies interpret themselves and their collective goals and aspirations. This is best termed a cultural model, which includes normative content, cognitive forms, and imaginary significations. The notion of a cultural model, introduced by Alain Touraine (1977), refers to a society’s capacity for self-interpretation. As used here it is also influenced by Habermas’s notion of culture as a domain of critique and reflection and Castoriadis’s (1987) notion of imaginary significations. The cultural model of society includes its normative orientations and self-understanding. It is not reducible to a cultural or political identity or a collective identity, since it does not relate directly to a specific collectivity and nor is it an objective cultural system of meaning or value framework. The cultural model of society is a more general level of cognition, reflection, and creativity (Touraine speaks of an ‘image of creativity’ that allows a society to give political direction). The concept of a cultural model has the advantage of solving a basic problem in the concept of culture, namely a view of culture as a whole way of life and culture as divided and contested. The notion of a cultural model has particular relevance to something as broad as Europe, though arguably the same applies to the analysis of a national society given the highly differentiated and diverse nature of all societies today. The notion of a cultural model offers a way to conceive of public culture as non-essentialistic. Notions of culture as either ‘thick’ or ‘thin’ frequently lurk in the background of many approaches to post-national culture, which is generally regarded as a thin version of national culture. The argument put forward in this chapter is that

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we need to avoid the dualism of thin versus thick conceptions of culture and also the notion that political identity must be underpinned by a cultural identity understood as a whole form of life. The contention, then, is that the notion of a European cultural heritage should be best seen in terms of a cultural model by which societies interpret themselves. Viewed in these terms we can reconcile the contested conception of culture with a more general view in that a cultural model can constitute itself a site of conflicting interpretations of the world, but in which there are possibilities for acts of signification. This essentially communicative concept of culture also opens up the cosmopolitan possibility for a reflexive relation between cultures and the cultivation of a more inclusive conception of the European heritage. The ideals of the post-1945 context have now faded and the brief optimism of 1989 has gone. The legacy of 1968 is perhaps a more enduring feature of the present in the perpetuation of cosmopolitan politics among critical publics. However, the politics of 1968 and its legacy never fully addressed the need for Europe to come to terms with the legacy of colonialism. While the worldwide protest against the US war in Vietnam was the background, the European events were preoccupied with European issues. This was also the case in 1989. Despite this limitation, both 1968 and 1989 created new visions of political order that were never realized. Despite the crisis and discontents of the present, the idea of Europe is still a powerful cultural orientation in contemporary societies and offers a cultural model that challenges many identities, in particular those marked by a high degree of closure. The implications of the argument of this book are that it also needs to be made more open to the inclusion of perspectives from the margins of Europe. In view of its history, Europe has never been entirely self-contained within itself but has always been shaped by relations with other cultures. The cosmopolitan challenge is to make this heritage more central to the contemporary European self-understanding. This is perhaps where the main markers of the past century have been lacking: 1918, 1945, 1968 and 1989 were all internal European moments of rupture. None of these moments addressed the legacies of history that stretch beyond Europe.

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Beyond the Grand Narratives: The Pluralization of National Identity The question of the European heritage should be seen in terms of not one Grand Narrative, but rather in terms of several competing ones. In short, to follow Lyotard’s (1984) characterization, we are in the age of the break-up of Grand Narratives. However the idea of a European heritage should still be seen as a narrative, but of a different and more plural kind. Narratives offer new interpretations of the present; they are ways of experiencing and interpreting time and situate the present in relation to the past and future (see Eder 2009). They are also ways in which societies or collective actors articulate a self-understanding. As Wagner has argued (2009, 2012), the self-understanding of contemporary societies has been irreversibly shaped by the predicament of modernity and therefore such self-understandings are necessarily open in terms of their solutions to the problems modern society face. Unlike earlier histories, which generally contained a ‘grand narrative’, new histories of Europe are entirely devoid of any attempt to discern a meaningful pattern. Norman Davies (1996) in his history of Europe does not tell the story of Europe in terms of anything that could be the basis of a self-understanding for the present. G. A. Pocock has denied the existence of such things as European history, claiming that there are only different constructions of Europe which means many different things to many different people (Pocock 1997, 2002). In his history of post-war Europe, Tony Judt (2005) went further with a general conclusion on the legacy of history: the European achievement was in the end the overcoming of the divisions and violence of the past and creating the basis for a new beginning, which does not reside solely in the emergence of the EU. This is a good point of departure, since it avoids the contradictory conclusions that, on the one side, there is persistence of history and, on the other side, there is nothing in European history to offer the present other than the overcoming of history. It is not implausible to argue that a narrative can be found to express a different account of European self-understanding.

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The aim of this book has been to develop a perspective on European history that avoids recourse to either Grand Narratives or a purely historical analysis and also resists a conception of the European heritage that reduces it to the politics of memory. The teleological arguments with their characteristic Eurocentric assumptions are now discredited while historical research does not offer an alternative since it avoids normative assessments and is generally circumscribed within narrow temporal domains whose significance for the present is generally left unexplored. Memories too are a poor guide to the past and are contested, as Judt (2005) has argued, and until they have been laid to rest a mature approach to the past will not be possible. What is needed is an approach that can place the past in a broader framework of analysis and which can provide both a normative reference point and a narrative that can connect the past and present. But this will involve going beyond memory-driven approaches to history. It may now be the time for such a new narrative to emerge. It is possible to see four main narratives of the European heritage at work today: heritage as a shared political tradition, heritage as a unity in diversity, heritage as trauma, and a cosmopolitan heritage. These are not purely speculative positions or merely academic constructions, but are variously present and debated in discourses about Europe. A brief discussion of these is in place before final conclusions can be drawn.

Heritage as a Shared Political Tradition The first and most obvious way to define the European heritage is to relate it to a political tradition as opposed to a wider cultural characteristic of European civilization. Against, for instance, a definition of Europe as Christian or a definition that posits a universalistic value such as freedom, a narrower political conception of the specificity of Europe offers an alternative to the Grand Narratives that posit the progressive unfolding of an idea becoming embodied in a political form. In this regard, one can find within European history a value orientation that might be the defining characteristic of its political heritage for the present day. Whatever this will be will partly depend on what might be taken as the

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most important development or direction Europe is undergoing. If we take the trend towards a post-sovereign order, on the one side, and on the other the contemporary concern with democracy and citizenship, we get quite different understandings of history. Thus, the post-sovereign trend will highlight alternatives to the state tradition, while a concern with democracy and citizenship will draw attention to civil society. To take the latter case of the centrality of democracy and citizenship, it has been argued that the political tradition that most captures the European heritage is republicanism (Van Gelderen and Skinner 2002; see Chapter 6). The republican tradition, or to be more specific the civic republican tradition, with its concern with civil society and the notion of a self-governing political community based on autonomous individuals is indeed a distinctive feature of the European political tradition. While it can plausibly be argued that it offers a shared heritage for much of Europe, it is possibly not as widely shared as is often assumed. For instance, its applicability to Central and Eastern Europe is not evident and it has not always led to democracy, as is illustrated by the example of seventeenth-century English republicanism; indeed it has often been autocratic. It is also not evident why republicanism is more central than, for instance, liberalism, which has arguably provided the foundations for European democracy and the modern state. The most plausible case that can be made for a conception of the European heritage based on republicanism is the Kantian vision of a Europe based on a narrative of peace and constitutionalism. This vision, which has been invoked by Habermas (2001b), extends the republican idea from the national level to the wider international context in a way that has some resonances in the current trend towards a post-sovereign European political order. The centrality of the individual has been one of the abiding features of the European legacy. It has been the integral to the liberal and the cosmopolitan tradition of thought. It is possible to see a clear link between the idea of Europe and the respect for the individual. In the cosmopolitical tradition of thought going back to Kant, it was expressed in the idea of hospitality. In Perpetual Peace in 1795 Kant established the principle of hospitality as the defining tenet of cosmopolitanism, which he contrasted to internationalism, which for Kant was based on treaties between states. Cosmopolitanism, in contrast, is based on the

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centrality of the individual and the need for the rights of the individual to be recognized even where the individual is a foreigner. It is this idea of cosmopolitan law, rather than the vision of global government, which Kant believed was desirable but not realistic, that has been the main legacy of modern cosmopolitanism. Its relevance to contemporary Europe cannot be underestimated. However, its connection with the legacy of republicanism is limited, and it has not been satisfactorily extended to encompass the recognition and the rights of migrants. The problem, in essence, is that the European political heritage does not consist of just one tradition, but several. The tension between liberalism and republicanism—between an emphasis on individual rights and on a self-governing political community—is one illustration of this wider tension within democracy. But more than this, it can also be argued that the defining feature of the European political heritage is neither liberty nor democracy as such, but the concern with social justice. As argued in earlier chapters, when one looks at Europe from a global perspective, it is the struggle for social justice that stands out as the most prominent feature of Europe’s political heritage and a key characteristic of the formation of modernity. Modernity evolved in Europe, unlike in other parts of the world, in a way that capitalism and state formation were constrained by the taming influences of civil society, including social movements concerned with social justice. The result of the interaction of state, capitalism and civil society in modern Europe was the triumph of social justice. However, rather than concluding that democratic socialism was more important than liberalism or republicanism, one should rather draw the conclusion that the European political tradition did not lead to one overall outcome. Instead, what is more important is a plurality of political traditions leading to a plurality of interpretations of heritage (see Wagner 2009). This perspective is a necessary corrective to the emphasis on the ‘dark side’ of European history and to approaches that see in the European past only the legacy of colonialism (e.g. Mignolo 2011). While no approach to the European past can neglect these dimensions, it is important that an interpretation of the European heritage is sufficiently broad to be able to grasp the different and frequently contrary currents within it.

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An alternative approach to the Kantian one would be to locate the political roots of the European republican heritage in the tradition of resistance to tyranny that lay at the root of both Greek republicanism and the Judaeo-Christian concepts of civic solidarity and brotherly solidarity (see Chapter 2; Brunkhorst 2005). The progressive transformation of these traditions of solidarity by modernity would bring the European political imagination in the direction of a cosmopolitan ethic. It may be objected that this characterization of the European heritage based on resistance to tyranny is not specifically European, and in its most potent forms, it was resistance to European tyranny that formed the political heritage of many parts of the world, in particular in the Americas. However, to say that a particular political trend has been a formative factor in history is not to say that it has not been equally present in other parts of the world. But it can be plausibly argued that a particularly pronounced feature of European modernity has been the relatively advanced degree to which a social project was forged against both the state and capitalism, leading to a strong tradition of social democracy and civil society. This legacy is represented by 1968 and a reminder of the wider international context of the cultural left that emerged at this time.

Heritage as a Unity in Diversity The search for a political tradition that defines the specificity of the European political heritage as a shared tradition runs into the problem of multiple political traditions. An alternative narrative that has considerable relevance today and is influential in EU cultural policy is the idea of unity in diversity. In this perspective, a narrative of becoming overshadows the idea of a past shared or one that is derived from a historical origin, such as an authentic original identity that was lost in the course of history. Europe is not yet a unity, but out of its diversity, a political unity based on national cooperation and understanding is possible. In this narrative, which runs the risk of becoming teleological—seeing in the present the signs of the future—European history is represented as one in which difference has been a factor that cannot be ignored or regarded as an inconvenient obstacle to unity, which can

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only be a political project. The idea of unity in diversity has increasingly come to the fore in European cultural policy, which shifted the earlier emphasis on unity to one of regional diversity (Sassatelli 2009). The earlier cultural policies were dominated by a vision of the essential unity of Europe as a cultural basis from which political unity might be possible. The trend in recent years has been a move in the direction of the recognition of cultural plurality. As stated in the Maastricht Treaty in 1992: ‘The Community shall contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common cultural heritage to the fore’. But exactly what this might consist of is at best vague and open to interpretation. It certainly suggests that there is not a prior unity and that diversity is not an obstacle to a common Europeanness. The nature of that common Europeanism may in the end reside only in the condition of diversity. This is clearly an unsatisfactory place to end since plurality makes sense only in relation to a notion of commonality that it qualifies. Despite these drawbacks, the notion of unity in diversity serves a critical function in highlighting problems with the older conceptions of Europe that fail to interrogate the notion of unity. Unlike the previously discussed narrative of a common republican heritage, the idea of unity in diversity suggests a conception of the European heritage that is not defined in the terms of what might be called ‘Old Europe’, namely a Western European-oriented definition of the European heritage or one based on a narrow interpretation of republicanism. With the enlargement of the EU, and generally a more pluralized conception of Europe, there is clearly a need for a wider definition of the European heritage to include the various historical regions of Europe. Such a broader view of the European heritage will need to include the contribution of the ancient civilizations and what has been referred to in this book, as the European inter-civilizational constellation. However, the European heritage is not only defined by the early civilizations, which has argued provided cultural orientations for Europe, but by modernity. There is no common history as such, but there is the possibility of a shared sense of responsibility for the present.

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Heritage as Trauma A different reading of the European heritage would take the unity and diversity theme to its limit and claim that the history of Europe has been inseparable from suffering. In this narrative it is more than a question of diversity; it is a matter of divisions and the inclusion of diversities other than national and regional ones, such as those of marginal and persecuted groups. There are no common memories as there is no common history, only divided memories. For instance, any account of the Christian nature of European civilization must consider that this heritage divided as well as united Europe. Christianity, like Europe itself, did not lead to a single church, but a diversity of religious traditions and different interpretations as to the meaning of secularism (see Taylor 2007). The concern with divisions in European history has recently been overshadowed by a stronger notion of trauma and collective memories shaped by trauma. The notion that the only adequate account of the European heritage is one based on the recognition of trauma has gained increased currency in recent years (see Alexander et al. 2004). This narrative is reflected in accounts of the European heritage that highlight the Holocaust, as in Christian Meier’s (2005) From Athens to Auschwitz. He argues that the problem of history is the centrality of Auschwitz, as the symbolic term to refer to the Holocaust as a whole. Auschwitz was the ‘definitive end’ of European history and must be taken into account in any assessment of the European heritage. In this case, for Meier there is no doubt that Europe begins in Athens as its primary origin. It is certainly correct that the past is becoming increasingly difficult to commemorate. The more voices that are included in the political community the greater will be the number of voices and memories. Nation-states have generally succeeded in commemorating the past around a heroic narrative of liberation from an imperial power or wars against neighbouring countries. But for Europe as a whole, unlike most nation-states, there is no European people as such and consequently commemoration can only take a very general acknowledgement of the traumas that have been integral to the memories of many

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groups and whole societies. For this reason, it is often held that for post-amnesiac Europe the idea of trauma may be a more appropriate way to articulate its historical self-understanding. The proposal for the Holocaust to be recognized as a European commemorative event is one such example of the entry of trauma into the very idea of the European heritage. This is not without problems, since it raises the issue of which traumas should figure in such a reading of the European heritage or whether, as has been argued, the Holocaust is the collective symbol of all traumas. Since 1989 there has been a proliferation of discourses of victimhood, many of which are products of communist oppression in Central and Eastern Europe and cannot be easily reduced to a single or dominant position of victimhood. Indeed, in such discourses the line separating victim and perpetrator is a thin one, and often, as also in the case of Vichy, the category of victims includes a very large part of the population, if not its entirety. There is also the problem discussed above that the European past cannot only be portrayed in terms of just one narrative, such as one of colonialism and violence against minorities. Memories also interact with others, making possible their reinterpretation. The holocaust memory has served as a master memory for other memories; for example, it has made possible a recodification of memories of slavery (Rothberg 2009). Yet, it is evident that today after the fall of the Grand Narratives of European mastery and progress that the experience of suffering has entered into almost every attempt to express the European heritage in a manner that is not unlike the ways in which national commemoration has also become increasingly more and more about the experiences of the vanquished than the victors. The theme of trauma as the content of a European narrative unavoidably runs into the problem of memory as a reliable basis for societies to construct a durable heritage; it is a necessary step, but it cannot be the only basis for the future which requires positive modes of identification.

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Cosmopolitan Heritage The historical heritage, including the conventional reference points, can be interpreted in different ways, including in the terms of the previous conceptions of heritage. The received interpretation is to see Europe as based on a singular civilization, with difference over-shadowed by unity. A challenge to this is suggested by cosmopolitanism. What would be a cosmopolitan conception of the European heritage? The answer to this will partly depend on a theory of cosmopolitanism, since the different theoretical approaches emphasize either the cultural or political expressions of cosmopolitanism and also take up different positions on the question of globalization and its relation to the nation-state. Three broad directions are: (a) deriving from Alexander von Humboldt’s vision of the unity of the world, a concern with commonality, and dialogue between different cultural traditions, (b) the Kantian tradition of cosmopolitanism reflected in the work of Habermas and Benhabib with its characteristic emphasis on ‘solidarity among strangers’ and based on an developing post-national normative framework in which an ethic of hospitality and rights becomes embedded in all societies, and (c) an emphasis on transnational processes, such as the de-nationalization of societies and growing impact of globality, including global civil society and more generally a view of Europe as part of a wider global context in which borders are becoming blurred (Balibar 2003; De Genova 2017; Rumford 2007, 2008). Rather than searching for patterns of unity or diversity, a cosmopolitan interpretation of the European heritage would therefore begin by identifying those aspects of European history and society that give expression to interaction, entanglement and dialogue. While diversity and especially the recognition of the civilizational plurality of Europe would be part of this, it is not the essential feature of a cosmopolitan perspective. Of greater importance is the inter-relation of the different historical traditions, including too the relation between Europe and non-Europe. The latter is important not least due to the

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fact that Europe from the beginning was itself formed through the constant incorporation of non-Europe. More generally, a view of Europe as shaped by the wider global context would be an essential dimension of a cosmopolitan approach. This does not mean that all aspects of European history should be reinterpreted in this light, or that the interaction of societies produces cosmopolitan outcomes such as dialogue. This kind of naïve cosmopolitanism is plainly absurd. The point would rather be to identify those cases where interaction has led to dialogue and the enlargement of the communicative space—whether by design or by unintended consequences—and to take such instances as the foundation to build a different European tradition. The conception of cosmopolitanism reflected in the Kantian tradition, which is more overtly normative, has considerable relevance in evaluating the place of institutional change in European societies, especially since the end of the Second World War when a demonstrable shift occurred in the commitment to create the conditions for lasting peace within Europe. While some cosmopolitan theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, believe that Europe has become increasingly cosmopolitan and that nation-states are relics of the past, another view is that the cosmopolitan current is one of many in the formation of European societies. At various points in history, it has been a counter-prevailing one, opposing the mainstream and opening up different futures. The debate around cosmopolitanism is generally a debate about the degree of cosmopolitanism and the claims that can be made for it. Some more than others make larger claims about the impact of globalization or the transnationalization of Europe. It is also contentious whether such processes are to be equated with cosmopolitanism, which can also be seen as a critical response to globalization. Obviously, the issue here lies in the understanding of globalization. Cosmopolitanism, which should not be reduced to globalization, is more concerned with the normative potentials of the present—which include both the global and the local—and is unavoidably found in social struggles, which are located in an increasingly complex political context that cannot be so easily reduced to any one level, be it national or global.

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One contemporary illustration of a cosmopolitan approach to the European heritage is in museums and exhibitions. In recent years there has been a shift in the nature of the representation of the past towards a concern with the representation of exchange and dialogue. Examples would include the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization in Marseille and House of European History in Brussels. A challenge for museums is the representation of accounts of the past that were ignored in the formative period of the modern nation-state when national museums sought to narrate the grandeur and prestige of the national heritage. Post-national conceptions of history have recently become the focus of attention for museums and exhibitions seeking to offer alternative accounts of history. Of particular importance are accounts of the past that seek to highlight the role of cross-cultural dialogue and other expressions of global history, such as those reflected in cross-cultural trade, communication and the arts. There have been some notable attempts to give expression to cultural encounters between Europe and Asia that preceded the imperial age as well as projects aimed at giving greater attention to the representation of transnationalism.2 From a cosmopolitan perspective, the European heritage is no longer tied to a European people. There is no single European people, neither in a political nor in an ethnic sense. The Europeans are those who live in Europe and those who have lived there in the past, including those populations expelled or exterminated. Europe is not underpinned by an objective reference, whether a state, a religion, a territory, an ethnicity. European heritage has become, like all of culture, de-referentialized; that is, it is not defined by immutable sources or an original culture that only undergoes pluralization. Europe is a cradle of intermingling cultures, but also ones that are in tension with each other. In sum, cosmopolitan heritage consists of the ways in which heritage has ceased to be based on a single voice, such as that of the nation, but is polyvocal and sometimes the result of re-signification following recombination of different memories. The elements that make up many memories and claims to heritage are often the result of transnational

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movements in cultural production. While the unity of national narratives of heritage has been considerably pluralized as a result of new claims to recognition of marginalized or excluded people, this has not had a significant impact on the wider understandings of the European heritage. This may change in the future as European societies become increasingly more entangled in each other. An indication of such a widening of horizons is the growing force of anti-war sentiment among Europeans. If anything, this now unites very different people. This has been recognized in the 2012 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union. War within Europe has become a thing of the past. Violent nationalism has more or less come to an end, with the cessation of armed struggle by separatist nationalist movements, such as ETA and the IRA. There are no significant possibilities of war within Europe. Despite the rise of nationalism, Brexit, etc., the clash of cultures is not accompanied by a drift towards violence. Public opposition to war has been a significant force since the Anglo-American led war in Iraq. While the external context in now more dangerous following the Arab Spring that led to a volatile situation in the Middle East and North Africa, Europe itself is peaceful and one of the main expression of European political consciousness is anti-war. It is of course the case that this is a negatively defined identity and does not directly result in positive actions. However, it does represent the legacy of the humanistic content of the European heritage in highlighting human dignity and anti-war.

The Conflict of Interpretations The four narratives discussed above are all present in different ways in debates about the European heritage and in that sense they are real, for the European imaginary is discursively produced in debates and in communication about Europe. In this sociologically oriented approach to the European heritage, the objective is not to try to define it in ways that are derived from a reading of European history, since all such aims can easily be contested with rival interpretations. The aim is rather to see how in the present day, or in a specific period, the past has been interpreted by the present. As I have argued, heritage is neither the memory of a subject

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nor the past as documented by historians; it is rather—as suggested by Paul Ricoeur (2004)—an evaluation by the present of the past and as such involves self-reflection. Jacques Derrida has referred to heritage as a task of choosing: ‘An inheritance is never a given, it is always a task’. ‘All the questions on the subject of being or of what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance’ (Derrida 1994: 67). I have characterized the European heritage in terms of a cultural model composed of a plurality of narratives. The age of the singular Western Grand Narrative has passed not only because of the plurality of narratives, but because all of these, different though they are, do not tell a story of the triumph of the West, but are responses to the European predicament since 1989. The European heritage has become an unavoidable a site of conflicting interpretations of the past. In this chapter, I have sought to explore some of the considerations that are at stake in the debate on the European heritage. The period since 1989 has been marked by a break-up of the Grand Narratives of the past. Their place has been filled by a plethora of memories, of which the memory of the Holocaust stands out as the singular event that has defined European consciousness in the twentieth century. But a new narrative that could overcome the vicissitudes of memory and be the basis of the European heritage has not yet emerged. New narratives are indeed emerging in the vastly growing discursive space of Europe. Looking at four major narratives, it can be concluded that there is in fact no underlying European self or constitutive subject. To claim otherwise is to ignore some of the most important debates and developments in European thought over the past few decades that call into question the notion of a primary subject or an authentic core of values. It is also not possible to claim that the European heritage has been always defined by reference to an external other, since much of the concern with otherness has been the European past itself. In sum, there is neither a clearly defined self nor other and much of the European heritage has been the endless reinterpretation of its own past. The notion that there is a past that can be recovered and made meaningful for the present has been seriously undermined by philosophical and historiographical scholarship. Yet, this does not mean the past cannot be of service to the present. But rather than providing the present with

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a comfortable illusion of a unity that transcends its divisions, new and emerging narratives of the European heritage offer interpretations that are more in tune with the changing nature of European self-understanding in an increasingly post-European age. At the moment there is no single narrative in ascendance. Europe taken as a whole is in an uncertain position with regards to its relation to the past. While many nations have increasingly come to terms with the past, others are discovering the legacy of divided histories, making all the more difficult a European memory or a shared political heritage, which has been further undermined by the current political and economic crisis of the EU. I have argued that the most promising option for European self-understanding is the re-invention of the cosmopolitan current in the European past in order to find a model of solidarity with which Europe can come to terms with its own cultural and political diversity. However, this will need to be as much future oriented as past, since the past does not always offer the present the means to renew itself. The time may therefore be ripe for Europe to move beyond the past, but as Adorno said in 1959, the past cannot be overcome until the problem it created have been fully worked through (Adorno 1998).

Notes 1. This chapter is based in part on Delanty (2010) ‘The European Heritage from a Critical Cosmopolitan Perspective, LSE “Europe in Question”’ Discussion Paper Series No. 19. It also draws from a later publication, The European Heritage: A Critical Re-interpretation, London: Routledge, 2018. 2. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 1500–1800 in 2004.

Conclusion: Europe—A Defence

The idea of Europe has now become a reality in a number of very specific senses and which are a challenge to some of the conventional conceptions of the meaning of Europe. The traditional view is that the primary reality is the nation-state and that Europe is nothing much more than an aggregation of largely separate nations. This is also one of the most common ways the history of Europe has been written: an aggregation of national histories. To the extent to which it has any meaning Europe is generally regarded as synonymous with the idea of the West and a vague notion of civilization as underpinning the diversity of national cultures and their histories. With the rise of European Union, Europe acquired a new political meaning as a geopolitical entity. However, the general tendency is also to see this embodiment of the idea of Europe as epiphenomenal with nations as constituting the primary reality. Although this view is becoming increasingly challenged by those who see the project of European integration as contesting many of the older assumptions about national autonomy, such perspectives are limited by a narrow focus on the institutional form of the EU and by a shorter time period. The argument developed in this book is rather that Europe can itself be seen as having a structural

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form as opposed to being a derivative of nations. In this view, a long-run historical consideration of Europe is needed in order to discern the nature of its specificity, which is neither to be found in national trajectories nor in the project of European integration. This means, too, that any notion of the ‘crisis of Europe’ must be placed in a broader historical context than that of the recent past or the immediate present. There have been surprisingly few attempts to do this and those that have sought to provide an interpretation of the course of European history have generally operated within the confines of a narrative history of Europe. As argued in the Introduction, such endeavours are beset with epistemological and methodological challenges, due to the problem of identifying independent variables for long periods of time and the fact that almost every reference point has changed considerably in the course of history. For these reasons, Europe cannot be used to explain itself. Purely constructivist approaches are inadequate, for while the idea of Europe has been a historically variable discursive construction as opposed to being a natural entity, historical specificity remains unexplained. Such attempts to de-naturalize Europe serve a useful function, but fall short of a macro-sociological analysis of how enduring forms take shape. Global contextualization has been a recent alternative, but it largely serves as a corrective to Eurocentric approaches that see Europe produced from within itself. The method adopted in this book is to approach the problem of the significance of Europe from the perspective of a macro-sociological theory of modernity, for only by adopting a broader framework of analysis is it possible to make sense of a long-run historical process in which virtually all the elements changed considerably over time. The fact that the constitutive elements did not all change at the same time made possible the relative objectivity of what can be designated Europe. A backward glance suggests that the object of analysis is in fact not Europe, but a structure-forming process to which we give the name Europe. This has two main dimensions to it, a cultural and a social one. I have characterized these in terms of a cultural model and a societal model. Both of these have given form to modernity and define the particular path of European modernity. The sources of modernity are civilizational and can be found in the various civilizations that constitute, what I have called,

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the European inter-civilizational constellation. However, the formation of Europe took shape from processes that ultimately go beyond the civilizational back-ground. While, as I argued, a Europe cultural model emerged by the seventeenth century, it did not on its own shape the subsequent history of Europe. For this reason, a different framework is needed than one confined to the civilizational context. A conception of modernity offers a more comprehensive way to make sense of the various structure-forming processes that emerged from the civilizational context and which give Europe a certain societal specificity. In this view, the current emphasis on plurality and the multiple forms of Europe needs to be corrected to take into account the structures that make plurality possible and the outcomes, since any account of variation presupposes a more general framework in the sense of a common starting point or at least a set of common starting points that led to variation. However, variation— and hence diversity does not end the story—since subsequent processes (e.g. entanglements in other civilizations, internal logics of change, re-revivals of earlier traditions) led to new societal forms. The formation of modern Europe is the product of all such processes of transformation, which took on an intensified level with modernity. These transformations include the transformation in subjectivity, which include the category of love (Passerini 1998, 2009; Passerini et al. 2010). I have argued, furthermore, that any account of the formation of Europe must take appropriate account of the global context, for many of the formative developments were the result of encounters with the non-European world. This approach affirms the importance of a relational view of Europe as shaped in relation to the rest of the world. However, a relational perspective does not only entail a consideration of dichotomous relations, such as friends and enemies, as is often the case in much of the literature, but also needs to take account of how structures are formed from relations with a multiplicity of reference points, including a relation to new conceptions of the world. Indeed, the idea of Europe developed alongside the very notion of the world and thus entails not just immanent or internal, logics of development, but also ones that can be termed transcendental in that it proved models of thought that transcended the specific contexts in which they arose.

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The emergence of a cultural structure that constitutes the European cultural model includes within it a certain reflexivity, since the resulting form is not an unchanging structure, but a form that makes possible selfinterpretation. The cultural model that formed over many centuries was in part shaped out of a relation to transcendental or, following Strydom (2011a), ‘meta-cognitive ideas’—freedom, autonomy, solidarity, equality, social justice—that took on an increased salience with modernity and gave to modernity its characteristic openness and transformative impact. This cultural model guided reflexively the construction of social and political projects ranging from the constitutional state and nation-state to the welfare state and to the post-Second World War project of European integration as well as many other and earlier societal models that have defined the course of European history as one of the shifts in modernity. The process by which cultural and social models develop is not easily summed up. A general conclusion is that cultural models tend to crystallize producing new visions of social and political order. I have stressed how such generative and transformative processes lead to the translation of these new ideas into new political and institutional forms. In this view, there is a certain tension between cultural models and societal models, as in the tension between democracy and social justice, on the one side, and on the other capitalism. I stressed this tension as constituting the core of European modernity. Viewed in such terms, the current situation with Europe widely perceived to be in crisis should be assessed from this wider context of modernity. The form of modernity in Europe offers the present with resources for addressing the future. It may be the case that the solutions to the present predicament lie in part in a reinterpretation of the past, that is both in modernity and in Europe’s inter-civilizational sources. The current predicament has three main dimensions to it. The first is a deep malaise in the coping with diversity, as expressed in increased xenophobia and racism. This is a social crisis rooted in fear driven by insecurity and uncertainty. But it is also symptomatic of a wider cultural crisis in the values on which Europe is claimed to be based. Many of these problems are due to the fact that the EU lacks the power to implement policies relating to migration. These problems impact differently on European countries and in many cases do not derive directly from

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national contexts. The flow of refugees into Europe is not something that can be controlled by the countries of arrival. In the absence of a European authority, the result is inevitable resistance and discontent. Democracy becomes an instrument of repression and exclusion rather than of empowerment and inclusion. The second dimension of the current predicament concerns problems in democratic legitimacy and in the political design of the EU with the growth of unaccounted for powers at both national and EU levels of governance. At a time when populist politics, by definition, has mobilized people against so-called elites, the EU has inevitably become a target of populist politics, since it is difficult to deny the elite nature of European integration. Whether or not the EU is anti-democratic in practice is another matter on which a great deal has been written, the objective reality is that it has been an elite project and is perceived as such. However, it should be noted that this is a problem for nations as much as it is for the EU. The political challenges to the EU are probably best seen as an expression of more general shifts in the nature of democracy in relation to capitalism and in the relation of the economy to politics. The third, a relatively recent one, concerns the economic crisis of Europe and the prospect of a model of capitalism emerging that is no longer embedded in the normative structures of what I have called the European societal model. The extent of the socio-economic crisis should not be exaggerated. For many people in the north-west of Europe, probably a majority, nothing has changed and social institutions and societal structures remain largely unchanged. But this is not true of Europe as a whole and there is the new phenomenon of the precariat, that is those with precarious work and without security and prospects, which in now a feature of work in contemporary societies. These are of course related: the so-called crisis of capitalism—which I characterized in terms of a crisis in systemic integration—is bound up with the crisis of democracy and takes the form of a crisis in governability and this in turns provides the context for a breakdown in solidarity leading to intolerance and anti-cosmopolitan trends. However, rather than seeing in the present predicament the signs only of societal regression, a broader perspective is necessary.

426     Conclusion: Europe—A Defence

The broad historical sketch outlined in this book draws attention to the plural and hybrid nature of Europe and challenges a conception of society that erases such differences in favour of a notion of unity. The argument has been that notions of unity must be predicated on the basis of diversity and variation within a civilizational matrix that took shape through multiple levels of encounters and reflexivity. The rediscovery of such diversity and unity should be part of the European heritage. The conception of modernity proposed builds on this interpretation which affirms the potential cosmopolitan currents to the European heritage. The idea of Europe has for much of its history been linked to a counter-factual future orientation. This needs to be recovered and placed on a new level in order to move beyond the current situation. So what is at stake in the question whether Europe can be defended is precisely a matter of re-invigorating its cultural model and potentiality for new institutional possibilities. In the second half of the twentieth century, the main challenge for those who took up the idea of Europe was to overcome fascism and the legacy of totalitarianism. This began in 1945, it took on a new significance in 1968 with the renewal of the left but was not complete until 1989 when Central and Eastern Europe emerged from the vestiges of totalitarianism. In the course of these decades, many European countries also made the uncertain transition from colonialism to becoming post-imperial nations within a post-national polity. The idea of Europe has remained opaque with respect to the past and to the future. It has always been more allied to the right than the left. Today it is a more contested discourse and open to new visions of political community. It has been the purpose of this book to seek a new narrative that may be the basis of European self-understanding as the old Grand Narratives lose their conviction and the vicissitudes of memory fade with the passing of the century that for many was one of the nightmares. The danger today is that a politics of fear will take the place of the older narratives and that social fragmentation will erode the capacity for social and political renewal. To defend Europe in this climate of uncertainty is to defend the social against the destructive forces of globalization and the

Conclusion: Europe—A Defence     427

dismantling of the institutions and structures of political community and solidarity that have been an integral part of European modernity. The best chances, then, for the idea of Europe to gain a revitalized significance for the present lie in the revival of its social dimensions rather than in the search for a supranational state or in the pursuit of exclusionary politics. However, it is evident that nation-states cannot achieve this alone, and much of globalization has been a product of the actions of states. The transnational dimension of European integration is essential to the viability of political community, which needs to expand in a cosmopolitan direction. Such a re-orientation will require a re-visiting of the legacies of history.

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Index

A

Afghanistan 208 Africa xxxvii, lii, liii, l, 3, 33, 34, 43, 53, 59, 94, 96, 97, 100, 105, 130, 139, 140, 142, 144, 206–209, 212, 216, 218, 219, 221, 222, 233, 235, 236, 239, 249, 250, 286, 418 Albania 103, 188, 250, 257, 258 Algeria 206, 209, 212, 249, 250, 276, 294 American exceptionalism 234 Americanization 226, 234, 279, 295 Antiquity (Greek and Roman) xxxviii, 15, 20, 27, 28, 33, 44, 48, 57, 74–76, 78, 98, 102, 109–113, 124–126, 135, 229, 249, 259 Arab Spring 235, 353, 418 Armenian genoicide 290

Asia xxiv, xxvii, xxxvii, lii, 3–5, 16, 22, 30–34, 57, 59, 80–82, 96, 97, 100, 105, 126, 128–130, 140, 144, 163, 177, 195, 206, 208–210, 218, 219, 221, 222, 234–236, 239, 281, 330, 331, 417, 420 Asian modernity 226 B

Balibar, E. xxx, 244, 320, 415 Balkans 43, 83, 103, 244, 248, 256, 257, 260 Bartlett, R. 58–60, 146 Beck, U. lviii, 226, 322, 333, 416 Berlusconi, S. 372 Blake, W. 166 Blumenberg, H. 62 Brazil 4, 126, 140, 141, 220, 221, 234, 305, 330

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6

467

468     Index

BRICS countries 330 Britain 97, 154, 206, 207, 211, 275, 276, 282, 285, 288, 294, 295, 297, 326, 367, 368, 386, 393 Churchill, W. 282 Great Fire of London (1666) 184 Buddhism 10, 31 Burckhardt, J. 110, 118 Byzantine xlviii, 16, 34, 36, 41, 43, 51, 56, 57, 60, 73–81, 84, 86, 88, 103, 241, 249, 257, 281 C

Canon law 42, 53 Capitalism conflict with democracy lii, 343, 355, 360, 361 era of organized 279 free market 150 transition to 262 Caribbean, the 140 Catalonia 146, 191, 390–392, 397 Cathedrals 54, 111 Celts, the 22, 32, 39, 150 Central and Eastern Europe (sub of State Socialism) xxx, 68, 135, 142, 143, 144, 192, 206, 231, 237, 243, 245, 256, 265, 267, 283, 284, 306, 307, 316, 328, 330, 352, 366, 373, 387, 389, 399, 409, 426 Chakrabarty, D. xxvii China 4, 11, 82, 83, 88, 96, 127, 177, 208, 220, 232, 235– 237, 283, 305, 330

Christianity anti-essentialist, notion of 8. See also essentialism Axial age, crisis of xxxviii, 11, 12, 35, 61 civilization 10, 16, 18, 45, 66, 77, 80, 92, 95, 149 New Testament 52 Old Testament 47 Orthodox Church 66, 80 Orthodox Greek 66. See also Greece secularization theology l, 10, 21, 23, 32, 42, 53, 54, 134, 173, 403 civilizational constellation 13, 15–17, 22, 28, 39, 45, 74, 87, 88, 92, 93, 103–105 civilizational process. See Elias, N Clark, K. 6, 96, 101, 163, 266 colonialism xxv, xxxix, xliv, 7, 9, 15, 23, 59, 60, 87, 93, 110, 116, 123, 134, 205–208, 210, 213, 216, 235, 276, 299, 328, 401, 403, 406, 410, 414, 426 communism xxiv, xxvi, li, 85, 86, 93, 231, 251, 256, 257, 268, 269, 281–283, 285–287, 289, 291, 292, 295, 310, 394 Confucianism, constitutionalization 10, 293, 297, 306, 313, 317, 331, 347, 396 Constitution of the United States of America 135, 171, 271, 282 constructionism xxix, xxxi. See also constructivist approaches constructivist approaches 422

Index     469

Cosmopolitan heritage 106, 408, 415, 417, 418. See also Heritage cosmopolitanism xliv, liii–lvii, 34, 35, 40, 45, 53, 123, 161, 163, 164, 181, 185, 195, 196 and nationalism 185, 197, 198, 318, 322 political community 194, 195, 197, 198 possibility of liii, liv, lvi Crimea, the 259 crisis xxiii, lvi, 20, 94, 129, 157, 159, 168, 176, 183–185, 196, 199, 227, 231, 237, 266, 269–273, 278, 307, 311, 315, 317, 328–332, 334, 339, 341–343, 346, 348, 349, 351, 353, 355–357, 359, 365–368, 400, 402, 404, 406, 420, 422, 424, 425 Europe, ‘crisis of ’ xii, 20. See also Europe political 159, 185, 358–362 Critical cosmopolitanism lv, lvi, 322, 336, 337 cultural commonality, cultural gradient 88, 401 cultural model of Europe 319 cultural model of modernity 176, 179, 195. See also Modernity cultural model of society xlv, 196, 405

Culture xxvii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxviii, xliii, xlviii, l, liv, lvi, 3, 5–9, 11, 12, 15–17, 21– 24, 28–31, 33–40, 42–45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 57, 58, 60, 62–64, 68, 69, 74–77, 79, 80, 85, 92, 93, 97–102, 104, 110–112, 115, 117, 118, 124–126, 134, 152, 158, 163–165, 167, 172, 187, 191, 198, 201, 210, 212, 215, 219, 248, 249, 252, 255–257, 266, 267, 271, 273, 297, 299, 308, 311, 321, 323, 327, 329, 337, 346, 359, 375, 380, 385, 400, 404–406, 412, 417, 418, 421 D

democracy democratization 61, 114, 188, 196, 203, 204, 231, 235, 237, 246, 247, 262, 271, 278, 312, 316, 329, 332, 334, 360 Western liberal 275, 276, 278, 279, 282 Denmark 70, 188, 206, 207, 297, 298 De Rougemont, D. 84 Derrida, J. 404, 419 Descartes, R. 117, 118 dissent xxxiv, xl, 65, 67, 123, 152, 153, 230, 284, 388 Durkheim, E. 201, 202, 273

470     Index E

East and West binary collapse of distinction 93 cultural encounters 100. See also Culture Economy Asian world economy 154 economic crisis since 2008 339 economics, Keynesian 278 Egypt 30, 31, 43, 46, 169, 206, 207, 250, 276, 294, 374 Eisenstadt, S. xxxvii, xxxix, xlvi, xlvii, li, 11, 12, 45, 61, 219, 223 Elias, N. 147, 148 Empire Byzantine Empire 74, 76, 77, 80 decline of 38, 43, 44, 53, 73, 75, 101 emergence of Europe 248 Empire, German 56, 144, 254 Empire, Ottoman 78, 81, 83, 84, 95, 97, 103, 104, 117, 128, 130, 137, 138, 140, 142, 171, 188, 192, 206, 254, 257, 258 Empire, Roman 34, 38–44, 46, 47, 51–57, 73–76, 78, 85, 99, 101, 139, 144, 145, 148, 150, 206, 246, 248, 254, 271, 286, 288 expansion of 75, 137 Enlightenment xxvi, xxvii, lii, 6, 9, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 69, 82, 96, 97, 100, 111, 120, 158–160, 162–167, 170, 172, 173, 179, 181, 183–185, 196, 260, 270, 272, 281, 287

post-Enlightenment 165 romantics, the 165–167 essentialism xxx, xxxi Eurasia 4, 16, 79, 82, 218 Euro, the 324, 349, 354, 357 Eurocentric xxiv–xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxii, xxxix, liv, 6, 29, 35, 75, 78, 116, 123, 124, 130, 221, 259, 260, 262, 401, 408, 422 Eurocentrism xxiv, xxvi, xxviii, xxxii, xl, xliv, 7, 87, 163, 217, 334 Europe Black Death, the, cultural model of 151. See also constructivist approaches federal 296 idea of xix, xxii, xxiv, xxvi–xxix, xxxv, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, xlvii, xlix, li–liii, 4, 5, 13, 15, 19, 33, 34, 44, 57, 75, 87, 94, 95, 130, 135, 137, 155, 157, 158, 166, 168–173, 175, 181, 185, 192, 194, 195, 200, 210, 216, 218, 225, 242, 263, 267, 268, 271–273, 279, 282, 288, 290, 301, 308, 328, 359, 400, 406, 409, 414, 421–423, 426, 427 Internal accounts versus external accounts xxxix internal homogenization 137 and Islam, relationship 91 Oceanic and Continental 141 political construct 169 politics of fear 426 post-Western 307, 330

Index     471

reunification of 309, 310 transformation 67, 354 transnationalization 416. See also narratives, nation-state European citizenship xxii, 299, 315, 320, 355, 362 European consciousness 3, 9, 47, 75, 97, 109–111, 128, 130, 135, 158, 210, 255, 419 European cosmopolitanism prospects for 338. See also cosmopolitanism European imperialism. See Empire European Economic Community (EEC) 246, 276, 295, 297, 298, 346, 365, 368, 386 European identity xxii, xxvii, 5, 79, 94, 112, 135, 159, 200, 297–299, 307–310, 314, 318, 319, 321–331, 333, 334, 337, 355, 400–404 European integration assumptions of 355 Maastricht Treaty 297, 305, 352 negative integration 352 realist and neo-functionalist schools 296 social and system 205, 351–353, 360 transnational dimension 427 European Islam lvi, 16, 91, 105. See also Islam Europeanization xxii, 59, 300, 311, 312, 314, 315, 318–321, 323, 326, 327, 333, 337, 402 European model of statehood 213

European society, development of 203 European Union (EU) xxi, xxiv, 25, 104, 144, 220, 250, 312, 318, 333, 350, 401 and nations 313 Euroscepticism 313, 314 Eurozone 236, 330, 342, 350, 354, 358 F

Fascism li, 192, 205, 231, 256, 268, 269, 285–294, 312, 394, 426 authoritarian populist 374 Foucault, M. xx, xxix, xxx, xxxv, liii, 118, 388, 404 French Revolution 170, 191, 196, 267, 270 G

Gellner, E. 187, 418. See also Nationalism Germany 21, 39, 101, 105, 143, 161–163, 165, 167, 168, 170, 245, 247, 251, 252, 265, 282, 285, 286, 288, 291, 292, 294, 305, 307, 326, 329, 345, 354, 366, 375, 393, 403, 416. See also Hitler, Second World War Nazism 167, 272, 285, 287 Unification 188, 189, 191, 205, 207, 307 globality lv, lvi, 125, 159, 179, 180, 415

472     Index

globalization 195 Goody, J. 10, 31, 99, 105, 110 Grand Narrative(s) xxvi, 78, 133, 267, 298, 299, 407, 408, 419 Greece xxiv, xxxix, 11, 28–30, 32–34, 37, 43, 46, 70, 74, 78–80, 91, 103, 128, 188, 248–250, 252, 257–259, 278, 294, 297, 326, 356–358, 360, 375 Greek civilization. See Greece Greece secularization 21 Guthenberg, J. 114 H

Habermas, J. xxxiii, xliii, xliv, xlvi, liv, 24, 69, 175, 316, 326, 333, 334, 336, 342, 349, 351, 356, 357, 359, 385, 404, 405, 409, 415 Haiti revolution 212 Halecki, O. 34, 143, 243, 253, 261. See also homogenization and plurality Hay, D. 34, 95, 168 Hegel, G.W.F. xlv, 6, 166, 170 Hellenic civilization 31, 35, 36, 39, 75 Heritage viii, x, xii, xix–xxii, xxv, xxvi, xxxvi, xxxviii, xlii, xlviii, lii, lvi, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 15–25, 28, 30, 32, 35–38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57, 62, 66, 71, 74, 79, 80, 92, 100, 106, 109, 114, 122, 136, 142, 158,

165, 189, 232, 248, 251, 255–259, 283, 297–299, 325, 332, 399–420, 426. See also memory as a shared political tradition 408, 409, 411 as trauma 408, 413 as a unity in diversity 408, 411, 412 Hinduism 10 Hippocrates 34 Historicism 21 Hitler, A. 282, 286, 288, 289, 395. See also Fascism Hitler, Second World War 159, 201, 266, 282, 307, 328, 341, 345, 361, 416 Hobsbawm, E.J. xx, xliii, 18, 189, 265, 275, 287 Holocaust xliv. See also Germany homogenization xxxiv, xxxv, 28, 43, 59, 136, 137, 139, 143– 150, 190, 191, 194, 275 homogenization and plurality 143, 144, 146–149 Hong Kong 206 House of European History 417 Huff, T. l, 134 Humanism xxxviii, xlvii, l, 10, 12, 23, 64, 66, 109, 111–113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 126, 154, 173, 403, 404 Humboldt, A. xxvi, liv, 4, 82, 163, 197, 415 Hungary 146, 251–256, 267, 284, 285, 358, 373, 375, 387, 395 hybridity xxxi, xxxii

Index     473 I

L

Ideology end of ideology 301 ideological bond 193 Internal accounts versus external accounts xl inter-civilizational constellation xlviii, lvi, 3–5, 8, 15, 17, 241, 412 Iraq lii, 94, 276, 418. See also war Ireland 60, 70, 146, 171, 191, 206, 209, 275, 288, 295, 297, 326, 357, 371, 382, 386, 393 Battle of the Boyne 171 Islam xxiv, xxvi, 10, 66, 75, 78, 82, 83, 91–106, 135, 139, 241, 245, 258, 309–311 Koran, the 96, 115 Muhammad 94, 96 Italy 59, 70, 81, 122, 146, 160, 188, 189, 202, 206, 245, 247–250, 277, 285, 288, 342, 349, 351, 353, 379, 382, 393

League of Nations 197, 394 Le Goff, J. 57 Lichtheim, G. xxii Lyotard, J.F. 407. See also Grand Narrative(s)

J

Jewish civilization 45–47 Judaism 10, 32, 45, 46, 51, 52, 92, 98, 105 Judt, T. xx, xxii, 294, 407, 408 K

Kant, I. liii, 69, 121, 161–163, 183, 196, 409

M

Machiavelli, N. 97, 120 Macron, E. 307, 395 Malta 99, 104, 249 Mann, M. 148, 153, 201, 220, 275, 377 Marshall, T.H. 177, 278, 345 Marx, K. xxxviii, 85, 197, 203, 273, 274, 282 Mauss, M. 7, 117 Meier, C. xxv, 29, 30, 33, 413 memory xlii, 10, 17–20, 23, 30, 31, 54, 58, 190, 200, 248, 294, 325, 374, 392, 399, 401, 408, 414, 418–420, 426 Middle ages, the xxxix, 13, 55, 93, 134, 147, 216 minorities, racism 19, 102–104, 148, 414 Modernity xx–xxii, xxxi, xxxviii, xxxix, xli, xliv–xlviii, xlix, l, li, lv–lvii, 6–8, 11, 20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 51, 55, 61–63, 67, 69, 70, 73, 80, 82, 85–89, 91, 92, 98, 104–106, 109–114 crisis of 269, 273 homogenizing logic, of 198 modernity and the holocaust xlii, 290. See also Fascism

474     Index

political modernity xlv, 56, 68, 104, 112, 122, 153, 176, 185, 196, 198, 199, 257, 268, 270, 291, 311, 334, 344, 346–348, 351, 354, 355, 360, 367 post-modernism 164, 299 routes to Central Europe 4, 83, 140, 143, 145, 158, 243, 245, 246, 250–253, 255, 257 East Central Europe 143, 251–255, 257 Mediterranean Europe 243, 245, 248–250, 257 North Eastern Europe 261, 262 North Western Europe 245, 250 South Eastern Europe 254, 257–259 societal model xlv, xlix, lii, lvii, 173, 176, 178, 179, 195, 227, 247, 345 Monastic orders 57, 59, 62 Mongol 80, 82, 102, 104, 138, 246 Montaigne, M. 117 Morris, C. 64, 65, 117 Mudde, C. 372, 377, 379 Museum of European History and Mediterranean Civilization 417 Muslim civilization 99 myth xxiv, xxxii, 32, 36, 46, 80, 84, 98, 121, 124, 209, 294, 369, 392

N

Napoleon, B. 56, 69, 84, 162, 170, 171, 282 narratives, nation-state national imaginary 213, 318, 322 national minority 191. See also minorities, racism post-national identity 327, 402 Nationalism lvi, 79, 88, 121, 122, 146, 151, 161, 166, 172, 185– 201, 203, 205, 208, 210, 225, 228, 230, 231, 252, 256, 268, 270, 275, 276, 283–288, 292, 293, 306, 307, 311, 312, 318, 321, 322, 331, 335, 337, 338, 350, 366, 367, 369, 371, 378, 380, 382, 383, 386, 388–393, 395, 396, 400, 418 extreme nationalist movements 285, 395 liberal nationalism 188, 189 nationalism and cosmopolitanism 185, 197, 318 nationalism post-1989 lvi, 88, 243, 305, 318 nationalism, imperial 209, 276. See also Western Liberal nationalism; revival of nationalism; rise of populist nationalist parties; post-national nationhood 61, 71, 125, 126, 189–191, 247, 291, 388 models of 68 Nelson, B. 10, 13 neoliberalism 278, 306, 343, 347, 352, 359, 367, 371

Index     475

Netherlands 70, 154, 202, 372, 375, 382, 383 New World 9, 110, 119, 124–126, 138, 139, 142, 147, 232, 233, 289, 330 Nietzsche, F. 271, 272 Nobel Prize 198 Norway 70, 188, 206, 260, 297, 313 O

Offe, C. 178, 230, 305, 344, 350, 352, 386 Old World. Compare New World Orthodox xxxvi, lvi, 16, 40, 66, 67, 73, 74, 76–78, 80, 81, 88, 89, 103, 257, 258. See also Orthodox Church Orthodox Church 66, 70, 84, 86, 87 Other xxiv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxvii, l, lii, lv, 4, 9, 19, 21, 22, 64, 87, 93–97, 100, 124, 135, 136, 146, 163, 166, 169, 179, 190, 195, 200, 207, 253, 260, 272, 285, 291, 298, 308, 326, 328, 332, 333, 379 P

paganism 62 Parsons, T. 202 Patocka, J. 37, 63, 118 Periodization xxxvii, 20, 111, 265, 267, 365 Persia 28, 34, 35, 93, 94, 208 Plato 37, 63, 65, 118, 119, 272 Neo-Platonism 53

Platonism 53 Poland 83–85, 143, 145, 188, 251–256, 261, 277, 284, 285, 373, 387, 395 Polanyi, K. 185, 230, 247, 345 Portugal 117, 141, 206, 207, 212, 234, 248, 250, 278, 279, 285, 288, 297, 326, 382 Lisbon earthquake (1755) 183, 184 post-colonial xxviii, xxix, 213, 235, 299 post-national ix, xxxiii, 300, 305, 306, 311, 312, 316–319, 321, 322, 324, 327, 331, 333, 393, 402, 417, 426 Post-truth 385 Protestant xxv, xxxvi, 60–62, 67–69, 77, 84, 101, 102, 114, 157, 171, 233. See also Christianity R

Race liii, 22, 96, 116, 124, 186, 205, 209, 210, 213, 282, 284, 426. See also colonialism racial superiority 210 Renaissance xxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii, l, lii, lvi, 9, 10, 15–18, 20, 23, 27, 57, 62, 64, 66, 76, 100, 102, 109–118, 120–130, 134, 154, 159, 162, 164, 173, 179, 403 ‘dark side’, the 116 Galileo, G. 113 republicanism lvii, 97, 112, 120– 123, 154, 161, 162, 170,

476     Index

186, 188, 197, 198, 225, 287, 393, 409–412 revival of nationalism 306 rise of populist nationalist parties 356 Roman civil law xxxv, l, 10, 42, 55, 58, 134, 173, 224, 229, 403 Roman civilization, colonialism xlviii, lvi, 11, 15, 16, 28, 36, 38, 42, 43, 63, 88, 241 Romania 74, 78, 79, 143, 188, 256–259, 261, 285 Russia 394. See also communism hybrid civilization 88 Moscow 86 October Revolution 87, 231 Russian Revolution 159, 266, 267, 270, 280 S

Said, E. xxv, xxvii, xxix, 97, 205, 209 Schmitt, C. 37, 62, 272, 288 Scientific revolution of the seventeenth, the l Second modernity 226, 227 Self xxvii, lii, liii, lv, xlv, 19, 21 self-determination 121, 152, 161, 175, 177, 186–188, 197, 224, 228, 233, 387–389, 391–394, 396 self-examination 64. See also Christianity self-problematization 117, 403, 404 Shakespeare, W. 112, 116 slavery 30, 59, 142, 163, 197, 210–212, 234, 414 Slavic 16, 22, 82, 87, 88, 254, 255, 258, 311

social movements 229, 233, 236 Soviet occupation 256 Soviet Union 89, 242, 251, 261, 262, 278, 280–282, 394 Spain Franco, F. 247, 278, 285, 288, 290, 291 Sombart, W. 233 War of the Spanish Succession 157 State socialism 192, 237, 268, 280, 281, 283–285, 301, 311, 329 St. Petersburg ‘window to Europe’ 83 Strydom, G. xlii, xlv, 163, 175, 176, 224, 405, 424 subjectivity 21, 23, 77, 110, 111, 134, 213, 274, 423. See also Self Syriza 356, 357 Szücs, J. 143, 153, 243, 253, 254 T

Taxation 154, 194, 313, 391 Taylorism 277 Tilly, C. 148, 157, 193, 213, 217 Tocqueville, A. 85, 171, 209, 233, 287 Touraine, A. xlvi, 404, 405. See also Culture Transnational regional organizations 222 Trump, D. 384, 385, 395 Turkey 16, 93, 103–105, 177, 208, 222, 232, 250, 258, 259, 294, 374, 395

Index     477 U

Ukraine, the 4, 74, 83, 222, 259– 262, 326 United Nations 293, 339, 361 United States of America (USA), the 135, 171, 271, 282 unity geopolitical unity 152 utopian thought 119, 120 V

Versailles Treaty (1919) 282, 286, 394 W

Wagner, P. xxii, xxxix, xlv, xlvi, li, lvii, lix, 174, 177, 181, 220, 277, 300, 348, 407, 410. See also Modernity war civil war xxxvi, 211, 212, 249, 250, 267, 285, 291, 307, 388

Cold War, the 5, 247, 260, 282, 292, 300, 308, 309, 346. See also East and West binary First World War 192, 266, 307 Herero War 207 Second World War 18, 159, 201, 266, 277, 282, 307, 328, 341, 345, 346, 361, 367, 416, 424 Weber, M. xxv, xxxvii, xxxviii, 7, 10, 46, 62, 118, 191, 229, 272, 273, 400 Weimar 198 Western Liberal nationalism 188, 189 Westphalia xxxvi, 67, 157 post-Westphalian state system 196 World regions xxxvi, 4, 221–223, 232, 238 Y

Youth movements 328

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500 miles 800 kilometres

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SLOVAKIA Bratislava

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95435-6 IA

SYRIA

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IRAQ

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International boundary

Map of Europe

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479